 A new poll shows that a majority of voters think Keir Starmer should resign as Labour leader. Among all voters, 37 people think he should stand down now, 28% of people don't. Now you might say that doesn't mean much when it's Tory voters anyway, but it's the Labour voters that I think matter here. 40% of Labour voters who voted Labour in 2019 want him to stand down, 35% of people want him to stay in the job. You can see that the only group of voters who want him to remain Labour leader are Lib Dems. Unfortunately for Keir Starmer, there weren't very many of them in 2019. We can go to the question slightly different. Should he be replaced before the next election, so before the 2024 election? This one is quite significant, I think. So here, let's just focus on Labour voters. 49% of Labour voters want him to stand down before 2024. Only 16% of people oppose that happening. So it's a very small amount of people who are committed to Keir Starmer standing to be the next Labour Prime Minister. Now alongside the disastrous results in Hartlepool, it's polls like these that might explain why the party's Blairites are getting ever more desperate to purge the left. Why? How does the logic work? Because if Keir Starmer has to resign, he'll clearly be replaced by someone else, that goes without saying, and they don't want that to be a left-winger. They don't want left-wing members to be able to vote for that left-winger. They basically want to destroy the power of the left in the party so that if Keir Starmer falls, another right-winger will replace him. I think this is the context in which we should read one particularly deranged op-ed which was published by the political director of the Tony Blair Institute in The Times. So it's titled, Labour Must Encourage Open Debate or It Will Die. Now from that title alone, I wouldn't have guessed this was calling for a massive purge of the left in the Labour Party. Debate purges don't normally go together. However, this is a particularly incoherent article by Ryan Wayne, as I said, political director of the Tony Blair Institute. And after blaming the left for Labour's loss in Hartlepool, which was a seat obviously held under Corbyn, the author writes of the left that wrapped up in identity politics. Their views become incontestable. Arguing against them is a political minefield of terminology where it's very easy to get blown up by the wrong word. The consequences can be fatal. We end up with a so-called progressive party unable to tolerate different points of view, a party where preaching has replaced debate. Whether it's the endless propagating of an anti-Western worldview, fighting over the rights of biological women to have safe spaces, or tweeting a picture of the Ku Klux Klan alongside the Sewell Report, Labour's backseat drivers are drowning out moderate voices. A lot to say about this. So first of all, Labour did not lose Hartlepool because of trans rights. They probably lost it because of Brexit. Also, what's obviously ridiculous about this is to suggest that Keir Starmer is drowned out by people on the left talking about issues he's not necessarily campaigning on. The people who get airtime on the radio and on television, and the news bulletin, most importantly, that's not left-wing backbenches. That's Keir Starmer. What this writer is talking about is Twitter. He's saying there are lots of backbenches who say things on Twitter, which Keir Starmer doesn't agree with. That's not how votes are won or lost. Clearly though, this guy is looking for someone to blame. He goes on. The aggressive left just doesn't get it. Their prescription following the Hartlepool defeat involves resurrecting the spirit of Corbanism and fervor entrenchment in the retweet-inducing, self-affirming world of identity politics. There is only one solution if Labour want to win. This wing of the party must be removed from the front line. No ifs, no buts. Firing Rebecca Long-Bailey and removing the whip from Jeremy Corbyn saw a bounce in the polls, but this isn't just a popular thing to do. It's the right thing to do. Labour must be about much more than internal battles and self-serving, introspective cultural issues. It should be prepared to debate. Again, lots of things to say about this particular passage. First of all, the idea of this poll bounce doesn't really stack up. Obviously, Jeremy Corbyn was suspended from the whip in November. Labour were doing reasonably well in the polls that winter, but that was more because of the deftile which was piling up because of the Tory's catastrophic handling of coronavirus. If you don't believe me, let's abstract Labour's polling from Tory performance and just look at how people were thinking about Keir Starmer, whether or not he was performing well or badly in his job. When the whip was withdrawn from Jeremy Corbyn, the Keir Starmer's ratings really start to plummet. In fact, it was that decision which I think we can probably infer really damaged Keir Starmer in the polls far from pleasing the electorate. However, of course, we don't really need to bother with polling to see how stupid this argument was. That all for starters a paragraph saying the left have to be purged and then he ends up saying we have to be prepared to debate. The two are not consistent. They are not compatible with one another. If you want to have a party where you have open debate and say, look, Keir Starmer is the leader, he sets the direction of the Labour Party, but we're not scared of having people like Jeremy Corbyn or Rebecca Long Bailey or John McDonnell disagreeing with us because we're an open party. We have the confidence in our ideas as Keir Starmer and the leadership that we can have a grown-up debate. No, this guy is saying, you've got to kick them all out. That's the opposite of a