Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Not a risk I'd be taking in regards to that ideology. The non-muslim world has no need for more muslims, only ex-muslims

[Josquius]

Not a risk I'd be taking in regards to that ideology. The non-muslim world has no need for more muslims, only ex-muslims

I disagree. I'd rather not let the Taleban make more people ex-Muslims.
I have ethical quibbles with murder in general. And theres the added problem that they're in this position due to Britain thus even ignoring ethics completely it's bad for Britain's reputation to let them just die, which has practical impacts.

[garbon]

While I vaguely understand Labour on Diane Abbott, I think Starmer is fucking up. I don't see how this frequent focus on a senior black MP helps them with...well anyone.

[Neil]

While I vaguely understand Labour on Diane Abbott, I think Starmer is fucking up. I don't see how this frequent focus on a senior black MP helps them with...well anyone.

It probably helps them with whites.  'It's only racism when it's against me' is the kind of race-hustler talk that politicians are pretty gunshy about in the face of the electorate's recent trends. 

[garbon]

While I vaguely understand Labour on Diane Abbott, I think Starmer is fucking up. I don't see how this frequent focus on a senior black MP helps them with...well anyone.

It probably helps them with whites.  'It's only racism when it's against me' is the kind of race-hustler talk that politicians are pretty gunshy about in the face of the electorate's recent trends. 

I think it is their fear of being splashed on by anything that could look like Corbynite antisemitism.

I am not sure the "white" voter is otherwise all that bothered.

[Sheilbh]

I don't know about the "white voter" angle - I think Diane Abbott gets a huge amount of racist abuse, but I think that is from a minority. I think she is (incredibly given her politics) approaching national treasure status. They may criticise what she says on things, which is understandable as she is on the Bennite hard-left, but even conservatives and Reform types seem really baffled and a bit outraged at the way she's treated.

I know that from Starmer tried to force her out as a candidate before the last election she got messages of support from very centrist Labour MPs and also from very right-wing Tory MPs. I think it definitely helps that she's also Mother of the House. I feel like she's viewed a bit like Tony Benn where her personal popularity as an elder stateswoman means only the cranky actually remind people of some of her slightly dodgy views on things

But with the whole removing the whip thing - again everyone from left to right who I read is just really unable to work out what Starmer thinks he's achieving politically. He is so bad at this. I saw one left wing union official wondering if Starmer is actually even less suited to be PM than Sunak or even Johnson - and I'm not totally sure I disagree which is not where I thought we'd be a year ago.

[garbon]

I don't know about the "white voter" angle - I think Diane Abbott gets a huge amount of racist abuse, but I think that is from a minority. I think she is (incredibly given her politics) approaching national treasure status. They may criticise what she says on things, which is understandable as she is on the Bennite hard-left, but even conservatives and Reform types seem really baffled and a bit outraged at the way she's treated.

I know that from Starmer tried to force her out as a candidate before the last election she got messages of support from very centrist Labour MPs and also from very right-wing Tory MPs. I think it definitely helps that she's also Mother of the House. I feel like she's viewed a bit like Tony Benn where her personal popularity as an elder stateswoman means only the cranky actually remind people of some of her slightly dodgy views on things

But with the whole removing the whip thing - again everyone from left to right who I read is just really unable to work out what Starmer thinks he's achieving politically. He is so bad at this. I saw one left wing union official wondering if Starmer is actually even less suited to be PM than Sunak or even Johnson - and I'm not totally sure I disagree which is not where I thought we'd be a year ago.

Yeah agreed all around. I've not been a big fan of her politics but see all of this as noted as yet another example of how Starmer is unfit for his position.

[Sheilbh]

I also wonder if there's sort of a muscle memory/have a hammer see nails side to it. Arguably the most effective period of his leadership was expelling Corbyn and decisively moving Labour against the left and that is what his team keep repeating at every turn. It's slightly like Trump seeing tariffs as the answer to every policy question. Every political challenge and Starmer withdraws the whip - I think we're up to maybe 15-20 MPs now which is wild after one year and I can't really work out what the political strategy for it is or what it's trying to achieve. Unless it literally is to try and force the remaining Labour left into a new party.

