Welcome Keir Starmer

 It is a relief that the Labour Party has chosen Sir Keir Starmer as their new leader.  Thank goodness their members   have put electability purity of dogma.  

That is not to say that I think Jeremy Corbyn is anything other than a decent man with reasonable ideas and a record of being right.  Unfortunately It was too easy for the hostile press to distort his past record so that, for example, support of the Palestinian cause was too easily twisted into anti-Semitism, and dialogue with the IRA was turned into support of terrorism.

I've no doubt that it won't take long for the press to discover items from Starmer's past with which to smear him.  He was, after all, a human rights lawyer and I'm pretty sure he'll have defended someone at sometime whom the right wing find unsavoury.  However, Starmer is a gifted man who rose to the top of a profession outside politics and is probably as capable as anyone of mastering the difficult tasks ahead.

I think these are three.

Most immediately he must co-operate with the government on finding the best measure to take to combat the coronavirus without at the same time allowing himself and his party to be dragged into sharing the blame for the mess the government has made so far.  This will be a difficult tightrope to walk.

There will be plenty of time for criticism later and the facts wills peak for themselves.  

As of last week China has all but stopped the spread of the virus with 3,322 deaths or just 2 per million population. The death rate in South Korea has also slowed with just 174 deaths or 3 per million population. In Britain deaths are still rising with 3,605 so far or 53 per million population.  

And we had three months to prepare.

Second, he must sort out the fratching within the Labour Party itself.  The great fault of the Labour party is that, collectively, it thinks it has the one unique solution to the ills in our society, and that those of us with different views should get off their patch and leave them to it.  Starmer's problem is that inside it the Labour Party has several factions each with its own unique view of the unique solution, and he needs to get them to pull together.  Good luck.

Thirdly Starmer needs to persuade these these unique possessors of the one true way that, if the Conservatives forces are to be defeated , then they must learn to accommodate to working with others.  

What might loosely be called the progressive forces in the UK, Liberal Democrats, Greens, most of the nationalists, the Women's Party are, along with Labour,  in the majority.  The major stumbling block to our working together has, in the past, been the Labour Party, especially the clause in their constitution which rules that there should be a Labour candidate to contest every parliamentary seat.  Getting rid of that could be Starmer's "Clause four" moment.