A recording of our online seminar with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Mark Perryman, Alan Finlayson and Jeremy Gilbert, recorded October 8th 2025

We ask:

How has it all gone so wrong for a government elected with one of the largest peacetime majorities on record? 

How have we got here? 

Do Starmer and his political allies even want to win another election? 

What would it take for them to do so, and is there any chance of them doing it? 

Does all hope of preventing the election of a Reform government now lie outside the Labour Party?

In this free online seminar, 3 contributors to the recent book The Starmer Symptom (Pluto 2025) discuss these questions and others raised by their contributions to the volume. 

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a renowned journalist, author and commentator, author of countless books, articles and columns including her contribution to The Starmer Symptom: ‘Biting the Hand that Doesn’t Feed Us.’.

Mark Perryman is the editor of many books about British politics, culture and sport, including The Corbyn Effect and The Starmer Symptom. His keynote contribution to the latter is called ‘Testing the Limits of Labourism’.

Alan Finlayson is a political theorist and political scientist.

Jeremy Gilbert is an academic and commentator. His contribution to The Starmer Symptom is ‘No Direction Home: the non-politics of Starmerism’.

Read Andrew Murray’s review of The Starmer Symptom

For more information about Culture, Power and Politics see: culturepowerpolitics.org

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