Turns Out I've Been Picking the Wrong Blokes My Whole Life. The Selfie Was the Last Straw
Me and this bloke I met in Liverpool. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
A personal reckoning, and a promise.
Wednesday 13th May 2026. Right then.
Keir Starmer sat through the King's Speech this morning. Eighty of his own MPs have spent the week telling him to do one, four ministers have quit, and the man sat in the House of Lords like everything's fine. I'll give him this: the commitment to the performance is impressive.
I also have a selfie with him on my LinkedIn from the last general election where I essentially told people to vote Labour. So we're both having a bit of an embarrassing week, to be fair.
I've chosen today to say some things I should probably have said sooner, and I want to be clear from the start about what this piece actually is — because it isn't a rant, even if parts of it read like one. It's a declaration. It's me planting my stake in the ground on the day I launch my new website, saying here is where I actually stand, here is what I've learned, and here is what I'm building and why. The reckoning comes first because it has to, because you can't build something honest on a foundation of things you haven't faced, but the building is the point. The world I want to help create — one where businesses operate from their values, where people show up as themselves, where grassroots communities have real power, where we are kind and fair and courageous enough to tell the truth — that world doesn't get built by people performing a safe version of themselves. It gets built by people willing to say what they actually think, and then do something about it. So this is me doing that. And if it resonates, I'd love you to come with me.
Before I get into all of that, here is what the headlines are burying under wall-to-wall coverage of Starmer's slow-motion resignation non-announcement:
The Green Party had the best election of any party last Thursday. The actual best. Nobody's really talking about it
411 council seats gained, the largest increase in vote share of any party, five councils taken including Labour strongholds Lambeth and Lewisham
Green Party membership has tripled to 220,000. Of Labour voters who've left: 15% went Green, only 8% went to Reform
Reform peaked at 31.8% in September 2025 and has been falling ever since. Their moment may have passed
Add up Labour, Greens and Lib Dems: roughly 47% of polling. Reform and Conservatives combined: 43%
The centre-left majority in this country is real, larger than the right, and what's missing isn't the votes — it's enough people willing to say out loud what they actually believe and act on it. That's what this is about, on every level.
Zack Polanski said it plainly this week: "Two-party politics is not just dying, it is dead and it is buried." I believe him.
This is that. It's a long read — grab a cuppa, and I'm genuinely grateful if you stick with it.
I watched the King's Speech while writing this, and before I get into the content, can we just acknowledge the ceremony for a moment. Grown adults in velvet robes and ermine trim, a man in a crown reading a speech he didn't write, yeomen in Tudor costumes searching cellars for gunpowder that hasn't been there since 1605, everyone bowing and processing while the country is in the middle of a cost of living crisis, a genocide, and a leadership meltdown. It's theatre, and theatre is always about power, always about reminding you of your place. The costumes are the message.
The actual content: more of the same, dressed up in new language. They mentioned antisemitism before the cost of living crisis, before energy bills, before housing — deployed right on cue while 80 of their own MPs were outside calling for the Prime Minister to resign. Gaza? Silence. Not a word about ending the genocide, no sanctions, no accountability. And not an honest word about Iran either, where on 28th February 2026 Israel and the US attacked a sovereign nation, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in self-defence, and oil prices surged over 40%, LNG nearly 60%, triggering what the International Energy Agency called the greatest global energy security challenge in history. Your energy bill, your food shop, your mortgage rate — connected directly to aggression this government funds and will not name. No wealth tax. Nothing for small businesses being crushed by costs. Nothing that would make a real difference to anyone's life this year. The silence was the loudest thing in that chamber today.
I've seen enough. Let me tell you what I actually think.
I have been wrong before. Quite a lot, actually.
For years I worked in the defence and aerospace industry, getting critical equipment to troops in the field, working late into the night on counter-IED systems, believing in what I was doing. And when Iraq was invaded, I believed the government. I believed there were weapons of mass destruction. I was one of the last in my circle to speak out, because I had trusted the mainstream narrative, trusted the institutions, trusted that the people in power were telling the truth.
