Lindsey German on Labourism, the fight for Palestine and the racist backlash

I’ve never heard so many people saying they won’t vote Labour ever again. Not in 1979 when they hated the Callaghan government (that paved the way for Thatcher). Not in 2005 when Blair lost a million votes over Iraq. In both cases there had been years of Labour government with deeply unpopular leaders and policies. This time Keir Starmer has achieved this remarkable outcome without holding office in 10 Downing Street for a day and only 5 years after being hailed as the new leader.

What has led to this parlous situation where a party so successful in the polls is finding that many people who have voted for them, often for decades, will no longer do so. And that if they win it will not be because of any positive endorsement of Starmer – whose personal ratings in polls are way lower than his party, so low that no one with such ratings has gone on to be prime minister – but because everyone is sick to death of the Tories and just wants change.

He will have lost many more votes over the last week from his treatment of Diane Abbott and Faiza Shaheen. There is something particularly distasteful about both cases. In one, the first black woman MP, elected 37 years ago, and recipient of some of the most vile racist and sexist abuse, has been subject to psychological abuse over the course of more than a year, and repeatedly belittled and insulted, suggesting that she is somehow not up to the standard that a Labour MP should reach.

Shaheen was the properly selected candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green, where she came very close to beating right wing Tory Ian Duncan-Smith in 2019. She was summoned to a kangaroo court over one tweet she had liked which contained reference to the Israel lobby, which she said she did not even notice. Forced to defend herself while holding her crying baby, she was removed as candidate to be replaced by a Starmerite.

Starmer was forced to back down over Abbott because of the outcry across the whole of the Labour party and beyond. Even now however he is trying to push her into the House of Lords and put one of his allies in her safe seat. She should resist this shabby move and stand again when she would get overwhelming support. He has not done so with Shaheen however and I hope very much she stands as an independent and takes the Labour votes which he has relied on.

As many have already commented this is particularly shameful treatment of black and Asian women. It also shows complete contempt for party democracy and how venal and brutal the team around Starmer is. Two of the three who decided Shaheen’s fate have since been parachuted into safe seats as Starmer loyalists. Many of these people would probably not have been selected in a democratic process. Yet they and the leadership repeatedly infer that Labour left candidates are not up to the job while endorsing some of the worst mediocrities and placemen and women.

I guess these two cases alone have added to the numbers saying they won’t vote Labour. And reports from round the country suggest that many of the left independent candidates are getting a very good response from previously Labour voters.

But of course the disaffection from Labour isn’t mainly about these cases and the attacks on the left. Its trigger was Starmer’s support for Israel in its genocidal war on Gaza. That why so many left Labour and why there are so many independent candidates. There are many other grievances though – the flag waving nationalism, attacks on refugees, militarism, refusal to deal with any of the real issues facing working class people, retreat on workers’ rights.

It is clear that Starmer is denigrating and excluding the left in order to focus exclusively on disaffected Tory votes. Even some on Labour’s right are extremely critical. Take John McTernan, former adviser to Blair. He has suggested that the Labour leadership has gone too far in trying to drive out the left and eliminate Corbynism and was quoted in the Financial Times as saying that Labour will not be able to govern effectively if it is run by the tiny right wing clique that dominates it as present. Labour has become so ‘obsessed with not losing votes to the right’ that it isn’t bothering to appeal to the left and liberals who as he says make up two thirds of potential voters.

He is absolutely right about this but no sign that Starmer is listening. Where does this leave the election campaign? I have two hunches. The first is that the more people see of Starmer the less they are going to like him. He has done himself a lot of damage in the first week of the campaign. Given hatred for the Tories and Labour’s huge poll lead he is almost certainly going to win.

That leads me to my second hunch: that he will find he has very little political capital despite a big majority and will face political problems very early on. That means the more we fight now, the more the independent candidates get good votes to challenge Starmerism, the better placed we will be to fight back as we will certainly need to do against his Tory policies.

The disappearing peace deal?

Joe Biden announced a new peace deal over Palestine from Washington last weekend and claimed it was backed by Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu hasn’t agreed. Instead he is claiming that he will carry on until ‘total victory’. Whether Biden manages to convince him to accept in the next few days we will see. His hard right allies in government say no, the opposition leader and demonstrators say yes.

But Netanyahu knows he has little future politically once the war ends. And he knows he can defy Biden unless the latter seriously sanctions him by not supplying arms. He also knows that Biden is under pressure electorally and he wants to increase that in order to help Trump. So it continues. The suffering of the Palestinians is low down on the list of the western politicians’ priorities.

But we should also be concerned about the effects of their support for Israel on politics here. In particular we are seeing the alliance of right wing Zionists with the far right and even fascists. The Tommy Robinson demo – which was much bigger than anyone would have wanted – explicitly mobilised in opposition to the mass Palestine demos and was an alliance between these groups. It was full of Islamophobic slogans, and repeated the falsehood that there is ‘two tier policing’ on the demos and that the police are soft on Muslims in what they call ‘Londonistan’.

The Zionists and their backers are very isolated in opinion polls. So they are increasingly turning to aggressive street confrontations to challenge the Palestine movement. We need to combine direct opposition to these movements with deepening and broadening the Palestine movement to strengthen our support. The trade unions are absolutely central to this and to helping to confront the priorities of both Sunak and Starmer.

This week: I will be working to build the next national demo on Saturday and also the Stop the War trade union conference on Sunday June 9th.