By Dave Savage
We do not have a presidential electoral system in Britain, of course, because the head of state is whoever happens to be the monarch. But that hasn’t stopped the mainstream media doing their best to turn it into a US-style campaign, restricting content to discussion of right-wing talking points and staged interactions with the phoney public personas of Starmer, Sunak and Farage. It has been a banal, depressing and entirely predictable exchange of lies, stupidities and absurdities. All of it set it against the backdrop of the political class’s obvious and open contempt for the rest of us. This, apparently, is what we are supposed to accept as democratic politics. At the General Election of 2024 we will each be voting for a parliamentary candidate in our own area, not a President of Britain. I’ve been a Labour member off and on since I joined at sixteen years of age and, in my time, I’ve been a branch secretary and a candidate for elected office. Formerly, I had respected the rule that Labour activists do not support non-Labour candidates where a Labour candidate is standing. I resigned from my (albeit minor) role in my branch some time ago because I was no longer willing to be restricted in this way. Blind loyalty to party is no virtue, especially when what is at stake is so important. War and peace, the future existence of our NHS and the viability of essential public services – to name but a few. I will no longer refuse to support the best candidate in an election, simply because he or she wears a different coloured rosette. Many on the left will, I know, be astonished (or disgusted) that someone with my beliefs remains in Labour at all. So why risk expulsion now? Why this general election and why Michael Lavalette?
When I was asked to nominate Michael Lavalette as a parliamentary candidate for the 2024 General Election, I instinctively and immediately said ‘yes.’ Until he moved back to Preston in 2023, I didn’t know Michael terribly well, personally. I got more heavily involved in various trade union and campaigning groups in Preston, just as Michael was moving from Preston to Liverpool for work reasons. But I knew him by reputation, of course, and, more importantly, I have friends and comrades – people I know and trust – who know Michael very well and have the greatest respect and admiration for him (as a person and as a political activist).
Having worked with Michael for several months now in the Preston & South Ribble Stop the War group, I have seen for myself something of what those friends and comrades have known for a long time. I’ve been deeply impressed by Michael’s knowledge of, and dedication to campaigning on, the oppression of the Palestinian people and the wider issues of war and peace that are within the purview of Stop the War. But I’ve also seen that Michael has a deep commitment, as a convinced socialist, to fighting for social justice locally, nationally and internationally, and that he understands the need for radical and far-reaching change in Britain. He has an impressive knowledge of most policy areas and is an expert in more than one. He has, too, and this is important I think for a prospective parliamentary candidate, a huge capacity for hard work.
Put simply, according to Tony Benn’s rule of thumb, Michael Lavalette is a signpost. Benn once said:
“I have divided politicians into two categories: the Signposts and the Weathercocks. The Signpost says: ‘This is the way we should go.’ And you don’t have to follow them but if you come back in ten years time the Signpost is still there. The Weathercock hasn’t got an opinion until they’ve looked at the polls, talked to the focus groups, discussed it with the spin doctors. And I’ve no time for Weathercocks, I’m a Signpost man. And in fairness, although I disagreed with everything she did, Mrs Thatcher was a Signpost. She said what she meant. Meant what she said. Did what she said she’d do if you voted for her. So everybody who voted for her shared responsibility for what happened. And I think that we do need a few more Signposts and few fewer Weathercocks.”
I was warned straight away that nominating Michael would inevitably mean my expulsion from the Labour Party. Party rules are quite clear about supporting non-Labour candidates against the Labour candidate in an election, of course. But I felt that this, when it happened, would only apply the coup de grâce to what for me has been a lingeringly slow process of gradual detachment from Labour. To be honest, I could and probably should have left much earlier. Socialists in Labour have not been short of reasons to do so, not least by being openly invited to leave by the Leader himself. The insults, the abuse, the witch-hunts, the abolition of democracy and free speech, the contempt for natural justice and due process, all these have been exhaustively documented by honest journalists and prominent former members.
Locally, my branch has normally been a welcoming place and I still remember with pride and fondness the open, positive and discursive meetings we had in the Corbyn years. When we discussed how to change our country for the better, and were not expected to just sit tight-lipped (on ‘controversial’ issues) until the next set of elections came round and we received our work orders from the party apparatchiks. The policy discussions were often stimulating, with good attendances at meetings (including from more women and young people, which in itself was refreshing) and no diktats from London on what we might and might not discuss.
