Three months into this Government, and 69 per cent of people, three out of five, already recognise that it is sleazy. But it is also far worse than that. Keir Starmer does not have a coherent political philosophy, and no one develops one of those in his sixties.
Insofar as Starmer has ever understood it, Pabloism would be just a highfalutin way of writing up what was assumed axiomatically to be common sense by the British upper middle class in both sectors, public sector middle class at all levels, and private sector middle class below an ever-higher age, all after 14 years of Conservative rule. In 1997, after 18 such years, the same was true of Gramscian Eurocommunism, insofar as Tony Blair ever understood it. Peter Hitchens was addressing a minority of his parents' generation then, and he is addressing that minority's ghosts now. Cold War boo words did not work even only a few years after the end of the Cold War. To the Middle Britain of the 2020s, their application to this Government would offer false hope.
Starmer was pointedly offered neither a peerage, nor a judgeship, nor a Vice-Chancellorship, nor a quango position, when he was pointedly not invited to apply for a second term as Director of Public Prosecutions. To avenge himself by becoming Prime Minister, he attached himself to the Labour Right, the most ruthless faction in British politics. Up to now, that has worked out for him. But he is not of the Labour Right. He is barely even of the Labour Party. He is utterly dependent on people who will destroy him as soon as they had determined that the time had come to install one of their own, presumably Wes Streeting.
They would need to make their move in this Parliament. Now the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff with no background beyond the internal factional politics of the Labour Party, Morgan McSweeney took that party to fewer votes than it had achieved on either occasion under Jeremy Corbyn, and to a far lower share of the vote than in 2017. The Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the Independents, and Reform UK made First Past the Post work for them. The Conservatives and the SNP failed to do so, although there was not really much that they could have done. But Labour just got lucky beyond its wildest dreams, so that it now holds numerous improbable seats by tiny margins. McSweeney did not make that happen, because no one is that good.
And no one wins the Lottery twice. The two-child benefit cap has already pushed at least 100,000 more children into poverty since Labour came to power. We are about to begin the first winter of four thousand extra deaths due to the means-testing of the Winter Fuel Payment. If Streeting or whoever wants to be Prime Minister and able to do anything much with it, or even to be Prime Minister at all, then the wheels needs to be set in motion pretty much now.
Imagine putting a Hitchensite programme to Middle England, imagine what they'd make of it, it would scare them half to death. You're right, by 1997 Middle England had arrived at Blair's watered down Eurocommunism as "just common sense" and by 2024 it had arrived at Starmer's watered down Pabloism as "just common sense". If you wrote it down for them without any history or jargon they'd say it was "what everyone thinks anyway".
ReplyDeleteBut Starmer, who is very much like that, has placed at the mercy of people who do indeed know the history and the jargon.
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