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By purging the Left, hollowing out party democracy and chasing approval from the Establishment, Keir Starmer may have stripped Labour of the authenticity voters crave.
If Labour looks strong on paper, it is weak in spirit.
That is the apparent verdict from voters who are deserting the party – not just for Reform UK, which is surging on the polls on the basis of bluster and zeal, but for other parties that seem more authentic, like the Greens and even the Liberal Democrats.
Under Keir Starmer, the party that once drew power from conviction now runs on control – a polished product that feels fake to the people it once represented – and voters can sense it. That’s why, Labour’s support is slipping away.
The trigger
Take a look at the following comment, responding to This Site’s article on why Labour can’t beat Reform UK:
Predicted that this would happen when Starmer became leader. Labour was once a broad church and his first action was to purge the Left not realising that one day he was going to need their support. He then got rid of anyone who voted against [him] on his policies, destroying democracy in the party. He has changed the Labour Party to something unrecognisable [in comparison with] what it was created for. Like many others, at the age of 83 who voted Labour since I was franchised, [I] found myself homeless and [have] now joined many others in my allegiance to the Green Party.
The question is: has Starmer sabotaged Labour? And did he do it thinking he was fortifying his own position?
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Labour is no longer a ‘broad church’
Starmer’s “modernisation” — which he presents as professionalisation and electability — has provoked hundreds of thousands of long-term party members to quit, and around three million voters to abandon it at the ballot box.
They would say the changes have, in practice, been a controlled demolition of the party’s internal democracy and ideological roots.
The purge of the Left, the marginalisation of activists, the disempowerment of local party structures, the control-freakery over candidate selections — all of it looks, from the outside, like the work of a man intent on creating a hollowed-out, leader-centric apparatus that no longer belongs to its members.
The irony, of course, is that this was probably meant to secure Labour’s hold on power: to prevent internal rebellions, to reassure donors, to make the party “safe” – for the Establishment.
That’s the problem, right there. He wanted Labour to be acceptable to a primarily right-wing cohort with priorities that are traditionally at odds with the ideological centre of the party he joined.
By altering Labour’s direction to fit in with those priorities, he is likely to have sawn off the branch he’s sitting on — alienating precisely the grassroots energy that sustains a party in difficult times.
The shift in voting patterns — from Labour to the Greens, Lib Dems, or even non-voting — is not a neutral redistribution of discontent; it is a symptom of Labour’s self-imposed narrowing.
Starmer’s leadership has defined itself by exclusion — of the Left, of dissent, of anything that challenges a tightly policed “professional” image.
The result is a party that has traded diversity of thought for the illusion of unity.
When lifelong supporters move to the Greens, it’s not because they suddenly became radicals; it’s because Labour stopped being recognisable as Labour.
That’s why polling analyses show an exodus of soft-left and socially liberal voters — the ones who once saw Labour as a moral rather than merely managerial force.
The ‘purge of the Left’
Starmer’s first action was to purge the Left from positions of influence in the party, according to my commentator – and we can see plenty of evidence:
Former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has repeatedly accused Starmer’s leadership of purging the left wing of Labour, or allowing a “right-wing faction” to get dominant and suppress dissenting voices.
Mick Lynch (leader of the RMT union) has similarly criticised Labour’s candidate selection processes as a “purge” of left-wing candidates.
The Guardian has reported that under Starmer the approved candidate shortlists from the party’s ruling National Executive Committee have increasingly excluded candidates supported by trade unions (including the soft Left) and those with more independent views.
Manipulation of party rules
Starmer didn’t just change the culture of the party; he changed its machinery.
Labour under Starmer has tightened control over candidate selection. People with even modest divergence from leadership-approved views have been blocked from shortlists. Former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said of this: “The selection of candidates … is so tightly controlled that anyone with a hint of independence of thought stands virtually no chance of being allowed on candidate lists.”
Starmer changed internal party rules: in 2021 he proposed alterations to how Labour elects its leader, moving away from “one-member-one-vote” to give or restore more power to MPs. Critics said the change was designed to prevent the return of a Corbyn-type leadership.
