Spoken Like A True Bonapartist

Keir Starmer's, reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalist, Blue Labour government is flailing like a drowning man. Starmer himself, who is even more lacking in principles, or original ideas, than he is in personality, was chosen, partly because of that, to be the cypher of the real forces behind Blue Labour, organised by the comically misnamed “Labour Together”, financed by opaque sources, with bank accounts in various tax havens across the globe. Blue Labour performed abysmally, in the 2024 General Election, despite the fact that it won a landslide parliamentary majority.

That landslide was down to the fraudulent nature of the electoral system, which amounts to ballot rigging. But, Blue Labour won less votes than did Corbyn's Labour in 2019, and 30% less share of the vote than did Corbyn's Labour in 2017. Even, now, it talks about the fact that it won a landslide, whilst avoiding the fact it won the smallest number of votes ever.  Its argument is similar to that of Starmer's friend Trump, who is busy jerrymandering electoral boundaries, in the US, to enable the Republicans to win more seats!  Yet, within less than a year, Blue Labour, under Starmer, has managed to reduce its popularity even more, as it inevitably began its period in office by attacking the working-class, and most particularly, the weakest and most vulnerable.  

In doing so, as the Tories metamorphosed into Reform, Blue Labour's actions have not only facilitated that rise of Reform, but, also, driven core Labour voters away from it, and into the hands of the Liberals, Greens, SNP, Plaid, and various Independents. The most obvious manifestation of that came in the 2025 local elections, but is also seen in the most recent polling data, showing that, in next year's local and regional elections, Blue Labour is going to get wiped out in Scotland and Wales, to the benefit of the SNP and Plaid. To the extent that Reform benefit from that, it is only as a result of the vote for these other parties being split. The more the Blue Labour vote collapses, and goes to SNP, Plaid, or, in England, to the Liberals, Greens, or Your Party the less Reform will benefit. That is merely a completion of the process of the conservative, social-democratic centre collapsing, already seen by the metamorphosis of the Tories into Reform, on the Right.

Starmer's latest lurch to the authoritarian, racist and nationalist Right, in response, is set to hasten the collapse of Blue Labour. The trajectory of Blue Labour, as with the Tories, is into Reform, meaning the Labour Party will be rent asunder.  That trajectory was set by all those Blue Labourist, jingoist Labour MP's and members that backed Brexit, and the Leave campaign of Farage and Johnson.  Some of them, like Lee Anderson, made the transition quickly.  Just as Starmer overnight abandoned all of the positions he stood on to win the Leadership, so, too, he will abandon any position, if he thinks it will get him more votes.  Today, he says Reform's plans to repatriate legal migrants are immoral, but tomorrow he will embrace it as Blue Labour policy, denying he ever thought anything else, as he has done on every other position he has opportunistically abandoned.

Starmer says he has a personal friendship with the convicted felon and sex
pest Trump.  So, did Mandelson and Epstein!

When Starmer talks about the danger represented by Reform, he does not mean what socialists, and even progressive social-democrats mean by that. He does not mean that it represents a threat to workers, to minorities, and to basic rights and freedoms. If he did mean that, then, he would not have been adopting the same language, methods and policies that Reform pursues in Britain, and likewise that his friend, Donald Trump pursues in the US. On the contrary, he would have been using the fact that Blue Labour is the government to do the opposite! Rather than blaming workers and the most vulnerable for the economic difficulties Britain faces, he would have been blaming the role of fictitious-capital, and the fact of 14 years of fiscal austerity imposed to protect the paper wealth of the owners of that fictitious capital. He would have been blaming the Brexit imposed by the Tories, whipped along by Farage, and have been organising Britain's re-joining the EU.

Rather than his racist scapegoating of migrants, he would have been welcoming their contribution to the economy, and he would have been organising safe, available legal routes into the country for migrants, be they economic migrants or refugees, so that they would have been able to work, and provide for their own accommodation and so on, rather than being corralled into decrepit former hotels, where they provide an easy focal point for the ire of racists and bigots, whipped into hysteria by the likes of Farage and Yaxley-Lennon, and Musk.

What Starmer means by the danger of Reform is only a threat to the chances of Blue Labour winning the next election. It is the same as Macron in France, presenting the threat represented by Le Pen, simply as a means of goading the opposition votes behind him, or of Harris in the US, doing the same in relation to Trump. It is demanding that the voters support them, despite their appalling politics and actions that created the conditions for the rise of the Right-wing populists in the first place. It is what Starmer did in 2024, and which, in terms of votes, already failed, just as it failed for Harris, and failed for Macron, in the Assembly elections.

Starmer and particularly the reactionary, racist and nationalist forces that stand behind him in Blue Labour and Labour Together, has no concern for workers rights and freedoms, or even basic civil rights and freedoms. Their support for the genocide in Palestine, by their allies within the Zionist state in Israel is illustrative of that. Its why they could so ridiculously proscribe Palestine Action as being a terrorist organisation, in order to try to close down any debate and criticism of the government's actions, and those of the Zionist state. Its why they have arrested hundreds of grannies for protesting that decision, whilst they welcome Zionist war criminals into Downing Street! Its why they have arrested dozens of people on grounds of “anti-Semitism” simply for carrying Palestinian flags, claiming that its intimidating to Zionists, who they falsely equate with all Jews, and yet, deny that the use of flags by British neo-Nazis and racists, and their own attempts to wrap themselves in that same colonialist, blood stained flag is in any way divisive or intimidating to those who, over centuries, were oppressed by it!

