Keir Starmer’s not great, but have you seen the voters?

I love you, but you are not serious people

Seen in London, 17.12.2024

It has, to be clear, gone worse than I expected. And it never seemed to me likely that it would go well; Keir Starmer always reminded me of figures such as François Hollande or Olaf Scholz, rather inflexible middle-aged men who lack the subtlety or charisma to adapt to a hysterical age, analogue politicians washed up in the digital age. At best the UK could have had another Anthony Albanese, Australia’s centre-left Labor leader who at least secured re-election.

And I do think Starmer is a decent person; I don’t think that’s an act. I think he fundamentally misunderstands how to use that decency in politics, that the distorting lens of media is such that a decent person can only communicate their decency by playing a decent man. Obama is a good example of this, an upstanding family man who also gave a public performance of being an upstanding family man, who understood the need for himself to communicate a sort of shorthand caricature of himself to voters. Starmer doesn’t seem to understand that, if you don’t perform a convincing version of yourself, a chimera the electorate can grasp, people will just decide on a personality for you anyway, and that can be any old thing.

In Starmer’s refusal to, in the performative sense, act¹, all manner of weird shit grows, as the image of this Blairite middle-aged lawyer is exaggerated into a national security threat, a paedophile-loving, terrorist-freeing Islamist authoritarian whose eventual goal is to have British citizens only allowed to travel fifteen minutes from their home. For anyone who has followed him closely, the attempt to transform Starmer into a terrifying figure is the least successful bad guy since Star Trek: The Next Generation tried introducing the Ferengi as villains.

On both sides, this mass game of Chinese whispers is afoot; from the far right, that Starmer was the personal QC of the grooming gangs, from the far left, that he himself enables genocide or is in the direct pay of Israel. That Starmer’s own wife and family are Jewish can become a particularly grim point of ‘evidence’ there. Both these critiques of Starmer have detached themselves from the reality of the man, and are now drifting even further from reality based on their own internal logic.

The left critique of Starmer is easily followable; they resent the fact that Starmer, after tacking to the centre, won the election a far-left leadership of Labour were unable to; Starmer is a walking repudiation of the idea that if only the electorate were ever given a proper left-wing alternative, the voters would embrace it en masse. Perhaps Starmer’s very centrism allowed him to function more effectively as a repository of left hopes than would otherwise have been the case. Still, there is no doubt Starmer lied to the Labour left about the extent of his sympathy for the politics of the previous Labour leadership in order to secure it for himself.

Nonetheless, their chief critique of Starmer remains that he is not Jeremy Corbyn, and I am not sure what he is supposed to do about that, not least because being Jeremy Corbyn is mutually exclusive with electoral success; neither would adopting more left policies have any positive impact on the left’s support for Starmer, given what they really want to have been right about his shortcomings all along.

As for the right, Starmer is entitled to hold them in a certain amount of contempt too. Certainly for their having argued that a decision for Brexit would be worth a certain amount of economic damage, denying the economic damage, and then, once ejected from office, blaming the entirety of said economic damage on a single year of Labour government. Likewise, for a populist right lambasting of the consequences of a wave of mass migration which they themselves inaugurated, the ‘Boriswave’, and which they themselves once argued was ‘fairer’ then having preferential treatment for EU citizens.

Are the Tories ever going to have a serious reckoning with Truss, Boris and Brexit? The truth is there is a forcefield blocking the right from any reality-based analysis of British politics and that is admitting that Brexit, its pet project for decades, has turned out extremely badly, that the ‘sunlit uplands’ are dripping with slurry.

For my part, I can only say Brexit has gone exactly as I envisaged in political terms; the bad economy driving UK voters to extremist parties and then the extremist parties driving the bad economy, and the country become a petri dish for every disruptive idea going, from Scottish nationalism to Trussian libertarianism. You can tell the desperation of an electorate by its willingness to embrace that ‘one big change’, what the Germans call the Befreiungschlag, the liberating blow. Since Brexit, the UK has tried on a lot of different political hats, and it might at this stage be time to acknowledge the striking level of baldness beneath.

Personally, I think the UK will struggle to make progress until – and this is an entirely separate matter than reversing Brexit – public discourse can acknowledge that the project of withdrawal from the European Union has not gone well. Just to be able to start to say honestly where we are and where we might go from here, which also starts from admitting how poor the country has grown.

To be clear Starmer has made mistakes; Labour don’t get to govern very often, and it shows. For all the British media’s headwinds against even a mild social-democratic government, you don’t need to appoint the mate of a paedophile as your ambassador to the US; nor do you need to cack-handedly inflame your base with sub-Powellite language, nor do you need to bind your own hands on tax ahead of an election almost certainly winnable without it. And finally, whatever they are doing on the economy is not obviously working, even allowing the the shadow of Long Trussism.

