What The Media Refuses To Tell You About Keir Starmer’s Resignation

Farewell then, Keir Starmer, a prime minister who will be missed by almost nobody. Those hoping Andy Burnham represents a radical change will be disappointed, but at least he has the virtue of not being a toxic right-wing factionalist, which sets him apart from those who've surrounded Starmer for the last five years, and the government will no longer be tainted by the stain of a prime minister directly complicit in genocide. More than the demise of Starmer, this is the final death of the Morgan McSweeney Labour Together project. As Paul Holden brilliantly spelled out in his book The Fraud, it was a project that was forever tainted by its sordid origins. In 2015, the Blairite candidate Liz Kendall received less than five percent of the vote in the Labour leadership contest. How that faction went on in less than a decade to seize control first of the party and then the country is in many ways an extraordinary story, but it was not through intellectual renewal, through their ability to charm and to persuade people that they were possessed of a brilliant forward-looking radical policy platform. Rather, under Morgan McSweeney's leadership, Labour Together simply lied. Posing as a consensus-seeking think tank, it secretly raised three quarters of a million pounds from hedge funds and supporters of Israel, money it illegally failed to declare, enabling it to fly under the radar as it set about systematically undermining Jeremy Corbyn, above all through the weaponisation of antisemitism. In doing so, they delegitimised the Palestinian struggle and facilitated the dehumanisation of the Palestinian people, helping lay the foundations for the British establishment's disgraceful complicity in the slaughter of the people of Gaza. The Labour right had two other weapons in its control of the party's disciplinary procedures, which were ruthlessly exploited to purge the left and the connivance of an embarrassingly complacent, complicit media. Senior journalists at institutions like the BBC and The Guardian were pretty much the only demographic in the entire country that bought into the grown-ups-in-the-room schtick of the Labour right. They nevertheless propagated it with unquestioning enthusiasm and proved more than ready to disseminate smears against Stalmer's enemies, no matter how thinly evidenced and frankly absurd they might be. For the left, the reality of Stalmer's leadership was soon painfully apparent. For Labour Party's mainstream, the realisation was slower and more painful. The truth was that McSweeney shared the contempt of his mentor, Peter Mandelson, for the party as a whole. McSweeney was seized by an almost millenarian zeal for destruction. The words of Times journalists whose book Get In, in many ways echoes Paul Holdren's The Fraud. McSweeney wanted, Pogrund and Maguire wrote, to pick the Labour Party up and smash its head open. Far more comfortable schmoozing with corporate donors than enjoying expensive freebies, the Blairites had no time for what Stalmer dismissed as the politics of protest. The little people on the outside pressing their noses against the window, waving their little placards, as Tony Blair once contemptuously described them. Of course, we now know who Peter Mandelson was more comfortable spending time with. The problem was that besides a sneering contempt for the left and guardian-reading liberals, Morgan McSweeney simply had nothing to offer. His gratuitous, performative cruelty towards the Corbynites, who were already prostrate and displayed no appetite for challenging Stalmer, achieved a remarkable feat, the opening up for the first time in British politics of a serious electoral space to the left of the Labour Party, into which the Greens have flowed. And his pursuit of reform voters achieved precisely zero political return, in a field already crowded with three right-wing parties. McSweeney's grip over the pliant, access-dependent journalists of the lobby meant for years he was given a free ride, despite his manifest failures. Until finally his connection to Peter Mandelson brought him down. As for Stalmer, he proved himself that most disastrous of things, an incompetent technocrat, an inept managerialist. Having spent the first half of his career as, by all accounts, a genuinely passionate human rights lawyer, he made the erosion of civil liberties one of the enduring legacies of his premiership. Ultimately, he was a colourless careerist, who had slithered his way to the top, and once there, stood exposed as an empty suit, a soulless automatum, whose eyes only really lit up when discussing one subject, and one subject alone, antisemitism, and by extension, Israel. In fact, Stalmer was never meant to be Prime Minister. McSweeney alighted on him as a candidate simply because, having served in Corbyn's shadow cabinet, he could be used to fool the Labour Party's left-wing membership. McSweeney was painfully aware of his excruciating limitations as a communicator, and his total lack of political instincts. The idea was that he would be Kinnock, preparing the ground for Wes Streeting's Blair. But the Conservatives imploded, and in 2024, Rishi Sunak made the disastrous mistake of calling a July election, rather than waiting for the autumn, when Nigel Farage would have been safely in America, shilling for Trump. Reform split the Conservative vote, and the Labour Party achieved a unique and unprecedented result, two-thirds of the seats on one-third of the vote. Fewer people actually voted Labour than had voted for Corbyn in 2019, and over three million fewer than had voted for Corbyn in 2017. Everything that has happened since is simply the painful unravelling of what was As for Andy Burnham, he's a shapeshifter. The joke during the rounds of the Labour Party is that a Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walk into a bar. Hello Andy, says the barman. But he is at least possessed of the baseline political and communication skills that Starmer lacked, and he gives the party a fresh start. Expect the Greens to slip back to single figures in the polls within days of him becoming Prime Already, though, he's signalled strong continuity in terms of both policy and personnel. Josh Simons, the former head of Labour Together, who played such a disgraceful role in attempts to smear and discredit critical journalists, looks set to waltz back into Downing Street. The truth is that unless he's prepared to shatter the whole neoliberal economic orthodoxy, which he's not, Burnham's options are painfully limited. In this restrictive political environment, Palestine represents a fascinating opportunity. No other issue has so angered the millions who have defected to the Greens. And more broadly, among the 50% of the electorate who might conceivably think of voting Labour, support for Israel post-genocide is vanishingly small. Burnham has never been a champion of the Palestinian people. Campaigning for the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015, he described Israel as a democracy that has a long history of protecting minorities and promoting civil rights. Yes, he really said that. And this was just a year after the Israelis had killed 500 Palestinian children during Operation Protective Edge. But he called for a ceasefire in Gaza long before Starmer, and is a long-standing supporter of recognising Palestinian statehood. Above all, he's always shown himself, first and foremost, to be a politician prepared to bend to the prevailing winds. Britain needs a leader who will tear up the military, commercial and diplomatic treaties that underpin what remains a very close alliance with Israel. Andy Burnham is not that man. But he could articulate the genuine moral fury that so many of his potential voters feel. And he could impose real costs on the Israelis for their crimes, rather than repeating the empty platitudes and meaningless gestures of his predecessors. Hey, he could simply start by echoing the rhetoric Trump and JD Vance have been deploying towards Israel in the last few days. It would be unpopular with the media, but if he has the courage to ignore this, it would grant him significant moral and political capital. Of course, ultimately, he'll stand or fall on the cost of living and other bread-and-butter domestic issues. But Palestine is an economically cost-free way of restoring moral legitimacy and signalling a clean break with the Starmie-McSweeney regime. It's a no-brainer, a win-win. And he might start by removing the patently ludicrous designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation and ending the mass arrests of vicars and little old ladies in Parliament Square that exposed the British state to such ridicule that he almost certainly won't do this as testimony to the extraordinary and bewildering grip Israel continues to exert over the psyche of the British ruling class. Here at Double Down Newswatch, we depend on you. We have no billionaire owners or sugar daddies. It's that which enables us to be fearless and independent in our coverage. 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