Front and centre, of course, was Starmer’s failure of principle and command over the war in Gaza. But it was notable that Galloway’s messaging made hay of many other unrelated issues, designed to attract disaffected white voters. Anti-woke rhetoric, Rochdale’s grooming gangs, local NHS inadequacy, and a sense of municipal dilapidation that an economically cautious Labour can’t be trusted to turn around: all also featured in his campaign. Far from a managerial mishap, this by-election points to a far graver threat to the Starmer project writ large. Just in time for this election year, the British Left that he swore to keep out and down is rearing its head once again.

Pollsters and analysts largely missed this development, obsessing instead over the electoral threat that Reform poses to the Conservatives. And this is considerable: we have a prime minister who waxes unlyrically over the “need to protect our democracy” even as, on his watch, trust in British political parties has slumped from a meagre 20% last year to a dismal 12% today. But this energy is not only clustering to the Right. A coalition of hundreds of thousands has assembled to march every week since the war in Gaza began. Galloway’s victory proves that, unlike a Reform Party whose political power still remains in the subjunctive mood, this is a movement that is capable of traversing from the streets to Parliament, depriving Labour of votes and MPs on the way.

Ever the opportunist, Galloway has lost no time in calling on Jeremy Corbyn to stop dithering, and lead a new party of the Left, which he says he would support. But, beyond him and his uniquely divisive personality, this is a move that a significant tranche of former Labour supporters, climate campaigners and peace activists would support, increasingly disenfranchised and frustrated by the Tweedledee and Tweedledum double act of Sunak and Starmer. Because the public fury over the failure of either politician to call out Netanyahu, and at the shenanigans in Parliament to prevent a vote on an “immediate & permanent ceasefire” that might acknowledge the collective punishment of Palestinians, is not confined to British Muslims. At a time when authenticity and answers to profound questions are lacking, it seems that the public increasingly regard Parliament and its occupants (taking their cue from Dennis Skinner) as a “Palace of Varieties”. An ineffectual conjuring house, utterly detached from real matters of politics.

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Keir Starmer the shapeshifter

By Mark Seddon

The terminal unpopularity of the Tories continues to provide for a large Labour lead on paper. The traditional parties of protest provide no comparable outlet: the Liberal Democrats have all but disappeared into one of those cracked pavements they tend to obsess about. But Labour’s standing as “the party of change” will only maintain its resonance while voters are on board with what this “change” represents. And a slip in the polls as the election approaches will open the door to new mathematical possibilities in Parliament, especially if Galloway’s win emboldens MPs on the rump Left of the party to jump ship. The best estimates suggest that at least eight Labour seats are threatened by the Gaza effect, while the anti-war SNP seem likely to hold on to more seats than hitherto projected.

And this could sabotage the entire strategic grounding of Starmer’s leadership. In their rush to congratulate him on winning the party leadership (with what proved to be a borderline fraudulent manifesto), and to salute the subsequent defenestration of Jeremy Corbyn (whom he had once claimed as “a friend”), many in Labour seemed to think they could happily do without their Left-wing. But the few successful coalitions of the Left in recent years have not permitted such arrogance. It is a mistake Joe Biden has strained to avoid, continuing to work closely with Bernie Sanders and members of the radical “Squad”, all while rolling out the kind of transformative, state-driven economic programme that Starmer has unceremoniously dropped. But for Biden, the fault lines over Gaza are also showing. He is dropping in the polls, and many of the younger activists who worked so hard for him last time are threatening to sit on their hands, even in the face of a third Trump candidacy.

Keir Starmer claims Harold Wilson as his political inspiration. But he shares none of his hero’s intelligence, shrewd political skill, or easy humour. If he did, he might be familiar with the irascible former Labour MP and Commons bookie, Ian Mikardo, who supplied the rule Wilson cleaved to in his own party management: the Labour Party needs a “Left and a Right wing to fly”. Starmer has decisively severed the Left from the body of the Labour leadership, ruling instead through a coterie of sectarian hatchet men. MPs and candidates from the Left have found themselves censured and suspended, often on the most spurious grounds, with even party veterans left wondering if they will be able to stand in the general election. The role of local parties in selecting their own candidates has been quashed beneath the boot of central office, and party panjandrums are said to have a list of approved, on-message candidates they intend to drop into safe seats that become vacant between now and the election.

