We're not abandoning Labour, Labour's abandoning us

Labour's headlong surge to the right under Keir Starmer has left traditional Labour voters wondering what's the point in supporting them.

Since 2020 Labour haven’t just binned all of the popular centre-left and socially progressive policies Keir Starmer was elected party leader on, they’ve also made their utter contempt for everyone outside of their narrow right-wing faction absolutely clear.

Over the last three years Starmer has delighted in ripping up pretty much every policy that’s popular with traditional Labour voters in his relentless march towards the political hard-right.

The transformation has been so extreme that his policy platform has morphed from "Corbynism without Corbyn" in 2020 to a toxic right-wing concoction in 2023 that’s almost indistinguishable from David Cameron’s Tory party pitch in 2010.

⚪ Investment economics has been switched out for "more of the same" economically illiterate austerity dogma that’s done so much damage over the last 13 years.

⚪ Redistributionist and poverty alleviation policies have been ripped up and replaced with gleeful retention of malicious Tory policies like the two-child cap, bedroom tax, "fit for work" abuse of the disabled, and the flawed Universal Credit shambles.

⚪ Environmental commitments have been watered down and abandoned, while Starmer now rants and raves about how much he opposes the objectives of environmental campaigners, and hates "tree-huggers".

⚪ Pro-worker policies have been replaced by dishonest anti-worker rhetoric to justify below-inflation pay settlements, and the abandonment of commitments to scrap Tory anti-union legislation.

⚪ Pledges to renationalise vital services and infrastructure have been scribbled out and replaced with rigid adherence to the catastrophically failing privatisation agenda.

⚪ Humanitarian posturing has morphed into war-mongering rhetoric, xenophobia, and outright hostility to the historic anti-war tradition within the Labour Party.

⚪ Promises to properly tax the wealth of the extremely rich have morphed into the exact opposite.

⚪ Fine words about the need for fair votes, more internal democracy within the Labour Party, and more autonomy for the nations and regions have turned into vehement opposition to Proportional Representation, top-down anti-democratic interference at every level of the Labour Party, and outright hostility towards elected mayors and devolved governments (including Labour ones).

⚪ Heartfelt "pledges" to drive private profiteers out of the NHS have morphed into promises to actively increase the parasitical profiteer infestation.

⚪ Commitments to clean air and safe and healthy neighbourhoods have been replaced by frothing tabloid-driven hostility to low emissions zones and traffic calming policies.

⚪ The veneer of social progress has been peeled away to reveal a profoundly illiberal inner core of festering authoritarianism, anti-refugee rhetoric, and transphobia.

And to top it all off, Starmer and his inner cabal of Labour right-wingers have made their hostility to anyone to the left of Margaret Thatcher absolutely clear, through factional purges, anti-democratic selection-rigging, cynical vote-fixing, endless authoritarian diktats, and a constant rolling barrage of vitriolic anti-left rhetoric.

They’ve not just abandoned all of the principles they pretended to hold when they were lying their way into the Labour leadership, they’ve also repeatedly told traditional Labour voters that they can just leave if they don’t like this horrifying rightwards surge.

And then whenever left-leaning people, social liberals, the economically literate, or the environmentally concerned ever dare to complain about this disgusting direction of travel, and all the barefaced lies that were told in order to steal the Labour party leadership in 2020, the only response Starmer’s acolytes ever have in reply is mindless parroting of the ridiculous assertion that anything other than blind adherence to the new agenda constitutes "enabling the Tories".

If you don’t support the cynical liars who are turning the Labour Party into a hope-sapping, right-wing, socially-illiberal, economically-illiterate, austerity-obsessed, pro-privatisation Tory tribute act, you’re the one who is guilty of enabling Toryism!

"We have to become the Tories to beat the Tories, and if you don’t support our Torification process, you’re guilty of enabling Toryism"!

It’s deranged, gaslighting nonsense. But it’s literally all they’ve got, because all of the policies that ever made Labour actually worth voting for have gone in the bin.

They lied their way into the leadership, they scrapped all of the policies that would have inspired traditional Labour voters to actually vote for them, they as good as told us to "fuck off" if we didn’t like it … and now they try to emotionally blackmail us into actively voting in favour of this toxic mess with a load of ridiculous gaslighting bollocks.

Politics isn’t like football. You don’t have to keep supporting the red team no matter how shit they are. They’re supposed to earn your vote rather than overtly pandering to billionaire donors, rabidly right-wing media moguls, private profiteers, fossil fuel polluters, economically illiterate austerity obsessives, and the most horribly vindictive minority of people in Britain.

And if they don’t earn your vote, that’s on them for abandoning the values that they pretended to have in order to steal the party leadership, not on you for refusing to hold your nose to vote for a load of repulsive stuff that you actually hate.