Yeah, it’s really fucking bad. Pair that with more and more restrictive demonstration laws and regulations, the proscription of Palestine Action which was already shot down by their own legal system as ‘baseless’, etc etc etc
It’s just Starmer’s leg up to another cushy job and nothing else. And Labour really showed us what Labour has become: a soulless job machine for the rich and careless. They may as well call themselves Tories at this point.
When I left Britain after over a decade living there (to were I had moved from almost a decade in The Netherland, so that was the reference against which I measured Britain), having been there for the 2008 Crash and all the way until after the Leave Referendum and just before the actual Brexit, I was thoroughly convinced that the country in Europe (excluding Russia, which already is) most likely to turn Fascist was Britain.
If you constrast it with that of a country with Proportional Vote, British “Democracy” is already thoroughly subverted, from the voting system itself being First Past The Post (thus the current government has more than 50% of members of Parliament only a little above 30% of votes) and unelected head of state (who has actual power to block laws) and parliamentary second chamber, to the entire Press being either in the hands of billionaires or controlled by boards of people with Royal Titles who went to very expensive, very exclusive schools (curiously called “public schools” in Britain even though only the rich and the upper middle class can afford them) and the Judiciary being entirelly in the hands of the exact same slice of society (not the billionaires, the “lords”, “sirs” and public school educated types).
All Pillars of Democracy have long been subverted in Britain and as things started getting worse for the majority of people in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash and the way to local powers decide to handle it (save the Bankers and the Asset Owners, make the rest pay for it with Austerity), the entire system at all levels moved more and more to scapegoating outsiders (the EU, immigrants and later when the consequences of Brexit were felt, the blame for it was “Russia interference” as if almost all of that shit hadn’t been mainly pushed by local people such as billionaires and their newspapers) thus redirecting the righteous anger of the rest of society away from the local power elites who did the deeds and are the ones mainly at fault.
Meanwhile at the same time there was the ever tighter surveillance net (that the Snowden Revelations exposed to a large extent, but are other scandals less known outside such as for example how coppers infiltrated Ecologist groups and left behind pregnant women whose children never knew their fathers), which has only been made ever more extreme ever more openly, hence the recent “age verification” legislation".
So yeah, the continuation of the scapegoating trend, the ever more intrusive surveillance and the ever more authoritarian use of force against peaceful civil society groups, are all the totally natural continuation of what was already happenning under the exact same machinery already in place more than a decade ago (whose last parts were probably put in place back when Thatcher approved Murdoch’s consolidation of the Press, destroyed traditional Unions, started the Economy down the path of dominance by Finance and other Rent-seeking activities and used extreme Force against the Miners) - the machine just kept chugging along towards its natural destination (there was a hickup when Corby was elected leader of the Labour Party, but all that was dealt with by, with the support of Israeli backed Jewish Groups, slandering him relentlessly in the ENTIRE PRESS - thus neatly showing just how hard rightwing and propagandistic all if it is, including the BBC and The Guardian - as an anti-semite, which by the way goes a long way to explain why the guy who got the leadership of that party after that and is now Prime Minister, is extremely pro-Israel) and that destination are the levels of Propaganda, Surveillance, Civil Society supression by Force behind “It’s the Law” excuses and control of the Judiciary that you see in Fascist Dictatorships.
At most the British version of Fascism is just going to differ in being posher (same steel fist, but covered with a satin glove - i.e. the abuse of Force disguised more with “it’s the Law”, the Press control with “it’s the Free Market”, the Civil Society Surveillance portrayed as “to protect the children”) than the “loudmouth rightwing populist” version of it of the likes of Mussolini or Trump.
Ah yes, cancelling rights (i.e. turning rights to privileges) and using politically charged litigation against citizens, also subverting their rights, is not a threat to democracy, of course! It’s what democracies are known for! Lol
There was an internal coup by the stooges of rich donors, many of them also aligned with Israel’s current genocidal government.
Who can the left turn to now?
Your Party looks increasingly like a dead duck, so that leaves the Greens. Ignore the character assassination against Polansky, which will continue, but keep in mind that the Greens have been growing rapidly and don’t yet have a party organisation with good nationwide coverage. Also the party’s governance structures need to be strengthened to prevent fuckery like the entryism that stymied the Zionism-is-racism resolution at the last party conference. It’s got the most open governance system of any party (along with Your Party), which is good, but its openness makes it at risk of being gamed by bad-faith actors, and that part will have to be changed.
Is it worth trying to salvage?
