Strauss’s claims about esotericism ought to be understood within the broader trajectory of his life’s work. Such an approach is in fact in keeping with Strauss’s own recommendation for how to read philosophical texts, esoteric or otherwise. According to Strauss, an interpretation of a given text must begin “from an exact consideration of the explicit statements of an author.” However, “The context in which a statement occurs…must be perfectly understood before an interpretation of the statement can reasonably claim to be adequate or even correct” (PAW, p. 130). Turning to the context of Strauss’s claims about esotericism helps to unravel a number of other important themes in his work, including what he calls the “theologico-political predicament of modernity,” the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, and the relation between revelation and philosophy (what Strauss also calls “Jerusalem and Athens”).
In his first published contention that Maimonides is an esoteric writer, Strauss self-consciously examines what it means to write about an esoteric text. Clearly referring to himself, Strauss writes:
No historian who has a sense of decency and therefore a sense of respect for a superior man such as Maimonides will disregard light-heartedly the latter’s emphatic entreaty not to explain the secret teaching of the Guide. It may fairly be said that an interpreter who does not feel pangs of conscience when attempting to explain that secret teaching and perhaps when perceiving for the first time its existence and bearing lacks that closeness to the subject which is indispensable for the true understanding of any book. Thus the question of adequate interpretation of the Guide is primarily a moral one. (PAW, p. 55)
Strauss maintains that before attempting to answer the question of whether a secret teaching, only hinted at in the text, can be grasped with confidence and precision, it is necessary to consider the moral implications as well as the moral impetus of a writer willing to write about such a secret. In making this claim, Strauss aligns his own dilemma with Maimonides’ dilemma and by so doing he points to the basic motivation that directs his own claims about esotericism. The question is thus twofold: why did Maimonides write the Guide in the first place and why does Strauss write about esoteric writing? In answering the first question, Strauss notes that the literary form of the Guide is a letter to Maimonides’ gifted student Joseph, who, like many Jews of Maimonides’ time, was traveling in far and distant lands: “Joseph’s departure was a consequence of his being a Jew in the Diaspora. Not a private need but only an urgent necessity of nation-wide bearing can have driven Maimonides to transgress an explicit prohibition [to write about esoteric matters]. Only the necessity of saving the law can have caused him to break the law” (PAW, p. 49).
If this is Maimonides’ reason, what is Strauss’s? Strauss is willing to make the seemingly immoral and indecent move of revealing the secrets of an esoteric text in order to save those secrets. The secret that Strauss seeks to save is insight into the political, philosophical, and theological meaning of what he calls “a forgotten type of writing.” But why does Strauss care about this forgotten type of writing? We can only answer this question by looking to Strauss’s published work as a whole and to the place of Persecution and the Art of Writing within this whole and to do so it is necessary to understand Strauss’s most basic question, which concerns what he calls the “theologico-political predicament of modernity.”
A Myth about a Myth: or free imaginative variation!
It’s been a year to the day since Javier Milei, the libertarian economist and TV pundit, became president of Argentina. His unlikely rise to the political center stage culminated in a stunning electoral upset that catapulted him to international fame.
A year ago today, he entered the national Congress and donned the presidential sash before breaking with custom to deliver his inauguration speech not to the career politicians inside but to the people waiting in the square.
In that year, the president plunged Argentina into a recession as part of a top-down process of wresting the country’s economy into line with free market orthodoxy. The process involved some of the most extreme deregulation the country has seen since the 1990s.
But Milei has also delivered plenty of surprises. Chief among them is that, despite protests that were often repressed with violence, his government has not faced the kind of massive uprising that would force them to renegotiate their fundamental proposals. Recent figures show that around half of Argentines still approve of him. Despite an abrasive stance toward his opponents and a tiny congressional minority, his pragmatism has allowed him to strike the deals he needs to govern. And, astonishingly, he has managed to cut Argentina’s inflation.
In this article, we summarize the key developments and challenges of Milei’s administration over the past year, exploring the impacts of his radical policies, the social responses they elicited, and the overall trajectory of his presidency.
Ley Bases: from failure to flagship
The Ley Bases bill was Milei’s biggest legislative win of 2024. Formally called “Law for the Bases and Starting Points for Argentines’ Freedom,” it was Milei’s flagship state deregulation proposal. But it had a rocky road, littered with hurdles that at times seemed insurmountable.
