Orange Juice? Keir Starmer is on the Kool-Aid

The Guardian

06-04-2025

On 1 April, the TV comedian John Richardsons, who you will have seen on many panel shows, announced he was becoming a teacher, having already completed the training in secret. I was humbled by Richardsons's decision to do something genuinely worthwhile and by his foolhardy bravery. How would he control a class of teenagers pre-armed with clips of him clowning around with Russell Brand on The Great Celebrity Bake Off?
But it turned out Richardsons's story was merely an April fool prank. D'oh! The fact that the inspiring tale wasn't true left me deeply saddened, like the time I wept when my mum finally told me Father Christmas hadn't been eating the mince pies I'd made for him. I was 28 years old.
Of course a multimillionaire comedian wouldn't quit comedy to become a teacher on a £31,650-a-year starting salary, you idiot! That would be ridiculous. Richardsons's April fool was a publicity stunt to promote his casting as a teacher in the soap opera Waterloo Road, where actors are paid more than teachers to pretend to be teachers.
But perhaps Richardsons should change career. And perhaps, despite being 'the world's greatest living standup' (the Times), so should I. We should all do the right thing and comedians have crowd-management skills that transfer well to the classroom. 'I remember when I had my first Prime energy drink, Jenkins! I'm here all week!! Try the fish!!!'
Teachers inspire kids and thus change the world for the better. But nobody ever went on to change the world after watching 8 Out of 10 Cats. And wouldn't it have been great, for once, to see someone successful walk away from their wealth to help humanity? It shouldn't always have to be Michael Sheen putting himself out, again and again and again, his beard all wet with Welsh rain.
Like most north London champagne socialists, I am increasingly disappointed, for example, by the endless wrong choices of Keir Starmer, who I voted for hoping he would allow me to pay lip service to progressive values while making minimal negative impact on my own standard of living and hoarded assets. That went well. Having been handed a blank cheque by a disillusioned electorate, Starmer has instead just drawn a fat ejaculating penis on it and left it on the worktop by the waste caddy to get smeared with old stinky food.
Donald Trump says he is imposing tariffs because other nations have been 'raping' the US for years, and it's bold to use that verb as a metaphor for financial exploitation when you, and many of your houseguests and cheerleaders, have been accused of rape: Mike Tyson, Brand, Conor McGregor and Andrew Tate. It's the worst series of Taskmaster ever.
In return for our 10% lower-than-average Trump tariffs, Starmer offered tax breaks to US tech companies. Presumably, these tech companies are the same sort of tech companies Starmer was complaining about last week because they didn't regulate their hateful and false content? This false content includes Elon Musk-endorsed posts saying the 'incel' drama Adolescence, which Starmer is basing policy on, was originally a true story about a murderous black boy who was changed to a white boy because 'blah, blah, wokeness, blah, blah, blah'. And, by the way, that bit in inverted commas was an actual quote from Kemi Badenoch.
When the US national security adviser, Michael Waltz, invited a journalist on to an insecure group chat, we learned that wanting to see Europe fail is essentially official American policy. Trump's US is our enemy. And Jeff Bezos's Amazon directly donates to Trump; former PayPal executives are embedded in Trump's government; Uber's chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, directly donates to Trump; Mark Zuckerberg's Meta gave Trump $1m; a senior executive at Peter Thiel's Palantir spyware company, into whose metaphorical Miami mansion Wes Streeting wants to move all our alluring NHS metadata, helped finance Trump's campaign; and Musk's Twitter, currently X, actively advances far-right talking points to destabilise European democracies and promote fascist candidates. They seem nice.
Starmer is encouraging people who want to destroy our values to come and do it in our country at reduced tax rates, like a man putting on trousers made of meat and running towards a leopard. Even Ed Davey, the Evel Knievel of the centre left, says our moral responsibility is to join Canada and the EU in opposing this new dark US. But, with our gross domestic product and European alliances decimated by Brexit, we can't afford to take the moral high ground, which was of course the plan of its shadowy backers all along. Is our economic future merely as an airstrip full of low-taxed American servers generating AI memes of Trump dressed as a golden Disney king?
People understand the peril we are in. I spent last weekend ecstatically inhabiting a small Welsh town at a multidisciplinary arts festival where punters and performers alike were preparing for possible US trips by deleting all their social media, fearing airport incarceration from Trump's thought police. But at least our Trump tariffs are 10% lower.
What happened to youthful ideals? In March 2024, Starmer said he remembered being inspired by leaving his 'village for the city of Leeds' and discovering 'a whole new world of indie bands – like Orange Juice and the Wedding Present'. Did Malcolm Ross take his distinctive guitar work from Josef K to Orange Juice just so Starmer could sell us out to the new Nazis, like Neville Chamberlain waving a various-artists cassette that came free with a mid-80s NME? 'I have in my hand a copy of C86.'
Perhaps, unlike the April fool John Richardsons, Starmer should become a teacher. We need more teachers. And if a big boy was bullying all the little kids and stealing their dinner money, Starmer's already shown he knows how to look the other way.
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