Starmer Out

It’s bizarre the Prime Minister’s fall from power is covered without reference to what he did with it. 

As if the country hadn’t suffered enough, Brits right now are being subject to endless think pieces ‘explaining’ to us why our latest PM is leaving office. These pontificate at length without once referencing the biggest policy changes the government has pursued. 

Keir Starmer, in case you missed it, is officially out. This has been inevitable for some time, but was officially announced this Monday. It’s a dramatic fall for a leader elected with a massive majority only two years ago.

A setup for failure

Yet the former superstar lawyer’s position was always deceptively weak. His victory was less a groundswell of support for him and more the electorate losing all patience with the hopelessly inept Tory Government. Our archaic electoral system had given him two-thirds of the seats on one third of the popular vote, meaning his foundation was a mile wide and an inch deep. The parliamentary party hence had huge numbers of inexperienced MPs, chosen one suspects to be ‘yes-men’, sitting on very small majorities. What followed was an insular government, unresponsive to even its own party. The backbenchers would grumble, but usually proved unable to restrain the executive from its worst impulses.

To make matters worse, Starmer had locked himself into a framework that prevented delivering material results for regular people. We were, when he came to power, eight years into an experiment in economic isolation—Brexit—that everyone understood wasn’t working. We are a much poorer country because of it. Yet in the run up to the 2024 election, revisiting the fundamentals of that deal was ruled out, as was significantly deviating from the (unworkable) Tory economic framework: no tax rises, no new borrowing.

Starmer made his success criteria turning the economy and our failing public services around, yet denied himself the most realistic ways of achieving that—for instance renegotiating trade deals or investing more in key sectors, much less making immigration easier to fill the massive staffing shortages in health and social care. Labour leadership genuinely seemed to believe that being a bit more dignified, having a more grown up affect, would be enough to get things moving again. It wasn’t. 

It is, to be fair, a tough time for incumbents. Biden too bet on ‘deliverism’; allowing his economic policy to colour outside the usual neoliberal lines—spending big, running the economy hot—in the belief that directly delivering on material gains would deliver votes in return. And it worked to a degree. The economy recovered, wages rose at the bottom, inflation was managed to a ‘soft landing’. He held his own coalition together, but it was not ultimately enough to save him. What, Starmerism rather daringly asked, would happen if we ran on deliverism without delivering? We have our answer. 

Frustratingly, all this was completely predictable, well in advance. In July of 2023, a year before Starmer became Prime Minister, I wrote:

I find a scenario in which Labour wins big but then collapses almost immediately in the opinion polls (like first 6 months) once the problems with the country become their problems, really plausible.

It was obvious then that what Labour was saying in opposition would make their lives much harder in government. 

But then they made it so much worse. Starmer was finished off by the one-two blows of the Mandelson scandal and poor local election results. But these might have been mitigated, and ultimately survivable, had he been more popular. There is much to criticise in Biden’s record, but ultimately he made it to the end of a single term. There still is a Democratic Party. An umbrella that the anti-fascist team, with various griping, can still all settle under. Something to build back from. It is not at all clear, as of time of writing, the Labour Party will survive Starmer. 

Because his premiership was not, ultimately, defined by being boring or failing to deliver. Within the narrow framework they've locked themselves into, the government's economic record is mixed—there is some progressive stuff in there. But that’s not the primary thing they have done with power. 

The ends of appeasement

Blessed with a massive majority, in a country that is functionally a legislative dictatorship, Starmer radically transformed UK policy on social issues. Rather than try and get out of (or at least perceive) the straitjacket they had put themselves in on the economy, their political strategy was what I term reactionary centrism. In a nutshell, this posits that electorates are moving right because they have ‘reasonable concerns’ about immigration, asylum, and the excesses of social liberalism (particularly on trans rights). The fascist resurgence can hence be understood as a ‘backlash to woke’. In response, center-left parties should give ground on these issues to ‘take them off the table’. 

