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Eyes Left Labour: the beatings will continue even if morale improves

Despite a healthy poll lead, there are no signs of a let up in internal machinations against the left and the membership at large — that's because party democracy is the last thing Starmer wants if Labour wins power, writes ANDREW MURRAY

IN the last two weeks, a newly elected member of Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) — the only Jewish one, in fact — was suspended for attending the wrong sort of meeting sometime in the past.

Another NEC member, Nadia Jama, on the completion of her term on that body immediately resigned from the party itself, describing it as “toxic.”

And a delegate to Labour’s conference in Liverpool was apparently suspended for having the temerity to make a dissenting speech concerning the Ukraine war.

We are supposed to regard all this as normal. The media has ignored these depredations — nothing to see here, it has agreed.

Likewise, there was little comment or follow-up on the revelations in the Forde report or in Al-Jazeera’s Labour Files programmes. The latter exposed lawless, bullying and racist behaviour by the party apparatus and its epigones, from Liverpool to Brighton, Newham to Croydon.

In particular, the programmes highlighted the hounding of Jewish socialists like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi — the suspended NEC member — by Keir Starmer and his team.

Today’s Labour is a deeply undemocratic and authoritarian party. Yet it also looks likely to lead the next government, thanks to the Liz Truss dividend.

Starmer calculates that the stultifying regime he has imposed on Labour matters little to voters when they are facing vast energy bills, wage cuts, the impossibility of securing a mortgage and the risk of pension fund collapse.

But it matters yet. There is method in Starmer’s malice. He fears above all the politics of mass struggle and its leakage into the charmed circle of parliamentary posturing.

Hence his widely derided ban on Labour frontbenchers attending picket lines. Jeremy Corbyn’s commitment to extraparliamentary mass campaigning was perhaps the aspect of his outlook that the Establishment found most threatening, along with his anti-imperialism.

Starmer knows that, should he secure a majority and form a government, he will inherit an economic disaster zone, likely including a ballooning budget deficit.

He will also have to deal with an aroused working-class movement, impatient for social improvement after nearly a generation of stagnation, austerity, debt and wage cuts.

It is all but certain that Starmer and Rachel Reeves will put placating the money markets first. They are not interested in transformational change. Fiscal conservatism will be their lodestar — although perhaps the purse strings will be loosened a little for the military.

Under those circumstances, inoculating Labour against any democratic pressures will be essential if it is to function as a reliable “B team” for capitalism. It must be sealed off from the mass movements of the working people by draconian discipline.

Some on the left claim to see signs of progress in the policy announcements in Liverpool. That is a delusion.

OK, Starmer is not offering full-fat Blairism. Since Labour’s right have not had a single new idea to huddle round for warmth since the 2008 crash blew up their socio-economic model, today’s front bench have to cobble something together from bits of Corbyn-Ed Miliband driftwood.

But their heart isn’t in it, because their heart isn’t anywhere. The great clunking fist of dictatorial social democracy is, however, everywhere.

On the evidence of Liverpool, Starmer has prevailed over the Corbynite party he captured on a fraudulent prospectus. The left of the party remains vocal on the fringe but stilled within the conference — unsurprisingly given the treatment of the delegate who unfashionably spoke out against war.

At some point the left will need to discuss why the defeat of December 2019 has turned into such a comprehensive rout within Labour. Certainly, serious weaknesses have been revealed.

For now, however, the priority must be connecting with the people and building a mass movement for change sufficient to overwhelm the pre-emptive barriers Starmer and his acolytes are building against them.

Labour’s Liverpool conference existed in a bubble, but one that can be easily burst.

The high cost of the free market

Punched in the face by the invisible hand. As Oscar Wilde wrote, you would need a heart of stone not to laugh.

Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng believe society should live and die by the market. Yet they are left spluttering when the god to whom they bring their pious offerings gives them an unequivocal thumbs-down.

“We get it, we’ve listened,” the hapless duo chirruped as they abandoned plans to axe the top rate of tax.

That was the centrepiece of Kwarteng’s mini-budget, the measure that got him the biggest applause from the Tory donors who gathered to swill champagne with the Chancellor straight after his announcement.

Turns out more sober investors weren’t cheering. They like tax cuts well enough, but not paid for on the never-never. They like sound finances and stable economic management even more, and social conflict a good deal less.

Truss has launched her premiership with a spectacular act of buffoonery. A polling deficit of 30 per cent plus may be bad enough, but worse could lie ahead.

The Telegraph quotes Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s biggest hedge fund, as warning that the “social contract is breaking down, and that the liberal democracies are heading for civil war and revolution unless they restore solidarity.”

I guess swerving civil war and revolution is part of Truss’s programme, but I don’t see solidarity being restored. Kwarteng’s nightmare part two will surely be big cuts in public spending to fund those tax cuts that haven’t been vetoed by the City.

At this point it is worth recalling that Truss was first choice for premier of around one Tory MP in seven. Worth noting too that Thatcherite true believer Daniel Hannan admits that just 2 per cent of the British public identify with the “libertarian right” ideology that Truss cleaves to.

Adam Smith may have set the ball rolling, but it will be the very visible dagger-wielding hands of anxious parliamentarians who can bring this episode, catastrophic and almost comic at once, to a termination.

God save us from self-reflection

Labour is a party which has never elected a woman as leader — last time of asking it looked past four to pick the bloke in a suit.

In the last 70 years it has never sung the national anthem at conference either. That would have required striking up God Save the Queen.

But as soon as a man is on the throne, the party finds its pseudo-patriotic voice. It would be good if Labour were a republican party, but a self-aware one would be a start.

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