Why I can't Back Labour Anymore

I've given them fifteen months. They've used these to sidle up closer and closer to Reform. I am done.

I was going to publish something about ID Cards today.

Or more specifically, I started off a draft last night in which I discuss my ambivalence towards them. The long and short of it boiled down to:

• I grew up with ID Cards (or rather ID Books for a very long time), though admittedly they came from a very dark place.

• I see the utility - and they’ve worked well in other countries.

• I think framing them as being part of the fight against “illegal migration” is idiotic and calling them a “BritCard” is cringeworthy.

• I don’t want Palantir anywhere close to my data.

But I’m not going to be doing that today, because as I was getting ready to go to bed, a Telegraph headline caught my eye.

Specifically this one:

Screenshot taken Friday 26 September.

So instead I’m going to write about how Labour has finally lost me.

I know there will be people furious at me for saying this out loud - but blind loyalty isn’t the same as solidarity and pretending everything is fine doesn’t make it so.

I was willing to give Labour a year. I distinctly remember last year saying that I’d give them 12 full months to show exactly who they were, because after fourteen straight years of Tory neglect and vandalism of this country, any party would have had an absolutely monumental job on its hands.

I gave them 15 months, and what we got in the end is Labour constantly framing immigration in right wing terms, parroting Telegraph tropes (in the damned Telegraph of all places) and treating what is his own base as the problem instead of the it should be.

The column read to me like a man who was trying to out-Reform Reform. He writes about “the Left” shying away from people’s concerns on immigration as though he himself isn’t the leader of the Labour Party, a party that is ostensibly on the left. He talks about “hyper-liberal free market migration” as though Labour, rather than the Tories, quadrupled net migration over the past ten years. He frames digital ID as a solution to “deter migrants from entering British waters” - an approach that’s so clumsy and cack handed that it makes the welfare benefits fuck up look positively graceful in comparison.

Cutting Backwards: The Policy That Forgot the People

And this is the point at which my frustration goes from simmering right onto boiling point.

And truthfully, the warning signs were there, and I should have seen it coming. A few months ago, when Starmer gave his speech in which he warned that Britain must not become “an island of strangers” - a phrase chosen that lands inescapably close to Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech. I largely stayed out of that conversation at the time, partly because there was so much else happening, but in hindsight, I should have paid more attention. That was the moment I should have picked up on the direction he was digging us into. I didn’t. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. That’s on me.

It’s goes beyond the speech and the column though, and includes the steady, constant drip of policy mistakes and idiotic decisions that have signalled to Labour’s traditional supporters that they’re nothing more than an afterthought. That they were a path to victory.

I was perfectly supportive of the idea of means testing the Winter Fuel Allowance - it makes sense to do so. We don’t need to hand free cash to pensioners with Bentleys in driveways. That checks out. But the way that Labour handled it was flat-footed and absurd. A muddled rollout using an inclusion criteria that left out so many of the people that actually did benefit from the WFA. It was done with such bluntness that it felt less like a long overdue reform than it felt like a punishment.

Same with VAT on Private Schools - absolutely right, do it. But again, completely botched in delivery. There should have been much more thought given to SEN students and their needs, there should have been far greater explanation of the rationale and benefit of this policy, but again, they just dropped it like a bombshell and then wandered off.

The only two policies that hold my support are the Renter’s Reform Bill, something there is exceptionally little communication on, and Angela Rayner’s Worker’s Right Protection Bill.

That’s it.

That’s two policies that they’ve introduced in one year that are even vaguely identifiable as something that a Socialist-Democratic party - one which I believed Labour to be - would introduce.

I’ve largely defended Labour for the past fifteen months because I truly believed they could be the grown-ups in the room - that they could push through the renter’s rights bill, strengthen worker’s rights and start rebuilding the country after it was gutted by years of austerity and the immeasurable damage of Brexit, but you don’t fix Tory damage with more Tory governance.

You don’t renew Britain by cutting support for disabled communities, swaying in the political wind or enabling the idiotic conversation that immigration is the source of all evil in this country.

