Starmer As Labour's leader - what should he do?

They've just suspended the chair and co secretary of the Bristol West CLP(Constituency Labour Party) simply for allowing a motion calling for Corbyn's reinstatement to be debated and passed.

C'mon nicky, even you can't defend Starmer and the party bureaucracy being THIS obsessed with silencing any dissent regarding his anathemization of Corbyn.  Any decent human being would agree that the "distancing" has gone far enough and that it's time for Starmer to stop treating the Left as either the enemy or intruders.

https://skwawkbox.org/2020/11/13/labour-suspends-chair-co-secretary-of-b...

The Labour rank-and-file utterly rejects Starmer's antisocialist, antidemocratic approach in the NEC elections:

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/left-wing-labour-slate-records...

Corbyn has just been reinstated as a Labour MP:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/breaking-jeremy-corbyn-reinstated...

The worst mistake of the Starmer era has now been reversed- just as the comparable 1950s mistake ofbriefly withdrawing the whip and expelling the great Labour Left MP and creator of the National Health Service Aneurin Bevan over his principled abstention on a vote on which the Labour leadership had whipped MPs to support the creation of the hydrogen bomb for the UK.

Labour needs to go forward now on the following assumptions:

1) That it is simply accepted that all sections of Labour, including the Left, can be assumed to be strongly opposed to AS;

2) That while AS should never happen in the party at all, it happened no more under the previous leader than at any other time;

3) That there is no justification for ever equating criticism of what the Israeli government does to Palestinians with AS, and especially not for ever implying that that Israel as a country or Zionism as a (now permanently right-wing) nationalist ideology are synonymous with Jews or Judaism.

4) That while it is fine for Starmer to create his own identity as leader-in fact, that that is simply to be expected- that Labour cannot unify to win the next election if Starmer spends the whole time between now and the next election building that identity solely on a Kinnock-style war against the Left.

5) That nobody, including Corbyn himself, is arguing that he should be back in the leadership, but instead, that the policies associated with his era, virtually all of which are popular, should be kept and strengthened and that his supporters should be treated as partners in victory rather than the enemy.

6) Labour exists to fight the right and to fight to implement a compelling radical alternative to the status quo- not to return to the useless idea that the best it can do is to be the second, slightly-less-nasty party of the status quo-while being just as much a party of the now-inherently right-wing concepts of military intervention and subservience to the police and to authority-for-authority's sake as the Tories.

nicky wrote:

No Ken, you are wrong to claim that Corbyn has been readmitted as a Labour MP.

A subcommittee of the NEC has reinstated his party membership. The parliamentary party continues to deny him the whip. Therefore he cannot claim, at least at the moment to be a Labour MP.

Let  us all hope for the sake of the Labour Party that it continues to distance itself from the greatest Tory enabler since Margaret Thatcher.  ( I'm sure you agree with that, don't you?)

Actual Tory enabling would be to go back to "the centre ground"-the centre ground that no longer exists in the UK- since the 2010 and 2015 elections prove that Labour can never win another election on non-radical policies.

This poll shows Keir Starmer...who, remember, leads what is currently the SECOND largest party in the UK in seat count and vote share...as the NINTH most popular politician in theUK.   Among the politicians more popular than Keir- Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, whose party is working to take Scotland OUT of the UK.

(thought I'd posted the link...have now posted it a few posts down).

nicky wrote:

What poll is that Ken?
where does Corbyn fall in the list? Number One perhaps?

This one.  I thought I'd posted the link earlier but hadn't.  Apologies:

The most popular politicians & political figures in the UK | Politics | YouGov Ratings

As the link shows, it's a YouGov poll.  In that poll, Starmer isn't even the most popular Labour politician; he runs behind Ed Balls(who lost his seat in parliament years ago and is essentially in retirement)  and Sadiq Khan, who is mayor of London and not available to seek the Labour leadership anytime soon).

Corbyn is at 18%- but that's to be expected for a former party leader who has been subjected to years of unjustified character assassination and slanders...you yourself admit he's not an antisemite, but the BBC, the Guardian, the Tories and the PLP usually don't make that distinction.  And again, Corbyn is not ever going to seek the leadership again, so it's absurd to treat him as a rival and a threat.

The point is, Starmer should not be running behind anybody else in the party in personal popularity.

Look, nicky, it's not about Corbyn returning to the leadership, it's just about not throwing him and the Left totally out of the party.  The man doesn't deserve to be anathemized- he isn't evil. And basically 99.7% or more of his supporters never did anything to deserves being made unwelcome.

The former constituency of Owen Smith, the antisocialist challenger to Corbyn in the 2016 leadership race, has voted to call on Starmer to cut the crap:

Owen Smith’s former CLP passes motion strongly supporting Corbyn – and calls on Starmer/Evans to follow party rules – SKWAWKBOX

nicky wrote:

For the sake of the Labour Party Starmer must keep Corbyn in exile until he apologizes for minimizing the anti-Semitism under his warch. Corbyn continues to an embarassment to Labour and the Conservativs' best asset.

