Labour’s Year of Descent
JVL Introduction
Mike Phipps has written a helpful review of 2024 focusing mainly on Labour’s (poor) performance, despite the “landslide” victory at the July election. Just six months on, Labour’s vote is down and it is losing at council by elections – all too often to Reform. On December 20th, at a by election in Dudley its vote was down by 34.7% where the seat went to the Tories and in Swale, the seat went to Reform with Labour’s vote also down by more that 30%. Just today twenty Broxtowe councillors quit Labour over Starmer’s leadership
There is speculation as to whether Starmer will still be Labour’s leader when the next election comes but the damage is done and replacing Starmer without a vision and a plan for meeting the needs of working class people will make no difference. Internationally, not least with the coming of the second Trump Presidency and ongoing slaughter in Gaza, we have much to be pessimistic about but Mike Phipps finds some cause for hope and, as socialists, optimism is essential along with good analysis and hard work. It sometimes feels hard to locate that necessary optimism but find it we must.
So welcome to 2025. As Gramsci said “The old world is dying and the new world is waiting to be born. Now is the time of Monsters!” Another world is possible so hang on to your metaphorical hats and do not give up!
LL
This article was originally published by Labour Hub on Wed 29 Jan 2025. Read the original here.
A Year of Descent
Labour won the July general election by a landslide, so what was there not to like about 2024? Virtually everything, argues Mike Phipps, in his review of the year.
If the earlier years of Keir Starmer’s leadership had been a time when grassroots Party members felt a growing disenchantment with the direction of Labour, 2024 was the year when that disillusionment became much more widely shared among the general population – with far more dangerous consequences.
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The rule changes within the Labour Party and the iron grip by the right of the bureaucracy and Party apparatus – controlling every aspect of shortlisting and selection – in addition to the narrowing of debate and the shutting down of discussion, effectively end the Labour Party as a progressive political force. Look at the appointees to the Lords and compare these to the MPs currently suspended.
It’s more a question of building ideas that can promote and support an alliance – and not PR ideas like ” anti-Semitism” , “immigration ” “satanic child abuse ” and the latest trump musk farage bandwagon of stirring up the swamp over grooming , instead of reducing the extraction of profits from local and national assets by corporate shell supranational criminal overlords with wars on drugs, terrors and their underworld counterparts that exploit poverty and desperation .
Mike Phipps summary makes grim reading about just how far away Starmer`s clique is from the Socialist vision of the Labour Party leadership back in 2015.
The fall-out continues at local level. You may be interested to know that today [02.01.25], 20 Labour Councillors at Broxtowe Borough Council [Nottinghamshire], including the Council Leader Milan Radulovic, and 100 members have resigned from the Labour Party enmasse due to:
* The Parties abolition of the Pensioners Winter Fuel Payment.
* Its refusal to end the two-child benefit cap.
* Central interference in candidate selection.
* Its continued support for genocide in Gaza.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cewxrzq0489o
Whilst the “leadership” veres ever rightward, the “Party” is becoming completely debased: with long-serving, dedicated people, who are prepared to speak out, and leave the rump, which Starmer and his zionist friends have created.
While in shadow cabinet, Starmer never said a word about antisemitism but after being funded for his leadership campaign by the Israeli lobby he sprung into action and supported all kinds of liars. Now Mike Katz of Jewish Labour Movement, an Israeli political party has been given a peerage along with Steve McCabe of Labour Friends of Israel who had the MET police arrest me for offending him
To anyone whose powers of reasoning have not been eroded by institutional nostalgia, the cognitive dissonance evident in Phipps’s last paragraph appears stunning. The persistence of the illusion which Phipps refers to as a source of hope, namely a magical resurrection of the LP as a ‘progressive’ force, is a source of despair rather than of hope.
The complicity of virtually the entire parliamentary LP in the Gazan genocide has one single merit: it has demonstrated beyond any shadow of doubt the lack of principle and depth of moral corruption of the parliamentary party, itself a cabal which is now effectively independent of the diminishing mass of demoralised party members.
The only chance to escape the descent to totalitarianism lies in the total disintegration of the LP, leaving those members impotently trapped by their illusions free to join others in a new collaborative socialist movement. The corrupt incoherence of ruling class ideology has never been more transparent. Those who claim that the demise of the LP can only benefit the far right misunderstand the polarising dynamics of mass social psychology – an insight which Farage has continually exploited in his obsessive determination to crush the Tories, even to his own electoral disadvantage.
