Corbynism has sunk virtually without trace. Corbyn himself has almost disappeared. His followers and supporters pretend that this is just a setback in restoring what they call the ‘soul’ of the Labour Party. Quite what that soul is they never bother to explain. Instead, in their social media chatter, they manically characterise Sir Keir Starmer as an MI5 or MI6 plant, and his allies variously as ‘Red Tories’ or ‘Blairites’, implying that they are foreign to the Labour Party and this mythical soul. A plethora of left Labour organisations urge disaffected members to remain in the Party to continue to fight for that soul. They disregard the fact that they have lost position after position within Labour, and that in practice they are now a marginalised force. And all the while, leader Sir Keir Starmer gives lesson after lesson on the real character of Labour’s soul: unbridled reaction. ROBERT CLOUGH reports.
When Starmer became Labour’s leader in April 2020, he announced that his policy towards this most reactionary of Tory governments would be one of ‘constructive engagement’. The meaning was clear: he was not going to challenge the Tory government ideologically, but only on its performance. His strategy is to promote Labour’s electability by proving to the ruling class that a government led by Starmer would be a safe pair of hands, in contrast to the bumbling incompetence of Boris Johnson and the Tories. However, it is one thing to prove he is fit to run the affairs of British imperialism; it is another to build the necessary electoral coalition to win a general election. For that, he needs to win the support of those elderly Thatcherite workers who voted Tory in 2019 (and for Brexit in 2016) in Midlands constituencies and in the so-called Red Wall constituencies of Northern England. That means ditching anything that smacks of Corbynism, and embracing policies on taxation and migration that according to the Labour left were supposed to be history. All Labour needs to do now is to condemn those forced on to benefits, and with Rachel Reeves as Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster it is surely only a matter of time. As Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary she had made her opinions clear, declaring in 2014 that ‘We’re not the party to represent those who are out of work’, adding a year later that no-one can expect to ‘linger on benefits’ under a Labour government.
Both for and against freedom of movement
So how far has Starmer moved Labour over the six months since his election? On immigration, Starmer has shown no principles. Back in 2016 as Shadow Brexit Secretary under Corbyn, he told the Andrew Marr show that ‘there has been a huge amount of immigration over the last 10 years and people are understandably concerned about it.’ When asked if that meant placing limits on the freedom of movement that Corbyn supported, he answered that ‘we have to be open to adjustments of the freedom of movement rules and how they apply to this country. We have to be shrewd and careful.’
Come the leadership election campaign, Starmer found it expedient to champion the continuation of freedom of movement. But with Labour’s first test on migration since he became leader – the plight of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in conditions of great danger – his Shadow Immigration Minister Holly Lynch criticised the gove-rnment not for its inhumanity but because of its ‘lack of grip and competence’ and called on the government to ‘urgently provide detail’ of how they would be addressing the issue. Starmer has remained silent on this. The perception that Labour has been ‘soft’ on migration, that it failed to listen to people’s concerns on the issue, has been one of the principal explanations offered by the Labour right-wing for its loss of the 2010 and 2015 general elections. However, Starmer is positioning himself as a dyed-in-the-wool patriot to appeal to these layers. Along with the red tops he opposed the BBC’s rumoured decision to drop Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory from the Last Night of the Proms, and in his speech to the Labour Connect Conference declared ‘we love this country as you do. This is the country I grew up in and this is the country I will grow old in.’
Starmer has also failed to challenge the ideologically-driven Tory privatisations of health services – the PPE scandal where companies run by Tory donors end up with delivery contracts despite having no experience in the manufacture of such equipment – or the Test and Trace debacle. To be sure, there are criticisms of performance – but they are obvious to everyone, especially when it comes to the supposed ‘world-beating’ Test and Trace system. But there is no condemnation of a policy decision which set up a privatised centrally-directed, call-centre modelled tracing system led by people without public health qualification or experience and staffed by workers with an hour’s training and employed on a minimum wage. Inevitably it would fall to local authorities (which together have over 150 public health departments) to set up tracing systems to deal with local outbreaks: only people with local knowledge and prepared to tread the pavements rather than sitting on the end of a phone would be able to manage the crisis. ‘Constructive engagement’ enables the government’s privatised approach to managing the coronavirus pandemic to escape any Labour comment. As he told the Andrew Marr show on 19 September, ‘they [the government] make a decision, we will follow that and we will reinforce their communications because in the end this is not about party politics.’ The point of course is that it has everything to do with class politics as every decision that government makes hammers the working class and protects the wealthy.
