It’s been another shocking week for Labour.
Hot on the heels of Sir Keir’s decision to relive Kinnock’s glory years by proscribing the inconvenient lefties he doesn’t like, it emerged that the party’s finances are in such a parlous state, redundancies are on the cards. For some of us, the news was not that much of a surprise. We’ve seen the costs of the court cases Labour has settled under Starmer and those it has chosen to defend. But more importantly we’ve seen hundreds of thousands of people leaving the party, disillusioned with the leadership or booted out on spurious grounds. Each £4/month subscription may seem like an insignificant pebble on its own, but combined together they have created the avalanche that is threatening to destroy the organisation.
According to Dave Evans, the General Secretary, Labour’s finances are in such a bad way, that the party only has a month’s salary in it reserves. Any self respecting CEO would tell you that reserves should never dip below three months’ salary and action should have been taken as soon as it became apparent members were leaving in their droves. But instead, the party has been allowed to reach crisis point, before applying the last resort of a failing and panicky management, to get rid of as many staff as they can. Which in turn will lead to loss of experience and skill and reduced capacity for the party to achieve its aims.
If this was an NHS Trust, Charity or Multi-academy, serious questions would be being asked of the leadership and finance team. Questions that would inevitably lead to heads rolling. But this is not an accountable public body it seems. This is the Labour Party. And like his counterpart in Downing Street, Sir Keir doesn’t seem keen to take responsibility for his actions any time soon. And so the official explanation is that yet again this is ALL JEREMY CORBYN’S FAULT. Despite the incontrovertible evidence that under Corbyn’s leadership, membership income rose from £9,532/yr in 2015 to £16,471/yr in 2019, and reserves from £2million to £13million, Sir Keir and his team continue with their peculiar obsession that the former leader is the source of all their woes.
The ‘unity’ candidate who sews discord.
The ‘grown up politician’ who is always two steps behind the curve.
The ‘competent administrator’ who can’t even manage his own budget.
Sir Keir proves time after time he isn’t up to the job. Under his watch, Labour looks set on a path of self destruction. His continued attacks on the left will increase the party’s reputation for division and factionalism, leading to further loss of members and income. Mass redundancies now will only be a temporary fix, while the loss of so many staff will leave a huge gap in capacity, experience and institutional memory. And of course, just as Liam Byrne’s infamous ‘there’s no money left’ haunted Ed Miliband, the Tories will use Sir Keir’s financial failures to suggest the economy can never be safe under Labour.
Meanwhile, as Dawn Butler won the thanks of a grateful nation on Thursday for calling out Boris Johnson’s lies in the House of Commons, Sir Keir, was, yet again, nowhere to be seen. We rate Dawn Butler highly, and, were it not for her poor performance in the Deputy Leader election, we would have her down as a possible future leader. We do hope that her speech has won her more friends and admirers in the party because it is clear that Sir Keir, whether through incompetence or malice aforethought, is running Labour into the ground. It is high time he stepped aside and allowed a real grown up to take charge. Ms Butler would do very nicely indeed.