Labour: following not leading

By Pete North - June 21, 2021

Labour has got itself into a bit of a bind. In order to swing Batley and Spen it has to toady up to the local Muslims. But the more it does that, the less it looks like a party of the white working class. Not that it ever does. But that’s the problem with retail politics. If you go around promising everything to everyone you’re soon going to be strangled by your own contradictions and eventually you’re going to piss everyone off. If you stand for nothing and your position is always biddable, people are going to wonder what they hell you’re actually for.

And that is the big question hanging over Labour. What on earth is it? Who does it represent and what does it want apart from power? We could deduce from Corbyn that he broadly wanted a socialist agenda – free broadband and nationalised trains, but beyond that I don’t really recall what Cobynism was about, apart from bleating about Palestine. It was mealy-mouthed about Brexit and has had nothing of substance to say ever since.

Fast forward to Starmer and not a lot has changed. Superficially the party has moved on from Corbyn, but not really. Scratch the surface and it’s still essentially the same party with the same electability problems, only now it’s one that broadly backs virtually everything the government does. It has wholly absented itself form the Brexit debate, and today it’s pandering to NIMBYs.

The conversation on these pages lately has been about supply chains suffocating, a massive NHS backlog, small businesses going under, farms threatened by globalisation, rise of antisemitisim, knife crime, out of control illegal immigration, a growing energy and water gap, political corruption etc, while Labour’s star activist is talking about transwomen in Olympic weightlifting. I won’t be surprised if Labour does lose Batley and Spen. It deserves to.

Ultimately Labour is going nowhere unless it can settle on a set of values and policies, stake its claim and go out and fight on that agenda. It cannot be all things to all people. It has to be prepared to lose segments of its existing vote if it wants to pick up new ones.

The problem there, however, is that Labour is unlikely to agree on anything. It’s going nowhere until its internal civil war is resolved. And they’re a way off that yet. The fighting has spread into the defunct unions and until that matter is settled a conflict will exist between the Labour party and its financial backers. I couldn’t offer informed speculation as to which way that’s going to go, but I can say with confidence that even that won’t solve anything.

Broadly speaking, or at least as far as I can see, there’s a faction who wants to reclaim Labour for the Corbynite left, which is completely unelectable, and then there’s the pro-EU legacy remain camp which is equally repellent. That will get nowhere because the country is still, roughly, evenly split on the matter of Brexit, and a re-join agenda is an electoral suicide note. Either way, it has nothing whatsoever to say to the British public.

As bad as the Tories are, I can’t fathom just how dire a Labour government would be. With half the party obsessed with Palestine, sucking up to Islamists and antisemites and the other half in thrall to an American psychosocial disorder, its priorities would be entirely out of kilter with those of the wider electorate. Starmer is talking about fast-tracking gender self-ID laws while the rest of the country wants to know when they can do something as basic as go back to work. Meanwhile, there is nothing (in the current Labour psychology) that is not essentially caused by racism, thus it renders itself incapable of multidimensional thinking about complex problems.

The essential problem with the left as a whole is that they do not psychologically reside in the United Kingdom. The far left lives in its own fantasy world while the progressives are trying to restore the 2012 Olympic illusion of a modern, progressive liberal country confidently asserting is values on the world stage. They accuse Brexiteers of romanticising the past, but it is they who wish to bring back something that never was.

That progressive veneer was a self-deception, and one reinforced by cutting itself off from any feedback signals, particularly with an electorate under the cosh of political correctness. Thus, they were surprised to learn that the country was not the one they imagined it to be. That delusion has been unravelling ever since, but there is no sign they’ve learned a single thing. The wave of virtue signalling over the NHS plunder of overseas doctors is indicative of a highly privileged middle class who cares nothing for the consequences of policy just so long as their immediate needs are served – and fuck everybody else.

Just about everything the left is presently obsessed with is a galaxy away from real world concerns. This, to an extent is also true of the right which would rather talk about culture war issues than the imminent collapse of our supply chains and our international trade, and is otherwise preoccupied with its anti-lockdown crusade but he left has gone off the deep end. Remainers are, of course, talking about trade and supply chains, but only insofar as rewinding to 2016, failing to note that much of what is presently hitting Britain, is happening across the whole of the EU and have been anticipated for nearly a decade.

What we’re not getting is a debate about the sustainability and suitability of current economic model which was already failing (hence Brexit), and has yet to even assimilate the long term implications of Covid both in the domestic sphere and in the global trade domain. The shortage of drivers and farm workers could very easily develop into a long term reality in which we do need to think about robotics, automation and a change of habits. Both Covid and Brexit have exposed the fragility not just of our supply chains, but also our model of consumption.

We now have a major opportunity to shift to an economy less dependent on exploitation, with taxation generated from the real economy as opposed to global finance (thereby more accountable), and a chance to gear the economic culture away from indolent consumerism and convenience services provided by sub minimum wage immigration. If we can’t get the doctors from overseas then we’re going to have to start training them.

To my mind, a hospital system where the porters are British blacks, the admin and management staff are white working/middle class, the nurses from EU, and the doctors from overseas is symptomatic of a dysfunctional country with a failing education system. Where is the political thinking that speaks to that? Certainly it is not to be found in London’s think tanks, particularly those of a left leaning persuasion who have only one answer: more immigration.

One would like to think the government’s Brexit Opportunities Unit would be thinking about these such things, but by the looks of it, it will concern itself with tinkering with regulations on the basis of a wholly flawed “red tape review”. You would think that a Labour party that fancies itself itself as a revolutionary outfit would at least have a shadow Brexit Opportunities Unit and have some more intelligent things to say than the witless blather of Iain Duncan Smith. With such a low bar, even Labour should be able to manage that.

But I wouldn’t hold my breath. It seems nobody is in the business of policy anymore. Our political establishment is simply not alert to either threats or opportunities, thus it absorbs itself in trivia and tribal infighting. The rest of us, meanwhile, are hung out to dry.