KEIR STARMER is right about one thing: Labour has changed dramatically under his leadership.

His speech in Milton Keynes today was designed to underline that transformation. He distanced himself not only from the period of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership but also from that of his predecessor, Ed Miliband.

That is an awkward move, since Miliband still sits in Sir Keir’s shadow cabinet — for now — with responsibility for tackling climate change.

Distancing from the Miliband era is a near-obsession for the Blairites who now have Starmer’s ear, brain and what passes for his conscience.

They have never gotten over the fact that the wrong Miliband won the fratricidal 2010 Labour leadership contest and that the victorious Ed subsequently announced that the “new Labour” period was over.

The Mandelson gang are still after him as a result.

Miliband took the first timorous steps away from Blairite neoliberalism but was forever looking nervously over his shoulder at the right-wing majority in the Parliamentary Labour Party.

As a consequence, Labour’s economic policy under his direction ended up with an “austerity lite” offer which pleased almost nobody come the 2015 general election.

By bracketing Miliband’s leadership years with Corbyn’s, Starmer makes it clear that he is aiming at a full-fat New Labour revival in office.

Corbyn remains the real target, however. His leadership actually offered real change to the country, rather than merely spraying the word around like confetti.

Labour today instead offers continuity with the main lines of Conservative policy. Tory spending cuts are Labour’s too. There will be no relief from austerity with Rachel Reeves at the Treasury.

Tax rates will remain unchanged. The greedy incompetents running the water industry and other utilities will stay in charge.

Talk of serious political reform is now buried in the long grass. And on the pressing international issues, from Ukraine to Palestine, Labour merely echoes pro-war Conservative policy.

No surprise then that Starmer’s speech today included not a word about the ten pledges on which he stood for office in a successful bid to win the backing of at least a section of Labour’s Corbyn-supporting membership.

The pledges have been scrubbed off his website and the membership has in large part left or been driven out as Starmer has cracked down on debate and democracy within the party.

So Labour is indeed a transformed party. It is once again a pliant and reliable instrument of the City of London, big capital, Nato and Washington.

It is a party which has changed itself the better to cast off the expectation of changing anything else — other than the faces around the Cabinet table.

And for all the chatter about “service to working people” service to the capitalist class is the star Starmer steers by.

One consequence is that it is now haemorrhaging further support as a result of Starmer’s backing for Israeli aggression, with an unprecedented departure of elected councillors from communities across the country.

One senior Labour figure charmingly described this as “shaking off the fleas.” The truth is that the bone and marrow of the party is decaying, a fact only concealed by the terminal and brutal bungling of the government.

This is a challenge that the left and the affiliated trade unions have yet to rise to. Wishful thinking — that Labour in office will be better than its opposition rhetoric — ignores the lessons of history.

Blair’s Labour was in fact worse, not better than he had indicated before entering Downing Street. The left needs at a minimum to plan a united front of struggle to really change the country — and maybe Labour with it.