[Robin McAlpine Blog] What is it that makes Starmer a ‘grown up’ then?

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What is it that makes Starmer a 'grown up' then?

What does it mean to be a ‘grown up’? It’s a question I’ve asked myself often, wondering if I’ve pulled it off yet. It is a phrase used so often that we all know exactly what it means, and yet we probably couldn’t specify what it means very easily if we were asked. Or at least, I’ve been told so many times that Keir Starmer represents ‘the grown-ups being back in charge’ and I’m struggling to put my finger on the justifications for this.

Because early Starmer is somewhere between a parody and a failed experiment, yet it still manages to be incredibly dangerous in terms of our collective wellbeing as the nation of Great Britain. What if he’s not a grown up at all but a fool or a patsy – or worse? Shouldn’t we discuss this?

Promoting the idea that the Rise of Starmer represents a new era of grown-up politics is more or less the prime directive of The Guardian. For years now we’ve heard Starmer outriders tell us how economic reform or an ethical foreign policy are ‘baby stuff’ that must be jettisoned and how Tories are mainly wrong for implementing their policies badly, not because there was anything much wrong with the policies.

Tories were right to say that we need to slash public spending to get the deficit under control but wrong not to do it more aggressively. Corbyn was wrong to address structural problems in the UK economy, like low productivity or wage inequality. Tories were right to crack down really hard on immigration but should have done it systematically and not as a gimmick. Corbyn was wrong that there are problems in the world that can’t be solved with guns and bombs.

If I’m picking this up right, what it means is that ‘grown up’ means being an Tory with effective administrative skills. The big goal (it seems) is that if you are a sufficiently effective Technocrat Tory then things will go great, the economy will grow, and then, at that point in the future, you will see the real difference between Labour and the Tories.

In the short term you can only see the difference in terms of how effectively they implement the same policies. But they are different because of ‘values’ and, damnation, if Labour won’t prove that to you just as soon as the Tory policies all work… When the boom comes (for politicians, the boom is always coming), the Tories would cut tax while Labour will… Well, it’s not really clear, but think how exciting it will be to find out.

So what would a real grown up do in the face of evidence and data? Is the idea not that children will always eat more chocolate but adults check the fat content and make different dietary choices? But what happens if virtually every piece of available data anyone has ever been able to produce shows that austerity harms the economy and ends up costing more than it saves?

What Team Starmer really remind me of is a load of people who have dressed up in the outfit they think the real grown ups will like and are constantly trying to guess what the real grown ups want them to do

To eliminate doubt here, every bit of available evidence does show that austerity harms the economy. (I was going to provide a link to that but there are literally so many options you are as well doing your own web search.) The impact of high public debt levels isn’t nothing (very high debt has a slight dampening effect on growth), but the impact of a major withdrawal of investment into the economy (i.e. cutting public spending) does way more harm.

Or what if you are still (I mean, seriously, still) stuck in a world of forever wars? If people keep saying ‘more militarism’ but, observably, more militarism makes the problem worse, what is the grown-up response? As best as I can tell, today negotiations are currently ongoing on allowing western missiles to be fired directly on Moscow. Grown up? My 11-year-old isn’t that reckless.

You know what this all actually looks like to me? It doesn’t look one little bit like this is a government of grown ups. What it looks like to me is that dreadful middle class trend of sending your children out at Halloween dressed up as little mini versions of your own profession.

What Team Starmer really remind me of is a load of people who have dressed up in the outfit they think the real grown ups will like and are constantly trying to guess what the real grown ups want them to do. The real grown ups are equity capital, financial traders, mega corporations, arms manufacturers, political lobbyists.

I mean, let’s say that tomorrow Keir Starmer simply dissolved his government and handed the reins to a carefully selected group of ‘technocrats’ drawn from all of the above sectors. Would you notice any difference at all? And if you could simply dissolve yourself and the world would be the same, how does that make you a grown up?

Cutting spending in a time of financial duress is not clever and it isn’t good policy. Starmer and Reeves are managing their own image, not the nation. So desperate to appear ‘grown up’ are they that they’re constantly telling us how grown up they are. In fact other than cutting things they seem to do nothing at all except making speeches in which they say ‘but we’re grown ups’.

I have only three interpretations of this. The first (and most generous) is that they’re not very bright, that Starmer and Reeves are doing what two very limited individuals think ‘a person like me in a position like this is supposed to do’. I genuinely believe that is at least part of the problem.

The second interpretation is that they are actually Tories (I exclude a few like Ed Milliband, Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy from that). If that interpretation is right, a bunch of them always had the elitist agenda of Osborne Tories but without the culture war stuff of Braverman Tories. They say capturing Labour as easier than reforming the Tories, so that’s what they did.

The third interpretation is darker. In this instance the key figures aren’t in the Labour Party at all, they’re the largely faceless economic and foreign policy elites, the people who have managed to maintain almost exactly the same policy agenda for over 40 years irrespective of who forms the government.

Who knows what a man that stands for nothing stands for

These people want neoliberal economic orthodoxy to reign supreme forever and ever and ever. After all, it has made them stinkingly rich. They want harsh crackdowns on public dissent. Of course they do, because the dissent is against them. And then there are the Atlanticists who honestly believe civilisation requires white nations to dominate and coerce black, brown and yellow nations. Again, sure they do because it’s kept them at the top of the global league tables of wealth and power.

In this interpretation they saw clear evidence that they had screwed up the economy with the financial crash, shattered the social bonds of our society with austerity, destroyed the very environment on which our species relies, and they saw the public getting more and more angry, less and less deferential.

Worse, they saw Corbyn elected as Labour Leader. Worse still, he nearly won in 2017 despite the best efforts of the establishment inside and outside the Labour Party. So they destroyed him and invented Starmer. Starmer himself has lied his way to the top without media censure for his lies. And now he is implementing their policies for them.

His crackdown on political dissent is proving to be every bit as harsh as the Tories, and probably worse. His destruction of democracy inside the Labour Party is almost complete, a brutal and barely legal political purge that the British establishment has refused to acknowledge never mind criticise. And his entire purpose in life seems to be to prevent ideological or political dissent from taking root anywhere.

Can he be a fool, a Tory and a patsy all at the same time? I’ve been thinking about it and I’m not clear why not. Watching this parody of an administration certainly leaves that possibility open. I mean, their economic policy is a parody of Osborne right down to the credit card analogies, their foreign policy is a parody too supine even for In The Loop and their rhetoric is a bargain basement parody of ‘I’m tough – watch me kick a granny’.

Honestly, I don’t know what it is exactly. I know Labour people in London who were hardly Corbynites who are horrified by what they see. They take the dimmest possible interpretation. I’ve been told straight out that Wes Streeting is simply working out how quickly he can privatise the entire NHS for the private health corporations who finance him so generously.

I don’t think Starmer and co are grown ups. I think they’re functions of a petrified elite who now know they can’t win on their merits (Starmer would bite your arm off for the number of votes Corbyn got) so need to rig the game. No party democracy in any party that will challenge their interests, no proportional voting system that might give a voice to anyone not in their control.

This is whom Starmer has spent his life around. He isn’t a ‘Sir’ for nothing. No, I don’t think Starmer is a grown up who is rolling up his sleeves and doing the hard work to repair our society. I think he’s a needy little schoolboy in thrall to people he thinks actually are grown ups. But who knows what a man that stands for nothing stands for.

In fact the only thing I know is that the rest of us are collateral damage. It isn’t much of an advert for Britain this, is it?

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