Ben Cobley

When Labour MP Neil Coyle took to Twitter for his extraordinary rant against Jacob Rees-Mogg and Brexit voters, he perfectly summed up Keir Starmer’s main problem as Labour party leader: it’s his party. In purely political terms, Starmer himself has done well, dampening down internal Labour party dramas, showing himself as relatively normal and clawing his way to level-pegging in the polls after a summer of Covid chaos for the Government. However Coyle’s outburst – for which he has since said sorry – shows the danger his MPs and activists pose to his ambitions when it comes to the politics of identity – of aligning to certain types of people over others.

In the past few weeks, Sadiq Khan has made a couple of interventions that show how hopelessly confused the Labour Party is on issues of race and diversity – and Ukip looms large in the background. First up, a couple of weeks ago, Khan made a Labour's pitch ethnic minority votes in a speech to Operation Black Vote. He said: ‘The fact is that if you are black or Asian in Britain today: you are significantly more likely to be unemployed. You will earn less and you will live a shorter life than your white neighbours.’ Invoking Policy Exchange’s recent ‘Portrait of Modern Britain’ report, he added: ‘Entire racial groups are significantly poorer, have lower educational achievements and worse life chances than their [white] neighbours’.