Political parties, be it through incompetence or miscalculation, have a tendency to shoot themselves in the foot every now and then, but Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is different. Its impulse is to fire off the whole damned clip to make a bloody, meaty mess of its little feet, reload, and then fire off another few rounds.
It is a fascinatingly novel approach to politics. Rather than shoring up the tenuous support it has by offering a small hint of optimism every now and then, Labour has, over the course of its first eight months in power, repeatedly and very publicly despaired over how fucked the United Kingdom is. To be clear, the country is fucked, but by constantly pointing that out, while offering a profoundly unconvincing vision of how it intends to fix it, Labour isn’t exactly endearing itself to its public. Its already thin backing has immediately collapsed, and, out of the cloud of despair it emits, the far right is rising.
The people of Britain are pissed off, and, unless they happen to be one of the country’s ever wealthier billionaires, they have every right to be. The poor just keep on getting poorer, and the middle class is rapidly disappearing. Food is too expensive, utility bills are too high, rent is unaffordable, and many of the houses are in a terrible state. Work is increasingly precarious and poorly paid, the healthcare system is broken, and the poor die young. Kids are on the streets stabbing each other, the water is full of shit, and global warming, in a fittingly British twist of irony, may actually make the fucking place colder than it already is.
This is, at the risk of sounding alarmist, a society in the midst of a collapse, but Starmer’s government seems not to grasp the severity of the situation. It understands that things need to improve, and it can rightly point out that much of the damage was done under 14 years of Tory rule, which it does at every opportunity, but its plan for national renewal is woefully inadequate. It promises to do things differently than the Conservatives, and then proceeds, in many instances, to act quite a lot like the Conservatives, minus the eccentricities that make the Tories, malevolent and dangerous though they are, interesting at least.
Labour has already done things like cut welfare payments to help the elderly pay for their too-expensive energy bills—knowing perfectly well that such a move would drive tens of thousands into poverty—and it also suspended some of its own ministers for demanding an end to the pernicious two-child benefit cap, which prevents families with more than two children from claiming sufficient welfare. All of this, at a time when its self-image as a respectable party of boring technocrats has been stained by allegations of sleaze, its one-time favored insult to level at the Tories. Around the time the government was ripping away the elderly’s heating payments, it was reported that Labour’s already well-paid ministers have, for years, been claiming taxpayer money to help cover their own home heating costs. Starmer, too, was specifically tarnished by revelations of his frequent habit of accepting “freebie” gifts—cough, bribes, cough cough—without properly declaring them to parliament. None of it looks especially good in the eyes of the electorate.
It’s true that Labour has taken some positive measures. It has committed to increased social spending in vital areas like education and healthcare, while the minimum wage is soon to be increased. But actions such as these, while welcome, are nowhere near enough to undo the profound damage inflicted upon the country by 14 years of Tory austerity. Labour understands more is needed, but its plan to obtain the change the country so desperately requires is to throw its weight behind one thing: growth.
Growth, growth, growth. It is the buzzword of the era, compulsively repeated by Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, at literally every opportunity they get. The assumption is that, by growing the British economy as a whole, the government will, eventually, generate enough money to spend on public services without burdening the country with more debt. This may, in the short term, mean pain for the public, but, by the time the next election rolls around in 2029, sufficient growth will have been achieved, and a grateful, more affluent electorate will vote them back into power. That’s the idea.
But Labour’s pursuit of growth reeks of the elitism that the public despises. It has seen senior cabinet members cravenly and publicly seek to seduce big business, while rolling back their own environmental commitments to expand an already busy and polluting airport in London. Labour has also taken to peddling the fantasy of transforming Oxford and Cambridge into “Europe’s Silicon Valley,” which is hardly the sort of message that working class voters in the deprived northern parts of the country really want to hear right now. There is a widespread belief that northern England has been abandoned, and talking about pumping money into the already affluent Oxford and Cambridge hardly helps to resolve that.
This government, through its words and actions, has become extremely unpopular very quickly, which means it needs this growth gambit to come off over the next few years. But this is an unstable world, where, thanks to ecological collapse, the global economy seems destined for some rough times ahead. Betting wholly on economic growth delivering better standards of living, in the context of the actual uncertain world we live in today, is deluded. Growth is not guaranteed.
What’s going to happen, then, in 2029, if poverty and inequality have actually increased across the U.K., as, indeed, economic projections have indicated they will? We need not look very far for the answer. It’s already there, spreading across Europe and sitting in the White House. Much of the Western world is being swallowed up by the far right, and there is absolutely no reason to think the exact same thing won’t happen in the U.K. To the contrary, it’s looking increasingly likely.
Opinion polling has, for the first time ever, indicated that the far-right Reform party, led by the weird, bigoted gecko that is Nigel Farage, is marginally the most popular party in the country, having polled particularly well in northern England. It’s true this doesn’t count for anything concrete yet given how far away the next election is, but clearly the signs are ominous, and Labour offers no indication that it will prove capable of handling it, just as the Democrats failed to contain Trump.
As Labour induces pain and actively cultivates an air of detachment from the public, Reform is presenting itself as the party of the people. But beneath its smiling, everyman shtick lies commitments to make life impossible for immigrants and sexual minorities, destroy all efforts to decarbonize the economy, and slash public spending even more. And, because Labour is delusional about the U.K.’s prospects of growth, the Tory party remains a mess under its new leader Kemi Badenoch, and the British left has yet to get its shit together since Jeremey Corbyn’s defeat five years ago, this is precisely the outcome that feels ever more likely by the day. This is what happens to a society left to rot, and, unless Labour reckons with that, there’ll be no stopping the coming nightmare of far-right rule.
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