This is a good article that indicates why Labour is almost certainly holed beneath the water line. It mentions the appalling Peter Mandelsohn who I recall being introduced to by Charles Clarke who was President of the National Union of Students at the time, later to become aid to Niel Kinnock and ultimately a senior member of Blairs Cabinet - alongside Mandelsohn. It was at a Party sometime in the mid-70's. I immediately thought him 'affected' and 'creepy'. Was I right or was I right.

This article glosses over one thing - and that is the war in Ukraine which it only obliquely refers to as 'an outdated Atlanticist Foreign Policy'. Many who say they are on 'the Left' fail to understand that the real crisis of UK/US Imperialism is that it bit off more than it could chew in provoking the war. It is losing and that's why Trump wants out and why Starmer, in true ignorant form (along with Macron and Mertz) chooses to double down.

The result of Labour shifting is emphasis from class politics to identity politics is the neglect of the traditional base with the mass demonstration in London last weekend led by Tommy Robinson (!) and the increasing popularity of Farage and Reform.....

'For all Starmer’s faults, the underlying causes of the government’s catastrophic failures run far deeper than him. A combination of a structural crisis that they are unable and unwilling to address, and political commitments – to an ideological forever war on the left, to an outdated Atlanticist foreign policy, to a City of London-led economic model of extractive financialisation – prevents any real change and locks the government into the failing status quo.

To break with continuing decline requires breaking with the fundamental tenets of the four-decades-old clapped-out elite consensus: privatisation, public austerity and chasing after rightwing populism. This wider conversation on Britain’s broken political economy is almost entirely missing, banished to the far reaches of the left following the establishment counterinsurgency against Corbynism.




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