It will take decades to unpick Starmer's ludicrous ‘deals'
As soon as Labour got in I could see the writing was on the wall. Desperate to curry favour with the unions, Starmer sent his ministers out to solve the unrest in the public sector. He sanctioned Wes Streeting to hand over a 22 per cent pay rise to the junior doctors. Labour boasted that they'd fixed the problem in the NHS and everything would now flourish. This week those same doctors will go out on strike because the government can't give them any more.
Next came the train drivers. After paralysing the country for months they accepted 15 per cent to return to a normal timetable. The Secretary of State for Transport Louise Haigh, who later had to resign over a fraud conviction, paid the money with no conditions. As a result the train drivers continue to milk the system, work four days a week and enjoy hopelessly arcane practices.
Then we come to the international negotiations. Sadly Starmer has fared no better than his Cabinet. Let's consider the Chagos Islands. When Labour got into power it wasn't entirely clear whether Mauritius actually wanted them. And with much huffing and puffing from Nigel Farage - who was covertly suggesting that he would get Donald Trump to veto any deal - it looked for all the world that the fire sale would never happen.
But thanks to Tony Blair's diplomat in chief Jonathan Powell and the Attorney General Lord Hermer a deal was struck. The bad news is that we are face paying the thick end of around £56 billion over the next several years. Hardly a bargain.
As I said at the time on my show, it's like paying someone £25,000 to take away your 35 year old banger that needs lots of work and an MOT.
Next up it was the French. Before the rather ludicrous summit this month in London where Starmer got into full love-in mode with Emanuel Macron, he had already sold off our fishing rights to the French in return for a completely nebulous promise that the gendarmerie of Normandy might try a bit harder to stop illegal migrants from clambering onto some small boats.
£771 million pounds later, they're still coming. And now they're being handed free life jackets too. Quite a ridiculously low return for our investment.
Since the summit Starmer's negotiations skills have gone into overdrive. Thanks to his interventions it now looks like we will be paying vast sums into the coffers of the European Union in order to harmonise our food standards and to equalise our carbon markets.
And we haven't even got to our trade deals yet. The one with Europe certainly looks like one way traffic with the UK as the supplicant in the relationship. We pay, they play seems to be the mantra for the Foreign Office.
India meanwhile appears to be the beneficiary of a spectacular deal to open businesses in the UK which will be given special treatment when it comes to levels of income tax and national insurance. Indian citizens will be enabled to come to Britain and work on a temporary basis and be better off than their British counterparts. And it isn't clear, as with most deals with this Labour government, exactly what we are getting in return.
Then we turn to the USA. Forget the cringeworthy moment of Starmer producing a letter from King Charles in the Oval Office out of his breast pocket, and instead focus on what has actually happened since the deal was done - much more recently than Labour would have you believe.
We have bought around £1 billion of military jets from America, but we are still subject to tariffs on steel, on cars and on a host of other exports that didn't used to pay them. It's a no win situation for the UK because walking into a room with a begging bowl isn't going to impress Donald Trump.
He's taken the Prime Minister for a very long and costly ride.
This week an increasingly irrelevant and nervous looking PM entertained the leaders of Germany and the Czech Republic. He signed the Kensington Treaty with the former and a memorandum of understanding with the latter. All nonsense of course.
If you were a betting man, or woman, in a casino you'd always bet against Two Tier Keir. He loses at the tables every time.
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The Guardian
23 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Orgreave inquiry: Why now and what are the crucial questions it seeks to answer?
Ministers have announced an inquiry into the violent policing at Orgreave and the collapsed prosecutions of 95 miners accused of offences there, 41 years after the infamous scenes of 18 June 1984. Here we set out some key details about why the inquiry has been set up and the crucial questions it may seek to answer. The revival of campaigning about the Orgreave injustices developed after the Guardian published an article in April 2012 making the link between the South Yorkshire police operation in 1984 and a collapsed trial in 1985, and the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, in which 97 people were unlawfully killed. The same force, led by the same chief constable, Peter Wright, was responsible for the disaster, and orchestrated a false narrative to blame the victims. The BBC in Yorkshire then broadcast a documentary in October 2012, highlighting that dozens of police officers' statements alleging criminal behaviour by miners at Orgreave had the same opening paragraphs, apparently dictated to them by detectives. The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC) formed after that, and it has argued for 13 years that the injustices endure today and an inquiry is needed. Yvette Cooper began calling for an inquiry in 2015 when she was shadow home secretary, and Labour has pledged to hold an inquiry in every election manifesto since 2017. OTJC founding member Joe Rollin said they expect the inquiry to finally access all relevant documents, including some that have remained classified on grounds of national security. The overall police operational plan has never been made public. The National Union of Mineworkers has always believed the police attacks were pre-planned, kettling miners into a field and deploying strategically positioned mounted officers, dog handlers and units with short shields and truncheons. During the miners' strike police set up roadblocks across routes to mining areas to prevent people picketing, but many miners who were at Orgreave still talk with bewilderment about the police directing them into the site that day. No police officer has ever been held to account for the apparently dictated statements and false evidence that was used to charge 95 men with riot and unlawful assembly. All defendants were acquitted in July 1985 after a 48-day trial in which defence barristers repeatedly accused police officers in court of lying and fabricating evidence. A 2015 report by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (now the Independent Office for Police Conduct) said it found suggestions that senior South Yorkshire police officers later acknowledged there was evidence of perjury, and in effect covered it up. The IPCC referred to a note regarding the force's 1991 settlement of a civil claim, paying 39 miners £425,000 compensation but with no admission of liability. 'The note also raises further doubts about the ethical standards and complicity of officers high up in [South Yorkshire police],' the report said. The inquiry will be a panel of relevant experts, chaired by Pete Wilcox, the bishop of Sheffield. This builds on the pioneering Hillsborough Independent Panel (HIP), chaired by the then bishop of Liverpool, James Jones. Unlike that panel, the Orgreave inquiry will be statutory, which means it has powers to compel people to provide information. Wilcox will develop the terms of reference, format and panel membership in consultation with the Home Office. He said that he expects the panel to begin its work this autumn. After it emerged last month that Northumbria police had destroyed their documents relating to Orgreave, Cooper, now the home secretary, said she has written to all police forces believed to have relevant records, saying they must be preserved. The inquiry may follow the model of the HIP, which considered only documentary evidence and did not hold hearings where witnesses such as retired police officers would be questioned in person. It is presumed the Orgreave inquiry will produce a report that will seek to illuminate the full truth of the police operation and prosecutions. Campaigners also hope that it will help redress the broader historical narrative, the negative portrayal of the miners in large sections of the media, and prime minister Margaret Thatcher labelling them 'the enemy within', while her government fully supported the police. Given the four decades since these traumatic events of the 1980s, it appears unlikely anybody could be prosecuted, whatever the inquiry finds. But Cooper did not rule it out, saying she could not pre-empt the inquiry's findings, or any outcome.
