I'm not unique, nor am I immune to the political processes I write about. No one stands outside of history after all. The decomposition of Labour's base is real and, just as recent events have accelerated the long-term decline of the Tories, the Labour leadership's support for Israel as it openly commits genocide has increased the rate at which Keir Starmer and his thuggish allies are hollowing out the party. For me at least, the attacks on Diane Abbott and the sacking of Faiza Shaheen and Lloyd Russell-Moyle were the final straw. If you are on the left in Labour, there is only so much shit you can eat and my belly has distended with my fill.
This isn't to say the character of the Labour Party has changed. It remains what it always has been: a fusion of opposites. It is simultaneously a party of selfless sacrifice and careerism, of peace and the enthusiastic advocacy of war, of working class self-help and the prostration before business. Self-confidence and servility runs through Labourism like Blackpool through a stick of rock, but in more recent years, as the internal counter-revolution against the vestiges of Corbynism has gathered steam the party has been remade. Starmer's mantra of "returning the party to service" is returning it to an outright political instrument of British capital. His "country first, party second" mantra is a coded statement to British business that their interests are the priority, and those of labour, which after all Labour is supposed to represent, are relegated to the never never. The right are in the ascendency, and the ability to do something about it within the party is extremely limited.
This is me, I suppose, catching up with my analysis. Years ago we could see Starmer sowing the seeds of his political self-destruction, but I didn't expect them to start germinating so readily. To be able to engage with the process of political recomposition outside of Labour, be it in the street and protest movements, the seeming impetus behind the left independent candidacies, and what's happening with the Greens means, for me at least, that Labour membership is a political encumbrance as well as a moral burden.
What my decision is not is a denunciation of those on the left who've kept their membership and remain variously active in the party. Nothing is gained from rubbish like "you can't be a proper socialist if you're a member of the Labour Party". This black and white approach to politics is common because it's a structural feature of every day life, but is something to be resisted, not embraced. James Schneider in his book Our Bloc, and his recent spot on Politics Theory Other made the obvious and sensible argument that all sections of the left should talk to one another and cohere as much as its able, given competing areas of focus. The left, it is worth remembering, has a mass presence that can set the agenda and make the establishment tremble. It is much more than the caricatured Saturday paper sale and the inquorate trades council meeting. If the future is in the business of being dangerous, then that is the only destiny suitable for the left.
Anyway, I'm rambling. That's the end of the road for me and the Labour Party for the time being. But certainly not an end for me and politics.
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30 comments:
Well done. The last 4 years have been brutal to watch (even for people outside the UK, Ireland in my case). We'll be dealing with the side effects not just of Tory and Labour decomposition, but UK decomposition also.
Anyway, shoutout to poster Shai Masot on this site. In 2020, during the leadership campaign, he wrote "Vote Starmer, get purged". And holy hell was he right.
Hugs to you and I wish you many years of being dangerous.
My whole family joined Labour to be Corbanistas..and left to remain free.Thankyou fo.ycontribution to that journe
Join the ever-increasing number of us sickened by the contempt for democracy shown by Starmer and his minions. I won't be voting Labour on July 4th.
snap, I also quit on thursday, faith is for the religous
Speaks for many thousands who’s voices will rumble louder once Labour achieves government👍
Sad to see a great thinker and humanitarian being driven out by the machine-faced apparatchiks. We can only hope that Labour turn out better in government than they have proved in opposition.
I left Labour after 1997 and the Blair government started punching down, although in retrospect their domestic achievements seem like heaven compared to the dystopia we are living through now. I will probably end up voting Green although Mid Derbyshire [!] is apparently a Labour-Tory marginal.
Anyway, your book about the strange death of the Conservatives seems to be coming true faster than any of us dared hope, so here's to the immaterial green revolution!
Great letter Phil, which is similar to my reasons for leaving the Labour Party. Sad days, take care and enjoy the freedom it gives us
I'm very surprised. I know how you feel -- I felt the same way when I finally abandoned the ANC in 2007 -- but your regular glum updates on the reality of Starmer's behaviour always seened to carry with them the implication that you would take absolutely any behaviour from Labour Party leadership so long as the party eventually gained power. Now that the party's on the cusp of taking powWer, you suddenly act on your principles.
