A long-read article discussing Labour’s approach to successive elections and their approach to dealing with Starmer - I included some excerpts to give an idea of the piece:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/05/16/labour-enemies-of-the-people/
Labourites and their legion of media sympathisers are nothing if not delusional, however. They seem to think that the party’s problems boil down to the man at the top: Keir Starmer. Get rid of Starmer, the adenoidal robot, and replace him with someone possessing better ‘communication skills’ and, ideally, a pulse, then hey presto, Labour can reverse its fortunes. ‘The government can get on with delivering the delivery it promised to deliver’, say the Labourites ad infinitum.
But Labour’s crisis is not what its MPs, members and supporters think it is. This is a crisis not of leadership, but of the party as a whole. It doesn’t matter if its members shuffle the ministerial deck, swapping in Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting or Andy Burnham for the wretched Starmer. It doesn’t matter if one or another of these products of the Labour machine tacks ‘left’ or ‘right’. Because this party is done. It is no longer capable, ideologically or organisationally, of speaking for vast swathes of Britain. It is a party whose disdain for the views, values and demands of the nation’s working-class heartlands runs through it like Brighton through a stick of rock. Indeed, it is a party that, having aggressively and stubbornly swum against the populist tide since Brexit, is now slowly but surely being swept away by it.
It turned alignment with the ‘new global market’ into the closest thing it had to a vision, embracing it even as its ‘Third Way’. New Labour was ‘globalist’ before the word was widely recognised. It dreamed of a world reshaped by the unrelenting forces of globalisation, a world of vanishing borders, in which goods, services and people moved ever more freely. A technocratic political universe in which those who knew best, the experts and the NGOs, were allowed to get on with administering the globalising society ‘free from short-term political manipulation’, as Brown once put it. A global order in which nation states were increasingly subordinate to the superior wisdom of transnational institutions, be it the EU or the WTO. New Labour elevated an expert class, a credentialled class, a professional-managerial class, and decommissioned the working class. It empowered transnational actors and lawmakers in the service of global causes, such as the fight against global warming, and disenfranchised British citizen.
In New Labour’s eyes, all this globalisation was synonymous with ‘progress’. And vice versa: opposition to it was seen as backward and reactionary. This, in part, explains why New Labour politicised and weaponised immigration in particular. It didn’t just welcome 2.5million incomers into the UK in little over a decade for economic reasons. It also did so for culture-war reasons. Immigration was the means through which New Labour could give real moralistic content to its project of modernising Britain. The means through which it could transform the country into a globally oriented territory, open for business. The means through which it could realise its ideals of ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ in place of older notions of nationhood.
…a new breed of ‘professional’ politician flourished during the New Labour era. Processed and credentialled at Oxbridge or, failing that, at some other Russell Group university, these identikit politicos shared the outlook and values of the broader middle-class graduate class that had fallen hard for New Labour. They usually had no employment experience outside party politics. Rather, they emerged from within the machine, working as researchers, campaigners or parliamentary assistants before, if fortunate, being parachuted into a safe seat somewhere. Andy Burnham, the current pretender to Starmer’s crown, is a prime example.
…Where New Labour embraced the ‘progressive’ thrust of globalism, Corbynistas embraced the ‘progressive’ thrust of identity politics. Both shared an animus towards the attitudes, values and traditions of supposedly unreformed, backward sections of society. They viewed them as something to be overcome, to be changed, to be re-engineered. New Labour went to war against nationhood and tradition. Corbynistas took the ‘progressive’ crusade further and doubled down on sex, gender and race.
…it continues to libel England’s working classes – just as Brown did Gillian Duffy – as bigoted. Indeed, it continues to paint the largely working-class-backed Reform and the wider populist pushback as ‘far right’, proto-fascist or, in Keir Starmer’s recent words, the trailblazers of a ‘very dark path’.
It is this demonisation of the increasingly assertive populist opposition to Labour and the broader political class that is most revealing. Labour is disdaining people’s demands for national and cultural security. It is ignoring their calls for new industries and decent jobs rather than welfare dependency. It is dismissing their profoundly democratic desire for greater control over their lives and their nation.
If Labour thinks that simply putting a new face at the top of the party will quell the populist, largely working-class anger now stirring across the country, it is deeply mistaken.