Digging Labour's Grave

Commenting about politics, you can only write so much about one thing. 18 months into Keir Starmer's leadership of the Labour Party and we're at this point already. Say what you like about Ed Miliband and what he did in the first third of his time, he at least did things. He announced wonkish wheezes (remember One Nation?). Unlike the Starmerist albatross, he won elections more often than not. Eventually, painfully he got round to announcing policies - some of which were mildly social democratic and Labourist. And he opposed the Tories. The party was mired in soggy centrism and could not break from the triangulating wisdom of recent years, but it wasn't wearying. Leading circles weren't preoccupied with chasing off the party's depleted membership and leaving behind a rump of supplicants competing for recognition from the hallowed parliamentary elite. Starmer invites curses from all corners of the map for inspiring nostalgic feels about this insipid past.

These last two days underline, again, why Labour under Starmer is going nowhere. Asked by Richard Madeley about "fencing off" the "hard left" Corbynites on Good Morning Britain, Starmer bounced around like a blue-panted Action Man with darting eyes. "We changed the rules at Labour conference! We're taking action to bash the party into shape! We're not for chanting slogans but changing lives!" For a moment, he felt the imagined gaze of Peter Mandelson's "millions of voters" who cheered his attacks on party democracy, and a frisson of enthusiasm momentarily flashed through his countenance. Starmer, the man who values his haircut more than his politics has taken one thing from his close cohabitation with the Labour right: a genuine zeal for taking on his party's left wing.

Speaking of slogans, in the time of Starmer we still have them. Except shouting them and writing them on cardboard is so 20th and lefty, man. A professional outfit spends time thinking about message, graphic design, and putting it out where most of the media are - on Twitter. And today's effort? "Labour would tax fairly, spend wisely, and get the economy firing on all cylinders". What even is this trash? Instead of staring starry eyed at the New Labour documentary currently showing on BBC2, the "grown ups" would do better to look at the sorts of sloganeering His Blairness went for back in the day. It might have been vacuous, but they were simple and straightforward. They could fit on a podium, and easily connoted the vibes they wanted to convey. This was a lesson Labour under Corbyn learned, with its "Standing Up, Not Standing By" and "For the Many, Not the Few". Leftist in inspiration, populist in delivery, but sufficiently vague enough not to scare the horses. The only time Starmerism has blundered into pithy statements was last year's cloyingly desperate and unimaginatively blunt "A New Leadership".

And ending where this post began, there are more rumours, yes, more rumours that MPs, drunk with victory and looking to exclude Corbyn permanently from the parliamentary party, want the power to exclude recalcitrant rebels and prevent them from standing for Labour in the future. A measure, it's worth noting, that even Blair did not reach for - despite occasional dark mutterings in this direction. Starmer's stupid enough to cleave to it. But we go down that path and we are in Labour Party split territory. Hundreds of thousands of members with nowhere to go but the SNP, Plaid Cymru, the Greens, new left parties, community organising and protest movements. And with cash rich unions not likely to play bank of mum and dad to ungrateful offspring who take the money with one hand and push them away with the other, the PLP's hard right could get to play out their Change UK-adjacent fantasies. With the same end result.

Cynicism and stupidity interpenetrate one another with such intensity in Starmer's leadership it's impossible to even analytically separate the two. Passing up free shots at goal, like the Tory sewage scandal, the unmitigated disaster of Covid management, the food shortages, energy bill rises, and everything else the Tories are and aren't doing, it's almost as if each egregious failure is the government goading Keir Starmer into having a go. But the path to effective opposition means saying nothing. Yes, this complete failure to fulfil Starmer's constitutional duty demoralises and demobilises the Labour left. But simultaneously imperils the seats of many right wing Labour MPs, assuming they'd like to carry on being MPs. Likewise, treating those who stuck with the party in 2019 as the "wrong voters" is only going to benefit one outfit in contention, and that would be the Tories.

The Earth turns, the sun rises and sets, and Keir Starmer and his allies demonstrate their unfitness to lead the party of opposition into government. We've been here before and we'll be here again until the curtain falls on Starmerism, or on the Labour Party itself.

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