Breaches of trust.

A riveting article from George Monbiot.

George Monbiot published an article in The Guardian recently that was as hard-hitting as I have ever read from him.

I found it very powerful even though I have not been living in England since 2008. Mr Monbiot has previously given me permission to republish his articles and here it is.

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Four-Year Plan

Posted on 3rd June 2025

Keir Starmer has accidentally given us four years in which to build a new political system. We should seize the chance.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 27th May 2025

This feels terminal. The breaches of trust have been so frequent, so vast and so decisive that the voters Labour has already lost are unlikely to return. In one forum after another, I hear the same sentiments: “I voted for change, not the same or worse.” “I’ve voted Labour all my life, but that’s it for me.” “I feel I’ve been had.”

It’s not dissatisfaction. It’s not disillusionment. It’s revulsion: visceral fury, anger on a level I’ve seldom seen before, even towards Tory cruelties. Why? Because these are Tory cruelties, delivered by a party that claimed to be the only alternative, in our first-past-the-post electoral system.

Everyone can name at least some of the betrayals:

 cutting disability benefits; supplying weapons and, allegedly, intelligence to the Israeli government as it pursues genocide in Gaza; channelling Reform UK and Enoch Powell in maligning immigrants; slashing international aid; trashing wildlife and habitats while insulting and abusing people who want to protect them; announcing yet another draconian anti-protest law; leaving trans people in legal limbo; rigidly adhering to outdated and socially destructive fiscal rules; imposing further austerity on government departments and public services. Once the great hope of the oppressed, Labour has become the oppressor.

Like many people, I was wary of Keir Starmer. I had limited expectations, but I willed Labour to succeed. So I’ve watched aghast as he and his inner circle have squandered one of the greatest opportunities the party has ever been granted. They seem to despise people who voted for them, while courting and flattering those who didn’t and won’t.

The results? Last week, the polling company Thinks Insight & Strategy found that 52% of those who voted Labour in the 2024 general election are considering switching to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. That’s more than twice as many as might migrate to Reform UK. The research group Persuasion UK estimates that Labour could lose 250 seatsas a result of this flight to more progressive parties (again, more than twice as many as it could lose through voters shifting to Reform). Figures compiled by the progressive thinktank Compass show that Labour would lose its majority on just a 6% swing. Already, while it won a massive majority on a measly 34% vote at the election, it now polls at just 22%.

Labour’s strategy is incomprehensible. Experience from the rest of Europe shows that when centrist parties adopt far-right rhetoric and policies, they empower the far right while shedding their own supporters.

What explains this idiocy? Labour has succumbed, quickly and hard, to the defining sickness of our undemocratic political system: the sofa cabinet system of close advisers. Opaque and unaccountable government favours opaque and unaccountable power. Ever receptive to the demands of rentiers, oligarchs, non-doms and corporations, Labour’s oh-so-clever strategists are moronically giftwrapping the country for Nigel Farage.

Governments don’t start conservative and turn radical. The cruelty will set like concrete. The likely result is annihilation in 2029. On this trajectory, it might not be surprising if Labour were left with seats in only double figures.

Perhaps it’s a blessing that Starmer has shown his hand so soon, as we now have four years in which to prepare. I’m not a party person: for me, it’s a question of what works. And now we can clearly see the shape of it.

The Compass analysis, published in December, reveals extreme electoral volatility. This is caused by a combination of public fury towards austerity, exclusion, rip-off rents and startlingly low rates of wellbeing, and the “democratic mayhem” resulting from a first-past-the-post system in which five parties are now polling at 10% or more. Small vote shifts in this situation can cause wild fluctuations in the allocation of seats.

The report points out that the UK is an overwhelmingly progressive nation: in all but one election since 1979 most voters have supported left or centre-left parties. Of 15 nations surveyed, the UK has the extraordinary distinction of being both the furthest to the left and the most consistent elector of rightwing governments. Why? Because of our first-past-the-post system, which is grossly unfair not by accident but by design. Labour refuses to change it, as it wants to rule alone. The result is that most of the time it doesn’t rule at all.

The thinktank was hoping to mobilise the progressive majority around a revitalised Labour party, but that moment has passed. What the figures show, however, is massive potential for more radical change. A YouGov survey reveals that almost twice as many people want proportional representation in this country as those who wish to preserve the current system. So let’s build a government of parties that will introduce it.

Here’s the strategy. Join the Lib Dems, Greens, SNP or Plaid Cymru. As their numbers rise, other voters will see the tide turning. Encourage troubled Labour MPs to defect. Most importantly, begin the process in each constituency of bringing alienated voters together around a single candidate. This is what we did before the last election in South Devon, where polls had shown the anti-Tory vote evenly split between Labour and the Lib Dems. Through the People’s Primary designed by locals, the constituency decided to back the Lib Dems. The proof of the method can be seen less in the spectacular routing of the Conservatives (as similar upsets occurred elsewhere) than in the collapse in Labour’s numbers, which fell from 17% in 2019, and 26% in a poll before the primary began, to 6% in the 2024 election. The voters took back control, with startling results.

