Keir Starmer: Empty shell resigns, soaked in genocide and authoritarianism

No one will miss Keir Starmer, who announced his resignation today, but it won’t save Labour, whose senior leadership all share his complicity in genocide and vile authoritarianism.

And so it’s over. Keir Starmer, the least charismatic empty shell of a human being to ever lead the UK in my lifetime has finally resigned, less than two years since he led the Labour Party to what was mistakenly described as a landslide victory in the General Election in July 2024.

Because of the distortions of the UK’s absurd “First Past the Post” voting system, the public’s exhaustion with the Tory government created the illusion that a huge defeat for the Tories was a huge success for Labour.

The figures, however, don’t lie. Despite Starmer’s Labour crowing incessantly about the disastrous tenure of Jeremy Corbyn, he secured more votes as Labour’s leader than anyone since Tony Blair in 1997 and 2001 — 12,877,918 in the 2017 General Election (40% of the vote, and an increase of nearly 10% of the vote share compared to 2015 under Ed Miliband), and 10,269,051 in 2019 (32.1% of the vote).

Both times, Labour under Corbyn “lost”, but more people supported his redistributive social justice message than the empty managerialism of Keir Starmer and his team, and the decline in Labour’s vote in 2019 was less to do with Corbyn than with the fact that the cynical opportunist Boris Johnson, with the support of the media, made the focus of the election all about his risible promise to “Get Brexit Done”, after three and a half years of paralysis since the suicidal EU referendum in June 2016.

In contrast, in July 2024, under Keir Starmer, Labour secured 9,708,716 votes, which translated into 411 seats, despite the fact that Starmer’s Labour secured just 33.7% of the vote. Labour’s “huge landslide” came about solely because the Tories’ vote collapsed to just 6,828,925 votes, a 20% drop from the 2019 election. In terms of voters, Starmer’s Labour was only able to secure a 1.6% increase in its vote share.

Labour’s relentless failures and crimes in government

Relative popularity aside, never has a political party with such a huge majority of seats in Parliament done less to persuade the public that they are fit to lead.

Under the incompetent economics of the Chancellor Rachel Reeves, aptly dubbed ‘Rachel from Accounts’, Starmer’s Labour announced that there was no money, and set about making savings by targeting the most vulnerable people in society, a sickening assault that immediately and accurately tarred them as both cruel and indifferent to the suffering of those most in need.

Mostly, however, Starmer’s tenure will be remembered for the sickeningly enthusiastic support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza that he espoused forcefully even before he became Prime Minister, support which, not uncoincidentally, is shared by almost all the members of his Cabinet.

In October 2023, just days after the October 7 attacks, and the start of Israel’s dementedly ferocious genocidal response, Starmer told Nick Ferrari of LBC that Israel not only had “the right to defend herself” — that use of “herself” and not “itself” being a key indicator of his fawning emotional subservience to Israel — but also that this “right” could include Israel imposing a siege on Gaza, and cutting off all power and water supplies.

As a human rights lawyer, he must have known that this was grossly illegal under international humanitarian law, but he didn’t care, because one of the main reasons — if not THE main reason — that he was anointed as Labour’s leader after the Party got rid of Jeremy Corbyn was because he was a fanatical supporter of Israel.

The irony — the biggest irony of all — is that, to secure a suitably pliant leader, Israel, and its servants threaded deeply throughout the entire machinery of the upper echelons of the Labour Party, chose a man so devoid of charm and charisma that all their long and devious work behind the scenes has been the most spectacular failure imaginable.

It’s almost the perfect metaphor for the terminal failure of Israel’s propaganda over the last 32 months. In the face of an ongoing and almost unspeakably depraved genocidal campaign of extermination, those defending it have been required to shed so much of their humanity that they’re nothing but empty vessels, fundamentally soulless, friendless and, behind the scenes, having to become ever more repressive just to maintain their illusions.

Starmer’s rise to power was, of course, intimately connected to the fake antisemitism scandal that influential figures in the Labour Party used to destroy Jeremy Corbyn, to purge the Party of as many left-wingers as possible, and to rebirth it as a an entity whose primary concern was to support Israel.

It has demonstrated this support incessantly for the last 32 months, pausing only, on occasion, when the winds have changed slightly, to issue “strongly-worded” criticisms of Israel’s actions with other briefly hand-wringing western countries, it has provided unprecedented military support, via spy planes operating from British military bases in Cyprus, it has refused to contemplate undertaking any serious measures to rein in or punish Israel, and it has persistently sought to portray internal domestic dissent unfavourably, while also amplifying fake narratives about increasing antisemitism in the UK, alongside a refusal to acknowledge a manifestly increasing epidemic of Islamophobia.

Starmer’s Labour, in government, has also shown itself to be a lunatic warmongering member of NATO in its ongoing sacrifice of Ukrainians, its vilification of Vladimir Putin as the most evil man who ever lived, and its hysteria about the need for massively increased defence spending.