They weren't.
The Chilcot Inquiry confirmed what many had known: the intelligence was flawed, the case for war couldn't withstand scrutiny, and the decision to invade had effectively been made before Parliament voted. Over a million people marched in London. I was not among them. I had trusted a system that didn't deserve it, and that trust had a cost measured in hundreds of thousands of lives. I tell you this not to flagellate myself, but because it matters. I am not someone who has always stood outside the establishment pointing in. I was inside it. I believed it. And a large proportion of my professional network is still in defence and aerospace — people I respect, people who may well read this and wonder what I'm on about. Writing this carries real professional risk. I'm writing it anyway, because staying silent when you know something is wrong has its own, quieter cost. And I've paid that cost long enough.
Why I supported Labour, and why I was wrong
I spent ten years as a Labour Party member, left before the last election over Gaza, then endorsed them anyway because after fourteen years of Conservative destruction I thought: anything but this. I was wrong. Again.
This Labour government has not introduced meaningful wealth redistribution. It has cut support for disabled people and pensioners, dragged its heels on the two-child benefit cap, eroded civil liberties, curtailed the right to protest, and weaponised antisemitism in ways that have silenced legitimate voices and caused serious harm.
The money trail tells the real story. Pro-Israel lobbyists donated to 13 of Labour's 25 cabinet members. Morgan McSweeney oversaw Labour Together, which the Electoral Commission found had failed to declare £730,000 in donations across over 20 offences. The key donor at the centre of that network publicly stated he had "spent my entire life working for Israel." These are the people whose calls get returned. Not yours. Not mine.
Peter Mandelson was appointed US Ambassador despite known links to Jeffrey Epstein. Files showed he had called Epstein "my best pal," maintained that friendship after Epstein's conviction for sex offences against a minor, and messages suggest he passed sensitive government information to Epstein while a senior minister. He was fired, arrested, resigned from the party and the Lords. The security vetting agency had recommended against granting him clearance. Officials overruled it. Starmer said he didn't know.
And Starmer himself was a secret member of the Trilateral Commission — a strictly off-the-record elite networking group — while serving as Corbyn's shadow Brexit secretary, never telling Corbyn, never declaring it to Parliament. Jeffrey Epstein was a member. So was Mandelson. It's a small world when you're running it.
Before I move on, I want to say something that rarely gets said clearly enough: there were children in Epstein's network. Real children whose lives were taken from them. While the powerful men in his contact book have had decades of institutional protection, his victims have watched their abusers remain untouched, sometimes appointed to positions of influence by governments that knew. Survivors said it themselves: "We should never be the ones named, scrutinized, and retraumatized while Epstein's enablers continue to benefit from secrecy." Not one of the men who abused those children has been arrested or prosecuted. Not one. The victims have names. The abusers have protection. That is not justice. That is a system protecting itself, quite openly now, which tells you something about how confident it has become.
Map the funding, the appointments, the access, and a clear picture emerges of a government that does not primarily serve the people who voted for it.
Gaza, and the word I will not avoid
And then there is Gaza. I am going to call it what it is: a genocide.
The United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court — the world's highest legal and human rights bodies — have all reached the same conclusion. ICC arrest warrants have been issued for Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister for war crimes including using starvation as a method of warfare.
Over 17,000 children confirmed killed. Over 720 attacks on healthcare. At least 1,580 healthcare workers dead. Over 430 humanitarian aid workers killed, 305 of them UN staff. People queuing for food shot at on an almost daily basis. The entire population of 2.1 million faces acute food insecurity, with half a million facing starvation.
A government that continues to supply weapons and intelligence to the forces carrying this out has crossed a line I cannot step back over. This is my red line. There are some things that cannot be made tactical, and the genocide of a people is one of them.
