Labour’s Self-Flagellation Tour
JVL Introduction
So Keir Starmer is to embark on a listening tour to connect with lost Labour voters.
As Labour List reported a while back , Starmer has vowed to “sweat blood over months and years” to earn “respect” from voters.
Wil anyone be listening? And, more to the point, does Starmer have anything worth saying?
Tom Blackburn, writing persuasively in Tribune, thinks Starmer has got It all wrong. Lacking sympathy for those who are still enthusiastic about Labour—young people, renters, minorities—there is little point, suggests Blackburn, of “MPs wringing their hands in front of focus groups assembled to tell them what they want to hear”.
What is needed is “ real commitment to rebuilding the movement from the bottom up, empowering workers to take greater control over their lives”.
There is precious little sign of it from those running Labour.
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This article was originally published by Tribune on Sun 25 Jul 2021. Read the original here.
Labour’s Self-Flagellation Tour
The Labour leadership’s ‘listening tour’ will do little to rebuild relationships with postindustrial communities – but it will provide plenty of opportunities to repeat right-wing attacks on the party’s progressive base.
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I am tired of saying this now, but if Labour doesn’t seem to have a viable plan to win an election that’s because winning elections is superfluous.
The movers-and-shakers in the party now have their tickets on the Tory neoliberal gravy train and their sole concern is to ensure it’s not derailed. That means making sure Labour doesn’t again threaten the status quo. If Labour wins an election again through some glorious accident, it will be just to serve as a placeholder to keep things in good neoliberal order until the Tories get their act together again.
Their sole intent is to obliterate any opposition to things as they stand. We have to stop gracing these ‘initiatives’ with credence and analysis and respond to them with the contempt they deserve.
Starmer and Evans largely control HQ and the party through its political levers (in spite of valiant fightbacks by individual members of the NEC, CLPs, some MPs etc). However, using those political levers as they’ve done destroys the party’s economic base and is close to sinking their project.
It’s widely reported that Labour has only the funds available to pay one month’s payroll. I read today that the GMB are cutting (halting?) their contribution because of lack of consultation with them over the 90 HQ staff made redundant and the hiring of 30 odd temp staff on much worse terms to replace some of them. Unite may well take similar action. So what was a month’s grace from bankruptcy may soon be a time when Labour HQ lives from hand to mouth, constantly wondering whether there’s enough in the kitty to pay next week’s bills.
Having got the party into such an acute and humiliating economic mess, Starmer and Evans will now be weaker and without personal credibility in most parts of the party.
The people with effective control over what happens to the party – because the purse strings are in their hands – are the membership, the affiliates and the unions, none of whom bear personal responsibility (as do Starmer and Evans) for the party’s imminent bankruptcy.
What’s URGENTLY necessary is for the grassroots organisations, the affiliates and the unions to reach out to each other and develop an agreed “rescue and regain control” plan for Labour. It should cover what to do if the Labour party actually goes bankrupt (eg plans for safeguarding the Labour name and brand for a genuinely left of centre, grassroots controlled democratic party). The plan should also cover how to manage the interregnum before Labour can agree on a new political and civil service leadership team.
I’m so angry about the mess Starmer’s made of what could have been a good future for Labour.
“It will require real commitment to rebuilding the movement from the bottom up, empowering workers to take greater control over their lives”
Well, Starmer’s made a good start – by disempowering and alienating the Party’s own activists and supporters.
Renaissance – they’re having a laugh. What’s next – Reformation, with all the accompanying witch burnings.
Managerialism will not do. Truth is, you need the vision thing. For all his faults, Corbyn at least attempted to provide a vision of real change.
You need to have a coherent vision of what you want to do and then try to persuade people to support the changes you want to make.
Starmer has no vision. But that’s not his job. He is not there to change anything substantive.
A good article, if a little too generous to the rather stupid closed minded folk that make up the Right of the LP, especially but not exclusively as found in the PLP.
I fully agree. Private Eye coined the phrase “wank tanks” to describe focus groups and bodies of that sort.
Starmer’s fake labour ,tin pot tory party are sinking in a cess pit of their own making.
For those who haven’t seen “Keir Starmer’s going to towns” – it’s priceless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iLvpRIU560
As for Ruth Smeeth, she gets off a bit lightly: the person who engineered Marc Wadsworth’s expulsion and wrecked the launch of Chakrabarti’s report; lied about the abuse she’d received on twitter and is almost certainly a CIA asset – but somehow is teflon-coated.
Ruth Smeeth was part of a group of 5 Labour MPs that decided to support the Trump administration’s destruction of the Reagan-era INF missile treaty. This treaty had contributed to our safety for over 30 years. But the Trump administration was certainly not acting in good faith at all.
The fact that Smeeth is part of Starmer’s entourage is reason enough to replace him as leader.
Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter wrote:
“By killing the INF Treaty based on flawed intelligence, the U.S. risks global annihilation.”
His full article can be read here:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/what-facts-how-politics-trumped-intel-in-nuke-treaty-pullout/
There is the Forde report to come as if we need reminding and party conference
The unions will be asked to bail them out, it would be a complete waste of money, its time to clean out the stable
Red Tories are in the wrong party, nothing less than them leaving and forming a Centrist party will suffice
If this can’t be negotiated then on Labour Day, Tuesday 5th October, unions and members should withdraw funding, bankrupt them, then buy the name back from the Receiver , it should cost buttons
It’s not just the finances which are a problem.
Campaigning requires boots on the ground and unlike in the past the left volunteer activists who do the bulk of the donkey work are voting with their feet and working without enthusiasm. The poor local election results this year, followed by a string of poor recent by election results, are merely a fortaste of what is to come as we have a rerun of the loss of votes following Blair’s illegal wars.
Faced with a choice of ‘ you can have any type of cola you want, but water ain’t on the menu’ the number of spoiled votes and people not voting due to lack of meaningful choice will increase further. Many of these will be former Labour members and supporters hounded out of the Party by Continuity Conservative sectarians in hock to outside forces. At one point earlier this century that number went above 18 million. A bloc larger than any single party vote in GE’s. It only went down significantly in 2017 (go figure) and rose again in 2018 ( again, go figure).
It’s probably better than even odds that it will touch 20 million come the next GE if current approaches are maintained.
The bottom line is that by attacking natural supporters and members for not bending the knee and crying uncle to the monopoly imposed narrative of economic neo-liberalism, foreign neo conservatism and imperialism, and social neo feudalism, those pursuing this sectarian approach are guaranteeing permanent opposition for themselves.
This is a relatively good article, with its points and is quite incisivish overall.
I have a ready answer to the probably rhetorical question posed at the start.
I have been a Labour Party member for about thirty years. Now is the worst that it has ever been, with worse than useless leadership, a sufeit of incompetent neo-Conservatives posing as Labour MPs, bags of cant and hypocrisy, but few bags of cash – as Starmer gave our funds away.