Owen Jones has no patience with those who are praising resigning UK prime minister Keir Starmer as a principled person of integrity who was unlucky and undone by circumstances.
No. This was not a decent man defeated by circumstance, a man of duty and integrity who was simply in the wrong job, a principled leader undone by events. This was an unprincipled politician who abandoned promises with as much enthusiasm as he trousered freebies from rich donors.
…Starmer was a frontman for a Labour-right operation whose purpose was clear: persuade a leftwing membership to hand the party back to those who despised everything it had just stood for.
…To win over the membership, Starmer’s campaign promised tax hikes for the top 5%, public ownership of utilities, abolition of tuition fees, “an immigration system based on compassion and dignity”, human rights “at the heart of foreign policy”, and the abolition of the House of Lords. In power, Starmer has either failed to deliver on these promises or done the opposite.
Soon after being elected leader, Starmer suspended his predecessor from the party before finally expelling him in 2023, claiming that he and Corbyn had never been friends and distancing himself from his previous leadership pledges. This was deceit, not pragmatism. When he stood for leader, Starmer told the BBC that nationalisation of utilities was a pledge that would be in the next Labour manifesto. The following year, he denied ever saying this, and told the BBC: “I never made a commitment to nationalisation, I made a commitment to common ownership.”
The party would be a “broad church”, Starmer had promised. Instead, he suspended Labour MPs or prevented candidates from running for making comments critical of the state of Israel, and opposing the two-child benefit cap. His machine blocked leftwingers from standing, such as Faiza Shaheen and Lauren Townsend.
…As for his claim that he took over a Labour party that was “morally bankrupt”, he was the human rights lawyer who said that Israel had a right to cut off power and water to Gaza.
…His government broke promise after promise. Its housebuilding revolution failed to materialise. “No return to austerity” gave way to departmental squeezes. International aid was gutted. Meanwhile, Labour’s internal authoritarianism was exported to the country. Thousands were arrested for holding placards after anti-genocide direct action group Palestine Action were proscribed as terrorists on the same legal footing as Islamic State.
…Starmer believed in little other than his own advancement, a trait hardly uncommon among Labour MPs. The danger is that his dismal, disreputable premiership laid the foundations for the hard-right agenda of Nigel Farage. We will soon discover whether the next occupant of No 10, Andy Burnham, believes the answer is simply to paint a northern, charismatic gloss over a failed agenda. If he fails to offer a decisive break from this useless travesty of a government then he, too, will sink.
Yes.
Meanwhile Burnham’s pick for chief of staff is not good sign and seems to indicate that he will try and continue the Blair-Starmer policies of catering to the right. If that turns out to be the case, Labour is doomed and we can expect Reform to win the next election and Nigel Farage to be the next prime minister.
Why has Labour become such a pale parody of the US Democrats?
The British muckraking magazine ‘Private Eye’ has a podcast about the resignation, you will recognise the editor from ‘*Have I Got News For You*’.
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“Coup, What A Scorcher! Private Eye on Sir Keir’s resignation… and Andy Burnhams ascension to power” (40 minutes)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=N1Xjryp1Ehc
Pierce R. Butler @ 1
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Jamelle Bouie: “Keir Starmer is a Cautionary Tale (For Democrats)”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=LNFic3cTD4E&si=CMPQHEWJb7DkqDpt
While I certainly agree that Labour would be doomed, I think we’re starting to see some question marks around whether Mr Farage can hold it together long enough -- the fundamental problem being that politics is a team sport, and he is very much not a team player. The break-up with Rupert Lowe (leading to the formation of the Restore UK party, which effectively split the right-wing vote in Makerfield) may just be the first of many. I would not be at all surprised to see Mr Farage flounce off from Reform to found yet another new party (I have literally lost count at this point) if things don’t go entirely his way.
Of course, this may just be wishful thinking on my part.
Because exactly the same institutional forces are in operation on both sides of the Atlantic.
Dunc @#4 Farage owns the Reform Party outright, so it will be other people that flounce off or are ejected. He is studiously avoiding the press at the moment, which maybe because he doesn’t want to answer questions about the £3 million donation he received from a British, but overseas donor between categorically denying he was going to stand in the last election and deciding to stand.
Everything looks choreographed.
We have multiple parties, yet with one exception, their manifesti are next to impossible to tell apart. Which is exactly what you would expect to see if they had all been accepting money from the same people, in return for writing manifesto promises “just the way you like them”. When you vote, you aren’t choosing policies; they were chosen in advance, and you’re just choosing the faces who will be delivering them.
I don’t even know what we can do about this, because everything assumes there is always going to be someone to whom the government ultimately answers.