Starmer may not be in the Trump league but nobody believes a word he says these days. He says he knew nothing about Peter Mandelson’s security status. He claims the Foreign Office didn’t tell him that the grandee had failed the vetting process. Starmer clearly thinks everybody is as stupid as himself.

Many thought that Ramsay MacDonald and Tony Blair were the worst but Starmer has proved them wrong. MacDonald presided over the meteoric rise of Labour after the First World War and led the first Labour government in history back in 1924. He ended up splitting the movement and serving the ruling class he once claimed to oppose during the turmoil that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929, which plunged the world into a slump that only ended with the outbreak of the Second World War. MacDonald admitted that all he could do was administer capitalism. But he still talked about “socialism” – albeit in the never-never land of the far distant future.

Blair, on the other hand, never talked about socialism at all and what he achieved is far outweighed by his role in the
imperialist onslaught against Iraq and his support for Zionism that continues to this day. Nevertheless, he did preside over the negotiations that ended the conflict in northern Ireland and his administration and that of the Gordon Brown government that followed did pass some constitutional reforms and make some minor concessions to the union movement. Starmer, on the other hand, has achieved nothing. All Starmer can brag about is a purge of the Corbynistas that drove hundreds of thousands out of the Labour Party.

Starmer surrounds himself with people lesser than himself – such as the ageing Blairites who pandered to his vanity to return to the money tree of Westminster politics. They said Starmer’s stand – just another variant of Tory austerity – was the key to Labour’s loveless victory in the 2024 general election. But in reality Labour’s landslide was due to the Faragist intervention that gravely split the Tory vote across the entire country. Now with the Greens and Faragists snapping at their heels Labour is heading for disaster at the Scottish, Welsh and regional polls
in May.

Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham wait in the wings to pick up the pieces when Starmer inevitably falls on his sword. Their time will come but at the end of the day their outlook differs little from the right-wing Labour milieu they came from in the first place. They talk about workers’ rights and pay lip-service to union bureaucrats. That’s as far as it goes – and as far as it will ever go as long as the careerists and time-servers remain in charge.

Dumping Starmer won’t make much of a difference. But any Labour recovery can only begin when he goes – together with the Blairites and the other bureaucrats who surround him. That fight begins amongst the rank-and-file of the labour movement. That’s where the struggle for socialism must begin anew. It starts now…