This was the week that was. Fully a third of the parliamentary Labour Party rebelled on a vote that will have no real-life consequences whatsoever: political theatre for the impotent. Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, the Government …
Labour still has an Israel problem
Keir Starmer, like Israel, must brace for a long war he might not be able to win. The Labour leader has staked out a position that is far more exposed than it might first appear, for this is a crisis …
The tragic death of Labour Zionism
Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson once boasted that it was impossible “for a political party to be more committed to a national home for the Jews in Palestine than was Labour”. Keir Starmer only wishes he could be so confident …
Keir Starmer should have no hope
Optimism is crucial to success in democratic politics. There is plenty of evidence to back up this platitude. Bill Clinton came from the town of Hope in Arkansas, and never let voters forget it. An advertisement for Ronald Reagan in …
Starmer’s hollow vision for Britain
There is a vast, petrifying hollowness to the British economy. As you race around dealing with everyday life, the reassuring facade of the state is still there: the police and roads, the schools and hospitals. And yet, if you ever …
Jamie Carragher: My warning to Starmer
Born and raised in Bootle, one of Liverpool FC’s longest-serving players, few characters embody the Scouse spirit more than Jamie Carragher. So, as the Labour Party circus departs the city after another conference season, who better to discuss the history …
Who will save us from boarding-house Britain?
Perhaps the Conservative Party Conference would better have been cancelled: after all, no one in the country, not least those on stage making pronouncements about the party’s future policies, has the slightest belief that any of those policies will ever …
Keir Starmer has no story to tell
In the autumn of 1996, Tony Blair and the New Labour bandwagon arrived in Blackpool for the final party conference before the election. A sense of euphoria was starting to take hold: as they hit 57% in the polls, it …
Starmer needs Corbyn’s secret weapon
The barriers are going up for the Labour party conference. Not just to protect, of course, but to exclude. The National Executive Committee is considering a rule that would threaten party members with expulsion if they campaign for rival candidates …
The white heat of Britain’s decline
A nation lost in what one American commentator described as “an orgy of self-criticism”; an exhausted Tory government out of ideas; an endemic sense of decline. This might describe the Britain of today, but it also describes the Britain of …
Keir Starmer will never rejoin the EU
With Keir Starmer all but measuring the drapes in No 10, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that his pledge to renegotiate Britain’s treaty with the EU has set Westminster aflutter. The reality, however, is less exciting: Starmer’s promise is little …
Keir Starmer still doesn’t get Brexit
France has been swept up in a mood of cross-Channel rapprochement. As the country hosts the Rugby World Cup, its minister of sport has shown a special solicitude towards English visitors, hoping to atone for the mistreatment of English football …
What does Angela Rayner really want?
Listening to Angela Rayner this week has felt like real-time evidence for Karl Marx’s quip about the past weighing “like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. Even before she had addressed the TUC conference, Rayner was fending off …
The dark arts of Starmer’s reshuffle
New uniforms, new haircuts and new shoes at the ready, many children went back to school this week (to the ones that aren’t about to crumble around their heads, that is). It was, too, the return of “Hogwarts” — many …
Will Starmer be Britain’s Merkel?
A smell of death is now seeping out of Westminster, choking the atmosphere of the nation, poisoning everything it touches. With each new crisis, the smell only gets stronger and the reaction from the public more visceral. Where there was …