Tag: Neoliberalism

French Election: Popular Frontists Outmanoeuvred Le Pen for Now. But the Danger Remains!

Lefitst social democrat Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Centrist bourgeois Emmanuel Macron, Far-Rightist Marine Le Pen

Joint Statement of LCFI and ClassConscious.org

President Emmanuel Macron’s gamble in calling new elections to the French National Assembly as an attempted means to counter the victory of the far right Rassemblement National – (RN) or National Rally, formerly the Front Nationale (National Front) of Marine Le Pen in the June European Election, has opened a new political situation. It was an act of desperation by Macron whose ‘centrist’ base of support has ebbed away due to his own vicious attacks on the working class over the last period, outrageously raising the pension age from 60 to 64 and ramming it through using emergency clauses in the constitution without a parliamentary vote. His warmongering in Ukraine, even earlier proposing to openly send French troops into battle against Russia, was almost designed to provoke war with Russia. Then there are his vain attempts to supress protests against the genocide in Gaza and his pandering to Zionist and French nativist Islamophobia and anti-migrant agitation. These things have completely discredited his regime and fuelled the growth of the far right in the seeming absence of a potent left movement.

So, after the shock of the Euro-Election, he dissolved the National Assembly. The first-round victory of Le Pen’s Party meant that the gamble appeared to have failed big time. But the New Popular Front (NPF), launched by the La France Insoumise (France Unbowed – LFI) party led by the left-wing social-democratic politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, which included the Socialist Party, Communist Party and Greens, was galvanised by the rise of Le Pen’s party. It launched a campaign of tactical voting to keep Le Pen’s Party from getting a parliamentary majority. Supporters of the NPF and Macron’s Party systematically withdrew their candidates in constituencies where they came third in the first round with their bloc partner having gained second place. This class-collaborationist tactic by the half-formed NPF, itself a class collaborationist alliance, achieved a short-term tactical victory, which in some ways appeared superficially to vindicate Macron’s calling of a snap election. In terms of seats, the NPF came first, Macron’s Renaissance Party came second, with the far right in third place. In terms of seats, that is, though with nowhere near a parliamentary majority for any of them.

But in terms of votes, the RN came first more decisively in the second round than in the first. It increased its vote from 33.21% in the first round to 37.06% in the second round. Quite a considerable increase.  Which means that while the Popular Frontism of the left and Macron may by tactical voting have thwarted the RN in parliamentary terms, they strengthened Le Pen in terms of popular support. Which has not solved the problem therefore, it just postponed the decisive conflict until later. Indeed, far from being a great victory for Mélenchon either, the NPF’s vote fell from 28.21% in the first round to 25.80% in the second round. Whereas Macron’s Party gained marginally, going from 21.28% in the first round to 24.53% in the second round. 

In parliamentary terms, the result for now is deadlock. No bloc has anything like a majority. Macron, as president, is likely to be desperately trying to fit together a coalition for months. He may well not succeed, as despite the parliamentary arithmetic, actual popular votes and the social forces behind them put enormous pressure on members of the National Assembly. And if they don’t succeed, there could even be another election at some point. Le Pen could still benefit from this.

One of the main reasons for Marine Le Pen’s rise is her opposition to France’s support for NATO’s lost war against Russia in Ukraine. The French proletariat simply opposes being dragged like cannon fodder by imperialism into war. A minority of the ruling class sees the far right as a battering ram to push a more nationalist agenda at odds with the mainstream pro-EU ‘globalist’ trend that is deeply involved in the US-led proxy war in Ukraine. That wing is using verbal opposition to French involvement in Ukraine as a means to garner support from part of the working class, particularly in more provincial towns that are more conservative and less ethnically diverse than the biggest cities. As well as mobilising racist anti-migrant sentiment, which Macron had already adapted to to try to ‘disarm’ his far-right opponents by stealing their clothes.

Macron introduced new legislation limiting access to citizenship, rights to social benefits, and family reunification for migrants, as well as deportation for ‘immigrants’ if they commit crimes…. even if being convicted as an adult, they’ve been living in the country from childhood. The issue of work visas for irregular migrants has been curtailed. Overseas study visas are also restricted. It all sounds very much like the kind of laws introduced in Britain by the Tories and Brexiteers over the past decade, except that Macron is as pro-EU as any politician can be. It shows how the nationalist wing of the bourgeoisie, using the fascists as a battering ram, can induce its critics to pander to its racist-nationalist agenda. Migrants are attacked, Muslims are vilified, with the niqab banned in public spaces. In France, 50% of the prison population is Muslim, which is disproportionate as the Muslim population in France is approximately 10%..

