Burnham must break with Starmer's dishonest politics, or fail just like him

Even if likely successor Andy Burnham wants change, he'll face formidable external controls from the financial markets and internal constraints from the Labour machine

[First published by Middle East Eye]

Keir Starmer’s announcement on Monday that he was stepping down as Labour leader – and therefore as Britain’s prime minister – is a remarkable turnaround for the man whose election victory less than two years ago was uniformly heralded as a triumph.

In fact, Starmer rode into 10 Downing Street on a grand deception, propped up by the UK’s establishment media, that has proven the key to his undoing.

This was a disaster foretold. And Andy Burnham, his likely successor, could well find himself in the same boat a year or two hence – unless he radically rethinks his party’s strategy on a range of domestic and foreign-policy issues.

Labour won by a landslide in 2024, gaining around two-thirds of the parliamentary seats on a third of the national turnout, thanks to the UK’s dysfunctional first-past-the-post electoral system. Starmer enjoyed the backing of scarcely a fifth of eligible voters, in what was the second-lowest turnout since 1885.

By contrast, Starmer’s much more leftwing predecessor as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn – roundly dismissed by mainstream media as “unelectable” – secured 40 percent of the vote in 2017. It was the party’s biggest surge in votes since 1945.

Labour’s huge haul of seats in 2024 did not indicate widespread approval of the party’s uninspiring programme, nor was it a broad endorsement of Starmer as leader. It chiefly reflected disunity on the right.

The outgoing Conservative government had lost much of its appeal after 14 years of misrule and an austerity politics that, as became ever clearer, was siphoning money from the public coffers into the pockets of the party’s donors.

As a result, the right split, with many traditional Tory voters either staying home or straying to the insurgent far-right Reform party, whose core policy is to blame immigrants for the dismal state of the nation.

Passionless politics

Long before the election campaign, Starmer had ditched the 10 pledges he made to secure the party leadership – promises that echoed the leftwing policies that had brought Corbyn within a whisker of winning the 2017 election.

Instead, Starmer presented Labour, and himself, as a safe pair of hands to steer Britain on a not-dissimilar course from the Conservatives, but without the corruption and “nastiness”. It was a passionless, visionless approach to politics that – along with dishonesty – would serve as his trademark.

In opposition, Starmer promoted an image of himself as Mr Rules, drawing on his previous role as head of Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service.

His campaign slogans, contrasting himself to the Tories, included: “Root out 14 years of rot” and “no more revolving doors”, along with commitments to “crack down on cronyism” and “restore standards in public life”.

Once in power, and under greater scrutiny, Starmer was quickly outed as a hypocrite of the first order. Revelations showed he had been showered with more than £100,000 ($132,000) in gifts and freebies, including clothes and designer spectacles, a personal shopper for his wife, and lavish corporate hospitality, with tickets to Arsenal matches and Taylor Swift concerts. One top donor also loaned him an £18 million central London penthouse so that, Starmer claimed, his son could study for exams in peace.

Starmer promoted his version of Labour as the “party of change”. But this looked all too similar to the kind of sleaze familiar from years of Conservative rule.

There was a reason for that. After Starmer unceremoniously booted Corbyn out of the party in late 2020, he began driving out the record numbers of members who had joined during his predecessor’s tenure. They had been attracted to Labour by Corbyn’s promises of a democratic socialism that would reverse austerity, and of a foreign policy that would place ethical considerations above war profits.

As the new leader, Starmer launched a large-scale purge, using the same weaponised antisemitism claims that had brought down Corbyn. The Labour bureaucracy suspended and expelled party members, including a disproportionate number of Jews, who were critical of Israeli abuses of the Palestinian people.

By early 2023, Starmer was telling the party’s leftwing members to go. “If you don’t like the changes we have made, I say the door is open and you can leave,” he declared.

They took him at his word and departed.

Narrow interests

Later, when the Green Party elected a new progressive leader in Zack Polanski, former Labour members hurried to swell its ranks. No one in the media cared to note that these political refugees, smeared as “antisemites” while in Labour, were enthusiastically signing up to the only major British party with a Jewish leader.

A reinvigorated Green Party would go on to deliver knockout electoral blows to Starmer this year, further battering his already-diminished authority. Polanski’s party trounced Labour in the Gorton and Denton by-election in late February, and then seized many supposedly safe Labour seats in the local elections that followed in May.

In the 2023 speech in which he told leftwing members to leave the party, Starmer also engaged in characteristic deceit: “The Labour Party is unrecognisable from 2019 [under Corbyn],” he averred, “and it will never go back. It will never again be a party captured by narrow interests.”

The supposed “narrow interests” he was referring to were the popular, democratic socialist policies that Corbyn had campaigned for in 2017, which nearly won him that election.

In fact, it was Starmer, not Corbyn, who ensured Labour was “captured by narrow interests”. The loss of leftwing members shrunk Labour’s income precipitously. No matter; Starmer’s aim was to rely instead on the same corporate donors that funded the Conservative Party.

