John Jefferson
It is easy to feel schadenfreude in the wake of the Conservative defeat in the British general elections. That it is easy, to be clear, does not mean that it is wrong. The Conservatives deserved to lose—and a lot of the Conservative MPs deserved to lose their seats. As I wrote in these pages, they accomplished little while doing a lot of harm.
That Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has not actually improved Labour’s vote share since 2019—when the party suffered a historic defeat under Jeremy Corbyn—demonstrates that its success had more to do with Conservative weakness than with its strength. There has been no rush of enthusiasm for Keir Starmer. There has just been the vague, and eminently understandable, sense that anyone is preferable to the idiots in power.
Still, a win is a win. What will the Labour Party be like in government?
Contra Jordan Peterson, I do not think that Keir Starmer is going to turn Britain into the next Venezuela. Starmer is not the second coming of Hugo Chávez; if nothing else, he does not have the same charisma. (Could you imagine hordes of British people returning him to power if he were removed? The question answers itself.)
But “not being an actual communist” is not a high bar to clear. The government of Tony Blair seems likely to be uninspiring at best and destructive at worst.
Britain faces tremendous structural problems when it comes to bureaucracy, infrastructure, and demographics. Starmer’s government—like, in fairness, the Conservative government—is pathetically ill-suited to solving them.
Part of this is not entirely their fault. Labour’s majority, as Sebastian Milbank writes, is like a butter mountain—hard but not firm. Will it take decisions that could incur short-term local unpopularity, like backing development in the face of protests or allowing unsuccessful universities to fail? It seems implausible.
Some of it very much is their fault. Labour’s manifesto is full of policies which combine progressive dogma with technocratic naivete. Their uncritical support for a “green transition,” for example, radically understates its expense and difficulty. Their idea for a “Race Equality Act,” as Fred de Fossard writes, “is expected to mandate diversity-related hiring, reporting, and pay requirements, [which] will end meritocracy in the workplace, and will create a divisive, legalistic working environment.”
Starmer’s government seems liable to seek not radical politics but radical depoliticisation—the outsourcing of decisions to unaccountable authorities. His closeness to Sue Grey, the civil servant who led the report into “Partygate,” the scandal that brought down the government of Boris Johnson, seems illustrative here.
So, economic policy will depend more on the Office for Budget Responsibility. Immigration policy will depend more on the Migration Advisory Committee. Ofcom—the Office of Communications—will be strengthened to take on dissenting media platforms. Unrepresentative “citizens’ assemblies” will provide a sheen of direct democracy.
As J. Sorel of the Daily Sceptic has written, Starmerism
is the declaration that the society created by Tony Blair, challenged after 2016, must stand forever. It is the project of a radicalised British establishment that has, in the face of these challenges, despaired of electoral politics altogether and wants to replace it with an explicit codification of the status quo.
For Starmerites, the triumph of the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum was a day of infamy to rival the Night of the Long Knives. Nothing similar must be allowed to happen again.
On foreign policy, it would be hard to push a rolling paper between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer when it comes to Ukraine. Their support, as Starmer has already said, is “unwavering.” Labour will seek to build stronger connections with the EU—even if, ironically, major EU states like France and Germany are drifting to the nationalist right. Starmer and his team must be saying silent prayers that Joe Biden will somehow be reelected. God only knows what Donald Trump would say about the Prime Minister. “Keir Starmer? He used to be a lawyer. I don’t trust lawyers. But he seems like a great guy and he likes me very much—”
David Lammy, the new British Foreign Secretary, has attempted to summarize his ideas beneath the term “progressive realism.” His recent essay for Foreign Affairs was a hodgepodge of clichés. On the one hand, it emphasized the need for “a long term, generational response” to Putin’s Russia, and declared that “the United Kingdom must continue supporting Ukraine,” while on the other it contained a lot more about renewable energy than the restoration of the British Armed Forces. We must do nice things, Lammy appears saying, without doing difficult things.
“Once Ukraine has prevailed,” Lammy declared, “The United Kingdom should play a leading role in securing Ukraine’s place in NATO.” Needless to say, no detail was offered on how—and, indeed, whether—Ukraine can prevail.
The right-wing opposition, which already contains Tory wets, the Tory right, and the insurgent nationalist upstarts of Reform, has a lot of internal feuding ahead. There is no point in lamenting this. Such disparate elements cannot be harmonized. In this author’s opinion, the Conservatives, who enjoyed a handsome triumph in 2019 on a lusty populist platform and then hurtled towards a miserable loss in 2024 after years of unprecedented immigration and infrastructural sclerosis, will not be cured by a dose of liberal managerialism. But we have a lot of time to make those arguments over the coming months.
A key point is that any opposition worth its name must also focus on Labour. The electorate will not be impressed by in-fighting, necessary as it is, which will alienate the right from our key concern—events. As Keir Starmer and his colleagues attempt to bake stale Blairism deep into British life, its dishonest nature and unproductive results must be emphasized. By 2029, it may be hard to undo a lot of damage. By 2034, it may be impossible.
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