Labour Uncut — Inside Labour Politics

UNCUT: Anas Sarwar must go

10/02/2026, 09:33:39 PM

by Kevin Meagher

What was he thinking? Anas Sarwar’s ‘Captain Oates/taking one for the team’ moment yesterday must surely come with consequences. The Scottish Labour Leader’s decision to shank Keir Starmer, only for the PM to look remarkably unscathed by the close of day, should now lead to Sarwar’s resignation.

As he damned the Prime Minister with faint praise (he was a ‘decent man’), Sarwar complained that the ‘situation in Downing Street’ was ‘not good enough’ with ‘too many mistakes’ under Starmer’s leadership. (A change in tune from his conference speech last year, when Sarwar lavished praise on him as a PM ‘that understands Scotland’).

How on earth can Sarwar continue in his role? He seemed to think, or was led to believe, that other resignations would follow his pre-emptive strike, with chatter that Welsh First Minister Eluned Morgan would do likewise, presumably triggering a slew of cabinet resignations, thus precipitating Starmer’s own.

Only it didn’t work out like that. At all. Feverish television news coverage up until Sarwar’s speech – given solemnly in front of an unfeasibly gigantic Scottish Saltaire backdrop – deflated over the course of the afternoon, as minister after minister tweeted their abiding allegiance to the current occupant of Number Ten.

The coup, such as it was, was over in half a news cycle – with embarrassed political journalists hurriedly reducing their hyperbole from DEFCON 1 when it became clear the Prime Minister would survive. All of which left Sarwar looking like the overexuberant uncle at a family wedding leading a solo conga.

The only realistic course is for him to immediately quit as Scottish leader. Its moot whether or not he can do any more harm to Labour’s position north of the border. The party is languishing in a poor third place already, just weeks away from all-out Scottish parliamentary elections – behind the rejuvenated SNP and Reform. Sarwar doesn’t add anything to the ticket. Not after yesterday.

His relationship with Scottish Secretary, Douglas Alexander – a Starmer loyalist and co-leader of the Scottish campaign – is now hopelessly compromised. The media will love stoking divisions between the two men until election day.

I’m sure we can expect Kemi Badenoch to recite chunks of his speech tomorrow at Prime Minister’s Questions (if she doesn’t opt to read Wes Streeting’s chummy texts with Peter Mandelson).

Whatever confederates Sarwar thought he was in league with quickly abandoned him. His putsch failed. He is cast as Holyrood’s Lee Harvey Oswald. The price for recklessness and bad timing is generally the same in politics. The exit door. Anas Sarwar should now walk through it.

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Labour Uncut

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UNCUT: Starmer should go. But not now

08/02/2026, 11:11:05 PM

by Kevin Meagher

I can only assume the plan was for Morgan McSweeney to stay in his role until the morning after the disastrous May elections, acting as a human flak jacket for the Prime Minister.

Or perhaps until the loss of the Gorton and Denton by-election (which I rather think Labour should hold). But the departure earlier today of Keir Starmer’s most senior and trusted aide over the Peter Mandelson imbroglio serves to underscore the sheer precariousness of the Prime Minister’s position.

Number Ten is on fire and Keir Starmer’s position is terminal. But here’s the thing – so are the fortunes of every PM. There is a beginning, middle and end for every career. And if to govern is to choose it is also to become unpopular for those choices. His critics would say Starmer’s tenure is in the final act, but what if it isn’t?

What if rather than chucking him out, panicking Labour MPs got a grip of themselves and thought strategically, rather than tactically for once – allowing the prime minister to make the necessary reforms to his Downing Street operation and to get on with it. For a while at least.

Labour still has two abiding and substantial advantages. The first is time. We are only a third of the way through this parliament with no need for a general election until summer 2029. Things as the New Labour anthem used to have it, can only get better.

