Labour is in its deepest trouble, Polly Toynbee wrote, arguing that Keir Starmer must be gone by autumn with a dignified timetable and that the party cannot ignore the rejection it suffered in the local elections. She said the revolt was not just against Labour, but crushingly against Starmer himself.
Her warning was blunt: Wes Streeting, she said, is trying to trigger a contest, and Labour is now facing this sixth game of thrones for No 10 in a decade. The pressure is not coming from a single misstep. It is coming from a party that won power but is already being told by its own voters that they want someone else in charge.
The weight of Toynbee’s argument is that Labour cannot answer this mood with management alone. She said a new leader would need to summon a sense of emergency and confront the big questions head-on, including whether to consider rejoining the EU, carry out massive tax reform and scrap the pension triple lock. If Starmer does step aside, she said, the Foreign Office would be the best fit for him.
The backdrop is not empty. In less than two years, Labour has ended the two-child benefit cap, a move projected to take 450,000 children out of poverty. It has also provided breakfast clubs for primary schoolchildren in England, made 500,000 extra children in England eligible for free school meals, planned up to 1,000 new Best Start family hubs, restarted a lost youth service with 250 centres to be built or refurbished, and begun creating new further education colleges with extra construction courses and apprenticeships.
But Toynbee’s case is that these measures are no longer enough to settle the argument inside the party. Mark Carney’s line, “Hope is not a plan, nostalgia is not a strategy,” captures the point she is making about Labour’s next move: voters may have heard delivery, but they are demanding something bigger.
The tension is that Labour has already legislated on several fronts, yet the politics around it have turned toxic. Toynbee said the local election message was deafening, and she backed that up by pointing to polling this month showing no contender beating Nigel Farage as best prime minister. That makes the leadership question immediate, not theoretical. If Labour wants to stop the drift, it must decide soon whether Starmer remains its answer or becomes the obstacle.
By autumn, Toynbee says, that decision should already have been made. The party can keep defending the leader it has, or it can start the search for one it thinks can survive the next fight.
