Today, Keir Starmer made it clear that the policy of the Biden Administration would simply be the policy of the Labour Party, and that would be that. This is of course a reversion to Labour's historical norm. Watch out for that party's demand that Britain participate in every American military adventure, in the face of the much greater scepticism of the Government, again broadly in line with partisan type.
And do not let Bidenite Labour anywhere near the National Health Service, to which it is opposed in principle. "Medicare for all"? The very idea. There was of course no such concept as NHS privatisation until the 1997 Election brought to power such Clinton fanboys as Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan.
The companies for which America prosecutes its wars may be nominally American, but they take full advantage of the much lighter regulatory touch in the City of London than on Wall Street, and they launder everything through the network of tax havens under British sovereignty. All the worst people in the world do that, including every actual or potential despot for whom the CIA might stage a coup.
That is the British Empire now, and the Labour Party remains faithful to its founding vision of transferring the spoils of Empire to its own core constituency in Great Britain. In 1900, or indeed between 1945 and 1951, that was at least theoretically an industrial labour that had been encouraged to forget that the slave trade had financed enclosure, so that there had always been One Struggle, as there still is.
Today, the intended beneficiary is unambiguously the public sector middle class. Therefore, Labour does indeed support all the wars for Empire, just as scions of the public sector middle class can rise effortlessly through the ranks of the party's own apparatchiki before slipping into, for example, the management of the reputation of HSBC, money launderers to the Mexican and Colombian drug cartels. What next on that CV? The parliamentary candidacy at North West Durham?
This makes the argument for One Struggle all the stronger, since the working class can now see starkly that the Empire is funding its oppression. The Conservative Party may be the man to whom you have to pay ground rent, but you have never met him. The Labour Party is the woman who banned you from seeing your children without allowing you to speak, and who erroneously called them by your ex-wife's maiden name on all the paperwork.
Moreover, if this year's census were to go ahead, then it would show what everyone already knew. At least in every ward east of the Irish Sea, there are now people whose political roots were at least partly in the Global South. And there are now people in Britain from every permanently inhabited territory on the planet, plus their children and grandchildren. Even if Labour were to propose a rather more radically egalitarian dispersal of the fruits of global oppression, then the British people of the 2020s might be somewhat less than convinced. Not that Labour ever would or could propose any such thing.
Enter tomorrow's launch of Jeremy Corbyn's Project for Peace and Justice. Other than Corbyn's two successful campaigns for the Labour Leadership, this is the highest profile expression so far of the emergence over the last 10 years of an autonomous Left that, with close ties to the Global South, is effectively repatriating the liberation struggle to the heart of Empire, simply bypassing the Labour and satellite bureaucracies.
Examples include the renters' unions, Disabled People Against Cuts, United Voices of the World, the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain, the initiating and supporting groups here, and the Progressive International. That pointedly has John McDonnell on its Council alongside, among others, Wang Hui of the Chinese New Left, which frightens the life out of the regime by subjecting it to a Marxist critique.
None of those things or people is perfect. But they are what is happening. Almost since the last census, I have been predicting what is apparently now called Britain's superdiversity of people with ties to everywhere, found everywhere, and including a large and rapidly growing mixed-race population, all to an extent unique in the world, and newly able to remain in close touch with the whole world. Starmer's talk of being a bridge between the United States and Europe is just quaint, a throwback to his own youth or even longer ago.
Ever since the 2005 Election, when the Conservatives won most of the seats in the South outside London but still lost overall, I have been pointing out that General Elections were won and lost along what has come to be called the Red Wall. And for ever, and ever, and ever, I have been saying that the real centre ground of British politics was economically well to the left, "socially conservative" (although in fact we were the ones who wanted to change contemporary society radically), patriotic in all directions, and precisely therefore, on all three counts, pacific abroad and open to superdiversity at home.
As for how an egalitarian and investment-based economic programme was supposed to be funded without the Empire, what the Empire has feared most has been the popular realisation right here in Britain that a sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency had as much of that currency as it chose to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effects, means that therefore needed to be under democratic political control. But here on Plague Island, everyone can see that now.
No comments:
Post a Comment