EACH day brings fresh evidence that Keir Starmer is shifting the Labour Party rightwards in his effort to create a “patriotic,” pro-business, pro-Nato party in which members have little or no say on policy.

Starmer was supposedly elected on a platform of “continuity Corbyn,” promising to maintain the former leader’s platform of popular policies that won an unprecedented 10 per cent vote swing to Labour in 2017 after the party saw its vote decline in successive elections since 2001.

However, following the snap essentially single-issue Brexit election of 2019, the Jeremy Corbyn project of returning the party to its democratic socialist roots reached a dead end, and the party’s traditional parliamentary and bureaucratic elite seized back control.

Starmer, having won the leadership, made himself the vehicle for a counter-revolution, symbolised by the expulsion of Corbyn from the parliamentary party, over comments regarding alleged anti-semitism in the party.

While much has been written about the counter-factual and evidence-light nature of the campaign against Corbyn, including the shocking way in which left-wing Jews have been systematically targeted by the Starmer bureaucracy, I want to look ahead to where this ongoing rightward shift will take British politics.

Over the last year, Tory electoral support has imploded, as the coalition put together under Theresa May and then Boris Johnson in support of Brexit, with a historic shift of working-class voters towards the party, came unstuck.

Johnson’s poor handling of the Covid pandemic, his litany of lies and partying, the rampant corruption seen during the Covid period with contracts going to insiders and numerous scandals involving Tory MPs, all began to chip away at the party’s support. Then the cost-of-living crisis hit the country, and the only winners were the energy companies and landlords.

Meanwhile, Starmer increasingly positioned himself as a safe pair of hands who would do nothing to upset the apple cart of Britain’s capitalist establishment. Popular policies such as public ownership of energy and water and renationalisation of the health service were jettisoned on spurious grounds of cost and “what works.”

Together with his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, and his oleaginous shadow health spokesperson Wes Streeting, the new leadership carved themselves an image as the “sensibles,” political insiders who were far happier in a room full of businesspeople or Tory grandees than the kinds of crowds of ordinary people who thronged to see Starmer’s predecessor, Corbyn.

Any encounters between Starmer and the party membership, never mind the public, are highly choreographed, reminiscent of the way Theresa May’s team ensured that her public appearances were air-tight, robotic affairs, decorated with union jacks and carefully selected extras.

The thing about the Starmer counter-revolution is that it must be seen to continue, and that means throwing red meat to the Tory media on an almost daily basis to show how irreversible the transformation of Labour into a party of business and militarism is.

Behind this lies the terror that any pause in this ongoing purge of anything socialist, democratic or left wing and the beasts of the media will turn on Starmer and tear him limb for limb.

The party machine’s faith that a favourable media and business class — typified by the recent £2 million donation from Lord Sainsbury, who withdrew his support during Corbyn’s tenure — will usher them into Downing Street, is a poisoned one.

For this strategy to work, they must strive each day against the undimmed belief of party members, trade union affiliates and voters in policies that will reverse the four-decade neoliberal onslaught on wages, public services and communities.

And so this week Starmer welcomes back the Blairite hatchet man Mike Gapes, well known for his friendly ties to Israel’s apartheid regime and to the Saudi dictatorship, who spent the last half of the 2010s endlessly making statements against the Corbyn leadership.

In 2019 he quit the party altogether, and stood against it, unsuccessfully, for the now-dead corporate party Change UK. It was no secret that Change UK was in fact a vehicle for the status quo and no real change at all. And that is now the brand of Labour under Starmer (who blithely ignores party rules that standing against it excommunicates any member from the party).

Starmer’s road to power requires an electorate exhausted and desperate after nearly 14 years of Tory mismanagement, austerity, lies and a crumbling Brexit project. Voters must look at Labour and not worry too much that it is telling them that nothing much will change once Starmer is in Number 10.

Austerity and the privatisation of public services, including the NHS, will continue: this is what Streeting and Reeves and Starmer keep telling us.

Of course, if this is the policy platform that Labour governs on, it will put itself in opposition to its trade union funders, its voters, and its mass party base (150,000 members have left or been thrown out, but 300,000 or more are still paying their dues). Amid the cost-of-living crisis, disappointment will be swift. Anger will likely follow. This is when the Starmer project will run out of road.

But between now and the election, perhaps 12 or 18 months from now, each day Starmer and his team will continue to demonstrate how safe and loyal they are to Britain’s Establishment, its traditional pro-US militarist foreign policy, and to preserving the most unequal distribution of wealth this country has seen in a century.

As recent local by-elections suggest, other parties, including Greens, independents and new far-right and anti-migrant groups will emerge to sweep up disillusioned Labour and Tory voters. For now, they can be safely ignored by the Westminster insiders who run Labour, but sooner or later, the massive propaganda campaign to tell voters that nothing can change will come back and hit Starmer and the party Establishment hard. It won’t be pretty.

In the meantime, we could be facing a year in which Suella Braverman, the hard-right Home Secretary, will use her new plan to deport all refugees and migrants arriving by boat to create a narrative that will encourage ever-greater hostility to refugees in general. Labour is likely to struggle, as this is the classic territory on which Tories like to paint Labour into a corner on. This sets the grounds for the most racist election campaign in recent history.