Farewell to genocide supporter Keir Starmer (Picture: Wikimedia commons)
Keir Starmer has been forced to resign as prime minister in the wake of Andy Burnham winning the Makerfield by-election last week.
The Labour leadership race will begin on 9 July, allowing a new leader to be in place for September.
Burnham has said he will stand, while right winger Wes Streeting is rumoured to be collecting nominations.
As Ode To Joy blared in the background, Starmer reeled off a list of “achievements” leading up to the crescendo. “Look at what we’ve achieved in just two years,” he said, fighting off the tears.
Starmer claimed that the Labour government had meant “an end to austerity” and rights for workers and renters.
But his first acts as prime minister were maintaining the two-child benefit cap—keeping over one million children in poverty—and stealing winter fuel allowance from ten million pensioners.
The Employment Rights Act was watered down to appease big business while the Renters Rights Act does not tackle the biggest issue facing tenants—sky-high rents.
The real “achievements” he listed made the world less safe—and fuelled the far right and racism.
Starmer boasted of “the biggest uplift in defence spending since the Cold War”, “boat crossings falling” and “asylum hotels closing”.
His appointment of Peter Mandelson—friend of paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein—didn’t feature in the speech.
Nor did he recount saying that Israel “has that right” to cut off power and water to Gaza and support for genocide. Or mention that Labour ramped up the war on trans+ people.
How did Starmer fail so spectacularly after just under two years?
A cycle of crises is feeding through the political system. Since 2007, the British state has been hit by the global financial crisis, Brexit, Covid-19 and the loss of legitimacy over its support for Israel.
We have already lived through a decade of six prime ministers—in contrast, there were only three in the 30 years before the financial crisis of 2007.
The turmoil has deep roots in the crisis of the 1970s. A crisis of profitability returned just as the British state was reeling from its decline as a global power.
The response from the British ruling class was neoliberalism. There was a narrowing of space between the Tories and Labour and a growing gulf between voters and parties.
It reinforced the sense that people cannot have any say over political and economic decisions, however limited they were before.
When the global financial crisis hit, ruling classes turned to austerity and ramped up scapegoating of migrants. They legitimised the far right’s racism and allowed them to pose as an “anti-establishment” force taking on the elites.
But neoliberal orthodoxy, too, has not survived. We are now seeing a shift to new ways of managing and organising the global capitalist system that relies much more on state intervention.
This is intertwined with the breakdown of the liberal capitalist order that has dominated the West since 1945.
So, Starmer and chancellor Rachel Reeves talked about wanting to copy “Bidenomics”. This saw the previous US administration under Joe Biden use state intervention in the economy to make US capitalism more competitive against China.
Economic growth has been sluggish for the past decade in Britain. And, if the Labour government wanted to boost growth, it would have to increase investment through boosting taxes or borrowing.
But it didn’t want to do that for fear of upsetting the rich and the financial markets—and instead pushed austerity mark 2. Relaunch after relaunch, lurch rightwards after lurch rightwards followed.
Starmer will go down as one of greyest and most grotesque representatives of the “Labourite” tradition.
Labour fails working class people because of “Labourism”—the idea that parliament is more important than workers’ struggles to winning social change.
The party has articulated working class hopes of a better world, but aims to take the reins of the British state and rule in the “national interest”.
The trouble is that there is no such thing as a national interest between bankers, bosses, landlords and working class people.
Any attempt to rule in a “national interest” means working within the parameters of what the ruling class will allow.
When capitalism is booming, it has much greater capacity to allow reforms without upsetting profit-making.
Today, the whole system is in crisis from economic stagnation to climate chaos and the threat of war.
Big business is willing to allow very little right now and has been demanding Labour waters down the mildest of reforms that could put up barriers to profit-making. Starmer and Reeves have been happy to oblige.
There is plenty of money to boost working class living standards, but that requires a confrontation with big business and breaking with the market.
Will Burnham, who will run for the leadership, be more willing to take on the power of the rich? All the indications say no.
He said the Labour Party should not be in hock to the bond markets last year. He has spent the past year running away from the comment and trying to reassure big business.
Burnham told the bosses’ newspaper, the Financial Times, that he was misinterpreted. He said, “What I’ve said is we had a way of running the economy over a long period of time where we just gave up control of the fundamental drivers of the economy.”
He made clear that he has no plans to change the “fiscal rules” chancellor Rachel Reeves uses to justify Labour’s austerity mark 2.
Burnham has brought in three mainstream economists as advisors in a bid to reassure bosses and bankers that he has “fiscal credibility”.
One of them is former Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane. The second is Richard Hughes who chaired the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR)—a body created by Tory chancellor George Osborne to police austerity.
The other is Jim O’Neill, a former Tory minister and former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
For all the “soft left” posturing, Burnham represents the politics of the neoliberal centre just as Starmer does.
He has not only made clear that he won’t step outside the fiscal rules set by Labour—meaning more austerity mark 2.
He has clearly signalled that there will be no break with the racism and authoritarianism of Labour—the opposite in fact.
During the campaign, he backed home secretary Shabana Mahmood’s plans to clamp down on immigration. He was following the same strategy as Starmer of trying to “out-Reform” on immigration.
Only a few days later he threw trans+ people under the bus and backed the EHRC’s transphobic guidance.
This means a Burnham government will not be a bulwark against Reform UK or Restore Britain—it will be an incubator of the far right and fascism.
Let’s cheer Starmer’s demise—but changing one centrist for another will not bring the change millions of working class people need.
So let’s build mobilisation from below, anti-racism and class struggle to fight for it.
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