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You can find us in the pub once we’ve got our Covid stub, as we discuss in this episode. As well as covering vaccine passport trials, we discuss the David Cameron lobbying scandal and Keir Starmer’s visit to a homophobic church.
Join us, but don’t give us a hug.
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The shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy used her first major speech in the role to criticise former prime minister Tony Blair. Rejecting the “uncritical embrace of economic globalisation in the 1980s”, she argued that New Labour became convinced the model was “not a choice, but a fate”.
“It ushered in an era of flexible labour markets and deregulation ‘to untie the hands of business’ as the then prime minister [Blair] described it in his Chicago speech,” Nandy told the Chatham House think tank.
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There is widespread bafflement as to why some on the hard left have taken to renaming Labour’s leader Keir Starmer ‘Keith’. No less than the Financial Times’ Sebastian Payne called it the “most bizarre Labour meme I’ve seen today”, presumably in a competitive field.
“Any explanation?” he asked. Well, the insult surely explains itself. As the very public sociologist Phil BC answers, “it annoys some people.” More importantly, it expresses the dismay of Labour’s left in being led by a drab middle-aged man who is trying to win power in a conventional way.
Continue reading →The London mayoral candidate Neville Watson has dropped out of the race due to a lack of money. “As we have not been able to raise the required financial commitment to run, our mayoral 2021 challenge ends today,” he told the Right Dishonourable last night.
Mayoral candidates must stump up a £10,000 deposit to enter the race, forfeiting the money if they fail to get 5% of the first round vote. By comparison, those running for the House of Commons only need a £500 deposit, which is returned if they get 5% of their constituency’s votes.
Continue reading →This week’s duel between the prime minister and the leader of the opposition saw the shadow foreign secretary caught by a stray if inaccurate shot. Defending the government’s new integrated foreign policy review, Boris Johnson tried to paint Lisa Nandy as some kind of peacenik.
“It is frankly satirical to be lectured about the size of the army when the shadow foreign secretary herself wrote only recently that the entire British Army should be turned into a kind of peace corps,” Johnson told the House of Commons during Prime Minister’s Questions. But this is untrue.
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