I feel sorry for Keir Starmer, says Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. The more he tries to prove his party is fit to govern, the more “shrieks of manifest derangement emanate from his backbench MPs”. Cubans are rioting because they “don’t have enough to eat… and have no freedom”. But for much of the Labour party, if it weren’t for the US trade embargo, the country would be “a utopia”. Cuba is a “dynastic totalitarian dictatorship” of “cigar-chomping bullies” who imprison gay people and suppress free speech. Yet because it is “anti-capitalist”, Labour MPs such as Richard Burgon and Ian Lavery (who paid off his mortgage with the £165,000 he trousered from a miners’ union) are all tweeting solidarity. Not with the people, but with the “glorious revolution” and “that pin-up psychopath” Che Guevara.
“All socialist states fail.” More than a million people have fled Venezuela, “the Labour party’s wet dream”. Marxist Ethiopia saw mass starvation and death. In Zimbabwe, under “Big Bob Mugabe”, 60% were “food insecure”. Millions starved in Mao’s China and the Soviet Union. And how’s the food in North Korea, another socialist country with which senior Labour figures, “incredibly”, stood in solidarity? Of course there’s something “shifty and cruel” about capitalism, but that’s nothing to the misery created by anti-capitalism. Lavery and Burgon are “too stupid to grasp this”, but the kids marching for Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter (both of which insist it is capitalism that causes poverty and misery) don’t know their history. “Someone, please, show them the bodies.”
Read the full article here (paywall).