I got this message from the Trades Union Congress via the Megaphone about an hour ago. It thanks everyone who attended their protest outside parliament yesterday, and pledges that they will carry on fighting the government’s attempts to stifle the right to strike. It also states that they have succeeded in getting the Labour party to repeal the offensive legislation. This is good news, but as it comes from Starmer’s Labour party, I’m afraid I do wonder how far it can be trusted, official platitudes about standing by the unions notwithstanding.
‘Hi David,
It was fantastic to be joined by so many of you in Parliament Square last night to send a clear message to the government: We will not stand by while you attack our right to strike.
As you may have heard, Conservative MPs again decided to support this undemocratic Bill. The Bill will now return to the House of Lords, where Peers will again decide where they stand.
While the government may get this legislation on the statute book, we will not stand by and let them sack a single nurse, paramedic, teacher, railway worker or civil servant.
We will defend the right to strike. And we will defend every worker who exercises that right to strike.
And I am pleased to say won confirmation that the Labour Party will repeal this legislation if they win the next election.
Thank you for everything you have done to build our campaign so far. Your energy and solidarity are the trade union movement’s greatest strength.
I’ve just found this piece from the I by Chloe Chaplain reporting that Momentum have warned Starmer that he could lose votes from purging his party’s left and pointing to their own electoral successes to show that Labour can still win with left-wing policies. He’s also been warned that he cannot rely on the Tories’ implosion to secure a Labour victory.
‘Purging the left and ditching socialism could see Labour lose voters, Sir Keir Starmer warned
Sir Keir Starmer has been warned he risks alienating core Labour voters who could stay home and not vote if he turns his back on socialism ahead of the general election.
The left of his party are pointing their own local election successes as evidence that a radical agenda can be attractive to voters. And others are warning Sir Keir of the danger of losing out to apathy.
The Labour leader has made a considerable shift to the centre since taking charge, with appeals to former Tory voters who could be tempted to swing to his party. In doing so, he has pulled power away from the vocal left-wing of his party that had dominated under his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn.
As the general election draws closer, and with Labour’s final policy agenda being drawn up, left wing campaigners and MPs are pushing to stop the leadership turning its back entirely on pledges they argue are very popular among voters.
It cites the Labour administration in Worthing, West Sussex – where Momentum co-chair Hilary Schan was elected as a councillor – and successes in Broxtow, Nottinghamshire, and Preston, Lancashire as examples of a socialist policy platform winning votes. They argue that, if he continues on his current path of “purging” left-wing candidates and policies he could lose support in areas like these.
Ms Schan said the three authorities were a “a living, breathing demonstration that there is no trade-off between electability and transformative policies”.
“As a general election closes in, the Labour leadership has a chance to lay out a bold programme to fix the Tories’ broken Britain. Choosing to instead pursue yet more purges and division will only weaken our electoral coalition and damage prospects of a Labour majority,” she said.’
I’m glad this is being pointed out to Starmer and that it’s got what appears to be a neutral report in the I. As opposed to the right-wing press, which will probably report this with headlines screaming that it’s another attempt by Corbynite anti-Semitic Trots to keep their hold on Labour. But I have absolutely no doubt that Starmer won’t listen, and will carry on purging the left.
As for New Labour’s right-wing policies appealing to Tory voters, this needs to be qualified. The public ownership campaign group We Own It has cited statistics again and again showing that the British public, including a majority of Tory voters, want the utilities taken back into public ownership. What is stopping this isn’t public opinion but Thatcherite ideology and the media and political establishment, which will seek to demonise and undermine any politician that seeks to press for such policies.
I got this latest comment from the pro-democracy organisation about the National Conservatives’ conference earlier this afternoon. They make the point that their real views about democracy and transparency are shown by the way they stopped left-wing media organisations like Novara entrance, despite all their rhetoric about it. Other highlights included Reet Snob stating plainly that the Voter ID laws were all about gerrymandering and a speech by Cruella in which she went on about genitals. This last was dig at Starmer. Cruella said that she and Sunak knew that 100 per cent of women don’t have penises, unlike Starmer. Who, she joked, would stand as the trans candidate at the next election. Here’s the message
Dear David,
The National Conservativism (Nat-C) Conference kicked off yesterday, proving to be just as much of a weird, far-right cringe-fest as any of us could have anticipated. Despite one of the conference’s ostensible themes being “free speech”, they’ve shut their doors to journalists.
Once again, this clique of Conservatives is showing that their commitment to freedom of expression is ankle-deep. One of their core values crumbles to dust the moment anyone disagrees with them, in which case they become the delicate “snowflakes” they claim to detest.
