Starmer’s Gone: What Now?

So Long, and Thanks for All the Rapes

The problem with a Post Starmer Labour.

JUPPLANDIA

Keir Starmer resigns.

For weeks Keir Starmer stood at the edge of the roof, with over a hundred Labour MP’s urging him to jump and more than a few prepared to push. Now he has jumped. Just two years after securing a gigantic parliamentary majority, the triumph of 2024 stands as hollow testament not to the idea that this Labour leader was ever popular and well-liked, but to the reality that the British political system is utterly broken.

Only 19% of the eligible to vote British electorate backed Labour in 2024, and only 33% of those who voted did so. Yet this secured 411 seats and a 174 seat majority. It was the third largest majority ever secured by the Labour Party, equipping their leader and new Prime Minister with the ability to rule almost as an elected dictator, assured that the massive surplus of Labour MPs could force through any legislation they pleased.

But nobody liked the man who had delivered it, and almost everyone except him and his closest allies realized from the start that this was not the mandate he pretended it was. His personal approval rating was low, barely in the positive, and the Labour majority rested solely on a combination of Tory collapse and utterly disillusioned apathy. The biggest vote in 2024 was the absent vote, the percentage of people who didn’t even bother to take part. And the huge majority came with the lowest vote share of any majority (even the narrowest) since modern records began in 1830.

What little real support Keir Starmer had in 2024 quickly evaporated. In two years he made himself the most hated and disliked Prime Minister of modern times, something of a feat given the visceral loathing Thatcher provoked in the Left, the tainted sleaze and scandal reputation of the Major years, Blair’s post-Iraq War unpopularity, the dour grimness and PR disasters of Brown’s brief period as Prime Minister, and all the internal battles, shambolic stumbles and false dawns of the Conservative PM’s who succeeded Blair.

Recent history, really stretching back to Thatcher’s removal in 1990 but increasing in pace and frenzy ever since, has with the exception of strong popularity in Blair’s first term and a half, seen almost every British leader despised by large swathes of the populace and an inordinate number of them unable to control dissent or retain affection even from their own party MPs. Thatcher-ousted by coup and leadership challenge in 1990. Major put in place without an election, secured one surprise victory, but then mired in scandal and sex stories and heavily defeated. Blair-ushered in as the Great Hope, but subject to Brown’s glowering ‘alliance’ and eventually forced to resign in favour of his Chancellor. Brown installed without an election, and then immediately rejected when one was held.

And the pace only increased after that. Cameron petulently resigning in July 2016 after losing the Brexit Referendum. Theresa May subject to multiple leadership challenges and forced to resign in 2019 after failing to secure a Brexit withdrawal agreement. Boris, hit by COVID and Partygate and forced to resign in 2022. Liz Truss forced out by a coup and an orchestrated run on the pound and gilt market turbulence which she (accurately) describes as a Deep State conducted plot assisted by the Bank of England. Rishi Sunak, again another person to become Prime Minister without facing a General Election, and immediately rejected when voters were given a choice.

A litany of leaders installed without public consent, removed by coups and plots, undermined by both factions behind them and disasters they fronted, delivering chaos and disaster and relentless decline, Labour and Tory alike, in an accelerating frenzy of coronations and removals that begin to resemble the rapid successions of the dying Roman Empire more than the electoral transitions of a functioning democracy.

Amid all this chaos, Starmer made himself the least popular of the lot with a consistent approval rating of -46%. Some of the others dipped to similar depths, but none of them were as unpopular as Starmer or so deeply unpopular for so much of their time in office.

The truly remarkable thing though is that the Party that has now pushed him off the ledge shows every sign of continuing all of the things that made Keir so hated. And this is after Tory self-destruction showed them where that ends up. Having learnt at least that protracted leadership battles are unpopular, none of them rushing to crown King Andy realize that installed, selected leaders, Prime Ministers put in place with no public say in a very obvious Party coronation, are just as likely to earn public resentment.

Voters want a say in who the Prime Minister is. They know that without that, the new leader has no more legitimacy than the old one. An election is the bare minimum requirement when presented with a new leader.

The rapid succession of Prime Ministers speaks rather obviously of a political system in deep crisis. It mirrors what we were once told could never happen under Britain’s first past the post system. It recalls the Italian, European or even the South American examples of governments failing and falling in quick succession. And Boris Johnson’s 2019 victory and Keir Starmer’s 2024 victories both tell us that even healthy (Johnson) or huge (Starmer) majorities don’t provide stability anymore. Three years later Johnson was hated and gone. Two years from the start of his premiership Starmer is the same, another failed and hated former Prime Minister.

