The Racism Of Starmer's Blue Labour Party

The current brouhaha over Stamer's, Trump style, attack ads against Rishi Sunak, reflects only the latest manifestation of the inherently racist nature of Stamer's Blue Labour Party. That racism inevitably flows from his collapse into reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalism, and jingoistic flag-waving, in a crude attempt to both win the votes of reactionaries, and a confused attempt to represent the interests of British capitalism.

The attack on Sunak, on the question of jailing paedophiles and rapists, deliberately plays to well established racist tropes based around the role of Asian men and grooming gangs. The intention is quite clear. In many of those Northern “red wall seats”, where Starmer, wrongly, believes that Labour lost in 2019, because of support for Brexit, from a section of working-class bigots, that bigotry was also given vent in relation to the issue of grooming of young, vulnerable girls by Asian gangs.

Of course, grooming and the abuse of girls and young women, is not at all, or even mostly, the preserve of Asian men, but you would not know that from the media coverage. Starmer seeks the support of those bigots, and so, as well as collapsing into Brexit jingoism, he is also using these well established racist tropes that stereotype Asian men. Of course, he doesn't need to claim, or even imply, that Sunak is himself a rapist or involved in such grooming, only that he is part of facilitating it, and condoning it, being soft on it, and so on. The well established racist trope does its work from there. It says, Asian men are involved in grooming, Sunak is an Asian man, draw your own conclusions.

In fact, Labour did not lose those red wall seats because of being opposed to Brexit. For one thing, it was clear, in 2019, that Corbyn had returned to his 1970's/80's anti-EU, economic nationalism, and, at the point that was most clear, in the Spring elections, Labour was annihilated, with 60% of its own members voting for other, pro-EU parties. It was that which set it up for defeat in the General Election, where its performance was only improved by belatedly trying to row back on that pro-Brexit stance.

The reality is that the large majority of Labour voters opposed Brexit (around 70% of its 2017 voters), wherever in the country they lived. By contrast, those petty-bourgeois and lumpen elements that backed Brexit, had never been part of Labour's core vote. They were, are and will continue to be Tories, or support agendas to the Right of the Tories. Scrabbling after their votes, lost Labour more of its core vote than it could gain, and that continued after Starmer himself collapsed into Brexit nationalism. It has only been the more recent travails of Johnson and Truss that even put Labour back in the running. But, Sunak has reversed some of that, already, hence Starmer's grabbing the race card to use against him, in order to try to prise away the votes of the bigots.

Dianne Abbott's suspension is another manifestation. Abbott's comments equating anti-Semitism with the prejudice faced by red-haired people was idiotic and crass. But, its actually the same kind of identity politics that Starmer's Blue Labour engages in too. It is the mirror image of it, because Starmer's identity politics homed in on anti-Semitism, because it was identified as the weak spot of Corbyn and his supporters.

Abbott's attempt to set up some kind of hierarchy of racism and prejudice, is, in fact, what Starmer and those that used anti-Semitism as a weapon against Corbyn and his supporters also did, except they reversed it, placing Anti-Semitism at the number one spot in that hierarchy. Essentially, that is what Jackie Walker was expelled for, as she refused to accept that hierarchy, and the privileging of Anti-Semitism by Starmer and Co., as she pointed to the fact that its not only Jews that had faced a holocaust, but also millions of black, brown and yellow skinned people who had died as part of a global slave trade run by European colonial powers, like Britain.

If its right to suspend Abbott, for trying to set up such a hierarchy of racism and prejudice, then it is also right to suspend all those who did the same thing in trying to set up Anti-Semitism as the pinnacle of such a hierarchy, and, thereby, necessarily, reduced the holocaust against millions of other human beings, to being of less significance, which, of itself, is inherently racist behaviour. But, of course, the Labour Party has that racism ingrained within it when it comes to the racism and suffering of those millions of colonial slaves, because, for most of its existence, its ideology and leadership, being thoroughly bourgeois, and committed to defending the interests of the British ruling class, acted to bolster the Empire, and thereby, its treatment of those colonial slaves.

In the 1920's, during the Chinese Revolution, when Britain attempted to cling to its imperialist advantages, and had its gunboats sitting in the Yangtse, and other Chinese waters, as it had done, during the Opium Wars, nearly a century earlier, the Labour leaders, along with the right-wing leaders of the TUC that had just betrayed the British workers during the General Strike, said nothing about the role of British imperialism in China. Even after WWII, when US imperialism was acting to dismantle the old European colonial empires, in the interests of its own multinational corporations, Britain still attempted to cling to its colonial possessions in Africa, and the Middle-East, and so on, and the leaders of the Labour Party played the part of loyal servants of the Crown.