The smear that tells you everything
Most people know what happened to Corbyn. A man who had spent his life opposing racism was destroyed by an antisemitism crisis — but here is what the evidence actually shows. Labour supporters were less likely to hold antisemitic views than Conservative or UKIP supporters. The public estimated around a third of Labour members had been disciplined for antisemitism. The actual figure was 0.1%. Three hundred times smaller than the impression the media created. The Forde Report, Labour's own independent inquiry, found antisemitism had been used as a "factional weapon," with senior figures actively slowing down the handling of complaints not to address the problem but to use it against Corbyn's leadership. We now know who those people were.
Corbyn wasn't destroyed because of antisemitism. He was destroyed because he believed in public ownership, redistribution and a foreign policy grounded in international law. The smear was the mechanism. Power was the motive.
Now watch what is happening to Zack Polanski — a Jewish man, one of only five Jewish party leaders in British political history — facing an almost identical campaign, accused of antisemitism in newspapers simultaneously running cartoons described as reminiscent of 1930s imagery. The irony tells you everything about how honest this campaign is.
The Green Party has tripled its membership and is polling at 17% because people can see the pattern now. And they are done with it.
This is not about left versus right. It is about up versus down. Three supposedly different parties — Labour, Conservative, Reform — funded by overlapping networks of billionaires, fossil fuel interests and offshore wealth. Different branding, same paymasters. The culture wars, Brexit, left versus right — division is a strategy. When ordinary people are fighting each other, they are not looking at the billionaire class, the donor networks, the funding trails. They are not asking who owns the media they're consuming. That is not an accident.
I believe in people. When they are not being manipulated by fear and division, when they have honest information and the freedom to think, people are almost always better than the systems built in their name. I believe in open conversation, respectful disagreement, and the radical idea that someone can hold a different view from you and still be a decent person trying to make sense of a complicated world.
And I believe in proportional representation — genuinely, not just as a policy position but as a philosophy. First Past the Post is not just an outdated voting system, it is a machine for manufacturing division, forcing people into two camps, suppressing minority voices, and producing governments that the majority didn't vote for. As the Electoral Reform Society has documented, the 2024 election was the most disproportionate in British history — Labour won almost two thirds of seats from just over a third of votes. That is not democracy, it is a distortion of it, and it is one of the primary reasons we are stuck in an endless us-versus-them tug of war that serves the establishment and exhausts everyone else. A proportional system would mean different parties — and the people who vote for them — actually having to talk to each other, find common ground, govern together. It would mean the politics of coalition and compromise rather than the politics of winner-takes-all. It would mean, in short, that the way we do politics might start to reflect the way most of us actually want to live. The Greens have long championed PR. It is one of the many reasons they feel like home.
The cost of living out of alignment
I want to be honest about what this journey actually felt like from the inside, because it wasn't brave. Not really.
For years I lived what felt like two lives. Professionally measured, careful, appropriate — knowing which opinions to keep off the table, how to navigate rooms where my actual values would have been unwelcome. But inside the misalignment was constant, a low-grade friction that never fully went away.
For me it became physical. A knot in my stomach that I recognised, over time, as my nervous system's response to sustained misalignment — not to overwork, not to difficult clients, but to the particular exhaustion of being someone you're not, repeatedly, over years.
I see it constantly in the people I work with. Leaders burnt out not because they've worked too hard, but because they've been working out of alignment, doing work that doesn't connect to anything they actually believe in, internalising the stress of that as a personal failing rather than a structural one. The gap between who we are and what we perform is one of the most underacknowledged sources of the mental health crisis in our workplaces. It affects performance too. You cannot do your best work from inside a version of yourself you've had to shrink to fit.
I didn't find my voice because I was brave. I found it because I got to the point where I simply could not go on as I was. The knot in my stomach had become my compass.
You are not broken. You are misaligned. And that is something we can work with.
The future I'm working towards
I believe in an energy-independent Britain, free from the grip of global gas prices — renewable, sovereign, unable to be held hostage by fossil fuel markets or the geopolitical whims of distant powers. I believe in food independence, in homegrown businesses as the actual engine of community wealth, in local economies that circulate money rather than extract it. I believe business can be a genuine force for good, not just in mission statements but in how it actually operates every single day.
I believe our country desperately needs unity — not the false kind that says stop talking about it, but the real kind built on honest conversation and a shared commitment to leaving something better for our children.