Milei filed the bill in Congress days after becoming president in December. The original version was a whopping 664-article list of aggressive economic deregulation reforms, laying the groundwork for privatizing over 40 state-owned companies.
A week earlier, he had issued a vast presidential decree that likewise sought to deregulate vast swathes of the economy. Decried as an abuse of the urgent presidential decree, it was voted down in the senate, and Argentina’s courts ruled the labor chapter unconstitutional—but the rest is in force unless the Chamber of Deputies also strikes it down.
The Ley Bases’ first round in Congress was a failure for the new government. It initially passed as a general item in early February but was sent back to commissions while the individual items were being voted on due to a rookie error by La Libertad Avanza’s lawmakers.
It finally passed at the end of June, along with a package of fiscal norms that was cut from the original bill and addressed separately. The number of articles was whittled down to 238, and the list of companies on the auction block was cut to 11, but the key points prevailed.
The final text of the Ley Bases grants Milei legislative powers over administrative, economic, financial, and energy-related issues for one year, as well as the ability to close or restructure certain public organizations. It also implemented major reforms on a plethora of issues including labor, state structure, rent, and public works.
Inflation, afuera
True to his promise, Milei started slashing public spending as soon as he got his feet under the table.
As of November, the government said, 33,000 public employees had been dismissed. The blender, as the president calls it, was also applied to pensions, which were allowed to lose value against inflation. A modest pension increase was the target of his first presidential veto.
The national administration has also clamped down on funds for Argentina’s provinces, placing Milei at a standoff with the nation’s governors in February. An olive branch he called the May Pact was, despite its name, signed in July.
In parallel, Milei vowed to halt money printing. After abruptly switching the nation’s coffers to run a fiscal surplus, Economy Minister Luis Caputo and Central Bank Chief Santiago Bausili announced in July that they would move the Central Bank’s interest-bearing liabilities to the Treasury as a measure to clear the monetary authority’s balance sheet. They argued this would allow the government to close the “second faucet” of monetary issuance, which Milei has long held is the key driver of inflation.
His economic measures culminated in inflation that, after spiking to 25.5% due to December’s devaluation, fell to a three-year low of 2.7% in October. But that achievement came at a devastating human cost: a recession in the first four months of the year contributed to poverty surging by 11 points to 53% in the first half of the year.
The government is now seeking to court investment with policies such as the RIGI large investment regime. In November, Caputo and the IMF both confirmed that they were in early talks about a potential new agreement. Meanwhile, there’s no confirmation of when Argentina’s all-important cepo currency controls will be lifted.
Presidential vetoes
Milei’s first year may be remembered as much for the legislation he nixed as that which he ultimately signed into law. On September 2, the self-styled anarchocapitalist issued his first presidential veto for a bill that would have prevented retirees’ pensions from falling behind the rising cost of living. At the time, he argued that it threatened the government’s plans to eliminate the fiscal deficit and was therefore “irrational.”
Hundreds descended on Congress to protest the body’s vote to uphold the veto, prompting a police crackdown that resulted in the pepper-spraying of several seniors.
Approximately one month later, Milei used his executive power again, this time to prevent a funding increase for public universities. The president announced his decision on the heels of a mass mobilization that saw thousands of students and faculty across the country take to the streets to defend the institution.
In the Official Gazette, the administration derided the legislation for failing to specify how it would finance its pay increases. The spending bill would have represented 0.14% of Argentina’s GDP. In 2023, the Congressional Budget Office released a report outlining tax expenditures in different sectors that amounted to 2.49%.
As with the pension veto, the public responded in kind, with students occupying administration buildings in different universities over a period of several days. Herein lies one of the lessons of Milei’s young presidency: every austerity measure will provoke an equal and opposite reaction from those affected.
Ministers: over and out
The recent dismissal of Florencia Misrahi as head of Argentina’s tax agency was the latest of 67 departures from an ever-reshuffling cabinet amid a maelstrom of changing ministries and secretariats. Many were abrupt and often surprising: the president fired the Labor Secretary in a television interview in March. That came just days after Infrastructure Minister Guillermo Ferraro stepped down after allegedly leaking information to the press. He had been under pressure to go as early as January.
