No-one really wants to watch a 63-year-old man break down in tears on the road outside his house. Unless that man is Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, announcing his resignation to the press outside 10 Downing Street.
There’s been nothing particularly remarkable about Starmer’s centrist brand of neoliberal managerialism, nor is there anything much of note in the manner or timing of his departure. Probably the only person shedding a tear during his resignation speech was Starmer himself (possibly also his family, who he has threatened to spend more time with after leaving the top job).
The one-time “landslide” election winner has in fact never been popular: an exit poll following the 2021 local elections found that, even then, the most common reason people weren’t voting Labour was “Keir Starmer/leadership”.
Starmer won the 2024 general election only because Nigel Farage’s Reform party split the conservative vote; Labour’s actual vote share was lower than that of any British government since the Second World War.
With Reform now leading in every YouGov voting intention poll since April 2025, disastrous local election results in May and the Greens threatening Labour’s electoral left flank, it was only a matter of time before Starmer was cut loose. The real conundrum is how this person managed to remain leader for so long. But, as Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour sang in 1973, “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way”.
Starmer will leave office having made an enemy of every decent left-wing person in Britain. His key purpose over the last six years has been to reverse the party’s social-democratic tilt under previous leader Jeremy Corbyn. Investigative journalist Paul Holden revealed in his 2025 book The Fraud that a circle of Blairite apparatchiks around Morgan McSweeney had been plotting to oust Corbyn from 2017. This involved establishing multiple not-for-profit fronts to feed false allegations of antisemitism against Corbyn to the media.
McSweeney’s group also deliberately misallocated campaign funds to undermine Labour’s performance at the 2019 general election and create a pretext for a leadership challenge. That December, Corbyn capitulated in the face of sustained pressure from the Labour right, ruling class and liberal media and stepped down as leader. McSweeney had already identified Starmer months earlier as the contender best placed to restore ruling-class confidence in Labour.
Ironically, Starmer had to pose as a kind of Corbyn continuity candidate in order to win over the Labour membership, promising to raise taxes on the top 5 percent of earners and reverse Conservative corporate tax cuts, among other pledges. Once elected leader, he dropped those assurances one by one, telling the Economist magazine in 2023, “We’ve been having intense discussions with business. This is about building new relations with business ... We’re pro-business”.
As leader of the opposition, Starmer oversaw a widespread campaign of expulsions, suspensions and sackings based on slanderous claims of antisemitism inside the Labour Party. Then as now, the accusation of antisemitism was hurled at anyone identifying with the left, opposing US imperialism or questioning the actions of the Israeli government. The witch-hunt atmosphere drove hundreds of thousands from Labour’s ranks.
Starmer also sacked shadow transport minister Sam Tarry for showing solidarity with rail workers during the strike wave of 2022. A party spokesperson explained that Tarry’s visit to a London picket line was not appropriate for a “government-in-waiting”.
Upon becoming prime minister in 2024, Starmer signalled his allegiance to business by attacking family welfare payments and trying to cut pensioners’ winter heating subsidies. Meanwhile, his government’s latest Strategic Defence Review promised to lift military spending to 3 percent of GDP by 2030, invest at least £15 billion in nuclear weapons and make the British army “ten times more lethal”.
The movement against Israel’s war on Gaza helped consolidate anti-Labour sentiment among a layer of young people and activists. Starmer responded with repression, most notably against the campaign group Palestine Action.
Starmer remains shameless about his role in driving out the left and grovelling to capital. “Six years ago, I inherited a Labour Party that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt”, he gloated during his resignation speech, “but ... we changed our party. Ripping out the poison of antisemitism, restoring trust on the economy, defence and national security”.
It’s precisely this legacy that’s turned so many voters against Labour. According to YouGov’s analysis of the 2026 local election results, the government is now losing one in five voters to the Greens, who are positioning themselves as anti-corporate and socially progressive reformers.
A sizeable constituency is growing to the left of Labour. But the prime minister has only doubled down on the most reactionary parts of his program, accusing migrants of putting “pressure on housing and ... public services”, restricting visa rules further and increasing persecution of refugees. Starmer’s resignation speech celebrated the fact that his government stands “proudly with, not against, our national flag”.
Starmer’s promotion of British nationalism, as well as his actual state-sanctioned tyranny against migrants and refugees, has encouraged more extremist elements around Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson. There have been three consecutive summers of racist street violence under Starmer’s watch. Starmer is blamed by many in the media for losing sections of Labour’s base to Reform UK. In fact, hardly any ex-Labour voters say they’re considering voting for Farage. Those who voted Labour in 2024 are four times more likely to abstain altogether than to flip to Reform, and a similar proportion will vote for the Greens. Starmer isn’t losing voters to Reform, but he’s enabled them all the same by shifting official British politics even further to the right.
Starmer’s likely replacement, Andy Burnham, has indicated he will maintain the current government’s “fiscal rules” and support Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood moving forward with further restrictions on migration. He has welcomed as advisers the former head of the Office of Budget Responsibility (a Conservative-era austerity oversight committee), along with two former bankers. Burnham served as a junior minister under Blair and held multiple roles in Gordon Brown’s cabinet and treasury. This is not the “soft-left” challenge it’s made out to be.
Starmer’s assignment as leader was to sanitise the Labour Party and present it as a viable option for the ruling class. There is no reason why Burnham would reverse any of that, coming as he does from Blairite heritage himself. Instead, we should expect more prostration to capital and neoliberal orthodoxy.