Big Business was wined and dined, as were donors who barely hid the fact that Israel was their main political priority. As a result, Starmer’s Labour government looked and acted little differently than its Tory predecessor.

Starmer lost no time in deflating expectations after winning his landslide victory in summer 2024. He issued dire warnings that state coffers were bare after years of Tory misrule. He was soon imposing swingeing austerity cuts that even the Conservatives had not dared to introduce. At the same time, he made sure to keep Big Business happy.

Particularly unpopular were his abolition of the winter fuel allowance for pensioners, and cuts to welfare and disability benefits.

Amid a cost-of-living crisis, Starmer’s decision to penalise the most vulnerable – a key traditional Labour constituency – provoked repeated rebellions on his backbenches.

Collusion in genocide

From the outset of his leadership of Labour in 2020, Starmer had worked assiduously to purge the party of its left wing over criticisms of Israel – under the guise of addressing a supposed “antisemitism crisis”.

It hardly came as a surprise, then, that he alienated swaths of the British public with his first foreign-policy test – in Gaza.

In late 2023, as opposition leader, when he had a chance to distance himself from the Tory government’s illegal collusion with Israel, Starmer shocked even sections of his party’s right wing by declaring that Israel’s denial of water, food and power to millions of Palestinians was an act of “self-defence”.

A former human rights lawyer, Starmer was excusing an unquestionable war crime. He later backtracked, unconvincingly, on the comments.

The International Criminal Court would later issue an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing him of crimes against humanity over the starvation blockade of Gaza endorsed by Starmer.

Once in office, Starmer proved no better. He repeatedly denied that the situation in Gaza was a genocide, even though he himself had argued before the International Court of Justice in 2014 that a Serbian attack on the Croatian city of Vukovar 23 years earlier was a genocide. That attack was many orders of magnitude less destructive than Israel’s erasure of Gaza.

Starmer refused even to admit that Israel was committing war crimes in the enclave – not least, because to do so would have required him to stop colluding in those atrocities.

His government continued to sell arms to Israel, and allowed Israeli arms manufacturers such as Elbit Systems to operate factories in the UK to build killer drones for use in Gaza.

British planes transported large shipments of weapons to Israel that helped level the tiny territory, while also carrying out endless surveillance flights over Gaza to supply Israel with intelligence used to obliterate the enclave.

At the same time, Britain provided diplomatic cover for Israeli crimes, including at the UN Security Council, and welcomed Israeli generals and politicians suspected of war crimes.

Authoritarian instincts

But most significantly of all, the Starmer government went further than the Conservatives in cracking down on basic and long-cherished rights to speech and assembly to stifle protests against what a consensus of experts concluded early on was a genocide by Israel.

In this regard, Starmer appeared to be extending to the wider public the dirty-tricks, antisemitism smears he had used against Corbyn and his supporters.

In the previous Conservative government, home secretary Suella Braverman had branded anti-genocide demonstrations in London that attracted hundreds of thousands of Britons as “hate marches“.

Starmer’s first home secretary, Yvette Cooper, not only continued the theme but recruited Britain’s draconian terrorism laws to further chill the protests.

Journalists and political activists who criticised the government’s complicity in genocide had their homes raided by police at dawn, and faced the threat of up to 14 years in jail for “supporting terrorism”.

Next, Cooper proscribed as a terrorist organisation the direct action group Palestine Action, which targeted Israeli factories hosted on British soil that make killer drones to be used in Gaza.

It was not just the first time in British history that a direct action group had been proscribed. In a related legal first, the judge in the trial of four Palestine Action activists sentenced them this month as terrorists, even though none had been convicted of a terrorism offence or of causing intentional violence.

A popular backlash was inevitable. Thousands of elderly Britons – from vicars and lawyers to doctors and army veterans – took to the streets in protest at an unprecedented assault on civil liberties.

In a clear indication of the deeply authoritarian instincts of Starmer and his government, the police were sent in to arrest the protesters en masse. They now face charges of “supporting terrorism”.

Meanwhile, the government announced it was preparing to scrap the right of many defendants to trial by jury – one of the most important safeguards against the dangers of state overreach.

It was hard not to conclude that the government’s urge to dispense with juries followed from the fact that juries had shown themselves far less ready than judges to convict those caught up in Starmer’s wholesale assault on rights of speech and protest.

Hologram leader

Why has Starmer been so actively complicit in Israel’s genocide? In large part, because it would have required of him moral fibre, and an independence of spirit, to break free of US-dictated policy in the Middle East.

Recent investigations by journalists show he was never going to be that kind of prime minister. In fact, they reveal that, in a real sense, Starmer was never in charge of his own party or government.

According to his closest advisors, he has largely been a hologram leader.

In a memorable quote, one described Starmer to journalists in withering terms: “He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR” – a reference to the driverless Docklands Light Railway in London.

So if Starmer was never running the show, who was?