2024 was also marked by consistent government infighting — from Milei publicly snubbing his own VP to blocs splitting in Congress — which contributed to the constant turnover. Milei’s Chief of Staff, Nicolás Posse, stepped down in May following a growing rift between them over the Ley Bases. Diana Mondino was suddenly fired as Foreign Minister in late October following a UN vote in favor of Cuba, but she had already lost influence within the cabinet following months of tensions. Along with former Health Minister Mario Russo leaving for “strictly personal reasons,” that makes four senior cabinet members departing within the first year.
Despite arriving at the Casa Rosada with a fiery “anti-caste” rhetoric, the ones who remain firmly behind its walls have repeat surnames. The inner sanctum of the Milei administration is his sister, Secretary of the Presidency Karina Milei, and Santiago Caputo, Economy Minister Luis Caputo’s nephew.
Visiting the free world
If we have learned anything about Milei over his first year in office, it’s that he enjoys his new position on the global stage. At the time of writing, the president had made 16 trips abroad since December 10, 2023. His favorite destination by far has been the United States, where he has traveled seven times. He has also made six trips to Europe and one to Israel, but only three to Latin American countries: Brazil, Chile, and El Salvador.
The choice of his destinations and reasons for travel have proven to be closely tied to his worldview. Milei’s dogmatic understanding of how the world works has informed a foreign policy based on labeling governments and institutions as friends or foes depending on where they land on his ideological spectrum. He has thus mostly appeared before right-wing and libertarian audiences, lauding them as staunch defenders of “freedom” while avoiding meeting with leaders he dislikes unless it is absolutely necessary. His meeting with his Brazilian counterpart Lula da Silva at the G20 summit in Brazil was so frosty that it became a meme.
The president has directed some of his harshest rhetoric against his imagined global enemies. Branding himself an enemy of what he calls “socialism” and the “woke agenda,” he has sparked conflicts with the leaders of Brazil, Colombia, and Spain — in the latter case unleashing a full-blown diplomatic conflict. Milei has also viciously attacked the United Nations and made a point of changing many of Argentina’s international positions, a stance analysts warn could eventually harm some of the country’s long-term objectives.
Freedom of hate speech
From early in the 2023 presidential campaign, concerns existed about La Libertad Avanza’s rhetoric as perpetually discriminatory and harmful. When three lesbians were killed in a brutal arson attack in May, campaigners were quick to point out that it came after months of homophobic government discourse. The administration’s dismissal of the hate crime birthed a central protest slogan regarding its vehement anti-LGBTQIA+ stances: “It’s not freedom, it’s hatred.”
The perpetuation of dictatorship apologia, also present in the campaign, continued apace, with a photo of deputies visiting convicted dictatorship torturers becoming another worrying milestone. Denialist social media posts erupted after the presidential inauguration, and a radicalized group with direct ties to the government has formed a right-wing online militia. Online threats have sauntered into the real world, from green Ford Falcons outside the Senate to LLA youth celebrating a new “armed wing” in an event with fascist trappings.
While fixated on the idea of freedom of speech, that right does not extend to the press or demonstrators. Argentina slid 26 places on the World Press Freedom Index, while Security Minister Patricia Bullrich’s draconian anti-protest protocol raised alarm bells as it enabled harsh crackdowns and arbitrary arrests by multiple security forces.
The forces of 2025
After a rollercoaster year, it’s time to look to 2025. Key questions to watch include whether Milei will secure a stronger foothold in Congress through the mid-term legislative elections, if and when currency controls will be lifted, and how a second Trump presidency will shape the political chessboard of the Americas. Whatever happens next year, the Herald will keep you updated with rigorous, high-quality reporting. Stay tuned!
U.S. securities regulators sued Elon Musk in federal court in Washington on Tuesday in an enforcement action arising from his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, now called X.
The lawsuit against Mr. Musk, who has become a close adviser to President-elect Donald J. Trump, is likely to be one of the more contentious final acts of the Securities and Exchange Commission under Gary Gensler, its departing chair. It could also be undercut in just a few days, when Mr. Trump appoints new leadership to take charge of the regulator.