The NPF’s circumstantial victory only postpones Le Pen’s victory because the NPF’s positions on the war in Ukraine are very close to Macron’s unpopular positions of increasing French support for Ukraine, sending more French weapons and military instructors to the war. By associating itself with imperialism in the Ukrainian War, the NPF plays the same geopolitical game as Macron, the game of pushing the proletariat politically into the arms of the “fascist-pacifist” extreme right. This is the NPF’s biggest crime at the moment. This crime, if not renounced and the opposite policy adopted and fought for by the workers parties involved, will pave the way for Le Pen’s rise to the French government. A disaster particularly for the sections of the working class with an immigrant origin.

This is at most a tactical defeat for Le Pen, but not a strategic one. The short-term tactic may even strengthen Le Pen strategically. She will be very dangerous in the 2027 Presidential Election, which may well be between her and Mélenchon, as Macron no longer inspires popular support. Mélenchon’s LFI party proposes some reasonable reforms, to restore pensions, raise wages and benefits, radically reverse austerity. It is also in theory hostile to NATO. On international questions Mélenchon is a mixed bag. On Ukraine, Mélenchon party condemned the Special Military Operation (SMO) that began in February 2022 as a so-called ‘invasion’ of Ukraine, echoing imperialist propaganda. Though he opposes the warmongering on a pacifist basis, in effect:

“’We stand for Ukraine’s restoring its territorial integrity. But it should be done politically, but not by means of military force,’ he said, adding that the idea of delivering strikes inside Russia is ‘absurd.’

https://tass.com/world/1814251?

There is no mention of the rights of the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking people of the Donbass in this. They voted against Ukraine’s ‘territorial integrity’ against a far-right regime in Kiev that began to supress their language rights in 2014. In this concept, territorial integrity overrides the democratic rights of the people who live in a state – hardly a socialist position. Though he did have a more sympathetic response to the separation of Crimea to join Russia in 2014, and he has called the Kiev regime ‘neo-Nazis’.

But at least on Syria he was quite supportive of the Russian intervention and hostile to Turkey’s intervention of the side of pro-imperialist mercenary jihadists. This may reflect an older pro-Russian position that is part of French bourgeois politics. He is rather like Jeremy Corbyn over Zionism and promises to recognize Palestine if LFI gains power. However, he is hostile to Iran – on the supposed grounds that Iran is seeking to destroy Israel in some bad way. A soft pro-Zionist position, it seems.

The Communist Party in France echo Macron’s denunciation of Russia, saying the intervention was a “criminal decision…” involving  “…aggression against the sovereignty of the people of Ukraine.” Though they make the usual calls for peace, negotiations, etc, they blame Russia for NATO’s aggressive expansion in the East. The Socialist Party is for the war drive. Its leader Faure was quoted as saying: “If we let Russia win, the risk we all run is to find ourselves in a situation where Russia will not stop.”

A joint statement of the Socialist Party and Greens is quoted by the Spectator as saying:

“‘Our line is clear: we support Ukraine, we support the delivery of arms, we support Ukraine’s membership of the European Union.”

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/frances-political-upheaval-is-bad-news-for-ukraine/

The ‘centre-left’ Place Publique, which is also part if the NPF, campaigns for ‘aid’ to Ukraine. The predominant policy in the NPF bloc is support for the same warmongering as Macron. And by his bloc with them, Mélenchon associates his party with this. While it has to be acknowledged that many in this bloc are driven by justified anti-fascist sentiment against the RN, at the same time the warmongering policy of most in the NPF over Ukraine is fuelling the growth in popular support of the same RN.

