223: The Labour Party is Dead
Centrism will kill us all if it continues
As liberalism collapses, can democracy survive its centrist corpse?
They killed it slowly.
First, by compromise. Then, by calculation.
And finally, by forgetting what it was for.
The Labour Party, like Canada’s NDP, no longer exists in any meaningful form as an agent of democratic or working-class power. What remains is a brand—polished, polished again, and hollowed out. A caretaker of capital. A legacy institution stripped of legacy, estranged from labour, and allergic to conflict with the rich.
This is not simply a political obituary. It’s a signpost.
Because if Labour is dead, then so is liberal democracy as we’ve known it.
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The Collapse of the Centre
For decades, parties of the so-called left were trained to fear powerlessness more than they feared compromise. They drifted to the centre not to win hearts, but to court markets. They promised social equity while managing austerity. They embraced technocracy over transformation.
The result? Obscene wealth concentration, unregulated financialization, and the normalization of fascist rhetoric. Now the centre is collapsing—not just ideologically, but structurally. Its promises have failed. Its managers are mocked. Its authority is evaporating.
In the UK, Labour under Starmer has become little more than a conservative placeholder. In Canada, Mark Carney is poised to do the same: govern competently, but conservatively, managing wealth for the already wealthy.
Yet the issue is no longer how well one manages the economy.
The issue is whether we will redistribute it—before authoritarianism makes that impossible.
Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s new political formation—currently dubbed Your Party—has struck a nerve. Within days of its soft launch, hundreds of thousands signed up. More than a party, it's a provocation: What if we took democracy seriously? What if we built a movement that wasn’t afraid to tax the rich, end empire, and empower the working class?
Early indications suggest this new effort is doing something rare in contemporary politics: offering hope. It’s decentralized, participatory, and shaped by popular input—not just polling and PR consultants. And unlike its centrist predecessors, it dares to talk about housing justice, public ownership, and ceasing arms sales to regimes committing war crimes.
It remains to be seen whether it will survive the inertia of British electoral politics.
But already, it is restoring meaning to the concept of opposition.
The real question is not whether the new British left can win.
The real question is: Can democracy be redeemed?
Because we are past the point of abstract debates about ideology.
We are now in an existential moment for self-governance.
If democracies cannot tax the rich, they will not survive.
If they cannot confront corporate power and redistribute resources, they will fall—
not to revolution, but to reaction.
And while the scale of this challenge is immense, it is dwarfed by what lies ahead.
Climate change will demand the largest redistribution of resources in human history.
Not just between countries, but within them. Not just of wealth, but of power.
Only a democracy that has already learned to redistribute can meet that moment.
Only a society that has practiced collective governance will survive it.
The UK is now a laboratory.
A test case for whether electoral democracy still has life left in it.
In Canada, the political class still pretends that management is enough.
But management is not resistance. It is accommodation.
Carney may soothe markets. He will not stop the fires.
Only solidarity will. Only redistribution will.
And if parties refuse to fight for it, the people will need to build alternatives.
Democracy is not the ability to vote for a manager.
It’s the power to determine our collective future.
The Labour Party is dead.
Long live democracy—if we can make it.
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