Byline Times’ political editor Adam Bienkov, as well as the political correspondents from OpenDemocracy, Politics JOE, Novara Media and others, all had their press tickets rejected. It’s not hard to see what those publications have in common: they don’t share the extreme views of the conference and probably wouldn’t cover it favourably.
We shouldn’t be surprised that non-Conservative media is being barred from entry. This conference is a symbol of minority rule, a gathering of election deniers, theocrats, and billionaires’ mouthpieces. They’re becoming increasingly bold about rejecting democracy outright.
Here are some highlights from the conference so far that illustrate the point:
Jacob Rees Mogg openly acknowledged that voter ID laws were “gerrymandering” elections. He actually just admitted it.
US Senator JD Vance said that the US and UK Conservative movements are on “similar trajectories“. This from one of the people that tried to overturn the 2020 US election.
Douglas Murray said that just because Germany “mucked up” nationalism doesn’t mean the UK can’t give it another go.
Suella Braverman’s weird speech about genitalia and the need to arrest protestors – ironically interrupted by an Extinction Rebellion stunt.
They may call themselves “populists” and pretend to be representative of ordinary people, but it’s all just rhetorical sleight-of-hand. These are free-market fundamentalists, Christian nationalists, and conspiracy theorists – and thepublic at large is not behind them.
As the old adage from David Frum goes: “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
We’re already there – the mask is now fully off. The only way to counter people like this is to force them to play the game fairly. Instead of letting them “gerrymander”, spread lies, and appeal to the worst elements of xenophobia and hate in Britain, we need to fix the system that has enabled them for far too long. We know that the general public rejects this kind of politics – we just need a system that reflects that.
A more democratic, fairer politics would prevent the rise of fascism in Britain. We’re running out of time to build it. As a young person in Britain, my future depends on us changing this trajectory – there’s nothing for me in the UK under Nat-C rule.
That’s why I signed up to Open Britain’s mission and why I would encourage everyone who shares my concerns to do so too. We know the majority of people in this country are on our side. By working together, we can and will see off this creeping authoritarianism and set free Britain.
I’m not a member of Open Britain, but I’m leaving the link here for anyone who is so alarmed by this swing to the extreme right that they do want to join the organisation.
I’ve seen a couple of videos about them on YouTube already. In one of them, various attendees were claiming that it was for small ‘c’ conservatives and that while some Conservatives were there, most of the attendees didn’t belong to the party. Hmmm. The problem is, some of the speakers were very definitely big ‘C’ Tories, like Rees Mogg and Braverman. They also had the former MEP Daniel Hannan, dubbed by Guy Debord’s Cat as ‘the Lyin’ King’, a hard-line Brexiteer who’d like to sell off the NHS. Politics Joe put up a video in which they interviewed some of the people going to the conference outside. One of them was an older man, who lamented the lack of sexual restraint in modern society and said quite plainly that if a man fathered a child, he had a duty to support it. Now I didn’t watch all of the video, and perhaps this gent said something far more extreme later on, but I don’t think what he said was particularly controversial. I think the traditional attitude among intellectuals at least until the middle of the last century was that restraint was one of the key elements of civilisation. It was what made us civilised beings instead of animals. And sexual restraint, finding appropriate channels for sexuality like marriage was an intrinsic part of this. As for men supporting their children, again I can’t see anything wrong or controversial about it. Not on its own, unless it’s coupled with more extreme policies, like attacks on gay marriage. But I don’t doubt that as a whole, the Nat Cons are indeed a deeply unpleasant, highly reactionary movement.
The Labour leadership’s radio silence on PR has finally broken. We have our answer. Byline Times reported today that Keir Starmer is officially against Proportional Representation. While the silence to date has been a constant worry to various electoral reform campaigners, including Open Britain, today’s news is a definite blow.
Ironically, this bad news for PR campaigners immediately followed some great news. Yesterday, the Union of Shop, Distributive, and Allied Workers (USDAW) added its name to the list of Labour-backed trade unions that support the campaign for PR. Labour stakeholders – from trade unions to party members – are overwhelmingly supportive of a fairer voting system. Unfortunately, they don’t get to write the manifesto.
Last month, Labour’s National Policy Forum held a consultation which gave Constituency Labour Parties, branches, unions, and others the chance to make policy suggestions relating to different policy areas. According to Labour for a New Democracy (L4ND), 44% of thetotal submissions called for PR – more than any other issue.
And yet, Starmer apparently refuses to recognise the will of his own party. He’s unilaterally shutting down the conversation about electoral reform. Not only does that speak to a troubling lack of democracy within the Labour Party machine, but it also reduces the chances that we will ever see the much-needed revitalisation of our national democracy.
