Starmer\u2019s rapid rise and (apparent) fall are symptomatic of a broader trend unfolding across the Davos regimes of the collective West.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Following the Labour Party\u2019s drubbing in last week\u2019s local elections, Prime Minister Keir Starmer needed to do something big and\/or bold to salvage his crumbling \u201cleadership\u201d (for lack of a better word) \u2014 something that might have conveyed to his disenchanted voters that their welfare actually mattered. He did neither.<\/p>\n
Instead, he brought Harriet Harman back into government as his \u201cadviser on women and girls\u201d. In the 1970s, Harman wrote a paper for the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) defending child pornography.\u00a0As The Canary notes, \u201cStarmer\u2019s first act of his reshuffle, after months of scandals over his knowing appointment of paedophiles\u2019 pals to senior positions\u201d, was \u201cto appoint a woman linked to a notorious paedophilia advocacy group.\u201d<\/p>\n
Starmer\u2019s next move was to bring back former Prime Minister Gordon Brown as the government\u2019s \u201cspecial envoy on global finance and cooperation\u201d, which, again, was an interesting choice. Besides failing quite abjectly as prime minister (2007-10), Brown is probably best known for two things:<\/p>\n
- \n
- Selling nearly 400 tonnes of UK gold reserves between 1999 and 2002\u00a0at a 20-year market low, in what famously came to be known as the \u201cBrown Bottom\u201c. By announcing the sale in advance, Brown, then chancellor of the exchequer, helped trigger a 10% fall in the market price of gold before a single ounce has been offloaded.<\/li>\n
- Helping to unleash the \u201canimal spirits\u201d of financial liberalisation during his tenure as chancellor (1997-2007), only for his tenure as prime minister to be marked by the 2008 crash \u2014 a crisis often described as a collapse of those same spirits. That painful history wasn\u2019t enough to prevent Starmer from pledging last year to \u201cbring back the animal spirits of the private sector\u201d by reducing the regulatory burden on businesses.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Starmer\u2019s third move was to (try to) deliver a skin-saving speech that would, if not inspire the nation, at least put paid to any internal stirrings within his government. But impassioned, inspirational speeches are not exactly Starmer\u2019s forte. As the veteran political analyst Andrew O\u2019Neil put it in the wake of yesterday\u2019s speech, \u201cthere\u2019s rarely been a situation so bad that it can\u2019t be made worse with a Keir Starmer speech\u201d:<\/p>\n
It certainly wasn\u2019t the Gettysburg Address. But nobody expects that from Keir Starmer. In places it was a familiar walk down memory lane, with the PM bigging up, yet again, his alleged working class credentials. As if we care.<\/p>\n
There was plenty of emoting with working people. Though much good it has done them so far. There was a lot of talk of the need for radical change. But no concrete examples of what that would entail. The three policies he announced were simply a rehash of existing policies.<\/p>\n
And there were a few outlandish claims, including the assertion that he\u2019d stabilised the economy \u2014 and that our economic \u2018fundamentals are sound.\u2019\u00a0 Yes he actually said that.<\/p>\n
Normally, when a sitting PM is thumped as badly by the voters as Starmer was on Thursday, they feel the need to say something to the nation.\u00a0 But Starmer wasn\u2019t speaking to us today. He was speaking to the Labour Party, especially its MPs who hold his fate in their hands.<\/p>\n
Hence the Labour crowd-pleasing sections on renationalising British Steel \u2014 it\u2019s already under state control \u2014\u00a0 taking Britain back to the \u2018heart of Europe \u2014 whatever that means \u2014 and more apprenticeships for young folks \u2014 already party policy. So far Starmer\u2019s efforts to save his own skin have been a textbook case of how NOT to save your own skin.<\/p>\n
I think I’m now at the stage of pitying him.<\/p>\n
