Keir Starmer, the Labour party, and a harsh reality the left don't seem to understand.
Castigating Starmer?
A middle ground liberal, looking in on the maelstrom in the Labour party
An unusually directly political post. Perhaps I should post more.
The question is do you want a Labour party which appeals to the polar left of the membership, or one that is capable of being elected and mounting an opposition? Appealing to the malcontents and idealogues is fine, but then you end up with a party of no practical influence. It just becomes the contemporary SWP who have always made a lot of noise and achieved fuck all.
This country is a democracy (skewed by FPTP), and the awkward part of that is that to appeal to sufficient votes to achieve stable power in parliament you have to compromise. Corbyn is a great guy - I know because I met him, but politically he was a sheep in wolf's clothing. Impotent. And as a leader certainly not going to sway an electoral majority. You may not like where Blair stood, but he got Labour into government because he understood how to bring a sufficient swathe of the population along with him and work with the wheels of government, and Starmer is cut from the same cloth. The alternative is a Labour party so far to the left it will never have a hope of a parliamentary majority - let alone a stable one - and permanent Tory government drifting ever rightward into the hands of isolationists, profiteers and shysters, because that is who the Conservatives now stand for.
So, the question to answer is whether the future of the Labour party is a purist and perfect nothing, or a functional something? That is the choice its supporters face.
