It’s Friday 5 July 2024. The electorate has proved the pollsters right, and Labour has returned to power with a staggering majority to match or even surpass the landslide victories of 1945 and 1997.
Will the new Labour MPs have the courage to stand up Sir Keir Starmer and his team when they believe that they are making a mistake? Will the cabinet dare to argue back when argument is essential?
Or will they opt for sycophancy?
Starmer’s Labour is in danger of reliving the worst days of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership
As he purges the far left, Starmer is already giving one hell of a lesson to the Labour party: keep your heads down and bite your tongues, or who knows what might happen to you.
Corbyn has gone. Elements in the party leadership clearly want to stop Diane Abbott running again as they have already prevented the left-wing candidates Faiza Shaheen and Lloyd Russell-Moyle from standing.
We are all about to learn how Britain’s distorted first-past-the-post system can concentrate power. Starmer could have a majority of 150 or 200 on less than 50 per cent of the vote, and the Labour leader is using the prospect of a crushing victory to rearrange his party.
I am not entirely sure that he will get away with it.
Before I go any further, I should say that I care no more for the Labour far left than the Tory far right. But the danger of all purges is that the fear they generate goes beyond deserving targets and leads to a dangerous urge to conform.
The reasons for Labour’s purge are obvious enough. You can see the hatred between the sides of Labour’s civil war from space.
The Labour leadership suspended Lloyd Russell-Moyle over a complaint about his behaviour. The timing was perfect from the point of view of Russell-Moyle’s enemies.
He will not be eligible to stand as MP for Brighton Kemptown while the complaint is investigated. By the time the investigation is over, it will be too late and someone else will have taken Russell-Moyle’s place
If Labour officials enjoyed wrecking Russell-Moyle’s career, one can understand why. At the 2021 Labour Conference, Russell-Moyle, made a jeering speech to his comrades at the Socialist Campaign Group.
‘This has been a goddamn awful conference with a goddamn awful leadership,’ he cried. ‘And the problem is he [Starmer] might be a very nice man, but he’s not a politician for the Labour party.’
‘He’s a liar’, shouted a voice from the audience
‘Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith’ others chanted, and Russell-Moyle’s face broke into an appreciative grin.
I'm devastated that Lloyd Russell-Moyle won't be in the next Parliament. This is a terrible, excruciating, and unbearable loss not just for the party, but the whole House and indeed the nation.
— habibi (@habibi_uk) May 29, 2024
Keith! Keith! Keith! pic.twitter.com/Tn9WiEOily
You do not understand the depths of the class prejudice on the rich-boy left until you grasp why they call Keir Starmer ‘Keith’.
It’s a low-class, low-status name. The type of name of Martin Amis gave his characters, or the name public school boys give a man from an unfashionable Surrey town, whose mother was a nurse and father was a toolmaker.
When they were giggling in 2021, Starmer seemed finished.
Today ‘Keith’ is destroying them.
I can see no objection to withdrawing the whip for Jeremy Corbyn. In one of the lowest moments in Labour history the Equality and Human Rights Commission found anti-Semitic harassment on his watch. Corbyn was too vain to apologise. If he had apologised, Starmer could never have withdrawn the whip.
But the purging of Corbyn was clearly not just a moral act.
Corbyn’s unpopularity in the 2019 general election – even half the people who managed to bring themselves to vote Labour said did they did not approve of his leadership – guaranteed Boris Johnson’s victory. It is an enormous advantage for Labour in 2024 that, not only is Corbyn no longer in the party, he is fighting the official Labour candidate in Islington north.
There is a deeper reason for the desire to purge, which is less well understood. When they look back at the far-left takeover of their party in 2015, Labour people ask how on earth it was that Jeremy Corbyn was even a Labour MP.
He voted against the Labour whip on 428 occasions during Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s premierships.
A kindly Tony Blair decided not to expel him because he believed Labour ought to be a broad church. After experiencing Corbyn’s leadership, the Labour right has had it with broad churches. It wants to vet the congregation so that never again can a politician like Corbyn take charge.
Its argument sounds plausible in theory – but looks very ugly when it is put into practice.
At the time of writing, it is far from clear whether Diane Abbot will be allowed to stand as a Labour candidate. To recap, she was suspended for engaging in competitive victimhood and telling the Observer that Jewish, Irish and Traveller people do not face racism ‘all their lives’ – a ridiculous claim considering that no group experiences the level of prejudice Roma people endure.
But she has apologised, undergone training and the party has lifted her suspension. Yet the decision on whether she can run again as a Labour candidate has been constantly delayed.
If she is banned, it will be hard to explain to the voters why, given that she has had the party whip restored.
If she fights off the leadership and runs again, the grateful Tories will claim that her victory is a sign of Starmer’s weakness.
Already there is a split between Starmer and Angela Rayner, who sees no reason why Abbott should not stand again, and Yvette Cooper, who sees her as a pioneering black female politician.
Is all this distraction from the failings of the Tory campaign worth the trouble it is bringing?
You can ask the same questions about the shady world Labour officials are going into in the pursuit of Russell-Moyle.
Labour people in Brighton and Hove, who have absolutely no sympathy with Russell-Moyle’s politics, tell me that they believe the claims against him have come from a man who has made multiple unsubstantiated accusations and made a point of targeting Jewish Labour members.
Starmer’s Labour is in danger of reliving the worst days of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. In 2019 his supporters used last minute allegations to knock out moderate Labour candidates such as Sally Gimson in Bassetlaw and Jas Athwal in Ilford South.
The bitterness such tactics leave can last for years. Jas Athwal’s friends in Ilford were so angry they deselected the left-wing MP, Sam Tarry, who had replaced Athwal, and reinstated their guy to run this time around.
More broadly it is far from clear that purges work.
Boris Johnson left the Tory party a diminished and cranky force when he drove out David Gauke, Ken Clarke, Nicholas Soames and Philip Hammond and 17 other pro-EU politicians. Middle-class England would not regard the Tories with such despair if they had stayed.
As Johnson’s subsequent fall shows, even leaders with large majorities cannot do whatever they please. They all have limited supplies of political capital.w
Starmer has burned through more capital than he appears to realise this week. I am not sure that it is money well spent.
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