Starmer's legacy is already in tatters

Yahoo

6 days ago

There are two mysteries at the centre of Keir Starmer's premiership. Does he actually want to be Prime Minister? And, if so, why?
These questions are prompted by reports that the Government could reverse course on key election pledges as the Spending Review is set to squeeze departmental budgets. These include recruiting 13,000 additional police, funding 1.5 million social houses, and spending £6.6 billion to insulate five million homes, seen as pivotal to achieving net zero by 2050.
Each of these policies was calibrated to appeal to an identifiable demographic in the Labour coalition. Home insulation was targeted at urban professionals concerned about climate change, housebuilding at young graduates unable to get a foot on the property ladder, and extra bobbies on the beat at floating voters who needed to trust that Labour would crack down on knife crime and street robbery.
To abandon one of these programmes would be politically damaging. To abandon all three would involve alienating multiple segments of the electorate all at once, for no obvious strategic gain. The backlash, and what a backlash there would be, could prove mortally wounding to the Prime Minister's prospects in Downing Street.
Starmer has U-turned on his belief that the category of 'women' can include trans-identifying males. He has pivoted from champion of mass immigration to someone who intones darkly about Britain becoming an 'island of strangers'. He has partially U-turned on the withdrawal of the winter fuel allowance from all but the poorest pensioners and there is talk of a volte-face on the two-child benefit cap.
The Prime Minister looks like a man speedrunning the final, fag-end months of a long-serving, intellectually exhausted government. Yet this ministry isn't even a year old. It need not put its case to the country for another four years. The chief priority for a new government is to repay the confidence the voters placed in them. Labour has spent the past 11 months reminding the voters why they kept the party on the opposition benches for 14 years.
There is no avoiding the cause of this political dysfunction: Starmer is a dud. The government's landslide majority is built on a shallow mandate of 34 per cent of the vote, but nothing is as politically shallow as the Prime Minister himself. There is almost no substance there, hardly a spasm of policy, and not even a skerrick of principle. It is difficult to discern why he wanted to be Prime Minister in the first place, other than not wanting someone else to hold the office.
An enduring but dubious criticism of Tony Blair is that he was nothing more than a spin junkie eager for his latest focus group fix. He undoubtedly paid more attention to public opinion than his predecessors and his Number 10 was stuffed with pollsters and public relations men, but Blair held very definite views about the Labour Party, the role of the state, and the UK's place in the world. You might have disagreed with those views, but they were clear and constant. He stuck to them even as the polls told him to retreat.
We can speak of Blairism but we cannot speak of Starmerism because there is nothing there, only vibes and the vagaries of political fashion. He is the archetypal soft-Left Labour politician: good intentions, vague sentiments, hollow ideas, and no imagination or gumption to make anything concrete of any of them. He has all the power he needs to do whatever he wants, but he doesn't know what he wants beyond office itself. Britain is a country without direction led by man without purpose. Nothing will get better until that changes.
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