Last week, I pointed to the fact that Starmer's racist, Blue Labour would use racism to cover its inevitable failure, when it takes over the government. As I'd also noted, previously, the notice of that was given in Starmer's six worthless promises, when he'd promised to “Launch A New Border Security Command”. In other words, doubling down on the Tories own racist targeting of migrants, and refugees. Starmer's reactionary Blue Labour, for the last four years has been characterised by his attempt to outflank the Tories from the Right, to be indistinguishable from them, on policy after policy, other than to be acting as a a whip on their Right flank, much as UKIP used to be. Starmer says he has changed Labour. He has, but not for the better. He has changed it into UKIP, or a pale version of the BNP, as witnessed by his welcoming into the party of Natalie Elphicke, and his exclusion of socialists.
So, its no wonder that, even before Starmer moves into Downing Street, and the inevitable failure begins, he has already begun that process of scapegoating migrants, much as the reactionary, racist nature of Blue Labour has its racism clearly on show, in its treatment of Diane Abbot, Faiza Shaheen and others, inside the party. Starmer's Blue Labour has now followed the Tories in saying that it will cut net migration into Britain, even though they know that Britain has a labour shortage, that immigration benefits the economy, and so on, and that, even as they promise that, they have also made pie in the sky promises of cutting NHS waiting lists, which either requires additional foreign workers, or involves putting even more strain on an already overworked NHS staff!
Of course, when Blue Labour's abysmal candidate for Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, appeared on Sunday politics programmes, she made clear that they were not going to make the mistake of the Tories of actually putting a number on the amount of net migration they would achieve. The Tories, of course, never came anywhere close to achieving their oft repeated target of tens of thousands, and nor could they. The nature of a modern capitalist economy requires a free movement of labour as much as of capital, and although Brexit hindered that, as far as EU migration was concerned, it simply shifted it into different channels. As with everything else associated with Brexit, it increased the cost, and reduced the effectiveness of the migration.
Cooper says that Blue Labour wants to prevent that legal migration from reducing wages and conditions for workers in Britain, which is just a return to the reactionary, nationalist and racist sentiments of Gordon Brown's mantra of “British Jobs For British Workers”, put forward before he lost the 2010 General Election, and opened the door for 14 years of Tory government. If Blue Labour really wanted to do what they say, they would make legal migration easier, so that fewer workers had to resort to illegal migration. That would mean that all those migrant workers, who have to, currently, resort to illegal migration, a number that will increase, as Blue Labour seeks to make legal migration harder, would be able to claim all the rights and benefits of any other worker, to join trades unions and so on. If Blue Labour really wanted to prevent wages and conditions being undermined, they would act to strengthen workers' collective rights, raise the Minimum Wage to £500 a week, and so on.
Blue Labour has not put a figure on its net migration target, because it knows it has no more chance of reducing it than have the Tories. But, talking about it, now, fits in with all of those reactionary, racist tropes that blame migrants, and foreigners in general, for the problems created by British capitalism, and made worse by Brexit, the epitome, itself, of that appeal to the bigots and backward sections of society, purely for the purpose of building a skin deep, superficial electoral coalition, used solely to enable a bunch of self-serving, career politicians to get into government on a lie, and line their own pockets.
That was exposed, again, over the weekend, as I had predicted last week, in relation to Starmer's cakeism on the EU. It is yet again an example of how Starmer, and Blue Labour have been identical to Boris Johnson and the Tories, over the last four years, except more reactionary and nationalistic, and so, also more delusional and lying. In Starmer, we see, merely, Boris Johnson without the hair, or charisma, but all of the same deceit, and machine politics, and tactics of Linton Crosby. Crosby once talked about throwing a large dead catfish on to the table, to distract attention, when the dialogue was not going in your favour. Although, many pundits have talked about the fiasco in relation to Diane Abbot, being a big mistake, during last week, the opposite is true.
