Over the last week, there was outrage amongst Labour members and supporters about Keir Starmer's latest racist outburst, which deliberately channelled the language of Enoch Powell's “Rivers of Blood” speech, in the 1960's.
Media discussion following Starmer's latest descent into the gutter, not surprisingly compared it to Powell's speech. The reality is that Starmer is worse than Powell. Powell was an old style British colonialist, much as with Churchill, and, for such colonialists, the ideas of white supremacy, racism, “the white man's burden”, and so on, were integral to their world view, and ideology. Powell like Churchill, was a bourgeois nationalist.
But, none of that is true of Starmer. He began as a socialist, a self-proclaimed Marxist, or even Trotskyist, though as Marx remarked in relation to such similar claims by the Guesdists, if this is Marxism or Trotskyism, then I am no Marxist, nor Trotskyist. The reality is that Starmer's Marxism and Trotskyism, long since abandoned anyway, had little to do with the genuine article, and was, like much of that trend, since WWII, simply a version of petty-bourgeois socialism, moralism, and petty-bourgeois nationalism. But, even on that insubstantial foundation, Starmer knows racism when he sees it, and knows that it is based on a lie, and the pernicious role it plays. He has simply picked it up, and used it for his own short-term political advantage. As with his whole approach, he has shown that he has no principles and that, much as with Trump, what he says today, will be denied tomorrow, requiring him to lie repeatedly, a characteristic he seems to display with alacrity.
At least with Powell and Churchill, they represented bourgeois nationalism, and so their inherent racism and colonialism, merged into their support for modern day imperialism. In that respect, they were more akin to Mussolini or Hitler, and, indeed, Churchill, as with most of the British ruling class, and establishment, openly approved of the role of Mussolini in the 1920's, and of Hitler in the 1930's, and squashing an uppity working-class, in addition to their support for virulent anti-Semitism. Like Hitler and Mussolini, Churchill, in particular, as an imperialist, understood the need to appeal to, and mobilise the masses of the petty-bourgeoisie, as foot soldiers against the workers, only, then, to turn on them, in the interests of large-scale industrial capital.
But, Starmer is not a bourgeois nationalist. He is probably nothing other than a careerist, whose beliefs extend no further than what he thinks the next popular wave might be to get a few more easy votes.
But, precisely that makes him worse than Powell, because, as with Trump, its impossible to place any limits on the depravity he might sink to, in order to chase those votes. When Corbyn was Labour Leader, the fact that some British Jews felt threatened was entirely misplaced, but in some cases, could be understood given the level of media fear-mongering being whipped up, and given the role of various Zionist organisations, in making the most ridiculous claims about a Corbyn government bringing back the gas chambers!
That was a part of a deliberate campaign by opponents of the Left, to weaponize anti-Semitism, and to use it against Corbyn, and the Left. Former leaders of Zionist groups inside the Labour Party, like David Mencer, made hyperbolic comments about needing to leave Britain out of fear. Of course, Mencer himself, now acts as propagandist and apologist for the Zionist regime in Israel, and its ongoing war crimes and genocide against Palestinians. Not a fanciful future genocide, but a very real one, taking place with the active support of Britain, and its Blue Labour government, with Starmer, himself, having said publicly that the Zionist regime had a right to commit war crimes, war crimes his government continues to facilitate with its supply of arms.
Starmer and his Blue Labour government are not bourgeois nationalists, but worse. They are reactionary petty-bourgeois, nationalists, seeking to appeal to that reactionary populist mass, not to actively mobilise it against a revolutionary proletariat, as Mussolini and Hitler did, but simply to secure parliamentary votes. Hitler and Mussolini, having gained power, sought to advance the interests of large-scale, imperialist capital, by the way which seemed most obvious at the time, by engaging in imperialist war, to create a large European state, to compete against US imperialism on the one hand, and the USSR on the other. Take away the superficial political features of those regimes, their lack of democracy and brutality, and the underlying historical reality is that they were “progressive”, in the same way that Trotsky described, in relation to the actions of Germany in WWI, in trying to create such a unified European state, albeit under German tutelage. The historic task they undertook, was progressive, even if the means of achieving it was brutal, and not one that socialists could ever support. But, then, historically progressive changes have often been brought about by brutal means that socialists would not endorse. Capitalism itself is a prime example. As Trotsky describes, in The Program of Peace, the historic task of creating a single European state, based upon the existing imperialist stage of capital, is one that is progressive, and that socialists would, themselves, seek to bring about, as a requirement of socialism. We would not propose doing so by creating totalitarian regimes, or by undertaking imperialist wars!!!
