BRITISH politics drifts through the summer silly season utterly disconnected from the realities facing the people.

In the fever dream that is the Conservative leadership contest, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak preen before the claque of elderly reactionaries who constitute their immediate electorate, pretending that the country is on course or, if not, that its problems are nothing to do with the last 12 years of Tory rule.

Keir Starmer, for his part, travels to Liverpool to make a speech on the economy of surpassing inanity, even by his Olympic-standard criteria, notably only for abandoning any residual radicalism of the sort that might actually make a difference to the recession and cost-of-living crisis.  

He pauses on his long march to nowhere to expel a leading Liverpool activist who berated him for a selection of his shortcomings in a local cafe.

The political mainstream has seldom looked so impoverished in terms of ideas or initiative, so lacking in the basic elements of popular and plausible leadership.

Yet while these tawdry performances unfold, real things are moving. Exasperation over years of stagnation and slump, which has depressed living standards for the best part of a generation now, compounded by a government-inspired wage-cutting drive, is exploding.

The growing wave of industrial action over wages and jobs led by the railway workers is significant, as it draws large sections of the working class into the most basic of struggles. The experience of striking can itself start to transform attitudes.

But the present struggle has additional importance in that it starts to open up the sterile political situation. Truss, assuming she emerges victorious in her struggle for Margaret Thatcher’s crown, has already committed to a further legal offensive against trade unionism, making industrial action still harder to undertake lawfully.

She will find difficulty pursuing that particular project. With inflation set to soar still further and her tax cut commitments clashing with deficit reduction, she may not have enough political capital in the bank for a successful confrontation.

Workers fighting to maintain living standards have most of the public on their side. Truss will lack any real democratic mandate to be prime minister, a further weakness.  

The trade unions must stay resolute, of course. Unite changed its rules a while back to give its leadership the right to fight outside the law if that was what was required. The RMT and the CWU, among others, exude a similar attitude.  

Of course, many in the movement remember that Thatcher won such confrontations. Ted Heath, however, did not, which should also be recalled.

Trade unions are not as strong today as they were in the early 1970s, but the Marxist view of the glass of water question is not whether it is half full or half empty, but whether it is filling up or draining away. We are in a filling up stage.

It is within the Labour Party that the larger reverberations are being felt. Starmer has got away with any number of outrages since becoming leader, from abandoning the pledges on which he secured election to deceitfully suspending Jeremy Corbyn to licensing a purge of Jewish socialists from Labour.

He has got away with all of it, despite these moves being accompanied by a record of electoral achievement that is patchy at best. However, his attempt to ban front-bench Labour MPs from attending picket lines and his sacking of Ilford South MP Sam Tarry for ignoring this shameful edict could see the camel’s back finally start to creak.

Many back-bench MPs have defied this foolish decree against solidarity, and they have lately been joined by shadow cabinet member Lisa Nandy. Even Wes Streeting, probably the Blairite candidate to succeed Starmer when the latter’s study in performative pointlessness is bought to an end, has made pro-worker noises. Starmer has started to flounder.

Nor has any affiliated union come riding to the leader’s rescue. How could it? A Labour Party against the labour movement is no party at all.  

The Labour left does not turn to Lenin for guidance very often. Nevertheless, this brief tactical suggestion seems apposite: “If you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw.” With Starmer, it’s mush time comrades. Push on.

Ukrainian affairs

BRITAIN continues to pour arms into Ukraine. The conflict shows all the signs of stagnation, with neither side able to advance or retreat at present.

That is not to say nothing is happening. The Zelensky administration has banned several political parties, all of them left wing.

The Ukrainian parliament has passed anti-union laws which would even make Truss hesitate, removing all collective rights from 70 per cent of the workforce.

And Volodymyr Zelensky has fired his security chief and his top prosecutor. Let me hand over here to the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, for a generation the oracle of the US foreign affairs establishment: “US officials are a lot more concerned about Ukraine’s leadership than they are letting on. There is deep mistrust between the White House and President Zelensky of Ukraine — considerably more than has been reported.

“And there is funny business going on in Kiev. On July 17, Zelensky fired his country’s prosecutor general and the leader of its domestic intelligence agency … I have still not seen any reporting that convincingly explains what that was all about.

“It is as if we don’t want to look too closely under the hood in Kiev for fear of what corruption or antics we might see, when we have invested so much there.”

Indeed. Now none of this justifies Putin’s invasion. And it is fair to argue that there is as bad — and worse — going on under his rule in Russia. But we are not pouring guns and money into Russia. We are funding the authoritarian neoliberal kleptocracy in Kiev.

Note something else too. There are increasing reports of the extent of treason — pro-Russian activities — within the Ukrainian state. What this indicates is that opinion in Ukraine itself, and its underlying national question, are not as monolithic as presented.

It is time for the adults to enter the room. Instead, yes, that is Truss at the door. If only there was an opposition in Parliament.