August 18, 2023 - 4:30pm
Every July several thousand trade unionists converge in the Dorset village of Tolpuddle. They do so to commemorate the Tolpuddle Martyrs — and what is widely regarded as the genesis of the British Labour movement.
When I attended last summer, it was obvious the crowds were much smaller than during the Corbyn era. Perhaps the lingering memory of Covid was why, but even for those present it was clear that the energy of recent years had gone.
There were some exceptions, however. One was Angela Rayner. Taking to the stage Labour’s deputy leader was every inch the firebrand and felt like an emissary from the recent past. Labour would scrap zero hours contracts she cried, while workers in the gig economy would immediately benefit from getting the Tories out. Importantly, there would be a single category of worker endowed with rights from day one.
I was sceptical about these promises at the time, and it now appears such scepticism was warranted, at least partially, with the Financial Times reporting that Labour wants to row back on workers’ rights by watering down elements of its “New Deal for Working People“.
That isn’t to say Rayner is in on it. The briefing to the FT likely came from those close to Peter Mandelson, and the New Deal for Workers Rights is the only remaining area where Rayner’s imprint is notable. The point, then, is to underscore that she has lost control of this crucial policy area — and is increasingly irrelevant.
Rayner has always been a strange figure within the emerging uniparty of Westminster. Rather than coming from the Labour Left, she is simply a trade unionist who joined the ranks of the political class and wants to fight for working people. Given 90% of her parliamentary colleagues attended university, she is something of a throwback.
Yet even a figure like Rayner, whose biography embodies Labour raison d’etre, is too radical for the dominant forces within her own party. Why? Because her default isn’t to genuflect before the business lobby, and equate their demands with “common sense” and “pragmatism”.
Alongside radical supply side reforms in addressing the country’s major problems — namely the need for cheap energy and cheap housing — there also needs to be a sustained pursuit to increase productivity and for real wages to rise. But for the passenger politics of Jeremy Hunt and Rachel Reeves, this is simply too close to actually doing something.
On issue after issue the two major parties agree…on inaction. One could call this a “consensus”, but I think that’s wrong given the ideas and presumptions were never debated in the first place. Public ownership of water? Both parties reject it, but it’s just that Labour wants to, performatively, make it seem they are committed to reform.
On fiscal rules, both parties are committed to national debt falling as a percentage of GDP over a parliament term — making Labour’s pledge to not include capital expenditure within deficit targets broadly irrelevant. Meanwhile both parties support tuition fees. It’s just that Labour MPs are more likely to virtue signal that they were, in fact, the first person in their family to attend university. Good for them.
Is Labour the party of Angela Rayner or the Tony Blair Institute? Because, for all the talk of a coalition, it increasingly feels like it can’t be both while upholding its basic commitments. This should be overwhelmingly obvious given Blair’s desire to “renew the centre” — an entreaty which means little beyond overseeing national decline and allowing the winners in today’s winner-takes-all economy to become yet richer still.
Does any of this matter? Perhaps, but only when those cheering Rayner on that sunny Dorset day understand the scale of what is happening. With Labour in office they may end up building coalitions with various other deplorables. That, more than anything else, is what the uniparty fears most.
Aaron Bastani is the co-founder of Novara Media, and the author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
AaronBastani
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SubscribeDr. Garner is right. 10,000 men from North Korea won’t win the war for Putin (although they may be much better trained than Dr. Garner imagines). But North Korea has 1.3m men in its regular army. 10,000 could expand to 50,000 or 100,000 quite easily. Then what?
Wrong, the North Korean military is in horrible shape, They don’t have the economic bass to sustain such a massive military. Much of their equipment is old and obsolete and in a bad state of repair and have allowed much of it to decay In pursuit of nuclear weapons .The fact being that the military is also extremely politicized also does not help matters and corruption is a huge problem in North Korea. The only reason why the North Koreans do not try anything against the south is because they would get hammered and what’s keeping the regime in place of an external threat is its nuclear arsenal and it’s ability to rain havoc on the Korean peninsula through massive artillery bombardments of Seoul. Essentially their whole military strategy is reliant on the idea that they Will be defeated in a conflict with the South and America, but they will make the cost so high that their enemies will be reluctant to actually initiate a war with them. They do this for a position of weakness not strength, and such strategy if they actually take part in offensive military operations in Ukraine is not going to work there do to being far away from their home. The real role of the North Korean military is to protect the regime from internal threats.