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UNCUT: The NEC’s 8-1 vote to block Andy Burnham suggests his team hadn’t prepared properly

25/01/2026, 08:48:07 PM

by Atul Hatwal

The headlines about the NEC blocking Andy Burnham’s candidacy for Gorton and Denton are about a ruthless, factional hit. That it was. But it didn’t have to be this way. Losing by 8 votes to 1 tells a tale of an quixotic leadership effort that had not done the essential prework required to secure the support of the only voters that mattered: the NEC officer group.

Three votes went against Andy Burnham that he could reasonably have expected to win, regardless of how Labour leadership representatives voted.

NEC Vice Chair, Peter Wheeler is a councillor in the Northwest (Cheshire West) and is well known to Andy Burnham, personally and professionally. In several putative vote tallies on Friday, he was viewed as a potential Burnham backer.

The GMB and Usdaw representatives were subject to strenuous lobbying from both sides, within and without their unions. Once again, having ready answers for inevitable questions on the Manchester Mayoral election and finance, as well as some explicit commitments for what a Burnham leadership would have offered these unions, could have won them over.

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UNCUT: The Uncuts: 2025 awards (pt III)

04/01/2026, 09:58:38 PM

Breakthrough of the year: The Peripheralocracy

Let’s hear it for The Peripherals.

Has our Red/Blue political system ever looked weaker or more irrelevant? A rhetorical question, you understand, with the obvious response being an emphatic ‘No.’

Still, as Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai famously responded when Henry Kissinger asked what he thought about the French Revolution, perhaps it’s too early to tell?

Yet blip or paradigm shift, it’s abundantly clear that all the energy in British politics has drained to the periphery over the past year. A combination of the campaigning brio and easy platitudes of Nigel Farage on the right and Zack Polanski on the left.

Managerial, Red/Blue centrist dad political doesn’t have much appeal when nothing works and everyone’s poor and cheesed off. This was vividly brought home in a YouGov poll the other day looking at where the various parties started 2025 in terms of their polling and where they finished up.

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UNCUT: Sir Patrick Duffy obituary

03/01/2026, 08:28:29 PM

‘The morphine syringe wouldn’t go in his frozen arm, so they had to stab it in’

by Kevin Meagher

Stoicism is often said to be the defining characteristic of the wartime generation. Their lives were enveloped in destruction and uncertainty, with death and privation ever-present. So, they just learned to get on with it.

I was reminded of that yesterday, learning of the sad death of my old friend, Sir Patrick Duffy, after a short illness. Amid the towering achievements of his life was his sheer longevity. At 105 years of age, Patrick was hitherto the oldest living former Member of Parliament.

But he was so much more than a footnote, personifying that very stoicism. He served in Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War, surviving a terrible crash at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. His injuries were so severe that he underwent experimental plastic surgery, with regular follow-up treatments even as a centenarian.

Quite matter-of-factly he recalled medics finding him on the mountainside, unconscious in the wreckage of his plane after a day spent freezing to death. The morphine syringe wouldn’t go in his frozen arm, so they had to stab it in.

At just 23, he received the last rites twice from a priest. With the upmost stoicism he flew again and was perilously close to being sent to Singapore in 1945, mercifully accruing a long-overdue piece of good luck as the war ended. The recipient of a military pension since the 1940s, I joked with him that he was personally responsible for the state of the public finances!

Patrick never complained and stayed focused on what Bill Clinton once referred to as the future business. I assisted him with his second book, which was published in 2024 (incidentally making him the second-oldest published author in the world). His acute observations about the post-war world were accompanied with chapters on Brexit and Boris.

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UNCUT: The Uncuts: 2025 political awards (pt II)

02/01/2026, 09:56:27 PM

Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory Award: Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana

For some light relief in an otherwise challenging political landscape, we now turn to Your Party.

UK fringe parties have generally had a very good year. In addition, during the last six years since the Labour hard left’s loss of the party leadership to Starmer, there has been a steady outward drift of members on the left to other parties. The Green party has been a particularly grateful recipient of Labour’s surplus, and Corbynite vehicles such as Novara Media have increasingly looked towards the Greens as a replacement Labour Party through which to achieve their ends, resulting in an increasingly nutty Green politics, which, let’s face it, was fairly nutty to begin with.

