The 1% have kept us in check with abject poverty, debt poverty, wage poverty, housing poverty, and education poverty, Centrist Governments don't change that.

Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash

My family has distrusted the "good intentions" of politicians, middle-class liberals and well-heeled journalists ever since a Labour government in 1930 broke my grandmother's heart. My Gran was born in 1895 but not granted the right to vote until 1929- when working-class women- of her age were allowed suffrage.

She was working class, so naturally, my grandmother cast her first vote for Labour. But the party under Ramsey Macdonald soured her on politicians because- as Prime Minister- he betrayed workers when he introduced austerity during the Great Depression.

It didn't matter to my grandmother that in 1945, Labour under a different Prime minister built the most comprehensive Welfare State Britain has ever seen or will ever see- once bitten, twice shy was her creed.

I don't blame her because neither my grandmother nor her children had a good Great Depression. What happened during the Dirty Thirties traumatised my father for the rest of his life because he experienced childhood hunger, homelessness and indifference to his plight from much of society. It made him a lifelong defender of the underdog and a socialist. It also made my father wary of politics unless it was firmly grounded in taxation for its wealthiest citizens, universal public healthcare, affordable housing and accessible higher education.

Having lived in poverty, my dad knew the entitled want people to be poor because it allows them free reign over society. The 1% have more control over our societies in the 21st century than they have had in 300 years because of the various forms of poverty they have shackled humanity with. The entitled have kept us in check with abject poverty, debt poverty, wage poverty, housing poverty, and education poverty, all because they don't want to pay their fair share in civilisation's upkeep.

In 2024, Britain's childhood poverty, including food insecurity, is the worst it has been in thirty years. There is a direct line that joins journalists, politicians and influencers who told you from 2014 to 2019 that Jeremy Corbyn was an evil antisemite, terrorist sympathizing socialist and today's epidemic of childhood poverty. Without their barrage of propaganda, a Labour government under Corbyn would have been elected in either 2017 or 2019. It wouldn't have been like the 1945 Attlee government. But it would have been a government that had empathy for the struggles of ordinary people and a will to attempt to ease their burdens.

It is only a matter of time before Labour leader Keir Starmer becomes Britain's next Prime Minister. I can't rejoice because Starmer's Labour Party is not intellectually or empathetically prepared to build a 21st-century variant of Attlee's 1945 social welfare revolution. It is just not in them because the Parliamentary Labour Party has purged itself of most of its left wing. It is now in the hands of technocrats and careerists, the people who put the banal in the evil committed by humanity.

A future Starmer Labour government will simply be a more efficient way to deliver democracy on a platter to the 1% rather than a means for positive social change for the masses.

I am glad Owen Jones left the Labour Party over its enablement of genocide in Gaza and its embrace of conservative austerity at home through its unwavering support for The Tories' two-child benefit cap policy. The Labour Party is now a big tent movement for careerists, cynics and lobbyists for the 1%. It is not a party that can offer any hope for a sea change that can return Britain into the bosom of if not socialism- social democracy with a functioning Welfare State.

I hope the Greens and Independent candidates on the left win many seats in Britain's next General Election. A solid Starmer majority ensures that in five years, there will be no NHS- just a neoliberal dystopia pretending to care. Starmer isn't even a Macron or Trudeau. Keir Starmer is the human resource manager at a corporation who hands you a tissue at your termination just before he has security exit you out of the building. 

The task ahead, until the next General Election is to attempt to prevent a Labour landslide victory because if their win is bruisingly close with solid gains by the Greens and other left-wing candidates, including the SNP, the party will tilt leftward.

But should the Labour mandate be an impregnable majority, Britain's politics will be an eternal winter of neoliberalism because none of those standing for Labour in the coming election are social democrats- let alone socialists.

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