The Heartlands Tribune
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Working Class Independent left-wing news, views, and opinions. #GTTO #StarmerOut Please Donate https://t.co/tdPMBfWdSf
Videos
Was it worth it? In 1970, the BBC interviewed Sidney Williams, a 73-year-old First World War veteran living at the Royal Star and Garter home in Richmond. He’d served in the trenches. A Lewis gunner. The interviewer asked him plainly: “How many people have you killed in the war?” He replied just as plainly: “Couldn’t say. I was in the Lewis Gunners.” A pause. Then the harder question: “Was it worth it?” His answer: “No.” No flourish. No speech. No grand theory of geopolitics. Just a man who had seen what modern war actually looks like - mud, metal and bodies - and who, half a century later, saw no glory in it. Before politicians talk about boots on the ground and historic destiny, they should listen to the men who were there. Sometimes history’s clearest verdict comes in a single word.
The Heartlands Tribune380,474 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
Keir Starmer: "We inherited a really bad #Brexit deal that Boris Johnson had negotiated" A reminder that as shadow Brexit secretary, Starmer rejected *his own proposals*, and he did this to sabotage negotiations over a soft Brexit deal in order to undermine Corbyn, push a vote losing second referendum and run for leader... Yes, we warned he would do that in 2018 Watch the second part of the video talking about how Starmer sabotaged even his own red lines on Brexit. #StarmerLies
The Heartlands Tribune72,238 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
The former RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch warned people about #KeirStarmer before the election. Most of the media laughed it off. Many in Labour dismissed him. But he understood exactly what Starmer represented. Lynch said Starmer’s Labour was managerial, not political. A party run by lawyers, advisors, and communications professionals rather than people rooted in labour history, trade unions, industry, or working-class communities. A party that believed in management, not representation. Stability, not change. Administration, not politics. He warned that if Starmer won, Labour would not govern as a movement, but as a management team. If anything, Lynch understated it. What we have seen is not a political Prime Minister but an administrative one. Government by briefing note, by focus group, by legal framing rather than political vision. A Labour Party reshaped from a political movement into something closer to a corporate structure with MPs. Under Starmer, Labour has been changed more fundamentally than even under Blair. Blair at least had a political project. Starmer’s project has been control. Centralise the party. Remove internal opposition. Sideline unions. Purge members. Control candidate selection. Control messaging. Control policy. The result is a Labour Party that is now barely recognisable as a working-class party, and barely recognisable even as a democratic political party. It behaves more like an administrative arm of the state than a movement representing the people. Alongside this has come something else that should worry anyone who cares about civil liberties. Expanding surveillance powers. Restrictions on protest. Speech laws framed as safety. Increasing police powers. More powers for the state, fewer rights for the citizen. All passed in the language of responsibility and stability. This is managerial politics. Not leadership, not representation, not democracy in the traditional labour movement sense. Management of the population. Management of expectations. Management of decline. Mick Lynch saw a managerial Labour Party coming. What he didn’t see was a Labour Party rebuilt as a machine: centrally controlled, staffed with loyalists, a government with authoritarian instincts and no roots in the labour movement at all, parachuting in MPs with little to no experience outside political offices, hand-picked acolytes from outfits like Labour Together, selected not for independence or service to their communities, but for loyalty to the leadership. MPs whose first duty is not to their constituents, not to their country, but to the party machine and the people who control it. Labour didn’t win power for the people. Starmer won power for the global oligarchy and that little club he's been a member of since 2019... Paul Knaggs , Labour Heartlands
The Heartlands Tribune105,399 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Keir Starmer at #PMQs: "My uncle nearly lost his life when his ship was torpedoed in the #Falklands" Fact check: The only ship torpedoed was the Belgrano Meanwhile, he's cutting the #winterfuelallowance for pensioners and veterans who actually served. No shame. #Starmerlies
Labour Heartlands486,848 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Andy Burnham says Britain is paying too much for the basics and promises “more public control” over water, energy and transport. That sounds fine until you remember one rather important fact. The price of water and electricity is already controlled by the state. Ofgem sets the energy price cap. Ofwat sets price controls for water companies. Regulators already decide what private monopoly utilities are allowed to charge, what returns they can make, what investment plans they can claim for, and how much of the burden gets pushed onto households and businesses. So what exactly does “more public control” mean? Because if Burnham means more regulation, we have already tried that. It has failed. Bills are still too high, rivers are still polluted, infrastructure is still creaking, and private investors are still extracting from assets the public cannot live without. The problem is not a lack of public control. The problem is ownership. You cannot properly control a monopoly utility while leaving the monopoly in private hands and pretending the regulator is a substitute for democracy. This is where Burnham’s fiscal confusion matters too. He talks about giving people breathing space, but refuses to say the obvious: a sovereign government is not a household. Within the real limits of labour, materials, energy, skills and inflation, Britain can build and own what it needs. The real fiscal rule should be simple. If the public pays, the public owns. Not “public control” while private firms keep the pipes, cables, profits and ransom note. Public ownership. Public investment. Public accountability. Anything less is just the same failed model wearing a northern accent. #weownit #andy
The Heartlands Tribune27,700 Aufrufe • vor 26 Tagen
Here’s the truth: nobody ever really liked Starmer. It was always there, the insincerity stitched into him like a Lord Alli suit. His lack of vision for the country was matched only by his lack of understanding of what the Labour Party was supposed to be. He never built a route for working people to rise. He built a reception room for corporations to enter. He shook the hands of the profit-makers and ignored the open palms of the poor. Fairly or unfairly, he is now despised by much of the public. Not because people are stupid. Not because they failed to understand him. But because they understood him perfectly well. A man without warmth. A party without roots. A government without a cause. Lewis Goodall says Keir Starmer has no way back as PM following the local election results, adding that former Labour leader "Jeremy Corbyn" didn't experience a similar "wipeout" at his most unpopular point.
