The circus in Westminster's House of Commons gets more raucous by the day. The latest defection of a Tory to the Labour Party - this time Natalie Elphicke, Member of Parliament for Dover, where Rishi Sunak's bugbear, those "small boats" carrying asylum seekers come ashore, caused some unexpected hilarity in Tory ranks...
Said Conservative Steve Baker, ex-minister for Exiting the European Union and ex-chair of the very-right-wing European Research Group, of which Elphicke was a member, "I have been searching in vain for a Conservative MP who thinks themself to the right of Natalie Elphicke". Another Tory MP joked, "This is a politician who makes Suella' Braverman look like a woke, crypto Marxist, wet liberal".
Many commentators said that by welcoming Elphicke into Labour's ranks, Starmer had shot himself in the foot; that it was just as damaging to him as it was to Tory Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak.
And indeed, it's true that the crossing of Elphicke, like a small boat across the House of Commons channel, wasn't welcomed by most Labour MPs and is likely to cause some waves among. Labour's rank and file. Former Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock (now a "Baron" who sits in the House of Lords and on the Privy Council), said Labour should be "choosy to a degree about who we allow to join", and that while Labour is a "very broad church", churches "have walls and there are limits".
Apparently however, there are no political limits for the always-reactionary, ex-public prosecutor, "and aspiring prime minister, Keir Starmer.
Yes to Elphicke, no to Abbott?
Some Labour MPs have already asked why, if the ultra-right, anti-immigrant Elphicke is allowed into the Labour party, veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott (the first black woman MP to be elected to the House of Commons) remains suspended outside?
In the light of the current conflation of anti-Semitic "racism" and anti-Zionism and the ever increasing accusations of the former flying around, it's worth explaining what actually happened to Abbott. And it's all the more necessary to discuss this because of the concerted and violent attacks against the latest wave of pro-Palestine anti-war protests at university campuses, where the accusation against these mainly pacifist students, some of whom are Jewish, is that they are "anti- Semitic" and hurting all Jewish people.
Abbott had the Labour whip withdrawn (the nice way of saying "was chucked out") in April 2023, for "racism"(!), as part of sustained efforts by Starmer's supporters to distance themselves from those on the "left" of the party who had, like Abbott, defended former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn against the accusations of "anti-Semitism" which had seen him suspended from the party in October 2020.
The storm blew up after she wrote a letter to the Observer newspaper in response to an opinion piece in the Guardian (15 April 2023) by a 29 year-old writer, Tomiwa Owolade, entitled "Racism in Britain is not a black and white issue. It's far more complicated".
In his article, Owolade comments on the "Equality National Survey" which found that "more than a third of people from ethnic and religious minorities have experienced some form of racist assault" - including 40% of Irish people, more than 60% of Gypsy and Traveller people and more than 55% of Jewish people. The point he made was that racism wasn't only experienced by "people of colour".
Abbot answered that: "in pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus. In apartheid South Africa, these groups were allowed to vote. And at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships". She added that black people faced racism all of their lives because of their skin colour, while others who are not black, but who "undoubtedly also experienced prejudice similar to racism", like the Irish, Jewish people and Gypsies, did not. It was this indisputable truth, a critique of the use of the word "racism" for hatred or prejudice against people on the basis of culture, religion, ethnicity etc., when they are of the same race, which got her into deep trouble, however.
One should add that Owolade had just written a book called "This is not America" in which he argued that "too much of the conversation around race in Britain is viewed through the prism of American ideas that don't reflect the history, challenges and achievements of increasingly diverse black populations at home" - referring to the leading black and Asian figures in the Tory party, no doubt, among others. He was thus nicknamed "Uncle Tomiwa" by Kehinde Nkosi Andrews, the professor of black studies at Birmingham City University who reviewed his book and thought it was "so spectacularly bad it should never have been published". For sure, Owolade could actually have learned a few things from Diane Abbott.
However, she was immediately attacked for creating a "hierarchy of racism" and for anti-Semitism. Her repeated apologies made no difference. The Board of Deputies of British Jews said her comments had been "disgraceful" and called her apology "entirely unconvincing".
But an exception can always be made
Needless to say, neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Diane Abbott are guilty of anti-Semitism - not if one respects the real meaning of words... But Corbyn's "failing" in the eyes of pro-Zionist Labour party MPs was that he never hid his support for the Palestinians, nor his overt criticism against the Israeli state for its bombing of Gaza four times over, before this present war, in 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021.
But Starmer is still sensitive to the Tory jibes about how he himself sat in Corbyn's shadow cabinet during 5 years (2015-2020) that Corbyn was Labour leader. And this is enough for him to ensure that Corbyn and his few remaining political allies are never forgiven and remain "kicked out".
On the other hand, Kate Osamor, the MP for London Edmonton has been readmitted, despite her "insult" to the Jewish people... In January she posted the following on X: "Tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day, an international day to remember the six million jews murdered during the Holocaust, the millions of other people murdered under Nazi persecution of other groups and more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and now Gaza".