The fact that Starmer's “Marxism” and “Trotskyism” was never really anything of the sort, but simply a form of reactionary, petty-bourgeois moralism, and petty-bourgeois nationalism, means that his transition into his current right-wing, populism is a simple transition, and one seen before. The example of Pilsudski is an obvious one. So, it is no surprise, given what has been seen in the performance of Starmer and Blue Labour that many people in Britain, today, do feel genuinely threatened, in a way that is far more grounded in reality than were the fears of British Jews whipped up by the likes of David Mencer, or The Jewish Chronicle and so on, in relation to Corbyn. Its not some hyperbole being whipped up by others that is the basis of those fears, but the outright, vile, racist actions and language of Starmer and his government that is the source of their fears.
Starmer's vile language in his speech was no accident, the allusions to the theme of Powell's speech no coincidence, and that is born out not just by their other statements, but also by their actions, their constant scapegoating of migrants, and so on. And, those expecting that this is all some ploy, should have learned by now that that was never the case. Those expecting that whilst chirruping all of the petty-bourgeois, racist and nationalist crap, and support for Brexit, Starmer was going to do a deal with the EU that led to entry by the back door should realise by now that nothing of the sort is planned. The provisional agreement with Trump shows the direction of travel, and the EU can offer nothing concrete in the coming talks, because when Trump demands access to British markets for chlorinated chicken, hormone treated beef and so on that will rule out any access for Britain to EU markets, any potential even for phyto-sanitary agreements and so on. Even the vaunted scheme for free movement of young people is likely to be frustrated, precisely because, it will inevitably lead to court cases by other British citizens, rightfully claiming age discrimination against them, and demanding, legitimately, the return of their own right to free movement within the EU.
Even in its own terms, Starmer's approach has failed. His head long rush to the right, his adoption of the most crass, racist and jingoistic sloganeering has not won votes of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie and lumpen elements, and has acted to drive Labour's core working-class vote into the hands of the Liberals, Greens, and has thereby, divided and dissipated it. Only ruin can result from a continuation of that road. Starmer must go, the failed experiment with Blue Labour, which should never have started, must be brought to an end. It is time for the labour movement to take back control of the Labour Party, before its too late.
8 comments:
Most of Reform's successes in the local elections were at the expense of the Tories: the Tory membership appears to have picked a dud in the form of Kemi Badenoch, much as they did previously in the form of Liz Truss. Badenoch seems to me to be a Diet Farage, and no-one will vote for that when Full Fat Farage is on offer! It thus seems like Reform will become the right-wing party in the UK, with the Tories going into terminal decline and ensuring that Labour won't benefit from a split right-wing vote next time.
As I see it the fundamental strategic question for Labour going forward is "what to do about the Red Wall?"
The traditional industries that originally made the Red Wall a Labour heartland have now been dead for so long that even their former employees are no longer a factor economically (because they're almost all now dead or in care homes), and while the Tories are bitterly resented for presiding over the decline of those industries, (New) Labour are also bitterly resented because of their failure to provide sufficient local opportunities, meaning that most young people who grow up there move away when (or after) attending university. Labour's true core vote is now the younger voters (often university graduates) along with non-white voters that are overwhelmingly concentrated in big cities (which severely limits their impact under FPTP).
This made the Red Wall very fertile ground for the nostalgic fantasies being pushed by Reform, and I expect that racist "Great Replacement" type rhetoric (which is now absolutely rampant on social media) feels more compelling in areas which are losing population. In an area where most of the population is old, can Labour offer anything better than welfarism? And is the cost of this welfarism one factor that draws you to the kind of isolationism that decries spending "billions on bombs for Ukraine"? I'm sure that the poor state of the UK economy during the 1930s was also a big factor driving the appeasement of Hitler!
(And in my darkest moments I wondered if Russia's stereotypical vodka-sodden lifestyles have given them an advantage, in that few Russians live long enough to become burdensome Alzheimer's patients!)
