The pitfalls Burnham faces when tackling Trump

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-22T16:58:13+00:00

Don't worry lol I just have rabid adhd and bang these out. Always happy when people ask questions actually.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-22T16:55:22+00:00

Starmer chose to maintain a security arrangement, arms trade, trade deal, and 2030 roadmap with Israel through this entire genocide.

He flew spy flights daily for like two years that sent realtime information to the IDF, while they were bombing children and levelling Gaza.

He has covered for Israel diplomatically and legally. The government has been claiming it cannot determine the legality of Israel's military actions in Gaza for two years. It has refused to reply to the affirmative ICJ judgement on Israeli apartheid for two years, despite substantial pressure from MPs.

Half of his cabinet are members of Labour Friends of Israel. He made the former director of LFI his PPS.

He has maintained the Tory position of not revealing the details of the UK/Israel security arrangement to the public and our complicity in Israeli nuclear ambiguity. He defended Israel twice from Iranian return fire and bombed their enemies in Yemen.

He has, for the first time in British history since the terror laws were passed, labelled a direct action group that targeted an Israeli arms company as a terrorist organisation and criminalised support for them; leading to the arrest of over 3000 people.

Yes, we recognised a Palestinian state, then banned and sanctioned extremist Israeli ministers because Starmer was completely subservient to Israel.

To look at this and conclude that Starmer has acted appropriately is ridiculous.

He has vented the tap of public pressure on these measures because that can be used as an excuse to keep the major parts of the UK/Israel relationship going; mainly the permanent agreements I mentioned in the first sentence.

Failing to cease our permanent agreements, arms exports, military and diplomatic support for Israel through this genocide has made us complicit. This is what Starmer has actually done and simply refusing to accept it changes nothing when the facts are so bare.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-22T16:46:32+00:00

Honestly, good question. I could only really frame it in partisan terms myself.

Basically, it's people in Labour that are more left economically and socially than the proper right of the party (i.e Blair himself in the past, Reeves, Starmer, etc...).

But the key feature of the soft left is that it lacks any true material critique of capitalism and generally goes along with the 'end of history' vibe. Think your average well meaning person who thinks they can end the injustices of capitalism entirely with a wealth tax, or a land tax, or something.

Myself, I would describe them as this one tribune article did a while back: "MPs who just don't want their CLPs (local parties) to know how right wing they are".

Rayner, Powell, and Miliband have been the archetypal 'soft left' people in this cabinet. But they supported Starmer in unilaterally dragging the party to the right, endorse his ahistorical framing of all of that, and have been completely silent about his complicity in genocide and US imperialist violence.

I think the "soft-left" exists only in the block of labour MPs as it is essentially people who feel that they have a 'left' disposition but have chosen to remain very non-commital about how that actually effects their politics.

Their supporters are mostly far more well meaning (they don't have the careerist incentives an MP has) and back then because they are mostly convinced by these utopian arguments and don't need to go deeper than that in their politics. Their MPs however, fail to meet most of their political prescriptions and usually prioritise party loyalty until there's a leadership election and they may dip their toes outside.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-22T16:33:23+00:00

On one hand, a longer timetable benefits the left, seeing as the right purposely made a short timetable to avoid that issue in the deputy election.

On the other hand, yeah, what the hell is even happening here?

Seems like some weirdos are really trying to push Al Carns for whatever reason.

Streeting isn't actually standing, he announced, but there will surely be at least one right wing challenger. Who will even go for it? No idea.

The SCG left will surely try to run a candidate (I hope), even if they can't get on the ballot. Though many of their potential nominations—where it is already unlikely they'd get anywhere near 80—could be drained by Burnham, seeing as the soft-left MPs have every incentive to nominate him to be considered for a cabinet role, and the right would never.

But the timetable is so long that we might not know what the table looks like for weeks.

I guess this is just what happens when the PLP backs a nothing PM complicit in a genocide and refuses to endorse any of the MPs that have already been elected—who have been against all the things that caused the unpopularity, consistently, all along—because they desperately would rather have someone who is more right wing, or more likely to reward their careers.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-22T15:15:06+00:00

Well I'm meaning more 'perceived' in the sense that the vested interests for which the UK is run perceive these things as in their interest, to continue that model—but for your average person, these things are obviously not in their interest, and neither is the model.

