It is hardly revolutionary to assert that the British Labour Party is in a state of collapse, but the scale of the current crisis is hard to overstate. After winning the 2024 General Election with a historically low share of the vote in a deeply fragmented and apathetic political context, the Labour government has lurched from misstep to sadistic misstep. No minority or disadvantaged group has been spared their attentions, and swarms of political advisors demand more – always more – as votes leak away to the Green Party on the left and Reform on the right. On foreign policy, this government has been defined by meek servility to Donald Trump and active collaboration in the on-going genocide in Palestine. Most damagingly amongst the public, a Labour Party that won power on a promise to be different from the years of Tory sleaze has instead been hit by scandal after scandal, all of them entirely self-inflicted.

       The Party – perhaps outside of its foundational first few years under Keir Hardie – has never been a party of socialism, and it would be deeply naïve to suggest that the success of the Labour Party has ever made possible revolutionary change. It is possible and likely correct to argue that the Party has served as a useful vehicle for capital to divert the attention of the working class from communist organising into projects of incremental change that don’t threaten the structures that have underpinned British society since the industrial revolution. Nonetheless – and I accept that this will be condemned as bourgeois electoralism – it is hard to deny that the tension between the centrist and left wings of Labour governments have produced genuine positive change for the working classes of the United Kingdom, even if only through fear.

       The Atlee government established the NHS and the welfare state whilst nationalising a fifth of the economy and withdrawing from large parts of the Empire. The Wilson governments saw substantive social liberalisation, increases in living standards, and a meaningful redistribution of wealth towards the poorest in society. The Blair government, as Thatcherite and imperialist as it was, still saw the implementation of the minimum wage. These were not good people and these were not good governments, but the outcomes of their elections were broadly positive for the majority of people in the United Kingdom. Perhaps these were simply inevitable results of the structural forces of history, and the lack of Labour government would have redirected public anger and need in a truly revolutionary direction. A historian does not engage in counterfactuals.

       The Labour Party is no longer capable of even incremental reform. It is a party that has ossified itself in Blairite paralysis and in-group lobbying. It is a party terrified by the experience of Corbyn - under whom they received far more votes than under Keir Starmer - and one that has become so scared of its own left flank that they have purged them out of the party entirely. The tension between the centre-left and the centre-right no longer exists; instead, it is a monolith of right-wing orthodoxy struggling to understand why the continual submission to bond markets and racist agitators is not making them more popular. In eras past, the party was full of so-called “big beasts” who, even without the leadership, could focus debate and change the direction of the party through force of will: Nye Bevan, Denis Healey, Tony Benn, Roy Jenkins. Today’s Labour bureaucrats are instantly forgettable, a succession of careerist politicians with interchangeable names and interchangeable ideas. They are not even capable of perceiving their own paralysis. Each new scandal and electoral setback is met not by reflection and a change in policy, but in calls for another comms reset; advisors are fired, speeches are given, platitudes about “listening to the voters” and “making the changes that need changing” are trotted out. Nothing changes, and nothing will.

       And so we come to the greatest comms reset of all. Keir Starmer, having led the party to its second worst local elections performance of all time – surpassed only by his own results last year – has likely reached the end of his tenure. Over 100 Labour MPs have publicly declared no confidence in him, the majority of the remainder privately admit that a leadership contest is now inevitable, and the party is engaged in an absurd intra-factional briefing war against itself whilst it waits for one of the contenders to formally begin the process of challenging and removing Starmer. So, who is likely to be the next prime minister, and what do they stand for?

       Firstly, Keir Starmer himself. Although it is received wisdom that his time in office is in its final weeks – and this is almost certainly correct – his stubbornness and apparent masochism makes it seem likely that he will be one of the names on the ballot when it goes to the Labour membership. This membership is not what it once was. Numbers have fallen by over half through a series of factional purges and mass exoduses; the left were told to leave, and we did. Starmer’s approval ratings have fallen dramatically, but less so amongst this residual base of Blairites and credulous centre-left voters. It is conceivable that Starmer – an empty void of a politician, a puppet piloted by the ghosts of Mandelson and McSweeney, the least popular prime minister in the modern history of the United Kingdom – might win. That this is possible says a lot about the quality of the field and the paucity of choice, in both talent and ideology, offered to the Labour electorate.

       The favoured challenger of the press is Wes Streeting. He made himself known in student politics as a dishonest Blairite operator and since then has been steadily climbing the ranks of the parliamentary Labour Party with aid from his mentor, Peter Mandelson. In government he has led the Health Department, though it is clear from his friends in the press and in the party that he has spent much of the time since Labour’s “landslide” election instead plotting his coup against Starmer. He portrays himself as the man who saved the Health Service and put it on the path to lasting reform, but the real picture is more revealing. Wait lists have been reduced, but only by virtue of cutting people from them wholesale. Doctors and nurses are on perpetual strike because of pay cuts and a lack of both jobs and training places. Entire hospital departments have been cut because of the relentless Blairite thirst for deregulation. He has given Palantir full access to NHS patient data, and been a long-term supporter of privatisation to “save the NHS.” Most personally of all, he has been the driving force behind the banning of trans healthcare to under-18s and the continued failure of provision for adults. He launched the coup against Starmer whilst loudly proclaiming that he had nothing to do with it, before suddenly proclaiming himself an ally of the left. Wes Streeting is an awful little weasel of a man, and dangerous: a genuine Conservative ideologue in the Labour Party with a real chance of becoming Prime Minister in the next three months.

