From facebook
With thanks to Andy Fitchet
A long read on my thoughts about the current speculation about Keir’s future.
Keir Starmer is not perfect. No Labour leader ever has been. But if there is one thing British politics does with astonishing consistency, it is this: it builds Labour leaders up just high enough to tear them to pieces the moment they become a genuine threat to the status quo.
We saw it with Gordon Brown. History has already begun rehabilitating Brown, but during his premiership he was caricatured relentlessly — awkward, gloomy, indecisive, “unelected,” somehow both too intellectual and not political enough. Yet Brown led Britain through the global financial crisis with a seriousness and competence that many economists now acknowledge prevented catastrophe. The very people who mocked him later quietly admitted he had been right.
Ed Miliband was ridiculed for eating a bacon sandwich.
Jeremy Corbyn was treated as an existential threat to civilisation itself.
And now Keir Starmer, despite being a cautious centrist by almost any historical Labour standard, is being denounced simultaneously as authoritarian, weak, radical, conservative, elitist and socialist depending on which newspaper one happens to open.
There is something deeply unhealthy about this cycle. Britain has become addicted to permanent outrage politics. We no longer seem capable of allowing governments — particularly Labour governments — to govern without treating every disagreement, every compromise, every awkward interview as evidence of total collapse.
And yet, beneath the noise, there is a government actually doing things.
This Labour government inherited a country battered by fourteen years of instability: collapsing public trust, crumbling infrastructure, stagnant wages, NHS waiting lists, local councils on the edge of bankruptcy, rivers full of sewage, schools literally unsafe because of concrete decay, and an economy that seemed permanently stuck between drift and decline.
And all this after a Conservative period that gave us not stability but chaos.
From 1979 to 2007 Britain had just three Prime Ministers: Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and Tony Blair. Agree or disagree with them politically, that was an era of relative governmental continuity.
Now look at the present madness. Since 2016 Britain has lurched from David Cameron to Theresa May to Boris Johnson to Liz Truss to Rishi Sunak — and if the rumours and plotting continue, we may genuinely end up talking about five Prime Ministers in five years across this political era. That is not healthy democracy. That is systemic instability.
The Conservatives lectured Britain for years about competence and seriousness while cycling through leaders like a reality television programme. One Prime Minister crashed the economy with a mini-budget. Another became synonymous with scandal and dishonesty. Another resigned after gambling on a referendum they barely understood.
Against that backdrop, Starmer’s greatest crime often seems to be that he is… normal.
Calmness now looks suspicious to a political culture addicted to spectacle.
And despite governing in brutally difficult economic conditions, Labour has already begun to shift the tone and direction of the country. Workers’ rights reforms. Greater investment into green energy and infrastructure. Attempts to rebuild relationships with Europe after years of performative hostility. Movement on NHS waiting lists. Action on housing and planning. An industrial strategy that at least recognises Britain needs to produce and build again rather than simply speculate and outsource.
None of this is revolutionary. But perhaps that is precisely the point.
After years of ideological drama and governmental collapse, competence is beginning to look radical.
There is also something profoundly unfair in the expectation placed upon Labour governments. Conservatives are often judged by intentions; Labour is judged by perfection. Tory failure becomes unfortunate reality. Labour failure becomes moral collapse. Conservative U-turns are pragmatism; Labour compromise is betrayal.
Starmer is trying to govern a fractured country in an age where social media rewards fury over patience, purity over progress, and outrage over realism. Every decision alienates somebody because politics now demands impossible ideological totality.
But government is not protest. It is not performance. It is the difficult, compromised, frustrating work of actually running a country.
And perhaps that is what unsettles some commentators most about Starmer. He does not fit the easy caricature. He is not a revolutionary firebrand nor a Thatcherite ideologue. He is a lawyerly, methodical social democrat trying to stabilise a country that has spent nearly a decade politically disintegrating.
And this is precisely why the current political moment matters so much.
Look at the rhetoric emerging from Reform during local election campaigns. Again and again, the message is not simply “vote for us locally” but “get rid of Keir Starmer.” The entire movement feeds off permanent instability, permanent grievance, permanent anger. It thrives when people stop believing democratic institutions can ever work.
But we cannot simply hand them what they want.
Because if every government is torn down within months, if every Prime Minister becomes politically disposable before policies have time to work, then politics itself becomes impossible. Democracy turns into an endless carousel of rage and reaction where no long-term thinking survives.
There is a profound irony here. The same political forces that helped create years of chaos now present themselves as the answer to chaos. The same voices that cheered on division, culture wars and anti-political fury now ask to be trusted as the guardians of stability.
Britain cannot keep governing like this.
A serious country cannot replace leaders every time opinion polls wobble or headlines become difficult. It cannot endlessly confuse turbulence with transformation. It cannot keep rewarding those who profit from public cynicism while punishing those attempting the slow, imperfect work of rebuilding institutions.
That does not mean Labour should avoid scrutiny. Far from it. Democracy requires scrutiny. But scrutiny is different from sabotage.
The truth is that much of the hostility towards Starmer says less about Starmer himself and more about a political culture that is understandably impatient for change but one that can’t seem to get its head around the fact that it takes longer than 22 months to turn around a failing charity, council or football club, let alone turn around a country where every single public service was on its knees.
