For those of you wondering how things are going in the UK, the leader of the Labour party is no longer recognising Palestine as a state unless it’s “acceptable to the state of Israel”, and their shadow equalities minister (shadow just means that they’re in opposition, not in government) is now openly opposing trans rights. Fuck this country.
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Yes, those who have been following UK politics over the last several years will remember that the right-of-center Starmer wrested the leadership of the Labour party from the possibly-disappointing-but-definitely-much-further-left Jeremy Corbyn. This was approved by the voters as a result of a series of “scandals”, nearly all of which eventually turned out to have been instigated by Starmer and his faction, but the initial seed of the anti-Corbyn campaign was an accusation of antisemitism originally arising from his expressions of solidarity with Palestine. Labour’s change of leadership was fairly explicitly an embrace of Zionism.
It’s also worth mentioning that Starmer has had zero concrete stances ever. He’s gone back on pretty much everything he has ever said as Labour leader. He is bizarrely hell-bent on losing an un-lose-able election. He’s sold the party to its right wing as a whole, and in the process lost the majority of the membership as well as the crucial backing of the unions.
That’s not even slightly a surprise. Starmer is an acolyte of Tony Blair, and a latter-day exponent of New Labour. New Labour, like the “New Democrats” in the US (members of the self-appointed Democratic Leadership Council, like the Clintons and Joe Biden), exist specifically to chase right-wing votes. They don’t believe in what might be called the traditional tenets of the party, and think that if they move far enough to the right they can permanently capture a majority of the votes by reducing their major opposition on the right (Tories in the UK, Republicans in the US) to a hollowed-out minority.
There has been a sort of yoyoing parallel between US and UK politics since the 1970s — the UK got their “New Labour” before we got the “New Democrats”, and got their far-right leader who brought in the modern right-wing clown show (Thatcher) before we got ours (Reagan), but we had our resurgence of the New Democrats before you had your imminent resurgence of New Labour, and you can look at Obama and Biden to see what Starmer will be like: all major promises broken (see: Obama on Iraq, drone bombing, and the Too Big To Fail banks, Biden on Covid, climate change, and immigration), relatively minor promises treated as though they were the most important thing in the world to serve as a distraction from the things which are actually causing harm (see: Obama with the ACA, Biden with “respectability” on Twitter), a total (and deliberate) failure to resurrect institutions and regulation using the remnants of the opposition as an excuse, and feigned reluctance to embrace right-wing policy matched with secret overwhelming enthusiasm (see: Obama with domestic surveillance and new wars like Libya, Biden with immigration, fossil fuel extraction on public land, and the genocide in Gaza). And in the end, it won’t help one bit — Democrats have not gained a single vote from the right wing by all of this; at best, some Republicans may not vote in 2024 — but in exchange, they have lost quite a lot of votes from their own base, and are currently projected to lose the next election as a result, although they are unwilling to admit this or take any steps to mitigate it.
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