Is Labour going anywhere?

It is time to judge the British Labour Party (LP) in the context of modern British and European political history. Why? Because the last General Election in the UK was a catastrophe for Labour and because social democracy is on its knees in Western Europe.

Among the (many) distractions of Brexit, included in the heap of arguments about why Labour did so badly in 2019, is that Labour under Corbyn did well in 2017 - and that showed the possibility of future success. In this scenario, it was the cliffs of Brexit that blocked Labour's progression. In reality in 2017 Labour (despite a high vote) fell behind the Tories (with a higher vote) who had to rally behind Teresa May, the worst Prime Minister since Alex Douglas Hume, and who proposed to carry on austerity - after 7 years of Tory cuts. In reality, despite the crisis of the Tories caused by austerity and then the upheaval of a referendum to leave the EU, Labour lost four General Elections in a row. Messrs Brown, Milliband, Corbyn and Corbyn again failed to win the the majority of the British electorate - before and after Brexit. These are the stubborn facts.

There is no doubting that Corbyn's leadership of the LP, coupled with an enormous and young membership, was something very new in Labour's history. And Corbyn was subject to scathing attacks, both inside Labour and out. But to fully understand the context of Labour's defeats in general requires an historical and international approach. It also helps provide a fully coherent understanding of the Corbyn exception.

The British Labour Governments

The first LP access to Parliamentary political power in Britain was 1945. Forty five years after its birth, Labour enacted the most dramatic reform program inside a capitalist system that the world had ever seen. And that was despite war hero Winston Churchill calling Attlee's Labour 'the Gestapo'.  (Corbyn's sluice of venom is nothing new.) Attlee's project has never been echoed or expanded ever since. Across Western Europe the 'welfare state' policy emerged as dictators fell, as economies were rebuilt and as the labour-force found its strength. In the UK it was the period between 1945 to 1948 that was the height of social democracy's advance. From that point onward the Labour Party, including the key component of the Trade Union leadership, saw their duty as the defence of the gains of 1945-48.

Naturally over time, these various defensive gains  - via Labour Prime Ministers Wilson,  Callaghan, Blair and Brown  - were scrabbled and, occasionally, pumped up in different parts from the Attlee heritage. PM Wilson led a house building policy that was needed, providing 400,000 new houses a year during his tenure. But the essence remained. Labour, in office, was methodically reduced to the defence of its original 'Welfare State', but experiencing less and less of the original successes and accepting more and more policy manoeuvres designed to win over capital, through more and more compromises.    

Under Labour PM's Wilson and Callaghan, British capitalism was already reorganising against industrial development, drawing away from any national investment, still moving from the remnants of imperial wealth to the creation of international finance and tax havens. The response of Wilson and Callaghan was to force a reductive compromise on to unions and workers and their pay. It was the central part of both of their main policies in Parliament.

Under Prime Minister Blair, British social democracy moved again, first by solidifying the downward trend of an increasingly powerless Labour Party membership. A 'middle' direction had already been constructed for Labour's Parliamentary leadership by Anthony Giddens's 'Third Way'. In 2009, Blair publicly declared support for a 'new capitalism'. Labour in Parliament sought its base from public sector workers and managers and new technology capital emerging in the US's West Coast. It offered 'Tory lite' to a declining electorate (who could not tell the difference between the main political parties.) Blair finally fell following his Iraq war debacle and his tangle with the US right.

Prime Minister Brown, who was known mainly for his hatred and envy of Blair - not in a good way -  had already made his major 'social democratic ' measure by hooking up crooked, minor firms that had emerged out of the lowest Thatcher swamp, on to key parts of the health and welfare services.  His Premiership forced him to buy the world's largest bank in the 2008 crash and was shortly bumped out of office by the next 'Tory lite' PM - who did not hate Blair but admired him.

This is the bones of the social democratic Labour Party in government in the UK. Besides Attlee it has mainly been an unsuccessful failure.

Britain's decisive politics since 1945/8.

