STARMERISM’S “reset” began with the arrest of nearly 900 peaceful protesters, many elderly, holding placards challenging government policy.

Perhaps there are still some who see in this broken-backed Labour government a serious force holding back the burgeoning advance of the far right.

The reshuffle for which the departure of Angela Rayner was the occasion but not the reason, ought to disabuse even the most purblind loyalist of their illusions.

The new team around the Cabinet table is set fair to be the remembered as the immediate anteroom to Farageism in power, having already capitulated to the rampant Reform UK on every point of principle.

Consider. The first move Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood made in her new role was to visit Scotland Yard to praise the Metropolitan Police for its repression of the Palestine Action protest in Parliament Square.

And Defence Secretary John Healey assured the media that Mahmood would be just as tough on pro-Palestine dissent as her predecessor.

That predecessor, Yvette Cooper, was shifted to the Foreign Office because she had been insufficiently draconian on advancing the anti-migrant agenda.

Here Healey, taking time out from fronting a massive transfer of resources from the civilian economy to the military, was again helpful in spelling out the “delivery, delivery, delivery” agenda of “phase two” Starmerism.

The hapless refugees, he said, are to be shifted to disused military camps for accommodation.

Presumably more space will be freed up for this as Healey deploys troops to Ukraine and even the Far East in pursuit of the neoimperial fantasies which have a lock on what passes for the government’s collective imagination.

Mahmood will doubtless have to supervise this, when not superintending the onslaught on democratic rights.

She has dubbed herself the “whatever it takes” Home Secretary, so asylum-seekers — many of them the displaced of Britain’s wars — will be shown scant consideration as they are moved from the hotels the government has allowed the far right to besiege to still more spartan military accommodation.

Cooper herself replaces David Lammy, whose bonding with US Vice-President JD Vance was not sufficient to keep him in the Foreign Office. His dignity saved by being named deputy prime minister, an office lacking power or purpose, Lammy has been demoted to accommodate Cooper, a more suitable hard face to front up Labour’s Trump-dictated diplomacy.

It is clear that the reshuffle marks a further shift to the right in a government which had already surrendered the narrative to Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick. The latter, a cynical law-breaker trying to outflank Reform from the right, is effectively leader of the Tory opposition as authority ebbs from the miscast Kemi Badenoch.

With the exit of Rayner, the culling of Commons leader Lucy Powell and the earlier exit of Louise Haigh, what might generously be dubbed the Cabinet’s “soft left” has been squeezed to the profit of hard-line Blairites.

As my colleague Solomon Hughes has reported, Blair-era figures and corporate lobbyists are already over-running Downing Street and the Treasury. Whatever strains of progress, or even liberalism, existed within the government are being expunged in favour of markets-first authoritarianism.

The one measure Starmer’s defenders have clung to as an indicator of advance — the employment rights legislation — is now under threat.

Rayner was the Bill’s main sponsor and defender. Justin Madders, the minister directly responsible for the law, was unceremoniously sacked in the reshuffle.

It is widely reported that the strengthened hard-right team in No 10 are pushing for the further dilution of its already inadequate measures, under pressure from big business.

TUC general secretary Paul Nowak reports that “the Prime Minister looked me in the eye and talked about delivering the Employment Rights Bill and improvements in employment law” last week.

Starmer, alas, is a practised liar. He looked the Labour Party in the eye and promised policy continuity with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. His mendacity is as entrenched, if less flamboyant, as Boris Johnson’s.

So we shall see. But what is certain is that the government’s course remains set on austerity, capitulation to the far right, and war.

Rachel Reeves remains at the Treasury, lashing herself, the government and the country, to the unforgiving dictates of the fiscal rules and the bond market’s strictures.

None of the new or old appointees will take the fight to Farage either. Whatever outrages the Reform leader cooks up after his lunchtime lubrication, Labour will not criticise on any point of principle, nor will it take the fight to the far right on ideological grounds.

Instead, it claims practical problems with Farage’s proposals and exalts its own more efficient racism instead. Thus it seeks to block the advance of racists while conceding all their political premises.

Guided by this strategy, Starmer handed the entire political summer to Farage as Reform and its media acolytes did their best to incite fascist disorder. Labour is as supine as social democrats have so often been at the advent of dictatorship, fearing radicalism on the left more than the order of the right.

Certainly, the people running the government fought far harder against Jeremy Corbyn than they do against Farage. And with the attack on Palestine Action they legitimise the greater authoritarianism of both Reform and the Tories.

Their only overt dissent from Farage is over his lack of enthusiasm for the military posturing that Starmer revels in. Here the government will not be outbid.

Indeed, the ubiquitous Healey, whose rise from trade union press officer to instigator of war is Labour’s one shining example of social mobility, was recently in Japan hailing a new military partnership with that country, directed of course against China.

“Our partnership goes beyond the seas and the skies,” the Defence Secretary said. “Our armed forces continue to train together, and the UK is proud to be the first European force to exercise with Japan on Japanese soil.”

“Our policy is defined by Nato first, but not Nato only,” he added, making it clear that British imperialism’s world role is not only undead, but very safe in Labour’s hands.

Japan’s Defence Minister General Nakatani responded in the same coin, summoning the spirit of the Anglo-Japanese alliance of the early 20th century. He observed that the defeat of “Russian imperialism was only possible thanks to the support of Britain” in the Russo-Japanese war.

Diplomatically, he did not add that the opposition of Britain played some part in the defeat of Japanese imperialism 40 years later, nor that British imperialism, in both conflicts, was only defending its own great power interests.

Today, Britain is at the forefront of military confrontation in Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific. The state budget is being gutted to fund this war drive. And it grovels at the feet of the incipient dictator in the White House, placing it at odds with the states representing the global majority which conferred in China last week.

Labour is entirely hamstrung by the obligations — to the City and its rules, to Washington, to Nato — which the ruling class have imposed on it. Starmer has proved nothing loathe.

Will any of these issues surface in the post-Rayner deputy leadership now being rushed through with indecent haste? It does not seem very likely. More likely a dull pragmatism will prevail, with talk of communicating better, fixing mistakes and so on.

In the same vein, a new campaigning body, dubbed Mainstream, has been launched “to reconnect Labour with its values.” An ambitious project for the most skilled engineer or surgeon.

Mainstream states the government has “responded timidly to the genocide in Gaza.” In fact, it has enabled that genocide and continues to do so.

Also, it arrests its critics, indulges racism and makes the poor pay for its war plans.

So this reshuffle is not about rearranging the Titanic’s deck chairs. Ultimately, those who went down with the cursed ship were victims of an accident.

The Starmer government is entirely the author if its own calamities, and ours. Delivery is its aim, and a far-right government the package.