BORIS Johnson doesn’t like to be out in public in Scotland. Given his (and the Tories’) overwhelming unpopularity north of the Border, his skulking through backdoors is understandable – if not excusable.
Keir Starmer has no such excuse, let alone in one of his party’s strongholds.
The Labour leader was on a visit to Liverpool to announce he had drafted Gordon Brown to help with his “distinctively British” economic plans. Whatever on earth that means.
Having given a suitably blue speech in which he pledged to carry on Johnson’s “levelling up” agenda after having already pledged to stick to his hard Brexit one, Starmer went out for coffee.
Unfortunately for the Labour leader, there was a Labour voter there – and she wasn’t too pleased with the job he’s been doing.
“I don’t know how you’ve got the guts to come to this city,” she started, strongly.
The Labour voter attacked Starmer for having written in The Sun – a newspaper which is widely boycotted in Liverpool after its coverage of the Hillsborough disaster in 1989.
The op-eds from Starmer were seen as a betrayal of promises he made during his bid for Labour leadership, where he told a hustings in Liverpool he would not be talking to the paper “during the course of this campaign”.
She went on: “Secondly, you lied to us about uniting the party. I’m still a Labour Party member, and you have expelled and witch-hunted in the most vicious way I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
Look how Starmer squirms when he's actually held to account by a member of the public pic.twitter.com/F5V319btW8
— j (@jrc1921) July 25, 2022
The voter – named as Audrey White who had previously been expelled from the Labour Party – said Starmer had done “nothing but distance yourself from the ideas which tens of thousands of people joined the Labour Party to support”.
“We may as well have a Tory if we have a person like you, who lies to the party,” she said.
Starmer has come under heavy fire for turning his back on some of the “ten pledges” he made to party members during his leadership bid.
The promise to support the nationalisation of “rail, mail, energy and water” has also been dropped by Starmer’s Labour – although a spokesperson has said their position on rail remains the same.
Starmer also pledged to “work shoulder to shoulder with trade unions to stand up for working people, tackle insecure work and low pay”, and “oppose Tory attacks on the right to take industrial action”.
However, when the RMT union took industrial action in June, Starmer ordered his frontbench MPs to stay off the picket lines.
The Labour leader further pledged to “defend free movement as we leave the EU”, something he has now ruled out “forever”.
Perhaps the misspelling of Merseyside as “Merseryside” in a video Starmer put out on Monday was something of a Freudian slip from the Labour leader.
“Merseryside” pic.twitter.com/27BdCgpjsF
— arlecchino (@arlecchinofilms) July 25, 2022
The Labour Party declined to comment.