Meanwhile massive shifts in British society have occurred since 1945/8, but the politics of these shifts have been adopted by the Tories (with a little help from their friends) who either created some of these shifts or promoted their arrival.

Labour PM Wilson might have argued for 'the white hot heat' of new technology but it was the Tory PM Heath, despite his flagging imperial grandees, that successfully pushed the 1975 UK referendum into the European Common Market. Heath opened its membership while in government in 1973. This was the beginning of a massive effort to remove government taxes as the main means of industrial investment in Britain. Labour's leading ministers supported entry as well as the Tory dream of private investment. The European market would re-create Britain's industrial base, without state dependence, stimulated by Britain's remaining advanced technology which was required by the most developed European nations (advanced technology in aircraft engineering, nuclear energy and high grade vehicles, technologies and 'brain drains' - that had been otherwise been pouring away to the US.)

In the 1980s Tory PM Thatcher destroyed the militant leadership of the trade union movement, sold off state utilities and opened the new, dominant centre of British capitalism, by unleashing the City of London and its access to international wealth. Thatcher also divided the working class socially with the sale of council housing, creating in the south of England a vast new industry of the building, buying and selling of housing, which remains today. Thatcher, long before Trump and now Boris, embedded a section of the working class as part of her political base.

Meanwhile, the enormous reorganisation of the nature of work across the UK, from the 1980s onward, was part of the change of international capital and the growth of the movement of finance seen throughout the European west. The process was rapidly encouraged by a succession of Tory governments in Britain. The mobilisation of international wealth, 'service' industries, the relatively dwindling public-sector and its 'outsourcing', selling property and building development, particularly in the south of the UK, all of them defined the new types of jobs. The new jobs were unskilled, with low wages, no unions, and self-paying contracts. This continental wide process was never grasped by social democracy either across Europe or Britain. Instead social democratic parties largely sought yet more new compacts with capitalism, a new capitalism that had little interest in the increasingly desperate offers of the social democrats, barring the opening of access to crooks and the nouveaux riche wide-boys.

Decline of Social Democracy's purchase

These great events and associated movements in the economy and politics that have rolled through the second half of the 20th century and the first third of the 21st in Western Europe, have been broadly untouched by social democratic parties. It is a simple fact that the social democratic proposition, that capitalism and its associated systems can be cajoled, pressurised, influenced or won-over, had its last success in Britain 75 years ago. (Which is not at all the same thing as the huge sacrifices and struggles that erupted as capital's offensive became more and more trenchant. In Britain alone millions actively backed the Miner's strike in the mid 1980s; overthrew Thatcher via the Poll Tax rebellion, and ruined Blair's political future in the movement against the Iraq war.)

The concessions made to social democracy by capitalism in Western Europe have progressively lessened for two main reasons. First, capitalism in Europe and across the world has not just globalised in terms of the extraction of raw materials and forced labour across the globe. They have industrialised global labour and made ownership and sale of wealth the main value of the global system. Naturally this reduces most access by national governments to force concessions (if they are so inclined) from the most substantial capitalist companies, even when these companies are nominally based in their own country. 'There's no alternative' became the dominant slogan of modern political economy.

Second; the decline of traditional political structures and instruments in Western Europe and the weakness of the political institutions when faced with the supposed inevitability of the economic system, produced cynicism among voters - particularly with working class voters. A recent survey led by Cambridge University, involving 4 million people and 3500 surveys across 154 countries, has spelt it out. In 2005 the proportion of those dissatisfied with democracy in the UK was 33%. In 2019 it reached 61%. (The US, meanwhile, has seen a 'dramatic and unexpected' decline in voter dissatisfaction, to above 50%.)

The crash in 2008 showed the only real political intervention that any government could take - apparently, when the various states and governments in the West re-stocked the banks (and the stock markets.) The politicians, especially the social democratic politicians, standing in front of millions whose lives were about to get worse for decades, explained there was no alternative. In other words, when it really came to the crunch, the social democrats were just another shadow of the political right.