Or should Labour push for proportional representation so that it could abandon the Red Wall to Reform but still win (or at least become the largest party in a coalition) by making its metropolitan core vote (much of which under FPTP is wasted building supermajorities in safe seats) count to the fullest?
Hi George,
I have another post in the works on this, so I won't make this a long reply. Yes, Reform took and always takes far more votes from the Tories than Labour. Its why the narrative that Labour lost "Red Wall Seats", first to Tories then to Reform, because it wasn't Brexity or racist enough was always wrong. It lost because, New Labour destroyed its traditional vote, by offering workers nothing, so many of them increasingly sat on their hands, or else some looked to the illusion of more "left" options such as Liberals or Greens - look out my replies to Damon Hoppe from getting on for twenty years ago, or something. In Red Wall seats, you also have to remember that many of those old industry workers you talked about, a) either were already racists and bigots, who never voted Labour to begin with, or did so despite their own reactionary views, b) in the 1980's, stopped being wage workers and became immiserated petty-bourgeois, self employed gardeners, window cleaners, shop keepers and so on, and so who adopted, over a time, the same kind of individualistic, self-centred mindset of all petty-bourgeois. For a very long time, therefore, they were never what constituted the core Labour vote into the 2000's. That core vote has, in fact, always been based on the more advanced sections of the working-class, and in the best periods, also on the professional middle-class. In the 1970's, for example, when I was an ASTMS shop steward, it was these white collar, managerial and technical unions like ASTMS and AUEW-TASS, as well as increasingly the NUT and so on that had the most "left" leadership and stance.
With New Labour having cratered its core vote during the 2000's, and with the "events dear boy" of the 2008 crash, its defeat in 2010 followed, though the damning role of Clegg in supporting Cameron rather than Brown, and so also making possible the 14 years of austerity and the EU referendum shouldn't be underestimated. Even then, Labour continued to win in the red wall eats, mostly because the vanguard of the racists and bigots, UKIP and the BNP, at that time, could not mobilise them to vote in General Elections, though as Stoke and other places showed, they could get enough of them out in low polls such as local elections to be effective.
The real reason, Labour has been losing in these seats is that the Brexit Vote mobilised that apathetic bloc of racists, and Bojo was able to consolidate it with the existing reactionary Tory vote, much as Thatcher did in the 80's, at the same time that, until Corbyn, Labour could not enthuse its own core vote to come out and vote for a continuation of the same old conservative social-democratic (neoliberal) agenda that had caused many of the problems of economic decline, amid huge asset price inflation in the first place.
It has only been a shuffling of deckchairs on he Titanic between Tories and Reform, a change of label not substance, and with Blue Labour trying to be third wheel, as yet another reactionary nationalist, racist party, that is doomed to fail. Unless Labour gets back its own core vote, via arguing for EU membership, alongside 1960's style progressive social-democracy, it will lose. Tories already now in fourth, meaning a split seems inevitable with the Tories merging with Reform, and the Conservatives merging with Liberals. A sort of reverse of the SDP in the 1980's. But, unless Starmer is removed and Labour changes course, its vote and many members will also simply be drawn to the enhanced Liberals, and possibly Greens. FPTP will work against it.
My guess is the unions will ally with the Blair-rights to oust Starmer and change course. Or Blair-rights already plan on destroying Labour, and doing a mass SDP themselves creating a new large centre party, freed of the existing labour movement control of it.
I disagree with your claim that "New Labour destroyed its traditional vote by offering workers nothing". Despite New Labour's very non-socialistic rhetoric, they did preside over a significant decline in UK inequality.
UK inequality in disposable income (as measured by the Gini index) peaked in 2000 at 0.36 due to the policies of Thatcher and Major, having increased from a value of 0.25 in 1979. New Labour reversed about half of that increase, with the Gini index decreasing by 2010 to 0.32.
The problem is that while New Labour was good at helping poor people it didn't really help the places that had lost their economic raison d'être with the death of old industries. And I'm not sure what they could really have done better in that respect: the Red Wall corresponds (to first approximation) to England's coalfields, and coal mining (as well as coal usage) was dying out in Britain anyway, as indeed it had to for reasons of fighting climate change. And the shipbuilding that used to provide good opportunities for manual workers in Sunderland was killed by Far Eastern competition, as international maritime trade became more Pacific-centred rather than Atlantic-centred, and also carried in gigantic container ships too big to be built in the UK's traditional estuarine shipyards. The top 10 of shipbuilding nations now includes only one European country (Germany) and even they are way behind the Asian giants.
