After Starmergeddon…
Whatever Happens, It’s Time Up For The Labour Right
Source: The Guardian
By Honest John
THERE IS something tragic about the increasingly undignified end to the Keir Starmer premiership. On a personal level, there is sympathy at the sight of someone those who know him describe as “a decent man” in denial, refusing to accept that, despite his best efforts, he has failed and that no one now wants him to be Prime Minister, least of all the electorate, that harshest of judges, who very deliberately delivered their verdict on Starmer at the English local , Welsh Senedd and Scottish Parliamentary elections so emphatically last Thursday. Starmer may also have cause to curse the Labour Party, Labour voters and even the non-Labour electorate who ousted the Tories so dramatically less than two years ago for ingratitude. After all, in a single term, Starmer had led Labour to its second largest majority ever and put an end to a ruinous fourteen year period of Conservative rule, virtually consigning the Tories to electoral oblivion in the process. Starmer may have a justified sense of grievance that, having achieved all this for the centre left, he has not even been permitted to serve two years in the post he had coveted and worked towards for so long - and by his own party too.
But here lies the nub of the whole issue. Starmer’s downfall has been almost entirely self-inflicted. He is not being brought down by the right wing media, by British corporate interests, the bond markets or by shadowy agents of British intelligence: there has been no plot. Sir Keir’s staggering levels of unpopularity have been brought about by his own political miscalculations, his astoundingly poor headline policy choices and a deep sectarianism as he disastrously attached himself to the Labour Right and became their pliant instrument through which it sought to secure control of the Labour Party and, ultimately, government. The real tragedy for Labour perhaps is that the catastrophic errors and wrong-headed policy direction of the Labour Right faction, effectively in charge of government since the election, but utterly dominant after the Cabinet reshuffle last autumn, could well bring the Labour Party down with them.
In a truth now widely acknowledged, summarised in breezy airport paperback style by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund of the machinations of the Labour Right to use Starmer to crush the Corbynite Left in their book Get In, and in a more forensically detailed account, including alleged financial impropriety, in Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, the Starmer “project” was based on falsehood from the start. Identified as early as 2019 by Labour Together, the innocuous sounding think tank that Morgan McSweeny and Peter Reid had decided would be their counter-revolutionary vehicle with which to purge Labour of its Left, Starmer was plucked from his unhappy role as a shadow Cabinet Remainer in the age of Brexit, to become their man to do it. But all was secret. When Starmer ran for the Labour leadership in the wake of Corbyn's crushing General Election defeat that year, he posed as a "respectable" left winger, an electable Corbynite, persuading the Party membership with left populist "pledges" that he could retain the ideals, energy and optimism of Corbynism while ruthlessly taking down the Tories in a way that was clearly beyond Corbyn himself. Starmer won, but he never meant a word of it.
The pledges were forgotten almost as soon as the leadership contest was over, and by the time the Boris Johnson government began to implode, Starmer, with Morgan McSweeney at his side, began to remove policy after policy from Labour’s ambitious social democratic programme that Starmer himself had announced so enthusiastically as recently as the 2022 Party Conference. The following year was characterised by row backs, “ditching” and watering down of the most eye catching and transformative survivals from the Corbyn era. By the time of the 2024 General Election, there was little of significance left and what there was was bounded by masochistic fiscal rules and absurd commitments not to tax or to borrow, a self-imposed fiscal restraint gleefully paraded by Chancellor Rachel Reeves, drunk on Treasury orthodoxy, for the benefit of the bond markets. Despite promising the voters “Change”, the fiscal position adopted by Starmer and Reeves meant that Labour could do little to effect that change thanks to the economic choices they had made.
Once in office, the errors continued. A brutal sectarian war commenced by McSweeney and his Labour Together allies, had removed left wing candidates during the election campaign itself; left wing affiliated groups had been proscribed and members driven out, often with charges of antisemitism, until the former masters of the Labour Party were entirely neutered. McSweeney carried on, ensuring even soft left Cabinet members were briefed against or edged out, with the Labour Right takeover culminating in the September 2025 reshuffle which left only Ed Miliband as a dissenting voice to the brand of neo-Blairite economics and legal authoritarianism that had come to comprise Starmerism.
The problem however was that the Labour Right had no ideas. They constantly looked to the Blair years for inspiration (which was how Peter Mandelson was fatally able to make his malign reappearance) and under McSweeney’s influence, pursued more and more virulent anti-migrant rhetoric, culminating in Shabana Mahmood’s disgraceful “rules changes” in a hapless attempt to attract back long gone Reform voters while driving appalled Labour voters into the arms of the Greens and the Liberal Democrats. The opinion polls illustrating this were ignored, because according to the Mandelson-influenced Labour Right, Labour voters had “nowhere else to go”.