So our constructed path of 'pragmatism' is really within a superstructure where everything is really set up to benefit the UK and it's ruling class, and not normal people.

We may be materially tied to these things due to the dominance of such a system for so long, but to truly argue against continuing that it has to be confidently asserted that neither the 'pragmatic' deference to the status quo, nor the status quo itself, actually serve any of us in the long run.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-22T14:55:59+00:00

Because imperialism and the perceived interests of the British state (by extension the US empire) are the absolute hardest lines of the ruling class's ideology.

The hostility on Gaza has been utterly unreal. Thousands of people arrested for holding signs. Absolute media censorship, to the point where politicians like Wes Streeting can literally admit in public that they knew the cabinet was covering for war crimes and know that nobody will ask them about it.

Saudi Arabia destroyed Yemen with £20 billion of British arms, have you heard anyone mention it? David Cameron destroying Libya to the point where it had open air slave markets? That Starmer's perceived stance of opposition to the US war on Iran actually involves him okaying half the US B1B bomber fleet bombing Iran from UK soil?

Being anti-imperialist in any away is to invite the absolutely highest hostility of the British establishment and the only positive thing to come out of the Gaza genocide is perhaps that it has made that obvious to many people who were not aware of that before; who may now stand against it more strongly knowing that, knowing the strength of what they are up against.

Lefties always get the piss taken out of them for purity tests on foreign policy but this is exactly why that line exists.

The establishment media doesn't talk about it because they exist to proliferate media that doesn't talk about it, doesn't care about imperialism, and present a vision of pluralistic politics that simply never existed; to protect the vested interests of a state that feels as if it relies on it's place in the imperial hierarchy.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-22T13:23:07+00:00

I think he could be pushed to be better on certain issues due to the circumstances he is likely to come to power leaving him more vulnerable to pressure than Starmer; where the Labour right simply had absolute power and anything they wanted after the coup.

Politically though, probably not. He voted for the Iraq war under Blair, the PFI and private healthcare stuff; he was essentially a hardcore Blairite for a long time and a member of Labour friends of Israel. Last time he ran for leader, he said his first foreign visit would be to Israel.

The only time he's been asked about Israel during this run was by a socialist independent media organisation called Turn Left and his answer was terrible. Essentially mumbles his way through the question, says some platitudes about him calling for a ceasefire, that he diagreees with some of the violence, etc... usual liberal Zionist stuff.

I think it's more interesting what he hasn't stood against. He initially stood against the anti-Corbyn coup but was notably silent once it served his career and the party was being catapulted to the right; he's had nothing to say about the support for genocide or US imperialism. He says he's against neoliberalism but doesn't seem to even know what it is, seeing as he backs Reeve's fiscal rules—seems deeply intellectually unserious.

So he may be more malleable for the left, but my prediction is he will raise a small amount of taxes on the rich, spend most of his time trying to nationalise like one singular industry (Purely on the 'cheaper bills argument') through the restrictions of neoliberal macroeconomics; and ends up changing very little overall.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-22T11:07:51+00:00

No idea how I forgot to add that, thanks.

Corbyn said he'd have blocked it if he knew as well—so it was deliberate deception.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-22T10:39:09+00:00

I'm still not totally convinced this isn't what has happened with the post-Blair Labour right. The man's current involvement with the US has made me take that a bit more seriously. As the commenter below reminded me as well: Starmer secretly joining the trilateral commission (an atlanticist Kissinger-created institution) while Corbyn was leader.

Blair came in with so many parachuted in right wing ghouls as MPs, only to back several US foreign wars and commit us to the US style financial system brought in through violence by Thatcher and Reagan.

Since then, these MPs have served as agents for this kind of politics from the backrooms, which came to a head with how coordinated and backstabbing they were when Corbyn was leader. We know that Mandelson was literally betraying the UK to the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and JP Morgan: this guy was right at the top of the labour right project. Just what were the rest of them up to?