debate. He goes on to say, this is a key tenet of progressive politics and ability to hear different perspectives build on them and reach a new unifying position rather than just sitting on the fence. His main argument is the left must be purged. Labour's leadership must act quickly and decisively, taking a stand against the aggressive left. If they can't debate, disagree, but fall into line. They must leave. It will be painful, which will be an unedifying spectacle and officials will likely be permanent. I mean, for a start, he's kind of talking about democratic centralism. So it's sort of a bit of a Stalinist principle in a way. No, it's probably some good arguments for it, but it's not an argument that he seems to want to make. He's saying, you have an internal debate and the argument is one. And then if the argument is one, not in your favor, you will shut up. Every single person in the party has to spout the party line. Even on Twitter, you can't say something which the leadership hasn't approved. That's a really, really centralizing idea. Very, very disciplinarian, very Stalinist, yet he seems to think this is consistent with saying the Labour Party needs to be open. What do you think is going on here? What's going through this guy's mind? So, I mean, it's his job to come up with an argument to fit the line, right? So by hook or by crook, no matter how incoherent, he needed to find a way of looking at what's happening right now in the Labour Party and using it as an excuse to purge the left. But look, the notion that the left is making Labour into a party that cannot tolerate disagreement and is dishing out fatal consequences to those who divert from a particular line is so delusional, especially in the context of the Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn and Corbynism itself actively courted, some would say too much, and tried to include people from across the different traditions in the Labour Party. There were many people in his various cabinets that did not come from the Corbynite or the McDonald tradition, and it was they who tried to destroy him, not the other way around. If you think about this idea of, oh, we have discussions within the party and even if you disagree with the outcome, you take it on board, sorry, is that not what Jeremy Corbyn did with nuclear disarmament? Jeremy Corbyn's one of his most passionate positions is for nuclear disarmament is for ending trident. But when there was a debate within the party and party members, I think it was party members, maybe it was the PLP, said no, we want to be in favour of trident. He said, okay, it's not my position, but it's the party democracy, and I have to respect that. The position on the EU referendum, Jeremy Corbyn is not massively pro-remain. He's historically a Eurosceptic, but that was the party position. That was the way that the members voted. He did that. That's what he respected. And it wasn't Corbyn that purged swathes of the party membership who were seen to divert from the position of the Labour Party establishment at the time. And it was Keir Starmer who, let's not forget, suspended Jeremy Corbyn and Sacked Rebekah Long Bailey because of a tweet. So who here is actually punishing diversity of thoughts? Who here is intolerant of other views and is dishing out fatal consequences for those who depart from the party line or depart from even just the establishment line within the party? And also, who here is invested in identity politics and cultural issues as if cultural issues are not part of what a political party should be invested in. But is it the people who are fighting for better infrastructure, for universal access to services, or is it those who spend every waking moment frothing at the mouth about metropolitan North London elites with their cappuccinos, while providing no concrete policies and no concrete program whatsoever, but just trafficking off this kind of very superficial lines of division that they're trying to outline? So this kind of story that is being told here, it's not grounded in reality, but unfortunately, this kind of flipping of the reality, this direct inversion where people who are incredibly tolerant are being portrayed as deeply intolerant is and people who are deeply intolerant are positioning themselves as bastions of tolerance. It actually is seeming to cut through a little bit. And so I think the left needs to be far more confident in sort of pointing out this hypocrisy and this projection and not acting shy when accused of things that are clearly not true. Let's focus on who this guy is, because I presume, you know, we can get something published in The Times, Connected Guy, political director at the Tony Blair Institute, I presume, well, I mean, you can basically assume, right, that he had Tony Blair's blessing to write this. We know Keir Starmer is fairly close to people around Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, for example. Another thing we know about this guy, and this is thanks to Solomon Hughes, who's an investigative journalist, is that he formally launched a party, launched a third party. And no, it wasn't even Change UK, because Change UK compared to the party this guy started, was a roaring success. He started the new centrist party called United for Change. I think this is from his LinkedIn, where it's showing that he was the CEO and co-founder of United for Change. Less successful than Change UK, because while they got obliterated in general election, this party never got to the point of standing in a general election. This guy is a complete failure. And now he's saying, what Keir Starmer needs to do is not have any policies. There wasn't a single policy mentioned in that article. He just needs to purge the left and hope for the best. It's completely pathetic.