KEIR STARMER’S wretched government stands doubly exposed as Israel resumes its brutal war on Gaza while Labour rolls out cruel attacks on the sick and disabled.

Ministers dress up punitive attacks on social security as about encouraging people into work, though experts say they will do the opposite. 

They claim the rise in sickness benefits is unsustainable, without asking why people are getting sicker or tying it to deepening poverty and insecurity driven by staggering greed at the top. Ballooning fortunes for the super-wealthy — Britain’s 50 richest families own half the nation’s wealth — are supposedly sustainable in contrast.

They intone platitudes to justify continuing the flow of weapons to Israel as it resumes merciless bombing of civilians.

For some, this is all the final straw. Neil Findlay, one of Scotland’s best-known Labour figures, sent Starmer his resignation from the party today. 

Findlay’s letter sums it up: attacks on pensioners, children in poverty and the disabled are combined with indifference to workers, as the betrayal of Grangemouth shows.

The rationale being to fund “increased spending on the UK’s war machine — weapons that will be used to kill innocent men, women and children.” Too few on the Labour benches have yet acknowledged that the latter is as unacceptable as the former.

And while dressing up attacks on the vulnerable as a moral crusade, ministers “accept hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of freebies... clothing, glasses and tickets to football matches and pop concerts.” As Findlay asks, “who is really milking the system?” Starmer is as implicated as anyone: the fish rots from the head down.

Since duping Labour members into making him leader on a false prospectus, Starmer has adopted a scorched-earth approach to the party. Hundreds of thousands have left or been driven out, as have high-profile trade unionists and MPs, most prominently his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn himself. Findlay makes a compelling case, but why should MPs treat this resignation as the wake-up call?

Because of the growing realisation that there is no future for Labour on this trajectory. British politics is wildly unstable, as the tumult of Brexit, Corbynism and the see-saw Tory and Labour landslides of 2019 and 2024 demonstrate. Labour’s landslide was on a lower vote than its 2019 defeat: its support base is already dangerously eroded.

Hanging on in the hope that things will get better is futile. The supposed “Starmer bounce” from his pointless summit of Nato-states-minus-the-US is a fabrication of our self-deluded media: Starmer has secured no concessions from Trump, and nothing but disunity defines his coalition of the not-that-willing. 

His war on the disabled will lead to immense suffering. Unlike under Blair, there will be no general rise in living standards to compensate. Cuts across almost every government department except war will worsen services and hurt workers. 

Rachel Reeves’s non-plan for growth involves asking the world’s biggest asset-manager Blackrock what to do. Blackrock amassed record sums last year, a 23 per cent rise even on the year before: these are exactly the people profiting from the current mess and have no interest in fixing it.

To turn Blair’s anthem on its head, things can only get worse. Even Blairite elder John McTernan worries that the excommunication of the left will spell electoral disaster. 

We must force a change of course. Unions are furious at social security cuts: branches and trades councils can start mobilising now for June 7’s People’s Assembly demonstration to demand change. That should include mass pressure on MPs to stop the cuts, both to welfare and across government departments, and to fund services through taxing the rich.

MPs are frightened of the most intolerant leadership in Labour’s history. But their party’s future depends on their readiness to stand up to it and ultimately remove it: as does the welfare of tens of millions of their constituents.