Article: https://novaramedia.com/2022/01/27/why-is-labour-broke/
Quite astonishingly, Lee Harpin a ‘journalist’ (and others) decided to lie (with seeming impunity) about UK Labour’s membership, saying it was booming etc. It’s not. By The Leadership’s own admission, we have lost tens of thousands of members. Many of them deliberately purged for factional reasons. UK Labour is broke in the literal financial sense, obviously policy/ideas-wise, obviously morally & socially too. It is now up to 200,000 members gone. When Corbyn left as leader, Labour were the biggest political Party in Europe and had nearly £14 million in the bank, with the Party drawing the most diverse demographical support ever.
Nearly two years on, Labour is a shadow of this. It is led by a proven compulsive liar, bully, racist and Establishment figure so balls-deep in the dark world on Empire that he whips to abstain on ‘rape’ and ‘torture’ bills, wants to emulate a war criminal mass-murderer who ramped up NHS privatisation and saw it as “My duty to carry on Lady Thatcher’s good work”, makes millions, literally, from the wars he started, supports and advises literal terrorist regimes who behead children. The main adviser is a proven corrupt charlatan who appears in Epstein’s black book ten times (along with Blair & Campbell…of course), and who sought advice and favours from Epstein, AFTER he had served time for being a convicted Paedophile.
Politically, factually, UK Labour now is centre right. Don’t take my word for it, check out the political compass that never changes. Factually, healthcare aside, they are to the RIGHT of Biden on domestic issues; Biden being a proud Neo Liberal Capitalist. Also UK Labour is now a fake, false-flag-flying chicken-in-a-basket Nationalist Party that is already proudly beating the drum for war.
More Jewish members have been expelled and suspended than all other previous Labour leaders combined; indeed, you are 5 times more likely to be suspended, bullied, expelled or harassed if you are Jewish under Starmer. The Leadership of the Party is absolutely, endemically Islamophobic and has a serious anti-Muslim problem that goes straight to the top. Starmer has promoted racists, bullies and-in their own words-people who literally tried to lose the general election(s) for us. They are anti-Trans, anti-Traveller, anti-Palestinian and have-in the words of those members themselves-betrayed Disabled, Kashmiri, Black, Asian, ‘BAME’ members.
They are literally fascistic specific to internal affairs, have suspended anyone trying to bring a vote of no confidence, forced MPs like Apsana Begum to face-without ANY support-their own physical abusers who were deciding their fate?! They have lost millions in Union funding, have tried and so far failed to sell access to policy making, and paid, tiered levels of membership. They have been given a free ride by the media. They have abandoned essential workers. They refuse to stand with said essential workers. Starmer has even gone out of his way to defend his old mate-Cressida Dick. He also sold out Assange and protected literal murderers and rapists. He has defended literal fascists against Labour members. Several times. He’s p*seed in the face of victims of racism and the city of Liverpool by writing in and chasing support from The S*n…after saying, proudly, IN LIVERPOOL how he would not deal with them.
Starmer has broken every promise and pledge he got elected on. He has genuinely the worst political instincts and judgment I have ever seen, and is dangerously incompetent. He does not think Boris Johnson is a bad man (his words), he welcomes with open arms Tory MPs who called all Labour “a bunch of c***ts” and who has a truly appalling racist, xenophobic and general awful voting record.
So, I guess the question is-WHY should any UK Labour Party member support him/this? WHY are some members supporting all this and turning on their fellow members and Corbyn? HOW is this better than the Tories, and HOW is this “moderate”, yet doing the opposite is apparently racist and extremist? WHY is this not being reported by the mainstream media? And…most importantly of all…
WHAT ARE ‘LABOUR VALUES’ NOW? Is all of this ‘Labour Values’ is it? Oh, and those who support all this or those doing it, WHY? WHY? WHY? To get rid of the Tories and replace them with war-mongering, mates with paedophiles, terrorist supporting, corrupt Establishment stooges?
Again….WHY? WHY? WHY?
Arthur Le Mesurier
If you like our content please keep us going for as little as £2 a month https://dorseteye.com/donate/
Why? Honestly? How about this: Our undemocratic excuse of an electoral system gives us no choice.
I think most of us would agree that, absent FPTP, the Labour party would have split by now, one way or the other. We have the right wing and the left wing of Labour struggling for ascendancy and it isn’t pretty and doesn’t work. Faced with a similar situation in Spain a decade or so back, a Partido Socialiste that was socialist in name only, that had turned further and further to the right, lots of left wingers founded their own party, Podemos (“Yes We Can”) and it did really well and is now in government as a junior partner of the Partido Socialiste. The hope is that, after the next election, it’ll be the other way round. Even if not, the establishment of a popular, left-wing party in Spain has forced the Partido Socialiste to veer back to the left somewhat.
So, why can’t this happen here? Because Spain is a democracy, unlike us. We have FPTP as an electoral system that 1) makes it almost impossible for small parties to flourish and grow and requires decades for such exceptional growth as it does allow; and 2) Rewards parties with huge working majorities (and therefore, under the British “Constitution”, something close to unlimited power) when they are a long way short of 50% of the vote – Johnson’s currently on 43%, which gave him a majority of 80 or so, pretty much unchallengeable.. At that, he’s better than some governments, which have had huge majorities on less than 40%.
In Labour, we have the Partido Socialiste and Podemos in the same party and it isn’t pretty. And it definitely doesn’t work. Because of this bias towards large parties, politics becomes, essentially, an attempt to force your faction to more prominence in your party. I think it’s pretty clear that the left are no good at this, Corbyn being our one success for decades. I would also question as to whether this sort of factional infighting could really be considered politics. It certainly doesn’t engage people and likely wouldn’t, even if we were winning.
But our ridiculous election system gives us no alternative. In Spain, the left could break away, form Podemos and capture the wave of outrage that swept Spain after the Crash of 2008 and the subsequent eviction crisis (the current mayor of Barcelona – from Podemos – was involved in the anti-eviction movement and there’s a famous picture, of which she’s quite proud, of her being arrested and dragged off by Riot Cops.) We can’t do this – it’s been tried and either sinks without trace, becomes corrupt, or more likely both – anyone remember Respect?
Worse, a halfway successful party would be counter productive. Imagine that, against all the odds, we founded such a party and it became popular, got 23% in the election or something. What would the result be? Well, we know. The SDP did something like this in 1983. They gained 26 seats in total. Labour lost 60. The Tories gained around 40, cementing them into power. Britain was stuck with Thatcher and the Tories for over a generation as Labour slowly recovered the lost votes, turning more right wing as it did so.
So that’s why people stay in Labour. What’s the choice? Form a new party? Wouldn’t work. Vote Green? They’re not socialist and, at any rate, suffer from the same problems as a new left-wing party would under FPTP. If they do well, they may break into double figures of MPs in the next decade or two. But Green parties in Europe are always small, even under democratic systems, and there’s no reason I can see for the UK Green Party to be different.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with everything you’ve said about Starmer and the current Labour party. But I don’t know that life would be better on the outside than on the inside, where, at least, we can attempt the factional infighting that passes for politics under FPTP. Who knows, maybe we’ll even get the Labour party to adopt PR. That would change things.