By New Worker newspaper.

Smears, rumours and gossip. From the mainstream media to the murky corners of the dark web, it’s clear that concerted efforts are being made by some of the Labour prominenti to clear the decks for a challenge to Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership later in the year. Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are in the frame amid renewed speculation around Andy Burnham’s return to the parliamentary arena.

The knives are out on the Labour street. Many in the West minster bubble say any one of those three could do a better job than Starmer. The truth is that practically anyone in the Labour Party as a whole would be better than Starmer – the man who led Labour to landslide victory at the general election last year and is now leading them to an equally colossal defeat if the opinion polls are anything to go by.

Starmer is a cynical politician whose lodestar is simply to follow what he believes is the dominant trend within the British ruling class. Not an easy thing to do at the best of times – let alone in these fraught times of end days capitalism.

But there is no dominant trend within the ruling class these days – neither on the European Union, NATO nor, more importantly, on how to deal with the Trump administration. Starmer’s European “reset” enraged the Brexiteers but won him no favours from the Remainers who say, with some justification, that these token gestures to Brussels do nothing to swell the demand for a second referendum on the EU. His attempt to become a ‘leader’ in Europe by rallying Franco-German imperialism to stave off the collapse of the Zelensky regime is an equally pointless gesture because the fate of Ukraine is going to be decided by Washington and Moscow – regardless of the “special relationship” that supposedly exists between Britain and the USA.

Gone are the delusions of grandeur of the British ruling class who believed that the American sphere of influence across the globe constitutes the “free world” and that Britain was the second-in-command in policing it. The days when British imperialism could play off the USA against the Europeans by acting as a trans-Atlantic ‘bridge’ between US imperialism and that of France and Germany are long gone.

The “special relationship” that Winston Churchill believed went beyond the terms of the NATO alliance largely existed only in the imagination of Tory leaders and right-wing Labour politicians. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair liked to pose as partners of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton but at the end of the day it was always the Americans who called the shots. Boris Johnson talked about “a new special relationship” and a trans-Atlantic free trade zone. But the ‘Treaty of Washington’ never saw the light of day and Trump’s latest thinking – a one-sided tariff agreement and the annexation of Canada – is totally unacceptable to the
British ruling class.

In the corridors of power some believe Britain should simply sit it out. Put up with Trump until his term of office expires and hope for better times to come. Others say time is not on their side – wary of the talk of a “new Yalta” in Washington and the Kremlin – a redivision of the world by the super-powers that would leave nothing but crumbs for Britain and the EU.

A change may well be as good as a rest but Labour needs more than a cosmetic reshuffle of the top table to revive its flagging fortunes. Starmer, of course, has to go. But whoever takes his place will have to dump the old imperialist agenda if Labour is to have any hope of winning the next election.