The End of Keir Starmer's Premiership: A Note

With Keir Starmer just resigned the prime ministership of the government of Great Britain, and the leadership of the Labour Party, it seems a good time to look back on his career these past many years.

During the 2020 party leadership contest Starmer, presenting himself as a "socialist" committed to a social democratic platform in his famous ten pledges, won the election. Of course, afterward he pretty quickly dropped the pledges, claiming that they were no longer a plausible program in the pandemic-shocked world--which line of argument was revealing about Starmer. For him reform was not a matter of practical and moral necessity for society (the genuinely reform-minded want change because so far as they are concerned what exists doesn't work), but rather a matter of pragmatic political concessions when those desirous of preserving the status quo find "compromise" cheaper and safer than the alternative (change a matter of little tweaks to keep the malcontents from getting out of hand and thus actually being able to press for real change as they continue to think of sound management of the economy in terms of orthodox, free market ideals, inclining toward balanced budgets at no cost to the rich, and the belief that government doing anything business does not like would only get in the way of any real solutions to problems). That is the outlook not of the capitalism-criticizing leftist Starmer purported to be when calling himself a "socialist," but the capitalism-committed, anti-capitalist-battling centrist, and indeed, in line with the most cynical aspects of that tradition, being quite convinced that keeping up false hope is as good as delivering the goods, and quite ready to dispense even with the hope the second it is convenient. Not that everyone was surprised, of course. From the outset many hailed Starmer's ascent to the leadership of the party as a restoration of the Blairite, New Labour, centrist neoliberal-neoconservatives to the control of the party they had enjoyed since the '80s save for the Corbyn interregnum, and indeed Starmer fulfilled all their expectations. Not only did he display great brazenness about his unapologetic abandonment of his social promises in a manner living down to the worst suspicions that they were no more than a cynical political maneuver, but he set about purging the party of its more left-leaning politicians, including the man he had described as a "friend" before, Jeremy Corbyn himself, in a manner very pleasing indeed to people who were not all confirmed rightists (certainly if one doesn't think of the editorship of the Guardian as such)--as Alexander Cockburn's characterization of Christopher Hitchens', shall we say, satisfaction, in acts of betrayal came to mind, and not inappropriate for a man whose name, uttered quickly, sounds an awful lot like that Japanese term with which anime fans may be familiar, "KISAMA!"

Of course, for all that, the 2020s was not the era of libertarian-neoliberal utopianism the 1990s was, and indeed Starmer did attempt to seem like something other than a Blairite, even to talk like a radical now and then. Thus where Tony Blair seemed incapable of even saying the word "worker" in public (so that we got such violence to the English language as his substitution of "the individual at the workplace" instead in his 1997 General Election Manifesto), Starmer was quite able to use the word. In a manner that would likely have appalled David Graeber were he still alive--even spoke of the "one percent." However, in almost the same breath he would again be groveling before business right with the best (worst?) of the competition, all as amid years and years of crisis and controversy he never went anywhere near a program like his old pledges. Indeed, a close reading of the Labour Party's 2024 General Election Manifesto shows that he never picked them up again--that indeed he "stayed the course" of Blairite centrist neoliberalism-neoconservatism, which however delightful this was to the sort of commentator addicted to the metaphor of a man carrying a Ming vase across a polished floor, was despised by the British public, and certainly that part of it inclined to vote for Labour, as it was back in 2010.

As one might expect the voters did not find this too inspiring. Yes, Labour won its election, but the "landslide" the press talked about so much was really not a matter of, as the commentariat seemed to imply, the British electorate overwhelmingly favoring Labour over the Tories, but rather weak support for the two parties in the near-two party monopoly that is Britain's party system as third parties had an exceptional showing. It just so happened that, in line with the reality that the Tories who had been in power for fourteen disastrous years in which the likes of David Cameron and Boris Johnson presided over austerity and a "let the bodies pile high in their thousands" response to the COVID-19 pandemic, took the worse beating in an election where the mood was profoundly anti-incumbent and anti-Establishment. (It was also the case that, however cowardly even the "liberal" media is about admitting it, having a figure with the epidermal melanin level of Rishi Sunak as party leader and premier was no help to keeping right-wing voters behind them rather than encouraging them to throw their weight behind Sunak's fellow public school-"educated" multimillionaire veteran of the Wall Street-City complex, Nigel Farage of the House of Drexel Burnham Lambert--you know, Michael Milken's old shop--and his "Reform UK.") The result was that in a situation that had the smell of The Strange Death of Liberal England all over it (not that the commentators mentioned it, it's a book, you see, and they don't read those), even as Starmer got a lot less of the vote than Jeremy Corbyn lost with (certainly back in 2017) he still ended up the "King's first minister."

I had had no doubts that Starmer would win in 2024, but given how in the end he won that election, also very strong doubts that he would still be Prime Minister in 2029. His government's position simply looked so flimsy that it seemed like it wouldn't take much to push him out of 10 Downing Street, especially in an age of polycrisis--and nothing I saw since changed that opinion. The degrading climbdown from what little he had been prepared to promise at General Election time represented by his Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves' speech to Parliament set the tone for his tenure as Starmer proved anything but "a man to match the mighty hour." In the meantime any sense I had that the comparison I drew between the Tories and the Strange Death of Liberal England-era Liberals was at all overstated fell by the wayside with Reform UK looking ever more like a right-wing Labour Party's principal challenger from the right as the party of Wellington and Salisbury and Disraeli and Churchill and Thatcher increasingly appeared headed for the dustbin of history--all as Starmer's failures gave the impression of a man in a race with them on the road to ruin, the more madly given that, again contrary to the stupidities written about an electoral landslide in July 2024, his government's position was so fragile. It is testimony to that that the blowup over Starmer's appointing Friend of Epstein Peter Mandelson the country's ambassador in Washington did so much to erode what little standing Monsieur Starmer had--the act doing him no credit (but then what act of Starmer's has done so in the period under discussion?), but frankly minor next to what certain other people in high places have been accused of, not just generally, but in the Epstein affair, for which they have to date suffered far less. Starmer's being squeezed out in the manner he has been is also testimony to what this is really about--the desire of some to see a Roderick Spode in 10 Downing Street before the decade is out, these the true beneficiaries of Starmer's government, and for that matter the entire run of British government since Tony Blair, which vulgarian would now seem to be enjoying the ill-gotten gains of his far from brilliant career as a member of the global superclass, remote from the masses this leader of a "Labour" party so evidently despised, the way he always wanted to be.