If Starmer goes, and the evidence suggests he should, what comes next matters enormously. Look carefully before being swept up in the media narrative. Andy Burnham was a member of Labour Friends of Israel for over twenty years, voted for the Iraq War, called BDS "spiteful," and his campaigns have been funded in part by arms industry donors. The same question applies to Streeting, Reeves, and almost every name being floated. Handing the keys to any of them is not change. It is continuity with a different face. What Labour actually needs, if it is to mean anything again, is someone not bought, someone whose first loyalty is to the people struggling with their energy bills and their rent, not the donor class that funded their career.
I am a Green Party supporter because when I look at genuine redistribution, environmental justice, grassroots democracy and human rights without the asterisks, I see the closest alignment with what I actually believe. Not perfect — politics never is. But the closest home I've found.
We are human. That is not a weakness.
I got Iraq wrong. I got the Labour endorsement wrong. I trusted institutions that didn't deserve it, more than once. And I'll probably get some things wrong in the future, because I am a human being, not a doctrine.
Being wrong is not the problem. The problem is being unable to admit it, digging in because your ego is more invested in being right than in being honest. Accountability without self-punishment — that is what growth looks like. And I think we need to extend the same tolerance to each other.
My pledge
I want to end not with an argument, but with a promise.
I am a Green Party member, and I will get more active — canvassing, supporting candidates, showing up for local and general elections, because grassroots political engagement is one of the most powerful things an ordinary person can do.
I will protect the natural world, starting with my own river. I live beside the Severn and love it with the devotion of someone who swims in it and draws something essential from it. I will volunteer for river conservation and guardianship, because our waterways are living systems that need people willing to stand for them.
I will build community. I'm starting to run Netwalks — networking for women, outside, in nature, without the stuffy suits and airless conference rooms, because connection happens when we're moving and breathing fresh air and not performing professionalism at each other across a table. I will speak out — against social injustice, against environmental destruction, for those who are vulnerable and being harmed, the children in Gaza, the children exploited by the powerful, the communities dismantled by policies made in rooms they will never enter. I will not always get it right, but I will not stay silent to protect my professional comfort. Not anymore.
I will show up fully in my business. Pure Improvement exists to help purpose-driven organisations perform with their values intact — to move from firefighting to flowing without compromising what they stand for. Businesses rooted in real values are one of the most powerful forces for change we have, and the people who lead them deserve support to be fully themselves.
And I will keep being wrong sometimes, and saying so, because that is what growth looks like, and because the world needs more people willing to be accountable without being destroyed by it. This is my stake in the ground. This is the direction I'm walking. Come with me, if it resonates. 🌿
Zoe Darlington is the founder of Pure Improvement, a holistic business consultancy supporting purpose-driven businesses, charities and social enterprises to perform with pure purpose. Based in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire.
Sources:
Declassified UK: Israel lobby funded half of Keir Starmer's cabinet (September 2024)
Declassified UK: Keir Starmer joined secretive CIA-linked group (July 2023)
Novara Media: Labour Together Has a New Excuse for Failing to Declare Donations (March 2024)
Al Jazeera / PBS NewsHour: Epstein-Mandelson files and arrest (February 2026)
Forde Report (Martin Forde KC, 2022)
YouGov (2017): Labour supporters less likely to hold antisemitic views than Conservative or UKIP supporters
Middle East Eye: Project Get Zack (May 2026)
UN Commission of Inquiry: Genocide conclusion, Gaza (September 2025)
International Court of Justice: Provisional measures order (January 2024)
International Criminal Court: Arrest warrants, Netanyahu and Gallant (November 2024)
OCHA: Humanitarian Situation Update, Gaza (May 2025)
WHO: 720 plus attacks on healthcare in Gaza (2025)
Wikipedia / Al Jazeera / IMF: Economic impact of 2026 Iran war
Electoral Reform Society: Polling breakdown, April 2026
YouGov: How would Britain vote, start of 2026
Ipsos Political Monitor: March and April 2026
Share
