“THE CENTRISTS in Labour are worried that an authentically left-wing rival party could emerge.”

Thus the usually interesting Telegraph columnist Sherelle Jacobs, apparently channelling the apprehensions of Downing Street.

Have the centrists — generous term by now — anything to be worried about? “Yes” would be the simple answer, not necessarily the longer one.

As previously argued here, the Starmer government has exposed more of Labour’s left flank faster than any Labour government in history.

The assault on welfare, following that on overseas aid, shows that the Prime Minister is bent on making the most vulnerable pay for the crisis while leaving its wealthy architects not so much untouched as actively indulged.

Strutting as a war leader without, as yet, an actual war, is unlikely to butter many electoral parsnips, particularly when it dawns that the disabled and impoverished are expected to foot the bill for these neo-imperial pretensions.

It took Tony Blair six years and a criminal war of aggression to get to anything like this nadir in popularity, with a bankrupt political strategy and a crumbling base.

So, there is a big gap on the electoral map where progressive politics should be.

The voters in that left-of-Labour space include those repelled by the Gaza genocide and Britain’s active complicity in it, those wanting more active economic intervention, those appalled by the war on the poor, those concerned for rights and liberties, and more. Many more.

To say that millions are unhappy with a choice between Starmerite centrism — authoritarian, sleazy, warmongering and in the hands of the rich — and a Farage-Badenoch nationalist populism serving the same interests with extra culture war pizzaz, is an understatement.

Every meeting your columnist addresses, whatever may be the subject, has at least one audience member asking, to general approbation, “When is the left going to get its act together,” “When will we have an alternative” or, sometimes — “When is Jeremy going to do something?”

There is, approximately, the rub. The Jeremy is of course the one who led the Labour Party into the affections of far more voters than his successor and now sits in the Commons as part of a group of five independent MPs.

Four owed their victory mostly to voter revulsion at Starmer’s unqualified backing for Israel, a policy he maintains to this day.

Twice that number also came close to winning from the left last July. Recall that this was a development with no precedent since the emergence of Labour more than a century ago.

The collective voice of these tribunes is further amplified by many of the hundred-plus local authority councillors who have quit Labour over the last 18 months.

Still, noise does not equal strategy, even if it establishes that there is an audience out there. The presence of that audience cannot now be doubted.

One problem standing in the way of any initiative is the litany of failures along that line over the last 30 years as one group or another imagined or invented an audience that had not, in point of fact, assembled.

You are twice shy having been bitten once, the wisdom declaims. After the serial maulings of the last generation, many will be bashful to the point of locking the doors and drawing the curtains at the idea of another new party or alliance of the left.

Nevertheless, the space exists and the forces are available to occupy it. Various ideas knock around — The Collective, Robin Hood and so on — which do not root themselves sufficiently in the forces already elected and on the field.

That must be a mistake. There is no need to plan like it’s 1995 or 2005 when the 2025 conjuncture is so much more fruitful. So what is to be done, as the famous question was posed, under conditions where we lack a Lenin?

A good plan would be to purposefully declare an intent to launch a broad progressive electoral challenge to Labour at the next general election — perhaps earlier; secure endorsement for that from as many elected figures and prominent others as possible, and then give the movement from below space to shape the eventual finished product.

Since we are not only one Lenin short but do not have a Zeus to hand either, expecting a new party to emerge full-grown from the brow of an Olympian leader would risk repeating past disappointments.

Nor should exclusive or excessive weight be placed on the shoulders of Corbyn who has surely more than done his bit to bring socialism back from the political dead in Britain already.

Before the general election, George Galloway — then an MP — called for an alliance headed by Corbyn to contest the polls — a positive proposal that was not enacted.

Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain did not win any seats in the election. It since seems to have moved Trumpwards, beyond backing welcome moves to end the Ukraine war towards a more general politico-cultural alignment.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is certainly an affliction on the left, but not by any means worse than Trump Infatuation Syndrome.

But then the Workers Party is explicit that it does not identify as left. “Stop the War, Stop the Boats” read one of its memes.

On social media I found one of its activists delivering a short script to camera on the iniquities of — Zarah Sultana. Quite the priority.

I encountered this young man at the Workers Party campaign launch in Parliament Square last summer, whereat he told me that Sultana was among the most dangerous enemies of the working class.

“Third Period Communism” had very serious problems but at least none of its British advocates said of the Mosleyites, as our comrade on the video does of Reform, that they agreed with them on some issues but not on others.

Moreover, since the case against Sultana, such as it was, turned on her being Labour, it is odd to fail to note that as things stand, and for the foreseeable future, she isn’t.

She is boldly challenging Starmer, at considerable prejudice to her career, over Gaza and most other issues at every turn.

One might imagine that winning her support, rather than denouncing her, might be the more serious approach for any project committed to taking on Labour, and one that hopefully will inform whatever emerges from present discussions.

Any viable alternative socialist project must also seek to transcend the divisive polarities of the culture wars — although I am not myself inclined to split the difference on the British empire — in the interests of class solidarity.

Simply going to bat for the other side — the conservative one — will produce no good results.

Leave MAGA-madness to Lord Maurice Glasman, progenitor of Blue Labour and newly influential in Downing Street, which finds very congenial his strategy of political nostalgia for the days when men were men, invariably white, who stood for the national anthem at the end of BBC broadcasts, mispronounced foreign names as either a point of principle or the height of humour and held up both halves of the sky without any need for female assistance.

Glasman was a special invitee to Trump’s inauguration. He is among those who have got over-excited. While there he confided in Steve Bannon, of all people, that progressives “don’t even want you to enjoy sexual intercourse with your wife.”

Being no psychoanalyst I will not wallow, or even dip a toe, in the Freudian expanses this observation lures us towards beyond observing that Trump Infatuation Syndrome apparently offers no immunity to derangement as well.

Little wonder that the other anxiety besetting the centrists of Number Ten — again we take the word of the estimable Ms Jacobs for this — is that “the Blue Labour faction under Maurice Glasman is taking things too far in its bid to neutralise Reform.”

Mandating satisfactory marital intimacy — Glasman maintains a telling silence on whether progressives permit women to enjoy sex with their husbands, presumably because that was not an issue in the 1950s and therefore mustn’t be one now — does indeed seem like government over-reach, even though no fiscal rules may be breached thereby.

Detailed research actually established that women in the socialist GDR had better sex lives than their sisters to the west.

War, poverty, austerity and inequality are the great passion-killers.

A socialist challenge to Labour must have better plans for making the earth move than indulging racism and building more weapons, as per the Trump left.

The free development of each as the condition for the free development of all would do it for millions. Lord Glasman should cease amusing himself and try it.