Generations of inadequate food and even starvation have produced a population and therefore a military that is physically (4 inches shorter on average than South Koreans) weak, and dull-minded. You need adequate food especially in the first years of life for the brain to grow, They’ll make good cannon fodder but more can’t be expected of them.
0 01 knows – or thinks he knows – a lot about the North Korean army. Precisely how he knows this, given the extreme secretiveness of the regime, is a mystery.
He also seems to think that this massive army is all that stands between North Korea and South Korean aggression. How sure is he that Seoul wants reunification by force, if it could get away with it?
Finally, it is reasonable to suppose that the North Koreans sent their very best troops to Ukraine. And as the North Koreans and Russians use essentially the same equipment, logistics should not be too much of a problem.
But the proof of the pudding… let’s see how they acquit themselves on the battlefield.
North Korean soldiers occasionally defect to South Korea. By all accounts, they are short, poorly fed, diseased, and are afflicted with parasites of various sorts.
I doubt very much tthat they sent their best troops, most probably the disposable ones sent as canon fodder, or grunts providing logistical support in order to free up more Russian conscripts to fight at the front lines . Why would North Korea lose their best or elite troops in Ukraine anyways? The Koreans have zero battle experience, they have not fought a war since the 1950s. They need their best troops to maintain the regime in place. Don’t be fooled by the numbers, North Korea is a backwards and very poor country, they would get annihilated if ever they attacked the South, and it would be an opportunity for the military to overthrow the decrepit Kim regime. The elite troops need to be kept close by, they won’t accept to be sent to die for Putin and could launch a coup if they are angry.
You’re delusional.
If North Korea wanted to send their best tropps to Ukraine, why didn’t they do that 2 years ago ? If it wre that important to them, they’d have done it then when it would have made a far larger difference. AS it is, this is nothing more than a transaction of convenience/desperation as the article states.
If this were a school playground and we were picking sides for a football match, I guarantee you that the North Korean military would be the absolute last pick.
And how do you know that “0 01” is indeed a “he” ? I have some recollection you may be wrong there. I guess you just know – or think you know.
“apparently planning”, presumably like Iraq apparently had WMD…
I’m pretty sure Russia has WMD.
No doubt on that…but the article is about North Korean troops being used in Ukraine, which I very much doubt. If Western “intelligence services” say it’s true, it’s probably just propaganda, rather like the MI5 guy saying Russia is going to cause mayhem in Britain. The only noticeable mayhem has been by fundamental Islamists, and it is worth recalling that Russia helped the USA in its “fight against Al Qaeda after 911.
Shouldn’t be too hard to find out. If there are North Korean soldiers in Ukraine, Ukraine is bound to kill the odd one here and there. Those dead soldiers are likely to have something linking them to Korea on their persons.
The only thing threatening our democracies isn’t a global authoritarian axis of evil but our homegrown technocratic streaks of p*ss.
Offer those soldiers $5,000 apiece, a full meal and help with repatriation to South Korea and they’ll desert in a second.
OMG! It’ll be WMD next!
You might just want to cross-refer here:
div > h1 > a”>A Russia–North Korea Alliance in the Works? Don’t Be So Sure
A juicy extract from the above (highlighted in the article to boot):
I think that the author of this essay is conflating two different theses, one of which doesn’t really support the other.
The point that he actually spends most of his time arguing (successfully, IMO) is that Putin’s Russia is a lot weaker than it seemed a few years ago. For what it’s worth, I’ve argued the same thing at my own blog – for instance in this article, written shortly after the failed Wagner mutiny last year. (And if the extremely slow and costly progress of the Ukraine War hasn’t convinced you that Putin’s national revival program was a failure, then his inability to control his own mercenaries definitely should).
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/a-failed-bismarck-and-his-barbarians
However, I don’t think that, just because one has shown that “Putin’s Russia is Weak” it necessarily follows that “The “Axis of Evil is a Fantasy.” Weak countries can still be part of serious alliance systems (cf. Italy in WWII), and right now, Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have realized that they have a common interest in ending American global hegemony, and they are cooperating towards that goal.