With not long to go before he replaces Keir Starmer as UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham is currently very busy deciding on his cabinet, sifting through policy options and working out a strategy that ensures he starts with a bang that really makes a difference, rather than the sort of treacherous, immediately disillusioning and deflating backsliding that marked Starmer’s arrival as PM two years ago. Like most people I wish Burnham well and hope he truly intends to deliver the host of radical changes that he rightly says the UK so desperately needs. But I fear that, even if he is sincere in his intentions, he is going to be thwarted – not by Labour’s usual foes, the rightwing mass media and the big tech propaganda onslaught, but by the Labour Party itself.

In his six years as Labour leader, Starmer was the frontman for a rightwing putsch whose purpose was to complete the groundwork laid down across 50 years by the likes of Callaghan, Kinnock, Blair and Brown and hand Labour over to those who despise everything it stands for. At the centre of that plot was fixer Morgan McSweeney and his ‘Labour Together’ thinktank, funded by the undeclared donations of wealthy donors that lead to a fine from the Electoral Commission. When journalists investigated those donations Josh Simons, McSweeney’s successor, commissioned a PR firm to smear them (disturbingly, Simons became the MP who would obligingly surrender his Makerfield seat to make way for Andy Burnham).

When Jeremy Corbyn resigned in 2020, having first increased Labour’s vote to 40% in the 2017 General Election – far higher than the 33% Starmer attained when luckily winning in 2024 – but then saw it reduced to 32% in the wake of Brexit in 2019, Starmer succeeded him as Labour leader thanks to duplicitous lies designed to appeal to the party’s leftwing membership. He promised tax increases for the wealthiest 5%, public ownership of utilities, abolition of tuition fees, “an immigration system based on compassion and dignity”, human rights “at the heart of foreign policy”, and the abolition of the House of Lords. In power, he either ditched these promises or did the precise opposite.

As soon as he was elected leader, Starmer suspended Corbyn from the party before finally expelling him in 2023. He rewrote history claiming he had never supported Corbyn despite the fact he served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, declared he was “100% behind him”, praised him for “bringing radicalism to Labour”, denounced the “terrible media attacks” on him and repeatedly called him his “friend”. Starmer’s promise that the party would be a “broad church” was promptly ripped up and he set about purging Labour of any remotely leftist, dissenting or diverse voices. Wickedly utilising the handy “anti-Semitism” card as an all-purpose, debate-silencing dog-whistle, he suspended and expelled Labour MPs (including Corbyn) and blocked candidates from standing for daring to make comments critical of Israel’s illegal policies of mass murder and land grab in Palestine.

In his tone-deaf, self-aggrandising resignation speech outside 10 Downing Street, Starmer claimed he took over a Labour party that was “morally bankrupt”. But it was he whose morals plunged new depths of depravity and cruelty. As PM, the former human rights lawyer supplied weapons to Israel and stated that Israel had a right to cut off power and water to Gaza. While war criminal Netanyahu gleefully issued genocidal statements, reduced Gaza to rubble and killed tens of thousands of people, Starmer refused to back a ceasefire and placed Israel’s “right to self-defence” above Palestinians’ right to live. Only after Gaza had been virtually flattened and the death toll had topped 70,000 did Starmer make the useless performative gesture of backing a ceasefire.

Starmer only won in 2024 thanks to the complete collapse of the terrible Tories allied to the sickening absurdity of the UK’s electoral system that gave Labour a landslide victory on just a third of the vote. With a political vision that amounted to smashing socialism, bedecking everything in Union Jacks, getting the approval of the Daily Mail and raking in freebies from fat-cat donors, the charmless nasty piece of work was found out almost immediately as his government tore up every manifesto pledge and concentrated on grovelling to City of London economic orthodoxy and maintaining Tory policies of making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Starmer dressed this up as a bold willingness to make “tough choices”. It didn’t fool anybody. In no time he was universally loathed as voters were repulsed by policies like attacks on pensioners and the disabled, and contemptuous of his repeated partial U-turns whenever his popularity ratings reached record lows. Competence and seriousness were supposed to be his defining traits, but the cowardly back-stabber only excelled at finding scapegoats for his shambolic administration before throwing them under the bus.

The man who had once campaigned for free movement transformed into a bargain basement Enoch Powell pandering to racist tropes rather than contesting the lies of the far-right, declaring immigration had done “incalculable damage” and risked turning Britain into an “island of strangers”, while building one of the harshest asylum systems in Europe. Promise after promise was routinely broken. His housebuilding revolution failed to materialise. Any tackling of the climate crisis, the biosphere disaster, the pollution horror and the nature annihilation was mocked and dumped. “No return to austerity” gave way to endless departmental squeezes. International aid was gutted. And no change was made to the Tories’ post-Brexit attacks on the powers of the devolved administration in Wales which had reneged on the promise to compensate for the loss of EU funds and simultaneously snaffled devolved issues back to Westminster – in fact Starmer’s Labour treated Wales even worse than the Tories had, implacably opposing every tiny furthering of devolution no matter how sensible, ignoring and undermining the Labour government in the Senedd and seeking to embed the ‘England & Wales’ formula that ludicrously deems a railway line from London to Birmingham to be a Welsh investment and will inevitably lead to the abolition of Wales (5% of ‘England & Wales’) if it is not reversed. Little wonder then that in the 2026 Senedd Election Labour suffered its worst ever result since the party was founded – chalk that up as yet another Starmer achievement.

Meanwhile, Labour’s internal authoritarianism was exported to the country. Thousands were arrested and hundreds of harmless, peaceful good people are languishing in prison for holding placards after anti-genocide direct action group Palestine Action were proscribed as terrorists on the same legal footing as Islamic State. And let’s not forget one of the worst Starmer fuck-ups: his appointment of sleaze-bag Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US just because he was a rightwinger, despite his publicly recorded links to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Typically, Starmer put faction before country, before party and before common-sense and this time McSweeney was forced to carry the can, meaning there was no one left to throw under a bus – except himself.

Starmer’s many failures are not his sole responsibility. The responsibility is shared by all the principle-free rightwingers who have taken over the Labour Party and been implanted as MPs in Westminster (as well as the remaining rumps in the Senedd and Scotland for that matter). This faction and its cheerleaders deluded themselves that what the UK needed was yet another rightwing party to join the Conservatives, Reform UK and Restore Britain – just in case there were not enough fascists at large already. The truth is that all rightwingers just want to impose even more of the failed economic model of the past 50 years that has bought the UK to its sorry state. Starmer was a typical contemporary Labour MP: a deeply conventional, utterly unimaginative British Nationalist, committed to nothing other than his own advancement, and armed with all the discredited Tory cliches like ‘growth’, ‘flag’ and ‘family’, always wielded like weapons. The worry is that his utterly shameful stint as Prime Minister laid the foundations for the far-right agenda of Nigel Farage. If his successor, Andy Burnham, believes the answer is simply to paint a more amiable, oop-north gloss on Starmer’s horror-show he too will not last long. He must make a decisive break from the values of this disgusting travesty of a government and be as ruthless with the entryist true blues in the parliamentary Labour Party as Starmer was with anyone who wanted Labour to abide by its founding purpose and singlemindedly pursue policies that favour the many not the few.