Starmer is leading us nowhere
JVL Introduction
In this opinion piece Aditya Chakrabortty highlights much that is wrong with Starmer’s apparent claim to champion the working class. However policies outlined at this year’s Party Conference and his commitment to the two child benefit limit show that little will change. His reliance on growth to solve all problems is not only uncertain but ignores the need to stop growth to address cliate change and to focus on distribution – within and between countries.
If Starmer is the champion of the “working people”, he would address how deregulation has squeezed wages over the last four decades to say nothing of the need to take our public services into public ownership; something that many Tory voters also support. Once again, as in 1997, we have a population desperate for change, when a radical programme could have been embraced but no, let us act as if “there is no alternative”.
This article was originally published by The Guardian on Thu 12 Oct 2023. Read the original here.
Is Labour the party of workers’ tools or cafetieres? I worry that Starmer doesn’t know
The likely next PM will never win over ‘working people’ while his party cosies up to corporations and betrays the unions
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If a trade union does not create and mobilize collective power then it is a UINO – a union in name only. USDAW certainly is a UINO; Unison is a hybrid.
No wonder their representatives sit at the front and back Starmer and Reeves’s version of National Labour (shades of 1931) on the NEC.
The first thing to note is that Starmer cannot be believed. Ever. He lies instinctively. Professionally and promotionally. And he has surrounded himself with people who operate on a level of duplicity (and outright hostility to socialism) that we haven’t experienced before in the Labour. The open appeal to Right (which Blair offered) is compounded by a willingness (a mission, really) to actually obliterate the Left. Starmer’s mob don’t want to win the argument – they want to destroy us. It’s only when we grasp this that we can begin to challenge what they’re about. They genuinely don’t care if we present workable solutions or alternatives to wholesale exploitation …. they just want to roll their tanks over us.
One word: disaffiliate.
Aditya is one of the better opinion writer in the G there not many I fear.. How long before Freedland tries to shut him up.
There’s another thing about Starmer, I think, which could be seen most clearly in his repeated failure to answer a question about the illegality of the current siege of Gaza in its now even more extreme form. It’s cognitive dissonance. He knows the right, legal, moral answer but dare not utter the words, hence the often hesitant delivery, the diversionary answers to the questions not asked. He must prevent any leakage of the truth he’s concealing. Overwhelmingly I suppose it’s the political ambition to win the premiership regardless of the cost paid by others. But it’s also because he’s essentially a hollow man and the more we see and hear him the more we realise he has suppressed what moral compass he had. That’s the cognitive dissonance. Maybe it looks like mendacity but I think underneath it is a failure of courage, absence of integrity, political cowardice.
Starmer shows yet again the retreat of Labour from the politics of the economic sphere to the politics of the cultural sphere – a retreat from class politics. The prime sphere has to be the economic one.
“His reliance on growth to solve all problems”. As well as needing to be stopped, growth is likely coming to an end any way as many resources are becoming constrained, particularly fossil fuels. As any GCSE maths student could tell him that you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet and it is the mathematical equivalent of believing the Earth is flat.
My take is that Starmer has continually lied, barefaced and openly from day one of becoming leader. He has spent the last year removing any hope for a better society Labours traditional support base desperately need. By any definition, Starmer has proven to be an absolutely typical ‘One Nation Conservative’ subsequently creating a system of two broadly similar Parties where personality becomes more important than policy.
His utter inability to look at both sides of any debate is truly terrifying.
To be honest, Ken Loach was right: this Establishment stooge cant be trusted from the first to the last bone in his body. Given his green light to Zionist Apartheid Genocide, is he really worth our valuable time. Todays Labour Party stinks ideologically, morally and politically. Meanwhile the bodies pile higher and higher in Gazza.
I’m reading Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism, chapters VI an VII. Eerily relevant.