In the UK, with Jeremy Corbyn gone from the leadership and firm hands back on the tiller steering a sensible centrist course, the Labour Party has gone to… a new series of disastrous defeats. Last Thursday saw a grab bag of elections, from a Scottish “devolved” poll to local councils to a byelection in the northern seat of Hartlepool.
Scotland is a headache for UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson (more on this later) but the other two were disasters for Labour. Local council elections are a big thing in the UK given the absence of regional governments, with a proportion of councils up for election every year. Labour lost more than 300 seats and the Tories gained 200. Given that incumbent governments are usually punished in these outings, and that the Johnson government staggers from crisis to crisis, that’s a pretty good result for the Tories.
Even better for them was the result in Hartlepool, your classic north-east constituency: a fishing town which became a Victorian shipbuilding city, all the industries closed in the ’80s after the old town heart had been ripped out for a shopping centre in the ’70s, which is now dying too. The place apparently got a marina in the 2000s, which was meant to fix everything. During the Blair years its MP was Peter Mandelson, the co-architect of New Labour, after which the place voted 70% for “leave”. It has been Labour for all but six years since 1945.
It’s the latest to fall of the “red wall” seats, the supposedly rock-solid north that stops Labour from being carved up. The red wall collapsed in 2019, with Labour down to 203 seats in the 650-seat Commons. This was blamed on Corbyn and his crew by a party centre who actively sabotaged him throughout the campaign. He was replaced by Sir (yes, Sir) Keir Starmer, a rock-jawed establishment type who was meant to have a touch of the Tony Blairs about him.
Since becoming leader, Starmer has kept a small target, announced no new program or direction, and assailed Johnson. Last Thursday he lost Hartlepool, 15,529 to 8589, the magic 28%, on a 42% turnout. Corbyn had won the seat twice. The loss was blamed on Corbyn.
It won’t matter to the narrative of course that Starmer lost a red wall seat after the Brexit issue was out of the way. It won’t matter that Labour’s campaign was so small-target that MPs on TV explicitly refused to say what their program was. Or that one of the few bright spots was Preston Council, which Labour retook with an explicitly left program. In Hartlepool, Labour lost to a farmer, Jill Mortimer, who lives in Yorkshire (Hartlepool’s in Durham) and can’t explain the years she spent living in the Cayman Islands.
The vacating Labour member had quit as soon as sexual harassment complainants threatened with going to the police, and the candidate the party centre dropped in, Dr Paul Williams, was a medical consultant who had advised closing down half the city’s hospital — which was what Labour was attacking the Tories over. He was not only a Remainer, he led the campaign for a second referendum. Williams recorded a 16% swing against him.
What came next was equally shambolic. Starmer, praised as a cool pair of hands, professional back in charge, etc, responded by sacking his deputy, Angela Rayner, one of the few working-class people in the leadership. This craven buck-passing met with open revolt, even from non-left MPs, and Starmer had to make it look like he was merely reshuffling her into multiple key roles — her job title now stretches to 24 words.
Never mind. There were honest party grandees ready to give the unflinching truth. Mandelson said that Starmer had come “unstuck”, and that the fault was … left-wing unions who should be separated from the party. Lord Adonis (Andrew Adonis, a British-Cypriot, not a Marvel character) said Hartlepool raised the question of whether Labour was finished. Andrew Rawnsley, a sort of British Peter Hartcher-Peter van Onselen mash-up, said it still had to make distance between itself and Corbyn who had “never looked prime ministerial”. Except of course to the 40% of those who voted for him in 2017, the largest Labour vote since 1997.
That vote was sabotaged in 2019 by the pro-remain parliamentary right, who said it would split and campaign against if Labour went to the people with a “respect the [leave] result” message. That would have preserved at least some, perhaps most, of the red wall.
But that doesn’t matter at all to these people. Labor here at least has the excuse of compulsory voting; you have to persuade the centre across. But the UK is a first-past-the-post voluntary constituency; you can win on turnout. Corbyn rebuilt that in 2017, and the right just lost it again. That is simply ignored.
It’s not about political difference any more, or firm conviction over strategy, or any of that. It’s that left-wing politics represents an existential challenge to the “centre” who have staked not only their careers but their lives on the notion that nothing ever really changes, and if it did, the elite would lose power and prestige, and that is a greater disaster than electoral loss.
Across the world, this disease is killing social democratic parties stone dead. Many of them are nearly there. How fitting that UK Labour should come to its crisis moment in the city where Mandelson, doing a walk-around at a fish and chip shop in the New Labour years pointed to the quintessentially UK dish of mushy peas and said that he would have some of the guacamale.*
*Sadly, apocryphal. On Mandelson’s team was a young American intern. Sent to fetch a team lunch from the chippie, it was she who made the error. But the story is more of a cheer up than anything else in this sad tale.
It boggles my mind that with the ever-widening inequality that left wing parties (even nominal ones) keep losing to parties of and for the ruling class. So much for “we are the 99%”…
Why does it boggle your mind?
Rundle has just succinctly explained it…
There’s reading an explanation, and there’s understanding it. I’ve read plenty of explanations about the inability of the left to make headway in the 21st century, but the explanations all seem post hoc rather than giving a satisfactory account. A lot of smart people have spilled a lot of ink to diagnose the languishing of the left, yet we don’t see better politics come from it. Just a lot of talking heads blaming other talking heads for being slightly too left or slightly too right in hitting that elusive electoral sweet spot that lesser educated folk had no troubles hitting before.
What Left?
Who’s on 1st-Scummo.
