Labour is Dead as a Party Representing The Working Class and Oppressed
I had a
personal and political reason for knowing that Starmer was lying when he stood
as a Corbyn continuity candidate for the Labour leadership. That he should have
jettisoned his 10 Pledges so quickly was no surprise
whatsoever. That he should have called himself a Zionist ‘without qualification’ was also no
surprise. Racism and Starmer go together like Laurel and Hardy.
On February 18th, hours after I had been expelled, Starmer welcomed my expulsion with one word – ‘good’. A man of few words and even fewer ideas.
Keeping
Starmer in his Shadow Cabinet, despite his personal responsibility for what has
happened to Julian Assange, his proposal to gaol those guilty of over
claiming benefits for 10 years (not tax dodgers of course) and his refusal to prosecute police murderers such
as the killer of Ian Tomlinson, should have given him ample warning of
Starmer’s Brutus like treachery.
Below is an article which I largely agree with, from Adam Johannes, a Welsh socialist. It
is clear that despite the Tories self-imploding over the summer with Liz
Truss’s 44 day leadership, the shortest in history,
Starmer has failed to capitalise on it.
Thornberry attacks the Crown Prosecution Service under Starmer for its
failure to prosecute Jimmy Savile
Sunak has
now stabilised the Tory government and Starmer has nothing to say, hence his
childish ad accusing him of not wanting to gaol child
abusers when it was he who refused to prosecute Jimmy Savile. Starmer himself has
never denied his part in the decision not to prosecute Savile.
Starmer represents the British state in all its ugliness and hypocrisy. He is, as I wrote, two months before he was elected leader, ‘the candidate that the Deep State & the British Establishment want you to vote for.’
For me the
key was Starmer’s pivotal role in the persecution of Julian Assange, whose only
crime was the revelation of American war crimes in the illegal Iraq War.
Starmer also ensured that thousands of CPS files were destroyed.
Corbyn made
many mistakes during his leadership but the key one was appeasing those who
were out to destroy him. Instead of calling out Israel’s supporters in the
Jewish Labour Movement he tried to work with them.
Corbyn
failed to understand the nature of the attack on him and took these attacks as
if they had been made in good faith. In particular he accepted the ‘anti-Semitism’
narrative.
As Asa
Winstanley made clear, The Jewish Labour Movement had been refounded precisely in order to destroy
Corbyn. Yet, as the Labour Leaked Report revealed (p. 306)
Jeremy Corbyn himself and members of his staff team
requested to GLU that particular antisemitism cases be dealt with. In 2017 LOTO
staff chased for action on high-profile antisemitism cases Ken Livingstone,
Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth, stressing that these cases
were of great concern to Jewish stakeholders and that resolving them was
essential to “rebuilding trust between the Labour Party and the Jewish
community”.
Well we were
all expelled or forced out of the Labour Party yet was trust rebuilt? Yet
instead of realising his mistake Corbyn went on trying to appease the Zionists.
Chris Williamson, his most faithful supporter in Parliament was thrown to the
wolves. Jennie Formby boasted about how many socialists she had
expelled compared to Iain McNicol.
The crowning
mistake was at the Labour Party Conference in 2018 when Corbyn opposedreselection. I spoke with Chris Williamson at the Labour Against the Witchhunt fringe meeting and I said to him after the meeting that by taking this decision, and persuading
Len McLuskey of UNITE to oppose it, Corbyn had driven the final nail into the
coffin of the Corbyn Project.
Tony Benn and Jon Lansman
In one sense
Corbyn and Tony Benn before him represented the fatal weakness of the Labour
Left. In Benn’s famous phrase an airplane needs two wings to
fly. This is of course true but when it has two pilots determined to fly in
different directions that is a disaster.
The Labour left had little or no imagination and could never imagine
life without the pro-war, pro-capitalist Labour Right. In practice what this
meant was that the Labour Left abandoned all hope of socialism and put its
faith in minor reforms to capitalism. The history of the Labour Left is a
history of retreat, ideological confusion and betrayal.
This has now
reached its logical end point with a Socialist Campaign Group that has, to all
intent and purposes, abandoned any criticism of Starmer or his policy of
faithfully following every twist and turn of US foreign policy.
John
McDonnell and the SCG support the United States’s proxy war in
Ukraine. Just as McDonnell, perhaps the most pathetic of the leaders of the
Labour left there has ever been, praising Starmer’s do nothing, see
nothing, say nothing refusal to criticise Boris Johnson over the COVID
pandemic.
However
Corbyn can make amends. To paraphrase Shakespeare, nothing would become Corbyn
so much as his leaving of the Labour Party to stand as a socialist independent.
