Oh Socialist Utopia, Where Art Thou ?

This is a piece I haven't been wanting to write for a very long time. Events, though, have forced my hand.

I've covered Keir Starmer twice on this blog, once in February 2024 and once shortly after the electoral landslide that swept Labour back to power. It's fair to say I've presented the man with a glowing, even gushing, review, and over on Decoherency I've presented similar arguments and defended Labour after they suffered quite the barrage of largely idiotic attacks.

Alas, the happy period in which we could mostly ignore politics lasted about six months. Fourteen years of Tory garbage and we got six months when things were sensible. For fuck's sake.

Now this is not like the time when I reversed my opinion on Jeremy Corbyn. No, rather than ranting against Starmer himself, here I want to largely rant against the feckless stupidity of the Great British public. So let me be absolutely clear about where I stand.

YER ALL A BUNCH OF FUCKING MORONS !

Which is not to say that Starmer himself is blameless, because he certainly isn't. But having seen people on Last Week Tonight describe Starmer as a "prick" and seen his popularity plummet to lower levels than Boris Johnson (!), I have to say that the British are a bunch of contemptibly stupid fuckwits.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... the electorate !

Look, I promise I am going to go through the points where I disagree with Starmer, and I do think he's done some incredibly stupid things. I promise I'm coming to that. But first, he is/was HANDS DOWN the best Prime Minister we had in twenty years. Not even close. Yet he's engendered a level of bitterness that would fuel the wet dreams of a true hate figure like Farage, and... why ? 

For not being good enough, apparently.

It's absolutely fucking exhausting to have to deal with this perpetual bullshit. What the absolute flying fuck is wrong with you ? What in God's name will it take to make you people fucking learn something ?

Jesus H. Christ.

As you might guess, I don't intend this to be an especially thoughtful post. If you came here hoping for another repeat of the five-part rebuttal of Epictetus, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. I don't much care for polemics, but the hell with it : sometimes people need not careful reasoning, but a damn good verbal slap in the cerebral cortex.

Haters Gonna Hate

My basic question is this. What is it about Keir Starmer, dear proverbial reader, that makes you hate him so ? Do you even know ? I doubt it. 

Not that all of you don't have an answer, mind you : plenty will point to things like (supposedly) transphobic policies, "hard line" immigration stances, or perhaps the Mandelson debacle or any number of various other messaging missteps. But I argue that, in comparison to the previous 14 years of Tory missrule, Starmer's government has done absolutely sod all to deserve anything like the level of contempt with which the majority of the public now seem to view him personally.

Again, LWT features British morons describing their towns as "shitholes" without any explanation as to what it is they think makes them shitholes, let alone what it is they actually want their town to be/do in order for them not to be shitholes. If some of you do have answers, then an awful lot of you certainly don't.

The long-standing appeal of Starmer for me was a lack of magical promises. He never said he would transform Britain overnight, because the recovery the country needs simply can't be done quickly. He never gave the impression of being a miracle worker in the way that Johnson or Truss ever suggested. He made it quite clear that the process would be long and difficult. And lo ! The process is indeed long and difficult, made all the more so by the fascist orange cunt running the White House. Getting disappointed that the recovery isn't going very quickly is just stupid. Nobody was ever promised that it would be easy or fast.

Which leaves me bewildered as to what it is everyone is actually upset by. Could it be the litany of so-called "scandals" that have beset the party since it came to office ? I rather doubt it. Consider each of these :

• Expenses and hospitality. This early "scandal" consisted of Starmer and others claiming expenses for things they were perfectly entitled to, and accepting and declaring donations with full transparency for concerts and other events. It's the most pathetic of stories, but it was at this point – not when the winter fuel story started as the popular narrative has it – that Starmer's approval took a nosedive. It never recovered. I find this absolutely exasperating because nobody ever gave a shit when Boris Johnson was handed vast amounts of money by a still-undisclosed donor or turned Downing Street into a tasteless pile of tat for his idiotic wife.
• Rayner's taxes. Even less of a scandal. The Tories wasted billions – tens of billions, all lost now – on useless PPE in the pandemic while Matt Hancock cavorted with an underling, but the fascist rags couldn't handle a working class woman accidentally misreporting a few grand in taxes. It's disgusting. She never should have resigned.
• Mandelson. I'll grant that this one is different : Mandelson is an evil bastard through and through. But the press acted liked Starmer must have been uniquely stupid not to know about the (very real and incredibly serious) issues that subsequently came to light, despite never having tried to do some, oh, I don't know, investigative journalism of their own. They also downplayed the whole aspect of actually imparting state secrets and concentrated heavily on the Epstein angle. Look, this one isn't a non-story, but the way the press span it was downright dumb. Mandelson, as a duplicitous, evil, manipulative, highly intelligent twat, was a downright inspired choice to deal with the duplicitous, evil, manipulative, thick as shit administration across the pond.

