Somewhere Else To Go

The Labour Party has no core vote. If the guardians of the white liberal bourgeoise think that Keir Starmer has betrayed them today, then they have a point. But they could always vote Liberal Democrat or Green, parties in which they would not have to deal, as it were, with anyone apart from themselves.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party enjoys its enormous majority because, although it and the Labour Party enjoy the same level of support among the rich, the Conservatives are much more popular than Labour among the far more numerous poor. Of course, 45 per cent of the working class always did vote Conservative. But this is still something else, which neither party has yet fully grasped. If the Conservatives ever were the party of thrusting, self-starting, go-getting economic success stories, then those days are long gone. Quite the reverse is now the case. Whatever else the 1980s may have been, they were a long time ago.

And then there are the BAME voters (I prefer the old school "politically black", but here we are) who were most loyal to Jeremy Corbyn right to the end, and who remain so, since he has spent decade after decade doing more for them than any other MP, of any colour, ever. Assuming that it went ahead, then next year's census would reveal that every ward east of the Irish Sea included at least some people whose political roots were at least partly in the liberation struggle of the Global South. Like everything else, that struggle rocked up in "the world in one city", which has effectively been its capital for a very long time. It has now fanned out across the entire country.

Corbyn is a superstar in that struggle, and he is probably capable of exercising more influence within it than any other individual on the planet. He is by far the closest that the poor and huddled masses of the Three Continents have ever come to having anyone remotely sympathetic as the leader of a major Western country. And he is a lot more than merely a remote sympathiser with their yearning to breathe free. Such is now the bedrock of the emerging new Left of British politics, to which Starmer is downright toxic. If you think that I have mixed a metaphor, since nothing can be toxic to bedrock, then just you wait and see.

In any case, with or without the ethnic diversity that increasingly characterises it, the Red Wall belongs to the global network of internal colonies, and of potentially revolutionary villages that surround the cities both literally and geopolitically. I was mixed-race on what is now the Red Wall long, long, long before it became fashionable. And I am the Independent parliamentary candidate for North West Durham. What are you doing?