LOOK at the polls. Look at the by-elections.

One after another, like the imperial chimes of Big Ben, they toll out the end of Starmer’s days. Recently, on August 15 in the South Jesmond (Newcastle-upon-Tyne) by-election, the Greens took the seat from Labour.

Labour’s share of the vote dropped by around 25 per cent. On the same day in the Grangetown (Cardiff) council by-election, the Greens took another seat from Labour. Once again Labour’s share dropped by around 25 per cent. Indeed, the Green Party has taken eight seats in all from Labour this year in England and Wales. But just before you break out your vegan champagne, bear in mind Reform have taken 35, more than four times as many.

Think back to May 2022. Two years out from the elections the unloved Starmer manages to ease ahead of the Tories in the polls. It was done at an astonishingly slow pace given that Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been fined over “Partygate,” Britain feared a recession and inflation was sky-high. Still, it confirmed the analysis of the Starmer faction that it could win.

This was based on two assumptions. The working class would continue voting for Labour, not just because they had nowhere else to go but because they would believe what Labour was saying: that once in power, Labour’s economic strategy for growth, based largely on the Biden administration’s failed “modern supply-side economics,” would eventually pay off and in the meantime, they would increase the minimum wage while strengthening trade union rights, giving unions the opportunity to fight for better wages and winning Labour the institutional support of the unions.

The Starmer faction also planned to enhance its appeal by tapping into British imperial nostalgia, not just by adopting Blue Labour prescriptions for omnipresent union jacks (see where that has taken us), but more concretely by offering uncritical support both to Nato and Israel ensuring they were in lockstep with US policy as delivered by Biden and his assumed successor Kamala Harris, ensuring Britain a place on the world stage. We would be Great again.

This meant sustaining, enthusiastically, the war in Ukraine and in the Middle East, Israel’s continued dominance. As early as 2021 Starmer said that Labour “does not and will not support” boycotts against Israel to pressure it over its treatment of Palestinians; in 2022 that Israel was not an apartheid state; and in 2023 that “Israel has the right” to withhold power and water from Palestinian civilians.

It is hard to believe now, given what followed, but on this platform Starmer limped to a landslide victory in 2024 on just 34 per cent of the vote.

The challenge from the ultra-right and the left was limited. Reform won five seats in that election, but they were gains from the Tories. Of the Greens’ four seats, one was a hold, two were from the Tories and only one was a gain from Labour. Starmer’s faction must have thought that it had demonstrated irrefutably that a thin gruel of limited reform spiced up with reactionary post-imperialist military posturing was enough to win and even sustain power.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves, despite an addiction to fiscal rectitude, produced a Budget in October 2024 that tried to avoid a crisis in public services, the inevitable consequence of 14 years of Tory hubris, by increasing public expenditure to the tune of £70 billion. But by then, the rot had set in.

At pains to convince the markets that her forthcoming Budget did not signal some tax and spend extravaganza, she had announced three months previously in July that pensioners not in receipt of pension credits or other means-tested benefits would no longer receive the winter fuel allowance.

It met a furious response. The government’s own figures indicated that this would push 100,000 pensioners into poverty. 

As opposition to the Labour leadership grew on winter fuel payments, it was exacerbated by the leadership’s refusal to remove the two-child cap and to countenance any compensation for the Waspi women and, finally and fatally for the Starmer faction’s credibility, there was a massive rebellion over cuts to the Personal Independence Payment (PIP).

Campaigning by the left, third-sector organisations, the unions, Labour Party members and left Labour MPs, some who lost the whip for their efforts, played an important part in shifting public opinion forcing a partial retreat by Starmer on winter fuel and PIP.

As someone once said of Tony Blair, even those who hadn’t voted for Starmer were disappointed. Starmer’s attack on the poorest and most dependent meant any belief that Labour really wanted to address austerity and inequality evaporated.

The cost-of-living crisis persisted, with no sign that Britain was turning any economic corners soon. Public reaction was reflected in Labour’s poor performance at the local elections in May 2025; they lost two-thirds of the council seats they had won in 2021.

Worse was to come as the Starmer faction’s strategy unravelled. The barbarous behaviour of Israel in Gaza intensified — slaughter followed by famine — destroying any notion that support for Israel was somehow support for the right to self-defence. It was instead unmasked as aiding and abetting a genocide. Starmer’s anti-Russian sabre-rattling didn’t help him either.

The US election in November 2024 saw Donald Trump elected as president. He switched the US focus from Nato’s role in Europe and unquestioning support for Ukraine, to an obvious effort at splitting the Brics bloc by courting Russia on the one hand and punishing others like India and Brazil by tariff impositions, sometimes in a blatantly contradictory way: India’s sin was buying Russian oil!

In a feeble effort to shore up militarisation, in February 2025, Starmer announced increased arms expenditure, not just to fill the gap left by the US, but as a way of encouraging growth in the British economy.

The problem is that arms expenditure is a very ineffective way of doing that. Michael Burke of the Global Campaign on Military Spending points out that military spending has one of the lowest “employment multipliers” of all economic categories. Using Scottish government data, he points out that miliary spending ranks 70th out of 100 economic categories in terms of the employment it generates. Health is rated number one. Agriculture, energy, food, manufacture, chemicals, iron and steel, computers, construction, and many more have greater “employment multipliers” than military spending.

So where are we now? Starmer’s faction may have devised a strategy that won power in Westminster in July 2024 but it has disintegrated since then.

The latest opinion poll for Find Out Now has Labour on 18 per cent and Reform on 33 per cent with the Greens taking 10 per cent. That would give Labour 59 seats at the next general election and Reform 400. Even worse, apparently some on Labour’s right think the answer is Wes Streeting. No, that is not the best joke of this year’s Edinburgh festival.

Members, meanwhile, are flooding out of the Labour Party, but of 333,235 who remain the vast majority oppose what the Starmer faction thinks is progressive politics.

According to Survation polling, 91 per cent support a wealth tax; 92 per cent want essential utilities like water to be brought back into public ownership; 74 per cent want Keir Starmer to stop suspending MPs for opposing the government; 89 per cent want a sensible, welcoming migration system and 84 per cent want to end all arms sales to Israel.

With the Labour Party annual conference approaching, it is time for those members to find their voice and find a way of telling Starmer that the bell he hears ringing in his ears is tolling for his political exit and the sooner the better.