Latest news with #post-Starmer
Middle East Eye
3 days ago
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
Starmer is running out of road
Most people in Britain think that Keir Starmer has outlived any use he might have had as Labour leader, according to YouGov's bimonthly poll of the prime minister's popularity. Some 40 percent think he should resign as leader, and only 37 percent think he should stay on, according to the May survey. The same thing happened in January, with only a blip in between. In another YouGov poll, Starmer is disliked by 51 percent of the population and only popular with 22 percent. It hasn't always been this way. Before this year, you had to go back to autumn 2021, long before he was prime minister, to find statistics that showed most people thought Starmer should resign. And Starmer is dragging the whole government down with him. Labour's drop in the opinion polls in its first 10 months of power is the largest of any newly elected UK government in 40 years, according to a Guardian analysis. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters The drop in approval is comparable to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson's fall from grace in February 2022, when Partygate was at its peak. The areas where voters think the government is least capable of solving problems are health, housing and the economy. As the Guardian reported, the proportion of the public who think Labour can handle these problems the best has dropped since the party took power. "The biggest drops were recorded in health, housing and the economy." This is terrible news for Labour, since they are precisely the problems that the government has pledged to solve. Power struggle The recent Runcorn by-election result and the council election results on the same day crystallised all these concerns in the minds of Labour MPs, especially those who are more worried about staying in office than about their constituents' welfare. After all, Runcorn was the 49th safest Labour seat in the country, and it was lost to Reform. Soft left MPs are now urging Angela Rayner, Labour's ineffective deputy leader, to challenge Starmer. Ignore Starmer's theatrics. Gaza's trail of blood leads straight to his door Read More » Those on the traditional left, the remains of Corbynism in the parliamentary Labour Party, don't want to be left out of a post-Starmer struggle for the leadership. Consequently, MP John McDonnell called for a rank-and-file challenge to Starmer within days of the rumours about Rayner's possible challenge becoming public. McDonnell painted a devastating picture of the party leadership, asserting that a power struggle was taking place already: 'What we are now witnessing is a panicked, half-hearted policy retreat, while the backroom boys - Morgan McSweeney in the leader's office and Nick Parrott in the deputy leader's office - fight between themselves.' Starmer is already reacting to this pressure. The rhetorical U-turn over Gaza is the most obvious concession to critics, although it is also a response to signs that the US administration is finding Israel's genocidal policy in Gaza to be more of a hindrance than a help in its overall plan to revive the Abraham Accords. But Starmer's partial retreat on winter fuel allowance is also meant to take the sting out of his critics' case. The problem for Starmer is that this kind of 'messy reset', as the New Statesman described it, will further deepen the crisis in Labour. Indeed, Starmer may be about to learn the truth of historian Alexis de Tocqueville's adage that 'the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets about reform'. Petulant mantra Starmer has shown that he is only really good at one thing: attacking the left. He is a classic Thermidorian figure, seemingly from the left but transmuting into the nemesis of Corbynism. What is equally obvious is that these factional skills are of little use in running a government. Starmer's frequently issued mantra of 'I won't stand for it' - whatever today's 'it' might be - may sound authoritative in internal party debates, but simply comes across as petulant amid recalcitrant economic realities. The more he gives ground, the more hollow and inconsistent he sounds The more he gives ground, the more hollow and inconsistent he sounds. It is very unlikely that his rigidity and sense of entitlement will allow him to find another model of leadership, not least because of the utter conventionality of his economic and social programme. More seriously, just as he is attempting to placate the left, he is also making gross adaptations to Reform leader Nigel Farage's racist rhetoric. This is making an already threadbare ideology look positively self-contradictory at best, and openly racist at worst. So it very much looks as if the wheels are coming off the Starmer wagon. But does this mean he will be replaced before the next election? He still has some reserves, including a whopping Commons majority, which will insulate him from opposition attacks and backbench rebellions - unless they are of tsunami proportions. Writing on the wall Starmer is also blessed with his Tory opponent, Kemi Badenoch, who is even more unpopular than Starmer, and seems even less effective as a leader. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey is more popular than Starmer with a negative rating of minus 8, compared to Starmer's negative rating of minus 46, but it's hard to say whether - given that his every public appearance is an ill-conceived stunt - Davey is a politician or a personality who has escaped from BBC light entertainment. But these are advantages of limited value when the real challenge that Starmer faces is from Farage's Reform. UK local elections: Starmer's betrayal of voters is handing England to Reform Read More » Farage is more popular than Starmer, and Reform has effectively replaced the Tories as the main right-wing opposition to Labour. Starmer is building Reform support through his economic attacks on the welfare state, fuelling discontent within Labour, and by mimicking Farage's hostility towards refugees. Rayner supporters are talking of the council and other elections in 2026 as a watershed moment for Starmer's leadership. But it could be sooner. One or two more by-election losses could push already-nervous Labour MPs to don the white coats and head over to 10 Downing Street. Reform is the most obvious beneficiary. But Labour is so low in the polls that in some constituencies, it could lose to the SNP in Scotland or to the Liberal Democrats in other places. A left alliance of independents, rumoured to be the project that former leader Jeremy Corbyn is working on, would also threaten Labour's arrogant assumption that progressives have no one else to support. The writing is on the wall for Starmer, and time may be much shorter than he imagines. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
