‘Keir Starmer’s cowardice has made Labour a party for no one’

When the Labour Party was created 125 years ago, it was done so out of a demand from the underrepresented in society, routinely struck down by an ambivalent establishment, to have their voices heard.

Crammed in the now-demolished corridors of the Congregationalist Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street, London, an eclectic array of left-wing groups, socialist movements, and trade unions set aside fickle differences which so often halt progressive organisation and, in February 1900, created the “Labour Representation Committee” (LRC). They quite literally brought the 20th century and the class-conscious issues which would define it, to Britain.

It wasn’t until the end of the First World War in 1918 that the political movement, now officially called the Labour Party, acquired its first taste of power. Veterans of the war, emerging from the unspeakable horrors of the trenches, questioned what their suffering had achieved and looked to Labour’s distinctive policies of social equity and state-led democratic freedoms as a means to the change they had fought for, culminating in the Party’s first government in 1924.

Labour’s meteoric rise to popularity, surpassing the dissolved Liberal Party as the main opposition to the Conservatives, was secured in part because its members filled the void of Britain’s economic and social issues with their firmly held left-wing beliefs. They became the answer to a question the British public had been screaming for years.

To say that things have changed since then would be an understatement so massive you could see it from space. The modern Labour Party, through its political twists and turns over the past century and a quarter, has become a husk of its former self, teeming with opportunists feasting on the decaying corpse of a party that once stood for something.

Yes, I’m talking about Keir Starmer.

No one knows what Keir Starmer believes. That’s not just columnistic touting, either. YouGov statistics from April prove that the majority of the British public (60 per cent) has absolutely no idea what Keir Starmer stands for. It often appears that members of his own political Party seldom know what their leader is going to say when he stands in the Commons or takes to his podium at Number 10.

Since becoming prime minister, several of Sir Keir’s positions, which he claims to have firmly held since becoming Labour leader in 2020, have fizzled into nothingness at breakneck speed. His immigration policies seem to be handpicked from the Tory playbook, his budgetary decisions completely fly in the face of the 2024 manifesto, and Labour still seems to have no answer to the NHS’s woes.

And then there’s his treatment of LGBTQ+ issues. This one makes my blood boil, because I was there. I was there during the 2022 PinkNews Awards when Starmer, on the cusp of success amid Liz Truss’ leadership failures and eventual departure, deplored the Conservative government’s treatment of trans people. I was there in the galleries of the Church House in Westminster as he honoured the life of the late human rights lawyer, Jonathan Cooper OBE, after he died in 2021, commending him as a force for “justice” among LGBTQ+ people.

What an insult to Cooper’s legacy of tireless activism, your subsequent political career has been, Sir Keir. What a cowardly person you have become since I saw you proudly standing with us at that podium. What a fool I was for believing you actually gave a damn about mine and all trans people’s rights.

Through this endless flip-flopping, Starmer and his politically centrist chums have helped transform Labour into a party that once stood for something to a party desperately looking for approval; acting like it isn’t already in power.

You only need to look at his statement on the UK’s Supreme Court ruling on the 2010 Equality Act’s definition of a woman to see the destructiveness of favourability politics. Starmer’s statement that he no longer believes trans women to be real women was liked by literally no one. Progressive activists saw it as the nail in the coffin for any hope that Labour would escape the TERF chains wrapped around its neck, and anti-trans activists deplored it as too little, too late.

And so here Keir Starmer is, left to stew in the consequences of his failed tactic to just go along with whatever he believes the public thinks, as though he thinks being a man of the people means to blindly follow them wherever they go – even off a cliff.

Aspiring young politicians would do well to take Sir Keir Starmer’s prime ministership as a keen warning on the purpose of politicians in a liberal democracy such as ours. In a functioning Democracy, politicians should be elected to serve as representatives of the people who can make pivotal political decisions. It means they should listen to the public while staying committed to the promises they made that prompted their election.

If politicians merely based their decisions on public opinion, pivotal legislative changes which have shaped our society wouldn’t have been brought. We would still have racial segregation, the death penalty, and, indeed, a ban on homosexuality in Britain.

All Labour’s commitment to following whatever they believe the public want has done has made it the Party of cowardice, and that is ultimately a Party that represents no one.