Starmer's vile post-Gorton and Denton meltdown

The cornered prime minister descends into the gutter

After being thrashed in Gorton and Denton by the Green Party, Keir Starmer had two main options.

He could have delivered a speech saying that he had heard voters’ anger, understood that they wanted change from the government, and would both listen and act.

After all, he has just lost one of the safest Labour seats. Both Gorton and Denton have been represented by Labour for generations. His party came third, its share of the vote halving, and the Greens secured one of the biggest swings in a post-war byelection.

Keir Starmer did not choose this option. He chose another approach.

This basically involves telling voters to go take a jump. It’s actually worse than that. He declared:

I will not stop fighting the extremes of politics, the extreme on the right in Reform, the extreme of the left in the Green party.

Because, of course, demonising and scapegoating migrants is just the same as supporting increased taxes on the rich, public investment, public ownership, tackling the climate emergency by raising living standards, workers’ rights, and not arming a genocide.

But the way he spat out “the left” was instructive. It was with far more viciousness than how he uttered “the right”. Which makes sense, because his response to Reform has simply been to ape their migrant-bashing - but the left, on the other hand, he regards as politically illegitimate. After all, his entire leadership was based on defeating the left with naked deceit and duplicity.

He denounced the Greens for “divisive, sectarian politics” - more on the latter shortly - but this is a little rich from the man who raids the rhetoric of Enoch Powell and is introducing one of the harshest asylum systems in Europe.

This is the same man who - back in 2020 - said:

When you lose an election in a democracy, you deserve to.

You don’t look at the electorate and ask them: ‘what were YOU thinking?’.

You look at yourself, and ask ‘what were WE doing?’.

It seems this only applies if it can be used to justify marching rightwards.

It gets worse though - much worse.

In a letter to Labour MPs, for some reason he decided to rant about George Galloway, and again take aim at the Green party’s evidenced-based alternative to the failed war on drugs.

But, outrageously, he denounced the Greens for “sectarian politics”. This is known as a dog whistle. Starmer is referring here to engagement with Muslim voters. Principally he means the Greens campaigning against Israel’s genocide, which many non-Muslims - myself included - are affronted by.

The other piece of evidence is that they printed a leaflet featuring Keir Starmer palling around with anti-Muslim bigot, the Indian leader Narendra Modi, who is linked to the killings of potentially thousands of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. In the 2021 Batley and Spen by election, Labour candidate Kim Leadbeater’s campaign doing exactly the same, except with Boris Johnson palling around with Modi.

Muslim voters are allowed to have concerns and interests, and politicians in a democracy can legitimately seek to answer them. The strategy is to make other voters panic about a big scary agitated Muslim menace.

It is striking that those who conflate Israel and Jewish Brits have the cheek to pontificate about this. Why is using this wrongheaded conflation when supposedly soliciting votes from Jewish Brits not religious sectarianism, but opposing genocide apparently is religious sectarianism?

But I am worried, because it’s clear that the hardcore right and Starmer’s crew are going to go hard on Islamophobia to drive back the Green surge. They will whip up bigotry and community division if that’s what it takes to crush the left. Here’s another example of why there is no compromise to be had with these political disgraces.

PS I talked about some of this on Channel 5 earlier: