Promoting Labour

What is the Labour Party for, and why should people vote for it? Apparently the party themselves are in some disarray, and are looking around for convenient formulations which will reverse the shock of the last election, and put Keir Starmer in Downing Street. The last solution I heard was “wear suits and display the union jack”, and I’m not sure that’ll do it. Send your answers, on a postcard, please…(Or, in my case, in a sonnet. See “Manifesto” in Poems from the News, also on this website.)

For me, the theme of decency is a key part of the answer, and that surely was one of the reasons why, despite gloomy predictions, Labour won Batley and Spen. Those voters, knowing Jo Cox, knowing Kim Leadbetter,, voted for a decency they could respect. (And it may actually have helped that George Galloway was around as a reminder of the alternative.)

What Labour shouldn’t do, it seems to me, is sack members like Ken Loach. He’s an old style idealist, sure, closer to Corbyn than to Starmer, but he also represents a kind of basic decency, and people like him won’t be encouraged to see that Labour would prefer to carry on their campaign without him.