Rayner’s backing for strikers widens rift
LABOUR’S chaos over the rail strikes has opened a damaging new rift between Sir Keir Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner.
Party insiders say the Labour leader was furious at Ms Rayner’s decision to give her open backing to last week’s rail shutdown.
One Starmer ally told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Keir is livid – Angela has undermined his leadership.’
Sir Keir also came under fire from critics who argued he was undermining his own position by failing to discipline several frontbenchers who joined the strikers’ picket lines last week.
Relations between Sir Keir and his outspoken deputy have been strained ever since his botched attempt to demote her last year. Those tensions deepened when Ms Rayner gave her backing to last week’s national rail strikes mounted by the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT).
The former trade union official declared that ‘workers have been left with no choice’ – adding ‘no one takes strike action lightly’.
The pro-strike stance is understood to have enraged Sir Keir’s office, given they had already told party frontbenchers ‘we do not want these strikes to go ahead with the resulting disruption’.
One Labour MP said last night: ‘It was a mistake for Keir to issue the picket line ban in the first place. If he doesn’t now sack frontbenchers who defied him, or punish them, he will simply look very weak.’
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar also ignored Mr Starmer by joining a picket line in Edinburgh.
The criticism comes amid anger from Left-wing MPs that Sir Keir – who boasted he was a ‘proud trade unionist’ during his leadership bid in 2020 – was now trying to distance himself from the union movement.
It also comes after Labour took aim at respected election expert Sir John Curtice for playing down the significance of the party’s by-election victory in the Red Wall seat of Wakefield last week.
Labour took the seat back from the Tories on a swing of more than 12 per cent and a jubilant Sir Keir hailed Wakefield as the birthplace of the next Labour government.
But after Sir John warned ‘the Wakefield result does not suggest any great enthusiasm for Labour’, a source said the party was furious with the Strathclyde University politics professor. However, even one Shadow Cabinet Minister confessed the Wakefield result was ‘good but not spectacular’.
Last night, Labour insisted ‘Keir and Angela are at one’ on the dispute. ‘Keir wants this strike brought to an end so everyone can get back to work,’ said a spokesman.
He added that frontbenchers who appeared on picket lines ‘will be spoken to and reminded of the responsibility and discipline required to be in government’.