The departure of former Deputy Prime Minister and housing minister Angela Rayner over a scandal involving the non-payment of taxes has forced Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer into reshuffling his cabinet. Such a reshuffle, especially one so early in the life of a Government, was bound to create somewhat of a kerfuffle in both the media and the country as a whole, but this particular reshuffle has been very badly received. Looking back on British political history I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Cabinet Reshuffle that has given us so many moments of surprise, astonishment, concern or disgust as this one.
Margaret Thatcher’s 1981 ‘purge of the wet Tories’ when the late Mrs (later Baroness) Thatcher removed many liberal Tories from the Cabinet did not as I recall raise as much public disquiet as Starmer’s recent reshuffle. Not even Thatchers 1989 reshuffle, one made in a desperate attempt by the then Prime Minister to stay in power and stem electoral losses, compares to Starmer’s reshuffle. The 1989 reshuffle did at least try to place competent people in positions that the public might not vehemently object to at the next General Election. Starmer has not done this, he’s not brought any new rising stars into the Cabinet, as Thatcher did, he’s just juggled the turds that were already in Cabinet, ministers who are increasingly perceived by chunks of the public to be either incompetent or out of touch or just otherwise not trusted. Thatcher did at least recognise talent and promoted people like Sir John Major to a Treasury position, unfortunately Starmer’s talent pool in the Commons is much shallower than the one that Thatcher had and therefore Starmer’s reshuffle has given us a situation where all the very worst of people that the Labour Party has produced are now in all the most important Great Offices of State.
Let’s just look at just a few of Starmer’s picks for posts in this latest reshuffle.
That bulky globe-trotting ball of self-entitlement and uselessness, David Lammy MP, has been taken off the Foreign Affairs brief and made Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary. Hopefully many of Britain’s allies or potential allies who have been disturbed by Lammy’s various actions and statements whilst as Foreign Secretary, might be cheered by his removal. The departure of the man known online as ‘Idi’ after his remarkable physical resemblance (especially his bulk) to the former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and his sub student union political views, might make the Americans and other nations who we really need as friends right now, less hostile. Unfortunately bearing in mind who has replaced Lammy at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), I’m not going to hold my breath awaiting a delivery of foreign policy competence.
Lammy’s replacement at the FCDO is Yvette Cooper, the former Home Secretary and an oozing pustule of platitudes coupled with a searing contempt for the increasingly stressed British people. It is Cooper who has presided over a dangerous and dysfunctional asylum and immigration system that has failed to protect Britain’s borders and has allowed into the UK some of the worst sorts of people from the worst sorts of cultures and with the worst sorts of intentions towards Britons. She has presided over even greater degradations of Britain’s police with increasing politicisation of police forces becoming more and more noticed by the ordinary Briton on the street. At least thirty people per day are arrested in Britain for various ‘speech crimes’ whilst rapists, burglars, robbers and more are not apprehended nor their crimes prevented. The police have had their numbers run down under previous governments and Cooper did nothing to reverse that and nothing to stop senior police officers from continuing to act as de facto politicians in uniform and deciding which laws they would enforce against which group based on the senior police officer’s left leaning political ideology.
Some might say that it is foolish and maybe it is to try to guess what historians will write about Cooper’s time at the Home Office, but I’ll have a stab at it anyway. Cooper’s time in office might end up being viewed as the time when the public, rightly and mightily angered by the failure to protect Britain’s borders and people, an anger that has been growing for decades, turned on the politicians who have clearly failed the British people. The image of Cooper, taken quite a few years previously, putting on her sad, concerned face and holding up a piece of A4 paper with the words ‘Refugees Welcome’ scribbled on it, might end up as a defining image of this period in British politics. It shows her as an aloof, remote virtue signaller cut off from the public who later entrusted her with securing the safety of Britain and Britons via border control. Instead of a robust border policy and a prioritisation of the needs of Britons above that of some random Abdul who rocks up on a South Coast beach or is picked up by lifeboats, what Cooper gave us was a statement of the Home Office’s position which is that the invaders come before Britons in the prioritisation of needs.
