Newsletter #9: Tough-guy Labour collides with the electorate

PLUS: Justin Welby, Starmer on holiday, and a medley of mini-updates

Good morning.

And hello to all of our new readers from our journal’s appearance on GB News. For the uninitiated, this is our weekly (sometimes bi-weekly) newsletter covering day-to-day British politics.

This week has been, without a shadow of a doubt, the one in which the least has happened in British politics since we started this newsletter back at the beginning of October. That said, a number of big things are bubbling under the surface, so let’s get into it.

This newsletter’s agenda: Tough-guy Labour collides with the electorate (free); Justin Welby’s head is gone — what next for the Church of England? (free); Starmer’s on holiday again (paid); A medley of mini-updates: Gove, Dorries, Gray, Tax, Southport x2, Reeves (paid).

The first half of this newsletter is free. Upgrade to a paid subscription — £8/month, or £80/year — to read the rest.

Tough-guy Labour collides with the electorate

*very unconvincing malcolm tucker impression* ‘Y-you’re like a, a fucking, fuckwit monkey cunt with a b-banana.’

Tomorrow, if the NFU is to be believed, up to twenty-thousand farmers will descend on London to protest the Labour Government’s planned reduction in relief on agricultural land for inheritance tax purposes. Rumours — mostly, so far as I can tell, unfounded — are that farmers might attempt to block roads with their tractors, copying some of the actions on the continent earlier this year.

In response to these threats (mostly promoted by random people online), John McTernan, formerly an adviser to Tony Blair, went on a bizarre, ultra-aggressive tirade against ‘small farmers’ on GB News, despite almost no prodding or prompting. He said the following:

If the farmers want to go on the streets — we can do to them what Margaret Thatcher did to the miners…. It’s an industry we can do without. If people are so upset that they want to go on the streets and spread slurry then we don’t need small farmers.

This rant proceeded to go viral (16k+ likes on James Melville’s post alone), causing yet another needless headache for Keir Starmer, who — understandably — swiftly disowned the rant.

McTernan’s rant is bizarre for two reasons. The first is the more obvious one: that it clearly contradicts Labour’s own line on the new policy. If we believe Labour’s calculations, the changes will mostly only affect relatively large farms (especially if basic tax planning is done to maximise the available allowances). The argument, from the point of view of Labour, is that rich people are using the existing allowance to dodge tax, driving up the price of agricultural land in the process. The intention, if Labour are to be believed — and in this case, even though the policy is still obviously misguided, I think they are to be believed — is nothing to do with a supposed desire to destroy ‘small farmers’. Yet, inexplicably, McTernan has decided to argue that this is exactly what Labour want to do. Why?

The answer to this question, in my view, leads neatly on to the second one: McTernan is just the latest example of a Labour man acting in a strangely belligerent way; ranting about taking the fight to various people, as if he is more than a little insecure about his own masculinity. He wants to be seen to shout, not make calm, rational arguments; telling people ‘how it is’. This behaviour, the eagle-eyed may have noticed, has become increasingly common among Labour’s declining numbers of white heterosexual males. You’ll start spotting it once you’re told about it.

McTernan has probably watched a little bit too much of The Thick of It; dreaming of going on his very own foul, aggressive, Malcolm Tucker-inspired speeches. Unfortunately, in real life, unlike on television, people don’t much like Malcolm Tucker, and they like Malcolm Tucker wannabes even less. Alas, I fear that few Labour Party apparatchiks will realise this until it is too late.

Justin Welby’s head is gone — what next for the Church of England?

Go Woke, Go Broke.

It appears that karma has finally come for Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby — a man who, it should be remembered, spent years trying to engineer a fake abuse scandal concerning the late and great Bishop George Bell, forcing Bell’s (at the time) ninety-one-year-old niece to come out publicly to try and clear his name after Welby’s Church inexplicably reached a settlement with a woman for crimes which Bell, a noble servant of Christ, simply did not commit.

As if it was not enough for Welby’s kangaroo court to drag a pious dead man’s name disgracefully through the mud, he was totally unrepentant when the review on Bishop Bell was released: instead of acknowledging that Bell had, for all intents and purposes, been exonerated, he instead chose to say that a ‘significant cloud’ still hung over this totally innocent man’s head, so desperate was he for an abuse scandal to emerge from which he could come out as a hero, condemning all of his older peers and saving the day to adulation from the press. That he has been hoisted on his own petard is somewhat gratifying to say the least.

