Lindsey German on Starmer’s hapless floundering and Israeli imperial aggression   

Labour has no one but itself to blame for its sea of troubles. The party’s conference opens against a background of plummeting support for the new government. Starmer’s rating are worse than any new prime minister other than Liz Truss and half of those questioned said they were disappointed with the Labour government so far. It takes someone truly tone deaf and unused to the most basic practice of politics to defend the free gifts of clothes, glasses and accommodation – not to mention the free hospitality box at Arsenal games – as acceptable.

You’ve also got to be pretty inept to keep defending this behaviour until you suddenly realise that you can’t defend it on the eve of your party conference.

Why has this happened to Starmer? Partly he is a rich, entitled and arrogant lawyer, who thinks it fine to whinge about not having had a day off since the election or about not being able to take ‘my boy’ to the Arsenal. Some people might ask at this point why he was so keen to be prime minister – did it he realise it would be hard work? And doesn’t going to football matches after all count as a day off?

But these can’t be the main reasons. I would put forward two others. One is that Starmer has led Labour in a thoroughly internalised and cliquey way since he lied his way to the leadership back in 2020. Since then the whole story has been one of change: the left has been thoroughly purged, Corbyn-era policies progressively dumped, candidates deselected or booted out on trumped up charges, and right wing bullies have run the party.

However you can’t run a government like an internal party faction fight. This is what Boris Johnson found after his 2019 victory and it is what Starmer is in the process of finding out now. This is already leading to some of the same problems that Johnson faced. Indeed it is already doing so over sleaze.

The second reason is that Labour has no real answers to the problems facing British society or British capitalism. It will do nothing to harm the rich and powerful, shies away from all but the most timid reforms, has no idea how to fix the big problems such a child poverty or housing or the NHS crisis. Its answer to the latter is more privatisation or so called “reform”.

So there’s a lot of talk about change but not much sign that anything will change for the” better – indeed Starmer told everyone as much in his politically inept Rose Garden speech. Unsurprisingly, millions of working class people take this seriously. They know larger families are being driven into to poverty by the two child cap and that millions of pensioners will suffer from the withdrawal of winter fuel allowance.

It’s no surprise therefore that coinciding with the slump in Labour’s ratings is another survey showing a fall in consumer confidence. This has been dramatic since the end of August triggered by the pessimistic warnings and threats of cuts as well as the stealing of the fuel allowance. Why would people eat out or invest in consumer goods when they think that their already inadequate wages are going to be further squeezed?

Labour’s conference will try to minimise the remarkable number of problems the government already has. But already the unions are proposing a motion opposing the fuel allowance cut. We will see where that goes. But it already clear that this big majority government is in trouble and can be forced to retreat if the left gets organised. The task is urgent.

Lebanon: state terrorism from Israel

The attacks on Lebanon in the last week are nothing less than state terrorism. They have even indiscriminate booby trap attacks on civilians which have led to around 40 deaths and thousands of injured. Many have lost hands or eyes as a result. This is on top of bombing raids and rocket attacks on Beirut. These are war crimes. But not a single word of condemnation has come from Starmer. David Lammy talks about the need for cool heads and that there should be no reprisals. All this means is Israel carries out an attack and then comes back the next day for another attack.

Imagine if these attacks had been on a US target like the CIA or the Pentagon – we would be at war with the perpetrator already. Yet the tone of the British media is that these were ‘audacious’ examples of ‘tradecraft’. No condemnation or accusations of terrorism.

A year after he began the genocide in Gaza Netanyahu wants to draw the whole Middle East into a war between Israel and Iran. The war between Israel and Hezbollah is now escalating and who knows where it will end. Responsibility for this lies with Netanyahu and his government but also with those governments who back him to the hilt, refuse to stop arming Israel, refuse to boycott and place sanctions on this pariah government and refuse to declare him a war criminal.

The UK government is very high on this list. It facilitates genocide in Palestine while urging the use of long range missiles by Ukraine into Russian territory. Will we look back at those months as the prelude to a major war which begins to join up the different conflicts? It’s the job of our movement to make sure we stop them.

This week: I will be speaking at an online meeting on Ukraine this Wednesday, and Edinburgh Stop the War on Thursday, then a whole day at Cardiff Transformed on Saturday 28th.