It’s worth trying, but it might be better to consider other options. Almost the entire party apparatus and a significant percentage of sitting Labour MPs are aligned with Labour Together. As we saw during Corbyn’s time as leader, the parliamentary party is far to the right of the membership. That has only gotten wose as Starmer has purged the few leftists in the party. As for potential leaders once Starmer fucks off, Streeting is likely to be even worse than Starmer, Burnham has already said he’d continue Shabana Mahmoud’s Reform-parroting immigration policies and won’t attempt to reverse Brexit, and it’s still unclear what Rayner would do differently, having once been in Starmer’s cabinet.
It was galling to see „Your Party“ (still a stupid name) fall in line with every other British party on trans issues right from its launch. Talk about missing the point. I found out recently that I technically have British citizenship but I will never exercise it.
I do not have a full accounting of what happened exactly but broad strokes are, Thatcher broke their brains and they went New Labour, meaning they would coddle the capitalists even more than they already had been doing. This kept up, Labour became more about getting fancy jobs, the started and supported deeply unpopular wars (especially unpopular among the left), Labour started tanking again and then they chose racism to try and claw back. The only reason they are in power now is because the Conservatives fucked up so much they became functionally irrelevant. But now the attempts by the cons and labs to out-racism each other will come home to roost with Reform on the horizon, quickly gaining momentum, so Labour and especially Starmer are trying to appease both the soulless capitalists who know the end of this economic cycle is coming (and will be disastrous) and the actual fascists of Reform and their voters. They are chasing fictional voter groups that will never vote for Labour while hemorrhaging their actual voter base to the Greens because hey, wasn’t Labour supposed to not be a fascist island of job-hopping dickholes?
Oh and a lot of social-democrats literally just died. Not even kidding, in statistics a not-insignificant voter base they had just straight up died and now Labour is standing on their graves going ‘please vote for us again, we’re racist now please’
Yeah, the rot started with Blair got in and killed off Clause IV. Before that, at least lip service was being given to public ownership.
And the reason there aren’t young socialists and social-democrats is because young people know that Labour, as currently constituted, is just Tory Lite. And the Tories have become a Reform clone.
Someone from the UK trans community would know best but from the news I’ve been following, “Your Party” (i.e. the people aligned with Zarah Sultana at least) could turn out to be the most dedicated to trans rights but they’re probably the least likely to win a seat anytime soon, while the Green Party has the right to self-identify on the platform for both trans and nonbinary folks, and is gaining in momentum. Plaid Cymru in Wales also has this.
It wasn’t just the Party bureaucrats. The main faction behind the anti-Corbyn coup was organised by Mandelson and his Mini-Me McSweeney, with Blair lurking behind the curtains. And the money behind Labour Together was deliberately obfuscated, but much of it appears to have come from donors whose quid pro quo was unconditional support for Israel.
The Power and Money elites will never ever accept to not keep getting “more cake”, so when the Economy doesn’t grow anymore, they switch from capturing pretty much the entirety of Economic Growth to Pillaging the existing wealth in the rest of society.
So the Economy has become more and more one of rent-seeking (which, thanks to increased indebtness, has expanded to such an extreme level that it is effectivelly taking existing wealth away from the people who own the least money-producing assets, who are mostly the younger generations and the working class) and less and less one of value adding activities, plus the share that the rest of Society (read: mainly workers) gets from the wealth still created has fallen so Consumption keeps falling.
All of this just makes the Economy grow even less (all that extra money for the wealthy ends up as Investments, which in turn end up as more Production, not Consumption, and as even that has stopped delivering any returns more and more of that money ends up in speculative assets, hence the various bubbles, from Realestate to Crypto and AI) so there is more and more overt Pillaging, which comes with more Authoritarianism in the form of Civil Society Surveillance and Forceful Suppression of Civil Society Movements to keep the victims from changing the system than enables and supports that Pillaging, and similarly with the Press (even those parts of it which had an image of independence) becoming even more intenselly Propagandistic than they were before.
Add to this the notion that the extreme Far Right in Britain (i.e. Reform) are the paid for political puppets of the ultra-rich (hence why the billionaire owned newspapers all support them) and almost all of the shit going on in the UK right now is explainable as pieces of a broad policy of keeping the elites in power and stopping the civil society from effectivelly challenging those power structures (by spotting them early via surveillance and cracking down hard on even the most peacefull challanges against the dictatums of those in power).
Yeah, it’s really fucking bad. Pair that with more and more restrictive demonstration laws and regulations, the proscription of Palestine Action which was already shot down by their own legal system as ‘baseless’, etc etc etc
It’s just Starmer’s leg up to another cushy job and nothing else. And Labour really showed us what Labour has become: a soulless job machine for the rich and careless. They may as well call themselves Tories at this point.