It has also shown itself to be, with sickeningly misplaced pride, a slave to global corporate interests, seeking to sell off, or give away whatever is left of the UK that hasn’t already been hollowed out through four decades of privatization, perhaps most notably via its cosiness with the world’s most rapacious financial entity, BlackRock.

Starmer’s Labour is also enchanted by notions of surveillance and control, making clear its authoritarianism and its contempt for the majority of the British people, working with genuinely evil AI companies like Palantir in the hope of finding a way — through the imposition of digital ID, in particular — to subject the entire British population to a sweeping and all-encompassing system of surveillance and control, in which, it is easy to imagine, those deemed a threat to the state, in any way imaginable, can be monitored, harassed, and, if deemed necessary, arrested and imprisoned, or cut off from all services, including, crucially, all financial services.

If that sounds like an exaggeration, then I can only suggest that you haven’t been paying attention. Contempt for the public, and rampant authoritarianism define Starmer and his government because their entire project, since they began seeking to undermine Jeremy Corbyn and to get rid of him, has been authoritarian, paranoid and vindictive.

Just as Israel sees everyone as an enemy without realizing that this is because of its own actions over the last 78 years, Starmer’s Labour also sees almost everyone as a threat, and is unable to recognize that this is because it has, institutionally, devoted the last decade of its existence to wiping our perceived adversaries, little realizing that, in the process, they have genuinely lost a part of their humanity.

The final nail in the coffin: the persecution of Palestine Action

Nothing makes this clearer than the persecution of direct action activists opposing the existence on UK soil of arms factories owned by Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest arms company. The decision, by then-home secretary Yvette Cooper, to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organization last summer marked the point at which a Labour government became even more punitively authoritarian than its predecessors, the succession of Tory governments that, after Brexit, drove ever further to the far-right, with the fundamental freedoms on which a democratic society depends subverted by two shockingly far-right home secretaries, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman.

Starmer’s Labour has gone even further. Finding pliable judges to use legislation that should never have been approved by Parliament — including “serious property damage” as terrorism in the Terrorism Act 2000, and allowing judges to augment activists’ sentencing with a “terrorism connection” after their trials have concluded — Starmer’s government has taken a hatchet to proportionality under the law, gleefully imprisoning activists as terrorists, which will not only haunt them for the rest of their lives after they are eventually released from prison, but will also mean that, while serving their sentences, in maximum-security prisons, they will be treated as though they were murderers or convicted terrorists who wilfully took people’s lives for a political aim.

Another by-product of the proscription, which the vengeful, Israel-supporting Starmer Cabinet failed to foresee, was that citizens who expressed peaceful support for the Palestine Action activists, by gathering in public and holding up placards saying “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”, would be regarded as supporting a proscribed terrorist organization, and would be arrested with the possibility of being prosecuted and imprisoned in future.

Nearly 3,500 people — many elderly, and including pillars of the professional establishment — have been arrested since last summer, which makes the UK a laughing stock around the world, but, more significantly, means that the UK, under a Labour government, is seriously implementing and maintaining an authoritarianism that veers very close to some of the defining signifiers of dictatorships.

Campaigners at a mass protest in support of Palestine Action in Parliament Square on August 9, 2025, when 474 people were arrested. (Photo: Andy Worthington).

As the empty shell that is Keir Starmer prepares to move on, parts of the Party machinery are clearly hoping that parachuting Andy Burnham in to present a new, more positive face for the government will suddenly make them more popular.

This is clearly delusional for a Party that, to date, has excelled solely in making itself ever more unpopular almost every time its representatives open their mouths, and that is heading for unprecedented electoral oblivion in a long, slow suicide that won’t be stopped through spin alone.

The most obvious problem is that the rot neither began nor will end with Starmer.

A new head on the puppet at the top of a rotten edifice

Almost the whole of Starmer’s Cabinet is also complicit in his failings — from Yvette Cooper (now the foreign secretary) to Shabana Mahmoud (her authoritarian replacement as home secretary) to David Lammy, Rachel Reeves and dreary longtime greasy pole-climbers like Steve Reed, Peter Kyle, Pat McFadden, Liz Kendall, Lisa Nandy and Jonathan Reynolds — the list goes on an on.

All are fanatical supporters of Israel, all have received money from pro-Israeli individuals and organizations, all are members of the opaquely funded Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), and all are exemplars of the startling across-the-board incompetence, corporate corruption and deep human unpleasantness that typifies their entire malignant government project.

Unless Andy Burnham, if he does become leader, sweeps them all aside, the rot will merely continue, with Burnham — already tainted by his support for Israel and his refusal to condemns its actions as a genocide — as nothing more than a new head on the puppet at the top of a rotten edifice that has consigned itself to deserving electoral oblivion, but that still refuses to acknowledge why.

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