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| Starmer & Zelensky - the unpopular front |
Last month Ihe NCP and the RCPB (ML) held a seminar to look at the challenges facing the communist movement following Labour’s victory in the summer general election. Both parties believe this is a discussion that needs to be taken throughout the labour movement. At the seminar Ian Donovan spoke on behalf of the Consistent Democrats, a Trotskyist movement that takes it name from a famous phrase of Lenin’s, and has, over the years, supported a number of NCP initiatives including the International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity campaign. This is what Ian said:
Starmer’s Labour is the least popular new British government after 100 days in office than any in living memory. The Tory government it replaced was an absolute shambles, led initially by the public school right-wing populist Johnson, whose corruption and penchant for pathological lying were legendary. When he had to fall on his sword having been caught partying when the population at large was locked down during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-21, he was replaced by Liz Truss, the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history, whose 2022 mini-budget with her Chancellor Kwarteng introduced massive, unfunded tax cuts for the very rich in such a way as to spook the capitalist market and cause a near-collapse of the British economy. When she was forced out after only 45 days, she was replaced by Rishi Sunak, the husband of an Indian IT heiress richer than the British monarch, who, like John Major at the end of his 1992-7 Tory premiership, struggled and juggled for nearly two years with multiple crises in a government that had obviously completely run out of steam.
But after only 100 days in office, Starmer’s approval ratings dipped below those of Sunak, who is still caretaker Tory leader while they tear themselves apart trying to elect his successor!
A key starting point of this was the government’s refusal to abolish the Tories’ brutal two-child benefit cap, which condemns millions of working-class children to dire poverty and even homelessness. Popular hostility to Starmer’s government then exploded with his attack on poor and middling pensioners, subjecting their annual winter fuel payment, previously a universal payment, to draconian means testing so that 9 million pensioners, whose income is just above the threshold for pension credit, will have their winter fuel payments of around £300 taken away. They lost the vote at Labour Party conference on this, but of course the government does not take any notice of things like that – Starmer’s regime is implacably hostile to the trade unions.
The new government abolished the Tories’ brutal scheme to deport refugees to Rwanda, but only because it was considered an expensive failure, not for any reason of principle. In fact, Starmer has been off to Albania trying to arrange a cheaper replacement. The Blairite Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, ordered a massive series of immigration raids across the country in July, almost as soon as they took office. The anti-migrant, Islamophobic riots incited by far-right Zionist helpmates in August were seen as a ‘law and order’ problem, not a problem of racism, and the government had nothing to do with the mass mobilisations of socialists and anti-racists that stopped the wave of attempted pogroms. On the contrary, they instructed MPs and councillors not to go on anti-fascist demonstrations, and in some cases suspended those who did and were too outspoken against the far-right terrorists who were burning down mosques and refugee accommodation, and violently attacking people for having the ‘wrong’ colour skin. They have also been instructing the cops to harass anti-racists and Palestine protesters and arrest them often on phoney charges of supporting ‘terrorism’ (resistance to genocide) and ‘anti-Semitism’ just as much as the Tory regime did.
Starmer and his neo-liberal clique are more worried about satisfying their Israel lobby donors and more general corporate sponsors than the working class, trade unions and oppressed minorities. This has manifested itself in the sleaze scandal, of Starmer and his ministers receiving gifts of luxury items from ‘donors’ who have nothing to do with the labour movement, which has discredited them the way similar scandals discredited the Tories. Though, like a classic bourgeois liberal party, which they aspire to project themselves as to the ruling class, they must make some gestures to the unions, they keep them as far away as possible from influencing policy. This has even upset Starmer’s most virulent supporter and apologist from the trade union bureaucracy, UNITE’s pro-Zionist semi-syndicalist Sharon Graham. Her leadership has actively sought to suppress political opposition to Starmer within the union, echoing the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ witch-hunt against militants within UNITE sympathetic to Jeremy Corbyn, and banning the showing of films about the witch-hunt within the union. But even she was not able to endorse Starmer’s General Election manifesto, and not does not endorse his tepid softening of some Tory anti-union attacks, as they do not remotely meet the concerns even of the union bureaucracy.
