MEET the new Keir, same as the old Keir.

The Labour Party is presently following the basic operating manual for malfunctioning machinery — switch it off, then switch it on again and see if that works.

We all know that it usually doesn’t. The attempt to reboot the robotic Starmer is the latest evidence.

Switched off amidst the reverberations from the Mandelson disgrace and the McSweeney sacking, the cabinet then switched the Prime Minister back on again and… another scandal about a New Labour figure with a paedophile friend, Matthew Doyle, blinked into life immediately.

Nor is there any operating improvement in matters of even greater consequence.

The proof can be found in Starmer’s interventions at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend. Here would have been a moment for the new reflective Starmer to start charting a new course.

However, he did not arrive in Munich bearing new ideas to de-escalate international tensions. Instead, all he had in his luggage was a lab report alleging that skin of poisoned frog had been used by the Russian state to kill oppositionist Alexei Navalny two years ago.

The release of this sensational information, as much Macbeth as toxicology, was doubtless timed to pressure the visiting US panjandrums into diluting their apparent interest in cutting a deal with President Putin over Ukraine.

Hand the Donbass over to a man capable of trawling the jungles of Ecuador for venomous amphibians to deploy against his enemies? How could we.

Anyway, Keir’s Munich mission was to keep the Ukraine-Russia war going and to lock in the vast increases in military spending he has planned for the next decade.

Remember, the arms bill is set to rise to 3.5 per cent of gross domestic product, or 5 per cent depending on what is included, by the middle of the 2030s. Only Starmer now wants to accelerate this bellicose programme.

That orgy of militarisation alone alone puts Britain’s economic and social prospects in as tight a straitjacket as anything the Treasury could devise. It mortgages social amelioration to an ever-escalating arms race justified by the need to defend against a “Russian threat” that is no more real for being deeply embedded in the establishment psyche for more than a century.

To repeat a point often made: not only does Russia have no conceivable interest in attacking Britain, it lacks the conventional capacity to do so by, oh, around 3,800 kilometres. At the present rate of progress in Ukraine, Putin’s army, or whatever might be left of it, could be expected at the Channel sometime around the end of the 22nd century.

Yet Britain’s future is in hock to the desperate efforts by Starmer to keep the present world order, so advantageous to British imperialism and its commercial interests, upright for a bit longer, without a thought as to the wider economic consequences.

And what does the “soft left,” newly ascendant in Labour’s counsels have to say about this? Exactly nothing. Not a whisper of dissent can be heard.

Given that these same politicians have gone along with Starmer’s policy towards Israel with nary a murmur, save for Wes Streeting’s artfully constructed and conveniently released messages to his mate Peter Mandelson, we should not be surprised.

But the brute fact is that there can be no reset for this government without a fresh approach to international relations, including the war in Ukraine and the monstrous military spending plans adopted, at least in part, at the behest of Donald Trump.

“Inclusivity” and an “end to factionalism” are all very well and surely desirable. But they are not on their own the fundamental reordering of priorities that any serious shift in electoral fortunes would require.

Are they talking of the menace from Moscow in Gorton and Denton? On the look out for Ecuadorian frogs in Scotland and Wales as they prepare for elections which could doom Labour to irrelevance?

Miliband, Rayner, Burnham and the rest know the answer. If they have serious convictions around a restart for this government, now is the time to find the courage of them and decisively put economic regeneration and the people’s welfare ahead of warfare.

And stop expecting a new Starmer to suddenly boot up after the eighth switch-off-switch-on routine. All machines end up as scrap in the end, and in this case the end is very much nigh.

How Lowe can you go? Sadly he’s the tip of an iceberg

AFTER some prolonged hemming and hawing, Rupert Lowe MP has launched a new party, Restore Britain. Lowe was elected MP for Great Yarmouth in 2024 on the Reform ticket but subsequently broke with Farage.

The rupture may mainly have centred around egos, like so many of the Reform owner’s relationships, but Lowe’s point of exit from Farageism was to the further right.

So goes his new party. It is one step beyond fascist-adjacent. It already has the support of Ben Habib, who preceded Lowe out of Reform, and of the notorious fascist Tommy Robinson.

The further-than-far right party thus starts with both a representative in Parliament and the capacity to mobilise very large numbers on the streets, as Robinson displayed last year.

Some complacently calculate that it might work to the advantage of the left by splitting the hard right vote in future elections.

That is only one aspect, however. Restore’s emergence is another sign of the rightward march of British politics, towards undisguised authoritarian racism.
Its developing platform includes mass deportations of ethnic minorities, excising the “cancer of wokery” which is code for an authoritarian onslaught on liberalism, and declaring Parliament is broken and does not reflect the will of the people, a stock turn of fascist demagogy for the last century.

Lowe himself is a rich businessman, who has also championed Argentine President Javier Milei with his brutal attack on welfare spending and trade union rights.

He regards Farage as too moderate and willing to truckle with Toryism. Lowe seems to share that perspective with the Trump administration and Elon Musk, and may be able to access the former’s public goodwill and the latter’s millions as a result.

It is true that Reform is absorbing hard-right Conservatives like Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick, which encourages their former party to move rightwards in pursuit, to avoid further defections.

But Reform is not moderating. Its candidate in Gorton and Denton, academic-turned-pontificator Matthew Goodwin, is a brazen Muslim-baiter of a sort Farage might have hesitated to select for such a high-profile contest a year or so ago.

And the Tories’ march rightwards is yielding lurid imagery. Former premier Liz Truss increasingly spouts extreme right talking points and was rewarded by being pictured with Trump, the snap every far-rightist across the world wants, this week. Kemi Badenoch has not repudiated her.

How the votes fall between these formations is secondary to the general trend they all embody, which is the powerful growth of racist, semi-fascist politics in crisis-ridden Britain. When the chips are down Jenrick, Braverman, Farage, Lowe, Truss and most likely Badenoch will find themselves in the same camp — violently reactionary neo-Thatcherism.

There should be no illusions about the scale of the resistance required.

One particular illusion to be speedily discarded is that it can be led by the premier whose banning of Palestine Action has been ruled illegal, who has been forced to back down on cancelling local elections and whose Home Secretary is waging her own war on migrants.

Every week that Labour MPs delay making the change to a leader who could champion the democratic cause with conviction and plausibility is another week wasted in this existential struggle.