Labour Traitors Rising In Polls - Time For A Reminder!

The Irish Labour Party has got a little bump in the polls - seems like some people need a reminder just how horrible Labour have been and how they betray the working class whenever they get a sniff of power.

“It’s an historic day for the Labour Party. This is the first election in the history of the state that the Labour Party is going to emerge as the second largest” said Eamon Gimore when the 2011 election saw Labour get its highest vote in a century, going from 20 seats to 37.

After campaigning as a stand-alone party they immediately changed tack and went in with Fine Gael - tying themselves to a party that was determined to save capitalism at huge cost to the working people of Ireland. Fine Gael and Labour had promised to burn the bondholders and renegotiate with the IMF and EU. They did no such thing.

The government attacked lone parents, cutting child benefit, increasing VAT and cutting public services - but it was the introduction of water charges by Fine Gael/Labour that was the last straw for people.

In May 2014 they had been punished in the local elections, but the austerity budgets of the previous years had seen their party lose TDs who came under pressure from their constituents: Willie Penrose had quit over the closure of an army barracks and Tommy Broughan had voted against the bank guarantee scheme. Gilmore stepped down and was replaced by Joan Burton.

“If somebody is 14 or 15 years of age, and perhaps they’re not doing very well in school, what happens in the current climate of jobs, they tend to drift out of school and end up not working (and become) dependent on social welfare,” said Joan Burton when she became Minister for Welfare.

Social welfare, she claimed, was becoming a “lifestyle choice”. This was a Labour Party minister echoing the right wing Tory line on welfare supports to justify a raft of policies designed to hound the poorest people into unpaid and low-paid work. This was especially insulting considering most people on the dole queues after 2008 were people who had been working in the construction industry and had lost their jobs through no fault of their own.

Instead of blaming the bankers, they attacked the working class.

“This always happens at the end of a protest, the fu****g dregs decide not to finish it.” said Joan Burton’s assistant Karen O’Connell. The “dregs” were the people of Jobstown, a working class estate in Dublin South West. When Burton visited Jobstown in November 2014 her car was surrounded by local water charges protesters leading to their arrest and trial, including TD Paul Murphy.

Jobstown is one of the poorest and most neglected estates in Ireland and people were legitimately angry that the Labour Party had been destroying working class communities with vicious austerity. The right wing media went into overdrive describing the sit-down protest as if it was something from ‘Black Hawk Down’.

Burton even gave testimony against the protesters in court - who were eventually cleared of the charge of false imprisonment. She tried to get them locked up.

Joan Burton stepped down, a vilified and despised leader of the Labour Party, to be replaced by Brendan Howlin. Howlin took over a decimated party, destroyed by doing the work of the establishment. Labour would have to fight hard to rebuild, especially in the poorest estates.

He stepped down on February 12th 2020. Alan “AK47” Kelly was to take his place. “Power is a drug . . . it suits me” he’d said in a newspaper interview. As Minister of the Environment, Community and Local Government it was his job to get water charges through. At one point he even threatened to take the hated charge from working people’s wages.

The party chose a path to recovery - they’d appeal to middle class voters on social issues while remaining a useless barrier to progress on economic inequality. They’d use their control of the trade unions to block working class struggle while mouthing support for progressive legislation like Marriage Equaliy and Repeal.

This strategy just pushes some poor people into the arms of the far right as they associate progressive values with hypocrites and working class traitors. Thankfully most workers don’t want to go back to the dark days of Church control.

But we have to call out Labour for this hypocrisy!

Labour felt they needed a D4 makeover - so they stuck posh lawyer Ivana Bacik up front. Who better to woo the voters of middle class Dublin and court the votes of young people who didn’t remember the austerity years?

In the century since James Connolly first proposed the creation of a party for workers Labour have spent their time holding back struggle and demoralising the working class once in power.

A leopard can’t change its spots. As Connolly once wrote:

“It’s not a Labour party the workers need. It’s a revolutionary party pledged to overthrow the capitalist class in the only way it can be done by putting up barricades and taking over factories by force. There is no other way.”

Labour sabotage the working class when they’re out of power, using control of major unions like SIPTU to do it. And then when they get into government they become advocates of the most vicious austerity.

So whatever you do, don’t vote Labour!