Well, good for you. But, dammit, it's depressing all the same, especially after our current election where the ANC was defeated, essentially, by a black neo-fascist party while the plutocratic white supremacist party is getting ready to take power by proxy.
Woe, woe, woe. However, the caravan passes on . . .
Phil. As always well written and hits the nail on the head. Struggling to see what's next for sensible left wing politics amongst the noise and fear in the UK personally.
One thing you cannot accuse Starmer and his entourage of is giving any hope of a better future or suggesting things will get better. Announcement after announcement tell us that things will stay the same but we will have a change of faces. Resigning now means you will not have to do so when a Labour Government implements some anti- immigrant, or welfare, or foreign policy, or workers' rights, or human rights, or decency legislation.
The interesting thing will be to see where people go once Starmer's Labour have failed to do anything for them. They flirted with UKIP, tried Brexit and Johnson, and now seem to be coming back to Labour. In Scotland, 5 years from now, in the wake of Labour failure they can move back to the SNP and independence, but where do they go in England? What is the English equivalent of the Brothers of Liberty>
Smart move. Labour aren't even Tory-lite these days.
I can't say commiserations because I think getting out is the only decent thing to do, and the only way to keep your integrity. But I wish that it were otherwise.
Someone I know was kicked out of labour after 40plus years and has since died. I'm not saying the two are directly related, but it didn't help. A friend who had been very active in the party for 30 years was also given the heave-ho, in an email. Lovely people at LP central. He has now joined the Greens.
The point about power is that it has to be for a purpose. Starmer seems to think that power is the end, rather than a means. What exactly his ends are other than to try to stay in power, is unclear. I think we are headed for a very messy few years as the ship of state, already holed and with one engine gone, drifts further towards the rocks, steered by blindfolded fools using charts that left out all the shoals and shallows and failed to allow for the steady current of decline, while a huge storm gathers behind us.
In a way you haven't really resigned from the Labour Party, in your heart you are still committed to it; you have have just given up being an unwelcome Labour Party entryst in the New Labour Party, the party of property ownership, NIMBYsm, hard brexit, police impunity, repression of demonstrations, hostility to trade unions, zealous warmongering.
50 years a Labour activist- on EC and out canvassing at every election. I left when Starmer became leader and realised what a liar , an establishment plant he was , final straw his treatment of Jeremy Corbyn. You’re well out of it. Everything I’ve heard since has only strengthened certainty that I made the right decision back in 2020.
«The interesting thing will be to see where people go once Starmer's Labour have failed to do anything for them.»
There are "people" and "people", there is no such thing as "everybody's interests".
New Labour in the Tony Blair period achieved very much for millions of people, tripling property prices and doubling rents, and pushing through a number of viciously authoritarian laws, ending up bailing out the City with several hundred billions ("excellent" work that was continued enthusiastically by Osborne and successors).
The 14 million voters who endorsed May in 2017 and Johnson in 2019 were all morons who voted for the Conservatives even if they were immiserated by "austerity", but because they enjoyed enormous gain redistributed to them from the lower classes, and that is the constituency that Starmer is targeting (except for his weird "I am a socialist" claim), and that the previous version of New Labour targeted as well zealously. As a reminder of a small aspect of that:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/sep/02/immigration.labour
“After the election, David Blunkett was promoted to the Home Office. He promised Blair he would 'make Jack Straw look like a liberal'. He was bragging, there's not a politician in Britain who can do that. But again it tells you something about the PM that Blunkett was obliged to make it.”
Here we are again! :-(
«The 14 million voters who endorsed May in 2017 and Johnson in 2019 were [not] morons who voted for the Conservatives even if they were immiserated by "austerity",»
As I rewrote that phrase I got it wrong: of course many if not most Conservative voters are not stupid, they voted Conservative and New Labour to get more affluent, and both Conservatives and New Labour delivered. It is the great electoral appeal of thatcherism as practiced by Conservatives and New Labour, to buy the votes of "Middle England" not by increasing taxes on the upper classes to give "Middle England" better pensions and public services, but by increasing housing costs for the lower classes to give "Middle England" big tax-free, effort-free asset gains.
I know you gave a lot of time in the past to LP campaigning etc. Much has gone on. Sorry.