One of the many failings of reactionary centrism is its utter unfalsifiability: if you lose an election you have to move to the right on social issues to win next time. If you win an election you have to move to the right to govern. If things are going well politically it means it’s working. If they’re not, you need to give more ground. Appeasement, for them, is something reasoned from, not reasoned to. Reactionary centrism cannot fail, it can only be failed. This makes it a hopelessly exploitable strategy: if you are committed to giving your enemies what they want, they learn pretty quickly to just keep asking for stuff. In an age where neo-fascism is on the rise, this is a very dangerous operating software to have running on a politician's brain. 

The Labour Government has, to be summary, implemented or proposed sweeping changes to the immigration and asylum systems and made us into one of the most trans-hostile developed democracies in the world. Legal immigrants will often have an expensive and insecure decade-long legal limbo imposed on them. We are functionally ending real refugee status. Even if we admit those fleeing war or persecution, they will (under proposed changes) only ever stay here temporarily, subject to deportation at any time. Their children with British citizens will also be subject to deportations. This is completely counter to both the letter and the spirit of international law on this subject, something the Home Secretary overtly lied about. She was, I think, correct however in describing the changes as the most radical made in the last 70 years.

On trans rights, it is difficult to convey just how quickly the country has moved. This was already underway before Starmer took power, but they have (without a manifesto commitment or vote in parliament) made it much worse. We are currently making a bathroom ban official. Youth healthcare has been criminalised. Trans people have been barred from competing in most sports. We have gone from one of the best countries in Europe for LGBT rights to one of the worst. 

These are not small side-issues. They directly affect the lives of millions. Brits who, say, are married to someone on a visa route, or have trans family, will also be impacted. Taken together, the country is a much, much more illiberal place than it was two years ago—as it exited a decade and a half of Tory rule. 

The British media

And yet almost nowhere is any of this mentioned in the media pontificating about Starmer's ouster. The right has not given Labour credit. Why would they? Camilla Long, writing in The Times, bemoaned that voters were concerned about immigration, but “the party doesn’t want to listen.” As if falling migration wasn’t falling massively, with net migration at 171,000, less than half last year’s figure. As if this wasn’t doing massive harm to our economy, as if legal migrants weren't having their lives made much worse, all to appease people like her. Instead, per Long, Starmer’s successor needs to focus on policies that “will make most of his party—especially the blue-haired city-dwelling Green-adjacent trans lovers who may fill his cabinet—squirm.”

Some might perceive an obvious trap in your political opponents counseling you to alienate your own core voters, but Labour hasn’t seen it yet. They’ll get the support of people like Long, they think, if they just keep at it. But even in her original dismissal of the left, you can see why this will never work. The goal posts have just shifted. Being a “trans lover” (go ahead and make the connection that phrase is inviting you to make) has gone from affirmatively supporting trans people, to voicing the mildest concern about their oppression.

Our centrist and even liberal press did no better, often seemingly unable to say anything at all. Peter Walker, The Guardian’s Senior Political Correspondent, in a long and well researched piece, portrayed Starmer as a man “frozen by the endless choices of power, hiding behind an ever-expanding lexicon of missions, goals and plans for change”. The focus was very much on what was not done, not on what was. The PM’s anti-immigrant “island of strangers” speech was briefly mentioned as an aside, but the hard policy that flowed from it was neglected. Other post mortems don’t even mention that. 

It’s generally accepted by our chattering classes that British politics is a competition to placate nativists. Yet hard immigration numbers are rarely mentioned in “why Starmer failed” explainers. Probably because they went down, quite significantly, under him (albeit for reasons distinct from his making life harder for those already here). Needless to say, this did not have the promised economic benefit for native workers. 

This is, to put it mildly, all a bit ridiculous. Consider the following two facts:

1. Starmer, in attempting to appease the new right, made the country radically more regressive.
2. The Starmer government was a catastrophic failure.

If you hold them in your head together, a conclusion emerges. Yet that conclusion is utterly beyond our own media. They agree with our illiberal turn, or have convinced themselves that it was politically necessary, or seemingly just not noticed it at all, so it can’t be mentioned together with the government's failure, lest The Conclusion emerge. We hence have the bizarre spectacle of our entire media trying to make sense of Starmer’s fall from power, without mentioning the main things he did with it. 

