Sir Keir Starmer’s honeymoon period as PM was always going to come to an end, but it’s come a little bit sooner than some of us might have imagined.
He chose the famous Rose Garden at the back of Downing Street, the setting for Boris’s vino beanos during Covid (allegedly) and that excrutiating appearance by the shifty Dominic Cummings after he drove from London to Durham to test his eyesight.
Eyesight isn’t a problem for Sir Keir. He can see the tax rises coming in the same way that the rest of us certainly can. And that’s despite the fact that he promised the electorate faithfully that he wouldn’t be raising taxes during the election campaign.
Ah well, what’s he to do? It wasn’t his fault, after all. It was those pesky Tories. Particularly Rishi Sunak, once Chancellor then Prime Minister and clearly the evil mastermind behind the s***show that poor old Keir and his Labour Party colleagues now have to clear up.
It’s one of the oldest tricks in the political playbook. If you’re going to have to go back on your word, then blame someone else. Political parties have been doing it for many years.
Yet he stood there amidst the sweet-smelling roses, looked the camera in the eye and seemed to expect sympathy and understanding. We are in this mess together but, fortunately, he has come galloping over the horizon on his trusty white horse to come to our aid, etc. etc.
Some might just have believed him. Some might have imagined Rachel Reeves flicking on her laptop after Labour had won the election, opening the email full of files from Jeremy Hunt and tottering up Downing Street ashen-faced to talk to her boss.
“It’s so much worse than we expected, Keir Dear,” she might have said. “In fact, it’s just horrific. Those capitalist b***ards have spent everything. It must have been the wine for the Covid parties, or Rishi’s helicopter trips. But they’ve left nothing for us. It’s just too much…..”, she whimpered (perhaps), burying her face in the shoulder of his expensive suit.
Some might have believed him except for one small detail. He – and she – have doled out generous pay rises to public sector workers, in particular the moaning train drivers, hardly an impoverished bunch of people to start with.
The rest of us, it seems, will have to put up with tax rises. Still, it’s the Labour Party, and leopards don’t change their spots. What did we expect?
Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch
Meanwhile, back on this side of the Irish Sea, most of our politicians are on some kind of interminable holiday. God almighty, who thought that was a good idea? Just back to work in February, a s***load of work to get through….and they take the whole summer off.
Asmattering of politicians who aren’t away on holiday reacted fairly lamely to Sir Keir’s speech. Apart from Alliance MP Sorcha Eastwood, who used a four-letter word beginning with ‘sh-‘ in her reaction. Such straight talking should be warmly welcomed, we reckon.
But the Rose Garden speech will have repercussions for this part of the world. A bit like the Tories a few years ago, he’s laying out his austerity stall. He’s pleading poverty. He’s making sure that no one thinks there’s any more cash rattling around in the bottom of the Henry Hippo.
So how then could he justify bunging a few millions over to help the PSNI? Or the Health Service here in Northern Ireland? Or Casement Park, for that matter? Or Northern Ireland as a basket case whole?
If and when they all eventually come back from holiday, our entire Executive could hop on the red eye to Heathrow, take the tube to Westminster and all go knocking on the big shiny black door of Number 10. But, like all of the beggars, whether they’re Welsh, Scottish, Irish or Northern English, they’ll be told to go away and come back in a few years time when Keir and Rachel have sorted things out. They haven’t a mission.
Yet our politicians continue to stand their ground. Health Minister Mike Nesbitt this week flatly ruled out any spending cuts. Paul Givan at Education has done the same and we all know what the Chief Constable thinks even though he was given a bollocking in writing by the Department of Justice’s Chief Buck Cat.
And so collision looks inevitable. Is it a case of irresistible force meeting immovable object? Probably not. Something’s going to have to give. And it’s pretty obvious who it’s going to be.
One Man Standing
If the Belfast Telegraph is to be believed, the race to be Ulster Unionist leader isn’t going to come to much. It looks as though there’ll only be one candidate and that’s the afore-mentioned Mike Nesbitt.
That wasn’t very exciting, was it?
There were concerns that Nesbitt would be lambasted for trying to combine the party leadership role with that of Health Minister, easily the most important job up at Stormont in most people’s eyes. But, if he reckons he can do both, then who are we to doubt him?
