Lessons For Next Time: How To Fight Starmeritis

On Two Centre-Left Hopes

Last week saw the yearly local elections in Britain, a time honoured tradition where sycophants try to draw national conclusions from county swings in Yellow Teeth-Bland Food-On The Thames or whatever fake local government areas they want to propagandize as real places. It’s an imperfect measure, but generally useful at identifying the lay of the land in broad strokes, and it’s certainly clear that the two major parties in Britain are utterly fucked.

The British Tory psychodrama is endlessly entertaining, but I must confess until someone actually ends Badenoch’s leadership it’s more pathetic than anything else. There’s only so many Tim Shipman longreads I can take before they have to actually get rid of her, after all. But the question of why Keir Starmer is so unpopular, and what lessons there are for Mark Carney, is quite captivating.

When I used to write about Britain more frequently, I was never particularly fond of Starmer, often decrying his useless lurches to the right on issue after issue. I think a lot of the Starmer problem is just fundamentally the fact that he has no core belief system. He truly has held every opinion on every issue, from supporting Corbyn to opposing him, from being pro-Remain to pro-Brexit, from being pro-significant nationalization to walking various commitments back, from ruling out significant tax rises to show his fiscal prudence after the Truss mini budget to raising them upon taking over, and a dozen other flip flops and broken promises.

Carney has avoided some of this potential by simply not being specific about too many things so far, which hasn’t wildly raised expectations. Said vagueness is irritating, for sure, but by not overpromising in the campaign and actually admitting to his (high) deficit projections in the first place, Carney has avoided the first step of getting Starmer’d.

Step two has to be actually delivering on outcomes in a way Starmer hasn’t yet. Starmer has some successes on policy grounds, namely on NHS waiting lists, but most of the benefits of Starmer’s decisions will come - if they ever do - in two or three years. Carney cannot expect voters to take it on faith that progress will come down the line at some point, he needs to deliver some tangible results quickly. The tax cut needs to come as soon possible, we need announcements on new housing projects as soon as possible, and if there is actually a pipeline project with a serious proposal and financial backing to be considered, we need shovels in the ground in 2026, not a study on the feasibility that may or may not extend until the 2030s. (Look, you’re just not going to get me to be excited about a pipeline, but I get that there’s a national consensus on the issue that I just have to swallow.)

But the biggest failure of Starmer is the failure to be authentic to who he was. Starmer was a North London lawyer who became Director of Public Prosecutions and a literal fucking Knight before he even entered Parliament. He was a leading advocate for Corbyn’s electorally disastrous flip back to Remain. He’s an Arsenal fan. These facts matter.

Every few months, or honestly every 6 weeks, we get some form of New Reset from Starmer, some pivot that never works for a specific reason - he’s about as sincere in cosplaying a working class hero as a Sens fan is at cosplaying a Leafs fan. Starmer does more damage in trying to outflank his populist opposition that all he does is burn himself with everyone. There’s a reason the Lib Dems are eating some of his vote, while also (obviously) bleeding votes to Reform.

The answer to not getting Starmer’d is simple - Carney needs to be willing to not chase every voter base in the country. He needs to focus on delivering his platform, and while he has obligations to national unity and managing the relationship with Alberta, he mustn’t attempt to outflank people and try and be everything to everybody. Nobody will believe it. He was elected as a Liberal on a Liberal platform. We need him to govern like a Liberal.

Carney has an opportunity to save this country, and as much as people bristle at the idea of it being “broken” or it needing “saving”, things have been bleak. That doesn’t mean we hate Canada, because acknowledging reality and working to fix it is a greater show of love than pretending everything is fine when it’s not. Carney cannot just claim everything is fine, nor continuously claim everything sucks while never having a useful idea how to fix it.

Starmer isn’t a test case for the failure of bad left wing government, it is a test case for cautious and indecisive government. We need big changes at this fundamental moment in history, and that is true in dismantling both progressive orthodoxies and conservative shibboleths. How many do you think would have guessed that I’d be a rabid crusader for deeper and harsher immigration cuts four years ago? Nobody, because I never could have guessed it. Facts and circumstances changed, or at the very least I realized my banal acceptance of a truism didn’t actually make it true. Then again, how many of us would have ever thought Pierre Poilievre would be running on continuing the child care, dental, and Pharma deals that had already been struck?

We need to embrace radicalism, not whatever bland version of warmed over third way crap that only worked because of the tech boom in the 90s and 00s. Carney needs to show, not tell, and he needs to make clear that he is not here to oversee the managed decline of Starmer so far.

I got Poilievre’s rise (albeit too late) as a response to Trudeau’s uselessness, I certainly understand why cultural conservatives feel out of place in the Democratic Party, and even in places like Germany I understand why the left coalition was one and done. Not only do I get why Starmer’s losing, I could never vote for him. Now, I’m unpersuaded that Farage would be any better, but I’m also unpersuaded that he’d be any worse, which is one hell of an indictment of a progressive leader.

We need Carney to be better than that. Fortunately, he should be able to.