After suffering significant blows in the local elections, Labour leader Keir Starmer has insisted that “we get it” – and then ruined it by saying he’ll go “farther and faster” – in the wrong direction.

The party lost the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, the West Midlands mayoralty and council seats up and down the country, but Starmer’s response – and even the venue from which he made it – shows detachment from the public mood, refusal to engage with grassroots discontent, and even active complicity in appalling policies.

Look at where he chose to deliver that message: a munitions factory that supplies weapons to Israel — a state widely accused of committing atrocities in Gaza, and currently facing an International Court of Justice case for genocide.

If there were a competition for the most tone-deaf political photo-op of the year, this one would be hard to beat.

It made two things crystal clear:

1. Starmer doesn’t understand — or is choosing to ignore — the anger many voters feel about the UK’s arms trade, particularly in the context of the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza.

2. He is sending a message — whether deliberate or not — that Labour under his leadership stands firm behind the status quo: militarism abroad, authoritarianism at home, and silence in the face of injustice.

It would be one thing if these decisions were merely symbolic missteps.

But they come at a time when Starmer is visibly shedding the party’s principles, its social justice legacy, and its base — all in a bid to appear “respectable” to the establishment and palatable to a handful of swing voters.

The West Midlands was lost.

Labour councillors are bleeding out.

Reform UK is capitalizing on public disillusionment.

And instead of introspection, we get a press call in front of bombs.

Predictably, this has angered people across the political spectrum. Reform UK supporters may gleefully pile on Labour’s failings — wrongly assuming that every critic must be a “lefty” loyalist — but they’re missing a bigger truth: those of us on the left aren’t defending Labour.

We’re calling it out, because what Starmer is doing is not left-wing. It’s not even centrist. It’s hollow managerialism, dressed in a suit of moral indifference.

In his piece on Another Angry Voice, Thomas G Clark writes:

“Starmer’s decision to give a ‘we get it’ speech from a weapons factory was the perfect metaphor for his leadership — utterly tone-deaf, contemptuous of Labour’s base, and obsessed with sucking up to the warmongering establishment.”

He’s right. And Labour would do well to listen — not to its PR advisors, but to the millions of voters who are watching this party slip further and further from what it once stood for.

Starmer said, “We get it.”

No, Keir.

You don’t.

If you don’t change course, the public may hand the country to Nigel Farage – and then we’ll all “get it”.