Thread by @DanFinn95

Going to take an overnight break from the state of British Labour politics, simultaneously sinister and shambolic. But for the road, this is something I wrote about Labour after Corbyn before Starmer's victory that tried to look at the bigger picture. 1/

jacobinmag.com/2020/04/jeremy…

This seems right enough in hindsight (except perhaps for the bit about Starmer paving the way for a "more right-wing successor"—his 10 pledges have already been junked, there might be no need for that). *But* there's a second part to this argument ... 2/

The Kinnock–Blair 80s-90s mutation of the Labour Party wasn't just about inner-party battles, or even the general course of British history: it was very much part of a global picture. 3/

The political and economic context that's facing us for the next decade or more is very different from that of the 90s and the early 00s. Hell, it's already looking bleaker and more unstable than it was when I wrote this in early spring. 4/

The package Starmer is offering is going to be completely inadequate for those conditions: it won't deliver a return to the Blair years, even if that were desirable. Corbyn's platform, on the other hand, is only going to be become more relevant in the coming years. 5/

I don't have any great plans for how you can build a political force that advances & goes beyond that platform. Things look very much blocked right now, in or out of Labour. But I do know it's absolutely necessary, and politics often finds a way to make the necessary possible. 6/