LABOUR’S looming electoral humiliation and its attack on democratic rights are linked.

Deepening restrictions on the right to free speech and assembly did not begin with Labour — a succession of laws brought in by the Tories gave police sweeping new arrest powers, introduced lengthy prison sentences for crimes as vague as causing a “serious nuisance,” and enabled police to shut down protests in advance of disruption they were deemed likely to cause.

Labour continues Britain’s march into authoritarianism because it faces the same fundamental problem the Tories did — the government, indeed increasingly the British state as a whole, lacks public legitimacy because it so obviously misrules the country on behalf of an unrepresentative, corrupt and morally bankrupt elite.

Historically British capitalism has drawn stability from cyclical political transitions. When everyone is sick of the Tories, Labour gets elected and vice versa.

Hence the importance to the ruling class of ensuring both party leaderships remained “safe pairs of hands,” which inspired the internal sabotage and unrelenting hostile propaganda that Jeremy Corbyn faced when leading Labour (a decidedly unsafe pair of hands, from the perspective of the Peter Mandelsons and Jeffrey Epsteins of this world).

But the system’s own success is killing it. The ferocious Establishment reaction to Corbynism has gutted Labour as a party that can plausibly offer the change people are crying out for.

People are not stupid and most saw this before the election — which is why the collapse in Tory fortunes from 2019-24 for the first time in 80 years did not lead to any rise in support for Labour, which limped to victory on a smaller vote than it lost with five years earlier.

Wiser heads might have spotted the systemic crisis lurking in a landslide majority on a shrinking vote. Keir Starmer and his Labour Together backers were too arrogant for such reflection. They treated their sandcastle majority as endorsement and carried on with “business as usual.”

The polls show the result: Labour stares into the abyss, the loss of the “red wall” (again) and the loss of Wales after an uninterrupted century of dominance there.

This is no cyclical shift, and the Tories are not the main threat. That comes from insurgents: parties which at least present themselves as challenges to the system itself.

Labour has learned nothing. It still sees repression as the answer to seething discontent.

Well done to the 21 Labour MPs who voted against the Crime and Policing Bill allowing police to ban marches due to their “cumulative impact,” but the size of the rebellion was pitiful.

We live in a country now where the police round up hundreds at peaceful sit-ins for the slogans on their placards, where they inspect the books and flyers on political stalls, where peace movement leaders get convicted of public order offences for leading a march to lay flowers on the road in memory of dead children.

Suppressing these movements does nothing to address their grievances and Labour’s support is in freefall. Arrests such as those at Lakenheath air base, protesting at the US using British territory as a launchpad to bomb Iran, are not even made to shield our government but a Donald Trump regime that humiliates and undermines it at every turn, while dragging our country into illegal wars.

Wales First Minister Eluned Morgan, demanding an end to military co-operation with the United States on a military radar project in Pembrokeshire, sees how toxic and dangerous the US alliance has become.

There is little Labour can do to turn things around by May: doing so at all will require a complete overhaul of government policy, and the ejection of Starmer himself.

But Morgan’s intervention does point to an immediate step needed to show Labour intends to change: dump Trump, and Netanyahu. Stop arresting people to shield them.

Stop the slide into repression and war.