In January 2023, Emily Maitlis asked Labour Party leader Keir Starmer:
You have to choose now between Davos or Westminster?
Starmer replied:
Davos
Davos refers to the World Economic Forum. Multinational corporations, usually with a turnover of at least five billion dollars, fund it as members.
Starmer continued:
Westminster is too constrained. It’s closed and we’re not having meaning. Once you get out of Westminster whether it’s Davos or anywhere else, you actually engage with people that you can see working with in the future. Westminster is just a tribal shouting place.
So Starmer admits it, if he becomes prime minister, he’ll be working with the transnational capitalist class, over even parliamentary democracy.
Starmer’s war on democracy?
Of course, Starmer can’t simply dissolve the limited democracy we have. Instead, he is going to war with key parts of it, in favour of a concentration of power.
For this election, Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee (NEC) didn’t just select candidates. Five of them imposed themselves as candidates.
But this war goes beyond the Labour leader and the NEC blocking local members from selecting prospective MPs.
At the 2021 September Labour conference, Starmer tried to overrule the one member one vote system for electing the party’s leader. The system was introduced in 2014 and led to the rise of Jeremy Corbyn.
He tried to replace it with the electoral college system. This reduces the say of members to just one-third of the vote. At the time, Labour MP Zarah Sultana called it an “elitist… stitch up”.
But the one member one vote system remains. While members all get one vote, a percentage of MPs must first nominate the leadership candidate. The thing is, Starmer was successful in doubling that from 10% of MPs to 20%.
Fast forward to 2024 and Starmer’s team aims to give MPs and only MPs the power to select the leader, if a contest is triggered while Labour is in government.
This would be even more of an increase in concentration of power away from the democratic membership and towards MPs. And from Starmer’s comments on Davos, he then wants to reduce the power of MPs further in favour of transnational elites.
Instead of joining the Tory Party, Starmer is controlling the labour movement through leading it. We must oppose him.
Featured image via Together – YouTube