Whether you fully support any of these parties is beside the point. This coalition would break for ever the lesser-of-two-evils choice that Starmer has so cruelly abused, and which has for so long poisoned politics in this country. Game the system once and we’ll never have to game it again.

No longer will we be held hostage, no longer represented by people who hate us. It will be a tragedy if, as seems likely, Keir Starmer has destroyed the Labour party as a major political force. But it will be a blessing if he has also destroyed the two-party system.

http://www.monbiot.com

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Proportional representation is explained in detail here. There is also an explanation on WikiPedia here. From which I quote a small section:

Proportional representation (PR) refers to any electoral system under which subgroups of an electorate are reflected proportionately in the elected body. The concept applies mainly to political divisions (political parties) among voters. The aim of such systems is that all votes cast contribute to the result so that each representative in an assembly is mandated by a roughly equal number of voters, and therefore all votes have equal weight. Under other election systems, a bare plurality or a scant majority in a district are all that are used to elect a member or group of members. PR systems provide balanced representation to different factions, usually defined by parties, reflecting how votes were cast. Where only a choice of parties is allowed, the seats are allocated to parties in proportion to the vote tally or vote share each party receives.

That is a timely and powerful article from George Monbiot.

7 thoughts on “Breaches of trust.”

  1. “Genocide in Gaza” is what has been called for 25 centuries a “rhetoric inversion”. One accuses the opponent of what one is guilty of. Hamas has a religious quote in its “constitution” article seven, which says that all Jews must be killed. That’s intent to commit genocide. There is no equivalent in Israel.

    Palestinians can move a few miles and be safe. Hundreds of thousands were killed in Algeria in various civil wars and nobody talked of genocide. Although, clearly ethnic groups or cultural groups were targeted for extermination.

    Hadrian, a Roman tyrant, decided to annihilate Israel in 136 CE. At this point, the Romans invented the word “Palestina” from the old name “Philistina”… Greek immigrants living in… Gaza… who were the enemies of Israel. In 136 CE Israel was nearly 15 centuries old, older than the invention of Islam is today….

    My father was born in Algiers. After several deaths and expropriation of out modest middle class lodgings, my family had to leave Algeria, never to return. I remember in my first years living in the M’zab. My dad, a geologist, looked for oil. He found it. The M’zab, Ghardaia, was forbidden to normal Muslims, and so had been for more than 12 centuries. It espoused the first Islam, democratic and knowledge oriented, later the enemy of the dominant, sword brandishing Sunni and Shia sects. They know themselves as The People of Truth and Integrity…

    Israel is not waging war, Israel is waging survival. 

    Holocausts is how humanity evolved. We now have genetic proof of this. Colonialism and supplantism are ubiquitous. Historian David Day’s book “Conquest” can be consulted. Human history is measured by territorial aggression and expansion, an endless cycle of ownership claims by dominant cultures over territory occupied by peoples unable to resist their advance and then “Great Replacements”. In five centuries, Italy was the victim of two such Great Replacements: under Augustus, and after the Fall of the Roman State, the latter obliterating mostly the former.

    Israel is in a gut wrenching knowledge of the concept of holocaust. It’s around 10 kilometers wide in the middle, which a hypersonic missile crosses in a couple of seconds.Israel eradication believing Muslim Arabs can live a bit further… I will personally never go back to the land of my childhood: I would be arrested like Boualem Sansal, and I also know even Western social networks or media like the Guardian apply Fatwas from, say, Pakistan (“ministry of Justice”).  

    As nukes become ever more available, the spirit of the times must turn to the probability of nuclear war, and what the most civilized tribes must do to survive. Recent scientific progress show that the rise of civilization was accompanied by the rise of new disease, and, certainly ever more advanced forms of war. JJ Rousseau pretended that humans used to be “noble savages” when in truth, they were bloody cannibalistic exterminators. However, ever more advanced war has been friendly to ever more scientific war.

    UK PM Starmer has discreetly grabbed a lot of UK GDP that was supposed to be gifted to save Children in Africa and the like. But the root cause of the death of children in Africa is that Africa is led by cruel, avaricious, bloody plutocratic tyrants… in full collaboration with the Western Plutocratic Deep State which brought us Putin, among other gifts.

    Starmer is trying to save civilization by arming it more. That’s correct and his mandate. It is known that, to keep the French nuclear arsenal, which is fully independent of the USA (differently from the British arsenal, which depends upon the USA) , costs six billion Euros a year (100 billion dollars for the US equivalent). Even then, Europe has no ballistic intermediate range missiles (only France has the capacity to make them, and is thinking about it, but it will cost money, lots of it…)  

    Starmer is also trying to reverse Brexit… There again in such a way that it will not be too noticed by the cognitively or mentally deficient….  

    Monbriot does not explain what he is most upset about… Defending Ukraine? Did Putin pay him too?

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