There are the Stalinist, Francoist and Nazi purges, those of the Vichy regime and the French collaborationists, the McCarthy witch hunt in the United States, the Chinese cultural revolution... And then, on a smaller scale, there are the purges which periodically performs the British Labor of its most radical left wing.
It's one of those moments, like when the Militant movement that had taken control of Liverpool City Council was purged in the 1980s and imposed policies so extreme that they scared the leadership itself. Now it has been the turn of Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer's predecessor at the head of Labor, and who led him in 2019 to one of the biggest electoral debacles in its history. And the persecution has spread to the Momentum group of young militants who backed him and brought him to power.
These cyclical purges occur when Labour, which was born in industrial England as the political arm of the unions and is still financed by them, considers that it has gone too far to the left to appeal to the silent majority (small businessmen, young families of the suburbs, housewives...) that usually decides the elections in a country (as Blair said) eminently conservative. When you decide to put aside the founding ideology and turn to the center or center right. When the objective of a socialist change changes for the more modest one of a certain progressive social reform within the capitalist order.
That is the mentality of Starmer, who does not mind appearing "too central" for the Party membership, but makes a virtue of it. To be successful, British Prime Ministers throughout history have needed to have a clear mission. Churchill and Lloyd George, winning wars; Clement Atlee, install the welfare state and create universal public health; Gladstone, to solve the Irish problem; Thatcher, to refound capitalism; Blair, bury Marxism. Those who did not have a clear purpose (Major, Brown, Callaghan, Wilson, Macmillan) fared badly.
After what will be almost seventeen years of Tory rule (in all that time they will not have lost a general election), the financial crisis, Brexit and two periods of austerity, Starmer defines his mission as "a decade of national renewal ”. Putting back on its feet a country with a paralyzed economy, destroyed social services, strikes, a flood of immigrants through the English Channel, interest rates, public debt and crime through the roof, education, productivity and public and private investment by soils, chronic lack of affordable housing, energy dependency, deindustrialization, lack of manpower, an unprepared labor force, antediluvian infrastructures, regional differences, population aging, territorial disintegration, a notable deterioration in the standard of living, loss of trust in institutions (such as the police) and a class conflict transferred to values and gender identity. It is the fourth incarnation of the conflict between left and right, this time with the anti-capitalists and defenders of the woke culture on one side, and the eurosceptics, cultural conservatives and neoliberals on the other.
Starmer wants to position himself in the center of that battle, with the Tories on his right and the Scottish SNP on his left. And to demonstrate it, he has considered it necessary to purge Corbyn (whom he does not allow to stand for re-election as a deputy for the London neighborhood of Islington) and his family. He assumes the risk of turning against an important sector of the Party, and of his abstentionism in the next elections, in order to demonstrate to the country his moderation and his intolerance with the anti-Semitism that is attributed to his predecessor (defender of the rights of the Palestinian people and harsh critic of Israel).
Also that of being accused of a certain cynicism, because as Corbyn's lieutenant he campaigned for him in the last elections, affirmed that he would be an excellent prime minister and endorsed his platform for the renationalisation of the railways and strategic sectors such as energy, tax increases to the richest and the elimination of university fees. But he backs away from all this now that he feels strong (Labour is twenty points ahead in the polls) and wants to seduce the center. He endorses what Groucho Marx said: "These are my values, but if you don't like them, I have others." All political projects, in his creation, are full of paradoxes, limitations and contradictions that carry the seeds of his own destruction and over time are his death sentence. Starmer's is no exception.
After the incompetence and moral decline of recent governments, cyclical demographic, economic, and structural forces favor Labour. The French beheaded Robespierre and imposed a collective leadership until the arrival of Napoleon. Starmer has decapitated Corbyn, and we will see what comes next.
