Labour: fit to oust the Tories?

Is Labour fit to oust the Tories? On 15 February Labour won two seats in by-elections, Wellingborough and Kingswood, with big swings from the Tories.

Labour is still a broad movement. There is more hope there than in the dim and narrow leftish splinters of the last few years.

Yet Keir Starmer and his new-Blairite backroom are working to shrivel hope. Starmer evidently believes that the Tories are floundering so badly that to win the general election “safelty” he needs only promise big business a safe and friendly hand on the wheel, and appease “socially-conservative” voters.

The 15 Feb turnouts were low. The Rochdale by-election on 29 Feb will be a fiasco for Labour. After the nomination deadline Labour had to dump its candidate, Azhar Ali. Comments indicating that ever-hidden Jewish conspiracies guide the world had not been taken up in the Labour internal meeting where they were made.

Some others there must have seen what was wrong; but, adapting to the norms of Starmer-Labour, they chose to “avoid trouble”, keep quiet, and hope nothing came out.

Then it came out in the Daily Mail. Bookies now favour the reactionary demagogue George Galloway (see page 4) to win Rochdale. In any case, Labour can’t win in Rochdale.

Labour’s opinion-poll lead may be fragile, especially if British capitalism recovers a bit — inflation is after all falling — and if the Tories get back on their feet

And if the opinion-poll lead continues through to election day, what then?

Keir Starmer is hosing down expectations, hoping that even the most meagre achievements in government will then suffice.

But the wounds and sequels of over a decade of squeezed real wages for many, of Covid and the lockdowns, of recent high inflation, and of collapsed public services, are hurting.

And if Starmer thinks it an easy get-out to postpone and curtail green conversion measures, reality says different.

In the USA, some have written about an epidemic of “deaths of despair”. Social despair is also, in many countries, pumping up a politics of rancour — against green measures; against migrants; against respect and sympathy for transgender people; against, even, the slownesses of democracy; and for illusions of “making great again”.

Those who sow the seed of despair and hopelessness fate themselves to live choked by the weeds which then sprout. The smug new-Blairite officials in Starmer’s back rooms are making wastegrounds for the future.

Solidarity works for a labour movement which is not smug, mean-spirited, short-sighted, minimalist, manipulative, and dishonest; but instead, thoughtful, generous, perceptive, energetic, straightforward, and truthful.