Purging women of colour on spurious grounds while handing safe parliamentary seats to apparatchiks like sweets: Keir Starmer’s Labour is high on hubris and telling us precisely how it will govern. As Tony Blair’s former director of political operations John McTernan put it, the sham investigation process into Diane Abbott, Britain’s first Black female MP, was designed to “humiliate”.
The same goes for Faiza Shaheen, Labour’s former candidate in Chingford and Woodford Green. Shaheen is a Muslim woman of colour and the daughter of a mechanic, who defied the odds to become a successful academic and won the overwhelming backing of her local party. Starmer previously described her as a “fantastic” and a “fabulous candidate”, praising her “passion, expert understanding and insight on inequality”. Yesterday, while canvassing with enthusiastic volunteers and carrying her newborn baby, she discovered via the Times newspaper that she was to be purged. Her offence? Tweets going back ten years, one of which, she said, was about her “experience of Islamophobia in the party”. Another related to text above a clip of the American Jewish comedian Jon Stewart on the Daily Show satirising how criticism of Israel leads to online dogpiling by the country’s defenders: text that had a caption about the “Israel lobby”, which she concedes “plays into a trope,” adding: “I absolutely don’t agree with that and I’m sorry about that”.
Stewart, informed that a tweet including a clip of his show was involved, described Shaheen’s ousting as “the dumbest thing the UK has done since electing Boris Johnson”.
When Shaheen was interviewed on Newsnight, she seemed shellshocked and on the verge of tears. Starmer has defended this decision as a way to ensure the “highest quality candidates” – presumably that includes candidates such as Neil Coyle, the Starmer loyalist MP for Bermondsey who was suspended then reinstated after drunken abuse and making racist comments to a journalist (Coyle also had a complaint of sexual harassment upheld against him).
Who, then, does the future of the Labour party belong to? The Starmer fixer Luke Akehurst is the director of We Believe in Israel, a pro-Israel lobbying group currently encouraging voters to urge their MPs to support the country’s murderous campaign in Gaza. This former Hackney councillor is now Labour’s candidate for North Durham. Or take Josh Simons, the director of the Starmerite thinktank Labour Together. His only public splash to date was when he contemptuously suggested that people smugglers should be shipped to Scotland. Simons has now been parachuted into Makerfield. Unlike Shaheen and Abbott – who were selected by their local members – not a single person cast a vote for these anointed candidates, who carve up safe seats like colonial administrators.
So what does this tell us about the incoming Labour government? Starmer’s own dishonesty is a matter of public record. As well as championing radical domestic policies in his leadership campaign, he promised Labour would be a “broad church”, demanding parliamentary selections be “more democratic” and that “we should end NEC impositions of candidates”. He is dishonest about the big things – like denying he agreed, during an interview on LBC, that Israel had the right to cut off water and power – and the petty things, like repeatedly describing Jeremy Corbyn as his friend, then claiming he never was. In the midst of an imploding Tory administration, this has got him far enough. But Boris Johnson is testament to how dishonesty, as a strategy, can quickly run out of road.
These purges tell us that Labour’s political cupboard is empty. They have no meaningful ideas other than factional warfare. If this is all they know, there is a strong chance their administration will be defined by continuity with what came before: continuous factional infighting. They will not stop at a purge of Corbynism: Labour figures have repeatedly told me that Starmer’s advisers regard Lisa Nandy and Ed Miliband as too leftwing. The latter is one of the few MPs with any ideas. For that reason alone, his position is precarious.
The purges also tell us that hubris does not compensate for reality. There is no enthusiasm for Starmer and his project. As the veteran pollster Peter Kellner notes, no leader of the opposition has ever won with such poor ratings. Labour’s numbers on key issues – like being fit to govern and understanding Britain’s problems – are significantly worse than they were under Ed Miliband – who, as you may recall, lost the 2015 election. Starmer’s ratings among minority Britons are more than 50 points lower than Tony Blair’s were in 1997, and that was before the events of this week. Minority Britons are core Labour voters, yet it seems as though the leadership couldn’t care less.
Labour will win this election not because there is any real enthusiasm for the party’s agenda nor any real belief in Starmer’s capabilities as a leader. It will win because the Tories have set one of the lowest bars in British political history. And then, when Labour is in power, enjoying so little support and enthusiasm among its natural voters, what next? Winning because people wanted to rid themselves of the incumbent party is not the same as winning because you offered a vision that voters rallied behind.
After this week, the mask is off. Labour’s leaders are sending a clear signal that once they have secured No 10, they will behave with the same power-drunk arrogance and the same disregard for democratic norms that they are showing now towards their own MPs. Starmer should consider, for a moment, the cautionary tale of Boris Johnson – another leader who purged his parliamentary party. Yes, he scooped an 80-seat majority. But then, in less than three years, he was driven from office in disgrace, and the Tory party was left in tatters.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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