One long-time Tory donor whom I know – a prosperous landowner and master of his local hunt, no less – told me in London recently that if Reform came up with a serious economic policy, he’d probably switch. There are many like him: bred-in-the-bone Conservatives, in mortal fear of Labour’s punitive property taxes and desperate that it not win a second term. When the denizens of the gentlemen’s clubs of St James’s are prepared to hold their noses and throw their support behind Farage, the Tories are in even deeper trouble than their disastrous election result suggests.
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Meanwhile, disillusionment with Starmer is causing fragmentation on the left. It erupted with the recent resignation of a Labour backbencher, Zarah Sultana, to form a new socialist party with the former leader Jeremy Corbyn. The new party – “Your Party” – was launched last Thursday. Its manifesto demands “a mass redistribution of wealth and power”, promising “a new kind of political party … rooted in communities, trade unions and social movements”. One of its main causes will be “the genocide in Gaza”.
Corbyn hopes to splinter the left as Farage has shattered the right. He still commands a big following on the far left, mesmerised by his aura as a socialist prophet. The unapologetic antisemitism within the Labour Party under his leadership makes him popular among large sections of the Muslim community – until now a key Labour constituency. Opinion polls suggest a new party to Labour’s left could take 10 per cent off its vote (which, in Britain’s first-past-the-post system, would not come back as preferences).
A fortnight ago, after a backbench revolt by 47 MPs forced Starmer to abandon cuts to welfare entitlements, he withdrew the Labour whip from the ringleaders (which means exclusion from the parliamentary party). This brisk discipline against four political nobodies – “putting a bit of stick about” as the House of Cards villain Francis Urquhart would have said – raised few eyebrows.
But then, the following day, Starmer shocked the political world by withdrawing the whip from Diane Abbott. Abbott is a major figure in the Labour Party with a huge following among its activists: the first black woman elected to parliament (in 1987) and now the Mother of the House of Commons, former shadow home secretary, comrade-in-arms of Corbyn and beloved icon of the British left.
Starmer’s decision to sack her was as horrifying to the party faithful as was Boris Johnson’s decision in 2019 to withdraw the Tory whip from Winston Churchill – grandson and namesake of the great man. Abbott is hardly a Churchill, but she too has a powerful iconography: for years, she has been Labour’s highest-profile black politician and an important role model for women in a male-dominated party. (Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is also a black woman – the party’s second consecutive leader from an ethnic minority and the fourth woman. Labour is only ever led by white men.) It remains to be seen whether Abbott will join forces with Corbyn.
The next UK election is years away. But at the moment, despair among Conservatives and the left’s disillusionment with Starmer are making the prospect of any party holding a majority in the next parliament look increasingly unlikely. The only beneficiary will be Nigel Farage.
George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is a professor at the ANU’s National Security College.