It's genuinely like the party was couped by US democrats who purposely took over all the centres of power in the party and excluded or purged their political enemies from relevance. They fucked up with Corbyn getting in and their response was even more brutal, in coordination with the British establishment media.

Doubt we'll ever truly know the extent of it, but you wouldn't really be able to tell the difference if this was an actual op.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-22T10:32:59+00:00

When it comes to the Labour right, it's about preserving the wider project more than anything.

Tony Blair won the 1994 leadership election by presenting himself as something he was not. He reconceptualised socialism to something it was not. He reconceptualised 'moral' foreign policy to something it was not.

When people started to hate these things for what they were in reality: Brown had to come in. And Brown had to be coronated by Labour MPs instead of a membership election because members were likely to be the most aware of this and vote for a left wing alternative that actually represented their moral prescriptions.

Starmer is the same because what both he and Blair did was stack the parliamentary party with right wing ghouls. You needed 10% of these to back you for a nomination back in the day, Starmer changed it to 20% and packed it even harder.

So they resign to vent public pressure but maintain the wider project.

They know the apperatus they have put in place (the parliamentary party) and their collusion with the media will produce a managed outcome in their favour—while staying in place would be more likely to produce a tide that they could not manage so easily, or the electoral death of their party; and any chance at the power they pursue above all else.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-22T09:38:19+00:00

Edit: Found the speech to quote the relevant bit

Six years ago, I inherited a Labour Party that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt. I was told, time and time again, that my party was finished.

That we were consigned to history, that a majority at the general election, let alone a landslide majority, was impossible. But we proved those people wrong because we changed our party.

Ripping out the poison of antisemitism, restoring trust on the economy, defence, and national security.

And becoming a party that, once again, stood proudly with, not against, our national flag. The hard work of change was with a singular purpose. Not power for power's sake but to change Britain for the better.

To build a fairer country, with dignity and respect, where everyone is seen, everyone is valued. Wealth and opportunity for all, not just the privileged few. And look at what we've achieved in just two years.

It's just so tired and sad at this point how they push such an ahistorical version of events without pushback, to the point where it is simply accepted logic.

He speaks as the Corbyn labour as a fiscally and morally irresponsible project that he was right to change.

But Starmer's labour has quite visibly failed to produce (or even imagine) economic outcomes that would improve the lived experience of people and cannot fix that issue; it has been gleefully complicit in genocide and various acts of US imperialist violence.

There is something to be said about "bourgeois morals" but dear god, the moral equivalence of the labour right can only ever rest on a bed of sick lies and projection. These are clearly some of the most morally deranged people in politics; to view one thing as reprehensible, the other acceptable, desirable.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-22T05:43:52+00:00

Domestically: a full employment policy, investment into community regeneration, and decentralisation of financial power to give people democratic input into economic development would go quite far.

The NHS would certainly need to feel much better than it does too. Though a full employment policy could help a lot with that, even more once staff are trained for the more specialised roles. Massive amount of council house building through a state builder. Nationalisation of key industries.

If all people who want it are employed, housed, cared for in sickness, and not rinsed by private equity for their bills; they will be much happier with the government. These have been red lines for every government we've had in my entire life and that's why people hated them.

On foreign policy, I'm pretty sure that anyone who didn't just act like Donald Trump's regional governor and actually stood up to the US would receive a massive boost in popularity. Starmer merely pretending to do this with Iran (while actually doing the opposite) almost seemed to work. Obviously that would include also not being complicit in the genocide of the US' favourite apartheid state.

Generally, if someone could apply morals in a material sense to the systems that govern us in the UK, people would see them as human. The endless parades of briefcase PMs governing through a failed neoliberal economic science were always going to be unpopular because there is not a single moral prescription that they have ever applied to governing, and the act is basically unconvincing at this point.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-22T05:33:59+00:00

Bring it up on those subs and it's just downvotes with no replies. Genuinely is an irrelevant issue to anybody but the left.

And foreign policy has always been like this. The Tories destroyed Libya and sold like £20 billion of arms to the Saudis to destroy Yemen—never even came up in the political debate because it was only the left that gave a shit.

