FOr the record, I couldn’t give a **** about the Liabour party but thought this was interesting. I’m not sure of the origin as I was sent it by email.
Labour’s Election Disaster Is Keir Starmer’s to Own
Ronan Burtenshaw: In the aftermath of defeat, the leadership will want to focus on messaging – scrambling to find a technical fix to this failure of a year’s worth of political endeavour. But unfortunately for Labour, the party’s problems run far deeper than this. One of Europe’s largest political parties – the opposition to a venal, corrupt, authoritarian, and increasingly dangerous right-wing government – has just run the most lethargic national campaign in living memory. A five or ten degree shift in trajectory will not save it.
The fact is, under Keir Starmer’s leadership the party has lost more than 100,000 members. It has waged a war on party democracy, shut down internal debate, and suspended not just activists but CLP chairs and secretaries en masse. It has closed Labour’s Community Organising Unit and sacked its community organisers. And it has landed Labour in a funding crisis which hamstrung campaigns across the country by driving away the army of small donors which sustained it in recent years, alienating the historic funding base in the trade unions, and failing to win over the new corporate donors Starmer has been courting. (In case you missed it: there’s already a very successful party of capital in Britain today and the rich are doing quite nicely, thank you.)
As Starmer’s team do the media rounds blaming their own disastrous defeat on a leader they have booted from the party – one who, by the way, won Hartlepool twice – we have a right to feel vindicated. Not least because the only consistent message Keir Starmer has conveyed during the past year has been that he isn’t Jeremy Corbyn. The project of pushing his leadership to the Left is a lost cause. Instead, we should turn our attention to the work he refuses to do – and rebuild an unashamedly socialist politics from the bottom up.
… of labour is the hope of the world
In this week’s bulletin of The Cause, general secretary of the CWU, Dave Ward argues that the Labour leadership has forgotten the party’s primary role – standing up for working people and defending their interests across society:
"I believe that the lesson couldn’t be clearer. Keir Starmer and his team need to fulfil the promises they made when they won the leadership on a left-wing platform last year. This means bold policies, unity in the party, and – above all – standing up for working-class people in the daily struggles they’re facing.
They should be learning from people like Andy Burnham, who defied the Tories and looks set to be crowned King of the North by voters. In post-industrial Labour heartlands like Salford and Preston – places not completely different to Hartlepool – there is no electoral meltdown, and union mayors like Paul Dennett and Matthew Brown are received well by voters because of their positive agenda.
As we come out of the pandemic, the trade union movement has a unique moment to shape this collective agenda. I would urge our movement as whole to move as one in order to deliver a new deal for working people in this country – we can’t wait for a real Labour government, but if we work for building real change in the communities of this country, we might deliver the next one."
Here’s the latest…
The devastating Covid-19 crisis in India reveals the tragic consequences of global inequality, and the only way to prevent further disasters is to challenge the power of Western states and big corporations, writes Grace Blakeley.
Former Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias has retired from politics – he was a pioneering figure on the European left, but couldn’t transcend the limits of Spain’s coalition government.
When it comes to telling the story of the labour movement, women have too often been an after-thought – we take a look at five documentaries which buck the trend by putting Britain’s working-class women to the fore.
From the 1970s to the 2000s, Britain’s undercover police surveilled at least 20 families seeking justice for lost loved ones, including those who died at the hands of the police themselves.
From a lack of investment in public healthcare to mishandling vaccine production, India’s far-right BJP government has failed its people during the pandemic, and paved the way for the present Covid disaster.
In the latest episode of A World to Win podcast, Grace speaks to Alex Press about Amazon’s worker exploitation, union busting, and avoidance of basic regulation in its quest to become the ‘everything store’ – and how workers are fighting back.
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