March 8, 2023 - 3:51pm
This week Mike Gapes, a Labour MP for almost three decades before leaving to co-found The Independent Group (later Change UK), re-joined the party. In a cliché-ridden piece for The Times, he wrote how it wasn’t he who had left Labour four years ago, despite contesting a general election against one of their candidates, but the party that had left him. Now, under new leadership, the dial has turned back. “The change in the past few years has been profound,” Gapes declared. “The way [Starmer] has returned Labour to its roots, with a strong, patriotic and pro-Nato position, has been very impressive.”
Conspicuous by its absence was any mention of Brexit. That should come as a surprise given that when he left the party Gapes vented his fury at a leadership “complicit” in its implementation. Indeed, Brexit was the central grievance that drove the creation of Change UK, in so much as it brought together disaffected parliamentarians from Labour and the Conservatives. When Sarah Wollaston, Heidi Allen and Anna Soubry joined the new group, they cited the government’s handling of the issue as their primary reason why.
Looking back, it is now close to impossible to make sense of what happened next. When he joined Change UK, the purported aim of which was to take on a perceived ‘hard’ Brexit, Gapes, alongside the Liberal Democrats and Caroline Lucas, voted against compromises including a customs union with the EU, or membership of the single market. His new party pursued a maximalist ‘all or nothing’ strategy, as Labour would proceed to do under the direction of Starmer. Ultimately they ended up with nothing, and became handmaidens for the hardest Brexit of all.
For Keir Starmer none of this can be changed. On assuming his party’s leadership he suddenly realised that perceptions around Labour trying to stop Brexit (it did) were his party’s greatest obstacle in regaining Leave-voting seats it lost to the Tories in 2019. As a result he whipped his MPs to vote for Boris Johnson’s deal in late 2020, and will do likewise for Sunak’s Northern Ireland deal in the weeks ahead. Presumably this is the kind of change about which previous europhile Mike Gapes is so enthusiastic.
The duplicity on show throughout this whole charade is hard to comprehend. Leave a party because you care about Britain’s departure from the European Union, proceed to reject any form of compromise, and then applaud the subsequent leader who accepts the very policies which made you leave in the first place. Much of the electorate doesn’t trust politicians. Reading a timeline like that makes it hard to disagree.
On top of all this is the bizarre assertion that the likes of Gapes represent mainstream, modern Britain. This is a man who worked for the Labour Party his entire life until the age of 66. In his youth, he was a student organiser before proceeding to work at party headquarters for 15 years. He then joined the Commons in 1992. That figures like this — the dictionary definition of party apparatchiks — are presented to the public as ‘ordinary’ shows the extent of the problem.
The subtext to all of this is, of course, that none of these people ever cared about Brexit. Instead it was a tool, an opportunity to exert pressure and ultimately remove a party leader they disliked. It could be argued that that’s politics, but it contributed to a constitutional crisis from which the country is yet to recover.
To cap it off Gapes and Starmer, who welcomed his return on Twitter, seemingly equate opposition to antisemitism with support for private enterprise. This is a bizarre statement. If the economy is stuttering from crisis to crisis, it’s partly because Britain’s permanent political class is stuffed with non-entity cosplayers like Mike Gapes. That the likely next Prime Minister celebrated his return undermines his claims to political seriousness.
Aaron Bastani is the co-founder of Novara Media, and the author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
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SubscribeCosplayers usually make an effort.
But the economy is *not* stuttering from crisis to crisis. In the circumstances we’ve been through it has been remarkably robust (so far).
This “crisis” narrative is 90% a fabrication of what someone commenting here called the “crisis media” a few months ago.
This is the typical and quite transparent technique of the media (in particular those who dislike the government – and not infrequently the British people too) to state an assumption as fact at the start of any article.
Frankly, I find it hard to tell who’s more ridiculous – Gapes, Starmer or Bastani.
But the economy is *not* stuttering from crisis to crisis. In the circumstances we’ve been through it has been remarkably robust (so far).
This “crisis” narrative is 90% a fabrication of what someone commenting here called the “crisis media” a few months ago.
This is the typical and quite transparent technique of the media (in particular those who dislike the government – and not infrequently the British people too) to state an assumption as fact at the start of any article.
Frankly, I find it hard to tell who’s more ridiculous – Gapes, Starmer or Bastani.
Cosplayers usually make an effort.
A lefty journalist like Mr. Bastani takes political issues terribly seriously. Practical politicians do as well, but they also realise when a political issue is dead and buried. Brexit has gone to the great political hereafter, like the death penalty, foxhunting and nationalising the steel industry.
Only from academia and isolated pockets of Remoaner North London, will we still hear plaintive complaints about Brexit. They will be ignored. The rest of us have moved on.
Hunting still in full swing today, if know where go. Tally-ho!
Hunting still in full swing today, if know where go. Tally-ho!
