Glyn Ford says the bell tolls for Labour without a total political reset
This year’s local elections are a historic repudiation of Labour and its current trajectory. Despite the threats to living standards and security, in the aftermath, America’s gratuitous attack on Iran with military success rendered moot by the catastrophic economic consequences, Labour at best recorded a dead cat bounce from an abyss of unpopularity. All the polls forecast a historically unprecedented failure. In Wales, Labour after 103 years – more than a century – will likely lose its position as the country’s most popular party. The loss will be no narrow defeat, but a total casting aside of history with Party representation in the low teens of a ninety-six-seat Senedd. Scotland will be little better. A deeply flawed SNP government polls predict to be back in place with Labour recording its worst result in a Scottish Parliament election, losing seats as it desperately tries to hang on to second place ahead of Reform, leaving Westminster bereft of excuses to refuse a second referendum to a Parliament with the SNP plus the Greens delivering a substantial majority in favour of Independence. As for England, predicted Labour losses in the high hundreds are matched by Reform gains that see Conservative rural heartlands and Labour councils to the North of Birmingham falling to Reform while the Greens, in more than doubling their number of councillors, open a second front undermining and taking Labour seats from the left.
This is no traditional mid-term itch. True, the Conservatives, throughout Thatcher’s long reign, performed badly in such elections before sweeping to victory in subsequent general elections. Yet to grasp at such straws is to be mired in denial. This time is different. This time, the bell tolls for Labour’s continued existence as a putative Party of majority power. Labour threatens to walk the plank trodden by Greece’s socialists in PASOK, a party that managed the feat of going from being the largest in the country’s parliament in 2009 with 160 seats to a sparse 13 six years later. Fifteen years on, it has scarcely built back a quarter of its 2009 votes.
What’s gone wrong, how did we get here and what is to be done? Everything and more went awry! Labour barely had its feet under the table before the Party squandered its political capital on baubles and trifles. There was the specific and the general. On one side were the suits and suites, spectacles – Taylor Swift matches – and glasses, while on the other was the Winter fuel allowance and Gaza as an entree. The handling of the first looked closer to sabotage than stupidity, and the second was an abandonment of any moral compass.
The Party was in the thrall of the political version of “snake-oil” salesmen. A toxic clique, hiding inside Labour Together, lied, cheated and dissembled to take control at the top, using hundreds of thousands of pounds of fat cat money to lubricate and leverage the process in a reverse Robin Hood. They gave money to the needless at the expense of where it would have made a difference. It all ended up in the grotesque palaver of paying a dodgy company money to dig the dirt on an investigative journalist threatening to expose them (see Paul Holden’s The Fraud). They created a Party in their own image, and it was an ugly one. They weaponised Labour’s anti-semitism crisis, sacked sitting MPs and fixed selections in favour of friends and family. All in the name of victory, seemingly unaware of just how close Labour had been in 2017. They got their victory, but it was a pyrrhic one and one that threatens now to destroy the Party.
Labour Together claimed a pro-Business agenda, but it was partial. It was speculators, not manufacturers or facilitators who got the nod; Britain’s hedge-fund Jeffrey Epstein and pals of Peter, not BAE Systems’ head Charles Woodburn. Preferencing those making money over goods and assuredly sold the pass to soaring inequalities. The emerging threat from Reform was countered with craven abasement of the scapegoated migrants to excuse finance capitalism’s greed; tone deaf to Denton, in thrall to Davos. Both unprincipled and self-harming. Decades of Labour triangulation saw large sections of Britain’s “left-behind” white working-class politically marooned. It was Reform’s right populism that rescued them from abstention. In the meantime, the skilled professionals joined the minorities in Labour’s camp.
As a result, for every voter the Party’s antics loses to Reform, we have lost four to the Liberals, the Greens and the ballot box. If Labour is to survive, we need a total political reset. Maybe Keir Starmer can escape the clutches and throw off the image of himself as their simulacrum once the shape-shifters are driven out of the temple. But we do need to take back control of our Party from those who have gerrymandered our leadership elections, engaged in voter suppression, and blatantly ignored Party rules that seemingly apply to the many but not the few at the top. These local elections sound the “last post”, and we have months to save our party from the parasites whose activities and chicanery threaten its very future. We should be demanding either a Special Labour Party Conference – or special sessions in Liverpool in September – to restore Party Democracy to what it was before this “party within a party’ seized control. The alternative is to collude in voluntary euthanasia.