The S.E.C. contends that in buying Twitter in 2022, Mr. Musk violated securities laws by amassing a large stock position in the social media company without filing the proper notification. The complaint said he had waited 11 days before filing the required disclosure with the S.E.C.
The regulatory filings are required so investors in the marketplace can monitor the moves of large investors and potential takeover bids.
Because Mr. Musk did not disclose his position, he was able to continue buying Twitter stock at an artificially low price, the S.E.C. said in its lawsuit. The move “allowed him to underpay by at least $150 million” for the additional shares before he belatedly disclosed his stake, the lawsuit continued.
Over the past few weeks, Mr. Musk had taunted the S.E.C. in posts on X about the potential for filing a lawsuit. In December, he shared a letter that his lawyer, Alex Spiro, had sent to the agency, rejecting a settlement offer in the case.
On Tuesday, Mr. Spiro denounced the regulator’s latest filing.
“Today’s action is an admission by the S.E.C. that they cannot bring an actual case, because Mr. Musk has done nothing wrong and everyone sees this sham for what it is,” Mr. Spiro said in a statement. The agency had waged a “multiyear campaign of harassment” against Mr. Musk but filed “a single-count ticky-tack complaint,” Mr. Spiro added.
This is the third time the S.E.C. has gone to court with Mr. Musk. The first lawsuit, during Mr. Trump’s first term in office, arose from inappropriate market-moving posts on social media in which Mr. Musk mused about taking his electric car company, Tesla, private.
Before filing the lawsuit on Tuesday, the S.E.C. had also sought to force Mr. Musk to comply with a subpoena seeking to take his deposition.
…
With Mr. Gensler stepping down with the inauguration of Mr. Trump on Monday, it is unclear whether incoming regulators will pursue the litigation. The president-elect has said he intends to nominate Paul Atkins, a former S.E.C. commissioner and pro-business conservative, to succeed Mr. Gensler.
Daniel Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School who specializes in criminal law, said the lawsuit appeared to be part of a pattern of matters being filed by Biden administration appointees “on their way out.”
It will be up to the new administration and Mr. Trump’s appointees to decide whether to “back off and withdraw” cases like the one against Mr. Musk, he said.
Technocrats are always busy at the business of ‘thinking’ about their status of as ‘experts’ ! Impressing on the minds of we lesser beings, their mastery of the ever expanding field of their ‘expertise’!
Reader think of Marshall McLuhan and or Thomas Kuhn, as the once ascendent practitiners of the ‘The New’, to borrow from Art Critic Harold Rosenberg 1959 book The Tradition of the New!
Here is a note from Adam Tooze’’s Financial Times essay of Octorber 28, 2022. The first mention of ‘Polycrisis’
The Reader isn’t quite prepared, for Adam Tooze, in his Financial Times streamlined iteration. Those New Statesman essays, have been miniaturized for those busy Capitalist Technos? Those majestic paragraphs are … Call it a collection of ideas, foreshortened for those readers, at the breakfast table, or riding that commuter train into the office? Let me begin here:
Headline: Welcome to the world of the polycrisis
Sub-headline: Today disparate shocks interact so that the whole is worse than the sum of the parts.
With economic and non-economic shocks entangled all the way down, it is little wonder that an unfamiliar term is gaining currency — the polycrisis.
A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts. At times one feels as if one is losing one’s sense of reality. Is the mighty Mississippi really running dry and threatening to cut off the farms of the Midwest from the world economy? Did the January 6 riots really threaten the US Capitol? Are we really on the point of uncoupling the economies of the west from China? Things that would once have seemed fanciful are now facts.
In my own reductive way I have outlined Mr. Tooze’s interpretation of what ‘Polycrisis’ is? It is a noun, as it describes a thing, no matter its abstractness!
This comes as a shock. But how new is it really?… This comes as a shock. But how new is it really?… So have we been living in a polycrisis all along?…Meanwhile, the diversity of problems is compounded by the growing anxiety that economic and social development are hurtling us towards catastrophic ecological tipping points. … The pace of change is staggering…. So, what is the outlook?… Perhaps. But it is an unrelenting foot race, because what crisis-fighting and technological fixes all too rarely do is address the underlying trends. …
I will put this to use in attempting to interpret? Mr. Tooze’s latest essay:
Headline: Three ways to read the ‘deglobalisation’ debate
Sub-headline: Proponents of business as usual and the new cold warriors are too confident of their ability to predict the future.
