The madness of the moderate

Would you insist you were on a break if a fire broke out on your oil rig during lunch? Would you refuse to drive a gunshot victim to hospital because your driving licence has expired? Would you refuse to break into a house if you were dying of exposure? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, you might just have the sort of stuff needed to make it as a member of the establishment. 

The British elite is in love with moderation, rule-following and an intangible grey aura of soundness. The favourite word of this class is “sensible”. The problem is that by “sensible”, they do not mean common sense, but a far more rarified quality of blind, indefatigable conventionalism. This worship of the moderate has seen the centrist press lionise a series of ever greater mediocrities, from Cameron, to Sunak, and now Keir Starmer. Each time, the rise of the polished, establishment man, glowing with a sense of technocratic complacency, is hailed as the triumphant return of the “grown ups” after an era of political and economic catastrophe, and an implicit rebuke to the rising forces of populism. 

Yet with no less inevitability, these figures have been utterly catastrophic. Sensible, placid David Cameron permanently hamstrung British public services via austerity, nearly saw Scotland leave the Union, and unleashed Brexit, dividing his party and dynamiting his own government. Likable, gillet-wearing ex-banker Rishi Sunak practically oozed PR firm optimism; a prime minister selected by focus group, precision designed to get things back to normal after Johnson and Truss. Yet it was Sunak who presided over the final destruction of his party, refusing to throw out the establishment rulebook, and failing to turn the economy round or deal with illegal migration in the process. 

The latest unhappy pilgrim on this trail of centrist tears is Sir Keir, and he seems doomed to suffer the same sorry fate. He is now the most unpopular Prime Minister since polling began, only a year into his time in office. The great populist menace that has been just over the liberal horizon for a generation is now screaming into sight in the form of Reform, a party on track for a substantial parliamentary majority, reducing what is left of the Tory party to a smoking ruin in the process. 

Yet, almost in proportion to the scale of Starmer’s plight, the collective hopes of the British establishment are even more fervently focused on his falling star. Starmer’s speech at the Labour Party Conference, in which he singles out Reform, saying that “Farage doesn’t like Britain”, has been widely praised by respectable opinion. In finally accusing Reform of “racism” and “ethnonationalism”, he has set the stage to win over the great, silent majority of sensibles, who need only be told that Farage is a nazi to rally around the (inclusive) flag. 

It isn’t just that Starmer’s speech is futile in the context of the desperate situation of his government, it’s that it is in fact a speech as catastrophic as his own leadership so far. In the same breath that he is accusing his opponents of racism for addressing mass migration, he recounts how “an ordinary, working class woman in Oldham, a Labour voter, felt that she had to prove to a Labour politician that she wasn’t racist”. Attempting to smear the party that discontented working class people are voting for as racist, without smearing the voters as racist is not a balancing act, it is a contradiction in terms. 

The vision of the Britain Starmer presented may have been sincere and heartfelt, but that’s precisely the problem — this is a Britishness that is as shallow as a pond. It’s patriotism that extends no further than the football pitch — “We’re all singing with one voice. Football’s coming home” — and a litany of economic benchmarks: “British graft backed – everywhere … from the steelwork in Scunthorpe … To the datacentres in Essex … And the wind farms of South Wales.” 

Attempting to prove that he is comfortable speaking about British nationhood, Starmer has demonstrated the opposite

Is this a man in deep mystical communion with the British landscape? A person who feels bound by a chain of gratitude and destiny that stretches from Shakespeare to Nelson to Churchill? Who sees the Labour movement as the living spirit of a British people and way of life, unique and precious? Instead, we were given the tragicomic inoffensive sentimentalism about Britishness permitted within the increasingly narrow bounds of liberalism. The sensibles, reliably 20 years behind, are starting to stumble dimly towards the notion that they may have fucked up, that they may be despised, and that they are believed to despise the country which they govern as if by ancient right. Attempting to prove that he is comfortable speaking about British nationhood, Starmer has demonstrated the opposite.

The success or failure of his speech, in the context of vast anti-establishment feeling, should be judged by how well or poorly the sensibles received it. Suffice to say, they loved it.