The leadership of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party – the same people who scuttled Labour’s electoral campaigns in 2017 and 2019 to prevent their own party leader Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister – have a new plan.
They are calling it the “Liz Truss lock”. But this should fool no one. What they are actually talking about is a ‘Jeremy Corbyn lock’.
It’s strange that they remain so terrified that Labour might be subverted from its imperialist mission by the mild-mannered social democrat, after such an abundance of evidence to the contrary.
But it seems that the British bourgeoisie, troubled by their political, financial and military crises; troubled by the mass opposition among Britain’s workers to their genocide in Palestine; troubled by the crumbling of Nato’s power, can get no sleep.
Perhaps Keir Starmer is after all wracked by a guilty conscience? He seems to feel at some level that the wrongs he did to his former ‘comrade’ in the process of usurping his place will have some consequences. ‘The left’ will surely rise and oust him.
There is, of course, no ‘Labour left’.
The Labour party has been carefully crafted to ensure that this is so. It is a well-tuned machine that ensures the production of impeccably imperialist ministers and administrations. Anyone claiming the contrary is part of the problem, not the solution. The entire Corbyn project amply demonstrates this.
Or perhaps Labour’s leaders are more mindful of the fraud they have played on the British electorate than they like to let on. Just 18 percent of UK adults went to vote for Starmer and his party on 4 July 2024, in an election characterised by a derisory turn out and a general vote of no confidence in the existing order.
The vote for Labour and Tory combined was its lowest since the first world war, in fact. And, given the monopoly of the capitalist class over our press and mass media, what are the other choices on offer? Yet this meagre harvest of ‘support’ gave Labour its much trumpeted “landslide” – a “democratic mandate” to put the boot into the working class at home and oppressed nations abroad on behalf of the billionaire elite.
It is not difficult to see that any really popular vote would judge Starmer or his successor most harshly, and with the Tory party in disarray could trigger yet another crisis for the capitalist class, exposing them even as their entire system – the British constitutional democracy as well as the tottering imperialist economic order it serves – is being hollowed out and exposed in the minds of the workers and the eyes of the world.
So let us hear about this ‘Liz Truss lock’:
“Labour could strip members of vote in future leadership contests,” reads the headline in the London Times.
“‘There’s a plan to bring a constitutional reform to conference that would cut out the membership for electing a leader when we’re in government, and only allow the MPs to decide,’ said a senior Labour source.’
“‘This is seen as the last reform that needs doing to syphon off any threat from the left,’ they added. A second said: ‘It’s known as the “Liz Truss lock”. The Tories compounded the country’s misery by letting their members put someone in No 10 the parliamentary party wouldn’t work with [!] So we need to make sure that can’t happen again.’”
Earlier, the author states: “Those behind the move also believe the timing is right for Starmer to use his first party conference as prime minister to tighten the centre-left [!] wing’s grip on the party.
“They are confident that conference delegates this year are tilted in the ‘moderate’ [!] wing’s favour and would pass the proposal if it were put to a vote.” (Aubrey Allegretti, 25 August 2024)
Incredibly, there are still those in the revisionist and Trotskyite swamp that passes for a socialist and communist movement in Britain who believe that, no matter how much evidence it furnishes to the contrary, Labour is the ‘party of the working class’, and will form the centre of a future socialist government.
All without challenging the underlying economic order or the property rights of the oldest capitalist class on earth. (“Forward to the ‘united front’”!!)
We are not among their deluded number.
Join us to fight for the working class.
