Attacks on New Labour Leader - 4 april 2020

Watching millionaire tax-dodger Labour MP Margaret Hodge spewing yet more undiluted hate at the anti-austerity Labour left, and then publicly threatening Labour's new leader that she'll keep the antisemitism hysteria going if he doesn't bend to her political will just goes to illustrate what an incredibly difficult job Keir Starmer faces.

How on earth is it possible to reconcile abominable behaviour like this with the wishes of the party membership which overwhelmingly supports the continuation of Labour's policy agenda since 2015 (reversing austerity, improving workers' wages and workers' rights, public ownership, investing in public infrastructure and services, repairing the Tory vandalism of our national social safety net)?

Meanwhile The S*n is already gearing up their propaganda campaign to create a demonic caricature of Starmer, just like they did with Corbyn.

Anyone who expects the hard-right propaganda rags to take it easier on Starmer than they did on previous Labour leaders like Miliband and Brown is quite frankly delusional.

Corbyn absolutely broke the cosy Westminster consensus in favour of austerity fanaticism, privatisation mania, welfare vandalism, infrastructure under-investment, and wage repression.

And coronavirus has suddenly proven that he was absolutely right that the money was always there to support ordinary people and to fund our public services, and that all the cuts, and closures, and wage repression tactics, and social support reductions were deliberate ideologically-driven political choices, not necessities.

A reversion to the neoliberal orthodoxy of Brown or the pathetically timid centrism of Miliband would be absolutely unthinkable in the current political context, so unless he decides to deliberately kill the Labour Party for good by getting outflanked on the left by the bloody Tories, Starmer's policy agenda is obviously going to be far to the left of the vilified Brown, and the ridiculed Miliband.

So not only is Starmer facing outrageous threats from within the ranks of his own party if the anti-Corbyn socialism-despising wreckers don't get their own way, he's going to have to learn how to stand up to the constant stream of abuse and misrepresentations the hard-right propaganda hacks are going to spew at him, and he's going to have to learn it fast.

Standing up to this abuse is going to be a hell of a lot harder if the likes of Margaret Hodge, Wes Streeting, Jess Philips, and the rest of the anti-socialist internal wrecker brigade keep incessantly briefing against their own party to the right-wing propaganda hacks.

If Starmer gives in and tries to appease the right-wing propaganda machine, they'll laugh at his naivety and attack him just as hard anyway.

And if he gives in to the threats of the right-wing orthodox neoliberals in the Labour ranks by initiating a Stalinist purge of all of the genuine socialists and a rewriting of the internal rules to weaken internal democracy and disempower the party membership, he knows they'll see his weakness and continue to manipulate and control him for as long as he remains Labour leader.

I don't envy his task at all.

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