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Will Keir Starmer unite the Labour Party and build on Jeremy Corbyn’s legacy? No.
As Reuters candidly headlined yesterday: Britain’s Labour turns page on socialism with Starmer as new leader’
Should we doff our caps and hail the triumphant Blairites? Swallow their call to unity, despite the fact that they betrayed the party throughout five years of smearing, back stabbing and undermining it? No.
Should we support this new corporate friendly re-branding of the Labour movement as the only option that progressive thinkers are entitled to? Let us think logically…
Labour’s task is to win back the ‘red wall’ that deserted the party over Brexit. Its stance on the referendum was not only the measuring stick by which many Leave voters measured whether Labour was on their side but (ironically) the final straw of decades of being taken for granted by the Blair, Brown, Milliband spadocracy.
Starmer was an architect of the ‘peoples vote’ and pivotal in the ‘arcane procedures’ which were deployed to block Brexit in parliament. Starmer’s insistence that Labour must embrace Remain was self-serving, dishonest and deeply cynical. His own constituency was solidly Remain and he was already thinking ahead to a Labour leadership election in which the membership was too. Starmer et al knew that campaigning under a Remain banner was general electoral poison – that’s why they did it.
As we repeatedly warned, the ‘People’s Vote’ was a trap for the left. By brow beating Labour into embracing it, the Blairites gleefully threw Corbyn under the bus, knowing that defeat would strengthen their post election attempts to wrestle back control of the party.
Looking back at the media coverage of that time, we find Starmer everywhere: undermining the Labour leadership and doing an end run around Corbyn. The right would rather lose an election than let the left win.
Starmer will be the obedient poodle of the careerist right of the Labour Party, the corporate media, the Tories, corporate lobbyists, Israel and Donald Trump. One consequence of the strategy deployed to oust Corbyn is that Starmer is fatally identified with Remain. Does any of this sound likely to win back a single voter in Labour’s former heartlands?
Quite aside from whether the lawyerly affections of a tainted ‘remoaner’ are likely to tempt back former Labour voters in Bolton, what is the point of electing a man so house trained by the establishment anyway?
Literally as I type, Starmer is on the Andrew Marr show re-positioning Labour to be the same red rosette Tory party it was before Corbyn.
Starmer has just said he did not think it was worth “picking over” the government’s herd immunity approach to Covid-19. Well, why would he? It is only the very policy that the establishment is desperate to cover up: a policy which has killed thousands and will go on to kill thousands more. Why would a Labour Party leader want to hold the government to account about that?
Listen to these impassioned words on behalf of working class interests:
“I want to be very, very clear that I’m going to engage constructively with the government.
“I spoke to the prime minister yesterday and said to him that I mean what I say about constructive engagement.”
Starmer said he will not try to “score party political points”
“We’ve got to pull together, support the government where it’s right to do so”
The neoliberal lock out has returned.
Boris Johnson will surely raise a glass to Starmer: he handed him the election, ousted Corbyn, defeated his successors and is already providing supine camouflage for Tory sins.
Starmer has quickly bowed the knee to Israel by talking up the manufactured antisemitism smears used to brow beat Corbyn. What a finger in the eye for Labour party members to be told that Starmer must sort out their institutionalised racism!
Starmer also wants to put an end to Labour’s ‘infighting’ which is code for quickly reversing the democratisation of the party under Corbyn and re-establishing the total control of the right.
Starmer will not deliver any election victory worth winning – nor any at all. He will merely repair the security barriers that Corbyn pushed over. All the entrances that temporarily allowed mass political participation will be sealed and higher walls built.
The battle for the Labour Party has been lost: all blown over Brexit. That cannot be undone now and remaining within an even more assiduously policed party will only serve to give left wing frosting to a re-claimed centre-right franchise.
We need a new united party of socialists unashamedly campaigning for socialism. This will be hard, but the longer we leave it the harder it will become: momentum will be lost; disillusioned people will drift away and give up.
If you need any inspiration look at Ireland: a sixty year duopoly of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael was smashed by Sinn Fein at the last election and the right are in disarray.
The Labour Party is finished as a socialist movement and overlapping crises like climate change and biodiversity loss mean we can’t just sit around waiting for the Blairites to drop the ball again. We don’t have time for that.
It’s time to pick up the red flag and leave. No need to feel sorry for those left behind: it was only a flag of convenience that they never really wanted anyway.
Since 2013 I have worked between 4-6 hours a day on this Ad-Free site: trying to give a voice to those without the power or agency to speak out for themselves and uncovering truths that well paid journalists in the corporate media dare not utter.
