The elections in the UK show beyond any doubt that the Labour party has completely lost the working class.
John Westmoreland is a history teacher and UCU rep. He is an active member of the People’s Assembly and writes regularly for Counterfire.
Cross-posted from Counterfire
Labour’s election results – the worst in history – have surely ended Starmer’s leadership. Or have they?
It’s almost unbelievable that in the light of safe Labour strongholds being so spectacularly overturned that the man mainly responsible shouldn’t resign in shame immediately.
The shocking examples include Wakefield Council where Labour lost 47 councillors and Reform gained 56. Wakefield has been a Labour stronghold since the 1920s, as has Barnsley and Newcastle. The list goes on.
Probably the most spectacular loss was in Wales, where Eluned Morgan made history by becoming the first leader of a government in the UK to lose her seat while in office.
You’d think that the historically disastrous results would be the end for Starmer but amazingly, as he wrote in the Guardian, he has no intention of resigning and this decision is supported, for the moment, by his cabinet colleagues.
Starmer is presenting his determination to cling on as part of his patriotic duty to steer the country forward, while rejecting a prospective leadership contest as internal navel gazing. The truth is that replacing Starmer is a huge problem for Labour. The defenestration of the left has hollowed out Labour branches and got rid of constituency activists.
The Blue Labour project masterminded by the egregious Morgan McSweeney has locked Labour into a doom loop it can’t escape from. The entire cabinet have all achieved office on the basis of their submission to trying to woo Reform ‘hero voters’ in Labour’s former industrial heartlands by out-reforming Reform on dog whistle issues like immigration.
Starmer has been the cause of right-wing ideological spiking over issues like rearmament and support for Israel, and continues to pursue the authoritarian solutions that open spaces for the far right to get in on. Bashing the pro-Palestine marches has stimulated a right-wing offensive on human rights and democratic rights. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, he invokes forces he can’t control and leaves us to pick up the pieces.
Replacing Starmer with another Blue Labour stooge will solve nothing, and Labour won’t be saved easily even if they bite the bullet and throw him overboard in favour of Andy Burnham. His popularity rests on the fact that he is not Starmer. He has never stood against the Blue Labour tide in any meaningful sense, apart from some rhetorical flourishes. Furthermore, although Manchester was held by Labour, they lost 24 of the 30 seats they were defending, where the Greens won 17 seats and Reform still made gains.
Reports from losing Labour candidates across the country are citing rejection of Starmer as the main reason for turning away from Labour.
There is a tacit acknowledgement that the Blue Labour turn is the cause of Labour’s fall. Eluned Morgan and many others are talking about Labour becoming a working class party again, but what does that mean?
In Starmer’s Guardian piece he offers platitudes about giving voters security over jobs and housing, and building ‘safe and vibrant communities’. He can’t get it out of his head that this means nothing to working class people. Increasing workers’ pay is meaningless if costs and rents are outstripping them. His constant yielding to corporate power on every front is impossible to reconcile with winning back working class votes, especially where the organic linksbetween the trade unions and working class communities has been broken.
Is Reform our future?
The gains for Nigel Farage’s Reform have been spectacular for sure. They have taken control of 10 councils and won 1,257 seats. And despite many commentators rightly pointing out that, so far, Reform has failed to produce any dramatic shift in the councils they run, Farage’s face is going to be beaming at us from the front pages up to the next General Election.
Farage used the results to announce the end of two-party politics again. He was able to point to taking votes away from the Conservatives in the leafy suburbs and Labour in their working class heartlands.
There is little doubt that the main legacy of Keir Starmer is his generous contribution to the fortunes of Reform. Some successful Reform councillors have no previous political experience and were voted in after simply volunteering to stand against Labour.
However, Reform’s success is in part due to the migration of votes from the Conservatives and Labour to other parties. Votes for the Liberal Democrats have come from both main parties, allowing them to gain 105 seats and control of one council – Portsmouth. The Lib Dems are looking to sell themselves as the alternative to the ‘extremists’ of Reform and the Greens. They took five seats from the Greens in Richmond on Thames, giving them a total of 54 seats there.
In Newcastle, Labour voters turned to the Greens, who got 20 councillors, as well as Reform, who took 24 seats. We shouldn’t think Reform will have a clear run come the General Election.
The Green surge
The Greens have achieved historic results that compare favourably with the other parties considering the vilification of their leader, Zack Polanski, and that they don’t get millions of pounds in donations from business.
Polanski has handled the muck thrown at him pretty well. His humiliation of the smirking and jibing Ed Balls was a YouTube hit, and he has refused to back down over Palestine. When Robert Peston tried to sucker him with ‘Does Israel have the right to exist?’ Polanski hit back with ‘No country has the right to exist. People have the right to exist’.
Polanski and the Greens, no doubt assisted by the many socialists who have gone over to them, have won votes by offering a joined-up package of left-wing policies. They have linked the cost of living crisis and the neglect of working class communities to the plight of children in Gaza. They have linked environmental issues to the rampaging corporations who destroy nature and are setting fire to our world.
Socialists should celebrate the success of the Greens. If Your Party is ever to emerge as a force in politics the Greens have set a high bar for them to contest. Without Polanski, whom the Daily Mail, called a power-grabbing extremist who must be stopped, the election coverage would have been bland indeed. The Greens victories in Hackney and across London, and in Manchester and the North East, show that Polanski has a point when he says that future elections will be contested between the Greens and Reform.
Breaking from Westminster
In Scotland and Wales the nationalist parties have held on, but without much enthusiasm.
In Wales Plaid Cymru came out with 43 seats but Reform were not far behind with 34. Reform’s rise mirrored Labour’s fall, and also reflects the desperation felt among voters in cities like Cardiff.
Enduring poverty is without doubt a factor causing desperation and the rejection of Westminster parties. Child poverty now over 31 per cent has been allowed to rise by successive Tory and Labour governments.
Reform’s anti-establishment shtick has played well in these circumstances. The success of Reform is likely to strengthen the call for a break with Westminster.
In Scotland social decay rather than poverty is driving voters away from the Westminster parties. ‘Scunnered’ means ‘fed up’ and is all over the media analysis of the Scottish elections. It explains the low turnout of voters, especially in southern Scotland. The fact that the SNP clung on, despite some gains for Reform and the Greens reflects voter despair at the failure of the main parties to offer hope to Scotland’s abandoned and declining communities.
Reform’s gains there (16 seats) shows that their scapegoating of immigrants will pull on the despair working class people feel. The Greens increase of 7 seats reflects the radical turn Polanski has brought them. Many expected the Greens to do less well after their coalition with the SNP discredited them.
Labour looks to have lost Scotland for good unless there is a radical shift. Replacing Starmer is one issue that might restore some hope. But, as in Wales, a return to working class politics is the only thing that will restore their fortunes.
We need a fighting party
Neither parliament nor the council chamber is where the struggle happens, it is merely echoed there.
The working class, as all the parties say, need change. For Starmer, Badenoch and Farage change means more of the same but led by a different face. They are committed to austerity to fund military spending, to Israel no matter what, and servility to US foreign policy. All with rhetorical differences of emphasis and tone. But all the same.
For the promises of the Greens to mean anything they will have to find the forces outside Westminster to drive them, and that can only be the working class.
Our class is shaped by our common suffering and aspirations. Against war and for peace. Against poverty pay and for a redistribution of wealth. Against the destruction of our lived and natural environment and for investment in our lives that the corporations see as waste. The party we need has to fight for change against the Westminster suits and stuffed shirts, and their corporate donors. Fight first, vote second.
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