Will Keir Starmer Be the 21st Century Ramsay McDonald?

This occurred to me a few days ago, thinking about Starmer’s strange decision to offer only constructive criticism of the government and his agreement to serve in a coalition with Johnson if asked. It was a bizarre decision, that either showed Starmer as naive, or far more closely aligned with the Tories at the expense of the left in the Labour party.

In fact there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Starmer, as a man of the Labour right, is basically a Tory in the wrong party. The leaked Labour report shows the Blairites in the party bureaucracy – Iain McNicol, John Stolliday, Emilie Oldknow and the other scum – actively working to make sure that Labour lost the 2017 election. One of them described feeling sick that Corbyn was actually high in the polls, and the intriguers exchanged emails in that the wished that Labour would lose to the Lib Dems or the Tories. One of them was even a moderator on a Tory discussion site, and had such a hatred for his own party that people wondered why he was still in it. Of course, when someone in the Labour party actually raised that question they found it was verboten and they were purged on some trumped up charge. And in at least one of the constituency Labour parties the right-wing leadership actually appealed for Lib Dems and Tories to join when the rank and file started to get Bolshie and demand change and the election of genuine Labour officials. Blair himself was described over and again as a man in the wrong party. He was a Thatcherite neoliberal. He stood for private enterprise and the privatisation of the NHS, although with the caveat that he still believed in free universal healthcare paid for by the state. And Thatcher herself claimed him as her greatest achievement. The first thing that the Blair did when he entered No. 10 was invite her round for a visit.

Blair claimed that politics had changed, as the fall of Communism meant that we were living in a post-ideological age. All that stuff by Francis Fukuyama about ‘the end of history’. Blair also packed his administration with Tories, arguing that in this new political era he wanted to reach across party lines and form a government of all the talents.

But neoliberalism itself has not triumphed, except as a zombie ideology kept walking by the political, social and economic elites long after it should have been interred. It keeps the 1 per cent massively rich at the expense of everyone else. And under Corbyn people started to wake up to it. Which is why the establishment were frantic to demonise him, first as a Communist or Trotskyite, and then, in a grotesque reversal of the truth, an anti-Semite. Starmer’s victory in the leadership elections is basically the Blairites returning to power and attempting to restore their previous domination.

It’s perfectly possible that Starmer is also simply being naive. After all, Germany’s equivalent party, the SPD, went into coalition with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, the German Conservatives. It was a disastrous mistake, as Merkel’s gang stole the credit for their reforms strengthening Germany’s welfare state, while making sure that the SPD took the blame for their mistakes and the negative part of the coalition programme. The result was that the SPD lost the next election heavily to Merkel. 

There’s also the object lesson of what happened to the Lib Dems in this country when Nick Clegg threw in his lot with Cameron. Despite the rhetoric of dragging the Tories further left or rather to the centre, Clegg immediately abandoned any real centrism and backed Cameron’s vile, murderous austerity programme to the hilt. Indeed, he went even further. Cameron was willing to concede to Clegg that university tuition fees shouldn’t be raised. But Clegg decided that they should. And so they were, and British students naturally turned against the man who betrayed them. And at the next election, the Lib Dems were devastated as their supporters chose instead either to vote Tory or Labour.

And there’s an important lesson for Starmer from the Labour party’s own 20th century history. Right at the end of the 1920s or the beginning of the 1930s, the Labour Party entered a coalition with the Conservatives under its leader, Ramsay McDonald. This was a response to the Wall Street Crash and the global recession that followed. The party’s members wanted their government to act in the interests of the workers, who were being laid off in droves, or had their wages and what unemployment relief there was cut. Instead the party followed orthodox economic policy and cut government spending, following the Tory programme of welfare cuts, mass unemployment and lower wages. This split the party, with the rump under McDonald losing popular support and dying. McDonald himself was hated and reviled as a traitor.

Something similar could easily occur if Starmer’s Labour went into coalition with the Tories. They’d back the programme of further austerity, an end to the welfare state and the privatisation of the NHS, and would lose members as a result. Just as the party did under Blair. However, I can see Starmer and the Blairites seeing this as a success. They despise traditional Labour members and supporters, whom they really do view as Communist infiltrators. They did everything they could to purge the party of Corbyn supporters, using the accusation of Communism and then anti-Semitism as the pretext for doing so. And they seemed determined to split the party if they could not unseat him. There were the series of attempted coups, in one of which Starmer himself was a member. It also seemed that they intended to split the party, but hold on to its name, bureaucracy and finances in order to present themselves as the real Labour party, even though they’re nothing of the sort.

My guess is that this would happen if Starmer does accept an invitation from Boris to join him in government. And the question is whether Starmer realised this when he made his agreement with the blonde clown. Is he so desperate for power that he sees it as a risk he should take?

Or does he say it as a way of joining the party to which he really feels allegiance, and a useful way of purging Labour of all the awkward lefties?

 

Tags: Angela Merkel, anti-semitism, Anti-Semitism Smears, Christian Democrats, Conservatives, Elections, Emilie Oldknow, Francis Fukuyama, Iain McNicol, Internet, Jeremy Corbyn, John Stolliday, Keir Starmer, Labour Party, Lib-Dems, Margaret Thatcher, Neoliberalism, NHS, NHS Privatisation, Nick Clegg, Privatisation, Ramsay McDonald, Recession, SPD, the Elite, Trotskyites, Wall Street Crash, Welfare Cuts, Welfare State