https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/tweedledee

19 June 2026 Politics

Given a chance, the electors of Makerfield did not hesitate. They voted to get rid of Keir Starmer and gave Nigel Farage a kick on the posterior in the process. On a turnout just shy of 59 per cent, high for an English by-election, the Labour candidate Andy Burnham won 55 per cent (nearly 25,000 votes), compared to 35 per cent for Reform (15,696 votes) and 7 per cent (3,111 votes) for Restore, the Tory-backed Reform-spoiler party. Burnham, a former Blairite MP, Iraq warmonger and Brownite Health Secretary, who quit Corbyn’s shadow cabinet to build his personal political base as Mayor of Greater Manchester, was helped into the Makerfield seat by the sitting MP, Josh Simons, himself a creature of the Labour Together caucus that first targeted Corbyn, then promoted Starmer. It seemed – temporarily – to have overreached itself in imposing its éminence grise, Epstein-hugger Peter Mandelson, as Britain’s Ambassador to the Court of Donald Trump. But a grateful Burnham will offer Simons and his friends continued access to Number Ten.

There was nothing to commend Starmer. A political dud, he was put in place following Corbyn’s 2019 defeat after a legal career – in Northern Ireland and at the Crown Prosecution Service – of kowtowing to those in power. The sordid story was told in an effective broadside by Oliver Eagleton in The Starmer Project (2022) and later in forensic detail by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire in Get In (2025) and Paul Holden in The Fraud (2025). In the July 2024 election, a divided right – Tories: 24 per cent; Reform: 14 per cent – handed Starmer a majority with 34 per cent. His advisers, led by Mandelson protégé Morgan McSweeney, counselled the new leader to suck up to Farage in public and compete with his policies. This was done via a photo-op in the House of Commons when the Prime Minister walked up to Farage and shook hands with him, thus becoming a stranger to many in his own party.

There followed expulsions of the Labour left, attacks on child benefits and pensioners’ fuel allowance and Farage-style rhetoric about immigrants (‘Island of Strangers’), wrapped up in austerity budgets. In line with the preceding Tory government, a woman of colour, Shabana Mahmood, was appointed Home Secretary to push through deeply reactionary policies on race and civil liberties.

The liberal press, thrilled by the purge of the left, eagerly supported Starmer. And Starmer eagerly supported the Israeli genocide unleashed in Gaza. The Labour Prime Minister gave his backing to Israeli measures like cutting off water, electricity, food and medicines to the Palestinian people. If Starmer opposed the targeting of women and children, he kept it to himself. The state apparatuses and RAF surveillance were employed to actively assist in the genocide. Starmer’s abject servility to the ultra-conservative Board of Jewish Deputies was loyally mimicked by cabinet members Cooper, Lammy, Streeting and the 100-plus Labour MPs imposed on local parties by Mandelson’s gang.

To take the measure of the Mandelson implants: even Labour loyalists Robin Cook and Clare Short resigned from the Blair cabinet when he took the country to war in Iraq against the will of a majority of his citizens, backed by the endless lies of his media manager, Alastair Campbell (and the barking of dogs of war like Burnham). Not a single Labour MP resigned from Starmer’s government on Palestine or the use of US military bases in the UK to attack Iran. On the contrary: the expelled Corbynites – John McDonnell and Co. – disgraced themselves by crawling back into the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Starmer made sure that there was nothing to choose from at any level between the extreme centre parties in parliament – Labour, Tories and Lib Dems. As the British economy stagnated and Labour’s ratings plunged to their current 18 per cent, the Greens took off from July 2025 to reach 16 per cent this spring. Coupled with the short-lived hopes in a new Corbynite vehicle, they revealed a substantial constituency to Labour’s left. After reading the focus-group runes, McSweeney’s men steered Starmer into a series of semi u-turns from the second half of 2025: fuel allowance, child benefits, anti-migrant digital IDs. None of it helped. In combination with his wooden appearance and inability to defend himself in Parliament, his flip-flops only increased the contempt for Starmer in the country at large. He will go. There are rumours that Burnham might offer him a cabinet job. Can I recommend the Ministry of Untruth.

Will the new boy from the North do any better on the economy and upset ‘the markets’? Unlikely. Will he make any changes to UK foreign and defence policies? All the indications are negative. Worth remembering also that social-democratic parties are going under in most of western Europe. Labour is not alone and the reasons are the same: total capitulation to the markets and US policies in the Middle East and elsewhere. Burnham’s victory in a by-election in the North of England should not be misread. Labour’s coming leadership switch does not portend any real change for the country or its position in the world.