If is highly doubtful that Mélenchon will be able to keep together his NPF for the 2027 presidential election, and that he would be able to generate the popular support to seriously thwart Le Pen even if he did. That will also be a two-round election, and it’s not clear who would be able to combat Le Pen. What is clear is that class collaboration, though it practically blocked the RN from gaining a majority and the premiership now, also caused a decline in support for itself vis-à-vis Macron in the second round. Popular fronts historically were an obstacle to revolution including in French history, and elsewhere like Chile, and the precondition for Macron leading a real struggle against Le Pen for the popular vote is a break with class collaboration, with the petit bourgeois Greens, let alone Macron’s bourgeois neoliberal party who he effectively endorsed on the second round by using tactical voting in this manner.

The precondition for serious struggle against Le Pen’s party is a break with popular frontism. In the second round of a presidential election, there is no way to evade the popular vote. But a break with popular frontism in France means a break with reformism, as within a reformist framework, the French electoral system makes popular frontism a practical temptation whenever the question of power arises. It may be that there is some kind of surge toward LFI before 2027, but if it does not break decisively with Macron’s warmongering and this strongly pro-war popular front, Mélenchon would be at best a candidate for the role of Salvador Allende.

Popular fronts, whether with the Greens or Macron’s Renaissance, are a trap for the working class. We demand that Mélenchon, the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, break with Greens, refuse any political bloc with non-working-class forces, and fight too and nail against the war in Ukraine.  The key indicator of the deceptive nature of this popular front is its support for Biden/Macron’s proxy war in Ukraine. In breaking with popular frontism, and this filthy war, they would actually undermine some of the support for the RN.

We need a party that opposes the threat of imperialist war against Russia and China, that defends migrant workers tooth and nail against the far right and Macron alike, and which fights against all the neoliberal attacks on the working class. For workers defence guards to defend victims of fascist terrorism! Down with Macron’s war in Ukraine – defend Russia, the Donbass and Crimea against Macron and his Nazi friends! Down with Le Pen, break with the bourgeoisie, no Popular Fronts – for a government of all the workers parties, LFI, SP, CP, on an anti-capitalist programme!   

Where now for the Left after the General Election?

Jeremy Corbyn, newly elected Independent MP for Islington North, lambasts Starmer at Palestine Solidarity demo on 6 July

This is the text of the presentation today at our forum on the result of the General Election on July 4th.

The presentation and extensive discussion can also be listened to as a podcast here.

The headlines of our leaflet read:

“Starmer’s Regime has NO MANDATE for its Genocidal Neoliberalism!  Independent Working-Class Forces promise Challenge to Zionist New Labour.”

This talk is based on that but expanded.

Media and conventional wisdom have it that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the July 2024 General Election by a ‘landslide’, with its overall majority of 174, and therefore has a strong mandate to rule, having supposedly ‘changed’ the Labour Party to make it ‘fit to govern’ by driving out the ‘unelectable’ Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing followers.

But the ‘landslide’ is a myth. Starmer got fewer votes absolutely than Corbyn’s Labour got in in the General Election of December 2019, which Labour lost by a considerable margin in terms of seats, producing an overall majority for Johnson’s Tories of 80. The Corbyn-led Labour Party got 10.29 million votes in 2019, whereas Starmer’s tally is well below 10 million. In percentage terms, Starmer’s Labour has 33.8%, not much higher than under Corbyn in 2019 (32.1%).

This is not the product of a surge of votes for Starmer’s Labour, but a much lower turnout, only 59.9%, the lowest since 2001. Caused by the well-known similarity between the main parties – “two cheeks of the same backside” as George Galloway put it. Over 19.5 million eligible voters did not vote. It is the undemocratic ‘First Past the Post’ electoral system yet again that produced this anomaly. In this case it was fuelled by the splintering and near–disintegration of the Tories. This has nothing to with any ‘achievements’ of Keir Starmer’s leadership, which is characterised by many of the same odious neoliberal, chauvinist and Zionist vices as the Tories.

In 2017, in a General Election that took on the character of a class confrontation between the Tories led by Theresa May and a resurgent left-led Labour Party led by Corbyn, Labour got 12.87 million votes and 40% of the vote. The Tories got only slightly more, and the result was a hung parliament where the Tories were forced to rely on the very right-wing Democratic Unionists in the North of Ireland to get their measures approved in parliament.

