Keir Starmer: Neither Sensible Nor Centred

The past couple of weeks in Britain have certainly been interesting. Yet none of the fundamentals of the situation before us have in any meaningful way changed: moral unity and regime legitimacy are at an all-time low and when all the dust settles, they will still need white boys to die in their wars. The principles of power, legitimacy and good government remain constant even if particular leaders or governments are not up to the task. In this article, I’ll outline what some of those challenges are and how the British ruling class is currently failing them. Despite appearances (violence on the streets, police crackdowns, exciting visuals), most of the response has been to rely on the usual foxy tricks of persuasion management and not the pivot to the hardhanded lionish crackdowns that dominate the fevered imaginations of American conservatives and their British readers. This is not Stalin, it’s something much more embarrassing. The much-publicised (though actually quite small) riots were the first test of the new Labour government led by Keir Starmer who had run on the promise of boring managerialism and a return to Blairite ‘adult back in the room’ politics. This is what they had explicitly campaigned on just three weeks prior, and what was promised to the British people by media outlets, radio call-in shows, and female journalists writing cringey stories about how they think Starmer is sexy. It is what I expected to happen also because it was widely publicized that Starmer was being directly helped by Tony Blair himself. This was to be the course correction the country needed after 14-years of the worst Tory government anyone has ever witnessed. Starmer was to get a handle on immigration, legal or illegal, fix the potholes, and put everyone back to sleep. It has taken the new government less than a month utterly to destroy these expectations, which not just me, but the nation as a whole had of him. I had previously voiced concerns that the Svengali, Sue Gray, a kind of nightmare civil servant Nurse Rached character, was sabotaging the Blair project, today the Mail on Sunday dished the dirt that Gray is blocking people from security briefings in Downing Steet and even withholding information from the Prime Minister. This leak looks to have come from Morgan McSweeney, who is yet another Svengali figure, and one not aligned to Blair, complaining that Gray keeps having his desk strategically moved further and further away from Starmer. It’s possible that Gray will be scapegoated for all this, allowing Starmer a possible off-ramp. But I’m not sure that will matter even if she is removed, since it is Starmer’s face everyone has seen, not hers. In any case, other people, notably Peter Hitchens and Alexander Mercouris of The Duran, correctly predicted that Starmer would be authoritarian in power, that he was always an authoritarian and that he’s much more radical than he lets on. We have all now seen this with our own eyes, it has been like watching a psychopath.

To me, Starmer seems like a modern-day Malvolio (the steward from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night), the jobsworth middle-manager, the pure joyless bureaucrat, elevated to the highest office. Shakespeare even gives us such a scenario in another play, Measure for Measure, in which Angelo, empowered by a wily Machiavellian Duke conducting a perverse political experiment, essentially declares war on the population of Vienna by promising to lock up and even execute anyone caught having sex before marriage or using prostitutes. Other, wiser, characters in the play protest to Angelo pointing out that if he were to do that, practically every man in Vienna would be arrested, that he needs to show more lenience and that the law is basically unenforceable. Power wielded in so brittle a fashion is frequently mocked, not only by Shakespeare in 1603, but also by comedians today. Even if Starmer did not mean directly to threaten 100,000s of people, home and (farcically) abroad, for posting tweets, but rather meant it in the much narrower sense of actively promoting violence, as some of his supporters claim, this is irrelevant because it is the first message that everyone has got. There are real limits to power, and Labour is brushing up against them at present. Something like the attempted counselling of Angelo from Measure for Measure is currently playing out in Britain, with prominent people such as Jeremy Clarkson, arguably the most powerful celebrity in Britain, Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister, (and even the BBC?) imploring Starmer not to go any further down the path he is on. Tony Blair himself has said often that the first principle of politics is to say ‘no’ to your radicals. After two years of purging them from the Labour ranks, now Starmer has empowered them like never before. Owen Jones has spent the week running victory laps. And yet, things still are not everything they seem.