Reports that Doug Beattie would change his mind and come back turned out to be wide of the mark and there aren’t, let’s face it, any other obvious candidates.
So it seems we’re headed for Mike Nesbitt – The Second Coming. At least, as a former leader, he knows the beast. He knows how it works. And he knows all about the party officers, and their predilection for getting involved in leadership matters.
Given that the party needs stability more than anything else, he’s probably the best bet. And the only one.
Turning The Other Cheek
Cast your minds back a few weeks to the All-Ireland Final at Croke Park and Armagh’s victory. Since then, of course, we’ve had to listen to the whiners and whingers complaining about PSNI officers celebrating with the local community. The absolute b***ards, how could they?
But that collection of red-faced hand wringers otherwise known as the TUV didn’t stop there.
Back in the days running up to the final, BBC Sport’s Mark Sidebottom must have thought he was being incredibly fair and even-handed. He didn’t just splash Armagh’s colours on his cheeks for a preview piece. Just in case any stray Galwegians were watching, he daubed their colours on the other cheek. Balanced reporting at its best. What could possibly go wrong?
The TUV, that’s what. In the absence of Jim Allister, either away on holiday or enjoying his new MP status a bit too much, it fell to his deputy Ron McDowell, a chip off the old block if ever there was one, to pick up his fountain pen and dash a letter off to the BBC.
And the Beeb, rather unbelievably, launched an internal investigation into the TUV’s allegations of ‘pro-Republican bias’. What did they do? Consult a face-painting expect? Ask poor old Mark to say the eighth letter of the alphabet? Or sing the national anthem? Or maybe they shone a spotlight into his eyes and told him to spill the beans?
Whatever they did, they came to the conclusion that the unfortunate sports reporter did nothing wrong and he was duly cleared. To repeat a well-worn phrase, you couldn’t make it up…..
Candy Is Dandy, But Liquor Is Quicker
Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary is always good for a quote or two, and he was in the news once again this week with his call that air passengers should be restricted to two drinks pre-flight at airports in an effort to cut down on disorder on board flights.
He has a point. Almost all of us will have been on a flight at some time or another when some tanked-up eejit who’s had too many pints of Stella Artois starts mouthing off in a loud voice. But it’s not always lads on the lager. Ladies brimming with prosecco or sauvignon blanc can be just as obnoxious….if not a tad more so.
Of course, there’s a big difference between the pissheads who talk too loudly or break into song, and those who verbally or physically assault crew members. Apparently, it’s a growing problem.
“We don’t allow people to drink and drive, yet we keep putting them up in aircraft at 33,000 feet,” said O’Leary. “In the old days, people who drank too much would eventually fall over or fall asleep. But now they’re also on tablets and powder. You get much more aggressive behaviour that becomes very difficult to manage.”
Indeed. But how could we ever enforce his idea? By breathalyising people at the departure gate? Hard to see that working.
And there’s always a hard core. Just take a look over the bar next time you’re going through Belfast International at 6 o’clock in the morning. You’d think it was 11 o’clock on a Friday night.
One For The Road
Let’s stay on the booze, if that’s OK. We love a good court story, and we were much taken by the story of the nice Belfast lady (using that term loosely….) who came to the attention of the constabulary whilst on a night out in the city.
They were called to the Hilton Hotel, not usually a den of iniquity, but the place where our friend’s boozy night came to a sudden halt. Apparently, she kicked one or two of the officers before calling one of them “a big nose black c***”. As insults go, it’s quite an impactful one, cleverly combining as it does one of the officer’s more noticeable physical attributes with his or her skin colour. The court was told that there was no racial element to the offences, even though it sounded a wee bit like it.
In court, of course, the sob stories were duly wheeled out and our hero managed to avoid prison. She was the sole carer to her kids, a fine upstanding member of the community (or something like that) and didn’t drink alcohol all that often. A saint living amongst us, in other words.
Saint or no saint, it might be best to avoid happy hour next time she’s out on the town. Or those tequila shots at the end of the night. Just in case the officer with the big hooter is back on duty.