Mosely was a Labour Minister too with position akin to Blue Labour

And, the fact that Starmer is not concerned about the real threat that Reform, and more particularly those that will ride on its bandwagon, represent to workers, and basic rights and freedoms, is shown, precisely by the fact that, in response, at every turn, Starmer has adopted those same measures!!! In response to Farage's racism, Starmer has sought to present his own racist policies, scapegoating migrants, for example. Now, Starmer responds to Farage's scurrilous proposals to stop all migrants coming into the country, and to send some of those already here, back to somewhere or other, reminiscent of Mosely, and then the National Front, in the 1960's and 70's, by proposing to clamp down on migrants by introducing a compulsory digital ID card!!! The Gestapo would have been proud of such logic, and measures, which would have made rounding up all the Jews, trades unionists, communists and others a far quicker and more efficient process.

If Starmer really wanted to deal with the problem of wages and conditions being undermined by “undocumented migrants”, as his friend Donald, in the US, refers to them, he would, instead, enable those migrants to enter Britain, by safe, legal routes. They would, then, not be subject to being trafficked or exploited by criminal gangs. They would be able to work legally, and obtain the required National Insurance number and so on, as well as being able to join trades unions and work with their fellow workers to obtain better pay and conditions for all. If Starmer really wanted to address the question of workers being undermined and undercut, he would not be watering down the proposals for workers and trades union rights, but would be strengthening them, and proposing much bigger rises in the Minimum Wage, including making it a Minimum Weekly wage.

If Starmer really wanted to prevent workers being undercut by undocumented workers – a problem that existed long before migrants were blamed for it, for example, the use of “lump” labour in the building industry - he would strengthen the ability of trades unions  to organise committees of workers inspection, with a right to enter any workplace, and check for malpractice by rogue employers. When Marxists talk about the threat of forces like those of Reform or Trump, we do not mean the threat they pose to the electoral careers of careerist politicians, but the threat they pose, to the workers, and to our rights and freedoms, and when we talk, as Trotsky did, about the need to unite to defeat them, we do not mean lining up behind the same bourgeois politicians whose actions created the basis for the rise of that reaction, but, uniting, in action, with the millions of workers that were misled by them.

That includes, now, opposing Starmer's latest attack on workers' rights and freedoms in his proposals to impose a compulsory digital ID card. Blair attempted to impose ID cards in the early 2000's, and was defeated. Workers and the labour movement should defeat Starmer's reactionary proposals too, and mobilise wider forces in the process. Starmer claims that the purpose is to stop illegal migration, but that is clearly bullshit. The rogue employers employing undocumented workers, are not going to be asking for a digital ID any more than they currently ask for any other ID, or documents! As for the employers that do not engage in such activities, they have already noted that they have no difficulty in obtaining the required information. And, the large majority of migrants are, in any case, legal migrants who come here, with a visa!

But, imagine how much easier it would have been for Thatcher's bully boys to have stopped pickets moving around the country in 1984, if they all had to be carrying a digital ID, which, in any case, could be continually tracked. It is an authoritarian regime's dream. So, when they also refer to Estonia, as has been pointed out, several million people there, for a time found that there digital ID had simply disappeared from the computer systems, making them effectively “non-persons”, unable to access any services.

Their use of the flag not at all intimidatory and symolic

Imagine what a Yaxley-Lennon/Musk regime would be able to do with that kind of power, to be able to simply disappear millions of people, at first digitally, and then, literally! And, having all of this vital data in one place, also makes it much easier for hackers to simply get everything they want on millions of people. Its not as though UK governments have any kind of good track record in rolling out big computer systems.

Others have also pointed out simple questions such as “what if you don't have a smart phone?” I have only obtained a smart phone in the last few weeks. Before then I didn't even have a mobile phone of any kind. At least, the young salesmen understood, when, I pointed it out to him, the difficulties of doing anything without one. My wife still doesn't have a smart phone, but she continues to get messages sent to her old mobile that presume that it is. The government spokespeople, and reporters, seemed to have no conception of the problem that represents for their proposals.  Only 82% of people over 65 own a smartphone, and although the percentage for the population as a whole is around 90%, that figure is distorted by the fact that many have more than one phone, and many phones are left unused.  Even so, if 10% of the population do not own a smart phone, that is around 7 million people.

But, those are simply obvious problems with the actual implementation of such a scheme, assuming that the state itself is, and continues to be, a benign actor. If Starmer really does see the danger that a Reform government represents, then, placing that kind of power in the hands of such a regime is the last thing he should be proposing. But, of course, its not those real threats that Starmer is concerned about, but only the threat that he and Blue Labour might lose the election. So he has scrambled once more on to the territory of Farage, Trump, Musk and Yaxley-Lennon, to whip up racist and nationalist hysteria, and to propose a solution to a non-problem, by imposing yet another authoritarian, illiberal measure.