Those old industries had been the basis of very close-knit, ethnically homogenous and socially-conservative communities, which nevertheless supported Old Labour for materialistic reasons. Once those industries died out the whole basis of Labour support in those areas was on borrowed time, even if many communities there limped on for a decade or two afterwards, supported by the generous pensions for their retired workers, as well as redundancy payments (which as you point out were often used to set up small businesses). Another issue that you didn't point out is that for those who remained in the wage workforce, jobs were increasingly in customer-facing roles and male workers having to take those jobs were deeply resentful: both because that kind of work was traditionally female-coded, but also because they couldn't get away with the kind of bigotry that had been routinely expressed in the (near-100% white male) workforces of the old industries.
Since (as you correctly point out) embracing bigotry or Brexit is likely to lose Labour more votes than it gains, what alternative do you suggest to counter the threat of far-right voting by those "left behind" by changes in economic geography?
I think you fall into the usual trap of confusing "poor people" with workers, or more specifically Labour's core vote. The poorest are often not workers. They are the long-term unemployed and others that have a dependency on the welfare state. They are atomised, like the petty-bourgeoisie, and often resent those in work, especially the better organised, better paid workers. Those sections have never been part of Labour's core or any other vote. I grew up in communities with such people, and as a Labour activist encountered them frequently. They were usually marked by being at best apathetic towards politics, or at worst nihilistic and potential fodder for the far right, but without any credible vehicle to pull them out of their apathy and give vent to their prejudices until it was provided to them by the Brexit vote.
The petty-bourgeoise are frequently less affluent than workers. Moreover, the Gini coefficient on income you refer to is meaningless in this regard. Maybe for the poorest there was some levelling up to workers, but that simply acted to piss of those workers, who saw their real wages stagnate, from he 1980's, and since. Meanwhile, the incomes of the super affluent increased, and many of those incomes are not captured, because they come in other forms such as granting of share options and so on. Most significantly, as I have set out before, income inequality is not the main consideration, wealth inequality is. Wealth inequality most certainly didn't decrease under new labour. Share and bond prices rocketed, as well as property prices, meaning those that had had more, and those that didn't became increasingly excluded.
You are right about many of those industries like coal having had their day, and others like shipbuilding, steel production require much larger scales of production than Britain on its own can provide. That is why the EU is central to provide that scale, and why Brexit was stupid. New labour at least understood this last bit, but because it was wedded to the ideas of conservative social-democracy, and delusion that you could create wealth by printing money tokens and inflating asset prices, including house prices, it rejected all of the elements of social-democracy, including those seen in part at least in Germany, that could have taken advantage of that larger market/scale of production, by investing in real capital accumulation. Where was Wilson's "White Heat of technology", NEDO and so on, let alone the NEB and so on to direct investment into the kinds of new tech industries of the future that could have provided the high value/high skill jobs of the future, which, as in the past, would not have employed the former coal miners, steelworkers and so on, but could have employed their kids?
And, as I've pointed out before, the idea of the red Wall seats only being characterised by that decay, unemployment and so on, with the better educated kids having moved out to cities in London and so on, is false. My youngest son still lives in Stoke with his partner, and they are both employed in media production. Many of my sons friends from school also still live here. Some of them, and some new friends he met at work, who had not been involved in politics before, joined Labour to vote for Corbyn, and have now left again. They have no interest in Reform or the Tories, but also no interest in Starmer's Labour, even before it tried to become BNP Light. They may vote Green or possibly Liberal, but more likely will not vote at all, and its that which is the biggest threat to Labour, not Reform.
You claimed that New Labour offered workers nothing, and I countered by pointing out that disposable income inequality fell under New Labour: is it your contention that this reduction in inequality was itself primarily down to welfare (likely much more easily paid for under Blair than today, as the UK was still a net oil exporter at the time)?
The Old Labour core vote was of course workers in the public sector (then including nationalized industries) along with skilled factory workers, and it wasn't so much that New Labour deserted those strata, as that they shrank massively due to deindustrialization, which (combined with the activation by the Brexit vote of the lumpen reactionaries you described in your last post) allowed the right to gain the ascendancy in much of the Red Wall.
