By-election disaster shows Labour is finished. A new politics is being born
Few British prime ministers have been handed such a magnificent opportunity as Keir Starmer after Labour’s election victory in July 2024. With a parliamentary majority approaching 200 seats, he had a chance to reshape Britain.
Just 18 months later, Starmer is one of the most despised premiers in British history.
There had been deep concern about Starmer’s survival as prime minister well before last night’s by-election calamity in Gorton and Denton.
He is probably safe for the next few weeks, because no sensible Labour MP, no matter how ambitious, will wish to assume the leadership ahead of this May’s local elections. Thereafter, it’s hard to see how he can survive.
It could have been so different. Starmer was elected prime minister on the back of a wave of national disgust at the corrupt, chaotic, immoral and incompetent Tories.
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Starmer could have turned his election victory into a moment of national renewal, fighting for social justice, decency, clean politics and (echoing Robin Cook, who resigned from Tony Blair’s cabinet rather than support the invasion of Iraq) an ethical foreign policy.
Starmer chose not to do this. Instead, he waged a factional war against the Labour left. He carried out policies favoured by Labour donors rather than members.
Rather than fight the far right, he copied its politics and employed its language. He bet the house on Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. He hollowed out the Labour Party and destroyed its soul.
Brutal calculation
Starmer’s key adviser through this long tragedy was Morgan McSweeney, a protege of now-disgraced Peter Mandelson.
McSweeney, following Mandelson, despised Labour’s traditional voters and went out of his way to humiliate the Labour left.
McSweeney was a special expert in the politics of personal destruction, as expertly exposed in Paul Holden’s masterpiece of investigative journalism, The Fraud.
Al Jazeera’s Labour Files also set out the sheer nastiness of the McSweeney machine, highlighting the contemptuous handling of Black and Muslim voters - so ugly that it suggested Labour might have been targeting the racist vote.
The June 2023 deselection of Jamie Driscoll, the former North of Tyne mayor, was an early example of the vindictiveness of Starmer and McSweeney. But even that did not come close to the ill treatment meted out to Faiza Shaheen, deselected as Labour’s candidate after she’d begun campaigning in Chingford and Woodford Green.
Former Prime Minister Harold Wilson once famously remarked that Labour is a moral crusade or it is nothing. Starmer’s mistake was to worship power at all costs.
He campaigned for the leadership as a Corbynite candidate, but turned viciously on the left the moment he won.
Advised by McSweeney, Starmer employed the vile language of the far right (such as warning that Britain risks becoming “an island of strangers”) to appeal to racist voters.
The calculation was brutal: decent Labour supporters had nowhere else to go. McSweeney himself gave the appearance of positively rejoicing as he drove left-wing voters out of Labour.
Staking a claim
Last night proves that this was a terrible miscalculation. Labour supporters have fled the party in their millions, and it is doubtful they will ever come back.
Hannah Spencer, the newly elected Green MP for Gorton and Denton, is a case in point. “I am a plumber,” she said in her acceptance speech on Friday. “I am no different to every single person here in this constituency. I work hard.” Starmer’s Labour had nothing to offer her.
Her message was authentic and so much more powerful than Starmer’s own attempts to package himself as a toolmaker’s son. Under Starmer, Labour has turned its back on the working class.
We are starting to see the shape of a new politics. Corbyn's Your Party, along with other leftist national parties, will be part of a broad popular alliance led by Polanski
And it is not just Starmer whose position is in peril. The same applies to the Labour Party itself.
Gaza matters a great deal. From early on, the British public wanted a ceasefire. The Labour government’s refusal even to acknowledge that Israel is committing war crimes, still less that it is committing genocide, has turned Labour (along with Kemi Badenoch’s Tories) into the party of atrocity denial.
Ever since Jeremy Corbyn told a cheering crowd at the 2017 Glastonbury Festival that “another world is possible”, we’ve known there is a national audience for a radical politician who can make the case for decency.
Last night, Green leader Zack Polanski staked his claim.
We are starting to see the shape of a new politics. Corbyn’s Your Party, along with other leftist national parties, will be part of a broad popular alliance led by Polanski. With Labour in collapse, and the Tories joining Reform on the racist far right, Polanski may find himself prime minister sooner than he expects.
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