BBC News
By Iain Watson & Bex Bailey
BBC News
image copyrightEPA
image captionOvershadowed by the Tories - Sir Keir Starmer on Friday morning, as the election picture unfolded
Ever since his election as Labour leader a year ago Sir Keir Starmer has emphasised that the party has an electoral mountain to climb. He conquered the foothills pretty quickly - stressing new leadership and even suspending the former leader.
The early emphasis was on eliminating negatives - in particular the stain of anti-Semitism. As long as the new leader continued making steady if slow progress, most of the internal grumbling - or downright opposition - was likely to be limited to the party s left. And not even all of them.
Updated 07/05/2021 19:26 BST
Labour Reshuffle: Who Might Be In And Out Of Keir Starmer s Top Team
What s in store for Anneliese Dodds, Emily Thornberry, Lisa Nandy, Jon Ashworth and others?
As the results came in, the pattern was clear and, for Labour activists, painfully familiar.
Keir Starmer, the man elected to stop the bleed in the party’s so-called red wall, was instead presiding over yet more red ruin.
Boris Johnson’s Conservatives had not only captured the totemic Westminster seat of Hartlepool – a Labour constituency since its inception – but a slew of English council seats from County Durham to Dudley were turning from red to blue.
What is Keir Starmer going to do now? The Labour leader has taken personal responsibility for “bitterly disappointing” election results in the Hartlepool by-election and in local council elections across England, promising to do “whatever is necessary to fix things”. “I will set out what change is needed over the next few days,” he said in a short interview to camera. So what is the Labour leader’s plan, amid furious calls for a change of strategy from both his left and his right? There are a few things. Starmer pointedly declined to rule out a shadow cabinet reshuffle in his interview, and shadow cabinet members are now expecting one imminently. The longstanding speculation around the future of Anneliese Dodds, the shadow chancellor, has picked up again, as well as that around other members of the top team, and there are jitters on the Labour front benches tonight.
Labour isn’t working – why only radical change can save Keir Starmer’s project The Labour leader has disowned the left but has offered nothing of substance in return. Britain’s politics, like its coastal geology, have become a long process of erosion punctuated by dramatic rockfalls. In 6 May s elections, two such rockfalls are about to happen – both of which have profound consequences for Labour and progressive politics. The first is a likely outright majority for Scottish independence at Holyrood. The second – whatever happens in Hartlepool – will be the continued erosion of Labour’s vote in northern English towns. The geothermal process causing both the Union and Labour hegemony to crack is pretty clear: the emergence of cultural identity as a driver of politics, and the failure of political bureaucracies and elites to face it, and above all to theorise it.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer
Keir Starmer has angrily rounded on “cowards” who brief against his staff and warned shadow ministers that they should quit if they’re unhappy with his leadership team.
The Labour leader told the weekly meeting of Labour’s shadow cabinet that he was appalled by recent criticism of his aides, saying those responsible should “either stop now or have the guts to get out” of his frontbench team.
In a rare flash of anger, Starmer said that if anyone wanted to criticise his leadership they should direct that at him rather than act like “cowards who attack my staff”.