‘A Keir Starmer government will trigger a revival of the Labour left’
JVL Introduction
The question as to whether the left should be in or out of the Labour party is a perennial one which will not be resolved any time soon.
Anger and disaffection may be at an all-time high but the reality is that Labour are virtually certain to form the next government.
For now, says Simon Fletcher a former senior adviser to various Labour leaders, we are at “peak Starmer”, with the leadership dominating and controlling the Party machine.
Nothing substantial will change until the blockage of the general election is out of the way. Only then will the gross inadequacy of the policies on which Labour is standing become clear. Only then can “the dominance of those politics within the labour movement and wider population” be successfully challenged.
But, asks your web editor, what does this fundamentally correct analysis say to individuals wondering whether to stay in or to leave the Party now?
RK
This article was originally published by Byline Times on Tue 2 Apr 2024. Read the original here.
‘A Keir Starmer government will trigger a revival of the Labour left’
The Labour party leader’s long marginalisation of the Left cannot survive the realities of Government, argues his former advisor Simon Fletcher
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Starmer, who is renowned for his skillfull strategic political moves, captures the mood of the Zionist genocide and deftly tacks a watered down version onto Labour’s policy platform which may well lead on to greater things. This leap towards mono-culturism will really spike George Galloway’s guns: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-labour-cuts-ties-major-muslim-organisation
What does “the Left” mean ?
The Attlee Government betrayed the Indigenous Palestinian population in 1948.
Harold Wilson was an enthusiastic Zionist as was every single post war Labour Prime Minister.
Time to remove our rose tinted specs ?
If Keir Starmer has proven one thing it is the utter uselessness of the Labour left. At every stage the Campaign Group MPs have placed a higher priority on their own seats than the need to stick basic socialist principles. Not one of them has dared to call for Starmer’s removal.
Instead the CG has now split instead.
Simon Fletcher offers the same miserable prescription as b4 except that the Labour Party has now abandoned any pretence of democracy, the pre-condition for change.
The Labour Left had the chance under Corbyn and blew it. There is no going back. Apart from anything else the unions themselves have changed as the working class itself has changed.
The real task ahead of us is to build a unified class struggle, anti-imperialist left that rejects the sectarianism of the fragments of self-declared ‘revolutionary’ parties (SWP/SP etc.)
The world around us is changing. Capitalism is abandoning its democratic facade as successive attacks on the right to protest have been waved through by Starmer with barely a murmur by what remains of the Labour left.
Starmer has even agreed with the ‘anti-extremism’ agenda of the Islamaphobic bigot, Michael Gove, who is an extremist if anyone is.
To stay in the LP, though most of us have been expelled or resigned, is a counsel of despair
‘Questions of whether the left should be in or out of Labour…’? The late Bryan Magee (sometime Labour MP) wrote, ‘When I told my friends that the reason I had begun to support the Labour Party was that I had ceased to be a socialist they thought this a witty remark, but it was simple truth.’ (Magee wanted ‘a problem-solving philosophy designed to be a non-ideological guide to practical action for social democrats bent on rapid reform’ along lines set out by Karl Popper.)
We may consider his view alongside what the late world expert on ants, Edward Wilson, famously (or notoriously, according to taste) wrote, ‘Karl Marx was right, socialism works; it is just that he had the wrong species.’ It’s all to do with the differing reproductive arrangements of species.
As Wilson put it, ‘[We humans] have reproductive independence, and we get maximum Darwinian fitness by looking after our own survival and having our own offspring … [But for the social insects] the success of the individual genes are invested in the success of the colony as a whole, and especially in the reproduction of the queen, and thus through her the reproduction of new colonies.’
‘[M]ost species of social insects have sterile workers, and therefore can have communist-like systems, in which the colony is all, the individual is only a part of the colony, and the success of the whole community is what counts far above the success of the individual. The behavior of the individual social insect evolved with reference to what it contributes to the community, whereas the genetic fitness of a human being depends on how well it can individually use the society.’
So as long as you don’t believe in socialism and especially if you’re not an ant, you can vote Labour, even join the party. Are you now or have you ever been an ant?
In the years running up to the 97 election the Liverpool Dockers were out picketing against the casualisation of their jobs. In the end they were hung out to dry by Bill Morris of the T & GW – apparently leaned-on by Blairites – on the basis that it would help get in a New Labour government.
Blair & Brown subsequently did NOTHING for trade unionists and spent most of their time in government on a Thatcherite tax regime redistributing to the rich by destroying the past achievements of Clement Attlee, Ney Bevan and Harold Wilson. See link below.
So based on precedent there is no reason to give Starmer a scrutiny-free ride or expect anything from him other than continued naked hostility and lobby money, taking corruption.
“The left’s right turn: Behind the media myth of neoliberal blairite social ‘achievements’
https://arena.org.au/the-lefts-right-turn/
This sounds a bit like jam tomorrow. I don’t believe anything of substance will change should Starmer’s Labour be elected. The shadow cabinet seems pretty much bought and paid for, they will hunker down and say there is such a mess from the Tory’s we can’t do all we want and privatisation we carry on disguised as improvements.
Sorry but this is how I feel.
If, as has been suggested, the current organisation of society is leading to disaster because the wealth of the nation ends up in the hands of very few people, there needs to be genuine solutions to avoid this disaster, which must include changing laws on the ownership of wealth as it is produced. Entrepreneurs can be maintained, but their period of ownership of enterprises should be limited. After this period, a form of social ownership should take over.
This political line appears to be,’never do today what you can put off until tomorrow’.
“As the formation of a Labour Government under Starmer brings the present impasse to an end, the tensions at the heart of its project will be laid bare. When that happens, the conditions for the left to rise again will be formed.”
What utter nonsense! We know Sir Kier tells lies aimed at wiping out the left, in support of the establishment. A great many people have noticed the gaslighting – Brexit, covid, Ukraine and now Israel – and there’s no going back. I’d rather give my vote to a feisty independent or someone committed to the Peace and Justice Project. A vote for Sir K. is a vote for a man without a moral compass. It’s there for all to see – our welfare is not central to his agenda – so why choose to vote for his version of the Labour Party…?
“Simon Fletcher was campaigns and elections advisor to Keir Starmer until 2021 and previously worked as a senior advisor to both Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Miliband.” I leave you to draw your own conclusions about this article in the Byline Times – imho this is just more of the same old gaslighting we’ve already had far too much of.
What Labour left? It doesn’t exist.
Galloway? His joke party has fascist standing for it in Rochdale’s municipal elections.
It’s OK to say that the membership of the LP will turn more left but what are we, the expelled, supposed to do?
“Labour’s lost, love” (as a local green-left newspaper put it recently).
Keir Starmer has not only ‘left-proofed’ the Labour Party for ever. He also leads a Labour Party which is well to the right of even New Labour, and which has no ideas for tackling either the ecological crisis or the wealth-inequality crisis which Britain now faces.
Owen Jones is right: the Labour Party has made itself history as a progressive movement. We all need to forget about Labour and move on.
It now looks like the established “progressive” parties now only exist to advise oligarchs of the bare minimum they can get away with to avoid pitchforks.