Keir Starmer: simply not up to the task
JVL Introduction
“Violations of natural justice were legion. The presumption of innocence was hopelessly subverted. Guilt by association became commonplace.”
This is not some future historian writing about the current Labour Party. It is Richard Heffernan and Mike Marqusee writing about Kinnock’s Labour Party some thirty years ago.
The parallels are worrying, as Mike Phipps explains. Labour has a mountain to climb to win the next election, but few people have any idea what it stands for any longer.
As the Guardian, ultra-loyal to Starmer until very recently, has written: “He has had 12 slogans since becoming leader, each one more meaningless than the last.”
In the name of attracting Red Wall voters, conceived of as dyed-in-the-wool nationalistic, reactionary, law-and-order racists, Labour seems to have abandoned all principle on immigration, asylum, prison reform and the like. And popular economic policies like nationalisation. Or supporting workers on strike.
When Starmer boasts about how he has changed the Party, more and more people are seeing how fast he has ditched everything he said he stood for in his leadership campaign. It doesn’t bode well…
This article was originally published by Labour Hub on Sat 15 Apr 2023. Read the original here.
Keir Starmer: Asset or Liability to Labour’s Electoral Chances?
Mike Phipps explores worrying but compelling parallels between Labour’s current leadership and that of Neil Kinnock.
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I sincerely hope he is another Kinnock, the next purge has to be the wholesale expulsion of Red Tories who worked so hard to stop JC in 2017 and 2019
……………Sir Keir Starmer, pictured ‘bending the knee’ in support of BLM, alongside Angela Rayner (off picture).
‘In the name of attracting Red Wall voters, conceived of as dyed-in-the wool nationalistic, reactionary, law-and-order racists…..’ aka the white working classes as defined by the affluent-Guardian reading, bourgeois-liberal-anti Brexit, authoritarian, so-called left, Labour not only seems to have abandoned Socialism, but has actively adopted policies designed to eliminate it from any political agenda completely. Carefully orchestrated by Blair’s chum, Peter Mandelson this is the one policy that was decisive in endearing Starmer to Rupert Murdoch in the post Hillsborough age. The one policy that will ensure that Starmer will never be undermined, nor attacked by MSM in the same way the Jeremy Corbyn was, as long as he continues along the true path of Neo-liberal Capitalism. Socialism is dead and buried.
One key point not mentioned in the above article is the amount of smearing of the ‘Welsh windbag’ that went on in the right-wing press at the time (as with ‘Barmy Benn’ and ‘Red Ken’ and the ‘Loony Left’) AND the reams of disinformation they churned out about the Labour Party and its policies. The Sun, for example, had a circulation of almost four million at the time, and was read by around ten million people.
And just a couple of months or so before Thatcher called the GE in 92, The Sunday Times (when Andrew Neil was the editor) ran the totally fraudulent Kinnock’s Kremlin Connection story, which he obviously shared with the right-wing tabloids PRIOR to publication so that THEY could all chime in the day before with THEIR smearing and disinformation.
I couldn’t find anything specifically about the KKC story, but this Indy article mentions it in passing:
‘Spy story that fails the credibility test’
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/spy-story-that-fails-the-credibility-test-1574005.html
And this wikipedia entry re Loony Left is quite informative:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loony_left
Yes, Allan, you are right.
However, Kinnock did not really do anything to challenge that portrayal of him.
He spent more time attacking his own party than he did challenging the media depiction of him or challenging the Conservatives. And the Sheffield rally and Kinnock’s disastrous performance at it are not media inventions.
If I remember correctly, Margaret Thatcher wrote of him: “He never let me down once.”
Labour lost the general election of 1992 when it endorsed nuclear weapons and Gulf War 1. The reason Labour lost in both 1987 and 1992 was primarily because the Conservatives were preferred on the economy.
Tony, how do you know that NK didn’t do anything to challenge the lies and smears? Seems highly unlikely. And I certainly don’t buy your assertion that he was too busy attacking his own party etc to do so. The right-wing press just completely ignore any rebuttals and/or completely misrepresent them. Their response to what NK said in his resignation speech about the right-wing press is a perfect example.
Try asking Ken Livingstone what they do when you try to expose a falsehood that they dissembled, and in HIS case it was more-or-less the WHOLE of the MSM, not just the rabid right-wing gutter rags.
As for the Tories being preferred on the economy, well yes, and PRECISELY because of all the lies millions of working class people were told in the Sun!
Here’s just one minuscule example – one could literally write a book! – of the disinformation blitz carried out by the Sun (along with the Mail and Express and Evening Standard):
John Major claimed last night that average earners will be £1,000 a year worse off in a tax smash-and-grab planned by Labour leader Neil Kinnock.
And a couple of days later the headline was BILLIONS ON YOUR TAXES with the sub-headline LOW PAID WORKERS FACE SHRINKING PAY PACKETS.
It was relentless, and continued right through the whole of the election campaign.
Surely the difference between Kinnock and Corbyn is that
the latter was opposed by the whole of the MSM (including the Guardian) as well as most of his Parliamentary party. So far as
I can remember Kinnock was opposed by the usual suspects but supported by the PLP.
Ed Miliband was also portrayed as a crazy leftie by the MSM
in contrast to his brother who was more “sensible”. The former was perceived by Labour Party members I knew as a “true socialist” in contrast to his brother – and for this reason they voted for Ed rather than David.
However he was a reed in the wind and has been so ever since – the 2015 campaign was a disaster with no discernible policies distinctive from Cameron’s Tory party. Ed appeared to support Jeremy Corbyn for a time but has now shamefully betrayed him.