By Radhika Desai, Alan Freeman and Carlos Martínez. Originally on Morningstaronline. co. uk.
First Minister Sir Keir Starmer poses for a photograph with the new organization of Scottish Labor MPs at 10 Downing Street, London, on July 9, 2024.
Speaking from 10 Downing Street, newly elected Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the country had voted “decisively for change” and “for national renewal and the return of politics to public service”. None of those statements can be outside the truth. .
Never has a government with such a gigantic majority been elected in a less “decisive” way. No claim to achieve a replacement has rung hollower, even though both ruling parties have made such claims to conceal the continuity of their shared commitment to unpopular neoliberal policies. policies.
Starmer’s “responsible” manifesto promised very little to staff, while granting generous subsidies, low taxes, lucrative contacts and permissive deregulation to big business and the wealthy, British and foreign. Promises of increased social spending are based on an expansion that is unlikely if neoliberalism prevails. and corporate social spending will involve outsourcing to large corporations, as Wes Streeting, the new fitness secretary, has already indicated.
The falsehood of both statements has been observed. What is less talked about is that all these lies will save Starmer’s Labor Party from delivering on the project it has been given and maybe even break the party.
Over the past five years, as the Conservatives’ dysfunctions have deepened, the British political status quo has invested in Starmer – the “safe hand” of the British status quo – and his party as a reliable political tool for controlling the British state and society. It’s no surprise that Starmer has enjoyed the attention of the mainstream media, from the Guardian to the Financial Times to the Sun, not to mention most of the corporate capitalist elegance that has generously feted Rachel Reeves as presumptive Chancellor of the Exchequer in recent times. months.
However, as the governments of primarily financialized neoliberal countries around the world – the United States, France, Germany – are discovering, it is difficult, even difficult, to control the state and society while implementing the neoliberal policies that corporate capital, both domestic and domestic, are implementing. foreign demands. impossible.
In Britain, with decades of neoliberalism crowned by austerity, Brexit and Covid blunders, the public crisis of extorted companies and the farce of Rwanda’s deportations, the process is much further along.
As the Conservatives head for disintegration or loss of relevance, the new Labour government may be only the penultimate level in the collapse of the British political status quo. The brilliance of his good fortune in turning Starmer’s paintings into a tool is the gaseous explosion of the supernova, the bloom that precedes the death of a star. Once Starmer’s government and party begin to malfunction, as they soon will, the British political status quo will lose its last tool of social and political control, falling into an unpredictable and unprecedented crisis. .
“Decisive” vote? What “decisive” vote?
Generally used to describe any primary electoral victory, the term “landslide” refers to a small replacement in the popular vote that results in a gigantic primary of seats in a first-past-the-post electoral system, much like a small stone fall can cause a landslide. Starmer’s Labor Party won such a landslide victory, passively reaping the benefits of the unprecedented 20 percentage point collapse of the Conservative vote, from 43. 6% in 2019 to 23. 7% in 2024.
Five years of failure and crisis have made the conservatives hopelessly unpopular: austerity; low growth; a disastrous Brexit; the fatal crisis of Covid mismanagement illustrated through Partygate; a savage burden of living through the crisis; a ruthless housing crisis that sickens other people, as in Grenfell, which kills, an “immigrant crisis” manufactured through competing parties in racism and xenophobia; factional infighting; Liz Farm; maximum interest rates; and the failure to fulfill the promises made to win the “red wall” in 2019.
These add to a decades-long decline that began as early as the 1990s, which kept the Conservatives out of power for thirteen years and forced them back into power in 2010 without a majority, while bleeding for the United Kingdom Independence Party.
This far-right force, currently taking the form of Nigel Farage’s Reshape Party, has become malleable in the 2010s. This threatened the party’s base in a political landscape transformed by Labour’s decades-old decision to capitulate to Thatcherite neoliberalism by moving to the right rather than challenging it by moving to the left.
When the procedure culminated in Blair’s New Labour and all the forces to his left were destroyed, it is possible that enough discontents of neoliberalism will be induced in favour of the Reform Party and its predecessors, who are self-conscious about attributing popular misfortunes to the neoliberal policies implemented since 1979. still to the EU and/or immigration.
Reformers and his predecessors had already forced Cameron to promise that in the Brexit referendum he would win their narrow majority in 2015. After helping win Brexit, Johnson – “irresponsible, narcissistic, dishonest, self-centered and incompetent” – heard about Brexit. On the other hand, he could win a much larger majority, though only by capitulating to Farage’s policy of tearing down the “red wall” in 2019.
This has strengthened the far-right faction so much that after the defeat an unprecedented split in the party is to be expected. This also benefited the Liberal Democrats: the Conservatives, alienated by the far right, gave them the number of seats (72) never recorded, but with virtually no replacement in the percentage of the vote.
Although the Conservative vote plummeted, Labour’s “historic” majority in 2024, of 174 votes, was smaller than Blair’s majority of 179 votes in 1997, when the Conservatives enjoyed greater electoral health. The Labour vote grew by only 1. 6%, basically in Scotland, where, the SNP’s 48 seats in 2019 fell to 10 in 2024, its percentage of the vote fell to only 1. 3%, while the Conservative vote fell sharply. Surprisingly, in 2017, with 40% of the vote and a turnout of 69%, Corthroughn Labour narrowly lost; In 2024, with 34% of the vote and a turnout of 60%, Starmer’s Labour Party won a “historic” majority.