Nevertheless, in light of all this, it should have been a slam-dunk for a hard left group, to capitalise on the disillusion of Labour’s Corbynites on being faced with the unappetising compromises of actual governing; particularly in view of the conscription into the new movement of one former party leader and an MP who was starting to be seen as his anointed successor. Correctly executed, this new party should have been a real threat to Labour.

This, however, was to prove far too simple for the Corbynites: stick them in a room together and there will inevitably be arguments, over what Sigmund Freud referred to as “the narcissism of small differences”.

Having formed in July a new political party with a now-significant membership (estimated at around 50,000), they then proceeded to spend the second half of the year in constant wrangles between the twin factions of Jeremy Corbyn and of Zarah Sultana. It couldn’t decide on its name. It couldn’t decide on who held the purse-strings. And it certainly couldn’t decide on who would lead it. There were expulsions; frenzied briefings and counter-briefings to the press; and Sultana ended up boycotting the first day of her own conference.

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UNCUT: The Uncuts: 2025 political awards (pt I)

31/12/2025, 05:59:24 PM

Most effective Labour frontbencher: Anna Turley MP, Labour Party Chair

This is Anna Turley’s second Uncut award. She was our Labour politician of the year back in 2019, another annus horriblis for Labour. Back then it was for taking on the libellous bullies of Unite and Skwawkbox, this year it is for for leading a step change in effectiveness of Labour’s attack operation. Since taking up the reins as party chair, the party has been quicker and sharper in responding to political developments.

The response to the Farage racism scandal is illustrative of the change she’s brought. The Guardian broke the story at 1500 on the 18th of November. Rather than waiting several days, hemming and hawing about what to say, the party chair was up with a quote 90 minutes later.

Labour Chair Anna Turley said: “These are disturbing allegations and it is vital that Nigel Farage now urgently explains himself.

“We have seen Farage’s weakness in the face of the divisive politics in Reform’s ranks. They are dragging our politics to a dark place”

— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) November 18, 2025

It’s clear from her quote that there wasn’t a clear line from Number 10 but Anna Turley understood the importance of ensuring a Labour voice was prominent at the start of a major story cycle. So she leant as far as she could within the parameters of what was possible, to insert Labour into the conversation, without triggering blowback and diverting the course of the story (note no mention of race in the quote). The fact that the party chair had commented meant Labour MPs were empowered to pile into the attack and to be much more explicit about their views on Farage and racism. The momentum of Labour MPs’, activists and councillors commenting boosted the story, pushing it up the broadcast agenda and shifted the dynamic within Labour. By the 21st of November, the Prime Minister was criticising Farage on racism across broadcast media.

Job done. A case study in modern communications and how to manage Number 10 into active decision making. More please in the new year.

Most effective political communicator: Zohran Mamdani

Uncut consulted a reporter who travelled through Pennsylvania during the 2024 US presidential election. All the Trump posters promised Strength to tackle Prices and Borders.

A year on and prices have not fallen. Inflation persists, with wages not growing fast enough to compensate for the dramatic spike in inflation during the pandemic. Trump has also enacted policies that have added to inflation (e.g., tariffs) and acted in ways that communicate different priorities (e.g., the push for a grandiose White House rebuild).

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UNCUT: Labour’s three recent, unforced errors are far more serious than the Budget furore

08/12/2025, 08:46:35 PM

by Rob Marchant

While Westminster has been alight with chatter over whether or not Rachel Reeves misrepresented the facts in the run-up to her Budget, events have been happening in parallel which are likely to have a far longer shadow for Keir Starmer and his crew. Indeed, they are situations which, if left as they are, will continue to have brutal repercussions long after they all leave office.

The first was Wes Streeting’s announcement last month of the puberty blockers trial, due to kick off in the New Year.

