State of the UK Labour Party

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Two articles about the UK Labour Party, Craig Murray discusses the pointless Keir Starmer:

Starmer’s role has been simply to emasculate the Labour Party, and to purge it of any elements that might seek to pose a threat to rampant neo-liberalism and wealth inequality. His efforts to ban Labour MPs from supporting striking railway workers must be anathema to anybody who has the slightest feel for the history and traditions of that party and indeed the most basic understanding of its very raison d’etre.

This Tony Benn quote from the 1980’s has come into vogue because it is prophetic, and the process appears now complete:

If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media – having tasted blood – would demand next that it expelled all its Socialists and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus British Capitalism, it is argued, will be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed off the National agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed… it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far-right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years.

Starmer is in one sense the apotheosis of this process. Not only has he acted to purge the Labour Party of socialism, he also offers so very little of a meaningful alternative to the Tories that there is very little danger of the Tories being voted out of office. Not only is he a safe right-wing backstop, he is a self-redundant safe right-wing backstop.

Jeremy Corbyn Sophie BrownCC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

and Jeremy Corbyn openly discusses the many parties that obstructed him. The article also discusses Julian Assange.

The Guardian has long been viewed as the voice of the liberal-left in Britain, so it surprised many during the Corbyn leadership to see it act as one of the main media vehicles through which the campaign to bring him down was fought. 

The paper was a key part of the “anti-semitism crisis” that engulfed Corbyn’s leadership. From 2016-19, the Guardian published 1,215 stories mentioning Labour and anti-semitism, an average of around one per day, according to a search on Factiva, the database of newspaper articles. 

In the same period, the Guardian published just 194 articles mentioning the Conservative Party’s much more serious problem with Islamophobia. A YouGov poll in 2019, for example, found that nearly half of the Tory party membership would prefer not to have a Muslim prime minister. 

The Guardian’s coverage of anti-semitism in Labour was suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggested that the issue was being used politically.

The late Jewish anthropologist David Graeber commented after the 2019 election: “As for the Guardian, we will never forget that during the ‘Labour antisemitism controversy’, they beat even the Daily Mail to include the largest percentage of false statements, pretty much every one, mysteriously, an accidental error to Labour’s disadvantage”.

Keir Starmer says he is scrapping Labour’s manifesto and ‘starting from scratch’ on policy

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Rob

    Boring and predictable cr@nk horse manure.

    Corbyn increased the Tory vote by three million 2015-2019; lost to Johnson AND to May (!!)- the worst two Conservative Prime Ministers since World War One; ‘led’ (sic) the party to its biggest defeat since the 1930s; called for Article 50 to be invoked the morning after the referendum (which he’d done little to help win for Remain- given he was a lifelong Brexiteer); and allowed a rancid culture of antisemitism (oh sorry, anti ‘Zionism’) to infect and almost swallow up the party.

    Murray is just another of those commoner garden apologists for authoritarian dictatorships who hates the West- in the suspiciously ‘Kompromised’ manner of many foreign agents allowed free speech (unlike refuseniks in totalitarian places like Russia, Iran or China).

  2. dizzy

    I am likely to delete the previous comment in a week or so unless all comments are enabled to this blog.

    I am unwilling to permit such comments when any further discussion is censored. Why should I allow it?

    11/11/22 I won’t be deleting the previous comment. I would point that it’s mostly name-calling and very little argument there.

    The issue is that comments to this blog are not permitted by – presumably – the UK government and always have been. A very few comments get through – on the C. Diff article, then the comments criticising Craig Murray above and another one criticising me. I don’t mind them criticising me but the argument’s not very strong – I am quoting an earlier version of regulations and that part doesn’t appear in the later regs. So it was pertinent when the earlier regs were in force but then the problem disappeared because it didn’t appear in the later regs? I can’t really see that.

    The real issue with not permitting comments is that it’s such a blatant denial of the rights to freedom of expression and participation in the democratic process and that it’s cast so broadly – all the people who might wish to participate through commenting.

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