A Letter to Sir Keir Starmer from a Member of the Working Class

I absolutely have to meet Ricky D. Hale:

Dear Sir Keir,

We have just witnessed you do something unthinkable, hurtful and plain wrong: you have blocked Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a Labour candidate at the next General Election.

Jeremy Corbyn has proudly served the Labour Party since I was a baby in 1983 and in that time he has formed a close relationship with his constituents, thanks to his unmatched record fighting for their, and our, rights.

The man you vilify campaigned for gay rights in the 1970s when it was unfashionable to do so, got arrested protesting apartheid against outside the South African Embassy in 1984, stood with the striking miners in 1984-85, gave a spine-tingling speech against the Iraq War in 2003, and has this unnerving habit of being on the right side of history.

For you to come into politics just eight years ago, achieve nothing but lie to become Labour Leader, and treat a man of Corbyn’s stature the way you have is disgraceful. Doubly so, considering you once called him your friend. If this is how you treat your friends, how can anyone trust you?

Corbyn was an overwhelmingly popular MP who won two Leadership contests and is still beloved by the members of your party. When you tell them Jeremy Corbyn has no place in Labour, you are saying 61.8% of the membership who voted for him to become Leader are not welcome either.

Labour is supposed to be a democratic socialist party, yet you seem to have a problem with both the “democratic” and the “socialist” part of that phrase, because you’re tearing up party democracy and telling the members of Islington North PLP they are not allowed to vote for a socialist.

Now, there are people who will feel I should stay quiet because the important thing is “getting the Tories out” and any Labour government is better than a Tory government, so let me explain why that argument does not work on me and why Jeremy Corbyn still means so much to so many. Just bear with me because this is going to take a while.

I had a rough start to my adult life. I remember walking into the council office as a homeless teenager and being met with indifference. I remember dropping out of college because the JobCentre told me I wasn’t allowed to continue going. I remember being forced onto an “IT training course” which involved slave labour and zero IT training. I remember losing almost a decade of my life to homelessness and long-term unemployment.

And you know who was prime minister throughout this period? Sir Anthony Blair. When you’re telling people like me that we’re returning to the Blair years, you’re not giving us cause for celebration, you’re triggering PTSD. And there are many, many people like me.

My home town had about 90% youth unemployment and even kids like me, who was the most academically gifted kid in school, were thrown on the scrap heap. Many of my school friends ended up in jail. My childhood best friend ended up dead. Money was an alien concept and opportunities were non-existent. I felt like there was one world for people like me and another for people like them, like we lived in two separate worlds and I could peer into their world, but I wasn’t allowed to be part of Blair’s “Cool Britannia”.

I would watch people walk into coffee shops and think I would never be in a position where I could spend £4 on a fancy coffee with a name I couldn’t even pronounce. I drifted between working temporary jobs where supervisors spoke to me like shit, and offering my body for medical research. I was a guinea pig, locked away in a medical facility for weeks at a time as nurses injected untested drugs into my arm and wired me up to a cardiograph, just so I could eat. Needless to say, this was not a nice period of my life.

Now don’t get me wrong, I understand not everything during the Blair years was terrible, despite the war crimes, and the mass privatisation, and the staggering inequality. Blair did have some decent policies, like SureStart Centres for example, but he offered absolutely nothing to people like me.

We were trapped and desperate, and when many North East towns voted for Brexit, you have to understand that desperation was the motivating factor. I happen to think people were wrong to vote for Brexit, but I certainly got their desperation for change. Blair and Brown did not offer hope, nor did Cameron, and today neither do you. After decades of Thatcherism, we were crying out for an alternative and yet here you are, offering more Thatcherism, but pretending it’s a little bit left-wing.

I’m not sure you understand how horrifying Thatcherism/Blairism is to the have-nots in my North East town because it destroyed our livelihoods. It exacerbated the North-South divide and left us to rot in the most economically imbalanced country in the developed world. Regional inequality in the UK is comparable to that of countries affected by civil war.

Life is a constant struggle for almost everyone here, and throughout my childhood years we had nothing. Well, that’s not entirely accurate, because when I was small, we actually had a number of playgrounds within walking distance. I remember the park on my doorstep with a flying saucer climbing frame, and the one up the road with a huge ship climbing frame and the one around the corner with a banana slide, and a bunch of other parks further afield. Thatcher tore every park down and my flying saucer vanished, only to be replaced by a building site that inevitably became our new playground.

The pattern of destruction continued and as teenagers. We were hanging on street corners, drinking cider, then breaking into abandoned buildings where we’d listen to live recordings from our local rave, the Afterdark. There was nothing better to do, and even if there had been, we couldn’t have afforded it.