As 2023 unfolds, the world of economic analysis and commentary is marked by a disjuncture between discourse and data. On the one hand, you have feverish talk of deglobalisation and decoupling. While on the other, the statistics show an inertial continuity in trade and investment patterns.
…
There are at least three ways to reconcile this tension.
Option one: you can cleave to the old religion that economics always wins.
Option two: rather than business as usual, we are on the cusp of a new historical epoch, a new cold war.
Option three: We are witnessing not a reversal of globalisation or full-scale decoupling, but a continuation of some aspects of familiar pattern, just on fundamentally different premises.
The end point of Mr. Tooze’s flaccid polemic :
Whereas the advocates of business as usual declare that it is still “the economy, stupid” and the new cold warriors rally around the banner of “democracy versus autocracy”, the third position faces the reality of confusion, the kind of confusion registered by a term like “polycrisis”.
Polycrisis has its critics, and at Davos 2023 it risked becoming something of a cliché. But as a catchword it serves three purposes. It registers the unfamiliar diversity of the shocks that are assailing what had previously seemed a settled trajectory of global development. It insists that this coincidence of shocks is not accidental but cumulative and endogenous. And, by its currency, it marks the moment at which bullish self-confidence about our ability to decipher either the future or recent history has begun to seem at the same time facile and passé.
Polycrisis is Techno-Speak ‘a catchword it serves three purposes’ … to place the economic/political future, in the hands of toxic political actors, that are the natural inheritors of Hayek/Mises/Friedman: as we have yet to self-emancipate from the thrall of the Neo-Liberal Swindle!
Editor: With Trump about to assume office on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025 : Trump has rendered any move that Biden, Blinken, Sullivan might make utterly superfluous!
Political Observer: Bass and Newsom, and a host of others face a Voter Rebellion in the form of Recall? Attention: James Woods, this could be your moment !
John Buridan’s Questions on Aristotle’s De anima—Iohannis Buridani Quaestiones in Aristotelis De Anima:
Reviewed by Jordan Lavender, Texas A&M University
John Buridan, John Buridan’s Questions on Aristotle’s De anima—IohannisBuridani Quaestiones in Aristotelis De anima, Gyula Klima, Peter G. Sobol, Peter Hartman, and Jack Zupko (eds.), Springer, 2023, 998pp., $139.99 (hbk), ISBN 9783030944322.
To read this excellent edition and translation of John Buridan’s Questions on Aristotle’s De Animais to encounter two things at once: an intellectual landscape remote from both ancient hylomorphism and post-medieval European philosophy and a bridge between the two.[1] Like Aristotle, Buridan thinks that all living things are animated by souls. But these souls are in many ways unlike the souls of Aristotle’s De anima. According to Buridan, the souls of non-human animals are themselves a kind of homogeneous substance, composed of extended parts spread throughout the matter of a living thing (QDA 91, 195–197). The arrangement of the integral parts of a living thing and the sensible properties of those parts depend on the soul as their efficient cause, but not as their formal cause (QDA 91–93, 113–115). The core of Aristotle’s account of sense perception—the reception of the form of an object in a sensory organ without the matter—in Buridan becomes a mere efficient causal antecedent to perception itself (more on this below). The operations of the intellect demand no more metaphysical apparatus for their explanation than the perceptual abilities of advanced non-human animals (QDA III, qq. 4–6). Nonetheless, faith requires holding a view of the human soul according to which the ability of such a soul to host sensations and inform a body is miraculous (QDA 257). The editorshave made this intellectual landscape available to a wide audience through an excellent edition of the Latin text from the medieval manuscripts; a lucid, philosophically and philologically well-informed translation; expert clarificatory footnotes; and a brief but substantive introduction.
