Keir Starmer: like bringing a spoon to a knife fight

Well, Keir Starmer appears to have started the New Year with a spring in his step, at least. The UK prime minister has been across the airwaves this week, telling us this is the year Britain will ‘turn the corner’, thanks to his enlightened leadership.

It didn’t take long for this cheery prognostication to be ratioed on social media, as practically every post put out by the government now is. If we are indeed turning a corner, as many joked, the past year-or-so’s experience would suggest we are turning into a dark alley – or perhaps a ravine.

Things have been so disastrous since Labour came to power, it’s incredible it has managed to cram it all in to just 18 months.

The small boats? Starmer said he’d ‘smash the gangs’, then he almost smashed the record for illegal channel crossings last year. The economy? His ‘laser-like focus’ on growth has produced, essentially, zero growth.

He went after the farmers, and the pensioners, only to be forced to retreat on winter fuel, inheritance tax, and much else besides. Indeed, the man has made more unexpected u-turns than a dispraxic on his first driving lesson.

Even when the PM sets out to do something good, like reform our dysfunctional benefits system or get Britain building again, he is kneecapped by the sclerotic civil service, or by his moralising backbench MPs.

With his authority among his party shattered, the soft left of Labour – true believers in all of the worst ideas in politics – is effectively running the country. As are the regulators, lawyers, NGOers and government officials who are filling the empty vessel that is this government with their usual pungent slurry.

Paul Ovenden, Starmer’s former director of strategy, broke cover last week to blame what he calls the Stakeholder State for much of this dysfunction.

For him, the Alaa Abd el-Fattah debacle was Classic Blob. This was the Egyptian activist who was welcomed into the UK over Christmas, following his release from prison, owing to a tenuous claim to British citizenship.

Starmer said he was ‘delighted’ that Fattah was ‘back’ in Blighty – until Fattah’s florid history of anti-Semitic, anti-white and violent posts came to light.

The years-long fixation with Alaa’s case in Whitehall, Ovenden writes, is ‘a totem of the ceaseless sapping of time and energy by people obsessed with fringe issues’.

I’d go further. It’s the work of a state that is both inept and diametrically opposed to the interests of its own people. A state that would happily scour your social media for any whiff of ‘Islamophobia’, but didn’t bother to do a cursory X audit of its favourite pet extremist.

On this score, Starmer is firmly part of the problem – a creature of the stakeholder set, as a crusading ‘human rights’ lawyer, long before he entered politics.

He’s a politician who finds more meaning in global causes célèbres, more kinship among global elites, than in his nation. Hence, his preference for Davos over Westminster, and his formidable airmiles.

This is the peculiar disease that afflicts our technocratic political class. It cannot do the basics – like maintain order, keep the economy ticking over, or build some effing houses. Meanwhile, it is convinced it can rewire our energy system (Net Zero), balkanise the citizenry (multiculturalism), and defy human biology (gender woo), without any adverse consequences whatsoever.

Then there’s the authoritarianism, which inevitably flows from schemes as deranged and unpopular as these.

It speaks to both how illiberal and shorn of any sense of tradition this prime minister is that he would sooner slap everyone with a digital ID, making us a ‘papers, please’ society for the first time since the war, than bother to control who comes into the country. Worse still, he would sooner get rid of our ancient right to jury trials, dating back to Magna Carta (1215), than go anywhere near the hallowed Human Rights Act (1998).

Perhaps Starmer’s only semi-virtue in all this is that he doesn’t really believe in anything. Having followed the man’s career, the only enduring conviction I’ve been able to detect is that he would quite like to be prime minister.

Now, in the wake of Donald Trump’s assault on Caracas, met with stunned silence from No10, Starmer has jettisoned the one thing he ever claimed to care about – namely, international law.

And so, this emptiest of empty suits has, on occasion, been forced by his savvier advisers to at least appear to do something about migration, or trans, or welfarism. But a shamefaced climbdown is never far away. The scorn of polite society prevails over the weight of public opinion on every single issue, every single time.

We live in trying times. A once complacent establishment is now assailed by war, energy crises, economic torpor and a restive population. The End of History has ended.

But even if Starmer wanted to meet the moment – to make the truly ‘tough decisions’ he so often talks about; to take on the orthodoxies and vested interests holding the country back – this cautious, vision-less politician would be constitutionally incapable of doing so.

Having Keir Starmer as our prime minister in 2026 is like bringing a spoon to a knife fight. Here’s hoping we do soon ‘turn the corner’, away from this weak, insipid man.

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