Policy Presentations

So if it's not the "scandals" which are the source of the anti-Starmer nuttery, could it be instead the policies Labour has enacted, or those they've failed to deliver on ? This is more credible, but only slightly :

• Winter fuel allowance. Total non-story. This should always have been means tested but the press refused to consider it could have had any other consequence except millions of pensioners freezing to death in their tiny hovels, dying naked and alone with the name "Staaaarmerrrr !" escaping from their frozen lips as they expired. The idea that this might be good for budgeting was never discussed. Ever.
• Treatment of climate protestors. More of an issue for Guardian readers than anyone else, but some people attempted to paint (pun intended) Starmer as personally responsible for the handful of rather harsh sentences for climate protestors as being emblematic of a police state, or something, while racist rioters were allowed to get off Scott-free and given a big bag of crumpets, or whatever. Utter garbage, pure culture war nonsense. This is the effect of sensationalism gone mad, when instead of legitimately criticising the judiciary you see any minor error as "evidence" that the ruling party is worse than the Nazis.
• Response to Gaza. Now yes, my response would not have been much like the government's response. But I accept that the need to balance morals and diplomacy isn't easy, especially given the Labour Party's disturbing recent indulgence in anti-Semitism under Corbyn. I don't agree with their response to pro-Palestine demonstrations and I'm totally unconvinced by their explanation as to why certain participants in these are somehow terrorists. Do I hate them for it ? No. I think they're being stupid, but not malevolent.
• Farmers. Fuck off the lot of you. You've been saying that farming in the UK is on the verge of collapse for at least the last thirty years and it's wearing a bit thin, no matter how hard you work and how essential you are. The inheritance tax was riddled with exemptions and easy to avoid by gifting away the farms before dying. Not difficult. But no, just like with pensioners, no interpretation other than, "oh no, my poor little hovel will crumble into dirt because now I have to pay three million quid because I own one too many tractors" was ever allowed in the media.
• Online safety act. Yeah, I don't like this one. The government has come up with some mightily stupid ideas, not least of which is age verification and – for some reason, God knows why – banning step-sibling porn (but not actually banning actual step-sibling sex, because <snarkasm> that makes sense </snarkasm>). Does this mean they did a very stupid thing ? Absolutely. Worthy of hatred ? Come off it. Hatred should be reserved for racist buggers like Johnson and deranged loons like Truss, not well-meaning bad decisions like these. And incidentally, not once have I seen the news ever suggesting the bleedin' obvious : encourage parents to monitor and regulate their children's screen time. There are already tools to do this. The need for the government to act and thus treat us all like children was routinely assumed as the only option : the idea that the parents could have anything to do with it was never mentioned. 

It winds me up something mental, it really does. Under the Tories we had austerity and the evisceration of our public institutions, and we let them get away with it because they were apparently competent. Yeah, right, whatever.

I shall say it again. You. Fucking. Morons.

And then I must necessarily rattle through the positive sides of the Starmer government : nationalising energy, nationalising rail, support for Ukraine, stabilising the economy in the face of massive international challenges, playing Trump like a fiddle for a trade deal (albeit that didn't stick, but show me anyone who's done better against that cretinous mass of putrid bile), the employment rights act, the renter's rights act, a national wealth fund, reducing migration (not my preference but it's what most people want for some reason), cutting waiting lists on the NHS, improved public sector pay, vastly better relations with the EU, and free breakfasts for schoolchildren.

Are you seriously going to look me in the eye and say that the Starmer government hasn't been, on balance, the best thing to happen to the UK in decades ?

Come off it. That's stupid, and you know it.

A Solution : Mixed Messages

Could it then be messaging ? This area I think is by far the most promising, but also the one where the implications for the British public are the most damning.

