Why is Starmer's Labour so hopelessly shit?

If Labour continue their downwards trajectory since the 2024 general election, they're facing electoral oblivion at the next election. So how are they doing so badly?

Somehow Keir Starmer’s version of the Labour Party has gone from winning a massive landslide at the 2024 general election, to such poor poll ratings that they make Boris Johnson’s government at its "partygate" nadir look rather popular in comparison!

When figuring out how this spectacular decline has happened, the first thing to note is that Starmer’s Labour was never as popular as the 2024 landslide suggested. In fact Starmer won significantly fewer votes in 2024 (9.7 million) than Jeremy Corbyn did in 2017 (12.8 million) or even 2019 (10.3 million).

The reality is that Starmer somehow garnered less actual support than Corbyn did in the 2019 electoral disaster, but became Prime Minister by default because the Tory vote literally halved between 2019 (14 million) and 2024 (6.8 million).

It’s just a function of Britain’s antiquated and absurdly disproportional voting system that Starmer ended up with a far bigger majority in 2024 than Boris Johnson did in 2019, despite winning 5 million votes fewer than Johnson, and over half a million fewer votes than Corbyn did in what the Labour right still refer to as "Labour’s worst electoral result since WWII"!

Instead of recognising their luck, and the precarious reality of their situation they were in, Starmer’s government behaved as if they had a cast iron mandate from the public to do whatever the hell they wanted.

One of Starmer’s very first acts as Prime Minister was to humiliate and expel seven Labour MPs for the "crime" of voting against his plan to continue the diabolical poverty-spreading Tory two child economic sanctions on families, which set the tone for what was to come.

There was the extraordinarily dumb 'things will only get worse' speech; Reeves talking absolute guff about a "£20 billion black hole to justify a load of austerity cutbacks; economic sanctions on pensioners; economic sanctions on disabled people; and Starmer getting caught red-handed accepting more lavish gifts and freebies than every previous Labour Party leader since Neil Kinnock combined!

Of the 9.7 million people who voted for Starmer’s Labour, it’s hard to imagine that many of them were wanting or expecting a Labour government that refuses to move away from Tory austerity penny-pinching; does nothing to combat the corporate looting of our country; beats up pensioners; bullies disabled people; and dances to the tune of the mega-rich donors who keep showering Starmer and his ministers in cash and freebies.

The freebies thing particularly rankles with ordinary people, especially after Starmer defeated efforts to reserve just ten Premier League games per season for free-to-air broadcast on terrestrial TV.

Starmer has demonstrated that he believes that he’s entitled to free corporate box Arsenal tickets from his mega-rich donors, but the rest of us aren’t even entitled to one free Premier League game per month on the telly.

It’s obviously not the most important issue in the grand scheme of things, but the hypocrisy absolutely stinks, and ordinary people can definitely smell the stench of it.

Labour could’ve used their unprecedented majority government, on such a small actual share of the vote, to try and gain popularity with policies aimed at materially improving ordinary people’s lives and living conditions, but instead they’ve decided to tell everyone that things will get worse, and then try to force through one diabolical and near-universally despised policy after another.

As a result Labour’s approval ratings just dropped to an all-time low of minus 54; most polls are creating projections of more than 250 Labour MPs losing their seats at the next election; and one recent poll has Labour on just 15% of the vote, which is the same as the Corbyn-Sultana left-wing party that hasn’t even been named yet!

You can almost feel the heat of the Starmtrooper rage at another mention of Corbyn in an article about what’s going so wrong for Starmer’s Labour, because they clearly thought they’d succeeded in stealing the Labour Party back; marginalising the Labour left; and burying Corbyn.

But Corbyn is still pretty relevant to why things are going so badly for Starmer’s horrible version of the Labour Party.

Starmer knew he had to lie to the Labour membership and issue a bunch of false "pledges" in order to steal the party back from the Labour left in 2020.