The first thing to say is that almost the entirety of what has happened has played out in media narratives, in Adam Curtis’s hyperreality. Yes, three girls were murdered, and, yes, some locals who rioted in response, have been jailed. But these are the only objective facts of the situation. There is good evidence to suggest that the men now in jail were not part of any organised group, were local and not outside agitators, and at least two of them have explicitly denied even being right-wing. Virtually no evidence has been presented to show that any of those arrested thus far we indeed ‘far right’. The entire narrative of them being ‘far right’ came from the government. Their crisis response was to frame the rioters as ‘far right’ and then to turn the situation into a wider war on their political opponents such as Nigel Farage and even Elon Musk. It is important to grasp this because many people on the online right, perhaps through their own wishful thinking, believed the government’s narrative because it fit their own prejudices, because ‘people are waking up’ is a good political slogan, and, in some way, because it vindicates their own activism. It may be emotionally satisfying, but to use an Adam Curtis-ism, this is a fantasy. The first two men convicted by the riot ‘turbo courts’ were not agents of Tommy Robinson, but a gay couple heading home from the bingo. As one might expect, these two pleaded in court that they actually hate right-wing ideology. Real details like this do not just puncture the government narrative, they punctures the terminally online narrative that inchoate local anger, as well as random people simply caught up in the fracas, represent part of some larger movement. It is important to recognise that this is virtual, just a narrative, and not something that exists in reality. What does exist is people who were silly enough to cheer this on online, despite everyone warning them not to, now ending up with criminal records.

The second thing to say is that everything that happened in the second week was pure Baudrillard. The weekend of the 3^rd and 4^th August saw some wider protests, which were again ginned up online by both the government, the organised left, and a very small number of online personalities – most told their followers not to get involved. Then, on Tuesday 6^th August, Starmer chaired a second Cobra meeting and came out looking oddly shellshocked.  After this meeting, it seems that the government or their organised leftist proxies created a raft of ‘over 100’ phantom protests, now admitted by Nick ‘Misinformation’ Lowles to be ‘a hoax’, in order to run the narrative that anti-racist and anti-fascist counter-protestors outnumbered ‘the far right’ and took back the streets, uniting the nation once against the ghost of Hitler. Again, these scenes are framed in a distortive way and amplified online. Fewer than 5,000 counter-protesters took to the streets to confront ‘far right’ protestors who numbered in the double digits. Some reports indicate the total number of rioters following the murders in the first place was less than 1,000. One would think 100,000s of people were involved, but this, again, is a fantasy, all spectacle, no substance. This all played out on Wednesday 7^th August, and the following morning every single newspaper dutifully ran it on their front pages, not just the leftwing Guardian but evil right-wing papers like The Telegraph, The Sun and The Daily Mail too. For a moment, just for a day, the entire machinery of the British state, the pretence of their being ‘sides’, different papers for different politics, the political kayfabe as we like to say, was suspended to run a narrative that would have made the editors of Pravda blush. It was difficult not to think of the moment in The Wizard of Oz in which the eponymous wizard is revealed to be a little man winding up a machine behind a curtain and not a big scary disembodied face. I noticed, you noticed, it is difficult to say how many of the baying online mob of American conservatives noticed, not to mention the perennially bovine masses tucking into their takeaways and watching the Olympics.

All of which is to say, as much as this was smoke and mirrors, it largely worked considered from the point of view of the permanent security state. Let me list the ways:

1.        It made ‘the far right’ the focus rather than fears about immigration and violent crime.

2.        Animated people they already call ‘far right’, such as Lawrence Fox, against them further, giving them further headlines in which they can tie the riots to figures like Fox.

3.        It gave the radical left, ‘the Muslim community’, Antifa, and so on a ‘win’, that allowed them crow and claim the majority is with them, that the country is with them, and that multiculturalism is working out just fine after all.

