Perhaps an anti-Labour sentiment is no surprise coming from an anarchist opinion column, but my atheism, this shower of spineless rejects from centrist central casting have had no compunction at all in sucking up to the newly-installed Imperial Orange

~ Rob Ray ~

After a furtive half-minute in a back room tickling Trump’s earhole last week Sir Prime Minister  Keir is smoothing his hair out for an in-person conversation on Thursday, at which he seems to hope that the so-called special relationship can be rekindled.

For a party that prides itself on not being the Tories (little else can be said of their principles) there certainly seems to have been a rush to be as much like the Maga Republicans as possible recently. Just this month there’s been Rachel Reeves doing her best impression of a poundshop Musk by announcing (yet another) audit of regulators aimed at “removing red tape” – including on arms sales. Even the previously vaunted AI safety ideal is on the chopping block.

Over at the Home Office meanwhile it’s time for another round of the “how harsh can we be to migrants” show as an effort is made to deny citizenship to refugees arriving by “dangerous routes.” You might ask how refugees, who cannot claim asylum without being here but aren’t allowed visas, might arrive without taking a dangerous route. Yes, quite.

Labour’s disinterest in repealing the Tories’ anti-protest laws has been covered in this column before, but its insistence on fighting the legal case for keeping climate and Gaza protesters in jail for as long as possible during a prison crisis has been particularly cruel.

And most damning of all is the use of upcoming welfare cuts to fund increased defence spending – a measure tailored specifically to appeal to the whims of the US president, and useless for any other consideration. Billions of pounds that could have gone to saving lives in Britain, destined to adorn a balance sheet when bragging at a G8 dinner.

Hardly surprising, in this atmosphere, is the disinterment of Blue Labour, a monumentally thick-headed idea in its first 2010s incarnation and a worse one now, trying the same “chase the rabbit down the hole” tactics that gave Reform its big break in the first place.

And yet all of this, the “hey look we’re like you” of audits and migrant bashing, the mealy-mouthing around topics like Gaza and Ukraine (where just days prior there had been sabre-rattling bellicosity towards Putin and promises of a 100-year partnership), the selling of whatever minimal principle still remained in hopes of being “the adult in the room” with Donnie are as nought. The US does not care whether Labour is pre-emptively grovelling, and Trump will humiliate his poodle regardless. 

It’s perhaps the most numbingly pathetic part of this “strategy” for Reform shoe-stealing and Trump placating that it doesn’t even work on its own terms.

People who have turned to Reform may be self-defeating, many or most may be bigots, or even willing dupes. But this isn’t the same thing as being stupid. Farage is a grifter, but he’s been banging his drum for decades. His politics are consistent. Labour on the other hand … everyone knows this lot. Their policies are weathervane. Making a big song and dance of performative cruelty only pushes the boundaries of what’s acceptable, or even desirable, in the body politic. 

And Trump will simply tell Starmer what to do with menaces, sounding vaguely magnanimous about it if Labour sucks up hard enough.

This is looking likely to be party politics for the next four years. Labour chasing Reform domestically, and Trump on the world stage. Which is a departure from what was being suggested by liberals and even much of the left as we entered the new government last year, that we’d at least be spared more Tory mess. 

Turns out the anarchists were right, and we’re getting largely the same Tory mess. Dogend neoliberalism washed down with a slug of watery Faragism. 

While centrists do what they were always going to, there has been at least some acceptance on the left, at long last, that hopes of an electoral route for progressive reform through Labour are now dead. And inevitably there has been recent talk, on the left, of starting a new party, or of trying to capture the Greens. 

Either would be a waste of time. 

The problem is not that we lack a party, it’s that any left party would lack a constituency. Labour gets away with this stuff because there’s no counter power to scare them out of it. They had election results in 2017 and 2019 showcasing this very fact, in which the public, offered a social democratic model by Corbyn and McDonnell, looked at it and said “nah, not plausible.” 

And of course it wasn’t. The left Labour machine was almost solely electoral, it had no economic muscle in the absence of a serious trade union or social movement and was getting its arse kicked by the media even before putting a foot in Downing Street. The public was correct to be sceptical and will continue to be so until we, collectively, have something of substance to offer.

And that doesn’t start in Parliament. 

For those of us who give a damn, the next four years should not involve worrying about what’s in the polls. Our concern should be for building the networks and community resilience that we failed to build ten years ago. Overtly and constructively fostering cultures of solidarity to reverse the alienation which has produced so many of the stupid ideas which currently infest our body politic. That’s what underpins Reform’s rise, along with MAGA in the US.

And given both climate change and the resumption of belligerent geopolitics, we need to have a sense of urgency about doing so.