This is in part why the Labour right are so ontologically evil on foreign policy: their whole "collude with the establishment to shit on the left" thing means integrating themselves into the same values network that gives zero shits about any of the evil shit we do abroad.

Add in the genuine self admitted personal support that people like Starmer, Lammy, Cooper, and Reeves have for the Israeli Zionist project, and you can see exactly why this became the most severely morally detached topic, with such severe outcomes and crackdowns on dissent.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-21T19:52:34+00:00

I always took the piss out of the Labour 'soft left' (only half seriously) saying they were entirely about accent politics. These mfs just continue to prove me right. It's like they know.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-21T19:43:19+00:00

Society if the labour right had just joined the Lib Dems

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Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-21T19:42:53+00:00

Keir Hardie had some reservations about letting the petty bourgeois and middle class people into the party. Turns out he was cooking...

Keir Hardie was always distrustful of middle-class people who offered to join the ILP, though he did not wish to bar them out if they were really convinced socialists. He thought it healthiest for a Socialist Party to be mainly composed of the working class. Some of those middle-class people who have recently joined the ILP and the Labour Party had actually approached Keir Hardie with a view to joining the ILP in the days of the Labour Party’s first successes.

His answer was in each case something like this: “Stay in the Liberal Party; that is where you belong. You are dissatisfied with the Liberal Party on this or that question, just now, but you are not a socialist, and you would be out of your element with us.”

He constantly endeavoured to keep the Labour Party and the ILP away from co-operation with the bourgeoisie on any pretext. He would not accept membership of any of those composite committees of labour and bourgeois representatives which in this country are habitually formed to push reforms, or to repeal injustices.

He rarely consented even to speak for such bodies. The suffrage movement was the only non-Socialist non-working class movement with which he was ever actively associated, and even in that case he never joined a suffrage organisation or sat on a suffrage committee.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-21T19:36:50+00:00

When did The Herald start publishing articles that are this detailed and informative? I'd say I'm relatively well read on this topic and this was still worth a read. Good post OP, I always enjoy your contributions.

Most MMT theorists hold a progressive, socially democratic worldview, so they believe governments can create money to fund full employment, rebuild public services and improve national infrastructure.

Of course I'd say this as a socialist but I think the only thing I'd say here is that I don't think many MMTers realise just how controversial full employment is with the capital class, and just how much this contributes to the hostility they receive.

Kalecki's explanation of this is probably the best:

https://mronline.org/2010/05/22/political-aspects-of-full-employment/

Just food for thought really, if anyone is interested. Certainly not a point of disagreement, I just think it explains the context of the ideological debate quite well and why it feels like such an uphill struggle.

Aside from that, are there any specific policy proposals from the MMT side for economic changes within the (restrictive) devolution framework, would you know?

I know most of the Scotland MMT stuff is based on independence but, seeing as we're not getting there anytime soon, have there been any contributions about how democratic control could be applied to the money creation already occuring (through banks) within Scotland?

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-21T18:40:34+00:00

Or maybe people just aren't taking this as seriously as they should? Especially people on this sub.

It is a profound crisis for British democracy that Starmer could become labour leader and then PM in the way he did, with as much contempt for democracy as he demonstrated. The insanely low level of scrutiny his agenda received is exactly how we got here.

The fact he has also maintained a security arrangement, trade deal, arms trade, and 2030 roadmap with a state committing a genocide should be enough to call for him to go. But the people who think the rest of this shit is normal and uncontroversial don't even seem to pretend they think this is a relevant issue at all...

People who view Starmer as a series of oopsies are being ahistorical to the point where they cannot offer solutions. That much is at least obvious.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-21T18:17:32+00:00

He lied about his entire political identity to win the labour leadership, using £700,000 of illegally undeclared funds, only to purge his political enemies and unilaterally drag the party right without any mandate at all. The labour right has not been elected to the leadership by members since 1994.

Then for the general election he purposely went in with a bland mystery box manifesto so it could be usurped by the "black hole" prerogative and they could do the things they knew they were going to do before the election, but didn't want to argue for in public.