All of this might have infuriated you, but the net result was actually to bring law and order back to the streets, at least for now. From the point-of-view of pure policing, it worked. A useful idiot like Ash Sarkar went from videos worrying about her safety as a ‘person of colour’ to running victory laps with Owen Jones. The trouble with all this, of course, is that scarcely anyone – not the government, not the media who were forced to print it by MI5, not Ash Sarkar – believes it. Orwell citations are overdone, but it is a little like Winston Smith printing stories about razor blade production being better than ever before when he knows he must shave with an old and rusty one himself. Therefore, we can say, it ‘worked’, but at what cost? Thankfully, for the security state, they can always count on short attention spans and memories, but I get the impression that many in the nation know they are being lied to. The only real positive to come out of any of this is that elites are now warring: ‘right-wing’ regime-stooge Andrew Neil was drawn into a flame war with ‘left-wing’ regime stooge Alistair Campbell after he called for the arrest of ‘right-wing’ regime-stooge Douglas Murray. If you go back to James Burnham’s essay, ‘Managing the Managers’, this can still be a good environment for us sensible centrists. Rival factions being at war can present opportunities, especially if you do not take a side.

               Thus, we come to the real challenges ahead of the British ruling class today: how do they stay in power and maintain legitimacy while also managing the real, obvious and now all-too-explicit problems that a multicultural society brings? These sorts of dog-and-pony show theatrics might get them through one crisis, but unlike ‘Look Back in Anger’, they can’t run this script again and again. This has eaten up all Starmer’s ‘honeymoon’ political capital, if he ever had any. It has hurt the credibility of containment outlets such as the Daily Mail, The Sun and The Telegraph with their own readers. It has severely damaged the image and credibility of the police, epitomised in the brittle figure of Sir Mark Rowley petulantly smacking a microphone from the hands of a journalist. And, most of all, it has obliterated the idea that Starmer’s government could be New Labour 2.0 bringing ‘common sense’ back to British governance under the wise and guiding hand of Tony Blair. From the point of view of Zero Seats, which was about irreparably damaging the legitimacy of the regime and the two-party system, things are going swimmingly. Re-read the article and see especially what I said about the prospect of Labour being like rabbits in the headlights. I had thought that Labour would be clever enough to be asked the question, ‘can you be sensible, can you be centred?’, and not fumble the ball. They have fumbled and have answered that question in record time. Labour will surely face their own Zero Seats situation in the future. Other things will play out also: the feud between Sue Grey and Morgan McSweeney is now mainstream news. The Dark Lord, Blair, has been deathly silent. He trusted Starmer, he helped Labour win the election, he entrusted Starmer with The Magical Blair Machine only to watch him blow years of hard work purging the Corbynistas in the space of two weeks. It is, for him, a total disaster. The new Labour government has embarrassed him in front of all his Davos and world-leader friends. His own image and reputation will be at stake, and one would think he might make a move against the traitors in the Starmer government when the time is right. Then again, he might just try to sell them AI technology and Digital ID again framing it as ‘now urgent’. I would not bet against him doing both.

But largely all these details will be irrelevant to any but a tiny percentage of people such as Westminster insiders and Unherd (who is it for?) writers who read and subtly counter-signal my articles. What the public will want to see is that the claims of Elon Musk and others that the country has a ‘two-tier’ justice system will be disproven. This gives the foxes an ‘out’, which is that next time the pro-Palestine marches take place and there is any disruption whatsoever, or, let us say, next time there is some sort of Islamist incident, they can be seen to come down as hard on them as they have on the rioters this week. When you’re the government, you have many ‘outs’ because, in a sense, you have a monopoly on response and are the only actual actor in the room. When ‘the people’ act, or even when this or that minority community act, it is not really political action, it is only ever an ‘event’, a bit like a bridge collapsing or a river flooding: the agency remains and only ever remains in the hands of those with power.  Starmer could do what I’ve outlined above turn what has been a catastrophic start to his time in charge into a win. That is, indeed, what he ought to do. Will he? Maybe, somewhere over the rainbow, but then again pigs may fly one day too, and I do not mean the police. Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure ends with Angelo being removed from authority and the Duke returning, ‘the adults back in the room’ so to speak. In 2024, adults, it seems, are in short supply.