Today's Opinion: ‘Starmerism’, the politics of nothing

“You won’t let dad go private, will you?” Surrounded by machines, wrapped with wires, those were the pleas of Keir Starmer’s mother as she lay in the bed of an intensive care unit. His mother, an NHS nurse, died just weeks before he was elected a Labour MP in 2015. She had a lifelong battle with Still’s disease, a severe illness that causes the immune system to attack joints and tissues.

To understand Starmer and his political career, you have to understand how the man he is today came to be. His mother was a sworn defender of the NHS - something that gave meaning to Starmer’s political career. According to Starmer, his mother feared that if things got “really, really bad” there “might be a temptation to try something else”. But, according to the now Prime Minister, “she wasn’t going to have it”.

Those very words explain the progressive Starmer. A mother who was deeply ill, but whose loyalty to the NHS was stronger than the temptation to “try something else”. And for some time, Starmer was also loyal.

You could argue his early commitment to an NHS free from the clutches of the private sector was one of the legacies of his mother. During his leadership election, he campaigned against the NHS outsourcing work to the private sector, making it one of his ‘ten pledges’. His predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, also campaigned to end private sector outsourcing.

But today’s Starmer doesn’t share that loyalty. A progressive who once hailed ‘common ownership’ now turns a blind eye to these once held political views, as he hands the private sector more and more control in reducing waiting lists, for example.

Supporters of Starmer will say he’s staying true to the core principles of the NHS as a health service free at the point of use. But he’s depriving it of the very funds it needs to uphold that core principle. Instead, he’s siphoning public money, putting it in the hands of private corporations like Palantir, which are dubious at best.

And even Starmer’s health secretary, Wes Streeting, has said he’s against the “nostalgia” people have for the NHS, at the same time as he’s received more and more donations from people and companies linked to private health.

Instead of the Corbyn continuity candidate he was painted to be, Starmer is now New Labour 2.0. And just like New Labour, his government is pursuing a neoliberal economic agenda that resulted in our treasured National Health Service owing over £14bn to organisations that are concerned more with making profit than doing the service any good.

This flippant change just shows how politically incoherent the Starmer project is. But it’s not the only example of Labour’s political volatility. In fact, ever since Starmer entered No. 10, he’s been dancing on a nail pin. To date, he’s made 15 u-turns. A u-turn on inheritance tax applied on family farms; a u-turn on compensation for ‘WASPI’ women; a u-turn on the winter fuel allowance cuts; a u-turn on welfare cuts. You could also say that occasional u-turns can be a sign of ‘good government’ that thinks about things. Yet nearly one a month shows a level of political incompetence that verges on the point of ignorance.

And the country realises this. Starmer isn’t just unpopular with the electorate; he’s resented by nearly two-thirds of it. Of the reasons why, they think he hasn’t got a vision. They think he’s dull. From East Ham to Edinburgh North, voters don’t know what he stands for. They don’t even know what he’s against.

They see a leader whose political beliefs are more bipolar than the wintry British weather. Who on one day references Enoch Powell as he envisages an “island of strangers” pulled apart by ‘mass migration’ and cultural anomie, but on the next day, apologises.

Politics, however, plays by different rules. It rewards people who have a vision. Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, Boris Johnson. Their politics aren’t my politics, and I honestly think the legacy of these leaders was one of malevolence, but they had a vision. And the electorate was drawn to them.

On the very first days of the New Labour government for example, the Bank of England was made independent from the government. On the very first days of the Keir Starmer government, well, I don’t even have the faintest idea of what happened, because Starmer’s political ‘mishaps’ have triumphed over whatever achievements he and his government have made.

But it shouldn’t be like this. Starmer was given a massive mandate, and his party was given a stonking majority in Parliament, giving him, in theory, complete and utter control over the legislative process. Yet his political incoherence has left him squandering the very power he was handed.

Starmerites wanted to seem moderate; they wanted to be trusted with power after a crushing defeat they had to endure in 2019. Perhaps it is this that explains Starmer’s betrayal of the ideas he promoted during the Labour leadership election, such as common ownership. After all, these ideas are not new epiphanies unique to the Starmerite project, but instead they are ideas that have long been associated with failure, as Labour was stuck in the political wilderness for fourteen years.

Yet, just over eighteen months since they entered office, the Starmerite project has imploded at the seams. The Gorton and Denton by-election in just under a week risks causing Starmer a whole host of new issues with the Parliamentary Labour Party, many MPs of whom have slim majorities and shaking boots as they head towards electoral and political oblivion in the next general election. And if he haemorrhages major support in the local elections this May, he may be staring down an empty barrel, and an incoming leadership contest by two individuals who far surpass his popularity within the party and amongst the electorate: Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting.

This not only risks prolonging the painful factional infighting Labour has endured for years now, but it also begs the question: what was the Starmerite project but a fight for power just for the sake of power?