British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced his resignation after fewer than two years in office in a term characterised by policy U-turns and deep public unpopularity. [GETTY]
Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has at long last resigned, outlining a timetable for his departure from Downing Street. His exit marks the end of a tenure that has done lasting damage to both people at home and abroad.
Part of his fall is down to the Mandelson–Epstein affair- a scandal that is, in its own way, a perfect metaphor for everything rotten about Starmerism. Mandelson was arrested on suspicion of leaking sensitive government information to a convicted sex offender, Starmer’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney was forced to resign, and a senior Foreign Office civil servant was pushed out.
This all stemmed from Starmer’s decision to appoint a man whose relationship with Epstein continued even after the convicted paedophile’s 2008 conviction. But Mandelson was not merely a diplomatic misjudgement. He was the architect of the entire machine that manufactured Starmer’s rise.
Starmer’s ascent to the Labour leadership was the culmination of a coordinated, years-long campaign to purge the party of its left wing and, in particular, to destroy Jeremy Corbyn. The vehicle for this was Labour Together, a faction closely associated with Morgan McSweeney- a protégé of Mandelson – which worked systematically behind the scenes to oust Corbyn. The means employed included falsified and slanderous accusations of antisemitism, something which continues to be weaponised to delegitimise the left.
Today, the Labour Party has been comprehensively hollowed out of its original support base, its leftist factions purged, its grassroots membership demoralised and dispersed.
The final straw for Starmer’s tenure was the catastrophic local election results in which Labour lost more than 1,100 council seats across England, while the far-right Reform UK gained more than 1,450. Over 95 Labour MPs have since called on Starmer to resign or set out a timetable for departure. He was resistant until the Makerfield by-election on 18 June, in which Andy Burnham won 54.8% of the vote, opening the door to a formal leadership challenge.
His legacy will be a premiership that presided over cuts to winter fuel payments for the elderly, a failure to provide meaningful resources for the crumbling NHS, and no serious attempt to raise taxes on the wealthiest.
Starmer’s record on Palestine, however, is perhaps the most damning chapter of his tenure- ironically so given that he built his career as a human rights lawyer. He set the tone just days after 7 October 2023, when, in an interview on 11 October, he said that Israel had “the right” to withhold power and water from Gaza. These comments triggered a string of resignations by Labour councillors, with one describing them as “horrifying” and as effectively endorsing a war crime.
His office later attempted to walk the comments back, but the green light to the Israeli regime had been sent.
What followed was not a correction of course but an entrenchment of it. Under Starmer’s government, the UK approved approximately $160 million worth of arms exports to Israel in just three months (October to December 2024), more than the total approved under the entire preceding four years of Conservative government.
Research covering the period from October 2023 to March 2025 found that at least 14 shipments of military items left the UK for Israel, including F-35 fighter jet parts and components supplied by UK manufacturers for approximately 15% of every aircraft produced.
There were attempts to appease and distract from this complicity. Then foreign secretary, David Lammy, announced a limited suspension of 30 out of 350 arms export licences to the Israeli regime in September 2024.
Crucially, the government excluded the F-35 programme, which it deemed too strategically significant to halt. Notably, the Israeli regime has become the first country in the world to deploy the F-35 in “Beast Mode” during active combat – a configuration that abandons stealth entirely in favour of raw destructive payload, expanding its bomb capacity from 2,600kg to nearly 10,000kg.
Indeed, Israeli F-35s do not need to operate in stealth mode because they are not fighting another air force – they are bombing a captive and besieged population. These are killing machines that are, in large part, built in the UK – the rear fuselage of every F-35 in Israel’s fleet was built by BAE Systems in Lancashire, and the targeting lasers were made by Leonardo in Edinburgh.
Activists who attempted to disrupt the production of these weapons were prosecuted and made an example of. Palestine Action, which targeted British facilities of Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in July 2025 under the Terrorism Act. Effectively placing the activist group in the same legal category as al-Qaeda.
Four of its activists were then sentenced as terrorists despite never having been convicted of a terrorism offence – the first time in British legal history that terrorism sentencing enhancements were applied in such circumstances. Sentences ranged from four years and eight months to seven years and eight months, which was widely condemned by human rights groups.
It was later revealed that the UK government had shared the contact details of counter-terrorism police and prosecutors with the Israeli embassy during the investigation.
Burnham is now being cast as Labour’s great redeemer; the northern outsider who can reconnect the party with voters it has lost to both Reform and the Greens. But so far, Burnham doesn’t seem to offer any radical policy changes. Indeed, reports indicate Burnham is expected to back Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s measures to cut all forms of migration and scrap permanent refugee status. This is a Labour Party that is increasingly competing with Reform on its own terrain.
Not only that, but Burnham seems to be opening his arms to Starmer’s boys club. The man who gave up his seat to make way for him to run is Josh Simons, now part of Burnham’s inner circle, and until recently, he was the director of Labour Together. It has since been reported that Simons commissioned a PR firm, APCO Worldwide, to investigate the private affairs of journalists who had published reporting that uncovered the organisation’s failure to declare over £700,000 in political donations.
This included Paul Holden, who has published a book called ‘The Fraud’ on the Machiavellian takeover of the Labour Party. Simons then personally emailed GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre, naming the journalists and falsely claiming they were operating within a pro-Kremlin propaganda network.
On foreign policy, Burnham is set to continue the Starmer legacy of ignoring the overwhelming popular support for the Palestinian people. Burnham has repeatedly refused to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide and has been deliberately evasive. This is not at all surprising. He has been a member of Labour Friends of Israel since 2015 and said that his first state visit, if he became leader, would be to Israel.
Starmer’s departure brings me a small amount of satisfaction. But it is not a cause for hope. The damage his government has done to working people abandoned in favour of the donor class, to immigrant communities in attempted appeasement to fascists, to the Palestinian people whose genocide it armed and enabled, is irreversible.
The machine that produced Starmer is already producing his replacement. Burnham arrives backed by the same network and prepared to continue the same immigration cruelty, offering no concrete break from the policies that have hurt so many people.
Yara Hawari is the Co-Director of Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.
Follow her on Twitter: @yarahawari
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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.