Reform’s ILR policy announcement this week went down like a lead balloon - as well it should, it’s cruel, stupid, unworkable and unpopular. That was Labour’s chance to pounce, to draw a bright red line, to say unequivocally: we would never do that. Instead we got “well, the policy finances don’t make sense”. Where is the moral argument against retrospectively revoking the right of residence from people who have lived here for decades? All we got was a “the sums don’t add up, but we won’t comment on the principle” line.

And this is the thing that makes me want to bang my head repeatedly into the nearest bus window - Reform UK voters will never vote for Keir Starmer.

Not now. Not in 2029. Not if he tattoos “STOP THE BOATS” on his forehead and gives Farage a reach around.

Hardline Reform voters are not movable, they’re not sat there thinking “Golly gosh, I quite like Starmer’s neighbourhood fund policy but I sure do wish he would sound a little nastier about immigrants.” They’re completely entrenched. At an absolute stretch they may drift their way back to the Tories if someone like Robert Generic finds a way to usurp Kemi Badenoch, but there are no conceivable circumstances that they are drifting leftwards.

So why for the sake of all things holy is Labour bending over backwards to chase them? Why frame policy, rhetoric and entire Telegraph op-eds around an audience that won’t ever give them a single bloody vote. It’s idiotic.

Actually - it’s worse than idiotic, it’s cowardice.

Because while he is doing every single thing in his power to win over people who despise him, he’s openly alienating the people who don’t. People like me. People who might have voted Labour reluctantly because the Tories were demonstrably completely unfit to govern. People who may have voted Labour in 2024, even reluctantly, because it was the party that was still the most realistic vehicle for the progressive change that we desperately need in this country. That base, the base I sit in, is being chipped away, column by column, awkward speech by awkward speech, until all that will be left is a hollowed-out party that wins on arithmetic but loses out on belief.

And I think that’s what’s made me the most furious out of all of this.

A few weeks ago, I wrote the statement that I wished that Starmer would make. One that, head on, calls out racism, division and scapegoating for what it is, instead of appeasing and excusing it. A speech that planted a flag and said “this is who we are, this is the line and we will not cross it.”

Enough Platitudes: Starmer Must Confront Racism With Courage, Not Flags

His Telegraph column did the exact opposite. It was a moment of cowardice. A moment, where instead of standing tall against the bile coming from right wing populists, chose instead to echo their talking points in softer tones. A moment where he essentially said to the millions of us who wanted a Labour government that “your values are not my priority.”

The rest of the Labour party is adding to this. Where are the voices from within the party who should be pushing back? Where is Jess Phillips? Or Darren Jones? Angela Rayner we know is now persona non-grata, and her voice is at this time missed the most. Where are the MPS who actually give a shit about progressive politics? Right now, the only people who seem to be giving any sort of pushback are mayors like Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham - and they should not be carrying this torch alone.

It cannot be left to two city mayors and a smattering of backbench MMPs to keep the flame of progressive politics while their leadership hoovers up Telegraph soundbites, but unfortunately, this is where we find ourselves.

I say this with real regret - my vote is now up for grabs. I do not say this lightly, or with any sort of satisfaction or joy. I say this because Starmer’s Labour has chosen, time and time again, to chase people who hate them instead of the people who put their trust in them.

And if that’s the choice they want to make - fine. But my choice is now to look elsewhere. I’ve said before that the Greens are becoming a compelling choice under the leadership of Zack Polanski. Ed Davey and the LibDems, for all their faults, at the very least don’t spend their weekends telling their own base that they’re the problem. Both of these leaders and parties have a real opportunity - because while Labours tries everything in their power to placate the Right, they’re leaving themselves wide open to the Centre-Left.

I will also clarify here that I am hardly “far left” - I have no appetite for a Corbynite version of purity politics. I want competence, fairness and courage - and right now, Labour isn’t offering any of those.

What they’re offering instead is Reform-Lite posturing, the same old Tory framing and the desperate hope that we, the people who voted for them, will turn a blind eye because we’re too scared of another Conservative government to hold them to account.

Bad luck. I notice. And I strongly suspect I’m not alone.

Labour has lost me today - and unless something drastic changes, I’m not sure they’re going to get me back. If Starmer wants to be Reform-Lite, then Reform-Lite can get on with it without my vote.

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