Starmer wins as Tories crash!

by New Worker correspondent

Rishi Sunak has resigned. Tory biggies, including Grant Shapps, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Liz Truss, have lost their seats. Plaid Cymru surges forward but the Scottish nationalist vote slumps. The Liberal-Democrats bounce back with 71 seats – their best result for a hundred years. The Greens are up from one to four. Jeremy Corbyn successfully staves off the Starmer machine. George Galloway doesn’t. Four other independents from the Muslim community take seats from Labour on Palestine solidarity platforms and Reform enters parliament for the first time with Nigel Farage at the helm.
Tory grandees are now scrabbling around to look for a new leader as Labour prepares for the Starmer era following a landslide victory of Blairite proportions in the general election.
Labour trounced the Tories this week winning 412 seats in the House of Commons that gives a huge parliamentary majority of 174. But Labour’s triumphant return owes much more to the Tory collapse than to anything Sir Keir Starmer had to offer. The turn-out was down – possibly the lowest since the Second World War and Labour’s share was only around 36 per cent – much lower than Tony Blair’s victory in 1997. And if Starmer & Co refuse to change course over Palestine the rift with the younger generation, the Muslim community and the left as a whole will only widen.
Labour lost four seats to pro-Palestinian independent candidates and faced serious challenges in several others including Starmer’s own London seat where a pro-Palestinian activist came second with 18.9 per cent of the vote. “Labour need to take the votes lost over Gaza as seriously as we took the loss of red wall” said Blair’s former adviser John McTernan as the results came in on Friday morning. 
"The work of change begins immediately" Starmer said soon after he moved into Downing Street though this would not be as simple as "flicking a switch". Platitudes come easy to a man like Starmer who spoke of the need for schools and affordable homes and vowed to "rebuild" the country's "infrastructure of opportunity...brick by brick" to meet the "challenges of an insecure world".
Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader who defeated a Starmer stooge to keep his Islington seat as an independent,  said Starmer “will have a very large majority in parliament, he has put forward a manifesto that is thin to put it mildly and doesn’t offer a serious economic alternative to what the Conservative government is doing. And so the demands on him are going to be huge, the demands from the people are going to be huge.
“If you don’t give yourself space, to increase spending on the desperate social needs, I mentioned the two-child policy, but there are plenty of others, then I think there are going to be political problems. He must have known this when he agreed this manifesto which is a bit of a straitjacket around any proposals he may want to push forward.
“If the government ends the two-child benefit cap for example, hallelujah! I will be delighted. But if they don’t, I’ll be there, saying: why haven’t you done it? If they bring in rent controls in the private sector, well done. If they don’t, I’ll be there. Because this is a vote to show that people do want a true and independent voice in parliament to speak up for social justice”.