Labour: Can it get any worse?

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Can it get much worse for Labour? There is still plenty of scope. Blair to return as leader? Peter-Mandelson to be the lead advisor to Keir Starmer (oops he already is)?

Yes, the Hartelpool by-election was a disaster.  

Yes, the Chesham and Amersham by-election was another disaster – Keir and the Starmerettes delivering an 11% reduction in vote share so Labour trailed in with 622 votes  and a lost deposit. 

But all the signs indicate that worse is to come. Labour’s zombie spadocracy have new slogans for those anxiously refreshing the page at meaninglessrhetoric.lab.co.uk/rebrand and its actually more scary when it foreshadows anything of substance.

Having looted the Barack Obama dressing up box so Keir could endlessly abuse ‘change’ as both catchphrase and manifesto, Labour’s spinmasters are now stealing war monger Hilary Clinton’s ‘Stronger Together’ schlock. This crew surely take out multiple insurances against having ANY original thoughts.

This is the Labour ‘rebrand’ – a deeply lacquered cynicism in which morality and intent (like the Corbyn manifesto) are converted into vacuous totems that people can project their hopes and dreams on to. Once you do the work of attaching actual morals to empty slogans, they feel confident of your vote – this arrogant sophistry is grotesque.

The rebrand is ‘work’ in progress apparently but its not hard to see where its heading. I actually tried to find hard evidence of what this all means but gave up in frustration – these phrases are in the ether however:

“Safe and secure communities”

“A future where families come first”

“Britain in the world.”

Ah, unity, sweet unity – the concept that Starmer ran his leadership campaign on, swiftly abandoned post victory. Now he sticks it to the Labour left in every way he can. With Corbyn exiled he moved to stifle local dissent and impose right-wing electoral candidates on local parties which is unity of a kind I suppose.  

Starmer doesn’t have much unity with the needlessly bereaved families of Covid-19 victims, or Food Bank users or really anyone who might actually need a socialist Labour Party fighting for them – his unity is with the comfortably off, people who can afford to buy into slogans like ‘Britain In The World’.

Britain’s professionalised political class are a pathetic gang – fighting over the last scraps of tradition and moral credibility that they haven’t yet managed to besmirch. Finding slogans and policy ideas devised by Rachel Reeves is akin to finding a losing scratch card and some cigarette butts outside your newsagent.

‘Britain In the World’ is chilling. Have a stroll through this Labour right pamphlet “A Progressive Foreign Policy For New Times” which seeks to ‘rebrand’ the politics of ‘humanitarian interventions’ (western imperialism). In the future, armed forces will be known as ‘human security services’ which would ‘include’ the military (someone has to do the bombing and shooting I suppose) but would also include groups of ‘gender balanced’ and ‘ethnically diverse’ doctors and aid workers too. Doubtless the millions displaced by western bombing campaigns will be glad to know that only ‘ethnically diverse’ aid workers will be on hand to drop food parcels outside their tents.

Surely most global citizens have had enough of ‘Britain In The World’? Were the days of empire not enough? Was our role in stealing Palestine not enough? Is our role in arming human rights abusers’ around the world not enough? Are our invasions and bombing campaigns not enough? Clearly not – as long as there are foreign  assets of interest to the usual suspects then the Labour right will strain to keep ‘Britain In The World’.

So yes – there is ample scope for Labour to get worse. Some of us still remember the Blair years and a million dead in Iraq. Some of us remember how it was Labour that enabled and emboldened vulture capitalism more than Thatcher ever dared.

Fear not readers, I have long since stopped being invested in the leadership of the Labour Party. H.M.S. Starmer is the Costa Concordia of political ships – basically wrecked on the rocks but not in deep enough moral water to actually sink beneath the waves (yet). Only the overall moral bankruptcy of UK politics gives life to this rusting hulk.

In a two-party system, even someone as vacuous and useless as Starmer might luck his way into power and that is my great fear. A total pox on the Tories of course, and the Lib-Dems and H.M.S Starmer – but they can’t all fail when they represent the totality of the Hobson’s choices placed before the electorate.

Hello, hello – turn your radio on… is there anybody out there – can you hear my song? Can somebody, anybody with a decently thick skin and any kind of a moral compass supply us with an actual political choice – an opportunity to vote against the amoral chancers that strut and harrumph on TV every day?

I have no hopes for the salvation of Labour – a new socialist party is my last hope for averting the apocalypse. 

Since 2013 I have worked on this Ad-Free site: trying to give a voice to those without the power or agency to speak out for themselves and speaking simple 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.     

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