Labour’s civil war is bizarre, shambolic and pointless

Politics is supposed to be about ideas and visions for dealing with the country’s challenges. Where is the great debate about these? Daily Telegraph 15/05/26 Winston Churchill famously wrote of the role of prime minister: “The loyalties which centre upon number one are enormous. If he trips he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes they must be covered. If he sleeps he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good he must be pole-axed.” Good advice. And we all now know that Keir Starmer is no good at being Prime Minister. When he trips, he blames others. When he makes mistakes, it’s in the full glare of daylight. He’s a dud.

Yet even now the Labour Party seems reluctant to conclude that he has to go. Even now Wes Streeting can’t quite bring himself to launch a leadership challenge and calls instead for a transition timetable. Personally I’m convinced Starmer is done for, but who could blame him for trying to tough it out against opponents so infirm of purpose? Things could get worse for Labour yet. But it is a fool’s game to spend time commenting on the tergiversations of an organisation so opaque to outsiders and so Byzantine in its workings as the modern Labour Party. Let us instead contemplate the wider picture. What is Labour’s actual argument about? Politics is supposed to be about ideas, about alternative visions for dealing with the country’s challenges. And yet where is the great debate about these? Streeting calls for a “battle of ideas” in his resignation letter. He sees the key to that as being a leadership campaign that involves “the best possible field” of candidates. Yet what is the point of having many candidates if they all think the same thing? Sure, there are differences of emphasis among the potential candidates. Maybe Streeting is a bit more open to some change in the NHS. Maybe Burnham and Rayner are more likely to try more tax and spend. Maybe some will be less maniacally attached to net zero than Ed Miliband. But the similarities are more obvious than the differences. All the likely candidates, just like Starmer, are creatures of the same political class. All have devoted their lives to Labour politics and none appears to have any meaningful non-political hinterland or wider interests beyond pop music and football. They all support Burnham-style state‑led regionalism, they all see the state as capable of resolving all society’s ills, and they are all in their different ways steeped in corporatism and the trade unions. All are pro-EU and want to reverse Brexit. And of course all are hostile to “populism”. As Streeting puts it, there is a danger from “English nationalism” (presumably in contradistinction to the good kind of nationalism, in Wales, Scotland, and nationalist Northern Ireland) and from Reform’s “threat to the values and ideals that have made this country great”. Contrast the last real battle of ideas we have had. When Boris took on Theresa May, he had a clear and distinct view of what needed to be done: deliver the referendum result, start using our new national freedom in our own interests, and save the Conservative Party as a result. Agree or not, think he delivered or not, at least you knew what you got with him in the 2019 crisis. Where is the equivalent now in Labour? What is Streeting actually trying to achieve and what does he stand for? And where in the wider party is the passion for great issues? Look at the list of bills in the King’s Speech. Merger of police forces. A “Water Ombudsman”. “Sandbox powers” for regulation. A hotel tax. A ticket tout bill. Where is the moral urgency that used to animate the Labour Party? I just don’t see it. I’m glad about that, obviously, because most Labour ideas are bad ones. But the absence of ideas helps us correctly identify what the current crisis is really all about. It isn’t about getting rid of Starmer in order to implement a genuinely different political programme. Rather it’s just the latest convulsion since 2016 in an out-of-touch establishment, one which thinks it has the right to rule, and which simply will not engage with the opinions of a large part of the country or accept what measures may be necessary to solve the severe problems we face. Instead, its representatives keep trying things that won’t work. Its Tory version tried managerialism under Sunak and nearly killed off the Tory Party as a result. Its Labour version has been doing the same under Starmer, and with the same result for the Labour Party. They have nowhere to go now. They could, of course, do something different: accept that managerialist process has failed and start engaging with popular views on issues like migration, culture, crime, and state effectiveness. But they won’t, probably can’t, do that. All they can do is occupy the seats of power for as long as they can and make solving the problems, eventually, even harder. Historically, the way out of this is not that the establishment reinvents itself, but rather that it splits, with part allying with outsider forces to displace the old politics. In the current context, with the legacy parties dying, that could happen in two ways. One is by a surge of voters and politicians to the Reform Party so as to finally break the model. The other is for the Rejoin establishment to call in the EU and let them govern us, directly or by proxy, instead. The latter is surely what the Labour leadership candidates really want. When they’ve finally poleaxed the PM, they’ll do their best to get us back on the road to Brussels. But voters and politicians on the Right still need to work out where they stand. Are they part of the solution, or part of the problem?