What’s on 2nd – the Gestapotato.
Where is ‘Labor’? – DoA but look, here comes Beetlebombbb!
Not last for a change, that’s AA in his dust, far, far behind.
Has anyone seen the centre lately.
Nah, it’s cohabiting with the Right, one might even say ”kept” if that term is still understood.
Grundle rarely explains anything – he lacks the depth – and never succinctly (an obscenity t a jobbing writer paid by the word).
This piece is a paraphrase & reprint of the Grauniad with some phrases nicked from BTL comments
I’m a little surprised no-one, Rundle included, has mentioned the treacherous swine at the Guardian for the role they played in bringing down Corbyn – they were absolutely crucial in Corbyn’s demise, and ran as hard on the anti-Semitism bs as any right wing rubbish in the Brits*** media.
Blairites to the last sellout, and they’re still pumping up the tyres of that scumbag war criminal.
And, in nothing like a coincidence, Starmer was in the ‘Prosecutor’s Office’ when they set about fitting up Julian Assange, at around the same time as the treacherous swine at the Guardian slipped the knife into Julian, as well.
Those geniuses who “accidentally” published the password to his online archive of diplomatic cables etc?
He has – frequently – mentioned the Guardian’s role in both Corbyn’s toppling and the betrayal of Assange.
But the Guardian ain’t everything …
Oh, that I have only one upvote to give that.
I agree that the degree (or savagery) of the Guardian’s betrayal of Corbyn/Labour and Assange is hard to understand. On the other hand, we forget or neglect the fact that the Guardian, ABC, BBC are basically centrists–who can be found bending to the left and or to the right as fits the mood. Rundle is right to call such ‘centrism’ a disease, one that encourages growth and decay, progress and ‘conservatism’ in equal measures. Nothing ever gets better, changes.
Western democracies slowing rotting away. The greed is catching up to them.
They’re all dead as dodos when the Chinamen and Russians kill off the US$ as the global reserve currency.
And, they are well on their way to achieving that goal. Recently, the share of the US$ in global reserves slipped below 60% (middish 50’s, IIRC) for the first time since the mid ’90’s. And, what’s happened since the mid 90’s. The Chinamen have become the global powerhouse of ‘Industrial Capitalism’ (as opposed to ‘Financial Capitalism’)
You cannot run a global reserve currency without running whopping trade deficits. Look up the “Triffin Dilemma” (or, “Paradox”).
The rot really began to set in when the Chinamen stopped buying mountains of US (e.g. Treasuries). The trade deficit got so big, the Chinamen were getting more than enough US$’s in payment for all the manufactures they sent to the US.
So, what did the Chinamen do, with all those US$’s?
See ‘Belt and Road Funding Model’.
‘…mountains of US debt….’
Good points Dave and China’s reserves have hit three and a half trillion, while Russia now makes more from gold production than gas sales. Guess who is buying most of Russian gold exports, the Brits. Even those wretched people know what’s about to happen.
Search for the recent words written and spoken by one Stanley Druckenmiller, Tony.
And, when you find Stan’s recent words, you’ll see the Morrison and Frydenberg budget is following the same blueprint.
Druckenmiller has been forecasting the demise of the $US for years, and he’s getting closer to right with each passing day.
One example – you cannot maintain long term interest rates on your sovereign debt below the rate of inflation.
That’s one of the most glaring signals to ‘foreigners’ to avoid buying that sovereign debt.
And, BTW, without the “hedonic adjustments”, the current rate of inflation in the US would be minimum 10 – 12%.
And, last night, the latest hedonically adjusted CPI in the US was released.
0.8% in a MONTH!
There have been many instances of adjustments to CPIs, both here & the UK (and probably elsewhere) which were extremely anti-hedonic – when some absolute necessity goes through the roof – typically rent, or energy,esp lotive fuel – and the authorities try to obscure their helpless/uselessness in alleviating…always assuming a will, which is rarely the case when it is a result of mad neolibs’ noxious nostrums.
The rotting remains of the undead Blairites in the parliament were never shy or even chary of their determnation to enure that Corbyn was hobbled and destabilised at every possible opportunity.
He almost knocked off Theresa May and forced her into minority government with the DUP, far & away the most risible party in a country with the Monster Raving Looneys (well represented in many regionl councils) and Lord Buckethead.
If this does not serve as a warning to what passes for ‘Labor’ here, then they have gone beyond the Brechtian boundary, “The People have failed the Party…” and will no doubt seek to find a new electorate.
Far, far away, in another galaxy possibly.
Depressingly like Aus Labor. Just what does labor stand for apart from not being the Coalition. In an ear when political corruption and rorts are now common place, Australian citizenship counts for nothing when you are from Inidia, and noone seems to care, when we are steadily being prepared for participation in yet another blindingly stupid American war, WHERE DOES LABOR stand?
“In an ear when political corruption and rorts are now common place” … there is nothing to stop them going out the other one.
PM May, a Remainer, nonetheless accepted the poison chalice after the feckless feckwit Cameroon skarpered from the ruins and did the best she could to carry out the people’s will of BREXIT, despite the bastardry of her party plotters.
The terms she arranged 2 or 3 times were traduced and thwarted by the likes of Bozo who as PM implemented the main one that lost her support, the border down the Irish Sea.
He didn’t come within cooee of achieving a fraction of the ”deal(s)” May secured.
He then wins a near record majority in 2019 and Labor Selfharmer Starmer has been barely noticeable except as a butt of jokes.
Change the names & issues and the political poltroonery, opportunism, treacheries and mendacities are eerily familiar here.