WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE LABOUR PARTY?
Labour Representation Committee response to recent election results and their aftermath
After a wasted year, Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party is in crisis.
The dismal May election results were entirely predictable - the latest in a series of disasters for the party. Starmer and his team have spent more time in the last year attacking loyal party members than opposing a Tory government whose incompetence in dealing with the Covid pandemic has cost tens of thousands of lives. Instead of uniting us against the Tories, the priorities of the ’new management’ have been internal and factional - removing the whip from Jeremy Corbyn, closing down constituency parties, denying us our right to debate, suspending and expelling us wherever they can. It really is a bit much for him then to say that “very often we’ve been talking to ourselves, instead of to the country”, as though internal purges and failure to oppose the government had not been his personal choices.
Starmer may have illusions he can do without the membership. He may think that with friends in the establishment and in the press, he has no need to take account of party members who have ideas of their own. A cruel delusion! Attacking party activists is the surest way to lose elections. The results are there for all to see.
However, where Labour was represented by candidates with a connection to their communities, showing some opposition to the Tories’ criminal policies - in Wales, Manchester, Preston, Salford, Oxford City and other pockets in England, its vote managed to hold up. Elsewhere, communities felt abandoned by Labour and either saw no point in coming out to vote, or voted for other candidates. The dangers are enormous:
• Labour has effectively lost Scotland - with little sign of recovery.
• It has lost many sections of the ‘red wall’ in the North as well as key areas in the Midlands. Hartlepool was a disaster waiting to happen - a slow decline in the Labour vote, apart from two elections under Corbyn. Labour has lost majority control of Durham County Council for the first time in almost 100 years!
• There is now a threat to Labour’s ‘urban Black wall’ as our leaders continue to take the support of Black voters for granted. Black voters have been ignored by our party. They are disproportionately affected by the Covid pandemic, more likely to live in poverty, be unemployed and suffer from the ‘hostile environment’ and from a racist criminal justice system. That will only get worse if the pernicious Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is passed.
What has Starmer to say to Black voters? What are we to make of the ongoing delays to the Forde Report? Remember four years ago, in those dreadful days after the Grenfell tragedy, how Jeremy Corbyn quietly and humbly engaged with the local community. The contrast with Starmer - stuck in his Westminster bubble, dismissing the Black Lives Matter movement, saying nothing meaningful to our communities – could not be more stark!
Just as devastating is the loss of the energy of those thousands of young people who were drawn to Corbyn and Labour with its message of hope and change. They saw in Labour not just the hope of a better world, but a means of achieving that goal. So many young people who joined us or supported us are now leaving in droves - either quitting political engagement altogether or retreating into single-issue politics. Our party is squandering their dream. It is a tragic loss. Without our youth, where are we and what are we?
What, then, is the purpose of the Labour Party? Until 2015, like so many parties of European Social Democracy, we were in serious decline. Post-Corbyn, that process has been accelerated.
The problem is not confined to losing elections. It is the political bankruptcy of what Labour is now offering, with Starmer’s team telling us to wear a suit when speaking in public and stand before a Union flag. The message of the Hartlepool campaign - where Labour’s leaflets were adorned with the red cross England flag in celebration of St. George’s Day - was the very opposite of what is required. Even Angela Rayner has said voters didn’t know what Starmer stood for - and she supports him!
The problems we face are global. How can we be safe from Covid while the pandemic rages in India and Brazil? We need to donate our surplus supplies of vaccines to where they are needed most. The same applies to the climate. How can we save the planet from irreversible climate change and destruction without the greatest commitment to global planning and co-operation? Now, more than ever, our message must be an internationalist one. Yet it is at this very moment that Labour chooses to pull up the nationalist drawbridge, competing with the Tories on their own reactionary terrain.
Electoral and political decline and defeat are not inevitable. Corbyn's near win in 2017, when he reversed the trends in the ‘red wall’ seats, shows that sections of the working class will only be persuaded by UKIP-style nationalism when no other voice offers a realistic promise of seismic, radical change - the transformative policy agenda that drew so many to vote for and join our party.
There is thirst for change in our streets, in our communities, in our trade unions and beyond, all crying out for courageous, progressive political leadership and a political vehicle to deliver that change. What better vehicle can there be than the Labour Party, rooted as it is in the trade union movement?
Starmer’s response to the election results has been clear - shifting the blame on others and demoting several of those who served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, while promoting right wingers such as Rachel Reeves. He is being advised to move the party further and faster to the right. Mandelson, brought in as an advisor, wants to distance the party from the unions. We are at a crossroads.
Time is running out for Starmer, with his devastating abdication of political leadership. For both our movement and the planet, it really is a choice: class politics or oblivion