As we’ve been saying in recent emails, the period of government between the next two elections will be make or break for this country. By refusing to embrace electoral reform, Starmer increases the risk that a disciplined, right-wing Conservative Party under new leadership could again exploit the weaknesses of First Past the Post to return to power in 2029, despite a significant majority of the electorate being against them. Given recent developments, that could even be a “National Conservative” government, a far scarier prospect even than the one we have now.
It’s easy to understand why Starmer might want to ignore calls to reform the system in a way that would share power with Labour’s political rivals and instead ruthlessly pursue a path that delivers absolute power. It’s especially easy when you consider how far ahead Labour are in the polls. However, that would be to ignore what’s right for the country and, indeed, what could be a route to far more ACTUAL power for Labour in future.
But don’t worry…no one is giving up.
We, and all the other organisations pushing for PR, are already agreed that we will double down on our efforts to build an irresistible public demand for change. There’s still plenty of opportunity to pressure Starmer into changing his mind, not least through the Sort the System mass lobby event on 24 May.
A few days ago Keir Starmer announced that if Labour came to power, boys would be taught to respect women in school. I can see the point of this, though it also seems to me to be a bit prim and schoolmarmish. It reminds me of the female management advisor who appeared on one of the TV shows a year or two ago and advised managers not to allow men to discuss sport at work in case it led to chauvinist behaviour. It also displays the totalitarian woke fixation with controlling how people think. But as a policy, I also find it rather threadbare as it ignores the real, material problems ordinary people are facing. This is the cost of living crisis with rising electricity bills and food prices. Some parents, and I think it may well be mostly mothers here, have been denying themselves the food they need in order to give enough to their children. People need higher wages, and unemployment and disability benefits at a level where they can afford food and other necessities. And, of course, an end to the humiliating, vindictive and persecutory sanctions regime. Starmer’s announcement does nothing to address these issues, nor those of massive profiteering by the oil and power companies and the raw sewage being pumped into our waterways. And you wonder how sincere Starmer is about anyway. He’s broken every other promise.
I wonder if it was designed to appeal to women following the debacle in Scotland over the gender recognition bill that brought down the SNP. Scots were rightly worried and angry at violent rapists and child abusers being put in women’s prisons after declaring that they were trans. Starmer and various other leading Labour MPs have made it clear that they believe transwomen are women and support the trans ideology, though Starmer’s commitment to it briefly wavered when Sturgeon was forced to resign. He stated that amending the gender recognition act would not be a priority under a Labour government. He’s been criticised for his bizarre statement that 99 per cent of women don’t have penises, while the right and gender critical have applauded Sunak’s statement that no, women don’t have male sexual organs. I wondered if Starmer had become worried that he was losing the support of ordinary women because of the trans controversy, and so made the announcement about teaching boys respect for women as a ploy to win it back.
This is another headline I caught from either Mahyar Tousi, Michael Heaver or one of the other hard-right Tory vlogs. I didn’t watch the video, as it seems to me all too credible that some extremely right-wing donors to the Tories may be withdrawing their support. If you look at the comments for many videos put up by the Brexiteer hard right, you find people complaining that the Tories are high-spending ‘Consocialists’ supporting the welfare state, high tax rates and promoting un-Tory policies like diversity and the transgender craze. There is very definitely a feeling among these people that the Tories are not Conservatives, or not conservative enough. Hence they state they’re going to support Reform or one of the right-wing populist parties. You even find the ludicrous claim that somehow Sunak’s Tories are ‘Communists’, as shown by a caller to Julia Hartley-Brewer’s show. The caller confused ‘communism’ with authoritarianism, which shows how little the British public really knows about Marxism and how effective it is as a term of political abuse.
This could pose problems for the Tories, as, like Starmer’s Labour party, they’ve been ignoring their membership in favour of donors for a long time. Ordinary grassroots Tories have complained and the membership of the party has declined., so this could put a financial squeeze on them. I remember Robin Ramsay in old issue of Lobster making the point that such policies had decimated political membership in America. The number of activists in each state was tiny, perhaps as low as two or so, because the parties had ignored ordinary membership recruitment to concentrate on the interests of the donors who set up PACs to fund individual politicians. This was a decade before Corbyn over here and Sanders in America and the explosion of political activism that followed them. The observation is therefore somewhat out of date, but the point remains.