So for a party in which racism is so ingrained, and institutionalised, its use by the leadership for its own ends is not at all surprising. The British Empire may have fallen, but its memory lingers on, in all of those reactionary bigots that voted for Brexit, and its to them that Starmer seeks to appeal with his pro-Brexit position, and his jingoism and flag-waving, and medievalist forelock tugging to the Monarchy. Similarly, the Empire has fallen, but the new Empire of financial capital has risen in its place, dominated by the US, to which Starmer must pay tribute, even whilst seeking to represent the specific interests of some undefined, peculiarly British capital, which can, in reality, only be the dwarf capital of the British petty-bourgeoisie.

And, of course, the outpost of that US imperialism in the Middle-East is Israel, which fitted perfectly with Starmer's use of anti-Semitism as the weapon with which to beat Corbyn and his supporters over the head. Yet, the Israeli state, based upon Zionism – a racist and colonialist ideology – itself represents everything that those old colonial empires signified, and which the anti-colonial revolutions were intended to destroy. Defending the Zionist state, entails defending Zionism, and, consequently the racist, colonialist ideology that underpins it.

What Corbyn and most of his supporters were guilty of was not Anti-Semitism, but anti-Zionism. By equating the two, Starmer was able to kill two birds with one stone. First, it removes any ground for anyone in the LP to attack the racist, colonial nature of the Zionist state, by equating any such attack as being an attack on all Jews – even, apparently, if those making the attack are themselves Jews! - and secondly, it created a vague basis upon which to accuse Starmer's opponents of being anti-Semites, no matter what their actual record of fighting racism and fascism, in the past, compared to the generally abysmal record on that count of their accusers.

But, slipping into this approach was easy for the racists within the Blue Labour leadership, because not only is the vague nature of the charge of “Anti-Semitism”, requiring no evidence of any actual hatred of Jews, but simply criticism of the Zionist state, the stuff of all witch hunts, but the idea of a hierarchy of prejudice, in which you are able to privilege concern at the hostility against the oppressor, as against concern for the oppressed, is the Holy Grail of apologism and propagandism. It is seen each time the spokespeople of Zionism appear on TV to justify the destruction of large swathes of Gaza, by Zionist military technology, in response to the firing of dozens of ineffective rockets on to Israel. The expulsion of large numbers of Labour members for speaking out against the racist, colonialist nature of the Zionist state, and its oppression of millions of Palestinians, by claiming that their attacks amount to Anti-Semitism, is just an extension of it.

But, of course, what that policy by Starmer and his supporters in Blue Labour amounts to is yet more ingrained racism, and a concern for the interests of the colonialist oppressor over the interests of the oppressed. It is impossible to defend Zionism, which is the ideological basis of the state in Israel, without simultaneously denying the interests of the Palestinians, and other non-Jews, oppressed by it. It is to claim that the racism and oppression those Palestinians face is somehow not worthy of the name compared to anti-Semitism, despite the fact that, when it comes to Israel itself, it is not Jews facing such discrimination, but non-Jews!

It seeks to justify the racism and colonialism of Zionism, not on the basis of any current oppression of Jews in Israel, but solely on the basis of the Holocaust that happened 80 years ago, in Europe! And, of course, to perpetuate that basis is precisely why it has to be set at the top of an hierarchy of discrimination, by those that seek to apologise for the actions of the Zionists. What those who seek to single out anti-Semitism, and that Holocaust against Jews, as somehow special, and separate from the racism and oppression of others do is precisely the same thing that Abbott did, and for which those same people have attacked her.

Stamer's racist Blue Labour Party seeks to apologise for and defend the racism of Zionism, and the Zionist state, and so is itself guilty of racism when it comes to its attitude towards Palestinians, and all those oppressed by the Zionist state, it defends. It does that as part of its attempt to represent the interests of British imperialism and its alliance with US imperialism. Its racist attitude, in relation to Palestinians, is combined with its racist attitude towards Muslims and Asians in Britain, as it seeks to win the votes of bigots in mainly northern urban areas. The two things are, in reality, incompatible, and held together only by this underlying racism. To represent the interests of the British ruling class, and the dominant form of large-scale, industrial capital, it is necessary to abandon that narrow nationalism and jingoism that is signified by Brexit, and yet it is on that basis that Starmer has attached his reactionary and racist wagon, in the hope of scrounging the odd bigot's vote.