We will soon have enough living former PM’s to form a football team with a fully stocked substitutes bench as well. Not a very popular team, obviously, but we have the numbers to play.

The underlying issue, beneath the fact that all of these leaders (with the sole exception of the one who was removed quickest) did things that justifiably earned hatred, is the fragmentation of Britain itself. We are often told there is a roughly 50-50 split between Left and Right in the UK. That may be be true if you add the votes of every Left party and Right party up. But its much more complicated. The Left is now the middle class mainstream (the Establishment), and the Right are the people most likely to be representing the working class. More than that, the division is not binary anymore.

The apathetic non voters form their own group.

A third of the country goes Left, and to a version of the Left that includes many extremist positions. A third goes Right, with quite traditional positions being designated as extremist. And a third sees no point in voting for anyone.

This means that whoever gets in, at the very start and at their very best, will only be liked or moderately liked by 33% of the country. At the start now, 33% of people will intensely dislike them or hate them. And 33% will be totally disillusioned, totally indifferent, and totally convinced that any government that gets in is worthless.

Is Andy Burnham going to change that?

No. In fact everything that was deeply wrong about Starmer is going to be the same or worse with Andy, or indeed with any Labour successor, especially since the Makerfield result and their own desperate indoctrination tells them, falsely, that Starmer was the only problem.

These are people who believe that the product (Labour policies and actions) is good, and it was just that the salesman (Starmer) was disliked on the doorstep. That is their rationalization and the whole impetus behind forcing Starmer to resign and rushing towards the coronation of Andy.

They have got this completely wrong. While it’s true that Starmer is robotic, irritating, and has an adenoidal, nasal whine to his voice, while his look and manner is very much that of the ultimate pen pusher, bureaucrat or soy-flavoured nerd, such presentational flaws become irrelevant if you do things that people want and deliver success and competence.

People didn’t grow to hate Starmer due to him looking and sounding like a nerd. They hated him because of the lies, the incompetence, the two-tier injustices, the hypocrisies, the national economic suicide, the very profound realization that he represents a class of Establishment figures who hate the majority populace of the nation they rule.

The failure as Director of Public Prosecutions in the Blair government to deal with grooming gangs, the failure as Prime Minister to want to create a public enquiry, the efforts to suppress investigation in both instances, tainted Starmer as a facilitator of the horrific mass rape of white children. The draconian responses to white protest, and the bending of the knee to black protest, all cemented the realization of double standards and unjust priorities, that this was a human rights lawyer only ever concerned with the lives and rights of people who aren’t White British. Other policies like the aborted Chagos deal, the Chinese embassy scandal, the removal of the Winter Fuel allowance, and the constant praising of Islam, cemented a growing awareness that other people, other priorities, and other nations had far more of Keir Starmer’s loyalty and affection than his own country, flag and people possessed.

This was a person who continually presented himself as a representative of a moderate middle, while delivering what was always a partisan and ideological extreme and an extreme that was highly authoritarian towards one group while constantly excusing and accommodating another. In this Starmer was simply typical of his class, his profession and his Party, and none of those attitudes and the policies that flow from them will depart with his resignation.

Every Labour leadership contender holds the same set of hypocrisies in their hearts, and is tied to the same policy platforms and oppressive methodologies that made Starmer so unpopular. There’s not much of any ideological battle within the Labour Party except in terms of degrees of madness. Paul Embery might be suggested as a lone figure left in the Labour movement who might understand why Starmer was detested. For the rest, the shift from Starmer to Burnham (or Streeting, or Rayner) is a sales team shift rather than a reckoning with their own sins and flaws.

It will repeat the Conservative shuffling of the deckchairs on the Titanic without resolving any of the key issues, and the most fundamental issue of all, which is that the entire middle class, university educated, still comfortable Establishment don’t have any understanding of, any sympathy towards, and any ability to engage with and reflect, the views of millions of people who aren’t happy with Net Zero, open borders, mass immigration, asylum hotels, increasing crime, Woke ideology, two-tier policing, State censorship, or any of the other examples of modern injustice and error forced on them.

Every Labour contender, just like Starmer, will view concern on each of these real issues for ordinary people as ‘Far Right’ and ‘unacceptable’ while telling themselves that a new face selling the same policies will work. Burnham might add more taxation and expensive nationalization into the mix, as additional wounds for the rest of us to suffer. That sort of thing still play well in towns where everyone works for the State.

But Makerfield is not the whole country.

So long Keir, and thanks for all the rapes. If only your rancid policies, vile Party, and endemic middle class treason, was departing with you.