“The world as we knew it has gone,” declaimed Keir Starmer in the Telegraph in early April, with all the acuity of someone who, having slept through an earthquake, wakes up amid the ruins. But though he recognized the redundancy of “old assumptions,” his register granted to the new world a familiarity — a hint of farcical repetition, even. “We know this approach works,” he boasted of his government’s investment plans, evoking Third Way pragmatism. The means to stability, he went on, is “national renewal” — a central promise of the New Labour manifesto of 1997, which he has reiterated since 2023.
Almost a year beforehand, once a date for the general election had been announced, Starmer belatedly, but unsurprisingly, set up camp on the political terrain of New Labour. “I think you win from the centre ground,” he affirmed in an interview for the Times. “The centre ground is where most people are.” Tautology, lest we forget, was the centerpiece of the high-neoliberal comms repertoire. But deployed by Starmer, such shibboleths transmit none of the conviction of turn-of-the-century centrist ideologues.
Starmer’s utter lack of conviction is his only remarkable feature, and his awkward efforts to feign some kind of political solidity appear idiosyncratic in an age of performative authenticity. Nonetheless, in cahoots with Labour’s National Executive Committee, he had already demonstrated a certain commitment to the cult of the extreme center by initiating an excision of the party’s left wing, which would be all but concluded during the election campaign. Sheathing his saber, he then rode to power promising to overcome the impasse of Britain’s political polarization and unite the country — a cosplay…
Auteur: Juliano Fiori
