If the working class aren’t impressed by patriotic waffle and flag waving, Keir Starmer is toast argues John Westmoreland

In the run up to Labour’s conference, the main media talking point was the challenge of Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham. Labour MPs are desperate to turn back Reform and they know that to do that, the party will have to be perceived as standing for something. Burnham has never stood for the kind of socialism that terrifies the bankers and bosses, but at least he talks about working-class suffering caused by the cocktail of inflation and austerity which has been waved through by Starmer and Reeves.

The latest polls find Starmer to be the most unpopular PM in history – quite a feat – and Nigel Farage tipped to lead the next government. But all is not lost! Starmer has hit back at his critics with a mixture of choreography and cowardice that is likely to have made no difference, whatsoever, to Labour’s fortunes.

If a sea of union flags, waved at the end of Starmer’s speech doesn’t scare the pants off Farage, what will?

A taxing time

There is one issue that could win Labour working-class support, but is utterly unthinkable to the Treasury and those whom it commands, and that is tax the rich. Redistributing wealth from those whose bank accounts have more loot than the treasuries of entire countries is a no brainer for those who have some feelings for economic and social justice, to say nothing of Labour’s survival.

Wealth and power is largely in the hands of a tiny minority of super-rich tech gods who are all too happy to intervene in British politics, championing Farage, Islamophobia and fascism. They don’t want a Labour government, or social democracy, or any pretence of legal protections for workers or trade-union rights. We either start to reduce their wealth and power or await our fate.

Starmer and Rachel Reeves are completely wedded to the rights of the super-rich to continue robbing and oppressing us, but cracks have appeared in Labour’s ranks. When Unite’s Sharon Graham called out Labour’s anti-working-class record, she got a massive cheer from the floor.

Graham ripped into Labour’s heartless austerity and the devastating effects it has had on working-class communities. Graham’s demands that Labour abandon austerity would swing millions back to voting Labour, if only it could happen. Nationalisation and taxing the rich are among the most important issues for working-class people, but Reeves and Starmer accuse those calling for a wealth tax ‘snake-oil salesmen’.

When Graham said, ‘instead of picking the pockets of pensioners, tax – the – rich’, the conference erupted. And, that was surely music to the ears of Andy Burnham and those with hopes he might replace Starmer.

Of course, we have a long experience of resolutions at Labour conferences being applauded but then ignored by the parliamentary party. So Sharon Graham’s call to end austerity, like the call to cut off trade and weapons to Israel, will not make any difference unless these demands are taken up on the streets, in real opposition to Labour.

Oh ye of little faith

In her speech, Rachel Reeves claimed seven times that Labour was a radical party, completely different from the Tories. She said she was standing up for working-class people and ‘economic responsibility’. It was an attempt to varnish Labour’s version of ‘trickle-down economics’.

Facing ‘strong global headwinds’, a metaphor for a capitalist system that is at peak instability, means Labour has to take the same tough decisions workers have been at the sharp end of for decades. It was a gutless, visionless managerial refrain, trying to sell the working class medicine that is more likely to kill than cure.

Aware that Andy Burnham was briefing against Treasury diktat (without abandoning it completely), Reeves kept urging conference to keep the faith in a policy of austerity that is driving workers into the arms of Farage. There is a level of contempt for working-class concerns about where the economy is going that is blatant, but concerns about immigration are a different matter.

Shabana Mahmood, in the same vein as Reeves, called for faith in her goodness despite the evidence to the contrary. ‘You may not always like what I do’ she told conference, and then, she revealed her intention to remove legal protections for immigrants facing deportation. Another abandonment of social justice. Another submission to the racist agenda of the right.

It is highly unlikely that faith is going to prevent Labour plummeting further in the polls, unless there is a rapid change of leader and direction. We shouldn’t hold our breath on that.

Faking a climax

Choreographed cowardice provided the climax of the conference. Starmer’s speech saw the parliamentary party rise in a cheering, flag-waving climax that left the remaining delegates sitting there picking their nails.

Starmer’s speech saw him squirm in the trap he’s carefully laid himself. The message was that Farage was unpatriotic; that he didn’t care about Britain; and Reform is racist.

The spectacle of Starmer, who has slavishly bowed to Trump on nearly everything, pretending to stick up for Britain and ‘British values’ was simply pathetic. The way to defeat Farage is to attack him on class issues, but that is impossible for a politician who has abandoned the working class to whatever the Treasury and the City of London commands.

In an attempt to separate ‘necessary’ racism from racist racism, Starmer, as we might have expected, not only failed, but managed to look every inch a failure too.

On planet Starmer, expelling immigrants and denying asylum to those seeking it, is patriotic when he does it. But when Farage says he would do the same thing that’s racist.

Farage only has to say that if immigration controls are a patriotic duty, then his promised mass deportations have to be even more patriotic than Starmer’s. Starmer has added to the racist bidding war, and made racism more acceptable in the minds of Reform voters.

The choreography organised by the spadocracy that directs Labour was not just deplorable, it was counter-productive. Starmer walked in to the conference with a flag-waving crowd of cheering stooges, and his speech ended the same way. It just didn’t work.

Enthusiasm for a nonentity – a better man could be carved from a banana – who stands for nothing is obviously fake. And that is Starmer’s greatest gift to Farage. It is not difficult to look sincere and honest when your opponent is as lame as Starmer.