In fact ONLY a broad mass socialist realignment resulting from the collapse of the LP, combined with organised working class resistance, has any chance of crushing the far right.. Success is certainly not guaranteed, but this is the only possible hope. The LP has become the handmaiden of fascism.
Alas, how true this is. It is a tragic state of affairs when the best a social democrat can hope for is a coalition of Greens, Independents and Social Democrats, who are now positioned to the left of Labour. Starmer used every dirty trick at his disposal to get where he is, and he is utterly devoid of compassion, wit, charm or understanding of what kind of change the people desperately need. Corbyn got it. Starmer and Reeves cling to failed Tory neoliberal policies and the result is a dying Labour party with an enormous majority and not a clue how to use it.
All of this was so predictable from the moment Corbyn was given the leadership, for whatever reason that came about. We knew what was going to happen to him, and we knew what would come of it: a right-wing Labour government with no better idea of how to govern than the right-wing Tories.
The Labour Party elite has been corrupted by the notion of power for power’s sake, and the sooner they are removed and replaced by a leadership that has a proper sense of what government is for – the regulation of social institutions for the benefit of the whole people – the better for us all.
The Labour Party has descended into shame and infamy. Its reconquest by its old right-wing hierarchy was accomplished by cheating, by spreading lies, by a bent disciplinary system which evades truth and justice, with an internal dictatorship that rigs party elections and controls candidate selection. Now in government, as only achieved by the failure of the previous Conservatives, it has shown itself to be incompetent, on the take, nasty, politically Zionist, complicit in genocide, jingoistic, clueless at tackling problems which matter, untruthful, unfair and already on its way to failure.
Yes, Mike Phipps has provided “a helpful review” of Labour’s worst hits in 2024.
But he has failed to come to grips with the bigger issue, namely that Labour is NOT a socialist party. Ralph Miliband, Ed’s dad, was under no such illusions and did not think Labour could be transformed into one.
In a 1966 piece titled “The Labour Government and Beyond” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/miliband/1966/01/labgov.htm) Miliband wrote in words of contemporary insight as well:
“What the present Labour leaders are basically about is not at all complicated, or mysterious, or very new: they are about the more efficient and, in a limited sense, the more humane functioning of British capitalism. What distinguishes them from their Tory and Liberal political colleagues and competitors is not their will to create a socialist society on the basis of the social ownership and control of economic power – they have no such will – but a greater propensity to invoke state intervention in economic and social life than these competitors are willing to accept.”
What he wrote in 1966 about the Wilson government could be said about that of Starmer:
“The trouble with the Labour Government is not that it has failed to destroy capitalism in a year or so. No one ever thought that this was on its agenda for 1965 or 1966. The real trouble, at least from a socialist point of view, is that absolutely nothing that the Government has said or done during its period of office holds out even the most remote and shadowy promise that this is what the Labour leaders want, in however long a perspective. On the contrary, everything they have said and done shows that they are not only very comfortably but also permanently installed in the “mixed economy”, and that their furthest ambition is to administer it rather better than their Tory opponents.” (edited to c 300 words as per our policy on comments Ed)
Richard writes: “All of this was so predictable from the moment Corbyn was given the leadership, for whatever reason that came about. We knew what was going to happen to him…”.
What happened didn’t happen as the right-wingers in the Labour party – and I – expected; and there’s comfort and hope for the future in that.
They (and I) thought Corbyn had NO CHANCE of winning the contest for the Labour leadership (both first time round and after the “chicken coups”). He did – with stonking majorities in all sections of the party. Labour regained its community roots, radicalism and activism as new members joined many of the CLPs – often to the shock and unease of CLP stalwarts who’d previously run them.
It was far harder than the plotters expected to unseat Corbyn. They might well have failed if there hadn’t been a well-connected, well-protected “fifth column” inside the party’s “civil service” assisting their efforts.
The plotters have only been successful in destroying what they dislike, they haven’t been able to build anything that’ll last. Starmer’s the third of their candidates to fail. Twenty by-election results since July and polling data all show the voters have become in a few months as sick of Starmer’s Labour as they are of the Tories. The plotters have shown allies and enemies alike they can’t deliver goods worth having and aren’t worth backing.
Assuming the current leadership continues to fail (likely) and brings down its backers as it does so (less likely), then the chaos to come MIGHT possibly create opportunities for a major political reset. But probably not.