The position of Starmer and Kinnock is both highlighted and contrasted in relation to Brexit. In 1983, having suffered the worst election defeat ever, in part caused by the split of the SDP, which itself was, partly, founded on divisions over Europe, Labour slowly moved away from its position of leaving Europe. It took until 1987 for that change to be effected. For Kinnock, this move was purely opportunistic. It was a move in search of more votes, in conditions where opposition to Europe was a position held by a minority of Little Englander nationalists, be they on the Left or Right. Whatever the base reasons for Kinnock's change of position, however, objectively, it was a move in a more progressive direction.
By contrast, Starmer's collapse into Brexitism, and nationalistic reaction is not just opportunistic, it is also objectively reactionary.
Kinnock's attacks on party members, as he got his witch-hunt under way, were sickeningly hypocritical. For example, in his well-known conference speech attacking Militant in Liverpool, he engaged in his rhetorical flourish about Council Leaders sending out redundancy notices by taxi. The reality, of course, was that this had been a tactic by the Council, in the context of its ongoing campaign against imposition of cuts. It was an ill-thought out, and ridiculous tactic that was inevitably going to be demobilising, and open the door to attack, but a tactic nevertheless. Kinnock's attack on it was not that it was an ill-thought out and ridiculous tactic, but was simply a lying, hypocritical attack on the Council itself. Kinnock's own strategy required Councils not to resist the Tory cuts, as Liverpool had been doing, but to comply with them, simply limiting themselves to being administrators of the system, which, in conditions of swingeing cuts, meant simply acting as the executioners on behalf of the Tories. Kinnock opposed redundancy notices being sent out in Liverpool, but his own strategy of compliance was seeing Labour Councils, throughout the country, sending out redundancy notices to workers on a monthly basis, as well as imposing large rent and rate increases on local working-class communities. Even more ironically, the Labour Party itself, soon after Kinnock's speech, was sending out redundancy notices to its own workers!
But, Kinnock did at least have the honesty to undertake his witch hunt on an open political basis. He made no bones about the fact that the Militant Editorial Board, and then its MP's, and Councillors and subsequently its members were being expelled on political grounds, as he sought to make the Labour Party again safe for the ruling class. The witch-hunt against the members of other left-wing groups was conducted on this same basis, and when CLP's and branches began to oppose the witch-hunt, or even backed measures at odds with the position of Kinnock, they too began to be closed down.
In 1988, I had moved house into a neighbouring ward, in Kidsgrove. At its, selection meeting at the end of that year, they selected me to stand for the County Council, in 1989. No sooner had they done so than the Regional Office told them they had to run the selection again. They had nominally found some technicality for doing so, but the Branch Chair, my good friend and comrade, the late John Lockett, told me that the Regional Organiser had told him that if they went ahead and selected me, they would close down the Branch. Rather than allow that, I decided to withdraw my nomination. It was another 8 years, before I actually stood, and won a seat on the County Council, again with a huge vote, of around 3,500, amounting to 60% of the poll.
But, Starmer is conducting his witch hunt of the Left not on this more honest basis that, at least, Kinnock did, but on the fraudulent basis of Anti-Semitism, and various amorphous charges of bringing the Party into disrepute. Now, once again, as with the witch hunt under Kinnock, we see even discussion of the witch-hunt, or even discussion of Anti-Semitism, or of the EHRC Report being banned, and those that do so themselves being suspended. As with the mass expulsions and branch and CLP closures under Kinnock, we see Starmer's henchmen and women, like Angela Rayner, proclaiming that they are prepared to expel thousands and thousands of members in this quest to again make the Labour Party safe for the ruling class.
Kinnock, of course, never did take the LP rightward enough to be able to pick up all of the Tory and reactionary voters required to compensate for the progressive working-class votes it lost in its opportunistic abandonment of any kind of progressive social-democratic politics. Although, much is written about the nature of Labour's loss in 2019, it was, in fact, a better performance than Foot accomplished in 1983, and not much different to Kinnock's performance in 1987 and 1992, in terms of votes. It could be argued that Blair completed that task, by taking the party further to the Right, and so winning the 1997 election. However, the reality is that Blair won in 1997, because the country had grown tired of the Tories, of the economic chaos they had caused, the years of austerity, of de-industrialisation, of falling wages and collapse of infrastructure, particularly in the NHS. They were tired of the sleaze that infected the Tories, who were also riven with their internecine battles of Europe. That fact is illustrated by the fact that, in every election after 1997, the Labour vote, once again began to shrink, as the memory of hostility towards the Tories faded. That fall in Labour's vote after 1997 was despite the fact that from 1999, the new long wave upswing got underway, meaning the economy grew more rapidly, and Labour benefited from rising tax revenues that were used to provide more resources to Local Government, and the NHS.
Starmer is moving in the opposite direction. In an opportunistic search for votes, he has lurched into the arms of reaction. His aim is to try to win the votes of reactionaries in the so called Red Wall Seats. But, those voters had been deserting Labour ever since 1945. Starmer will never move the party rightwards enough to win a large enough share of the votes from these reactionaries without turning it into a pale version of UKIP or the BNP, and to do so would destroy the LP, and lose it the votes of its core working-class support in the cities and larger metropolitan areas. Indeed, Starmer has already shifted Labour on to this reactionary ground to an extent that its likely to have lost a large chunk of that progressive vote, which will see no great difference between it and the Tories, and will simply sit on its hands. At the same time, Starmer's lurch into English nationalism means that the chances of Scottish independence has been enhanced. Seeing that risk, Starmer has then lurched even more into English nationalism, aligning himself once again with Johnson, in demanding that Johnson deny the Scots even the right to another independence referendum! This from the man who based much of his opposition to Corbyn for four years on a demand for a second EU referendum.
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