Welcome to Project Fear 2.0
Keir Starmer's attack on Reform shows the elite class is panicking
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Yesterday, a visibly shaken and anxious Prime Minister Keir Starmer rushed to northern England to give a speech that was wholly dedicated to attacking Nigel Farage and the Reform party —a party which currently has only five MPs.
In the astonishing speech, in which Starmer mentioned Farage by name no less than sixteen times, the Labour leader repeatedly attacked Reform and its leader.
He said Farage would “crash the economy”. He said Farage supports “fantasy economics”. He said Farage is no different from Liz Truss. He said Farage is a “gambler” who is pursuing a “mad experiment”. And he said the British people could simply never trust Farage: “You can’t trust him with your job, your mortgage, your pension, your bills, or your future”.
And as if all that wasn’t enough, at the same time, Sir Keir Starmer’s close friend Attorney-General Richard Hermer KC compared people who want to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, like Farage and Reform, to the Nazis.
Yes, that’s right.
People who want to reshape the legal architecture that has left us unable to control our own borders and deport foreign criminals are equivalent, in the eyes of Labour politicians, to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
This is the level of debate to which Labour politicians have plummeted.
You know what this is, don’t know? It’s Project Fear 2.0 –an outburst of hysteria, panic, sensational claims, and untruths among an elite class that can now sense its political project and personal power are being openly rejected by voters.
In episode one of Project Fear, before the vote for Brexit, in 2016, the elite class on both the Left and Right joined forces to dogmatically warn and gaslight voters that if they dared to challenge the broken status-quo in this country there would be a “year-long recession”, World War Three, endless chaos, and no trade deal with America, before the likes of Labour MP David Lammy went on to compare politicians who wanted to see Brexit through to … you guessed it … the Nazis.
While the strategy completely failed, much like it failed to stop Donald Trump in America, it was all part of an attempt to stigmatise, discredit, and shut down any public opposition to the elite consensus in Westminster.
And now, failing to learn that lesson, Keir Starmer and his team are returning to the same old playbook because, clearly, it’s the only thing they know how to do.
Yesterday’s sensational attacks on Farage and Reform make one thing crystal clear: Keir Starmer, his team, and the Labour Party are panicking.
By instantly elevating Nigel Farage to Prime Minister-in-Waiting, by making it clear to the British people that he now considers Reform, not the Tories, to be the Official Opposition, Keir Starmer is showing us all how terrified he and his fellow Labour MPs are about surging public support for Reform, especially in the Labour heartlands.
Clearly, somebody in Number 10 is reading this newsletter.
Labour can now sense that in many of these areas their political project –a project that ever since Tony Blair has given us mass uncontrolled immigration, broken borders, zero growth, soft-on-crime policies, two-tier justice, the erosion of free speech, and an enormous, wasteful welfare state—is now being repudiated by millions of voters who have had enough of all the chaos and carnage.
And by implicitly comparing Reform supporters to Nazis, Starmer’s allies, like those who described Trump voters as “the deplorables”, Brexit voters as “gammons”, and, in earlier years, UKIP voters as “loonies, fruitcakes, and closet racists”, Labour are also showing us they have lost the intellectual argument. This is all they have left.
One central message from the last fifteen years in Western politics is that these kinds of condescending tirades and insults never work. On the contrary, they inflame voters’ outrage and determination to overturn an out-of-touch, morally righteous, sneering elite class. Have Keir Starmer and his team not realised this?
And on what planet is Starmer living if he thinks Labour represent an “economic reality” that voters can trust while anybody who suggests an alternative to this dreary status-quo in Westminster is representing “economic fantasy”? Seriously? What kind of reality is being ruthlessly imposed on us from above?
Last year, before taking power, Keir Starmer and Labour promised the British people tax rises of £8.5 billion, an extra £9.5 billion in spending, and £3.5 billion in additional borrowing but then, after taking office, they sent taxes surging by £40 billion and borrowed £36 billion more than what they promised.
Is this reality? Or is this Fantasy Land where you can say whatever you want to get elected only to then do the very opposite of what you promised voters?
Keir Starmer now says only Labour can be trusted to “look after working people”. But is this the same Labour Party that completely smashed workers in this country, the Alarm Clock Class, by opening the door, under Tony Blair, then Gordon Brown and now Keir Starmer, to hyper-globalism and mass uncontrolled immigration?