All of this is unlikely to cost Starmer his victory, although it suggests a smaller majority than that predicted by the pollsters. But a network of internal opposition is forming, not least in Starmer’s own backyard. In common with a number of prominent Labour MPs who have demurred from calling for a permanent ceasefire (including West Streeting in Ilford and Rushanara Ali in Bethnal Green), Starmer’s home ground of Holborn and St Pancras will likely be facing an insurgent campaign from the Left. Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC MP under Nelson Mandela, has lived in Starmer’s constituency for 20 years and is weighing up standing there in the general election. This weekend he endorsed the launch of a new political alliance, billed as the first organised movement of the Left outside Labour, calling itself “Collective”. The name is more than symbolic: a pragmatic grouping, Collective will likely work with other parties, including Galloway’s own, and could field several parliamentary candidates, targeting constituencies in inner cities with large student populations.

The idea that the bruised Labour Left could be bundled up and tossed over the ropes of the political ring was an enormous miscalculation on Starmer’s part. After all, we’re only seven years on from the peak of the Corbyn movement, which operated with a grassroots dynamism well beyond the playbook of the powerbrokers who’ve managed the party since the New Labour turn. The same forces will drive this new Left, with enthusiasm and young volunteers making up for the lack of donor money drawn to the big parties. And while some may dismiss the electoral damage a Left breakaway could do, as with Ukip and the Brexit Party’s influence over successive elections, independent Left candidates could one day hold the balance of a Labour majority.

For now though, the next election seems probably produce a Starmer-led Labour government, benefiting from the Tory collapse and a likely low turn-out. But beneath this victory, a new movement might begin to find its voice. For decades, first-past-the-post elections have been fought and won among swing voters in a small band of marginal constituencies. Independent candidates may perform better than expected, exerting a disproportionate impact at a time when constituency boundaries have been redrawn and pressure continues to mount for proportional representation. It is the election after this one which may deliver the body blow to the old political giants, who in any case already resemble, as Christopher Hitchens once said of America’s own dead two-party system, “two cosily fused buttocks of the same giant derrière”.

“Today marks 20 years since the beginning of an invasion and occupation that has been estimated to have cost more than one million Iraqis lives, along with those of 179 British servicemen and women,” he told a TV camera afterwards. “Today, we remember how the then UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, warned that the war was not in accordance with the UN Charter and was illegal. Last month, we observed a minute’s silence for those killed in another illegal war, started by Russia in Ukraine. If there is a lesson for all of us to learn, it is that the UN Charter is there for a reason.”

Less than a mile away, at the Houses of Parliament, the Leader of the Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, also observed the minute’s silence. “I have previously stated that the Iraq war was not lawful because there was no UN resolution expressly authorising it,” he said in a statement afterwards. “The decision to commit British forces was taken by a former Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair. My Labour Party condemns all breaches of international law — both past and present.”

And then I woke up… to the dulcet tones of Tony Blair, sufficiently emboldened by yet another soft-soap BBC interview to pronounce, without a hint of irony, on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. When gently challenged over his own invasion of Iraq, he loftily declared that “each case must be judged on its own merits”. Blair, of course, has form with Putin, visiting the St Petersburg opera with him in 2000 as Chechnya was being pulverised. He later said that it is “important we support Russia in her action against terrorism”.

Twenty years ago, as an elected member of the Labour Party’s ruling National Executive Committee, I had a ring-side seat at the launch of the Iraq War. From the outset, I didn’t believe Blair’s claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. According to Robin Lustig, then a presenter on Radio 4’s The World Tonight, my clash with former US Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, was the first time anyone had publicly challenged the WMD claim. (So furious was Eagleburger, he started calling me “Buster”.)

From early 2002, it was already clear that America had a political imperative for Iraqi regime change. Tony Blair, far from dissuading President Bush, was actually helping him build an international “coalition of the willing”. On January 28, I sat next to the veteran Labour Left-winger Dennis Skinner at a meeting of Labour’s NEC as he jabbed his finger at Blair and said: “This will be the biggest mistake you will ever make!”

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By Helen Thompson

Unbeknown to Blair, I was working closely with Jan Kavan, a former President of the UN General Assembly and Czech Foreign Minister, and Robin Cook, who would later resign from the Cabinet in protest at Britain’s support for the Iraq war. Together we drafted a series of resolutions to be tabled at meetings of the NEC, in the hope that this might encourage a wider revolt within the Parliamentary Labour Party. On three occasions, with only the support of three other members of the NEC, we challenged Blair directly, submitting resolutions demanding that the Labour Government ascertain from the UN Secretary-General and the President of the General Assembly the legality of any attack. The 30-strong committee voted us down twice and on a third occasion, as the countdown to war intensified, ruled a resolution “out of order”, which meant that it could not be voted on. This time, I walked out of the NEC meeting in protest. In another meeting, we were briefly handed a copy of the “dodgy dossier”, with its confected claim that WMDs could be launched against British military bases in Cyprus within 45 minutes. Then we had to hand it back.

