This was posted to r/LabourUK today (and, unsurprisingly, eventually deleted by mods. Thank God for the Internet Archive.) It seems as straightforward and concise a summary of the most salient critiques of Labour under Starmer you’ll find anywhere. Some of the passages that stick with me the most:
A while ago I finally chucked in my membership. The final straw which broke the camel’s back being Starmer unwilling to condemn the evil Saudi takeover of Newcastle, whilst prattling on about James Bond needing to be female….
My mrs works in a care home. She likes Burnham, is pro armed forces, centre left on most issues, left leaning on nationalisation, LGBT and trade union rights, a bit centre right on crime, and is exactly the sort of person Labour NEED as a minimum just to hold onto seats let alone to win. So when she sees the party is resorting to attacking unions, putting the likes of Cooper (who’s WCA brutalised the disabled – people she has worked with for years – she has seen the terror they have been subjected to by Atos / DWP thugs) in key positions, attempts to edge out people like Rayner (who are like my mrs – northern and working class), and shifting the sort of soft left figures out of key positions, she realises the party is no longer for her. She, like I wanted an Attlee style reset of everything – we are sick to death of having to work through this virus, lose colleagues to it and get treated like shit. Regardless of whether this new variant is a relatively harmless storm in a teacup or something so deadly it will end up slaughtering vast swathes of the population, she (and I) will still have to work through it. Policies and figures who appease Westminster based political pundits don’t cut it.
If Starmer was genuinely interested in unity, the soft left would not be being purged from key positions, as they are literally the “centre” of the fucking party. Rayner herself is bang in the middle of the party and has great support from much of the base. Alienating her shows the direction of the party is simply to become some drippy form of market liberalism coupled with establishment politics. Nor would he be tolerating stupid attacks on unions, when given the state of the country, unions are more important than ever.
Mike Passarini 