(Interestingly, a group of European countries has been bucking this trend, with satisfaction with democracy higher than ever before in Denmark, Switzerland, Norway and the Netherlands. There is a strong argument to connect those results to their highest state social spending over decades by these countries - especially the Scandinavian ones. See Blog 14 January 2020.)

The Corbyn initiative.

Although Corbyn followed the main historical trend of the weakness and decline of social democracy in the 2017 and 2019 General Elections, there was the emergence of a new development based on two new significant shifts in politics and society. In politics, the Corbyn leadership reconstructed the Attlee formula for modern times. In other words they proposed a new balance in society and the economy. This was the first time that British social democracy had acted that way for 70 years. In society, a new youth movement, experiencing the misery of the latest capitalist model in terms of jobs, pay, rights, social-costs, housing, attached itself overwhelmingly to Corbyn's Labour in both General Elections (despite Corbyn's confusion over Brexit.)

It turned out that the two political and social changes were not enough to resist the social bloc created by Boris's Brexit or the deluge of attacks on Corbyn, most effectively from the inside of the parliamentary Labour party itself. Nevertheless, polls consistently support a new model economy - and now there is a majority in the UK for a new type of democracy - something which the Corbyn program barely touched.

Not so much a conclusion ...

The Labour Party is under enormous pressure to pretend it is now unified - as the first step needed to muzzle the Corbyn base. The main candidate for leadership (in the media) is Keir Starmer who tells us he supports everybody in the broad church he is designing. But the political and economic context in Britain forbids anything other than dramatic change in the UK nations, particularly Scotland, its economy (if it is to avoid a satellite of the US, managed by Singapore-on-Thames) and its society, which already echoes a Dickensian quality, particularly for the young. Politics is the first clarifier.

Those that support Corbyn's program need to organise in action for its victory in society. Unifying a fuzzy, silent consensus of the Labour Party - heading for a second rate 'Tory lite' - is an empty goal. If Starmer wins then the base of Labour will need to organise their own faction that is going to fight every battle to establish the new democracy, beyond the traditional, failed, Labour Party of history, a democracy needed to win the breakthrough that Corbyn sought.

The best future for the UK's people.

The best future for the UK in the next political and economic period is to accept the right of its various citizens to decide the separation of the UK's different countries. It would follow that the English, the Scots and the Welsh could seek a federation together with the other more social democratic countries of Northern Europe. The Northern Irish, happily, are already able to become part of Ireland, should they so wish.

What would this achieve? It would simultaneously dissolve the self-styled 'great power status', of UK/England and make it much easier thereby to focus the separate countries on the conditions and lives of their ordinary peoples. A second 'Hanseatic League' (originally a very successful 13th to 15th century trading arrangement across Northern Europe) could start again on the new basis of defending the social gains made so far in the West, as globalisation smashes up the post WW2 welfare states. It is the Northern European states who are still holding the social-democratic line - against their will in some cases. With a new approach promoting the sort of society that starts from the needs of the people, an England, a Scotland and a Wales could stand with Norway, Sweden and Denmark, holding back the wave of destruction of social support and care which destroyed Greece and is currently rolling its menace across France and Italy.

Utopia? Behind what might be described as a fantasy, are two hard facts. First is the economics of the next period in the West. Most large European countries spend the bulk of the taxes they receive on Health, Education and Welfare. Their governments have been forced to do that since 1945. The EU countries as a whole use 35.7% of their countries' Gross Domestic Product (the goods and services that the country produces) in government expenditure. France is in the middle of a battle to drastically slice government expenditure by cutting pensions, but the French state normally spends 47.9% of France's GDP.  Germany 44.5%. Then there is Scandinavia. There is a battle here too; an endless demand from the corporations, most of the media, the higher classes to cut government spending. But ...

Sweden uses 49.8% of its country's GDP. Denmark 50.8% and Norway 54.8%. And the UK government? It spends 34.4% of the country's GDP. The UK is at the bottom of all the large western countries, thanks to Thatcher and Blair.

