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He Spent Two Years Telling Half The Country They Didn't Matter. Now There's Nobody Left To Save Him. Andy Burnham can apparently take the leadership without a contest. That single detail tells you more about the state of Keir Starmer's government than anything else in this story. The Labour Party isn't choosing its next leader through a vote of its members. It is quietly coronating one, because a contest would expose just how little is left to defend. A senior government figure says Starmer has realised the game is up and is now thinking about how to shore up his legacy. One of his own loyalists says support among MPs is down to "friends and family," people whose relatives work in No 10 or who have known him personally for years. Five senior Cabinet ministers, Heidi Alexander, Yvette Cooper, Shabana Mahmood, Ed Miliband and others, have told him to set a departure date rather than fight on. His own chief whip has told him the same. This did not happen by accident, and it did not happen because of one bad week. It happened because for two years this government made a consistent choice, over and over, about whose interests came first, and it was rarely the people who didn't vote Labour. Pensioners lost their winter fuel payments while the asylum hotel bill ran past £10 billion. Farmers were hit with inheritance tax changes that threatened family land held for generations, while billions in defence funding could not be found. The Chief of the Defence Staff wrote directly to Downing Street warning the country was at risk, and John Healey resigned as Defence Secretary because Rachel Reeves would not fund the armed forces properly, while Ed Miliband's net zero budget stayed untouched. Al Carns, a decorated combat veteran, resigned as Veterans Minister because he could no longer ask soldiers to trust a covenant the government wasn't honouring. And running underneath all of it was the language. Anyone who raised concerns about uncontrolled migration, two-tier policing, grooming gangs or the erosion of British institutions was met with the same word, deployed by ministers, by activists, and increasingly by Labour MPs themselves: far right. Concerned pensioners. Family farmers. Serving and former military personnel. Ordinary voters asking why a teenager could be handcuffed by police while dying in the street because his attacker shouted racism. All filed under the same label, again and again, by a government that built its entire posture around managing dissent rather than answering it. That is not a coalition. That is a list of grievances waiting for an outlet. Burnham's win in Makerfield was simply the moment that outlet appeared, and once it did, the loyalty evaporated in days because there was nothing underneath it holding people in place. You cannot spend two years telling the majority of the country it is the problem and then expect that majority, or your own backbenchers, to stand and defend you when the numbers turn. Starmer's allies are now talking about legacy. That is the most revealing word in the whole story. Not about fixing what's broken. Not about answering the people who lost faith. About managing the exit so the record looks better than the reality. It is the same instinct that produced "reports get reviewed" at counter-terror police and "still reviewing" at the institutions documented this week: protect the process, manage the optics, and hope nobody asks the harder question. The harder question is simple. If a Prime Minister with a landslide majority can be reduced to friends and family within two years, the issue was never really about Starmer personally. It was about what, and who, he chose to defend, and who he didn't. "Burnham's win in Makerfield was simply the moment that outlet appeared, and once it did, the loyalty evaporated in days because there was nothing underneath it holding people in place."

HARMAN LOBBIES FOR LORDS SEAT FOR COUNCILLOR WHO BLOCKED GANG RAPE INQUIRY Baroness Harriet Harman is lobbying to place Arooj Shah in the House of Lords. Harman, a Labour peer and former deputy leader of the party, posted a public reply to Shah’s X account. The message was short. “Hi. Hope all good with you. For next Lords list? H.” She is a sitting member of the second chamber. She is using that position to bring into the same house the woman who spent years blocking a government investigation into the cover-up of the gang rape of children in Oldham. SHAH BLOCKED THE INQUIRY Arooj Shah is the leader of Oldham Council. She is despised across the town for a specific and documented reason. She repeatedly blocked attempts to call in the government to investigate how the rape of young White girls by Pakistani rape gangs was buried by the very institutions she now leads. She is regularly seen in the company of a convicted heroin dealer who was the getaway driver for a cop killer. Her brother is a convicted money launderer. She celebrates election victories alongside a man convicted for kidnap and torture. These are not allegations. They are matters of record. HARMAN KNOWS Labour’s exposure on grooming gangs is severe. The national inquiry exists because journalists and campaigners forced it into being against the resistance of MPs like her colleagues. Harman knows what Oldham represents in that story. She sent the tweet anyway. The Joint Committee on Human Rights cannot be chaired by a politician privately advancing the Lords prospects of a council leader implicated in blocking accountability for child sexual exploitation. Harman’s mandate and her conduct are irreconcilable. She has made her choice visible. A PEERAGE ENDS THE QUESTION A Lords appointment would place Shah beyond the reach of any future local election. It would insulate her from the political consequences of everything documented above and give her a platform no Oldham voter could remove. Nobody proposes a peerage in a two-line tweet without having run the conversation already. Harman is not acting alone. Somewhere in the Labour leadership, someone looked at Arooj Shah’s record and decided she deserved elevation to the second chamber of the British Parliament. They looked at everything above and concluded she was the right choice. That decision was made. It was made deliberately. And it was made by people who believe they will never be held to account for it. THE COUNCIL MOTION Reform UK councillors in Oldham will be asked to table a motion at the next full council meeting calling on the council to write formally to the House of Lords Appointments Commission opposing any nomination for Arooj Shah. A letter from Oldham Council itself carries a different weight than letters from individuals. It is the institution she leads, on record, telling the body responsible for vetting her that her own town objects. HOLAC cannot ignore a formal submission from the council whose leader is under consideration. It becomes part of the file. Labour councillors do not have the numbers to vote it down. Should any other councillor try, they will have voted to suppress Oldham’s objection to the woman who blocked the rape gang inquiry being handed a life peerage. Their vote will also be on record. _________ I’m Raja Miah MBE. For seven years, I led a campaign that exposed how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs. The people of my town helped force the national inquiry. My work is free. No paywalls. No gatekeeping. No exclusions. Because the truth shouldn’t belong only to those who can afford it. If you can afford to do so, supporting me costs as little as 75p a week (£30 a year). Sign up here; 👉 https://t.co/56iWix5yC4 If you can’t commit to a regular subscription, a one-off contribution genuinely helps keep this alive. You can support me using one of these links; 👉 https://t.co/kvFfhHNJ03 👉 https://t.co/8Og0hDKfjy