Starmer and Labour’s failure to address Britain’s post-imperial delusions and decline

Review of The Starmer Symptom, edited by Mark Perryman, Pluto Press, £16.99.

Jim Sillars

The 2024 election was a strange electoral beast. A Tory government despised and held in contempt by many was routed, but its main opponent, Labour, could not generate enthusiasm for what it had on offer, giving us the perplexing result of a party with a massive parliamentary majority with only 33% of those who voted. Since polling day that 33% has melted. Something wasn’t right in 2024. Something isn’t right now. Something needs explained.  A way out of this needs to be charted. 

The Starmer Symptom, a book edited by Mark Perryman, of eighteen contributions from a fair chunk of the left’s intelligentsia, sets out to tell us what has happened and, importantly, the direction Labour has to take. Among the book’s endorsements is this from Alex Niven, editor of Tribune: ‘A vital kickback against national decline, ranging over the aimless, joyless landscape of Britain under Grey Labour. Mark Perryman has persuaded some of the fiercest, most eloquent polemicists in the land to examine, expose and ultimately eviscerate one of the lamest leaders in Labour history.’ That claim about national decline is one I shall return to, because it lies at the nub of this book’s ultimate failure. 

The issue of Labourism

Eviscerate seems a bit strong for the criticism of Starmer, but contributor after contributor damns him for his attachment to labourism, a belief of continued Labour Party hegemony as undisputed leader on the left spectrum of British politics, that has had its day.  He has an added mortal sin: according to Hilary Wainwright: “Starmer’s ‘achievement’ has been, in fact, not so much to return the Labour Party to the working class as to make the Labour Party safe for the establishment.” 

Labour has had a number of leaders from Keir Hardie onwards, and all have been subject to severe criticism by the members but there was also always some degree of affection and respect. Starmer seems to be the exception. Nye Bevan’s description of Hugh Gaitskell as “a desiccated calculating machine” seems more apt in relation to Starmer, because Gaitskell had what Starmer lacks – charisma, passion, fire in the belly, vision and a set of beliefs founded upon a body of thought.  Starmer, in the view of Clive Lewis MP is rooted in “centralised managerialism” that has led to “a hollowing out of Labour – not just of ideas but of a political culture.”

Eunice Goes sees Starmer as a mere “doer and a fixer, not a thinker” who declared at the door of Downing Street that his government would be “unburdened by doctrine.” It is hard in its 282 pages to find a kind word said about Starmer. All contributors are good at pinning down his flaws, and don’t dodge the more important fundamental problem that has been the bane of socialist life in Britain, desire for transformative near revolutionary change when the instrument chosen, the Labour Party, accepts that it works within a capitalist system which it can only modify not destroy. The book, outside of assassinating Starmer’s political character, provides a great deal of information about the state of the UK economy and society.

The frustration the contributors have with this unpalatable fact of non-destruction of capitalism is present in every article about labourism.  You might think, given the intellectual power gathered within its covers, that after damning labourism for its inability to be a real challenger to capitalism, a brilliant ideologically based alternative emerges from its pages to re-kindle belief in real change being accomplished.  You would be wrong.

The problem is not just Starmer but Labour take on Britain

Starmer isn’t the only one with flaws.  The common theme about replacing the despised labourism is changing the electoral system to proportional representation, Labour abandoning hegemony by embracing a coalition with the Lib Dems and the Greens, thus ushering in an era that is progressive. Clive Lewis explains: 

Coalition building is not simply electoral pragmatism, it’s an acknowledgement of complex, interdependent realities. No one party alone can solve the polycrisis we face. Collaboration between Labour, the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and other progressive forces is not a sign of weakness, but maturity.

Not the new big deal one would expect from people who differentiate themselves from the non-thinker, too pragmatist, ideologically empty Starmer.

Many women, and men, in the  UK,  would quarrel with the description of the Greens as completely progressive; and there is not a cat in hell’s chance of the Liberal Democrats, nice people as they are, taking the country out of the capitalist orbit and shifting the balance of wealth and power to the people, an aim once proclaimed as central to the socialist purpose of the Labour Party.   

In this book, there is plenty of evidence, and graphs that demonstrate the plight of today’s UK.  Danny Dorling quotes Stephanie Flanders, who used to appear regularly on our television screens and is now head of Bloomberg Economics stating about the UK: “the poorest fifth of the population are now much poorer than in most of the poorest countries in central and eastern Europe.” He goes on to describe the UK as “now a peripheral, poor European country where life for most people has been becoming worse since 2008 and especially so for children.” 

This brings me to Alex Niven’s assertion that the book and its authors deliver a “vital kickback against national decline.” They don’t, because they like most others in the higher levels of UK politics and governance haven’t been able to grasp two things: that the “UK is a poor country pretending to be rich,” to quote The Daily Telegraph, and that it is in the final stages of post-imperial decline.

All of my life the UK has had economic crisis followed by economic crisis. After World War Two, it was in managed decline as it tried to hang on to a role of a Great Power, and even when that delusion was exposed in the Suez Crisis its leadership, of both parties, could not bring themselves to acknowledge that reality and adjust to policies suited to an offshore European economy. From managed to precipitate decline was due to three major shocks to the system – the financial crisis of 2008, the cost of a disorganised, chaotic Brexit and the crass mishandling of the pandemic with its lockdowns.  An intrinsically weak economy buckled, the inability to pay its way was exposed, and the only recourse was to an international credit card piling up debt.

The contributors to this book can rubbish labourism, point to the ‘greyness’ and limitations of Starmer, can genuinely be angry about the levels of poverty now standard, but as they cannot understand the true causes of the UK’s national decline, with its institutions crumbling, they have no answers.

If this group of the left’s intelligentsia can see what is wrong but cannot understand why, no one should expect the non-thinking Starmer and his Labour Party to halt the decline.  They are lost. A vacuum that cannot be filled. There is a message in this book for Scots. We 5.4 million are at present handcuffed to England, the main component of this declining decaying British state, which has only one way forward – further decline. Read the book and grasp the message: our neighbour is going down the tubes, and we will go down the same tubes with it unless we disengage and separate.