Blue Labour Government Sets The Course In First Hours
The reactionary, petty-bourgeois, nationalists of the new Blue Labour government have set the course we can expect from it, in its statements and actions of the first hours.
Starmer has claimed, in traditional populist and Bonapartist fashion that Blue Labour has been given a clear mandate. Indeed, he claimed such a mandate in all four nations, despite the fact that Blue Labour did not even stand any candidates in Northern Ireland, where the petty-bourgeois nationalists of Sinn Fein, are now the largest party. But, as I have pointed out over recent days, Blue Labour has no real democratic mandate, despite its huge number of seats and parliamentary majority. Those seats, and that majority are not the result of electoral support for Blue Labour, or clever targeting by it of seats it needed to win, but purely a result of the corrupt nature of the electoral system, and the effect of Reform splitting the Tory vote in half.
As I pointed out, yesterday, Blue Labour vote, was lower than that obtained by Corbyn’s Labour in 2019, and amounted to only, more or less, the same vote share (34% as against 32%), and was a third fewer votes than Corbyn’s Labour won in 2017, when Corbyn’s Labour won 40% of the vote! Indeed, given that the national turnout was also lower, Blue Labour’s actual support is worse than that. It represents only 20% of the electorate!! Yet, Starmer claims an overwhelming mandate.
As I noted, yesterday, the argument presented by the Starmtroopers that this simply reflects the fact that they cleverly used the electoral system to target the seats they needed to win, and so increased their votes in those seats is also manifestly untrue. Take, Newcastle under Lyme, which was held by Labour for all of the last century going back to Josiah Wedgwood, following his move from the Liberals. It was also the seat of Marxist, Stephen Swingler, unfortunately followed by the hard Right, John Golding.
The last Labour incumbent was Paul Farrelly, who stood down in 2019. A look at Farrelly’s vote and vote share, itself, illuminates many of the lies told about Corbyn’s Labour. In 2001, Farrelly obtained more than 20,000 votes, representing more than 50% of the vote. As with other New Labour MP’s, after 2001, that continually declined. In 2010, he was down to 16,000 votes, representing just 38% of the vote, and that was barely changed in 2015. In 2017, however, despite Farrelly being an ardent opponent of Corbyn, in the traditions of John Golding, he, like other Labour candidates, was swept along in the surge of electoral support for Corbyn’s Labour.
In 2017, his vote rose by 30% to over 21,000, and his vote share similarly rose from 38% to 48%! So much for the unelectability of Corbyn’s Labour, compared to New Labour, particularly given all the attacks on Corbyn by the Right of the party, supported by their friends in the Tory media. In 2019, he stood down, and the unknown, new Labour candidate Carl Greatbach lost the seat to the Tories.
So, this was clearly a seat that Blue Labour would target — despite the fact that, as elsewhere, none of the parties had any great number of canvassers on the streets, or literature distributed, as their membership has collapsed. So, if Blue Labour’s win is the result of great planning to target such seats, and increase its vote and vote share in them, that should be clear in this seat. It isn’t.
In 2019, when he lost to the Tories, Carl Greatbach won 16,000 votes, representing 36% of the vote share. In this election, as the sitting Tory, Aaron Bell stood down, Labour’s Adam Jogee, managed to win less than 16,000 votes, i.e. less than the losing Carl Greatbach in 2019! So, this win certainly was not the result of clever targeting, by Blue Labour, to increase its vote in target seats. Jogee won, not as a result of Blue Labour’s vote rising, but of the Tory vote being split down the middle.
In 2019, Bell won more than 50% of the vote, with more than 23,000 votes, with the Brexit Party getting less than 2,000 votes. In 2024, the Tory vote collapsed to less than 11,000, whilst Reform’s vote rose to nearly 9,000. Indeed, add together the Tory and Reform vote, and you get to nearly 20,000, which would have given the Tories a majority of nearly 5,000!
Without Reform, this result would have been repeated in seat after seat across the country. In Newcastle, as in many other seats, the biggest gainers, besides Reform, was not Blue Labour, but the Greens, who more than doubled their vote and vote share.
So, the story being conveyed by Starmer and Blue Labour, in relation to this supposed mandate, continues in the same vein as their approach over the last four years, which is to blatantly lie. They have no democratic mandate, and their seats and majority is founded on support from only 20% of the electorate, much of that only obtained as a result of hatred of the Tories, and a desire to get them out at almost any cost, including voting for the reactionaries of Blue Labour. It spells disaster ahead.
Not satisfied with forming its government from MP’s that have no democratic mandate, it has taken the obvious further step to that by sending for some of the former, often disgraced members of Blair’s government, and simply giving them peerages so that they can become Ministers, whilst being unaccountable, and sitting in the Lords. Having said that he was going to base the government on honesty, service and a clearing out of sleaze, which, of course, only the most voluntarily gullible believed, Starmer has breached all three in the first 24 hours!
