LABOUR’S support has gone from bad to worse, as accumulating evidence from the polls shows. The attempts to blame this fiasco on others will not wash. The responsibility for Labour’s precipitate decline lies squarely with Keir Starmer, his Cabinet and the entire Starmer project.

Unless the political course is reversed soon they are paving the way for a Labour collapse in 2029, preceded by a decimation of its representation at devolved and local levels, with the emergence of an extreme right-wing government to follow.

The Labour leadership has been recklessly complacent about prospects for the next election. When Labour was drubbed in the May elections, Starmer declared he would go “further, faster [in the same direction].” Remember, these are the tactical geniuses who stood down a perfectly good Labour candidate in Clacton to ensure Farage won and remained a permanent thorn in the Tories’ side.

It has not worked out well. Briefings from Number 10 now suggest they believe it will be a straight fight for who will form the next government between Labour and Reform UK. But this is very far from a foregone conclusion.

In August’s opinion polls Labour has averaged just 21 points. Reform UK has recorded an average of 30 points and the Tories are on 18 points. Labour is much closer to the dismal Tory total that it is to rivalling Reform UK.

Worse, Labour has slipped so far in the polls that there is no prospect currently of being able to form anything like a centre-left coalition. Even if it were possible to lash together some unwieldy sort of coalition bringing in the Lib Dems, SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens, it would not currently be possible. All the seat projections based on recent polling numbers suggest any such coalition would fall well short of being able to form a workable government with a parliamentary majority.

In effect, the Starmer project has paved the way for the right and the far right. It is not certain that Reform UK can win an outright majority on 30 points, although Blair won a very large majority with 35 per cent in 2005 and of course Starmer won a landslide on just 34 per cent in 2024. But, even if they cannot, that puts a rightward-moving Tory Party as the kingmakers.

Tellingly, the average polling puts the combined Tory and Reform UK vote at just short of an overall majority, at 49 points. This means that, for now, and absent any fightback from Labour, the right and far right are the dominant forces in terms of popular support.

The main thrust of Reform UK’s politics is anti-immigrant policy and rhetoric. In Britain, hostility towards migrants has long been an outrider for racism in general. If there should be any doubt about this look at the recent case where bogus concerns about asylum-seekers being sexual predators and paedophiles quickly transmuted to hostility to two black men playing with their white grandchildren.

For Reform UK, every issue is subsumed into that hostility to immigrants. Genuine issues like the cost of living, housing, the state of the NHS and so on are all blamed on migrants. So, it is pointless attacking Farage solely for his views on women or wishing to privatise the NHS or hostility to trade unions. For Reform UK, and their message to voters, these are all secondary issues at best. Unless Reform UK is tackled on its hostility to migrants, you are not tackling them at all.

Yet, this is what ministers have done. The main reason the right and far right are dominant is that the Labour leadership have conceded Farage’s central claims.

They have compounded this by echoing Reform UK’s lines on both the protests outside asylum-seeker accommodation and on the small boats. Starmer even says now that he is an English patriot and supports hoisting the St George’s Cross, presumably including by the far-right activists. The Labour Party can kiss goodbye to Wales and Scotland at their next elections.

All this is cast as winning back voters from Reform UK. Yet, as Neil Kinnock recently pointed out, Labour has lost more voters to the Lib Dems, to the Greens and the Scottish and Welsh parties than it has to Reform UK. He also correctly points out that you cannot beat any party, including Reform UK if you simply echo their messages. Yet this is exactly what the Labour strategy has become. Every video where Starmer boasts how many people he has deported is probably worth another seat to Farage at the next election.

The strong suspicion remains that many in and around the Labour leadership are keen to talk about winning over Reform UK voters with anti-immigrant lines because this reflects their own politics. There has always been a nasty strain of that in Labour. Who can forget “chasing the angry white vote” in Phil Woolas’s 2010 election campaign? Oddly, these same people never promote nationalisations, even though they are also strongly supported by Reform UK voters.

The dangerous complacency of the Labour leadership is also expressed in the idea that we have already touched bottom in terms of support and that economic recovery will fuel a poll rebound. There is no evidence that Labour’s vote will recover from here. A recent poll showed Labour’s approval rating as just 13, its net approval rating -56.

As for economic recovery, this remains largely in the realm of hope or just wishful thinking. The economy continues to grow at a very moderate pace, little more than 1 per cent a year and inflation once more threatens to cut into living standards.

We have had 15 years of continuous austerity now, in one form or another. It has never led to sustained recovery yet. But the evidence-free optimists around the Cabinet table ask us to believe that somehow, under the Starmer-Reeves austerity this time it will be different. Even if the latest round of planned cuts gets transformed in the autumn Budget into taxes on the rich, it will only postpone the cuts to come. There is a huge expansion of the military Budget that must be funded.

This is all before we come onto the potential impact of the new party led by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. I have deliberately avoided this as it is not at all a factor in Labour’s slump to date. That is all the handiwork of Starmer and his supporters. They are responsible for Labour’s decline and for opening the door to Farage.

But of course, if the new party does take off, it will not be to Starmer’s benefit.

Diane Abbott is MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. Follow her on X @HackneyAbbott.