But in 2024 Starmer won precisely because the Labour vote was NOT a class vote, by virtue of the anti-democratic electoral system and the splintering and collapse of the Tories. Reform played a similar role in screwing the Tories as the Social Democratic Party did with Labour in the 1983 election. Though that was not as extreme a manifestation as today’s result, as in 1983, Thatcher’s Tories got nearly 44% of the vote – a genuine landslide.

Since the election Sunak announced his resignation. A leadership election process for the Tories has begun. Farage’s Reform Party is hopeful of either replacing, or taking over the Tories for a more consistent, xenophobic far right type of politics. More on this later.

Starmer today actually achieved a bigger majority than Thatcher with only 33%.    Blair in 1997 got a slightly larger majority than Starmer, but he won 43.3% of the vote. That was also a genuine landslide, whereas this is not at all. Starmer has no real mandate. He will be a weak and likely vicious PM. Even before he took office, a warning sign was decision of the police to refuse to allow the Palestine Solidarity movement to march on July 6th in Parliament Square and Whitehall. The police by then knew full well that the Tories were finished and it’s obvious that they would consult and take note of the views of the Zionist clique around Starmer in deciding what would be allowed. This is a sign of weakness, not strength from Starmer. His party is likely to generate rebellions on the backbenches precisely because of that lack of a solid mandate. This will not be a stable government.

Jeremy Corbyn’s overwhelming victory in Islington North is a considerable political blow to Starmer and will damage his authority right from the start. Starmer brazenly ran a candidate who is involved in private healthcare and who spoke publicly about the ‘importance’ of healthcare privatisation. A serious threat from the new regime since its designated Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is also an evangelist for private healthcare.

The victory of Shockat Adam over would-be cabinet minister Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester South is a wonderful blow to the Labour Zionists. Shockat made Gaza a big element of his campaign. The same is true of the victory of Ayoub Khan in Birmingham Perry Barr, who took the seat of the neocon Zionist stooge Khalid Mahmoud, who has even served on the Council of the neocon arch-Zionist Henry Jackson Society.

Iqbal Mohammed, Newly Elected Independent MP for Dewsbury and Batley, West Yorkshire

Iqbal Mohammad, is a former Labour member who quit the party over Starmer’s endorsement of Yoav Gallant’s call for the deprivation of food, fuel and water to the population of Gaza (described by Gallant as ‘human animals’). He defeated the Labour candidate, Heather Iqbal, getting 41% of the vote to her 23%. A massive victory.

Then there is the victory of Adnan Hussein in Blackburn. There is some controversy over this as Craig Murray, the long-time anti-war activist and prominent campaigner in the successful campaign to free Julian Assange, was standing in this seat with the support of the Workers Party of George Galloway. Another independent Muslim candidate withdrew in favour of Craig Murray, but Hussein refused to do so. Murray offered to toss a coin for the left candidacy with Hussein, but the latter indignantly refused. It transpired that though the vote was split, Labour was just about defeated anyway. There are accusations that Adnan Hussein might be a ‘spoiler’ for Labour and that he has connections with the New Labour Iraq war criminal Jack Straw. We can only hope that this is untrue: if it were true. it would be very damaging. A ‘spoiler’ phoney candidate was run against Andrew Feinstein in Starmer’s seat, though he was exposed as such during the campaign and completely marginalised.

Prominent Palestinian activist Leanne Mohammad came within 500 votes of defeating the arch-Zionist Wes Streeting in Ilford North. Jody McIntyre, Muslim and disabled activist and supporter of the Workers Party, almost unseated Jess Phillips, friend of Israel, in Birmingham Yardley, by only 693 votes. George Galloway, founder of the Workers Party of Britain, lost the Rochdale seat he won in February, but quite narrowly – by around 1500 votes.  He promises to take the fight to Labour on Rochdale council.

Starmer lost a lot of votes in his own seat. 17,000 of them. Andrew Feinstein came a very good second with over 7,000 votes after a very energetic campaign that attracted activists from a wide area keen to have a go at Starmer himself. It lays down a marker for the future: Stamer will not be able to consider his own seat to be ‘safe’ in future elections.

