John McDonnell just called for leadership challenge against Keir Starmer

The latest YouGov poll has Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party eight points ahead of the Labour Party less than a year after Keir Starmer entered government. In a piece for the Guardian, former shadow chancellor John McDonnell has called for a progressive leadership challenge against the prime minister. He argues Starmer is trashing Labour’s legacy by more than at any point since the Iraq war.

Starmer is failing says John McDonnell (and everyone else in the country)

It’s important to remember that opposition to the neoliberal status quo and its latest form in Starmerism can come from within Labour and from without.

Whether it’s progressives within Labour, the Greens, a new party, or a coalition of the lot against Reform. In France, it was such a coalition that succeeded in defeating Marine Le Pen’s far right party (which was predicted to win) in last year’s election. Anything else but a dedication to policies over banners is closer to a party-style jingoism than rational politics.

That said, John McDonnell is on point with his criticism of Starmer. Whether it’s the two child benefit cap, looming cuts to disabled people’s support, Labour’s neoliberal fiscal rule, his rampant lies, or selling arms to colonial Israel, Starmer has steered Labour well away from its anti-establishment roots in the trade union movement.

Can progressives challenge Starmer?

But a leadership challenge to Starmer, as John McDonnell is calling for, will prove more challenging after he changed Labour’s internal electoral rules.

It could have been worse. At the 2021 September Labour conference, Starmer tried to outright overrule the one member one vote system for electing the party’s leader. The system was introduced in 2014 and led to the rise of Jeremy Corbyn. This was ironic because the Labour establishment thought it would produce right-wing candidates.

Starmer then tried to replace it with the electoral college system. This reduces the say of members to just one-third of the vote. At the time, Labour MP Zarah Sultana called it an “elitist… stitch up”.

The one member one vote system remains. But, while members all get one vote, a percentage of MPs must first nominate an alternative leadership candidate to challenge the prime minister. And Starmer was successful in doubling that from 10% of MPs to 20% in 2021.

And unfortunately, many Labour MPs are nodding dogs taking a ride on the parliamentary gravy train. They take part in a Westminster group think that doesn’t want to rock the boat, merely issue a tweak here and there. High salaries and symbolic status consolidates their position as yes men to a neoliberal leadership.

A brighter horizon?

The Corbyn years may well have been successful had the leadership not capitulated to the likes of Starmer over Brexit (who was shadow Brexit secretary). This ensured Labour lost a ton of key battleground seats who felt betrayed over the proposition of a second referendum. It turned the 2019 election itself into largely a re-run of the referendum but with the added issue of the fact that most Labour seats voted Brexit. Meanwhile, in 2017, Corbyn made more Labour gains than at any point since 1945.

The appetite for change is real and a broad coalition of anti-Reform progressives in and outside of Labour could be the winning ticket. Alternatively, the hints at a Corbyn-led new party are also appearing more and more.

Regardless, something is needed as John McDonnell recognises. Otherwise Farage may take us even further backwards.

Featured image via the Canary