Firstly, it was no mistake, any more than the removal of other Left candidates such as Faiza Shaheen, or Lloyd Russell-Moyle was a mistake, but was part of a planned, Night of The Long Knives, Bonapartist coup, inside the party. Secondly, the Far Right inside Blue Labour saw this open assault on the Left as being beneficial to them in terms of their search for the votes of the reactionary, petty-bourgeoisie, who are most hostile to, and whose interests are most threatened by any kind of social-democratic agenda. Thirdly, the idea that a week of news focusing on Diane Abbot, distracted from Blue Labour's policy proposals, assumes, wrongly, that Blue Labour actually wants any kind of detailed scrutiny of those policies by the media and others. It doesn't, precisely because those policies are as vacuous and lying as the rest of its politics, and fall apart as soon as any such scrutiny is applied to them. Diane Abbot was used by Blue Labour, as just another manifestation of its inherent racism, as that large, dead catfish thrown on to the table, as recommended by Linton Crosby. Not only did it distract from Blue Labour's empty and reactionary programme, but it also distracted from the other Left candidates like Shaheen and Moyle, blocked from standing.
Trades union leaders, like Dave Ward, interviewed at the weekend, said that, although they were disturbed by the blocking of these candidates, they would not lead them to disaffiliate. Quite right, the job of socialists is to stay and fight inside Blue Labour, against the coup of Starmer, and the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie he represents. But, that involves an actual fight against that coup, and not just words. The reality is that the union bureaucrats are themselves responsible for creating the conditions which enabled Starmer and the Far Right inside Blue Labour to carry out that coup. That responsibility goes back even to the time of the leadership of Corbyn.
The union bureaucrats are opportunists, whose main concern is to get the Tories out at any cost, and get a Labour government in, even if that Labour government is no different to the Tories it replaces. For the union bureaucrats, it is different, simply because, from their standpoint, they feel they have the chance of being able to talk to that government, what used to be called, in the 1960's and 70's, beer and sandwiches. It is, of course, pure self-delusion, but fits their mentality as social-democratic arbiters, managing the relations between labour and capital. Its why the unions created the Labour Party in the first place. So, under Corbyn, they were a bulwark of that conservative tendency, coming from Corbyn's Stalinist advisors, to placate the Blair-Rights, and to not push the needed democratic reforms, for mandatory reselection, and so on. When the Right launched their attacks on Corbyn, via his Left base, using the lies over anti-Semitism, to implement a witch hunt, the union bureaucrats, again, stood behind that conservative approach of not confronting the Right head-on, so as to not rock the boat. The same thing had happened in the 1980's.
Even after Starmer has lied his way into the leadership, and, then, lurched the party massively to the Right, in search of the votes of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, and other bigots, as he turns it into a UKIP Mark II, the union bureaucrats have simply acquiesced. Not even Kinnock or Blair was this far to the Right. Kinnock and Blair both stood on the ground of conservative social-democracy, of serving the interests of the ruling class, of large-scale capital, and so on, but none of that is true of Starmer, who stands purely on the basis of his own career, and of saying anything in order to build the electoral coalition required to get him elected, which, currently, means winning the votes of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, the small traders, white van man, and all of the reactionary declassed elements on their periphery, the bigots and racists, and other such flotsam and jetsam.
The union bureaucrats, like Dave Ward, are willingly deluding themselves, about Starmer's proposals for worker's rights, if elected. Having seen the way Starmer has lied, day after day, after seeing how one social-democratic policy after another, no matter how moderate, and even popular with workers, has been ditched, in order to appease that reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, why would any sensible union member believe that Starmer would stick to that particular promise?! No sooner than Starmer is in Downing Street than that promise will be ditched like all the others. Starmer needs the unions weak, because with labour shortages, and so workers able to get real wage increases, even without taking industrial action, in many sectors, the last thing Blue Labour wants is ordinary workers beginning to, also, organise in those unions, concentrated in the state sector, and also beginning to demand their wages catch up with those in the non-state sector.
So far, union bureaucrats have led workers up the hill, and down again, in wage disputes, by limiting action to useless and demoralising one and two day protest strikes, rather than all-out, co-ordinated action. At some point union members will get fed up of that, and the existing union bureaucrats will be forced to move or be replaced. As Blue Labour fails from Day One, and the reality of its government quickly manifests in one confrontation with workers after another, its inherent Bonapartist and totalitarian nature will lead it to try to smash down any such opposition from workers, and the last thing it is going to give to them, is any strengthening in the position of their mass organisations.
