The knives are out. The back-stabbers are at play as the struggle begins anew in the corridors of power within the Labour Party for the key to Number Ten. Sir Keir Starmer says that the UK faces going down “a very dark path” as he pledges to fight on as Prime Minister. And a Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, a one-time ally of Jeremy Corbyn, says Wes Streeting is planning a stealth coup to move against Starmer to avoid a leadership contest that could include Labour’s ‘King of the North’, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham.

The solid vote for the Scottish and Welsh nationalists in last week’s elections in Scotland and Wales along with the spectacular rise of Reform in the council votes in England spells doom for Keir Starmer and the ageing Blairite crew that has brought Labour to the brink of electoral collapse in recent years.

The results – the collapse of the Labour and Tory vote across the country, sweeping gains for the Faragists and more modest but significant gains for the Greens and the Liberal-Democrats – came as no surprise to the pundits who long ago read the writing on the wall when the Labour leader purged the Corbynistas and drove hundreds of thousands out of Labour’s ranks soon after Starmer became leader in 2020. The likes of Peter Mandelson believed the working class would put up with this and more as they “had nowhere else to go”. They said Labour’s loveless landslide victory, largely due to the Faragist intervention that split the Tory vote, was a vote of confidence in their particular brand of class collaboration that revolved around following what they believed was the dominant trend within the British ruling class, crawling to the Americans and the Zionists, upholding the old Tory austerity programme and carrying on with the stealth privatisation of the NHS.

Many of them clearly believed this rubbish even though reality was staring them in the face as hundreds of thousands took to the streets every month to demonstrate against Israeli aggression and hundreds of thousands more abandoned Labour at the ballot box. Starmer clearly still believes in the old lies – trying to block the Blairites chosen successor and clinging to power when it’s obvious the game’s up.

But just getting rid of Starmer will not revive Labour’s for tunes. Labour needs to accept the inevitability of independence for Scotland and Wales and the re-unification of Ireland. It needs to go beyond the parameters of political debate set by the bourgeoisie that revolve around law and order, immigration and the EU and campaign to win the demands of the union movement that the Labour Party was set up for in the first place back in the early 1900s.

A genuine return to a working class agenda and a commitment to restore the welfare state and the public sector that existed until the Tory come-back in 1979 could win back the traditional La bour vote. That may be a call too far for the Burnham and Rayner camp but it has to be made – inside or outside the Labour Party.