UPDATE: Starmer refuses to resign despite pressure from dozens of deputies and ministers | International
According to recent reports, the following story has emerged from the international scene.
The ministers of the British Government, convened at 9:00 this Tuesday (10:00 in Spanish peninsular time) at the headquarters of the Executive, in Downing Street, have found before them a defiant Keir Starmer, willing to fight against the rebel deputies who demand his withdrawal. What in other circumstances would have been the usual weekly meeting, to deliberate policies or the political situation, seemed headed this time to become the end point of the political career of the Prime Minister, the Labor Party Keir Starmer. But he, for the moment, has refused to resign. According to several media outlets, at least two members of the Cabinet – the Minister of the Interior, Shabana Mahmood, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yvette Cooper – have already met personally with Starmer to ask him to step aside and prepare his withdrawal, after the disaster of the municipal elections in England and the regional elections in Scotland and Wales, held on May 7, in which Labor suffered a historic defeat at the hands of of the extreme right of Nigel Farage and the left of the Greens. However, Starmer has been clear and firm. He is not going to resign, he has told them, because no one has yet activated the mechanism in the Labor Party to force primaries. “The last 48 hours have been very destabilizing for the Government and have had a real cost for our country and for families,” Starmer warned his ministers. “The country expects us to focus on governing. That’s what I’m going to do, and that’s what we must do as a Cabinet,” he added, according to a Downing Street spokesperson. The markets have shown their nervousness, since early in the morning, regarding the political instability that a change of Government would generate in the United Kingdom. The 30-year public debt rose this Tuesday to its highest interest rate since 1998: 5.79%. Starmer’s strategy, like that of his rivals, focuses on bringing fear to the opponent’s body and challenging him to jump. At the end of the meeting of ministers, the head of Housing, Steve Reed, one of his most loyal collaborators, supported Starmer’s challenge in statements to the media gathered at the doors of Downing Street: “This is not a game. Instability [política] It has consequences on people’s lives. The most affected by all this will be those who voted for us two years ago. “We must remain united behind the Prime Minister,” he stated. After Reed, three other ministers, Pat MacFadden, of Pensions; Peter Kyle, of Business, and Liz Kendall, of Science, also supported Starmer’s continuity. At the moment there were only four. The rest of the ministers avoided the press when they left, but the internal division within the Government was clear. Before Starmer’s allies, Paul Johnson, former director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies and one of the most economic analysts. prestigious in the country, had joined the warnings: “Starmer and Reeves [la ministra de Economía] They’re not kidding when they say this political uncertainty causes economic damage. The only ‘reset’ being achieved at the moment is a higher cost of borrowing. Result? We are all worse off. So deeply depressing,” he wrote. Early in the morning, as the ministers were arriving at the doors of Downing Street, the first resignation within the Executive was known. It was Miatta Fahnbulla, deputy secretary of State for Self-Government, Faith and Local Communities. It is a minor position, but symbolic. Firstly, because Fahnbulla is part of the left wing of Labor, the most critical of Starmer. But above all because an internal resignation in the Government is usually the starting signal for the crisis to be unleashed. “We have not acted with the vision, pace and ambition that our mandate for change required,” Fahnbulla reproaches Starmer in his resignation letter. The prime minister announced on Monday that he had every intention of continuing to lead the Government, and warned his party colleagues that they would pay a high price if they became entangled in the same fratricidal wars that previous governments, in that case conservative ones, had. “The voters are not. “They would forgive us,” he told them. It was of no use. At the end of the day there was a concerted outcry in a large part of the Labor parliamentary group that demanded the public sacrifice of Starmer, whom they consider the main reason for the strong rejection of the voters towards the Government party expressed at the polls and at the doors of the homes visited by the candidates. The day in which Boris Johnson, the controversial former Conservative prime minister, already knew that his deputies had decided to send him to the guillotine (politically speaking), he said that about “when the herd moves, the herd moves.” The Labor herd moved at breakneck speed on Monday and, by the end of the day, more than 70 deputies had publicly asked Starmer to resign now or put in place a withdrawal schedule, to allow for a primary. If Starmer finally gives in and presents his resignation throughout this Tuesday or in the coming days, there will be many keys that he and his party will have to clear up. The majority of rebel deputies have asked an “orderly transition”, which would lead to the election of a new leader at the party congress, scheduled for September. Those who ask for this delay, which for many is unrealistic because it would leave a Government without real power for four months, have a specific reason: to allow the necessary process to be opened so that their candidate – the mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, representative of the moderate Labor left – can run in a by-election in some easy-to-conquer constituency, and thus obtain the seat he necessarily needs to aspire to the leadership of the party. Opposite him, the current Minister of Health, Wes Streeting, who embodies the right wing of the party, wants to accelerate the process to stop the passage to Burnham. His rivals see the hand of the minister behind the accelerated maneuver on Monday. If the figure of 81 critical deputies established by the Labor regulations is reached (20% of the parliamentary group), the primary process in the party would automatically be activated. In that case, the left of the party would have to quickly look for a candidate for the party. confront Streeting. The options being considered for this scenario are Angela Rayner, former deputy prime minister, who left the Government due to her problems with the Treasury, and the current Minister for Climate Change, Ed Milliband, who was already at the head of the party more than a decade ago and ended up failing in his endeavor.
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Source: This article was originally published in another language by Internacional en EL PAÍS and has been translated and adapted for our global English-speaking audience. Read the original article here.