Messing about in boats…
JVL Introduction
Last week Starmer used all his five questions to rubbish the Tories’ record on asylum.
He was in his element: government failure to keep their promises to keep numbers down, a record number of crossings, money spent on hotels, failure to process applications or deport enough – but nothing about the inhumanity and immorality of their proposed laws.
Taking on the arguments politically instead of as a manager and a bureaucrat, argues Phil Burton-Cartledge “means telling people with unfounded prejudices and racist attitudes that they’re wrong. Which is something the Labour right are never willing to do… Treating refugees like human beings now hampers Labour’s room for manoeuvre later.”
This article was originally published by A Very Public Sociologist blog on Wed 8 Mar 2023. Read the original here.
Cultivating Labour's Scapegoats
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I’m ashamed to have Starmer as the Leader of the Labour Party !! Foolishly I voted for him and thought his pledges were from an honest man! Should have listened !
“Memeable content like this shared by Stephen Kinnock stresses the record numbers of crossings and the money it’s costing to put people up in hotels.”
He voted for Trident replacement. Clearly not bothered about the cost.
The positions taken by Starmer on behalf of ‘his’ party on issues like asylum seekers, benefit claimants, the right to protest, picket lines, Shamina Begum, anti-black racism and Islamophobia, to name but a few, are ones you would expect from a fringe group with an extreme nationalist agenda – Britain First, say, as distinct from a party traditionally supportive of minorities and human rights. Of course we have been here before, with the establishment-friendly activities of the Blair government and Ed Miliband’s notorious ‘controls on immigration’, but those positions were never as front and centre as they seem to be now. Starmer seems to be angling to replace the votes lost by his war on Corbyn and the left with disgruntled Tories and Red Wall Brexiteers who deserted Labour in 2019. For the moment, given the party’s substantial lead in the polls, his gamble seems to be paying off.
But there are ominous signs that the lead is built on sand. Those voters previously prepared to take Starmer at face value seem to have sussed him out. Despite the Tories’ woeful record of economic competence, he currently lags one point behind Sunak in the polls for best Prime Minister. The problem with Starmer’s strategy is that a voting bloc that wants to see asylum seekers turned away is less likely to entrust the task to Labour than to the Tories, the party traditionally associated with that policy. Obviously with a year to go it is too early to say who will win the next election. My gut feeling is that Labour would be better served establishing a distance from the Tories rather than competing with them for ownership of the same nativist focus-group driven policies. But I have been wrong before and will doubtless be wrong again. All I know is that Starmer’s Labour is unrecognizable from the party I joined eight years ago, hoping that at last there was something worth voting for. I am more than ever glad I resigned.