Elphicke?! Just… ELPHICKE?! [Video]

by Martin Odoni

Long-term readers may recall a couple of years back me responding to a dishonest question from some centrist nobody formerly in the press demanding to know what it would take for disaffected Labour leftists to support Keir Starmer. The question was clearly just a patronising show of theatrical exasperation, trying to paint the left as being stubborn and demanding, when in practice it is the right wing of the Labour Party who can never tolerate not getting everything their way. But I wrote a full list of demands that I still see as entirely reasonable.

I would like to draw particular attention to demand number 14 on that list; –

14. Expulsion with immediate effect of Christian Wakeford.

If Starmer’s Labour were really ‘moderate’ and not just another Tory Party, why has it spent so much time purging the left from its ranks, sometimes on grounds of them somehow not sharing the party’s values, while this week welcoming with open arms a firmly right-of-centre Tory who is bitterly anti-immigration? If Wakeford does have Labour values and the left does not, the party must be well in the right of the political spectrum, and not moderate at all.

Clear enough?

The Labour Party – home for MPs too right wing for the Tory Party

The chances of me voting Labour any time soon thus grow more remote than ever, as this week, Starmer has welcomed another Tory MP into the Labour household, and this one takes some believing. Natalie Elphicke, one of the twenty most extreme right wing Members of the British Parliament, crossed the floor to leave the Conservatives and join the Labour Party.

Yes, you read that right. Elphicke, perhaps the most xenophobic anti-migrant in party politics, has been welcomed with open arms by Keir Starmer into the Labour Party. It does not shock me at all that Tory MPs are abandoning the ship of state they helped to sink, and in quick flurries. But I was expecting the ones from the liberal wing of the party would slip away first. But Elphicke?

She is welcome in the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn is not?

A common saying, adopted from a joke with which Tony Benn used to tease David Davies, is that the Conservative Party is there as a safety net for MPs who are too left wing to stay in the Labour Party. But it seems the reverse is also true. Starmer’s Labour Party has become a safety net for Tory MPs who are too right wing to stay in the Conservative Party long enough to be pushed.

I shall not dwell on Elphicke, as the ludicrousness of what has happened speaks for itself. But I must point out what this says about Starmer, especially in the context of the poised Israeli attack on Rafah, and the overrated Labour performance in the Local Elections last week.

Underwhelming results

Although the BBC spun last Thursday as a fine evening for the Blatcherite Party, in truth, it gained about a hundred councillors or so fewer than I was expecting. The projections drawn from the votes cast suggest that the General Election will be a lot closer than has been widely imagined, with the hysterical notion that the Tories would end up with fewer than a hundred MPs in the House of Commons made to look a laughable fantasy. If the projections are anywhere near the truth, Labour will only have about fifty seats more than the Tories, and will finish some way short of a majority; a majority of at least sixty is surely the minimum acceptable target when fighting a Government this inept, sleazy and widely-hated.

Starmer and his colleagues have made absurd, somewhat racist noises about how the Gaza bloodbath is in a sense ‘distorting’ the results, therefore ‘the Muslim voters are not doing their job right’ or some such nonsense. Labour’s attitude really does seem to be as though a genocide is a minor, irrelevant side-detail and Starmer’s own conduct in relation to it should not ‘count’ in voters’ calculations, when surely how any potential national leader would behave during a genocide should be regarded as the most important possible test.

And once again, consider the arrogance of saying voters in traditional Labour demographics have a ‘duty’ to vote for Labour all the time, no matter what. No, that is not how democracy works. It is the party’s duty to try and win the electorate’s vote, not the other way around, and voters are allowed to demand more than just “Not-the-Tories.”

Still, Starmer has made vague promises about winning back the Muslim vote, the loss of which is clearly a critical blow to his hopes of a majority at the next General Election

Do you not think the Muslim voters themselves should have a say in that, Keeff?

So, with this unclear promise, perhaps for the first time, Starmer is finally acknowledging the damage he has done to, at least part of, his party’s traditional support base.

Promises mean less than actions

But what does he do just a week later? He provides yet more evidence, in among a raging torrent of such evidence, to that same injured support base that he is now just setting up a second Tory Party, by warmly welcoming into the Labour Party one of the most right wing MPs in the country. Elphicke makes the Democratic Unionist Party look like the SDP; even many Labour Right MPs are appalled at her arrival.

Given his record as leader, especially his unashamed support for Israel’s massacres of the Palestinians, does Starmer really think the Muslim vote can be won over after he now green-lights recruitment of a hard-right xenophobe? Never mind which wing of the political spectrum Elphicke is on, she is also bloody corrupt; we have not all forgotten her illegal attempt to coerce the judge in her now-husband’s sexual assault case.

Starmer thinks people want more of this? The man is unhinged.