The silence at the end \u2013 where it was obviously assumed there would be hearty applause \u2013 is so gloriously cringe-worthy. pic.twitter.com\/JVEIwrHeED<\/p>\n
\u2014 Olly (@oIIyjm) May 11, 2026<\/p>\n
At this point, the only thing that could possibly save Starmer\u2019s skin is the absence of a clear successor within the party\u2019s senior ranks. Labour\u2019s neo-Blairite health secretary, Wes Streeting, appears to have already mounted a leadership challenge. But Streeting is even more exposed than Starmer to the Labour Party\u2019s \u201cprince of darkness\u201d, Peter Mandelson, who is now under criminal investigation over his associations with Jeffrey Epstein.<\/p>\n
I called for time for serious discussion, no precipitous coup & fully democratic process if leadership election.Instead Wes Streeting has launched coup for fear of a democratic process & whilst candidates are blocked. Handing leadership to Mandelson\u2019s protege is gift to Reform<\/p>\n
\u2014 John McDonnell (@johnmcdonnellMP) May 12, 2026<\/p>\n
Streeting is also about as characterless and as devoid of integrity as Starmer and is even more craven to corporate interests (see below). Labour\u2019s soft-left members, like John McDonnell, will stop at nothing to prevent a Streeting premiership. If they fail in that task, Streeting\u2019s ascendance would represent the ultimate coup for the Blairite wing of the Labour Party that sabotaged Jeremy Corbyn\u2019s leadership with the bogus charge that Corbyn was anti-Semitic.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As of writing (Monday evening, GMT), the odds of a Streeting challenge appear to be rising.\u00a0 According to Bloomberg\u2019s Alex Wickham, the prime minister looks in increasing peril as several of Streeting\u2019s allies, including his PPS Joe Morris and constituency neighbour Jas Athwal, have called for Starmer to stand down:<\/p>\n
\u2014 Labour MPs and aides say developments could now happen quickly if momentum continues to build. A loyalist says it\u2019s now a matter of when not if.<\/p>\n
\u2014 A Labour official says they believe several Cabinet members are ready to tell the PM he has to set a timetable for his departure if it becomes clear he has lost the authority of the backbenches. They think if the number of public dissenters heads toward three figures that will happen.<\/p>\n
\u2014 However Cabinet aides insist we are not there yet and they don\u2019t think the whole Cabinet is yet ready to move. One notes that Streeting\u2019s allies appear to have gone after markets closed, after gilts dropped on Monday on the political instability. There will be a lot of attention on market open tomorrow.<\/p>\n
\u2014 Streeting is silent but there appears to be an orchestrated plot by his supporters to call for Starmer to go so he can move. There was disappointment among some of Streeting\u2019s allies today that he has not moved already but it now feels increasingly inevitable.<\/p>\n
Another possible successor is \u2014 or at least, was \u2014 Manchester City Mayor Andy Burnham, but he would need to become a member of parliament to be able to run as Labour leader. And the Labour Party leadership recently blocked him from being able to stand as a candidate for the by-election in Gorton and Denton. According to Wickham, \u201cBurnham\u2019s allies say he will soon be ready to show he has a route to parliament.\u201d<\/p>\n
Burnham, who was formerly a junior minister under Tony Blair, has already run for the party\u2019s leadership twice before, with underwhelming results. Like Streeting and most other high-ranking party members, he also has close ties to Labour Friends of Israel and other Zionist lobbies. Indeed, if Starmer were to fall, one thing we can be totally certain of is that there will be no meaningful change in UK relations with Israel.<\/p>\n
Your Reminder that Streeting, Burnham. Rayner and Milliband have all been prominent in Labour Friends of Israel and all received donations from the zionist lobby.<\/p>\n