The evidence that many people are better off in any meaningful way is not convincing. The decay of public services affects homeowners too, and especially those over 60. Private care is costly and soon erodes any sense of affluence and comfort once the bills start to pile up. Many of these people have kids, or grandkids, and no matter how self-centred have some concern for their future.
As public services decline, people start having to pay for stuff they used to get for free. Instead of being complacent, they start to be defensive. They feel that all they have to rely on is the value of their home. Of course, to realise that they have to sell or borrow against. Neither is appealing, but needs must. The idea that these people are smugly voting to feather their nests is a caricature in many instances. Rather its trying to hang on to a sense of safety.
The irony is that the solution to this is better public services, but because they are fed scare stories about national debt and deficits, which they equate with their own household budget, they believe that money will just be wasted and taxes will have to go up. Which will negatively affect them. These stories are pumped out continually, and the two main contending parties both subscribe to them. The spectre of a huge debt that has to be paid off and the simplistic mantra of living within ones means are pushed to ensure that people really believe there is no alternative to more austerity and more cuts.
If the ship of state is sinking, then seeing your home as a liferaft and clinging to it is rational. Anything that might threaten that liferaft is frightening and motivates you to protect it at all costs. Rather than see these people as making a choice, the reality is they are manipulated into seeing it as the only option, and the alternative as dangerous and damaging.
Your comment about the left needing to work together within and beyond the Labour Party reminds me of the old days of the Liberal Movement, which was founded by members of the pre-1988 Liberal Party to hold that liberalism together whether people were in the Liberal Democrats, the post-1989 Liberal Party or in no party at all. As time went on, liberals would join other parties (especially the Greens) and they, too, were included in the Liberal Movement.
In the Charles Kennedy years, as most of the liberals left the Liberal Party (especially after Steve Radford replaced Michael Meadowcroft as leader in 2002 and led the party in a more authoritarian direction) and the Liberal Democrats became more robustly liberal, the Liberal Movement gradually ran down, which is a great shame because we could really have done with it after Clegg took over the Lib Dems and directed the party firmly to the right.
Some sort of semi-formalised talking shop for socialists, including those on the left of the Labour Party, those in other parties and those of no party at all would probably be a good idea - though, if Starmerites would purge people for participating, it might be sensible not to have a formal membership. If it could hold workshops and conferences for people to socialise, and to debate and study together, that would be of real value, even if it never directly has an electoral or organisational impact.
Sorry to hear you've left Phil. Yet another socialist leaving (to go where?), will not help when the present leadership collapses. People will join a left-wing Labour party (2015 to 2019 is proof of that) and campaign for it, but if those who understand what is happening keep leaving there will be no left-wing, in the party, for them to join forces with, when they (re)join. The right will then, once again, twist & manipulate the rules to keep their hands on the levers of power in the party (which is all they are really concerned about).
The lack of a substantial co-ordinated left-wing in 2015 laid the foundation for the right to regain control (not that they ever really lost it). If there had been a properly organised left-wing in 2015, there would have been no need to create Momentum. If experienced members had not left during the Blair years there would have been a different outcome. More left wingers would have been ward officers and on CLP Executive Committees, better placed to be more welcoming and encouraging to the members who joined to support Corbynism. Better able to organise the new members to resist the attacks from the right.
Some on the left are repeating the mistakes of those who left during the early years of this century and effectively handing the party to the right-wing. It is difficult to be a member at the moment, but there will be opportunities to promote socialism in the future and whilst the organised strength of the working class, the trade unions, continue to support the Labour party the most effective place to do that is within the Party.
Seems to me the only surprise is that it took you so long!
It's interesting to see the denial point of view expressed so clearly by the commenter above. It goes like this: "We know Starmer is taking the party to the right and purging as many left wingers as he can. We know that his policies are no more socialist than Sunak's. We know that the right controls the party apparatus and all the levers of power. But, if you leave now you are betraying your few remaining comrades and the history of this movement. You are handing the party to the right wingers tied up in a bow. If you could just hang in there, hide your true feelings and pretend to go along with this Tory-lite approach, the opportunity to rise up and 'take back control' of the party will eventually appear. Not today, not tomorrow, not next year, but sometime between now and never. Just have faith!"
