THAT didn’t last long. The brief moment when the Labour left felt it might finally be heard by the Starmer leadership has said goodbye before it had even taken its coat off.  

Smarting from his defeat at the hands of his own backbenchers, Starmer waited just a few days before exacting revenge by suspending the parliamentary whip from an arbitrarily-selected gang of four “rebels.”  

This despite having initially responded to the enforced evisceration of his welfare Bill by pledging to “learn lessons” and listen more to the parliamentary party.  

That pledge proved as robust as a self-assembled Ikea wardrobe. The left proved not to be such an irresistible force, and anyway, it was up against not one presently immovable object but two.

The first is the weeping Chancellor, Rachel Reeves. Starmer has, it seems, little interest in economic strategy and has sub-contracted that aspect of government — the most decisive — entirely to Reeves.  

The welfare Bill rebellion has left her £5 billion awry on her spending plans — books which were to be balanced on the backs of the disabled poor are now out of kilter.  

One can well imagine Reeves remonstrating with her Downing Street neighbour that her job will become entirely impossible if these U-turns — and the welfare collapse followed the winter fuel benefit reversal — were to become a habit.  

Of course, Starmer could have shown his lachrymose Chancellor the door. But not only would that leave him even more politically exposed than he is already, it would solve no underlying problem, since behind the rather unformidable Reeves stands the more-imposing City of London and the bond market.  

So Reeves presently has him over a barrel and, given her long-established loathing of the Labour left, she will have demanded that the whip be cracked — or withdrawn, to be precise — before she has to come back to the Commons with fresh austerity proposals.  

That will have been music to the ears of object number two, Downing Street chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, whose reputation as a political genius defies every known fact about his actual record.  

It is said that if you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. For McSweeney, every nail is to be found on his left. Whatever problem is brought to his attention, the response is the same — hammer the socialists.  

So the one-trick pony who is the sole source for what passes for Starmerite political strategy will have been an enthusiastic leader of the revenge party. When the Prime Minister loses authority, so too does McSweeney.  

He will himself have been smarting from media reports holding him responsible for the political fiasco of the welfare cuts. And I would guess he drew up the target list for sanctions.  

So out go three class of 2024 new-intake MPs, Chris Hinchcliff, Neil Duncan-Jordan and Brian Leishman, together with Rachael Maskell.  

They join John McDonnell and Apsana Begum as left MPs presently excluded from the PLP. Another, Zarah Sultana, has of course recently left the party altogether, having correctly understood that the whip was never going to be restored to her.  

And in a bizarre, vindictive move, three further MPs were removed from their roles as unpaid trade envoys to particular countries at the same time.  

They are Rosena Allin-Khan, Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Mohammad Yasin. I would guess that when the list of MPs to be suspended was presented to McSweeney he noticed that none are black, so he ordered up measures against a group of ethnic minority MPs for afters.  

That would be consistent with Downing Street’s focus on appeasing racist-minded Reform and Tory voters on this “island of strangers” it believes we inhabit.  

There could be no other obvious reason for the move, since the trade envoys remaining in post include sundry opposition parliamentarians and even the odious and bombastic Lord Austin of Dudley, ennobled by Boris Johnson and now flying the flag for British business in genocidal Israel.  

McSweeney will have felt his week got even better with the renewed suspension of Diane Abbott. He has long smarted over the failure of his attempted drive-by shooting of the iconic black MP before the last general election.  

Abbott now appears unique in two ways. One is that she is, in addition to being Britain’s first black woman MP, the longest-serving woman MP of any description, serving as the Mother of the House of Commons.  

She also appears to be the only black person not allowed to describe her own experiences of, and opinions about, racism. Given that she has been subjected to more of it over a longer period than anyone else in public life, that is not just extraordinary, but it is in itself racist.  

Did Starmer, McSweeney and Rayner pause to think about the message sent by her suspension, coming at the same time, as it happens, that England footballer Jess Carter is herself struggling under a mountain of online racist abuse?  

Or do they simply not care? The latter, I would guess. They are by now so imbued in racism and authoritarianism that returning were as tedious as to go o’er.  

At any event, the ball is now in the court of the remains of the Labour parliamentary left. All their erstwhile leaders — Corbyn, McDonnell, Abbott — are now in different degrees of exclusion; wherein they are joined by future standard bearers like Sultana, Begum, Leishman and Duncan-Jordan.  

It looks like a rout. One prominent member of the Socialist Campaign Group assured me that this purge was merely hastening the end of the Starmer regime.  

Maybe. But then what? Angela Rayner, a seriously compromised figure by now, is their best hope for the Starmer succession.  

The days when that prospect might have quickened a socialist pulse are gone. The phrase “best of a bad bunch” has never seemed as apposite.  

And if rule changes being brewed by the right-wing to limit the electorate to MPs only when Labour is in government are agreed, then even Rayner will face an uphill struggle against Wes Streeting or Bridget Phillipson.  

Streeting has problems of his own, to be sure. All polling suggests that his Ilford North seat will fall to charismatic British Palestinian campaigner Leanne Mohamad at the next time of asking. The technical term is “toast.”  

The polls tell us more than that, too. They speak of a potential new socialist party running neck-and-neck with Labour, a circumstance which, if it materialised, would overturn a political disposition established before universal suffrage.  

Moreover, Unite, a union more entwined historically through its antecedents with the Labour Party than any other, is now surveying its workplace representatives as to whether to maintain its affiliated relationship.  

Any actual decision to cut the links would have to come from a more formal constitutional process, but still.  

Put it all together, and it must at least be possible that we are advancing through the stages of the incipient disintegration of the Labour Party, its social roots atrophied and its political failures mounting up as a monument to its devotion to imperialism and City orthodoxy.  

Of course, the new left party has hardly put its best foot forward thus far. A number of left-wing Labour MPs have advised that the squabble over its leadership is hardly likely to entice them over. Maybe that will be overcome.  

But whether the new party gets its act together or not, the stench of decay is hanging over not just the Starmer administration but the Labour Party itself — and the scent of a summer purge cannot avail to conceal it.  

Draconian Palestine crackdown is now nationwide

EIGHT held in Truro. It’s those sort of details that matters.  

Every weekend, the police are arresting dozens — even hundreds — of citizens protesting against the absurd and authoritarian proscription of Palestine Action.  

Mostly, those arrests have been happening in London and other large cities.  

But on the steps of Truro Cathedral? It is a sign of the breadth of the opposition to the cynical attempt to ban direct action as “terrorism.”  

It is a rupture with the liberal traditions dear to many, in places the left does not commonly reach.  

When Cornwall rises against Yvette Cooper and her dictatorial inanities, the regime is in trouble.