‘The Global Progress Action Summit’ is exactly the sort of event Keir Starmer loves. It’s a sort of Blairite seance, where all the ghouls of a dead liberal order are summoned and live again to spend 24 hours doing their favourite thing: bloviating. It’s a pretty cast-iron rule that an organisation with two words for physical movement in its title will in fact be an impotent talking shop.
It was to this appalling gathering that Sir Keir – a man who famously prefers Davos to Westminster – had trotted to announce the introduction of ID cards. This little piggy had gone wee wee wee all the way to his spiritual home; a soulless conference centre, to unveil a policy he’d long been gagging for. ID cards are Tony Blair’s unfinished business, and so it is only appropriate that Starmer’s government, which increasingly resembles the reheated, congealed microwave meal version of Tony’s years in power, should take it up. Here we had it: Blairism with botulism.
He began with a tone-deaf tour of the successes of ‘social democratic’ parties around the world. ‘I’d say centre left parties are having quite the year,’ he announced in a sinusy yodel. Well, given his own administration is sinking into the mire of corruption which inevitably heralds the grubby end of such governments, I suppose he’s not wrong.
As you’d expect, the stream of jargon was near-constant. His government was ‘delivering pride and belonging’, and ‘building a better country brick by brick, from the bottom up’. Starmer talked a lot about ‘national patriotic renewal’, about ‘the infrastructure of grievance’. It all resembled the introduction to a new tractor production strategy during the later years of the Soviet Union – or as if a really bad AI from a few years ago had been ineptly programmed to give a patriotic speech.
StarmGPT bragged about his economic strategy: ‘some people call it abundance, I call it social democracy’. I’d call it bollocks, but we were very clearly in an arena where words had abdicated all relationship with their actual meaning. We were through the LinkedIn Looking Glass.
These people – hilariously – are absolutely convinced they are the good guys. A sort of Marvel Cinematic Universe of Beige. Who their enemies were was clearer. The PM complained about: ‘A politics of predatory grievance preying on the problems of working people and using that infrastructure of division against the politics of renewal’. I think, in plain English, that means anyone who has the gall to suggest that this card-carrying, technocratic vision of the future might not be so hunky-dory after all. The one silver lining is that these people are too staggeringly incompetent to run a bus timetable, let alone a gulag.
Starmer then sat down for a fireside chat with the leaders of Canada, Australia and Iceland, all chaired by a grating, Trans-Atlantic accented non-entity, a sort of Temu Kamala Harris. It’s probably a good thing that this didn’t take place in front of an actual fire, because people would have been tempted to throw themselves into it.
There was one moment of light relief, when the woman chairing managed to misidentify the Icelandic prime minister Kristrún Frostadóttir as the Finnish premier. Some might have said that the ‘dottir’ suffix was her first clue, but then again, national identity is not something that comes naturally to these people. ‘Oh my God, this is so embarrassing!’, crowed the Non-Entity. It was the truest thing we’d heard all day.
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