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So the good news is easy. After 14 years of cruelty, incompetence and corruption, the Tories were wiped out in yesterday’s General Election in the UK, suffering their worst ever result, and ending up with less MPs than at any other point in their 190-year existence.
Of the 650 seats contested, the 365 seats that the Tories had when Rishi Sunak unexpectedly called a General Election on May 22 were slashed to just 121 (a loss of over two-thirds), with their vote almost halved, from 13,966,454 in 2019 to just 6,814,469 yesterday.
High-profile Tory losses included Liz Truss, the disastrous 43-day Prime Minister, whose vote plunged from 35,507 in 2019 to 11,217 in South West Norfolk, the absurd and offensive pro-Brexit toff Jacob Rees-Mogg, and a number of ministers until six weeks ago including the vacuous Tory pin-up Penny Mordaunt, the empty Grant Shapps and Mark Harper, the far-right ideologues Liam Fox and Johnny Mercer, and the offensive Thérèse Coffey and Gillian Keegan.
Other good news involved the Green Party, whose vote share leapt to 7%, and who quadrupled their number of MPs, with Siân Berry not only successfully replacing Caroline Lucas (the sole Green MP for 14 long and lonely years in Parliament), but also with co-leaders Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay triumphing in Bristol Central and Waveney (in East Anglia), and Ellie Chowns securing victory in North Herefordshire.
It was also a hugely successful election for the Liberal Democrats, who increased their number of seats from eleven to 71, taking shire after shire in the Tory heartlands which, in many cases, had always been Tory, and whose MPs made the mistake of thinking that they would remain so even as they became ever more infected with cruelty and complacency.
There were also resounding victories for a number of independents, most prominently Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader and veteran MP for Islington North, who was booted out of the Labour Party by Keir Starmer, as the sacrifice for his alarming and completely invented antisemitism witch hunt — which made Labour the malignant global poster child for equating criticism of the State of Israel with antisemitism. Despite Starmer pouring resources into the constituency to promote an NHS-privatising rival, Corbyn had the last laugh by romping to an astounding victory.
Corbyn secured 24,120 votes (49.2% of the vote share), which was a much more resounding victory than Starmer’s lacklustre performance in his home constituency of Holborn and St. Pancras, where his vote share halved from 36,641 in 2019 to just 18,884 yesterday, and where his closest challenger, the former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein, secured 7,312 votes on a platform specifically opposed to Starmer’s unconditional support for Israel’s’s genocide in Gaza.
For Labour, however, the giddy enthusiasm of having secured a landslide really ought to be tempered drastically by a recognition that they only won because the Tories lost so badly — and, alarmingly, because a late entrant to the circus, the whingeing fascist Nigel Farage, split the opposition vote still further, his Reform UK Party securing a disturbing 14% of the vote nationally (over four million votes).
However much Labour may want to hide it, the awful truth for Starmer’s grand-sounding but vacuous project of “change” is that he secured less votes than Jeremy Corbyn did in both 2017, when the Starmerists’ own covert sabotage of Corbyn largely prevented a Labour victory, and in 2019, despite the landslide that Boris Johnson secured because he turned the entire election into a narcissistic spectacle devoted to his hollow promise to ‘Get Brexit Done.’
Overall, Starmer’s Labour Party secured 9,712,011 votes, compared to 12,877,918 for Corbyn in 2017 and 10,269,051 in 2019. Even factoring in the spectacularly low turnout yesterday — just 59.9% of the registered electorate, down from 68.8% in 2017 and 67.3% in 2019 — there is no way that Starmer’s Labour Party can claim that they won a resounding victory — and, of course, the low turnout was not only due to Tory fatigue; it was also clearly due to the fact that Labour had done precisely nothing to enthuse anyone to believe that they offered any sort of inspiring vision for the future. In election-eve polling of Labour Party members, 48% admitted that they only wanted a Labour win to get rid of the Tories.
While one dispiriting aspect of Labour’s victory is that it shows up, yet again, how unrepresentative Britain’s antiquated ‘First Past the Post’ system is — Labour secured 63% of the seats on just 34% of the vote — the most alarming factor, as noted above, is that Labour has no vision to inspire the British people, exhausted by 14 years of Tory rule.
