How Late it Was, How Late

Sir Keir Starmer is on his way out as Andy Burnham arrives by train and fanfare from Manchester. It looks likely there will be no real election but a coronation. This, ultimately, weakens political leaders as they fail to arrive with a strong mandate or sense of legitimacy. It’s understandable, but part of the politics of fear that has defined Starmer’s short reign.

As John Kampfner has said: “If you wanted to encapsulate the reasons why mainstream politics has so struggled across the liberal world, you would call it Keir Starmer.”

He writes [The Lessons for Burnham]: “Everywhere you look you see liberal democratic leaders paralysed with fear. They worry about the markets (with reason); they fret about conventional media and social media (with less reason). They wait for bad things to happen, trying to anticipate what their critics might say of them in case they put a foot out of line. It’s a self-fulfilling spiral.”

This is really like being on a doom-loop now in our third incarnation.

Despite being blessed with a huge electoral majority, Starmer was simply never to take the reigns of his own administration. He yearned for establishment approval and made a virtue out of approaching power by publicly renouncing all of the Left Wing policies and ideas he adopted to get elected. Not having any principles became the only point of principle. Starmer was emphatically Not Jeremy Corbyn, but other than that it was difficult to see what he was for.

If the British two-party political system that has dominated politics since the Second World War is over, Labour’s decomposition has been a long time coming. The pattern is cyclical and inevitable: any political leader even moderately of the Left: Foot, Kinnock, Corbyn gets monstered in the British press, often with the active collusion of the right-wing of their own party.

The grinding disappointment of Labour, over decades, is not confined to Starmer’s time in office, but it is now inter-generational, and it is part of what broke British politics. It’s what Marie Le Cone has called the Death of Hope.

The fundamental dishonesty of endless collusion with the far-right, endless triangulation and focus-group timidity inherited from Blairism was now combined with an unshamed right-wing social and economic agenda, In March 2025 the Scottish MSP Neil Findlay resigned from the party.

In a scathing, visceral letter to Keir Starmer Findlay took no prisoners:

“A party that gave assurances to voters that “change” was coming but failed to tell them that the “change” they meant was to impoverish pensioners through cuts to their winter fuel allowance, betray WASPI women by refusing to compensate them for the states’ failure, punish defenceless children by maintaining the horrific two-child cap, abandon the Grangemouth workers and now attack the long term sick and disabled by slashing social security payments (I refuse to call them benefits or welfare). All of this to fund increased spending on the UK war machine – weapons that will be used to kill and injure innocent men women and children in far-off lands”

He added: “At a time when more people are going hungry, fuel bills are soaring and the cost of living is leaving working class families unable to afford the basics, a Labour Government should be going after the billions lost in corporate tax fraud and avoidance, it should be making those companies that pollute our environment pay and it should be introducing a wealth tax on the super rich.

“But instead you choose to punish and stigmatise the weak, poor and the vulnerable.”

The letter concluded: “The reality is that Labour will be lucky to come third at the forthcoming Scottish election, will lose power in Wales for the first time and faces being routed at the next UK election and this will be down to your disastrous tenure as leader.”

Faced with a wall of such sentiment from within his own party, Starmer did nothing.

Even his own party leader in Scotland found him an electoral burden. Anas Sarwar famously abandoned Starmer mid-election campaign. It was a move that many celebrated as a stroke of genius at the time [Actually, this is brilliant – Bella Caledonia].

Alongside all of this – as Starmer prepares to leave – has been the mewling, self-pitying personal narrative. Starmer’s Exit Speech was peppered with personal story-telling.  On the day he announces his departure, a Labour source says Keir Starmer feels “betrayed”.

“He gave everything to Labour, including sacrificing much of his children’s teenage years to help make the party electable. He feels deeply betrayed, especially by those he believed were loyal to him.”

The dark irony of all of this seems to have passed him by. This from the man who said: “If you don’t like the changes that we’ve made, I say the door is open and you can leave.”  And they did, in droves.

Starmer, the broken centrist, couldn’t respond. He had nothing to say. All he could do is repeat stories about his dad, and host special announcements declaring his values, or explaining that people didn’t know the real him. But they did.

To be fair, Starmer was caught in-between two historical forces, the new populism of Left and Right under Zac Polanksi and Nigel Farage. But also to be fair, this was a situation of his own making that he then handled badly. Starmer would combine Normcore politics with ruthless pro-Israeli politics that he would let alter our politics, our laws and our civil liberties.

Starmer spent years telling anyone who would listen about how his dad had been a ‘tool-maker’ until it became a meme.  He seemed to have swallowed whole the contemporary idea of having a ‘story to tell’ as if this was X-Factor or Britain’s Got Talent. This superficial blah superseded any policy direction and was widely derided by the general public.

Starmer’s Anglocentrism widened divisions within the UK while never talking to or about Scotland or progressing the constitutional impasse. The closure of Grangemouth and Mossmoran and the failure to back Chinese investment at Arderseir are just some examples of Starmer’s preference for investment in England rather than Scotland. But ultimately Starmer will be remembered for his position on Gaza just as Blair will be forever linked with the Iraq war.

Elected on a promise of ‘change’ he delivered continuity failure. As Yanis Varoufakis puts it:

“Consider the litany of Starmer’s moral and logical failures. He promised a ‘different Britain’, yet his actions were a masterclass in Tory-lite politics—using the same maxed-out credit card analogies that once served the austerity brigades to justify his own failure of vision. He promised a human rights lawyer’s approach but he embraced a racist-lite version of Farage. On Europe, Starmer promised Brexiteers that Brexit is Brexit yet stood before those who yearn to rejoin the European Union, winked at them to make them feel that Britain would gradually reconnect, even rejoin, with the EU while offering nothing of substance. This is not leadership; it is a fraud. And then there’s the manner in which Starmer and his government rushed to offer Israel unequivocal support in pursuing its genocide in Gaza, sacrificing precious political and civil liberties in the UK by imprisoning grandmothers, priests and peaceful activists who dared support Palestine Action, an organisation that Starmer and his minions proscribed as terrorists for practising the usual activist tactics of trespassing to spray paint military planes that had demonstrably aided in the genocide.”

“To add insult to injury, Starmer performed the diplomatic pantomime of recognising a Palestinian state, in a manner that ensured it would never happen. But above all else, this is a government that has learned nothing from the post-2008 era. Starmer and his Chancellor are playing the same tired austerity game while enabling and empowering the Finance Curse perpetrated by the City of London, throwing in for good measure cuts in international aid to fund a military spending trickle under the guise of a “Strategic Defence Review”. It is the same old doctrine: austerity for the masses, socialism for the financiers and the arms dealers.”

What does this mean for Scotland?

Nothing other than a revival of the myths of change in the UK locked into a cycle of personality politics devoid of meaning. We’ve been here before.

Anas Sarwar will no doubt pledge his allegiance to the new leader, and no one will reflect on his own era-definig failure as he remains shackled to Labour’s UK. We are in the last stages of Late Britain and the personality politics can’t distract from this reality.