IT SEEMS to be a law of British political history that every Labour government ends up further to the right than it started out, no matter what the point of departure.

Ramsay MacDonald had modest plans in 1929, but they did not include cutting unemployment benefit and forming a coalition with the Tories two years later.

Clement Attlee set out all nationalisations and health service but ended up cutting welfare to fund aggression in Korea.

Harold Wilson’s “white hot heat of technological revolution” cooled down to anti-union legislation fast enough.

Even Tony Blair, who worked overtime to minimise progressive expectations of a New Labour government, did start out promoting the minimum wage and devolution, yet moved on to proselytising for imperialist war and public service privatisation.

Since this rightwards shift of Labour governments seems a regular historic pattern, it is no use seeking its causes in personal whims or weaknesses.

It is the normal response of reformism to elite pressures brought to bear on a project which cannot conceive of transcending the Establishment.

Those pressures are applied by international finance, transmitted through the Treasury and the Bank of England, with their priorities of currency strength; world imperialism, now mainly expressed via Washington; and of course reactionary opinion among the British public hyperventilated by conservative media.

Still, there is something new. In all preceding examples, blissful dawn has been separated from reactionary sunset by a decent interval of years.

On Keir Starmer time, political darkness is drawing in before we’ve even had our elevenses.

His first anniversary in office is still two seasons away, and admittedly it was never exactly glad confident morning to begin with, but where are we now?

Winter fuel benefit cut. A “growth” plan centring on deregulation. Unconditional backing for Israel’s genocide. Anti-migrant raids for the News at Ten. Three billion pounds a year for Ukraine’s military. Nothing at all for Waspi women.

And now the lowest overseas aid budget since there was first such a thing, all to fund more war. Very little of this is to be found in last year’s Labour election manifesto, baldly entitled “Change.”

Finally, a straw too many for one particular camel, international development minister Anneliese Dodds.

Dodds was also women’s equality minister. This set a bad example to women since she is herself a woman very much not treated equally, yet putting up with it — over the last five years she has submitted loyally to one humiliating demotion after another at the hands of male politicians and their male acolytes. 

Be that as it may, the most potent line in her letter of resignation was this one. 

After accepting that military spending increases were needed, she bemoaned that the aid budget was expected to bear the entire cost and wrote: “I also expected we would collectively discuss our fiscal rules and approach to taxation, as other nations are doing.”

That reveals the truth. Starmer gave consideration to no other options when determining where the new military money was to come from. No wealth tax. No increase in public debt. Just impoverish peoples in the global South.

But save the fiscal rules! And spare the rich! These are the red lines. No wonder Starmer discussed his plans at length with the Treasury, we learn, yet gave the unfortunate Dodds just 24 hours’ notice of the evisceration of her portfolio.

The specific reasons for Starmer’s Olympic-class dash to the right seem to be two-fold. First, the British state has been foundering since 2008, its finances shaky and its capacities radically diminished. His rescue plan is conventionally authoritarian-conservative.

Second, the US is radically redrawing power relationships within the Western imperialist bloc, in a way that impacts not only on foreign relations but on domestic politics. Witness Vice-President JD Vance’s shameless promotion of the far right in Europe, and the pressure on monopolies that do business in the US — more or less all of them — to drop equality policies in hiring.

So we end up with a policy shift — cut aid to buy bombs — more-or-less copied from the Reform party and loudly advocated by Kemi Badenoch just two days before Starmer’s announcement. 

Indeed, the cowardly choice of cut was doubtless influenced by Trump’s own decision to destroy USAid, as Dodds suggested in her letter.

All this accords with what passes for political strategy in Downing Street. Rather than seeking to expand outwards from the puny share of the vote secured last July, Labour is shrinking inwards in an ever-more obsessive hunt for the Reform-inclined voter, offering a slightly diluted Starmer populist chauvinism to lure voters away from embracing full-fat Farageism.

So how’s that going? Well, the opinion polls tell their own story. One might have thought election mastermind Morgan McSweeney would have better things to do than perch on an Oval Office sofa watching his very own Manchurian candidate suck up to Donald Trump.

Yet there he is and here we are. MacDonald served 12 years in two shifts as Labour leader, Attlee 20, Wilson and Blair 13 each. It would be rash to bet on the incumbent in Downing Street outlasting the present incumbent in the White House.

Starmer did, however, pass one landmark last week. He surpassed Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as Labour leader — you know, the guy who led a party of more than half a million members to nearly 13 million general election votes and saw Farageism reduced to less than 2 per cent of the poll.

That is a reminder that if the movement of Labour governments to the right appears as an invariant law, the shift of politics, even in our crisis-wracked time, towards reaction isn’t.

Echoes of Salisbury

ACCORDING to reader George Hallam there is no battlefield stalemate in the Ukraine, merely a masterclass display of military attrition by Russia’s army.

Readers anxious for pre-Putin examples of attrition in action should study 1916’s battle of Verdun, in which the French and German armies tried to bleed each other white, far from unsuccessfully. Thank God no-one brought that to an end before they were good and ready, eh? But, yes, it concluded in stalemate.

Hallam also, surely unwittingly, conjures the spirit of Victorian imperialist Lord Salisbury when he assures that Russia’s strategy is “not about seizing land.”

Launching the Boer war, Salisbury, then prime minister, told the world that he was waging a “war for democracy” which “seeks no goldfields, seeks no territory.” Yet lo! Britain prevailed in the conflict (eventually) and ended up with more goldfields and more territory, but no democracy in South Africa. Truly shocking.

Likewise, if Putin is not interested in seizing land, he is unfortunate enough to have ended up with a considerable quantity of it, about one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory, and shows little interest in disgorging any, while actually claiming still more.

A winning deal

PITY the poor Telegraph columnists. They have been slavering over the prospect of Donald Trump humiliating Keir Starmer in various ways. In particular, they want the US president to nix the Chagos Islands deal, which transfers sovereignty to Mauritius.

Yet not only is Trump full of praise for the obsequious Starmer, he appears to have given the thumbs-up to the agreement, despite the Telegraph’s firm conviction that he would veto it.

They should not be surprised. The opaque deal-in-the-making appears to involve Britain paying Mauritius large sums of money in order to ensure that the US can retain its military base on Diego Garcia for the next century, well beyond the outer limits of Trump’s attention span.

You don’t have to have written The Art of the Deal to recognise a gift horse when it is braying in your face, whatever disappointment that occasions to Telegraph readers.