It is a disgrace that the Parliamentary Labour Party under Keir Starmer’s leadership is refusing to accept former leader Jeremy Corbyn as a member but welcomes with open arms the Tory MP Christian Wakeford who has supported most of the regressive and reactionary measure of this Johnson government.
Christian Wakeford’s grand gesture in crossing floor of the House of Commons – wearing a Union Jack mask – was loudly cheered on Labour benches and that in itself is an indication of how Tory-lite the Labour leadership has become. In the last year Wakeford has supported the Tories on cutting Universal Credit by £20, on the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill and on the new Borders and Nationality Bill.
He has actively supported, in other words, direct cuts in the living standards of the least well off, voted to limit democratic freedoms and voted for a bill that can potentially take away citizenship even from people born in the UK, and without their prior knowledge. Not surprisingly, on the morning of his defection, a fellow Tory MP described Wakeford as a “solid Conservative.”
Wakeford was a ‘solid Conservative’
Yet as a ‘solid Conservative’ is welcomed into the Parliamentary Party, Jeremy Corbyn, who has voted in exactly opposite terms to Wakeford in the past year, is still kept out. In recent weeks it is notable that while Corbyn has spoken against the Borders and Nationality Bill, Labour’s front bench, incredibly, have said nothing.
It is hardly surprising that social media is filled with protests, including many by left Labour MPs, and demands for Corbyn to be reinstated. Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves, cut a miserable figure as she was touted around the TV studios this morning to try to justify the Alice in Wonderland logic of welcoming a Tory MP, while ostracising one who has been a good Labour MP for decades.
Starmer has not even called for Wakeford to resign his Bury South seat to cause a by-election. A genuine Labour candidate could win it back, since the Tories only won by 402 votes last time, with the Brexit party took over 1,600. No doubt there will now be efforts by David Evans and Starmer to have this solid Conservative adopted as ‘Labour’ candidate in any future election. But that will not be to the liking of local Labour members.
Writing on Twitter, Lucy Burke, defeated Labour candidate in 2019, reaffirmed the right of Labour Party members in Bury South CLP to select a candidate. “I think that the members of Bury South CLP should be given the opportunity”, she wrote, “to select their parliamentary candidate and the people of Bury South the opportunity to vote for their MP and the party for which they are standing.”
In her numerous TV interviews, Rachel Reeves tried to argue that “Labour has changed”. In fact it has not – it is the Parliamentary leadership that has changed and little else. The Parliamentary Labour Party, with a few dozen notable exceptions, has long been populated by ‘Labour’ MPs who look to their personal careers above all else.
Growing divide between the leadership and workers’ aspirations
The leadership may have changed, but the rank and file of the Labour Party and, even more so, the trade unions have not. As a result there is a growing divide between the outlook and policies of the Labour leadership and the movement and the voters that they claim to represent.
On the same day that Labour’s front bench was welcoming a Tory into the fold, Rachel Reeves was giving an interview to the Financial Times, to explain that the new Labour leadership was proudly pro-business. “A precondition for doing anything,” she argued, is being trusted with public money.”
This is a case of back to the future. It was the same Rachel Reeves, in a speech in 2013 (she was then Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary), who promised that Labour would be tougher than the Tories on benefits. The Guardian at the time reported her speech in these terms: “Adopting a firm party line on welfare, the former Bank of England economist stressed that a key part of her task would be to explode the “myth” that Labour is soft on benefit costs, and to prove instead that it will be both tough and fair”
In her FT interview, she even welcomed the decline in Labour membership. “Membership in my constituency is falling and that’s a good thing,” she said. People had left “who should never have joined the Labour party. They never shared our values,” she added. Her values, of course, have nothing to do with working class needs and hopes and a lot more to do with an economic system resting on greed, rent, interest and profit.
Yesterday’s embrace of a Tory MP is in itself minor issue. It may even have been a tactical blunder, delaying the vote of no-confidence in Johnson, and within weeks, people will be asking, “Christian who?”
The Labour cannot be both a workers’ and a business party
But it is yet one more measure of the gulf that is opening up between the Labour leadership in Parliament and the aspirations of Labour’s rank and file and workers in general. Labour cannot – despite Reeves’ claims – be the party of both working people and big business. When workers face the biggest squeeze on living standards in a generation, as they will this year, the Starmer/Reeves leadership have no answers to give.
With a succession of crises following one after another, the Tory government is increasingly unpopular. It is possible, therefore, that we will see a Labour government elected at some point in the future, although it is impossible to say when. But if or when that happens, the gulf between the Labour leadership’s Tory-lite policies and the aspirations of working class people will become an unbridgeable chasm. That will be a time of turmoil, angry debate, argument and recriminations inside the Labour Party. It will be a time when genuine socialist ideas are tested in real time against half-cock semi-Tory measures from the likes of Reeves and Starmer.
In the meantime, while the issues is still live, we would urge all Labour Party members and members of trade unions affiliated to the Labour Party to submit motions to their local CLPs calling for Jeremy Corbyn to be reinstated as a Labour MP.
