The penny’s dropped! Labour centrists have finally realised they haven’t a hope in hell of winning a general election.
Starmer’s Tory-lite Labour Party is beginning to realise that by offering zero opposition to the Tories, while at the same time failing to come up with any original ideas of their own, they have effectively lost all credibility. Successful election campaigns depend heavily on strong local campaigns (for which you need lots of local activists) and a great deal of money but the party has been hemorrhaging members and money on a grand scale for months now and Union support appears to be ebbing away.
Starmer’s hope that wealthy donors might be persuaded to step in and make up for the hefty losses from lost membership fees & Union funding seems to be nothing more than a pipe dream. After all, why would wealthy right wing donors back a party that, by all accounts, looks and sounds like a cheesy Tory party cover band? After all, the majority of wealthy business donors demand a return on their investment when the party is in government but if donors (investors) don’t think the party can win an election then they’re not going to invest.
Of course we don’t need to consult the runes to determine that this spells disaster for Starmer’s Labour Party. Only earlier this week, the Guardian reported on an investigation by the ‘Labour for the North’ group that concluded that “Labour ‘red wall’ seats lost to Conservatives in 2019 might be ‘lost for good'” However, they attempt to argue that this has more to do with a change in voting habits than it is to do with a change in the political landscape. They largely ignore the divisive impact of the Brexit debate over the past 4yrs or the damage done to voter trust after 13yrs of a centrist Blair/Brown government – voters who have always supported and continue to support popular socialist policies and who now no longer believe that the Labour party shares their values or is even interested in representing them.
A recent Ipsos Mori poll in Scotland has also revealed that the SNP are way ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives. Not surprisingly, Labour centrists have decided to use the Ipsos poll as an excuse to oust Richard Leonard as the Scottish Labour leader. Worth noting that the Scots rejected the Labour Party long before a Corbyn led socialist party was ever a prospect and way before Richard Leonard, another Socialist, took on the mantle of the Scottish Labour leader – both significant details that Labour centrists have deliberately side stepped for years, as is the fact that Labour gained 6 seats from the SNP in 2017, under Corbyn’s leadership.
If that wasn’t all, the Express reported last week that Boris Johnson is planning draw up a new electoral map “to help him destroy Labour at next election”. According to the Express, constituencies will be redrawn before 2024 and Johnson is also planning to increase the spending limits for each party from £19.5million to £33million.
Let us bear in mind that 3yrs ago, under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Labour very nearly won an election and probably would have won if the PLP hadn’t sabotaged their own campaign by starving marginal seats of funds and resources. However, although Labour’s current ruling centrist elite have finally registered the utter shambles they have created by their own actions, instead of rising to the challenge and trying to fix the damage they have done, they’ve opted to transform the Labour Party into a version of ChangeUK, something they call – Compass Labour.
As Labourlist explains, Compass is effectively a Labour centrist plan to form a coalition with other centrist political parties (LibDems, Greens, SNP), as they are now convinced that this is the only way they can defeat the Conservatives in a general election. Compass Labour have even produced a report on Labour’s electoral chances, ironically titled “If we divide, they conquer” and concluded that “Labour will struggle to win alone,” and that an alliance is the only way to install a Labour led government. What they’re really saying is that centrist Labour has no hope of winning unless they form alliance with other centrists and that’s the only option they are prepared to consider because they refuse to concede control to the democratic socialist left.
Incidentally, the LibDems and Greens have simultaneously just launched their own Compass groups. It’s also blatantly clear that this is far more than just cross-party collaboration as they’re proposing to “develop shared policy ideas and campaign together”. In fact, according to Labourlist, they’re planning to “hold informal discussion meetings, run fringe events, publish articles and campaign on issues relevant to a progressive alliance”
Surprisingly, Compass Labour appear to be in favour of a form of proportional representation as a replacement for first-past-the-post system while, at the same time, being entirely comfortable with politically disenfranchising the majority of the Labour Party’s own membership. It seems, therefore, that they are in favour of any system that allows them to gain and retain political control while, at the same time, ensures the left never will.
It actually doesn’t take an internal, politically motivated, Labour party report to convince the majority of the Labour membership that Labour has been made almost politically irrelevant by unscrupulous right wing political actors from within the party. People who have spent 5yrs smearing the party leadership, under Jeremy Corbyn (and the membership) and who have colluded to sabotage two Labour election campaigns. The fact that they did that tells us that these centrists are well aware that the Labour Party could actually win elections if the party was under socialist control and it also tells us just how determined they are to keep the left out of power. The Compass report simply reveals the real reasons they want to form a new centrist alliance – to install a centrist government and to ensure the left will never be allowed to win control of the Labour party again.
As a political activist and former Labour Party member, I must say I find the underhanded shenanigans from all the key political parties utterly distasteful. I personally no longer see any difference between Labour, the Conservatives, the LIbDems or the SNP who all appear to be more than content to use whatever gameplay they can think of to try and gain political control and who demonstrate zero desire to understand what voters actually want to see happen. They promise the earth and the minute they’re in power they forget everything and move the goal posts. Seems to me the current system is set up to disenfranchise voters and efforts to form a cross-party alliance only shows us that what voters want will always take a back seat to any efforts to keep the ruling elite in power.
There is a way to change the system in a way that empowers voters but it means ditching party loyalty and committing ourselves to championing local campaigns – choosing the best local candidate for the job, regardless of which party they belong to or don’t belong to. I’m currently working on a new project to form a Democratic Socialism Alliance that welcomes voters from all political persuasions and empowers all it’s members equally by giving them a platform on which to debate and even vote on issues and policies, as well as supports it’s members in the work they do as local campaigners. If you’d like to be part of this project or would just like to be kept informed about its progress then please drop me a quick email – admin@spotlight-newspaper.co.uk.