When I left Britain after over a decade living there (to were I had moved from almost a decade in The Netherland, so that was the reference against which I measured Britain), having been there for the 2008 Crash and all the way until after the Leave Referendum and just before the actual Brexit, I was thoroughly convinced that the country in Europe (excluding Russia, which already is) most likely to turn Fascist was Britain.
If you constrast it with that of a country with Proportional Vote, British “Democracy” is already thoroughly subverted, from the voting system itself being First Past The Post (thus the current government has more than 50% of members of Parliament only a little above 30% of votes) and unelected head of state (who has actual power to block laws) and parliamentary second chamber, to the entire Press being either in the hands of billionaires or controlled by boards of people with Royal Titles who went to very expensive, very exclusive schools (curiously called “public schools” in Britain even though only the rich and the upper middle class can afford them) and the Judiciary being entirelly in the hands of the exact same slice of society (not the billionaires, the “lords”, “sirs” and public school educated types).
All Pillars of Democracy have long been subverted in Britain and as things started getting worse for the majority of people in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash and the way to local powers decide to handle it (save the Bankers and the Asset Owners, make the rest pay for it with Austerity), the entire system at all levels moved more and more to scapegoating outsiders (the EU, immigrants and later when the consequences of Brexit were felt, the blame for it was “Russia interference” as if almost all of that shit hadn’t been mainly pushed by local people such as billionaires and their newspapers) thus redirecting the righteous anger of the rest of society away from the local power elites who did the deeds and are the ones mainly at fault.
Meanwhile at the same time there was the ever tighter surveillance net (that the Snowden Revelations exposed to a large extent, but are other scandals less known outside such as for example how coppers infiltrated Ecologist groups and left behind pregnant women whose children never knew their fathers), which has only been made ever more extreme ever more openly, hence the recent “age verification” legislation".
So yeah, the continuation of the scapegoating trend, the ever more intrusive surveillance and the ever more authoritarian use of force against peaceful civil society groups, are all the totally natural continuation of what was already happenning under the exact same machinery already in place more than a decade ago (whose last parts were probably put in place back when Thatcher approved Murdoch’s consolidation of the Press, destroyed traditional Unions, started the Economy down the path of dominance by Finance and other Rent-seeking activities and used extreme Force against the Miners) - the machine just kept chugging along towards its natural destination (there was a hickup when Corby was elected leader of the Labour Party, but all that was dealt with by, with the support of Israeli backed Jewish Groups, slandering him relentlessly in the ENTIRE PRESS - thus neatly showing just how hard rightwing and propagandistic all if it is, including the BBC and The Guardian - as an anti-semite, which by the way goes a long way to explain why the guy who got the leadership of that party after that and is now Prime Minister, is extremely pro-Israel) and that destination are the levels of Propaganda, Surveillance, Civil Society supression by Force behind “It’s the Law” excuses and control of the Judiciary that you see in Fascist Dictatorships.
At most the British version of Fascism is just going to differ in being posher (same steel fist, but covered with a satin glove - i.e. the abuse of Force disguised more with “it’s the Law”, the Press control with “it’s the Free Market”, the Civil Society Surveillance portrayed as “to protect the children”) than the “loudmouth rightwing populist” version of it of the likes of Mussolini or Trump.
there are a lot of reasons democracy is threatened in the uk, trans rights and palestinian protest are way down the list
Ah yes, cancelling rights (i.e. turning rights to privileges) and using politically charged litigation against citizens, also subverting their rights, is not a threat to democracy, of course! It’s what democracies are known for! Lol
Lots of people call them “Red Tories”.
Yeah, new labour was the fully coöptation of the socialist party by capitalism and machine politics.
Before that they were at least Democratic socialists so they tried to help the working class a little bit.
What the actual hell happened to Labour? Who can the left turn to now? Is it worth trying to salvage?
There was an internal coup by the stooges of rich donors, many of them also aligned with Israel’s current genocidal government.
Your Party looks increasingly like a dead duck, so that leaves the Greens. Ignore the character assassination against Polansky, which will continue, but keep in mind that the Greens have been growing rapidly and don’t yet have a party organisation with good nationwide coverage. Also the party’s governance structures need to be strengthened to prevent fuckery like the entryism that stymied the Zionism-is-racism resolution at the last party conference. It’s got the most open governance system of any party (along with Your Party), which is good, but its openness makes it at risk of being gamed by bad-faith actors, and that part will have to be changed.