While the Conservative vote has plummeted, the Labour vote has risen slightly, making the combined vote share of the two parties the lowest since 1945. The explanation is simple. Starmer’s Labour Party has swept away the very popular elements that excite workers. He destroyed the only leader actually committed to “change” and “national renewal and the return of politics to public service,” Jeremy Corthroughn, among others, sabotaging the party’s 2017 election campaign, so that his defeat would cause him to lose his position as leader. After failing, they persisted, deploying the neoliberal establishment’s weapon of choice, accusing pro-Palestinian figures of anti-Semitism. An exhausted Corthroughn resigned in 2019 and the party’s left-sided sweeps have become the biggest political purge in history.
This purge explains the very poor results of the Labour Party. Candidates imposed or eliminated by diktat in Islamophobic acts masquerading as “fighting anti-Semitism” destroyed a significant component of the component’s historical base, alienating the Muslim Labour electorate, with the black electorate also furious at the outrageous remedy through Diane Abbott, as well as classical workers. -Class electorate and young people. This was dramatically revealed when the independent George Galloway won an outright election in Rochdale, the birthplace of the British commercial revolution, because of Starmer’s hated Zionist policies towards Gaza.
After getting rid of the left of the party and the radicalism of its programme, Starmer’s Labour Party has failed to motivate the workers. At 60 percent, turnout was lower than the 59. 4 percent of any postwar election in 2001.
That’s all. Starmer’s Labour Party won its 412 seats, or 63. 38% of the seats in Parliament, with only 33. 7% of the vote or, taking into account the 60% turnout, only 20. 22% of the British vote. A fifth of Britons will have voted for a government that, at least in theory, has a landslide majority.
Change? What change?
However, given the electoral precariousness of Starmer’s parliamentary majority, the gap between theory and practice would likely be large. Large majorities can only overwhelm the opposition if they remain united, which is almost inevitably not the case with giant parliamentary parties: with a limited number of seats and limited force to distribute, discontent proliferates.
Other disorders will emerge from the complex neoliberalism that Starmer’s Labor Party represents. Sunak’s legacy of a public debt of more than 84% of GDP and Starmer’s commitment to “fiscal conservatism” will see the disorders plaguing Britain’s economy, society and institutions all but resolved. .
Although it inevitably reneges on its few promises, public opinion and the left of the Labour Party, having lived through forty-five years of neoliberalism and Labour and Conservative attempts to make it appear one way or through the realisation of the public interest, will never be more than a hair to provoke protest.
A crisis of the Starmer government will therefore occur sooner rather than later, and as the Conservatives will likely have strayed into the confines of anti-immigrant populism, the British political status quo will run out of tools for the state while maintaining the state. alive. Emergence of an electoral democracy. The resulting chaos can easily disappear unless the left organizes a political force that takes over the state apparatus.
Despite all the efforts of the political status quo and Farage, the left is still alive. The very situations they have created require it. While the far right peaked with 14. 3% of votes cast, the third highest, and came in second with 103 seats. , there were also symptoms of a resurgence of the left.
A significant, if embattled, left survives within the Labor Party, notably Diane Abbott and Zarah Sultana. Jeremy Corbyn, forced to present himself as an independent opposed to a Labor Party device determined to defeat him, began his crusade late. Only after making marvelous efforts to secure the party’s nomination did he not only win his seat, but did so with 5,000 more votes in Islington North than Starmer won in Holborn and St Pancras.
Four other pro-Palestinian independent MPs ousted Labour MPs: Shockat Adam, Ayoub Khan, Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed, although, as the Financial Times noted, “it is incredibly rare for independent candidates to win. . . on the United Kingdom ticket. ” This organization of five anti-Zionists is now the sixth largest “party” in Parliament. The Greens, with 4 MPs, quadrupled their parliamentary presence, while Plaid Cymru, to the left of the Labour Party, also won 4 seats.
Independents Leanne Mohammed and Jody McIntyre came within a hair’s breadth of ousting Wes Streeting and Jess Phillips. George Galloway came close to retaining Rochdale, despite Labour sparing no effort against him. The thousands of votes cast by Andrew Feinstein, Faiza Shaheen and Chris Williamson reflect mass discontent with the Labour Party’s egregious stance on the Gaza war and the effect of campaigns such as No Ceasefire, No Vote and The Muslim Vote. Meanwhile, Sinn Fein triumphed in northern Ireland, bringing Irish unity. more together.
Mao Zedong joked that when “there is wonderful chaos under the sky, the scene is perfect. ” Even if the chaos is wonderful and will get worse, the scenario will only be perfect if it is made imaginable through a regrouped and resurgent left. Otherwise, blatantly racist and repressive neo-fascist elements can claim to govern and get the establishment to accept it, a decidedly not-wonderful scenario.
With the rise of a left-wing Labor Party organization in Parliament, drawing power from the still-burning embers of Corbyn’s leadership from 2015 to 2019, capable of shaping a socialist and anti-imperialist platform opposed to neoliberalism and austerity, as well as opposed to NATO and nuclear weapons, publicly advocating peace with Russia and cooperation with China, free from the cautious bourgeois Labor bureaucracy: the first shoots of a movement that could work to break the control of neoliberal capital over the emerging state forces. .
The left, however, faces demanding situations on the scale of the 1920s. Then, as now, you can’t just “build another party. “Brave new forces on the left, outside and inside the Labour Party, are needed for a renewed left. Only his collaborative paintings can close the chaos of Starmer’s failure in favor of ordinary people.
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