New New Labour - No Scooby, No Future

Endless calls for activists to turn out, endless calls for members to donate, endless calls to give support one more time to a party that had already alienated so much of its core constituency. The result was as predictable as it was inevitable: New New Labour took, as the Norwegian commentator put it, one hell of a beating in the latest round of local elections.

And so continued an inevitable decline, the next peeling back of the rotten onion. First had come the gloating revelation that, while activists were getting serious amounts of abuse on the doorstep in the 2019 General Election campaign, those who subsequently took charge of Labour were working behind the scenes to throw the contest. And then there was Keir Starmer.

The new party leader sold himself to the membership with a manifesto on which he then reneged. He lied his way to the Top Job. Then came changes designed to keep the left from taking power ever again. Starmer told party members that if they didn’t like that, the door was open and they could leave. Left-leaning departures were compared to fleas being “shaken off”.

Could it get worse? Sure thing: revelations about the behind the scenes presence of one Peter Mandelson chased away more members, persuaded yet more to stay at home or be absent elsewhere when the call for canvassers, leafletters and phone bankers came. Mandelson’s appointment as UK ambassador to the USA opened yet another can of worms.

But, came the Mandelson faction’s response, the left had nowhere else to go, no other place on the ballot paper to mark their cross. This was their clincher, the cornerstone that allowed them to kick out the left, tack to the right and capture all those social conservatives. But, as Captain Blackadder might have observed, there was only one thing wrong with that: it was bollocks.

Worse, Starmer had scored a monumental own goal when a report he commissioned - from Martin Forde KC - was effectively shelved and dismissed. Bad mistake: the report described a “hierarchy of racism” within the party. So no-one should have been surprised when Nels Abbey noted that “Black and Brown Britons appear to be done with Labour”.

Tacking right, being tough on alleged anti-Semitism while appearing to take all other racism and bigotry less than seriously, all came back to bite New New Labour last week. Social conservatives voted for Reform UK, latest vehicle for Oberscheissenführer Nigel “Thirsty” Farage. Many diverse communities, especially in London, voted en masse for the Greens.

Our free and fearless press’ demonising of Green Party leader Zack Polanski had little effect. Their lack of Reform UK scrutiny was so, so telling: Farage and his pals are an Establishment party. The rest of the Establishment gives the game away by giving Reform UK a free pass, right down to the party fielding, and getting elected, an actual Holocaust denier.

The attacks on Polanski and the Greens - trying the anti-Semitism smear while publishing anti-Semitic caricatures of Zack - have convinced no-one. Labour using Steve Reed - who had to apologise for calling a Jewish businessman a “puppet master” - to deploy smears against the Greens would be comical, were it not so jaw-droppingly stupid, so utterly tragic.

And contributing in no small measure to Labour losing more than half the seats it was defending is the uncritical support of the Israelis bombing, shelling, sniping, rocketing and otherwise burning alive tens of thousands of people, and not only in Gaza and the West Bank. The attempts to smear any criticism of Israel as “anti-Semitism” aren’t working. Because it isn’t.

The conclusion is as before: the Labour Together cancer must be cut out before it kills a once great party stone dead. The Greens need to push back - as aggressively as it takes - against the anti-Semitism smears, because New New Labour is good at one thing, and one thing alone - dirty tricks.

Keir Starmer and his cabal have taken a huge Parliamentary majority and wasted the freedom it gave them to be a genuinely progressive force, a force for good. Now they are falling apart. No-one should be in the least surprised.

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