A See Ya to Keir

I felt many emotions seeing Keir Starmer announce his resignation outside Downing Street on Monday morning. Not one of them was sympathy. For those who've spent the day celebrating the Prime Minister, demanding we respect the human frailties of a hard-done-to public servant, of Starmer's cracking voice as he struggled through the last few lines of his speech, there's a straightforward reply. Where was his respect and sympathy for the protestors ruthlessly designated as terrorists, for the refugees and trans people he's kicked up and down the country like political footballs, for the disabled people he terrified by threatening them with destitution, with the Palestinians whose genocide he abetted and publicly justified?

It's funny how tributes to Starmer studiously avoid all mention of these things. That offered by George Eaton typifies the trend. This Labour government is "surprisingly left wing" but is never "identified as such", framing the failure of Starmer as a matter of comms. As if left wing politics is about tractor production figures, and not challenging class power and expanding the realm of human freedom. Something that even post-war Labourism in its finest hours did. For every watered-down gain in workplace rights can be opposed by Starmer's chilling and dangerous clampdowns on collective liberties and personal autonomy. A legacy to be repudiated and undone to be sure.

Authoritarianism is just one thing Starmer will be remembered for. The other is his dishonesty. Boris Johnson was left holding Keir's beer has he brazenly lied throughout his time as leader. It began when Starmer unveiled the policy pledges that won him Labour's leadership, and then spent the next few years disowning every single one. No one, not even a Tory leader has so gracelessly abandoned the platform that got them into office. The signs were there early on, and some were sharp enough to draw the right conclusions. The two obvious ones were his refusal to come clean about his main donors during the leadership campaign who, quelle surprise, turned out to be wealthy businessmen. And his first foray into criticising the Tories over their Covid crisis management showed whose side Starmer was on. Weak, pathetic, and arguably peddled in bad faith, it was a studied effort in refraining from upsetting the apple cart. These proved to be the touchstones how Starmer would conduct himself in high office. Thanks to a combination of meticulous journalism and arrogant boasting, we have a good idea of the extent to which the people behind Starmer defamed and harassed critics, and manipulated outcomes with the full support and connivance of British politics journalism.

There is one aspect of politics Starmer did prove rather good at. That was the neutralisation and dispersal of Labour's solid bloc of left wing votes. It's no word of exaggeration that large sections of official politics lost their minds after Jeremy Corbyn's better-than-forecast performance in 2017, and even after 2019, 10-and-a-quarter million votes for a left programme were far too many. Starmer's tenure can be read as a ceaseless effort to take the coalition assembled by Corbyn and unpick it. Every abandonment of Starmer's socialist-sounding pledges, every betrayal, funnelled the official politics of opposition into narrower and narrower channels. With each one came despondency, of a layer here, a layer there falling away. The big break, of course, was Starmer's unqualified support for Israel's genocide against the Palestinian people. From opposition he cheered it on, and large chunks of Muslim and progressive opinion decisively broke with Labour. This culminated in a miserably thin manifesto, dubbed Change, that promised anything but, and Labour got the result it got. Fewer votes than Corbyn's Labour at its most damaged and self-sabotaging, and as with all governments the only way was down. Helped by Starmer going after pensioners' winter fuel payments from the off, making summer speeches about more pain to come, and then vigorously defending his right to the perks of office. Labour's coalition continued flaking, and now thanks to Starmer's arrogance and straightforward commitment to the authoritarian class politics of capital, the party for the first time faces a viable challenger to its left.

Those are the reasons why Starmer has folded. He lost the confidence of his colleagues because his ruination of Labour's vote means many members of the PLP were set on being one-term wonders. Who could have known that a strategy for dispersing your party's support would ... disperse your party's support? If Starmer is lucky, he'll only be remembered as the most dishonest and authoritarian PM in British political history. Because if the damage done cannot be repaired by his successor(s), Starmer's entry in the history books will be as the man who killed Labour.

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