The shift in leadership nomination thresholds (from ten per cent of MPs to twenty per cent) effectively locks the Left out of future leadership contests, meaning a Corbyn-like candidate is no longer mathematically viable unless the PLP’s composition changes dramatically — which, under Starmer’s candidate control, it won’t.
Combine that with NEC rule changes and the control of conference agendas, and Labour democracy is more choreographed than organic.
This gives the lie to the notion of “strong leadership”: it is strength through suffocation.
The more Starmer controls, the less alive the party becomes.
The illusion of mandate
Starmer’s government did not win power through enthusiasm.
Turnout collapse among former Tory voters handed Labour a parliamentary majority in the general election of 2024 – but not moral authority. Support for Labour didn’t surge; voters simply chose not to come out and the party got into government on the lowest vote (as a percentage of the electorate) in history.
The proportion of the electorate actively voting for Labour was historically low — and this has a knock-on effect upon its delivery of manifesto promises.
I saw a social media post claiming that the Tory government of 2019-24 managed to deliver on only two of its manifesto promises, while Labour has either enacted or is in the process of enacting dozens.
That’s all very well, but if a majority of the public doesn’t want those changes, this “record of delivery” is meaningless.
So the apparent paradox of rapid legislative activity alongside cratering approval ratings is explained: Labour is busy – doing what most of us believe to be the wrong things.
Fragmented dissent, shared cause
The result of the purges, rule changes and policy dissatisfaction is clear – and was predictable. People are abandoning Labour in multitudes.
Polling data shows Reform UK ahead of Labour in many voter intention polls. For example: Ipsos poll (Sep 2025) had Reform UK at 34 per cent, Labour at 22 per cent, with Labour satisfaction and Starmer’s approval sharply low.
An earlier Ipsos poll (June 2025) also showed Reform UK leading Labour by nine points.
In local elections and by-elections, Labour has lost many council seats since the 2024 general election. Some of those losses have gone to Reform UK.
Labour’s drop in polling since entering government is very large: The Guardian notes this is the worst drop for any governing party since polling data began in the late 1970s/early 1980s (PollBase), losing ~12 points in eight months.
Admittedly, not all Labour voters are going to Reform UK. Why would they? Reform is a right-wing, Establishment party that exists to promote the interests of the rich. Reform has taken most of its support from the Tories. But only a few people coming from Labour is still a victory for the populist party.
The majority of the Labour vote losses are going to other places: Greens, Liberal Democrats, becoming undecided or abstaining.
This exodus shows that Labour has stopped being a ‘broad church’ and re-focused itself on being a narrow-interest, right-wing party that has pandered to the Establishment and the right-wing media at the cost of everything else including credibility.
It’s crucial to stress that voters drifting in different directions may still be driven by the same feeling — the sense that Labour is fake, managerial, and alien.
Reform UK, the Greens, the Lib Dems: all project authenticity to some group of disillusioned people. Each of them represents, in their own idiom, a reaction against what Labour has become — not necessarily agreement with one another, but rejection of technocratic, hollow politics.
That means the “broad church” has not disappeared in the electorate; it has merely been dispersed.
Starmer’s Labour has made no effort to contain it.
The ‘zeal’ gap
And here’s the final twist: Farage’s populism thrives precisely because Labour’s managerialism leaves an emotional vacuum.
Labour’s language — focus-grouped, flattened, fearful of controversy — reads as simulation. Reform’s is chaotic, reckless, but alive. Zealous, one might say.
In modern politics, that counts for more than accuracy or detail. Voters don’t rally to spreadsheets; they rally to conviction. Labour’s tragedy is that it mistook professionalisation for persuasion.
So, yes – Labour is floundering because Starmer has made it fake.
He has silenced the voices that gave it strength, rewritten the rules to keep power in his own hands, and turned a movement for change into a brand for management.
Now the voters who once filled Labour’s sails are walking away – some to the right, many to the Left, all to something that at least feels real.
By chasing approval from those who will never truly support it, Labour has alienated those who once did.
