DARREN LEWIS:
IT IS a reshuffle bearing all the hallmarks of swapping deckchairs for armchairs on the Titanic.
There is a complacency at the heart of Keir Starmer’s Labour which suggests that for all the destruction at last week’s local elections the party may not even have reached rock bottom yet.
If you can’t hurt the most incompetent, mendacious, unstatesmanlike, chiselling chancer of a Prime Minister this country has ever had – with a supporting cast of halfwits and hangers-on – then you really do have further to fall.
Starmer’s performative kneeling in support of the movement to ensure black lives matter last summer has been followed up by so little that Boris Johnson’s allies are boasting of a potential “decade in power”.
You can only dismantle Johnson at the Despatch Box so many times before the spotlight falls on your failure to take one of the open goals presented to you.
You can only expose the cronyism and sleaze on so many occasions before your suitability to step into the breach is sized up.
That black Britain largely turned its back on Starmer says a great deal about his Labour’s failure to once again become the party that mine and many other black people’s parents voted for as a matter of course in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Too much of the inquest since last week has centred on what Starmer and Labour should do to look good.
Labour has failed to adequately address racism within the party.
It has sat on its hands for fear of upsetting middle England on the issue of race in general.
It has had journalists doing a better job of holding the Government to account on the hostile environment, the Windrush scandal and the disproportionate deaths of black and brown people during the pandemic.
Many Labour councils are poorly run and actually exploit those in danger of falling through the cracks in society instead of saving them. Out went Deputy Leader Angela Rayner, Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds and Chief Whip Nick Brown in this week’s reshuffle.
Only for none of the replacements to include someone with the relevant lived experience to connect with Britain’s black and brown contingent.
All too often Labour has been sucked into culture wars when it could have established a culture of winning.
Now the most comical set of characters since the Muppet Show is set to clean up.
Sucked into culture wars instead of establishing a culture of winning