We need to talk about the future of the left
TetleysTLDR of this article
Keir Starmer’s Labour is punishing MPs for standing up for the poor and disabled, specifically, four who voted against real-terms benefit cuts. This signals a shift from democratic socialism to authoritarian centrism, more interested in appeasing capital and pro-Israel lobbyists than in justice or equality.
The party now gags dissent, purges the left, and disciplines moral conscience. Its complicity in war crimes and its cruelty towards Britain’s vulnerable expose Labour as morally bankrupt.
Even stalwart allies like the Fire Brigades Union are turning away. Disillusionment is growing. The Labour Party is fracturing, and talk of new political movements is gaining ground.
Starmer's Labour is no longer a safe-space for progressives: it’s a hostile environment. If the left wants real change, and wants to stop the far right - it must build something new.
Keir Starmer’s Labour has abandoned the poor: and any claim to moral legitimacy
In the past year, Britain has seen the flickering hopes of political change replaced by something far darker: the reassertion of authoritarian politics in a red tie. While some have clung to the illusion that a Labour government might mark the beginning of a just transition: one grounded in equality, compassion, and ecological sanity, the truth has become unavoidable. Keir Starmer’s Labour is not the vehicle for that transformation.
It is an obstacle to it.
Earlier this week, the Labour leadership withdrew the whip from four MPs: Rachael Maskell, Neil Duncan-Jordan, Brian Leishman and Chris Hinchliff, whose apparent offence was to vote against real-terms cuts to benefits that will plunge thousands more into poverty and deepen the suffering of the most vulnerable. These MPs acted not out of self-interest or factionalism, but out of conscience. They stood up for disabled people. For the working class. For a society in which no one is left to freeze or starve because of a spreadsheet in Whitehall.
For this, they were punished. This act of political retribution tells us everything we need to know about the Starmer project. It is not a programme of renewal but one of erasure. What’s being erased is not only the left, but the very memory of what the Labour Party once was: a democratic socialist movement, rooted in collective struggle and the defence of the marginalised.
I still remember what was printed on the back of the Labour membership card: The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It wasn’t a slogan. It was a statement of principle: a commitment to building a more equal society through democratic means. Today, under Starmer, Labour is neither democratic nor socialist. It is a centralised, hierarchical shell, weaponised to discipline dissent and placate capital. Starmer’s defenders call this discipline.
It is in fact a form of political cowardice. It is the fear of honest disagreement, of moral clarity, of a grassroots membership who still believe that politics should be about more than market stability and triangulated soundbites.
There is no bold moral vision here, only the beige dullened glint of managerialism. One that punishes the poor while whispering reassurances to landlords and arms dealers. We saw it in the party’s complicity with Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza, where instead of standing for international law and human rights, the leadership chose to demonise peaceful protesters, smear solidarity as extremism, and greenlight weapons sales to a regime engaged in what many international lawyers consider genocide. As Netanyahu called in the favours for all the Israel Lobby funding the Labour Party has received over the years. Shekels for looking the other way and silencing the voices of dissent. You didn’t think all that money to the like of Streeting, Cooper, Starmer, Lammy etc and all those 'fact finding' freebies to Israel were for their sparkling personalities did you?
This is not strength. It is subservience: to power, to capital, to Israel and to the most reactionary elements of our media and political class. Labour has become a hostile environment for progressives. It gags CLPs, parachutes in candidates, suspends critics, and purges the left all while pretending to be a government built on unity. But unity built on fear is not unity at all. It is conformity, the kind that leaves us vulnerable not just to moral failure, but to political disaster.
What is perhaps most alarming is that Starmer’s team appear to believe they can get away with it. That voters will have no alternative. That the left has nowhere else to go.
But boy are they wrong. Already, conversations are taking place about a new political formation: a realignment of the left grounded in justice, internationalism, and ecological survival. And while those wheels turn, many are looking to the Greens, whose policies on social and economic justice increasingly reflect the values Labour has abandoned. The four MPs who were punished this week may well be the first to walk. But they will not be the last. Decent, principled MPs, councillors, and members who are hanging on out of habit, loyalty, or sheer inertia. Even they can see it now: Labour is no longer a safe space for progressives. It is a hostile environment, policed from the centre by people who see the left not as a vital part of the movement, but as an enemy to be crushed. And when they do leave, it won’t be a split. It will be a moral exodus.
The fallout from Keir Starmer’s decision to strip the whip from four principled MPs has not just ignited outrage. It has confirmed what many on the left have known for some time: the Labour Party no longer represents us. For years, progressives held their tongues. They hoped, perhaps naively, that Labour might one day honour its own values again: values of justice, equality and democracy. But no more. The left has moved on. The trade union movement is pulling away. The party’s base is fragmenting and the illusion that Starmer’s Labour is a vehicle for change has finally collapsed.
Across the left, there is uproar. The Fire Brigades Union, one of Labour’s most stalwart affiliates, condemned the decision as “outrageous and authoritarian”. That phrase matters. These are not casual critics, they are frontline workers, people who risk their lives for others, now risking their political capital to say: this is wrong.
Anti-poverty campaigners have added their voices, rightly furious that a party founded to defend working people is now disciplining MPs for doing exactly that.
Veteran MP Richard Burgon, one of the few remaining voices of principle within Parliament, called it out with clarity:
“It’s not a sin to stand up for the poor and disabled.”
(Sky News)
Diane Abbott, Ian Lavery, and others warned that the optics of this purge: authoritarian, top-down, morally tone-deaf were a gift to the hard right. As Abbott put it, it was a “terrible look” that risks driving voters “into the arms of Reform” a party whose policies would dismantle what little remains of our social safety net.
And they’re right.
The truth is this: if we want a political movement that speaks to the scale of the crisis we face - ecological breakdown, mass impoverishment, the collapse of social cohesion, it cannot come from a party whose leadership punishes those who act from principle. It cannot come from a party that internalises the logic of the powerful and treats the powerless as a problem to be managed.
It must come from somewhere else. We are at a moment of fracture. A crack has opened between the political class and the country it claims to represent. Into that crack must come a movement of solidarity, of care, of rebellion. Because if we do not build it, if we do not become it, then the future belongs not to us, but to those who profit from our silence.
And we cannot afford to be silent any longer.
A bit of shameless self-plugging here. This is www.TetleysTLDR.com blog. It's not monitised. Please feel feel to go and look at the previous ones on the website and if you like them, please feel free to share them.
