It's the 13th week of this Labour government, but the "winning team" is already out of luck. Starmer's speech at Labour conference last week didn't even offer the promised "light at the end of the tunnel". What's more, everyone kept bringing up the expensive gifts received from Baron Alli, staunch Labour Lord and former media mogul.

    In the conference hall, UNITE union leader Sharon Graham led the chorus calling for a reverse of the cut in pensioners' winter fuel allowance payment. The majority attending the conference even voted for government to scrap it - by a token show of hands.

    Then came the resignation of MP Rosie Duffield, over Starmer's "cruel and unnecessary" policies: the cutting of pensioners' Winter Fuel Allowance and the refusal to reverse the two-child benefit cap which has contributed to the huge increase in child poverty.

    Indeed, a barrage of criticism has been mounted against the new government's austerity measures from right to left. And no wonder. The overwhelming crisis in the NHS alone is a factor holding up the economic growth (i.e., profits growth) they all crave. And how else under this system can that be addressed without "taxing the rich"?

    Economists are all offering advice. Reeves could, for instance, embark on some kind of disguised Public Finance Initiative - keeping in mind how that came back to bite Tony Blair.

    Yes, among all the other things which bit Blair. Like his co-invasion of Iraq in 2003 alongside George Bush - which is a memory revisited today as Starmer in turn, acts poodle to the US, by standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Biden and Netanyahu.

    Indeed, Starmer has already emulated Blair by dipping his hands in the blood of the wounded, dying and dead of the Middle East, as Netanyahu turns the region into hell - including for his own population. If Starmer et al deserve to be criticised - no, cursed - today for "cruelty", it is above all because of their complicity in this war.