What Is STARMER ACTUALLY COMMITTING TO BY PRAISING THATCHER?

As we noted recently, Keir Starmer has been on an extended act of genuflection before the British ruling class. His manner doing this is to call upon the legacy of the most successful Labour Party leader in recent years, Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair but you can call him Tony. Starmer has followed the Blair hand book to the letter. He has made a pilgrimage to kiss the feet of Rupert Murdoch, he has dutifully grovelled to the city of London and now he has offered praise of Margaret Thatcher. As Charles Moore (Thatcher’s biographer) pointed out Blair & Peter Mandelson were big admirers of Thatcher and were open in their admiration of her. Starmer in that sense is following Blair as he always does, believing that if he repeats all of his steps he too can find a way into Downing Street. Starmer is out to prove to the British ruling class the he is a reliable man, a sound chap, the kind of guy who can be trusted to front up British imperialism. He has already showed a fanatical commitment to NATO, has purged many of his (nominal) opponents on the left, has committed to continuing public spending cuts and has mirrored the Sunak governments position backing up Israeli crimes in its latest war on the Palestinians. The praise he offered of Thatcher has attracted predictable outrage from what remains of the left within the party and more widely. A lot of this misses the point though, in the same remarks where he offered praise for Thatcher he also made very positive remarks about Clement Attlee. Starmer has also cited Attlee as an inspiration before particularly when talking about his predecessors role in building NATO. So for all the froth that his praise of Thatcher has generated he is not doing anything particularly new. This is how Labour Party leaders have behaved going all the way back to Ramsey Macdonald, what is interesting to consider is not the praise of Thatcher but the question as to what is it exactly that he is praising about her. To understand this you need to analyse why it is necessary for Labour Party leaders to perform this homage. Thatcher represents, for the British ruling class, the political leader who they see as having saved them. From what exactly? The answers is that her government successfully defeated the most advanced elements of the working class, the most class conscious, militant and determined fighters of the working class went down to defeat in 1985 when the struggle of the National Union of Mineworkers was lost. To the ruling class this ended a twenty year intense struggle that had been caused by the end of the post war boom and the need of the capitalist class to go on the offensive. The NUM had been central to the opposition of the working class and miners leader Arthur Scargill came to inspire much fear within the ruling class. The defeat of the strike in 1985 thus represented a triumph of capital over labour that has endured for two generations now. This is what Thatcher represents to the ruling class, she is the symbol of their victory. This is why Starmer praises Thatcher, he is showing the ruling class that he is committed to keeping the working class in a state of demoralisation and defeat. He is promising to maintain the most important achievement of Thatcher and this in ensuring that the working class never rises to challenge the ruling class again in the same way as it did between 1965 and 1985.

It must be pointed out though that Starmer is absolutely in the tradition of Labour Party leaders in this promise. The defeat of the NUM in 1985 would not have been possible without the governments headed by Harold Wilson and James Callaghan demoralising and destroying the unified working class actions that defeated the Heath government by 1974. The job of the labour party is, the role it plays for the ruling class, is to use its relationship with the trade union leaders to destroy working class militancy. This is what they successfully did between 1974 and 1979 even in the coal industry itself. The division between Nottinghamshire and the rest of the NUM was (in part) down to bonus schemes the Labour government put in place precisely to reward some coal producing areas over others. This division was to prove deadly in 1984 when the higher rewarded Nottinghamshire miners rapidly became strike breakers and then formed their own break away scab union, all encouraged by the government of course, but the root of the problem lay in the actions carried out by the Labour Party. This is just one example but there are many others that took place across British industry where the Labour Party and the trade union leaders sought to divide workers from each other and to ensure that the moves towards a general strike that did exist would not be repeated. I emphasise again, this is the job of the labour party and it always has been. This is why it has been the trusted second eleven for the British ruling class for over a century now.

Keir Starmer is an obnoxious, porcine buffoon and a reactionary tool of the ruling class but he is nothing new. His praise of Thatcher is him acknowledging his role as the leader of a party whose main purpose is to block any working class struggle, it is to prevent the British proletariat from reaching a higher state of class consciousness. His homage to Thatcher is his public commitment to the ruling class to keep workers down and to ensure that the victory the bourgeois achieved in 1985 is maintained. If you are angry with Starmer then the only way to properly act on this is to reject not just him but the wretched labour party and trade union bureaucracy that he rules over.