Given that Welby was not only extremely unpopular as Archbishop of Canterbury but was also forced out, it has become more likely that the Crown Nominations Commission — the little-known (outside of the Church of England) body responsible for choosing his replacement — will select someone more socially conservative than Welby, not less, as his replacement. But even aside from his general unpopularity and the immediate impact of the scalp, this was already on the cards anyway, even if Welby got to retire gracefully when he turns seventy (the mandatory retirement age for bishops in the Church of England) in just one year and one month from now, simply because of how the Commission is made up.

The Crown Nominations Commission was established in 1974 (before 1974, the monarch used to choose the archbishop directly). This time, it will consist of the following: the Archbishop of York; a second (as of yet unnamed) senior bishop; six General Synod members; three Canterbury diocese representatives (these are ordinary church members who have been elected); and five members selected from the wider Anglican Communion (i.e., from Anglican Churches around the world; these people will be heavily African, as this was one of Welby’s passions).

With the combination of this electorate, and the possibility of a schism (something that liberals and conservatives alike know would be fatal to the former, not the latter) if a woman were chosen for the top job, those on the political Right both cynically and excitedly predicting that the next Archbishop of Canterbury will be someone like the strong, independent black woman Rose Hudson-Wilkin, currently the Bishop of Dover, are almost certainly going to be disappointed. It is obvious that many on the liberal wing of the Church were reluctant to call for Welby’s resignation because even they are aware that they are likely to be harmed by the dynamics at play. In the end, it was Helen-Ann Hartley, Bishop of Newcastle, who got the final shot off at Welby, being the only bishop to publicly call for Welby to Go, but even the Bluesky enjoyers in the Church of England see her as an extreme long-shot for the keys to Canterbury.

Pimlico Journal are predicting that Paul Williams, Bishop of Nottingham — one of the four bishops to vote against the (successful) proposal for gay blessings in the Church at an emergency synod last year — will romp home with the title.

With all this in mind, it is very appealing to want to be off with the current Archbishop’s head. However, as a long-time hater of Welby, for both political and religious reasons, it is my personal belief that advocating for his removal in these circumstances is the epitome of penny wise, pound foolish.

The facts, for those who are not aware, are as follows: John Smyth, a barrister-turned-lay-reader who abused boys at Winchester College and in Zimbabwe, was active in the ’70s and ’80s, long before Welby (who was only ordained in 1992) could possibly be said to be responsible for anything.

It is obvious that this scandal is going to be used by bad actors to harm the Church. First out of the gates was, inevitably, the vile Richard Coles who, even before Welby had resigned, posted on X that ‘…a reset [is needed] that begins with making Safeguarding in the CofE independent of the CofE... isn’t that obvious?’ This takes power and independence permanently away from the Church, and — better yet from the point of view of Coles, who has a permanent axe to grind due to the Church’s position on gay marriage — creates the idea that the Church as a whole is indelibly guilty for all of eternity.

Even worse was the idea published in The Guardian, quoting verbatim from the ‘damning report’, that Welby should have known Symth was an abuser at the time. This was because in the ’70s, when he was still working in the oil industry, Welby volunteered at Christian youth camps, which Smyth ran, cleaning toilets. As such, The Guardian, backed by the report itself, claim that ‘…[while Welby] may not have known of the extreme seriousness of the abuse… it is most probable that he would have had at least a level of knowledge that John Smyth was of some concern’. This is a stretch to say the least.

When combined with the ignorance among the general public as to what this latest abuse scandal is even about, that Welby has actually been forced to resign over this suggests nothing more than a rigmarole-fuelled decapitation. I fear that the consequences of this will stick with us for far longer than the five minutes of euphoria that his departure has brought us.

—Christopher Danby-Lloyd Contributor, Pimlico Journal

Starmer’s on holiday again

Yet another all-expenses-paid jolly.

Starmer’s gone on holiday again. Okay, he’s not technically on holiday. But he’s not doing anything much at home. (Perhaps we should be grateful.)