Tom McTague in the New Statesman: What Keir Starmer can’t say.
I thought this was really interesting as it identifies a central problem with Starmerism – it uses people’s problems as a way of not solving people’s problems.
The problem is that fixing problems one at a time is not enough as Prime Minister. The job is to fix the country as a whole by explaining why so many things need fixing in the first place: to identify the cause of the problem and to convince the public that you have the right answers. This is the side of the job that he struggles with.
Ultimately, do I care what Starmer is like as a person? Or what slightly weird moral code he’s created around sacrifice, duty and a myopic commitment to “fixing problems”? Or about the people he’s met whose problems affected him? Not really, unless it informs ideology, and a coherent strategy for fixing many problems, not just those of a few people who invoke his sympathy.
Starmer is in trouble if he’s unable to convince a Westminster journalist who won’t question him on the views he does profess to hold (such as those in his racist “island of strangers” speech), and who’s even willing to ascribe the UK’s problems to the most Starmer’s-Labour-sounding cause of all – “stagnation”:
The country that he governs is one that feels traumatised by events: uneasy, fearful, hopeless, broken. Britain is coming to terms with almost two decades of stagnation…
But then Tom McTague is also able come up with this on-the-nose description of the UK:
National hopelessness has set in after two decades of failure in which living standards have fallen, public services have deteriorated and the public realm degraded. The poorest households in the UK are now worse off than the poorest households in Slovenia. Many see a future in which their children cannot afford to buy the same kind of house as they had or go to university. They begin to worry they will not be able to enjoy a decent retirement or to pass anything on to their children. As the spirit saps, so do the horizons of the country and the trust in the institutions of state to turn things around. The result is a political malaise in which voters begin to turn to more radical solutions. “If you don’t give people hope, you will get the alternative,” Starmer’s aide warns me: “The destruction of failing institutions.”
And Starmer absolutely isn’t – he could really do with the voice of someone like McTague in his ear.
Camden Hells, natch.