The trail of a turncoat

None of us should be surprised at Keir Starmer these days. Crawling to the Americans. Pandering to Zelensky’s vanity in Kiev. Stating that Jeremy Corbyn will not be allowed to stand for re-election on the Labour ticket. The Labour leader is doing his best to prove to the ruling class that he will be a safe pair of hands when and if his party wins a majority in the House of Commons. And Labour members who don’t like it can simply push off.
    "The Labour Party has changed," Starmer says, "from a party of protest, to a party of public service...[Labour] will never again be a party captured by narrow interests... if you don't like that, the door is open, and you can leave". Over a hundred thousand already have. Many more will undoubtedly follow as Starmer and the ageing Blairite clique that backs him in Parliament prepare an election manifesto that is barely distinguishable from that of the Tories.
    In his quest for high office Starmer needed allies within the labour movement. He posed as a left-winger to jump on the gravy train and aligned himself with the Remainers when he was a member of Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet. But once he became leader – elected on false pledges of “continuity” – he speedily dumped them in favour of a neo-liberal agenda that doesn’t even pay lip-service to social justice.
    Of course we’ve seen all this before. Every Labour leader, apart from Jeremy Corbyn and Harold Wilson, has come from the Labour right. Ramsay MacDonald, who led Labour’s first government back in the 1920s, talked about socialism, albeit in the far distance future, while admitting that all his government could do was administer capitalism. These days Starmer never even mentions it.
    What we get is this sort of vacuous nonsense. “The Labour Party I lead is patriotic. It is a party of public service, not protest. It is a party of equality, justice and fairness; one that proudly puts the needs of working people above any fringe interest. It is a party that doesn’t just talk about change – it delivers it”.
    Ultimately social democracy can never solve the economic and social crisis facing working people because it basically upholds the system which has created those problems in the first place.
    But the “socialism” of Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan that was based on Keynesian economics – like Mussolini’s corporate state or Roosevelt’s “New Deal” delivered the welfare state, the NHS and the education system. Starmer offers nothing.

End Sanctions Now!

Chinese, Russian and Arab relief teams are working in Turkey and Syria. Humanitarian aid from the Third World is pouring in to earthquake stricken region. But aid from charities and agencies in the West is being hindered by the US sanctions regime against Syria.
    While the Americans and their NATO allies bleat on about the plight of the Ukrainians to justify the billions of dollars-worth of arms being sent to Kiev to fight the Russians they turn a blind eye to the suffering of people who need medical aid, foodstuff and children’s needs aid in quake-afflicted in Syria.
    Under pressure the Biden administration has temporarily lifted sanctions on aid to Syria for a total of 180 days largely for the benefit of the Kurdish autonomous zone in northern Syria which is under American occupation. And it’s unclear whether the new measures have lifted the sanctions blocking much needed financial assistance to Syria.
    The answer is, of course, to end the sanctions regime altogether to speed humanitarian aid to the hundreds of thousands left homeless and destitute in Syria and help in the massive reconstruction needed to restore life to the shattered region.