Labour Heartlands68,462 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Something unexpected happened at #Davos Jamie Dimon, hardly a socialist firebrand, openly called out the dysfunction at the heart of the global system. Not in activist language. Not in moral rhetoric. But in blunt, managerial terms. Dimon argued that targeted public spending, if directed straight to people who need it, would drive growth rather than drain it. He dismissed the obsession with deficit panic and even accepted that modest tax rises might be justified, if the money actually reached ordinary people instead of disappearing into Washington’s black hole. Then he went further. He described Congress as a “swamp”, dominated by 17,000 lobbying groups. He admitted that banks and corporations are part of the problem, pursuing narrow self-interest over the public good. He pointed to how programmes like the CHIPS Act are bloated, distorted, and ultimately fail because they become vehicles for interest groups rather than real economic strategy. In other words, the system doesn’t fail by accident. It fails by design. And then, right as he reached the core of the problem, the moderator stepped in: “OK. We’re running out of time.” That moment mattered. Because when even a Wall Street CEO starts saying that money should go directly to people, that growth comes from real investment not endless lobbying churn, and that the political system is captured, the limits of acceptable discussion are suddenly revealed. Redistribution is fine, apparently, as long as it’s abstract. Critique is acceptable, as long as it doesn’t question power for too long. And honesty is tolerated, right up until it becomes inconvenient. This wasn’t a radical speech. It was a controlled breach in the narrative. And the speed with which it was shut down tells you everything you need to know about who Davos is really for. When even the beneficiaries of the system can no longer pretend it works, the problem isn’t ideology. It’s legitimacy in a rigged system exposed Paul Knaggs, Labour Heartlands #WEF2026 #WEF
Labour Heartlands119,535 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
I am fed up with journalists and pundits pretending they cannot work out how Starmer went from a so-called “landslide victory” to being booted out in two years. It was not a landslide. It was the Tory Party collapsing in public. Labour won a huge majority on barely a third of the vote. That was not love. It was exhaustion. And spare us the “decent man” routine. A decent man does not win the Labour leadership on ten pledges, then bin half of them once he has the job. A decent man does not promise public ownership, then run back to the market. A decent man does not attack austerity, then keep the two-child cap. A decent man does not promise to abolish tuition fees, then drop it. A decent man doesn't pretend genocide is not happening, while it's been screened on our TVs. A decent man does not sell hope to Labour members, then govern for donors, consultants, corporate interests and the permanent establishment. A decent man does not lecture the country on standards while taking clothes, glasses, hospitality, football tickets and freebies from wealthy donors, then act wounded when people notice. Starmer was forced to repay more than £6,000 in gifts after the row over donations and hospitality. This was not an accidental failure. It was a character revealed.. The man who promised clean politics gave us Mandelson. The man who promised integrity gave us managed slogans. The man who promised change gave us continuity with better lighting. The media class cannot explain Starmer’s collapse because they helped sell the myth. They told us he was serious. They told us he was competent. They told us he was decent. Working people looked at the bills, the broken promises, the arrogance, the freebies, the war posturing, the donor class, the u-turns and the empty technocratic mush, and reached the obvious conclusion. He was never the answer. He was the establishments man wearing a red rosette.