It's full of contradictions and oceans of wishful thinking. The right wing have long since taken over, and whether a few desperate leftists stay or go makes no difference. They have it sewn up. Yes, when the Starmer project fails it will lead to fractures which the left could take advantage of. But everyone involved will be implicated in the failure and that includes those who stayed and kept quiet. And you'll have to keep quiet until it all falls apart. Then it'll be too late to claim the moral high ground, and nobody will trust you. Stay and be silent and ignored and then be vilified and irrelevant. Or leave and have some dignity. Not a great choice, but anyone who kids them self that staying is the nobler course is a fool or delusional.
This is likely the pride before the fall for the Labour party. As Mary Midgeley said "“Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started.”
Its not just the left that are leaving either.
«"[...]the opportunity to rise up and 'take back control' of the party will eventually appear. Not today, not tomorrow, not next year, but sometime between now and never. Just have faith!"
It's full of contradictions and oceans of wishful thinking.»
That to me is a big misrepresentation of the “point of view expressed so clearly by the commenter above”: that commenter pointed out that it actually happened in 2015, after "only" 20 years of New Labour, and that because so many had left the Mandelson Tendency eventually managed, by hook and by crook, to take back the New Labour Party from the Labour Party entrysts.
so the “the commenter above” made a much better argument, and a plausible one, than the one misrepresented as “full of contradictions and oceans of wishful thinking”.
What the ultimate failure of the 2015-2019 story teaches us however is two thing: that it is possible for the Labour Party members to take back their party, but that "the establishment" have vast resources and ruthless and cunning operatives and they can thwart and/or take over *any* purely parliamentary attempt to even partially undo the “Thatcher revolution”.
My guess is that only a political party that is profoundly rooted in a widespread movement cannot also be be easily thwarted if it gets "traction". But its organization will be both subtly and brutally undermined by the political police and other operatives of "the establishment" (see Alex Salmond, Craig Murray, etc.), so it will be a risky endeavour. Because as long as there is a huge block of very smug and content rentiers "the establishment" knows it has substantial (but not majority) popular backing.
Two of my usual related quotes:
A commenter on "The Guardian", 2018: “I'm nearly thirty, which means I grew up under Major (just), Blair and Brown then Dave and Nick. In my considered opinion and the opinion of my peers - you couldn't fit a fag paper between them. Frankly my generation grew up not being listened to. We walked out of school in protest at the invasion of Afghanistan - nothing happened. We marched against the invasion of Iraq - nothing happened. We marched against increases in tuition fees - nothing happened. We voted when we came of age - nothing happened. Now, most of us have stopped marching and many have stopped voting because nothing happens - and the generation below us saw this too, as their older brothers and sisters, cousins or even parents became cynical and jaded because we were so consistently and so constantly ignored.”
https://books.google.ca/books?id=jJj0NgA08SUC&pg=PA244&lpg=PA244
"Review of The Civilization of France by Ernst Robert Curtius" (1932)
“In England, a century of strong government has developed what O. Henry called the stern and rugged fear of the police to a point where any public protest seems an indecency.
But in France everyone can remember a certain amount of civil disturbance, and even the workmen in the bistros talk of la revolution - meaning the next revolution, not the last one.
The highly socialised modern mind, which makes a kind of composite god out of the rich, the government, the police and the larger newspapers, has not been developed - at least not yet.”
So Bliss, you are arguing that Phil and those like him with strong socialist beliefs should stay in the party and ride along with Starmer and Mandy and the right wing, holding their noses as he tacks ever rightwards, in the hope that at some indeterminate point in the future they will be able to seize back the party and turn it into a genuine socialist one?
But you keep telling us that the left can never win nationally because a comfortable majority are all smugly counting their property capital gains. I can only assume you think that when property prices collapse the nation will be ripe for revolution. That is when the New New New Labour party will leap into life and lead us to a glorious red future. Any thoughts on when this greatly to be welcomed day will arrive?
«But you keep telling us that the left can never win nationally because a comfortable majority are all smugly counting their property capital gains»
Yet another hallucination: it is a comfortable and large *minority*. But it is a block big enough to win a majority of seats. If the majority wakes up and organizes they can defeat it, especially if they persuade back some significant slices of the property owner class.
«when property prices collapse the nation will be ripe for revolution»
Since 1980 as a commenter on this blog says several years ago a governing party has been defeated only when property prices failed to rise, and that large minority wants to punish them.