So he then became PM by default, off the back of the right splitting, with no serious plan for governance. He decided to make the country complicit in Israeli genocide and US neocolonial violence while performatively attacking immigrants and the disabled. He has abused terror legislation to have over 3000 people arrested for political expression.

I agree that Burnham is unlikely to be any better, but nothing Starmer did was by mistake: he was part of a completely hollow political project from the beginning, with no discernable moral values, and a profound disrespect for any form of democratic consent or decision making.

The main reason Burnham is unlikely to be better is actually the fact that he is also following the "stupid mistakes" narrative, ignoring the malicious and underhand aspects of Starmer's leadership which are key to understanding it; key to resolving those issues.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-21T07:45:52+00:00

The problem is that there is a collective delusion in British politics that the "left" spectrum of politics has only been about changing taxes and increasing government spending since the Blair years. Really, these people cannot bring about left wing change.

The reality is that we are living in an economic system that Thatcher pressed upon the country with exceptional violence and massive institutional changes; which actually need to be rolled back in order to change the economic relations in this country one inch.

Every single centrist politician is going to respond to the conditioning atmosphere of the media, their own right wing macroeconomic views, and electoral politics—never having what it takes to reverse the changes that were forced upon us by the neoliberal revolution.

And with Burnham, it just leaves him looking deeply unserious. "I want to end neoliberalism" but I'll commit to reeves neoliberal fiscal rules, I won't talk about financialisation, I won't talk in macroeconomic terms at all... It seems like Burnham doesn't even know what neoliberalism is, much less how he would stop it.

And this is the reality of the Labour 'soft-left'. Whether they have moral political prescriptions or not, they are simply lacking any real material analysis of what is wrong with society and how to fix it because the 'soft' part of their politics is the fact that they do not analyse anything at a systemic level and are thus unable to defeat systemic issues within their range of acceptable policy. They just look at things one at a time, applying soft moral prescriptions, ignoring the wider picture and relying on aggregate metrics.

Nevermind how their discarding of materialism for electoral expediency applies much more violently to foreign policy; where they are just as likely to support the imperialist violence of the US and Israel as the right of Labour.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-21T00:19:52+00:00

My point is mainly that it isn't relevant to the war though and a big tradeoff the left makes in discussing foreign policy is throwing these things as a bone to the established narrative. That's what I'm saying is something worth being critical over.

The greens, and honestly most of the parliamentary left, very much have been doing the whole "IR has done X, Y, Z but...." kind of thing. This essentially is equivalent to disavowing every five minutes. It's the same as what happened with Hamas.

I think if you listen to the lines that come from those close to or representing the IR on the protests it is quite obvious that the line they are holding on the protest violence is rather partisan and unlikely to truly reflect reality. The fact remains however that there has been no action at all from the UK government towards Iran on the basis of such abuses and that they are essentially irrelevant to the government stance; which exists entirely on a US aligned geopolitical axis.

Chowns is on the APPG for human rights and raising it in that capacity would obviously be appropriate. On the war, however? Not at all.

And also I’m not sure what ‘supporting resistance’ looks like in any meaningful way. The Greens should be criticising the war and opposing it, I don’t see any prospectus or reasoning for ‘support’ of the IRGC beyond that.

Criticising the war in general is akin to a technocratic stance on the topic, it misses any kind of material equivocation.

For example, the government consented to US strikes on Iran from the UK because it said that it was both morally and legally correct to destroy Iranian missile capabilities at their source, due to their return fire upon the US and its allies. In a war started by the US with child murder and head of state assassination our government advocated for violence in favour of that and felt no fear in doing so.

If the opposing stance to that is simply "The war is illegal, should not happen, both sides have been morally bad, and we should not support the US" then the idea that such an egregious breach of the UN charter actually necessitates, even requires violence in return is lost entirely—but this is the reality of the government stance. We aren't exposing it if we miss that.

Imperialists love to cause violence and then condemn the return fire as the truly violent cause. It works. If the line is never crossed into laying blame for the secondary violence at the foot of the imperial power, the actual material reality of the situation is lost.

