A Left-wing splinter revolt was brewing. If only Starmer had been nice
Happy birthday, Sir Keir. The week that was meant to mark one glorious year in office for Labour ends with the welfare Bill in tatters, the Chancellor in tears and now Zarah Sultana quitting the whip to form a Left-wing party with Jeremy Corbyn. And Starmer brought all of this on himself.
The proximate issue is politics, but the subtext is character. The rise of a non-Labour Left was spurred by Gaza, by No 10’s failure to cook up a formula that would satisfy Jewish and Muslim voters, and has been turbo-charged by its attempt to raise defence spending on the back of benefits cuts.
Sultana is acknowledged in Parliament as a passionate voice for Palestinians (also, transy, woo-woo, married to a windfarm yada). Corbyn is defined in many people’s minds as an anti-war militant. The tough job ahead of them is to knit together foreign and domestic concerns, to ally Muslims, poor whites and the intelligentsia around an economic programme. In short, to rebuild the historic Labour coalition outside of the Labour Party.
Start-up parties in Spain or Greece have followed a similar path, and they benefited from the moral rot of historic centre-Left parties plus the unpopularity of austerity.
The spotlight thus falls back on Rachel Reeves. By insisting on her fiscal rules, which means limited borrowing plus no rise in direct taxes, she has compelled her party either to savage growth through indirect taxes or to permanently seek cuts to welfare, savaging their constituents. In short, Left-wing Labour MPs can see that their ambitions – redistribution and equality – will never get an airing within this Parliament, under this neo-Blairite leadership.
In which case, what’s the point of keeping the whip? It’s been removed from them often enough. Sultana is already whipless, suspended for opposing the two-child benefit cap.
By forcing the Left out so brutally in 2019-20, Starmer gained control of the party at the expense of its ideals and its base. No one had gone quite so scorched-earth before. Wilson, Callaghan, even Blair to a lesser extent worked on the assumption that if you unite as much of the Labour family as possible, you can win the country – and thus Blair tolerated the soft-Left (Gordon Brown) and hard-Left (Michael Meacher) within his government.
Starmer permitted no such compromise, and now he pays the price. He won the leadership by copying Corbyn’s manifesto, then vindictively drove Jezza out of the party – the man who won far more votes than Sir Keir, in 2017 – deprived the Left of internal advancement, and made sidelining them part of his triangulation strategy.
His defeat in the welfare Bill was a psychological turning-point. The parliamentary Left realised they are bigger than their own Prime Minister, with their own supporters and crusades, freeing them to imagine a future without him.
That said, seeing Starmer defeated by parliamentary manoeuvre might persuade some Leftists to stay inside the tent for longer, to see if they can repeat the trick and extract further compromise (ironic to think this catastrophe might work to his advantage – for now).
Brexit and Reform have revolutionised British politics, proving that you don’t have to peddle orthodoxy to win, or run in one of the two big parties to enter the Commons.
A Left-wing splinter revolt was brewing for some time and, to be honest, journalism has not taken its demographic seriously enough (we were too busy chasing Nigel and his C2s around the high street).
But if Tories can walk away from their party without fear, it was only a matter of time before socialists or greenies or peaceniks did the same, splitting the centre-Left vote and, very probably, making a Reform administration more likely.
Farage must be a very happy man. The more parties there are on the ballot, the further first-past-the-post crumbles.
If only Starmer had been nice. If only he had kept Corbyn in the party, better balanced his Cabinet, been more collegial, less sanctimonious, less cynical on Gaza, less pro-Trump, less primed to drool with lust when surveying the latest US bomber in his Lockheed catalogue.
I can, off the top of my head, name a dozen Labour MPs more likely to join Corbyn/Sultana because Starmer has made life in their own party personally unpleasant and ethically compromised. I say: do it.
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