British politics risks an unprecedented shift to the far right as a result of public disillusionment if a Labour government fails to enact radical change, the former shadow chancellor John McDonnell has warned.
Writing in the Guardian, McDonnell said the threat would come not just from Nigel Farage’s resurgent Reform UK but from the return of a Conservative party “shorn” of its moderate wing and dominated by populists.
McDonnell, who served in the shadow cabinet under Jeremy Corbyn, reflected the views of others on his party’s left who are impatient with what they regard as Labour’s too-cautious approach. “The central messaging of Keir Starmer’s electoral strategy is that he’s not Jeremy Corbyn and that Labour is not the disaster that is the Conservative party,” he said.
McDonnell pointed to the polling figures of Reform UK, reaching as high as 11%, as evidence of “how a far-right populist programme can pull the major parties on to a rightwing agenda”.
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Not sure what your point is? That he increased the number of people voting Labour when he ran again Theresa May (and still lost, I mean talk about someone who was vilified in the press), and promptly lost it when there was any slight competition?
So Starmer should copy the Corbyn playbook of losing, and blaming the Blairites, despite it being 20 years since he was relevant? For fucks sake, when will you just face it that he lost because he didn’t put forward point that the 50.1% cared about.
Blair in 2001, 10,724,953 votes.
Corbyn in 2019, 10,269,051 votes.
Good job increasing that vote share!