A deeply unpopular leader, Starmer has not secured the resounding endorsement his 412 seat tally would suggest, while record numbers of Green and independent MPs could pose a robust leftist challenge to Starmer’s Government – if they get organised
Keir Starmer, an ersatz Blair without a hint of his charisma or vision, is now Prime Minister, despite achieving a Labour vote share six percentage points lower than Jeremy Corbyn in 2017. These results reveal the electorate’s widespread disillusionment, if not outright resentment, towards both Labour and the Tories. Smaller parties and independents had a great set of results, with shock wins for Greens and pro-Palestine independents, but also Farage’s new pet project Reform. However, a significant minority of eligible voters opted to stay at home, with turnout dropping to 60 percent. This matches the record low set in 2001, when voting seemed futile as everyone knew Blair was set to win another landslide – except in this election everyone but your pet goldfish knew we were in for a new government.
It is a damning indictment of our voting system that a party can win two thirds of seats and lay claim to a “landslide victory” having persuaded only 20 percent of eligible voters to vote for them. (Out of the six in 10 people who voted at all, Labour only won a third of the vote.) And our twee unmodified constitution means this fulsome endorsement grants Keir Starmer the right to form an electoral dictatorship for the next five years. However, there are silver linings to be found. And a surprising number of them, in fact …
Corbyn won his seat as an independent with a 7,250 vote lead over Labour, after he was blocked from running as Labour’s candidate in Islington North, a seat he’d held for 40 years. Labour also lost Chingford and Woodford Green to Ian Duncan Smith, after Faiza Shaheen was similarly blocked by Labour on dubious grounds and continued her campaign as an independent – ultimately this helped IDS win on around 17,200 votes, compared to Faiza Shaheen and the Labour candidate winning around 12,500 votes each. Shadow cabinet minister Jonathon Ashworth lost his seat to a pro-Palestine independent, along with three other Labour MPs, while the prominent Terf and shadow health minister Wes Streeting clung on by a thread after a challenge from a pro-Palestine independent. Israel’s brutal escalation of its 75 year-long genocide in Palestine has not only dismayed Muslims and anti-Semites as the media love to imply, but a diverse coalition of people from all backgrounds, united by their outrage at leading politicians excusing, if not actively cheerleading, crimes against humanity.
Beyond the three largest parties, the balance of power in Parliament now lies with a socialist, environmentalist, pro-Palestine left. The Greens won all four of their target seats – not only in the young, urban constituencies of Brighton Pavilion and Bristol Central, but also in the rural, once solidly Tory constituencies of Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire – an achievement few really thought possible. (Greens and pro-Palestine independents also came second in a record number of constituencies, laying the ground for more gains next time.) Those four Green MPs, along with Corbyn and the other four pro-Palestine independents, make up nearly double Reform’s five MPs. As such, we will have a principled leftist grouping in Parliament, not beholden to the Labour whip, to hold Starmer to account.
There is hope the new pro-Palestine independents can put aside subtle philosophical differences and work together to offer a robust left opposition to Starmer. We could see Corbyn and other independents join the Green Party. This would be a strategic move; they could still reasonably claim to be independent voices for their constituents as Green MPs, as the Green Party does not whip its MPs like other parties. Meanwhile, they would benefit from this established party’s resources, networks and mass membership. The highly democratic structure of the party means, if they brought a lot of their voters with them, new Green MPs could even secure a change to any Green policies they disagreed with. As for socialist Labour MPs, we could even see some defect to the Greens now they’ve secured their seats, especially if Labour remains a deeply hostile environment for them. Defections from Labour seem unlikely at this stage, but they cannot be ruled out.
More than anything, we should take heed that our best chance of enacting real change lies in our communities, through grassroots organising and direct, solidaristic action. Green and pro-Palestine independents only won by rooting themselves in their communities, engaging with the voters they hoped to represent, and inspiring masses of people to join their campaigns. We cannot rely on career politicians, whose class interests are diametrically opposed to ours, to protect us and our interests.
There’s more to politics than elections, which only come around every few years and, all too often, seem to yield no real change. Real progress does not come from above. It is not gifted to us by the powers on high. It is fought for, from the ground up. In the words of Frederick Douglass, power concedes nothing without a demand. We must keep faith, keep fighting and keep organising. This election shows us that hard work can bear fruit. We know a better world is possible, but we won’t achieve it by just voting. It’s on us to bring it about.
Possession of puberty blockers for trans children is now punishable by up to two years in prison in the UK. Puberty blockers for cisgender children remains legal.
The timing of this act was careful and deliberate. As parliament was dissolved the next day, there are now no working MPs in the UK, meaning that citizens have no way to challenge the ban.
the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy’s way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn’t expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.
btw this is maybe the single most key distinguishing feature of the terfy strains of radical feminism, the seed all the rest of it springs out of: they have absolutely no faith in the ability of feminism to actually destroy patriarchy. they do not think feminism can truly build a better world. they cannot really even imagine that possibility. they think patriarchy is an inevitable natural consequence of unchangeable biological facts, and therefore the goal of feminism can only be to mitigate the worst effects of patriarchy, not to get rid of it.
they can imagine a society where women get some designated safe spaces without men around. they cannot imagine a society where the presence of men is not inherently a danger to women.
“In the end, the anti-trans victory lap barely made it a few feet before being overtaken by hundreds of academics, experts and service users exposing the review as a sham.
“Over 100 academics signed an open letter by the Feminist Gender Equality Network condemning the review as ‘dangerous and potentially harmful to trans children’ due to its ‘unsound methodology, unacceptable bias [and] problematic and supported conclusions’. Therapists Against Conversion Therapy & Transphobia (TACTT) slammed the review as having an ‘eliminationist agenda, dressed up in the language of reasonableness’, urging clinicians to treat the Review’s findings with ‘extreme caution’. ‘Underpinning this report,’ wrote trans rights group TransActual, ‘is the idea that being trans is an undesirable outcome rather than a natural facet of human diversity.’ …
“Cass also suggests that the rate at which young people move from puberty blockers to subsequent hormone treatments may, as anti-trans groups have warned, prove puberty blockers help cement a trans identity in these youth. Her data for this is the fact that in two studies, nearly all trans youth prescribed blockers went on to take hormones. Of course, this finding could just as easily suggest that puberty blockers are being prescribed very precisely – a possibility Hilary Cass does not entertain for even a second.
“While roundly ignoring the evidence of experts, the review mysteriously arrives at many of the same conclusions that anti-trans groups did years ago. Cass recommends that young adults aged 17-25 use an intermediary gender service instead of being referred to adult services, for example – a recommendation straight out of the mouth of anti-trans group Our Duty, which has long pushed to ban gender transition for under-25s. The influence of anti-trans groups like Sex Matters, Therapy First and the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, all of whom appear in the citations, can be felt throughout the review.
“More worryingly still, many of Cass’s conclusions are based on evidence that does not corroborate, or in some cases, directly contradicts her findings. For example, her recommendation of an intermediate service is based on the idea that brains don’t reach maturity until 25 – a notion that Dean Burnett, a neuroscientist and the author of The Idiot Brain describes as ‘guff based on hearsay, misunderstanding of neuroscience or wilful ignorance’.”
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