Sir Keir:  the Honourable Gentleman who is for turning

Perhaps Sir Keir Starmer ‘misspoke’, perhaps he forgot or Trump-like didn’t really know what his 2024 election manifesto did and didn’t pledge, when he decided to withdraw the party Whip from four MPs on 17 July 2025 for allegedly transgressing the manifesto. 

‘We had to deal with people who repeatedly break the whip because everyone was elected as a Labour MP on the manifesto of change and everybody needs to deliver as a Labour Government.’

He should consult that 2024 document, punctuated by photographs of himself and proclaiming how he has changed the party.  He would be reminded that Starmer’s cruel cuts are not delivering the 2024 manifesto, and they aren’t supported by public opinion.  

Nowhere in the manifesto is there a promise to cut disability benefits, keep the two-child benefit cap or abolish pensioners’ winter payment allowance. 

These MPs did not disavow the manifesto, he did. He has emerged as, a conjuror of the false promise, an Honorary Gentleman who is for turning.¹

The punishment of York’s MP Rachel Maskell is emblematic of the chasm between the leadership cabal and the voters. Maskell is a former physiotherapist and trade union official, a popular advocate of ethical socialism. Her values are what could be called decent – she is a Christian whose voting record is generally consistent with the values of the progressive electorate, from the environment to public ownership of national utilities and transport, social welfare, equality and human rights. 

You have to wonder what the Labour Party is if not a manifesto that the Maskells of this world could promote. 

Starmer by contrast is shut, ambitious yet on the wrong side of history on much that matters, not least re-distribution of wealth and power, and above all Israel. His notion of the party appears as the antithesis of, for example, Labour’s post-war leader, Clement Atlee who, arguably, steered Labour’s most momentous change agenda ever; he was on the right, but he broke bread with politicians across the firmament and, most important, grasped the necessity of the left’s presence and roots in popular feeling. 

Not even Tony Blair, on a mission to re-locate Labour to the centre of the political firmament, was so insecure as to invoke the Inquisition. 

Not so the Starmer clique. When Chancellor Rachel Reeves proclaimed ‘this is a changed party, not a party of protest’ she identified: merely what it wasn’t. But what else could it – should it – be after the Tory deluge and genocidal war-making?

Starmer’s latest round of Parliamentary detentions is indicative of a theory of the party as an audience, a subaltern servant, not a movement – a space in which multitudes can muster, experience the pleasures and productivity of solidarity; a space to think, a source of collective self-discovery and a resource to do stuff that answers society’s problems. 

It is not just that the leadership is managerial and macho, it is worse, much worse, it is pathological, animated by visceral hatred of the left – exemplified by the serial harassment of Diane Abbott. 

By the time Starmer was elected Prime Minister in 2024, he had emptied the party of half its membership, though Labour remains the biggest political party in an emaciated political culture. His government is weak, adrift from a a social base, for which, evidently, it has little interest or respect. 

In their book Get In Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund chronicle the modus operandi of Starmerism – furtive, furious, manic and yet strangely maladroit. His boot camp regime won’t equip the party with strength and valour, more likely an indecent scramble to who knows where.

1. In 1980 Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refusal to respond to recession and roaring unemployment.  ↩︎

Photograph: Reuters