A quasi-religious belief in government power

Eliot Wilson has a useful Critic piece on what he calls Keir Starmer's quasi-religious belief in government power. 


Labour is trapped in a statist doom-loop

Keir Starmer has a quasi-religious belief in government power

Sometimes politicians are required to say preposterous things. One of the most obviously outlandish arguments recently came when Sir Keir Starmer spoke from outside 10 Downing Street for the first time as Prime Minister. He lacks Sir Tony Blair’s eye for the dramatic flourish, the impromptu lyricism of 1 May 1997: “A new dawn has broken, has it not? Isn’t it wonderful?”

The words Starmer did find were dramatic in their implausibility. He promised “to deliver change, to restore service and respect to politics, end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives”. Anyone who has been awake for the last 20 months will know how little of that has come to pass — service and respect are on extended sick leave, while noisy performance would at least be better than muffled stasis — but it was the pledge to “tread more lightly on your lives” that caused eyebrows to raise and jaws to drop.

This has never been how “progressive” politics works. In 1889’s Fabian Essays in Socialism, Sidney Webb, co-founder of the London School of Economics, from whose pen had flowed the old, long-cherished Clause IV of the Labour Party Rule Book, had seen the future. He foresaw the “unconscious abandonment of the old Individualism, and our irresistible glide into collective Socialism”.


The whole piece is well worth reading as yet another reminder that the UK Labour Party reached the end of the Fabian line years ago. There is nowhere else to take Labour ideology beyond a totalitarian cul-de-sac, the route Starmer is currently following one step at a time. That too is the gradualist, Fabian way.

Change is coming, because our current model is so clearly unsustainable. I suspect there could be some first-mover advantage for a politician who was willing to set out some unvarnished and uncomfortable truths about Britain, but who also had plausible, considered, ambitious and optimistic plans about how we can not rewire but remake and reimagine the nation.

It becomes more and more obvious by the day that Sir Keir Starmer is not that kind of catalyst or visionary; but the Labour Party is not intellectually ready to produce and support such a figure. It is stuck in a statist doom loop, haunted by questions but unable to produce any answer except more government.