There are many good people in my local Labour Party, some of whom are good friends of mine. They have been badly let down, betrayed, by a ruthless clique of extreme centrists in Westminster. Starmer, Reeves, Ashworth, et al, might masquerade as progressives but, as so many people have testified on so many occasions, they are nasty and bigoted, without political or natural principles, and loyal to the Labour ‘brand’ only in the way a football hooligan is ‘loyal’ to his team. That’s why, of course, they have to force so many of their favoured candidates on local parties at election time. How else would they get their protégés into office? A truly democratic process of selection would allow members to see them for what they are and, more often than not, Labour members would reject them out of hand.
Starmer has killed democracy inside Labour and he has adopted a fundamentally neo-liberal programme for the next Labour government. There is to be no meaningful change, therefore, and none of the many serious crises facing Britain will be properly addressed. It will just be more of the same. This is as good as it gets, will ever get, under Starmer’s Labour. Socialist alternatives are not only firmly rejected, they are condemned as dangerous, divisive and disloyal. To insist as Starmer does that ‘there is no alternative,’ despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, is to abdicate any claim to moral leadership in Britain. It is to say to those millions of Britons whose suffering is unnecessary and could be alleviated, that the Labour Party (like the Tory party) now exists merely to preserve the political and economic status quo, nothing more. That widespread poverty, systematic economic exploitation, rampant racism and discrimination will go unaddressed; that our crumbling public services will continue to be mere fodder for private corporations; that our elderly, unemployed and disabled will continue to be treated with contempt and neglect.
Most voters desperately want shut of the Tories. But do they want their Tory MP replaced by a Labour MP who will not speak up for them, who will merely toe the Starmer line, whether out of fear of deselection or because they share Starmer’s neo-liberal views? I don’t think so. And this is why Faiza Shaheen, Andrew Feinstein and the other left independents are polling so well, and why Michael Lavalette is getting such a good reception on the doorsteps in Preston.
The Labour Party has no God-given right to exist, no political party does. The Liberals won a landslide victory in 1906, remember, but they never formed a government thereafter. The Liberals split during the Great War, they could not heal the rift and they were replaced as the party of opposition by Labour. Given the right circumstances this could happen again. George Galloway’s result in Rochdale in February (and the current polling of left independents) reminds us that genuinely leftist candidates can win parliamentary elections.
Regardless of what form the parliamentary opposition takes, we will always be able to build extra-parliamentary movements for change, and the huge popularity of the anti-war movement is proof positive of this. But it would be healthy for our democracy, and a small victory for the left, if we could get more MPs in parliament who are rooted in the lived reality of their communities, who have a passionate commitment to changing this reality for the better. Individuals who are also connected with, and responsive to, the social movements and campaign groups. Michael Lavalette is one such candidate.
There is a widespread impulse in working-class communities for practical solidarity, for collective action and there is a real thirst for radical change. It should have been able to be channelled through the Labour Party and the trade unions. But Starmer has rejected this notion outright and the unions, despite the odd victory here and there, seem to be struggling to increase their membership and still cannot recruit effectively in industries and sectors where they are most needed but have little or no effective presence. But this popular impulse for radical change, in spite of Labour’s disinterest in it and the unions’ inability to harness it, will inevitably find expression in new and existing groups, organisations and movements, with thousands of new local leaders and potentially millions of newly politicised members.
In the past, as a Labour member, I would have preferred a rejuvenated and thoroughly democratic Labour Party to have made this unnecessary. But we had our chance, Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leader and Starmer has dragged the national Labour Party, now disciplined into mute compliance, back into alignment with the Westminster Consensus. A worldview that demonises migrants, the disabled and the unemployed, agitates constantly for war and insists on making a brutal and inhumane ‘austerity’ the permanent policy of the British state. It is a betrayal of the entire Labour Movement (many thousands of trade unionists fund and campaign for Labour) that Starmer knows the gravity of the problems facing this country yet refuses to do anything substantial to address them. That he knows – not least as a ‘human rights lawyer’ – that the Gaza Genocide is a despicable crime against humanity, but supports it nevertheless. It is not merely a failure of political leadership, it also a moral failure.
