Kier Starmer is a good man doing an impossible job with an ungrateful public and bias right wing press demanding things almost impossible to deliver quickly. Some in the Labour party want to return to the EU, even though they might not want us back; this is for their own political career purposes rather than strategic positioning for the country. The push back from Reform etc. would be damaging. Others want better and more effective communication with the public over Labour's policies and this needs to happen immediately. Whoever ends up in charge and di facto Prime Minister has a difficult job in revitalising our trade and industrial output during testing economic times, especially now Trump had created an energy crisis. Can the parties social improvement programme still remain on course under these pressures?

I have been impressed by this post by Paul Mason on Substack
https://substack.com/home/post/p-198255093
He focuses on the need for the Labour leadership hopefuls to have a deeper economic plan to provide enough money to maintain decent public services and to provide hope for working class voters. This won’t be achieved simply by renationalising water companies and the railways, or even by building more council housing.
He point to issues like the financialisation of capitalism and its enormous debt burden. The result is that “Financial, technological and commercial monopolies (think Blackrock, Palantir and Amazon) have near-unlimited power to extract rent from the worker, the consumer and the entrepreneur alike.”
There is also the rising cost of government borrowing, the difficulty of collecting taxes from multinational companies and the very rich, and the threats to our democracy from the first past the post system and the influence of foreign money and dark social media supporting right wing populism.
The taboo subject of a wealth tax needs to be broached.
We need to admit that the time is running out for our “Captain Sensible” prime minister. He lacks the empathetic communication skills. But whoever replaces him needs to have a good toolkit of ideas – and the passion to argue for them against the onslaught from our right wing media. The new leader will need the brains and a bit of the humour and sang froid of Harold Wilson back in the day.