Across two of his six allotted questions at PMQs on Wednesday, Keir Starmer uttered the words 'working people' six times. It was calculated and had as much to do with electioneering as it did taking Johnson to task. He has revisited these words time and again in recent months as he seeks a foundation on which to achieve something that eluded Brown, Miliband and Corbyn - a Labour general election victory.
Starmer has two main problems with his appeal to 'working people'. Firstly, he is still a man of little substance. His policies are thin on the ground and even when he proposes something new it is clear that it is of no help to anyone and will merely heap more on the already colossal national debt. His other big thing at the moment is calling for a 'windfall tax' on energy companies, but that will just result in bigger energy bills as companies pass it on to customers.
Secondly, too many people are already aware that Labour politicians actually despise working people. Who can forget Emily Thornberry's infamous tweet about the white van man in Rochester? Starmer is no different. It was he who drove Labour's anti-Brexit policy under Corbyn's leadership and without working people there would have been no Leave mandate in the first place.
Starmer's working people mantra was mocked in a recent cartoon by Morten Morland of The Times (click below).
With the ever increasingly woke narrative, establishment politicians now tread on eggshells whenever they speak. We saw this with Starmer's desperation not to offend the trans lobby earlier this week when he refused to discount that a woman could have a penis.
Ironically, Starmer's recent decree that Labour is the 'party of working people' drew the ire of disabled groups. A spokeswoman for Disabled People Against Cuts said: "As a disabled person and a pensioner I find this utterly offensive".
It seems that whatever anyone says these days there will be someone who is offended. We used to have something called a stiff upper lip in this country, but in recent decades we have descended into a bunch of self-obsessed, state-reliant, nodding news junkies who fall apart at the drop of a globalist hat. In many ways we have the likes of Starmer and his idol Tony Blair to thank for that.