Edit: Also I think it matters that Starmer was an incredibly lucky leader of the opposition (slightly reminiscent of how Theresa May became leader and PM because all of her opponents imploded before her). He was supposed to be the transitional, Neil Kinnock figure for the right of the party. Someone from the soft left who could help regain control of the party and fight the hard left before losing the election and, after 18-9 years in opposition the party faithful would be so desperate for power they'd embrace someone like Streeting. Instead the Tories blew themselves up repeatedly and Starmer accidentally became PM.

[HVC]

I saw one left wing union official wondering if Starmer is actually even less suited to be PM than Sunak or even Johnson - and I'm not totally sure I disagree which is not where I thought we'd be a year ago.

Problem is I don't think the left, anywhere, has well suited candidates. They got so good at culling dissent that that they annihilated their pool of new, younger, candidates. Canada got lucky, for example. Trump helped, inadvertently, to crush our maple MAGA candidate. Whether Carney makes a good PM in the long run is left to see, but he was better then the alternative on either side.

[Sheilbh]

So mentioned some fairly striking polls recently. Obvious caveats need to be said - we're one year into this parliament, the government have a massive majority (which, at some point, they may discover means they can do things ), plus the Sultana press release was clearly premature as her and Corbyn have not formed a party yet (which will probably come out of Corbyn's "Peace and Justice Project"). Lots can and will happen, you can't just take one poll and widely extrapolate and you certainly can't use it to predict seats - having cleared my throat, I'll now do all of that

However this poll did the rounds last week and is pretty striking:


One very small thing I'd note is that in the 2024 election broadly left-ish candidates (Labour, Greens, Gaza Independents and, generously, the SNP and Lib Dems) won about 60% of the vote. In this poll unambiguously right-wing parties are on over 50%. The volatility - and also increasing urgency of people wanting change - is pretty incredible.

But polling like this is catastrophic for Labour - and I'm fairly sure that the Corbyn Party would do an electoral pact with the Gaza Independents (who came close to winning several more seats at the last election) and could do one with the Greens, which would cause absolute carnage for Labour. I think the single biggest goal right now for the Tories is simply to survive - and we might be heading in a similar direction with Labour.

Now you can't and shouldn't just plug this in to a uniform swing calculator to see what seats fall. But if you did () it's pretty extraordinary. Labour would lose lots of seats in the West Midland cities. There'd be three way marginals in the North-West (Reform-Labour-Corbyn). And whole swathes of London including East London. Hackney, Poplar, Bethnal Green, Bow. I think in terms of emotional resonance and symbolism, losing the East End would have an even bigger impact than losing Scotland (in 2015) or the Red Wall (2017-19).

But even that would be cumulative. Currently Labour are third (!) in the polls for next year's Senedd election with Reform and Plaid basically neck and neck for first. That would be the first time Labour haven't held the Welsh government in 27 years. Labour are also polling third in Scotland behind the SNP and Reform. So the next election could plausibly see Labour lose in their heartlands in Wales and Scotland (to Reform, Plaid and SNP), the Red Wall seats again (to Reform), the post-industrial towns and cities with large Muslim communities (to Reform and Corbyn), as well as London and the university towns (to the Greens and Corbyn). I'm not really sure what's left.

One slightly interesting thought I saw from someone is that in part this may just be the end of "labourism" as a force in Western politics. The age of the 20th century left whose power is derived from organised labour and the organised working class would be finally over. Instead you could see in a Corbyn Party the eventual triumph of the New Left and a case for Labour's more centre/liberal New Labour wing possibly cooperating with the Lib Dems to consolidate the centre and fight Reform (can't help but think of Hollande and what followed looking at these polls).