The kind of state-led industrial policy which you were clearly alluding to (with your mention of Wilson's "white heat of technology" speech) was a failure: none of the products of this drive (the most famous examples of which would likely be Concorde and the Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor) were successful in world markets. While European integration certainly helped in some sectors (contrast for example the flourishing of Airbus with the struggling of national-scale European airliner manufacturers: Europe's only really successful pre-Airbus jet airliners were the French Caravelle and the British One-Eleven) it hasn't in others: Big Tech platforms are overwhelmingly American (as Europe is hindered by linguistic fragmentation and a lack of anything comparable to the Silicon Valley venture capitalist culture) and manufacturing is becoming ever more dominated by China.
Maybe instead of Britain learning from Europe, it is Britain, Europe and the United States that all need to be learning from China?
And while Germany has clearly done better than Britain economically, that has not prevented it from developing its own "left behind" region (namely the former DDR) that is attracted to far-right politics (which is after all the original topic I was seeking to discuss). And that is also in spite of the fact that Germany put far more money into "levelling up" the East than Britain ever did into "levelling up" the North!
What would your response be to the increasing geographic concentration of jobs, which leads to overcrowding and extortionate rents in the favoured areas, and far-right surges in the unfavoured areas?
Yes, I'm saying that a lot of the drop in income inequality was a relative rise for the poorest as a result of welfare. Some effect may have come from the Minimum Wage, but it was set so low, and zero hours contracts and other forms of precarity make it doubtful. The normal rise in employment from the start of the new long wave after 1999, increased wages, but not at the expense of profits, rents and so on. Also look at Labour's response to that in 2007/8, when lorry drivers struck for higher wages, as I wrote at the time. New Labour did nothing to get rid of Tory anti-union laws, or CCT 9renamed Best Value), and the hiving off of council houses etc. In the meantime, any fall in income inequality was massively outweighed by rises in wealth inequality as asset prices surged.
Deindustrialisation happened in the 80's, before New Labour. It led to the expansion of the petty-bourgeoisie that had its impact on the Tory Party and elections. The significance of Wilson I was referring to was not a question of success or not, but what it meant in terms of outlook, geared to actual investment, as against speculation in financial assets and property. In fact, Europe suffered a similar fate, though less so. In other words, the corporatist agenda of the 1970's gave way to the neoliberal agenda of the 1980's.
The DDR was already "left behind" before it fell under the ambit of West Germany. But, I've recently given the figures taken from Paul mason's Pots-Capitalism, about the rise in per capita GDP in former Stalinist states, showing that it rose far more than anywhere else.
I've discussed this with you before. I would be in favour of planning so that we scrap the Green Belt monopolisation of land use, which pushes up land prices, and so new house prices. I would limit the size of developments, and require decent green space between them. I would not waste money on fixed route forms of public transport such as buses, trams or railways, and would focus on flexible forms of transport such as taxis, cooperatively run ubers, and hopefully soon, driverless electric vehicles that can be summoned and disposed of on request.
Forget HS2, and instead build better East-West links, and airport hubs distributed across the country. Build a world leading broadband infrastructure, fibre and mobile so that as much as possible can be shifted out of fixed work places. Develop AI controlled robots to take on undesirable manual jobs such as care workers, bin collectors, and so on. This latter is coming soon anyway.
It's not surprising that the former DDR became a "left behind" region as most of it was part of what used to be known as "East Elbia": mostly a relatively poor agricultural region. (And the one East Elbian region that actually had industrial prosperity was Silesia, which was lost to Poland in 1945.)
And you are correct that GDP per capita rose significantly after reunification, but my point was that it this didn't stop the far right becoming popular there. (And if we look at West Germany, the far-right is most popular not in poor Saar or Schleswig-Holstein, but in wealthy Bavaria.) The problem seems to be more driven by youth flight than by poverty.
How exactly does increased wealth inequality harm ordinary working people? It doesn't seem obvious to me how higher share or bond prices would have a significant negative impact: higher housing prices are harmful of course, but is that not so much a macroeconomic failing, as a case of insufficient housing in the places where people want to live?
The dominance of London and the South East is not the result of planning laws: the 1930s make that clear, as they were a time before most of those planning laws were introduced in which new industries located overwhelmingly in the South East (or the Midlands in the case of the car industry).
