KEIR STARMER finds himself in the driving seat of government just as our peculiar electoral system — that evolved to ensure that the dictatorship of capital remained unchallenged — has lost its credibility.

From the standpoint of today’s rising generations — broadly speaking, everyone who has entered their working life but not yet reached the ever-ascending retirement age — the welfare state is passing into history along with the expectations it engendered.

The age of full employment ended as the 20th century entered its final quarter. To secure the consent of people living in the developed capitalist countries of Europe, our respective ruling classes found it necessary to guarantee unprecedentedly high levels of employment, rising wages, free schooling, relatively cheap mass public housing, an NHS, and a measure of child and adult social care.

The picture since then has been one of steadily deteriorating social conditions as one by one these social guarantees have been weakened, withdrawn, monetised and privatised, and the capacity of the average wage to support a stable living standard diminished.

Where the Labour Party traditionally saw itself as both the progenitor and the guarantor of the welfare state, today millions understand Starmer’s Labour as a significant threat to its existence.

Rachel Reeves and Starmer opened their administration with a shock and awe attack on the most vulnerable in our society. This week’s partial climb down is not enough to ensure a reset to some kind of social democratic norm, and whether it comes soon or later, these two — and the political project they front — have entered the zombie realm of the politically dead.

This week’s parliamentary revolt is an expression of the truth, almost universally accepted in the bloated and unrepresentative Parliamentary Labour Party, that unless some radical changes occur, they are drawing their MPs’ pay on borrowed time.

The bigger and more sustained the MP revolt, the better chance these people have of continuing in politics, provided only that there is a dramatic change of direction in the way the party is constituted, administered and led and then only if the trade union affiliates become integral to such a change.

The bigger picture is that Starmer’s spectacularly maladroit leadership has brought to full maturity a crisis of democratic accountability that has been growing with every retreat from the post-war settlement and with every imperial war.

The lesson we can draw from the humiliations heaped on Starmer and his miserable ministers this week is that class politics finds a way of imposing its logic on any government, however large its formal parliamentary majority is.

Complacency, born of the police regime that has driven hundreds of thousands of party members and millions of voters to abandon the party, meant that the ministers and the whips failed to understand the scale of the revolt.

Or anticipate the speed with which the government’s grip on the situation deteriorated.

Last Friday’s volte face — a climbdown from imperious arrogance dressed up as reasoned response to collegial consultation — quickly revealed that the revolt was both more extensive and more deeply rooted than either ministers or the whips understood.

Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall was sent in to make noises about personal independence payments. When the number of putative rebels remained high enough to threaten a parliamentary defeat, yet another concession was put together.

Long-time loyalist Hackney South MP Dame Meg Hillier, who, no doubt under constituency pressure, first joined the opposition and then accepted the initial concessions as sufficient, has lost credibility with both government supporters and the rebels she hesitantly joined.

Equally exposed is Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, whose endeavours to shore up the government’s position run embarrassingly counter to the political persona she wants to project.

Desperately lacking in authority, it is entirely possible that Starmer might sacrifice Reeves, whose Treasury-set agenda is the blunt instrument of Labour’s complete capitulation to capitalist economic orthodoxy. Kendall can even more easily be sacrificed.

But blood sacrifice will not be enough to end Starmer’s humiliation.

The Prime Minister’s apology for his morally repugnant foray into Reform UK territory brings out just how bad he is at politics. His failure to understand that trespassing on the poisonous ground on which Nigel Farage pitches Reform UK’s appeal entails a breach of trust that once lost cannot be recovered gives us the measure of the man.

Worse than the carelessly scripted words is the realisation that either he didn’t understand the toxicity of the connection he was making with the language of Enoch Powell, or that he didn’t care.

The right-wing Labour assumption that the party’s endless tracking to the right can be sustained because its electoral base has — in the discredited notion of Peter Mandelson — “nowhere else to go” has collapsed as its voters have gone variously voted Green, nationalist, Lib Dem, Reform UK or joined the legions of the non voters.

The government’s enormous and unrepresentative majority now makes it vulnerable to parliamentary revolt, and the unprecedented scale of the welfare Bill revolt has bloodied a substantial number of MPs, too large to be bribed with the perks of office and too fearful of losing their seats if the government doesn’t change course.

The immediate consequences are likely to involve the defenestration of Morgan McSweeney, who is the clerk of works to architect Mandelson’s witless strategy and possibly a leadership challenge when the autumn parliamentary term gets underway.

Last week’s More in Common poll gave an indication of how a new left-wing party might change the electoral picture. One in 10 voters are projected to vote for such an enterprise.

As such an entity doesn’t yet exist, this poll tells us something about what some voters want. Even so, the numbers make interesting reading.

Reform UK on 27 per cent, the Tories on 20 per cent and Lib Dems on 14 per cent would remain unaffected, Labour might lose 3 per cent and drop to 20 per cent. The Greens face a drop from 9 per cent to 5 per cent and the SNP a drop from 3 per cent to 2 per cent.

The New Statesman magazine — which can usually be relied on to convey the more sophisticated thinking of the Labour right — makes the compelling point that such a party doesn’t yet exist.

It argues: “The biggest flaw with More in Common’s survey is simple: the Jeremy Corbyn Party isn’t real; it hasn’t accrued baggage; we don’t know who its hypothetical candidates would be or how badly organised it might be.”

True enough, but, as the last week’s events show, politics is a dynamic process, and in their totality, people’s thoughts and actions do not resemble the operations of a mechanical machine.

While the poll suggests that a discrete left-wing constituency exists and that in today’s highly fluid situation — with the First Past the Post system no longer functioning to corral voters into two potential parties of government — that this limited pool of “left-wing voters” might simply redivide itself.

This fails to take into account what people expect of the political parties competing for their votes and attention. Critically, it doesn’t account for the contradictory expectations of every tendency among voters. Or for the statistically significant fact that to be able to command a body of support from a section of voters doesn’t depend on being popular with all voters.

For example, most voters, including a majority or a substantial minority in every tendency, favour public ownership of rail, mail, utilities and energy, and these policies are popular even among people who don’t like the most prominent politician identified with them, Jeremy Corbyn.

In every party’s electoral following, this deeply held sense of what is right and necessary is marginalised. With the exception of the post-war Labour government and the close-run 2017 Corbyn-led election campaign, this has never been presented to the voters in any coherent form. But when it does appear as electorally credible, it has a transformative effect.

It has the proven potential to mobilise people, especially working people and drag into electoral politics a big part of non-voters as well as attract voters across the spectrum. The highly fluid and substantially working-class support presently attracted to Reform UK is especially vulnerable to such an appeal, while the big business, City-style policies of Farage and his billionaire backers cannot mask their class loyalties forever.

At present, the idea that Reform UK might be able to form a government is sustained by its opinion poll lead and a scattering of real election results. The point Ben Walker makes in his New Statesman piece about “political baggage” is becoming a factor as Farage’s outfit struggles to form credible administrations in the various places where FPTP has gifted it a majority.

But Labour carries substantial baggage. On foreign policy, Britain’s complicity in the Gaza genocide has deeply eroded its moral standing, Starmer’s racist ramblings have detached another tranche of party members and voters, the government’s economic credibility is weakened, and its command of Parliament is rapidly dissolving.

Undoubtedly, some form of electoral challenge from the left will emerge. That it needs to be well led, well organised, with a democratic and collegiate political style and policies that deal with the real-life problems of working-class people is a given. The Greens need to make up their mind whether to reach an accommodation with such a new formation or fight a mutually destructive battle.

The absolute need is for such a political initiative to enable the working class to begin to act in its own interests.