THE Tory devastation in the 1997 UK election was a delight to behold, but it was somewhat blunted by suspicions that New Labour was neither equipped nor inclined to reverse the destructive thrust of nearly two decades of Thatcherism. Margaret Thatcher subsequently picked Tony Blair as her favourite heir and New Labour as her greatest achievement, given its dedication to advancing her agenda.

That agenda included steadily dismantling the social welfare state that the postwar Attlee government had installed despite financial exigencies, and which subsequent Conservative governments did not substantially tinker with until the advent of Thatcher, who declared that there was no alternative to neoliberalism. New Labour embraced that absurd declaration, and implemented it in places that Thatcherite Conservatism had failed to reach, not least in the health and education sectors.

Popular enthusiasm for Labour dwindled after 1997, but the lack of a viable alternative enabled it to secure majorities based on declining turnouts until 2010, when the Tories returned to power. Five disastrous prime ministers later, voters’ aspiration for change is expected to be rewarded tomorrow with the biggest Labour landslide since 1997. At the new government’s helm will be someone who looks back on the Blair years as an inspiration rather than a cautionary tale. Keir Starmer earned his legal spurs as a ‘human rights advocate’ before he was propelled to the post of director of public prosecutions, a position in which his service to the Tory-ruled state was sufficiently appreciated to win him a knighthood before he became a Labour MP in 2015. His task thenceforth was to undermine Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, who threatened to return the party to its social democratic origins.

Corbyn had first won his north London seat in 1983 in an election that broadly reduced Labour to a parliamentary rump. He remained an active backbencher for the next 32 years, popular among his constituents but occasionally threatened with expulsion from his party for embracing stances that militated against the Labour leadership’s dedication to the status quo. He was occasionally hauled away by policemen for protesting against South African apartheid or Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, long before it became fashionable to do so.

Tomorrow’s UK election won’t change much.

Corbyn’s empathy for the oppressed also extended to the Palestinians. Not long after it began to become clear that his policies might actually pave the way to Downing Street, he was assaulted by absurd allegations of antisemitism. Corbyn tended to be politely apologetic in the face of such charges; he ought, instead, to have gone on the offensive against the Zionist lobby. To his credit, he never resiled from his stance nor disguised his abhorrence of the genocide in Gaza.

For his pains, he was expelled from Labour — by no means the only one. Diane Abbott, the first black woman to sit in parliament, also elected in 1983, was permitted to run again only after a backlash against a typically Starmerish smear-and-discard campaign. Corbyn is running as an independent, and senior Labour figures in his Islington constituency have resigned from the party to support his candidacy. In other jurisdictions, many activists have been expelled, often for opposing Starmer’s support for genocide, including Faiza Shaheen. It seems as if wherever the Zionist lobby chips in, Starmer bends down and asks ‘What do you want?’.

Starmer insists his wife and children are “not Jewish for reasons I won’t bore you with” to an interviewer from The Guardian, a newspaper that played a huge role in defenestrating Corbyn with the aid of associated nitwits, but admits that “half of the family are Jewish”, and “they’re either here or in Israel”. That might help to explain why his leadership campaign was partly funded by the Zionist lobby, which also provided pocket money to other Labour MPs for undermining Corbyn.

Starmer returned to the Corbyn shadow cabinet after resigning from it in 2016, and helped to set up the Brexit trap by insisting on a second referendum that was successfully designed to demolish Labour’s chances in 2019. In his leadership campaign, he claimed he would hang onto much of Corbyn Labour’s legacy, but discarded much of it soon afterwards. Since then, he has also had no qualms about serially shrinking or diluting his own proposals. The inevitable upshot is that Labour will attain office by tomorrow night, and embrace a platform not radically different from its predecessors. Starmer can’t name a favourite book or poem, and claims he has no dreams, but his notions of magical ‘economic growth’ and ‘wealth creation’ chime with the Tory-lite attitudes that have attracted Tory donors and even a couple of Conservative MPs to his den.

Don’t hold your breath for ‘hope’ or ‘change’. They remain a distant dream.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 3rd, 2024