When Labour MP Neil Coyle took to Twitter for his extraordinary rant against Jacob Rees-Mogg and Brexit voters, he perfectly summed up Keir Starmer’s main problem as Labour party leader: it’s his party.
In purely political terms, Starmer himself has done well, dampening down internal Labour party dramas, showing himself as relatively normal and clawing his way to level-pegging in the polls after a summer of Covid chaos for the Government. However Coyle’s outburst – for which he has since said sorry – shows the danger his MPs and activists pose to his ambitions when it comes to the politics of identity – of aligning to certain types of people over others.
As leader of this ravaged, interest group-dominated, bureaucratic nightmare of a party, Starmer cannot completely avoid these muddy waters. His flip-flopping on Black Lives Matter is one example of this. One minute he was taking the knee to the activists, the next he was backtracking to call BLM merely a ‘moment’ and distancing himself from their revolutionary agenda.
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