Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer

• IN an interview with the The Sunday Telegraph at the weekend, the Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer praised former prime ministers Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher.

Mr Attlee became PM at a time when the United Kingdom was needing to undertake economic recovery from the ruins of war.

Despite this Attlee introduced the welfare state, the National Health Service, raised the school leaving age and undertook the biggest project of building affordable housing this country has ever seen.

Thatcher undertook the destruction of swathes of British industry; introduced a tax (the poll tax) by which the less a person earned the higher the proportion of their wages she took; annihilated the trade union movement; sold arms to murderous despots and dictators, including Saddam Hussein; introduced a policy that has led to an acute housing shortage, pushed up housing benefit payments beyond sustainability and continues to make decent housing unaffordable to so many people; pushed up unemployment four-fold during her time in office and then moved people from unemployment benefit to invalidity benefit to disguise the true figures (the same people her heirs now call skivers and cheats); undermined democracy by abolishing the Greater London Council because she didn’t like the policies of the person Londoners chose to lead it; fragmented key services in order to line the pockets of a privileged few with a programme of privatisation that has led to a lack of coherent strategies in transport, communications and energy and water supply; supported mass murderer Augusto Pinochet while branding Nelson Mandela a terrorist; claimed that “there is no such thing as society”; introduced the homophobic local government act section 28; supported apartheid in South Africa; and always put the desires of the individual above the needs of the many.

With Sir Keir Starmer’s total abandonment of the 10 pledges on which he was elected Labour Party leader, his determination to further privatise the National Health Service, his commitment to continuing with the current government’s spending plans, his unequivocal support for apartheid in Israel/Palestine, and his continual use of dog-whistle politics, it is clear that it is Margaret Thatcher and not Clement Attlee who Sir Keir is more likely to emulate should he ever become prime minister.

GEOFF STODDART, N7