The foremost question Labour party members should be asking themselves this morning, following yesterday’s predicted disastrous showing in the local, mayoral and devolved government elections, is this: do you care more about the short-term survival of your party or the long-term survival of your country? Because as it stands, and if the predicted coup against Keir Starmer is set in motion later today, that is the choice you will now have to make.
Starmer’s passive timidity in the face of this threat has made matters worse
The reason why Starmer has been such a dithering and inept Prime Minister is that, wittingly or not, he has always placed party before country. Most of his bad decisions, and the failure to make good ones, have stemmed from his undue concern for the left-wing faction that constitute his backbenches, and from the threat posed to the party by leftwingers outside it.
The power of the left, as made evident in a likely good result for the Greens today, has been both his and the country’s undoing in less than two years of government. While his Chancellor Rachel Reeves has actively made matters worse, punishing the middle classes and crippling businesses with £75 billion worth of new taxes, leaving the country with a welfare budget which now exceeds the total amount the Treasury receives from income taxes, Starmer’s passive timidity in the face of this threat has made matters worse.
His recent cosying up to the EU has been mostly driven by a desire to placate a far left that actively dislikes this country, and to a globalist left represented by the likes of Sadiq Khan, Andy Burnham and Zack Polanski, all of whom have actively advocated rejoining that bloc.
Starmer’s failure to tackle the menace of Islamist terrorism at home, or to properly address today’s epidemic of violent antisemitism – one which mostly originates from the Muslim community – has been driven by a similar concern. He lives in dread of that tendency which has an unhealthy preoccupation with Gaza, the cynical vacillators who won’t speak openly on this topic for fear of losing their seats to an Independent or Green Party candidate, and to those who belong to that coterie of shrill far-leftists who shout down as racist any talk of tackling terrorism or cutting immigration. In March, more than 100 Labour MPs signed a letter urging the Government to rethink Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s plans to tighten rules on indefinite leave to remain. That number, a quarter of Labour’s parliamentary presence, represents the immovable object which has forever directed Starmer’s decisions.
His failure to tackle the spiralling welfare budget has in most people’s minds been his greatest act of appeasement and his biggest dereliction of duty. As it stands, the UK’s welfare bill is set to rise from £313 billion in 2025-25 to £373 billion by the end of the decade. Time after time, Starmer has shirked and shrunk from efforts to address this problem, knowing that the left won’t accept it.
Far from signalling, as many of the party’s most delirious supporters yelped back in July 2024, that the ‘adults were back in charge’, Keir Starmer’s victory in that general election ushered in an administration whose members wouldn’t pass an A-level economics exam. This has been a government that doesn’t understand that hiking taxes kills off wealth-creating businesses which employ people, that increasing the minimum wage and national insurance simultaneously leaves more young people unemployed, that punishing landlords and seeking to introduce rent freezes will increase the cost of renting.
Of Keir Starmer’s three likely successors, Angela Rayner or Andy Burnham would both make matters even worse
This is a Prime Minister who has constantly been held hostage to the vindictive and vacant instincts of the simpletons on the left, to those who think keeping people trapped on welfare is the caring thing to do. On the contrary: it’s cruel and wrong, both for the recipients of this charity, now condemned to a life of humiliating and idle dependency, and for this country, now teetering on bankruptcy.
In a rational world, most people who went to the ballot box yesterday should have voted for local or regional reasons. But such is the fury and frustration generated by this incompetent and spendthrift administration that many will have used the occasion to vent their exasperation with the national government. This is why Reform UK are set to emerge the biggest winners.
Of Keir Starmer’s three likely successors, Angela Rayner or Andy Burnham would both make matters even worse, being left-wingers by conviction and both backed by the unions. By dent of being the least bad option, Wes Streeting remains the party’s last hope right now. As his standoffs with striking junior doctors illustrated, he at least understands that the books have to be balanced in the long run.
While the first two might save their party for the time being, yet guarantee its oblivion at the next general election, he’s the only one who might stop Britain careering into the abyss.
Comments