The second 'hard fact' is the dissolution of Britain's traditional politics. Boris Johnson's victory at the polls in Britain's 2019 General Election, manoeuvred by the crushing of his EU remainers in Parliament; was created by the defeat of the left-led Labour Party. But Boris's maimed victory is not resolved, courtesy of Corbyn's defeat. It is Boris's 'utopia', as it will unfold under the pressure of his brutal Brexit, the downturn across the the capitalist world, the single economic leverage that he has chosen to use for the UK's future, that will turn the politics of the UK into another fast spin. In essence, Boris has to burn down the current proportion of the UK's education, health and welfare to shore up the tax-light wealth he needs to attract and sustain his contest with Singapore, etc.

How will the politics of Boris's project fall-out? The Borisian dream is utterly bent on the critical role of the British-based banks and finance companies (touched by computer super gaming - expanding as hard as possible - offering a tech substitute for the failure of AI.) This is to be underpinned by the US of course; together with all the other Anglo 'let's go world-wide wide open' countries - that want to hoard wealth and keep the immigrants out. This is not any sort of recipe for stable future, buttressed by well paid and interesting apprenticeships and jobs!

The smoke and mirrors in front of Boris's political success will clear very fast. Indubitably, our UK's mini-Trump will try to hold onto his equivalent of the British rust-bucket that Trump still savours. Hundreds of thousands are 'back to work' in some of the US States that crashed out of their traditional Democratic allegiance in the last Presidential contest. The new work is now some fracking, some metal work, but mainly folding boxes. In the UK, fracking is going nowhere, metal and engineering are escaping Britain almost as fast as cars. And most of the Midlands and the North East are already folding boxes or working in the collapsing social services. Boris has to make a giant leap beyond Trump's 'offer' in the US, in order to set his new rust-buckets screwed Tory tight. That's the real fantasy.

And then there is the nation. Scotland will demand the right to vote again on independence. Northern Ireland are allowed to do it when they want. Scotland is already on the march. This, and the deep dislike of Boris in Scotland, will force the issue after the Scottish elections in 2021. Additionally, the British Labour Party may well by then agree with the SNP's view on a new referendum - as Labour digs deeper when their 2020 leadership election proves nothing like enough to rebuild a victory in a UK election.

And then there are the direct movements that will erupt against Boris's government. The post Brexit times will cause all sorts of certainties to crash. The growing hatred of the current political system among a third of Britons will quickly re-grow. (The Royal family are providing further fuel.) The absolutely essential creation of a new Green deal, in jobs, technology and reorganisation of industries like farming, will become more and more acute. Recognition of the meaning of Britain's separate nations will be unavoidable. New political alliances will be essential. All this will seem to come very quickly. British politics (along with most western politics) is going very fast now. But the new Labour leadership will not solve, let alone lead, these great movements. That is the decisive result of the 2019 election.

What can Labour do?

Starting with 10 million who ignored and who even spat at the attacks on Corbyn that blossomed from both outside and in the Labour Party, a real, tough, practical vision is emerging in a future that will need much more than the standard 'our turn next' from the Labour Grandees.  

The ten million Labour voters and the hundreds of thousands of Labour members need to take stock of why the Labour Party failed and what the Labour Party should do now. Now is the time to ask the questions; what sort of Labour Party do we want to be? What sort of Labour Party can we be? The dangerous effect of Labour's defeat is the idea that now is the time for what will be a paralytic 'unity'. The truth is the exact opposite. The would be 'unifiers' have turned reality on its head. There are a potential five years before Boris can be overturned by votes in a General Election. The time for Labour's unity was before and during the election. It did not happen inside the Parliamentary Party - who ignored the members and opposed Corbyn. There was no unity in the Labour Party in the 2019 General Election. That was when there should have been unity. But now is the time to analyse, criticise, debate and consider. The call for 'unifying' now is simply a means by which it will be the wings of the Parliamentary Labour Party that will de facto answer the questions about Labour's future.

