LAURA DODSWORTH
Keir Starmer took to the stage at the Labour conference and delivered a speech that, frankly, sounded — and read — like it was drafted by AI, in a word salad mash up of Yes, Minister’s Sir Humphry and 1984’s O’Brien
He’s no Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair, both orators of undeniable charisma, so we can’t blame him for seeking a little assistance, but the repetition of vague, lofty terms, surreal “new country” rhetoric and emotionally flat, and peculiar syntax was one of his more robot-like efforts.
Renewal, according to Starmer, is “long,” “difficult,” “not cost-free or easy,” and “not always comfortable.” It sounds awful. And at the end of this hard road, what do we get? A new country. But we didn’t want a new country. Can we, in the old, nice country we prefer, just reduce immigration pressures, start exploiting our own natural energy resources, and enjoy a reasonably comfortable and easy life, please?
In this mysterious new country, we get to wave flags proudly. We’re virtually told to wave them! (Yvette Cooper must be having nightmares.) But he completely misunderstands why people hoisted flags on lampposts and bridges and painted on roundabouts up and down the country for Operation Raise the Colours. It was about celebrating the country we have, not commissioning a new one.
Starmer wants us to believe our country is beautiful, tolerant, and diverse. And yes, it is all those things, but those aren’t the values that have defined Britain across generations. Fundamental British values are democracy, the rule of law and liberty. Our island nation has also gifted the word an unparalleled inventive, pioneering, artistic spirit.
“Tolerant” and “diverse”? That’s a command, not a creed: “Be good children, wave your flags for this new country you don’t recognise anymore. Wave harder! Be tolerant, children!”
And “beautiful”? This from the man who is ruining life for the long-suffering British farmer really sticks in the craw. He wants small family-run hedgerow- lined farms run into the ground. To be replaced by what? Big corporate farms? Solar panels? Insect factories? I have no idea, except I have a feeling I won’t like it nearly so much as the patchwork of traditional farming fields that have defined our landscape for centuries.
But it was the claim that he wants to serve the whole of our country, that made me laugh. (Bitterly, mind.) We all know he prefers Davos to Westminster — he said so. To serve in Westminster is an honour, rooted in a tradition of democracy dating back to the Anglo-Saxon witan. Remember the Anglo-Saxons, Keir, that ethnic group so foundational to Englishness, the one we’re told by academics either didn’t exist or is racist?
It’s easier to call critics of mass immigration racist than accept the public’s deep discontent with untrammelled immigration. Serving the country means remembering Reform voters exist, Keir. Reform’s proposal to scrap Indefinite Leave to Remain has resulted in a surge in voting intentions.
Polls suggest roughly a third of the country would vote Reform — more than the fifth who voted Labour. Meanwhile, Labour’s conference speeches full of vindictive and inciteful swipes at Reform appear to have cost the party five points in voting intentions. It seems that Starmer was right about one thing: people really are fed up with the politics of “division” and “grievance”.
Here’s a final stat for you: I ran Starmer’s speech through ChatGPT which reckons that there’s roughly a 75–80 % chance this speech had significant AI assistance — which explains why it sounded like an eerie robot manifesto.
This article (Was Keir Starmer’s Latest Speech Written by AI?) was created and published by Laura Dodsworth and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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Starmer is no Enoch Powell, more’s the pity.
SEAN WALSH
Liverpool happens to be my city of birth and my family is generational CIA (Catholic, Irish, Alcoholic). I get back there when I can, usually for funerals family reunions. I can confirm that as long as you don’t mention Thatcher, The Sun, any Manchester band, the Wirral, or ask a native to pronounce the word “chicken”, you will be more than welcome to visit there. Scousers are rightly celebrated for a quick, if chippy wit, and unique sense of humour. Not least by ourselves.
Hopefully that last quality will help the city survive the invasion by credential-class lawyers, Islington familiars, boilerplate career MPs, lanyard fetishists, lobbyists, and the process algorithm who was slush-funded to the Labour leadership.
For years Liverpool dodged hosting the Labour conference, and was probably resentful at the snub. Now its rejuvenated docklands is the go-to venue for this annual festival of enforced fun/confected joyfulness. It’s probably resentful at that as well.
I’m not sure British politics has seen a speech as bad as Starmer’s to this year’s wakegathering. And before you mention Enoch Powell and “rivers of blood” that speech was “bad” only in the minds of those who never read it or were unable or unwilling to appreciate the deep truths he was advancing behind the veil of metaphor.
The Prime Minister was vindictive and politically maladroit in equal measure. Powell, a genuine member of the British working class, was a trained classicist who thought, spoke and wrote in the languages and metaphors of the ancient world. Powell’s lack of condescension, an unwillingness to dumb down, created room for bad faith and mischievous interpretation.
Starmer, who thinks and speaks the language of the petty bureaucrat has no such defence. Where Powell made his predictions in poetry, Starmer rams home his malevolence in bullet point and crass soundbite.
We expect our political speeches to be unlovely now. Starmer’s went beyond that and managed to be offensive and yet boring all at once. As I said, the Prime Minister is an algorithm, and there are three things you can say about algorithms: they lack memory, have no sense of humour, and are unaware that they are an algorithm.
As he moved through the paragraphs, from one “logic gate” to the next via whatever hard-wired syntax his programmers had selected for the big event, it became clear that the murder of Charlie Kirk had been forgotten completely. The Prime Minister who locked up Lucy Connolly on the basis that words on X cause violence in real life seemed to think it was fine to disapply this maxim when it came to words spoken by him on a national platform in prime time.
If, as seems likely, this contribution to the anti-Farage pile-on, which is turning into a Leftist psychosis, results in political violence it will be an attack not on Farage himself but on a sympathetic commentator or leaflet volunteer. And at this point you can bet that the causal link between words and deeds, so clear apparently in the Connolly case, will suddenly become vague and unquantifiable.
The Left in general has maxed out the “racist” line of credit. It’s not working for them now. People are alert to this government’s systematic linguistic chicanery. Especially in Liverpool, I imagine, where the aforementioned sense of humour comes with a seriousness about language and what words mean. They might have been too busy fighting to watch it, but if they happened to catch it the regulars in my old drinking den would have concluded it was very incompetently delivered bullshit.
Again, algorithms can’t laugh. Not authentically. The irony will therefore have escaped Starmer, that in his obsession with Farage he yesterday turned himself into a warm-up act for the Reform leader who, with his usual opportunistic genius, got to swoop in and play both victim and Prime Minister in waiting all at once.
There is no point wondering how Keir Starmer is feeling today because there is “nothing it is like” to be an algorithm. He is of interest, at a stretch, to anthropologists not psychologists, unless they are of the radical behaviourist school.
I like to imagine he escaped his programmers and the sanitised conference zone and wandered into the city proper whistling an Oasis song and carrying a copy of The Sun.
I suspect not though.
This article (Starmer is no Enoch Powell, more’s the pity.) was created and published by Sean Walsh and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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