Labour Heartlands Editorial.
An Official Rebuke of Starmer’s Capitalist Aberration
As a community rooted in the traditional values of Labour Heartlands, we advocate for a 21st-century socialism that champions equal opportunity, public asset ownership, and a vision of society where every individual has the chance to thrive. Our ethos centres on empowering workers, industrial strategies, and fostering an educated healthy society, while promoting social equality to ensure a future where prosperity is shared by the many, not hoarded by the few.
Occasionally, individuals join our group under the misconception that our name implies unwavering support for the Labour Party and its current leader, Keir Starmer. It’s important to clarify that while we share common values with the wider Labour movement, we do not share the values of the right-wing, warmonger, genocide-supporting Labour Party, our allegiance lies with principles, not personalities or what the Labour Party claims to be ‘pragmatism’ a euphemism for the dropping of core principles and foundational ideology in return for power.
Our members have consistently expressed a desire for independence in thought and action, seeking to advance our collective vision for a fairer, more equitable society. This official response reflects the prevailing sentiment within our community and reaffirms our commitment to advocating for progressive change that benefits all.
In view of the misconception that our name denotes our support for the Labour Party, we find ourselves in the position of announcing an official statement, on where this platform stands in supporting the current Labour Party.
Labour Heartlands Offical Position on Supporting The Labour Party
Let this serve as the sternest rebuke and formal statement of any lingering ties between this esteemed assemblage and the quisling regime headed by Sir Keir Starmer. For his “New Labour” represents nothing so much as an unconscionable betrayal of the Democratic Socialist principles upon which the party was founded.
We, the true inheritors of Labour’s once-proud democratic socialist tradition, wholeheartedly denounce the revisionist counterfeits currently harboured under Sir Keir Starmer’s craven stewardship of that gutted party apparatus.
Starmer’s New Labour capitulation to the neoliberal dogmas of Blairism represents an abject betrayal of the working class interests and values Labour was founded to uphold. His regime’s steady rightward lurch, openly contemptuous of socialist principles and subservient to corporate interests, is an obscenity unworthy of the labour movement’s name.
We reserve our endorsement for those stalwart few who remain faithful adherents to the Labour movement’s historic, transformative vision – outfits like the Socialist Party, the Workers’ Party, the CPB and the CPGB. We will support ‘independent’ left wing candidates genuine tribunes of the downtrodden masses. For only they, along with campaigning bodies such as TUSC, can lay claim to carrying the tarnished standard of a politics democratically accountable to the toiling multitudes.
Any who profess affinity for the unapologetic anti-socialist reaction embodied by Starmer’s anti-worker coterie are no comrades of ours. Until Labour undergoes its long-overdue renaissance as a genuinely socialist vanguard for the downtrodden multitudes, those who suffer under this neoliberal consensus, it shall receive not our backing, but be a target for our obdurate scorn.
We call upon all those repulsed by Starmer’s centrist revisionism of right-wing collaborators to reject his hollow pandering. The path to meaningful change lies not with his brand of oligarchic appeasement, but in steadfast commitment to the principles of democratic worker’s control over economic and political life. Only then can we reclaim Labour’s ideological soul from the grasping clutches of those who would reduce it to a capitalist lickspittle.
To those Hand-wringing Casandras who bleat about partisan “unity” and ushering the Tories back into power, we say this:
“When the Labour right so treacherously betrayed the left, it forever salted the soil upon which the socialist project stood. They quite literally opened the gates to multiple Conservative reigns – the very bloody-fanged spectres they now disingenuously brandish. So let them reap the droughts of their own sowing. We’ll not squander one more drop of solidarity lending our voice to the mirages of “unity” and “electability” peddled by the vacuous ghouls who hold the levers of the party apparatus”.
For in Starmer’s victory, the left foresees only its own inexorable demise – the permanent quashing of any substantive, democratic socialism in Britain.
Lord Mandelson’s baleful augury that left-wing parties are inherently “unelectable” shall echo through the land like a funereal knell over any prospect of meaningful change. The repetitive ritual of “lose, lose, lose, lose, Blair, Blair, Blair, lose, lose, lose, Starmer” shall become a perpetual mourner’s threnody ushering in an oligarchic future where the tawdry pantomimes of Tory and Labour constitute mere narrative veneers obscuring an authoritarian uniparty system.
In this harrowing prospect, policy and ideology are utterly interchangeable – hollow vessels into which the prerogatives of capital are ceremonially decanted. True alternatives to the prevailing order of wealth concentration and ecocidal extraction will be banished as relics, and any who dare breathe the dread words “socialism” or “redistribution” will be met with the blind rejection borne of generational superstition.
So let the clarion call ring out in defiance of this foreboding anti-utopia. Let it rally all who yet retain fidelity to the dispossessed and immiserated. Let it summon the unflinching few who would storm the citadel of oligarchic reaction, seizing the lost banner of democratic worker’s emancipation and raising it aloft upon the battlements.
Only then can we cast off the shackles of this moribund “politics” peddled by parasitic classes unfit to govern. Only through such a reclamation of first principles – the unwavering pursuit of economic democracy and social equity for all – can the left be reborn to continue its inexorable march.
Let none be deluded into conflating our exalted principles with the quisling regime that has come to embody the soulless husk of the Labour Party. For in its present, blighted incarnation, that gutted leper of an institution represents nothing but a circuitous retreat into the oblivion of capital retrenchment and militaristic jingoism. We would no sooner support Starmer than the Tories.
So let this edict be uttered in terms of blazing clarity: We owe no fealty to such a depraved aping of the political mainstream – this sad residuum of a party whose sole purpose now seems to be facilitating the terminal looting of the nation’s social substructure. Our allegiance is to the immutable principles which birthed the socialist movement itself – the radical ethos of economic justice and unwavering solidarity with the toiling masses.
For as the immortal William Morris presaged, we must have no masters but ourselves. The future lies open before us – shall we lurch towards the yawning abyss of neo-feudal destitution, or seize the reins of our collective fate?
In solidarity with the abandoned and dispossessed, On behalf of Labour Heartlands membership, Paul Knaggs.
Who will help raise the banner? Please consider donating to Labour Heartlands using the link below. 2024 promises to be a hard slog and with your support we intend to upset the apple cart in this fixed system…
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