The result is often public befuddlement. “it's hard to make sense of what happened to Starmer” Economist columnist Stanley Pignal posted on Bsky. A real head scratcher. “Political scientists will have their work cut out on this one.”  

They won’t. Political academics have their blind spots, but this they saw clearly enough. When Starmer started his turn to appeasement over 200 of them signed an open letter (which, disclosure, I wrote) that warned that “the government positioning itself as ‘tough’ on immigration and asylum will not have the intended effect of sidelining the far-right.” Accepting, as Starmer has just done, that legal migration was the country’s main problem “only validates” the far right and “Attempting to outbid them with deportations and visa denials will always fall short. They will not be satisfied with falling net migration numbers. They will never be satisfied.”

In the United States—for all its problems—there would’ve been a section of the media like, well, like Liberal Currents, but one might also mention The UnPopulist, The New Republic, The Bulwark, and others, that would’ve pushed back, aggressively, against appeasement. And connected the Dots when it failed. The above media (and others in the US) have been able, with the slightest glance across the Atlantic, to connect the dots for us. Yet the British media just can’t. It’s difficult to really convey to an international audience the extent to which they can’t. 

Messaging and morals 

“People always make their own personal bugbears the reason for a politician's rise or fall”, someone might say at this point. “Yes, you care about trans-rights, but surely that’s not a big issue for most people”.

I think it’s a combination of things, I would answer: a failure to deliver economically, poor communication and messaging, and the lurch to the right on social issues. I’d be hesitant to weigh them (i.e it was 40% down to the economy) because I think they’re related and feed into one another. Part of good messaging, for example, is having a clear story about what’s wrong with the country and what we do about it. Yet the fact that the government lacked such a narrative is part of why they didn’t deliver economically—ministers really did seem to think things would just get better by themselves. 

One might dismiss the lurch to the right on social issues as a cause of fracturing Labour’s vote by isolating those issues. Trans people are, after all, a very small percentage of the population. Yet they’re not vanishingly small: they have friends and family, and queer people tend to see their rights as interconnected. Labour claimed 43% of the LGBT vote in the last election. That had fallen to 25% by May of last year and I suspect it’s fallen since then (though I couldn’t find a more recent figure). If you add all this up, we’re talking a reasonable number of votes. Likewise, those with foreign-born family members number in the millions. 

The queer vote, the, for lack of a better word, ‘internationalist’ vote, are invariably going to be core pillars of any modern centre-left party’s coalition. They’ll put up with a certain amount of performative moderation, given how frightening the alternatives are, but their patience is not infinite. People will not cast ballots for a party that is actively oppressing them, removing longstanding rights, or describing them in dehumanizing terms. 

In the elite blindness to these basic facts we see something not instrumentally rational but identitarian. A common feature of all of the worst elements on our side—from reactionary centrists like Starmer, to centrist columnists in the US, to anti-alarmists who scold us for being scared of Trump, the dirtbag left who can’t get over their hatred of ‘normie resist libs’—is the contempt they have for the people who actually vote for centre-left parties in the 21st century.

This, too, is gender. 

In somewhat different ways, they desperately want a movement of big, burly steelworkers and rugged coalminers. But there are more manicurists than miners in the UK by a 2:1 margin. Their image of the working class is an aesthetic, often an entirely imagined one, unconnected from the reality of life for most working people.

The actual centre-left coalition is bartenders, supermarket shelve stackers, and waitresses. People who live in a big city in a small rental with roommates. Nurses, teachers, office staff. Young aspirational couples in the suburbs. Students and recent grads. Progressive professionals and, yes, academics. 