Which is the thing I find really interesting that arguably the big trend in British politics is its Europeanisation. For example a "generic candidate" poll for the French presidentials has RN on 35%, the centre right on 10%, Macron's Ensemble on 15-20% and both the PS and NFP (assuming they ran separately) on about 15%....Snap. Or Austria: FPO on around 30-35%, the centre right on 20-25%, centre left on 20%, liberals on 10-15% and Greens on 10%. Finally becoming something like the meme:


Separately as discussed I just don't think Starmer is up to it - I think he fundamentally has no sense of politics (I'm not sure Reeves or many of the people around him do either) and I'm not sure it's fixable.

[Josquius]

The Abbot ban was so ridiculous.
She has said lots of stupid things in the past. She has some dodgy views.
But what it was over here was pretty factual. There is a difference between visible minorities and invisible minorities.
She could maybe have said she spoke a bit clumsily, but the core point is right .

[Valmy]

Is Starmer aware he was elected to save Britain, not plunge it into darkness?

[HVC]

Is dismissing a whip a common thing that stamer just getting extra flack for (as is the want of liberals to eat their own)? Sheilbh mentioned the number, maybe he just has shitty ones lol. Which can be another problem if he's the one picking them. I know nothing about Abbott, but the tidbits shared here isn't really the best defence of her. Mainly she sucks but he shouldn't have done it

[Sheilbh]

So one thing that also makes me think about Starmer and Hollande is that by all accounts Starmer genuinely is profoundly normal. He doesn't come across that way and even the things he is genuinely deeply invested in don't come across particularly authentically. But he really is a North London middle aged dad who plays 5 a side football and is a huge Arsenal fan. By all accounts he also isn't interested in talking about politics (apparently he is very interested in people's families and really talks about that), from people at the top of government by all accounts he is "really not political" and he kind of holds politics in contempt a bit - he doesn't like the briefings or the spin or any of that stuff. And in that he sounds like an incredibly normal middle aged professional. But I can't help but feel not being interested in politics and holding it in contempt might be okay if his career path had gone as expected and he became Attorney General in an Ed Miliband cabinet, but is possibly a big problem in a party leader and PM.

Two slight examples of what I mean by Starmer just not being good at politics which have stuck in my head. The first is that in the last year he has only actually voted on government legislation 8 times. Now obviously he's got a massive majority but I think it is helpful for the PM to vote (and Downing Street is literally a 2 minute walk to Parliament). But more importantly because votes in Westminster are done by literally going through a yes lobby and a no lobby, it's a really important way for leaders (or hopefuls) to press the flesh with their grassroots MPs - and, crucially, for those MPs to get a couple of minutes possibly with the leader or senior cabinet and flag things. Relatedly one of the MPs Starmer withdrew the whip from today said it was a surprise and also noted that Starmer hasn't spoken to him once since the election. Again there's a bit of MPs' precious egos here - but also politics is a people profession.

But also just thinking about the difference with Blair because in Blair's first year, he also passed some welfare cuts that were very unpopular with Labour backbenchers because of self-imposed fiscal constraints. There was a big (but nowhere near as big) rebellion over it. What's really striking though is Blair's approach - first he had an argument that was tied to his wider agenda for why it was right to make these cuts (basically welfare to work) as opposed to just saying "we need to make the sums add up or the economy will collapse". But also throughout Blair's time in office he actually made time to host backbench MPs who were opposed to various policies and in part it was to try and persuade them - but I think for Blair it was also about testing arguments and hammering out which ones worked best. It was always about trying to build the case that he could make to MPs but also to the country - and I just think there's no sense from Starmer that he needs to do that. There's no rolling the pitch for policies, there's no argument, there's no engagement with rebels or doubters. At best it's sort of saying what policies are without arguing for them and then withdrawing the whip from "serial" rebels (now up to 15 after 1 year).