His victory on a pack of absolute lies was the culmination of a years-long effort to defeat the left-wing Labour leadership from within, and seize the party back for the right.

Everyone who paid attention was well aware of what had been going on since 2015. High profile Labour-right figures outright refusing to serve as Corbyn cabinet ministers; the catastrophically failed Anyone But Corbyn chicken coup in 2016; an endless parade of Labour right-wingers shit-talking their own party on TV shows and in newspaper columns; the calculated sabotage of the 2017 general election; Labour right-wingers deliberately slow-tracking antisemitism cases in order to make life as difficult as possible for the Corbyn leadership (Labour Leaks); and then lumbering Corbyn with the unsellable proposition of a "sore loser" referendum in 2019.

The Labour right were so utterly fixated on the narrow party political objective of toppling Corbyn and seizing back control of the Labour Party, that they didn’t care what damage they were doing to the country by allowing the likes of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak to run amok, and they clearly never really bothered thinking about what they’d actually offer people once they’d got what they wanted.

This Corbyn derangement didn’t end when Starmer stole the Labour leadership back either, because if we look at the policies that have been making Starmer’s government so incredibly unpopular, it’s easy to see them as products of Corbyn derangement too.

These people aren’t driven by any kind of principle whatever. They just wanted control of the Labour Party and government because they felt they were entitled to it, and they seem to have been operating on a simplistic "do the opposite of what Corbyn would" decision making process since then.

Corbyn would’ve replaced austerity ruination with Keynesian investment economics - so we’ll keep Tory austerity going.

Corbyn would’ve taxed greedy corporations and the mega-rich - so we’ll pledge not to.

Corbyn wouldn’t have taken a load of lavish freebies and handouts from mega-rich donors - so let’s cash in!

Corbyn would’ve renationalised the greedy, filthy water companies - so we’ll side with the polluting profiteers against the British people.

Corbyn would’ve opposed the depraved live-streamed Israeli genocide in Palestine - so we’ll actively support it.

Corbyn would never have misused terrorism legislation to punish non-violent protest and intimidate political opposition - so let’s do that.

Corbyn would never have channelled Britain’s most notorious racist Enoch Powell in a pathetic attempt to pander to Reform voters - so "Island of Strangers" is a great thing to read out to the nation.

Corbyn would never have deregulated the financial sector and promised them a slush fund of public cash to bail out their reckless gambling - so that’s exactly what we’ll do.

Corbyn would have fiercely resisted economic sanctions on low-income pensioners; families; and disabled people - so barbaric sanctions on the most vulnerable people in society here we come!

Obviously some of these anti-Corbyn positions align with Labour right interests, especially the dodgy donation taking, and the sucking up to corporations and the mega-rich, but it’s basically impossible to discern any coherent programme for government in what they’ve been doing for the last year, beyond it being basically the opposite of what Corbyn and the Labour-left would’ve done.

The problem with this approach is that much of what Corbyn proposed was actually very popular with the general public, and particularly with left-leaning potential Labour voters.

Furthermore, stuff like pensioner mugging; "more of the same" austerity penny pinching; genocide complicity; "island of strangers"; and impoverishment of disabled people is deeply unpopular with the general public, while the kind of pillocks who take delight in pointless cruelty; economically illiterate austerity; merciless child-killing; and anti-immigrant rabble-rousing WILL NEVER VOTE LABOUR ANYWAY.

It’s extremely unlikely that Labour is going to have any kind of resurgence in fortunes as long as Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves maintain control of party policy and the government’s purse strings, and while Labour back benchers continue behaving like a bunch of cowardly yes-men, despite their seats being under extreme threat come the next election.

If the British left get their act together and form a broad left-green coalition for the next election, it’s easily conceivable that Labour finishes in 4th place, and maybe even fifth in terms of MPs if the SNP regain lost ground in Scotland, which would be the most spectacular party political downfall in British history.

And when so many Labour MPs lose their seats at the next election, they’ll clearly only have themselves to blame.