This week’s local election results have been bad for Labour, and bad for Keir Starmer’s standing as the party's leader. It may be that no one in his position could have expected anything but defeat under present circumstances; we’re living through a global crisis with no peacetime historic precedent, at least not during the era of universal suffrage. It will not be clear for some time whether a relatively successful vaccine roll-out really was the overwhelmingly deciding election factor that some pundits assume it to have been.
What is evident, though, is that nothing Starmer has done since taking over leadership of the party from Jeremy Corbyn has contributed to any kind of recovery of Labour’s position. Let’s be absolutely clear. Starmer was last year elected leader on an explicit promise to maintain Corbyn’s radical, popular programme while giving it an electable face. He also solemnly pledged to end internal factionalism in the party.
He has openly and unhesitatingly broken these promises. He has engaged in ritual humiliation of the party’s Left, with the egregious and entirely unnecessary withholding of the whip from Jeremy Corbyn, and the removal of Rebecca Long-Bailey and other prominent left-wingers from the shadow cabinet. His hand-picked appointee for the party's general secretary, David Evans, a notoriously sectarian figure of Labour's Right, has overseen repeated, large-scale interference in the party’s democratic structures across the country, in order to prevent left-wing members from being selected as candidates or elected as local party officers.
