Starmer's Labour Party Would Have Lost WW2.

On May Day 1945, Europe basked in a spring that felt more like midsummer. Swords were rapidly being turned into ploughshares. The citizens of Europe and North America rejoiced because a peace was about to be born that was just and promised prosperity, equality and enlightenment to a generation that have suffered much both during and before World War Two.

There were tangible reasons why 80 years ago ordinary people could feel optimistic for their futures and trust their political class to take them forward to a better society. Mainstream political parties accepted taxation as a necessary expense to build Welfare States as that prevented fascism from returning.

Today’s Labour Party, aside from its name, bears no recognition to the Labour Party that helped win the Second World War for Britain and delivered a prosperous, economically inclusive peace for its citizens.

Eight Decades ago, the Labour Party was an equal partner in Winston Churchill’s wartime coalition government. Labour introduced left-wing economic policies into the domestic portfolios it controlled, like central planning, equitable food rationing, and an increase in social welfare as it aided the fight against Hitler.

Today Keir Starmer’s Labour administration is economically and ideologically to the right of Winston Churchill's Tory war time government. Starmer and his caucus want to emulate Nigel Farage’s reform party’s fascism. Labour has become their equal in xenophobia as well as making the lives of Britain’s poorest as miserable as possible. Like Margaret Thatcher Starmer will be not for turning when it comes to his military and economic policies which drag Britain towards unwinnable wars and a nation more cruelly unequal than the age of Dickens.

I have a photograph of my mother taken on May 1st 1945 when she was 17 and a resident of Hamburg. She stares smiling at the camera without any fear for the present or future.

On the day the photograph was taken, Nazi Germany was less than a week away from its unconditional surrender. Hamburg, however, was still under Nazi control, and fascist political leaders ordered residents to dig trenches across city streets to slow the anticipated attack by the British Army.

My mother, along with her friends, refused the command even when threatened with execution by an ageing, arthritic Volkssturm officer that my mother described as so doddering, his military service probably began in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

My mother told the geriatric officer to go to hell because Hitler was dead and the war lost. Instead on that May Day, Mum went to Hamburg’s Plantenblumen Park and celebrated the Fuhrer’s suicide, and the peace soon to arrive with a bottle of wine nicked from my grandmother’s apartment. On May 4th, Hamburg was declared an open city, which allowed Allied troops to occupy the city without bloodshed.

During her 71 years, my mother was a citizen of three nations: Germany, Britain and Canada. She lived under fascism, social democracy and neoliberalism. My mother distrusted patriotism, religious faith and much of the middle class in the 1970s and 1980s because they mythologised their good fortune as an exclusive product of hard work.

My mother died in 1999, a year when neoliberalism's bloom waned because working and middle class prosperity was built on consumer debt rather than wage growth. The decade had begun in triumphant optimism. The Soviet Union collapsed, the Berlin Wall came down, and Eastern Europe became an American sphere of influence. But during that era, Reagan, Thatcher, Mulroney, Chretien, Clinton and Blair- clawed back many of the gains the working class earned on the battlefields of Europe combating Hitler.

The year before her death, Mum spoke about that 1945 May Day. "You could breathe again without looking over your shoulder frightened of being denounced. The weight of totalitarianism was lifted that imprisoned my generation." With prescience, my mother said. “Fascist’s isn’t done, yet, with Germany, Europe or North America. It always waits in the wings, ready to strike.”

The political shape of the 21st century has proven her correct because today's dominant political ideology is fascism. It makes all these anniversaries and celebrations about the defeat of Nazism 80 years ago on May 8th empty, cynical gestures.

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For the last 18 months, I've been piecing together my Dad's Green and Pleasant Land, which was unfinished at the time of his death. It covers his life from 1923 to July 1945 concluding with Labour winning the General election. The book at least in its beta form will be ready on May 8th to coincide with the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe. Let me know if you want a copy.

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