"Those of us on the left warned this project would disintegrate once it encountered reality. The obvious retort is that opponents always predict failure. But the point is not that we predicted Starmerism would implode: we predicted why.

When Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership in 2015, the party’s right faced a choice. They could admit that their ideas were exhausted, that the financial crash had shattered old certainties and demanded new answers. When Labour secured 40% of the vote in the 2017 general election, overturning the Tory majority on an unashamedly leftwing manifesto, it was fair for critics to say this still fell short. But it was also reasonable to conclude the platform that delivered the party’s biggest surge in vote share since 1945 was something to build on, even as the Brexit culture war overwhelmed it in the lead-up to 2019.

The party’s right chose a different path. McSweeney had run the leadership campaign of the Blairite torchbearer Liz Kendall in 2015, when she offered a political agenda similar to the eventual Starmerite offering. When Kendall secured 4.5% of the vote, McSweeney and his ilk concluded they could only retake the party through deceit. Starmer was the perfect candidate: a politician who wanted to be prime minister for its own sake, who served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and opportunistically sounded off against Brexit, and thus could rub the belly of the Labour membership.

It should have been obvious that this project was doomed when the leftwing policy pledges of Starmer’s successful leadership campaign – run by McSweeney – were so swiftly abandoned. As Paul Holden’s recent devastating book, The Fraud, meticulously documented, this strategy exposed that Starmerism was defined by deceit, cynicism and a desire for power for its own sake. And that it lacked any coherent policy vision of its own."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/09/left-starmer-britain-morgan-mcsweeney-labour

#UK #Labour #LabourParty #Starmer #McSweeney #RadicalCentrism

"With Macron’s failure looming, Starmer has put his austerity plans on hold for the time being. This, however, has caused “nervousness” in the government bond markets. Merz has so far been spared this, although he has been wavering between announcing “tough reforms” and attempting to negotiate amicable, somewhat less stringent reforms with his Social Democratic coalition partner.

Merz’s hesitation also reflects internal power struggles within the CDU/CSU alliance, between those who cling to the self-image of defenders of liberal democracy and those who want to try their luck with Alice Weidel. Before Trump’s return to the White House, defenders of liberal democracy bet that the financial markets would punish fiscal laxity and foreign trade protectionism. They were wrong.

The markets get along well with the new right. They will punish European heads of state and government who fail to meet their austerity targets. Efforts to avoid this punishment through austerity measures only play into the hands of the new right.

Macron, Merz, and Starmer are not defenders of liberal democracy but rather of its rearguard. If democracy is to have a future, liberalism must be freed from the clutches of the markets and reconciled with the idea of social democracy."

https://socialistproject.ca/2025/11/macron-merz-and-starmer/

#Europe #Macron #Starmer #Merz #RadicalCentrism #Austerity #Militarism

"In short, Macron’s close confidant wants to double down on a program of fiscal austerity, which will hit working- and middle-class French people the hardest. The president’s allies point to the country’s swollen budget deficit — expected to hit 5.4 percent of GDP in 2025, the current highest in the eurozone — to argue for a package of spending and welfare cuts.

Yet Lecornu is far from having the parliamentary majority that he’d need to force through such an unpopular and unbalanced economic program. One month after the deeply divided parliament ousted the previous premier François Bayrou, the Macronite center is again digging in behind its red lines.

This should come as little surprise. Macron has governed from the right since his first election in 2017 and has no intention of changing course now (his second term officially finishes in spring 2027)."

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/macron-france-insoumise-rassemblement-budget-bloquons/

#France #EU #Macron #RadicalCentrism #Austerity #Neoliberalism

"Their argument is, essentially: voters think their immediate concerns about energy prices are more important than addressing climate change, so politicians should just drop mention of the climate crisis entirely and focus, as Republicans do, on cheap energy. Does Searchlight say that the cheap energy in question should be renewable? They don’t really discuss it. They just say, essentially, climate change is a losing issue with the electorate, so stop discussing it.

