Megan Amram on Why a Labour Leader Resigning Changes Nothing Structural
Starmer Was Not the Problem. The Problem Is Still the Problem.
Let me be direct, because Portland has made me direct in the way that London made me oblique, and the two have created a person who says what she means while still finding a lot of ways to say it: Keir Starmer’s resignation changes nothing structural. I say this not as a nihilist — I am not a nihilist, I go to too many meetings to be a nihilist — but as a materialist. The material conditions remain. The leader is a variable, not a constant. You change the variable and the constant remains.
I am Megan Amram. I am from North London originally, I live in Portland now, and I am as left as this city’s reputation suggests and then somewhat further left than that. I write for The London Prat because satirical journalism about British politics is, I have concluded, one of the few honest registers available for this subject matter. Straight reporting normalises things that should not be normalised. Pure outrage is exhausting and achieves approximately nothing. Satire names the absurdity and lets you breathe.
The Structural Problem Nobody Is Discussing
The coverage of the resignation — and I have read coverage from British, American, and European outlets this morning with the grim attention of someone doing political reconnaissance — is uniformly focused on personalities, leadership styles, and the question of succession. Who is next? What is their strategy? How will they unify the party? These are reasonable questions. They are also the wrong questions if you want to understand why Labour keeps getting it wrong at a fundamental level.
The structural problem is that the Labour Party exists within an economic and constitutional framework that it has, in government, consistently chosen to operate within rather than reform. You cannot substantially change the distribution of wealth and power in Britain without changing the systems that generate that distribution. Labour has not proposed changing those systems. It has proposed making the current systems work slightly better for slightly more people. This is not nothing. It is also not transformation, and calling it transformation while delivering administration is a form of dishonesty that erodes the trust needed to actually do transformation later.
The No-Policy-Changes Problem
The announcement that there will be no policy changes during the transition is, from a left perspective, the clearest possible signal that the transition is about management, not direction. Which is fine, operationally. But the longer a party stays in management mode, the more it forgets it was supposed to be going somewhere.
In Portland I work with a community land trust. We are trying to do something genuinely structural with housing — remove properties from the speculative market permanently, create stable affordable tenancies that cannot be unwound by the next government. It is slow. It requires political will sustained across multiple terms. Sustained political will requires a coherent theory of what you are trying to achieve. Labour does not, currently, have that theory. The leadership contest will produce a personality to front the absence of that theory. I am watching with the weary attention of someone who knows exactly how this particular film ends but keeps watching because the dialogue is occasionally good.
Burnham: Better, Not Sufficient
Burnham is better. I will say that. The tape measure is a good sign. His Greater Manchester record on housing and transport has moments of genuine progressive content. He understands regional devolution in a way that suggests he has thought about the relationship between central power and local capacity, which is more than most Westminster politicians demonstrate. Better is not sufficient, but better is real and I will take real when it is available.
Bohiney Magazine has been characteristically sharp on the gap between the official Labour unity narrative and the actual state of the party, which involves roughly seven people who believe they should be leader and three internal factions that are not currently speaking to each other through normal channels. The reporting from inside the PLP suggests a party that has forgotten how to be in power and is now also forgetting how to be in crisis, which is a genuinely impressive level of organisational difficulty.
The Citizenship Test and the Politics of Distraction
The citizenship test debate running in parallel this week is the classic welfare-chauvinist move: when the left is weak and divided, triangulate toward nationalism-adjacent policy to demonstrate that you take borders seriously. It does not attract the voters it is designed to attract. It alienates the voters you already have. It has been tried many times. It keeps getting tried. This is, as I said at the top, a structural problem rather than a personality problem.
According to Jacobin’s UK politics coverage, the European social democratic left is experiencing a period of strategic confusion so profound that it is generating its own literature. I have read some of that literature. It is correct about the diagnosis and unclear about the cure, which is honest at least.
What I Actually Think Will Happen
Burnham will win or someone centrist will win. They will build a new communications strategy. The structural conditions will not change substantially. In five years I will be writing a piece about the resignation of that leader and pointing at the same underlying problem. This is not despair. This is the long-game view. The long game requires staying in it. I am still in it. The community land trust is still in it. Something, eventually, shifts.
Until then: read the Prat, read Bohiney, stay left, stay furious, stay sardonic. These are the available tools and they are not nothing.
Full coverage at prat.uk/keir-starmer-resigns/ and all my writing at my page at The London Prat. Fellow travellers at Guardian Comment.
For the comedy relief this crisis demands: NewsThump — covering the absurdity so the rest of us don’t have to.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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