The knives are out for Starmer. In Downing Street Starmer aides move to undermine Wes Streeting, the Health Minister, said to be plotting to mount a challenge to the beleaguered Labour leader while Streeting himself talks about the "toxic culture" of Downing Street and questions whether the PM's long-time ally and chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, should keep his job.
Labour won a landslide victory in the general election last year. Though this was largely due to the collapse of the Tories deserting in droves to the Faragists Starmer & Co and the gang of old Blairite has-beens that surround him actually thought this was a ringing endorsement of their policies – which amount to little more than continuing with Tory austerity and crawling to whoever is in power in the United States. Now Starmer’s Blairite revival, a trashy imitation of a failed past, has brought Labour to its knees.
Everywhere we look we see unemployment, homelessness, poverty, drug abuse and crime. The symptoms of industrial decline, inflationary pressures, stock market volatility and economic stagnation. This is capitalism. And working people are being made to carry the burden of its failure. Unemployment, homelessness, poverty. No wonder the Starmer government is on the rocks.
It would take at least 80 dissident Labour MPs to trigger a leadership challenge but that’s not likely to happen this side of Christmas. Most of the wannabees are from his own bloc like Wes Streeting, Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood while the “prince over the water”, Andy Burham, bides his time in Manchester waiting for the opportune time for a bid for power that may never ever come.
We certainly can’t expect much from what’s left of the old Corbynista front in the Parliamentary Labour Party. Most of them made their peace with Starmer.
A handful took the principled stand to remain in parliament as part of Jeremy Corbyn’s Independent Alliance.
There’s still fighting talk from Socialist Campaign Group Secretary Richard Burgon who tells us to “cut through the briefings and counter-briefings — what’s playing out is typical Westminster soap-opera stuff, not a disagreement over policy, principle or vision. What’s really needed to prevent a Reform government is a radical change of direction, with real Labour values”.
But that’s not going to happen is it – not as long as the unions remain in the hands of careerists who, despite their bogus socialist credentials and the empty promises of the factions and platforms they head, are still part of Labour’s bureaucratic bloc that put Starmer into office in the first place.
There is, of course, a fight-back driven by the need to stave of the complete collapse of the Labour Party in the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and fend off Reform in the local and regional elections next year. Some will stay to battle it out inside the Labour Party. Others are campaigning inside Corbyn’s new party to hammer out a programme that can provide an effective electoral challenge to the old guard in next years’ polls.
Communists have to defend the principled line of socialist advance throughout the labour movement. We can, and indeed, must work with other progressive forces inside and beyond the Labour Party to support the struggling people of Palestine and the millions upon millions of other people struggling against imperialism across the world and build the resistance to austerity and war throughout our own labour and peace movement.
Labour won a landslide victory in the general election last year. Though this was largely due to the collapse of the Tories deserting in droves to the Faragists Starmer & Co and the gang of old Blairite has-beens that surround him actually thought this was a ringing endorsement of their policies – which amount to little more than continuing with Tory austerity and crawling to whoever is in power in the United States. Now Starmer’s Blairite revival, a trashy imitation of a failed past, has brought Labour to its knees.
Everywhere we look we see unemployment, homelessness, poverty, drug abuse and crime. The symptoms of industrial decline, inflationary pressures, stock market volatility and economic stagnation. This is capitalism. And working people are being made to carry the burden of its failure. Unemployment, homelessness, poverty. No wonder the Starmer government is on the rocks.
It would take at least 80 dissident Labour MPs to trigger a leadership challenge but that’s not likely to happen this side of Christmas. Most of the wannabees are from his own bloc like Wes Streeting, Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood while the “prince over the water”, Andy Burham, bides his time in Manchester waiting for the opportune time for a bid for power that may never ever come.
We certainly can’t expect much from what’s left of the old Corbynista front in the Parliamentary Labour Party. Most of them made their peace with Starmer.
A handful took the principled stand to remain in parliament as part of Jeremy Corbyn’s Independent Alliance.
There’s still fighting talk from Socialist Campaign Group Secretary Richard Burgon who tells us to “cut through the briefings and counter-briefings — what’s playing out is typical Westminster soap-opera stuff, not a disagreement over policy, principle or vision. What’s really needed to prevent a Reform government is a radical change of direction, with real Labour values”.
But that’s not going to happen is it – not as long as the unions remain in the hands of careerists who, despite their bogus socialist credentials and the empty promises of the factions and platforms they head, are still part of Labour’s bureaucratic bloc that put Starmer into office in the first place.
There is, of course, a fight-back driven by the need to stave of the complete collapse of the Labour Party in the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and fend off Reform in the local and regional elections next year. Some will stay to battle it out inside the Labour Party. Others are campaigning inside Corbyn’s new party to hammer out a programme that can provide an effective electoral challenge to the old guard in next years’ polls.
Communists have to defend the principled line of socialist advance throughout the labour movement. We can, and indeed, must work with other progressive forces inside and beyond the Labour Party to support the struggling people of Palestine and the millions upon millions of other people struggling against imperialism across the world and build the resistance to austerity and war throughout our own labour and peace movement.
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