How would you define ‘working people’? You’d think that ‘people who work’ would be a pretty safe bet. But Keir Starmer seems to have a different definition, telling LBC earlier this week that working people are ‘people who earn their living, rely on our services and don’t really have the ability to write a cheque when they get into trouble’. Is this a tacit admission that those who have managed to save could be a target for Labour when it wins power?
‘Working people’ is one of Starmer’s most repeated phrases; he’s made it his own. It is usually said in an appropriately reverent way, with the same head-slightly-bowed tone that vicars use while mentioning the Holy Ghost, or that people on television employ when referring to the Lionesses. It is the nearest the Labour leader gets to a catchphrase, so it’s useful that someone has tried to pin him down on what he actually means when he says it.
As a black hole absorbs all light, Starmer absorbs all interest
It’s interesting to note that ‘working people’ has at some fairly recent point replaced ‘hard-working families’ in the politicians’ lexicon. Fair enough, as that did always conjure up Cratchit-style visions of sooty children disappearing up chimneys, tubercular mothers straining at a mangle, etc. ‘Write a cheque’ is a curiously archaic expression, too – I think I last wrote a cheque over twenty years ago.
As Kate Andrews has noted, Starmer’s definition seems to mean that people who save their money – which you’d think would surely be what any sane government would want, or indeed encourage them to do – somehow aren’t working and thus can be safely taxed. (And what a giveaway the use of ‘our services’ is – again, that tinge of sacredness, but this time proprietorial. Starmer views the good citizen as somebody reliant on his largesse.)
This is surely an acknowledgement that, under Labour, prudent financial management will be punished. After pledging not to raise taxes for ‘working people’, Starmer then redefines the term out of accepted understanding in order to stab savers on his fork on a technicality.
It’s just the kind of semantic chicanery that a particularly slippery lawyer might do. Funny, that. It also demonstrates that he can slip out of any of his (already vague) commitments by changing the premise he uses. By any reasonable definition, people who have worked to accrue savings, and thus don’t have to ‘rely on our services’, are working people. Apparently not. In the Starmer dictionary they are deliciously fatted calves, people with ‘the broadest shoulders’ and it is ‘only fair’ that they should ‘pay their fair share’ – in other words, taxed to bring them down to his preferred level of state clients too.
This sounds like the Labour position of old: penalising people for doing well and being self-reliant. But, as always with Starmer, it’s incredibly hard to work out what he actually wants, and why. Because we all know he might say the exact opposite tomorrow.
What is he for? It is very difficult to tell. As many have noted, he is a strangely androidal being. He does a lot of pretended outrage. The most perfect capture of him is the meme of his shirtsleeved serious-looking manifesto picture with the caption changed to: ‘Do you want to share that joke with the rest of the class?’ There is something of a Deputy Head about him. ‘I hear there was a culture war in the morning break, no I don’t care who started it, now back to your desks – and that bell is a signal for me, not for you’.
Starmer is surely the first great mystery to be really boring
He feels less like a human being than a machine running a politician program. Now Rishi Sunak is likewise robotic, but he is a C3PO model, the kind that makes dreadful, cringeworthy mistakes in an attempt to seem flesh-and-blood. His most recent firing off of silly tweets about buying British and the Euros are excruciatingly inept, which is at least a semi-human foible.
In contrast, Starmer is unknowable. His positions have been so contradictory, so obviously motivated by expediency: I love Corbyn/I never loved Corbyn, I accept the referendum result/I do not accept the referendum result, a man can be a woman/a man cannot be a woman. It makes one wonder, what does he want power for? Who is he? If we could get an inkling of his true secret plan, if he couldn’t help letting it slip, it would make him seem like a person. But there is no through-thread in any of his reverse ferrets and broken promises. He is just there, saying whatever is needed to get through a particular day.
This makes him an enigma, but with a unique twist. An enigma is usually fascinating. The Bermuda Triangle, the Loch Ness Monster, Atlantis – all baffling and beguiling. Starmer is surely the first great mystery to be really boring. The Tories have attempted to make hay with all his flipping and flopping, but it’s very hard to land a punch on someone that doesn’t seem to exist. As a black hole absorbs all light, Starmer absorbs all interest.
What this ‘working people’ fudge has confirmed is that we are – by default – about to hand enormous power, at a time of perilous global instability and societal disquiet, to a man that nobody knows.
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