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Thank you in solidarity with all our readers. John Lynch, Editor.
Half an hour. That’s all it took after the leadership announcement for the hard left to form a circular firing squad around Starmer in the media.
Maybe you do understand, maybe you don’t care, but this whole outpouring of bile makes the left of the party look like a bunch of chippy, bitter, unelectable twats. Do us all a favour and go ahead with your suggested divorce; and take the terminal cancer of ‘momentum’ with you while you’re at it. Bye now, here’s your hat.
Also, you might want to edit your words of wisdom. Starmer isn’t a ‘peer of the realm’ as you claim, he was knighted for ‘services to law and criminal justice’.
Thank you for providing such a shining example of balance and harmony for us all to follow. We will amend the factual error of course. It has taken Starmer 48 hours to collude with a Tory cover up about their eugenicist ‘herd immunity’ (something he didn’t want to ‘pick over’), exclude the left from his cabinet, promise to support Boris Johnson and to hide his first newspaper editorial as leader behind the paywall of a Murdoch newspaper. Supine stupidity from a house trained member of the establishment. That you call the passionate and youthful engagement of Momentum a ‘cancer’ tells us all we need to know about how you regard ordinary participation in politics. We decline to be lectured by you on ‘outpourings of bile’ while you call people with whom you disagree ‘twats’- not least when Momentum itself congratulated Starmer and said they looked forward to working with him. Sodium Haze has always placed morality and values above political parties, because if you don’t have the former the latter doesn’t matter. Stay safe.
I agree with almost everything in this article but I wonder how we can form a new party without the financial backing of the trades unions. (Unless one like the PCS come on board). You cannot build a mass party from mebership subs alone I fear.
Much can be learnt from the example of Sinn Fein in Ireland and I shall be writing about this soon. Stay safe friend.
“Sodium Haze has always placed morality and values above political parties”. Thats funny, because the content of this site comes across as anything but a “shining example of balance and harmony”, so much so that it just reinforces the “chippy/ bitter” comment. I could go further, and mention the content looks like a deliberately poor pastiche of Owen Jones, but that would be below the belt.
To get back on track with your article, It’s clear where this needs to go. Momentum needs to cut the apron strings and form a hard left political party. If nothing else it will give Derek Hatton a party membership, rather than a day pass. Add in the ghost of the CPGB and you’d have something that would be too big to confuse with a decent sized pub quiz.
In all seriousness, if Momentum did reform as a hard left ‘alternative’, it would at least take the aforementioned ‘circular firing squad’ with it. But without Labour in some shape or form regaining vote share from the SNP then none of this matters. An unelectable hard left party wouldn’t produce anything of worth, it would just be faux political masterbation, designed to give some form of gratification to a disagreeable group of overambitious daydreamers.
I appreciate the return to more measured tones.You make some interesting points about which you may well be right. Politics is about opinions and values and ideally we try to find the truth together. Your comments about Owen Jones raised a goodly sized chortle here at Haze Towers as we haven’t exactly puffed him in the past! ROTFL actually! Its worth bearing in mind that Keir Starmer is not an unknown quantity to the left, his voting record, media appearances, media supporters, chicken coup participation, Israel support and Brexit shenanigans meant that the left of the Labour movement never wanted him as leader and never will – hardly a surprise. It would seem that Momentum is staying so that point is moot. Many are resigning their Labour memberships – many are staying. I think the ones that remain are being quite naive – you think that the ones that leave are being unrealistic. I think the model of Sinn Fein in Ireland sets a better example of what to do next than hanging around in a faux-centrist rebrand of Blairism. We shall see. At least while we are arguing about politics we are indoors and safe!
What do you mean by ‘Brexit shenanigans’ please ? Are you saying that Starmer was playing shenanigans by not immediately ‘respecting the result / no further questions?’. Is that not actually an anti-democratic impulse you’re expressing there ? Starmer is from a constituency that is very pro Remain – was he supposed to ignore his constituents ? Wasn’t JC’s stance ‘Remain and Reform’ in 2016, or are we re-writing history ? Didn’t JC appear on The Last Leg on TV saying he was ‘7/10 for Remain’. ? If so, the main thrust for Leave in 2016 came from the Telegraph, Mail and Express, not JC. So why is anyone suggesting a 2nd referendum , or asking for debate over WTF Brexit is supposed to be for, ‘playing shenanigans’ ? Do we have to ‘respect the result’ of the 2017 and 2019 general elections, forever, if we’re interested in democracy ?