Fighting constituency by constituency over the next period for an MP that 'unifies' the Party - in their own terms - is a cul de sac. Boris will rapidly provide battlefields in the economy and in politics which will require the most intense direct action. Boris's inevitable attacks on the right to independence, on pensioners, the unemployed, on Welfare, Health and Education, on worker's rights and on US collaboration, will also decide if there is a future for the Labour Party. The membership and supporters of the Labour Party need to be front and centre in the movements, the marches, the direct actions that stop Boris and, as with PM Heath in the 1970s and Thatcher in the 1980s, bring him down. The other Labour Party - in Parliament - can go along with their membership, or carry on despising them and praying for a wealthy post, as in the past. In effect, two Labour Parties. It is breathtakingly obvious which of the two Labour Parties would win back the Midlands and the North East, open the door to a new, green economy and re-build respect in a separate Scotland and Ireland.

And that is why Labour's membership and Labour's supporters need now to discuss and debate, to consider what is right and what is wrong with Britain's Labour Party, to look around Europe and the world and to set a different course - to make new alliances for a new society and a new democracy.

Can Labour survive?

1. The British Guardian newspaper has recently conducted a poll revealing support for Labour's new possible leaders. In the poll of 1059 Labour members, taking into account the possible stages of the election, they strongly backed (Sir) Keir Starmer, shadow Brexit secretary, against all other potential candidates.

Starmer (as with a couple of other candidates) has so far been careful not to distance himself from Corbyn's 2019 Manifesto. The large membership of the Labour Party was, until now at least, mainly Corbyn supporters. Ken Livingston has promoted Starmer's candidature. Nevertheless Starmer voted twice against Corbyn as leader and, at one stage, walked out of the shadow cabinet in order to force the Party to propose a new referendum as part of its Brexit policy. He will not be carrying on with any sort of 'Corbynism'.

2. Labour as a whole lost in 2019 but Labour's left has also had a resounding defeat however delicate Starmer's footsteps fall. And the Guardian poll is a very shaky and very early prediction. More significant is the real meaning of the distribution of the votes during the 2019 General Election. Labour polled 10 million and the Tories polled 14 million (a shade higher than ex PM May's vote in 2017.) The data also shows that 18 to 24 year olds would have put 544 Labour MPs into Parliament and 4 Conservatives. The Lib Dems, despite their support for the EU, were basically irrelevant for this group. From 24 to 49, voters would have put 310 Labour MPs as against 240 Tories into Parliament - again, because of the Corbyn program and despite the significant desire that sector had to remain in the EU. The Lib Dems were more successful here. (If only 65 year olds and older voted then Labour gets 35 MPs and the Tories 575.)

3. Labour membership still runs into the hundreds of thousands. And 10 million voted Labour. Most important Labour is still the overwhelmingly dominant mass party of young people. Yet the serious debate in Labour and across Labour voters in general about 'what really went wrong' has yet to be opened up. Most Labour leader contenders (including Starmer) are determined that the MPs should lead and control any real discussion about Labour's future. It is to be through the leadership candidates' votes that any realistic debate will be heard. Starmer's efforts, if he decides to stand, will be just another attempt to close down debate among party members and Labour supporters. 'Let's reunite the whole Labour Party' he will headline, while meaning let's unify Labour's MPs by not opening any real debate among the party: by not opening the most important political debate today in Britain.  

4. Aside from the pantomime leadership election, what will happen to Labour?

The answer is discovered through a study raised by wider question. What will happen now to British politics in general - and to British society?

At the end of 2019 the Hansard Society published surprising research which showed that 37% of Britons believed 'the system' needed 'a great deal' of change - 10% more than the previous highest record, in 2010, when MPs were setting up austerity and fiddling about in their expenses scandal. This is how the Economist Magazine 'Predictions for 2020' put it;

'Britain saw relatively few public protests between the arrival of democracy in 1918 and the referendum in 2016. Now it sees marches almost every week. The same could happen with political violence, the relative lack of which made Britain such a peaceful place.' 

