KEIR STARMER’S carefully constructed persona — human rights lawyer turned DPP and guardian of public safety, politician of probity and principle, custodian of Corbyn’s manifesto pledges — all these misrepresentations of the real person lie discarded.

Politics in class society is always a question of compromise. Not with principle but with the balance of class forces.

This is a truth acknowledged daily by every shop steward and trade union negotiator. The aim is always to make the best of the situation in which the majority of the power lies with the employer, who can rely on habit, the law and the state.

When a prime minister is elected in the labour interest, there is an expectation that the power of employers will be diminished a fraction and the protections of the welfare state tweaked. In short, the dictatorship of capital will be mitigated a little.

Starmer, his prime ministerial power backed by an unfeasibly large majority, has proved these expectations to be not so much misplaced as repudiated.

Add to the expectations betrayed — the pensions of the Waspi women, the winter fuel allowance for many pensioners, child allowances for any parent with more than two children — and add to this our government’s prostration before Donald Trump’s braggadocio and its solidarity with the genocidal regime in Israel.

These are not principled compromises made to facilitate a higher achievement but represent a complete collapse before the neoliberal orthodoxy of a Treasury bound by belief and personal links to the City, to the imperatives of finance capital and the dictatorship of the bond markets.

Such is the depth of the capitalist crisis that every faded Labour tradition and worn-out promise is sacrificed to fiscal rectitude.

Words are in the everyday tool kit of lawyers, and we must understand that when Starmer chooses words, he does so with the intent to convey the full range of meaning they bear. His headlong dive into the poisonous narrative of the far right must be taken to mean what it says.

The growth of electoral support for Reform UK is undoubtedly a problem for every Labour MP who wants a parliamentary career long enough to see their infant children into secondary school.

But Labour’s approach to the question of immigration is a mistake of such magnitude as to compromise its chances of ever recovering the trust of the working class.

By pandering to racist representations of immigration and failing to explain it as the inevitable consequence of colonialism, empire and the neoliberal global order, Starmer now shares an ideological position with Nigel Farage.

The plan to end licensed immigration by people contracted to work in the care sector will intensify the crisis in the NHS and make life miserable for people in care.

Care sector employers are upset because it hits their supply of cheap labour and thus their profits.

This illustrates a feature of 21st century immigration into capitalist countries that disrupts both Farage’s narrative and Labour’s imitation of the same.

A migration-enlarged labour force increases precisely those profits — the unpaid wages that employers retain — that would be diminished if they were compelled to train locals and pay them enough to attract a sufficient supply of labour.

A sensible strategy would be to attack Farage for his support for privatisation, his opposition to employment rights, his fawning over Trump and his works, his willingness to flog off the NHS to US corporations.

The most productive approach would be to stand up for what most Reform UK voters want and which they share with most people in our country — public ownership, higher taxes on the rich and an end to the privileges of the plutocracy.