Starmer has bankrupted the Labour party
Who would have guessed telling your own supporters you don’t want them would cause an unprecedented financial collapse?
Keir Starmer’s Labour party is in the soup big time, and we’re not even talking electorally. The structures of the party he plotted away to take hold of under Jeremy Corbyn are now rotting and falling apart, as members, affiliates, and supporters just ship faster than a bullet leaves the barrel of a gun. Keir Starmer’s choices lead us here, his self defeating nonsense ended us up in this situation, and no one can credibly argue anything other than that this is all on him, although of course many people WILL argue this, particularly in the media; Labour’s leader is pathologically incapable of taking responsibility.
Is the Labour party on the brink of collapse? We’re closer to that possibility than at any point under Jeremy Corbyn, and any point in my lifetime frankly. Why? For sure, at many points under Corbyn the party and the leader polled worse than this, but the rot is more fundamental than that: Labour’s finances are in dire straights, and they have no solid base of activists and supporters anymore beyond liberal Britain’s wealthy donors, the same folks (Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair, Lord Adonis) who were central in running or backing the People's Vote campaign that produced the 2019 Labour collapse, and who are using all their influence to attract shady money and corporate donors back to Labour, presently to no avail.
Just how bad is this? Well, by November 2020 Labour had shed 50 000 members, and Unite cut £1 million of its Labour funding. So we have a dearth of members and presumably small amount donations, and just a short while’s payrolls left for party staffers. Compare to the summer of 2018, when in the midst of constant attacks over antisemitism from Britain’s professional media class, liberal pundits, many Labour MPs, and the entire apparatus of the Conservative party, all to bring down the most radical Labour leadership since the early 1900s, Labour raised a record £56 million, from unions and from working class people, giving them £10 million more than the Tories! What a material difference having a leader who won’t stand up for the working class makes.
Labour can no longer credibly call itself the party of workers, nor can it claim to have the moral high ground when critiquing the government over the many anti-working practices it allows to remain enshrined in law, or even increases. Why? Because not only did they bin the community organising unit, the backbone of many a Labour hold or a Labour win when things were looking dicey (particularity in 2019 byelections, where they quite literally turned the political dial against predicted Labour defeats), but they now they’re laying off 90 staffers out of the blue, giving pink slips to nearly a quarter of Labour staffers; meanwhile their priority remains proscribing and expelling tiny leftwing organisations from Labour that have literally zero influence in the party and have no reason to be expelled, while dubbing things like Socialist Appeal extremist; this sort of thing is worthy of political parody.
In my view, there is little to no value in remaining in the Labour party, other than hanging around to vote Starmer out as soon as possible. And no, that isn’t infiltration: the left has always been Labour’s backbone, and time and time again they make the mistake of killing off the faction that literally created the Labour party and drove the Labour movement in its early days. the left was Labour’s history, and if it had one it would be its future, with Gen Z holding even more radical economic views than Millennials, with a plurality or even a majority of those under 40 endorsing the downfall of capitalism. That hasn’t happened before.
Jess Phillips calls left media organisations loud children, and this betrays what a fraud she is. She paints herself as a tribune of the grassroots working class, when in actuality she’s a mate of Murdoch and a corporate bankrolled politician opposed to almost every pro-working class policy in the book. That faction of the Labour party are in charge now, and unlike what they always said under Corbyn, they’re literally driving this thing into the ground. History will remember the Labour right as vacuous and unprincipled, and quite possibly as the political formation that killed the Labour party.