After the ball is over

 “Many the hopes that have vanished, after the ball” goes the old song – much like Keir Starmer’s pipe dreams about the Trump state visit this week. Two days have gone in a flash. Donald Trump’s been and gone. The Donald was treated to an unaccustomed right royal pageant at Windsor Castle which no doubt went down well with his MAGA constituency back home. Starmer however got nothing out of the visit – which was entirely predictable to everyone apart from the sycophants and flatterers that the Labour leader surrounds himself with these days.
They say Starmer and his clapped-out old Blairite advisers genuinely believed that the American president could be wooed by a red-carpet meeting with the King into cutting tariffs and making other trade concessions to the UK at any given time. Openly talking about Trump as if he was a gullible, vain old fool wasn’t such a good idea. Revealing your hand (and it was a very weak one) in advance to the mainstream media for all to see only compounded the folly. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. This, after all, the government that appointed Peter Mandelson ambassador to Washington in the first place... 

There may be trouble ahead

The public spat between Zarah Sultana and the other five MPs in the Independent Alliance doesn’t augur well for the new Corbynista party that still lacks a name. Though the rift is simply over who should manage the membership system and bank accounts of the new party it clearly reflects underlying differences between those who want a conventional left-social democratic party and Corbyn’s kitchen cabinet that seems to hanker after the sort of rally party like the old Gaullist movement in France or the mass movements of Ghana’s Nkrumah and Nasser in Egypt that were models for much of the Global South in the 1950s and 60s.
With support for Labour and the Conservatives crumbling Reform UK is waiting to pick up the pieces. The Faragists have deliberately stoked up the flames over asylum-seekers. They will have no qualms in using the racist rabble that we saw march through the streets of London last week to pave their way to power.
There’s clearly deep divisions within the corridors of power. Though the Tories have traditionally always been the chosen political instrument of the ruling class Brexit has gone badly wrong for them. Boris Johnson and Madame Truss burned their bridges with Franco-German imperialism and their pivot to American imperialism failed. Sunak and Starmer fared no better – unable to negotiate some sort of associate relationship with the European Union or deal successfully with the truculent Trump administration in the United States.
Though it has served them well in the past Labour will never replace the Tories as the governing party of the bourgeoisie as long as it retains its organic links with the trade union movement. But neither will Reform. Though many Tory activists have gone over to Farage members of the old guard are few and far between in the Reform camp. And as far as the ruling class is concerned Farage remains an outsider – even in the City of London where he made his money in the first place.
They’ve got to put one of their own back at the helm of the Conservative & Unionist party while at the same time maintaining the credibility of Labour to contain the Corbynistas in parliament and on the street. That cuts Starmer out as well. It’s a difficult equation. But
for us we simply have to defend the principled line of socialist advance throughout the labour and anti-war movement. So let’s face the music... 

Counting the days…

How long has Starmer got? The immensely unpopular Labour leader who claims to run the country licks the boots of Donald Trump while turning his back on starving Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Booting out four more of his own MPs for sticking up for the disabled shows how unfit he is to lead the party let alone the government he heads.
On his own front bench there’s plenty more than ready to take his place while supporters of Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, are once again talking about his return to national politics.
Meanwhile others are looking to the new political platform which the Corbynistas hope will be built on the foundations of the five-strong Independent Alliance bloc in parliament that Jeremy Corbyn currently heads. The Corbynistas say a new left party will "build a real alternative" to Labour following the launch of a consultation exercise this month.  
Zarah Sultana, the Coventry MP purged last year for voting to scrap the two-child benefit cap, says she’s planning to create a new political party with Corbyn and the Alliance though what sort of “party” it will be remains to be seen. Corbyn and the four other MPs in his bloc are naturally wary of setting up a party that could easily be dominated by Trotskyist or communist movements whose views they do not share. This, they say, is what happened to Arthur Scargill when he launched his Socialist Labour Party (SLP) in 1996. His party became a magnet for all sorts of fake left posers which Scargill drove out in crippling purges that marooned what was left of the SLP to the fringe of left politics in the UK. They look  also at George Galloway, whose attempts to build alliances with the Socialist Workers Party and the Brarite CPGB (ML) all ended in tears.
What the Alliance MPs clearly want is some sort of political platform, based on a few basic social-democratic demands, that reflects the consensus amongst their MPs and revolves around Corbyn and Zarah Sultana at election time. This is, afterall how General de Gaulle’s Rally of the French People worked from 1947 to 1955. His Rally was open to members of other parties apart from communists and former collaborators. But it was always led the general and those who worked with him in the Gaullist resistance during the Second World War. Similar movements emerged throughout the Third World in the 1950s, much like Nasser’s Liberation Rally in Egypt that eventually became the Arab Socialist Union and a number of other mass based parties in the countries that broke the chains of colonialism in Africa and Asia in the post-war era.
Others simply want another conventional social-democratic party though it is difficult to see how this could succeed without union funding and a legion of activists to maintain the electoral machine needed to sustain its growth at local and national levels.