THE sacking of the Ilford South Labour MP Sam Tarry for attending a protest at London’s Euston station in support of striking rail workers is the latest in a recent run of strange decisions for Sir Keir Starmer.

The judgment is split. Some say it’s further sign that he’s paralysed by fear, trapped in a political cage of his own construction, beholden to the standards and values as set by the Daily Mail. Others say he is canny – and could not be seen to be backing strikers disrupting everyday life. But it does make you think, as many of have been thinking since about 1984, what is Labour even for?

Faced with the obscene profiteering of the energy companies, a populace terrified by the prospect of imminent fuel poverty, and the disastrously toxic Tory party tearing itself apart (live) 24/7 on all frequencies, this isn’t a moment for hiding.

If the torn relationship between trade unions and Labour could ever be mended, it is now, when people’s sense of their own financial precarity and vulnerability is acute, and their sense of social solidarity is refined by the experience of the pandemic. But no.

Far from healing the remaining rifts between unions and Labour, they are becoming worse.

On Thursday Kevin Lindsay, an organiser for the Aslef train drivers’ union in Scotland, said Tarry’s sacking was “a step too far” and a sign the party is “moving to the right and is becoming unrecognisable”. Not only did he leave he urged Aslef to disaffiliate from the party.

The problem for Labour is not just that nobody knows what they stand for, and can see them paralysed into inaction, they will lose funding from union support too. The energy, credibility and life blood of the party just drains away. Where will it end?

As Liz Truss, incredibly, the heir apparent waiting in the wings talks of criminalising strike action, what will the Labour leadership do then?

This is the problem with not having any threshold, not having any principles at all. Once you start moving there’s really nothing anchoring you down, so you can go anywhere.

While caution about being slaughtered by the tabloids is understandable – and Labour need a line and a strategy for coping with that – but the irony is the public aren’t baying for blood. The attempts to demonise strikers have largely failed.

As the much derided former deputy leader John McDonnell puts it: “In terms of the general public, the reason that there is an unprecedented level of sympathy for these strikes is not just down to the impressive straight-talking eloquence of the RMT’s Mick Lynch. It’s because millions are being hit by the same cost of living crisis, which has become the key mobilising factor in the massive wave of industrial disputes that is currently building.”

He’s absolutely right and even the dogs in the street know it.

Not only is August the month when people are taking a break (or trying to), huge swathes of society have changed their working practice so that the idea of futile presenteeism is redundant.

The Tories and their media seem oblivious to any of this and seem caught in a discourse-loop stalled in about 1973.

The dialogue happens as if the Tories under Thatcher didn’t bring in some of the most sweeping, anti-democratic and punitive legislation against workers' rights, which they did. It was 32 years ago but now Truss and Sunak are outbidding each other to see who can be the most effective Thatcher lookalike. We seemed to have suffered some collective amnesia in which Thatcher wasn’t a widely-hated figure who was driven out of office.

It’s all tragic and farcical. The tragedy is it won’t even work. The farce is they don’t even have to do it.

As Neal Lawson points out: “Keir Starmer’s game isn’t to inspire with hope and a grand vision, but to play a glorified game of whack-a-mole with every possible Tory attack line. He promises, for example, ‘no magic money tree economics’, no nationalisation of public services, that Labour won’t talk to the SNP or deal with Liberal Democrats. And the unions must be held at arm’s length so as not to frighten the horses of the right or some fictional middle England swing voter.”

In Scotland, Scottish Labour could have been making hay out of the whole economic meltdown. They could have pointed at the disgraceful and ongoing situation in which Scotland continues to have by far the highest drug death rate recorded by any country in Europe and five times the rate in England.

The Scottish Government remains under huge pressure as new figures show drug-related deaths fell by just nine, or 1%, to 1330 in 2021. This is a shameful and astonishing situation.

Yet Scottish Labour are stuck with Starmer’s leadership, and the signals it sends to the Scottish electorate, and its own members is a massive turnoff. We are left with the extraordinary scenario in which an SNP government after 15 years in office, and a Tory government after 12 years in Westminster are not put under serious political pressure despite obvious and dire failings. Starmer’s bland Blue Labourism and his constitutional straitjacket makes him completely ineffectual.

YES the notion that trade unions will mass disaffiliate doesn’t seem to be an answer. There is no left-vehicle beyond the Labour Party and the loop-cycle of inventing a new party of the left seems perpetually doomed.

So you have Britain 2022, ravaged by the exploitation of privatised utilities, booming only in loan-sharks and debt collectors – with no political outlet for change – and an incoming prime minister that no-one elected mouthing the rhetoric of Margaret Thatcher.

At least its symmetric. Starmer seems unaccountable to his own party despite disgracefully abandoning its very core principles in a way that would have made even Neil Kinnock or Tony Blair blush into their red rosettes. Sturgeon seems unaccountable for presiding over a drug-deaths epidemic. Truss seems unaccountable as she ascends the throne like a particularly dense Boadicea for a tiny electorate seemingly untroubled by her crushingly obvious and wide-ranging inabilities.

In this Britain, currently in a paroxysm of joy and rapture about the Lionesses, the fact that millions and millions of people are facing destitution while millions of others are being plunged into their first taste of fuel poverty isn’t really important. Nothing will happen.

The profits of Centrica (owner of British Gas): £1,300,000,000, are up by 500% in a single year. While our energy bills are forecast to hit £3850 in the winter, up 200% in a year. Yet nobody is accountable and no-one is moved to action.