The UK general election 2024: A plague on both your houses

There’s an account I follow on Twitter by a guy called Michael Walsh who every time Keir Starmer goes back on one of his promises posts a clip of Cilla Black doing her “surprise surprise” routine. It makes me laugh every time, even though it’s actually fairly depressing. I realise there’s an air of excitement for a huge proportion of the population about the results tonight. And I get it. After 14 years of the Tories who have essentially laid waste to all the UK’s institutions from top to bottom, who wouldn’t be glad to see the back of them? Essentially the Bullingdon Club boys did to the country what they used to do to restaurants, but without the “here you are plebs” throwing around of cash at the end of it. There were no depths to which the Tories wouldn’t descend, to the point where it’s hard to find any public figure now who’ll openly say anything positive about them. For now at least, they’re finished – and amen to that.

But it’s difficult to feel any particular sense of excitement about it when the offer from the party which is going to win the election today by a landslide is undoubtedly the least inspiring we’ve had in living memory. If you removed the word “Labour” from the manifesto and had been in a coma for the last 5 years, you’d struggle to guess it was from the party which gave us Atlee or Wilson or even Blair. It reads most like Cameron’s 2010 programme for government, prior to the surprise austerity they decided to inflict when they apparently noticed “there’s no money left” (despite our economy then beginning to grow again under Gordon Brown) and is notably to the right of Theresa May’s 2017 manifesto in some key areas. It’s a manifesto which says very little, and the bits it does say, on the basis of recent evidence, you wouldn’t put money on actually happening.

There has been some wilful blindness from progressives when it comes to Keir Starmer, which is understandable – if he’s the only alternative to Rishi Sunak, why would you want to fuck that up? But Starmer is the luckiest politician alive. You’ll see a lot of the kind of delusionary analysis like this from Sky’s Beth Rigby over the next few days: “When Sir Keir Starmer told me repeatedly he could turn around Labour fortunes in one term, I thought he was wrong – it now looks like he’s about to be proved right.” But the idea that he turned it around is symptomatic of how much he thinks of himself and how little the media have investigated demonstrably false narratives. It’s self-aggrandising bullshit. Starmer was performing so badly two years ago that the odds on bet was that he was going to be ditched. The key thing which changed was Liz Truss’s disastrous brief spell as PM, at which point the Tory vote collapsed – by an unheard of 20%+. Starmer remains a perenially unpopular figure, with approval ratings below Corbyn’s before the 2017 election, and in YouGov polling only 1% of respondents named him as the reason to vote Labour (compared to 50% for getting the Tories out). It doesn’t take a political genius to understand the reasons for this – Starmer is a deeply uninspiring and authoritarian figure with a sinister air around his control-freakery, whose capacity to pathologically lie is only matched by that of Boris Johnson. Every single one of his 10 leadership pledges has been abandoned, and the 2017 manifesto which he described as the party’s “foundational document” he now dismisses with a laugh as if he had nothing to do with it. His stock answer to why he reneged on his pledges is that the pandemic changed everything. It’s not exactly convincing as an argument for any of them if they were apparently “foundational”, but doesn’t even begin to make sense for some of them: What’s changed about “Defend migrants rights, end indefinite detention and call for closure of centres such as Yarl’s Wood”? He said he’d never talk to The Sun – here in Liverpool! – and then did exactly that, repeatedly. They have repaid the favour, this cancerous tabloid which has caused so much harm over the years to so many people, by announcing last night that they were backing Labour. And I mean there’s an argument for talking to your enemies, but why not just say that? Why say these things if you don’t mean them? Because he cynically used them as a ploy to dupe the membership with no intention of ever keeping them.

Starmer is a human rights lawyer who advocated Israel cutting off power and water to a civilian population, something that he would have known was illegal under international law, and then gaslit critics by stating “I didn’t say that” when there is footage of him literally and explicitly saying that. He plays the race card when he thinks it’ll pull in votes, most recently with the Bangladeshi community. As Pete Sinclair the political sketch writer pointed out, “Starmer is one of the most cynical, dishonest, unprincipled chancers” to lead any party, let alone Labour. He comes across, as someone memorably described him, as a petty and vindictive middle manager, without any sense of a moral core. He was banned from the Society of Socialist Lawyers for as they describe it his “appalling policy positions” including his manoeuvres to force Labour MPs to support a bill to allow ‘intelligence sources’ – including civilians – to commit crimes, his disregard for migrants’ rights, his assault on free speech,  his inaction on anti-Black and anti-Muslim racism and his inaction over abuse of transgender people.

The choice in this election, as even a Conservative peer in the form of Sayeeda Warsi has pointed out, is between a centre-right offer from Labour and a populist-right offer from the Tories. The centre ground of politics has shifted firmly to the right while the centre-left has become abandoned territory. Party discipline is important for a programme to be delivered effectively but it is not the same as, as she put it, “an unquestioning obedience to an ever-narrowing ideology and one that is increasingly at odds with the long and historic tradition of a party.” Labour’s spending plans are pitiful – say what you like about Biden, at least he knew the size of the job in hand – with the IFS noting they will barely touch the sides of the amount of investment needed to even just get back to where we were 5 years ago once you take population changes into account. We have the situation now when a billionaire who has in recent years given the Tories £500,000 has said: “what Keir has done… is taken all the left out of the Labour party, and he’s come out with a set of values and principles in complete alignment with my views as a commercial capitalist.” The candidate standing against the now exiled-Jeremy Corbyn is a private healthcare lobbyist, who has at least 17 million pounds in the bank (as Michael Walsh again asked: Why would he want to be an MP and why would Labour want him to represent them?)  Ex-Channel 4 News Journalist Michael Crick, who says he considers himself to be on the right of the Labour Party, recently highlighted the unbelievably shallow reporting of this election and the party manifestos, with little interrogation of key policies from any of the main players. It was reported this week, late in the day, that private sector lobbyists are embedded into Labour’s shadow cabinet teams, and the party is awash with donations from some of the most dubious businesses with ties to the worst kind of vulture finance. Irvine Welsh pointed out recently that Labour’s main message appears to be: “We won’t change anything, but we’ll be less corrupt, look after your money better and not rip you off so much”. Which would be a start of course. But it’s a pretty low bar.

So why focus on Starmer on today of all days? Because the Tories are done, for now. But what comes next does matter. If Starmer and his cabinet don’t fundamentally change anything, his government will soon be deeply unpopular, and as we are seeing in France, this then leaves the door open for the far right next time. Worryingly Reform is not just picking up support from its natural base, but also from young people many of whom have vocally stated that they feel abandoned under Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party. Paradoxically, the best chance of Labour having any progressive leanings over the next five years is if their majority is small enough that they have to talk to other parties on the left, or indeed the progressive wing of their own party, which while on life support still exists. There seems little chance of that given the predicted landslide. Maybe Starmer will have again lied about everything he’s said for the last four years and actually be more radical. It’s never really happened in history but hey, it’s the hope that kills you. The most likely warning though comes from the American memoirist and poet Maya Angelou – “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” There is no reason to believe Starmer will change. Celebrate the downfall of the Tories. Be glad that we might have people with an ounce of competency in office, but if nothing does really change and neoliberalism continues to run through the veins of our political discourse, and all the evidence suggests that it will (how dearly I would love to be wrong on all this), then they need holding to account, as they’re not going to do that themselves. Sadly the fight for a fairer world doesn’t end tomorrow.

The views of this piece are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the view of Americana UK as a whole. Feel I particularly need to say this this time and give credit to some of my colleagues who are out canvassing for parties including Labour. A thankless task, I have been there!