For this, it's worth reading Tony Blair's recent essay in full*. Yes, the man is profoundly amoral, and his stance that we should have let the American's use our bases against Iran is crazy both pragmatically and morally. The man acts as though moral values are something nice to have, not actually of practical benefit, whereas this case is a clear demonstration that they are not. Support America's despot in their pointless and economically wrist-slitting war to distract from the Epstein files ? That's not a sane choice, Tony. Likewise, his belief that we should prioritise cheaper rather than cleaner energy is moronic : the climate crisis isn't something abstract that you can pretend isn't happening. 

*Blair also gives some suggestions regarding actual policy and a way forwards, some of which I agree with, some of which I react strongly against. A much better set of arguments on that front comes in Starmer's own response.

But politically, only the most foolish would disregard a three-times election winner. The root of it seems to be, in his assessment, that Starmer didn't pick a side. Tribalism may have its problems, but it's also a source of strength and a clear heuristic : when people think they know what you're about, you're predictable, and they can use that to judge if they think you're basically decent or not. When they don't, they can't trust you. In Unruly, David Mitchell stresses the importance in ruthlessness for medieval kings in eliminating the fatality of doubt among the populace, and there's certainly more than an echo of that here, at least analogously.

I would add that perhaps worse, though, was that while Starmer could have tried to brand his own approach, he just never did that at all. He just thought that people would essentially do this for themselves, and didn't care how they chose to interpret it. To an extent, it wasn't so much loosing the narrative as never crafting one in the first place... "mission-led government" doesn't strike a chord with people. Wanting this to be the "best country in the world" is a platitude, an abstraction, not something nearly concrete enough that people can tell what you're about.

Blair's second good point is that changing leader won't help without having a coherent strategy. I disagree that Labour doesn't have one, but I violently agree that they haven't marketed it. Its approach of almost pure pragmatism does have a whiff of making-it-up-as-they-go-along more than following a clear path. I agree with Blair when he says that to seize the centre, you must first devise policy and only then employ politics. That is, decide on what your goals are first, and then formulate how you're going to persuade people to go along with them. And these have to be lower-level than the "let's make everything better" stratagems of Starmer. You need to define clearly what it is you want to accomplish, fix, or improve, and only then go about deciding how you're going to do that.

His third point is that there is a real need to be radical. Starmer did have a vision for a radical centrism, ironically by decentralising government*, but that all came to nothing. On other policies he never even really offered that much you could call "radical". Nationalising rail and energy is definitely a good thing, but while the piecemeal approach has many advantages, it's also slow. Blair stresses also the importance of unconventional thinking, noting that while this may indeed result in actual disaster**, it also connects with people at a visceral level. The "stabilise" approach was perfectly sensible for the first year, but after that, incremental approaches were just not going to cut it.

* A federal structure for the UK, greater powers for local councils, replacing the Lords with a Council of Nations... all these were on the cards and promised within the first term. There was little enough sign of any of them actually happening though.
** Likening Trump to a car crashing into a brick wall, he rightly notes that the problem is that "radical people aren't sensible, and sensible people aren't radical".

So Starmer needed something big, bold, and obvious : a four day week, universal basic income, rejoining the EU, a wealth tax for the wealthiest, something of that magnitude. Not necessarily any of those specifically, and certainly not all them, but of that order, and economic rather than in terms of government structure. Reforming or replacing the House of Lords might be popular among some segments, but won't be itself directly affect anyone outside the Westminster bubble.

What Went Wrong

The most disappointing thing about all this was just how well-prepared the Starmer government was before going into office. They had many meetings with business leaders and institutes well before the election; by the time of the event, everyone knew their major policies. They had successfully eliminated the doubt that plagued medieval monarchs, made themselves presentable, serious, and safe enough for Tory voters to ignore rather than cosplaying Reform. Their whole shadow cabinet exuded dull competence after the chaotic farce of the Johnson and other previous administrations.

I don't think I can say too much about why this all went wrong, but I do think I can at least identify what went wrong. Starmer learned many of Blair's key lessons but not how to implement them. He knew how to say no to his own side, but not when or how (like telling a child they can't have a pony versus telling them they can't have a My Little Pony play set). He knew that change must be felt, but not how to make it felt or how to have it associated with his government. He knew that you have to meet people where they are, but not how to change their minds when you need to... opting to appeal to their sentiments rather than ever challenge them very much. And he knew that people judge policies in aggregate, but not how to get them to judge them at all... again, failing to paint himself in any sort of ideological colours.

