If Keir Starmer wants to govern he must crush the Labour left
Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire/PA Images
Labour politics only makes sense when you realise the Corbynites don’t think they lost the last election. Not fairly at any rate. The Labour left don’t think they were beaten so much as betrayed. They truly believe they would have stormed the Winter Palace if only the damned Blairites hadn’t hidden their scaling ladders.
Stab in the back myths are never pleasant and rarely convincing. The one currently enveloping Corbynism is no different. In one of their final acts of sabotage, allies of Corbyn produced, then someone leaked, an 860-page report into the handling of the Labour anti-Semitism accusations. The implied conclusion, that moderate Labour staffers sabotaged attempts at resolution by the leadership, was offensively absurd. But it strengthened the betrayal narrative, so this scarcely mattered. Indeed it may have been the point.
The Corbynite version of the past five years goes something like this — in September 2015 Jeremy Corbyn stormed the Labour leadership with the backing of the trade union left and new social groups like the anti-austerity and “anti-war” movements. He was immediately, and viciously, undermined by the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) and Labour’s bureaucracy. This was not only responsible for Labour losing the 2017 General Election, but also for politicising a mild anti-Semitism problem and finally for allowing “The Project” to be wrecked on the towering rock that was Brexit. Corbyn may have “won the argument”, but betrayal stopped him short of winning the country. Like all great lies, it contained just enough truth to appear credible.
Corbynites’ refusal to accept that their man lost fair and square helps explain why they never truly reconciled with Keir Starmer’s leadership. Since Starmer became leader back in April, they’ve been sulking. They are now turning openly mutinous. Last week Corbyn, along with John McDonnell and Diane Abbott, defied their leader to vote against the policing bill. In response #ResignStarmer began trending nationally on UK Twitter. Two shadow ministers, Dan Carden and Margaret Greenwood, have since resigned from Labour’s frontbench in order to oppose the legislation.
Just as dangerously, the Unite chief Len McCluskey, a man thus far cruelly denied a peerage for services to the British right, has suddenly discovered fiscal conservatism. Angered at payouts made to former Labour employees who turned whistle-blowers over anti-Semitism within the party, he cut Unite funding to Labour by 10 per cent and warned that more cuts could follow. The days when Unite would prop up any pro-leadership agitprop, like Corbyn’s 2018 “Labour Live” ego fest, are long gone.
Alas while the Corbynite left have decisively turned on Starmer, the Labour leader has yet to properly return the favour. Starmer is treating the far-left in much the same way Ed Miliband did. They are an embarrassment, to be sure, but still an essential part of Labour’s electoral coalition. For Miliband this was ill-advised, but just about excusable. The far-left were an obscure fringe and so, unless you were prepared to spend your evenings in dingy pubs or browsing conspiratorial blogs, it was possible to miss how vicious, and often racist, they could be.
Starmer has no such excuse. He doesn’t just know what Corbynism is, he was an active collaborator with it. Starmer may not be ready to befriend anti-Semitic racists, terrorist thugs and dictatorial regimes, but he was prepared to put a man into 10 Downing Street who did. This is no small charge, nor a matter that can be swept under the carpet. While other Labour politicians, the likes of Ian Austin and Luciana Berger, sacrificed their careers to fight Corbynism, Starmer was facilitating it. He was Labour’s Philippe Pétain, not Charles de Gaulle.
To convince middle-Britain he’s ready to lead, Starmer must take the fight to the Corbynite left. He has a moral imperative to make up for his years of facilitating Corbynism, to show that he has learned something from a vile episode in Labour’s history and won’t allow for a repeat. This is especially, but far from exclusively, the case for Britain’s Jewish community, nearly half of whom told pollsters ahead of December’s election they would “seriously consider” leaving the UK if Corbyn became PM.
Corbyn is, unsurprisingly, back to his old tricks. This weekend he’s speaking at an event organised by a front group for the Socialist Workers Party, a faction which openly despises Parliamentary democracy. He will be joined by the likes of Danny Haiphong, an apologist for China’s Ugyhur persecution who recently published a sycophantic article titled “My Trip to China Exposed the Shameful Lies Peddled by the American Empire“. Starmer must act, and make it clear that collaboration with the opponents of representative democracy, not to mention genocide deniers, is not compatible with Labour membership. Anything less would be a mistake.
The perception that we’re led by a second-rate Prime Minister and third-rate Cabinet that are endangering the union makes even conservatives like me pay serious attention to Starmer. He appears competent and not actively malicious, neither of which can be taken for granted in modern western politics. But he must atone for his collaboration with Corbynism. Only with another “Clause 4 moment”, vanquishing the extreme left, can Starmer show he’s fit to govern Britain.