Instead of promising meaningful “change”, Labour’s empty one-word campaigning soundbite indicates only that the individuals in charge of the country have changed; not that there is any fundamental difference in policy.
I suspect that most people in Britain today would struggle to confirm even one single policy proposed by Starmer’s Labour Party that differs noticeably from their predecessors. Unprovoked, Starmer has, almost on daily basis, committed to fundamentally Conservative right-wing policies — or even far-right policies — on almost everything for which his Party is now in charge.
Noticeably obsessed with wooing Conservatives, to the deliberate exclusion of existing Labour voters, and, especially, anyone on the left, Starmer’s right-wing enthusiasms cannot be explained solely by the obstacles that even a moderately centre-left would-be government faces in a country dominated by a hostile right-wing — or far-right — largely tabloid print media, and a thoroughly compromised broadcast media.
Co-opted by the ruinous myths of neoliberalism
At the heart of the problem is the adherence of Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves to neoliberalism — essentially, the market-based dogma focused on the unchallenged supremacy of unfettered private profiteering, and the privatisation of everything for which an argument could and should be made for its public ownership.
This is in spite of the evident truth that, over the last 45 years, since Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, neoliberalism has ruinously dominated politics, turning political leaders into little more than pimps and prostitutes for big business, and has also entrenched an ever-growing chasm between the rich and the poor.
Despite neoliberalism’s demonstrable failures, leading to such discontent amongst the poor that fascism is noticeably on the rise — not just in the UK, but across the whole of the west — Starmer and Reeves are, if anything, even even more enthusiastic about it than their Labour predecessors from 1997 to 2010, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who at least tempered their neoliberal enthusiasms with a nod to aspects of redistributive socialism.
After 14 years of austerity, first imposed by David Cameron and George Osborne in 2010, as a devastatingly cynical response to the banker-led global economic crash of 2008, the last thing the UK needs right now is more of the same, and yet Starmer and Reeves won’t even commit to the most basic redress of some of austerity’s most cruel and punitive measures — the welfare cap on families with more than two children, for example, introduced by George Osborne, which affects two million children in the UK — and instead only drivel on about securing “growth” and “investment” from the same corporate ghouls who have already plundered almost everything there is to plunder in this broken country, ravaged by predatory corporate greed.
Britain has, to be blunt, been completely broken by the privatisation that is Thatcher’s darkest legacy. To take just one example, water privatisation, imposed in England and Wales in 1989, uniquely in the western world, has left our rivers literally swimming in sewage, as the private transnational consortia who own the water companies have accrued £64 billion of debt, while paying £78 billion to shareholders, all while presiding over such neglect of the water and sewage systems that our rivers are full of sewage, and in some places even the drinking water in unsafe.
Renationalising water may well be fiendishly expensive (although I’d like to see Labour working with clever lawyers to work out how to expose the water companies’ activities as illegal), but it’s difficult to see how it won’t continue to get worse without these companies being once more brought into public ownership. Starmer’s announced intention — of ramping up oversight and accountability — simply rings hollow as an attempt to address a colossal and ongoing 35-year national crime scene.
Similarly, on housing — the most pressing issue for everyone in the country who isn’t fortunate enough to either be a well-established owner-occupier, or amongst the dwindling numbers of people in safe, secure and genuinely affordable social housing — Starmer shows no sign whatsoever of recognizing that an out-of-control housing bubble, in existence since the early years of Blair and Brown, has made housing fundamentally unaffordable, pricing out first-time buyers, and, via a startling absence of regulation, allowing the country to become awash with abominably greedy private landlords. Only a massive social homebuilding programme can effectively deal with this, but Starmer remains as wedded to private homebuilding — or, more accurately, the monstrous private/quasi-public hybrid of private developers and housing associations, with their unaffordable ‘affordable’ homes and their monstrous scams (in particular, Shared Ownership) — as any of his predecessors, thereby continuing to fuel a crisis that has reached breaking point.
