Keir Starmer’s anti-Corbyn hate campaign comes at a cost

If Jeremy Corbyn cannot stand as a Labour MP, the party is doomed

This particular Tory government came into power when I was in my second year of university. They allied themselves with the Liberal Democrats who, in turn, abandoned everything that made people vote for them in the first place in order to facilitate the goals of their supposed ideological opponents.

For me, it was a pretty stark realisation that there are two types of politics: the type where you try to carve out a version of the world that you genuinely believe in, and the type where the only goal is to win at any cost.

In the intervening years, we seem to have pretty much abandoned the idea that there was ever a category A. People have always treated their favoured political party like a sports team, but this rhetoric has ramped up so much in recent years that people seem to have forgotten that there are periods between elections where their chosen party has to actually, you know, do stuff.

The Tories’ real victory over the past 10 years has been to force Labour into a corner where it has to purge anything that differentiates itself from its opponent in order to win elections. The Conservative Party has, in essence, effectively cloned itself – ensuring a future where even when it doesn’t win, it still wins. It’s clever, in a “my favourite comic book character is the Joker” sort of way. It would be impressive, if it wasn’t so damaging for the country.

You can see this in Keir Starmer’s recent comments that he “[doesn’t] see the circumstances in which [Jeremy Corbyn] will stand at the next election as a Labour MP”. It’s another shot across the bow in the war between the current Labour leadership and the ideological foundations of the Labour Party.

Corbyn, like him or not, has represented Islington North since 1983. His standing in that constituency isn’t just a home run guaranteed win; it’s the acknowledgement of a deep political trust between party and people that has stood for nearly four decades. Starmer is determined to lose that trust, as he has with a huge swathe of current left-wing voters (and future voters who eventually have to deal with the fallout once this current politics of grievance and hate has run its course) in order to… what, exactly?

Starmer’s total abandonment of Corbyn in 2020 made sense at the time, even if it was spineless and ideologically inconsistent. You make a clean break from the previous leadership because they lost, and you don’t want to lose. You have to score those points; this is a game, after all.

But there comes a certain point where it becomes so clearly excessive, and feels personal. There’s a real hatred for Corbyn, that extends to alienating the people who have voted for him – some for generations – to prove a point that nobody except him seems interested in making.

With Corbyn, I always feel as though I must have missed something. Like the backlash against him must be somehow justified, as vicious and sustained as it is? None of the actual accusations against him seem to hold much water, no matter how much David Baddiel keeps repeating them, so there must be something else, right? Did he get caught selling organs on the black market? Did he propose legislation to ban cat gifs on the internet? Did he implement policies that led to the deaths of 200,000 people during a public health crisis? Sorry, that last one was the current government.

Hey, maybe he should have just killed a bunch of puppies instead of suggesting we give people free broadband. Then he wouldn’t be a public hate figure; instead he might be in the final three on I’m A Celebrity.

Right wingers have this phrase they love to use – “virtue signalling”. In theory, it refers to when a person is excessively vocal about their good moral standing on a political issue, often at the expense of substantive action (though the right tends to use it whenever a person does anything good at all, because they can’t conceive of a world where somebody would do something nice without some ulterior motive).

Starmer seems to be doing the opposite – I guess you’d call it “vice signalling”, or maybe “jerk signalling” – where a lot of what he does just seems designed to indicate to voters that they don’t have to worry: he’s definitely going to give them more of the same Tory betrayal once he gets into power.

It’s not the worst strategy; we’re country of masochists. We call good, well-meaning politicians “naïve”, and duplicitous, morally inconsistent politicians “shrewd”. We don’t look at the last four prime ministers and say to ourselves “what this country really wants is somebody with integrity, and the people’s best interests at heart.”

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In the game of politics, it’s a decent play. But only in a type of politics where winning matters more than anything else. By continuing to rail against Corbyn – against people who elected him leader in a landslide, who have been under his stewardship for 39 years in Islington North, or people who find they actually agree with him when they look at his policies removed from the hate campaign directed at the man himself – Starmer further entrenches himself as somebody whose only goal is to win, no matter the cost.

The issue is, you and I are the cost. The country is the cost. The continued backsliding of the economy, our wellbeing and our international standing is the cost.

Starmer can pretend to buy into this country’s spiteful right-wing fantasies and beat the anti-Corbyn drum all day long, and it’ll probably do him some good in the short term.

But when Corbyn is proven right over and over again – as we slide into recession to fuel the whims of billionaires, and nurses are told to accept real-terms pay cuts by politicians who used our money to heat their horse stables – how long until the public wakes up to the fact that their anger has been completely misplaced this whole time?