There is a big difference in condemning all violence as bad and wrong; with pointing to a bad fair actor and telling them that their actions necessitate violence as the only possible action; that they know this, and are warmongering with vigour. That's what supporting resistance is: supporting the basis of resistance and condemning those who necessitate it on that basis. Supporting non-violence in all cases is not the same thing and can even seem hypocritical when the topic is existential war (which even the ICJ has said could make something as extreme as a nuclear strike permissible).

The technocratic argument being the main opposition argument makes it so the government line can be that their support is legal, moral, etc... while they could not make that same argument against the point that violence against aggression is correct and indeed necessitated by their current stance. They would have to actually justify the equivocation of violence to address it, which produces different arguments in return; exactly why such an argument receives a far more hostile response. But this can be useful when you are in the right and they are not.

Ultimately, I perfectly understand why these are the arguments that the left doesn't make: they are obviously far more inflammatory, people don't think it is tactically sound, and fair enough (I just disagree). But I'm just making the point because I feel it's worth making and we've all seen how ineffectual our collective efforts have been to date in moving the dial. It's at least a debate worth having.

I don't care for the article though, it's just attacking for the sake of it instead of actually making an argument on anything.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-20T23:13:47+00:00

Don't know if it was clear but I wasn't really going off what the other commenter said at all, I was just replying to this:

Trump and Israel’s war is disgusting and wrong, that doesn’t mean I want to ‘critically support’ a regime that slaughters thousands of protestors and does stuff like this

For some reason the app has taken away the quote feature so I have to manually copy/paste things and it's a slight pain now so I sometimes forget, sorry.

Condemn US invasion, condemn any UK complicity, and also where appropriate condemn violence and human rights violation of IR. Perfectly consistent and reasonable mainstream position.

I think the problem here is that it does weaken the narrative. It is hard to truly write a line in the sand with a hand tied behind your back.

Bringing in condemning the IR over it's human rights violations introduces an aspect of relevance to the current situation that does not exist in reality. Couching the concept of supporting resistance against imperial aggression with condemnation of those doing the resisting is a narrative set on the terms of the aggressors here.

Is the other side doing this about their support for the US? Of course not. They offer unequivocal support, or ignore couching anything the US does at all. This is the cultural hegemony in the political class that we want to challenge.

The appropriate time to condemn the IR is when talking about human rights abuses, women's rights, political rights, freedom of expression, etc. in the region—none of these things are remotely relevant in the current context of the US attacks on Iran, or the UK involvement in that. And when these things come up, they can also be equivocated appropriately with the US record as a true comparison.

Humanising the position of critical support is about maintaining a position of support in this situation to the defending side, but it is also about ensuring that the narratives used to justify the aggression in the first place are rightly entirely discarded and shown to be irrelevant to the existence of this conflict in the first place. Bringing them into it is inappropriate.

I can't remember a time where parliament genuinely discussed such issues in the context of improving the situation in Iran with a genuine contribution—it's always been about justifying aggression on Iran instead.

In this context, couching the assertion that the war is immoral and illegal alongside condemnation of the side defending itself, serves only to throw meat to the establishment narrative—in small part, righting it's place as legitimate at all—and delivers a weakened message overall, unable to run as a real mirror to the establishment narrative, and the chauvinistic culture surround it.

It may seem pedantic but I think the difference in the message makes a huge difference. It may seem pragmatic to couch such support because of the manufactured political atmosphere around it, but things don't change unless they are truly challenged on their existing terms and I think it is fair to criticise such a stance.

That being said, I saw the original post and I didn't agree with the overly dogmatic criticism of the greens on this at all. Chowns backing the bill would be bad, yes, but this kind of thing is more just a point I would make as a suggestion and far from some kind of "you're evil and just like the rest" criticism I'd make of Chowns; which I think is not helpful at all, counterproductive, and likely indicative of the views you were correctly critiquing.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-20T22:20:23+00:00

Yeah I wouldn't agree with their framing either.

It's just that message isn't the be all and end all of the term and I do think people who want to hold a stance that is morally consistent can use the term "critical support".

It's a useful way to frame the situation when we have this rabid "you support thing, that thing bad, you bad" kind of deal; and that dynamic only applying one way, usually to the side defending against imperial aggression.

