Starmer’s true colours

Starmer’s true colours

It hasn.t taken long for Sir Keir Starmer to reveal his real agenda for Labour now. He talks about “unity” but what he means is closing ranks behind the neo-liberal ‘New Labour’ agenda and unity around the Blairite has-beens in parliament that backed his cause. His first act has been to call for a Brexit delay. His first response to the coronavirus crisis has been simply to call on the Government to produce a lock-down exit strategy and his reaction to the damning Labour internal report on the treacherous role of the Blairites in undermining the Corbyn leadership was to call for a probe into who leaked it.

Some within the Starmer camp dream of high office in a ‘government of national unity’ whilst the usual fake lefters bleat on about the need for a new ‘Marxist’ party to challenge Labour in the polls. None of them can explain why all previous attempts to do so have failed dismally.

The New Communist Party has never confused the Labour Party with a revolutionary party nor imagined that we can gain a workers’ state through parliamentary elections. But a Labour government, with the yet unbroken links with the trade unions, offers the best option for the working class in the era of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. Our strategy is for working class unity, and our campaigns are focused on defeating the right-wing within the movement and strengthening the left and progressive forces within the Labour Party and the unions. We support those in the Labour Party fighting for left policies, which is part of the struggle for a democratic Labour Party.

More Trump madness

Donald Trump says he’s going to suspend US funding of the World Health Organisation (WHO), claiming it was pro-Chinese and that it had made mistakes that “caused so much death” as the coronavirus plague spread across the globe. Whether the President of the USA has the power to take this action without the approval of Congress remains to be seen. It will certainly be challenged by his Democrat rivals.

The WHO is a United Nations agency whose primary role is to direct international health within the UN system and to lead partners in global health responses. But Trump says that it “failed to adequately obtain, vet and share information in a timely and transparent fashion”, and he claims it “pushed China’s misinformation about the virus, saying it wasn’t communicable and there was no need for travel bans”.

Trump is an immensely vain man with an ego of Neronian proportions. But Nero, at least, had something to boast about. That the brutal Roman emperor was an accomplished poet and sportsman was something even his enemies did not deny. Trump, on the other hand, has nothing to brag about unless one counts his incoherent ravings as some sort of street poetry.

This is the man that Theresa May and Boris Johnson fawned over when he came to London for talks with the Government. This is the leader of the US imperialist system that the Blairites and the rest of Labour’s right-wing admire and uphold. This is a man clearly unfit to hold public office.

Last week the WHO’s top official urged leaders against politicising the outbreak “if you don’t want to have many more body bags”.

“At the end of the day, the people belong to all political parties. The focus of all political parties should be to save their people, please do not politicise this virus,”  Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

He called for unity across the globe, warning that: “If you want to be exploited and if you want to have many more body bags, then you do it. If you don’t want many more body bags, then you refrain from politicising it.”