Well, it’s a fascinating time to watch politics, isn’t it?
The Labour leadership contest seems to be emerging under the guise of a row over immigration.
So look, I am a conservative, you will be watching this and you will be throwing your slippers at the television saying it was us Tories who got it all wrong.
And yes, we did allow too many people in after Covid, but the people who came in haven’t yet got the permanent right to remain.
They need to have been here for five years before they can do that, and they came in 2022 and 2023.
Shabana Mahmood had a policy that was going to extend that to ten years, which was a way of dealing with a problem that was created, I accept when the Conservatives were in Government, but this doesn’t suit Angela.
And Angela positioning herself for a leadership go, as far as one can tell, has now decided that it won’t do. And at the same time, Sir Keir Starmer is too weak to be able to stop it.
He has lost his authority. There have been so many problems over recent months, the Peter Mandelson affair being just one of them, the dithering over Iran, where he was overruled by his cabinet, another, he is not in charge of his own administration and therefore he gets buffeted about.
Jacob Rees-Mogg reacts as former Deputy PM Angela Rayner appears to set her sights on the Labour leadership
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GB NEWS
But the country is still deeply concerned about migration, both legal and illegal. It still thinks too many people have come in and that too many continue to come in, and yet this Government doesn’t have the backbone to do anything about it.
The small boats, when the weather’s nice, continue to arrive, and the plan to reduce the numbers who are already here by not giving them the permanent right to remain has been undermined.
And this is really serious, because Governments need to command a majority in the House of Commons. It’s how our system has worked since the 18th century.
The Prime Minister is somebody who commands a majority in the Commons, but Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t do that anymore. He may sometimes be able to get the House to support him, but he doesn’t command it.
It is now on an ad hoc basis, where the strings are being pulled by other people, and that other person who is primarily in the frame is his potential challenger, Angela Rayner.
Angela Rayner, of course, who has all sorts of difficulties herself after tax advice was paid for by the Labour Party, running into tens of thousands of pounds, and HMRC hasn’t yet cleared her non-payment of stamp duty from about a year ago.
So you’ve got sleaze surrounding the challenger, you’ve got inefficiency and incompetence around the incumbent, and therefore you have drift and a failure to grip the problems that the British people are concerned about the words in office but not in power come to mind once again.