LABOUR’S first full week of general election campaigning has been overshadowed by the authoritarianism and racism of the Starmer apparatus, and the complete collapse of democratic norms and procedures within the party.

Now who could have seen that coming?

What had previously been Westminster insider understanding — that Starmer’s Labour is an undemocratic, mendacious and discriminatory project — is now common currency.

That was presumably not what campaign supremo Morgan McSweeney was planning.

McSweeney is no stranger to campaign calamities — he was, after all, the mastermind of Liz Kendall’s 2015 bid for the Labour leadership, rewarded with 4.5 per cent of the vote.

There is a cynical argument that the rows over Diane Abbott and Faiza Shaheen are exactly what Labour was looking for, since they highlight its distance from its recent past and show the party taking on residual Corbynism.

Yet the optics of attacking two outstanding black women — probably with more to come — while waving through white men with deeply chequered presents, never mind pasts, is such dreadful optics that it is hard to believe it was planned.

The imbroglio over Abbott — leaving her in limbo over whether she could stand for Labour or not, before finally caving to mass public pressure and outrage and clearing her to stand — and the hounding out of Shaheen are the confluence of several factors.

One is racism. We do not need to speculate whether the Labour apparatus holds racist and misogynist views. We know it. The leaked report into Labour’s handling of anti-semitism complaints revealed the shocking abuse directed towards Abbott by party officials.

Anyone who believes that Labour is intrinsically anti-racist knows little of its history. It is certainly less immersed in racism than the Tories, but that is not a terribly high bar to clear.

The second is the suppression of dissent, which has been a hallmark of Starmer’s brittle leadership almost from the outset. 

The party he inherited from Jeremy Corbyn could not be turned into a safe option for the British Establishment by democratic methods, so he and his entourage turned to others.

These included deception, starting with Starmer masquerading as a leftwinger during his leadership election campaign, through to the brutal exercise of bureaucratic authority to eliminate the influence of anyone opposed to his strategy of offering minimal change and unqualified appeasement of the powers-that-be.

The problem with ruling by lies, manipulation and intimidation is that when things nevertheless spin out of control there is no safety mechanism, no reliable plan B, to fall back upon.

That is what started to happen when the BBC revealed that Starmer had had lied when he claimed that the probe into Abbott was still continuing. It had in fact concluded last December, and her subsequent suspension had been entirely at his behest.

The third factor is simple blundering. Trying to force out the iconic Abbott was a car crash in plain sight. There were plenty of chances to do the right thing with broad support, not least when the row blew up over Tory donor Frank Hester’s racist attacks on her.

That could have been the moment for reconciliation, had Labour’s right been the least bit interested in that sort of thing.

It seems that the witch-hunters in the Labour apparatus had another agenda.

It is this: minimising the size of the left in the next parliament at all costs. That has been a key objective of the right since they got their hands on the party machine with Starmer’s election in 2020.

They have exerted every effort to that end. Evicting sitting MPs was just a start — Corbyn being the obvious example.

Then there has been the persecution of Abbott and Apsana Begum. As of this writing, while Starmer has backed down over Abbott, Begum’s case is uncertain at best.

Two working-class socialists were eased out through procedural manipulation when constituency boundaries were redrawn — Mick Whitley in Birkenhead and Beth Winter in Cynon Valley.

The right was less successful when it came to deselections. Drives were made to persuade local parties to dump Zarah Sultana in Coventry and Ian Byrne in Liverpool, but both efforts came up short.

However, the right’s real success lay in ensuring that no new left candidates were adopted in winnable seats.  

They accomplished this by the simple expedient of having the national executive rule them ineligible for longlists or shortlists, no matter how much local or trade union support they may have had.

The strategy was to confront constituencies with a minimal choice between two conformist candidates, both safe for the Starmer project.

Thus hardly any new left candidates have been adopted and those that have, like Shaheen, have since been subject to intolerable pressure and bullying, even prior to their final purging.

Why many affiliated trade unions acquiesced in their own marginalisation and the exclusion of their candidates from any shot at public office is hard to explain.

In the end, even the pretence of democracy has been abandoned. In numerous safe Labour seats, compliant parliamentarians were persuaded or bribed with offers of future sinecures to delay announcing their retirements past the point where any form of local selection procedure could be followed.

That leaves the way clear for the executive to simply dictate the adoption of favoured rightwingers, including people like ultra-factional Israel lobbyist Luke Akehurst or Labour Together director Josh Simons, described to me as “a ticking time-bomb” liable at any moment to make offensive remarks, as he did towards Scotland earlier this year.

These are people who would struggle to prevail in any form of democratic process. Instead, in an extraordinary display of political insider trading, no fewer than six rightwingers on Labour’s executive have simply had themselves appointed, without any vote at all, as the party’s candidate in safe seats.

Michael Wheeler, to take one example, moved without missing a beat from service on the panel which eviscerated Faiza Shaheen to being imposed as Labour’s offer to the electorate of Worsley and Eccles in Greater Manchester.

One thing animating the McSweeney gang in all this is the far-from-stupid fear that Labour may not secure the monumental majority the polls predict and that the final outcome may be much tighter than anticipated.

Under those circumstances, the right’s nightmare would be a do-nothing Starmer administration vulnerable to left pressure and rebellion from the back benches. Thus, the parliamentary left needs to be squeezed down to the bare minimum.

That rational calculation channels pure factional bile of course. Labour’s right, unencumbered by any real wish to change society significantly, is driven above all by hatred of socialism and socialists.

It is what gets the Akehursts out of bed in the morning. They believe in little else.

But not quite nothing else. Here is the final element. The Labour right’s world view can be summed up in three words: Nato. Trident. Israel.

And the last-named is top of the agenda right now. Shaheen’s fate was sealed when the Jewish Labour Movement decided to move against her publicly.

One has only to see the rictus on the faces of Labour’s front bench any time one of the party’s backbenchers speaks up for Palestine to realise that those MPs, few enough in truth, who have raised their voice against the Gaza genocide are entirely unwelcome.

A pro-Palestinian voice as articulate as Shaheen’s was never going to be tolerated. While 1980s Labour was, for all its faults, open to Abbott, the Labour of the 2020s is not to those she blazed a trail for, like Shaheen.

Her parliamentary hopes have been martyred above all to the struggle between anti-imperialism on the one hand and racism on the other within the Labour Party. An extremely talented woman, she will survive.

Labour on the other hand, even as it approaches electoral victory, is rotting within and storing up the political kindling which will likely consume it in flames when Starmer tries to extend his abusive methods of political management to the country as a whole.

Eyes Left is normally a fortnightly column on Wednesdays. In the run-up to the election, Andrew will be providing extra analysis and commentary as events unfold, so keep an eye out for more Eyes Left in the days to come.