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IN what’s probably the best-known scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, King Arthur wishes to cross a bridge guarded by the Black Knight, who refuses to let him pass. A sword fight ensues. Arthur chops off the knight’s left arm. “’Tis but a scratch,” claims the injured party. After losing his second arm, the knight insists it’s “just a flesh wound”. Once both his legs have also been hacked off, he concedes: “All right, we’ll call it a draw.”
Sir Keir Starmer’s apparent determination to soldier on as prime minister is reminiscent of the limbless Black Knight’s bravado. Last Thursday’s monumental losses for the British Labour Party in council seats across England, as well as in the Scottish and Welsh assemblies, hardly came as a surprise. Disenchanted Labourites, including many of the white knight’s former allies, have been sharpening their long knives at least since the government was rocked by the scandal around Peter Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to the US.
Since May 7, the PM has come under growing pressure to either immediately resign or to outline a timetable for a relatively swift exit. Instead, Starmer seems determined to cling on, telling the Financial Times that he wants to serve two terms at the helm of a “10-year project of renewal” and writing in The Guardian that despite “unnecessary mistakes”, the “message that voters have sent us … doesn’t mean taking left or right” but instead “bringing together a broad political movement … and addressing people’s demands”.
These are precisely the kind of meaningless platitudes that have disenchanted the multitudes. He says Britain “must break with the status quo once and for all by building a stronger and fairer country”. ‘Stronger’ alludes to more spending on weapons and other means of warfare, and the resources for that will no doubt be found (or reallocated). As for ‘fairer’, Starmer and his ilk are ideologically allergic to the idea of redistributing wealth. As for undoing Brexit by stealth, so far there is merely a potential youth mobility scheme that would enable Britons under 30 to live or work in the European Union, with limited reciprocal rights for EU citizens. There’s also talk of aligning more closely with Europe on defence and trade, but little to show for it so far.
The Starmer project wasn’t built to last.
Brexit was predicated partly on the prospect of lucrative trade deals with Britain’s former colonies and on benefiting from the ‘special relationship’ with the US. The latter has been on life support since the UK turned down the US invitation to directly participate in its Israeli-instigated aggression against Iran, even though Starmer eventually relented on the use of UK military bases for operations. More broadly, Britain shares the rest of Europe’s angst at being dismissed as a relatively insignificant auxiliary of the American empire.
Meanwhile, there are at least two key aspects of Britain’s current predicament that the mainstream media often tends to overlook. The first is the sordid saga of how Starmer became Labour leader under false pretences, as part of a project intended to ensure that never again would the party risk being seen as even vaguely socialist, as it was under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Ridiculous antisemitism smears were just part of a plot that diminished Labour’s chances in the 2017 election (when it won the highest number of votes in 20 years) and destroyed them in 2019 — when the party nonetheless gained more votes than in its Pyrrhic triumph under Starmer in July 2024, when its so-called landslide was based on less than 34 per cent of the popular vote and proportionately the lowest turnout since universal adult franchise was introduced more than a century earlier.
Labour has lost around half its members since the Corbyn era and many of them are likely to have voted for the Greens or for Reform. That’s the second point. Greens leader Zack Polanski has been subjected to the same kind of nonsense that Corbyn endured, although it’s a bit harder because he is Jewish. Spouting far more attractive policies than Labour, the Greens have recorded significant gains in London and beyond and would have been likely to have scored even more wins had other urban councils been up for grabs. But the biggest beneficiary of Labour’s suicidal tendencies and the Tories’ self-immolation has been the far-right Reform party, and it’s possible that the monstrous Nigel Farage will make 10 Downing Street his home unless Labour can trace its path back to the ideals it once stood for.
It won’t under Starmer, but most of the obvious alternatives are equally pathetic. There’s the dismal prospect, though, that if Britain takes a semi-fascistic path it might find itself more closely aligned with European neighbours headed in the same direction. And Donald Trump, if he’s still around, will no doubt claim credit.
Published in Dawn, May 13th, 2026
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