Keir Starmer is halfway to defying the conventional wisdom that successful politicians campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Starmer campaigned in dull, functional prose. He must now find a way to complete the contradiction and inject some poetry into his government.
And not the poetry of another line that has become a political cliche: WB Yeats’s complaint in The Second Coming that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity”. This one is trotted out so much now because there is an obvious truth to it. We live in a political era where passionate intensity has become the preserve of the most malign actors.
Starmer and his Labour colleagues offer to Britain what Joe Biden originally offered to Americans when he won the presidency in 2020: the negative gift of relief. After the tumult and noise of Donald Trump’s four years in office, just turning down the volume was a welcome release. After the chaos of 14 years of tragicomic Tory misrule, Starmer’s greyness has the same immediate effect.
Essentially, the centre left in the UK, as in the US, has provided a political form of respite care. But respite is not reprieve. Seriousness, competence and personal integrity are not nothing. They are necessary conditions for the governing projects that might prove capable of tackling the profound crises of late capitalism and moribund democracy. But they are not sufficient conditions. Something much bigger and more exciting is required: a progressive version of passionate intensity.
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The biggest mistake that progressives can make is to imagine that the system of liberal democracy that became standardised in the West after the second World War is a golden mean from which upheavals such as Trumpism or Brexit are aberrations and to which their societies will naturally return. The stark truth is that liberal democracy is no longer the default setting of western politics.
There are many reasons for this. The vast wealth created by globalisation and new technologies has been hoarded by small elites. The question of who will pay to tackle the climate crisis has generated profound economic and social tensions that democratic states are struggling to mediate. The neoliberal assault on welfare states has undermined public services as bearers of the common good. Migration and identity politics have challenged the notion of a collective “us”. The generational promise of progress – my life will be better than my parents’ – has largely evaporated.
All of these forces are tearing the democratic settlement apart. It is not enough for those who believe in it to offer some breathing space in this destructive process, a hiatus of calm and decency before the gory action movie of nativist reaction starts up again. The left can’t content itself with serving refreshments in the foyer during the interval between lurid episodes of authoritarian populism.
In the case of the UK, one of the many problems of Starmer’s refusal to talk about Brexit is that not only can he not address its consequences – he cannot contemplate its causes. The temptation to keep the B-word out of his political lexicon will be enhanced by the disappearance of so many of its advocates – Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Andrea Leadsom, Ian Paisley Jnr and so on. It is hard, indeed, to think of a successful political project that has so quickly devoured its children, with the DUP served as a bitter little side dish.
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But apart altogether from the innate contradiction of trying to get rapid economic growth without dealing with Britain’s most egregious self-inflicted economic wound, Starmer really should be thinking a lot about Brexit and specifically about why it had such a powerful appeal for a majority of his compatriots.
He needs to think about it not least because its progenitor, Nigel Farage, got more than four million votes. The forces that upended British politics in 2016 are regathering themselves in slightly different forms. No one looking around the democratic world now – especially after watching the rapid rise of Marine Le Pen in France – can dismiss the possibility that Farage could cannibalise what is left of the Tory Party to create a similar far-right movement in England.
To put it crudely, a big part of the appeal of Brexit was scale. It felt like a very big thing to do, just as, later in 2016, electing a celebrity non-politician to the White House felt big. These were moments that gave people who (rightly or wrongly) feel powerless in so many areas of their lives, the thrill of exercising power. They could be, not just the objects of history, but its subjects.
It is right and proper to say that this feeling of power was largely illusory, channelled as it was, through lies and delusions, into projects that benefitted existing elites. But that does not take from the evidence of a deep hunger for a politics of big things. Citizens sense that there are vast historic forces working in and around their lives and that only large-scale gestures can be meaningful responses to them.
It’s not that most of these citizens actually want to destroy democracy. On the contrary, the existence of democratic systems serves to give them a false sense of security. They imagine that they can experience the thrill of transgression while still being ultimately safe from fascism. Politics becomes a kind of adventure holiday: white-water rafting with Brexit and bungee jumping with Trump get the heart racing before you return to mundane reality. The problem of course is that in this trip there is a point of no return, one that is very rapidly approaching in the US.
If Starmer governs as he campaigned – small, cautious, polite, anxious not to give offence or raise awkward questions – his effectiveness will be equally minor. There will be a period of rest and recuperation in which to savour the pleasures of revenge against a series of appalling Conservative regimes. But then the whole show of reactionary performative politics gets going again. Radicalism is risky – but caution is, paradoxically, reckless.