Starmer: every bit as unelectable
By Pete North - June 19, 2020
I’ve written several critiques of Labour over the past few years charting its path from bad to awful. But at least in the past I knew roughly what they were about. I’m not so sure now. I just can’t get a read on what we’re looking at under Starmer.
This is partly because Starmer himself is a passionless cardboard cutout who really has no affinity for politics and looks like a man a decade late to the party. He’d have made an adequate junior minister in Blair’s cabinet, and perhaps even a viable nonentity Tory backbencher, but I don’t think he really knows or understands what the Labour party presently is much less how to lead it.
What he does know is the Labour Party cannot remain as the party it is if it wants to get elected, hence the lip service paid to the anniversary of Lee Rigby’s death. It must have stuck in the craw for a progressive to have done something so grubby; to pretend to care about something he understands that working class people care about.
Somehow, if Labour wants to reclaim the mantle of the party of the working class then it somehow has to connect to them in ways Starmer just can’t. Blair had a ruthless competence about him that could carry his otherwise unappealing rabble. Starmer does not.
His other problem is his supporting cast. He himself can project an image of Blairite mundanity but on all sides he’s surrounded by circus freaks. His deputy is a moron and the talent pool with which to form a shadow cabinet is more of a puddle. He needs Caroline Flints but he’s got Dawn Bulters. I wouldn’t know what to do with that either.
He’s also damned either way. He could move the party closer to the middle and have the members turn on him, or he can pander to the left and have the electorate abandon him. All he can do is tread water. Moreover, his relevance is waning. Starmer cut his teeth as a fervent remainer, but there’s nothing he can bring to bear especially with Brexit having dropped off the agenda.
His one hope was that the Tories under Johnson would be as dreadful as many of us expected they would be. And they haven’t disappointed. This is very possibly the worst government in living memory with an unswerving ability to screw up everything it touches. That should at this point in the cycle have given Starmer a thumping lead over the Tories. At best it’s only really put Labour back in the game.
Until last week that is. Starmer may have limited himself to only a few gestures and the usual obligatory posturing over Black Lives Matter, but out in the country there is a wave of revulsion at what’s happening and this entire episode in a matter of days has turned compromising liberal conservatives into hardline nationalist conservatives. All the while centrist socialists are having to admit that the lunatics have indeed taken over the asylum.
At least under Corbyn the leadership was united with the far movement but Stamer is a man who has to lead the movement somewhere it most definitely doesn’t want to go so all he can really do is manage the public relations to try and lodge the notion that Labour isn’t as dreadful as it was.
Ultimately no leave voter is ever going to give Starmer the benefit of the doubt and for as long as he largely represents a progressive middle class that doesn’t particularly like Britain and especially doesn’t like the working class, it’s impossible to rebuild a national coalition.
There is still a space in the spectrum for a Labour party but it needs to be one whose concerns are primarily our concerns. The national conversation is still about immigration, housing, jobs, social mobility and to a point, Brexit. The Covid recession is about to sweep up all these issues into a snowballing crisis that ought to be easy pickings for an opposition party, but while Labour is playing toxic race baiting games and kneeling before the mob, it has nothing at all to say to anyone remotely normal.
As a conservative, I’m never likely to vote for the Labour party but I am certainly in the market for a tolerable alternative. Tony Blair managed to be that for a time. Labour doesn’t have to be liked, it just has to be tolerable and we have to trust that a Labour government isn’t a trojan horse for a far left revolutionary mob that detests the very notion of the nation state. Being that Starmer’s base considers patriotism to be uncouth and akin with racism, as does the man himself, he’ll never shake the perception that Labour, when it comes down to it, doesn’t really like us. And who’s going to vote for that?