LABOUR’S new aggressive campaign strategy was meant to blow away the Tories with a series of deadly explosions.
Instead, the hard-hitting approach has turned out to be a gigantic suicide bomb that has detonated in Labour’s own ranks, leaving rubble and ruins inside the party.
As the fallout continues, anger is growing towards Sir Keir Starmer’s self-destructive, ill-judged style of leadership.
Ever since Labour’s campaign team first put out the now notorious tweet, with its ridiculous accusation that the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak does not want to see child abusers jailed, the party has been gripped by division and discord.
Many activists believe Sir Keir has plunged into the gutter.
From tongue scraping to saying no, here are 12 health trends to try in 2023
In contrast, Starmer loyalists argue that his “squeamish” critics do not have the stomach for the fight against the Tories.
But such defiant language is totally unconvincing.
The assault on Sunak backfired disastrously because there was no conviction behind it.
Sir Keir and his front bench don’t really think that Sunak is a supporter of leniency towards paedophiles.
And this kind of dishonesty can also be seen on a deeper level.
The truth is that Labour’s tough rhetoric about law and order is just cynical opportunism.
The party does not really believe in harsher sentencing or a bigger jail population.
Panic and ignorance
On the contrary, this lot are the same old softly softly gang of handwringers and excuse-makers who are more concerned with rights of criminals than their victims, who feel that offenders need support rather than punishment and who maintain that law-breaking is the fault of an unequal society and an underfunded welfare system.
That was all too clear from the car-crash interview Emily Thornberry, the Shadow Attorney General and high priestess of the metropolitan wokerati, gave today to the BBC.
In her attempt to defend the Labour leader she only inflicted more damage on him.
How to de-clutter if you have a beauty stash to last you a lifetime
Almost from the first moment she spoke she was struggling as the hypocrisies and contradictions of Labour’s position were exposed to scrutiny.
When she denounced Sunak for the leniency of court sentences on abusers, her BBC interrogator Justin Webb politely pointed out that between 2008 and 2013 Sir Keir Starmer, in his role as Director of Public Prosecutions, actually sat on the Sentencing Council, the very body which drew up the guidelines on sentencing child abusers.
Those rules explicitly stated that, in some cases, convicted abusers might be spared prison.
“Had Sir Keir objected to that clause?”, Webb asked Thornberry.
She did not know, she replied, adding feebly that she “wasn’t at the meeting”.
The rest of the interview was just as dismal, with Thornberry swinging wildly between smugness, panic and ignorance.
She sneered at the idea of trying to “slap as many people into prison as possible”, even though Labour’s big charge against the Tories is that not enough predators are being put behind bars.
Nor did she promise any more money for jails, while she also burbled about “putting a mental health worker in every school” as if that would do anything to reduce crime.
Just as hollow was her talk about rigorous community sentences.
There is no such thing. The only meaningful punishment for a serial or serious offender is a spell behind bars.
The whole interview was a farce. But then Labour’s entire stance on criminality is farcical.
This is the party that introduced the Human Rights Act — which became a charter for offenders and a bonanza for left-wing lawyers — agitated against the deportation of foreign criminals, opposed attempts to strengthen our borders and crack down on people smugglers, swamped the justice system with politically correct bureaucracy and promoted toxic identity politics across the institutions that should be protecting us, from the police to the probation service.
Sir Keir now has the nerve to lecture Sunak about child abuse, when Labour-run local councils were responsible for a string of grooming scandals and child protection failures.
And it was a Labour Home Secretary, John Reid, who declared in 2006 that the Home Office was “not fit for purpose”, words that served as an indictment of Labour rule.
With breath-taking delusion, Starmer’s team have boasted of the success of the attack on Sunak and are promising more of the same “provocative and aggressive” material.
The incendiary tweet is “only the start of things to come” and “you ain’t seen nothing yet,” trumpeted one aide yesterday.
Act of self-harm
We are told the Government will be denounced for effectively legitimising rape because of the low rate of prosecutions, while another advert will rip into the Tories economic policy for driving up taxes and the cost-of-living.
Sir Keir himself claims to be in a bullish mood and says he stands by “every word that Labour had said on the subject” of child abuse failures since 2010.
But this front of self-confidence cannot conceal the reality that Labour, far from going on the offensive, has committed a spectacular act of self-harm.
This might seem bizarre given that the party has consistently been more than 20 points ahead of the Tories in opinion polls.
But the Prime Minister was beginning to eat away at that huge lead through his record of achievement and competence, like his Ulster deal with the EU, his Trans-Pacific Partnership and his shrewd handling of the SNP that led to Nicola Sturgeon’s downfall.
To their alarm, Labour began to see their ascendancy crumbling.
One opinion poll at the weekend put them only 11 points ahead, nowhere near enough to guarantee a working majority at the next election.
So they decided to go on the attack with these drastic, dishonest adverts.
Like the child abuse nonsense, the others will backfire.
All they will do is emphasise that Sir Keir has no integrity and his party has no meaningful policies.
Take the economy. Labour now bleats about taxes going up, yet they are the ones who constantly wail about “Tory cuts” and “chronic under-funding”.
So how are they going to pay for more spending except by increasing the burden of taxation.
After 13 years of Tory rule, Labour wanted to emphasise their opponents’ unfitness for office. All they have revealed is their own.
