THERE are good and bad ways to respond to intensifying efforts to destabilise the Labour government from the right.

We are seeing once again the imbalance of power and publicity between Establishment and anti-Establishment causes.

Farmers’ marches are depicted by the monopoly media as overwhelming public pressure for a government U-turn. 

Demonstrations for a ceasefire in Palestine orders of magnitude larger pose no such dilemmas for ministers.

The way in which Tory titles, months into a Labour government after 14 years of Tory-led ones, howl about Labour wrecking the economy with tax rises and being unable to bring down welfare spending shows that for powerful players in the British elite, a Labour administration can never be legitimate.

In the face of this it is easy to fall into reactive politics. Ministers feel pressure to make concessions to the aggressive right.

The labour movement, and those MPs who consider themselves part of it, must fight to stop them: but this too can become reactive, leaving us in the unenviable position of defending a right-wing government that backs privatisation at home and war abroad, and institutions from the NHS to councils whose failings provoke real anger.

Though two million signatures on an online petition for a new election is a stunt, it reminds us that ours is a genuinely unpopular government. It should never be forgotten that Labour convinced half a million fewer people to vote for it last summer than it did when badly losing the election in 2019. 

Far from changing Labour into an election-winning machine, Keir Starmer simply benefited from public disgust at a Conservative government driving down living standards, presiding over a ruined NHS and beset by scandals from partygate to poisoned rivers.

Labour has too small a vote to weather declining support over several administrations, as it did under Blair, while the ideological similarity between Kemi Badenoch’s Tories and Reform UK set the stage for a potentially formidable right-wing lash-up next time round.

Stopping that means the left taking the fight to the government and advancing our own agenda for change.

We need a positive vision for the NHS to set against government and opposition support for further privatisation. We need a loud and angry campaign to renationalise water and energy to clean this country up.

Unions continuing the fight against policies like means-testing winter fuel payments is an example of where we need to be: the labour movement needs to become a channel for public anger, a role Reform UK cynically adopts. We need a more consistent challenge to the overall direction of this government if we are to be that.