[Sheilbh]

Is dismissing a whip a common thing that stamer just getting extra flack for (as is the want of liberals to eat their own)? Sheilbh mentioned the number, maybe he just has shitty ones lol. Which can be another problem if he's the one picking them. I know nothing about Abbott, but the tidbits shared here isn't really the best defence of her. Mainly she sucks but he shouldn't have done it

So it's worth slightly distinguishing here. Starmer took the whip from four MPs for being "serial" rebels and from Diane Abbott for comments on racism and anti-semitism (which I don't think are actually wrong).

It's very rare to do it just for MPs who rebel. It's not normally a tool for party management - there's been an argument among historians over when was the last time this sort of thing happened. The normal reason the whip is withdrawn is scandal or something like a statement like Abbott's. The whips have different degrees of control but broadly speaking the parties are fairly broad tents. There is a Labour Left and Right and a Tory Left and Right. There was an article recently about trying to rate the ideology of MPs and they used several methods - applying the one used in the US to look at Congressional records produced some wild results because of this. For example, Bernie Grant who was a very radical leftist (like Corbyn and Abbott) was apparently the most right-wing MP because of the number of times he rebelled against the Labour whip so found himself voting with the Tories - similarly a furiously right wing Tory MP was identified as the most left-wing

So from 1983 until 2024 - it happened three times. Twice under Johnson and once (rather shambolically as you might expect) under Truss - but all on votes that the government considered confidence votes (again somewhat dubiously in one case under Johnson and farcically wrong under Truss).

Aside from that I think there's an argument among Labour historians of the last time it's been withdrawn in this way in the Labour Party at least in government and it seems to have been either in the 60s under Harold Wilson (not sure over what issue) or definitely in the late 40s under Attlee when the whip was withdrawn from MPs who voted against joining NATO. A few of them were subsequently expelled from the party and set up an "independent group" (I suspect modeled on the Independent Labour Party, pre-war) with another former Labour MP who'd been expelled for his vocal support for the Soviets in the Winter War. They were largely very sympathetic to the Soviets and Stalin (although one, who subsequently re-joined the Labour Party and became an MP again broke with them in 1950 as he was pro-Tito and subsequently became a fierce admirer of Harold Wilson and Nikita Khrushchev ).

I thought this was interesting from a former Labour Whip in Blair's first term and now academic:

Starmer's suspension of 'rebel' MPs risks alienating his party in a way he can't afford
Published: July 17, 2025 2.48pm BST
Author
    Tony McNulty
    Lecturer/Teaching Fellow, British Politics and Public Policy, Queen Mary University of London

Disclosure statement
Tony McNulty is a member of the Labour Party.

Political parties with commanding parliamentary majorities are often tempted by the promise of assertive leadership and decisive action. Yet, as the events of the last few weeks reveal, a large majority is no substitute for the subtler arts of political management, party cohesion and narrative discipline.

Missteps like suspending four MPs and sacking three trade envoys are not isolated misjudgements but symptomatic of deeper issues within Labour's approach to internal governance. These are issues that need to be addressed if this government is to make the difference needed.

At the centre of the week's controversies sits the leader's decision to discipline members of his own parliamentary party. On the surface, such acts might be interpreted as "factional authoritarianism" – a heavy-handed display to quell rebellion. But it is more probably rooted in clumsy party management and weakness.

This is especially true given Labour's comfortable majority, which is currently around 160. It is reasonable to expect a majority party to exude a certain confidence and to practise tolerance for internal debate. It knows, after all, that a handful of dissenters pose no existential threat to the government's legislative agenda. Instead, the government appears brittle, hyper-sensitive to criticism, and more interested in enforcing unity than fostering meaningful dialogue.

The consequences are not trivial. Rather than projecting an image of strength and competence, the government gives the impression of insecurity and control for its own sake. The sacking of trade envoys – posts which previously were barely known or understood by the public – appears to many as petty and vindictive. The broader public takeaway is not about Labour's policy on trade or any other issue, but about its willingness to punish internal dissent.