Brexit: the killer of all it touches
Beyond the blithely unrecognised evils of neoliberalism and the devastating and ongoing austerity that cannot be dealt with without some sort of increase in taxes, Starmer also has a blind spot when it comes to Brexit and its ills, even though Brexit is responsible for almost everything that has gone wrong in Britain over the last eight years.
Just the day before the election — again, totally unprovoked — Starmer made a point of declaring that “the UK will not rejoin either the EU, the single market or the customs union within his lifetime”, a deranged, counter-productive promise — again, seemingly aimed at his beloved far-right target voters, as well as disgruntled traditional Labour working class voters who switched to the Tories in 2019 and are now queuing up to laud Nigel Farage — which must be undone if Britain is to stand any chance of economic recovery.
Starmer can’t be so stupid as to have not noticed that British trade with the EU has been gutted by Brexit, and that EU trade with the UK is now becoming so unpalatably tied up in red tape and xenophobia that lorries don’t even want to come here to deliver the copious amounts of everything that are necessary because we are unable to feed ourselves. However, just as significantly, he and Reeves cannot for a moment imagine that their promises of “growth” and “investment” are not completely meaningless while Britain remains an isolated, essentially pointless country on the edge of Europe, completely unattractive to foreign investors because we stupidly cut ourselves off from frictionless trade with our 27 nearest neighbours.
Brexit has been damaging in other fundamental ways too, of course, as the succession of post-Brexit governments led by Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have demonstrated; firstly, via a shameful notion that post-Brexit Britain had become a tabula rasa, a blank slate on which arrogant inadequate people like Jacob Rees-Mogg could seriously propose a swift and all-consuming bonfire of countless EU laws, to be replaced, without any parliamentary scrutiny, by people like himself; and secondly by vile anti-immigrant sentiment, whipped up via two particularly malignant home secretaries, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, to not only make the very act of being a refugee illegal, but also to make sending asylum seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda the prime focus of government policy, enthusiastically embraced by Rishi Sunak as his premiership began to flounder, and including the truly outrageous decision to pass a law that purported to override a Supreme Court ruling that Rwanda was not a safe destination.
While the public — clearly — are not as cruel and heartless as this trio of British Indians, whose parents were themselves immigrants, and Nigel Farage has now made clear that the number of miserable and irredeemable racists in the country may be no more than the 14% of those who voted for Reform yesterday, it remains to be seen if Labour are prepared to take the necessary steps to thoroughly repudiate this horrible and inhumane expansion of the “hostile environment” first enacted by Theresa May.
On the campaign trail, the only distinction between Labour and the Tories that I could see was that Labour promised to drop the Rwanda scheme (probably because it was, in any case, legally doomed), but they need to do far more than just drop it. They need to address the huge backlog of unaddressed asylum cases (around 70% of which, on average, lead to confirmation that those seeking asylum are in fact refugees), they need to do away with all the offensive rhetoric about “illegal migrants”, and they need to establish safe routes to enable refugees to come to the UK without risking their lives in smuggler-controlled small boats.
All of this requires courage — to take on the right-wing and far-right media — but it is not only morally required; it is also necessary to address the shortage of workers in the UK in so many parts of the economy.
If anything in particular has become clear over the last few years about the motivations of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, it is that they are constantly seeking not to alienate anyone except their base (who, shamefully, they attack ruthlessly), in what seems to be nothing more than a desire for power rather than having vision and beliefs that are inviolable, and that ought to be declared openly and with confidence, however unpopular they may be with certain people and organisations.
The unavoidable juggernaut of extinction
On the gravest issue of all — climate change — this cowardice, this fundamental lack of self-belief is the ultimate test for Starmer and his cabinet (as, it should be noted, it is for all governments in the west). It will take a brave leader to stand up and tell the electorate that he or she has uncomfortable news — that catastrophic climate collapse, caused by our own promiscuous burning of fossil fuels, is now so advanced that we are close to making the earth uninhabitable, and in the very near future, and to follow up by stating that he or she is going to address this through a revolutionary deconstruction and remaking of capitalism to solely prioritise survival, but also, it must be said, to create an entire new green economy dedicated to mitigation.
