Sunday, 5 January 2025
A sort of loathing
Some political commentators have said this already – Keir Starmer seems to loathe ordinary working people and everything not conceived in the sterile offices of officialdom. We could say much the same about many of his political colleagues, the UK Establishment and sections of the media.
We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something else? We don’t know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if our petulant prayers were answered.
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Notes from Underground (1864)
A related explanation for Starmer’s obtusely aloof political behaviour is a middle class loathing for the gritty compromises and trade-offs of real life, engendering a kind of contempt for those who must stoop to making those gritty compromises work.
I myself had already spoken to you of that middle class which hungers so ravenously for place and office, distinctions and plumes, and which at the same time is so avaricious, so suspicious with regard to its money which it invests in banks, never risking it in agriculture or manufactures or commerce, having indeed the one desire to enjoy life without doing anything, and so unintelligent that it cannot see it is killing its country by its loathing for labour, its contempt for the poor, its one ambition to live in a petty way with the barren glory of belonging to some official administration.
Emile Zola – Rome (1896)
It is far from being a new issue, this contempt shown by officials towards everyone else, this preference for blanket coercion over pragmatic administrative services. Taking political account of covert animosity of rulers towards those they rule is not easy, because it is shared and ignored by mainstream media. Yet our senior politicians clearly see themselves as a kind of superior gilded official, not an experienced person providing political oversight from the real world.
Starmer is unusually poor at hiding it.
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7 comments:
I sometimes get a sort of pale gleam of insight when I see all politics as an extension of mediaeval or even earlier control. When masters and overseers bludgeoned the recalcitrant peasantry into being orderly and productive enough to support the extraction of taxes. As society progressed, there were less labour-intensive methods tried out (make them frightened of an afterlife...convince them we're all on the same side...promise them things can only get better...frighten them with an external enemy...) but deep down, that's all it is. The political culture has been passed on for generations, and anyone from the brutal to the glib can step up to the plate, depending on current circumstances.
Maybe TTK has contempt for an electorate stupid enough to choose him? (With acknowledgement to Groucho Marx).
Sam - I think your pale gleam of insight is right, the history of government has coercion and overseers at its core and this doesn't change, merely the mechanics of coercion. Maybe it seems like a pale gleam because of the great mass of historical detail, the ideologies and changing social and economic circumstances, but it is probably more than a gleam.
I have a related blog post in mind, but the complexity isn't easily distilled into a post.
decnine - it isn't easy to imagine what he thinks of an electorate stupid enough to choose him, but he obviously has no intention of doing anything for them in return. Unless he is dim enough to think his wooden rhetoric is some kind of return, but that seems unlikely.
@decnine
2TK has worked hard (yes, really) to escape being the son of a working man, even if that working man was a business owner.
Now he has escaped he cannot imagine why everybody else should not escape. And so Labour is no longer 'for' the working man, but for the bureaucracy.
Of course on the subject of Kier Starmer's intelligence, it can often be very hard to gauge an individual's intellect. A mere impression, that Starmer is an intelligent man is insufficient as it is with others. Were Hitler or Churchill intelligent? Perhaps, but in limited and different ways, as with many others.
Tammly - it is difficult, although easy enough to see that his intelligence is narrow, not adaptable and hemmed in by ideology.
Yes indeed. I have met any number of people with narrow intelligence hemmed in by ideology. Indeed socially, it's been the bane of my life, I must attest.
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