It appears that Diane Abbott is being allowed to stand as a Labour candidate, although the final decisions will not be certain until Labour’s NEC meets on Tuesday. If she stands it will not be because Keir Starmer wants her in parliament, but because he has bowed to the howls of outrage from all quarters of the labour movement over his shamefult treatment of her.
In briefings to the press the last week, Starmer flagrantly lied about the disciplinary process which Diane Abbott has been forced, quite unnecessarily, to undergo, and in which he has a direct say. Starmer hid the fact – which he would have known – that the process was completed months ago. There was no ‘trigger ballot’ as there needs to be for a sitting Labour MP to face de-selection, but the right-wing faction in charge of the party make up their own rules as they go along.
Although having now apparently allowed her to stand as a Labour candidate, for most party members, Starmer’s disgraceful attitude towards the first Black woman MP has left a bad taste in the mouth. It is apparently not enough that Diane Abbott is the most abused member of parliament – attracting almost as much offensive comments as all other MPs put together – but she has had to suffer further indignity at the hands of her ‘leader’.
It was only a few months ago, that there was a special parliamentary debate about the racist and misogynistic abuse levelled at Abbott by the Tory donor Frank Hester. Astonishingly, although she was the subject of the debate, she was not called in (pictured above) by the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle – an omission that had Starmer’s fingerprints all over it. After the revelations of Hester’s boorish and insulting comments, the Labour Party even used the issue to appeal to Party members for donations, but didn’t have the courtesy to mention Diane Abbott’s name in the email.
Spite and factionalism throwing away Afro-Caribbean votes
The spite and factionalism of Starmer and his cabal of ‘advisers’ will not be forgotten in the Afro-Caribbean community. Not content with throwing away the votes of hundreds of thousands of Muslims over his support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Starmer is now throwing away as many Black votes.
It has been because of Diane Abbott’s national standing that Starmer has been forced to back-track over her nomination, but there has been no such reprieve for other left candidates who have been unceremoniously turfed out. Lloyd Russell-Moyle, who is the current MP, has not been allowed to stand again in Brighton Kemptown, and Faiza Shaheen has been barred in Chingford.
Meanwhile, like a battalion of paratroopers, right-wing functionaries and nonentities have been dropped as candidates into unsuspecting constituencies where they have no connections and even less support. Chris Ward, a close friend of Starmer, who worked as his aide for six years, has been selected in Russell-Moyle’s place as Labour’s candidate for Brighton Kemptown.
NEC members rewarded for their support for the right
Unison’s Mark Ferguson (head of that union’s Labour Link) and Usdaw’s Michael Wheeler, who are also NEC members, have been given seats, as has the Community union’s Kate Dearden. NEC member Gurinder Singh Josan – he was on the panel that barred Faiza Shaheen – has got a seat. Then there’s former Starmer staffer Uma Kumaran, who is now a candidate, as well as Josh Simons, who is the Executive Director of the right wing’s extremely wealthy (and dubiously financed) think-tank, Labour Together.
And we cannot forget Luke Akehurst, director of the lobbying organisation, We Believe in Israel, who has been foisted on the constituency of North Durham. All of these candidates were chosen directly by NEC panels under emergency selection procedures, and they have awarded themselves, their union colleagues or their factional allies with seats. Sometimes the process is helped on its way by a promise (through other sources) of a peerage for an MP willing to step down.
In this way, trade union bureaucrats and MPs’ bag-carriers can get plum seats, the former as a reward for backing the right wing at conferences and on the NEC, and the latter, because…well, their Job-for-Life ‘careers’ have to start somewhere. The CLP members then have to put up with a useless MP with no roots in the area and so a lot of people leave.
Building a PLP in his own image
The entire process stinks to high heaven, and it shows the power that can be wielded by a faction-ridden and unelected Labour bureaucracy. Starmer and his general secretary, David Evans, are determined, not only to draw a line between the current leadership and that of Jeremy Corbyn, they are determined to build a wall between the two.
In contrast to Corbyn, who constantly appeased his right wing, even abandoning Open Selection when it was an ‘open goal’ at Labour conference in 2018, Starmer is ruthless. He is building a Parliamentary Labour Party largely of his own acolytes and supporters. When Labour is elected, the PLP will be more right-wing and with fewer ex-workers, than at any time in its history.
