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.
If one oil company is synonymous with funding decades of climate denial, it is Exxon. For decades, the oil giant copied the deadly playbook of Big Tobacco of sowing doubt about the evidence and delaying action.
The company funded a covert network of foot soldiers to deny evidence, delay action, and divert away from the industry. Between the late ’90s and 2005, the oil giant donated $16 million to numerous right-wing and libertarian think tanks to manufacture uncertainty about climate change.
The oil company spread such confusion and obfuscation despite knowing for decades that fossil fuels would cause global warming. The company knew by the ’60s that climate change could have catastrophic consequences. For example, a report for the American Petroleum Institute, on which Exxon is a prominent member, warned of the dangers of climate change and the risks to sea level rise if Antarctic glaciers melted.
We must keep trying to hold the companies to account for their failure to act, for their failure to future generations.
Nine years later, in 1977, Exxon’s leaders were told directly by a senior company scientist, James F. Black, about the looming climate crisis. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” he told Exxon’s Management Committee.
Decades after the company was first warned about climate change, in October 1997, the head of Exxon at the time, Lee “iron ass” Raymond, delivered a speech to the Fifteenth World Petroleum Congress in China.
As Steve Coll recalls in his book Private Empire, Raymond “devoted 33 paragraphs of his 78-paragraph speech to the argument that evidence about manmade climate change was an illusion.”
Months later, Exxon helped create a task force working with the American Petroleum Institute: “Victory will be achieved when average citizens understand (recognize) uncertainties in climate science” and when public “recognition of uncertainty becomes part of ‘unconventional wisdom.’” Where Big Tobacco led, Exxon followed with devastating consequences.
In 2006, nearly three decades after Exxon was first warned about climate change, the British Royal Society wrote to Exxon asking the company to stop funding organizations that feature information “on their websites that misrepresented the science of climate change, by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change, or by overstating the amount and significance of uncertainty in knowledge or by conveying a misleading impression of the potential impacts of anthropogenic climate change.”
When Raymond retired, the Independent newspaper ran a front-page headline the following year: “The man who sold the planet.” The paper called Exxon the “Darth Vader of global warming” for its “denial that carbon emissions cause climate change.”
New study published in Nature says period was as destructive as record 2016 El Niño drought and heatwave
The first half of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency was so destructive for the Amazon that it was comparable to the record 2016 El Niño drought and heatwave in terms of carbon emissions, according to scientists.
Annual emissions from the world’s largest rainforest roughly doubled in 2019 and 2020, compared with the 2010 to 2018 average, according to a new study published in Nature, as swaths of forest were deliberately cleared and burned for cattle ranching and farming during the first two years of the far-right leader’s time in office.
While the amount of carbon that the Amazon absorbs and emits changes with weather cycles, generally sucking in more in wet years and less in dry periods, the study found that the rise in emissions under Bolsonaro had little to do with natural processes, but was instead caused by the systematic removal and downgrading of environmental law enforcement in Brazil.
Under Bolsonaro, the number and severity of fines for illegal deforestation by Brazilian authorities fell dramatically while fires and land-clearing soared, the study found. Carbon emissions increased from an annual average of 0.24 gigatonnes from 2010-18 to 0.44GtC in 2019 and 0.55GtC respectively.
In effect, he has become the chief annihilator of democracy.
Anti-Donald Trump protesters hold letters that spell out ‘justice’ in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 3 as former president Donald Trump was set to appear in federal court on charges that he sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. (AP Photo/Jess Rapfogel)
“He has trafficked in racism and xenophobia. He has incited violence. He has kowtowed to dictators and trashed our alliances. He has welcomed Russian attacks on our elections. He has locked children in cages. He has called for his opponents to be locked up.”
Put differently, Trump has criminalized both social problems and politics itself.
Trump and his allies have long created a culture of lies, illusions, cruelty and misrepresentation. He has waged an incessant attack on reason, critical thinking, informed judgment and social responsibility. His distaste for Black people, migrants and others he considers disposable is matched by his support for the financial and corporate elite.
Yet, despite the damage Trump has done to democracy, he has almost complete support of the Republican Party and a majority of Republican voters — slightly more than 58 per cent say they still plan to vote for him in the 2024 presidential election if he wins the Republican nomination. He appears poised to clinch that nomination.
Even more troubling are recent polls indicating he’s in a dead heat with U.S. President Joe Biden if they’re the presidential nominees in 2024.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden participate in a presidential debate in Nashville, Tenn., in October 2020. (Jim Bourg/Pool via AP)
What explains Trump’s appeal?
Most of media is focused on Trump’s legal troubles. But too little has been written about the conditions that have given rise to his authoritarian politics or why Trump is a national disgrace still backed by millions of Americans.
Trump’s grip on power is a collective nightmare that can only be understood in terms of the historical, economic, political and cultural conditions of which he is the endpoint.
“Odious as he may be, Trump is less the cause of America’s decline than a product of its descent.”
Trump embodies a society that has been in crisis for decades, but especially since the 1980s. This was a period when the right-wing counter-revolution emerged with the election of Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan gives a thumbs up to the crowd while his wife, first lady Nancy Reagan, waves from a limousine during the inaugural parade in Washington following Reagan’s swearing in as the 40th president of the United States in January 1981. (AP Photo/File)
Since that time, the democratic values that informed the social contract and common good have been increasingly displaced by market values that stress self-interest, privatization, commodification, deregulation and the accumulation of profit and celebration of greed. Civic culture came under attack along with the erosion of the values of shared citizenship.
The market became a template for controlling not just the economy, but all of society. The language of rabid individualism replaced the notion of the common good and gave way to a disdain for community.
Government was discredited as a force for good, its public infrastructure was eroded and replaced by a culture of cruelty in which matters of compassion, care, and ethical responsibility began to disappear.
What emerged was society marked by precarity, loneliness and mass anxiety. The rising cult of individualism made it difficult for the public to translate private troubles into systemic considerations, weakening the public imagination. The rise of a media environment where politics becomes a form of entertainment helped silence any resistance to a growing culture of lies and greed.
Staggering levels of economic inequality also emerged, setting the ground for dark money shaping politics. This neoliberal poison helped to create a society of political monsters, immune to the virtues and conditions of democracy.
A homeless man resting on a steam vent on the National Mall in 2019 in Washington. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
Harnessed to exclusion and bigotry, the language of freedom was invoked eventually by Trump and other Republican Party politicians to produce policies that have banned books, crushed dissent, limited classroom and workplace discussions about race, whitewashed African American history and justified a virulent anti-democratic politics that echo the ghosts of a fascist past.
America at a crossroads
The most important issues Americans face today are not solely about Trump’s corruption, lawlessness or open authoritarianism — it’s about learning from history.
We must rethink the lies that neoliberal capitalism have told us about how American society defines itself while rethinking what it will take to challenge and overcome the anti-democratic forces that gave rise to Trump.
The 2024 election should be about more than Trump’s ongoing legal travails. It should be a directive for what kind of society Americans want and what kind of future they desire for their children. They should regard the election as a choice between democracy and the further criminalization of American politics.
Henry Giroux, Chaired professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