New Statesman
6 days ago
- Politics
- New Statesman
Andy Burnham has made his leadership pitch
Photo by. Inside Labour there might not be a vacancy but there is always a contest. The government's early unpopularity means this is even more true than usual. Over the last fortnight – via her leaked memo to Rachel Reeves – Angela Rayner's alternative vision has become clearer. MPs believe both the Deputy PM and her more Blairite rival Wes Streeting are monitoring their support within the parliamentary party. But it is Andy Burnham who is most clearly positioning for a post-Starmer world. Critical interventions by the Greater Manchester mayor are hardly unheard of. During Keir Starmer's difficult early years as Labour leader, Burnham regularly advertised himself as an alternative. His speech to the soft left group Compass on Saturday afternoon (31 May), however, was qualitatively different. It was the most wide-ranging critique of the government from any senior Labour figure since the general election and ultimately resembled a leadership manifesto (Compass's director Neal Lawson opened the day by hailing Burnham as 'by far and away the most popular person to be the next leader of the Labour Party'). In the mid-1970s and early 1980s, Tony Benn championed his 'alternative economic strategy'; Burnham hailed what he described as his 'popular left programme'. His 17-minute address – which avoided any mention of Starmer or Reeves – was filled with rebukes to the Labour leadership. 'I believe you do have to take on the right,' Burnham told a crowd assembled on the dancefloor of the Ministry of Sound in south London. 'But what's the best way to do that? Definitely not by aping their rhetoric' (an implicit reference to Starmer's recent speech on immigration). He added: 'We see from Canada and Australia that a strong, confident left, which leans into what we believe, rather than tilting the other way, can win and can win well.' Burham, who has had a historically fraught relationship with Starmer's office (once declaring: 'leave me alone'), demanded a 'move away from the factionalism that has bedevilled us on all sides of the party' and condemned the 'infantile' belief that it was 'disloyal' to 'talk to other parties, particularly on the centre or the left'. It's traditional for mayors to speak out on issues related to their administration – such as devolved funding – and to occasionally intervene on national policy (as Burnham and Sadiq Khan did when they backed a ceasefire in Gaza in 2023). But Burnham went far beyond this, calling for a 'substantially new offer for the public'. Though he praised 'good policies' such as the renationalisation of the railways, he repeatedly outflanked the government from the left, criticising 'too much timidity in our offer, too much reluctance to show the courage of our convictions'. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe He called for Labour to abandon cuts to health and disability benefits, to impose higher taxes on wealth (Reeves's aides repeatedly point out that she has already done so), to announce 'the biggest and quickest council and social housing building programme the county has ever seen', to reverse spending cuts to local authorities, to introduce free transport for teenagers in England, to replace first-past-the-post with proportional representation and to abolish the party whipping system. In its fusion of economic and constitutional radicalism there were echoes of the programme once advocated by Benn (another former cabinet minister who moved left with age). One left-wing Labour MP described Burnham's speech to me as a 'full-blooded rejection of the politics of Reeves and Starmer' and an 'extremely interesting development'. Another MP commented: 'What's he got to lose? But they [the leadership] are not going to let him come back into parliament.' The event marked the most significant gathering of the soft left – the group which often determines Labour leadership results – since the election. Though Compass has allowed members of other parties to join since 2011, this was a Labour-focused affair: other speakers included energy minister Miatta Fahnbulleh (who spoke alongside Burnham), former cabinet minister Louise Haigh, former Welsh first minister Mark Drakeford and former New Labour ministers Clare Short and John Denham (who described Starmer's administration to me as 'the most intellectually incurious Labour government that has ever been elected'). Fahnbulleh, a key ally of Ed Miliband, used her own address to call for Labour to transform the welfare state into 'a well-being state', which offers 'guaranteed access for all who need it' to 'social care, to education, to childcare – a proper safety net to catch people when they fall on hard times'. A distinctive soft left critique recurred through the course of the day: Starmer's government, it was said, has not done enough to amplify policies such as the employment rights bill, rail public ownership and GB Energy and has made avoidable errors such as the winter fuel payment cuts and overly rigid fiscal rules. Fahnbulleh urged activists to 'tell the story of the wins that a progressive government is making' and to 'hold us to account when we get things wrong'. There were almost no references from speakers to Starmer – treated by some as a bystander in his own government – with ire focused on Reeves and the wider leadership. Lawson denounced the old right group Labour First, which I profiled here, as 'a party within a party' that 'now runs Labour in its rather dull, sectarian interest'. Who will emerge as the soft left's candidate of choice? Among Labour members, as polling by Survation shows, Miliband and Rayner are the most popular cabinet ministers (with approval ratings of +65 and +46 respectively). But Burnham's speech was an attempt to position himself as the soft left's standard bearer – a claim to Labour's moral leadership. 'If the next election is going to be a binary choice between two worldviews and the opposition is going to be the divisive populist right then we must be the unifying popular left,' Burnham declared. He did not say whether he hopes to lead this movement – but he didn't need to. [See also: The British left is coming for the Government] Related
