That Starmer fella...

I'd put it to you, that to the majority of Labours 'natural constituency', it's an eminently esoteric position.

If you consider Labour's 'natural constituency' to be the trades union movement, you're absolutely right. But that's a reductionist view of Labour, which has always been an alliance between socialists (then later, democratic socialists), social democrats, the TU movement and the Liberal movement. Against those constituencies a blanket position of solidarity with one means rejecting the other.

Whatever the reasoning behind it, the headline is factual, Kier Starmer did sack him, and he was clearly supporting striking rail workers.

But he wasn't sacked for supporting striking rail workers. The headline implies causation when there's at best correlation.

What is the point of Labour being a government in waiting if they're not going to support the working class because of the 'optics'?

Here's the key, isn't it. The working class isn't just those striking - for the most part the working class is not unionised, reads The Sun, and gets less than ten seconds of domestic news a day. And if the Murdoch press uses that ten seconds to say 'its Starmers fault you couldn't get home from your zero hours contract in order to see your underfed kids for three minutes before you go to your night shift as an Uber driver' then you will not vote Labour.

Starmer is in a position where he needs to convince a decent chunk of people who voted Tory last time to vote Labour this time. That means convincing them that our role would not simply be to encourage strikes, but to do a better job of resolving disputes fairly. I think it is fairly obvious that in those negotiations he would be on the side of the workers, but it's catnip to rightwingers if he said it out loud.

You might think that's a cowardly position. You might even be right! But it's clearly a strategy and it's one designed to get us into power. I'm going to at least see if it works.