Right, left or centre, UK’s wish for 2026 is for Starmer’s government to go

I consciously try not to follow US politics much, mainly because it feels like the British political elite have become softened to the reality of their vassalage to the United States by treating it like it’s their home country. I’ll break that rule for this funny anecdote about George Santos.

For those who aren’t familiar, he was elected to Congress in 2022, but pretty soon afterwards, people started noticing problems with his biography. Within weeks, of being elected Santos had issued a statement declaring: “I’m not a criminal who defrauded the entire country and made up this fictional character and ran for Congress.”

He did however admit that he did not have a degree from New York University, nor did he ever work for Goldman Sachs or Citigroup. He also clarified that when he said his grandparents were Jewish Holocaust survivors, he meant that “I believe we are all Jew-ish.”

I don’t think he’s ever explained what he meant when he claimed his mother was at the World Trade Centre on 9/11, despite being in Brazil at the time.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, we have a less entertaining imposter in British politics, but rather than being booted out once this was exposed, they’ve been able to just brush it off and continue on in the second most powerful office in the country. I’m of course talking about the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves.

You may remember the scandal of Reeves having “lied on her CV” earlier this year, but if anything the press framing of it was to play down the severity of it. For instance, media coverage strangely focused on her having exaggerated how long she worked for the Bank of England, as if that was the most serious dishonesty here.

More alarming was her claiming to have been an ‘economist’ when she had actually “worked in a managerial role within the bank's complaint handling department.” Hardly a job to be ashamed of, but not one where she’d be giving anyone economic advice.

This is important because in the last general election Labour’s key selling point wasn’t that they had any real political program or ideological vision, it’s their supposed integrity and superior competency. That’s why Reeves would make claims about her work being published in one of the world’s leading economics journals, only for that to also be untrue. Or why she purported to have written a book about female economists, only for it be found to be heavily plagiarised with entire paragraphs lifted from Wikipedia and blogs.

You might be able to explain her still being Chancellor after these embarrassing exposés if she’d shown herself to be highly competent. But I don’t think anyone thinks that.

Her most memorable performance of the year was when she spooked financial markets by bursting into tears in Parliament when her proposed cuts to welfare spending were being upended. We’ve since had a debacle of a budget where Reeves essentially announced that there were going to be significant tax rises, but didn’t specify what they would be.

The (predictable) political outcome of creating this uncertainty was scaring the country into assuming the worst, so that when they eventually decided not to raise income tax, this only resulted in a negative news story of the government having u-turned.

On the other hand, you can’t really understand why someone like Rachel Reeves is in the position she’s in without noticing she’s married to Nicholas Joicey (senior civil servant and Gordon Brown’s former speechwriter), or that her sister also happens to be the Solicitor General, who is married to former Chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party John Cryer, who is himself the son of two former Labour MPs…

Indeed, the Labour Party under Keir Starmer is primarily concerned with protecting a patronage network of interlinked families and friends who perform services for British capital and the state in return for privileged jobs and high status. Their horror at almost losing their status during the Corbyn era and their shutting down of internal party democracy in response to those events should be understood in that light.

All this results in a government which doesn’t have any real political platform other claiming to be a safe pair of hands for the status quo. They spent their time in opposition criticising the Conservative government for a lack of competency or spending too much on stationary than setting any serious alternative governance model.

Starmer’s election pitch was that “a vote for Labour is a vote to stop the chaos”, and indeed, if they’d just about managed that, they’d probably be fine, even if the country would still be in terminal decline. That they’ve failed to clear even this low bar, however, has resulted in them being deserted both by the factions of British capital who thought they’d be a safer bet than the Conservatives, and the most moderate elements of the trade union movement, who are finding it increasingly difficult to justify funding a party which gives them virtually no return on that investment.

Even punters are predicting a strong lack of faith in Starmer’s future as leader. In the past 24 hours a shocking 93% of bets placed have backed a 2026 exit for the PM according to Oddschecker.

So what has been the government’s answer after this year of more chaos and collapse in popular support? Promises of bigger and harsher crackdowns.

This is best encapsulated by the bizarre rise to supposed political superstardom of Shabana Mahmood, a politician most people outside Birmingham had never heard of a year ago. She is now announcing plans to seize jewellery from refugees to sell off to raise funds, ideas that are more about performative cruelty than serving any practical purpose.

These antics aren’t likely to win over Reform voters, the reality is people rarely switch from one voting block to another. But if there’s a good chance it’ll convince some dodgy businessman to fund Shabana Mahmood’s Labour leadership challenge, then maybe it’s an endeavour worth pursuing.

Daniel Lindley is a writer and trade union activist in the UK.

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.