Making Sense of Keir Starmer

The New Statesman recently ran a poll discussing the confusion among the British public regarding Keir Starmer's politics.

The confusion did not surprise me in the least, for three reasons.

1. The extreme sloppiness with political language seen across society. Words like "conservative," "liberal," "neoliberal," "socialist" all have well-established, quite coherent and useful, meanings, but even supposed "pundits" (another horribly misunderstood and misused word given that "pundit" literally means "learned" and so many of them are anything but) do not even seem aware of those meanings. Even when they give the impression that they have sufficient mental capacity to grasp the concepts (this does not happen often) they show those meanings little respect--at their worst falling back on the postmodernist claptrap that all speech is language games, and no definition any more or less valid than any other. The result is that even those approaching the issue with genuine knowledge and in good faith have a hard time making themselves understood in such a situation.

2. The generally lousy job the press does of clarifying the issues of the day and the positions of prominent political figures toward them--instead subjecting the reader or viewer to an incessant rain of details without context, worsened by its preference for politics to policy, its fear of analysis, its "both sidesism," its tabloid foolishness.

3. The reality that politicians find it useful to not be too clear on what they stand for. This is hardly new to the neoliberal age, but it has arguably become a wider problem in it because just about anyone near the mainstream is forced to stand on an economic platform that has never been popular, and which has grown ever more deeply unpalatable to the broad public. Accordingly the "center-right" pretends to be more moderate than it really is, the "center-left" pretends to be more left than it is (in Britain, hardline neoliberals from the Conservative Party posing as "One Nation conservatives," and their not terribly counterparts from Labour calling themselves "socialists").

These days the game is wearing thin--and one cannot claim that Keir Starmer has refused to play it. In presenting himself to the public he has called himself a "socialist," made quite the list of social democratic promises, and heavily invoked the spirit of "Old Labour" (where Blair never missed a chance to put it down"). Still, close-reading his more substantive statements about how he sees the world and what he is prepared to do, especially the statements that came further and further away he got from winning his party's leadership contest, he often it seemed to me that he sounded far more Blair then Bevan, as his more leftish promises seemed to fall by the wayside. (You can find my detailed take on this here.)

Those inclining to appraise Starmer generously may see him as a well-intentioned figure walking a fine line in difficult circumstances--wanting to take another path while anxious about offending elites, and a party Establishment, still deeply committed to neoliberalism, no matter how it has disappointed, or grown discredited. Those grading less generously, however, can see him as only the latest in that very, very, very long line of neoliberals who pretended to be something other than what they were, producing what they see as the train wreck that is "fuel crisis Britain"--and indeed it strikes me as neither surprising nor inappropriate that British voters identify him more with Tony Blair than anyone else.