Polly Toynbee, True Believer: hope springs eternal?

The public career of Polly Toynbee is a continuous source of mirth.  How many socialist saviours has she hitched her wagon to, only to have her hopes crushed.  Owen, Blair, Brown, Patricia Hewitt (sic), … and now Starmer/Reeves.  Always bearing the imprint of the last person to sit upon her / brief her confidentially over lunch.  But before the worm turns & the Great Disappointment strikes, whilst her wagon still hitched there’s nothing she won’t do by way of providing what she thinks of as helpful outrider support.  Here’s the latest - in the Graun, as usual: 

The Waspi women suffered outrageous misogyny, but in poverty-stricken Britain they’re not the top priority. The government is right in its decision not to pay the women up to £10.5bn in compensation … a government [does not] have a financial duty to repair historical sexism.

Polly: calm down!  Starmer & Reeves – just like your former beau Brown – don’t mind lying & brazening these things out.  It just doesn’t bother them!  They don’t need your sophistry.  Haven’t you spotted how they are leading you by the nose?  Here was you, Polly, back in July in that self-same Grauniad: 

Starmer will bin the two-child benefit cap and outdo New Labour on tackling poverty – I’ll bet on it. I will eat my hat – or several – if Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves don’t soon find the money to bury the pernicious two-child benefit cap. In her first budget, expect Reeves to find the funds for this, and other public spending not yet announced.,, Some worry that Starmer and Reeves will be deterred by the campaign to force them to pay up, fearing it would signal their willingness to capitulate and splurge on everything else. I don’t think they’re that frit, with the markets and everyone that matters backing them. It would demonstrate surefooted self-confidence…

Any doubt about their good intent vanished with their creation of a new child poverty unit. … Every Labour government always reduces poverty: this one will be no exception.  Expect no less from Starmer and Reeves, and probably more… And they will start by hurling the two-child benefit cap into the dustbin of atrocious Tory policies. 

Heart-rending stuff, eh?   Here’s how her infatuation with Brown ended …

ND