While many people have been dissecting the power struggles and growing fissures within the Labour party, it might instead be timely to concentrate on what their senior figures all have in common. Behind the division and fratricidal scheming, they are united by the same raw desire to preserve their party at all costs. They seem to place its existence above all other considerations.
This was made clear in Angela Rayner’s speech to the centre-left Mainstream group on Tuesday, in which she warned that the ‘very survival of the Labour party is at stake’. While her speech has been seen as part of her longer-term plan to usurp Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, those words betrayed an awkward truth. Rayner appears to have the same priority as her leader: to prevent Labour fragmenting and to staunch the flow of support towards the Greens, which now caters to both the hard left and the Muslim vote.
Rayner appears to have the same priority as her leader: to prevent Labour fragmenting and to staunch the flow of support towards the Greens
This fundamental urge to keep his party intact and in power has explained most of Starmer’s decisions and behaviour during his administration: his inaction, U-turns and general pusillanimity. It was on show yesterday during PMQs, when, in relation to Nick Timothy’s remarks on a Muslim act of mass prayer in Trafalgar Square being ‘an act of domination’, he urged Kemi Badenoch to sack her shadow justice secretary. Instead of responding to Timothy’s legitimate and plausible concerns, Starmer side-stepped their substance altogether, instead accusing the Conservatives of having ‘a problem with Muslims’. In effect, the Prime Minister was playing the Islamophobia card.
And why wouldn’t he? This is the man who, no matter how much he tries to repackage it as ‘anti-Muslim hostility’, is still keen to endorse the whole concept of ‘Islamophobia’. In essence, this is the belief that criticism of anyone Muslim is unacceptable, because being ‘offensive’ or hurting people’s feelings is a grievous sin. Just wait and see how this rebranded definition will be weaponised with growing frequency and intensity.
Starmer has given his blessing to the concept because he saw at the general election two years ago, when four pro-Gaza independents were returned to parliament, what happens when you don’t appease a noisy section of the populace who see society primarily through the prism of religion and ethnicity. This is why Labour has reacted to the defeat at the Gorton and Denton by-election in the way it knows best: by seeking to appease Muslim voters even more. As reported in the Daily Telegraph, the government has now abandoned a crackdown on electoral fraud, including ‘family voting’, an initiative introduced in 2022 by the Conservative government in guidelines given to the Electoral Commission.
Labour politicians of all hues appreciate the value of the Muslim vote and fear for their electoral lives should this bloc defect wholesale. Hence Rayner’s speech this week, and its broader appeal to the left of her party. Rayner knows that her thinly-veiled attack on the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood – the only member of the cabinet who seems to have this country’s welfare and future as a foremost concern – will go down well with Labour backbenchers ahead of a coup attempt.
It’s these same left-wing backbenchers who thwarted Liz Kendall’s attempts to reform disability benefits last July when she was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. It’s this coterie of the economically illiterate and emotionally incontinent who will also seek to prevent her successor, Pat McFadden, from trying to reduce the escalating and unsustainable welfare bill. All because they think it’s ‘uncaring’ to cut payment to thousands who’ve diagnosed themselves as ‘anxious’ or to others who are gaming the system. It’s the same left of the party, who, following Rayner’s speech, are set to push Starmer into a U-turn on immigration. At the moment it looks likely that the Prime Minister will bow to pressure and water-down Mahmood’s plan to make it harder for 1.6 million migrants to stay in the UK.
Mahmood describes her reforms as essential to avoid a ‘drain on our public finances.’ Yet what does the Labour party know or care about finances? Or social cohesion, given that all it seems to do is constantly surrender to sectarian interests? Whether left, right or centre, all the Labour party appears to care about is itself.
The longer the Labour party remains in power – no matter who leads it – the further we will go down the road to financial ruin and the deeper we will fall into the quagmire of social disintegration.