When the Cass report landed in April last year, campaigners looking to protect Britain’s children from the harm of untested medicines were surely so overjoyed to see that thousands of lives could be protected from likely sterilisation and severe health problems in later life, that less focus was given to one of the report’s other recommendations, on the smaller number children which it recommended be recruited for a clinical trial, to finally put a stop to any debate on the efficacy of said treatment.

It seemed churlish to complain about this matter of the fine print, when the main battle, over ceasing the general puberty-blocker programme, had already been won. But now the last grain of sand has fallen into the bottom of the egg timer and the trial, which it was easy to blithely assume would never start, is about to begin.

This means that 226 children will be legally taking the same drugs which have been declared illegal for thousands of others diagnosed with gender dysphoria. To recap: these drugs have never been approved for this use; the treatment is experimental, with some horrific side effects; and consent cannot be meaningfully given by minors as young as 10, most of whom are too young to have experienced pubertal changes, let alone sex.

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UNCUT: A boosted Starmer, but he’s still haunted by Burnham and Farage

04/10/2025, 01:26:56 AM

The Labour Party conference fulfilled its time-honoured purpose of providing respite for a beleaguered prime minister, assailed by the vicissitudes of government and the inveterate scheming of colleagues. This is an audience willing its leader on. A useful corrective to the Whitehall slog and the sniping of the Westminster village.

At conference everything is washed clean. At least for a few days. Unity was the vibe, with Keir Starmer greeted by thunderous applause in the hall from delegates as he rattled off a list of the party’s overlooked achievements in government, while he socked it to Nigel Farage. There is no mood in the activist base for a change in leader and the novelty of being in government again after 14 long years in the wilderness has still not worn off.

Not yet.

Will it last, that’s the question. It’s clear that what was true before the conference is still true after it. The country is in turmoil; the product of a general dissatisfaction with Red/Blue politics, but this is overlaid by a stubbornly unresolvable cost-of-living crisis, barely functioning public services, the highest tax-take any of us has known and an all-pervading sense of national decline. Throw in the early manoeuvrings of World War Three and it’s a challenging in-tray for Keir Starmer, to put it mildly.

He might consider the past 12 months have been arduous, but the next year will be worse. A difficult Budget at the end of November and a potentially disastrous set of elections next May could undo this week’s positivity and with it his tenure in Downing Street.

Ministers are plainly rolling the pitch for more tax rises – skating perilously close to their pre-election promises not to raise income tax and VAT – as they seek to plug the hole in the public finances, unable, as they would have preferred, to trim the welfare bill.

And polls point to a devastating set of results in the spring, with Labour in Wales trailing in third place ahead of the all-out assembly elections, while the SNP rides high in Scotland and Reform is set to rampage through Labour’s English local government strongholds.

And then there’s Andy…

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UNCUT: Our paradox PM needs to show us he has the stuff

29/09/2025, 08:50:06 PM

Who is Keir Starmer? I mean, who is he really? A year of more into office, propelled into Downing Street with an enormous 170-seat Commons majority, our chameleon PM remains elusive. Unknowable.

His father was a toolmaker, apparently. But what does he want? Whose side is he on? Are there particular passions that drive him? What is he for?

Our Prime Minister: the walking paradox.

The human rights lawyer who wants to die on a hill over compulsory identity cards. The north London liberal who has gutted the overseas aid budget. The barrister – a King’s Counsel no less – who can only manage faltering performances in the House of Commons.

The man who told us Britian had become a ‘nation of strangers’ because of excessive immigration, only to disown his remarks weeks later. The election winner with personal ratings that are now through the floor (who, in any case, managed to win half a million votes fewer than Jeremy Corbyn did in 2019).

While his army of restless and underworked backbenchers are now plotting against the man responsible for putting them on the green leather benches in the first place.

Governing is hard, it turns out.

Yet Starmer could have made things easier on himself. For a start, the government’s communications have been shambolic – not helped by the general absence of political strategy since entering Downing Street and a revolving door of often sup-par backroom staff.

And who would have thought a PM with a 170-majority would struggle to get tricky proposals through parliament? But he’s managed it with the fiasco over the proposed welfare cuts – which are set to cost more!

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