Starmer’s government did not come to power on the back of a wave of working-class support and anger, and determination to sweep away the brutal Tories. Everyone with the slightest political consciousness in Britain knew Starmer as the political assassin of Jeremy Corbyn, whose main purpose was to smash the resurgent left that brought Corbyn to the labour leadership in 2015, and within a whisker of unseating Theresa May’s Tories in the 2017 General Election. In 2017 Corbyn’s Labour got 40% of the vote, nearly 13 million votes (12.87 million to be exact). In 2019, Corbyn’s Labour got 10.29 million votes, but a resurgent right-wing populist Tory party meant they got only 32.1% as a percentage. In 2024 Starmer got only 9.7 million votes, which amounted to a higher percentage, 33.6%, only because of a considerably lower turnout. This was not a class vote based on working-class enthusiasm for Labour, as was clearly the case in 2017. The vote was depressed because Starmer made it very clear (not that his war against the left did not already) that his government in power would just be another variant of anti-worker neoliberalism, fundamentally the same as the Tories, with only secondary differences. Thus, there was no principled basis for socialists to support Labour in the General Election in July.
Starmer’s government came to power 9 months into post-October 7th Israel’s Western-backed genocidal onslaught against the Palestinians, and in a developing crisis caused by the US/NATO slowly losing their Nazi-fuelled proxy war in Ukraine. It has proven utterly craven, supportive of these genocidal projects on a consistent basis, and as willing as the Tories to steal the remaining and threadbare social gains working class people depend upon to funnel the proceeds to Netanyahu and Zelensky.
Supporting Israel’s preservation as a transplanted settler-imperialist state in the Middle East is a strategic priority of imperialist capitalism in the early 21st Century. This is the reason that the pretence of so-called ‘international law’ has collapsed, and why there is such huge resistance from the ruling classes of the major Western powers to doing anything to hinder, let alone stop, the extermination of the people of Gaza and now the extension of similar monstrous crimes to Lebanon.
The same goes for the proxy war against Russia over Ukraine and the seemingly distant, but gradually nearing prospect of a similar proxy conflict with China over Taiwan. All these militarist projects reflect the class interest of the imperialist bourgeoisie and the over-arching project of the bulk of them to preseve Israel and maintain the political cult of Zionism that helps to hold them together as a cohesive world-dominating class-cartel. At the same time, they wage a parallel campaign for neo-liberal regime change and dismemberment of the anomalous bourgeois states of Russia and China, which embody elements of two social systems – capitalism and embryonic/invading socialism - in a unique manifestation of ‘combined and uneven development’. These giant former workers’ states are still too close to ‘Communism’ for the imperialists’ liking.
Furthermore, they have put themselves at the head of a revolt by semi-colonial, oppressed countries around the world and thus threaten imperialist domination as it has existed since the late 19th century. The aim of the proxy war and mooted extensions is to open them up fully to Western economic penetration and thus give the imperialists’ declining system a new lease of life. The converse possibility, of a defeat for NATO in Ukraine and possibly defeat of Israel by the Arab masses, opens up a horrendous scenario for the imperialists, where militarism and ‘sanctions’ (imperialist economic blackmail) no longer work, and the so-called ‘rules-based order’ (“we make the ‘rules’, you do as you are told”) ceases to function and hold any terror for oppressed countries around the world. The monopoly of world power of the Western imperialist countries, which lasted the whole of the 20th Century and so far in the 21st century, is within sight of its own mortality.
