[Robin McAlpine Blog] The Starmer Legacy – a warning for politicians everywhere

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The Starmer Legacy – a warning for politicians everywhere

It’s a funny thing, legacy. You can pretty well tell whether a politician has been successful, disastrous or meh based on whether they end their term obsessing about one or not. Basically if you’re Clement Atlee or Margaret Thatcher, you don’t need to worry about it. If you’re Liz Truss or Richard Nixon you’d rather not think about it.

Then there are the Tony Blairs, David Camerons, Nicola Sturgeons and Keir Starmers and they can’t stop talking about it. They spend time just before and long after their departure trying to manufacture a lasting legacy on their terms. I’ve never seen one of them manage it yet.

The lesson is really simple; if you get towards the end of your time and someone else can’t tell you what your legacy is, you don’t have one. And if you don’t have a legacy, one will be assigned for you. That is what they hate.

Blair wanted to be seen as the man who transformed Britain for the 21^th century, but because he mostly acted as caretaker for Thatcher’s legacy, he became known for his most consequential action – starting the illegal Iraq War. Cameron wanted to transform Conservatism for a new era but instead was left mainly being ‘Brexit Man’.

Sturgeon’s legacy is still settling, but I think it’s going to end up being ‘con artist’, so much relentless talk, so little delivery, so much murk and misadventure. All of which takes us to Keir Starmer.

There is some real chance that he will go down as the least consequential Prime Minister to have achieved their own mandate in modern British history. You get the occasional caretaker Prime Minister who is of almost no real significance (Rishi Sunak) – but a Prime Minister who won a strong, clear mandate in an election?

Here’s my guess; it’s a little before my time but perhaps Jim Callaghan achieved less, although even then, only in comparison to his era. He actually brought in race discrimination legislation, a modern system of police complaints and created a legal duty on local authorities to address homelessness. It’s just that his was still an era when politicians got things done.

And for me, John Major was a more consequential Prime Minister than Starmer, if only culturally. John Major represented something about the Britain which elected him. He stood for an era, even if his significance is largely about the disintegration of the Tory Party.

For all that Starmer was obsessed with what didn’t work in government (Johnstone and Truss), he was blind to the fact that everywhere there was a managerialist government there was failure

Starmer is a curiosity in politics. He is a man who represented an abstract idea of a thing that hasn’t been working for decades – his philosophy (with one specific exception) was technocracy. He wasn’t a socialist or a neoliberal, a social democrat or a liberal, a libertarian or a proper authoritarian. Fundamentally, he believed his strength was that he wasn’t a politician at all.

His ‘theory of change’ was facile. He believed the national failure was purely down to ‘the wrong kind of people’ running politics. Boris Johnstone was all popoularist razzamatazz and big talk, so personality was the problem. Liz Truss was a swivel-eyed ideologist, so ideology must be the problem. Both were like ‘political children’, unable to make the smart choice of brown bread when confronted with a sweetshop.

But he would choose brown bread no matter what. He wasn’t going to be seduced by any interest in being interesting, any hope of being actually hopeful, by a vision of having a vision. He would simply do The Things that Appropriate People do when they are the Right People for That Kind of Job.

The capitalisation is important here. For Starmer, each of these was a proper noun, a definitive article. He wasn’t An Appropriate Person, he was The Appropriate Person. What that was didn’t need discussion; we’d wasted too much time deciding what a good leader is when it just meant ‘pulling levers’.

He didn’t debate why or how exactly he was A Right Person, it was self-evident to him that he was The Right Person based on his concept of being a ‘grown up’. But perhaps most importantly, he did not believe there was a debate to be had about what the job even was. For Starmer it was That Kind of Job, a specific kind of job he knew – the job of managing interests.

He knew how to manage interests. It is, after all, surprisingly easy. What you do is you put people in a room and then the only skill is to work out who is the most important person (which more or less boils down to either money or media profile) and then you give them what they want. This is what they really mean by managerialism.

