Labour’s Leader, Brexit Lemmings, US Tinderbox

Starmer Shows Signs of Swift Leadership

Keir Starmer moved swiftly when he dismissed Rebecca Long-Bailey from her frontbench position of Shadow Secretary of State for Education. He had little choice. The realities and perceptions of ant-Semitism under the Corbyn era cost the party dearly in terms of internecine squabbling and easy fodder for the right wing Press. There was no comparison between the fast and decisive handling of Long-Bailey’s careless re-tweeting and subsequent asinine behaviour in refusing to delete her tweet of support for Maxine Peake’s interview, and the way Corbyn’s team sat on complaints, and seemed to have strange bedfellows on Twitter that seemed blind to allegations of anti-Semitism. Amnesty themselves have said Peake’s claim – saying the infamous neck-hold which killed George Floyd was based on training received by US police forces from the IDF, according to an Amnesty report – was not what they had said.

The usual Corbynites jumped to the defence of the hapless former leadership challenger, but in a sign of how much the party has moved since Starmer’s ascendancy, she was gone by the end of the day. There was fury from the hard left, with a lot of them threatening to leave the party. If that is one of the outcomes, then there’ll be few regrets from Starmer’s team. Although he was all things to all people when he ran for leadership, he knows that relying on Momentum, the latter day Militant Tendency, will be more of a burden than a boon as Labour try to rebuild and challenge a populist, deceitful Tory Party between now and the next general election. If the Hard Left goes to war, it could be brutal. But it’s a battle Starmer may have no choice but to fight.

Brexit Endgame

Brexit, even during times of a global pandemic, is a background noise that isn’t going away. As the British negotiators close down more and more possibilities of compromise, it seems, from a European outcome, that the only logical conclusion, is a no-deal. To reemphasize this, the United Kingdom’s current position, is to have conceded the trading advantages they had as members of the European Union, principally priveledged access to a market of 450 million people, and to start with nothing, in a time when Covid-19 is still prevalent, particularly in Great Britain itself. No trade deal can with the US can replace the status Britain would have within the EU. They are hobbling themselves for a generation down to the ideology of Little England fanatics, and Libertarian Anarcho-Disruptors.

It is a shame for British public life, and the status of their economy in the coming years, that Dominic Cummings wasn’t hounded from office as he would have been in any functioning accountable government. Instead, his arrogance seems to have been bolstered, as his Rasputin-like grip on Boris Johnson continues. The two of them are edging their country ever closer to the no-deal Brexit cliff, an option which the vast majority of those who voted in the 2016 referendum would have thought was complete madness. The shame is that there was genuine goodwill from Barnier in the negotiations, and an empathy from people like Donald Tusk that Britain could construct an amicable departure agreement. No more; the mood has hardened, there is a feeling that they want shot of Perfidious Albion for a long time indeed.

US on the Brink

Finally, some serious commentators are discussing the prospect of serious civil unrest in the US in November following the Presidential election should Trump refuse to respect the result. It has been the elephant in the room for much of the presidency, one that the respectable, liberal, Press has been too scared to address. The US, with Trump increasingly flirting with laying the ground for disputing the November result, is a powder keg, When a serious, unsullied, and decent candidate like Joe Biden can be demonized as some sort of evil, demented, crook, when there’s approximately 300 million privately held firearms, when there’s a broken electoral machinery, then you can see how the US could easily disintegrate, state by state, city versus rural, into a Yugoslavian nightmare.

Can it happen? With fascistic militias on maneuvers, and organizations like the Boogaloo actively looking for a race war, and a President declaring war on anti-fascists, the situation is closer to midnight than many are prepared to admit. The US have come through terrible times, but this seems different. There is an unstable, dull-minded, cruel, corrupt, figure at the head of the Republican Party, one that puts Nixon in the shade. The GOP have a relatively simple choice over the next few months; do a sufficient amount of their number join in with the honourable Never-Trumpers in upholding the constitution, or do they enable the drift towards an horrific outcome, one that history will judge them as culpable for as the actions of the anti-Union side in the Civil War?