A lefty journalist like Mr. Bastani takes political issues terribly seriously. Practical politicians do as well, but they also realise when a political issue is dead and buried. Brexit has gone to the great political hereafter, like the death penalty, foxhunting and nationalising the steel industry.
Only from academia and isolated pockets of Remoaner North London, will we still hear plaintive complaints about Brexit. They will be ignored. The rest of us have moved on.
What, if anything, is the Labour Party going to do with Mike Gapes? It did not do a lot with him last time, he is now 70, and it is not much more than three years since he stood against it at a General Election. But it will certainly not be making him Chief of Staff to Keir Starmer. If Gapes had wanted that, then he would have had to have stayed out of the Labour Party. There is officially no one in it who is capable of being Starmer’s Chief of Staff.
That is hilarious. The faithful sons of the right-wing Labour machine were venting their spleens in the Commons on Monday. They were the only Labour MPs who had turned up. But try and imagine their reaction if Jeremy Corbyn had appointed a Chief of Staff who had not been a member of the Labour Party. Or if Corbyn had welcomed someone who as a sitting MP had left the party to stand against it at what, at the point of readmission, had been the most recent General Election. Starmer has now done that at least three times, for Gapes, for Luciana Berger, and for Angela Smith, who gestured to Ash Sarkar live on national television and made a remark about “a funny tinge”.
All three must now be Brexiteers after all, complete with staying out of the Single Market and the Customs Union, since that is now Starmer’s position. The same must also be true of Lord Sainsbury. Or have I missed something? And then there is Christian Wakeford. But Corbyn cannot have the whip. Why would he want it? Does he want it? Like Sue Gray, Starmer is one of those types who think that people call them “The Enforcer”, and who therefore believe that the rules do not apply to them. We now see on full display how they would run the country, and how Gray has famously been doing so for decades. The nearest thing to a rival to her power has been the Prime Minister of the day. But what if that were Starmer? Be very, very, very afraid.
What, if anything, is the Labour Party going to do with Mike Gapes? It did not do a lot with him last time, he is now 70, and it is not much more than three years since he stood against it at a General Election. But it will certainly not be making him Chief of Staff to Keir Starmer. If Gapes had wanted that, then he would have had to have stayed out of the Labour Party. There is officially no one in it who is capable of being Starmer’s Chief of Staff.
That is hilarious. The faithful sons of the right-wing Labour machine were venting their spleens in the Commons on Monday. They were the only Labour MPs who had turned up. But try and imagine their reaction if Jeremy Corbyn had appointed a Chief of Staff who had not been a member of the Labour Party. Or if Corbyn had welcomed someone who as a sitting MP had left the party to stand against it at what, at the point of readmission, had been the most recent General Election. Starmer has now done that at least three times, for Gapes, for Luciana Berger, and for Angela Smith, who gestured to Ash Sarkar live on national television and made a remark about “a funny tinge”.
All three must now be Brexiteers after all, complete with staying out of the Single Market and the Customs Union, since that is now Starmer’s position. The same must also be true of Lord Sainsbury. Or have I missed something? And then there is Christian Wakeford. But Corbyn cannot have the whip. Why would he want it? Does he want it? Like Sue Gray, Starmer is one of those types who think that people call them “The Enforcer”, and who therefore believe that the rules do not apply to them. We now see on full display how they would run the country, and how Gray has famously been doing so for decades. The nearest thing to a rival to her power has been the Prime Minister of the day. But what if that were Starmer? Be very, very, very afraid.
I do wonder if the author ever actually met this ex-MP? Far from being a “non-entity cosplayer” he was a really committed andand popular constituency MP and Chair of Foreign Affairs Committee with cross-party respect (reflected internationally). But he’s an MP (boo) and Labour (double-boo) from London (triple boo) so he must be the bogeyman. We complain abut Manichean simplicity from our political class, yet so many authors journalists are just as happy to reproduce the same tropes.
I doubt it. Can you realistically expect journalists to refrain from commenting on political figures unless they have met them in person?
In any case, I’m not sure a personal meeting would necessarily be helpful: I know people who’ve meet Boris Johnson and come away marvellously impressed with his ‘charisma’….
I doubt it. Can you realistically expect journalists to refrain from commenting on political figures unless they have met them in person?
In any case, I’m not sure a personal meeting would necessarily be helpful: I know people who’ve meet Boris Johnson and come away marvellously impressed with his ‘charisma’….
I do wonder if the author ever actually met this ex-MP? Far from being a “non-entity cosplayer” he was a really committed andand popular constituency MP and Chair of Foreign Affairs Committee with cross-party respect (reflected internationally). But he’s an MP (boo) and Labour (double-boo) from London (triple boo) so he must be the bogeyman. We complain abut Manichean simplicity from our political class, yet so many authors journalists are just as happy to reproduce the same tropes.