The Labour Party under Keir Starmer’s disastrous leadership is haemorrhaging votes in every single council by-election that is taking place, whether in England, Scotland or Wales. It is losing to the Greens, the Lib-Dems, Independents and even to the Tories; but above all, it is losing support to Reform UK. It is not only losing seats; it is losing disastrously.
Starmer is walking the Labour Party into oblivion, and his answer…? In a move no doubt dreamt up by some idiotic policy wonk in Number Ten Downing Street, the Labour leadership is hoping to cut across Reform by aping its policies.
In the last week, the Labour leadership have gone out of their way to mimic Farage’s party, by boasting about the number of failed asylum seekers they have deported. On the instructions of Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, the Home Office released a video showing raids on home by police and the Border Agency, and further footage of people being put on aircraft to be sent somewhere else; anywhere but here.
Reform UK have been very successful in spreading their poison on social media, emphasising mainly their fake ‘radicalism’ and even taking in some unwary lefts. Now Starmer’s response is his own post on Facebook, bragging that “Labour have removed the highest number of people with no right to be here since 2018 and organised 4 of the largest return flights in UK history.”
As the Guardian humorist John Crace wrote, it is becoming like a competition between Labour and Reform “…to see who could channel their inner sadism best. There were no votes to be had in compassion. Affording people dignity. That was so last year. Now the fashion was to celebrate human misery. To turn deportation into a spectator sport”. Crace’s comments would be funny, if the stance of Starmer and Cooper wasn’t such a disgrace.
Irregular arrivals automatically denied citizenship
The government have now also decided that anyone who finds their way to the UK by crossing the Channel on a small boat will be automatically and permanently denied British citizenship. What seems to have escaped Starmer’s attention is that these perilous journeys on small boats, and yes, their exploitation by ‘smuggling gangs’, only happen because the Tory government closed off virtually all the safe routes that had previously been available.
Goaded by the Tory press, Starmer even seems comfortable with a migration policy that operates a clearly racist distinction between white asylum seekers from Ukraine and Arabs from Gaza. Starmer’s outlook on refugees and asylum pollutes the entire historical ethos and tradition of the labour movement.
It is only desperate people who risk their lives and their families’ lives by crossing seas in small rubber dinghies and it is a disgrace that a ‘Labour’ government is demonising the victims instead of offering assistance and refuge. While Starmer is boasting about high numbers of deportations, he has not lifted a finger to ease the access of refugees to safe and legal routes to the UK.
In Labour’s Party Political broadcast on February 5, Keir Starmer, for once, said something with which most Labour voters would agree. “For too long”, he said, “working people have given more and more and got less and less in return…” Unfortunately, what he didn’t say is what his predecessor, Jermy Corbyn said on numerous occasions: that the problems of poor services, a failing NHS, a housing shortage and low pay are not in any way the fault of migrants; they are the product of a system rigged against working people. The fundamental nature of our economic system is to shift power and wealth from the poor to the rich.
Daily lives of workers increasingly precarious
Most workers may not realise it, but they are facing the same basic problems as workers everywhere else. There is a process of pauperisation taking place across Europe and all of the capitalist countries, as living standards are squeezed and services are slashed. Yet while the daily lives of workers are becoming increasingly precarious, the millionaires and billionaires of the world are making money hand over fist.
With each passing year there are more billionaires than ever and they have more money than ever. And they have more ingenious ways of dodging taxes than ever. None of this is the fault of impoverished and terrified migrants who see a traumatic move to another country as their only hope of a safe and secure future.
Starmer’s desperate lurch towards Reform policies has to some degree been given impetus by some of the careerists and carpet-baggers in the Parliamentary Labour Party, who see their once safe seats disappearing next election. Some of them – like so-called ‘Blue Labour’ (whatever that means) –argue that the Party needs a lurch to the right to stave off a threat from the right. They will be disabused of that idea when Reform continues to grow at Labour’s expense.
John Crace seems to have more political nous that some of the know-nothings advising Starmer. As he wrote, “Reform voters won’t have watched [the Home Office video] and thought: ‘Ah! Labour are serious about immigration. We no longer have to vote Reform.’ They will have just realised they had been right to switch to Reform all along”. Why vote Labour when you can have the real thing?”
The Labour leadership have no political compass other than a desire to stay in office and to maintain at all costs an economic system that runs on profiteering and the greater enrichment of the elite. We need a system, to use the expression to benefit the Many instead of the Few.
There has never been a more important time for the socialists, including those still in the Labour Party, to fight for socialist ideas and policies as an answer to workers’ needs. We are not just facing crises, but emergencies: in housing, health, education and in other services. The left needs to demand emergency measures appropriate to the needs of the moment, and that must mean the expropriation of big industries, utilities, land and finance and the organisation of a democratic economic plan for the benefit of all.
Labour’s right wing lurching further right
Labour’s right wing are lurching further right and trying their best to bend the rules and make up new rules on the hoof to suppress dissent in the Party. They do this because they have no arguments and no answers themselves. Socialists have to provide them.
With Starmer at the helm the ship of Labour will continue to sink in the coming months as Rachel Reeves rolls out new ‘economies’ – which translates as cuts and more austerity – to satisfy the needs of big business and high finance. It is likely that Labour ministers like John Healey and David Lammy will demand an increase Defence spending, but that can only come from the NHS and other services.
Opposition to Starmer will grow; it is only a matter of time. While the right wing leaders of most of the bigger affiliated unions are complicit in supporting his leadership and policies – and they will not admit their error – their members will make their voices heard in due course.
Cuts in education, the failures of the NHS, a squeeze on local authorities, lost jobs in the public sector, cuts in welfare benefits – all of these things will aggravate the anger than is already brewing among trade union rank and file members. The hostility of the union base to the trajectory of the Labour leadership will become evident this Spring, as regional, national and sector union conferences take place.
Added this is, there will be hundreds of Labour councillors reading the runes and looking at what is likely to happen in May. Angela Rayner has cancelled many local authority elections, on the spurious grounds that local government reorganisation is imminent. But there are still many places where Labour will lose seats. Here too, it is inevitable that opposition to Starmer will increase – even though only a minority of Labour councillors are on the left of the Party.
Acting as recruiting sergeant to Reform UK is a desperate act by a leadership bereft of ideas and lacking confidence, one that can feel the ground moving beneath its feet. It is likely that a mood will develop among members and activists, and even some councillors and MPs in the Party, to ditch Starmer. Once that dam bursts, there will be new possibilities for the left and for socialist ideas in both the unions and in the Party.
[Feature picture from Home Office video showing raids on homes]
