The UK’s Likely Next Prime Minister Is Waging a Racist War Against the Left

He was once happy to campaign for Corbyn to be prime minister, even serving in the shadow cabinet in a high-profile shadow Brexit minister role. Now he won’t even allow the veteran left-winger to stand as the party’s candidate in Islington North, expelling him from the party instead.

In the aftermath of the bruising 2019 general election defeat, Starmer defended the former Labour leader, claiming that the press had “vilified” him. Aware that Corbyn had won not one but two leadership contests with landslide majorities, Starmer positioned himself as the unity candidate in the 2020 leadership election, pledging to maintain many key policies from the Corbyn era. But, from taxing the rich to the abolition of university tuition fees, he has abandoned almost all of the pledges he ran on.

At 21, Starmer proclaimed, “Just as there must be a pluralist socialism in today’s world, there must be a pluralist Labour Party if it is to play any part in the transition to socialism.” But four decades on, “pluralism” is as ugly a word as “socialism” in the Labour Party.

The enforced erosion of dissent, vital for a healthy party and a democratic society, will not bode well for a future Labour Government. Veteran journalist Michael Crick, a self-described centrist, has been following Labour’s purge closely, labeling it one of the most shameful episodes in modern Labour Party history. In a recent interview, he made an astute observation about the danger ahead” “If all you have is yes-people there, then you end up making bad decisions. Nobody challenges the Prime Minister. Nobody challenges the party leadership. And that is a sure recipe for bad decisions.”

These days, Starmer is keen to emphasise his Blairite credentials. But the country is in a much worse state than when Blair took power in 1997. And Starmer’s personal ratings are much lower than Blair’s. At present, nearly half the country think Starmer would make “a bad prime minister”—powerful evidence that the landslide majority he seems certain to win is a testament to just how disgusted Britons are with the Tories rather than a tribute to his political charms.

Labour will enter government with declining economic growth, an escalating ecological crisis, and numerous domestic crises to solve, from healthcare to housing.

The party plasters the word “change” across its campaign literature, but in many policy areas it promises more of the same. It intends to stick to Tory tax-and-spend plans, boxing itself in with a self-imposed straitjacket in the name of fiscal responsibility. According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, what this means in practice is £20 billion in cuts per year.

Britain has already suffered the longest period of wage stagnation since the Napoleonic wars and the worst squeeze on living standards since the 1950s. Voters want transformative change, not sticking plasters for gaping wounds. An incoming Labour government that refuses to address this is merely sowing the seeds of its own destruction.

In his book Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, political scientist Peter Mair identified a democratic rollback that had taken place in the West. Turnout had fallen, and apathy—alongside hostility to politics and politicians altogether—had grown. Mair attributed this process to the capture of political parties by a centrist technocratic tendency that discouraged mass participation.

This was certainly a tendency that Tony Blair embraced, whether through sidelining anti-war protesters and trade unions or ceding control of the Bank of England and embracing bureaucrats in Brussels. Starmer seeks to do the same, manufacturing indifference and embracing the unelected “experts” when it comes to decision-making. But the circumstances are very different.

After the biggest wave of strikes in decades, Britain has an emboldened trade union movement prepared to demand its worth. More recently, the mass movement in support of Palestine is already transforming the British political scene.

Starmer’s abhorrent comments on Gaza—in which he said Israel was justified in cutting off food, water, and electricity to a civilian population—led to widespread outrage. The party refused to support a cease-fire for several months, causing over 100 local councillors to resign. In November, Starmer faced rebellion as 56 Labour MPs—a quarter of the parliamentary party—defied the leadership to vote in support of a cease-fire in Gaza. Ten shadow ministers were sacked. This rebellion would not have come about without hundreds of thousands across the country lobbying their MPs to vote in support of the motion.

Following relentless pressure from the public, the party was eventually forced to shift position. But in many traditional working-class strongholds, particularly those with a large Muslim population, the damage has been done.

Over a dozen formerly safe Labour seats are now being treated as battlegrounds as independent challengers put up a fight. In recent local elections, the party lost support in former strongholds like Newcastle, Oldham, and Blackburn.

Labour has calculated that it can afford to lose votes in these traditional working-class heartlands. Any loss in support, it believes, can be offset by picking up the support of disgruntled Tories in the leafy suburbs—disproportionately marginal constituencies under the first-past-the-post electoral system.

But the rise of the Scottish National Party, the United Kingdom Independence Party, and later the Brexit party provides a cautionary tale—that loyal supporters can and will abandon the party if they feel they are not being listened to. And once Labour is in government, “get the Tories out” becomes a meaningless electoral slogan. The shift need not be sudden. Between 1997 to 2010, the Labour Party lost 5 million votes.

The biggest story in this election will be unprecedented voter apathy. Under Corbyn, Labour quickly became one of the largest political parties in Europe, with more than 550,000 members—six times the number of Conservatives at the time. In the last four years, Labour has lost more than 200,000 of them. Some have been suspended. Others have left in anger, most recently over the party’s position on Gaza. These were the party’s foot soldiers who could be relied on to knock on doors, hand out leaflets, and get the vote out at crucial moments like this.

With Labour leading by over 20 points in the polls, Starmer is surely presuming that he doesn’t need an enthusiastic army behind him. He might be right, for now. The Labour leader is, indeed, a lucky general. But his luck is unlikely to last.