Patrick Christys: Labour talks about cervixes, safe spaces and whether Tories are scum

The state of the Labour Party conference has made me genuinely fearful about where British politics is at.

Keir Starmer has long been accused of sitting on the fence so much he has splinters erupting out of his throat. A man so wooden that a flock of starlings could nest in him. The Labour Party conference was a big opportunity for him to set his stall out and tell us what his policies were on things like immigration, the education system, how is he going to reform the NHS, what’s his Covid recovery plan.

Instead, we’ve been talking about cervixes, safe spaces and whether or not Tories are scum.

Instead, we’re talking about the minutiae of internal rule changes that will make it harder for the left of the Party to seize control, Corbyn-style.

I’ve watched a video of someone essentially telling white people not to put their hands up and engage in a discussion.

I did take particular pleasure in watching John Bercow plunge new depths. The tiny tyrant who is widely regarded as bringing the speakers chair into disrepute with his sopping wet pro-EU overtures and total disregard for the will of the people has completed a shocking about turn.

He’s gone from being considered a pretty extreme right-wing politician to attending a fringe event at Labour conference and calling lefties ‘Comrades’.

Apparently he posed for selfies with people for at least 15 minutes. It’s a sad decline for Bercow, who is now so evidently desperate for attention that I’m pretty sure he’d dance for me if I tossed him a tenner.

And then, despite the fact that Former Labour MP Louise Ellman, who quit the party over anti-Semitism concerns under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, said she was rejoining the party, Labour members saw fit to back sanctions against Israel for crimes of apartheid.

This kind of sums it up – there’s a lot of stuff domestically that the Labour party is very quiet on – they seem to care more about Palestine than policies. And that’s an issue.

Of course there was the Shadow Cabinet resignation – Andy McDonald resigned because Starmer told him not to back a £15 minimum wage. This is a strange move from Sir Keir, because he was pictured campaigning for that very thing in 2019.

But it’s all pretty low hanging fruit to go after the Labour party, and at times they make it so easy it’s almost unfair. But then yesterday it was announced that Britain First has registered as a political party, and then Gina Miller announces she’s going to launch the True and Fair Party.

We’ve got other parties emerging – The Reclaim Party, for example. They’re obviously all radically different parties and I don’t want to group them all in together. But we have to ask why are these groups emerging? What’s going on?

Well Labour is trying to be about 15 different things at once, The Tories have been decidedly unconservative – Boris’ push for net zero, the curtailment of civil liberties…Big Brother Government has become a reality. The Lib Dems are an irrelevance. The SNP are useless to anyone south of the border…

In a time where this country has needed politicians from all parties to stand up and show leadership, probably more so now than any time other than the last World war, they’ve gone AWOL, they’ve been missing in action. They’ve been found wanting. And people feel politically homeless.