But that is not needed, as I have very many times pointed out there are two important property aspect that most people have missed:
* Most property owners are not obsessed with property, with "owning their home" as the propaganda says, but with property profits. Only fools and maniacs would want to invest not just their entire savings, but 10 times their savings, in property if it did not yield enormous profits and was volatile. As I have quoted many times, when Gordon Brown cut the discount on Right-To-Buy to 10%, Right-To-Buy sales collapsed, only to boom again when George Osborne raised again the discount to 70%. It is as simple as that.
* Property prices have been *falling* in real terms for a long time in most UK areas outside the south-east, because property prices are a tax on access to good jobs, and the governments have spent fabulous amounts of public money to attract jobs only to the "golden tory areas". See CrossRail, the bailout of the City in 2008-2009 and still going on, etc., and this map which I have cite many, many times (from 2005 to 2015):
https://loveincstatic.blob.core.windows.net/lovemoney/House_prices_real_terms_lovemoney.jpg
http://www.lovemoney.com/news/53528/property-house-price-value-real-terms-2005-2015-uk-regions
Property owners outside the "golden tory areas" of the south-east are getting shafted hard by the policies of the governments of the past 45 years to wreck the economy of their areas and concentrate the jobs that attract tenants and buyers to the south-east from the other regions. These people should not be voting Conservative or New Labour (or LibDems) but they still do. Then there is another constituency who wants the big gusher of property redistribution because they are mainly interested in their pension security. Both these categories should be voting instead for a generous safety net and generous pensions, instead of the huge debts and risks and hassles of property ownership. That they still vote Conservative or New Labour (or LibDem even) is a colossal failure by "leftoids".
I am sorry to say this, but craziest thing that Corbyn did was not to let the Mandelson Tendency keep their control of the Labour Party organization and let them undermine him at every opportunity, which he did as he believed in "party unity" with the New Labour Party, even if it is a determined and irreducible (opposite class interests) enemy of the Labour party.
The craziest thing he did was to voice the idea that Right-To-Buy could be applied to privately owned properties. This persuaded even the stupid proprietors who vote Conservative or New Labour outside the south-east and those who would prefer to be state-backed instead of property-backed that "the leftoids" just want to confiscate their "precious".
These are all points that I have made before several times...
«there is a huge block of very smug and content rentiers "the establishment" knows it has substantial (but not majority) popular backing.
«you keep telling us that the left can never win nationally because a comfortable majority are all smugly counting their property capital gains.»
BTW it is amazing that I write "substantial (but not majority)" (consistently with many previous times) and someone turns it oh so cleverly just a few dozen lines later into "a comfortable majority". Amazing! :-)
this is how it ends for every left wing member of the labour party. with a few exceptions. i cant imagine your going back to your old part or are you?
«Arguing that Phil and those like him with strong socialist beliefs should stay in the party and ride along with Starmer and Mandy and the right wing, holding their noses as he tacks ever rightwards, in the hope that at some indeterminate point in the future they will be able to seize back the party and turn it into a genuine socialist one?»
As I pointed out that *had already happened* with Corbyn, for almost 5 years.
But not just that: the Mandelson Tendency, the New Labour Party members, did not resign from the Labour Party during those years, they did the opposite, they organized to operate relentlessly to undermine him and his politics, and to take back control of the New Labour Party from the Labour Party entrysts like Phil who had taken it over. Their leader himself said very clearly:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/21/peter-mandelson-i-try-to-undermine-jeremy-corbyn-every-day
«“Why do you want to just walk away and pass the title deeds of this great party over to someone like Jeremy Corbyn? I don’t want to, I resent it, and I work every single day in some small way to bring forward the end of his tenure in office. Something, however small it may be – an email, a phone call or a meeting I convene – every day I try to do something to save the [New] Labour party from his leadership.”»
They succeeded (even if with the help of nearly all the media and likely of the "security" services too and their operatives and allies).
I am sorry you have left-their loss.
On another LP issue that nobody is talking about . They had a good candidate in Staffordshire Moorlands but did not shortlist. Not a left candidate but hard working and respected locally- because loads of local experience and very competent. What is going on?
Anyway whatever- YOUR experience and insight should have been better used by the Labour Party.
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