When we took our opposition for a fourth time to the Labour Party Conference, despite party chairman Charles Clarke’s attempts to persuade us to withdraw our amendment, we were subsequently rounded on by tame, hand-picked speakers in the debate. I was accused of being an “appeaser” and “guilty of making orphans of the sons and daughters of servicemen in Cyprus”. Given that I was the son of a serviceman based in Cyprus who had been evacuated because there was a very real threat of a Turkish invasion at the time, it all seemed pretty hysterical. 

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The betrayal of Baghdad

By David Patrikarakos

On February 15, 2003, millions of people in more than 600 cities worldwide took to the streets to protest the impending invasion. In London, with more than a million people filling the streets and Hyde Park, I joined speakers including Reverend Jesse Jackson, Charles Kennedy, and Jeremy Corbyn. I had brought the nonagenarian Michael Foot from his home in Hampstead to give possibly one of his last great flights of oratory. In Europe, crowds were even larger. Anti-war organisers reported that the worldwide demonstrations collectively formed the largest peace protest since the Vietnam War.

What have we learned from the Iraq invasion? Precious little it would seem. Today, Gordon Brown, whom I had attempted to win over before the invasion, and who I knew in his heart didn’t really want to go along with it, is calling for a Nuremberg-style special court to try Putin for war crimes; the same was promised for Saddam Hussein and look how how that turned out. Meanwhile, arms control treaties have been ripped up and the UN Secretary-General is invisible enough for most not even to know his name.

In Britain, it is now very difficult to find anyone who was ever in favour of the invasion and dismemberment of Iraq. Yet Tony Blair has never apologised or been held to account; instead, he has become revoltingly rich, partly by advising the kind of regimes he once railed against. Meanwhile, his chief propagandist, Alastair Campbell, is treated reverentially by the media, holding forth with no hint of self-awareness on such vexed issues as “standards in public life”. However, perhaps Peter Mandelson is thriving the most: he is now back in control of a Labour Party that Starmer claims as his own. This is the legacy of Iraq for New Labour: the lies might seem a distant memory, but the liars are most certainly not.

Starmer and his Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, spent the past week in the somewhat unlikely setting of Davos in Switzerland. Their reason for attending the World Economic Forum — that exclusive club of business magnates and like-minded politicos — was clear: to demonstrate that Labour had moved back to what is euphemistically described as the “centre ground” (the “centre” is wherever an exclusive set of pundits and politicians decide it to be). Clearly now in better, more refined company, Starmer, in an interview with Emily Maitlis, rather let the cat out of the bag: “Westminster is too constrained,” he said. “Once you get out of Westminster, whether it’s Davos or anywhere else, you actually engage with people that you can see working with in the future. Westminster is just a tribal shouting place.”

I have known every Labour leader since James Callaghan (who gave me my first job interview and then thought better of making an offer), worked for one (Gordon Brown in his UN capacity), and for a number of years shared an office with another (Michael Foot). In that time, I have voted for every Labour leader who attained the office bar one, Tony Blair. I thought the latter was a phoney the moment I met him for a coffee in his Islington home shortly after he became leader. That feeling about Blair never escaped me in the years I spent on the party’s ruling National Executive Committee, before the disastrous Iraq war forced me to quit.

When running for the party leadership, Starmer was asked which former leader he most identified with. He settled on Harold Wilson, who still holds the record for winning four out of five General Elections for Labour. Wilson was, of course, the consummate party manager. On occasion he would do battle with the Left, but essentially took his cue from the inimitable Ian Mikardo, the Jewish Tribunite MP and the Commons’ resident unofficial “bookie”. The Mikardo maxim was that “in order to fly, Labour needed both a Left and a Right wing”. Sadly, few leaders have been able to free this old bird as Wilson once managed. But following the extraordinary toxicity that had characterised the relationship between the parliamentary Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer’s call for “unity” and his commitment to broadly social democratic policies was enough to persuade many, including me, to vote for him. Since then, however, he has picked his side and is ferociously pinioning the Left of the party.

“These are my principles,” Groucho Marx is said to have remarked. “If you don’t like them, I have others.” Starmer, after being reminded recently by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg of some of the pledges he had made when standing for leader (or which there were at least ten), looked her in the eye and said: “When I was running for leader, I made pledges reflecting my values. Since then, a lot has changed.”

