I‘m glad Keir Starmer’s speech turned off the radical left – it’s about time they left the Labour Party

Any Labour moderate aiming for electoral victory must work to purge the membership of its Stalinists, and the sooner the better

The important thing isn’t that Keir Starmer stole the show: it’s that his speech needed to be made in the first place.

The greatest challenge to any incoming Labour leader was always going to come from within. Boris Johnson’s Conservative leadership doesn’t exactly provide much competition for any opposition: all the leader of the opposition must do to win the argument is to stand and point at the ever-increasing list of government failures.

But the battle raging within Labour has to be settled before the party can go to the polls with even the tiniest chance of victory. While pundits so often focus on Brexit, Labour antisemitism and the upcoming Equalities and Human Rights Commission report, they miss one of the major contributors to the surge in support for the Tories: the online activity of the Labour membership.

No amount of good messaging, spin, or PR will dispel the doubts among those of us with Twitter accounts. Any balanced Labour statement coming from the leader’s office is up against hordes of abusive, Neo-Marxist-run online accounts, which victimise anyone who they see as speaking against the far left. They are intolerant, pushy, and prioritise issues that most people find perplexing. Most importantly, they are so short-sighted they don’t see that they are doing the Tories’ work for them.

The average person in the UK wants to know they can prosper and provide for their families, yet these online accounts berate anyone for having the “wrong” attitude on intervention in Syria. They are absorbed by nebulous debates about pronouns and whether mathematics is a tool of white supremacy. And they leave swing voters with a nagging question: are these people, this army of anonymous avatars screeching about Palestine, really to be trusted to establish a government? An adult, mature government? Starmer’s “under new management” tagline is winning, but Corbyn’s online acolytes continue to risk the success of that brand.

There is no comforting way to put it. Any Labour moderate aiming for electoral victory must work to purge the membership of its Stalinists, and the sooner the better.  Failing to do so risks the Labour leader continuing to struggle against the tide of student union, amateur politics – because whilst Labour press releases go public, so do the hateful posts disseminated by those with hammers and sickles in their Twitter bios.  

Perhaps the cleanest way to settle the matter is for the Labour leader to become so offensive to this faction of the left that its adherents rid themselves of their Labour membership, with no other intervention required. And if that was Starmer’s aim, I’d guess that his speech to Labour Party conference on Tuesday was about as successful as it could be. It didn’t simply distance himself from this faction of online accounts, it berated them. He spoke in terms they would find deeply offensive. Saturated with the language of the moderate left, using terms the online membership will likely find ugly, he spoke of patriotism, family and opportunity. If I were to create a bingo card of buzzwords that the online left find distasteful, I would easily have a full house.

Most strikingly, he took responsibility for Labour’s 2019 defeat. “When you lose an election in a democracy, you deserve to,” he said.  “You don’t look at the electorate and ask them: ‘what were you thinking?’ You look at yourself and ask: ‘what were we doing?’” Surely this was a nod to the now-clichéd cries of “well, sod off and join the Tories” that come from these hateful online accounts, and to Corbyn’s failure to take responsibility for his own defeat.  That won’t go unnoticed.

To add insult to injury, Starmer was introduced to the conference floor by Ruth Smeeth, a Jewish former Labour MP who now heads an organisation dedicated to promoting free speech. And if the last five years have taught us anything, it’s that what the blistering online Labour left hate the most are outspoken Jewish women who have no time for amateurs.

Starmer’s speech was a step in the right direction. But he may have killed two birds with one stone: he has set a mature tone that separates himself from the last five years of Labour failure, and has done so in a way that may rid him of this longer-term problem. Because the longer Labour is under new management, the more likely it is that he will defeat the problem within the party: those Labour members who should perhaps heed their own advice, and sod off to join the Tories.