Monday, July 8, 2024

Great Britain Goes into Labour

Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of a physician named Anthony Daniels. He has worked as a prison psychiatrist in Great Britain and has also offered up some sage and salient culture criticism.

Dalrymple counts among those who have offered the best commentary on the recent British elections, the elections that ousted the conservative Tory party and empowered the Labour Party. 


In a phrase that deserves special emphasis Dalrymple points out that the leader of the Labour Party, one Keir Starmer, got his start as a human rights attorney.


One is reminded of the simple fact that another human rights organization, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency was receiving American funds in Gaza and has used those funds to contribute to the October 7 massacre.


And one recalls that the wife of one George Clooney, by name of Amal, worked long and hard with the United Nations International Criminal Court to attack the Israeli government and to recommend that its leaders be considered on the same plane as Hamas.


Knowing this we have no problem understanding Dalrymple’s most important commentary on the recent British elections:


The road to hell is paved with human rights lawyers.


As for the elections, Dalrymple has no special praise for the Tory Party. Having been in power for well over a decade, the conservative party simply failed. But, just because the Tories deserved to lose that does not mean that Labour deserved to win.


The Conservatives, in power for the last 14 years, have been spendthrift, incompetent, directionless, frivolous, and corrupt. They seemingly believed in nothing and stuck to nothing. On their record, it would be hard or impossible to say what they stood for, except for hanging on to office.


But then, what does Labour stand for? Dalrymple suggests that human rights lawyers exploit everyone’s compassion while enriching themselves:


Keir Starmer, is a former human rights lawyer, a field of activity that combines advocating for the supposedly downtrodden with making an excellent living: a hint of what is likely to come.


Does it mean that Labour will increase taxes? Apparently, it does. Someone has to pay for the social services that Labour has promised:


In the run-up to the election, Starmer said that the new government would not tax working people further. Pressed by a radio interviewer to define what he meant by “working people,” Starmer said that he meant people with no savings, who therefore had to rely on public services. This was extremely revealing as to his underlying beliefs about how a society works, or ought to work. Apparently, people with savings were not, in his estimation, working people. What were they, then? Having declared himself to be a socialist, presumably he thought that they were all exploiters, who aspired to live by rents or returns on capital, having accumulated in their lives what socialist economists call surplus value. The true citizen was he who was dependent on the government and could arrange nothing for himself.


One consequence is that wealthy people are leaving Great Britain. Taxing the rich is an appealing idea, as long as there are a sufficient number of rich people. If you run out of rich people you might end up destitute.


A greater number of wealthy people, proportionately, are already fleeing Britain than from any other country in the world. The taxes they pay will be lost, making it imperative to tax even further the prosperous who remain—that is to say, the diminishing number who wish neither to join the nomenklatura nor depend on the government. Eternal electoral victory for Labour beckons, on an alliance between the nomenklatura and the working people, in the Starmerian sense of the phrase.


Nevertheless, Britain’s new prime minister could soon face a crisis of legitimacy. His “landslide” victory was such only because of the system of first-past-the-post in constituency elections, giving him an unassailable majority in Parliament.


Politically speaking, the Labour Party only received some 34% of the votes. As you know, the Reform Party of Nigel Farage siphoned off Tory votes, thus giving Labour the vast majority of the seats of parliament.


Dalrymple wrote:


But Starmer received the votes of only 34 percent of those who voted, who were themselves only 60 percent of eligible voters. This means that he will govern on the basis of the positive choice of just over 20 percent of the adult population, not exactly a popular mandate for radical experimentation.


And then we are beginning to see the outline of the new Starmer government. Being a good leftist, he is going to empty out the prisons. What could be more compassionate-- except for the victims of said miscreants.


The BBC reported:


Sir Keir Starmer has said he wants to reduce the number of people going to prison through renewed efforts to cut reoffending.


In his first press conference as prime minister, Sir Keir said too many people found themselves back in jail "relatively quickly" after being sent there.


He added that intervening to prevent young people committing knife crime would be an early priority for his new government.


But he said there would be no "overnight solution" to prison overcrowding, adding: "We’ve got too many prisoners, not enough prisons."


It comes after he appointed a businessman as his prisons minister who has previously said only a third of prisoners should be there.


And, one Aylmer added this detail:


The majority (52%) of prisoners are there for sexual or other violent crimes. Releasing two thirds of prisoners would infallibly mean hundreds more murders, rapes and assaults every year. Timpson is not an expert and his views are in no way grounded in the evidence. He is a dangerous ideologue.


And then there is this. Starmer also appointed one Anneliese Dodds to be Minister for Women and Equalities in the Department of Education. James Estes reports that Dodds does not know what a woman is. So, the new Labour government is all-in for transmania. Surely, this qualifies her…


@Keir_Starmer has just appointed Anneliese Dodds, someone who does not know what a woman is, to the office of Minister for Women. This tells us everything we need to know about the disdain this Labour government has for biological reality.


She has also been appointed Minister for Women and Equalities in the Department for Education


So, now Great Britain has gone into Labour. Who knows what monstrosities will be born.


Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It may be time to lose the Great and change the name to just plain Britain.

David Foster said...

"knife crime"...like the people talking about "gun crime" in the US, the focus in on on the object rather than the criminal.

SCOTTtheBADGER said...

Punishing an inanimate object for the acts of it's user is such a clever idea.


That way, no one has to take responsibility!

Walt said...

As long as they’ve got power, the Left doesn’t care if they have a mandate; all they need is a pen and a phone.