\u2014 Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) May 11, 2026<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the Labour Party, like the Conservatives before it, is haemorrhaging support \u2014 both to Nigel Farage\u2019s Reform Party on the right and the Green Party on the left. This is not a surprise given the scale of Labour\u2019s betrayal to its core voters, beginning with the proposed scrapping of the winter fuel allowance in Starmer\u2019s first months of power, as well as the authoritarian excesses of Starmer\u2019s rule, writes Yannis Varoufakis:<\/p>\n
The crux of their debacle lay, first, in a distinctly dictatorial, authoritarian reflex. And second\u2014crucially\u2014in a seething contempt for those who lent them their votes, while simultaneously performing a grotesque pantomime of flattery toward those who never would, and never will, support them.<\/p>\n
Having exorcised from the Labour Party its most authentic voices\u2014people of unimpeachable integrity, such as Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, a purge that eluded even Tony Blair\u2019s repertoire\u2014Starmer embarked on a rampage:<\/p>\n
He slashed disability benefits; armed and fed intelligence to the Israeli government as it executed genocide in Gaza; channeled his own inner Farage, perhaps his inner Enoch Powell, to vilify migrants and treat refugees as vermin; gutted international aid to masquerade as a defender of defence spending; bulldozed wildlife and their habitats; unveiled a new lexicon of draconian anti-protest laws; left trans people suspended in legal limbo; clung with religious fervour to absurd, socially ruinous fiscal rules; allowed Rachel Reeves to squander \u00a3100 billion covering the Bank of England\u2019s outrageous and wholly unnecessary Quantitative Tightening losses\u2014a gift that keeps giving to the City\u2019s banks\u2014while imposing yet another round of austerity on government departments and public services.<\/p>\n
Once the great hope of the downtrodden, Starmer\u2019s Labour has become the villain \u2013 the genuinely nasty party. Once a human rights lawyer, he has single-handedly plunged Britain into a shoddy, incompetent authoritarianism.<\/p>\n
We have covered that creeping authoritarianism in some depth in our two-instalment post, \u201cJust How Dystopian Can Starmer\u2019s Britain Become?\u201d (here and here). Indeed, arguably Starmer\u2019s most important legacy is the way he has instrumentalised the law, particularly the anti-terrorism laws, to arrest and intimidate pro-Palestinian journalists, activists and protesters.<\/p>\n
With ruthless zeal, his government has criminalised public opposition to Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza while lending support to the furtherance of said genocide, including through the provision of more than 100 RAF spy flights over Gaza. In Starmer\u2019s Britain, merely expressing critical views about the political ideology of Zionism in a private conversation can get you arrested\u2026<\/p>\n
If you, in a private conversation on a train in the UK, express criticism of Zionism, British police will hunt you down to arrest you.#priorities <\/p>\n
\u2014 Trita Parsi (@tparsi) May 10, 2026<\/p>\n
Even before his election as prime minister, in July 2024, Starmer had shown his colours on the Israel\/Palestine question. Starmer had already played a key role in bringing down his former, pro-Palestine boss, Jeremy Corbyn. On October 11, 2023, Starmer, then leader of the opposition, told LBC that Israel had the right to collectively punish Gaza, including by cutting off water and power to the enclave, in response to Hamas\u2019 Oct 7 attacks.<\/p>\n
11th Oct\u201923<\/p>\n
Starmer on the siege of Gaza \ud83c\uddf5\ud83c\uddf8<\/p>\n
\u201cIsrael \ud83c\uddee\ud83c\uddf1 does have that right” to cut off water & power from Gaza \ud83c\uddf5\ud83c\uddf8<\/p>\n
He gave support to \ud83c\uddee\ud83c\uddf1 to bomb and starve children<\/p>\n
He partnered with Netanyahu \ud83c\uddee\ud83c\uddf1<\/p>\n
Never let anyone forget<\/p>\n
Starmer is not a \u2018decent man\u2019pic.twitter.com\/MHyEsuE5dw<\/p>\n
\u2014 Howard Beckett (@BeckettUnite) February 10, 2026<\/p>\n
