LABOUR’S left warns against any bid by Keir Starmer or the wider Cabinet to stitch up a transfer of power without a proper contest.

MPs with any sense should recognise the folly of any such move.

Forget the received wisdom at Westminster about leadership contests being navel-gazing exercises.

Labour’s crisis is existential, as former shadow chancellor John McDonnell and Unite general secretary Sharon Graham point out.

It will not be solved by a new face at the top — only by a full and frank reckoning with the government’s record.

The stakes are high. On the one hand the big winners from the local elections are Reform, indicating the real prospect of a far-right government that would trample on human rights, shred what remains of the public sector and wage savage war on trade unions.

On the other, outside England the most popular parties are now all for dissolution of the United Kingdom itself.

There are big differences between the causes and politics of Sinn Fein, the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru; and if the reunification of Ireland’s north with the republic is a clear anti-imperialist demand, the logic of separation in Scotland and Wales is contested. But for all three to be led by parties supporting independence is unprecedented, and reflects the collapsing legitimacy of the British state.

Labour is not solely responsible for that collapse, but it is obviously responsible for its own.

The shift from two- to five-or-six party politics is quite recent: in 2017, Labour and Tories combined got over 80 per cent of the vote. On Thursday they together got just 34 per cent.

The 2017 election was an anomaly — it reversed a trend for the big two’s share to drop — but a relevant one, because it is Starmerism that has destroyed Labour and Starmerism can only be understood as a response to the Corbyn years.

Presented by the capitalist media as a weird aberration — Corbynism meant Labour going “AWOL” from meaningful British politics, in the words of one Guardian sage — in fact, for all its flaws, at its height it was the best effort Labour has made to reconnect with its fragmenting base. The decline in Labour vote shares in “red wall” seats has been steady since Blair — with that one exception of 2017, where they spiked again, in the biggest surge in the party’s vote for 70 years.

That didn’t interrupt the trend for long and this newspaper’s readers will be familiar with arguments over why. Today, what should be pressed on Labour MPs and affiliated unions is a simpler point.

The only period since 1997 that Labour increased its membership, dynamism and popularity with the public is when it moved towards socialism.

The current “new management,” as Starmer once called it, rose to power on false pretences, silenced and expelled its critics and demoralised what remains of the party’s activists. Now it can neither inspire with its policies nor knock enough doors to get a vote out.

That management rewrote the rulebook to stop the left contesting the leadership. It stitched up the deputy leadership contest last year to ensure a tame run-off between two government supporters. But it doesn’t have a clue what the public wants.

If Labour is ever to be competitive again, give it a real contest. Make Starmer announce his departure, but with a timetable to allow a proper tournament of ideas in the battle to succeed him.

Such processes can even engage the public in themselves, as with Corbyn’s 2015 run or Tony Benn’s for the deputy leadership decades before. They should certainly engage the mass movements, and pressure from unions, the peace and anti-racist movements on the party’s direction is essential.

Otherwise whether it is Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood or even Andy Burnham announcing their plans to fix the mess, it is unclear the public will be listening.