       Andy Burnham’s leadership campaign has been running longer than Streeting’s. After being a loyal cabinet member through the tail end of the New Labour years, he made his first attempt at the leadership in 2010, pitching himself as a standard centre-right Blairite. Five years later he tried again, this time as a soft Corbynite. He lost badly both times and promptly left Westminster to win the mayoralty of Manchester, declaring himself done with party politics and happy to end his political life in the North. Since then, his brand has grown, with the media openly calling him “The King in the North” and agitating for his return to Westminster. He is popular, but I suspect only because he alone is untarred by the failure of this Labour government. He offers no real solutions except a vague allusion to “Manchesterism,” which is left purposefully ill-defined, and a promise to be different, despite appearing very much like the rest of the Labour apparatchiks. He has rebranded again from his faux Corbynite days to a bland soup of empty soft-left-centrism that anything can be projected onto. Burnham is another chameleon, an empty suit with a record of opportunism and corruption, and a man with no new ideas except that the Prime Minister should have a northern accent.

       The final major contender is Angela Rayner. A working class Northern woman who has always faced tremendous abuse from the media, she accrued a lot of favour with the membership through her loyalty to Corbyn in the face of repeated coup attempts. Because of this, she is often described in the press as “of the left”, despite there being very little evidence to support that position. Uniquely amongst the candidates she has a life outside of the Westminster bubble, coming from a desperately poor household and being forced to leave school pregnant at the age of 16. Despite this experience, her positions are as vague and veiled as the rest of them, and what may be glimpsed through that haze is another centre-right Blairite talking vaguely in terms of “aspiration” and “fairness”. Had the contest happened a year ago, she may well have been the clear favourite. Since then, she has become known to the public for her attempt to evade £40,000 in tax and her subsequent resignation from the cabinet; as it is, she stands little real chance against the spectre of Burnham.

       Two other names are worth mentioning. Ed Miliband is perhaps the most convincingly left of the entire group and has strong credentials when it comes to green energy and mild wealth redistribution. His major issue – along with being a creature of the squishy Labour centre – is that he already faced the public as leader of the Labour Party in 2015, and was resoundingly rejected. It is hard to imagine that the party or the wider public would welcome a prime minister who has only ever managed to lose an election. His experiential mirror is Al Carns, who has been in parliament for all of two years and already considers himself ready to run for the highest office. Al Carns is a marine, and that is all he is prepared to say; Starmerism’s third pressing with a squarer jaw. His interviews have revealed such a void of ideas that there is nothing else to be said. If you vote for Carns, please email me your bank details for inspection.

       The sum of this leadership election is a cartel of centrist and centre-right politicians in empty suits. Each of them offers a very similar approach to the political and economic crisis of the United Kingdom, and one which seems little changed from the failed consensus of the post-2008 austerity governments imposed by both Conservative and Labour prime ministers. They are collectively incapable of change, unlikely to revive the Labour party as an electoral force, and have no ability other than to cause further harm to the people who live here.

       That being said, there are better and worse choices – though if anyone reading has remained eligible to vote in a Labour Party leadership election after the last seven years, you are the wrong audience for this masturbatory, barely-concealed polemic. The worst outcomes are Streeting and Burnham. Streeting (because I hate the evil rat bastard) because he would come into office with a mandate for change, a brief moment of will in the parliamentary Labour Party, and the ability to launch a massive campaign of deregulation, privatisation, and transphobia. Burnham, because he offers a different evil: the ability to, at least briefly, be genuinely popular without offering any real change, and revive the fortunes of the Labour Party for long enough to see off the threat on their left flank.

       The best outcome, and the one that should be encouraged as much as possible, is the paralysis and death of the Labour Party. In just two years their governance has seen a rapid decline in living standards, an assault on marginalised groups that goes further than the Conservatives dreamed, and the terrifying ascent of the far right as a viable electoral force. This is the modern Labour Party, and it cannot change.

       How do we achieve this paralysis? It comes through keeping Starmer as prime minister. His incompetence is his greatest virtue. He has lost all authority with his own backbenches and is incapable of passing through parliament more of the regressive policy of his first year. His historic unpopularity has also gifted us with a once-in-a-century opportunity: the rise of the Green Party. In polling, it regularly registers as the second most popular party in the country, and the only viable opposition to Reform. In the recent local elections, they demonstrated that strength and made historic gains across the breadth of the country, whilst the SNP cemented its hold on Scotland and Plaid Cymru won power in Wales for the first time in its history. In a 2029 general election that is almost certain to be dominated by fragmented political groups and tactical voting alliances, it is precisely this coalition that might serve not to just to keep Reform out of government, but also to be the sort of centre-left social democratic coalition that is capable of producing real change of the sort once enacted by the Labour Party. This is electoralism, yes, and the Green Party is no more a socialist party than Labour was, but a genuine revolution does not appear near. Instead, people are suffering, the NHS is collapsing, living standards are in terminal decline, and several marginalised groups are facing their complete expulsion from mainstream society. The need for change is more apparent now than at any time since 1945, and it is only through the Green Party that we can achieve it.