Indeed, those laws (and specifically the Metropolitan Green Belt) were likely introduced precisely in the hope of driving new industry northwards (they followed from the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population, known for short as the "Barlow Commission"), but they backfired as the industry mostly went abroad instead.
The wealthy heart of Europe is the "Blue Banana" running roughly from London through Belgium, the Netherlands and West Germany through to Switzerland and northern Italy. Places elsewhere in Europe are generally only rich if they are either capital cities (such as Paris), or the closest major city to the Blue Banana in their respective country (such as Barcelona) or rich in natural resources (such as oil-rich Norway or Aberdeen, or indeed Northern England during the 19th century Age of Steam).
In those terms, South East England's overwhelming economic advantages over the rest of the contemporary UK become clear: it has the most favourable climate, it's where the capital is, and it's the closest part of the UK to Europe's wealthy "Blue Banana" region. And another point is that the economics of shipping mean that island nations in particular tend to be overwhelmingly dominated by their capital cities: Dublin, Tokyo and (South Korea functions as an island because its only land border is the most tightly sealed on Earth) Seoul are all even more dominant over their respective countries than London is.
In the 1970's, however, the per capita GDP in the DDR rose above that in Britain! It was an indication of the extent to which Britain was in decline. The far right in the DDR, and other parts of the former Stalinist states, is a reflection of the carry over of the “national socialist” ideology of Stalinism itself, which shares many features with Nazism.
The fact that the far Right do well in more affluent areas, is again a reflection of the fact that its support is complex. On the one hand all studies show that support for such parties is greatest in areas where there is least immigration, but large amounts of fear of immigrants stoked up. There is also apparent divergences of wealth and affluence, cheek by jowl. Not everyone in a wealthier more affluent area is themselves wealthy or affluent. One aspect of that also becomes gentrification. The actually wealthy and affluent are able to pay for private services and provision, whereas the petty-bourgeoisie, precarious workers, etc. find public provision deteriorates.
Higher wealth inequality affects ordinary workers, partly in the way described above. A very obvious thing is, indeed, in relation to property. The crucial divide today is between the owners of assets and non-owners of assets. If you own them and the price rises, non-owners are excluded from them, and that applies not just to property but to things like pensions. The higher share and bond prices rise, the less affordable they become for workers to buy to put into their pension fund, and so the less able the fund is to cover their pensions, hence the black holes. If your parents own a house – and money in a mutual fund – they can lend you money, meaning you have more chance of getting a deposit to buy a house and so on. Not to mention inheritance. If not, you have to rent, and as all asset prices have risen, and property has fallen into the hands of those who already own assets, the higher also rents have been driven, only sustained as a result of a ballooning bill for Housing Benefit, which goes straight into the pockets of landlords – and also drains profits.
The reason there is insufficient housing is that the rise in asset prices, drives higher land prices, which makes any new housing far more expensive than it would have been. After WWII, land made up 10% of the price of a new house, today, its 70%. Its another example of how New labour failed to offer workers anything, because they continued the policy of Thatcher/Major, and saw inflating asset prices as money for nothing, wealth from thin air, believing everyone could get a house, despite soaring prices, simply on the back of the near zero interest rates that were the concomitant of rising asset prices, and money surging into that speculation rather than into actual investment in real capital accumulation. But, as with all such bubbles and Ponzi schemes that quickly burst in 2007/8.
Even council housing was hived off to ALMO's, with former Housing Directors getting cushy jobs on double their previous salaries, and the refurbs were to come from even more borrowing, until that was also not possible, and all of the schemes for urban renewal like Pathfinder, were found to be corrupt, lining the pockets of more speculators, and were abandoned, leaving usually the poorest left in those decayed areas to live amongst it.
The new industries that set up in the 1930's, many of them US companies, followed an old pattern that, at the start of a new long wave technological revolution, the new industries arise also in new geographical areas. They find, new young workers. But, there was also distinct social-democratic planning involved, with the creation of new towns, and so on.
There is a lot in what you say about the centripetal forces that concentrate wealth, and its again why Brexit, which cuts off Britain from the EU, and the Blue Banana, was stupid. But hat is why even a social-democratic strategy for development requires an EU wide footprint.
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