Nesrine Malik, The Guardian.
Here we are again: constant rebooting, cruel rhetoric and crackdowns. And hurtling towards a Reform-shaped future.
There has been a familiar feeling in the air for a while, but not one I could identify until last week, when it finally settled. It is a sense that this Labour government is just as terminally dysfunctional and directionless as its predecessor. I am beginning to feel the same sense of frustration, confusion, anger and depletion that I carried through all those years of Conservative government.
Here we are again, with the pettiness and authoritarianism, the performatively cruel rhetoric and crackdown on immigration, the ridiculous posturing on flags, the empty sloganeering – and with the constant rebooting in order to jumpstart a broken machine. The result is that government has been reduced to the same intrusive and meaningless background noise: Keir Starmer droning on about “phase two” or “delivery, delivery, delivery”. There is a sense that it’s pointless to insist that Labour can do better, be better – because it is structurally incapable of doing so.
The overwhelming feeling under this government is sometimes that of drift, at other times of heading at speed towards a crash. Either way, the destination seems to be Reform UK having more power than should be possible with so many grownups around. It all seems, above everything, a colossal wasted opportunity for a party that sailed in on a large majority, with an eviscerated opposition and a moment ripe for the taking.
At least with the Tories it was clear why governance had become an empty exercise in buying time. The party was spent, Brexit had run out of steam, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss had burned through public goodwill during Covid and economic uncertainty, and Rishi Sunak was tragically unsuited to turn it all around, even if that were possible. But what’s Labour’s excuse? Westminster is preoccupied with policy announcements, conferences, budgets, resignations and reshuffles amid personal scandal, but zoom out and what hoves into view is that the UK’s political system is imploding.
I find myself reluctantly pulled into the psychodrama. Both gripped and repulsed, I have watched Starmer’s bizarre and robotic pronouncements, former home secretary and now foreign secretary Yvette Cooper’s chirpy updates on forced removals and the newly minted deputy prime minister David Lammy not doing much at all. What timing, that just as the world was plunged into insecurity and conflict, the foreign secretary was a man who only spoke in platitudes about “progressive realism”. I look forward to him being loudly pointless in his new role.
Collectively, these people constitute a government that is absent when required and violently invasive when not. A summer of anti-migrant protests and rising nativism is met with statements about closing asylum hotels and the importance of the flag, offering little to assuage the fears of those frightened and unsettled by the new mood. In contrast, the government mobilises to ban Palestine Action and arrest hundreds of peaceful protesters.
There is something hardwired within this government that shapes its character. It is unreactive and leaden, unless it’s showing force to prove itself to a set of voters, privileged above all others, that Labour is hard enough – even though all the signs point to the fact that all that is achieving is more alienation. This party was fashioned in a fight against the left and its need to represent itself as “under new management”. It is defined by its distaste for its progressive wing’s history and legacy and is constantly purging its ranks and affiliations. Following the departure of Angela Rayner, a load bearer for the party’s left-leaning and working-class constituency, the cabinet reshuffle has nudged the party further rightward. Labour’s pathological insecurity that voters and the press do not buy that its leaders are sensible, grownup moderates has cannibalised the party, turning it into an organ that is driven by how it looks and sounds rather than what it wants to achieve.
Yet for all its bluster, Labour’s posture and messaging ring hollow. Austerity, closed borders and security overreach are key expressions of rightwing ideology. When Labour promotes such ideas, it feels inauthentic: the product of triangulation and focus groups. It is a chronically defensive way of going about politics that misses the instinct and spirit needed to inspire trust and passion in voters. The outcome is that it has turned into a party with no natural constituency, appealing to those who will always be more at home in parties further to the right, and telling off its own voters. The end result is that same mean, scolding negativity of the Tories in their later years.
At the centre of it all is the sinkhole that is Keir Starmer. The simple explanation for why he is how he is, is that he is simply unsuited to office and in over his head: a man who approaches politics on the basis of what he feels he needs to say in the moment, rather than out of belief or mission. Some of you may know him from the office: a careerist who will look you dead in the eye and tell you, the moment it becomes more convenient to take a different line, that isn’t what he said at all.
But maybe the more complex reasoning for why Starmer is such a vacant leader is that only such a man could have been elected as prime minister. Only a man characterised by the ability to identify who he must ingratiate himself with could have won the electoral race, placated powerful business interests and fended off the rightwing press. It’s a political skill that could be put to good use in power if he just knew what he wanted to do with it. It turns out “ruthlessness” alone, a quality often commended when Starmer was an aspiring prime minister, is a turn-off in post, when leaders must inspire and lead as well as govern.
And so it makes sense that a party built on a lack of conviction and disdain for progressive values, and driven by entitled ambition, should be exposed so quickly. There’s something triggeringly familiar about how we have ended up exactly here again, even though all the red flags were there. It is, above all, a sad reprise for a nation that constantly gets worse than it hoped for. But here we are. We go again.