It’s worth trying, but it might be better to consider other options. Almost the entire party apparatus and a significant percentage of sitting Labour MPs are aligned with Labour Together. As we saw during Corbyn’s time as leader, the parliamentary party is far to the right of the membership. That has only gotten wose as Starmer has purged the few leftists in the party. As for potential leaders once Starmer fucks off, Streeting is likely to be even worse than Starmer, Burnham has already said he’d continue Shabana Mahmoud’s Reform-parroting immigration policies and won’t attempt to reverse Brexit, and it’s still unclear what Rayner would do differently, having once been in Starmer’s cabinet.
It was galling to see „Your Party“ (still a stupid name) fall in line with every other British party on trans issues right from its launch. Talk about missing the point. I found out recently that I technically have British citizenship but I will never exercise it.
Burnham is also against nationalisation.
I do not have a full accounting of what happened exactly but broad strokes are, Thatcher broke their brains and they went New Labour, meaning they would coddle the capitalists even more than they already had been doing. This kept up, Labour became more about getting fancy jobs, the started and supported deeply unpopular wars (especially unpopular among the left), Labour started tanking again and then they chose racism to try and claw back. The only reason they are in power now is because the Conservatives fucked up so much they became functionally irrelevant. But now the attempts by the cons and labs to out-racism each other will come home to roost with Reform on the horizon, quickly gaining momentum, so Labour and especially Starmer are trying to appease both the soulless capitalists who know the end of this economic cycle is coming (and will be disastrous) and the actual fascists of Reform and their voters. They are chasing fictional voter groups that will never vote for Labour while hemorrhaging their actual voter base to the Greens because hey, wasn’t Labour supposed to not be a fascist island of job-hopping dickholes?
Oh and a lot of social-democrats literally just died. Not even kidding, in statistics a not-insignificant voter base they had just straight up died and now Labour is standing on their graves going ‘please vote for us again, we’re racist now please’
Yeah, the rot started with Blair got in and killed off Clause IV. Before that, at least lip service was being given to public ownership.
And the reason there aren’t young socialists and social-democrats is because young people know that Labour, as currently constituted, is just Tory Lite. And the Tories have become a Reform clone.
Someone from the UK trans community would know best but from the news I’ve been following, “Your Party” (i.e. the people aligned with Zarah Sultana at least) could turn out to be the most dedicated to trans rights but they’re probably the least likely to win a seat anytime soon, while the Green Party has the right to self-identify on the platform for both trans and nonbinary folks, and is gaining in momentum. Plaid Cymru in Wales also has this.
The Party bureaucrats turned on Jeremy Corbyn like lupus.
It wasn’t just the Party bureaucrats. The main faction behind the anti-Corbyn coup was organised by Mandelson and his Mini-Me McSweeney, with Blair lurking behind the curtains. And the money behind Labour Together was deliberately obfuscated, but much of it appears to have come from donors whose quid pro quo was unconditional support for Israel.
The capitalists need number to go up. They can’t generate more, so offloading costs to and eroding rights of the workers is the easiest way to do it.
The Power and Money elites will never ever accept to not keep getting “more cake”, so when the Economy doesn’t grow anymore, they switch from capturing pretty much the entirety of Economic Growth to Pillaging the existing wealth in the rest of society.
So the Economy has become more and more one of rent-seeking (which, thanks to increased indebtness, has expanded to such an extreme level that it is effectivelly taking existing wealth away from the people who own the least money-producing assets, who are mostly the younger generations and the working class) and less and less one of value adding activities, plus the share that the rest of Society (read: mainly workers) gets from the wealth still created has fallen so Consumption keeps falling.
All of this just makes the Economy grow even less (all that extra money for the wealthy ends up as Investments, which in turn end up as more Production, not Consumption, and as even that has stopped delivering any returns more and more of that money ends up in speculative assets, hence the various bubbles, from Realestate to Crypto and AI) so there is more and more overt Pillaging, which comes with more Authoritarianism in the form of Civil Society Surveillance and Forceful Suppression of Civil Society Movements to keep the victims from changing the system than enables and supports that Pillaging, and similarly with the Press (even those parts of it which had an image of independence) becoming even more intenselly Propagandistic than they were before.
Add to this the notion that the extreme Far Right in Britain (i.e. Reform) are the paid for political puppets of the ultra-rich (hence why the billionaire owned newspapers all support them) and almost all of the shit going on in the UK right now is explainable as pieces of a broad policy of keeping the elites in power and stopping the civil society from effectivelly challenging those power structures (by spotting them early via surveillance and cracking down hard on even the most peacefull challanges against the dictatums of those in power).