Im no fan of Starmer but …

[BettyWhittaker]

I am very anti - Labour government, have never voted Labour in my life and never would and I hope an early GE is called …

BUT - AIBU to think he really couldn’t have handled Trump any better than he had? Christ the man is completely unhinged, his behaviour is getting worse and worse - AIBU to think Starmer really couldn’t have done more to handle this?

I thought his statement yesterday was pretty good. Let’s just hope the mad man gets taken out of office before he kicks off another bloody war

I find this deeply depressing - that there are so many problems within the UK and because of Trump and Putin we are instead talking about spending even more on defence.

I do agree that we need to deal with what the world is, not what we want it to be, but I feel some despair that we will be able to tackle issues with SEN or the NHS - these things require long term planning and investment (for example, we need to figure out how we want people with additional needs to contribute to society, how do we move towards preventative healthcare so we can limit chronic expensive conditions - and work backwards from there) but given the way democracy works and the lack of money I don’t think this is going to happen.

I don’t think she would’ve done any better. It’s like trying to nail jelly to a tree.

The similarities between Trump and Hitler are actually quite frightening. You only have to look at ICE … and that’s without the “invading other countries” bit.

We also need governments to stop wasting our money - on governments.
You say it's about support systems etc, but I can remember 50 million helicopter under Sunak, couple million on a media room etc and of course, the well known billions on the PPE. This is just the tip of the iceburg when it comes to wasting our hard earn taxes.

Our money does indeed need to be spent better.

I'd rather not.

What crap.

He was DPP. Be honest, how many DPPs could you name immediately other than Starmer? And there are many, many KCs, and non-KC barristers, with better brains and better reputations than Starmer. The man can’t speak without irritating or boring people. No, I’m really not impressed by him.

As for handling Trump, I have never thought there was any skill or charm or magic in what Starmer does. Trump likes Meloni more than him. I genuinely think any sensible person could deal with Trump just as well as Starmer does, given the realities: there’s no room for friendship, discussion or compromise. All anyone could do is keep their temper, be pleasant and hope the toddler moves on to something else.

Calling a world leader ‘very wrong’ is the strongest possible terms for politicians.

He’s not going to call him a cunt is he 🤷‍♀️

I do wish people understood politics and diplomacy better

I’m not sure what’s worse - the idea of Trump and Johnson in charge now, or when we had them in charge during Covid, you know that other worldwide crisis we went through not so long ago.

Just watching the US house speaker on Sky News now, even he seems to be trying to backtrack on Trumps comments

Difficult to imagine what Nigel would be able to articulate, with his tongue all the way up Trump's arse.

Yes, that was bad, but the difference this time is that Trump is the crisis.

By forging closer ties with our allies, those that were damaged by Brexit.

'never here Keir' has had it's merits on the global stage.

I think this is what I mean though. The UK is in crisis left right and centre, yet it always comes back to SEN and the NHS - that if we’re spending money on anything else at all, it somehow ‘proves’ we have yet more money to throw at the NHS and SEN.

SEN should be fairly far down the priority list right now. We’ve been increasing spending on it for years, it’s costing a fortune, and it’s made very little difference in the scheme of things.

Defence needs to be the priority now.

Hopefully.but whatever happens I can't see a rerun of the War of 1812.

Agree, It's all getting rather terrifying. What happened to Trump boasting of his record to keep world peace and not start wars?!

He didn’t get his shiny bauble for doing it. He’s told us that. No Nobel Peace Prize so fuck peace.

I’m on the fence. We are talking about diplomacy with a lunatic which is never going to be easy. Personally I think all European leaders should just ostracise Trump and blank him first a while. He wouldn’t know what to do not having everyone’s attention. But of course let’s not forget this is only really yet another distraction from the Epstein scandal.

Well he’s thrown all his toys out of the pram, now, because he didn’t get the Peace Prize.

I wonder if there are White House staff members who are secretly open-mouthed and horror-struck at Trump’s increasingly unhinged behaviour and rhetoric? I always thought that there would be behind-the scenes scrabbling to prevent the biggest inappropriate gaffes and ludicrous statements seeing the light of day, but apparently he has free rein.

You must be hard to impress. He was an extremely talented and experienced human rights barrister. He has saved many lives in his career as a barrister, using the diplomacy that we saw him excelling at yesterday. It’s all well and good saying “anyone could do it”, but when Tories vote in the likes of blundering Boris then slip onto nasty Nigel, I, along with apparently the majority, am grateful for someone with peace and people as their priority when it comes to negotiating with this dangerous psychopath.

The problem with blanking is that Trump will retaliate: American tariffs can cause enormous damage to Europe and he can withdraw support for Ukraine still further. He is dangerous and erratic, but I wouldn’t put this entirely down to mental illness.

I agree. And I wish the press would stop demanding answers from the government on their policy on this (and then reporting "minister REFUSED to say next steps for Greenland", etc) because it has to be dynamic as the situation changes so rapidly, if they say one thing and then do another (because things change) they get lambasted by the press which is unreasonable. And we also have to keep some plans close to our chest for now.

I wish we could just ignore the mango dictator, but we can't. We have to be very careful what we respond to and how.

I don’t think the majority do feel as you do about Starmer.

The only good thing about this situation is that many voters who swopped to Reform will be recoiling at the thought of having a rabid arse-licking Trump supporter as PM, and will be re-thinking how they vote.

There’s a whole army of talented barristers. Human rights barristers are no more able than any other. And where does diplomacy come into lawyers arguing human rights law?

We can’t know how Johnson would have got on with Trump. But I suspect at least no worse than Starmer does.

I also suspect that Trump despises and laughs at Farage. Trump likes and respects hard-nosed business people, deal cutters, people who build things, change things. Farage was just a city money-mover, a commodities trader. And Farage has no presence, much like Starmer.

But I’m not convinced that the endless grovelling and ego mastubation is doing Europe any favours. It’s just feeding his ego further. This is akin to an abusive relationship and we would be advising an abused partner not to engage. Yes he's dangerous and erratic, but he’s also extremely abusive and I think we need to change tactics completely now. It’s ironic that this is an idiot who doesn’t even know the history of his own country. Should the native Americans or Europe take America back from him? I mean by his logic it’s not his country just because they landed a boat there a few hundred years ago…