A mixed grill
BRITAIN is not working and needs fundamental change. We heartily agree with Keir Starmer on that.
Millions do. Which is why he became PM in July.
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But while we applaud the early part of his conference speech — that people have lost faith in politics’ power to improve their lives — and the conclusion, where he promised to make us happier and richer, some of the meat in the sandwich was more dubious.
There was, though, plenty to savour.
We hugely welcome the Homes For Heroes pledge to put veterans at the top of social housing lists nationwide.
Sir Keir’s confirmation of a huge home-building programme was music to our ears.
So too the acceptance that migration is too high and we must get more young people into those jobs instead.
And the vow to cut the welfare bill.
We are far less convinced by his vehicles for change: Ed Miliband’s ruinous folly “GB Energy”.
Nationalised trains.
A “wealth fund” for a nation with an alleged £22billion black hole.
Huge pay rises and sweeping powers for unions.
These are “solutions” based on Labour ideology.
Britain needs genuine realism about the challenges of the future.
It is disingenuous to blame “14 years of chaos” on the Tories without mentioning the global crash, Covid or war.
And claiming they “served themselves” is ill-advised given Labour’s freebies scandal.
Meanwhile “stabilising the economy” by robbing OAPs is a terrible error.
And while Sir Keir earned ovations for rightly standing up to far-right racist thugs, what did he say about anti-Semitic pro-Hamas thugs on our streets?
Not a sausage.
Lynch mob
SURRENDER to the unions and they simply come back for more.
Aslef and the BMA rapidly secured mind-boggling pay rises from Labour.
Now the RMT’s Mick Lynch wants nothing less than “the complete organisation of the UK economy by trade unions”.
The 1970s were a bleak, violent decade of economic collapse, endless strikes, power cuts, the dead unburied and the Government begging cash from the IMF.
But it was a golden era for the unions who all but ran Britain via Labour.
Keir Starmer must never let these wreckers take us back there.
Police farce
WHAT rank double standards by the Met, banning cops from wearing a badge commemorating fallen comrades.
The public is fed up seeing police forces virtue-signal their support for trendy liberal causes.
Yet for Met bosses this simple Thin Blue Line emblem is somehow a step too far.
But it is neither political nor “contentious”, as Met chief Mark Rowley claims.
He must think again.