REPORTS of an imminent leadership challenge from Wes Streeting overshadowed the King’s speech.

All now accept Keir Starmer has to go. How to turn that into the “fundamental change of direction” affiliated unions demand is the key question.

If Streeting does trigger a contest ahead of the Labour left’s preferred candidate Andy Burnham becoming available, the left needs a plan.

A Streeting victory would cement the discredited New Labour agenda of privatisation and outsourcing responsible for hollowing out public services and driving a race to the bottom on pay and conditions, two main drivers of the perception of national decline that fuels support for the far right.

A straight Starmer-Streeting contest would also risk leaving Starmer in place should fear of Streeting prove stronger.

This would put off a change of direction indefinitely. Starmer gave no sign of understanding one was needed in his speech on Monday, insisting he had got the big decisions right.

Centrist comfort-zone warnings about “populists” — he again tried to present Labour as the steady-as-she-goes choice and the Greens and Reform as crazy extremists — really do fall on deaf ears now the status quo looks so exhausted.

The stakes are high. In the winter of 2024, Trademark Belfast’s Stiofan O Nuallain told the TUC anti-racism conference we had “four years to beat the far right.” We’ve got about three left and Reform still top the polls.

Nothing announced this week will change that. Nationalisation of British Steel is overdue, but too narrow in scope to signal a new seriousness about either industrial strategy or public ownership.

The government remains wedded to authoritarianism, from digital ID to a politicised national police service nicknamed a British FBI. It is relaxed about the infiltration of British public services by sinister US tech firms linked to Washington’s far-right regime like Palantir.

Starmer is still a danger in himself as well as a millstone round Labour’s neck. Allowing him to plod on isn’t just wasting time, but permits continued attacks on living standards, refugees and civil liberties.

We need a leadership contest offering a timescale for candidates to make their cases and for organised labour to make its demands.

The Socialism26 initiative, backed by four union general secretaries and a number of left-leaning MPs, offers some constructive immediate ones and rightly confronts the whole of the Starmer agenda, not just bits of it: calling for action on the cost of living (by cutting energy bills) and workers’ rights (plugging the gaps in the Employment Rights Act) but also recognition of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and a halt to the assault on protest rights and jury trials.

But no candidate currently being mooted for the top job is especially trustworthy and Starmer himself is living proof that pledges are easily discarded.

Ironically the best service unions can do for Labour, given its only hope of survival is to change, is to stop treating it as fundamentally different from a Tory government.

Protest and industrial action, or the serious threat of it, put real pressure on decision-makers: the Fire Brigades Union demonstrated this in its successful campaign to stop cuts in Oxfordshire.

Ministers aware that a strike wave on the scale of 2022-23 is coming should they not address the long-term decline in pay and the looming Trumpflation crisis are much more likely to bend on public spending: and actions that put unions in the public eye are opportunities to make organised labour the recognised champion of the working class and expose the anti-worker instincts of Reform.

Embracing the politics of street and workplace activism, both the Together Alliance against the far right and a revived People’s Assembly to press the government and local authorities on pay and services, is not a tactic to reserve for Conservative administrations but an essential part of building mass pressure for change.