The Embers

24 October

Ollie Richardson pokes about again in the smouldering ruins of our politics.

The commentariat have been examining every twitch and fart of the Labour Party’s decomposing corpse for any reassuring parallels with New Labour in the run-up to 1997. Even by the standards of Blairite propaganda, it is a show of chutzpah to cast Sir Keir Starmer as the moderate saviour of Labour from electoral humiliation under a 1980s-style ‘Loony Left’. In reality it was Sir Keir himself and his very New Labour anti-Brexit policy that caused that electoral humiliation. Sir Keir’s hands are still dripping with the ink from Labour’s 2019 electoral suicide note: lecturing Red Wall voters about how they had screwed up in 2016 and would need to try again.

By-election in Mid-Voidfordshire

Still, Labour won by-elections in two safe Tory seats on Thursday, thanks in large part to Tory voters deserting the Conservatives. Increasing volatility in party support is a key symptom of the void between rulers and ruled. Both parties’ remaining roots in the population are snapping; as Labour cannot take their Red Wall for granted after 2019, the Tories’ Blue Wall is now crumbling. If the parties’ husks can be cleared away, perhaps genuinely representative democratic structures can have the chance to grow.

‘All we need now is for the voters to ratify the shift in power’

So wrote a Bloomberg columnist, observing the brain-dead shuffle of Britain’s zombie establishment over to the zombie Labour Party, and accidentally displaying admirable honesty about the expected role of the electorate in our post-member-state. Still somewhat shaken by the democratic eruption of the Brexit vote, the establishment looks to Labour as the better bet for managing a continuation of safe, hollow member-state politics.

Lord Sir Keir of Starmer is attracting such glittering gems of the twenty-first century as: a lawyer who used to be married to Boris Johnson, some civil servants, and an ex-Tory PR man (his firm’s motto: ‘Redefining communications to deliver meaningful change’). Panto has higher standards.

‘If Starmer and Sunak were to go to Davos together, Starmer would be the one attracting the crowds’

It is easy to sneer. But Labour has pulled some bigger names too, doing particularly well among international finance capitalists with a history of failed anti-Brexit predictions.

Labour offers hope to non-voters like the US billionaire and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink – someone who could look at failed politician George Osborne and think, ‘there’s a man worth £650,000 a year’. In 2016 Fink was among the sages who predicted a recession to punish the UK for voting for Brexit. He then failed to pop back up again later to accept any responsibility once the figures began to show the UK economy continuing to grow in quarter after quarter following the vote.

At the Labour conference, Rachel Reeves was strangely unashamed to publicise an endorsement from Mark Carney – the whiz appointed by David Cameron and George Osborne to head the Bank of England. In 2016 Carney disregarded the supposed political impartiality of his position to warn the electorate against voting for Brexit by invoking the threat of a recession which, of course, failed to arrive. Unemployment too failed to rise after the Brexit vote – especially his, as his spurious political intervention was met with no especially noticeable accountability.

Donor organs

The Financial Times struggled to disguise tumescence as it described how Labour succeeded in selling out in one day £400,000 of tickets to what sounds like a thrilling corporate event next February.

While mass political participation and party membership have died away, the charade of party politics has been able to continue in the UK thanks in no small part to infusions of resources from corporations and other moneyed elite sources. The corporate funding of political parties should be outlawed in order to force parties to rely for their existence on mass democratic participation.

Scottish Notional Party

The SNP conference suggested further that, for all its talk of independence, it is not serious about popular sovereignty. The party has decided that winning a majority of Scotland’s Commons seats would be a mandate for pressing for another independence referendum, drawing back from aiming for a majority of the Scottish vote. This means that the SNP could lose 13 of its current 43 seats at the next election (out of 59 Scottish seats in the Commons) and claim this as a popular mandate pressing for independence.

Meanwhile in EUtopia…

Our regular look at headlines from the EU member-states, where the complete absence of political, social or economic problems reminds us daily of the folly of Brexit:

Poles polled: To great applause from the technocratic wing of the voidocracy, Poland’s Right-populist government looks beaten following the recent election. Government of this erstwhile bastion of EU Right-populism looks set to be taken over by a coalition led by EU replicant Donald Tusk. However, the out-going Polish government – with its history of causing trouble by butting heads with the EU leadership and recently squabbling with a NATO proxy – may only represent a less-developed form of EU Right-populism. Perhaps now the more advanced Right-populist, like Italy’s Georgia Meloni, is clearer in surrendering overarching loyalty to the EU and NATO, while busying themselves with culture wars within their own satrapy.
Germany: The government cut its forecast for economic growth; it now expects the economy to contract overall in 2023.
Germany: A regular survey of the business climate in the residential construction sector found it at its worst since the survey began in 1991.
France: The government pushed the first part of its budget legislation through the lower chamber of Parliament without a vote
France: A poll suggested that Marine Le Pen’s party is the single most popular ahead of elections to the EU’s ersatz Parliament in June.
Sweden: The second-largest party called for the military to be deployed to the streets of ‘vulnerable areas’ with high immigrant populations.

The Embers, 24th October 2023

You can leave a comment below (comments are moderated).