Keir is no Seer

As we begin to consume the journalistic flotsam from the elections, our journalists have given us a short menu of ready explanations for the seismic shift in voting patterns. There is little analysis of the policies of the parties or the burning issues at Scottish, Welsh or English local levels. It is all about the personalities and the roulette table of who has run out of chips. None more so than Sir Keir Starmer.

Even respected journalists like Pippa Crerar of the Guardian seem more fixated on bringing down Prime Ministers; she has already claimed the scalp of Boris Johnson, by exposing the profligacy of dodgy whisperers like Dominic Cummings and has now outed Peter Mandelson. Keir Starmer is in her sights, as he is for most other Parliamentary journalists, who are scouring the corridors of power and adjacent bars to gather details of plots from their secret cast of contacts. They are behaving like diary correspondents, but their celebrities are politicians. Unlike film and TV stars or game show contestants who are lionised, politicians are demonised. No wonder we have had five prime ministers in the last seven years. Mature functional democracies like Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland have had one, two, three and three respectively in the same period.

Meanwhile, the jackboots of populism are on the march. Keir Starmer accepted a suit, declared it and was hammered for corruption. Nigel Farage accepts £5million of cryptocurrency for his own personal use, which he doesn't declare, but it is already factored in as part of his cheeky chappie appeal. The fourth estate has lost its moral compass and is becoming guilty of hubris that is damaging our fragile democracy, which has no protection from a written constitution. 

Keir Starmer's government has shown fortitude in introducing an impressive array of policies to address priorities such as young children, health reform, housing, rent control, the minimum wage, and financial stability. After years of Austerity, Brexit, and Covid, the country needed measures to eradicate income inequality and improve public services that have been hollowed out since 2010. However, these policy changes have not been explained or reported well, nor have they progressed at any pace, as government processes become clogged by interdepartmental disputes and parliamentary inertia. They had also failed to set a positive agenda of change before the 2024 election, and by promising no changes to taxation, they thwarted their ability to make radical changes to the taxation regime that were necessary to create the headroom for radical policies.

The government has made mistakes like national insurance increases, removing winter fuel payments and making several U-turns, some of which show a lack of courage. It has created the sense of a government in office but not in power. There is a lack of a strategy, and Starmer's attempts to explain his decisions fall flat, devoid of any charisma, crispness or consistency as he wades through the attacks from the opposition parties, the media and his increasingly vocal MPs. 

Keir Starmer is basically honest and hard-working; he has had some success in his foreign policy, and the changes he promised to make have become bogged down in the Westminster inertia. He has lost or dismissed too many advisers and civil servants, which suggests that he is struggling in a job that has become almost impossible in the glare of the media and political inertia. The role of PM requires someone with a clear vision and the ability to communicate about the things that matter to the electorate, and with a veneer of pragmatic optimism. Unfortunately, Keir is no seer, which is why he is on the back foot defending the lack of progress and offering no alternative to incremental change.