Lost narrative and missed opportunities

A parallel failure lies in the government's continuing inability to control or shape the public narrative. Just days before the prime minister decided to suspend his rebels, the government announced £500m for a "better futures fund" to support vulnerable children and families. This could have been a bold declaration of intent for the new government. It could have been a huge win. Yet, it was disconnected from any overarching narrative and proved yet another missed opportunity to champion a new direction for the party and the country.

Instead, media and public attention shifted immediately to the suspensions and sackings, drowning out any potential positive coverage of the government's messaging. The chancellor's Mansion House speech – an annual opportunity to set the agenda – fell similarly flat. Rachel Reeves received only insipid headlines before being entirely overshadowed.

The government's inability to sequence and frame its positive announcements, and to anticipate how punitive actions would dominate the news cycle, requires urgent attention. It is not enough to make policy announcements; there must be a coherent story that MPs and the public alike can follow.

Rebellion, dissent and party discipline

The rebellion that sparked this drama was not led by perennial troublemakers, but a group of select committee chairs who are experienced, respected parliamentarians and not easily dismissed as the "usual subjects." When the government gutted its own benefits bill to quell the backlash, a majority of rebels indeed relented. Only Rachel Maskell (one of the four MPs now suspended) and 46 others persisted in voting against the bill at third reading.

Was this really worthy of suspension, especially so early in a new parliamentary session? The government's justification rests on the need for discipline – that rebels should "play ball" after exacting concessions. But this only works when both government and rebels understand and respect the same rules.

The claim is that the four rebels and three MPs who lost envoy status are persistent rebels, but this is an overreaction. In either case, it is clear the backbenchers felt ignored and undervalued, and that the government failed to take their concerns seriously in the first place.

There is a sense that Labour's leadership is more interested in enforcing conformity than in building consensus. A true show of strength would be to sit down and discuss with colleagues how differing views can be accommodated, and to have some confidence in your argument and build a narrative around it.

Several warnings about internal unrest were ignored. The Whips Office flagged issues around poverty, pensions, and benefit reform, but these concerns were sidelined by Number 10. Ministers called for a broader anti-poverty strategy but again found themselves ignored. Select committee chairs, who tried for months to initiate constructive dialogue, were only heard in the final days before the bill's debate.

External threats

Labour's majority, while impressive, is based on fragile foundations. It won with only a 34% share of the vote. Many of the newly elected MPs are inexperienced and hold wafer thin majorities. A 5% swing against Labour would see more than 100 MPs lose their seats. External threats – an ascendant Reform UK, a possible Corbynista party, and the consolidation of the Liberal Democrats and Greens – compound the sense of fragility.

In this context, disciplining a handful of MPs as some sort of a show of strength to keep putative rebels in line, is not going to work. The government cannot afford to alienate its own MPs.

Labour's early weeks in government provide a cautionary tale in the risks of prioritising discipline over dialogue, and of losing sight of the narrative that should bind the party and its supporters together. Most Labour MPs want the government to succeed, but early heavy-handedness breeds resentment and undermines unity just when it is most needed.

True political strength lies not in the ability to punish dissent, but in the confidence to accommodate it – building a compelling story that inspires loyalty rather than demands it.

If the government wants its MPs to sing from the same song sheet, it must first establish the melody. The significant achievements of this government – £40 billion more on public services, international trade deals, infrastructure investment, renters' and workers' rights, energy initiatives, advances in the living wage, and free school meals – can only resonate if they are woven into a story that MPs and the public can share.

The lesson is clear: discipline without narrative and command without consensus are recipes for internal discord and political decline.

Edit: Just looked into more details of the 1940s fellow travelers who were expelled - and it's incredibly on brand. Most of them fiercely clever, terribly well (privately) educated, generally esteemed barristers and KCs, very committed multi-lingual internationalists involved in all sorts of worthy causes in the interwar years - and often took a trip to the Soviet Union and believed everything Exactly the type of background you'd probably guess for fellow traveling Labour MP.