All year Keir Starmer has been using a reassuring phrase about his inevitable Downing Street tenure in a bid to calm the nerves of those not certain they were keen on it. He debuted it in January, when the Labour leader promised to bring forth ‘a politics that treads more lightly on all our lives’. Starmer used a similar line on the steps of Downing Street on July 5, after becoming Prime Minister, when he pledged to ‘tread more lightly on your lives and unite our country’.
Starmer’s lack of warmth or wit as a communicator only serves to enhance the impression of power-mad arrogance
This suggested that he understood the limitations of his ‘loveless landslide’, gained on a sub-34 per cent vote share in a low-turnout election largely thanks to quirks in the electoral system and the obvious exhaustion of the previous governing party. But the first eight weeks of Starmerite rule have delivered the very opposite. His new proposal for a ban on smoking in outdoor places, including pub gardens, is just one policy that treads very heavily on the lives of millions.
There has also been the axing of winter fuel payments for more than 80 per cent of pensioners, the unexpected abandonment of social care reforms that were meant finally to curtail a vicious means-testing lottery – and a series of no-strings, inflation-busting pay deals for favoured public sector groups.
Starmer has also warned voters of a ‘painful’ impending Budget that will bring tax rises, despite having insisted throughout the election campaign that all Labour’s spending proposals were fully funded.
His tribalism has extended into social policy and penal policy too, earning him the soubriquet ‘Two Tier Keir’ for his draconian clampdown on those partaking in August’s riots – or even fulminating unwisely to tiny followings on social media – while turning a Nelsonian blind eye to violent crime at the Notting Hill Carnival and not spearheading any discernible law and order response over the earlier Harehills riot in Leeds.
The Rwanda scheme to deter illegal migration has been dumped. The right to apply for asylum has also been granted to tens of thousands of people who arrived in the UK without authority.
In his statements and speeches on the rioting after the terrible Southport murders, Starmer showed not a trace of understanding for the concerns of much of the electorate over a loss of border control or high crime rates within certain communities.
The upshot has not been to unite the nation, but to leave it more divided than ever and to cause a cratering in his own poll ratings. The contours of an emerging identity politics can now be discerned amid perceptions of favouritism being exhibited by the police and courts towards groups able to claim an oppressed minority status.
Figures such as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) are rapidly building larger followings. Anger is growing among averagely socially conservative voters at being dubbed ‘Far Right’. Meanwhile, Ed Miliband has been permitted to set about his obsession with accelerating the carbon net zero mission at enormous cost and despite a big rise in the domestic energy price cap against which millions of retired people on modest incomes are no longer cushioned.
Impending protections for free speech on university campuses have been abandoned further, suggesting that Starmer regards as hate crime what a previous generation of leftish thinkers would have dubbed thought crime.
Perhaps Starmer is not deliberately or cynically trashing his own pre-election brand. Perhaps he is just so out of touch with non-partisan, ‘normal’ Britain that he does not understand the tides of opinion already running heavily against him. But his lack of warmth or wit as a communicator only serves to enhance the impression of power-mad arrogance.
With the Conservatives currently residing in the status of ‘gone but not forgiven’ in the eyes of most of their erstwhile supporters, there is every chance that autumn will usher in opinion polls showing the combined score of Labour and the Tories coming in below 50 per cent.
Each part of the usual duopoly will be able to partially console itself by pointing to the unpopularity of the other. Starmer will also have the comfort of having more than 400 MPs in the House of Commons. Yet smaller parties of right and left that he brands ‘populist’ can hardly fail to prosper in such a strange political climate. We should prepare for the continued rise of Reform and the Greens.
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