There is so much going on in the meltdown of the Starmer regime that it is a little tricky to know what to add that is of any value. You’re not going to struggle for stuff to read if you have nothing better to do tonight.
So let me explain the thing no-one will tell you: the reasons this is happening is because of a major flaw in politics which is largely the responsibility of the people who write about politics.
The problem is basically the same as AI hallucinating – it is a function of a system of pattern recognition failing, but failing in a plausible-seeming way, right up until it isn’t plausible any more. The pattern concerned is ‘what politics is supposed to look like’ and the computers computing this are all in the heads of political journalists and commentators.
While they would never admit it, political journalists are the most incredible conformists you could ever meet. They almost never don’t see precisely the same things as important, and in the same ways. Let me give you an example; if you make policy which creates positive gains for poor people at the expense of some losses for middle class people, that is always a bad story, a story of injustice and failure.
Why? Because basically post-Thatcher a group of strategists around Labour (Mandelson prime among them) created the ‘Floating Voter’ model of UK politics. This has a simple rule; people who vote vote, people who don’t don’t, so only the ones who do and are susceptible to changing their mind matter.
If you believe something strongly and are committed to it, you don’t count. You’re going to do that anyway and it doesn’t matter how much you become alienated if those beliefs aren’t respected because in a First Past the Post election you have nowhere to go.
The problem with this is that it is superficially true – if you literally give up on trying to expand the voting base or motivate people who vote who aren’t currently motivated, and then if you disregard everyone with a settled view, and if you won’t reform a winner-takes-all voting system then yes, the only voters that matter are floating voters.
The more politics focussed on being a caricature of what they think a small segment of voters want rather than on a coherent, meaningful policy platform, the more they became what the other voters hated all along
There isn’t space here to show that this is flat-out wrong – the Scottish independence referendum, Brexit and to a lesser degree Corbyn, Johnstone and Farage all show that you absolutely can engage non-voters if you offer them something. So offering them nothing and focussing on the most capricious voter instead creates its own reality.
The thing about floating voters is that they are by definition the exception – or they were. Up until the 1990s only about one in five voters changed their vote from election to election. So if you’re ignoring two big main blocks of voters who make up 80 per cent and you’re focussing on only the most volatile voters, you are following the least consistent people.
They appear to have weaker views on politics than others or to be more skittish generally. But they also have another function which New Labour people loved – they appear to ‘discipline the extremes’. Almost all of politics has revolved around a comparatively small group of people who keep changing their minds and so sit somewhere in the middle.
There is a reasons for this effect; swing voters are significantly more likely to vote on the basis of what they perceive as ‘competence’ than on ideology. They are attracted to authority and ‘the right kind of person’. And why do they swing? Because vibes are a daft basis on which to pick politicians and keep changing.
But swing voters are wrong – there is no such thing as policy-neutral competence. Competence does of course matter, but only in as far as it means a coherent programme is being successfully delivered.
Now this vibes thing has overtaken. If you read party positioning on policy issues it is often really hard to tell them apart. They are both leaning into this lesson that if you say ‘economic growth’ and ‘controlling borders’ (or whatever is in the papers this month) then you’re done with policy and now you mainly need to focus on looking the part.
Then you do this cyclically for more than 30 years and you create your own reality – it isn’t 20 per cent of voters who swing now, it is nearly half. The more politics focussed on being a caricature of what they think a small segment of voters want rather than on a coherent, meaningful policy platform, the more they became what the other voters hated all along. A fake.
But the custodians of this whole mess were not the politicians or the strategists but the journalists with their shared fundamental tenets about what politics is and how it works.
Which is why they all totally missed what was happening in indyref and Brexit (and Corbyn and Johnstone and Reform and now the English Greens). They have a pattern recognition function and they dismiss anything that doesn’t appear to fit the pattern,.
The journalists ignored morality in favour of the pattern and the pattern turned out to be stupendously wrong
The pattern basically looks like Tony Blair with Peter Mandelson by his side and David Milliband standing behind him. A great communicator, a great schmoozer of elites and a technocrat – that is literally the pattern. One distracts the public, one negotiates with elites, one oversees a policy machine.
So when New Labour shuffled off this mortal coil in 2010, Cameron, Osborne and Letwin were a seamless replacement. But the more the pattern was repeated, the worse it got, almost as if the universal political orthodoxy wasn’t working. So you get the rebellions – Scotland nearly votes for independence, we do leave Europe, Labour elects Corbyn then the Tories elect Johnstone.
The difference was that while neither Corbyn nor Johnstone fit the pattern, at least Boris had a large and supportive media. Corbyn didn’t stand a chance. The media couldn’t take him seriously because he didn’t fit. He wasn’t an identikit swing-voter politician. He did crazy things like try to engage new voters. And worst of all, he had no Mandelson. No-one was negotiating with elites.
What this all means is that when Starmer and MacSweeny came along, the media pack was right back in its happy place. Look! A perfect fit! This is a team that looks like politicians are supposed to look! They were called ‘the grown-ups in the room’ and every single word or phrased used in the liberal media was a pattern recognition hallucination.
Because Starmer had no communicator. McSweeney is no strategist and has no popular touch. He was an extreme factionalist with no vision or real skillset other than acting as Mandelson’s proxy. And so it was that the liberal media sat quietly and did not mention the very widespread set of abuses that Team McSweeney engaged in – because that’s what ‘the right kind’ of politician does.
Corbyn was eviscerated in the Guardian on the basis that some of his supporters contemplated a factional fight to replace some right wing MPs; McSweeney did it on an industrial scale and was called a genius. It was nothing more than corruption in which the media was complicit, but it is still being talked about as if this was a work of a higher intellect.
It meant that since then, almost every political journalist has submitted to this fantasy – that Keir Starmer was good at politics, that McSweeney was a political genius, that the grown-ups were back, that they had detoxified the Labour Party.
None of this was really true. No-one in the political establishment ever admits that McSweeney lost votes after taking over. Fewer people voted for Starmer than voted for Corbyn, it couldn’t be more obvious that Starmer was bad at politics and the journalists had no more reason to believe they’d be good at government than the fact they wore smart suits. That was it. That was the basis of the faith.
The real moment though is when they brought Mandelson back. This was pattern recognition out of control. It should have been a massive scandal from day one because of how completely, overwhelmingly compromised Mandelson was. But they all thought that Mandelson was ‘the sort of guy you want running things’ so almost the whole press pack called his appointment genius.
It was a hallucination, it was all a hallucination. It’s not just that none of it was true, if you looked at any of it objectively it was always obviously not true. That’s how I’ve been able to talk you through this in real time.
And here is where we are; morally bankrupt as a political nation. The journalists and the politicians applauding each other very loudly indeed because they are the kind of people who understand that Starmer is the kind of person who should run things and Mandelson is the kind of person who ought to be behind the scenes. That was the delusion that just fell apart.
That is the lesson. The political class is becoming endemically wrong about everything, and more or less every one of them found it blisteringly easy to drop any concerns they had about abused girls when there is the Big Business of State to be getting on with. For Britain’s political journalist those girls were every big as disposable as they were for Epstein himself.
So they ignored morality in favour of the pattern and the pattern turned out to be stupendously wrong. And now our democracy is fucked. If only I believed they would learn anything from this…