Ask a structural engineer – weakness isn’t something you can identify from a distance. A stress factor in a steel girder doesn’t advertise itself. Real strength and the appearance of strength are not the same thing.
Likewise, with politicians, ingore the show and watch the other stuff. There is a ‘big political book of how to look tough’ and they’ve all got a copy on their shelves. And yet they all appear to be incredibily weak, incredibly delicate. The outcome is the death of our political parties.
At the moment the big political players all have leaderships that appear simultaneously obsessed with the show of strength yet act like they are petrified of their own shadows. None are led by someone who in the last year or two hasn’t taken paranoid steps to try and protect themselves from challenge.
This is most obviously the case with that most perplexing conundrum Keir Starmer. A man who made his reputation in part through a ‘decisive’ (i.e. undemocratic) purge of legitimate members of the Labour Party because he didn’t like their political ideology. This was disgraceful, but the British Establishment likes nothing more than a display of strength against the left so praised what they should have condemned.
Since then Starmer has been bent further and further into the shape of a hard man, being ruthless in throwing people out of cabinet or out of the party altogether, of talking to and about protestors like a thug talks about their victim. Yet none of this has ever really disguised what was clearly weakness.
Because put him in front of someone whom the British Establishment doesn’t reward you for crushing or badmouthing and he melts like snow (or more accurately, crawls around on the ground picking up the papers you just dropped like the secretary to the deputy finance officer of a regional sales department). Starmer is a coward in the face of the powerful.
But more to the point, he is a coward in the face of challenge to his failed regime. There are uncontacted tribes in the Amazon who woke up this morning and said ‘did you see that Keir Starmer wet his pants when Andy Burnham applied to stand for parliament?’. Keir is busy trotting out lines about the rules and cost implications and running the country.
Meanwhile sentient human beings just see a failure who everyone knows his party wants rid of, blocking one of the people they might replace him with in what is patently a vague hope that if all competent challengers are sleeping with the fishes, perhaps he’ll get to play at being Prime Minister a bit longer.
As a reminder, when John Major faced a challenge from John Redwood in 1995 he showed some actual courage
As a reminder, when John Major faced a challenge from John Redwood in 1995 he showed some actual courage. He resigned as Tory leader and turned up for the fight, beating Redwood and making himself untouchable at the top of his party.
More pathetic than John Major? Oh that it were only Starmer…
Because in the seemingly endless degredation of democracy in the SNP, you may have forgotten that John Swinney has made Keir Starmer look brave. Starmer only blocked one potential challenger, John Swinney altered the constitution of the SNP to block every and all challengers forever.
It now takes 1,500 individual nominations from at least ten different branches before you can put yourself forward as a challenger to the leadership – and the SNP effectively bans members from contacting other members. I am unconvinced John Swinney could get that many party members to endorse him in a leadership election.
It was outrageous, but such is the sad, decrepit state of the SNP it was just nodded through. And of course this comes off the back of ten years of near constant meddling by Nicola Sturgeon to banish anyone critical of her from the party. The move where she overturned the democratic decisions of the membership by getting the NEC to require that only a disabled person could top each list was breathtaking in its cynicism.
The Scottish Greens pride themselves on democracy – just as soon as the leadership has bullied any opposition to its extreme ideology out of the party and made it clear they’re not allowed back. Just in case members imagined they got to think for themselves or make their own decisions.
In all of this, the Tories actually come out rather well. The worst Badenoch has done so far is just to make the usual round of the TV studios claiming a challenge to her would be a distraction (after dreadful local elections increased speculation about her future). That’s North Face of the Eiger brave by comparison to the others.
It is no more Andy Burnham the victim here than it was Kate Forbes or Andy Whightman before – it’s us, all of us, our democracy and our future
Here is the point; politicians have reasonable cause to be paranoid because it is an unusual job where there are a bunch of people constantly trying to get you fired. But that’s the game. It’s like footballers objecting to being tackled.
In fact let’s extend that metaphor for a second; imagine footballers acted like politicians. Every time a promising young player emerged, the senior squad would break his legs, in case he takes their place one day. All new talent would be hampered, pushed out, bad-mouthed – anything to stop them flourishing.
And what kind of football team would that produce? That’s what’s wrong in our political parties. It really started with Blair whose moves to control who was selected to stand for the party was unprecedented at the time. The SNP took that and ran with it, creating the most repressive system of parliamentarian selection I’ve ever seen.
Starmer appears to have learned from that. His purge of the left was barely constitutional and his faction’s control of the party had little to do with anything other than brute force. So let’s have a look – how is it working out for them?
Well, the fact that Burnham (who was never previously considered anything other than mediocre) is their best bet tells you everything. There is no talent, only compliance. Ther SNP has no credible leader after Swinney (his level of credibility is not high either). The Greens came up with Ross Greer and Gillian McKay, a ways short of convincing.
It’s like that football team – all fresh young talent has been purged and now the second tier is in complete control of everything forever. It’s destroying party politics. If you keep destroying the best new talent because it might prove to be a challenge to you, you display your weakness for all to see and you kill the chance of a stronger future.
Apart from weakness, there is another unifying factor of everyone I’ve mentioned – they are very personally ambitious and little encumbered by principles or ideology they can’t ditch along the way. Even Ross Greer (the most committed of this group) finds it easy to justify rolling back on public policy, as we saw when Green government ministers repeatedly delivery a weak broth of non-solutions in their portfolio areas.
And that’s where we are now, an era of David Camerons, a whole generation of people whose main belief is that ‘I’m the kind of guy who should be running things’ but who can’t back it up with the courage to stand on their own feet and fight their own battles.
It is no more Andy Burnham the victim here than it was Kate Forbes or Andy Whightman before – it’s us, all of us, our democracy and our future. All because parties keep selecting weak men (and women) based on how tough they pretend they are.