She has had to apologise for the anti-Semitic implication that genocide is taking place In Gaza. She said she will continue to reach out to "Jewish stakeholders", but if Starmer has reached out to her now in the aftermath of the local elections (see below), it is because he is worried about losing votes in constituencies dominated by pro-Palestinian voters.
By now, even US president Biden has decided to caution Israel's Netanyahu for going "too far" invading Rafah and has (at the time of writing) just suspended an arms' shipment to Israel.
Anyway, if Starmer has been 100% behind Netanyahu's government up until now, it was not because of his personal conversion to Zionism, but because Labour has always been bipartisan on all issues of foreign policy, without exception. What the Tories say about Israel and Palestine, Labour will echo. And of course, the Tories in turn, are just echoing everything which is said in Washington.
Labour's victory may be a foregone conclusion, but...
Although it remains highly likely that Rishi Sunak's Tory government will lose the coming general election, the 2 May local elections were not the political rout for the Tories which had been predicted, even If they lost 479 council seats to the other parties and lost the hotly-contested Mayoral seat in the West Midlands.
As Sunak himself pointed out the morning after, on the basis of the votes cast, the Labour Party was only 9 points ahead, so the result of the general election "is not a foregone conclusion... It is closer than many people are predicting..."
On the other hand, national polls show the gap between Labour and Tory to be much wider - at least 12 and even 30 points, depending on which national pollster is doing the counting. If these polls are right the Tories will certainly lose. The question for them is how badly; that is, how many parliamentary seats they can hang onto.
Said one commentator, if the Blackpool South by-election win by Labour could be replicated in the general election, the Tories would be reduced to just 100 seats (compared to the 365 they won in 2019)! Elections expert, John Curtice, said the 26% swing from Labour from the Tories, was "the third-largest Labour-to-Conservative by-election swing since 1945". But such swings are near-impossible in a general election.
Anyway Blackpool South, one of the most deprived constituencies in England, had been a Labour seat for almost 30 years, from 1997 to 2019. It was one of those which was lost to the Tories in Boris Johnson's "Get Brexit done" election, along with 47 other Labour so-called "Red Wall" seats.
Since then, nothing has changed for the jobless and ageing working class of this decimated former industrial region. Not in Blackpool, nor in any of the former Labour Red Wall constituencies - definitely not "levelling up" as promised by Johnson. So why would these voters turn out for the Tories today?
In fact Blackpool "blue" vote reverted to its usual minority. A total of 6,319 votes were split between the Tories and the former Brexit Party, now renamed Reform UK Ltd., (and "owned" by far-right politician Nigel Farage ) - which missed coming second by just 117 votes.
A "Gaza" election?
If Labour got back some of its traditional voters in some localities on 2 May, it was partly by default, since the Tory electorate apparently stayed home. As one Tory minister put it, "they were on strike".
There was a high abstention: only 1 in 3, to 1 in 4, people voted in other words almost three-quarters of the electorate didn't bother. But in the case of Labour's usual electorate in certain constituencies, they were not on strike. It was clear from the support given to independents who stood on pro-Palestine platforms, that they were consciously voting against Labour policy on Gaza. The same shift away from Labour had happened in Rochdale by-election, this February, where George Galloway won the seat as an MP for his so-called "Workers' Party", by campaigning almost exclusively on the issue of Gaza.
In the West Midlands Mayoral election Labour's much-celebrated win was by a margin of just 1,508 votes, because "independent", Akhmed Yakoob, standing against Starmer's support for Netanyahu's Gaza slaughter, took 69,621 votes from Labour and came in 3rd. Jamie Driscoll came second in the contest for North East Mayor, taking an even bigger chunk (126,652 votes) out of Labour's total score. Driscoll was the former Labour mayor who Starmer threw out of the party for consorting with pro-Palestinian film director Ken Loach, who was thrown out for consorting with pro-Palestinian Jeremy Corbyn, who was thrown out for "anti-Semitism"... as aforementioned!
What Sunak can't do
Unlike Tory PM David Cameron in 2016, when faced with defections to Nigel Farage's UKIP, Sunak does not have a handy device such as a "Brexit" referendum to prevent electoral leakage to UKIP's right-wing ultra-nationalist successor, Reform UK - formerly the Brexit Party.
This party, led by the upper-class property magnate turned-populist-politician, Richard Tice, is according to the polls, the third most popular party after Labour and the Tories. Prior to the local elections, pollsters estimated its share of the vote as 13%, compared to the Tories' 19% and Labour's 44%. However, so far it is not easily comparable to its Brexit Party predecessor, since it fielded only 326 candidates out of a possible 2,660 in the 2 May election, winning only one seat outright in Havant, Hampshire. As previously mentioned though, it came a very close second to the Tories in Blackpool South. But its only MP is Lee Anderson, who defected to Reform after being suspended from the Conservatives for refusing to apologise to Sadiq Khan, Labour's London Mayor (who just won a third term) for saying that he was "controlled by Islamists"!
Sadly for Sunak, the Rwanda deportation scheme, his flagship anti-immigrant policy to "stop the small boats" across the Channel and win right-wing voters, has failed in every sense to do the trick - not with the Tory electorate, nor even with his backbenchers.
