🔴 Not that old boyfriend Andy Burnham again!
Labour keeps knocking. The planet keeps burning. Don't open the door.
Occasionally there is a critical political moment when the radical political class should be doing A, but yet again it follows the now literally suicidal path of doing B.
A, in this case, is for the Green Party to throw everything it has at winning the Makerfield by-election — calling on Andy Burnham to leave the Labour Party and join them, if he has any morality and any guts.
Of course, he has neither.
He is part of the machine that consumes all radical impulses and turns them into capitulation before the rich. This is what the Labour Party has been doing for generations. It is the controlled opposition. Its organisational culture is structurally broken. It can never stand up for ordinary people — only deliver them pacified and demoralised into the hellspace of social and ecological breakdown, which is now inevitable.
Peter Walker
The Green Party is unlikely to do this unless Zack Polanski goes up a few notches on the prophetic leader scale. Far more likely, the "old boyfriend" dynamic will show itself one more time.
This is how an independent working-class candidate I worked with described Labour after the recent local elections. In her ward, the party was nowhere to be seen — but on the day of the vote, their people finally arrived on the streets, just like an old boyfriend: wanting forgiveness, pleading it will be different this time. The being taken for granted. The endless lying. The toxic abuse.
And it works. They know how to pull them in one more time.
Burnham is the worst and most dangerous of the lot. As Martin Luther King reminds us, the white moderate is always more dangerous than the open extremist. Burnham says to the Green Party:
"Hey look, I will get in and it will be different. I will do PR. I will tax the rich. I will be the decent guy."
It's all bollocks. The Labour Party is broken beyond repair.
The Green Party needs to say it loud and clear. Hope will only become normal again once that truth has been spoken plainly.
This is a moment of truth. One of the last such moments before the cascade of ruptures begins.
Reform won 2000+ council seats. The Greens won 400. While we fiddle, the far right takes power in a 1.5 °C world. Next week in London, I will speak about what the Green Party must do to build alliances, drawing on my last months of election organising. Come along to chat over a vegan supper.
If this political moment feels like a dead end, that's because it is — my new book Suicide names it. From the structural failure of liberal democracy to the legal and moral case for resistance, this is the argument the mainstream won't make. The Labour Party won't save us. Resistance in courts might.
If you're a paid member of this blog, you can download the ebook below. I hope you like it, and please reply with your thoughts. We need reviews to grow its impact.