The Heartlands Tribune26,659 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Kwasi Kwarteng says the welfare bill is “unsustainable”. This from the man whose mini-budget sent markets into panic and mortgage bills through the roof. Kevin Maguire points out that welfare spending is forecast at 10.6% of GDP, lower as a proportion than in much of Europe. And over half of it goes on pensioners. But here is the part politicians rarely mention: millions of Universal Credit claimants are already in work. Public finances are not simply supporting people without jobs. We are topping up low wages while companies such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s report billion-pound profits. So spare us the lectures about Britain’s “welfare dependency”. The scandal is an economy where working people cannot afford to live on their wages, while profitable corporations expect the public purse to bridge the gap. #welfare
The Heartlands Tribune23,705 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
"The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged." 📉 Jeffrey Epstein describing the Trilateral Commission, where billionaires and politicians coordinate across continents to maintain "stability". Their stability. Not yours. ✅ Epstein: Member ✅ Mandelson: Member ✅ Starmer: Member ✅ Peter Thiel: Member ✅ BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: Member ✅ Former CIA Directors: Members Listen to Epstein brag about Bill Clinton, Paul Volcker, and "every great leader in America" filling out applications to join Rockefeller's club. Now ask yourself: when Mandelson leaked market-sensitive information to Epstein during the 2008 crash, was it a friendship or a network? And when Starmer appointed Mandelson as US Ambassador despite the files, was it poor judgment — or loyalty to the club? 🔥 Watch Epstein describe the system. Then decide who your government really serves. Paul Knaggs #TrilateralCommission #MandelsonFiles #StarmerOut #EpsteinNetwork #MandyFiles #StarmerLies
Labour Heartlands49,766 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
Sky News confirms what many could already feel on the ground. Labour’s support in London hasn’t just dipped, it’s fallen off a cliff, from 48 percent to 25. That isn’t a swing. It’s a rupture. Keir Starmer built a project on focus groups and managed decline, and now the voters have returned the favour. Prominent MPs are staring at their own obituaries, and the leadership looks less like authority and more like borrowed time. When a party forgets who it’s for, the public reminds it. Brutally. The "Uniparty" isn’t holding. It’s cracking under the weight of its own emptiness. Paul Knaggs, Labour Heartlands
Labour Heartlands31,091 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
STOP USING PEOPLE WITH DSD AS PROPS FOR GENDER IDEOLOGY This is Nick, better known as That XXY Guy. Nick has a Difference of Sex Development, a medical condition. He is also a man. A male. And he is furious that activists keep dragging people like him into arguments about transgender identity as though their medical conditions prove that human sex is imaginary, fluid, or somehow no longer male and female. His message is blunt because it needs to be: people with DSD are not a mythical “third sex”. They are not political exhibits. They are not a convenient shield to be held up every time someone points out that sex is real. Nick is male. His XXY condition does not make him less male. It does not make him “both sexes”. And it certainly does not exist to prop up an ideology he does not consent to represent. More importantly, this is not Nick standing alone. The UK charity dsdfamilies, which supports children, young people and families living with Differences of Sex Development, has repeatedly warned against conflating DSD with transgender identity. DSD concerns complex physical differences in sex development. Transgender identity is a separate issue entirely. After the Supreme Court ruling, dsdfamilies warned against the “oversimplification, misrepresentation and weaponisation of DSD/Intersex by third parties”, stating that such misuse increases stigma and may discourage people from accessing support. Read that again. The people activists keep using as their biological trump card are telling them to stop. This is what ideological capture looks like: people with real medical conditions are spoken over, misrepresented and reduced to poster children for a political argument they never asked to carry. So listen to Nick. Stop claiming people with DSD abolish the reality of male and female. Stop pretending their conditions are interchangeable with transgender identity. Stop using other people’s bodies, medical needs and lived experience as ammunition for an ideology that does not even respect what they are saying. People with DSD need proper medical support, dignity, understanding and a voice of their own. They do not need activists appropriating their conditions to deny biological reality. #sexisbinary
The Heartlands Tribune21,959 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Sir Keir Starmer's advice for voters today. If you don't like the changes we've made, I say, the door is open, and you can leave. I'm taking his advice, are you? What a shame, he ran this once great party into the ground... The Labour Party #Starmer #localelections2026
Labour Heartlands23,469 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Their hope is a coronation, a quick change and carry on. But it’s the oldest trick in the book: meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Burnham is not the break from Starmer. He’s the continuity candidate, and they think we’re too daft to spot it. There's not a thing Burnham has said he'll do, that Starmer didn't promise to do... #AndyBurnham The Labour Party