On climate collapse, politicians are either stupid, corrupt or cowards. Boris Johnson, memorably, finally realized the truth after a briefing at the time of the COP Summit in the UK in late 2021, but was too corrupt and cowardly to seize the moment that he was offered to do something worthwhile in his otherwise miserable narcissistic life. Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, however, were both irredeemably stupid.
I can’t tell whether Starmer and his team are, in contrast, capable of grasping the enormity of the environmental challenges that we all face. I understand that those who deal in power and self-preservation are all too often trapped in a bubble of delusion, and I fear that Keir Starmer is, quite startlingly, incapable of rising to the occasion.
Under pressure — presumably from Ed Miliband, the shadow secretary for energy security and net zero, who undoubtedly grasps reality more than his colleagues (as was the case with Alok Sharma and Chris Skidmore in the Tory years) — Labour announced in September 2021 a £28bn a year green investment pledge, but abandoned it in February this year, blaming the Tories for “crashing the economy.”
This was a convenient explanation, but what had clearly spooked Starmer more than anything else was a miserable campaign in July 2023 by cynical Tories and far-right, climate change-denying provocateurs in Uxbridge, in Boris Johnson’s old seat, to successfully defeat the Labour candidate in the by-election on the basis of a concocted froth of anger about the expansion of ULEZ (the ultra-low emission zone) introduced by London’s Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan, who, ironically, was only following Boris Johnson in implementing it, more or less as part of ongoing efforts in cities around the world to tackle the pollution caused by car drivers.
In response to the by-election loss, Starmer cynically turned on Khan, publicly calling on him to “reflect” on the impact of the ULEZ extension in what was nothing less than a pathetic and cowardly attack. It was a horrible sign of Starmer’s slipperiness — his absolute refusal to let any kind of principles stand in the way of perceived political expediency — and it was, sadly, no surprise that, having joined Sunak in his pea-brained defence of motorists’ “rights” (which then led to a full-blown repudiation by Sunak of Britain’s legally-binding commitment to net zero targets), the watering down of Labour’s green pledges soon followed.
Unsurprisingly, Starmer kept Ed Miliband under lock and key throughout most of the six-week election campaign, only letting him out on Monday this week (July 1) to make some woolly promises about “tak[ing] the lead on global efforts to tackle the climate crisis, filling a ‘vacuum of leadership’ on the world stage and proving Rishi Sunak’s U-turn on net zero has been a ‘historic mistake’”, and it remains to be seen if Starmer and Reeves can be persuaded to recognise that there is nothing more important than climate collapse.
Starmer’s dull but dangerous authoritarianism
One other reason for doubting that Starmer will seize the occasion involves another hideously draconian aspect of the recent years of Tory hysteria and authoritarianism — the assault on the right to protest, again initiated by Priti Patel and hammered home further by Suella Braverman, in which it has become almost impossible to engage in any kind of moderately disruptive climate protests — for example, stepping off a kerb to slow walk and slightly inconvenience traffic — without being arrested, and, in many cases, receiving a prison sentence.
In the last raft of super-draconian laws, Braverman made it “illegal to conspire to disrupt national infrastructure”, and, in the days before the election, numerous Just Stop Oil campaigners were arrested at a public meeting, and in their homes, on the basis of suspicions that they were planning to disrupt airports, even though, as I explained at the time, they are “only trying to raise awareness that we’re rapidly making the planet uninhabitable through our fossil fuel addiction”, and are not asking the government to do anything more than they promised to do at the UN’s Paris Summit in 2015, which aimed to keep the rise in temperatures since the industrial revolution to well below 2°C, and preferably 1.5°C, to keep the planet habitable, and whose commitments were meant to be legally binding.
Starmer has an opportunity to undo all of these outrageous assaults on the right to protest, but on this point, almost more than the catalogue of weaknesses outlined above, I fear that he will be particularly intransigent, because, before he became an MP and climbed the Labour Party hierarchy, waiting for his opportunity to assassinate Jeremy Corbyn, he was the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), essentially the country’s chief prosecutor, and he is deeply untrustworthy when it comes to civil liberties.