Halima Khan in Stratford and Bow for the Workers Party – former Labour whistleblower about corruption and the activities of the Zionist lobby in Newham – came a very good third, behind Labour and the Greens. She gained ten times the vote of prominent RMT activist Steve Hedley, who mistakenly stood without any real base. Faiza Shaheen, a respected economist and the overwhelming popular choice of Labour members in Chingford and Woodford Green was banned from standing for Labour, because she criticised Islamophobia in the Labour Party. She was set to defeat Iain Duncan Smith. She rightly refused to accept this, Labour imposed a stooge candidate, and a split vote ensued that allowed IDS to retain his seat. This is entirely caused by Labour Zionism and Islamophobia.

We live in a world where social democracy has failed, and imperialist capitalism is threatening human existence both by the destruction of the biosphere and through predatory, permanent imperialist wars, of which the genocide in Gaza is the most obvious and foul manifestation. We desperately need an alternative, both here and internationally.

The left needs to create a proper party to fight under in the next period. Unlike the situation in the 2000s under Blair, now as a result of the Corbyn surge in Labour in the late 20-teens and then it’s defeat, there is a large layer of ex-Labour working class people involved in this movement. Though Labour has an awful history and record as a party controlled by a pro-imperialist bureaucracy, its party loyalty element was correct. We need to recreate the party loyalty element without the pro-imperialist bureaucracy and go beyond the weaknesses of the far left in general and the Trotskyist movement in particular.  

The struggle against the far right and Farage’s semi-far-right movement, which aims to parallel the rise of Marine Le Pen, Meloni etc., is going to be a key struggle in the next period. But it is going to be inseparable from the struggle to build a new party of the working class left. Trotsky wrote in a different situation, about the counterposition of the fascists, and what the party of the working class left, the communist party, should stand for. He said that the fascists were the party of counterrevolutionary despair, whereas the communist party was the party of revolutionary hope.

We are in a somewhat different situation today. In the 1930s, there were strong, highly political working-class movements all over Europe, and fascism was a petty bourgeois and lumpen movement directly aimed at crushing them. This time round there is not a strong, highly political working-class movement. Far from it. The parallel rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and the collapse of Stalinism caused a massive weakening of the working-class movement in the imperialist countries. A qualitative weakening, which has not yet been overcome.

This rise of fascism intersects a conflict within the imperialist bourgeoisie, because in the period since the collapse of Stalinism under the unprecedented US domination, the globalising factions of the bourgeois gained unprecedented dominance. The problem is that the imperialist bourgeoisie is a national class. Although, as Lenin pointed out, the nation-state is obsolete, and the proof of that is the world war that broke out in 1914. But the war in 1914 showed that, not only is the nation-state obsolete, but the imperialist bourgeoisie cannot abolish it. Rather, it will try to ‘abolish’ it by imperialist powers attempting to conquer each other, and the rest of the globe also. And tearing apart human civilisation in the process and threatening human existence today as today’s technology is quite capable, from climate pollution to the threat of nuclear war.

Today’s right-wing populist and fascist movements derive from a backlash within the various imperialist bourgeoisies against the ‘globalising’ liberal factions of the bourgeoisie. They are not particularly aimed at the workers movement, which is qualitatively weaker, both organisationally and politically, than it was in the 1930s. However, they are aimed at migrant workers, and the workers movement has to act as the tribune of the oppressed, and therefore has a duty to defend such workers tooth and nail. There is nothing remotely ‘progressive’ about this reassertion of the ‘national’ prerogative of the various imperialist ruling classes.

Unfortunately, the populist factions have managed to convince some sections of the working-class movement that there is something positive about them. Even some left-wing sections of the workers movement have been drawn into the orbit of the populists, at least partly. Thus, we see working class support for Brexit, so-called ‘Lexit’, the most extreme example of which is George Galloway, who openly allied with Farage during the period of the Brexit referendum.

Even now, as he advocates the most courageous defiance and attacks on the imperialist bourgeoisie over its criminal support for genocide in Palestine, and its criminal, equally genocidal (in intent) proxy war in the Donbass, he still echoes the demands of the populists over so-called ‘illegal’ migration. He embodies a contradiction. He should be both hailed and congratulated for his courage over Ukraine and Gaza and taken to task for his chauvinist politics over so-called ‘illegal’ migration. For the working-class movement, no-one is illegal. Migrants, legal and ‘illegal’, are part of the working-class and oppressed.

