Thread by @joecguinan

Watched Starmer’s speech in Liverpool and I’m glad I did. First, this is the best speech I’ve heard him give as leader. The dullard of last year is gone, the ambition of his leadership campaign back. Lots to disagree with, of course; but the tonality is what matters. #LabourParty

It’s important to watch the pivot he’s making now. He’s shown himself to be an epic political conman in the past, and now that Starmer is back. The trick with three paper cups he played on the Labour membership—where’s the real Starmer?—he’s now attempting to play on the country.

And so we are again being promised a watered-down version of some of the elements of the economic transformation programme we need: public ownership, industrial strategy, investment in public services. A version of the siren song of his leadership campaign.

And people’s expectations will have been so lowered by the last couple of years—the void of policy and ideas, the thin New Labour gruel that we were served up instead of his leadership pledges—that many, including some on the left, may be tempted to snatch Starmer’s hand off.

That would be a mistake. He has amply demonstrated his facility with deceit and dissimulation—that you cannot trust a word he says. There is nothing he won’t do or say when convenient. There has never been a more ‘Manchurian Candidate’-style sleeper in frontline UK politics.

Yes, it is good to hear again talk of workers’ rights—but the test is actual support for what it takes to deliver them. Starmerism on industrial action is like Bill Clinton on admissions of adultery: he’ll concede it in general but never in particular.

We need to stay focused on what is necessary in the face of the crisis. These pick-n-mix elements of rebadged Corbynomics—from a sovereign wealth fund to the Great British Energy Company—do not in toto add up to the needed structural overhaul of our clapped-out political economy.

Not is there a politics capable of delivering them. Starmer spent the last two years in full assault on the movement that came into being around his predecessor, ruthlessly purging and attacking democracy in the Party to the point of removing natural justice from the rulebook.

The challenge of transforming Britain’s political economy—its core institutions and relationships—is not something that can be delivered from on high by a Labour government (or any government, for that matter). That is not our theory of change!

Even if Starmer were well-intentioned—he isn’t!—the policies he has indicated will run headlong into the apparatus of the British state and the power of financial markets. Both are designed and operate to co-opt and incorporate change into the neoliberal status quo—or defeat it!

The rotten party he sits atop of—institutionally racist, lawless, a danger to its own members—is not and cannot be the vehicle with which to challenge and tackle the rottenness of the British state.

And so where does that leave us? We should learn a lesson or two from our opponents on the political right and simply pocket these concessions to what is needed and push and outride for more and more. Where they represent good first steps, they are not enough. We must demand more

Where Starmer concedes public ownership, we must demand democratic public ownership. Where he concedes industrial strategy, we must push for greater planning and democratic control.

And all the while we should be doing what we ought to have been doing anyway—building our own social power and institutions, the sole, the *only* guarantor of our agenda. Together with the trade unions and the emerging movement in response to the cost of living crisis.

The terrain has just shifted a bit, and we must course-correct and adapt to the new landscape in turn. But the strategic game remains the same. Only a democratic political movement can bring about a democratic political economy. That is what we must build.