Yet for all that Starmer was obsessed with what didn’t work in government (Johnstone and Truss), he was blind to the fact that everywhere there was a managerialist government there was failure. I didn’t doubt he was the walking dead from the moment he became leader. I never thought he’d be significant, I just didn’t realise he’d be that bad that fast.

So he has nothing for a legacy in the realm of what he believed would be his legacy, meaning by default his legacy will be created for him. The first is that of his puppetmaster, Morgan McSweeney. This legacy is one of disrepute. He lied, was nasty, betrayed people, stabbed people in the back, threw them under a bus – he has broken all sorts of bonds of trust in the broad left segment of the body political.

This is what the centrists don’t get – why is Starmer so hated by people he stabbed in the back?, they ask forlornly. Perhaps more reflection on the part of centrists might have elicited a possible explanation…

So his first legacy is to do to the left what Farage did to the right – he broke the one-party system. It is very possible that the most significant role he played in Britain was to convert our centuries-long system of one large block representing each half of our ideology into a fragmented system more redolent of continental European political systems.

Starmer and Truss are effectively to co-dependent stars in perpetual orbit, each an argument against the other, spinning wildly in the vast coldness of irrelevance

But it is a mistake to believe that Starmer didn’t believe. He did, he very much had an ideology – but it was limited to the international sphere. And this is something on which I do not think there has been enough focus – his existence is taken by commentators to be a reaction to Corbyn’s domestic agenda, but I believe this is wrong.

Morgan McSweeney and Peter Mandelson certainly didn’t love Corbyn’s mild-mannered moves to something that looked a little bit more like a social democratic economy, but what they absolutely hated was his rejection of Neocolonial Zionist Atlanticism. What Starmer represented was the British War of Dependence.

In an inverted form, just as the founding fathers of the US fought to escape British rule, the founding fathers of Starmerism fought hard to make sure that Britain remained a colony of the USA, with Israel as a near neighbour. Protecting Israel and prostrating himself before Trump were the ultimate expressions of his true political ideology.

So just like other underachievers, Starmer will not be remembered for anything he wants to be remembered for. In a more parochial way, he is the man who broke Labour and propelled the Greens into competitiveness. I am doubtful that Burnham is going to change that (certainly if he thinks he can win us over by appointing the truly horrible Shabana Mahmood as Chancellor). The centrists have cried wolf too many times is my guess.

Yet in time it will become hard to put your finger on who broke Labour because the centrists (who have all the media access) will continue to tell you it was Corbyn (which is measurably untrue). So I think in the end, Starmer’s real legacy will come down to one sentence:

“I think that Israel does have that right."

Believe me, no-one remembers all his milestones and pillars or foundations or missions or whatever they were. He may just about be vaguely remembered for handing Britain over to US Tech Oligarchs. But what will most certainly exist in every history book will be the destruction of Gaza and the genocide of its people (no-one is going to defend that in a decade, it is already a consensus atrocity).

And Starmer’s words are the most consequential he ever uttered. He genuinely said on a national broadcaster that the war crime of starving a population, taking away their access to clean water, power and communication, was just fine. That will never, ever leave him.

Those eight words will be in the history books where none of his other words will. None. And they mean so much more. They are an admission of the West’s complicity in this genocide. Starmer is the man who gave that complicity a real voice. That is his legacy.

There is a real lesson in this for the next generation of politicians; if you do not believe in something and if you do not deliver that something, fate will decide your legacy for you, and there is a very good chance it will be your biggest moral failure.

And so, forever now, Starmer and Truss are effectively to co-dependent stars in perpetual orbit, each an argument against the other, spinning wildly in the vast coldness of irrelevance, the populist and the technocrat each unable to countenance the possibility that they aren’t the solution to the other, neither truly believing they have failed.

Meanwhile, the world moves on like none of it happened.

Source: The Starmer Legacy – a warning for politicians everywhere