It’s day one of Labour conference and already there’s demands for Sir Keir Starmer to quit. With his party well ahead in the polls, you might have thought that would buy the Labour leader some respite. Not a bit of it, for over at The World Transformed festival – the breakaway Corbynite tribute act – Mick Lynch, the boss of the RMT union last night took aim at Starmer’s moderate leadership with the oratorical equivalent of a double-barreled shotgun.
In a fiery 13-minute speech, the ‘people’s Mick’ told his audience at “The Working Class Strike Back” rally:
The working class is back. We need to be in the community with the people who are struggling. We have to tell the Labour party to put your shoulder to our wheel. If you do that, we’ll support you. If you can’t, Keir Starmer needs to get out of the way and let in somebody else who can.
To cheers from the Corbynite crowd, Lynch concluded:
This is the most militant right-wing government most of us are going to experience. I just wish the people that are meant to be representing us were as bold and radical as this lot have shown themselves to be in the last two or three days. If Starmer can’t understand that, he needs to wake up and get another job.
As John McTernan, the long-suffering former Labour advisor, noted wrily: “Mick Lynch calls for Labour unity, then gets the biggest cheer of the night by calling for Keir Starmer to resign.” With friends like these, who needs the Tories?
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