After Corbyn, UK Labour elects Keir Starmer, Zionist with Jewish wife, as leader
New opposition chief immediately apologizes to Jews for anti-Semitism in ranks, vows to ‘tear out this poison’; his wife comes from a Jewish family, has relatives in Tel Aviv
4 April 2020
Britain’s main opposition Labour party on Saturday said that Keir Starmer had been elected as its new leader, replacing Jeremy Corbyn who resigned after its crushing December election defeat.
The 57-year-old former chief state prosecutor won 56.2 percent of the vote of more than 500,000 Labour members, defeating Corbyn loyalist Rebecca Long-Bailey (27.6%) and backbencher Lisa Nandy (16.2%) for the top job. Angela Rayner becomes the new deputy leader.
“Congratulations to @Keir_Starmer, the new Leader of the Labour Party!” the party announced on Twitter after a three-month leadership campaign.
Read more at https://www.timesofisrael.com/
After Corbyn, Socialists Must Continue the Struggle Within Labour
Today’s Labour leadership election is a defeat for the Left. But the real victory for our opponents would be watching the forces we have amassed in recent years scatter to the wind.
By Ronan Burtenshaw
Apr. 4, 2020
Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 epic La Haine, tracing the lives of disenfranchised youth in the Parisian slums, begins with the story of a man falling from a great height. “So far, so good; so far, so good; so far, so good,” the narrator assures himself. Then the screen is engulfed in flames. “It’s not the fall that matters,” we are told, “it’s the landing.”
At times in the past five years, the Left has scaled great heights. So much so, in fact, that a socialist Labour government seemed visible on the horizon. There were many achievements along the way — from overturning an austerity consensus that held total sway over British politics for years, to remaking Labour as a mass party with more than half a million members. Thirteen million people voted for a decisive break with neoliberalism in 2017, and ten million voted for a radical left-wing manifesto in December. More than had backed Miliband, Brown — even the last Blair government.
Read more at https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/labour-leadership-election-keir-starmer-corbynism
Jeremy Corbyn Showed the Way. But We Must Learn the Right Lessons
Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party ends this weekend. We need to defend his legacy and carry on his noble democratic-socialist program, while being honest about where and why he fell short
By Daniel Finn
Apr. 3, 2020
Ralph Miliband’s Parliamentary Socialism became a standard reference point for debates about the British Labour Party as soon as it first appeared in the early 1960s.
When Miliband published a new edition of the book in 1972, he rejected the idea that Labour might one day become “a party seriously concerned with socialist change.” There was, he acknowledged, no other left-wing organization capable of challenging Labour’s dominant position. But that was “no reason for resigned acceptance or for the perpetuation of hopes which have no basis in political reality.” The first step toward building an alternative force would be “the dissipation of paralysing illusions about the true purpose and role of the Labour Party.”
Read more at https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/jeremy-corbyn-labour-party-miliband-thatcher-blair-keir-starmer
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Labour’s next leader has already betrayed the left
