Starmer's Feckless Leadership

On A Leadership In Trouble

I've always loved Marcus Rashford.

One of my seminal and lasting moments of my love for European football was an early morning Liverpool-United match at Old Trafford in 2018, where Rashford scored twice in rapid succession on route to a 2-1 victory over the hated Liverpudlians. Rashford was a beast in that game, and ever since, as my love for United has increased and my mood towards the many players who have cycled through has oscillated wildly, my love for Rashford has always been constant, and unabating. So, I just want that on the record when I say what I'm about to say.

The fact that Keir Starmer was less effective at opposing the Tories in 2020 than Marcus Rashford is a fucking disgrace.

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"Keir Starmer - oh, sorry, Sir Keir Starmer KCB QC, because the Labour Party literally nominated a fucking knight to fix their working class problems," was how I once referred to Keir, and I was pilloried as an out of touch asshole who knows nothing about the UK, but after a run of polls where Starmer is in decline - and, back down to Corbyn-era levels with Leavers in many polls - the question of whether or not a barrister with no firm ideology or any amount of publicly known convictions about anything are starting to come back up. And, frankly, the only person to blame for this is Starmer.

Starmer is indecisive, troubling so at times, and unwilling or unable to actually just make the case for a cohesive set of beliefs. He attacks the government, but he never makes a compelling case against the government on the whole, just a case against each decision. He wins a U-Turn every 5th time he complains about something, which seems impressive until you remember Boris Johnson would burn his beloved Eton to the ground to win an election. Being in opposition to an ideological nothing is easy - it allows you to mold the agenda, and roll the tanks onto Tory territory.

Labour has to wind back the clock with Northern Leave voters while continuing to make the gains that saw Putney go from a seat only won in Blair landslides to a seat winnable in landslide defeats. To do that, Starmer voted for a Brexit deal, which was the correct call. But, if you want to make a meaningful dent into the Red Wall seats you lost and get them back, you're going to need more than just warm nothingness to get culturally conservative voters to vote Labour. Why hasn't Starmer appointed a group of Labour grandees to look at what opportunities for state investment in the North might be available, free of the auspices of the European Union? Why hasn't Starmer announced any form of substantial Northern policy? Why, fundamentally, is Starmer as reactive as my old dog when I decided I wanted to fuck around with a laser pointer?

The thing I consistently wrote throughout the 2019 election in the UK is that Boris Johnson being an unserious charlatan was not enough. That argument was real, and true - he is an elitist wanker who sucks. It's also not relevant. He won an election, he will probably win the next, and a large part of why he won the last one is that people thought Boris' patent unseriousness was enough to stop people from voting for him, no matter who else they put up. Unfortunately, Jeremy Corbyn was magnitudes worse, a dangerous anti-Semite who never should have been anywhere near the corridors of power.

In Starmer, Labour has ditched the personal odiousness of the Corbyn era but decided to go back to an era of Labour politics best described as "derisory triangulation," a politics of looking like you're trying to do the right thing. Miliband and Brown were horrific leaders because they were aimless, more focused on what they weren't going to do than actually articulating a vision for the future. Starmer is much the same - he complains the government failed on COVID, which they did, but nobody is actively blaming them for right now. The lesson of global politics is that citizens are not blaming their governments for excessive COVID death tolls, and the lesson of the Biden-Trump campaign is that small targets and caution can work - when the other guy won by a statistical fluke. When his majority is 80, and if you exclude Scotland, 127, you need to be bold.

Starmer has time to get his shit together and to bring Labour back, but it won't be with questions of managerial competence, but with an alternative offer that compels. "We will manage British decline outside of Europe better than the Tories" doesn't get me racing to the polls to support Labour, but the barrister-turned-politician doesn't seem to want to do boldness or vision. The only person who has managed to actually get the country to see an issue differently is Manchester United's #10, and while I will always love Marcus, it's an abomination that he had to lead the charge.

Starmer has the room to lay out a cogent, coherent, economically literate platform that can start the process of broad Labour rebirth in the North and speed up the realignment in the South. The problem is, he's timid. He's scared of being too bold and going too far, and in doing so, he's letting a bad government skate by. Britain needs an opposition willing to fight about the future of a country building back from the duel traumas of COVID and Brexit, and instead they have a man with a sense of restraint that would better serve him as one of Sir Humphrey's colleagues in Yes Minister. He is feckless, and that fecklessness will lead to electoral failure if he does not find a vision and start selling it to the British people quickly.