A ruthless, extreme, mad experiment that is being imposed top down on the British people and which we now know undermined wages, eroded working conditions, made us poorer, and is making our housing crisis much worse? Is this the Labour Party we should be trusting? The reality we should be thanking Keir Starmer for?
And are we now being told that the very same Labour government that made it harder for companies to employ British workers by raising National Insurance, gave tax exemptions to Indian workers that were not given to British workers, sold our fishing communities down the river, is using British taxpayers’ money to outbid British workers in their own housing market so that Labour can favour foreigners, and is forcing workers to pay billions in tax to sell off our own national territory through the Chagos deal, is the government that puts workers first?
The same government that took winter fuel payments from pensioners and smashed family farms up and down this country through new taxes while literally sending billions of pounds overseas to help the likes of eco-farmers in Nepal and obese children in China? Again, I ask, is Starmer being serious right now?
And are we honestly being asked to believe that the one political party in Britain that is truthful and honest with the British people is the very same Labour Party that has been consistently gaslighting and lying to the British people, claiming it’s bringing down legal migration when the small reductions we just saw had nothing to do with Labour policy, while also claiming it’s “controlling the border” while sending the number of small boat crossings to record levels?
Is this the party that is being straight and honest with the British people? Or is this a government that is openly lying to us all?
And are we now being told that the one party we should trust is the same one that very clearly believes people who want to do whatever is necessary to fix a border crisis that is costing British workers and their families upwards of £7 BILLION every year, and which is forecast to cost another £15 billion over the next decade, are somehow equivalent to the Nazis?
That the Nazis in this country are people who want to change the visibly failing status-quo, as opposed to the Labour politicians who are eroding free speech and individual liberty by expanding ‘non-crime hate incidents’ to shut down dissent, tightening definitions of ‘Islamophobia’ to shut down debates about the rape gangs and the creeping influence of Islam, who seemingly have no problem with radical leftists singing anti-Semitic songs and celebrating Islamist-led atrocities against Jews, who are presiding over a regime of censorship and believe it is somehow acceptable to have people like Lucy Connolly locked up for nearly three years because of what they wrote on Twitter, all of which would not look all that out of place in … 1930s Germany?
Who is really living in Fantasy Land, I ask you?
Because what we are seeing this week, reflected in Starmer’s deranged attacks on Farage and Reform, is a Labour leader and indeed a Labour government that are definitely not living in the same, depressing reality as the rest of us —in a country that looks increasingly unrecognisable to millions of hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding people, many of whom feel like strangers in their own country, and where a rapidly rising number want to completely overturn the extreme project that has created all the chaos and carnage that we see around us today.
What Keir Starmer and his allies have failed to recognise is that millions of people in this country are now proactively choosing an alternative to the elite consensus that has governed this country for much of the last thirty years.
They might not think Nigel Farage and Reform are perfect, I suspect many don’t, but what they recognise in Reform is a vehicle they can use to change the system, an off-ramp from the failing, broken consensus in Westminster.
Berating these voters, insulting these voters, resorting to the same Project Fear that failed to derail Brexit and then Trump, will simply not work —it will only strengthen the determination of voters to oust an elite class that appears completely adrift from the rest of the country. The only question is whether Keir Starmer and his team will realise all this before it’s too late …
I'd been feeling a bit 'Brexity' looking at my Douglas Murray and Matt Goodwin books on their shelf, while waiting for a knock at the door, but it was a bit of a surprise to discover I was now a Nazi.
Smear escalation is inevitable as overuse removes their original power. Calling Brexit voters racist failed to work and via David Lammy to Hermer Nazi is going the same way. But what trumps Nazi? They'll have to find something when they find the latest smears fail to stop Refrom. Satanists next perhaps? I look forward to discovering the next step in my evolution from ordinary democratic Englishman to ...?
If Starmer’s looking for Nazis he need look no further than his own party. Rampant anti-semitism. Locking up individuals for saying things they disagree with. Protecting one faith at the expense of all others - Islam in the case of Labour. Starmer is a disgrace and a fool. He doesn’t realise that the country has already stopped listening to him.