I was one of the few kids who was expected to go to college and university and move away from my forgotten town, but things never worked out for me and I ended like most of my peers, facing years of instability and frustration. I spent over eight years of my life on the homeless register before finally getting my own place at the age of 26.

It feels like my life didn’t start until my late twenties and even then I had a dead-end job with no realistic chance of “bettering myself”. I hate the term bettering myself though because I don’t want to become better than anyone. I want everyone to have better, but the option for me to escape would’ve been better than nothing and it just wasn’t there.

Tony Blair had no intention of fixing our region, because he thought he could take North East votes for granted. When you tell us Jeremy Corbyn is never coming back and anyone who doesn’t like it (61.8% of the membership) can leave the Labour Party, you are talking about much more than Jeremy Corbyn. You are telling us we are not allowed a different economic system, and a continuation of the same system is a continuation of the hell I described above.

When we talk about Jeremy Corbyn, it’s not even about the man, although we immensely respect him and care about how he’s treated. We are yearning for the time we were finally offered structural change and came within 2,000 votes of getting it.

There was a reason Jeremy Corbyn was emphatically elected as Labour Leader not once but twice. There was a reason he attracted huge crowds, and there was a reason a late surge in 2017 very nearly made him Prime Minister: he represented those who have been left behind. Corbyn listened to us, proposed solutions to the problems you won’t even acknowledge, and genuinely cared about the people you sneer at.

Labour MPs and the Labour Leader should be proud to represent the working class, and they should always stand in solidarity with unions. A Labour MP is not supposed to be a neoliberal who thinks nationalisation is a dirty word and democratic socialists are a problem to be solved. If you do not understand this, you should not be Labour Leader, and you would not be Labour Leader if you had been honest about your intentions in the Leadership contest.

When you made 10 pledges to the Labour membership, you understood perfectly well who and what a Labour Leader was supposed to represent. Only your aides were briefing the press that you would not honour those pledges when you became Leader, and of course you did not. You U-turned on every single one of your pledges. I’m not talking about slight tweaking, a little change of direction here and there. I’m talking about you being the opposite of what you pretended to be.

Liberal pundits love to talk about integrity, to whine about "post-truth" politics, and here you are, showing yourself to be a liar with no integrity. You have infiltrated the Labour Party because your natural home in the Liberal Democrats would not have been as good for your career prospects.

And you talk like your nonsense is necessary, yet you are guaranteed victory, thanks to the Tory collapse and you’re still risking bankruptcy to pursue whistleblowers. The ICO has decided there is insufficient evidence against the accused, but you are vindictively pursuing those suspected of revealing the truth. That truth being that your faction sat on antisemitism complaints to hurt Jeremy Corbyn.

I can only assume you have a wealthy donor ready to bail you out if your court action goes wrong, given how much time you spend sucking up to big business. You’ve made it abundantly clear you’re not going to represent people like me, so why the hell should I get behind you?

I want a party that stands with unions, because the unions are standing up for my economic interests during a cost of living crisis. They’re the ones fighting against the real-terms pay cuts the Tories, and even you, are telling us to accept. The system is not working, and people like you, who think it requires only minor tweaking, might as well be living on a different planet.

You’re treating us like simpletons, and to add insult to injury, you've gone and made Rachel “tougher on benefits claimants than the Tories” Reeves your Shadow Chancellor. You will struggle to find a single person on my estate who has never claimed benefits and a party with Rachel Reeves as Shadow Chancellor is showing contempt for us.

You are being nothing to anyone and you keep blaming Corbyn for the 2019 election defeat, yet that disaster was on you, and I’m pretty sure it was self-sabotage. You acknowledged the People’s Vote policy would divide the Red Wall one year prior to adopting the policy, after seeing internal polling data. This was your great plan to become leader though, wasn’t it? And now you’ve thrown the People’s Vote crowd under a bus. If you really want to “win back trust”, an apology would be a good start.

If you want people to embrace you, there is a way to achieve this: listen to people, acknowledge the problems we face, and propose meaningful solutions. Explain how you’re going to end homelessness, put a stop to corporate price gouging, make energy clean and affordable, revitalise public transport, create opportunities for the youth, restore our work rights, and bring an end to inflation.

Unless you can do that, you will never attract the crowds Jeremy Corbyn did and you will never escape his shadow because people will forever be talking about what we could have had.

If Jeremy Corbyn had become Prime Minister, his opening speech was going to include the words: “Today rough sleeping and homelessness ends. There will be no more homeless people in this country. The state will provide.” And those words would’ve meant a hell of a lot to me because they would’ve meant no young person would go through what I went through ever again.