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Indeed it has. Each of his pledges, let alone his values, has since been discarded, along with the party’s former leader and a significant portion of its fee-paying membership. Most political leaders U-turn to an extent, but few with such lack of guile and poor dexterity as Starmer. Take Brexit: first he accepted the referendum result, before demanding a second one, and now apparently accepting it (at least for the time being). His interview in March 2020 with Andrew Neil will doubtless be mined to exhaustion by his opponents for maximum effect ahead of the next election.

Neil: “You made 10 policy pledges — including that energy, rail, water, the Royal Mail will be taken into common ownership; so, will they all be in Labour’s next manifesto?”
Starmer: “I’ve made that commitment — the pledges I have made indicate the direction of travel.”
Neil: “So, those four industries will be in the Manifesto, for nationalisation, in 2024?”
Starmer: “They will. They are baseline indicators for where we are going. I think that we’ll need to think about how we will do it.”
Neil: “What about abolishing university tuition fees then?”
Starmer: “They are all pledges, Andrew, so the answer to these questions is ‘yes’.”

On the privatisation of the NHS (firmly ruled out), Starmer now looks to the private sector to remedy the crisis. Elsewhere in recent months, the shapeshifting has moved with some abandon. Having garnered union votes for his election, Starmer subsequently criticised Shadow Ministers joining picket lines. Someone could have shown him the pictures of Labour Ministers, Shirley Williams, Denis Howell and Fred Mulley, no militants they, on the Grunwick picket line in the late Seventies, or a photo of Harriet Harman and the sadly missed Jack Dromey, in matching duffle coats, doing the same.

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The Labour Party has a woman problem

By Rosie Duffield

Can Starmer pull off his Jekyll and Hyde act? Here he is when he was questioned about his predecessor during the leadership contest: “I want to pay tribute to Jeremy Corbyn, who led our party through some really difficult times, who energised our movement, and who’s a friend as well as a colleague!” Fast forward a few years, and Corbyn has become the object of the now-obligatory “six minutes of hate”; doubtless we shall soon hear that he has been blocked from standing in his Islington constituency.

The Forde Report, commissioned under Starmer into allegations of bullying, racism and sexism during the Corbyn era, produced enough uncomfortable truths that the leader and his consiglieres want to see buried. For instance, after claims of antisemitism dogged the Labour Party, Starmer resolved to tackle the crisis. So, according to Jewish Voice for Labour, under Starmer, an entirely disproportionate number of Jewish members, some 59 in total, are currently suspended, have now resigned, been expelled or been auto-excluded. A few were “cleared” and others received a “reminder of conduct”. Most have been investigated for allegations of antisemitism, which often means that they have been critical of Israel. The party membership, as a whole, is under unprecedented surveillance.

Members seeking selection locally or nationally have always been vetted for the more obvious misdemeanours that could rebound on the party. But, as Michael Crick has observed, the process has taken a sinister turn, with a number of individuals being blocked from standing for seemingly minor infractions, such as wishing Nicola Sturgeon a swift recovery from a bout of ill-health, or for once liking a post from a proscribed organisation before it had actually become proscribed. This process of filtration has been remarkably successful. Crick recently observed that out of the more than 70 or so parliamentary selections so far, only one contender from the Left of the party has managed to get through.

Under Starmer, it is estimated that 137,000 fee-paying members have either left, been suspended or expelled. There may be more, since the party is slow to cancel direct debits and we have less of an idea of how many new members may have joined. Practically, with fewer members and unions issuing blank bank transfers, Labour is potentially being led down the Tory route of “dark money”, with all of the pitfalls. Look no further than the recent row involving Wes Streeting, Dan Jarvis and Yvette Cooper, who all denied they did anything wrong by accepting tens of thousands of pounds from a company, MPM Connect, which is part-owned by Peter Hearn, a Labour donor, but does not have any obvious line of business.Meanwhile, Starmer is insistent that all Front Benchers now contribute to fundraising efforts. He has also recently recalled the services of Blair’s former chief fundraiser, Lord Levy, who was the centre of a “cash-for-honours” investigation in 2006. What could possibly go wrong?

Starmer has wisely drawn from Gordon Brown’s work around further constitutional reforms, and he is coming under pressure from his MPs to offer a Green manifesto. But where are the meat and potatoes; the bold vision that was at least encapsulated in Wilson’s promise of the “white heat of the technological revolution”? There are still two years until a General Election, one that comes with boundary changes that do not work in Starmer’s favour, a Scotland that has stopped sending large numbers of Labour MPs to Westminster, and an economy that may be beginning to recover. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde may be able to control the Labour Party, but that doesn’t mean they are certain to win an election.