8 Articles by:
Andrew Murray is vice chair of Stop the War and a Tribune columnist.
Desperate to show a contrast to ‘old Labour’, Tony Blair took pride in upholding draconian anti-union laws and was happy confronting organised workers. But this belligerence created a new generation of trade unionists unafraid to challenge him and make things difficult for New Labour.
In the wake of the war in Ukraine, NATO has been presented as a defensive alliance for democracy — but its actual history has been the promotion of Western imperial interests, often at the point of a gun.
On this day in 2003, the Iraq War began. It was an illegal invasion in the same mould as Putin’s war in Ukraine – but almost two decades later, its architects have faced no consequences.
Keir Starmer’s latest attack on Stop the War had nothing to do with peace. Its aim was simple: to convince the hawks who dominate Western foreign policy that Labour no longer stands in the way of their warmongering.
The moves to realign Labour’s foreign policy after Corbyn reveal exactly what the political centre means by ‘internationalism’ – liberal values advanced at the point of a cruise missile.
The failure of Corbynism was its inability to cut through in working-class communities. The risk of a Starmer-led Labour Party is that it abandons that effort altogether.
To understand December’s loss, socialists should look beyond the ‘Brexit or Corbyn’ binary to deeper problems facing the labour movement which can’t be solved by charting a course towards the centre, argues Andrew Murray.
The media treats Corbyn’s emergence as an anomaly. In fact, it is the product of decades of failed economic policies.