In 1897 Gabriele D’Annunzio stood for the Italian Parliament in the seat of Ortona a Mare in Abruzzo, his home region. He stood as an independent, declaring in a deliberately Nietzschean manner that “I transcend both right and left, just as I transcend good and evil.” Instead he called himself “the candidate for Beauty”, and promised a “politics of poetry”.

If the Comandante of Carnaro bought the politics of poetry, one wonders what written form Keir Starmer’s politics owes its debt to. Most certainly a legal work; lawyers like Starmer have mastered — even weaponised — verbose and repetitive documents of coma-inducing dullness. A tax return, perhaps, or the exact wording of a criminal act — dull, grey, plodding, but with a certain frisson provided by the threat of punishment should it be misunderstood. If D’Annunzio was the poet turned warrior, Starmer is the bureaucrat turned bureaucrat – and his political language is pitched to match.

Language has always mattered in politics, and Starmer is no exception. His lingua franca is a kind of doggerel post-liberalism, bastardised to camouflage the intellectual hollowness of his politics — which, if it can be called such, is best described as domestication. Starmerism (which at first appears as grey and ineffectual managerialism) is an attempt to reduce politics to a process which can then be controlled or managed, rather than allowing it to exist in a state of nature as something which — deriving authority from the people — is as alive, unpredictable, unruly, troublesome, demanding and wayward as they are. Starmerism is politics done by a former Director of Public Prosecutions.

In a piece in the New Statesman that attempted to define “Starmerism”, George Eaton wrote that his study revealed “three intellectual pillars … one focused on ethics (the common good), one on economics (“securonomics”), and one on geopolitics (“progressive realism”).”

In response, David Goodhart, who helped to popularise many postliberal phrases, tweeted that “I recall (cringing) my past enthusiasm for these word salads that pass themselves off as serious thinking. Who is against the common good, or realism or security?”

… postliberalism’s greatest failure is, and always has been, its inability to step from the realm of prose into policy

For Starmer to bastardise postliberal language makes sense. Although now more associated with a particular strain of right-wing thought, as Gladden Pappin writes, “British postliberalism tends to be a left-wing phenomenon, couching its goals in the terms of Christian socialism.”

But this language also lends itself to bastardisation because postliberalism itself has remained so resolutely unable to reify itself; postliberalism’s greatest failure is, and always has been, its inability to step from the realm of prose into policy.

Ed West noted in his review of noted postliberal Danny Kruger’s book, Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation, that the book “doesn’t go into policy details, rather it is a short reflection on the philosophy of the Burkean movement within a party that has long been an alliance of liberals and conservatives.” 

The problem with this is that it’s about time postliberals started doing policy; of the foundational texts, Philip Blond’s Red Tory is nearly 15 years old, Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is 5 years old and David Goodhart’s The Road to Somewhere is a year older. Ed, who contributed to a book on Blue Labour in 2015, writes that “beyond meaning culturally Right and economically Left, I’m not entirely sure what it means, especially as it seems to have a slightly different definition on either side of the Atlantic.”

Postliberal practitioners have been largely unable to come up with an idea of rights or responsibilities beyond those which are arbitrated by the state — i.e, through central government provision and taxation. For so much intellectual effort, defining the “bonds of community” solely through the tax take is poor return. 

But the hollowness of postliberal language, unmoored as it is from a meaningful policy platform, makes it ideal to provide linguistic cover for increasingly sinister policy developments. 

One major goal of postliberalism has always been to restore a sense of community to Britain, in particular the “left-behind” parts which, they argue, have been deracinated by neoliberalism. But in a not-insignificant neological development, Starmer has begun using the plural of “our communities”.

This harks back to the multicultural model of “a community of communities”. But, in the context of the recent riots — during which some groups were vigorously policed whilst others were left to self-police on the recommendation of “community leaders” — it raises a set of questions. Who is “my community”? Do I have a “community leader?” How are they appointed? To whom the law? 

Likewise postliberalism has always concerned itself with the rebuilding of, and restoring respect in, Britain’s institutions. Here, again, a subtle change in Starmer’s language suggests a radical policy shift. 

When asked whether he was considering banning smoking, the justification he offered was largely concerned with the protection of the NHS — even rationalising the need to save the 80,000 people who lose their lives to smoking every year in terms of “reducing the burden on the NHS”.

Likewise, Bridget Phillipson’s recent announcement that Labour will scrap single headline Ofsted judgements, on the grounds that they had previously been “high stakes for schools” was anchored in the language of institutional protectionism. 

As former special adviser Rajiv Shah put it, this marks “a subtle — and dangerous — shift from thinking humans are of ultimate value to thinking an institution is.” When he invited the nation, in his inaugural speech, “to join this government of service”, few of us guessed that it would be the people serving the government by limiting their information and liberty so as not to overwhelm what the creaking and ineffectual institutions of the state can deliver. 

Starmer’s is the language of retreat, of managed decline, of — as D’annunzio wrote — “the ancient city tired from having lived too long, the ravaged marble and worn out bells, all those things oppressed by the weight of memories”.

The politics of poetry did not last long in the earthy realm of legislative politics; D’Annunzio served only one term in office. We can only hope the politics of the tax return suffers the same fate.