Bulletins and News Discussion from July 15th to July 21st, 2024 - It's Joever

Interesting article in Canadian Dimension analyzing the UK Labour victory.

The argument presented is that the Labour win is the penultimate stage of British political collapse. After over a decade of Conservative dysfunction, Starmer has rode into power supported by most mainstream media. However, the party might be doomed:

Starmer’s “responsible” manifesto promised very little to working people, while showering generous subsidies, low taxes, lucrative contacts and permissive deregulation on big corporations and the rich, both British and foreign. Promises of increased social spending are predicated on growth that is unlikely if neoliberalism prevails, and such social spending as is undertaken will involve contracting services out to big corporations, as Wes Streeting, the new Health Secretary, has already indicated. The falsehood of both claims has been noted. What is less discussed is that together these falsehoods will prevent Starmer’s Labour from fulfilling its assigned mission and might even end the party.

... as the governments of major neoliberal financialized countries around the world—the US, France, Germany—are finding out, keeping control over state and society while implementing the neoliberal policies corporate capital, domestic and foreign, requires, is difficult, if not impossible. In Britain, with decades of neoliberalism topped with austerity, the disasters of Brexit and COVID, creaking public services administered by extortionate corporations, and the Rwanda deportation farce, the process is much further advanced.

With the Conservatives headed into disintegration or irrelevance, the incoming Labour government may prove the penultimate stage in the collapse of the UK political establishment. The brightness of its success in fashioning Starmer’s Labour into its instrument is the gaseous brilliance of the supernova, the efflorescence that precedes a star’s death. Once Starmer’s government and party start malfunctioning, as they must soon, the UK political establishment will lose its last instrument of social and political control, falling into an unprecedented and unpredictable crisis.

The article then talks about how, despite the political majority that Labour won, their actual majority is extremely fraught. Starmer's majority is less than in 1997 under Blair when the Conservatives were a more powerful force. Corbyn won 40% of the vote in 2019 with 69% turnout. Starmer won 34% of the vote this year with 60% turnout, which is almost the lowest turnout in the UK post-war period. In total, a mere 20% of Britain's voting-age population actually voted for Starmer, and an overwhelming majority of Labour voters said they only wanted to get the Conservatives out. What this indicates is that Britain is still very politically agitated and not at all unified or mollified under a Labour banner, and:

As it inevitably reneges on its few promises, the public as well as the left of the Labour Party, having lived through 45 years of neoliberalism and Labour and Conservative attempts to tart it up as somehow realizing the public interest, will only ever be a hair trigger away from protest. So, a Starmer government crisis will come sooner rather than later and, with the Tories likely to have wandered off into the farthest wilds of anti-immigrant populism, the British political establishment will be left without an instrument to control the state while keeping alive the appearance of electoral democracy. The resulting chaos could easily spin out of control unless the left organizes a political force to take control of the apparatus of the state.

The UK left is far from dead, though it is still reeling from the purges and is still largely unorganized on a national level. Corbyn won his seat as an independent and four other pro-Palestine MPs unseated Labour MPs. Others, including Galloway, were defeated but not by massive margins.

The left, however, faces 1920s-scale challenges. Then as now, it can’t just “build another party.” Courageous new left forces outside the Labour Party and those inside it are both necessary to a renewed left. Only their collaborative work can turn the imminent chaos of Starmer’s failure in favour of working people.