The Guardian
23 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Government launches Orgreave inquiry, 40 years after clashes at miners' strike
More than four decades after the violent policing at Orgreave during the miners' strike and a failed prosecution criticised as a police 'frame up', the government has established a statutory inquiry into the scandal. The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, announced the inquiry having informed campaigners last Thursday at the site in South Yorkshire where the Orgreave coking plant was located. The inquiry into the policing on 18 June 1984 and the collapsed prosecutions marks the culmination of remarkable persistence by campaigners, who argue that the miners' strike remains an enduring source of injustice. The present-day focus on Orgreave developed after 2012, when the Guardian highlighted the violence and alleged manipulation of evidence afterwards by South Yorkshire police, and the fact that five years later the same force was responsible for the Hillsborough disaster, in which 97 people were unlawfully killed. Speaking to the Guardian at the Orgreave site, which has now been developed into an advanced manufacturing complex, retail estate, new homes and parkland, Cooper said: 'I think the miners' strike still has deep scars across coalfield communities, and the decisions made at that time – the broadest decisions that were taken by the Thatcher government in the 1980s – the scars can still be felt across the coalfields.' The Home Office said in its announcement that the criminal charges brought by South Yorkshire police against 95 miners were dropped 'after evidence was discredited'. The legacy of Orgreave has been to undermine 'the wider mining community's confidence in policing for decades,' it said. Cooper said that as an MP for a former mining area in West Yorkshire, she understood the community feeling. She made it clear that the inquiry would address the collapsed prosecutions as well as the policing on the day. 'People have waited for answers for over 40 years,' she said. 'The scale of the clashes, the injuries, the prosecutions, the discredited evidence, all of those things – there's still so many unanswered questions.' At Orgreave, about 8,000 miners assembled for a mass picket called by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), and were met by 6,000 police officers from forces nationwide, led by South Yorkshire police. The violence that ensued has become an infamous episode in British history, police charging on horseback and hitting miners over the head with truncheons. Some miners did throw stones before the police charge and retaliated after it, and the next day 28 officers were reported to have been injured. Official reports later put the figure at 72. The NUM, however, has always believed the police violence was pre-planned, and that the South Yorkshire force, and Margaret Thatcher herself, who described the Orgreave picketing as 'mob rule', greatly exaggerated the extent of miners' misbehaviour. The prosecution of 95 miners for the offences of riot and unlawful assembly collapsed on 17 July 1985 after their barristers repeatedly accused police officers of lying in their statements and in court. Michael Mansfield KC, who represented several defendants, said after their acquittals that it had been 'the biggest frame up ever'. The form of the Orgreave inquiry is modelled on the Hillsborough independent panel, whose 2012 report is recognised as a landmark, establishing crucial details about the disaster and overturning the false South Yorkshire police narrative that was intended to avoid responsibility and blame the victims. The inquiry, which will have the power to compel witnesses to testify, will be chaired by Pete Wilcox, the bishop of Sheffield, who has long regarded it as important for community healing. As dean of Liverpool from 2012 to 2017, Wilcox worked with James Jones, then the bishop of Liverpool, who chaired the Hillsborough panel. The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC), founded by strike veterans and activists in 2012, welcomed the announcement. Joe Rollin, a founder member, said he was 'cautiously elated' by the prospect of the inquiry. 'We've got a long way to go – and people know us, we're determined, and we'll not give up until we get the justice we deserve.' Arthur Critchlow, one of the miners prosecuted, suffered a fractured skull from a police truncheon blow at Orgreave. He was with the OTJC representatives who met Cooper, and said he lived with the trauma every day. 'It's a massive injustice. For the 48 days of that trial I was convinced I was going to get life in prison.' The inquiry announcement was fantastic, he said. 'I just hope the miners will be vindicated, and the majority of the country will realise that we weren't lying – the media were lying, and the police were lying. I just want the truth, for people to know what the police did, and who ordered it.' The NUM president, Chris Kitchen, said: 'We we are over the moon. We're hoping the inquiry will show that our dispute, which we believe was industrial, was political, orchestrated from No 10, or higher up the food chain towards No 10. 'And that the police were used as a parliamentary force to push a political objective, against working-class lads that were fighting for their jobs in this community and the industry. 'We never came to this field to cause a riot or to deliberately lame people. I don't think that was the same for the police, who came tooled up, with a plan to injure us, and to try and get the public perception on their side and end the strike.' A spokesperson for South Yorkshire police said: 'We will fully cooperate with the inquiry in a bid to help those affected find answers.'
Daily Mail
23 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Police calendar's one day for women… two months for trans
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