FEARS that a popular local Labour candidate will be barred from standing for Parliament in the Vale of Glamorgan add to rising unease about Keir Starmer’s approach to candidate selections.
Concerns about Labour HQ stitch-ups have spread beyond the usual left-wing circles in recent weeks, prompting attention in Establishment papers and even a critical article by former BBC and Channel 4 broadcast journalist Michael Crick.
Clearly the fixes that have blocked promising left-wingers like Lauren Townsend and Maurice Mcleod are linked to the deselection attempts on sitting left-wing MPs and more widely to the stream of expulsions of longstanding Labour members.
Does it matter? To all socialists it should.
The Labour right — when engaged in their hysterical five-year campaign to undermine Jeremy Corbyn — claimed the nature of the party as a “broad church” was under threat.
Some pointed out that this “broad church” had only ever existed on the right’s terms.
Loyalty to the party’s electoral fortunes was often used to blunt left-wing criticism of the right, but no such loyalty had ever inhibited the right from attacking the left.
The discrepancy points to a contradiction at the heart of a party which is built on working-class organisation — the unions — but deeply embedded in the imperialist British state. The right’s class loyalty (to the ruling class) trumped party but the left’s party loyalty too often trumped class.
These observations could be made about Labour for the last 100 years. What is new is the scale of the right’s suppression of the left, and the wider ruling-class assault on democratic rights.
Labour’s democratic space has never been narrower than now. Neil Kinnock’s war on the Militant Tendency was not extended to a generalised programme of excluding left-wingers wherever an excuse can be found — with the excuses as feeble as having liked posts from non-Labour politicians on Twitter or having engaged with subsequently proscribed organisations before they were banned.
Nor did Tony Blair attempt to force people out of the party for condemning its imperialist foreign policy.
Clearly the right’s purges are a response to the Corbyn period — a bid to ensure Labour can never be led from the left again.
But in the process they seek to change the very nature of the Labour Party as a site of class struggle.
Many left-of-Labour socialists who worked with Labour MPs to campaign against the war in Iraq never anticipated that one of those MPs would come to lead the party, but they did recognise that Labour was the only place where socialist and anti-imperialist politics were likely to be articulated at Westminster, and that local Labour members were a core part of social justice campaigns. If the Starmer project succeeds, this will not be the case in future.
His Labour Party’s authoritarianism is not in doubt: it calls for longer sentences for protesters and stricter censorship of the internet, even if we ignore its appalling treatment of its own members.
It faces a Tory Party whose draconian tendencies are still more pronounced, especially with threats to the right to strike that amount to the most serious assault on civil liberties in decades.
But that is not a reason to give Labour a free pass as the lesser of two evils.
It is a dangerous sign that following the unscripted popular mutinies of the past decade, the drive to shut down democratic space is cross-party. The parameters of acceptable political debate are to be narrowed and the penalties for dissent increased.
This is not a separate issue to the escalating confrontation between capital and labour in Britain. It is among the attacks being levelled against the working class by the British state.
A candidate selection in the Vale of Glamorgan might seem like a little local difficulty. But it reflects an ominous authoritarianism that is sweeping British politics.
