THE GUARDIAN: Country ‘fed up’ with leadership turmoil, says Starmer as he pitches Labour as party of ‘sound money’
Keir Starmer has hit out at the “ridiculous, chaotic circus” of the Conservative leadership contest, as he pitched Labour in contrast as the party of sound money.
The Labour leader, who is pushing for a general election, said the Tory party was failing Britain with its contest while the country was struggling to cope with the financial situation.
Starmer told BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show that people were “fed up to the back teeth” with the leadership turmoil.
“My focus is on the millions of people who are struggling to pay their bills, have now got additional anxieties about their mortgage. I know what it feels like not to be able to pay your bills, that happened to me and my family when I was growing up,” he said. With video » | Rowena Mason, Whitehall editor | Sunday, October 23, 2022
The Tory Party, the Party of wealth redistribution, the redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top, needs to die a natural death: it is a Party of fossils. People who are backward-looking, regressive and, despite their protestations, unpatriotic. They need to follow the Whigs into extinction. That will be better for the country; it will be better for us all: the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish and the English themselves.
For certain, this country needs a business-friendly party, but a business-friendly party which is progressive and forward-looking, a party which is EU-friendly and one which doesn’t constantly look back on the UK’s glorious imperial past. Get with the story: The Empire is dead, and it will forever remain so. Realistically, the UK is now a middle-ranking country, no better or worse that France, Germany, Spain, etc. Let us, please, as a nation refrain from delusion. Let us also be mature enough as a people to realise that we have made a huge mistake in plumping for Brexit. Because of the dire economic outcome of Brexit, we shall never be able to forget the calamitous mistake voting to exit the European Union has been. It was an act of self-harm. Suicide, if you will. It will ensure that this country will become ever poorer. Our GDP will shrink year-on-year until many Eastern European countries which have managed to slough off the shackles of communism will overtake our GDP and economic growth in just a few years.
There is only ONE remedy for this: we need to eat humble pie and ask our European friends, neighbours, brothers and sisters for forgiveness for the trouble and expense we have created for them by erroneously, and in a delusional way, believed that we could actually go it alone. We cannot without great economic pain and impoverishment.
Keir Starmer should disabuse himself of the notion that we can “make Brexit work”. We cannot. At least not if we wish to remain a successful and prosperous nation. Therefore, I repeat: We need to eat humble pie and rejoin the European Union as soon as possible, thereby re-entering the Single Market, a market of more than five hundred million consumers – the biggest single market in the world. This, if we truly want economic growth, is our only realistic political and economic solution. Moreover, if the powers-that-be in this country truly wish to keep the UK whole, that means to say with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all one integrated whole with England, then Brexit needs to be reversed pronto. Remaining outside of the European Union is one sure-fire way of seeing the breakup of this, our, Union. – © Mark Alexander
