John McDonnell’s warning delivered in The Guardian on Wednesday, repeated in The Canary, and echoed in The Morning Star—has the mournful tone of someone watching a once-possible future disappear. He says the soul of Labour is at stake, but it isn’t. It was sold off long ago. What we’re seeing now is the final nail hammered in the coffin of Corbynism. There’s no reckoning coming. No surprise uprising. Just another purge, another focus-grouped platform written by people who’ve never met a tenant, a teacher or a striking worker.
Keir Starmer’s “take back control” line, McDonnell notes, is a hollowed-out version of something that once had radical potential. In his Guardian piece, he writes that “if Keir wants to be remembered as a great reforming prime minister, he has to start now.” But this is fantasy. Starmer doesn’t want to reform anything. He wants to manage decline, softly. He wants to govern like Blair without the landslide or the ideas.
And what of the Greens? Prospect notes they’re no longer the party of the anti-austerity moment. Their leadership, lacking class politics and rooted more in NGO-speak than movement struggle, offers climate concern without confrontation. They mouth climate justice but trim radical commitments. Green reformism wants to sand down the sharp edges of extinction. It won’t stop the machine.
What’s needed isn’t a softer shade of green, but revolutionary ecosocialism: a politics that names the enemy—capitalism—and organises to take it down. Climate collapse, racial injustice, imperial war, and the violent border regime aren’t accidents or deviations. They are how the system survives—by extraction, dispossession, and control. A new party has to start from that truth, not from the fantasy that capital can be reasoned with.
And we don’t just need a new party—we have MPs who must help build it. Zarah Sultana and John McDonnell remain outside the parliamentary Labour Party, their whips still not restored. Richard Burgon, Ian Byrne, and Rebecca Long-Bailey were brought back in February but have been kept on the margins. Jeremy Corbyn, expelled in all but name, still commands huge support across the movement. These MPs have seen up close what Labour has become: a hostile environment for socialism, protest, and working-class organising. If they stay, they lend Starmer legitimacy. If they leave together, they could ignite something far bigger. The time for appeals and internal fights is over. The time is now to walk out and help build the party we need.
That party doesn’t exist yet. It’s not inside Labour. It’s not waiting in the wings with a leadership challenge. And it’s not the Greens. It must be new. Red and green. Angry and organised. Not to tweak policy, but to build class power.
Starmer’s platform confirms it: nothing to scare capital, just smooth talk about stability. As The Canary puts it, clinging to a McDonnell comeback is clinging to a corpse. Even he stops short of saying what needs to be said: the party’s over. Inside games won’t cut it.
And yet, nothing has replaced it. Just drift. The Morning Star captures the anxiety. Starmer is leaving the flank open for Reform UK. But this isn’t just misjudgement. It’s the result of a politics that sees working-class people as a threat to manage, not a class to empower.
Labour fears the left and flinches before the right. It triangulates on crime, migration, protest. And when the backlash comes. From Reform, from Farage, from the streets. It’ll say its hands were tied.
A new party has to break that logic. It must stand with the junior doctors on picket lines and the refugees facing dawn raids. It must say plainly: Britain is broken because capitalism broke it. Landlords, bosses and billionaires run it for profit. Labour and the Tories, red and blue managers of the same rot, won’t change that.
We don’t need Starmer 2.0. We don’t need the Greens. We need revolutionary ecosocialism. Class-rooted. Movement-built. Organised to win. The job now isn’t to save Labour. It’s to replace it.
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