When I read that Dianne Abbott – Diane Fucking Abbott! – is saying that Keir Starmer will have to resign as Labour leader if the party loses the Batley and Spen by-election, I wonder if it’s worth me bothering to vote for the party, never mind pay money to it for the dubious privilege of being a member. Millions of other people have already come to that view, as the 2019 general election showed, as did the recent council elections. Abbott has already concluded that Starmer is the problem and has suggested the hard left will support Andy Burnham to take over from Starmer. I can see some problems with this.
I will not deny that Starmer is not the most charismatic of politicians. In times where, apparently, substance barely matters to many people – how else could Boris Johnson be so popular? – serious people are not required. But he is very smart and it is not his fault that his first year as Labour leader has been somewhat overshadowed by COVID-19. I doubt that the public would be listening to any leader of the opposition at the moment, never mind just Starmer. Starmer exposed Johnson’s failings as a leader, presiding as he did over one of the worst death rates in the world. The vaccine, as well as saving thousands of lives, has boosted Johnson’s popularity too. But let’s dig deeper.
Currently, Labour does not have a clear message, an offer to the electorate. After the disastrous election defeat of 2019, Labour is nowhere. Johnson, to be fair, has no overriding philosophy at all, other than slogans like ‘Get Brexit done’ and ‘levelling up’. But people like his optimism and carefully staged eccentricity and they don’t mind his lies. The Old Etonian Bullingdon boy is ‘one of us’ and no one is listening to the man whose father was a toolmaker and his mother was a nurse. You might think this is very unfair, but that’s life, that’s politics.
Abbott served in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and seems to have forgotten that Corbyn, her ex boyfriend by the way, lost two general elections, the second disastrously, as well as the European election and council elections. Abbott didn’t want Corbyn to quit after his disastrous failings but Starmer, she says, must go if Labour loses a by-election.
There is clearly desperation from the hard left because by suggesting they could support Burnham, whose politics are virtually identical to Starmer’s, means they have no credible candidate of their own. Many of the Corbynistas are drawing their pensions, others like your Richard Burgons and Rebecca Long Bailey’s stand for exactly the same slogans that saw Labour annihilated in 2019. Burgon constantly urges Labour to return to the ‘popular policies’ of the Corbyn era. You could not make this up. The ‘popular policies’ – well, do I need to say it again ? – which saw Labour suffer its worst defeat since 1935? Christ on a bicycle: how does that work?
Where does Labour go now? Not back to the hard left, that’s for sure. The party simply cannot win unless it builds a coalition of different groups, including – yes – the former red wall, the aspirational and ambitious middle classes, the old, the young and pretty well everyone else in between. Today’s Labour, which draws much of its support from the well-educated affluent middle classes in big cities, is doomed not just to fail, but to irrelevance. I do not see how taking advice from Diane Abbott, who is regarded by many as a joke figure, will shift the millions of minds Labour needs to change. Above all, I don’t see how axing Starmer will help change a single thing.
Can Keir Starmer do better? Yes, he can. And I suspect that when and if some kind of normality returns, and he comes forward with a serious offer for the British people, he will get a hearing. Replacing him now with Burnham will not end the critical chatter because, sooner or later, the hard left would accuse him of ‘selling out’, as they always, always do. The point with Corbyn is that he couldn’t do any better. What we saw from 2015 to 2020 was the best of Corbyn, a bumbling, ineffectual politician who lapped up the adulation of a weird cult following and never made any attempt to speak with people who didn’t already agree with him. I would go so far as to say that Corbyn was the worst leader of a major political party of my lifetime, worse even than Iain Duncan Smith – and he was so bad the Tory party sacked him before he could even fight a general election.
Finally, as for Abbott there is one reason I call her out. And that’s because she’s useless like Burgon is useless, Long Bailey is useless, Ian Lavery is useless and Corbyn was as useless as all of them put together.
Labour has a death wish and voters can see it. I look forward to the next general election – my guess is 2023 – with trepidation because division never appeals to voters. And I don’t want division: I want a united party under Keir Starmer. If the comrades can’t support that, then I hope they bugger off and form a hard left party of their own. Because if they stay, we’ve got at least another term of Johnson and maybe permanent Tory rule. No, not maybe: definitely.
