The eerie and the uncanny fascinate us, whether it’s the abominable snowman, the Loch Ness monster or the Bermuda Triangle. And now we have another great mystery to puzzle over: why is this Labour government so awful? What is it all for?
At the election I was not optimistic about Starmer’s mob, but I allowed myself a brief moment of wondering – even hoping, a bit – that I was wrong. What if Labour actually had the wits and the nerve to jolt Britain out of its decline? It seemed very unlikely, yes, though stranger things have happened.
This government is fascinatingly bad, in a way that attracts your wonder at the same as it repels
But in the end that wasn’t the case. What’s worse, Labour’s tiny, token efforts to address some of our biggest problems – the welfare bill, for example – have been reversed, usually at the behest of their own backbenchers. They have done so much that is bad in their short spell in office that we forget some of the really big terrible things; they get swallowed up in the ocean of awfulness. It’s very hard to keep up and keep the details fresh in the mind, because Labour are always moving on to another desecration.
We’ve all pretty much forgotten, for example, that Starmer removed the whip from MPs who rebelled against his welfare cuts – but then soon after enacted exactly the policy they wanted and reframed it as ‘lifting children out of poverty’. The sheer gall of such behaviour is breathtaking.
This government is fascinatingly bad, in a way that attracts your wonder at the same as it repels. Right now, Starmer is spluttering about X, accusing Elon Musk’s platform of ‘protecting their abusive users’ rather than ‘the women and children who are being abused’, which apparently ‘shows a total distortion of priorities’. He is pronouncing loftily from that hillock of the moral high ground occupied by people disgusted by fake bikini pics, but who didn’t do much more than shrug and change the subject when hundreds of actual girls were being systematically raped, because it was politically embarrassing. The artless transparency of Labour’s faux-outrage is contemptuous. Even with their rock bottom approval ratings, they seem to think we’ll swallow this huffing.
We spend a lot of time on the puzzle of why they are so awful, which perhaps distracts us from the simple fact that they just are awful.
They are different from previous Labour governments, a new breed. Envy and petty spite retain their traditional place in Labour politics, of course, as we see demonstrated in the smashing-up of activities they suspect the wrong sorts are enjoying: trail-hunting, private education, milkshakes, going to the pub. As always, these nasty Labour impulses are dressed up in the mask of social justice and fairness.
But this government’s badness goes much deeper than its predecessors. It’s more than the usual Labour inability to see the world as it is, and to legislate instead for another planet. This bunch are not ideological like their predecessors, or at least not coherently ideological. So for example, they are currently simultaneously fulminating against sexism and misogyny while running an experiment to put little girls on puberty blockers. None of it joins up.
Dominic Cummings’s regularly used sarcastic phrase, ‘the system is working as intended’, often comes to mind. But do Labour really, truly want these outcomes? Let’s take one small example.
After the murderous attack on the Heaton Park synagogue in October last year, Starmer said, ‘To every Jewish person in this country: I promise that I will do everything in my power to guarantee you the security you deserve.’
After this, we discover that West Midlands Police colluded with Islamists to ban Jewish football supporters from Britain. And also that Jewish Labour MP Damien Egan was barred from visiting Bristol’s Brunel Academy, a school in his constituency, due to ‘safeguarding’ concerns, allegedly following a campaign by staff and union activists.
I don’t know about you, but if I made such bold statements and then things like this occurred, and I did nothing about them, I would expect to shortly afterwards burst into flames.
Do Starmer and co. really want the Chinese mega-embassy? Do they want the economy to tank? Do they want to be the most detested government of all time?
I think it’s eerier than an impulse to self-destruction. Another current news item gives us a steer, perhaps – Peter Mandelson’s extraordinary see-no-evil claim that he simply didn’t notice the sexual abuse on Epstein’s island, because he’s gay.
This is a very Starmer’s Labour mode of thinking, and maybe it gives us the key. So often their process seems to be – ‘I am always fantastic, and one of the good progressive people, so although this situation looks bad it cannot possibly be bad … so how, exactly, was I actually fantastic and wonderful this time?’ It’s a bit like Rachel Reeves ‘not realising’ her business rates would destroy the hospitality industry.
Perhaps it’s as simple as this: Labour think the sun shines out of their backsides, and that we should be happy to bask in their radiation.
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