Paul Knaggs writes:
There is a particular kind of lie that does not trouble itself to argue with the truth. It simply replaces it.
On Monday morning, Sir Keir Starmer stood outside Downing Street and performed that replacement in full public view. In six minutes during his resignation speech, he rewrote the history of the Labour Party, casting himself as the surgeon who saved a dying patient and his predecessor as the disease. It was a fluent performance. It was also, in its founding claims, untrue.
Orwell saw this coming, as he usually did. “Who controls the past controls the future,” he wrote in 1984; “who controls the present controls the past.” Starmer, in his last act of control, reached back for the past and tried to bend it. The difficulty is that some of the past is written down, audited, and filed with the Electoral Commission, where it cannot be talked over.
SIX MINUTES OF FICTION
The Bankruptcy That Wasn’t: Labour Was Debt-Free
He told the nation he had inherited a party that was “financially bankrupt.” The accounts say the opposite. Labour was debt-free. The debts of the Blair years had been cleared; the books balanced; membership fees were arriving at the rate of £19.3 million a year.
The red ink came later, on his own watch: a deficit of £5.2 million by 2021, with Momentum pointing not at Corbyn but at Starmer’s leadership and the exodus it caused. Membership income fell to £16.2 million as the members walked. He did not inherit the deficit. He spilled it.
He Inherited a Movement – He Presided Over an Exodus
He implied a party in terminal decline. He had in fact taken charge of the largest political membership in Western Europe, close to 600,000 people. Within a year of his leadership it shed around 91,000 of them, falling to 432,213, leaking members at a rate that would empty a marginal constituency inside a month.
He inherited a movement. He presided over its hollowing. Then he stood in Downing Street and described the hollowing as a rescue.
He did not inherit a ruin. He built one, and called it a rescue.
The tragedy is this. Starmer could have built on Corbyn’s achievements. He could have taken the party’s colossal membership, its debt-free finances, its popular policies, and turned them into a government that genuinely transformed Britain. Instead, he spent five years dismantling everything he inherited, alienating the membership, abandoning the policies, and governing as a pale imitation of the Tories.
“Morally Bankrupt”? The Forde Report Contradicts Starmer
The cruellest claim was the most personal. The party, he said, had been “morally bankrupt,” and he had “ripped out the poison of anti-Semitism.” Here the ground is more serious, and honesty requires precision. The Equality and Human Rights Commission did find, in October 2020, that Labour had broken equality law in its handling of complaints. That finding was real, and it mattered.
But the Commission did not find that the party was morally bankrupt. It did not find that Jeremy Corbyn was personally anti-Semitic. Corbyn accepted its conclusions and commissioned the Forde Report, which found the scale of the problem had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons,” and that hostility towards the leader from inside his own party had crippled the response.
There is one fact Starmer left out. Within weeks of becoming leader in 2020, his party chose to settle the Panorama libel claim rather than fight it, a settlement Corbyn called “a political decision, not a legal one.” The man who boasted of cleansing the party had paid, early and quietly, to close down the argument about it.
What Corbyn actually said
Corbyn did not stay silent this time. He said he was “extremely angry.” He reminded the country that he had been “elected twice” to lead, that the policies were “all of which were endorsed by Keir Starmer,” that the party he handed on “had funds,” “had 600,000 members,” and stood on a programme of “social redistribution” that stayed popular long after its author was expelled for believing in it.
Then the line that will outlast the speech: “The idea is morally bankrupt is a really disgraceful comment to make.”
Corbyn Won More Votes in Defeat Than Starmer in Victory
Let the other case be put, because his defenders will put it. Starmer won a landslide; Corbyn lost twice; a man who reaches Downing Street is entitled to write his own record. But let the record be true.
It was not a landslide in any honest sense of the word. It was a supermajority of seats conjured out of barely a third of the vote, the lowest winning share ever recorded, on the lowest turnout since 2001. Labour did not win that election so much as the Conservatives lost it, having made themselves so toxic that no one, not even a lifelong Tory, could bring himself to mark the ballot.
Here is the figure that should settle the matter. Starmer’s triumph rested on around nine and a half million votes: roughly half a million fewer than the party polled under Corbyn in the defeat of 2019. The man he calls a loser brought more people to the polls in defeat than Starmer managed in victory. The majority was a quirk of the counting, not a verdict of the country.
His list of achievements is arguable, line by line. The inheritance he described is not arguable. It is checkable. And it fails the check.
The tragedy is the size of what he was handed. The largest party in Europe; debt-free books; a manifesto the public actually wanted. He could have governed as though all of it were true. Instead he spent his years dismantling it, alienating the members, discarding the policies, and ruling as a cautious imitation of the people Labour exists to replace. When his own MPs finally moved against him, he stood on the steps of Downing Street and blamed the man he had betrayed to get there.
That is not leadership. That is cowardice dressed as valedictory.
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