An alternative needs to be built to defend the health, education, wages, and welfare of working people

All over the country, DIY stores have been running out of paint as customers prefer to go home and watch it dry, rather than endure the Sunak-Starmer election. The disconnect between the mass of citizens and the political establishment is nowhere more clearly on view as in the reaction to the Tories’ election wheeze of announcing a return of national service.

Already deeply unpopular with every age group under forty, the Tories have clearly decided that the only electorate that matters is older voters who might be tempted to vote Reform. Ignoring the Yougov poll that shows that a majority of military age oppose conscription even in the face of imminent invasion, the Tories’ Vera Lynn nostalgia policy has been given a full campaign launch.

Yet the Tories themselves don’t even seem to believe their own propaganda. National Service was rejected by Sunak’s own defence minister just a week before the prime minister made it the centrepiece of the election.

And the proposal is for conscription-lite: draftees will be able to choose between a year’s military service or be compelled to do a year of weekends taking the jobs of other workers: carers, council workers, health workers, and emergency-service workers.

All this should be a gift for Labour, an easy win against an authoritarian and unpopular policy which even its advocates can’t be bothered to defend.

But no.

Rachel ‘the Robot’ Reeves, Starmer’s shadow Chancellor, had only one problem with dragging eighteen-year olds into the military. ‘It hasn’t been properly funded’ she wailed.

The consensus over the desirability of conscription, as long as it’s ‘properly funded’, is only the latest in a long line of such bipartisan convergences.

On Gaza, on increasing defence spending, on public spending cuts, on workers’ rights, on anti-trade-union laws, the Labour leadership is still so desperate to bury all memory of the Corbyn years that it cannot resist endorsing any Tory policy, no matter how damaging it is to the lives and livelihoods of working people.

Small wonder then that Starmer moved with lightning rapidity to expel Jeremy Corbyn as soon as he declared that he was going to run in his seat in Islington North.

Jeremy Corbyn is the most significant left challenge to Starmer, but he is far from alone. The huge Palestine solidarity movement has generated a wave of resistance to the Labour Party leadership’s gallop to the right.

Andrew Feinstein, previously a South African MP under Nelson Mandela, is challenging Starmer in his own Camden constituency. Leanne Mohamad is taking on Wes Streeting in Ilford. Former Preston City councillor Michael Lavalette is challenging the town’s time-serving MP.

These challenges to Labour are only a few of the better-known alternatives to the Sunak-Starmer double act. The independent candidates will find it hard to unseat Labour MPs because they often have networks of support and patronage that activists underestimate. But an alternative needs to be built, and in some cases, real progress can be made in strengthening the anti-war movement, the trade unions, and the anti-austerity movement.

And that is the really vital work in this election. Starmer may yet blow the election. But if he doesn’t, the battle to defend the health, education, wages, and welfare of working people will need to be redoubled after the results are in on 4 July.