The reality of Boris Johnson, as I set out from the start was that he knew that Brexit was a nonsense. Its why he wrote two Daily Telegraph articles on it from opposite positions. It was simply a means of him becoming Tory Leader, based on that same core, petty-bourgeois base. Despite all of the talk about “getting Brexit Done”, at stage after stage, he was forced to capitulate to the EU, because that is simply the reality of the relation between Britain and the EU. Starmer, even more obviously knows that Brexit is a nonsense and a nightmare, hence his strongly pro-Remain position, prior to the referendum. But, like Johnson, he is a liar and opportunist, who will say anything simply to achieve his immediate aims, and so, he used that Remainer position to build a coalition of support inside Corbyn's Labour Party, preliminary to launching his bid for leadership, just as now, as his goal is not Leader of the Labour Party, the vast majority of whose members support re-joining the EU, but is to become Prime Minister, he has become the arch-Brexiter, and jingoist, to win the votes of that large mass of petty-bourgeois, along with the declassed elements in the old decayed urban areas (Red Wall).
Just as he is the prisoner of the Far Right inside Blue Labour, so too Blue Labour will be the prisoner of that large reactionary petty-bourgeoisie. It is one reason that from Day One, Blue Labour's chickens will come home to roost. Starmer may or may not believe that he can negotiate a “Labour Brexit”, such people who lie as easily as they breathe, often come to delude themselves that the words that come out of their mouths are what they actually think, even if they are the opposite of what they said they thought the day before. But, what Starmer thinks or doesn't think is as irrelevant as what his political clone, Boris Johnson, thought. Reality is what counts, and it simply imposes itself upon them.
Britain is dominated economically by the EU, and politically/strategically by the US, hence Lammy's cosying up to Trump, as the next likely US President. These two things are themselves antagonistic as, although, in the short-term, politics dominates economics, in the long-term, it is economics that determines politics. Politics is concentrated economics. Its one reason that EU imperialism is not going to simply allow British imperialism to act as a US surrogate in its midst, and to undermine it by seeking to have all the benefits of EU membership, without being a member.
On that, Starmer is likely to also copy Johnson in claiming that any such problems in negotiating a deal favourable to Britain are the fault of the EU, just as he seeks to blame immigrants for the problems of British capitalism. It is simply the same resort to racist tropes and scapegoating, as used by the Tories. Blue Labour will be forced to recognise the reality of Britain's subordinate position relative to EU imperialism, and to accept all of the conditions required by the EU, such as signing up to Single Market and Customs Union rules and regulations, ECJ jurisdiction, and so on. As soon as it does that, its reactionary popular front with the petty-bourgeoisie will fall apart.
In the Red Wall, the petty-bourgeoisie that formed the core base of the Tories and Brexit, are already shifting to Reform, just as, in the Blue Wall, the professional middle-class support for the Tories has shifted to the Liberals and Greens. When the Tories get obliterated in the election, and a large chunk of that petty-bourgeois base has gone to Reform, the door will be open for a return of the Conservatives to their former pro-EU stance, as they seek to win back those Blue Wall constituencies. As Blue Labour's reactionary electoral bloc falls apart, it will be it, not the Tories, in the Red Wall, losing votes to Reform, whilst it also loses votes from workers, and the liberal bourgeoisie, as it tries to cover its capitulation to economic reality, with more intensive lies and jingoistic and racist rhetoric, aimed at scapegoating foreigners for its own inevitable failure.
That opens up, as I wrote some time ago, the potential for a realignment, as the Conservative Party, with its much larger resources, and ties to the bourgeoisie to take over the Liberals, though as is the nature of such things, it would be presented as a merger. Blue Labour would quickly find its rotten, reactionary electoral bloc falls apart, and at the same time, it is confronted with economic conditions, in which the working-class is strengthening, placing even greater strains upon it, and causing it to move even further on to the ground of authoritarianism, as it seeks to batter it down, with only the appeal to more extreme racist and reactionary tropes for its ideological cover. The labour movement should prepare for that, now, and begin the fight back, not after the election, but ahead of it.
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