My concern is that Starmer will try to hoover up these right-wing donors for the Labour party, just as Tony Blair did when donors and Tory-supporting businessmen and news magnates, like Murdoch, switched their support from the Conservatives to Labour. Blair was already a Thatcherite infiltrator, but the funding and support of these donors helped him continue Conservative policies, as well as reward the donors and their senior executives with positions in government. As a result, actual political engagement in Britain fell. People felt disenfranchised as it seemed whatever party you voted for, you got the same policies.
I can see this easily coming back with Starmer, accompanied by the alienation and anger this caused when Blair did it.
Yesterday I put up the list of questions I’d like to be put to Starmer, which he would be forced to answer without any refusals or evasions tolerated. One of these covered the benefit sanctions regime. I said that Labour under Ed Miliband offered only tepid resistance to them. I think this was about an issue when the supposedly ‘Red’ Ed ordered the party to abstain, rather than vote for it. Trev kindly set me straight about this with this comment, pointing out that Miliband’s Labour party didn’t resist at all:
‘Under Miliband Labour didn’t show any opposition to Benefit Sanctions, quite the reverse, they actively supported the use of Benefit Sanctions and told me in an email that they (the Labour Party) believed that Sanctions were “a vital tool in helping people back to work”. And for that reason I voted Green instead. I’ve emailed them several times since then to ask if they’ve changed their minds yet but so far got no reply.’
Obviously they haven’t. They’re still chasing the Tory vote and the millions of people, who believe everything the read in the Scum and the Heil that the feckless unemployed are all living the high life scrounging off their hard-earned tax money. The reality is people are starving, and the reason why work doesn’t pay is because wages are too low, not benefits too high. It’s another example of why the Labour right shouldn’t be in control of the party and can’t be trusted in national government.
I went to the online meeting last night on restoring Labour party democracy staged by Arise and the Labour left. I didn’t spend very long there, as sometimes I get too irate at what’s being said – not at the speakers, but at the problems they’re talking about. And the major problem facing democracy in the Labour party is Starmer. He and the NEC are doing everything they can to purge and silence socialists in the party. The most glaring example of this is his deselection of Jeremy Corbyn, a man whose position as party leader Starmer isn’t fit to fill. But there are other cases where he’s deselection sitting MPs and senior party officials over the heads of local constituency parties and the wishes of ordinary Labour party members. And one of the most blatant and toxic examples of this, after Corbyn, is his removal of someone Leonard as head of the Scottish Labour party.
Leonard had aroused right-wing ire by being too left. Even before his removal the NEC and the Labour right had been trying their damnedest to undermine him. The crunch finally came, however, when someone in the House of Lords and a group of Labour party donors told Starmer that they wanted him gone or they would take their money elsewhere. New Labour are corporatists, and when their masters in industry say ‘Jump!’, they say ‘How high?’ And Starmer duly got rid of Leonard and replaced him with someone more pliable.
This does not bode well for the future of the Health Service, as Stalin has among his advisers people from the private healthcare companies. He got touchy when asked about them, and declared that he wouldn’t answer questions on his advisors. Well, the time is long past when we should be questioning politicians on the help they’re getting from the private sector. When Blair slithered into power he was surrounded by a host of lobbyists and advisors from private healthcare companies and even American private prisons, all keen to influence his government. And the result was over a decade of corporatist government that left the people of this country worse off but made Blair and his backers rich. George Monbiot describes this sorry state in his book Captive State, and Bremner and the Long Johns tore into Blair and his corporate cronies in their book You Are Here.
Corporatism is a major problem in America. It’s led to an erosion of trust in politicians, as the majority of Americans believe that once they get elected, their politicos will abandon their election platforms to do what their corporate backers want. A Harvard study declared that because of this, America was no longer a proper democracy but a corporate oligarchy. And some conservatives were also outraged at it. A Republican businessman in California wanted to have a law passed stipulating that politicians gaining from corporate donations should wear the badges of the companies funding them, like racing car drivers and other sportsmen. The major problem in America is a judgement in the 1980s stating that corporate donations are free speech, and thus permissible under the law. Over here it seems to be pretty much a straightforward reaction by industry to the unions funding the Labour party. And just as this corporatism is undermining democracy in the Labour party, it also caused people to leave the Tories. Because the Tory grassroots felt their concerns were being ignored in favour of the corporate big boys and girls.
Starmer is just going to drag us back to the corporate sleaze of the Blair years.
There might be some hope, though. One of the speakers, Nabeela Mowlana, pointed out that Starmer hadn’t killed young people’s enthusiasm for socialism and Corbyn’s and his vision. And there was Blair’s spectacular failure when he tried to stop Red Ken standing as mayor of London. The man Private Eye dubs ‘Leninspart’ stood as an independent, and beat Blair’s candidate.
