‘A politics that treads more lightly on all our lives.’ That’s what Keir Starmer – remarkably, our new Prime Minister – promised a weary nation as he was vying for their vote. Perhaps fittingly, he ended up with a victory that is incredibly light on voters – a huge majority on a lower vote share than any victorious party in the postwar era. Clearly, while Brits had grown tired of the Tory soap opera, they’re switching off from Starmer already.
Keir Starmer is an empty vessel – a man for whom principles are fine until they interfere with getting elected
Like so much Starmer says, that quote – and his insistence on the steps of No.10 that he’ll lead ‘a government unburdened by doctrine’ – is not all it seems. Because if you actually look at what he hopes to achieve in government, you see a programme that will intrude very heavily indeed on all our lives: dictating what we can and cannot say, further crippling our living standards, even shaking up the constitution of the nation in which we all live and call home. The paucity of his day-to-day, tax-and-spend economic ambitions lies in stark contrast with the deranged arrogance of his cultural, environmental and constitutional ambitions.
Yes, Keir Starmer is an empty vessel – a man for whom principles are fine until they interfere with getting elected, or getting him out of a testy radio interview with Nick Ferrari. But the empty vessel has to be filled with something. And it’s abundantly clear that it will be filled with divisive wokeism, greenism and all the other terrible ideas that have very suddenly become inviolable orthodoxies among our cultural elites.
His planned Race Equality Act has barely been mentioned at all this election campaign – and yet, if passed, it could be among the most consequential pieces of legislation in this parliament. It will give ethnic-minority Brits the ‘full right to equal pay’, even though paying someone less because of their race is obviously already illegal. In truth, the bill would smuggle in equality of outcome under the banner of equality of opportunity. It could turbocharge a culture of racial grievance-mongering, in which we agonise about disparate outcomes between groups, while ignoring class-based solutions that would raise everyone up – and while ignoring areas in which minorities actually out-perform white Brits. Of which there are many.
Now, the gender issue has been discussed over this election campaign – due to the Labour frontbench’s seemingly eternal, stammering inability to admit in public that a woman cannot have a meat and two veg. But the idea that Starmer has ‘moderated’ on trans is nonsense. It’s all there in the manifesto: loosening gender-recognition processes, and thus imperilling women’s spaces, and banning ‘trans conversion therapy’ – a euphemism for banning therapy that doesn’t reflexively ‘affirm’ a patient’s belief that they were ‘born in the wrong body’. Given we now know, from the Cass Review, that the majority of gender-confused kids grow out of it and are often just in the process of coming to terms with being gay or bisexual, this ban on ‘trans conversion therapy’ amounts to the institutionalisation of gay conversion therapy – ‘fixing’ gay kids because they don’t fit in.
If you wish to raise your voice in complaint against this, or just refuse to go along with the fiction that a man can become a woman at his say-so, I’d watch out: Starmer intends to beef up laws around ‘transphobic’ hate crime laws, itself a euphemism for clamping down on gender-critical speech. If you think that the prospect of someone having their collar felt or being dragged through the courts after they misgendered someone is far-fetched, this has actually already happened under existing legislation. Believers in biological reality, be on your guard.
Those clinging to the vain hope that Labour – alleged party of the working class – will provide some relief from the cost-of-living crisis will be among the most bitterly disappointed. As we all know, Labour is now the parliamentary wing of the metropolitan elite and they are worshippers at the shrine of Net Zero. Despite reining in his £28 billion-a-year green investment pledge, Starmer is still committed to ‘zero-carbon electricity’ by 2030 and banning new oil and gas licences in the North Sea. Whatever magical thinking Labour is captured by, the simple fact is you cannot raise living standards while ditching cheap and reliable energy in favour of expensive and unreliable renewables.
I know what you’re thinking. Starmer is hardly a conviction politician
Then there’s Labour’s plans for the constitution. Lurking in the background of this new administration is Gordon Brown’s proposals to accelerate devolution, replace the House of Lords with a new ‘Assembly of the Nations and Regions’, hand more power to the Supreme Court and introduce new ‘social rights’ to secure a minimum standard of healthcare or education. As many learned critics have pointed out, this would corrode British sovereignty – even handing the power to Holyrood to enter into international treaties – and turn political questions over public services into legal ones, to be battled out in the courts by activist lawyers. While Starmer says this is all on hold for now – he is currently ennobling people so they can serve in his cabinet – it’s one to look out for if he squeaks a second term.
I know what you’re thinking. Starmer is hardly a conviction politician. As far as I can tell, his only guiding principle up to now has been wanting to be Prime Minister. Is he really going to wake up each morning, desperate to reshape Britain in his image? Isn’t he too sensible, cautious, boring for all that? But the quest for a ‘legacy’ beckons, and Starmer has simply outsourced it. After Covid and the BLM protests, he set up a task force to come up with his Race Equality Act. Ed Miliband – our new energy security and Net Zero secretary – is calling the shots on climate. Starmer still seems to be taking his cue on gender matters from Stonewall. And he both commissioned and fully endorsed the proposals by Gordon Brown, who is doubling down on devolution, desperate to ignore the terrible governance and separatism his New Labour reforms unleashed.
Britain might be about to find out that a man who believes in nothing can be a very dangerous thing.
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