Perhaps at least one root cause is that Starmer is too experienced at dealing with the dregs of humanity. Having dealt with rapists, murders, terrorists, Boris Johnson and Lizz Truss, he appears to have become thick skinned to the point of being tin eared. He could not acknowledge when messaging had a serious problem, preferring to go to foreign summits with other leaders than engage with the rough-and-tumble of the British electorate. I sympathise, but the Prime Minister of the UK needs to be seen to be dealing with UK issues. Starmer is right when he says that many international issues do affect us directly, but this doesn't acknowledge that this isn't how people feel about them. These issues needed to be left to the foreign secretary (and probably having somebody who wasn't David Lammy would have been a better choice there). Messaging really matters, because if you don't craft a narrative, someone else will do it for you.

And finally, he didn't stick to his guns. There were just too many u-turns and climbdowns, raising that hellish spectre of doubt : since he won't stick to his guns, say dissenters, it appears that if we stick to ours, we'll win. He didn't properly understand when to fight and when not to fight, which resulted in a messy, spitballing approach of trying hopelessly to please everyone. He could be ruthless in dealing with his party-internal opponents, sometimes too much so, but not in offering moral clarity.

Aftermath

So yes, as promised, I've set out what Starmer got wrong. I will say again that there are some policies I also disagree with, particularly transphobic judgements about bathrooms and the bizarrely prudish online safety act. The internet should be for adults; it's children who should bear the difficulties of access, not us, and parents who should be responsible for this, not the government. That one really did feel nanny state.

And yet the government has done an awful lot of good. To hate them for their entirely predictable missteps and utterly minor misdemeanours is profoundly lacking in sense. Frankly, if we can't be grateful for the improvements under Starmer compared to the last decade and a half under the Tories, then we'll never be happy – ever. We've been sold down the river on expectations of absolute perfection, and nothing less, it seems, will every satisfy us : anything less than a miracle is worse than shit. The perfect is indeed the enemy of the good, to the extent that if something is slightly flawed, people seem to want to vote for the exact fucking opposite instead. 

Indeed, it often feels as though the public view someone being slightly incompetent as worse than being deliberately malevolent. Nothing much else can possible explain the appeal of Reform or their brainless cousins in Restore.

For a much better sort of milkshake man, see this.

There is something rotten in the state of Britain. I cannot fully address what it is, but I will venture two major contributing factors. First, nobody seems to have a clue how our economy works. Nobody seems to realise what's really generating the money or where it's going; Blair is convinced AI will affect changes (literally) on the scale of the Industrial Revolution, but as to the basic questions of 1) where is all the money going ? and 2) why was our economy so much better in 2005 ? nobody seems to have a damn clue.

The second is the media. I love this piece on grumpy old men, and its main claim ties in to the British press perfectly. By selecting and sensationalising  all the negative stories, they've become an engine for conditioned responses. The voters are trained to see the bad in everything and the good in nothing, to see politicians as all self-serving hypocrites and worse. They're deft at finding the clouds is every silver lining and assuming that the negative interpretations are the only valid ones, with any positive interpretations being dismissed out of hand as tribal propaganda. We aren't allowed to be happy with anything. We don't appreciate for a moment just how much worse things could be.

Even this, though, I think doesn't fully explain what's happened. There is something rotten also in the psyche of the British people, something that prevents us from seeing the blindingly obvious. When we react with "my town's a shithole" for no good reason, then it makes perfect sense to say, "Starmer is a prick" for no good reason, and by the same token to declare that "Andy Burnham would be much better" even though he's at most 10% more likeable than Starmer.  

I don't claim to know what exactly has come over my fellow countrymen. I'm acutely aware that "they're all just bad people" is an insanely common and idiotic fallacy that explains nothing. But this is the reason why I said that "mixed messages" as a solution for why the Starmer government has failed is such a damning verdict for the public : that they cannot see how minor the problems really are, that they need to be spoon-fed to think for themselves, does not bode well at all.

Let's hope Andy Burnham can figure it out. If he can't, Brexit and austerity will be the least of our problems. And what a cheery thought that is.