Perhaps the most fatal aspect of Starmer’s premiership, itself reflective of the enormous gap where principle and ideology should lie, was the catastrophic messaging the Starmer operation put out almost immediately, which goes a long way to explain the Prime Minister’s visceral personal unpopularity with the voters. Labour was elected conditionally in 2024, but with hope too - hope that after having indicated for nearly a decade that the public wanted an end to austerity and the rebuilding of public services, they may at last get it. Starmer and Reeves promptly told voters that this was impossible due to the mess left by the Tories. Perhaps the government thought it was being clever - after all traducing your predecessor for the economic mess had served David Cameron well. But voters were in no mood to listen to this. They had finally demolished the Conservatives to secure the change Labour promised, only, it seemed, to be denied yet again. The sense of disappointment with Labour’s constant message of economic gloom was palpable. When this was followed up by seemingly never ending Ministerial freebies scandals, involving Starmer himself, and then a Budget which means- teased pensioners' Winter Fuel Payments, then voters could indeed be forgiven for thinking in the words of Pete Townsend, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." The Winter Fuel decision, stubbornly held onto for twelve months, stigmatised Starmer’s Labour forever in the eyes of many voters.
But of course it didn’t stop there, having given non-committed voters buyers’ remorse almost immediately, the triumphant Labour Right then set about infuriating its own voter base. Having decided to deny herself any means of raising revenue, Reeves then, with Thatcherite predictability, sought large scale public spending cuts to bridge an alleged “black hole” in the public finances. But it wasn’t just any budgets that were targeted, it was cost of living support to disabled people, the so-called PIPs (Personal Independence Payments) she sought to cut, almost calculated to affront and dismay Labour voters. And so the outraged defections from Labour to left alternatives continued.
Perhaps the most puzzling disastrous political choice, in terms of damage to Labour’s voting coalition, was the clear pro-Zionism of so much of the Cabinet at a time when Israel was inflicting genocide on the Palestinians of Gaza. Any criticism of Israel was muted, logistic support to the IDF continued to be provided by the RAF and in a bizarre exercise in legal vindictiveness, the government attempted to categorise pro-Palestinian agitprop students and loud-mouthed pop singers as terrorists, enacting troubling illiberal legal precedent along the way. Arguably morally wrong actions anyway, the pro-Israel stance of Starmer himself and his Ministers (notably David Lammy, Yvette Cooper and Lisa Nandy) drove Labour-voting liberal leftists and Muslims not only to despair but overwhelmingly in the direction of the Greens. The tin ear Starmer displayed to an issue of passionate concern to many Labour supporters remains politically baffling.
And so we here we are: the local elections have almost crippled Labour’s local presence in England and driven it out of power, possibly forever, in Wales. Accepting that there can never be a direct read across from local results to future General Elections, particularly given the low turnouts last week, nonetheless, if the same voting pattern was replicated in three years time at a General Election, at the very least, the U.K. will have a Reform-led government.
So, Keir Starmer - look on his works. Through mendacity, factionalism, outdated economic solutions and the lack of any sort of vision, Starmer has brought the country and his party to this pass, to the absurd situation of Britain very probably having its seventh Prime Minister in ten years. British politics is arguably broken, particularly its First Past The Post electoral system, unable adequately to reflect a multi party landscape, but the failure of successive governments to grasp the issues of inequality, lack of investment, poor economic growth, shrinking living standards, failing public services and lack of personal security, is what has led voters to the non-answers of the far right and the ill-formed utopianism of the Greens. In 2024, Labour had an opportunity that comes but rarely to the centre left - a stonking majority that gave it almost untrammelled power and the opportunity to truly transform society to the benefit of those voters so consistently let down by their political leaders. But Starmer has blown it, attaching himself to a busted flush of a political faction with all the wrong ideas, and continuing the dishonesty through which he won the Labour leadership into government.
The true tragedy is not that of Keir Starmer’s Shakespearean travails, nor the possible electoral demise of the Labour Party, but that once again, the British public have been led up the garden path, testing their faith in Parliamentary democracy to change anything to the limit. Whatever and whoever follows the disastrous tenure of the Labour Right will have to address these issues and attempt to deliver rapid and visible change in the remaining three years of this Parliament. It may indeed be Labour’s last chance.
12th May 2026