Finally, and literally by hook and crook, he got the so-called "Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill" passed into law, after a near all-night game of ping-pong between the House of Commons and the House of Lords, on 23 April. But when Sunak tried to use the death of five refugees in the Channel which occurred within hours of the vote that morning, as some kind of vindication of his policy (claiming his policy will "save" Channel migrants) nobody was convinced.
The Rwandan flop
Having thus legalised his fantastical Rwandan deportation scheme, Sunak has failed miserably to win is party any credit. And he has now lost the MP for Dover, to boot.
This was all a gross electoral miscalculation. Because it turns out that voters do not agree with politicians that preventing immigration, whether illegal, via small unsafe boats, or legal via safe aircraft, is a vital issue. This may well be linked to the fact that so many skilled professionals, who everybody knew came from "overseas" disappeared after Brexit and have not come back, leaving the NHS, social care and schools where they had previously worked, in an appalling mess.
For the so-called voting public, right across the political spectrum, quite obviously the most pressing issue is the cost of living crisis; the "pound in your pocket". Just as it always has been. Ordinary people wonder which planet millionaire Tories like Sunak are actually living on. Following close behind in importance is the very dire crisis in the NHS. And following that, the crisis in education. In both there is a huge shortage of qualified staff. In the NHS the number of vacancies increased in the first quarter of this year to a total of 125,572. The government is recruiting fewer than two-thirds of the secondary teachers it needs, and a third of teachers leave within five years.
Sunak could have deduced these factors quite easily, given that the bosses are crying out for workers and cursing the Brexit effect and the immigration controls he and his predecessors implemented. Instead he committed himself to stopping the small boats and is now obliged to see though the implementation of this ill-judged "monster" policy, which has already cost £290m, and would need another £100m over the next 2 years - and £1bn more in the long run... if it has any run at all, before he is ousted from 10 Downing Street.
A Brexit unlikely ever to be fully-baked
It is worth briefly mentioning the issue of Brexit, which is conspicuous by its absence as an election issue. And little wonder. For one thing, the raft of British-EU tariffs and controls, which have been postponed five times already, are still only partially implemented. And since the losers are mainly traders and producers on this side of the Channel, the attempted extraction by British government ministers of more concessions - with yet further negotiations - continues.
Already the latest plant and animal regulations with accompanying reams of paperwork for British business and agriculture, have, in some cases, increased costs by 25%. And this autumn should see more of the belated controls coming in, with more anticipated difficulties, red tape, and added costs. One result has been the temporary or even permanent disappearance from British shelves, of products made in EU countries, including essential medications.
We should add that, although the Labour leadership flatly denies that it has any intention of compromising on Britain's exit from the EU, let alone reversing Brexit, this must be taken with a large pinch of salt. And not just because all politicians tell lies. But because Brexit has damaged the City's financial standing and hurt British business - and Starmer and his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, know very well that their job in government is first and foremost to serve capitalist interests.
For now they calculate that the voters they need to win back are still pro-Brexit. They may well be wrong: according to Statista (27 March 2024), 55% of those polled said that Britain was wrong to leave the EU - a percentage that has increased slightly every year since Britain officially exited on 31 January 2020. And anyway, it should be remembered that the 51.89% in favour of Brexit in the 2016 referendum, reflected positive support for Brexit by only 38% of the electorate as a whole, given the turnout of 72.21%.
Reviving New Labour
The real problem for Starmer's "new" Labour Party is the need to attract a good few votes from the middle class, just as Tony Blair did, in 1997. Blair got away with assuring the capitalists that there would be a "seamless" policy transition from Tory to Labour, and there was - and managed to retain the vote of the working class. After 18 years of "Thatcherism" along with all the attacks against workers (including the steelworkers, the dockers, the miners, the print workers, etc...) and with the NHS in as dire a state as today, thanks to serial cuts and privatisation, Blair was elected on a huge wave of anti-Toryism.
Having met the Tories more than half-way by adopting many of their policies, Starmer boasts that he has "changed" Labour. He has even gone so far as to drape himself in the England - the flag of St George - which has always been seen as a symbol of the far-right. Whether his efforts will translate into the Labour landslide he would like to see, emulating Blair, is entirely another question. Today, his "changed Labour" might well win him votes from Conservative constituencies, but it may lose him votes from Labour ones...
It's true to say that today the electorate is fed up with the Tories and by its 5 prime ministers since 2016. But many workers and youth in particular, are cynical and mistrustful towards all politicians, if not all politics. And when it comes to Labour, they see right through the leaderships' opportunism and feel only contempt for the likes of Starmer. So if they vote at all, it is for smaller parties which have no hope of getting elected due to the first-past-the-post electoral system, as a token protest.
As for the only effective alternative, the collective class struggle to overthrow the system, the political conclusions which need to be drawn from the defeats of the very "un-collective" bureaucrat-led, sectional strikes of 2022 and 2023 are still in the process of being digested. But many workers have already realised that they will need to organise themselves differently - and that it is perfectly possible to do so. It is only a question of "when".
11 May 2024