Although the Economist's correspondent has failed to notice the defeat of the Heath government via the trade union movement in the 1970s and Thatcher's fall after the Poll Tax riots, Boris is not going face any sort of a calm future. Big changes, mass actions and reactions are going much faster than the second half of the 20th Century. There are now many more blocks to any sort of smooth progress in Britain's politics. All of the coming swerves and crashes will also shift society. Britain's fragility is greater now than any time since the World Wars. Britain's society has been captured by its uncertain and incoherent politics. The fate of Labour will only be determined by its political capacity to mark out and lead the shift in society best suited to the working class and its allies.

5. We already know that this year a 'no deal' with the EU may still be possible. A huge political struggle, in society, outside Parliament, could follow at the end of 2020.  But there are many other, even more drastic obstacles for the rulers of Britain. Another new British politics that could smash up its society was first hinted in September 2019 when a (small) majority of voters in Northern Ireland stated they were in favour of Irish unity. So far, Britain's mass media have been promoting the coming battle between Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon over Scottish independence. But seeing no further than the 'right' of Westminster, eg Boris's 'right', to refuse another referendum in Scotland, Westminster believes the problem is solved. However the significance of Sturgeon's demand, that the Scottish Parliament should have its own right to decide whether to hold another referendum, starts to break down Westminster's domination. Again politics goes outside Westminster. The point is that another part of the UK already has its own right to independence. If the SNP win a solid victory in the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood in 2021, it is inconceivable that Scots will not demand, and act on their 'right', to vote for their future - just as the Northern Irish can. 

2020 in Britain will not only face the next EU treaty and the national question, it will face Trump's election and his drastic measures to prove that 'America is great' again. Trump will do literally anything to defend his slogan, including short term measures that accelerate the West's weakening economy. Britain is exactly in the wrong place in relation to a major economic decline across the globe. Already Boris intends to drop EU law that defends workers' rights. Already the courts have smashed the biggest majority vote for action ever polled by Postal workers. Already Boris has backed one of the worst railway companies that reneged on its deal with Britain's most militant union, the RMT. Already Boris publicises  plans to withdraw the right to strike by transport workers.

So far nurses in Northern Ireland, Postal workers, Railway workers, Amazon workers, etc, etc have begun a fightback. Outside Parliament.

6. This is the picture that faces Labour as it now stands. If the 2020 EU Boris deal (or no deal) becomes toxic for Labour, another Labour break is inevitable and not just among Labour's MPs. It is one thing to support Corbyn despite your favourable view of EU membership. It is entirely different when a mini pro-Blair leader tries to concoct a new Labour 'solution' as Boris pushes through his anti-working class objectives in his new deal with the EU.

But the crisis of Scotland's independence is still worse for Labour's MPs. Corbyn's leadership did not resolve the Scottish question in the Labour Party or among its supporters - although a shift had begun. The obvious answer would be to accept the right of the Scottish people to decide their own future and for Labour to actively seek an alliance with the Scottish government on shared core issues.

Labour too will have to face mass action outside Parliament and the probability of economic downturn. Will the debate about Labour's defeat raise the need for the Party to join the battle of workers and their organisations, given a debate that is focussed on the next leader and 'business as usual.' Again Labour finds itself in a two part turmoil.

7. The developing future for British capitalism is being created out of these and other crises. The shape of Britain's social and economic future is emerging out of the leadership of the the most right-wing government since Thatcher. The critical centre of that future is the new structure that needs to be built to maintain and to gain globally accumulating wealth. The EU cliche, now a year old, of Britain's future as 'Singapore on Thames', a global tax haven, has already become more mature and refined. The latest version of the new Britain is emerging as part of the 'Anglosphere', America, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, (as opposed to the Sinosphere; China and its mongrel puppies.) The Anglosphere countries are now all heady market players, they spy together on everybody else (it's called 'five eyes'!) France, Germany and Japan are out of the Anglosphere clique. Its shared intention is the consolidation and control of the non-Chinese world's wealth. And Britain's City of London hopes to become the pearl in the Anglosphere's crown - a prized centre to challenge China's future. And the British people? The successful ones will service this prize and the rest of us will serve the servers.

