ALBA - Unofficial Forum

The Starmer meltdown is quite something to behold – but there is something odd about it which I don’t think people are picking up on properly. This is a political collapse that… isn’t really political at all. Clearly there is a political dimension, but politics doesn’t explain what is happening.

Competence does. Starmer is failing because of sheer incompetence across four major areas which are essential to any successful political project. Yes, these are accompanied by political failure, but had this failure been purely political it would have taken longer to resonate. The speed of the collapse is because of something else.

The four areas are narrative, communication, theory of governing and issue targetting. Let me start with the last because it is the most straightforward.

If you have a product and that product has customers and you have a rival with different customers and a different but competing product, the first thing you want to do is spend as much of your time as possible talking about your product on your terms. This is as true of toothpaste as of politics.

For example, if you have a toothpaste brand and your focus groups find that the customers of the other brand think your toothpaste ‘tastes a bit like cat piss’, there are loads of things you can do. By far the most counterproductive is any variation of talking about about cat piss – as in ‘no it doesn’t taste of cat piss’ or ‘cat piss is actually really nice’.

Starmer Labour has spent time on; freebie scandals, fiscal misery, tub-thumping-fuck-the-environmentalists economic growth, resignations, defending Israel, sucking up to Trump, immigration crackdowns, flag waving and hammering poor families and people with disabilities. Not a single one of these is a brand strength or priority for their ‘customers’.

None of this was forced; it was all chosen (except the freebies, which was also incompetence). You need to know where your brand strengths are and spend the maximum amount of time there, or all the public hears is ‘cat’s piss, cat’s piss’.

The tricky thing for Starmer is that it is not clear what his brand strength is. This is where narrative comes in. Most of the analysis of what is going wrong in Labour is about ‘lack of mission’, and this is fundamentally true. But in a strange way, at this point it doesn’t matter. Look at Trump – his mission is ‘break things when I fancy it’ which is stupid.

But his narrative is strong. It’s exactly like Boris Johnstone – you didn’t entirely know what his mission actually was in any detail, but you knew what his narrative was. You can have a weak mission but cover it with a strong narrative. You’ll eventually come a cropper because eventually people will notice the narrative-mission gap (this is what has happened to Sturgeon) – but not quickly.

Starmer’s problem is that his narrative is dire. We’ll come to the language they use in a minute, but even if you had a better wordsmith sorting their comms out for them, what are they communicating? Starmer’s line is ‘grown-ups in the room’ and ‘economic growth’ and variations of ‘I like flags’.

None of that is a narrative. This line about ‘grown-ups’ is dismal and patronising and means nothing. The politicians who don’t say that they want economic growth is pretty well none of them. And ‘I like flags’ is not a brand narrative and it is deeply unconvincing anyway because normal people don’t talk like that.

People are focussing on ‘what Labour is for’ and they’re right to do that, but that means they’re missing the first question of ‘what Labour says it is for’. To fail at your mission takes time; to fail at your narrative is immediate. What is happening is not a failure of mission but a failure to persuade you they actually have a mission.

Of course, that takes us to the most glaringly obvious problem they face – that Starmer and his main team have zero ability to communicate to the public in any way that sounds vaguely normal never mind engaging or inspiring.

I can only tell you this because someone on the team sent round a meme but did you remember that there were five missions and a mission delivery unit which no-one knew anything about so they converted it into six milestones which no-one knew anything about so they instead started saying their had three priorities.

The problem is someone seems to have counted them and apparently Starmer has now stated 30 different and separate things as his priorities. So that’s five missions, six milestones, either three or 30 priorities and two phases (of which no-one knew phase one was happening), the second of which has three priorities itself which are (confusingly) delivery, delivery, delivery.

Or, to capture it in one go you could spend the longest 35 seconds of your life watching Starmer explain what on earth is going on. It involves him having a meeting. At times this lot really, really gives the impression that they don’t know what words are or how they work. I was having fun about this last week – they stagger between leaden-footed and clueless when they try to craft phrases.

If you spend all your time talking about your rival’s brand strengths, you can’t explain why and you can barely tell it in words anyone doesn’t nod off to, you really better be enacting powerful, meaningful change in government. That’s your last refuge – we can’t tell, but perhaps we can show?

This is the most god-awful embarrassing thing about Team Starmer – given that their whole pitch is about being grown-ups who know how to run a government, they quite clearly had very little sense of how to run a government. Or, to put it more concisely, they had no theory of governing. This isn’t something that gets discussed much in politics but it is crucial.

Let me give you some examples of theories of governing. Thatcher wanted to disempower the old-school bureaucrats that she saw as being to resistant to rapid change via shock tactics. Blair wanted to coopt and schmooze the bureaucrats while driving through action to a strict grid-based timetable. Osborne was mainly going to cut (which is easy) but wanted someone else to take the blame – hence OBR.

They are different approaches, but they share one core concept – they are aware of what governing involves, what the barriers to getting what you want are and they have a core idea about how to use governing practices to change society. That is a theory of governing.

Starmer shares his theory of governing with David Cameron and Boris Johnstone – that all it takes is to be ‘someone like him’. He is his own theory of governing. He genuinely believed that the only thing stopping the government from achieving overwhelming success was the tom-foolery of Boris Johnstone.

This is garbage. Governing is not a ‘personal attribute’, it is about having an understanding of how the machine works and having a plan to make it work for you. As best I can tell, Starmer’s whole plan was ‘be me’ and ‘hire Sue Gray’. It is this lack of a theory of governing which is leading to churn. He has actually done very little and, compared to Thatcher, Blair and Osborne, it is moving at a truly glacial pace.

Every political administration I’ve ever known does most of the good and impressive things it will do in its first year or two. It is almost always downhill from there. It’s ‘difficult second album’ syndrome – when you’re not in the hot seat you have all the time in the world to come up with good plans. When you’re in the hot seat the one thing you never, ever have is time.

Don’t get me wrong, Starmer’s politics are all awful too – they won’t work as a policy agenda and they speak to almost no-one in his voting base. But politics takes time to filter through. To collapse this fast you need to do one of two things – try a massive gamble and fail (Truss), or be incompetent at the core business of governing (Major).

It takes something special to be a technocrat and fail at the technical bit, but that’s what’s happening in Starmer’s Labour. They are politically inept and yet that manages not to be their biggest problem. It’s kind of impressive in its own way, but what there is not is any excuse for any of this.