Shifting Sands?

The biggest ever rebellion of Labour MPs against Jeremy Corbyn's Leadership was the organised mass abstention from a vote to condemn Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen. The lucrative Saudi ties to the Parliamentary Labour Party are very close indeed.

How Keir Starmer reacted to the visit of Prince Mohammed bin Salman should be the litmus test of whether figures such as Helena Kennedy could continue to have anything to do with him. He has already put them through a lot, what with the Public Order Act, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act, the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act, the Nationality and Borders Act, the Elections Act, the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, the National Security Act, and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, with the Online Safety Bill coming down the line. Labour has opposed each of those barely or not at all, and no one seriously imagines that it would repeal any of them. 

In the case of the Public Order Act, the promise to leave it in place has already been made explicitly. Labour would also retain and exercise the power of the Home Secretary to strip people of their British citizenship, without having to give a reason, and now without even having to tell them. It is more than hinting at a revival of the identity card scheme that it tried to introduce when it was last in office.

None of this is, or would be, in any way contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights. Most of the signatories to that already have identity cards, and none of these measures has ever been struck down, nor ever would be, whether in London or in Strasbourg.

But withdrawal from the ECHR would directly breach the Good Friday Agreement, and there would be no limit to how any President of the United States might retaliate. The courts would just find other grounds for ruling against things like the Rwanda Plan, a gimmick designed to be "thwarted" rather than to be given effect. There will never be a Commons majority for such withdrawal, so that is that. David Cameron won an overall majority on a manifesto that contained something or other about this, but that was three General Elections and five Prime Ministers ago. Nothing has happened. Nor will it.

Just as the EU was conceived in no small part to inject West German capital into the French and Belgian Empires in Africa, so the ECHR should be understood in light of the fact that the victorious post-War European powers were also global imperial powers, and while there were people who wished them to cease to be, those were not in The Hague to hear Winston Churchill at the Hall of Knights in May 1948.

Churchill and his audience were as concerned to check self-determination abroad as they were to check social democracy at home, and vice versa. The EU presented no obstacle to any aspect of Thatcherism from, in fact, the Labour Budget of December 1976 onwards, and it offered no hope to Denis Healey's and David Miliband's other victims, the Chagossians. On both counts, nor has the ECHR. Well, of course not. Look up David Maxwell Fyfe, who, moreover, was furious with Anthony Eden for not having taken Britain into the EU at the start.

For workers' rights, we need to look to our own Parliament. But how? Starmer has abandoned his commitment to a single status of "worker" in employment law, and to John Smith's signature policy that employment rights should begin with employment and apply regardless of the number of hours worked. The present crop of affiliated trade union leaders is so bad that these betrayals probably really did make it past the National Policy Forum.

What was the point of the EU, if it never even gave us a single status of worker, and employment rights that began with employment while applying regardless of the number of hours worked? Then again, it was never intended to. What is the point of the ECHR, if it has never even given us a single status of worker, and employment rights that began with employment while applying regardless of the number of hours worked? Then again, it has never been intended to. And what is the point of the Labour Party, if it would not even give us a single status of worker, and employment rights that began with employment while applying regardless of the number of hours worked? Then again, was it ever really intended to?

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair’s Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.