Keir Starmer is managerialism’s pathetic last stand

There are worse things for a government than being hated. Being pitied, for one thing. And a year into Keir Starmer’s premiership, we appear to have already reached that stage.

As ‘Iron Chancellor’ Rachel Reeves struggled to hold back tears in the House of Commons today (we’re told, over a personal matter), the UK prime minister, fighting for his political life after another humiliating u-turn, reeled off the supposed achievements of the first year of his Labour government. Breakfast clubs, if you’re wondering.

It was a pathetic spectacle. This week, he set out to reform welfare and claw back some money for the groaning public coffers. With the legislation gutted and then gutted again by restive backbenchers, the bill will now do neither. So he was left jibbering about bowls of muesli in primary schools, as if this were a historic blow for social justice.

Starmer and his frontbench have come to resemble the cast of a light-hearted comedy, in which they have ended up running the country by a series of hilarious misunderstandings; left to play-act the part. No one’s laughing now, as the government appears incapable of governing even as crises, both domestic and international, pile up around them.

What a difference a year makes. This time last summer, the media could barely contain their glee as a historic rout for the Tories delivered the first Labour government for 14 years. After a brief, populist blip, normal technocratic service was supposedly resuming. The competent people, the nice people, were supposedly back in charge. ‘We now have a government with [a] massive majority, widespread internal agreement and no likelihood of massive instability anytime soon’, rhapsodised Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy. ‘There is nothing more erotic to a middle-aged woman than competency’, groaned Caitlin Moran, sending Times readers for their sick buckets.

The public never suffered from these semi-erotic delusions. Voters didn’t so much endorse Labour rule at the last election, as they did wearily acquiesce to it – sending Starmer to Downing Street with a sandcastle majority, built on a historically low turnout and vote share, after the Tories tried and failed to remake themselves in the image of Brexit.

Keir Starmer now stands exposed – not as the renewal of Politics As Usual, the Third Way reborn for a troubled 21st century, but as the last gasp of a managerialism that has failed ordinary voters for decades. A distant elite whose anti-democracy and general fecklessness generated the great democratic revolt of 2016.

Among the many scions of ‘centrism’, he cuts an even more diminished figure. A glorified manager who can’t even manage his own party. A man for whom the proverbial whelk stall would be miles beyond his capabilities. If nothing else, this Labour government is a damning indictment of the phony ‘meritocratic’ elite we are all told knows so much better than us.

A restive population. A decaying economy. A nation creaking and poorly protected in a time of conflict. How absurd it is that anyone thought another empty suit – doubling down on every failed New Elite orthodoxy from multiculturalism to greenism – could ever chart a course out of this, when he comes from the very ruling class that got us into this mess in the first place.

Radical change is what our era demands. It’s what ordinary people demand. And yet we are lumbered with another tinkerer, whose vision doesn’t extend beyond the next news cycle. The man who believes in nothing has achieved nothing. He seems incapable of doing anything, other than sending his poll ratings plummeting.

It’s yet more proof, if any more were needed, that we need a return not to technocracy, but to politics. We need not another insipid flavour of haughty establishment rule, but a new democratic settlement forged by the people, and parties willing to represent them. That way the future lies.

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