[Robin McAlpine Blog] Now we know what the Starmer Project is

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Now we know what the Starmer Project is

If we didn’t know what the Starmer Project was before yesterday, we do now. The thing everyone has been asking is what is Starmerism for? We know about tactics and strategy and messaging. We know (god do we know) what he blames for all the world’s problems. But what is he trying to create and how?

It is really clear now. The purpose of the Starmer Project is the Starmer Project. It is its own goal, its own aim, its own vision. What he is trying to create is a world that is run by People Like Keir Starmer and the way he is going to create such a world is by being a Person Like Keir Starmer. That’s it. That’s its totality. He is centrism condensed into its purest, most ludicrous form.

I’ve been writing about this for a while. Centrism is absolutely nothing to do with being ‘in the centre ground of politics’. In reality it is an elite political ideology that is based wholly on the idea that good societies are achieved via ‘the right elite’. If the right elite manage existing processes efficiently, everything gets as good as it is possible to be.

Which means that what centrism is is really an order-based ideology. It is an ideology that is predicated on a central form of social organisation which is ‘rule by the best’. In fact there is a very specific Greek word which is there to describe the concept of a society being ruled by whomever is the ‘best’ members of that society. The Greek word is ‘aristocracy’.

(Our usage of ‘Aristocracy’ to mean rule of a wealthy hereditary elite which hands the right to rule down through its own family should actually be known as ‘Hereditary Monarchy’ and is really propaganda to lead you to believe that the ‘best’ can be identified by assuming ‘heritable traits’ of bestness cascade down through genetics.)

How do we know that this is the purpose of Starmerism? Well, for a kick off, it was blatantly obvious even before Starmer was anywhere near leadership. An aristocratic coup was always what Labour’s anti-Corbyn faction presented its interventions as, ‘grown ups’ here being the phrase used instead of ‘best’.

For seconds, in leadership he and his team immediately started doing what aristocrats do – they started cutting off lines of accountability to the plebs (by de-democratising the Labour Party), dealing with all other hereditary threats (the ‘Children of Corbyn’ were all summarily executed) and closing any path of self-replication not in the hands of the existing elite (the right to pick the next Labour leader is constantly being loaded heavily in favour of elected political elites).

For thirds there was his manifesto, which said over and over again words which only ever meant ‘we’re the kind of people who should run things, so you don’t need details’. It really was pretty obvious.

We really, really didn’t take change to mean ‘repeat this cycle one more time, with everything except the guy in the suit staying the same’

And it has been a fucking disaster. Forget what any Labour or Guardian source tells you, the General Election was really not good for Labour. In Starmer Lore, 2019 was the all-time lowpoint of Labour politics. He went on to all-but replicate the 2019 result, but with added ‘Tories in meltdown and Reform breaking through’. That is literally the only reason he’s in power.

Starmer’s approval ratings have collapsed in a way no-one in politics has ever seen before. To see your approval collapse within few weeks of gaining the biggest majority ever is outside every model of politics that establishment politicos have.

But perhaps the most devastating indication of how poorly Starmerism has worked is perception. I say this often but in politics it is regularly a good idea to look not just at assessments of ‘what a voter is going to do’ but ‘what a voter things everyone else will do’.

Asking what you think others think tells you about what you perceive to be the wider mood. Amalgamate lots of those and you get a revealing picture. Well, three out of five people already think Labour is going to lose the next election. From a base of the biggest majority ever? And coming to that conclusion, what, about ten weeks after achieving a landslide? Go on, give me a precedent or comparator for that.

If the aristocracy thing wasn’t clear enough you ought to have realised that ‘change’ without any policies designed to achieve change just means ‘change the management class’. And to nail it home, he made an entire speech about it yesterday and didn’t want you to misunderstand.

So he ran through all the primary tenets of aristocracy, which basically run to ‘there’s all this really difficult stuff someone needs to do and since I’m the right person to do it, you needn’t worry your pretty little head about it’. He said ‘less politics’ and ‘no ideology’ and ‘don’t worry too much about policies’ and ‘someone has to make tough choices’ and ‘now let me talk about why I’m the right kind of person’.

This is (also remarkably) something of a relaunch. Starmer Mark One has been identified by everyone as failing. His misery is supposed to reinforce his seriousness, his fitness for the job, his wisdom. Except no-one is buying it. We can all see exactly what he’s playing at and it is not what we elected him for.

It is this that is the big mistake of the Starmer Project – we (mostly) rejected aristocracy a while ago. As far as we can understand it, Blair was elected because Major’s Tories were ‘the wrong people’ and had made a mess, and then Cameron was elected because Labour had become ‘the wrong people’ and made a mess, and then Starmer was elected because Tories had become ‘the wrong people’ and had made a mess.

See, from our perspective this is just a load of people telling us they’re clearly ‘the right people’ but who then go on to make a total mess. I mean, it’s basically 2003 since we trusted any of them, and that was only for five years after a preceding decade in which we also didn’t trust them. Which means it’s really only for about five years in the last four decades were everything wasn’t basically shit.

So my guess is that Starmer is actually exactly what he looks like, one of the more minor characters in a novel by Trollope or Dickens, a needy pleb who spends his life pursuing advancement because he wants it rather than because he’s on a mission

But as a man who stands in genuinely imperceptibly expensive suits and glasses (prior to being told, had it ever occurred to you that Starmer was wearing the best gear available to mankind?) which he cadged aff some rich guy like absolutely none of the rest of us ever have in our lives, he is going to have to do more than to ask us to trust him to do whatever he wants for ten years.

That is fine for aristocrats. That is the universal rule of aristocracy – ten years flies by because it’s all freebie tickets and fine dining and the best seat in the house for you with the guarantee that at the end of it you’re still going to be quids in no matter what. Ten years spent on NHS waiting lists is something of a different experience.

Which is to say that there is very little evidence that Starmer is even a basically-competent politician, never mind ‘the best of them’. Which would be fine because really he’s not standing as a politician but as a technocratic manager. Yet is there any evidence he’s a good technocrat? Well, at the Crown Prosecution Service (our only source of potential evidence), you can certainly see how he toadied up to power.

And let’s be honest, that’s what technocrats are really all about. But competent leadership? There really isn’t much evidence. I mean, the thing we keep hearing is that everything that went wrong in CPS when he was there was someone else’s fault. That is seldom what you hear from an organisation with a genuinely competent leader.

So my guess is that Starmer is actually exactly what he looks like, one of the more minor characters in a novel by Trollope or Dickens, a needy pleb who spends his life pursuing advancement because he wants it rather than because he’s on a mission. Those characters never make any kind of impact because their neediness really demonstrates their fundamental weakness.

Starmer thinks he’s Caesar when really he’s a kind of boring Pip no-one wrote a book about or a less mission-orientated Obadiah Slope. He’s a minor character convinced he shouldn’t be. And, like all of his type, when he achieves his goal, he faces a harsh reality he never admits to himself.

He isn’t a main character, he’s an extra. This isn’t an aristocracy, it’s a stitch-up. That’s not change, it’s a substitution. This isn’t a proper democracy, it’s a plutocracy where the rich choose who we’re allowed to vote for. This isn’t the future, it’s the past. And we’re not just going to be OK if we stop thinking about it and trust to The Project. Because it isn’t a project at all, it’s a delusion.

Source: Now we know what the Starmer Project is