John Buridan (c. 1300–c. 1361) spent his career at the University of Paris as a member of the Faculty of Arts. As the editors indicate, QDA is the product of Buridan’s lectures on the three books of Aristotle’s De anima. It was completed by Buridan sometime after 1347, and probably before 1361 (QDA xiv–xv). However, QDA is not a mere exposition of Aristotle’s De anima or even a textbook summarizing late-medieval psychology. Rather, it is a “question commentary” containing Buridan’s own, often very original, responses to some of the most difficult questions regarding biological life, perception, and thought faced by the philosophy and science of the time.The questions, 51 in all, are loosely arranged according to the order of topics in Aristotle’s De anima. Occasionally, the questions raise issues about how to interpret Aristotle’s works. More often, they focus on philosophical problems. Book 1 (6 questions) covers a wide range of topics and includes a question on the status of universals (q. 5) and an intriguing discussion of the relationship between cognizing properties and cognizing the substances of which they are properties (q. 6). Book 2 (25 questions) begins with a discussion of the soul’s relationship to its powers and to the body (qq. 1–7). After that, almost all of the remaining questions deal with sense perception and include detailed discussions of each of the external and internal senses. (The exception is q. 7, which is the only question in QDA solely devoted to “vegetative” powers and activities.) Book 3 (20 questions) begins with a discussion of the metaphysics of the human intellectual soul (qq. 1–7) and ends with questions devoted to further issues involving the same topic (qq. 17–20). The questions in between (qq. 8–16) contain an extensive discussion of the nature and causes of thought and various related problems.
Headline: Keir Starmer’s Bafflingly Bad Start as the U.K.’s Prime Minister
Sub-headline: The Labour government’s first hundred days in power have been characterized by mistakes, infighting, and drift.
By Sam Knight
October 12, 2024
Editor: Tony Blair’s and his Neo-Liberal Lite cadre are the arbiter’s of Responsible Govervance? Mrs. Thatcher called Tony Blair her greatest acomplisment. Yet Starmer is Blair’s dead-end?
This week, as the hundredth day of Starmer’s government approached, it was impossible not to compare the sense of drift with the dynamic early months of Tony Blair’s Labour premiership, in 1997, which followed a brisk “route map” of policy announcements. “Government is not just about the technocratic delivery of policy and change,” Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former press secretary, told the B.B.C., when he was asked about the performance of the new government. “It’s about the relentless, endless, never-ending conversation that you’re having with the country about what you are trying to do for the country. And I think it’s fair to say that that bit has been largely missing.” Another official from the Blair era told me, “It’s a little bit unforgivable to come in without a plan of some sort. I mean, that is the point of being in government. You have to actually want to do something.” The official despaired of the donations fiasco. “They say we have abided by the rules, so what’s wrong with it? They don’t think about how this actually looks, and that’s the politics of it,” he said. “If you’re missing that bit, it makes it a whole lot worse.”
Starmer’s own behavior has been erratic. He has veered between attempting to stay aloof from petty criticism and giving long, overwrought explanations. (The Prime Minister said that he needed to borrow Alli’s eighteen-million-pound apartment during the election campaign so his son could have somewhere quiet to study for his high-school exams. “Any parent would have made the same decision,” he told Sky News.) In September, at the Labour Party conference—a noticeably sombre affair, given the Party’s landslide election victory—Starmer gave a creditable and, by his standards, warm speech, in which he reflected on his love of playing the flute as a teen-ager. “Even now, I turn to Beethoven or Brahms in those moments when, how to put it, the reviews aren’t so good,” Starmer said, before waiting a beat. “I’ve got some Shostakovich lined up for tomorrow.”
I asked Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer, for his impressions of the Prime Minister’s early struggles. Baldwin served as a communications director under Ed Miliband, the Labour leader prior to Jeremy Corbyn, and he is sympathetic to Starmer. But he acknowledged that the Prime Minister has an ungainly style as a politician. “I have used this metaphor of a minefield,” Baldwin said. “He takes one step forward, two steps to the side, one step back, two more steps to the side. It is inelegant and uninspiring—confusing even. But it’s the best way to get to the other side. In opposition, the other side was victory. In government so far, he’s looked more like a man wandering around a minefield without a clear sense that he’s getting somewhere.” Baldwin observed that Starmer has been in comparable situations before—both early in his time as the head of the Crown Prosecution Service and as Party leader—and that he was able to get it together. “It kind of almost needs to get quite bad with him before he does recognize a change of course is necessary,” Baldwin said. “But, when he recognizes there is a problem, he’s quite ruthless.”
