Everything changes and everything stays the same

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At time of writing the turnout in the UK general election is set to be the lowest since WW2. Labour have secured a crushing victory in terms of seats but in every other measure the results reflect a ‘loveless landslide’.

In 2017, Jeremy Corbyn (returned triumphantly last night as an independent in Islington North) secured 40% of the vote and 12,877,918 votes. With nearly all of the results in, Keir Starmer’s brutalist Blue Tory makeover has secured 33.9% and 9,675,936. Not exactly a ringing endorsement and the context makes it even less so.

Corbyn always faced the united opposition of the entire corporate media and wilful sabotage from within his own party, Starmer by contrast had clearly been anointed by the establishment and has had the most supportive ride imaginable from the party machine.

Starmer has really won by default: the Tory implosion making this election essentially a one horse race. If Starmer had been competing against any kind of a functioning Tory Party, we would today be welcoming another Conservative government. Indeed without the intervention of Farage’s Reform Party the result might also have been very different (I wonder if Farage was put up to it by the usual suspects). 

With 41%, the biggest group were people who refused to vote, not minded to choose between different flavours of Tory. 

Starmer did not attract the collapsing Tory vote which went to Reform. Labour gained almost nothing in terms of vote share from 2019 and lost half a million votes.

I don’t detect any of the hope of the 2017 election under Corbyn or indeed from the 1997 election with Blair: just a guarded sigh of relief that the Blue Tories are out.

There was clearly a desire to punish the Blue Tories but many left-wing people still held their noses while voting for Labour. I have yet to find anyone who voted for Starmer who was inspired by him or his manifesto of nothing.

Starmer’s team courted the ‘meh’ vote in marginal constituencies. If anyone was nailed on to attract the ‘vaguely unimpressed, not really into politics but may as well get the other lot out’ vote then it was Starmer: his sheer nothingness an enormous electoral asset.  In a one horse race Labour didn’t get more votes than Corbyn or a bigger % of the vote: what they did was play the system.

That Starmer’s Labour are ruthlessly unprincipled at playing the system we already knew: making no kind of a moral argument has been handsomely rewarded by the twisted mechanics of Britain’s broken electoral landscape. 

That a party can win a crushing electoral victory by making no moral arguments reflects the true electoral topography of the UK. I have watched many vox pop interviews around the country. The pattern was always the same: a few bright sparks but mostly a sullen resentment towards a British decline blamed on immigrants and the perceived failure to deliver a ‘proper’ Brexit.

This ‘stop the boats’ anti-EU narrative is what the right wing press have been pumping into British society for many decades. This latent racism and dim witted nostalgia for empire comes from a loss of hope, community, identity and meaning imposed by global neoliberalism. Legitimate rage has been steered so as to scapegoat refugees and the poor. While hugely powerful U.S. corporations carve up the UK like a roast, many have been persuaded to blame destitute Afghans shivering on rubber dinghies. 

Politicians do not really run the UK anymore and its political climate is not affected by them. The billionaire owned media and their lobbyists are the resident power and the politicians who front their will are on rotation. 

After his election as Labour leader, Starmer’s first act was to scuttle quickly to the Murdochs to gain their blessing. Nobody dares to oppose the prevailing tide of right wing narratives anymore… contemporary politicians just chase the lowest common denominator. In the absence of any genuine moral debate we spiral ever downwards as a society into a dangerously stagnant apathy.

Political parties campaigning on nakedly racist platforms have just captured over 70% of the vote: Starmer quite happy to sound like Enoch Powell and to bash the Bangladeshis.

What happens next? Well nothing new really, for nothing has really changed.

No moral arguments for ‘change’ have been offered or embraced; the political current of the UK is still directed by the corporate media; the underlying tectonic plates of British resentment and the scapegoats for it remain the same. Starmer and his crew will ‘change’ nothing for they have no morals or ideas and would flee in terror from either if they stumbled across one.

Once the public realise that Starmer bats for the 1% they will be very angry. With the underlying moral landscape unchanged and the prevailing right wing narratives still driven by the right wing press, the field will be clear for a right wing demagogue to steer the UK towards an openly fascist fate. While politicians continue to eschew moral engagement and chase ‘victory’ within a moral landscape pre-defined by the super-rich,  then our fate is sealed.

I see nothing to celebrate in a Starmer victory for nothing has changed. I might say that ‘everything changes but everything stays the same’ but the real situation is much worse than that, for as the rise of the far right across Europe and the U.S. shows, if good people don’t push moral debate up the spiral then it will soon slide down it.

A party of genocide apologists have just won a landslide electoral victory. If that doesn’t appall and worry you – it really ought to.