14.00, and this is what we know.
Starmer is not going. I believe him.
Burnham has no idea what to do, and wants 100 days to work it out. I believe him: he does not know what to do.
The Cabinet are showing no sign of moving. Convictions and decisions are beyond them.
The neoliberal circus is delighted with Burnham's choice of advisors: nothing is going to change. He has made that clear.
Dithering indifference, incompetence and prevarication is the order of the day.
True New Labour, then. Everyone, only worrying ability themselves and their CV, too worried to do anything.
Without exception they suffer internalised neoliberalism. See yesterday's video.
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Oh well in that case we may as well all clear off and throw the towel in. Alternatively we could look to the admittedly few chinks of hope he has given, condemning trickle down and austerity in his speeches and his not bad record as mayor of Manchester and try to nudge him to be a bit more progressive yet. In my nearly 70 years on this planet two things I have learned is that political change is never fast enough and us lefties in general are never happy.
One of the BTL comments in the Grauniad said ” Labour is a broad church where everyone hates each other, Reform/store/servative is a narrow church who hate everyone else.
There is something not right about all this. Why were the exit polls so out? I think they should be banned henceforth.
We’ve gone from febrile to a ‘vacuum’ in a matter of hours.
The needs/desires of the voters and the stasis created by the political cartel we have are like two of the same poles of a magnet trying to be forced together – they just repel each other and there is therefore no ‘anschluss’ a joining between one and the other and there can be no real democracy as a result – two worlds apart, almost nothing in common.
There is nothing in this for me at all. I’m simply repelled by it all.
I’ve looked hard for evidence of significant differences between Starmer snd Burnham.
It appears Labour will once again speak publicly with a Northern accent when it calls for and promises significant change.
Apart from that, I think Theresa May’s mantra sums it up…
“Nothing has changed”.
I agree.
Burnham seems to be something of a political chameleon.
Starmer seems very confident about staying in his role – why is that? The game has long been up for him – are his handlers sure they can steer him through a leadership challenge? On the face of it, he is deeply unpopular with the public and members of his own party and yet, he pops up on TV with not a hint of worry about being challenged? Why is that?
He is like a very bad football manager, convinced draws and defeats are good enough to carry on.
But there is no chair to withdraw their previously declared vote of confidence
I checked out this “Westminster village/Downing St bunker” article
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/19/keir-starmer-pressure-andy-burnham-wes-streeting-allies-not-fight-leadership-challenge
for references to the electorate of a Labour leadership contest, and found only one mention of the word “membership”.
The authors and those they are talking to, seem to have forgotten several hundred thousand members of the party and affiliate organisations who will vote for the next Labour leader. They have no insight beyond Westminster power plays.
That’s what happens when you stop paying attention to your members, expel CLP officers, suspend branches and impose candidates. Then you start believing your centrally imposed candidate is popular – apparently, Starmer loyalist MPs will offer Darren Jones to the membership, if they can’t keep Starmer.
Who could have ever imagined that what Starmer did to his predecessor, might finally be done to him?
Meanwhile, in the real world, climate collapse, war, and war crimes, including genocide, poverty, famine, disease – these horrors continue, and workable solutions abound, looking for people of courage, integrity and ability, to implement them at a national and international level.
There is a window of opportunity for the politics of care and the economy of hope – if the gyrating headless chickens at Westminster are prepared to listen, and we are prepared to push.
The Labour Party long ago forgot accountability to its memebership. Jeremy revived it. But now? They just don’t count. Which is why they should move on.
The same advisors behind Starmer are now behind Burnham, just more concealed. This is all just a sleight of hand performance reset. Nothing will change. Burnham is a centrist who’s said some Left wing things in the past. He hasn’t done them though. I have zero faith that anything good will come of this.
I am inclined to agree with you. The single transferable party will remain in power.
If he remains in office, Starmer will continue to favour Israeli policies to the detriment of British interests. I do not trust him.
Starmer advocated left-wing policies in order to be elected Labour Party leader. Then he adopted right-wing policies. He partnered with Morgan McSweeney and received significant sums of money from Israeli sources. The (alleged) story appears in Paul Holden’s book: The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy.
Owen Jones: “A meticulous account of the destructive project that brought us the shambolic Starmer government. ions.”
Peter Oborne: “Elucidates Starmer’s careen from the honourable left to the racist right.”
“This book tells how a shadowy group, Labour Together, came to the cusp of delivering Sir Keir Starmer to power. The project sabotaged Corbynism through covert plotting, and, having crushed the left, poses an imminent threat to British democracy. Starmer’s most senior advisor, Morgan McSweeney, worked to ‘develop a strategy for defeating the Hard Left.’ They included people who are now among the most senior members of Keir Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet: Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood and Steve Reed.
“Holden describes how Labour Together used undeclared funding, to secretly insert itself into the Labour Party’s ‘antisemitism crisis’.
“In these pages we see how Labour Together selected Keir Starmer to be its frontman, helping him win Labour’s leadership with the most mendacious campaign in recent political history. The Party under Starmer has since embraced the ugliest forms of racism and Islamophobia, and shared information hacked from journalists critical of its allies. The Labour Together project has subsequently transformed the Party into an authoritarian machine entirely intolerant of dissent, rowing back on an ocean of previous commitments and propagating an agenda of reheated austerity.”