Starmer is not just destroying democracy in the Labour party, he’s also destroying the wider hopes of the British people, the majority of whom backed Corbyn’s policies for a mixed economy and strong welfare state. We do need to organise and resist him.
Simon Maginn is, I believe, a Jewish Labour member of the type Starmer, the Blairites and the Israel lobby despise. He’s put up a series of videos critically refuting the anti-Semitism smears in the Labour party, each one dealing with a separate part of it. In this video he attacks a story retailed by former comedian David Baddiel in his book, Jews Come Last, that going around one Labour conference was a pamphlet about the Holocaust that mentioned all the other groups target by the Nazis except the Jews. The central theme of his book is that crimes and offences against Jews are taken less seriously than those against other books. Baddiel was also one of the media figures telling the world and anyone who would listen that Jeremy Corbyn was terribly anti-Semitic and so was the Labour party. I don’t know whether the man Julie Burchill once described as looking like his fellow comedian’s, Rob Newman’s, afterbirth, is just naive and gullible, and has simply swallowed everything the British media said about Corbyn and the Labour party, or whether he is actively malign.
As Simon shows, there is zero substance to this story, making it impossible to check. The leaflet has never been produced, and there are no accompanying details about it. Baddiel doesn’t mention what conference it was at, or where, who produced it. There was a pamphlet produced by the Socialist Workers in 2008 in Leicester that didn’t mention the Jews. This seems to have been a genuine oversight and the result of bad editing by the writers, rather than actual anti-Semitism. But it was not by the Labour party and was long before Jeremy Corbyn became its head. Simon therefore considers this allegation refuted.
As for crimes against other groups given priority over Jews, one of the allegations at the beginning of this century made against the French authorities was that they treated Islamophobic crimes more seriously than anti-Semitic offences. But this was because there was greater prejudice against Muslims than Jews. If I remember correctly, only 5 per cent of the French population considered that Jews weren’t real Frenchmen compared to 30 per cent plus for Muslims. Jews were given less priority not because of anti-Semitism, but because of its absence. If something like this is happening in Britain, my guess is that it’s for the same reasons. Tony Greenstein has cited statistics several times which show, contra the allegations of the Community Service Trust and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, that the majority of severely normal Brits either have positive views of Jews, or consider them no better or worse than anyone else. And even without the smear campaign, my own impression is that people take allegations of anti-Semitism and Nazism extremely seriously.
I also found this book on the English Defence League on Google Books.
The Rise of the Right: English Nationalism and the Transformation of Working-Class Politics, Simon Winlow and Steve Hall (Policy Press: 2016).
‘The shock Brexit result highlighted a worrying trend: underemployed white men and women who have seen their standard of living fall, their communities disintegrate and their sense of value, function and inclusion diminish, desperately want a mainstream political party to defend their interests. However, no such party exists. These men and women cannot connect their declining fortunes and growing frustrations to their true cause. Instead, immigrants are scapegoated and groups like the English Defence League (EDL) emerge. This book is the first to offer an accessible and uncompromising look at the EDL. It aims to alter thinking about working-class politics and the rise of right-wing nationalism in the de-industrialised and decaying towns and cities of England. The rise of the right among the working class, the authors claim, is inextricably connected to the withdrawal of the political left from traditional working-class communities, and the left’s refusal to advance the economic interests of those who have suffered most from neoliberal economic restructuring. Incisive, contentious and boundary-breaking, it uses the voices of men and women who now support far-right political groups to address the total failure of mainstream parliamentary politics and the rising tide of frustration, resentment and anger.’
This is pretty much the same constituency that voted for UKIP – working class Whites who feel that they have been left behind and are no longer represented by the mainstream parties. And it has been demonstrated that the extreme right can be successfully combated with proper, socialist policies that bring the working class together. When Blairite Margaret Hodge was an MP, she did so little campaigning against them, that when the BNP got seven members elected to Tower Hamlets council their gruppenfuhrer, Derek Beacon, sent her a bouquet of flowers. But this was later reversed with a change of MP, I believe, who did campaign for improving working class conditions and Beacon and squadrists were all voted out.
There’s a warning there for Keir Starmer. If he continues Blair’s policies of concentrating on Tory swing voters at the expense of the working class, while pursuing the identity of politics of race, he will alienate members of the White working class. I don’t know if the EDL are still going. I haven’t heard anything about them in quite a while, but certainly Reclaim, Reform and David Kurten’s Heritage party are eager for recruits.
If we want to stop the far right, we need proper socialist, working class politics that unites Blacks, Whites and Asians together.
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