There will be no real avenue in Britain for the next five years, opening to a new society based on a new green revolution. Work is going to be more tied to service. Work will be more and more unregulated. State health, education and welfare will be more and more polluted by the market. The crown jewels will remain in London.

8. Against this future the Labour Party has so failed to show its alternative - or even, so far, set up the debate required, as the petty-leadership epithets begin to fly, providing substitutes for real discussion and action. There are two fundamentals that the Labour Party must face to survive and have any chance to lead society. First, part of Labour's failure in 2019, including by the leadership of Labour's left, was its virtual silence about where Britain's wealth truly was (including its tax havens in the great corporations and in Britain's islands in the sun) and how they might be taken back to Britain's people. Second, Britain's Parliament no longer serves any real democracy, let alone the needs of society as a whole. 

Labour should focus its hundreds of thousands of members, its ten million voters and society's young people on an attack against the billionaires and their wealth. That is the prime question for Britain's society. It is the core of the future. And it will be fought successfully only in mass action as, even in the West, the current unsuccessful democracies fail to provide any platform for that crucial step. 

Second, the form that the failure of Britain's democracy takes is that it does not represent the overwhelming majority of the people. Simply look at the proportions of votes for any UK government. Meanwhile the House of Lords keeps expanding. Voting is completely unfair in the bit of Parliament that people can vote for. Two of the four countries that make up Britain are moving to independence because they are not represented. A growing percentage of the population, enough to win a British Parliament's government, regard the 'system' as unsuccessful. To really win an alternative to Boris's crew, Labour needs to attack the current Parliamentary system in favour of a democracy that distributes power to people, not where a quarter of the electorate gives the little bits away that are on offer every five years.   

9. What should be done (and what are the new Labour leadership likely to do?) 

There are some crises to come that will be shared by Labour and Johnson's Tories. But, as in the case of Scotland, and Northern Ireland, the new Labour leadership is likely to flow in entirely the wrong direction. Then there are other crises which are truly Labour's own. The defeat of the Corbyn left is now beginning to swing back to Blair's love of the 'centre ground'; the 'Tory light' version of the 1990s and early 2000's. The reason why Blair succeeded for 10 years was he replaced the non-functioning Tory Party - which had become no use to either of Britain's two main classes. It eventually failed because it was a version of the Tories. It failed a working class that was dealing with its retreats and defeats across the board. It failed through its half-baked nonsense of the unity of the market (read a collection of Dell-boys sharks) and the UK's public institutions. It failed because the classes (not just in Britain) were polarising without any interest from the Labour leadership, between poverty and wealth. It will not be able to be reconstituted. The polarisation has happened. Any future Labour potential support will not feed from its dismal history. Boris's success proves that.

And what therefore should be done? The defeat of Corbyn is not replaceable or reversible. The new leadership of the Labour Party will buttress the current state of society and offer a traditional Tory-lite project. (This is already emerged as would-be Labour leadership candidates start comparing their version of English patriotism with Boris's! No contest.) 

What should be done? What has to be done? The membership, the Labour voters and the youth have to be coalesced in a mass-action political current that fights the new Tory government. The two key headlines; 'No rich and no poor! We need Real Democracy.' They would build a Labour faction, 'Real Labour', that organises independently of most Labour MPs and what will be all of its shadow cabinet. They would draw strength and experiences from the battle in France, the new Italian squares movement, the anti-fascist movement in the US. They would continue to fight at Labour's conference. And if necessary, they would form an independent organisation.

Tailending the Parliamentary Labour leadership's direction; compromising the battle that has to be had to shift the wealth in Britain, will begin to turn the Corbyn defeat into the defeat of Labour's members, their voters (who stood by Corbyn and the shaky 2019 Manifesto) and most of all, millions of young people. 'Real Labour' has to be critical of the 2019 faults but bold and most of all practically active in their answers. The first demand that 'Real Labour' should make from Labour's would-be leaders is that Britain's undemocratic Parliament, dominated by a mini Trump, must be brought down and replaced as soon as possible.