Keir Starmer needs to realize that this isn’t a serious age
People are off on one
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of sharing a train ride with a middle-aged woman who took the journey to outline to me her theories of the New World Order.
Being a polite man, I listened without much comment and with the odd leading question, but it was sufficiently heady stuff – talking about the cabal secretly running the world for their own self-interest, who met in secret and had engineered lockdown– that it brought a loud tut of ‘New World Order? Absolute rubbish’ from a fellow passenger.
I remain myself far from inclined to see conspiracy theories as interesting or endearing even, as I hail from a family of the European Jewry which was itself destroyed by a conspiracy theory. What else is antisemitism but a conspiracy of Jewish power?
Beyond a certain point, conspiracy theories are just the junk mail of thought and have as much intellectual value. I always think being overly interested in conspiracy theories from an ‘anthropological’ standpoint is often down to wanting to assert one's own intellectual superiority in seeing the world more sensibly.
Anyway, in the same year as that train ride I went to see Sadiq Khan speak and outside the venue was an unruly crowd of protesters against ‘15-minute cities’. A handful of the same people disrupted Khan’s book launch inside. They were eventually thrown out – which of course only confirms their own sense of persecution - but they left violence and tension hanging thickly in the air.
To be clear, this is a ‘protest’ movement which has got itself worked up about the idea of people having walkable access to amenities; a conspiracy theory which has spun paranoid fervour out of neighbourhood pedestrianization schemes. I put protest in scare quotes above as I do believe on some level protests have to be in response to things which are actually happening.
I’m sure many of you also have had the experience in the last few years of talking with someone, an old friend even or at least an established acquaintance, who suddenly reveals themselves to be an anti-vaxxer. Just like antisemitism takes one individual misconception and then, from that initial faulty premise, adds compound error after error, leaving an individual truly unmoored from reality, so an opposition to a novel vaccine can take one individual example of personal iconoclasm and lead the individual to a whole world of social isolation.
I was talking to a person in French recently, and as I did I realized that, across the barrier of my third and oftentimes shonky language, that my interlocutor was a complete loon. It was a realization compounded when, after I asked how many times they’d taken the vaccine, they silently moved their finger and thumb to form an ‘O’.
We all know people who haven’t really come back from the pandemic. Perhaps people who were accidents waiting to happen but, still, along came corona and the accidents came to pass. As I’ve written before, my own pandemic proved an unusually well-timed midlife pause, with the main impact being a considerable diminution of my movie watch list; it has since regained its dimensions.
Looking back, it seems clear the combination of locking everybody up and giving them access to the most reliable generator of half-truths and lies in human history may not have been a recipe for lasting cultural stability. It has left a legacy of the hyperbolic and the deranged in our political culture, with people continuing to move down the tracks of their own realities.
It is not fair to say tho that the extremes are dominating our politics, as extreme views remain by and large minority pursuits, in the same way that a nutter standing up on the Tube continues to render everyone uncomfortable. It’s just that the loudhailers afforded these voices, and the inherent marketability of political extremes, are pulling our sane political centre out of place and forcing our political culture to engage with the outrageous and depraved.
This is, to come via a circuitious route to my main point today, in part why I think Keir Starmer and his government have struggled so much in their first few months. I should say that I am unusually inclined to give that government the benefit of the doubt; I am a social democrat and so is Starmer, I am a moderate as is he, I have always thought and still do that he is a very decent bloke and family man. I wish him and Labour well.
But they are struggling badly and seem frit. In part, I think, because they’ve misdiagnosed the moment we find ourselves in.
Part of this is not a them problem, but about the immaturity of British political culture, or at least its addiction to a diet of cheap drama. A political press expecting Labour to fix the accumulated problems of fourteen years of Tory rule is clearly not to be taken entirely seriously, and let us be clear that 2010-2024 was a disaster for the UK, as poor a spell of governance as we’ve seen in the developed world, a once serious country going horribly to seed.
Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak. What kind of collective noun for Tory Prime Ministers could cover that? A gaggle? A shower? An infamy?
Even my own lifetime Blair was better, Major was better, goodness even Thatcher at least embodied some kind of moral rectitude. Yet that recent Tory sequence allowed every kind of right-wing politics to be tried on the UK and none of it worked. And don’t even get me started the kind of right-wing commentator who argued the economic price of Brexit would be worth it and then turns round and tries to pin all of its fall-out on a nascent Labour government. Who claim Brexit has no economic consequences, and also that those non-existent consequences are all Labour’s fault.
Yet Labour has misjudged things too. They seem to be expecting a round of applause for being Very Serious People who do Very Serious Things. They have serious haircuts and functional clothing. And they seem to want to be respected for a grim refusal to entertain hope when of course hope, in the personal or political, is always to coin a phrase audacious.
‘The adults are back in the room,’ Starmer seems to be saying, and no doubt his own approach to government is dogged and serious. But we are now living in a period where not only do people not want adults, a substantial number of people are ready to tell you that, if you look closely at the photos, there's not even a room. It's all done with green screens, you see.