This is arguably years too late.

Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell has finally spoken out.

In a passionate and damning article for The Guardian, he has called for a leadership challenge against Keir Starmer, accusing the Labour prime minister of abandoning the party’s founding principles, betraying the poorest in society, and surrounding himself with corporate interests and political incompetents.

“Keir Starmer was elected leader of the party on the policy platform that Jeremy Corbyn and I developed, and then he promptly dropped virtually every policy promise he made,”

McDonnell writes.

What follows is a blistering critique of Starmer’s time in office: from the retention of the Tory two-child benefit cap, to the punishment of MPs who defied the whip to vote against it, to Labour’s failures on poverty, disability benefits, and Gaza.

McDonnell accuses the Labour leadership of political incompetence, cowardice, and cruelty.

He highlights internal factionalism, attacks the fiscal rules being used to justify austerity-lite, and condemns the moral collapse of a government whose ministers now accept gifts and donations from “corporate carpetbaggers.”

And in his most sobering line, he warns:

“Unless party members, affiliated unions and MPs stand up and assert themselves to take back control of Labour, in the next period of its history we may not only lose a government. We could also lose a party.”

It’s a serious moment.

One of the last remaining figureheads of the Labour left has finally drawn a line.

But is it too late?

A belated rebellion that comes far too late

That’s the question now.

And the honest answer is: yes, probably.

This is my view — not McDonnell’s.

And here’s the hard truth: even as welcome as his intervention is, it comes years after it was most needed.

While the Labour left was being dismantled, its senior figures hoped for compromise.

They hoped for realism.

They hoped that Starmer would be forced, by sheer necessity, to return to a more radical and effective path.

They were wrong.

Now, even McDonnell should acknowledge the bleak reality: there’s likely no progressive challenger left in the Parliamentary Labour Party who could win a leadership contest.

The PLP has been purged and packed with Starmer loyalists.

The left has been marginalised, suspended, smeared, deselected, and driven out.

Any challenge now would only deliver a Starmer 2.0 — maybe slicker, maybe even blander, but pushing the same agenda.

As Einstein supposedly said, the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Trying to win back the Labour Party has become that kind of madness.

Where now for the left?

McDonnell’s critique is powerful, heartfelt, and right on nearly every count.

But it also inadvertently exposes just how little power the left still has inside Labour — and how late this rebellion has come.

The future must now lie elsewhere.

If there’s any path forward for progressive politics in the UK, it lies in building a new left movement outside the Labour Party.

It could be rooted in the values that built Labour in the first place: solidarity, equality, democracy, and anti-poverty.

It might take years.

It may take decades.

But it’s better to start now than continue waiting for salvation from a party that has made it clear that it has no intention of saving anyone.

That delay — that false hope that Labour could be turned around — is partly why we’re here today, still without a viable political vehicle for the working class and the marginalised.

And that responsibility lies with McDonnell and his colleagues as much as with Starmer and his acolytes.

The tragedy is that those who had the power to lead the charge out of Labour clung on too long.

Now we all have to build something new.

Source: Starmer and co are trashing Labour’s legacy. We must take back control of our party – before it’s too late | John McDonnell | The Guardian