After Corbyn\u2019s downfall, Starmer then began the task of purging the Labour Party of any remaining left-wing thinkers. It is a task he may have been assigned by the Trilateral Commission, a trans-Atlantic forum set up by US billionaire David Rockefeller in the 1970s to help steer Western democracies by prioritising corporate interests over those of labour.<\/p>\n
Starmer was the first ever sitting British member of parliament to join the Commission, according to Matt Kennard, which he did behind Corbyn\u2019s back.<\/p>\n
Starmer\u2019s job was to extinguish socialist left organising in Labour, to block any future prospect of a left fightback, to ensure there could be no socialist left leader in the near future & to create distance from the trade union movement- irrespective of the electoral\u2026<\/p>\n
\u2014 Laura Pidcock (@LauraPidcock) May 11, 2026<\/p>\n
Since Starmer\u2019s election in July 2024, the Blairite faction of the Labour Party has wielded outsized influence over government, through the appointment of Blair acolytes like Streeting and Peter Kyle, the science secretary, as well as through Blair\u2019s think tank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), as we warned in our our May 3, 2024 post, Tony Blair and His Associates Are Waiting in the Wings to Take Back Power in UK:<\/p>\n
One of the great contradictions of British political life over the past 15 years is Sir Tony Blair. The three-term prime minister is broadly reviled by the British public, even among many Labour Party voters, yet he continues to be feted and fawned over by the British establishment and media. Even after the \u201ccrushing verdict\u201d (in The Guardian\u2018s words) of the Chilcott Inquiry \u2014 that the Blair government\u2019s case for the Iraq war was \u201cdeficient\u201d \u2014 was finally made public in 2016, Blair remained a go-to person for the British and international media on all manner of topics, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
It is a very different story for the British public. In a recent\u00a0YouGov opinion poll, only 22% of respondents said Blair had had a positive effect on the Labour Party, with 38% saying his impact was broadly negative. Even among Labour Party voters, only 26% labelled his impact as positive compared to 38% who saw it as negative. According to another\u00a0YouGov survey, this time from 2022, a mere 14% approved of his knighthood and only 3% strongly so, while 63% disapproved, 41% strongly so.\u00a0Over a million\u00a0people signed a petition demanding the knighthood be revoked.<\/p>\n
In other words, the last thing most people in the UK want to see is Blair making a political comeback. Yet the former PM is closer than ever to regaining political power, albeit through a proxy Labour Party government led by the current party leader, Keir Starmer, who is hotly tipped to win the next general election\u2026 Starmer is favourite to win not because of a groundswell of support for his vision or candidacy \u2014 the UK public view the party under Starmer even less favourably than under Ed Miliband \u2014 but because support for the governing (if you can call it that) Conservative Party is in freefall\u2026<\/p>\n
As the <\/span>FT\u00a0<\/span>reported in 2023, TBI has in effect become a global consultancy to the UK government, giving advice on a whole host of issues. It has over $100 million and is currently active in 40 other countries, including the United States. Most, however, are in the global south\/majority, where TBI advises governments on DPI such as digital vaccine certificates, digital identity and central bank digital currency.<\/span><\/p>\n
Since coming to power, Starmer\u2019s government has prioritised the digital authoritarian solutions peddled by TBI, such as digital identity; the mass sharing of the UK\u2019s digital health data, which would hugely benefit TBI\u2019s main paymaster, Larry Ellison; and the nationwide deployment of facial recognition cameras, a project that was begun by the Conservatives but has been massively expanded by Starmer.<\/p>\n
Blair\u2019s latest grand proposal for the people of Britain is to scrap the state pension\u2019s triple lock, which will help further impoverish struggling pensioners\u2026<\/p>\n
Once again, Tony Blair is wrong and advocates to make ordinary people worse off.