The Heartlands Tribune12,568 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Some people have been calling out Mandelson for years... Starmer and the government pretending they didn't know just doesn't hold water Back in 2023, Mick Lynch said Labour members and politicians should be supporting restrictions on Mandelson’s behaviour, pointing out that he was not a friend of the working class and that his influence should be curtailed. "I think all Labour members & all Labour politicians should be looking to support restrictions on Mandelson's behaviour... he's not a friend of the working class.. hopefully he'll have his responsibilities & his say curtailed" #Mandelson #starmer Keir Starmer Hat tip... Saul Staniforth
The Heartlands Tribune39,021 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
The “forensic Starmer” myth died a death here. Liz Kendall didn’t defend him. She exposed the problem. In that exchange with Trevor Phillips, she admits the appointment was wrong, admits the facts mattered, admits the seriousness… then still says Starmer isn’t responsible. That’s not a defence. That’s damage control. Because the facts don’t move. He appointed Peter Mandelson, then blamed process when it blew up. Leadership isn’t about what you would have done. It’s about what you did. So here’s the question that killed the whole performance: If it was this serious… why make the appointment in the first place? #StarmerOut Liz Kendall #starmer #mandelson
Labour Heartlands23,654 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Darren Jones playing the Inner Party Member from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four makes his rounds, reciting the approved lines with the calm precision of a man who knows deviation is the only unforgivable sin, a blue-suited functionary in a system where repetition is proof and doubt is quietly erased. Darren Jones MP tells Lewis Goodall that accusations against Starmer aren't serious enough to warrant a Privileges Committee investigation. That’s the moment the script falters. They know if the full story is allowed into the light, it won’t go the way they’re telling you it will; it's not just a can of worms, it's a vipers' nest... #Mandelson #Starmer
Labour Heartlands19,303 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Clive Lewis MP says Wes Streeting becoming Prime Minister would be “the end of the Labour movement in this country.” The hard truth, Clive, is that the Labour movement inside the Labour Party has already been buried. What remains is a Westminster management brand wearing the old rosette like a stolen medal. Streeting would not be the end. He would be the logical conclusion. A Party of donors, lobbyists, media handlers and careerists does not suddenly become a workers’ Party because it swaps one suit for another. That is not renewal. That is just rearranging the deckchairs on a sinking ship while arguing over who gets the captain’s hat. Here's the awkward truth. The Labour Party did not die because of one man. It died because too many of its MPs chose power over principle, donors over members, and managed decline over working-class politics. Streeting would simply be the gravestone. #starmerout #resign
Labour Heartlands16,353 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
Michael Foot was right. “We didn’t fight for the vote to give it away.” That was the whole point of #Brexit. Not fantasy. Not nostalgia. Not flag-waving theatre for careerists in Union Jack cufflinks. It was about sovereignty. Democracy. The basic right of the British people to hire and fire those who make their laws. That was all Brexit had to achieve. The rest was down to Parliament. Down to government. Down to the political class who spent years pretending to “respect the result” while doing everything possible to blunt it, bury it, sabotage it, or turn it into another managerial stitch-up. So when #Starmer now dresses up closer EU alignment as some grand rescue mission, let’s be honest about what is really happening. He is not fixing Brexit. He is exposing the failure of the politicians who never wanted to carry it out in the first place. His latest speech pledged to put Britain back at the “heart of Europe”, while Downing Street still claims the red lines on rejoining the single market and customs union remain in place. That is not leadership. That is triangulation with a Brussels postcode. Brexit did not fail because ordinary people voted wrong. It failing because the same political class that hollowed out our towns, sold off our industries, crushed our unions, privatised our utilities, and shipped power upwards and outwards was suddenly asked to return power downwards to the people. And they hated it. The people voted to take back democratic control. The shower of parliamentarians handed us delay, deflection, bad faith, managed decline, and then blamed the voters for the wreckage. That is the oldest Westminster trick in the book: fail the people, then accuse the people of failure. Michael Foot understood what Starmer never will. Democracy is not an ornament. It is not something to be admired in speeches and surrendered in treaties. It belongs to the people, or it belongs to nobody. We did not fight for the vote to give it away. And we certainly did not fight for it so Keir Starmer could hand it back wrapped in a focus-grouped bow that told him it will win back support. Here is the hard truth Starmer needs to face: he never had that support in the first place. He became Prime Minister by default, carried into Downing Street on the wreckage of a collapsed Tory Party, not on a great wave of public belief. There was no national love affair with Starmerism. No working-class uprising for managerial politics. No mass demand for grey men with donor-class instincts to tell the country what it really voted for. He mistook Tory collapse for Labour consent. And now he wants to mistake that thin mandate for permission to unpick Brexit by stealth. #JustResign
The Heartlands Tribune12,975 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten