Starmer should be looking to Clement Atlee for inspiration, not Tony Blair
Keir Starmer sucking up to the rich and powerful at World Economic Forum, Davos.
With the Government on the rack amidst the austerity-fuelled school building crisis, yesterday’s shadow cabinet reshuffle gave Keir Starmer one final chance to live up to his leadership pledges: to unite the Labour Party and offer the country a transformative programme, one which is more urgent and popular than ever in the Tories’ broken Britain. Sadly, what we got, as commentators have concluded, was yet another shift to the Right.
Nowhere was this clearer than in moves against the soft left, particularly Lisa Nandy, who was demoted for the second time, now to shadow an international development ministry which doesn’t even exist. Preet Gill, in turn, left the shadow cabinet, while Nick Thomas-Symonds faced another demotion, to Shadow Minister without Portfolio. Rosena Allin-Khan left the Shadow Cabinet after Starmer told her he did “not see a space for a mental health portfolio in a Labour Cabinet”, despite having herself sat in the shadow cabinet in such a role
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Meanwhile, the scrapping of the dedicated Shadow Development brief means that Starmer’s pledge to re-establish the department abolished by Boris Johnson will be added to his long list of broken promises. Nor will there be a dedicated employment rights role, the first time in nearly half a decade that Labour’s Shadow Cabinet has not contained such a role; big business has a dedicated secretary of state, but workers don’t. The loss of these roles signals danger for progressive politics.
Of course, it goes without saying that there were no promotions for members of the Socialist Campaign Group, who are uniformly excluded from the Shadow Cabinet. How far we are from the days when Starmer promised to build on Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-austerity agenda and ‘end factionalism’.
THE battle lines are being drawn for the next general election — but guess what? There is no real battle.
The British people are living through a masterclass in the nature of bourgeois democracy — that is, a system with democratic forms but capitalist-class rule.
Such a regime can only allow choices within fairly limited parameters: the needs of capital accumulation and the maintenance of the rate of profit push all governmental decisions in one direction.
That is not to say that competing parties offer no choices at all. Priorities can be reshuffled within limits, and occasionally strategic questions — like Britain’s membership of the European Union — are thrown up for decision.
But the imperatives of the Establishment are, at any one given time, firmly set. Capitalists hate unpredictability more than almost anything else, and so a major change of course at the will of the electorate every few years cannot be countenanced.
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As a result, at the next general election, there will be no change in the main lines of government economic and social policy. Call it “Stunakerism” if you think this beast — public austerity in search of privately profitable growth — deserves a proper name.
Rishi Sunak has steadied the capitalist ship following the Truss squall; Keir Starmer has pledged that his Labour government will neither spend nor raise any more money.
Starmer cannot allow voters to see what might have been or how he is outshone by his predecessor
Keir Starmer’s cowardly purge of the Labour left has extended even to the party’s YouTube page – every Jeremy Corbyn-era video but one (Corbyn’s 2019 conference speech) has been deleted from the channel in an attempt to airbrush Corbyn out of history, leaving a staggering nine-year gap in the video record:
Nine years of party videos… gone
Starmer is right to be afraid: Corbyn’s sincerity, authenticity and actual vision for the UK backed by actual policies shed a merciless light on the craven, empty and deceitful moral vacuum that is Keir Starmer.
The move is reminiscent of the infamous image in which Soviet leader Josef Stalin had a lackey who had fallen out of favour airbrushed out of a photograph as if he had never existed:
The UK has been robbed of the prospect of real change for the better, for the many – and has had an Establishment ventriloquist’s dummy foisted on it instead, to create the clearly inauthentic illusion of choice in this broken democracy.
And the spinelessness and dishonesty of Starmer and his ghoulish hangers-on know no bounds.
Senior Labour figures accepted valuable gifts from Google in the days before abandoning a plan to tax digital giants more, openDemocracy can reveal.
Labour’s shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, his senior parliamentary assistant (who is his wife), and Keir Starmer’s political director all attended Glastonbury festival in June as guests of YouTube, which is owned by Google. Including accommodation and ‘hospitality’, Reynolds estimates his Glastonbury package for two was worth £3,377 – significantly more than the cost of two regular tickets, which were £335 each.
The next day, reports emerged that Labour had ditched its proposal to hike tax on digital businesses like Google.
The Digital Services Tax, introduced in 2020, is a 2% levy on the UK income of online companies like search engines and social media platforms. In August last year, Reynolds and his shadow chancellor colleague Rachel Reeves had called for an increase in the tax to 10%, saying the income would be used to fund a slash in tax for small businesses.
As recently as 5 June, Reynolds was still talking about the policy. Yet on 26 June this year, the day after Glastonbury ended, The Times reported that the policy had been ditched, with Labour saying it had “no plans” to raise the digital service tax when in government. Reynolds declined to comment.
It was not the only time senior figures in Starmer’s team accepted luxury gifts from Google in the months before the party’s U-turn. Shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell’s political adviser, Labour’s executive director of policy, and the party’s head of domestic policy all accepted tickets and transport to, and ‘hospitality’ at, the Brit Awards in February from the digital giant. Powell’s register of interests estimates that the adviser’s ticket was worth £1,170.
Starmer’s political director also accepted transport to and ‘hospitality’ ahead of the event from Google, though his ticket, along with that of Starmer’s private secretary, was covered by Universal Music.
YouTube will sponsor an event at Labour’s annual conference next month with the chair of the business and trade select committee, Darren Jones. The talk, hosted by the New Statesman Media Group, will be on “harnessing tech for growth”.
Last week, openDemocracy revealed that Starmer had accepted a £380 dinner from Google for him and one staff member during the World Economic Forum in January.
In total, openDemocracy estimates that Labour shadow cabinet members and their staff accepted luxury gifts from Google worth nearly £10,000 over the months before they announced their policy U-turn. By contrast, the value to the British public of the policy Labour appears to have ditched is estimated at around £3bn.
Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said: “This is a really very worrying set of events which suggests that big business has far too much access to senior opposition politicians.
“But this isn’t simply about foolish behaviour on the part of the individuals concerned. In office, Labour needs to radically restructure our economy if it’s to have any hope of creating a more sustainable and equal society, and undoing the damage of recent governments. To do that, they must take on vested interests, like the Big Tech monopolies, which have far too much wealth and power.”
Staff for other Labour shadow cabinet members have also accepted valuable gifts from controversial companies. A political adviser to the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, accepted two ‘box’ tickets to a Harry Styles concert worth £250 each from BT. In the 2019 Labour manifesto, the party committed to nationalising BT, a measure the company opposed. It’s not clear whether the party maintains this policy, but Reeves has distanced herself from other nationalisation plans.
In April this year, BT announced a 14.4% average increase in its prices, and £1.7bn in profit. An Openreach spokesperson said: “As you’d expect from any major employer investing billions into the UK, we engage regularly with a range of stakeholders to support the interests of our people, our customers and our business. Any hospitality is consistent with the rules, fully declared and transparent.”
Updated 31 August 2023:The original version of this article incorrectly stated that the value of the Harry Styles box tickets was £700 each. They were in fact £250 each.
Led by Donkeys remind Keir Starmer of his commitment to proportional representation.
Campaigners have draped a giant banner outside the headquarters of the Labour Party to ‘remind Keir Starmer what he once said about proportional representation.’Led By Donkeys – a group which specialises in creative and high profile political stunts – organised the action.
The group installed a banner with a photo of Keir Starmer and a quote of comments he made during the Labour leadership election. The banner quoted Starmer as saying in February 2020: “…millions of people vote in safe seats and they feel their voice doesn’t count. That’s got to be addressed by electoral reform.”
Led by Donkeys shared a video of their banner drop on Twitter, and said: “We’ve scaled the scaffolding at Labour’s London HQ to remind Keir Starmer what he once said about proportional representation.”
Sir Keir Starmer has since distanced himself from his 2020 comments on electoral reform.
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We’ve scaled the scaffolding at Labour’s London HQ to remind Keir Starmer what he once said about proportional representation. pic.twitter.com/oK9q0G5lzE