Investigative journalist Paul Holden’s recent book The Fraud disclosed that Starmer was the creature of a shadowy think tank called Labour Together, set up during Corbyn’s tenure as leader.

In secret, and in breach of electoral laws, it amassed a giant slush fund – some £800,000 – from wealthy benefactors, including more than half of the money from a prominent pro-Israel lobbyist, Sir Trevor Chinn.

Their campaign included feeding the media endless smears associating Corbyn’s Labour party with antisemitism.

The aim was to replace him with a pliant novice who could be coached into telling party members what they wanted to hear but ignore their wishes once elected leader.

Starmer was Labour Together’s choice. He was an empty vessel through which hidden actors could exert their control over the party in the interests of wealthy donors.

Before the 2024 election, Labour Together would handpick and fund more than 100 candidates it parachuted into seats to bolster its grip on the party.

For much of this time, the think tank was led by Morgan McSweeney, who would go on to become Starmer’s chief of staff. McSweeney was himself a protege of Peter Mandelson, the key architect of Tony Blair’s Big Business-friendly New Labour.

McSweeney insisted, apparently against the advice of the security services, that Mandelson should be Starmer’s ambassador to the US.

That decision would seal first McSweeney’s fate and then Starmer’s as it emerged that both knew at the time of his appointment that Mandelson was a close friend of the serial sex predator Jeffrey Epstein.

It was yet another sleazy episode in Starmer’s short political career – and one, along with his complicity in the Gaza genocide, that pundits mostly preferred to gloss over this week in their assessments of his two-year tenure as prime minister.

Why? Because were the threads of the Labour Together scandal to unravel further, they would lead beyond the tawdry, crooked Starmer project to the role the establishment media played in destroying Corbyn and puffing up Starmer, all to eradicate the threat of a mildly socialist programme curtailing the privileges of the Epstein class.

Easy scapegoats

The question now, as Burnham prepares to take Starmer’s place, is will anything change – beyond spin – under a new leader?

Britain is about to get its fifth prime minister in four years. The country is looking ungovernable.

That, in large part, is because the public – tired and cynical after years of an austerity politics that visibly serves not their interests but those of the billionaire class – now demands radical change. It wants a politics of insurgency.

But the so-called “financial markets” – that is, the super-rich – insist on more of the same: the continuation of a business environment in which they grow fat on profits and can hoard their wealth.

The globalised economy is a hidden constraint, designed to tie the hands of national politicians. It forces them to deceive the electorate about what they are willing and able to do.

Some, like Starmer and Labour Together, promise change but deliver yet more austerity. Others, like Reform’s Nigel Farage, find an easy scapegoat – immigrants – to blame for the malaise.

Can Burnham break this cycle? The indicators are not hopeful.

One of the main images following Burnham’s victory in Makerfield last week was of Josh Simons, who quit as the constituency’s MP to trigger the by-election, warmly embracing Burnham the morning after the vote.

Simons resigned as a government minister in February after it emerged that, in emails to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) spy agency, he falsely linked reporters investigating Labour Together to a supposed “pro-Kremlin” network. Simons succeeded McSweeney as the director of Labour Together.

Simons is reported to be advising Burnham on policy, and is being tipped for a place in his future cabinet.

Wriggle room

Unlike Starmer, Burnham may be by nature a politician but, like Starmer, he shows few signs of having strong convictions or a moral core.

He has already followed Starmer in moving on to Farage’s terrain on immigration controls and detention centres. He is reported to favour keeping Shabana Mahmood, another Labour Together alumna, as home secretary.

Mahmood has led Starmer’s authoritarian crackdown on speech and protest and has promoted the idea of the state running AI-powered, Big Brother-style surveillance – what she called a “panopticon“ – of the British public.

A long-time Labour Friend of Israel, Burnham refuses to call what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide. He has not responded to a letter from Corbyn last month calling on him to hold a public inquiry into British complicity in Israel’s genocide.

Burnham has referred to the peaceful boycott campaign against Israel as “spiteful“.

Burnham backed the illegal Iraq war in 2003 and voted twice against an inquiry. Defending his record during the 2015 leadership contest won by Corbyn, he observed that “there wasn’t an easy answer” on the issue of illegally invading a sovereign country.

His vague formulations about “public control” over national utilities like water and energy give him plenty of wriggle room to avoid actual public ownership. One of his first acts after winning Makerfield was to “reassure the financial markets” by meeting a trio of leading economists, including a former chair of Goldman Sachs.

Polanski, leader of the Greens and the left’s new insurgency candidate, threw down the gauntlet to Burnham: “The time for half measures and sticking plasters is long gone – if he becomes the next PM, Burnham must be bold or he will be bust.”

Even if Burnham wishes to rise to the challenge, all evidence suggests he will face not only formidable external controls from “the financial markets” but insuperable internal constraints from Labour’s party machine.

Starmer leaves office with the country more divided than ever. His successor is unlikely to heal those wounds.

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