UK Local Election: Blairites and the Anti-Migrant Left Are Responsible for Labour Losses

Tories have won by a landslide in yesterday’s British local elections, with significant losses for Labour, and the near erasure of UKIP in the local councils contested. The SNP held their position in Scotland. Theresa May’s party has effectively become the far right. It is unlikely that the situation will change significantly in the next few weeks. May is set for a major victory in the general elections in June as well, a true disaster for Britain.

The Labour leadership stance after the Brexit vote has not worked. Pandering to far right sentiments on migration and hard Brexit has neutralised the chances of principled opposition to rising white nationalism. When you compromise on your principles to provide a half-baked version of the far right, people tend to go for the real thing, in this case the new incarnation of the Tories.

On a personal level, I feel sorry for Jeremy Corbyn and what he has had to face in these months. He found himself ambushed from all sides. The old Labour neoliberal establishment used any opportunity available to undermine and crush him, in collusion with the mainstream media, even at the cost of sinking the party and let the Tories advance unchallenged.

On the opposite side of Labour internal struggles, the reactionary leadership of some of the unions, and a group of self-proclaimed leftists have joined the anti-migrant wave. They have tried to sell the story that closing borders and sacrificing migrant lives is an unavoidable step to help the British working classes regain power and voice in national politics.

The rhetorics and tone of these arguments often resemble the style of white masculine voices that have been at the forefront of the growth of the far right. They are providing legitimacy from the left for the rising fascism and the spread of hate against migrants and people of colour across Britain. When crisis hits, apparently many in the British left thinks that the British come first, just as the white Americans come first for Trump and his supporters.

Even after a likely Labour defeat in June, these elements of the left won’t leave the scene so easily. As long as they can claim to represent the interests of the British working classes, they will continue to have a space, providing an internal dialectic to the growing white nationalist consensus in British society.

The impending devastation of prolonged Tory rule under Brexit will eventually show that left-wing Brexiteers never had the interests of the working classes at heart, but it might take a while until people realise this.