Removing Starmer won’t change the Labour Party enough to stop Farage

If you lose every football match because your goalkeeper keeps booting the ball into their own net, shouting at the other team is pointless. Inventing new tactics to get past the other keeper is pointless, because the ball will always go past yours. That was true about Jeremy Corbyn. It is true about Keir Starmer. And it’s time for progressive voters to accept that it’s true about the Labour Party in general. Removing Keir Starmer as leader won’t change Labour enough to prevent Nigel Farage from becoming Reform prime minister.

A confession

Don’t get me wrong. I was still holding out hope that Labour might save us – until last month.

I even got major egg on my face, suggesting that the Greens should stand aside in the Gorton and Denton by-election. I wanted a clear path for Andy Burnham to become an MP and then replace Keir Starmer as prime minister.

Burnham has always campaigned to ensure that all votes count equally. So, if he became prime minister and gave us a proportional voting system, the UK would genuinely be saved from fascism. Reform, who are polling around 30%, therefore wouldn’t be able to gain a majority in parliament. Furthermore, parties to the left of the Tories (Labour, Lib Dems, SNP, Greens) have received more than 50% of the vote in almost every election since WW2.

So, if all votes counted equally, the future of the UK would be almost permanently progressive. But Labour blocking Andy Burnham didn’t just make me look foolish; it killed the Labour Party.

Labour is dead and buried

Why? Because Keir Starmer was already on borrowed time, even before he knowingly hired a child rape-trafficker’s fan as our US ambassador. He already had the lowest popularity rating of any prime minister in UK history. So the Labour machine knew that Starmer was on his way out. So the decision to rule out Andy Burnham as a potential challenger was about the politics he would bring to the table.

This is a long-standing problem.

In 2020, Labour kicked me out of the party for saying that I joined the Labour Party to get them to support proportional representation. Labour members have supported proportional voting for several years and made it the party’s official conference policy, yet the leadership has rejected it. Labour just published its Representation of the People Bill.

This is their flagship law to reform our democracy, yet it makes no mention of proportional representation. So Labour is committed to ensuring that most British votes don’t count, because a minority-voted party always get a majority of seats in Parliament.

Wes Streeting, Starmer’s most likely successor, even explicitly confirmed this when I interviewed him at the party conference. When I accused Labour of supporting a system where most votes don’t count, he said, “In the grand scheme of things, I’m more worried about the NHS”.

To which I replied: “So democracy doesn’t matter?”.

Streeting: “Democracy does matter”

Me: “So you want the majority of votes to count, then?”

Streeting “No. We’re focusing on our manifesto.”

No allegiance

So, we are dealing with a Labour Party that is institutionally committed to a voting system that has consistently given us governments that are more right-wing than what the majority of people voted for. Logically, our voting system is the most right-wing policy the UK has ever invented, and yet it is being supported by the party some people still call “the Left”.

If you can’t tell, I have no allegiance to any politician or any party. I backed Corbyn when he campaigned for Remain, opposed him for the three years where he backed Brexit, then campaigned for his Labour Party when he backed a 2^nd referendum in late 2019.

I backed Starmer when he called for a referendum on the Brexit deal in early 2019, then opposed him once he became a genocidal Thatcher tribute act, so I voted Green in 2024.

So, having entered politics in 2016, I’ve only ever really seen Labour copy the biggest right-wing policies of the day. Whether that’s Brexit under Corbyn, or austerity, bigotry and genocide under Starmer. As I said, if your keeper keeps booting the ball into your own net, complaining about the opposing team is pointless. And if you care about protecting people from what happens next (see America), then your allegiance shouldn’t be to any player, whether that player is in green, red or yellow. Besides, this isn’t a game.

Labour is finished

I joined the Green Party in October because they actually want to stop this car from driving to the far right, not simply say slightly nicer things from the passenger seat. Labour has become part of the problem and can’t beat Nigel Farage.

What’s tragic is… on balance, even Reform voters believe Brexit has made us poorer, and they don’t like the Tories. But the Brexit Party changed their name to Reform UK and has populated itself almost exclusively with former Tories.

Yet somehow that’s enough to convince them that they’re not voting for the same Tories who already made them poorer… If simply changing Labour’s leader is enough to convince you that it’s become a whole new party, then stop pretending you’re smarter than a Reform voter.

Featured image via the Canary