https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/purge-dissenting-mps-sign-starmers-weakness
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer during a meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, in Downing Street, London, on his first official visit to Britain, July 17, 2025…
Just 12 per cent of the public approve of the government’s record, a historic low. Current polling shows the great majority of Labour MPs losing their seats at the next election, either to Reform, or to the new left party struggling to be born, or in Scotland and Wales to nationalist parties.
Certainly, at present it is as easy to see the suspended four — and the already-whipless John McDonnell and Apsana Begum who rebelled a year ago against the two-child benefit cap — securing re-election as independents than as candidates of the Starmer regime.
It is certainly hard to see this move breaking resistance to the new austerity agenda going forward. Only successful leaders can hope to get away with this sort of crackdown.
So this latest exercise in authoritarianism speaks only to Starmer’s loss of capacity to advance his right-wing agenda, as well as to his consigliere Morgan McSweeney’s blinkered view that whatever the problem is the answer lies in attacking the left.
But it is also a challenge to the Labour left. Over the last five years it has consistently failed to find the means to arrest the Starmer-McSweeney purge of the left, often for want of the simple virtue of sticking together when under attack.
The response to the latest suspensions has been robust, in words at least. The left has shown it can inflict defeats on the government, reversing specific policy proposals.
But it is now beyond obvious that only a fighting plan to actually oust Starmer himself has any prospect of reversing Labour’s dismal prospects in time to save the next election. They should take every opportunity — and even create them — to express no-confidence in this government of austerity, war and authoritarianism.
Failure to do so will certainly turbocharge the case for the new socialist party being promoted by Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn. The appeal of that venture rests in part on the perception that Labour is a lost cause.
Starmer’s latest sanctions against dissent tend to make that case. He has flung down the gauntlet — the left in the PLP, the affiliated unions and the membership must pick it up.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/purge-dissenting-mps-sign-starmers-weakness