Galloway became particularly vulnerable to such deviations when, as Britain’s most radical MP, he was brutally beaten by a Zionist in 2014, and betrayed by every member of the House of Commons bar one (including the Labour left) who failed to publicly condemn this fascist attack. He appeared to become partially disillusioned with the left after that. But this is not a mere personal foible. There are other examples.

Similar such contradictory phenomena are so-called ’MAGA-Communism’ in the United States (would be communists who support, or at least are in the political orbit of, Donald Trump). Or the left-wing politics (over Ukraine and Gaza) of Sahra Wagenknecht – very courageous in today’s Germany, and yet similar chauvinism to Galloway – her chauvinistic politics over migration. Wagenknecht has formed her own party over this, and appears to have the same mixture of courageous anti-imperialism and chauvinism as Galloway. This has partly come about as the Ukraine war has been seen particularly as a project of the ‘globalising’ faction of the bourgeoisie, with their populist opponents (Trump, Farage, the AfD, being seen to be more dubious about it).

This needs to be properly understood by the workers movement. A key text in understanding it is a 1977 essay “On Bourgeois Class-Consciousness” the then-leading Marxist intellectual figure of the Spartacist League/US, Joseph Seymour.

I would like to see us do a public forum/discussion on that soon. It would be very useful for enhancing a Marxist understanding of populism and the roots of the current growth of the far right. And re-arming the workers movement and the left, to understand this phenomenon, to gain a sense of perspective and discover how to combat it.

For this we need to advocate a unification of the anti-neoliberal, anti-imperialist left including its sizeable ex-Labour, ex-Corbynite component. Programmatic development can only come through full debate and wide-ranging education. We need an anti-racist/anti-Zionist Socialist-Communist party with full freedom of programmatic debate. Freedom of criticism, unity in action, as in the early stages of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.

Starmer’s Regime has NO MANDATE for its Genocidal Neoliberalism

Independent Working-Class Forces promise Challenge to Zionist New Labour

Top: Jeremy Corbyn, witchhunted and expelled from Labour by Starmer for belatedly defending his leadership against ‘anti-Semitism’ scam, defeated the Starmerites in his long-held Islington North seat.
Bottom: Ayoub Khan, former Labour councillor and now independent MP defeated neocon Zionist Blairite Khalid Mahmood in Birmingham Perry Barr.
 

Media and conventional wisdom have it that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the July 2024 General Election by a ‘landslide’, with its overall majority of 171, and therefore has a strong mandate to rule, having supposedly ‘changed’ the Labour Party to make it ‘fit to govern’ by driving out the ‘unelectable’ Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing followers.

But the ‘landslide’ is a myth. Starmer got fewer votes than Corbyn’s Labour got in in the General Election of December 2019, which Labour lost by a considerable margin in terms of seats, producing an overall majority for Johnson’s Tories of 80. The Corbyn-led Labour Party got 10.29 million votes in 2019, whereas Starmer’s tally is well below 10 million. In percentage terms, Starmer’s Labour has 33.8%, not much higher than under Corbyn in 2019 (32.1%). This is not the product of a surge of votes for Starmer’s Labour, but a much lower turnout, only 60%, the lowest since 2001. Caused by the well-known similarity between the main parties – “two cheeks of the same backside” as George Galloway put it. Over 19.5 million eligible voters did not vote. Around 80% of the eligible electorate did not vote for this government.

It is the undemocratic ‘First Past the Post’ electoral system yet again that produced this anomaly. In this case it was fuelled by the splintering and near–disintegration of the Tories. This has nothing to with any achievements of Keir Starmer’s leadership, which is characterised by many of the same odious neoliberal, chauvinist and Zionist vices as the Tories.

In 2017, in a General Election that took on the character of a class confrontation between the Tories led by Theresa May and a resurgent left-led Labour Party led by Corbyn, Labour got 12.87 million votes and 40% of the vote. The Tories got only slightly more, and the result was a hung parliament where the Tories were forced to rely on the very right-wing Democratic Unionists in the North of Ireland to get their measures approved in parliament.

