Whingeing and Hand-Wringing

Over the last few years, Keir Starmer hasn't just annoyed people on the left and in the labour movement, he had upset his core support as well. The base in the state bureaucracy, in the professions, and crucially in the media has been divided about his leadership since Starmer and Rachel Reeves explicitly said nothing will change. Because we live in an era where we can all take comfort in illusions of our own devising, a lot of this group overlooked - or accidentally-on-purpose did not notice - the pledges of allegiance to fiscal hawkism and bowing to far right culture warriors as disagreeable but necessary compromises on the road to Number 10. But this cannot be ignored any longer.

The politics of noticing has another spox today, the Graun's Rafael Behr. He writes about how Starmer is lining one policy atrocity up after another, giving little time for Labour MPs to catch their breath and salve their souls. It's an "unpalatable choice" buffet, and all wings of the parliamentary party are affected, from soft left to Blairites with instincts for electoral self-preservation. And what's driving all this? Nothing, it seems. There is no strategic purpose to this Labour government, and without that there is a "dwindling purchase on the growing cohort of voters who see Labour and Tories as interchangeable and equally contemptible." Steady on "Raf" for your own sake. We know what happened last time you got very upset with a Labour leader.

It's not just what Starmer is saying and doing that's upsetting. The positive vibes are gone as well. The project of state modernisation is still part of his emotional economy, but the feels are messed up by the telling. Labour's plan for the civil service, for instance, is the sacking of tens of thousands of workers and their replacement by unreliable technologies. The crisis in the universities and the piles of student debt, the very people who would otherwise be the next generation of support for Starmer and his heirs - they get increased fees and institutions Labour is seemingly content to bury. And any idea this is a government motivated by compassion is just not credible. Turning the page on the cruelty of the Tory years means overseeing brutal cuts of their own.

And so it's coming to pass, signs that the Starmerist base are peeling off are not difficult to discern. But while Behr's despair is symptomatic of how a layer of relatively privileged people are feeling, he does have one reason to be cheerful. He played the expected role as a mid-ranking media commentator at Britain's leading liberal daily in opposition to the left wing alternative to "sensible" centrism and Boris Johnson's buffoonery, and did his bit driving the foul scourge of socialism out of permitted politics. It brought them political peace of sorts, but left the landscape a desert. But in purging radicalism and new ideas, the arid vista is left for prospectors like Behr to describe and bemoan. In other words, while he is a voice of a strata Behr has unwittingly returned to the historic mean of people like him who work in the media: as paid-for whingers hand wringing at a state of affairs that keeps them in a job.

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