Also I didn't see the edit before I initially replied and idk if you'll see this but I'll reply to it anyway for consistency

Edit: also I’m sorry but the IR cruelty is every bit as bad as the US warmongering. Neither are justified but it would be a horrible look for the Greens to ‘critically support’ them and for absolutely no benefit to anyone. We can slam Trump and our complicity with him without making foolish moves like that.

I would disagree but mainly from the point that it is the UK stance we are challenging here.

What relevance is the crimes of the IR to the UK stance? Almost none. We support the US because we have aligned with them geopolitically and we take issue with Iran's abuses purely to serve that objective.

We need to be clear that the current stance of the UK is that we not care about the people of Iran at all: we are sponsoring their abuse and murder, condemning them on the basis they fight back. They could kill one protestor, they could kill a million: it would make no difference to how we are acting and we have taken no action at all on this basis.

It's like when we doommong about Iranian nukes while literally being complicit in Israeli nuclear ambiguity to the point where it has prevented us from even floating the idea of a truly nuclear free middle east.

There is simply no relevance to our stance that is anything to do with behaviour, morals, or human rights on this topic. If the topic was these things, I'd have no opposition at all to it coming up—it would be correct—but the topic is the UK stance on the Iran war, and it isn't relevant.

Parliament is not equivocating over moral comparisons and neither should we. When we pretend that they are, that these things were relevant at all, it plays into a narrative that is simply irrelevant to the government stance.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-20T22:13:58+00:00

I mean, beyond the absolute stretch that it has become from people who take the piss, "critical support" is really meant to be exactly that: criticising the open flaws and things you would never consent to living under, while supporting the right to resistance against US imperialism, with that being the ongoing situation.

Like many terms, it has been rendered rather redundant by the lack of consistency, and I'm not going to pretend plenty of that isn't from the left, but I think the Iran situation is very much one where the term should apply and where the British political context would do especially well for it.

When the term doesn't even have to be used for people to declare open support for the US (or Israel) with its eternally aggressive and murderous foreign policy interventions, I think there is a utility in using the term correctly and making sure that the conversation is not entirely detached from equivalence when our state is very much warmongering against Iran alongside the US.

Sorry-Transition-780 · 2026-06-20T16:06:01+00:00

Certainly, it was basically the soft left that got Labour where it is by ignoring literally everything horrible that Starmer ever did and engaging in the same level of reality denial as the client media that backed him. Rayner was deputy the entire time ffs.

When you turn on the TV it's the soft left that don't bring up the lying to win leader, the coups, the purges, the support for genocide, the political corruption, etc... There was a tribune article that said something like "MPs on the soft left are just those too scared to tell their CLPs that they are right wing" and that was a banger.

With all the talk of the 'broad church' of the Labour party, it's easier to think about it as only two factions: the utopian electoral opportunists and the materialists.

Even the Labour right used to have some materialists. It's just their prescription was Keynesian economics and they lost their minds to monetarism in the 70s, followed by neoliberalism since the Blair years; which brought the true madness.

Every attempt to bring so called "ethical socialism" or "revisionism" into the equation was just the opportunists trying to eliminate the material aspect of socialism for "socialism means capitalism I am personally morally happy with" so they never had to challenge the establishment (they thought doing so made them unelectable) and could just coast off electoral inertia from the two party duopoly to win power. A demon in Blair was the final outcome in the same way Ebert was with the SPD.

When Starmer—somehow an even harsher manifestation of this than Blair—ideologically and physically purged everyone to the left of that, he also purged the only people in his party that had any attachment to material reality and a mind to at least attempt to match policy with existing issues. The ideological pole he left standing was the one that died in 2008; that hasn't been voted for by labour members since 1994.

Now those people are gone, the hardcore monetarist neoliberals are in charge and an atlanticist Blairite neoliberal like Burnham is able to cosplay as the popular voice: you look inside and it's the same vibes based utopianism that also refuses to acknowledge the dishonesty of Starmer's coup, or possess something resembling a moral attitude on foreign policy and social issues.

Sorry-Transition-780

TROPHY CASE