CSM EDITORIAL
Dear Readers of Country Squire Magazine, the Squires trust that You are well and that 2024 is a terrific year for You and Your families.
2024 is election year both here and in the United States (where a fifth of our readership resides).
While we suspect that a Trump will be hard to beat stateside (note ‘a’ rather than mere Donald), here in the UK we are sorry to announce that Sir Keir Starmer will be UK Prime Minister this time next year, after winning an autumn election. The other news is that we predict Starmer will need a coalition with the Lib Dems to form a government but will just about be able to put a government together without having to promise an enfeebled Humza Yousuf a referendum on Scottish independence. (Do not believe current polls giving Starmer a landslide – most shy Tory respondents like us tell the spotty pollsters that we are voting Labour just so they get lost).
On the positive side, Starmer’s interregnum could have been a Corbyn government. Also, election defeat will make the Tories face up to two facts that 1) The Conservative Party needs to listen to actual voters again, especially to rural voters it took for granted. This will include Reform and its more imaginative policymakers – Tories will need to pinch popular policies just as they stole policies from UKIP in the past and 2) it needs to simultaneously embrace the centre ground and become conservative again if it is to regain the trust of the British People.
A shedding of personnel, swift reform of CCHQ and an olive branch to Reform will provide the kind of opposition a liberal leftist coalition needs to self-implode. The replacing of Sunak will not be by the equivalent of a Hague or IDS as in the past, as there isn’t the time for such Tory introspection.
14 years is far too long for any government, especially for one that experienced the choppy seas of Brexit and Covid. Out with the knackered and incompetent. In with new blood, innovative policies and fresh hope.
For the Conservative Party, 2024 is essentially a year to survive and there are so many reasons why Brits should not vote for Starmer at the upcoming General Election:
- Why should anyone vote for a Marxist who allied with Corbyn and doesn’t know what a woman is?
- Why should anyone vote for a man who removed a poppy from his lapel before addressing a Muslim group?
- Why should those who voted for Brexit vote for a man who campaigned to Remain and wants us back in the EU’s orbit in no time?
- Why vote for a man who seems to think that windfall taxes are a cash cow to plunder an industry we instead need to invest in to give Brits the energy security we want and require?
- Why vote for a man who demanded longer and harder lockdowns during Covid and had the temerity to attack the Tories for its mismanagement costing the UK taxpayer £900B when he would have cost us more?
- Why vote for a party that not so long ago was antisemitic on its front bench? Its front bench is still frighteningly left-wing and untalented with race-baiter David Lammy as shadow foreign secretary! Labour laps up every crackpot woke idea!
- Where are your policies, Starmer? With every new speech you try to cover up a weakness but what about your policies? Are there none?
- Where, Starmer, are your charisma and steadfastness that suggest you’ll last anything more than part of a five-year term, propped up by the Lib Dems and at risk of a putsch at all times from your Deputy Rayner and other far left-wing radicals – sleepers waiting to pounce from your backbenches?
- Starmer is a man for all seasons without a backbone and as unprincipled as they come. He is inevitably a team player yet lacks a competent team. He embodies what is wrong with the selection policies of all the political parties – we are governed by stuffed suits and visionless bores, driven by a civil service blob who have not been kicked into shape since Thatcher. But worse, Starmer is leader of a rabble of career politicians half of whose patter heralds from Fabian Society apparatchiks who all supported Corbyn and have as much experience of real life as Quentin Crisp had of clitorises; the other half from Blair (about whom Peter Hitchens was nail-on-the-head right on GB News just the other day – clip below).
Finally, a Latin quote from the Squires that will become excitingly relevant in 2024:
‘Contritionem praecedit superbia et ante ruinam exaltatur spiritus’
Happy New Year!