Associated Press
The new leader of UK Labour has decided that the party should stick to the right. Many leftist movements in Europe seem to understand this.
The former leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, is no longer in office. But he cannot give up the idea of defending the oppressed. For forty years he, like Moses, has led the voters of the London borough of North Islington to victory. And there, by the way, is the highest concentration of social housing in Britain. That is, to put it bluntly, not rich people.
A struggle has thus begun in the party between the extreme left wing, which observers have called Corbynites, and the party machine led by the current leader, Keir Starmer. Corbyn has created an intra-party movement, Peace and Justice, and is now thinking about running as an independent candidate, but he was barred from doing so by the party's National Executive Committee, which met on the issue the other day. They were afraid that the story might develop into an independent party, and then it would be a total split, an exodus of voters, a goodbye election and Downing Street.
"The idea of a new party is unrealistic," says Labour activist Jon Lansman. He, by the way, has always been close to Corbyn and even ran his election campaign in 2015. - "Jeremy has no strategy, and he never wanted to be a leader, so he's been a backbencher (an opposition figure in the House of Commons who doesn't sit on the front bench. Backbenchers are not part of the shadow cabinet and have little influence - auth.). He still wants to continue in the same spirit, supporting from time to time the organizations and movements he cares about."
There was still no way to escape a split in the party. Since Corbyn's resignation, three components have emerged - the Corbynites, who are ready to fight to the death for the leftist cause, the rightists, who sleep and see when he will finally leave, and the middle, who respect the tireless fighter, but in case there is a choice, will vote, maybe without enthusiasm, for the official party candidate.
It is clear that the personal ambitions of 73-year-old Corbyn are apparent here. If he does not run as a candidate, he retires from parliamentary politics and takes his well-deserved place in the history of the Labour Party. If he decides to run and loses, it will be the same outcome, but with the bonus of national admiration. If he runs and wins, he's not an MP and can't be, what they call, the face of the Labour brand. His wife advises him to forget about parliament and finally take a rest. No decision has been made yet.
Moreover, a sort of purge has begun in the party. Those who had supported Corbyn for years are now ready to leave the party themselves. The new leader has explicitly said: "If you don't like something, the door is open, you can go." Curiously enough, after Corbyn's resignation, 200,000 people left, while 150,000 joined the party.
This battle is ideological and arose from a crisis of awareness of what has become of the leftist movement in recent decades. Starmer, when he was vying for the leadership seat, put forward a clever Ten Pledges program. There were ancient Corbynian socialist ideas like renationalizing the railroads and other former public services, eliminating school and university fees, controlling rent growth, or a gigantic social housing program.
But the author of Pledges is no anti-imperialist, but a gentleman respected in the world, the founder of a law firm specializing in the defense of human rights, a former Attorney General who was granted a noble title by the Queen. All this is supposed to unite all the wings of the party, and it becomes clear who will lead Labour in the next general election.
Starmer needs a right-wing tendency to gain the trust not even of the party members, but of the wavering voters. Left-wing ideas in their pure form will no longer work, well, they certainly won't work on most voters. The slogan "Pay us more for the same work" does not work, at least not in Western Europe. The leftist parties mainly call for the redistribution of wealth and the treasury, and these ideas are only supported in the columns of demonstrators.
What have the "yellow vests" achieved in France? Crumbs that no one will remember anymore. Pension reform there went exactly the way the center-right government needed. The January wave of strikes in England - from nurses to railroad workers - also did not bring visible results. Only countries such as Norway can build a complete social system with a paradise for pensioners and free health care, but not everyone has such gas reserves and an understanding of how to intelligently manage natural resources as they do there.
It is indicative that in the case of Jeremy Corbyn, whom the CEC urged to put his party card on the table, he was supported primarily by labor unions and left-wing movements affiliated with Labor, which are the main organizers of strikes and the authors of slogans that have little to do with modern economic realities.
Of course, Labor cannot leave its trenches overnight - the social struggle cannot but continue. However, it is not easy to politically identify Keir Starmer right now.
He, for example, took a completely unusual position for the Left in its assessment of the Black Lives Matter movement by refusing to stand up for the "oppressed." When the Johnson government introduced a bill to exempt security forces from liability for crimes committed in special operations, some Labor MPs voted against it and were asked to leave the party. The former pro-European became an ardent supporter of Brexit, and to be honest he does not particularly criticize the government.