In 2011, when riots erupted across the country following the police assassination of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, Starmer presided over the subsequent response, hunting down everyone involved via CCTV and interrogations, and setting up night courts to prosecute them all as swiftly as possible — as I described in my song ‘Riot’, recorded with The Four Fathers, when I contrasted this response to the treatment of the bankers who crashed the global economy: “They hunted down those who stole a bottle of water while the bankers all walked free.”
As someone who has always, and will always celebrate the necessity of tolerating troublemakers as a hallmark of democracy, I’m particularly concerned by the “robust” but achingly dull authoritarianism that emanates from Starmer and Reeves, who strike me as the kind of tiresome law and order conformists who, while lacking the hysteria of Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, may well be even more punitive towards protest than their predecessors, without concerted opposition from civil liberties groups.
The blood of Gaza on Starmer’s hands
My last area of concern involves Britain’s foreign policy under Starmer. No one must ever forget that, despite being a human rights lawyer, Starmer is so infected by rabid Zionism that, just days after the deadly attacks by Hamas and other militants in Israel on October 7, 2023, he publicly declared, on a radio show, that Israel had the right to cut off food, water and fuel to the civilians of Gaza, even though that is very evidently a war crime. He later tried to back-pedal, even, absurdly, denying that he had said it, despite the incontrovertible evidence establishing otherwise, but it set the tone for his unforgivably uncritical support of Israel, honed over the long years of inventing an antisemitism scandal to topple Jeremy Corbyn, which, as noted above, has been so successful in promoting the false notion that criticism of the State of Israel is antisemitism that it has been used throughout the west, since October 7, to suppress any and all criticism of Israel, even as it engages in what is quite clearly the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Yesterday, Starmer paid a price for his support for Israel’s genocide, as Labour lost four seats to pro-Palestinian candidates, and, as noted above, Andrew Feinstein seized a sizeable chunk of Starmer’s majority on a platform of condemning him for his complicity, but Labour under Starmer remains a deeply troubling haven for genocide apologists and collaborators, especially as so many of Starmer’s shadow cabinet, both the front bench and junior ministers, are members of the pro-Israel lobbying group Labour Friends of Israel.
In addition, Starmer’s Labour government are also, more generally, warmongers, fully committed to almost the only club left that Britain is a member of — NATO — which, to anyone not brainwashed by the relentless propaganda of the last two and a half years, provoked Russia into invading Ukraine in February 2022, and is now engaged in a confected revival of the Cold War in which war has once more become the main purpose of western European economies, paranoia is rampant, nuclear bunkers must be built, and Putin must, apparently, be crushed, even though that is impossible, even though the extent of the slaughter of Ukrainians in our proxy war is sickening, even though it risks nuclear annihilation and World War 3, and even though it is, frankly, none of our business to be trying to claim that we have the right to destroy entire countries just because we don’t like the way their leaders operate.
We should have learned this from the various illegal wars that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, including our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, but apparently we learn nothing from history, and are therefore doomed to repeat it, with Keir Starmer a fully paid-up member of this club of ignorant, self-righteous belligerence.
My apologies if this has been a roll-call of worries, rather than a simple celebration of the end of 14 years of uniquely disastrous Tory rule, but I don’t live to provide comforting fairy tales, and I believe that being forewarned is to be forearmed. I fully suspect that Starmer and his government will face unrest if they don’t make and deliver some bold promises about genuinely transforming Britain for the better in the coming days and weeks, but I also believe that we need to know that they are deeply suspicious, dull, hectoring authoritarians, of the kind that interesting people have fled from throughout my entire life in search of something more rewarding.
We need courage now — shining, righteous courage — not miserable conformity and cowardice, and while I doubt that Starmer and his cabinet will be willingly brave, they need to wake up to the fact that they don’t have a choice. Bravery is the only option for the times we are living in, and that doesn’t involving mouthing empty soundbites about “growth” and “investment”, and trying to make sure that everyone who criticizes them from the left is silenced.
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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).
In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.
Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.
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