The question is whether he will take that step and lead the fight against
Starmer and for a new socialist formation.
I agree with
Adam Johannes. Because Starmer has
refused to oppose the Tories on economic affairs, civil liberties, racism or
indeed anything substantive, the Labour Party today is by no means guaranteed
to win the next election.
Dido Harding - only qualification was marriage to a Tory MP
The refusal of Starmer and Streeting to
support striking workers, including the nurses and junior doctors is
particularly shameful. ‘There is no
money’ they repeat in Tory fashion. But there was £37 billion for a failed
COVID test and trace system run by Dido Harding. of which there is no trace other than to say it went to Tory
cronies.
There were
billions of pounds for a VIP channel for COVID contracts that even the High
Court declared unlawful. It is capitalism that prefers to reward ruling class
crooks rather than pay ordinary workers that is the problem and the problem
with the Labour Left is that they have never opposed a market economy or
capitalism.
Tony Greenstein
The Weakness of Starmer Labour and the tasks ahead
Adam
Johannes
The latest
opinion polls suggest that the days of a 20 point lead by Labour over the
Tories are over and we could be heading for a hung parliament in the next
election, which could even mean the prospect of another five years of Tory
rule.
On the
central faultline in British politics the cost-of-living crisis and the economy
the Labour Party are not offering a sharp, clear alternative way of resolving
the crisis by ending it, or any easily understood solutions to the ills that
plague everyday life today: wages, benefits and pensions that don't match
rising living costs, the housing crisis, crumbling public services etc.
Labour's
plunge in the polls comes as we reach the end of round 1 of the national strike
wave which offered the possibility of a national alternative narrative to the
establishment on the economic crisis, but has dipped with the drive of the
trade union bureaucracy for sectionalism and to settle for pay rises well below
inflation, effectively a pay cut, and refusal to link individual disputes into
a national programme to end the cost of living crisis.
A stronger,
more political, movement of workers in the rank and file will be needed that
can push for a winning strategy in the workplaces and articulate an alternative
set of national policies to end the crisis, tied in with supporting campaigns
against racism, climate breakdown and imperialist war etc.
The
permanent dithering of Jeremy Corbyn over whether he will stand as an
independent (let alone help build a left wing alternative to Labour) is also
problematic, as such such an election campaign even though in one constituency
would offer a possibility to give a national profile for an alternative set of
national policies and exert pressure on Starmer's Labour from the left.
One of the
weaknesses of the Corbyn Project was the beginnings of a sweeping economic
programme separated from fighting social movements and militant trade unionism
at the base of society, it was as though it could all be done from above. One
of the side-effects of the collapse of Corbynism is the beginnings of a revival
of social movements and militant trade unionism that often don't link the
day-to-day battles with 'high politics' and a sweeping economic programme that
challenges the system.
Meanwhile
yesterday's canvassers for nationalisation of the commanding heights of the
economy now say that all we can do is burrow away at a very local level in our
renters unions and workplaces in the hope that in some far flung future we will
reach the cumulative strength to articulate a national alternative, politics
doesn't progress by gradualness though, but by 'Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!'
The Enough
is Enough campaign has also been a setback for the left. The unions involved
CWU, RMT, UCU, as well as Tribune and Acorn, and Zarah Sultana should be held
to account, you don't play sectarian games during a major economic crisis. Last
summer as the cost-of-living crisis began to fight hundreds of thousands signed
up to this sham organisation wanting to join a national mass organisation to fight
back. It's main achievement has been to derail building a national movement
around the cost-of-living crisis and a national community organisation to
support the national strike wave, by pretending to fill the space and thereby
stopping anything actually being built to occupy the space.
The coming
election will probably be the ugliest on record fought out on so-called
'culture war' issues in a bidding war between Tories and Labour over who can be
most in the gutter in cynically using the lives of minorities, migrants and
marginalised groups, and the poor, for political gain, and Labour deploying
right wing tropes around being tough on crime, rather than its causes.
This is a
potentially combustible mix. With no strong national left wing voice, as
bitterness rips though society over rising living costs coming on top of years
of austerity and neoliberalism, all kinds of dark forces may be waiting in the
wings.
The left
must stand with the oppressed and the scapegoated, but simply remaining in that
defensive space means essentially getting bogged down on a terrain decided by
the right and where the right is strongest.
What is
desperately needed is HOPE a sense of a national movement in political life on
the offensive with a progressive economic programme that can unify our people
and cut across various cultural divides in society.
Not only repairing years of damage to the fabric of society done by forty years of Thatcherism and individualism, but offering something collective for the common good that goes beyond the welfare state consensus of 1945-1975.