The problem here, of course, is that the climate crisis will continue and worsen regardless of polling. To abandon discussion of one of the most important issues of our time because “cheap energy” polls better is indefensible. If the asteroid is hurtling toward Earth, pollsters might find that talking about the asteroid depresses people, and they’d rather hear politicians promise a chicken in every pot. But it’s the responsibility of those who grasp the scale of the problem to move public opinion, not to simply ignore the crisis because the public doesn’t currently grasp the nature of the crisis (in part because Democrats have spent so many years being terrible on climate change and failing to convey an understanding of the emergency to the public). I believe that, properly framed, climate change can actually be a massive winning issue for Democrats, because Republicans have no solution to this immense unfolding disaster, and are in total denial about it. And this advantage will only increase with each passing year, as the extreme-heat deaths and the unprecedented hurricanes and wildfires become more frequent, and more people are directly affected. The Republicans should be aggressively attacked for failing to meet the moment, but instead, Searchlight is advising Democrats to drop the issue precisely when it’s most critical to act. This is objectively nuts."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-latest-democratic-idea-having-fewer-ideas

#USA #Democrats #DemocraticParty #ClimateChange #ThinkTanks #RadicalCentrism

"The day before global leaders convened this week in New York City for the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia joined the vast majority of the world’s nations in recognizing Palestine as a state. At the start of the U.N. session on Monday, France and Luxembourg added their nations to the list.

Both the French and British heads of state said that they decided to recognize Palestine in order to pursue peace. “The time for peace has come because we’re just a few moments away from no longer being able to seize peace,” said French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday before the U.N. A day earlier, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a recorded speech, “In the face of growing horror in the Middle East, we are acting to keep alive the possibility of peace.”

What Macron and Starmer failed to mention, however, is that they — and many of their fellow nations now pushing for Palestinian statehood — continue to supply weapons and military support to Israel."

https://theintercept.com/2025/09/25/palestine-statehood-israel-arms-sales/

#France #UK #Palestine #Israel #Gaza #Genocide #RadicalCentrism

"Setting aside the problem that there is no sign of an increase in aggregate productivity from the stochastic parrot inaccurately called “AI,” and the bigger problem that higher productivity in no way translates to shorter workweeks for laborers instead of higher profits for owners, that last sentence refutes the entire book. Klein and Thompson are opposed to redistribution, which they refer to as “parceling out the present” and which they claim is “not enough,” and instead of imagining “social insurance programs,” they propose that we make “technological advances.” Here they are consistent with Obama and with Ronald Reagan before him. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote that “Reagan’s central insight—that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie—contained a good deal of truth.” Abundance has little to add to that statement beyond technological enthusiasm.

Klein and Thompson do not seem to realize that their proposals would also entail large-scale redistribution and that the ills they seek to cure are the result of inequality rather than regulation, because they do not seem to understand how prices and property work in capitalism. Translating higher profits to shorter workweeks would require a scale of redistribution that far outstrips anything Bernie Sanders has proposed. Claiming that profits will be shared because they are based on “the collective knowledge of humanity” opens up a wider set of imperatives than they realize. Most profit, labor, and technology is in some way built on the collective knowledge of humanity, in the sense that education, work, and knowledge are shared, social, and cumulative, and all workers are the result of collective social reproduction."

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/09/25/how-to-blow-up-a-planet-abundance-klein-thompson/

#USA #Abundance #Capitalism #RadicalCentrism #Liberalism #AI #Productivity

"[I]f Democrats have proved reluctant to take up the role of loyal opposition, it is not — as liberal pundits had feared — a reflection of the so-called normalization of Trump, much less public approbation for his approach to governance or the consolidation of a new Republican majority. Nor is it merely the case — as the party’s critics have alleged since at least the last decade of the twentieth century — that Democrats and their allies in the liberal commentariat have simply lost the talent for telling stories that resonate with working-class voters rather than consultants and professors. While party leaders do appear allergic to political formulas that involve anything that could be labeled as populist — witness the marginalization of Tim Walz during the 2024 campaign — weak PR is better understood as a symptom.

