Labour heads for catastrophe

Some of us warned that Starmerism would prove a disaster in power. Well, we were right

Labour just received an absolutely battering.

A Starmer cheerleader - such as they still exist - may say that describing this as an absolute battering is deeply unfair. After all, Reform only won by 6 votes in what was the closest by election in history in post-war history - which is very much the line being pushed by Labour.

But this Labour held constituency was the sixteenth safest seat in Britain. In the general election, Labour won a majority of over 14,500 over Reform UK - securing nearly 53% of the vote compared to just 18% for the Farageists.

And bear in mind this was after Labour won the election overall with just over a third of the vote, winning two thirds of the seats only because of our weird and wacky electoral system. Disillusionment with the offering was also underscored by the fact that this was the lowest turnout in British democratic history.

Based on that swing, Labour would go down from the 411 seats they won in the 2024 election down to a rump of around 156 seats.

Why, less than a year after turfing the Tories out of power, is Labour in meltdown?

It’s very straightforward. The soulless hacks who took over the Labour party have one skill - and that’s destroying. They proved adept at crushing the left - that is, those in Labour who support things like taxing the well off to invest in our crumbling country, public ownership of utilities and services instead of making them cash cows for private profiteers, not saddling young people with debt because they aspire to a university education society as a whole benefits from, tackling poverty, and having a just foreign policy, rather than say, arming genocide

But the teeny tiny little problem is they didn’t actually have a vision. Destroying, tearing down - sure, they can do that. Building something else - even a basic idea of what sort of country they’d like to create - well, there’s nothing there. The cupboard is empty. Which is why amongst other things we’ve ended up with a Labour government which has variously declared war on pensioners, children and disabled people. Yes, really taking the fight to the people who need to be fought there.

Nigel Farage is understandably triumphant mode. “What does he actually believe in?” Farage asks of Starmer, denouncing Labour for having “no conviction.”

Farage’s strategy is clear: expose Starmer as a principle-free zone. That strategy is likely to be effective because it is true. This is someone who wanted to become prime minister for its own sake, and indeed made a pact with the most obnoxious elements of the Labour party. The agreement was he’d outsource the politics to them and he’d be the frontman who could look terribly important and jet around the world trying to look like a statesman.

Indeed, these dead behind the eyes hacks who run the Labour party briefed two Times journalists that Keir Starmer thought he was driving the train, but in fact they’d sat him at the front of the driverless Docklands Light Railway.

What Farage then goes on to do, of course, is direct people’s very justifiable anger at the state of the country to migrants, to people from other countries. The surge in people arriving on the Channel in small boats has everything to do with our rulers deciding to scrap safe and legal routes.

Listening to Prof John Curtice, Britain’s pre-eminent polling expert, it’s clearly entirely plausible that Farage could end up in No. 10. Indeed, the Tories face an existential threat from a party which may replace them.

And if Farage does become PM, it’s because of Labour’s catastrophic inability to offer solutions to a country devastated by stagnating and falling living standards, public services ravaged by austerity and underinvestment, and other injustices of a broken economic order.

As Henry Zeffman, chief political correspondent of the BBC reports, one Labour campaigner in Runcorn and Helsby said: “On every door it was the same story - winter fuel and PIP.” PIP is personal independence payment, the support given to disabled people which Labour has decided to confiscate from so many, leading to a predicted surge in poverty of 400,000.

Strikingly, Labour’s collapse in support is being overwhelmingly driven by the party attacking the welfare state.

Bear in mind they’ve also kept the two child benefit cap which drives hundreds of thousands of kids into poverty, and they even booted out seven Labour MPs who voted to get rid of it.

Is that what people expect from a Labour government, deliberately driving elderly people, disabled people and children into hardship and squalor?

