radfordinlondon
Vital Football Legend
This is a good read
Keir Starmer has announced his full shadow cabinet now, and it's nowhere near as bad as many on the left had feared. The dominance of the neoliberal right of the Labour party has clearly been absolutely broken, and the team Starmer has assembled is way to the left of what Ed Miliband was shackled with between 2010 and 2015.
There are some big omissions that most on the left will be disappointed about: Clive Lewis, Richard Burgon, Dawn Butler, Ian Lavery, and Barry Gardiner, but they've all indicated that they'll serve loyally from the back benches, rather than deliberately wrecking from within because they didn't get their own way like the Labour right have been doing pretty much ever since Gordon Brown took over in 2007.
The neoliberal right of the party fared dreadfully. In 2010 Miliband made the catastrophic mistake of handing them the shadow treasury and control over Labour's economic policy, which resulted in austerity-lite and the absolute flunking of the 2015 general election.
Who would have thought that behaving like a disloyal bunch of internal-wrecking shit heads for the entirety of the Corbyn leadership would have resulted in Starmer deciding not to trust them with any serious positions of authority?
Most of Starmer's picks are from the centre-left of the party, with the right limited to only minor token positions, like Rachel Reeves being given the ceremonial Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster position, and Ian Murray returning as Scottish secretary (they could hardly have picked anyone else for that position given he's the only Labour MP in Scotland!).
I don't have the time to do fully detailed appraisals of every single appointment, and I doubt that you'd have the inclination to read a 10,000 word essay on a load of people you'd mainly never heard of until today, so I'll try to keep it relatively brief, starting with the most important positions, and then covering most of the rest of the appointments in no particular order.
️Shadow Chancellor: Annaliesse Dodds
She's from the left. She's got the John McDonnell seal of approval. She's pro-public ownership and anti-austerity. Not a polished public speaker, but clearly intelligent. She's a good appointment, but she'll have a tough time if it comes down to a superficial popularity contest between her and the slickness of Rishi Sunak.
Soft-left. His legal expertise should allow him to absolutely run rings around Priti Patel. Biographer of Attlee and Bevan, which means he'd relish being part of a radical and transformative Labour government.
Sensible to keep him in place. We're in the middle of the worst public health crisis in a century. Shifting him now would come across as foolish and self-indulgent.
Soft-left Ed became Labour leader in 2010 as the most left-wing of the leadership options, but he was horribly constrained by the still-dominant party right. I'm really looking forward to seeing the genuine Ed Miliband unleashed. He's already talking about the importance of a "Green New Deal" and he's unlikely to pay much heed to small-minded right-wing detractors these days.
Labour left. Strong opponent of university tuition fees. Supporter of the fantastic National Education Service policy. If anyone is going to get to grips with the absolutely farcical mess the Tories have made of the education system over the last ten years, it's her.
Old school left-wing. British workers are going to need a powerful personality to stand up to the inevitable Tory assault when the coronavirus crisis recedes. The Middlesbrough bulldog is just the man for the job, and a much needed working class voice in the shadow cabinet.
To me I thought she would have made a much better fit somewhere like local government or transport, given her track record of raising issues like left-behind towns and failing public transport, and speaking well on them. It's a really odd appointment.
The 'centrists' are delighted with this one, but he's somewhat further to the left than a lot of them would care to acknowledge, after all he was one of the rebel Labour MPs who defied the party orders to abstain on George Osborne's savage austerity cuts in 2015, to join Corbyn in rebelling and voting against it (the pivotal vote that basically handed the party leadership to Corbyn on a silver platter). The biggest stain on his record is the abstention on Theresa May's institutionally racist "Hostile Environment" legislation in 2014. He was warned that it would be used against black British citizens, but he followed party orders to let it slide through parliament unopposed. Since then he's made numerous passionate speeches about the Windrush scandal, but he's made no public apology for the role he played in allowing it to happen. Hopefully he doesn't let any more unlawfully racist Tory malice slip through.
Voted in favour of the Iraq War, and against an investigation into the Iraq war. Appointing an unapologietic Iraq war-mongerer as defence secretary is probably the biggest departure from Corbynism, and a signal to international arms dealers that a Labour government would be unlikely to stand in the way of their death-profiteering.
The return of Corbyn's original pick as communities and local government minister who quit during the spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup. Hopefully he's better at the job second time around, and works to hold the Tories to account over the ruinous impact of their austerity cuts to local government budgets up and down the country. One of Labour's biggest failings ever since 2010 is their failure to explain how much damage austerity extremism has actually done to our local communities.
A thoroughly uninspiring appointment. Does she really have the passion, focus, and determination to deal with the massive challenges of the housing shortage, unsustainable house price inflation, homelessness, lack of social housing, and the virtually unregulated rip-off private rental market? It seems unlikely to me, but I'm willing to be proven wrong. Literally millions of people are relying on her to get it right.
Working class background. Former leader of Oldham Council. Became an MP in 2015. Served under Corbyn. Advocate of rail expansion in the north. Apparently a supporter of rail renationalisation, Looks like a good pick.
With Labour's other excellent communicator Barry Gardiner frozen out of cabinet over the weekend, I was worried Thornberry would be gone too. Technically she's been demoted, but she's still there in a pretty important role, which is a good thing.
A lot of people had this qualified doctor down as their pick for shadow health secretary. Given her relative inexperience, this role seems like a very good fit, with the possibility of progression to the main health secretary job if she excels at it.
Shadow Women and Equalities: Marsha de Cordova
Another of the 2017 intake. A solid pick for the position.
Soft-left. One of Labour's 2017 intake of new MPs. Described as a "rising star". Definitely a wait and see appointment because even most politics nerds have barely heard of him.
All in all this doesn't look all that bad, but what's really interesting is the radical shift isn't just in personnel, it's in purpose too.
Corbyn's Labour between 2015 and 2019 could be seen as radical left people trying to develop a 'centre of the road' agenda that's acceptable to the rest of the party.
Starmer's Labour is 'centre of the road' people, who by necessity are going to have to develop a radical left agenda to deal with the devastating fallout from the coronavirus crisis (the second existential crisis of the capitalist orthodoxy in the space of just 12 years).
"More of the same" simply isn't an option any more. Starmer, Dodds, Thomas-Symonds, Miliband and the like are all plenty smart enough to understand it.
So let's see what they come up with ...
Lol i like your objective appraisal, very balanced.
Agree about nandy. Dclg much better fit. Out of her depth imo for a first job. Some good politics going on and more balance. Far from perfect but way stronger than 3months ago.
In your diatribe against lammy u forgot to mention he is a qualified lawyer so is a good fit at justice. He might surprise one or two.
Do think the stage is nicely set for a green new deal.
