I. Drift and Collapse
In today’s Times, Jason Cowley described Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves plotting their long-promised “reset,” another attempt to breathe life into a premiership already defined by drift. A few days later, Angela Rayner’s tax affairs detonated, taking down the deputy prime minister, the deputy leader, and the last figure in government with a direct line to the unions. What followed was not a reset but a collapse.
John Harris, surveying the wreckage, reached for the image: a man next to a burning house, offering to buy a new bookcase and rug. That is Starmerism in miniature: managerial tidying in the middle of conflagration.
Labour came to office with no equivalent of Thatcher’s Stepping Stones report, no framework, no theory of government. What it had was technocracy and the fantasy of competence. It is no surprise, then, that when the first flames licked the curtains, Starmer reached not for water but for a lobbyist. Tim Allan, Blair’s old spin man turned corporate influence peddler, is now back in No 10. As someone replied to me on Bluesky: he’s no leftie. The message is clear: the reset is not political but cosmetic, not a new programme but a change of PR.
This government is not a tragedy, it’s a farce. There’s no dignity in the project, no moral stature.
II. The Faragisation of Labour
Farce quickly becomes danger. In the days after Rayner’s resignation, Labour ministers began to speak with remarkable candour. “We need to do something that makes us feel queasy,” one said, “to stop the advance of Nigel Farage.”
This queasiness is already policy. Shabana Mahmood, the new home secretary, has military planners scouring the country for barracks to house asylum seekers. John Healey, the defence secretary, confirmed it on live television: military sites, non-military sites, anything to get people out of hotels and into camps. Hotels had become the focal points of right-wing mobilisation; rather than confront the mob, Labour moves the people.
At the same time, ministers float “tightening” the European Convention on Human Rights — a postwar settlement once held up as a moral line. Articles on the right to family life are in the crosshairs. Healey insists Britain will not leave the ECHR outright, lest it be lumped with Russia and Belarus, but the logic is the same: narrow the scope of rights, in law and in practice, to appease Farage.
What began as Reform UK’s agenda is now the government’s. The far right sets the weather to rain; Labour carries the umbrella.
Labour is in government, but it is Farage who governs.
III. Corporate Capture
If Farage is writing Labour’s script on migration, capital is scripting the rest. Solomon Hughes has tracked the appointments: Tim Allan from Strand Partners — lobbyists for Uber, Deliveroo, Blair’s son’s company, and a pharma outfit hawking weight-loss drugs. Jenny Scott, co-founder of Apella, lobbyists for Thames Water, brought into the Treasury board by Rachel Reeves. Lord Carter, Labour grandee, chairing a private pathology company squeezing NHS workers.
This is the “strongest team” Darren Jones boasts of: lobbyists in cabinet, privatisers in health, water polluters whispering in the chancellor’s ear. The unions are cut out, the workers’ rights bill is put on ice, and the business of government is once again the business of business.
Rayner’s departure and Justin Madders’s sacking from the employment rights brief leave Labour’s “new deal for working people” orphaned. Day-one rights, bans on zero-hours contracts, protections against fire-and-rehire — all promises on the chopping block. Starmer will not even attend this year’s TUC.
A Labour government that abandons labour: there is your reset.
IV. The Moral Indictment
This would be bad enough if it were only about institutional capture. But it comes against the backdrop of human catastrophe.
Ten years after Alan Kurdi’s body washed up on a Turkish beach, thousands still die trying to reach Europe. The UN estimates 3,500 children dead in the decade since — one a day. Entire trawlers sink off Greece and Libya, hundreds at a time. In Britain, the Channel has become a graveyard: 249 dead since 2018.
Europe responded not with humanity but with deterrence. Meloni grounds rescue planes, Germany steps up deportations, Macron flirts with Le Pen, and in Britain Starmer replaces Rwanda with barracks. The EU spends billions on Frontex while NGOs are harassed and criminalised.
The crossings continue. The bodies keep coming. Deterrence does not deter, it only kills.
Starmer’s decision to scrap Rwanda was not moral but managerial. It cost too much and failed in the courts. His alternative is no alternative at all: modular camps, curtailed rights, and bilateral deals that trade human beings as bargaining chips.
The moral lesson of Alan Kurdi has been inverted. The image that once shamed Europe now serves as justification for a fortress, a wall, a camp.
V. Pogrom Politics
Inside Britain, the consequences are lived daily. Rohan Sathyamoorthy, writing in the Guardian, describes turning nineteen in the midst of attempted pogroms: men in Middlesbrough stopping cars to check skin colour, mobs trying to torch hotels in Rotherham, racist graffiti scrawled on family homes.
A generation that grew up believing Britain was racially tolerant is learning otherwise. The National Front of the 1970s is not just back; it is being legitimised by mainstream politics.
Every Labour concession to Farage. Every barracks plan, every “tightened” human right, every refusal to face down the mob, fuels this atmosphere. Starmerism is not neutral drift; it is complicity.
The cruelty of Starmerism is that it promises competence while licensing violence.
VI. The Theatre of Succession
Yet, inside the Labour Party, the conversation is already about succession. Andy Burnham calls for pluralism, for a reset away from London-centrism. MPs line up for the deputy leadership, factions whisper about who might replace Starmer.
It is theatre. The house is burning, and Labour debates the upholstery.
Burnham may talk plain, but his project is personality politics, Gary Neville populism. It offers no answer to barracks, to corporate lobbyists, to drowned children in the Mediterranean. The left of the party is reduced to spectators, hoping for crumbs.
Looming behind all this is the threat of Blue Labour, the final nail in the coffin, the rebranding of concession as common sense, family values as cover for authoritarian drift. If Burnham represents the soft-left brand extension, Blue Labour offers the hard turn: nationalism, borders, “community” recast as exclusion. Starmer’s collapse creates the opening for both.
VII. The Horizon Beyond Labour
That is why Zarah Sultana’s words matter: Labour is dead. She and Jeremy Corbyn are building something new, slowly, clumsily, but already with 750,000 sign-ups. The Greens hint at cooperation, activists gather in Newcastle, and the air stirs with the possibility of a left alternative. Zack Polanski, notably, looked assured on Sky’s Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips today—calm, direct, and markedly more grounded than the government’s “queasy” doublespeak.
It may not yet have form, or even a name, but it already has a purpose: to break with the logic of capitulation. To stand not with Farage but against him. To represent labour rather than capital. To insist that migrants are human, not bargaining chips.
Starmer’s legacy is already clear: drift, capitulation, cruelty, corporate capture. But that legacy may also be his undoing. Out of the collapse, something new can be built.
The only question is whether Britain’s left can seize the moment, or whether Farage will.