In the States, the socialist left has painfully learnt the lesson that asking for these people’s votes in a primary while barely hiding your disdain for them is not a winning message. In the UK, the Labour government has shown you cannot lead a coalition of people you openly loathe. After a loss to the left Green Party in a recent by-election, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood insisted she would not abandon her regressive policies. In order to make legal migrants' lives harder she would sacrifice “bourgeois support”. A telling phrase. Not to mention a bizarre one after a low-income area of Manchester had rejected the party for a local plumber. This did not count as an authentic expression of the working class, however, as the plumber, Hannah Spencer, was socially progressive.

So Starmer’s poor messaging wasn’t unconnected from his lurch to the right. Both are downstream of desperately wanting a different set of voters than the ones they actually have. This has also created the widespread impression—even for people who may not care about the minorities being harmed—that the government believes in nothing. That there is nothing they will take a stand on. That they have no loyalty towards their friends and an abject cravenness towards their enemies. That they will allow themselves to be bullied on the one hand, then turn around and bully the powerless on the other. 

Quo Vadis 

I keep hearing about how Starmer is a decent man, albeit perhaps not one cut out for the bareknuckle word of politics. The Guardian article cited above ends with this quote from historian Anthony Seldon: “He is this decent, hard-working, serious-minded figure, who could have made it – but critically, fatally, didn’t have the ability to learn how to do the job.” 

I’ve never seen it. Indeed, Starmer gives every indication of having no core values whatsoever. The inescapable conclusion is that to many people ‘decency’ is a sort of middle-class affect. A Republican politician might brag about having personally thrown a trans person out of the “wrong” toilet. A Labour minister urged us to “alert a member of staff” when “a person of the opposite biological sex enters a single-sex facility”, a near perfect encapsulation of how they talk and think. 

To those who are baffled by the hatred of Starmer from the left, ask yourself, if you were to be prevented from using a toilet, would it matter to you if it was done directly, or through an intermediary? Ask yourself also how people who work service roles might feel about those who outsource ugly, discriminatory conversations to them, in order to keep their own hands clean, to maintain their self-image as ‘decent’ people. 

And this is what’s so galling about the press analysis of this moment: They can only see the middle-class affect, not the substance of what it’s being used to deliver. One gets the terrible impression of people who would not notice any amount of oppression providing it was presented in this simpering way. 

On the economic front, they can note that Labour failed to deliver economically, but have very little to say about why. Starmer’s departure coincides with the 10th anniversary of Brexit, a project that made most people meaningfully worse off for overtly nativist reasons. We have essentially imposed sanctions on ourselves, not to mention becoming an international laughingstock, just to try and sooth the delicate feelings of anti-immigrant voters. 

Another anniversary comes to mind. On June 16th, 2016, Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered. Shot twice in the head then stabbed fifteen times. A judge concluded her murder had been motivated by “an admiration for Nazism, and similar anti-democratic white supremacist creeds”. Yet when her memory is raised, it’s usually in service of cautioning against heated political arguments in general. Of decrying how toxic politics writ-large has gotten, of the need for civility, of being nice to politicians online. Often it is not even mentioned that her killer was motivated by a specific ideology. Much less is that ideology tied to the increasingly open racism of our right—or the validation of it by figures like Starmer. 

At some point we’ve got to start saying the cultural right are wrong. That their ideal of a culturally (and possibly racially) pure country, with no trans or gender non-conforming people in it, is a perverse fantasy. But no. Instead we get Brexit, Jo Cox, stagnation, the endless PM’s who failed while trying to appease the right. We’re a decade into our national doom loop and it’s always someone else's fault. 

And when it can’t be pinned on someone else it just…  kind of becomes everyone's fault. With our latest PM fed into the woodchipper there’s vague notions that something is going wrong in the country. Voters are scolded for not wanting sensible options, as if they’ve ever been offered them. Or perhaps the UK is just ungovernable, it's said with a shrug. 

Yes, things are indeed going badly, but could we perhaps assign blame with a greater level of specificity than the nation-state and everyone in it?  Are we really going to be here a year from now, unable to explain why Burnham's numbers are in the trash? 

This is pathetic. It’s embarrassing. And everyone can see it but our own political class. 

Featured image is "Keir Starmer election infobox," CC BY 3.0 Chris McAndrew 2017.