Starmer’s long list of failures

With a long list of failures, Starmer has turned even the most ardent Labour supporters against him

Keir Starmer has proven increasingly unpopular

Keir Starmer’s problem is not a lack of vision. It’s that he has completely the wrong vision.

After the turbulent years of the Tories, the Labour Party and the media presented him as a boring, bureaucratic, technocratic alternative.

But nearly two years on, he is universally hated.

At every turn, Starmer has turned even the most ardent Labour supporters against him. From football stadiums to dart halls, everyone thinks “Keir Starmer is a wanker.”

He kicked off his time in office by refusing to abolish the two-child benefit cap and kept 1.6 million children in poverty. He showed that the “moral case for socialism” he had promised in the run-up to the election was neither moral nor socialist.

The hits kept coming over the summer. The “summer blitz” of immigration raids fed an increasingly active far right and spread fear among migrants and black and brown people.

In the autumn, Labour scrapped the winter fuel payments. It left thousands of pensioners to make the “hard choice” between heating and eating while Starmer enjoyed free tickets at the Emirates stadium.

The prime minister then threw disabled people under the bus by slashing benefits with a promise to “stop benefit fraud”. Then Labour picked trans women as its next target by backing the Supreme Court’s transphobic ruling.

Next came Starmer’s infamous “island of strangers” speech. In perhaps his most overt rightward turn, he peddled racist lies in the hope of looking “tough on immigration”.

He has pushed unabashedly vile racism and banked on the false idea of a national identity to try to turn the tide against Nigel Farage’s rise.

The next months were rocked by scandal after scandal in the party. Starmer’s anti-corruption tsar was put on trial for corruption. Housing minister Angela Rayner was in hot water about a second home.

Peter Mandelson was sacked for his connections to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and Starmer’s right hand man Morgan McSweeney was forced to resign over the same.

You would think the former human rights lawyer would not side with and collaborate with a genocidal state that is shamelessly committing ethnic cleansing.

But before he was even elected, Starmer stated that Israel “has that right” to cut off water and electricity to Gaza and that it was not his place to say whether something is “genocide or not”.

His loyalty to US imperialism has gone hand in hand with a crackdown in policing protests and free speech. The bastion of the British left for the past century is now overseeing one of the most authoritarian British governments ever.

The anger is palpable and the crisis of the Labour Party can be expected to spiral even further out of control. Whether it’s his devotion to Zionism, his racism, his transphobia or his apparent hatred of the working class, it’s no wonder Starmer’s Labour suffered historic defeats in last week’s elections.

At least we can say he’s fulfilled his promise of “things getting worse before they get better.”