Starmer is in Trouble, but so is everyone else

All political parties are in crisis. Starmer’s MPs are rebelling against his draconian welfare reforms at a scale and intensity that makes it a significant threat to the Prime Minister’s entire project, such as it is. Robert Peston has written:

“Labour’s whips are in despair. So said a number of senior Labour MP. And they are not professional troublemakers. They are loyal – largely – to the PM. This captures the failure in the party machine exposed by the massive rebellion of Labour MPs against the prime minister’s welfare reforms. What these MPs have told me is that whips, led by Sir Alan Campbell, have been warning 10 Downing Street officials for weeks that the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payments Bill is hated by large numbers of their own side, and they have been ignored. Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, told them that the data showed the reforms were popular with voters, that Labour MPs should toughen up, and the government was pressing ahead regardless – according to multiple sources. This steamrollering has brought a government with an enormous working majority to the brink of losing legislation central to its ambitions to make the welfare state more affordable.”

The Financial Times has framed it like this (A defeat Keir Starmer can’t afford): “Less than a year after his landslide victory, Keir Starmer is facing a defining moment. If the next few days go badly, we may well look back on this as the last effective week of his authority. The parliamentary revolt against proposed welfare reforms is an existential crisis both for the prime minister and for his government.  This is not the usual tussle over amending legislation, painful enough but commonplace. Instead, around 120 of Starmer’s own MPs — enough to wipe out his majority — are threatening to sink an entire piece of legislation before it has even begun the amendments stages of its passage through parliament. It is one thing to compromise, another to cave in to those wanting to torpedo a vital bill.”

Always sure footed, Anas Sarwar chose this week to pin his colours to the mast of this disastrous legislation (Anas Sarwar backs UK disability benefit cuts as Labour MPs revolt) and Murray Foote reminds us that “a timely reminder that five obsequious Scottish Labour MPs – Graeme Downie, Blair McDougall, Frank McNally, Gregor Poynton and Joani Reid – so strongly supported Starmer/Kendal’s benefits catastrophe that they very publicly put their names to it” (Scottish Labour MPs back ‘progressive’ UK Government welfare reforms). As Paul Hutcheon laments today: “Anas Sarwar refuses to back Labour welfare rebels as he offers support to Keir Starmer on the UK Government’s cuts bill. His position is in contrast to the criticisms of mayors Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham.”

So far, so disastrous.

But other parties are also in disarray.

Politics UK reports dozens of Tory MPs believe that if Kemi Badenoch is still leader by next spring, there will be “very little left”, One ex-minister said: “Kemi’s personal polling is in Liz Truss territory. There is now no precedent for it”. Tim Shipman lays out the scale of Badenoch’s disastrous leadership at the Spectator ‘It’s Liz Truss territory’: how bad are things for Kemi Badenoch?.

Reports from the SNP’s recent National Council are of John Swinney having lost the floor and being repeatedly challenged with Alyn Smith making what some have described as an ‘open pitch’ for the leadership and taking apart recent strategy, or lack of it. My sources say that Swinney’s inability to respond to calls across the party and the wider independence movement will be terminal for him.

Meanwhile, over at the troubled Alba party, they have turned down Craig Murray, Scotland’s Ambassador to the UN to stand as a candidate. The given reasons are a) his prison sentence and b) standing for the Workers’ Party in Blackburn. Despite George Galloway’s Damascene turn towards declaring his support for Independence, the Worker’s Party of Britain’s long-standing position has been against it, and Galloway was a key pawn in Better Together’s 2014 propaganda campaign. He called independence ‘sectarian nationalism’ and campaigned enthusiastically for Better Together. To be turned down via vetting for one political party is unlucky, to be turned down twice is something else, even if the feeling is that Kenny McAskill must have felt threatened by the Ambassador.

The announcement of Alba blocking Murray had some suggesting he should join the ISP. More as we have it from this breaking story.

Meanwhile, down south, a Reform UK councillor has resigned as leader of Warwickshire county council just five weeks after he was elected, leaving his 18-year-old deputy in charge of the £500m budget.

How do you explain this collective shambles? Reform are a disaster-area flush with the loot of ex-Tory donors but filled with swivel-eyed loons and consistently falling apart whenever they have to either campaign or govern. Alba are a shard of a shard already descending into bitter factionalism and a pastiche of the Judean Popular Front.

The Conservatives have destroyed themselves over a decade of infighting and a descent into crazed policies and platforms that have no rationale other than feeding the insatiable culture wars and appetite of Britain’s rabid right-wing media.

Labour and the SNP are both riddled with a managerialist outlook and an inability to confront vested interests in either country. Both have been lobbied into submission and driven to corporate capture. The result is a bleak and bland conformist political landscape with few options to inspire. But it is also a reflection of a lack of purpose seen in different ways in both parties of government in Scotland and England. The purpose seems to have been reduced to the pursuit of power at all costs, and then once in power being totally resigned to an inability to effect real meaningful change.