Perhaps, this is finally the beginning of the end for Labour? It, too, has had its chance to properly represents the interests of the majority of British people and to provide a meaningful opposition to the Tories. If they’re honest with themselves, Labour big-wigs can hardly complain when voters in ‘safe’ Labour seats (like Preston) look elsewhere for the political and moral leadership that this country so badly needs. Working class people have always had to reinvent their political organisations, to retain and reform some or dispose of others. A transition of this size and scale doesn’t happen very often, of course. But when it does, when the latent power of the people is aroused and properly channelled, the consequences can be seismic.
Indeed, the pumping-up of Farage in the legacy media, the demonisation of independents such as Jeremy Corbyn, Faiza Shaheen, Andrew Feinstein, and the attempts to sideline the Greens and the Workers’ Party in legacy media, are some of the signs that show the establishment might be concerned by how the campaign is developing. The ruthless purging of Labour might have made it safe for government but it ensured the election of an unpopular leader and the adoption of a deeply uninspiring policy programme. The initial idea, no doubt, to was to rehearse the 1997 campaign, with Starmer playing the role of Tony Blair (though Blair at least displayed a modicum of political flair and skill, Starmer appears to have no political nous at all). The plan was to maintain the illusion that change could be brought about by replacing John Major’s Tories with Blair’s New Labour. Thus the safety-valve of elections would allow any dangerous political pressures to be eased. And all the while nothing would really change and the rich and powerful would continue to have it all their own way. This was clearly the plan for 2024, too.
The anti-war movement must be marginalised, therefore, and dismissed as extremist and antisemitic. Starmer insists we must all remain content with the Tory-Labour pass-the-parcel game in Westminster. The rich and powerful have conceded that yes maybe it should be Starmer’s turn to hold the parcel now. There will be no alteration to the political or socio-economic status quo, of course. But they can then point to a Prime Minister with a differently coloured rosette and say: ‘there… there’s the change you wanted.’ Good grief, Starmer even has the temerity to entitle his deeply unambitious and banal manifesto ‘Our Plan to Change Britain.’ But, increasingly, many more of us are getting weary of the whole Westminster game. The vast unnecessary suffering, the gross exploitation of workers, the needless poverty of the working poor, the unemployed, the disabled and pensioners, the huge inequalities, the devastation of public services – it’s all too much, we’ve had enough. Things must change. And if the system can’t permit change, then the system needs to change.
Incidentally, though Labour has retained its lead over the Tories the polls show leaps in support for left independents and the Greens. To check this, given the collapse of the Tory vote, the establishment needs a fresh right-wing force, of course. Which probably explains the oceans of media coverage being poured over Farage’s Reform Party. Perhaps too many voters are rejecting the script written for them for the 2024 election? The ‘masters of the universe’ in London might be concerned that increasingly more British people see through the facade of what remains of British democracy. That the ‘change’ on offer is actually no change at all. There is always a danger that such a trend might lead to a wider political reaction against our political system as its currently constituted. And so Reform will be nurtured as a populist right-wing force that can split the working class vote and successfully promote the kind of corporate-friendly policies that the discredited and despised Tories are currently incapably of selling.
Starmer might be on track to become Prime Minister but he has already ensured he will be damned by history. Should I live a long life, I hope and pray I never forget the dead babies of the Gaza Genocide. The many hundreds – thousands – of murdered babies. It is a matter of deep shame to me that in 2023 and 2024 my own party, the Labour Party, cheered on the murderous onslaught against the men, women and children of Gaza. In the al-Nasr hospital in Gaza, in November 2023, five premature babies were left to starve to death by marauding Israeli soldiers. The soldiers ordered the families and medical staff to leave the hospital at gunpoint. The babies were then abandoned to a heartbreakingly lonely death, their pained cries unheeded, their bodies left to rot where they lay, once their agonisingly slow deaths had been accomplished.