Among other things, weak PR is symptomatic of a political party structure that has become, in the words of Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, hollowed out in recent decades — incapable of controlling key functions like candidate selection, fundraising, and the formation of policy, which are increasingly delegated to a network of outside groups, the media, and wealthy donors."

https://jacobin.com/2025/08/democrats-ngos-jeffries-schumer-dealignment/

#USA #Trump #Democrats #DemocraticParty #RadicalCentrism #Liberalism #Authoritarianism #Democracy

"At the cusp of a possible Skydance sale, The Free Press faces a challenge: It is difficult to position yourself as the voice of the sensible unheard when the “anti-wokeness” your publication feeds on is unequivocally in power. As officers from unknown agencies and the National Guard set up checkpoints in DC and ICE abducts children from their schools, The Free Press asks us to preserve our free speech by stepping back, chilling out, and learning how to party. As children go hungry in Gaza, The Free Press asks us to consider whether those children in Gaza “might have been sick or worse even if there was no war.” To paraphrase Adorno: The Free Press offers itself as a device for orientation in a cold, alienated, largely incomprehensible world. It is a device for casting oneself as reasonable: Gays (like Bari Weiss) are fine, sure, but maybe those claims of malicious Midwestern doctors force-transing children are worth interrogating. Democrats are fine, sure, but that Zohran Mamdani made a rap song once."

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/i-went-to-the-free-press-party-for-under-30s-all-i-got-was-ennui/#

#USA #Liberalism #RadicalCentrism #Zionism #FreePress

"I was never sold on Starmer’s Labour delivering sunlit uplands. He doesn’t have a theory of change, or policies commensurate with the challenges he often acknowledges. But even I was shocked when it was revealed that Rushanara Ali, the now former Minister for Homelessness, had evicted four tenants from her East London property only to re-list it for an additional £700 a month. Besides that, the agents acting on her behalf initially tried to charge the evictees nearly £2,000 to redecorate, and an additional sum for professional cleaning. Under the Tenant Fees Act, passed under the May government, neither was permissible.

Ali resigned shortly after the i newspaper broke the story. That was inevitable given the Renters Rights’ Bill, which Ali herself claimed would “tackle the root cause of homelessness”, included the minor detail of prohibiting what she had done. Ali could, of course, have put the property on the market with the tenants remaining in situ. That is, after all, what normally happens.

The house in question is presently listed at £894,000, and is one of three Ali owns across the capital (one is jointly held with a family member). Other Labour MPs who are also landlords include Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, who lets her former South London home for £6,000 a month, and David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary. Two ideological stalwarts of the party’s Labour First faction, Jas Atwhal and Gurinder Josan, allegedly own more than 20 properties between them. As of the last election, three of the leading five landlords in parliament are Labour MPs.

All this stands in contrast to most of Labour party history."

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2025/08/labour-has-become-the-party-of-landlordism

#UK #Labour #LabourParty #Housing #Rentism #Rents #LandLordism #Starmer #RadicalCentrism

"The Labour Party is dead. It has destroyed its principles and its popularity. Some Labour MPs who consider themselves on the left are still clinging to its corpse. They say that by staying in they’ll be able to retain their political influence. My response is simple: you haven’t been able to stop disability cuts, you haven’t been able to stop the flow of arms to a genocidal apartheid state, so where is this influence you’re talking about? There’s no point standing around waiting for a change of leadership while people are dying – not just in Gaza, but also from the poverty in this country. Time to get out, build something new, and invite everyone to join."

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-alternative

#UK #Labour #LabourParty #RadicalCentrism #Corbyn #Socialism