Labour’s worst year yet
JVL Introduction
Mike Phipps reminds us on Labour Hub what an awful year it has been with Labour plumbing new depths of stupidity and malevolence, particularly with regard to refugees and to political dissidents.
It’s a useful reminder of quite how many own goals Labour has scored, quite how far it has failed to address the agonies of ongoing austerity and rampant prejudice fuelled by Reform and emulated so frequently by Starmer and co.
A useful reminder, too, that there have been optimistic moments, most recently the victory of Andrea Egan as secretary of Unison and reversal – finally – of the two-child benefit cap.
Two question for us all: is it too late for the Government to change course/does it even want to?
And can Keir Starmer survive?
RK
This article was originally published by Labour Hub on Wed 31 Dec 2025. Read the original here.
Labour’s worst year yet
Mike Phipps looks back at the highs and lows of 2025.
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I take issue with much of this piece. It reinforces Russophobia. It singles out the EU as the victim of US sanctions, when the EU (more than ever an institution that acts against working class interests) has been behaving in an equally demagogic manner in sanctioning Jacques Baud, Xavier Moreau and Nathalie Lam. As for Imran Ahmed being sanctioned/expelled by the US, the man is a weasel who played a major role in undermining Corbyn and demonetarising The Canary, so no tears will be shed for him. I will certainly not be ordering Phipp’s book.
Certainly not. This ghastly parody of a government, more like a regime, is doomed to erasure like the Tories. Your Party is hardly making the running, obsessed with navel gazing instead of coming out with a positive manifesto like the one in 2017 or even 2019, while the even more ghastly min-Trumpian Reform Party, and Mamdani-like Green Party may take a huge clump of the votes in the upcoming Council elections.
The Labour government’s refusal to act on Palestine and Gaza will lose it even more votes. The outlook for 2026 looks utterly bleak.
There is a quite unprecedented record, a catalogue of deceit and mismanagement that has sabotaged Labour’s position. This is entirely self-inflicted and now I can see no way back. Labour won an overwhelming majority but it was a quirk of our dated first-past-the-post electoral system that handed Keir Starmer a comfortable majority based on an unprecedentedly low popularity and Labour ha s squandered that advantage. The Labour position on Gaza is unconscionable.
The sad thing about this situation is that the ‘establishment’, its media and its Labour Party supporters quickly disposed of Jeremy Corbyn, to make way for an even more draconian, authoritarian and right wing government, which will assuredly take over when Starmer and his shower have completed their decimation of a workers voice and power.
Incidentally, what proof is there extant of Putins ‘Imperialism’?
Excellent summary. How do we at least get some better councillors in at the May elections, given the endless rowing within Yourparty?
Mike Phipps I believe is also part of the valuable Unite the Struggles group: connecting activists around Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Georgia.
A brilliant and highly knowledgeable review exposing the machinations, now well documented of the insidious underground cabal that worked to stop Jeremy Corbyn from being elected in 2017 and even more definitively in 2019. The Al Jazeera documentaries of the Labour Files also exposed the nasty cabal, which in fact now still exists in brazen arrogance, advising and protecting the cipher Starmer in removing every vestige of what defines an authentic Labour Party.
Now both Labour and the Tories are being dissolved into insignificance leaving the field open for the abdominal Reform, and the promising Greens. An opportunity for your Party to provide a real socialist alternative seems to dissipating unless it urgently grasps the reins of power.
The war in the Ukraine is not about defending Ukraine. The British government has supplied that country with depleted uranium weapons. If used, they will poison the Ukrainians for generations to come. The people of the Ukraine are clearly regarded as expendable by our so-called leaders.