In addition, Starmer hasn’t, unlike when say he threatened to resign if fined over Beergate - one for the deep divers there - shown much bravery. He could in my view have been bolder even if just in terms of the ambition of his rhetoric. Just his vibe, his tone has been too dour by far; if, as I have speculated, Brexit is in some way equivalent to the Commonwealth Period, when a Britain obsessed with Parliamentary sovereignty isolated itself from the rest of Europe, Starmer and Chancellor Reeves are two of our time's grimmer-faced Puritans.

Yet, as with pretty much any social democratic government, there have been good things; the Renters’ Rights Bill, the careful work to keep Trump onside with Ukraine, and above all a general commitment to build stuff – even if, stuck in their analogue political modes, the government has struggled to communicate them. Yet even when the government does well it doesn’t really make any difference to these voters. Look at what Starmer has done on Israel; expressed initial solidarity with the victims of October 7th, suspended a share of arms sales to Israel and finally recognised a Palestinian State; played it all, within the limited scope Britain has available to it, just about right. The response of his critics is to accuse him of personally killing children. What can he do with that?

Anti-immigration protests in Aberdeen, 06.09.2025. Photo by Lucas Kendall

Is there any real relation between what Starmer and what his critics say about him? Indeed, is there any relation now between anything any politician does and the reception of it in the culture at large? From where I sit, it seems that Starmer could introduce UBI and put a free all-day work hub up in every town centre and he’d still be the villain of the leftist creative class; likewise, even as he introduces further restrictions to the already tightest migration laws in Europe, making even settlement a matter of a ten year wait, the right decry his open door policy. Of course, Starmer isn’t helped by that when he does speak of immigration in more communitarian terms he sounds unconvincing and outside his own comfort zone; the cruelty of his policies is the point, but said cruelty is also, in this media environment, largely pointless.

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What lends me most sympathy for Starmer in face of his critics is that they’ve only given him a year.

Like a partner who had already decided to leave, the electorate are just waiting to be vindicated in their pre-existing decision to get rid. After fourteen years of Tory rule, in my view amongst the poorest and most damaging by any political party of a developed country, the electorate have refused to give Starmer and Labour any real chance.

This level of impatience bespeaks a childishness in the country at large. Particularly from the same electorate which ten years previously was blithely stating that a smaller economy was quite worth it in order for our country to set our own regulations on farm machinery. The media have some responsibility here too, returning the UK post election immediately to the rolling soap opera which has made the country so laughable in previous decades. Still, no-one is forcing the electorate to buy into the crap. People’s choices are limited in this age of encroaching techno-feudalism, but we do have the choice not to sink into a diet of intellectual junk. Good books and better thinkers are available.

Starmer has the air of a man who tells other people off for being childish. It is certainly annoying and po-faced for an adult to tell other adults they are being immature. And yet… the British electorate is being silly. It votes to leave its largest trading-bloc and demands to be richer; it votes for a Labour government after fourteen years of Tory psychodrama and expects it to immediately sort out the mess; it now contemplates making Nigel Farage, a man who made his career taking EU money to tell the EU the EU is shit, Prime Minister.

Starmer telling such voters to grow up would be entirely inappropriate, yet at some point to get to any kind of decent outcomes someone will need to. Particularly as its silliness is sliding, like any sustained period of irresponsibility, into outright wickedness; the idea of deporting people who have lived here for decades, for example, or depriving people who have legally settled and paid significant contributions in tax of access to the benefits system. To vote to be poorer in anger at foreigners and then to blame the same foreigners for the results - I can’t escape a certain revulsion at people lapping that up. Not that the left is much better, finding its energy in reallocating a fantastically high tax take from ‘billionaires’ and contorting itself in its efforts to avoid recognising any antisemitism at all.

Brecht had a poem that, in the event of the uprising in East Berlin of June 17 1953, perhaps it would be better to for the government to dissolve the electorate and elect another. It’s a satirical line, usually quoted in face of government overreach and ‘voter-shaming’. And yet increasingly looking at the UK electorate I just think, ‘Why not?’ Of course, there are millions of squeezed people in Britain looking for a politics that makes life a little easier. Of course, there is still a societal middle which would be amenable and sensible enough to vote in favour of a government which tried to improve their lives. That’s what they did last year, right?

Yet there’s also increasingly an ‘insane middle’ too. Ordinary people who exist on a diet of weird internet junk and are currently attempting to bring it into reality. They’re making up stuff, spreading conspiracies about vaxxing and believing any old rubbish about Israel and Palestine, and existing in their own little epistemological bubbles which they demand others pay fealty to and then claim that the refusal to do so is disrespect. It is not disrespect to tell someone that something untrue they believe is untrue.

Starmer would never do it, in part because of that somewhat rigid conception of decency, or perhaps a genuine belief in the goodness of the country he is attempting to serve, but still, someone needs to tell these people: Your concerns are not legitimate. A lot of you are just going mad.

A one-off tip here is always welcome

1. Of course, Starmer may simply not be a good actor, tho this would be unusual in a lawyer. Even then, there is nothing to stop him taking acting lessons.