We know that many of the Blue Labour MP’s and, now, Ministers are connected to private healthcare companies, as it prepares to privatise the NHS. Now we also have former Blair-Right Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, who was involved in the expenses, scandal in 2009, on multiple counts, relating to claiming for the cost of downloading porn, and to the use of a second home, has been ennobled by Starmer, so as to “serve” in his new government! We can expect to see far more of this kind of sleaze, as the careerists of Blue Labour take the opportunity to get their snouts in the trough, as the NHS and other “services” are privatised.
Blue Labour secured the support of just 20% of the electorate, and only a third of those that actually voted. Of this third, a large proportion will be core Labour voters who wanted above all to get rid of the Tories, and who did not have the option of voting for a more progressive candidate with a chance of winning, as with Corbyn in Islington North. Yet, Blue Labour built its reactionary, petty-bourgeois programme on a search for the votes of the immiserated petty-bourgeoisie, and lumpen elements in the decayed urban areas, known as the Red Wall. It largely failed to win their votes, as they went overwhelmingly to Reform, hence the failure of Blue Labour to win additional votes, and even to lose votes, in those seats to more progressive candidates from the Liberals and Greens.
Yet, Blue Labour has continued to orient its policy to those reactionary, nationalists whose votes it still failed to win over, and which, in doing so, is driving away its core working-class vote. In the round of Sunday morning politics shows, Blue Labour politicians have prioritised their commitment to those reactionary nationalist policies, as they again scapegoat immigrants for the problems of British capitalism, made worse by the Brexit they also, now, champion.
Johnathan Reynolds, the new Secretary of State for Business and Trade, spoke about responding to the concern of the British people over immigration, for example. But, poll after poll has shown that there is no such great concern by the majority of citizens. Reynolds went on to say that the number of legal migrants needed to be reduced, which, of course, if you actually believed the first point, would follow for a reactionary populist and racist government that seeks to tail the prejudices of the people whose votes it seeks. But, the first claim was false, as the majority of people are not concerned by immigration, as against concern over other issues such as the NHS, housing and so on, and many recognise that it is beneficial and necessary to resolve many of those other issues, it is more concerned about, despite attempts by reactionary nationalist, and racist bigots to blame immigrants for those problems.
More importantly, as the Tories found out, the reality is that immigration is required to resolve those other problems, which is also why free movement of labour, and membership of the EU played such an important role. The Tories tried to scapegoat immigrants, just as New Labour Home Secretaries had done, in the 2000’s, but both found that they needed those immigrants to fill jobs, in conditions of rising labour shortages. One reason the NHS has collapsed at a faster rate than it was already doing, as a result of the austerity imposed after 2010, is that Brexit cut off the supply of trained doctors, dentists and other professionals from the EU.
Yet, Blue Labour whose Orwellian Doublespeak has “Change” meaning no change/stability, and genocide being peace and self-defence, wants us to believe that its continued application of Tory immigration policy, and scapegoating of immigrants to divert attention from its own contradictions and failures, represents “change”, and is compatible with its own statements about dealing with health, housing and other problems, which it clearly isn’t.
The Liberal leader Ed Davey, on the Sunday politics programmes talked about Blue Labour’s failure to talk in its programme or after about social care, and the role of the millions of unpaid, family carers (many of them as young as 14). But, of course, Blue Labour will not talk about that scandal, or offer any real support for those that provide it. It is too busy engaged in its own talk about “Service” in relation to itself, to actually recognise or support the actual service being provided by millions of ordinary citizens.
It cannot afford to recognise that actual service let alone to support it, and fund it, and even less to make it unnecessary by providing large-scale, good quality social care, because to do so would require greater government spending, requiring greater taxation, and ownership and control of the means of production, which is the last thing it is going to do. It would also require large-scale immigration, to provide the workers required to undertake those jobs, which it has firmly set its nose against as it tails the ideas of the racist bigots whose votes it is forlornly seeking to win over.
As with Blue Labour’s commitment to provide 40,000 new GP appointments, and cut hospital waiting times, at the same time that it not only continues this racist stance on immigration, and reactionary nationalist stance on EU membership, and free movement, whilst, also, refusing to pay the existing doctors adequately, it is pie in the sky, and more Doublespeak. Starmer has said how he intends to do that, which is what I set out some weeks ago. Rather than paying doctors properly for the work they already do, or employing more doctors (which would require more funding, which he has refused to commit to), not to mention increasing immigration to provide those doctors, he intends to simply work the existing doctors even longer and harder, on top of their already long hours!
In one of his first statements he pointed to the examples of having hours extended at night times, and weekends, and so on. The result will be even greater burn out, an even greater exodus of NHS doctors and nurses from the NHS abroad, and into private healthcare, which, of course, fits well with all of those Blue Labour MP’s, and Ministers that are seeking the privatisation of the NHS, and who act as lobbyists for the private healthcare companies.
And, this is just day one.
Originally published at https://boffyblog.blogspot.com.