On October 2nd, Starmer announced that he had paid back some six thousand pounds’ worth of gifts that he had received since becoming Prime Minister and that the rules on hospitality for ministers would be modified. Four days later, Gray quit as Starmer’s chief of staff and was replaced by McSweeney. There were signs that Starmer was finding his direction. Westminster bubbled with talk of a relaunch and “Starmer 2.0.” “It’s good to have a serious Prime Minister. I don’t think that’s changed since before or after the election,” the Blair-era official told me. “This is come-able back-able from. People writing off a government after two months, when they got a huge majority and five years, is just ludicrous.” Baldwin suggested that Starmer return to the language of “Five Missions” which had framed Labour’s election campaign— economic growth, green energy, public safety, education, and the N.H.S.—but which has since got lost in the noise. “I don’t think he can turn around now and say, I’ve discovered a new fundamental purpose for this government,” Baldwin said. “There’s a very real danger he’ll be ridiculed if he does that. And the missions are personal to him. They’re important.”
Editor: The Reader might wonder at this Blackburn introductory paragraph:
Keir Starmer is posing as the Labour Party’s unity candidate, appearing prime ministerial while sticking by the party’s left-wing policies. But if elected, he would be forced to choose between these priorities — and it’s clear the left policies would lose out.
Editor: Starmer is the creation of The Neo-Liberal Lite Tony Blair!
December’s general election was undeniably a hammer blow to Labour activists. It’s fair to say that most probably weren’t expecting to be beaten as badly as we were. Since the election of 2017 all the talk had been about what a socialist-led Labour government would do in office, and although a Commons majority always looked unlikely, many Labour members will have at least fancied their party’s chances of forcing a hung Parliament.
These heightened expectations make the scale of the defeat that materialized, and another five years of Tory government, all the more bruising. Now the Labour Party is facing up to the question of how to respond. Some aspiring leadership candidates have toured the TV studios volunteering to abandon high-profile policies from the 2019 manifesto — not because they’re unpopular, which they aren’t, but implicitly bargaining with the media and offering them the chance to set the boundaries of Labour policy in return for more favorable (or just less vituperative) coverage.
Regardless of this, support for existing Labour policy remains strong among the party’s rank and file, shortly to be voting for a new leader, and the prospect of any drastic retrenchment from the current manifesto is unlikely to be favorably received. Hence the different tack taken by Keir Starmer in his leadership campaign, positioning himself as the unity candidate working to bring Labour’s draining four-year civil war to an end and take the party back into government on a left-wing program at the next time of asking, presumably in 2024.
This, to be sure, is an appeal which might hold some allure to Labour members — among them many erstwhile supporters of Jeremy Corbyn — especially those still disorientated and demoralized after last month’s election. But there are major problems with it, not the least of these being that a sizable minority of Labour MPs have no intention of making the kind of compromises Starmer appears to be asking of them.
…
Editor: this reads like Robert Colvile in The Times:
Editor: File this under the rubric of Political Chatter!
…
One longer-serving MP said McSweeney did not have Whitehall experience, “which could come back to bite us,” while “Starmer lacks people skills, and has surrounded himself with people with the same problem.”
McSweeney had a previous spell as Starmer’s chief of staff in opposition, but was removed amid accusations that the Labour leader was foundering on his watch without a clear vision.
The same MP complained there was now a “boys’ club” at the heart of No. 10, with those now in full charge of Downing Street blaming Gray for what had gone before. “Everything was always conveniently Sue’s fault, and not the lads’, despite all the major issues in Keir’s office predating her arrival,” she said.
One of the McSweeney allies quoted above rejected those claims, pointing out that Hollie Ridley, recently installed as Labour’s general secretary, had been one of his most senior lieutenants.
He also has two new and well-regarded female deputies in Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson.
For now, Starmer still has a host of considerable advantages on his side, notably a hefty parliamentary majority and a chief of staff with a proven winning record. But his early forced reset hints at the need for something more.
Editor: The reader can see very clearly, from this collection of political commentaries, that Tony Blair’s political catamite ,Kier Starmer, is not just a failure but an incompetent. The Reader can only conjecture what steps Blair can take, if any, to redress his utter failure of judgment?