But it also means that it will be more isolated from Party members and the trade union base than ever before. Constituency Labour Parties up and down the country will be dismayed and angry at having unknown careerists dropped on them. Given time, what is happening now will pretty much guarantee that Open Selection will come back onto the agenda again, as CLPs begin to chafe at the lack of democratic choice of candidates. That is all the more true, when their MPs do their utmost to defend Starmer/Reeves policies in office.
The biggest single factor deciding the outcome of this election…
What Starmer has in his favour, and which is the biggest single factor determining the outcome of this election, is that there is a massive groundswell of hatred of the Tories. For many voters – the majority of whom will not even know the name of their Labour candidate until they enter the polling booth – Labour is still seen as the only viable alternative to the Tories. That is why Labour will win and Starmer will become Prime Minister, despite having the lowest personal rating of any likely winner this side of an election.
A Labour victory is by far the most likely outcome in this election, but because of the right-wing’s approach to Gaza, to Diane Abbott and to its denial of local democracy, in a number of constituencies, Labour’s vote may well be dented.
Why would voters in Brighton Kemptown vote Labour when a perfectly good Labour MP has been dumped for an unknown carpet-bagger? How can Labour voters in Chingford possibly warm to a last-minute, second-rate candidate, when Faiza Shaheen has been campaigning in the area for years and has her face on posters all over the constituency?
Yet Labour, although it will lose votes in a number of places, will still win nationally despite all of this gerrymandering and factionalism by the right-wing. It is clear why the Tory vote is going to collapse.
A report on Friday by the Institute of Fiscal Studies shows that compared to most of the main capitalist economies living standards in the UK have “underperformed” since 2010. This is putting it mildly. Even on the basis of ‘official’ figures for inflation, most households are worse off, but the official figures mask the fact that lower-income households pay proportionally more for housing, energy, food and transportation and these costs have risen much more than average inflation. Many households are hanging on desperately, living from hand to mouth, week-in and week-out.
Every week a new scandal
There is hardly a week goes by without some new scandal surrounding this government. Post Office bosses and ministers lying over the victimisation of innocent subpostmasters, NHS bosses (and ministers again) lying over infected blood, Tory peers lying over dodgy multi-million pound Covid contracts, ministerial indifference to the dumping of millions of tonnes of raw sewage – the list goes on…and on.
It almost a foregone conclusion that the Tory vote will collapse to its lowest in a century and the millions who are desperate to see and end to this government will vote Labour as the only viable alternative.
But instead of fighting for socialist measure to end the crises in housing, health, living standards and everything else, we have a leadership wedded to a failing capitalist system. The new Labour administration will introduce very minor reforms to appease the trade union leadership, but the thrust of their policies will be towards a new round of austerity, re-branded as “tough decisions”.
Tens of millions of workers still have illusions in the ‘market’ system, with all its failings. The Reeves/Starmer economic strategy is to pretend that they can somehow ‘manage’ a failing system in a benign and more productive manner, but it will not work. They will not resolve the problems faced by ordinary workers.
If their flawed strategy is to be exposed in the eyes of millions of workers, the Labour leadership should have no ‘excuses’. The bigger the majority they get, the less excuse they have. But also, the greater will be the weight of expectation on their shoulders and the more people will expect the ‘change’ that is supposedly at the heart of Labour’s election message.
Socialist policies will get an airing again
Socialist policies mean the public ownership and democratic control of the utilities and services that were once in state hands – water, electricity, mail, railways – and these measures already have popular support. But to organise the economy in the interests of the mass of the population, those policies must be extended to the banks and financial institutions and big corporations that dominate different sectors of manufacturing, construction and transportation.
When Labour comes into office, real political debate will begin again inside the labour movement and trade union and Labour leaders will no longer be able to call for restraint ‘until Labour is elected’. Labour will be in office by then. The pro-capitalist wing of the Labour Party will come under challenge in the face of ‘Labour’ austerity and real socialist ideas will get an echo again. As much as the right wing can exercise utter domination over the Labour bureaucracy today and the parliamentary party tomorrow, they will not be able to prevent the growth of left and socialist ideas again in the ranks of the trades unions and Labour Party in the coming years.