So Starmer’s government represents the will of the bourgeoisie, pure and simple, and in no sense can be said to be even a deformed product of working-class resistance to capitalism and neoliberalism. The strategic task of Marxists is to build a party that can split the working-class base from Labour to a genuine working class party, one that has the potential to generate a revolutionary programme and lead a proletarian revolution as part of an international revolutionary movement. This is a key strategic task for Marxists in Britain, but it finds expression in different ways depending on the concrete political configurations that dominate in Labour at a given time. In the period of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, from 2015 to 2020, the correct tactic for Marxists was to join the Labour Party and actively get involved in the struggles of its subjectively pro-socialist left wing against the neo-liberal Blairites, who despite Corbyn’s election remained enormously powerful in their hold over the apparatus of the party. In the late 20-teens the Blairite and Zionist right-wing, the ‘friends of Israel’ etc, devoted huge amounts of energy to sabotaging Labour’s chances of achieving government, both through the smears of so-called ‘anti-Semitism’ against the left, and though manipulating the issue of Brexit to try to mobilise backward workers influenced by right-wing populism against Corbyn and the Labour Party.
It is now very clear that the ‘anti-Semitism’ witch-hunt was political preparation for the Labour Party to support the genocide in Gaza, which was always on the cards. Indeed, Starmer’s Labour has done so, quite openly, as when on Nick Ferrari’s LBC Radio show in October 2023 Starmer clearly endorsed the measure announced by the genocidal monster and Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who denounced Gaza’s Palestinians as “human animals”, that Gaza was to be starved of fuel, energy food and even water. Starmer, when explicitly questioned by Ferrari about these measures, replies that “I do think that they [Israel] have the right to do this.” A clear endorsement of monstrous, genocidal actions that should lead to Starmer being charged as a political accomplice of genocide.
More recently, under massive pressure of public opinion and the Palestine Solidarity movement, the Starmer regime has put an embargo on around 10 per cent of arms export licences to Israel. But Starmer’s Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, who is a prominent supporter of Labour Friends of Israel, made clear at a meeting of that body that they did so reluctantly, that this was the minimum that they could get away with doing, and that if he had his way and his hands were not tied by popular pressure, even these minimal measures would not have happened.
Likewise over Ukraine, the Starmer regime has made very clear its support for NATO’s proxy war against the people of the Donbas, and Russia itself, and its support for the massive arming of Ukraine’s dominated politically by followers of the Nazi leader Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, who since the far right, US-funded Maidan coup of 2014, have waged war against Russian-speaking Ukrainians and the people of Crimea, on a genocidal basis. They seek to crush the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass and openly use cluster bombs and depleted Uranium against them. They fire missiles at Crimea aimed to kill civilians and punish them for voting to rejoin Russia in 2014, as they do to the Donbas population that voted to join Russia in 2022. The Starmer regime has stated that it would like to allow Ukraine to use long-range Storm Shadow missiles against Russia, which has drawn warnings from Russia that such actions would be regarded as an existential threat and likely to provoke a nuclear response. Because of these statements from Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, the Biden administration backed off from such provocations, in fear of Russia’s evident military capacity. But Starmer’s government has made it clear that it abides by the US decision reluctantly – it would like to let Ukraine go ahead and attack Russia with long range missiles.
Over the past few years, since the beginning of the Special Military Operation in February 2022, the Starmer regime has threatened any Labour MP who dares to endorse even pacifist opposition to what the West is doing in Ukraine would be thrown out of the party.
The tactical task of Marxists confronted with Labour at this point is to try to cohere a genuine (not bourgeois), workers party in opposition to Labour, and to give it as much coherence as possible in that regard. That is the point of our activity in the Socialist Labour Network. That does not mean that we cease to regard Labour as a bourgeois workers party. Our strategic aim is to split it along class lines. But a workers’ party outside it could be a key means of doing so in a period like this when the bourgeois, imperialist pole has achieved unparalleled dominance. That may change, as it did from Blair/Brown via Miliband to Corbyn. If it does, which is not guaranteed, we would have to change our tactics. But at this time, for Marxists, these are the correct tactical positions to take.
