How Starmer’s cynicism is driving people to Reform

Martin Shipton

The victory of former army major Stuart Keyte – Reform UK’s first elected councillor in Wales – at a Torfaen by-election on Thursday may mark a watershed in Welsh politics.

He immediately issued a warning to Labour that none of its council seats in Wales are safe.

Cllr Keyte may have a point, although I’m old enough to remember when a man called David Shand became the SDP’s first ever elected councillor at a 1981 by-election in Sedgefield, Co Durham, where I was living at the time. Two years later Tony Blair became Sedgefield’s Labour MP, and 14 years after that he began an eight-year stint as Prime Minister.

Meanwhile Mr Shand had come and gone, as indeed had the SDP. Reform may suffer the same fate, although I have a feeling that the populist right will be with us for some time.

Depressing

It happens that Thursday was also publication day for the book Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by the journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, which I’m finding an interesting but depressing read.

Its focus is the Labour Party and its bid under Starmer to dislodge the Conservatives from power after 14 years, although Nigel Farage and Reform are a vaguely looming presence.

The book’s focus is on the behind-the-scenes goings-on as Starmer’s chief strategist Morgan McSweeney – rather than Starmer himself – engineered the changes that resulted in Labour’s general election landslide in July 2024.

As with many books of this kind, there is a fair sprinkling of gossip amid the political analysis.

We learn, for example, how Swansea East MP Carolyn Harris, Starmer’s earliest fan in Wales, was sacked as his Parliamentary Private Secretary after spreading a rumour that Angela Rayner was having an adulterous relationship with another Shadow Cabinet minister.

More substantially, a major theme of the book is how McSweeney and his associates deliberately deceived ordinary members of the Labour Party into believing that Starmer would keep the radical policies they had found attractive about Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

The so-called Ten Pledges, released during the leadership campaign, included increasing income tax for the wealthiest 5%; returning rail, mail, energy and water to public ownership; abolishing student tuition fees and Universal Credit; and giving MPs a veto over overseas military interventions by British forces.

U-turns

Later Starmer was criticised for the series of U-turns in which he dropped most of the pledges. They’ve been put forward as examples of his inconsistency, but the book tells us there was never any intention to pursue the left-wing policies: it was all just a ruse to get Starmer elected as leader – something he knew from the outset. Ironically, the Ten Pledges had considerable public support at the time, although to McSweeney they were anathema.

Having secured Starmer’s election, McSweeney embarked on destroying the left as a force within the party, using a variety of means to do so, including improving the organisation of right wing members as a faction and using procedural mechanisms.

A further significant revelation in the book is that Starmer was, in essence, a vehicle for McSweeney and others to mould into the kind of leader they were looking for. In other words, they weren’t following him because they agreed with his ideology. He was, to all intents and purposes, an empty vessel without baggage that they could manipulate.

The mould was created before he was fitted to it. The most passionate personality trait he possessed was his ambition, to appease which he was happy to be manipulated by his advisers.

Brexit

Underlying all of this was the assumption that the bulk of the British people – apart from a metropolitan elite – was instinctively right wing. As a result, a decision was made that it would be a mistake to reopen the issue of Brexit. Arguments about the way Brexit was damaging to the economy were “unhelpful” and might incline those who had voted Leave in the 2016 referendum on EU membership to continue feeling alienated from Labour.

McSweeney and Starmer got their way and the Labour left is now an impotent, spent force.

The lack of radicalism and perceived policy delivery has, however, now driven voters into the arms of a party that is even further to the right than the Tories.

Policies on Reform’s website seem either wildly optimistic in terms of how much revenue they will deliver for the UK Government or designed to give tax breaks skewed to the wealthy.

Equally, no consideration is given to the existence of devolution, and that the Welsh Government may wish to do things in a different way. Perhaps there’s already a built-in assumption that Reform will be in power at the Senedd by the time of the next scheduled general election in 2029, with its local cohort happy to take orders from “Nigel”.

We are heading in a dangerous direction. Before long we could find people in government who want to reintroduce the death penalty, implementation of which would make us one of only two nations in Europe – the other being Belarus – to engage in judicial execution.

As someone who knows people who have wrongly spent years in prison for murder, having been falsely convicted before ultimately being exonerated, I am shocked that this could be a possibility.

I also find it thoroughly shocking that a political party like Labour feels it necessary to pander to the basest instincts of voters to get elected.

Farage is, of course, well tuned-in to Trump’s America, where many people have no empathy with or sympathy for those who are less well off than they are, deriding the notion of a National Health Service as “socialist healthcare” – something which is intrinsically evil. As things stand, such a view is, I’m pleased to say, unlikely to gain currency here. If it’s ever seriously mooted, it could lead to Farage’s – and Reform’s – downfall.

Nevertheless, the book Get In shows how in the mindset of Starmer’s Labour, leadership is not about being honest with people about what is achievable and inspiring them to strive for the best, but settling cynically for what people will find superficially attractive while knowing it’s to their disadvantage – as in the attitude towards the EU.

This is not a way to run a country and achieve success. It increases disillusionment for ordinary people, thus making them even more susceptible to bad players who see them as a route to power.

Once installed they will dance to the tune of their billionaire masters.

What a sorry state we are in. We need a rescue strategy badly. Who will supply it?