After Starmer’s local election debacle it looks like his time is up. Chris Nineham evaluates the probable contenders and finds them lacklustre
Keir Starmer has a way of confusing stupidity with bravery. Being defiant in the face of millions of people who think you are useless and should leave isn’t bravery, it’s delusional arrogance. It shows both self-conceit and complete contempt for democracy.
Now it looks as if he is going to face a challenge as Wes Streeting has finally resigned and, crucially, Andy Burnham has engineered a by-election in which he can stand.
The lobby correspondents report that no one in the Parliamentary Labour Party actually thinks that Starmer should lead Labour into the next election.
There is more bad news for both Starmer and Streeting. The first polling of Labour members suggests that the only candidate that Starmer can beat in an election would be Streeting himself. Ed Miliband, Andy Burnham and Angela Rayner would all comfortably defeat Starmer.
The remarkable thing is that Starmer lasted a single day after the local election car crash. His sole argument for staying and fighting is that Labour needs to avoid the internal chaos which brought down the Tories. But that is missing the main point. His tenure in office has already brought Labour to its lowest point since the Second World War.
He has probably been encouraged by the fact that at least until the weekend he had the backing of the City of London. As the Financial Times put it, ‘bond markets regard Starmer and his chancellor Rachel Reeves as bulwarks against a more left-wing government’. He has also been helped by the fact that the parliamentary Labour Party has been so decisively won over to neoliberal and pro-war politics that it has been hard for even mildly left candidates to gather the required backing of 81 MPs. Even after the collapse at the polls, one hundred MPs were bizarrely prepared to call for Starmer to stay.
No change in direction
The post Corbyn assault on the left has also left us with a lacklustre set of candidates. Wes Streeting promises continuity only with more menace. In a half-civilized political world, his links with Peter Mandelson would disbar him from any public facing role let alone from being prime minister.
Electing him would be getting a Keir Starmer clone who believes passionately in the policies as opposed to implementing them through dull obedience.
Angela Rayner, who could still emerge as a ‘left candidate’ hasn’t exactly shone in office and polls badly with the public. As Housing and Communities Minister she has made no discernible impact on the desperate homeless crisis. She was deeply hostile to Corbyn, calling him out as soft on antisemitism.
Rayner self-defines as ‘soft left’ and ‘quite hardline’ on law-and-order issues. In one interview, she told her local police force to ‘beat down the door of the criminals and sort them out and antagonise them.’
Ed Miliband faced the electorate as Labour leader in 2015 and managed to lose in an election against Cameron and Osborne’s austerity-touting Tories in a campaign that most Labour activists would probably prefer to forget.
Andy Burnham’s first problem is that he is not yet an MP, and it is not entirely clear that that he will win in Makerfield. Constituents understandably don’t like this kind of manoeuvre and given Labour’s disastrous results in the North-West there is no safe Labour seat there.
While Burnham arguably has more personal appeal than the other candidates, this is mostly because he has been away from the toxic world of Westminster politics since becoming Mayor of Manchester in 2017. His actual track record hardly inspires. He supported the Iraq War and never really stepped up as shadow minister for either health or education in the 2010s.
He stood against Jeremy Corbyn in the 2015 leadership election, finishing a distant second. If he does stand, indications are his platform will be strong on security and weak on anything approaching the kind of redistributive politics that the left needs to take up. The right-wing press may bait Burnham as a left-wing fire brand, but he is anything but.
As even the most dim-witted commentators concede, the recent elections show that millions of people are looking for a real change of course. It will be great to see the back of Keir Starmer, but don’t expect a radical new direction from any of the above.