Putting British interests first
Wherever we look, we see that Labour under Starmer has shown its absolute determination not to rock the boat. A good dose of anti-Russian and anti-Chinese chauvinism (see FRFI 277: Labour: always a racist, imperialist party); a policy on Kashmir which endorses India’s brutal occupation; defending the police against Black Lives Matter criticism; and of course the continued pursuit of Zionist interests and dismissal of Palestinian rights. Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy is quite clear: ‘I think you’ll see a real change in tone and approach from the Labour Party. I think you’ve already seen it, that we’ve set out in a number of areas, including in my area of foreign policy, that we stand up for Britain, we stand up for British people, we stand up for British interests and we will always put that first.’
Nandy was also happy to confirm that as far as she was concerned, Starmer no longer adhered to some of the ten pledges he made on becoming leader, for instance, that to raise income tax for the top 5% of earners and reverse Tory cuts to corporation tax: ‘In the middle of a global pandemic… the idea of raising taxes and squeezing people who are in work and trying to make ends meet is just completely the wrong priority for the country.’ Even the very popular pledge on rail nationalisation has gone by the board in favour of some vague promise of ‘greater public control’.
When Extinction Rebellion blockaded print works in Knowsley near Liverpool and Broxbourne in Hertfordshire on 5 September as part of their latest actions, they were of course vilified by Boris Johnson who complained that ‘it is completely unacceptable to seek to limit the public’s access to news in this way’ and Home Secretary Priti Patel who described it as an ‘attack on democracy’. But Starmer was not going to be left out: ‘the free press is the cornerstone of democracy and we must do all we can to protect it. Denying people the chance to read what they choose is wrong and does nothing to tackle climate change.’ The papers affected were the Murdoch titles, and The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. This is the ‘free press’ for Starmer – billionaire-owned and rabidly reactionary.
Labour left all at sea
As ever, socialists have to ask of the left of the Labour Party as it repeats the mantra ‘we must remain in Labour’: what would it take for you to leave the Labour Party? How reactionary would it have to be? Corbyn refused to leave it when it was led by a war criminal – but somehow managed to be portrayed as a man of principle. Now it is led by a man clearly of the ruling class establishment proud as Director of Public Prosecutions to have prosecuted Irish republicans. Pro-austerity MPs run the shadow cabinet. Their foreign policy is utterly chauvinist and, of course, anti-Palestinian. Yet an organisation such as Labour Left Alliance (LLA) will continue to state that ‘We urge comrades to remain members of the Labour Party, but we continue to accept members expelled and suspended as part of the witch-hunt. We also agreed to continue to allow those to remain involved in the LLA who have left the party in despair over the direction taken by Keir Starmer – provided they don’t support candidates who stand against the Labour Party’ (emphasis added). There is one thing that LLA will not tolerate: open opposition to Labour, and this standpoint unites the myriad of left Labour organisations.
Momentum also remains locked in a fantasy: ‘The Labour Party must be transformed into a more open, democratic, member-led party that’s ready to win elections. Whether it’s local or national elections, Momentum believes ordinary people should be front-and-centre of getting Labour into power.’ If it could not achieve this in four years when it apparently had an army of 500,000 members and a left leader, what chance now when the left is receiving a drubbing?
Pointless ‘labour movement inquiries’
It was left to Labour Party expellee Tony Greenstein to show the bankruptcy of the left Labour strategy when in early September he called for ‘a labour movement inquiry’ into the campaign of anti-Semitism allegations against the Labour Party, ‘with figures like Mike Mansfield, Stephen Sedley, Geoffrey Bindman, etc invited to become panel members.’ This is the ‘labour movement’ which has not moved at all against the onslaught on the working class over a decade of austerity and which has no relevance to the mass of the working class who are anyway outside Greenstein’s ‘labour movement’. And what would the purpose of such an inquiry be anyway? Whom is it intended to persuade? After all, Greenstein himself says that 75% of Labour members did not accept that there was an anti-Semitism problem within the Labour Party. The other 25% are clearly not going to be persuaded. Yet all that Greenstein can do is turn to the same forces which proved incapable of defending the working class.
In the end, there is one very simple and utterly obvious learning point from the experience of four years of Corbynism: that Labour cannot be reformed, that it cannot become a vehicle for social progress. The danger of the Labour left lies not in its delusions, which are simple to expose, but in its determination to foist its fantasies on to the young people getting involved in politics for the first time, and its determination to exclude those who reject its daydreams. Labour’s soul is what it has always been: reactionary, pro-imperialist, racist, anti-working class, and it is fittingly embodied in its leader, Sir Keir Starmer.