Britain has one of the lowest effective state pension entitlements in the whole of Europe.<\/p>\nTony Blair’s thinktank urges scrapping of state pension triple-lock<\/p>\n
\u2014 Diane Abbott (@HackneyAbbott) May 1, 2026<\/p>\n
A Streeting government would pursue these with even greater vigour. As an FT expos\u00e9 revealed just yesterday, the Streeting-run NHS England has granted external staff from companies including Palantir \u201cunlimited access\u201d to identifiable patient data. This is in direct contradiction to NHS England\u2019s previous assurances that under Palantir\u2019s management of the NHS\u2019 federated data platform, all keys and data would stay under NHS control.<\/p>\n
FT Exclusive: NHS England has granted external staff from companies including Palantir \u201cunlimited access\u201d to identifiable patient data while working on a part of its flagship data platform. pic.twitter.com\/qR7JogFhxw<\/p>\n
\u2014 Financial Times (@FT) May 11, 2026<\/p>\n
It\u2019s still unclear whether Starmer will see out this leadership crisis, but one thing is for sure: he will hold on, tick-like, for as long as he can. If he falls, the UK will soon have its seventh government since the Brexit referendum 10 years ago. As The Times\u2019 Matthew Syed notes, the next leader, whoever he or she is, \u201cwill be subject to instant leadership speculation and the next, and the next, whether Labour, Reform or Tory. Britain is becoming ungovernable.\u201d<\/p>\n
As political instability rises, one can\u2019t help but wonder how it will affect the UK\u2019s economic stability at a time when the economic fallout from the war in the West Asia is beginning to be felt. With UK unemployment already close to COVID-era highs, productivity stagnating, stagflation looming, and 10-year gilts topping 5% in recent days and 30-year gilts just hitting a 28-year high, the warning signs are already flashing.<\/p>\n
Some may feel I\u2019m dwelling on this, but I am concerned for the health of the UK economy.
The yield on the 10-year gilt has climbed 12 basis points today (see the CNBC chart below), decoupling from both oil prices and yields in other advanced economies\u2014both of which are currently\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/38rAwIc0uX<\/p>\n\u2014 Mohamed A. El-Erian (@elerianm) May 5, 2026<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the hollowing out of the Labour Party has opened the door to much darker forces, as the late Labour grandee Tony Benn presciently warned in the 1980s:<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media \u2013 having tasted blood \u2013 would demand next that it expelled all its Socialist and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus British Capitalism, it is argued, will be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed off the National agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed\u2026 it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far-right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ultimately, what is happening in the UK \u2014 the rapid rise and fall of mediocre leaders, the degradation of living standards, the unquestioning support for Israel, even as it commits two genocides, the inability to find a new place in the emerging multipolar world, and the rapid roll out of digital surveillance and control systems \u2014 is symptomatic of a broader trend affecting the \u201cDavos Regime\u201d across the collective West, as Armchair Warrior noted in a tweet yesterday:<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve actually seen this for years now in the West, electoral cycle after electoral cycle. Party A takes a certain paraliberal policy course \u2013 let\u2019s call it the Universal Davos Policy \u2013 that heavily favors special interests and globalism, and which is wildly unpopular with citizens because it necessarily entails continued degradation of Western standards of living (via self-destructive economics from war and\/or green policy) and cultural cohesion (via mass migration and official woke nihilism). Party B then campaigns against this state of affairs, scores a massive win in a protest vote, and continues the Universal Davos Policy unchanged, sneering all the while at anyone who suggests they should actually fulfill the campaign promises that got them into power. Party A then takes advantage of voters\u2019 short memories to get back into power on another landslide protest vote, or in more fractured political systems Party C wins the protest vote\u2026 and they continue the Universal Davos Policy unchanged.<\/p>\n
Thus we have constant political churn in the West, with political blocs switching off essentially every election \u2013 and no policy turbulence at all because the entire political establishment is a wholly owned subsidiary of Davos and ignores voters to do their bidding on ALL substantive policy issues. Anti-Davos political forces are ruthlessly branded as extremists, coopted to promote the Universal Davos Policy should they assume power, or even criminalized and destroyed. Democracy itself is no object, as elections have begun being cancelled and openly rigged in the West when the wrong person could possibly win.<\/p>\n
This is as true of Europe, where the EU, which Starmer is desperate to re-join, has interfered in national elections in Romania and Hungary, as it is of Latin America, where it is the Trump administration that is doing most of the meddling.<\/p>\n
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