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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Now, no doubt, we watch as the same people who undermined Corbyn to install Starmer pick that playbook straight up again to try and ensure Burnham's failure. Because to them, the people must be silenced.
I understand why many people on the left feel betrayed by Starmer. He campaigned for the Labour leadership on a platform that was considerably to the left of where he ultimately positioned the party. It is entirely reasonable to criticise him for abandoning pledges, centralising control, or for his specific decisions on welfare, protest legislation, and foreign policy.
Where I part company with this analysis is the assumption that there is only one possible explanation for those changes: deliberate, day-one dishonesty.
Between Starmer becoming leader in 2020 and entering government in 2024, the UK navigated the aftermath of Labour's worst electoral defeat since 1935, a global pandemic, an energy crisis, war in Europe, and soaring inflation. It is fair to argue that Starmer responded to those events badly, timidly, or by unnecessarily sacrificing progressive commitments. But it does not automatically follow that every policy shift was evidence of bad faith from the outset.
The central question is whether Starmer's trajectory was a calculated deception, or whether it reflected a political judgement, right or wrong, that Labour needed a drastic course correction to become electorally viable under First-Past-the-Post.
The difficulty with the original critique is that it leaves no room for political complexity or competing interpretations. Every action is retrofitted into a pre-existing conclusion: dropping pledges proves dishonesty; moderating policy proves service to elites; electoral caution proves bad faith.
A balanced assessment should weigh the whole record. One can believe Starmer made serious political errors and mismanaged his coalition, ultimately leading to the collapse in colleague confidence that forced his resignation, while still acknowledging achievements the left spent years demanding. The introduction of major employment protections and stronger tenant rights are real policy shifts that cannot simply be brushed aside.
A commentator should not have to like Starmer to acknowledge facts that cut against their argument, nor should doing so require abandoning criticism. The problem is not criticism itself. The problem is when criticism becomes so totalising that every achievement is discounted, every compromise becomes a betrayal, and every event is interpreted through a rigid moral framework.
Ironically, this totalising framework is precisely the criticism that the activist left has spent years making of the mainstream media. The complaint has long been that mainstream outlets view politics through a narrow ideological lens, minimise contradictory data, and present complex events as a simplistic morality play between heroes and villains.
Yet, some sections of the activist left now appear to be doing exactly the same thing from the opposite direction. If we object to newspapers ignoring evidence that complicates their narrative, then we should also object when left-wing commentators ignore evidence that challenges theirs.
This is precisely why large parts of the contemporary activist left struggle to build lasting political coalitions. When partial victories are dismissed as insufficient and every disagreement is treated as evidence of bad faith, it results in a style of politics that is excellent at identifying enemies but far less successful at persuading allies or winning durable public support.
If every politician who delivers 60% of what you want is denounced as an authoritarian traitor, then eventually there is nobody left to work with. You end up shooting yourself in both feet and wondering why you cannot move forward.
BBC political reporters, Becky Morton and Brian Wheeler, managed to write 3,000 words on how Starmer ‘failed to connect with the public’ without once mentioning the Gaza genocide.
Owen Jones played the clip of him in DC introducing Mandelson. "We call him Pete", with a big stupid grin on his big stupid face. He had no empathy for Epstein's victims either. And even less for the elderly Jewish woman on her deathbed (described in Holden's book 'Fraud') who was slandered as an anti-semite in her dying hours. I think she had better things to have on her mind in that time, but Starmer and his soulless droids thought otherwise.
And now we have the enigma of Burnham who seems to have mythologised his Mayorship into a heaven on earth on the basis of a bus service and private apartment building - ignore the state of Gatley and Wythenshaw or the town centres of Rochdale, Oldham, Bolton and Wigan. The true believers in Labour seem to want to see him as a force of nature who will transform their fortunes, drive back Reform and Restore and see off the Greens. So much hope invested in so little achievement.
Should he tack left in anty real sense he will have hell unleashed on him. The 'Labour Together' gang are still there and running the party machinary with easy access to the political journalists waiting for the stories to print about Andy's problems and issues. For the time beeing they are keeping their heads down and waiting. McSweegan et al will be developing their approach to incorporating Burnham or destroying him. They can't help themselves. It is their cultural and psychic instinct.
All quite true McIntosh. But I don't think we need worry about the slippery shape-shifter, Andy Burnham suffering any political or moral dilemmas. He will be fully on board with the existing policies of Labour's billionaire donors, ie, ever-greater income and wealth disparity, permanent austerity for most of us, privatising the NHS, and backing fully the military industrial complex and Deep State full time UK bureaucracy who are preparing us for open war with nuclear superpower ,Russia ,circa 2029/30.
And as you say, most of the claims about Andy Burnham's supposed "triumph" as Manchester mayor is pure hype and tosh. Andy, and his Labour council pals gave most of the public grant cash supposedly for affordable housing to ONE developer, who built luxury flats , not affordable ones. Hardly any genuine social housing was built during Burnhams' tenure as mayor. Unfortunately a couple of years of Andy overseeing all the same dire stuff as Starmer will finally kill the Labour Party , and usher in a pretty loony racist, authoritarian, ultra neoliberalism on steroids Far Right, Argentina-style, government.
Starmer has left the Labour Party politically, financially and morally bakrupt. Can't think where I heard that before. First time it was said it was for effect and to create a mythology. Now it is true.
It's been pretty comprehensively documented that Starmer was adopted as the front man for a project to drive the left out of the party, and he willingly accepted the deal. You can criticise that on the basis of it being a 'narrative', but it's one that fits the available evidence rather well.
No amount of attempting to sloganise "Labour's worst electoral defeat since 1935" (as if the context of Brexit did not exist, and as if their previous one weren't their best result since before the shine wore off Blair's grimace); no amount of invoking the protective demon of "first part the post"; no amount of frankly transparent apologetics, can negate the impact of the uncomfortable central facts.
Starmer won a huge majority on a shallow vote share and then took his party's poll position on a continuous, precipitous downward trajectory, literally attacking his own party and its natural supporting coalition, trying to appease the natural voters of its opponents instead, and making some of the most egregious and blatant political missteps imaginable. If we're to assume incompetence rather than malice here, then the sheer magnitude of wilful incompetence which we need to assume in order to explain the facts is pushing into superhuman territory. Indeed the incompetence requires errors of judgement which are almost indistinguishable from the malice that our blogger writes of; so why bother making a distinction so slight that you need laboratory grade equipment to measure it?
Starmer ran his premiership unapologetically for the Labour Right Wing and its paymasters first, the citizens a distant second, and for the future electability of his party almost not at all. That reality was proudly displayed to everyone. And this is the inevitable result.
Taking up the point of Labours worst electoral defeat since 1935, 2019 is a neverending source of fascination for me, because although 2024 gave Starmer a massive majority of MPs, it was hardly a ringing endorsement by the electorate, as subsequent public attitudes have shown.
Starmer is totally detested across whole swathes of the electorate. His great electoral victory had 3million votes less than Corbyn achieved in 2017, and 1.2 million less in 2019. It should also be noted that Starmer had just over 20% of the electorate behind his 2024 victory, again notably less than Corbyn.
Of course we know and accept that Corbyn lost and Starmer won in the electoral test, but only one can claim the moral high ground and it isn't the one who occupied the role of a useless, incompetent, dissembling, lackey of foreign governments, genocide apologist and enabler, at the expense of the civil liberties of British citizens.
I mean when the 40% is so bad it sets the ground for the far-right to destroy the 60% then yeah, denouncing him as an authoritarian traitor feels entirely justified. Have we really learned nothing from the while Biden débâcle ?
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