Burnham substitutes for Starmer

“A decent man forced out by a coup” !?

No. This was not the Chief Political Commentator at the iPaper showing buyer’s remorse over Starmer’s treachery against Corbyn. Kitty Donaldson was lamenting Starmer’s own demise with no hint of irony. She began by saying that Starmer “did the decent thing and fell on his sword,” and went on to say: “He’s been forced from office by a bloodless coup, even as he holds on to the knowledge he cleaned up the Labour Party and delivered a landslide victory.”

Leaving aside the awfulness of the writing – falling on his sword in a bloodless coup, really? – what did he do to clean up the Labour party? This is centrist speak for marginalising the left and expelling dissenting voices on Israel for antisemitism, including record numbers of anti-Zionist Jewish members who spoke out against the genocide in Gaza. Meanwhile half of his cabinet are in receipt of donations from Israeli lobbyists. No Labour MP has resigned from Labour Friends of Israel over Israel’s clear breaches of international law and crimes against humanity. The stench of corruption is only exceeded by the stench of genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, aided and abetted by Starmer’s government.

Of course none of this will be mentioned in the encomiums that the media will heap upon Starmer in the weeks to come. All of which makes a mockery of the current party line, iterated by many Starmer supporters on social media, that his government has done so much for working people that he is under attack from a media campaign funded by billionaires promoting the far right.

Apart from the usual suspects like Musk on social media and the axis of evil represented by the Mail, Express, Telegraph and GB News, Starmer’s media coverage has ranged from mild approval to sycophantic, as evidenced by Kitty Donaldson’s puff piece with which we started this article. Compare that to the almost universal media assault on Corbyn that was orchestrated by Starmer’s backers in Labour Together.

A prime example is Polly Toynbee in the Guardian. In 2017, months before Corbyn polled more votes than any Labour leader since Blair in his landslide year of 1997, she predicted that Corbyn was leading Labour to annihilation.

After Starmer won his own landslide in 2024 with fewer votes than Corbyn polled in Labour’s 2019 election defeat, she reassured us that, despite a disastrous first six months in office, “Starmer’s plans are both radical and profound.”

Now that Starmer has been profoundly and radically dumped by Labour she is confident that “things really can get better” with Burnham. This is not a recent aberration. In 2012 she was telling us that Ed Miliband was a “political genius.” Toynbee is not alone. She is part of a media establishment devoted to persuading the left that the next centrist is really on our side so forget your principles and back the latest “next best thing”.

The truth is rather more mundane. Labour Together, a right wing Blairite continuity faction within Labour, decided that their man Starmer was no match for Farage and could not find a single MP among the 400 in the PLP who could be trusted both to beat Farage and execute their neo-liberal policies. So they turned to Burnham. One of the Labour Together inner circle, Josh Simmons, resigned his seat so that Burnham could become an MP. Simmons will get his reward, probably as a member of Burnham’s staff at Number Ten before heading for the House of Lords.

There are some dissenting voices in the media like Andrew Fisher in the iPaper, Owen Jones in the Guardian and Peter Oborne in Middle East Eye. They castigate Starmer’s record in office and clearly identify the problems with Starmer, such as his mendacity, his authoritarianism, his complete lack of a moral compass over Gaza and his militarism, all compounded by political incompetence. But all are hopefully agnostic about Burnham, wanting to believe that he will display the qualities of leadership that can begin to reverse Britain’s decline.

This is an improvement on the majority of mainstream commentators who, having finally decided that a fascist in Number Ten is not necessarily a good idea, are cheering on Burnham solely on his ability to beat Farage at the next general election. For them it is all about the personalities. Who are the “big beasts” at Westminster? Who is up and who is down?

None of this addresses the serious questions that late capitalism poses. We are already in the midst of a climate catastrophe. It is not some distant prospect. Last week’s red warning from the Met Office meant that otherwise healthy people could die from the excessive heat. Stop the War has long pointed out the disastrous effects of war upon climate change. This should be headline news. Instead media and politicians are obsessed with Russia, China and the nuclear threat from Iran, a country with no nuclear weapons at all.

That is why the International Conference Against War that Stop the War UK organised in London last Saturday is so important. It may have been eclipsed by the political drama around Starmer and Burnham but it was the most important anti-war conference in living memory. It brought activists together, mainly from Europe, but with representatives from the rest of the world. The most significant feature was the strong trade union presence, which demonstrated the connection between the drive to war between nations and escalation of class war within nations, signified by attacks on welfare and wages to fund arms spending.

We have had conferences in the past. So now the real test begins. Can we turn conference declarations into trade union action and solidarity across national boundaries to curb the multi-trillion dollar arms trade and persuade our governments to take positive action on welfare and wages that raises people out of poverty. That is what real national security looks like. It will also be a better test for Burnham than his ability to defeat Reform. As Starmer has just shown, winning is one thing. Delivering is something else.