The zeal now lies elsewhere.
Unless Starmer rediscovers what Labour is for, and exchanges that for what he thinks it should look like, the party he leads will continue to suffer a long, slow death.
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Is Labour floundering because Starmer has made it ‘fake’?
Share this post:
By purging the Left, hollowing out party democracy and chasing approval from the Establishment, Keir Starmer may have stripped Labour of the authenticity voters crave.
If Labour looks strong on paper, it is weak in spirit.
That is the apparent verdict from voters who are deserting the party – not just for Reform UK, which is surging on the polls on the basis of bluster and zeal, but for other parties that seem more authentic, like the Greens and even the Liberal Democrats.
Under Keir Starmer, the party that once drew power from conviction now runs on control – a polished product that feels fake to the people it once represented – and voters can sense it. That’s why, Labour’s support is slipping away.
The trigger
Take a look at the following comment, responding to This Site’s article on why Labour can’t beat Reform UK:
The question is: has Starmer sabotaged Labour? And did he do it thinking he was fortifying his own position?
Labour is no longer a ‘broad church’
Starmer’s “modernisation” — which he presents as professionalisation and electability — has provoked hundreds of thousands of long-term party members to quit, and around three million voters to abandon it at the ballot box.
They would say the changes have, in practice, been a controlled demolition of the party’s internal democracy and ideological roots.
The purge of the Left, the marginalisation of activists, the disempowerment of local party structures, the control-freakery over candidate selections — all of it looks, from the outside, like the work of a man intent on creating a hollowed-out, leader-centric apparatus that no longer belongs to its members.
The irony, of course, is that this was probably meant to secure Labour’s hold on power: to prevent internal rebellions, to reassure donors, to make the party “safe” – for the Establishment.
That’s the problem, right there. He wanted Labour to be acceptable to a primarily right-wing cohort with priorities that are traditionally at odds with the ideological centre of the party he joined.
By altering Labour’s direction to fit in with those priorities, he is likely to have sawn off the branch he’s sitting on — alienating precisely the grassroots energy that sustains a party in difficult times.
The shift in voting patterns — from Labour to the Greens, Lib Dems, or even non-voting — is not a neutral redistribution of discontent; it is a symptom of Labour’s self-imposed narrowing.
Starmer’s leadership has defined itself by exclusion — of the Left, of dissent, of anything that challenges a tightly policed “professional” image.
The result is a party that has traded diversity of thought for the illusion of unity.
When lifelong supporters move to the Greens, it’s not because they suddenly became radicals; it’s because Labour stopped being recognisable as Labour.
That’s why polling analyses show an exodus of soft-left and socially liberal voters — the ones who once saw Labour as a moral rather than merely managerial force.
The ‘purge of the Left’
Starmer’s first action was to purge the Left from positions of influence in the party, according to my commentator – and we can see plenty of evidence:
Former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has repeatedly accused Starmer’s leadership of purging the left wing of Labour, or allowing a “right-wing faction” to get dominant and suppress dissenting voices.
Mick Lynch (leader of the RMT union) has similarly criticised Labour’s candidate selection processes as a “purge” of left-wing candidates.
The Guardian has reported that under Starmer the approved candidate shortlists from the party’s ruling National Executive Committee have increasingly excluded candidates supported by trade unions (including the soft Left) and those with more independent views.
Manipulation of party rules
Starmer didn’t just change the culture of the party; he changed its machinery.
Labour under Starmer has tightened control over candidate selection. People with even modest divergence from leadership-approved views have been blocked from shortlists. Former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said of this: “The selection of candidates … is so tightly controlled that anyone with a hint of independence of thought stands virtually no chance of being allowed on candidate lists.”
Starmer changed internal party rules: in 2021 he proposed alterations to how Labour elects its leader, moving away from “one-member-one-vote” to give or restore more power to MPs. Critics said the change was designed to prevent the return of a Corbyn-type leadership.