The guilty men are monsters, of course, and any right-thinking person would demand their arrest and trial for cruel murder. Indeed, these men and their leaders are the worst kind of criminals, and their repulsive atrocities mean we must include them amongst the most awful people to have ever walked the earth. But the grim fact is, that this is just one episode – albeit a particularly nauseating example – in the terrible litany of unspeakable horrors that is the Gaza Genocide. All informed commentators agree that this slaughter of Palestinians is being sustained, diplomatically and logistically, by the USA (and to a lesser extent by the UK). If Washington stopped shipments of ammunition, weapons and equipment, if it paused its regular huge financial payments to Tel Aviv, then the Israeli war machine would grind to a halt in a matter of months, if not weeks. Sunak’s slavish adherence to orders issuing from the White House makes Britain’s complicity in these war crimes obvious. But Starmer’s support of Biden and Sunak ensures he, too, is guilty, that he is willingly complicit in Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Labour Party leadership may be heading for success on July 4th but this is not down to a deeply unpopular Labour leader or a dull-as-dishwater policy platform. It is because the Tories are so obviously divided, and have so grievously misgoverned this country, that even swing voters can’t stomach voting for them anymore. The result will be a government that will have the same or perhaps even less of a beneficial effect on the lives of working-class people in Britain than did Blair’s or Brown’s. In other words, it will be better – slightly better – than being ruled by the Tories.
What opposition there will be in parliament to all this, will come from the Workers’ Party, the Greens and left independents. In Michael Lavalette, Preston voters have a chance to elect someone to parliament who will join this principled and honest opposition. To fight for peace, social justice and the redistribution of wealth, and against more war, more ‘austerity’ and deeper inequality. Preston has a history of radical politics, of course, and it wouldn’t be the first major upset in the city’s electoral history – Henry Hunt, a popular Radical, famously defeated a scion of the local aristocracy (and a future Prime Minister) in 1830.
Given the likely makeup of the next parliament, a substantial majority for Starmer’s Labour, many important political battles will be fought outside of and beyond parliament. And here we have more certain grounds for hope. But were Michael Lavalette Preston’s MP we would have an elected representative who was connected to and understood the social movements, and this could only be a good thing. George Galloway dramatically predicted last week that, if elected, Starmer will lead Britain into an open war within six months.
Starmer must know that his crazed thirst for war against Russia in Ukraine, for bombing the Palestinians, the Iraqis, the Syrians and the Yemenis in the Middle East – and even threatening war against China (over Taiwan) – is not shared by a majority of the British people. Indeed, there is still mass popular opposition to the neo-liberal consensus in parliament. A united front of discredited politicians has failed to defuse the explosive popular reaction to the disgusting crimes of the Israeli state in Gaza. Mass discontent with Britain’s foreign and defence policies has been manifesting itself on a huge scale for months now. In Preston we have had some of the biggest protest events since 2003, organised and led by Michael Lavalette, and more are being planned.
The moral decline of the Labour Party is clear for all to see. The dead babies of Gaza cry to heaven for vengeance, their blood stains the hands of the Tories but also those of Keir Starmer and his reactionary clique in Westminster. Starmer is as morally bankrupt as any of the gruesome gang of cruel and corrupt Tory ministers that his minions are about to replace. His craven submission to Washington over Gaza and his support for the Israeli genocide is his deepest, most disgusting, betrayal yet. Should Labour win the general election – when Labour wins, if we’re to believe the polls – we can expect no solution to the many crises facing Britain. What we can confidently expect is more war. If Starmer can stomach supporting the genocidal slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women and children in Gaza, there can be little doubt that he will support any and all aggression ordered by future occupants of the White House.
As I expect a Labour majority in parliament to do little of any use, I will remain active (in a limited way, given my medical condition), politically, beyond party politics – whether in the trades unions, the pressure and campaign groups or the social movements. But I believe it is still useful to work to get socialists elected to parliament, and this is why I will join a different party when I’m expelled by Labour. But parliament will only act decisively when it is pressured to do so from outside. Each trades union, each socialist society, campaign group and social movement, will have to decide for itself how to proceed when the Starmer government has been seen to fail. Will there then finally be a consensus for a new left party or coalition of parties? To my mind, to accept the status quo ad infinitum, to endlessly go on with the Labour Party as it is – undemocratic, war-mongering and reactionary – is to forever deny to the British people the radical change they so badly need. It is to give up on socialism, or indeed any progressive vision for our society, and it is to say to our children and grandchildren that this – Britain in 2024 – is as good as life gets. That is why I and many others are looking elsewhere for the political and moral leadership that this country so badly needs. And this is why I support Michael Lavalette to be Preston’s next MP.
Dave Savage is Secretary of Stop the War, Preston & South Ribble and lives in the Ribble Valley constituency.
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