He didn't minimize it.  He said it was greatly exxaggerated for political gain by the right wing of the party, by the Tories, and by the vast majority of the media.  Under the EHRC's rules, Corbyn had every right to say what he said. 

Starmer's bloodyminded intransigence-and once again, with Corbyn's party membership reinstated, Starmer has no right under current party rules, to deny him the whip- is causing a massive result in the party.  Several unions have demanded he back off on this, clp's are now passing motions calling on Starmer to give this nonsense a rest, and by week the number of clp's doing that will have grown exponentially.

The voters care about what Labour will do if elected, and they want Labour to be radically different than the Tories if it does get into power.  They do not put the anathemization of Corbyn-who did condemn AS and has, in fact fought antisemites all his life, as well as having speeded up the disciplinary proceedings so it would be easier to kick the small number of actual AS offenders out of the party-let's face it, at this point essentially everyone who has been accused has been kicked out, including the ones who were innocent of it like Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein.

Corbyn never tried to stop any actual antisemites from being suspended and expelled. 

The only resistance Corbyn ever put up was to the idea that criticism of the Israeli government was AS- in truth, it essentially never is, and weirdly enough, Zionism as an ideology is technically in violation of the IHRA, because in postulating the ideas that there is a Jewish race and that Israel exists solely as "A Jewish state", Zionism is making both a racist statement and committing the crime of implying that every Jewish person in the world is somehow responsible for what the Israeli government does- assertions that are not only racist but despicable.

If Starmer keeps this going, he will split the party irrevocably and simply not have enough votes left to get whatever remnant he calls "Labour" after the split elected.

The only people Starmer should be fighting are the Tories.

And it only gets worse for "Sir Keir":

Labour’s Members Are in Revolt Against Keir Starmer (tribunemag.co.uk)

If Starmer doesn't stop, both with the persecution of Corbyn and the purges of the left, he'll end up having to stand down in a matter of weeks, at most.

What he's doing might have been acceptable if he had the party in a twenty- or thirty-point lead in the polls, but it's not worth it if all he's managing to do is get them slightly ahead or, more frequently, level-pegging with the Tories at best.

The interparty rebellion against Sir Keir continues:

The first motion of 'no confidence' in Sir Keir Starmer passes vote - Labour Heartlands

If what's happening now is what you were hoping Starmer would bring, you were apparently hoping to see Labour destroyed.

The way for Starmer to survive is for him to end the war against Corbyn and his supporters and admit the AS issue is put to rest.

He was only elected because he promised to keep Labour socialist, which means keeping the post-2015 policies.  u=

It's absurd for him to think Labour can only win the next election if every vestige of what the party stood for after 2015 is erased and everyone associated with those policies is forced to either recant or be made a pariah.

And again, there are no policies to the right of the post-2015 policies that can possibly be considered Labour.  It can't be Labour to keep rail, electric and water privatized.  It can't be Labour to go back to screaming at Russia for the sake of screaming at Russia-and since the Skripals were not given Novichok-we know that because they're still alive- and since we can't even be sure what they were given was given to them by anyone connected to Russia- it wouldn't have served any purpose or gained any votes for the party for Corbyn to sanctimoniously denounce that country.  And it can't be Labour to go back to the delusion that The Troubles in Northern Ireland were all the IRA's fault, as everyone who denonunced Corbyn for talking with Sinn Fein was demanding.  And it could never be consistent with Labour values to support bombing Syria or bombing Iran, or to support the outdated "special relationship" with the U.S.

And there are no votes to be gained by going to the right of those policies- nobody wants Labour to disown the Green New Deal or to back to being "extremely casual" about invading non-Europeacn countries.

Starmer only won by promising not to move to the right of any of those policies.

He has an obligation to keep to that.

And Starmer never needed to anathemize Corbyn.  If he'd left the man and his supporters alone after becoming leader, he wouldn't be facing a growing interparty revolt.

Starmer needs to leave Corbyn and his supporters alone- he needs to focus solely on fighting the Tories.

Nobody out there in the larger electorate wants him to keep the war against the Left going, and if Corbyn's policies really did only have 0.01% support- in reality, the vast majority of Labour supporters want the party to be anti-austerity and antiwar other than defending British soil from external attack- Starmer would face no real opposition in the party to what he is doing.

Corbyn endorsed the findings of the EHRC report and has called for the party to implement them.  That's all Starmer had any right to ask.  He never had the right to expect the man to agree that he and his supporters DESERVED to be treated as though they'd caused a massive increase in AS in the party when they'd done no such thing, and he never deserved to have his lifelong commitment to fighting racism put into question.