Starmer must go!

 Many in the labour movement questioned whether Sir Keir Starmer capable of leading Labour when he got the job in the first place. Now there can be no doubt following last week’s disastrous elections which cost Labour 323 council seats, eight councils and the once save parliamentary seat of Hartlepool. Even the Blairites who have been covertly advising Starmer over the past year are beginning to openly call him an “interim leader” while they scrabble around to find another Blairite clone to replace him.
     Under current rules a Labour leadership election can only be forced if a challenger gets the support of 20 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party which more or less rules out the Corbynistas. But there’s no shortage of wannabee leaders from the supposed “centre” of the Party who would eagerly step into Starmer’s shoes if the opportunity arose.
    Andy Burnham, flushed with victory after trouncing the Tories in the Manchester Mayoral election, once again hints that he’s up for it. “In the distant future, if the party were ever to feel it needed me, well I’m here and they should get in touch,” he says. But Burham will need to get back into Parliament before he can stand under current Labour Party rules – unless they’re changed. And that’s not impossible given the curious remarks of the Blairite Lord Adonis who said last week that a future leadership race should not be “restricted to people who are currently members of the House of Commons”.
     Rule changes take time. Burnham can afford to. Others may not be as patient. After telling everyone he would take full responsibility for Labour’s setbacks in the polls Starmer tried to scape-goat his deputy, Angela Rayner. But she turned the tables on him and now her standing in the party has risen despite her apparent demotion. Whether that’s enough to win a future Labour leadership vote is, however, debatable.
     The same can be also said of Lisa Nandy, the Shadow Foreign Minister whose followers are already testing the waters in support of a possible bid for power when Starmer goes.
     At the end of the day what Labour needs is a campaign that reflects the unions’ agenda and the demands of the street and a campaigning leader who can mobilise working people to beat the Tories at the next election. At the moment Labour has neither.

 

fight the real fight!

This week is election week up and down the country. While mainstream parties battle for control of local councils, devolved assemblies and the regional governments in Scotland and Wales others run simply to make a point.
     Some like the stand-up comics who pose as “Count Binface” or “Lord Buckethead” do it for laughs and to raise money for charity. Others take it more seriously like Laurence Fox who is running for the London Mayoralty in what looks suspiciously like a publicity campaign to promote his acting career. He faces competition from Brian Rose, a cranky former American banker who leads the “London Real Party”, who drinks his own pee and promotes conspiracy theories on his popular YouTube channel.
     So spare a thought for the band of hapless left social-democrats who are standing in England, Scotland and Wales this week. They range from the absurd “Northern Independence Party” and whatever George Galloway’s followers call themselves these days to old-time Trots and revisionists who have learned nothing over the past fifty years.
    The fact that these platforms are rejected time and time again by the same working class these programmes claim to advance, never deters these pseudo-revolutionaries who believe they can change the consciousness of the masses through rhetoric and wild promises.
    Some argue that they split the Labour vote and let the Tories in by the back-door. But this misses the point. These people usually only get support from the sort of people who might otherwise vote for Buckethead or the Loonies – a “protest” vote than rarely gets beyond the low hundreds these days.
    Standing left candidates without mass support against Labour divides the movement and the class and ignores the obvious fact that the only realistic alternatives are those of the Tories, Scottish nationalists and the Liberal Democrats that have been, and would be, much worse than any Labour administration.
     Disaffected Labour voters generally abstain or turn to another mainstream alternative. Past beneficiaries include the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party. At the last elections a significant number even switched to the Tories over Brexit. But few ever succumb to the allure of the self-styled “revolutionary” left. All these left posers do is simply reinforce the erroneous belief that the class collaborationist ideas of social democracy can be defeated by simply imitating it in the countless variations of the British Road to Socialism upheld by the revisionist, pseudo-communist and Trotskyist movements in Britain today. At the same time they reinforce the legitimacy of the Westminster parliament that creates the illusion of the bourgeois “democracy” that we live in today.
    There have been exceptions. But they only served to prove the rule. The two communist MPs who sat in the House of Commons during the Attlee era achieved next to nothing. George Galloway, who returned to the House of Commons on his own Respect ticket, achieved even less. That’s possibly why he barely even bothered to attend sessions of that august body.
    We can all play games and conjure up imaginary legions beyond the British working class to take us down the revolutionary road. We can all invent a class that is seething with anger and mobilised for revolutionary change that is just waiting for the correct party with the correct formula to lead them to victory. But the real struggle to defeat the class-collaborators and agents within the labour movement is being fought inside the trade unions and the Labour Party today. That’s where we need to be. We are communists. We work with the working class that exists and not the phantom of romantic ultra-leftism.