Technocracy’s last stand

Following Keir Starmer’s deathly dull rise to the leadership of the Labour Party in 2020, there was endless pontification about what kind of leader he would be, as commentators tried valiantly to wring some column inches out of this singular husk of a politician.

Would he be a Blair, steering Labour back to ‘centrist’ electability? Would he be a Kinnock, a transitional figure who would clean up the mess left by his predecessor before handing the baton over to the real deal? Starmer, for his part, tends to invoke both Wilson and Attlee.

Well, in Starmer’s long-trailed ‘Plan for Change’ speech yesterday, he made clear that he’s the new Rishi Sunak – another man who seems to have become PM almost accidentally and now has no idea what to do with it.

Where Sunak inherited his crown, Starmer won a low-turnout election almost by default, as the Conservatives imploded on a historic scale. Now he, like his old Tory sparring partner, is trying to PowerPoint presentation his way towards having a programme.

Sunak had his ‘five priorities’. To which Starmer responded with his ‘five missions’. Before the election, he then laid out his six ’first steps’. Now Starmer has unveiled the six ‘milestones’ by which we are told to measure his sure-to-be-glittering success.

In a baffling press conference, Starmer struggled to explain to the assembled media how his various pledges and bullet points related to one another. When asked why immigration wasn’t a ‘milestone’, he reassured us it was a ‘foundation’ on which the milestones rest.

The ‘milestones’ are a mix of vague aspirations and specific, technocratic targets. He wants to raise living standards in every part of the UK, build 1.5million homes, ensure patients wait no more than 18 weeks for treatment, put 13,000 more police on the streets.

The Resolution Foundation has described his living-standards pledge as the ‘absolute bare minimum for any functioning government’ (real disposable income has risen in every parliament since 1955). Given our sclerotic planning system, meanwhile, getting Britain building will be a much taller order for Starmer.

Even so, these are largely repackaged versions of plans that were either meagre in their ambitions to begin with or that no one expects him to achieve. Those hoping Starmer would represent some kind of break with our dysfunctional politics will likely be disappointed.

Starmer postured against ‘populism’ in his speech – reducing the West-wide revolt against the political establishment to charlatans peddling ‘easy answers’. Later that day, a poll put Labour third behind right-wing populist upstarts Reform UK for the very first time.

He still doesn’t get it. Even with Donald Trump on his way back to the White House and fellow ‘centrists’ being toppled in Germany and France, Starmer seems to think that his bloodless managerialism is what people are thirsting for, even though the ‘adults in the room’ have brought nothing but economic and political turmoil.

The technocrats’ claim to wisdom and competence lies brutally exposed. We’re about to learn all over again that those who prize ‘delivery’ over ideology, who trust the views of ‘experts’ and the edicts of judges over those of voters, are often as useless as they are vision-less.

Where the technocrats are genuinely ambitious, it is in their appetite for economic immiseration. Starmer has watered down his insane decarbonisation pledge. He’s now gunning for 95 per cent ‘clean power’ by 2030, rather than the full 100. But no one sane thinks either target is doable. And trying – and failing – to hit it will still be immensely harmful for jobs and energy prices.

After the populist revolts of the past decade, you’d have thought the political establishment would have at least attempted to recalibrate. For self-preservation, if nothing else. But the most they can bring themselves to do is the occasional bit of lip-service to the concerns that are animating voters. Hence, Starmer can inveigh against the Tories’ ‘open-borders experiment’ one week and then leave migration out of his ‘milestones’ the next.

Keir Starmer is right about one thing. Voters are desperate for change. For turning the page. For all those clichés he trotted out at the election. But it’s now obvious to almost everyone that he offers only more of the same. The last, pathetic stand of a technocratic order that has failed ordinary voters so miserably.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater