Labor finds it disappointing that their shadow ministers are often unable to conduct interviews without being asked if a woman can have a penis. However, their frustration should not be with the interviewers, but with themselves. Like Tory MPs who asked if Boris Johnson was right, the questions will stop once they give a clear answer.
Something similar is happening with the strikes that are expected this week. The Tories call them “Labor strikes” and challenge Keir Starmer to condemn the unions. There is no point in complaining that ministers, not Labor, must prevent disruption. The unions called the strikes and they funded the Labor Party. Not surprisingly, Labor will not oppose them.
Most Labor MPs have suggested they would like an end to the strikes, but say the government is to blame. This means for society that they do not approve of industrial action, but for unions that Labor supports their demands for wages. Yet last week, Wes Street, the shadow health minister who will replace Starmer, went further. “If I were a member of the RMT,” he said, “I would have voted for the strike.”
Streeting’s intervention tells us a lot. First, about where power remains in the modern Labor Party. The streets, many on the Labor right, know that in order to become a leader, he must obey trade unions and party activists.
If this is where power remains, voters can be confident that the interests and values of unions and activists will be before theirs if and when Labor returns to power.
The second thing Streetting’s intervention tells us is about the dishonesty of Labor. After his comments caused a furor, he apologized to the shadow cabinet – but only for the bad publicity he caused.
Most importantly, the incident reveals how weak Starmer is in his own party. It is true that Labor is ahead in opinion polls, but with eighty percent of voters saying the prime minister is a liar, their six-point lead seems small. Of course, this suggests that they are not on the way to governing the majority. Labor is likely to win the by-elections in Wakefield this Thursday, but a victory there will not convince skeptics that Starmer is doing enough.
He may soon lose his job anyway. Having taken on a morally high level of lawlessness and dishonesty from Boris Johnson, Starmer is the subject of a police investigation into his own behavior and seems to be economical with the topicality while defending himself. After promising to step down if fined, he allowed his deputies to plan a conspiracy and campaign to replace him.
The new story in Westminster is that Starmer is just too dumb to please the public. This opinion became popular after a survey was published last week by the sociological company JL Partners. This study found that people complain that Starmer is boring, but other words used by voters to describe him tell us more: weak, gentle, neutral, unreliable, useless, hypocritical. The complaint that voters hear over and over again is that Starmer is never constructive: all he does is moan in favor of retrospective support.
The perception that Starmer is boring is just a symptom of two more serious problems for Labor. The first is that neither Starmer nor his party has a compelling analysis of what’s wrong with the country, let alone a plan to make things right.
The economy is in a dangerous state. Growth has been anemic for years. Wages are no higher in real terms than before the financial collapse a decade and a half ago. Productivity growth is weak. Regional divisions show no signs of narrowing. And inflation is making us all poorer. But what is the Labor explanation for this whole struggle?
Of course, after the years of Corbyn, Starmer wants to lure Labor into what he sees as more moderate. But if he believes he can do that by taking him back to Blair’s old shattered consensus, he’s seriously wrong. A moderate proposal to solve our economic problems requires original thinking and significant change.
This is true for the whole economy, but strikes are a good example of the challenge. The interests of workers must be better balanced against the interests of capital. However, the solution is not the abuse of trade union powers, but the empowerment of workers through legal protection and greater participation in corporate governance.
The second problem is that neither Starmer nor Labor are honest with the public about who and what they are. Starmer presents himself as a sensible man trying to protect himself from the cultural war and tame his more ideological party. But sometimes the mask slips away. He said, for example, that it was wrong to say that only women have a cervix, and promised to change the Gender Recognition Act. He knelt down on the Black Lives Matter and spoke of “systemic racism,” a controversial theory that claims that white people benefit from systemic social discrimination against minorities.
And the list goes on. Starmer pays homage to the royal family, but has previously boasted of his republicanism. He says he accepts Brexit, but has done everything he can to stop it, and promises to change the agreement we have with Brussels. He won the leadership of the Labor Party by turning to the left, but then betrayed his supporters. Even with his promise to leave if fined by police, as former Labor MP Ian Austin points out, it took him days to decide what he said was a matter of “honor and integrity”.
Starmer, a lawyer by birth, may not have the knowledge to take on the great economic challenges we face. It may turn out that his party simply lacks the originality to bring new ideas to the country and is too convinced of its ideological and cultural nihilism. But the problem of Labor is much more than personalities. Their problem is that they are quite brazenly trying to hide their true instincts and beliefs and have almost nothing to say on the issues that matter most.
So it should come as no surprise that they are not ahead – even with such a chaotic government like this.
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