As Ros Jones, who narrowly held the Doncaster Mayoralty for Labour said:

I wrote as soon as the winter fuel allowance was actually mooted, and I said it was wrong, and therefore I stepped in immediately and used our household support fund to ensure no-one in Doncaster went cold during the winter....I think the results here tonight will demonstrate that they need to be listening to the man, woman and businesses on the street, and actually deliver for the people, with the people.

So, is there any sense of contrition from our rulers, any sense of a change of course? Keir Starmer’s response is to double down on Labour’s disastrous course, committing to going “further and faster” in the direction that voters clearly despise.

And then there’s this absolute gold. Lee Harpin is a journalist who consistently spins for Starmer in a really crude tribute act to Comical Ali, and part of me just thinks Labour HQ should put him out of his misery and give him a job.

Anyway, he tweeted: “Labour source: 'Some of the new intake need to learn what it's like to be in the trenches. Taking time off, not campaigning because it's recesss. Maybe some of them would be better off in private sector jobs' .”

Amazing. Labour stitched up parliamentary selections to parachute in their chosen goons, to be their loyal voting fodder. They crushed the left, claiming it was about quality control. A Labour source was once quoted saying: “This isn’t factional. We just aren’t insulting voters with piss poor candidates anymore.”

And now they’re briefing that their own stooges, who they parachuted in, are crap. That is very funny.

And according to the Financial Times:

Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, will pore over the results today and is likely to conclude that he is right to pursue a “Blue Labour” strategy to address the populist threat — a policy which is already starting to be deployed.

So the guy in charge of a Labour strategy which has led to disaster responds to that disaster by… stating the said disastrous strategy has been vindicated.

Some of you might understandably ask - what is Blue Labour? In theory it’s supposed to be about fusing social conservatism with left-wing economics, but there is no left-wing economics here, so it’s social conservatism combined with clobbering pensioners, disabled people and children among others.

This Blue Labour strategy is the same strategy Morgan McSweeney has already had, and it’s going down like a vat of sick.

Labour are clearly going to conclude they need to bash migrants more. But this strategy has been deployed over and over again in the UK and beyond with disastrous results. Labour and the Tories tried doing this in the 2010s and they drove the rise of Farage and Brexit, while in countries across Europe, mainstream politicians in France, Germany, Austria, you name it, thought they could defuse the radical right by raiding their rhetoric and policies on immigration. But all they did is shift the political conversation on to exactly the terms the hardcore right wanted - legitimising them and their arguments.

What we need instead is an alternative vision that inspires people, that offers actual solutions to people’s problems, not least by forcing the well off to contribute more so we can invest in people, communities, services, infrastructure. That’s how we deal with the understandable disillusionment and anger which Farage and his crew are feeding off - by actually trying to improve people’s living standards.

The truth is Keir Starmer is one of the great political frauds of our time. He won the Labour leadership after pretending to be Jeremy Corbyn’s buddy and promising to keep radical domestic policies like taxing the rich and public ownership and scrapping tuition fees.

He then crushed his internal opponents and ensured the parliamentary Labour party was full of careerist drones who would do as they’re told.

He was handed the general election on a plate thanks to the Tories destroying themselves, and even then only won a third of the vote. And when in power, rather than trying to fix the country, he decided to give a beating to pensioners, children and disabled people. Meanwhile, him and his cronies were being showered by freebies from the likes of rich donors like Lord Ali.

This is what they fought so hard and bitterly to take the Labour party back for, and they thought it would prove devastatingly popular - that this was the brand of politics voters are crying out for.

Well, instead Starmer’s government is one of the most unpopular in British democratic history, and it has no plan or vision so it can get out of this hole.

But that doesn’t mean all the criticism needs to go Labour’s way. The left - those of us who believe in a society run in the interests of the majority, not the elites - need to get our act together. The Green Party at the moment is simply failing to build on its breakthrough at the last election - its leadership is invisible, there’s no cut through messages, no attempt to harness people’s anger and direct it in a different direction.

If the left as a whole don’t get our act together, then we face Labour imploding - and the hard right triumphing. Well, time’s running out.