But in 2024 Starmer won precisely because the Labour vote was NOT a class vote, by virtue of the anti-democratic electoral system and the splintering and collapse of the Tories. Reform played a similar role in screwing the Tories as the Social Democratic Party did with Labour in the 1983 election. Though that was not as extreme a manifestation as today’s result, as in 1983, Thatcher’s Tories got nearly 44% of the vote – a genuine landslide. Starmer today actually achieved a bigger majority than Thatcher with only 33%.    Blair in 1997 got a slightly larger majority than Starmer, but he won 43.3% of the vote. That was also a genuine landslide, whereas this is not at all.

Starmer has no real mandate. He will be a weak and likely vicious PM. Even before he took office, a warning sign was decision of the police to refuse to allow the Palestine Solidarity movement to march on July 6th in Parliament Square and Whitehall. The police by then knew full well that the Tories were finished and it’s obvious that they would consult and take note of the views of the Zionist clique around Starmer in deciding what would be allowed. This is a sign of weakness, not strength from Starmer. His party is likely to generate rebellions on the backbenches precisely because of that lack of a solid mandate. This will not be a stable government.

Jeremy Corbyn’s overwhelming victory in Islington North is a considerable political blow to Starmer and will damage his authority right from the start. Starmer brazenly ran a candidate who is involved in private healthcare and who spoke publicly about the ‘importance’ of healthcare privatisation. A serious threat from the new regime since its designated Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is also an evangelist for private healthcare.

The victory of Shockat Adam over would-be cabinet minister Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester South is a wonderful blow to the Labour Zionists. Shockat made Gaza a big element of his campaign. The same is true of the victory of Ayoub Khan in Birmingham Perry Barr, who took the seat of the neocon Zionist stooge Khalid Mahmoud, who has even served on the Council of the neocon arch-Zionist Henry Jackson Society. Iqbal Mohammad, a former Labour member quit the party over Starmer’s endorsement of Yoav Gallant’s call for the deprivation of food, fuel and water to the population of Gaza (described by Gallant as ‘human animals’). He defeated the Labour candidate, Heather Iqbal, getting 41% of the vote to her 23%. A massive victory.

Then there is the substantial victory of Adnan Hussein in Blackburn. There is some controversy over this as Craig Murray, the long-time anti-war activist and prominent campaigner in the successful campaign to free Julian Assange, was standing in this seat with the support of the Workers Party of George Galloway. Another independent Muslim candidate withdrew in favour of Craig Murray, but Hussein refused to do so. Murray offered to toss a coin for the left candidacy with Hussein, but the latter indignantly refused. It transpired that though the vote was split, Labour was overwhelmingly defeated anyway. There are accusations that Adnan Hussein might be a ‘spoiler’ for Labour and that he has connections with the New Labour Iraq war criminal Jack Straw. We can only hope that this is untrue: if it were true. it would be very damaging. A ‘spoiler’ phoney candidate was run against Andrew Feinstein in Starmer’s seat, though he was exposed as such during the campaign and completely marginalised.

Prominent Palestinian activist Leanne Mohammad came within 500 votes of defeating the arch-Zionist Wes Streeting in Ilford North. George Galloway, founder of the Workers Party of Britain, lost the Rochdale seat he won in February, but quite narrowly – by around 1500 votes.  He promises to take the fight to Labour on Rochdale council. Starmer lost a lot of votes in his own seat. 17,000 of them to Andrew Feinstein, who came a very good second after a very energetic campaign that attracted activists from a wide area keen to have a go at Starmer himself. It lays down a marker for the future: Starmer will not be able to consider his own seat to be ‘safe’ in future elections.

We live in a world where social democracy has failed, and imperialist capitalism is threatening human existence both by the destruction of the biosphere and through predatory, permanent imperialist wars, of which the genocide in Gaza is the most obvious and foul manifestation. We desperately need an alternative, both here and internationally.

The left needs to create a proper party to fight under in the next period. Unlike the situation in the 2000s under Blair, now as a result of the Corbyn surge in Labour in the late 20-teens and then it’s defeat, there is a large layer of ex-Labour working class people involved in this movement. Though Labour has an awful history and record as a party controlled by a pro-imperialist bureaucracy, its party loyalty element was correct. We need to recreate the party loyalty element without the pro-imperialist bureaucracy and go beyond the weaknesses of the far left in general and the Trotskyist movement in particular.  We need an anti-racist/anti-Zionist Socialist-Communist party with full freedom of programmatic debate. Freedom of criticism, unity in action, as in the early stages of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.