Have no sympathy for the 'grown-ups', they brought this on themselves
The pattern for life under Labour has been set. Ministers, hopelessly out of their depth, try to save money, fail, reverse, end up spending more, and yet the Left calls them closet-Tories and swans off to Jeremy Corbyn. The excess of lefty MPs in the Commons hasn’t brought order to Labour but, like an experiment involving overbred mice in a cage, they’ve started to eat each other.
No 10 will try to make a virtue of this. They will say: “Keir Starmer is where the public is. He is trying to fix the mess left by the Tories in a fair way – balance the books, control the borders – and opposition from both Corbyn and Reform proves he is the non-ideological man we need.”
He’s the human version of the BBC. Everyone hates it, so it must be good.
Except no one watches the BBC anymore, just as dwindling numbers vote Labour, and the vision of Starmer as a man patrolling the middle-ground doesn’t ring true. It’s more accurate of Rachel Reeves. For all her sins, she’s been saying the same things for over a decade (loudly, through a fixed smile). As shadow work and pensions minister, she promised to be tougher on benefits than George Osborne. She did not serve under Corbyn. She called for immigration to be curbed after Brexit.
By contrast, Starmer’s career is built on a series of U-turns he believes it is our patriotic duty to forget. Forget that he was a militant Remainer, that he knelt for Black Lives Matter or that he won the Labour leadership calling Corbyn’s manifesto “our foundational document” stuffed with “radicalism and hope”. Starmer, who said “the free market has failed”, stood for a “moral socialism” that “opposes austerity”.
The base he was appealing to had spent the 2010s alleging that welfare reform amounted to murder; John McDonnell quoted someone saying they wished to “lynch” Esther McVey. Starmer’s Labour might have later turned on the Corbynites, but it drew from the same pool of assumptions and resentments. Torsten Bell called the two-child benefit cap immoral. David Lammy said his constituents were “ruined by austerity, left hungry by Universal Credit”. Angela Rayner apologised for calling Conservatives “homophobic, racist, misogynistic… scum.”
Starmer ran ads that suggested Rishi Sunak was soft on paedophiles and his wife was a tax dodger. He called Boris “pathetic”, a man who “had no principles, no integrity” (I “loathed” him, he later said). Having abandoned a coherent critique of Tory economics – which, to be fair, had no coherence anyway – Starmer reframed politics from Left v Right to Good v Evil, and this is what a new generation of MPs presumably believed when they won in 2024. Everything the Tories had done was wicked and unnecessary, a choice born of greed.
So, what happened when Reeves took over the Treasury, found Rishi had in fact spent too much money, and announced that “Dickensian choices” had morphed into Labour necessities? Hurt and panic. Akin to a Puritan discovering their mother is a lush and daddy frequents a drag bar. And so the children rebelled – and we should have no sympathy for the adults who once claimed to be back in charge.
Why? Because their moral tone before entering office implied that any effort to limit the state was class violence. Another example from Torsten Bell (there are many): in 2021 he wrote that revising the Covid-era uplift to Universal Credit, worth £20 a week, might damage not only “family finances” but people’s “mental health”.Tory policy could drive you mad.
Of course, the Left has well established in the popular mind that mental health is as serious as physical, so must get PIPs; that Britain is a nation of immigrants and human rights, so we can’t deport lawbreakers; and the Earth is on fire, so we can’t use new sources of fossil fuel. Many of the problems Labour inherited are the by-products of assumptions Labour has helped embed within British institutions (including within the Tory Party, which is why it did little to reverse the trend).
Why was Starmer shouted at when he laid a wreath for the victims of the Southport killer last year? Why has Reeves been derided for crying in the Commons? Because most voters do not see Labour as a change agent with Fairy-soft clean hands, but rather as the latest iteration of a grubby establishment that has run this country for decades, and which shares as much blame as the Conservatives for where we are. Arguably, more.
New Labour bound Westminster with legal restraints, such as the Human Rights Act or the Climate Change Act, while empowering quangos that operate as watchdogs against elected officials. Whoever you vote for, policy options are narrowed so far that we can really only travel in one direction. Thus the economy is in constant crisis because spending is axiomatic, frugality penalised and alternatives for growth shut off (ask Liz Truss).
Reeves, in her first year, found herself testing what this political system would tolerate with her modest mix of tax hikes and savings. Last week’s welfare rebellion rules out further cuts, while her fiscal rules render it harder to borrow, leaving only taxes on the table, which will kill the growth that grows the pie that makes progressive government feasible.
Changing course will be difficult. Starmer and Corbyn have profound differences, but they share the psychological defect of seeing themselves as Very Good People – a condition that makes it easy to give criticism but hard to take it. Good People cannot accept they are wrong because their rightness, or righteousness, is the rock upon which they construct a life.
Sitting in Westminster, it’s fun to hear Labour MPs bitch about each other. The Starmerites truly loathe the Corbynites; they are “professional activists” who harm the people they’re meant to help. The Corbynites say the Starmerites will never fix a capitalist system they don’t understand, and thus haven’t learnt to hate. Out of power, this conflict was barely worth a column in the Morning Star, but as we enter Year Two of the revolution, journalists must study every nuance, unpack every conference motion, to see where this civil war is taking us.
If you want a vision of the future, Winston, it is pro-Gaza activists glueing themselves to a truck at London’s Pride parade on Saturday. Black flags v rainbow flags. A family row with consequence, because the entire country is stuck in the traffic behind, pumping the horn but going nowhere.
0 Comments