Cooper might be remembered as the Home Secretary at a time of mass protest of a type not seen in the United Kingdom for many years. This protest might be less concentrated or indeed violent as for example the Poll Tax protests but they and the support for them is much wider and deeper than some previous protests were.
Cooper has been an abject failure as Home Secretary and I do not hold much hope that she would be much better as Foreign Secretary. She didn’t put Britons first as Home Secretary so I can’t see her putting the British nation first or negotiating with other nations with the aim of benefiting Britain. She could be just as much a failure as David Lammy.
But these are not the most controversial appointments. A whole host of green nutcases with connections to politicised green lobby groups is now, thanks to Starmer, infesting the Energy department and endangering Britain’s economy and energy security. We also have one MP who is profoundly antagonistic to private housing being made into a housing minister. Every appointment that Starmer has made seems to herald yet more potential disaster for the United Kingdom.
However probably the most controversial appointment by Starmer has been Shabana Mahmood who moves from the Justice Department to become Home Secretary. A lot of criticism has already been aimed at her because she is a practising Moslem at a time when Islamic terrorism is one of the main security threats to the people of the UK. She’s not the first Moslem identified politician to serve in one of the Great Offices of State in Britain as Sajiv Javid served as Home Secretary and separately Chancellor of the Exchequer in previous Tory governments, but there is a big difference between Javid and Mahmood. Javid has never been associated with causes beloved by Islamic extremists such as ‘Palestine’ whereas Mahmood has been very closely identified with such causes. She’s appeared at ‘Palestine’ demonstrations and abstained in a vote to proscribe the violent political group ‘Palestine Action’ who have been linked to attacks on British military installations.
Whilst I’m loathe to accuse Mahmood of ‘dual loyalty’ as others have done, because such an accusation has in the past been used against loyal British Jews, it can’t be denied that she holds views and has associated herself with causes that are not exactly flavour of the month with either the majority British population nor with some of Britain’s Western allies. If these associations with dodgy Islamic causes were in the distant past then maybe some slack could be fed to her but these associations are not in the dim past but while she has been an MP. Her clear devotion to Islam, especially at this present time when the nation and its people are being assailed by some of the more dodgy followers of this ideology and which therefore poses both a social order and a terror threat, is not good optics when the public is getting ever more febrile about the issues of migration and Islam. She might surprise us and be a strong advocate for better border control than at present or she might, as some of the Moslems that I have come to admire do, take a very hard line with Islamic extremism. But, and it’s a very big and necessary but, she was picked for this job by Starmer and that doesn’t bode well for the future or what she might be able to achieve for the British people at the Home Office.
As I said earlier in this piece, I don’t, in the decades that I’ve been interested in or have followed British politics, ever seen a Cabinet reshuffle that has elicited so much negative comment. Each post announcement has, on social media and especially on those social media outlets that protect freedom of speech, been welcomed with a hearty groan. Some have reacted with words of utter and complete disgust at the individuals whom Starmer has decided should govern us.
This has not been a proper reshuffle, a cleaning out of ministerial deadwood or ridding a Cabinet of incompetents brought in by a previous party leader, it’s merely a cosmetic exercise of moving a pile of crap and a pile of rotting wood from one side of the room to the other. The new people who have come into the junior ministerial ranks are also not either memorable or give anything like the impression that they would be anything else than a yes man for the Prime Minister. There’s nobody either in the higher levels of the Cabinet nor among the new or promoted Junior Ministers who I can look at and honestly and impartially as I can, feel in any way impressed by either their previous or potential achievements. There’s a whiff of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic about this reshuffle with the incompetents that Starmer chose being moved to positions where they can continue to exercise their incompetence or worse their malevolence.
The only good thing about this reshuffle is that it might not save Labour from ruin. I can’t see that this reshuffle will inspire that much goodwill to go Labour’s way. Unless some miracle happens or the Labour Party rediscovers the patriotism that it was once very comfortable with, then I can’t see this reshuffle enthusing the voters for either the party or its policies. The fact that so many Labour politicians of dubious competence or sanity of ideas have been kept or moved to very high office is not going to help improve Labour’s standing among an increasingly restive and angry general public.