ARE WE near a tipping point? Elected not nine months ago with a huge parliamentary majority the Labour government already has the air of the sepulchre about it.

The planned savage cuts in disability benefits, driven solely by the desire to save money and thus propitiate the bond market whatever moral posturing about work accompanied Liz Kendall’s announcement, have alarmed parts of the Labour benches other outrages did not reach.

So far at least 25 Labour MPs — plus the three who remain suspended from the whip — have indicated that they will vote against the move when it comes up in the Commons. Not enough to stop them going through, but enough to provoke a crisis.

Many more have declared unease or unhappiness. Only the militant Blairites and the incurably careerist express content with Keir Starmer’s conduct of business.

Already, polling shows that people understand that Labour has crossed class lines. According to Opinium Research, it is now the party of the rich. Those earning over £80,000 a year put Labour as their favoured party, with 39 per cent backing, against 22 per cent for the Tories and 21 for Reform.

Yet among the poorest — those making under £20,000 annually — Labour secured just 17 per cent backing, half the support for Reform and behind the Tories too.

Those polling figures are working through politics in a variety of ways in different parts of the country, some of them reactionary. Some are more hopeful, even in local authority by-elections which would not normally be taken as a guide to anything larger.

Thus, last week’s result in Redbridge Borough’s Mayfield ward, in the Ilford South constituency in east London, was remarkable.

The ward had been the power base of Jas Athwal, leader of the council until he became the MP for the constituency last year. Yes, that is Athwal subsequently exposed as a rogue slum landlord who did not even follow the rules he set as council leader.

This Athwal nevertheless passed Starmer’s test as a fit-and-proper Labour candidate in the very same borough as the admirable economist Faiza Shaheen was ruthlessly purged on the eve of the election.

Athwal will not, I guess, be one of the MPs troubling the Labour whips when it comes to the benefits cuts vote. In fact, he may not be troubling the Commons at all after the next election.

The Mayfield result: the seat was won by a pro-Gaza independent with 43 per cent of the vote, while Labour’s vote dropped an enormous 45 per cent, from 71 to just 26 per cent.

Reform UK secured only 5 per cent, be it noted.

I would guess the writing is on the wall for Athwal’s undistinguished parliamentary career. A similar independent won more than 23 per cent of the vote across the seat last year.

Ditto for Wes Streeting in Ilford North, next door, still more consequentially. The NHS privatiser and Israel champion only hung on by the skin of his teeth at the general election in the face of the challenge by the remarkable Leanne Mohamad.

This offers a more hopeful reading for the left, and there are plenty of seats with Ilford-type characteristics, although there are more which are substantially different.

Every 10 minutes of every day since the election it has got all too much for a Labour Party member, who has turned in their membership.

At this rate of attrition the party will have lost two-thirds of its already-depleted July 2024 membership before the country next goes to the polls. In the last column, I cited a Telegraph pundit indicating Downing Street’s growing awareness that it may be vulnerable to challenge from the left.

Now there is another one. This time it is Tim Stanley, who writes: “One can see the basis for a fresh, hard left party emerging from this confusion, with opposition to Kendall’s Bill as a revolutionary spark.”

Stanley also indicates the counter-productive nature of Starmer’s rolling purge of dissent, which may be tested to its limit by any rebellion against the disability cuts on the scale anticipated.

“By being so authoritarian, offering no space for dissent, he persuades the left there is zero future in his party and the costs of forming a new one thus diminish. Reform suggests that start-ups can return MPs.

“It is estimated that an undivided Gaza independent campaign would have gained six extra seats in 2024, making it bigger than the SNP,” Stanley writes.

Ilford suggests he may not be wrong.

A brush with a spook

FAREWELL, Oleg Gordievsky. The Soviet traitor has died, aged 86, 40 years after he was revealed as an MI6 mole inside the KGB.

I may have met many MI6 agents in my life for all I know, but he is the only one I can be sure I have encountered.

We were invited to lunch by a mutual acquaintance — then, as now, I was the Morning Star’s political correspondent. At the time I thought I was dining with a senior official at the Soviet embassy in London. 

It was sometime after the 1983 general election, which led to Michael Foot standing down as leader of the Labour Party. Gordievsky sought to enlist me in a bizarre scheme.

He said that the Soviet embassy wanted to make a presentation to Foot to thank him for his services to world peace and sought my good offices to arrange a meeting.

The whole thing was preposterous. It would have been unthinkable for Foot to consent to any such evidently compromising proposal.  

And if the Soviet embassy wished to advance it, the ambassador could surely have approached the Labour leader’s office directly rather than via the Morning Star, the involvement of which would have made the whole thing even more question-begging.

I left the lunch befuddled that a senior Soviet comrade could be so ham-fisted. Of course, the penny dropped a couple of years later when Gordievsky came out as a long-standing servant of British imperialist intelligence.

It was indeed a provocation, just one cooked up in the offices of MI6 rather than the KGB most likely. I did nothing to advance Gordievsky’s request, nor did Foot ever get his award, to the best of my knowledge. 

The spy lived on, a liar and apparently an extreme snob as well. He never invited me to lunch again.

His victims included his wife. She was innocent of his treachery. Moreover, she was inside the USSR when he made his personal escape without her. The next few years did not go well for her, which her husband must have anticipated. Not the actions of a hero. 

Gordievsky left socialism in the boot of a car, we are told. There is a serviceable metaphor in there somewhere, but I am not sure he is worth it.

No dissent allowed

THE British Establishment really don’t do irony. Hat tip to my old comrade Steve Howell for drawing attention to the latest incongruity.

The government announces plans to prohibit protests near places of worship, deliberately conflating violent actions directed by fascists at mosques with peaceful demonstrations that may pass in the vicinity of synagogues and churches.

And two days later the Met Police, having apparently not got the memo, storm into a Quaker place of worship mob-handed to arrest six young women from Youth Demand holding a peaceful planning meeting there. Not much respect for religious premises there.

It only adds to the irony that the religious body to have its premises violated by the police are the Quakers who, in their outraged response, pointed out that their adherents had over the years taken non-violent direct action against slavery and for women’s suffrage, inter alia.

Howell’s conclusion — “these anti-protest laws give the state the power to use them selectively to suppress dissent arbitrarily” — is the bare truth.

Also true — if you lose the Quakers on top of the Muslims, the left, the young, pensioners, the disabled and all the rest, then no amount of police storming places of worship, nor banning of peaceful protest, is going to keep you in office.