The shift in leadership nomination thresholds (from ten per cent of MPs to twenty per cent) effectively locks the Left out of future leadership contests, meaning a Corbyn-like candidate is no longer mathematically viable unless the PLP’s composition changes dramatically — which, under Starmer’s candidate control, it won’t.
Combine that with NEC rule changes and the control of conference agendas, and Labour democracy is more choreographed than organic.
This gives the lie to the notion of “strong leadership”: it is strength through suffocation.
The more Starmer controls, the less alive the party becomes.
The illusion of mandate
Starmer’s government did not win power through enthusiasm.
Turnout collapse among former Tory voters handed Labour a parliamentary majority in the general election of 2024 – but not moral authority. Support for Labour didn’t surge; voters simply chose not to come out and the party got into government on the lowest vote (as a percentage of the electorate) in history.
The proportion of the electorate actively voting for Labour was historically low — and this has a knock-on effect upon its delivery of manifesto promises.
I saw a social media post claiming that the Tory government of 2019-24 managed to deliver on only two of its manifesto promises, while Labour has either enacted or is in the process of enacting dozens.
That’s all very well, but if a majority of the public doesn’t want those changes, this “record of delivery” is meaningless.
So the apparent paradox of rapid legislative activity alongside cratering approval ratings is explained: Labour is busy – doing what most of us believe to be the wrong things.
Fragmented dissent, shared cause
The result of the purges, rule changes and policy dissatisfaction is clear – and was predictable. People are abandoning Labour in multitudes.
Polling data shows Reform UK ahead of Labour in many voter intention polls. For example: Ipsos poll (Sep 2025) had Reform UK at 34 per cent, Labour at 22 per cent, with Labour satisfaction and Starmer’s approval sharply low.
An earlier Ipsos poll (June 2025) also showed Reform UK leading Labour by nine points.
In local elections and by-elections, Labour has lost many council seats since the 2024 general election. Some of those losses have gone to Reform UK.
Labour’s drop in polling since entering government is very large: The Guardian notes this is the worst drop for any governing party since polling data began in the late 1970s/early 1980s (PollBase), losing ~12 points in eight months.
Admittedly, not all Labour voters are going to Reform UK. Why would they? Reform is a right-wing, Establishment party that exists to promote the interests of the rich. Reform has taken most of its support from the Tories. But only a few people coming from Labour is still a victory for the populist party.
The majority of the Labour vote losses are going to other places: Greens, Liberal Democrats, becoming undecided or abstaining.
This exodus shows that Labour has stopped being a ‘broad church’ and re-focused itself on being a narrow-interest, right-wing party that has pandered to the Establishment and the right-wing media at the cost of everything else including credibility.
It’s crucial to stress that voters drifting in different directions may still be driven by the same feeling — the sense that Labour is fake, managerial, and alien.
Reform UK, the Greens, the Lib Dems: all project authenticity to some group of disillusioned people. Each of them represents, in their own idiom, a reaction against what Labour has become — not necessarily agreement with one another, but rejection of technocratic, hollow politics.
That means the “broad church” has not disappeared in the electorate; it has merely been dispersed.
Starmer’s Labour has made no effort to contain it.
The ‘zeal’ gap
And here’s the final twist: Farage’s populism thrives precisely because Labour’s managerialism leaves an emotional vacuum.
Labour’s language — focus-grouped, flattened, fearful of controversy — reads as simulation. Reform’s is chaotic, reckless, but alive. Zealous, one might say.
In modern politics, that counts for more than accuracy or detail. Voters don’t rally to spreadsheets; they rally to conviction. Labour’s tragedy is that it mistook professionalisation for persuasion.
So, yes – Labour is floundering because Starmer has made it fake.
He has silenced the voices that gave it strength, rewritten the rules to keep power in his own hands, and turned a movement for change into a brand for management.
Now the voters who once filled Labour’s sails are walking away – some to the right, many to the Left, all to something that at least feels real.
By chasing approval from those who will never truly support it, Labour has alienated those who once did.
The zeal now lies elsewhere.
Unless Starmer rediscovers what Labour is for, and exchanges that for what he thinks it should look like, the party he leads will continue to suffer a long, slow death.
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