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This is - I really hope - the last thing I'm going to say about Sir Keir for some time. The important thing for people to grasp is that this goes way beyond the factional narrative, the left feeling powerlessness, sour grapes etc (though these things are real enough). 1/
The really tragic thing at the bottom of all this is a brutal political reality. It’s simple stuff. Since Thatcher began to radically shift the country to the right over 40 yrs ago we’ve needed a radical (or at least energetically reformist) Labour gvt just to get back to ... 2/
soft-left social democracy. Whatever you think about New Labour you just can’t say it did this. For every soft-left reformist success of the Blair Years (Sure Start, spending increases, devolution & Good Friday) there were at least an equal number of deep structural reforms .. 3/
that continued the reorganisation of the country on Thatcherite lines (tuition fees, academies, foundation hospitals, ASBOs, anti-immigration stuff, private housebuilding, hawkish foreign policy etc). Pretty conclusively, the scales of Blairism were not tilted to the left. 4/
And so we continued (albeit more slowly) along the Thatcherite road. The hope post-2008 was that we’d reached the end of the line with neoliberalism & the space for a left reformist gvt had finally opened up. This was where Corbynism emerged. 5/
It wasn’t/isn’t really about anything other than thinking that by this point we NEED a radical programme just to break even & reverse a small part of the last 40 yrs. The point about all this where Starmer is concerned is that on current form even if he succeeds (unlikely)... 6/
his boomer-establishment mindset will simply not allow him to grasp how critical the situation is. His strategy seems to be a more cautious, less garish version of Blairism: hit some social-conservative keynotes & when we get in gvt we can smuggle in some ... 7/
moderate soft-left economic stuff (though tbh it’s not even clear to me atm what the latter wld be). As with Blairism this would keep us well short of the reformist shift we need.
Unless you do radical things like abolish tuition fees, reverse privatisation ... 8/
Unless you do radical things like abolish tuition fees, reverse privatisation ... 8/
be uncompromising on ‘culture war’ stuff & perhaps above all be militant about climate change, we stay pretty much in the hole we’re in (& then the next Tory gvt will come along & dig even deeper & quicker). 9/
For a host of factors (especially the deep conservatism of the electorate) I understand the urge to compromise & triangulate. But we’ve gone way beyond the point where compromise is either viable electorally or expedient for the sake of the basic survival of society. 10/
The only hope - & it is a long shot – lies in nurturing & developing a radical mainstream political movement oriented around young people. It probably won’t win in 2024 but with hard work (& luck) it would stand a decent chance of winning eventually. 11/
The alternatives - and at the moment Starmerism is one of them – will simply not be enough to save us. 12/
