December 5, 2024 - 4:55pm
Few would claim that Keir Starmer is a great orator. After all, he lacks the fast-talking homilies of Barack Obama, the instinctive banter of Nigel Farage, or the magnetic persona of Donald Trump.
And yet, in a speech delivered at Pinewood Studios near London this morning, the Prime Minister captured the state of Britain’s malaise better than any of his recent predecessors. “You look at our infrastructure,” he said, and “it is clear almost immediately that we have long freeloaded off the British genius of the past. Because we won’t build a future.” Mobilising both nostalgia and at least the possibility of a better tomorrow is the money shot of contemporary politics. Progressives and the Left have long deceived themselves into thinking “hope” is more powerful than anger. Really, you need both.
This is where Starmer’s set of six pledges, or “milestones”, comes in. The first relates to housing, and the target to not only build 1.5 million new homes by 2030 but fast-track decisions on more than 150 major infrastructure projects. The second covers living standards, with the PM promising an improvement in every part of the UK. The third is safer streets, and the ambition to recruit 13,000 more police officers, PCSOs and special constables. Fourth is for 92% of patients in England to wait no more than 18 weeks for treatment. Fifth is the ambition to generate at least 95% clean power by 2030. The last of these pledges was new, aiming for 75% of five-year-olds to start school “ready to learn”.
Of course, some of these will be harder than others. The objective around living standards shouldn’t be especially difficult, while the commitment on zero carbon energy actually represents a downgrade on Labour’s manifesto commitment of 100%. But returning NHS performance to that of a decade ago will be no mean feat, while the ambition for 300,000 new homes a year is unprecedented in recent decades. Notably, however, even that target falls short of what is needed. According to one analysis conducted by the Financial Times earlier this year, Britain needs to build 421,000 new homes before 2036 to keep up with demand. That figure rises to 529,000 if current net migration levels continue.
While rhetoric is not action, it can still be instructive — especially when emanating from a figure as dull as Sir Keir. Franklin D. Roosevelt once asked to be judged by the enemies he had made, a phrase which came to mind as Starmer took aim at a range of targets which at times felt almost Trumpian. If the milestones themselves are about “deliverism”, the rhetoric often felt more akin to a Dominic Cummings Substack post.
Most conspicuous was his repeated targeting of the Civil Service, with the PM claiming his plan would land on desks across Whitehall with “the heavy thud of a gauntlet”. He later insisted that he didn’t think “there’s a swamp to be drained here”; but as the philosopher George Lakoff memorably put it, if someone tells you to not think of an elephant you tend to visualise a large mammal with a trunk. By repeating Trump’s popular phrase, even in the negative, Starmer opened a new line of attack against the permanent state. He was also right in saying that too many in Whitehall are comfortable in the “tepid bath of managed decline”. When someone so colourless says something so vivid, it’s wise to pay attention.
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SubscribeAaron, you are delusional if you think TTK’s Labour will meaningfully reform any part of our bloated, useless civil service.
I’m sorry, what?
Starmer IS a creature of the deep state, and has surrounded himself with its creatures, see Chris Wormald, his latest appointee. Claiming that he is somehow gearing up to take on Whitehall is risible. And as for his pledges, frankly what a miserable collection of fantasies they are; green energy? We’re already spending £1bn on curtailment of ‘green energy’. Kiddies ready to learn? (what? trans ideology, CRT?), Safer streets? Sure, better make certain those keyboard warriors are all tightly locked up so the charming local drugs dealer and thieves can go about their business uninterrupted. More police? Of course – there are simply SO many non crime hate incidents to deal with, plod can barely keep up. Building 1.5million houses, but not reforming planning….
This whole article is utter tosh, but what does one expect from a techno-marxist left winger? Certainly not common sense.
A little tongue-in-cheek I think. Mr Bastani is a communist but he hates Keir Starmer because he is not sufficiently left-leaning. Mr Bastani is so left that Marx himself might not be good enough.
The title of his book says it all: the impossible contradiction that is luxury communism.
SE – what evidence do you have to argue against what Bastani has written that you disagree with?
Even half-brained individuals know the deep state needs to be dealt with. Just because Starmer is beginning to even allude to this, does not mean he’ll do anything meaningful. It’s just words until it isn’t.
I agree. Starmer IS a creature of the deep state. His every instinct is to give the government (and therefore the permanent state establishment) more power. The only people he will purge will be anyone in the permanent establishment with democratic instincts that might impede the power grabs.
Tackling the deep state means necessarily means shrinking the role of government which is the source of its power. Starmer is doing the opposite.
” Ahhh.. Starmerde… time for another round of port for the guns and another go at the Stilton, thank you, before the last drive: see that the whisky is teady for when the guns return.. that will be all, now, Starmerde”…
Children have been enrolling in primary school still wearing nappies, unable to use a knife and fork, and very behind on social and language skills. Teachers have been raising these issues since the lockdowns ended, during which their development was curtailed. It’s not about gender ideology ( a whole new kettle of fish).
Yes, and that is about parenting: the lack of good parenting and the lack of actual parents – not teaching.
How do we fix that without facing up to the issues of feral families, the drug economy, single mothers, absent fathers, and most women needing to work? The left certainly doesn’t know.
Wake up please.
The least politically neutral civil service in anybody’s lifetime.
A self-induced trauma that’s been going on for nearly 6 and a half years. Most of which have been spent outing Brexit supporting Tory ministers and Prime Ministers.
No longer fit for purpose. If Labour soul-mates can’t get a tune out of it then we may as well join the EU, lock stock and smoking burden-sharing, and outsource the lot to Brussels.
75% of 5 yr olds ready to learn? More destruction of the family, children shouldn’t start school until they’re 7 and had love and nurture in the home and not farmed out to surrogate mothers in state sponsored baby growers. More Marxist substitution of family life, it’s all state indoctrination and women as cheap biddable labour.
Families are already struggling with childcare costs now and you want to make them pay for an extra few years of it by starting school later?
Note how this target – how do you measure “ready to learn” ? – is carefully chosen so that it’s impossible to actually check if it’s been met. Likewise “on track for 90% clean energy”. He’s clearly learned from the success of the Ed Stone with it’s equally vague aspirations.
If only Starmer were ready to learn …
Starmer’s best plan would be to get somebody else to come in and sort out the Civil Service. Then, if it works, Starmer can bask in reflected glory. More likely it would fail because of political interference but Starmer would have a ready made scapegoat.
But who would have the will to tackle such a thankless (but necessary) task? Probably no one in the current Labour Party.
Perhaps baby steps are required? Defund the BBC before tackling the Civil Service or the NHS.
Aaron Bastani’s most idiotic article yet.
Starmer does words. Only words. And not very well at that.
He’s also on his nineteenth relaunch. In five years.
So why would you believe a word he says ?
It’s more like: why would anyone believe a word someone else (probably Morgan McSweeney) has told him to say.
Bastani says we should “take notice” when Starmer says something apparently ‘radical’ – as if!
He is the best dressed leader in the Anglosphere plus Franch thanks to Lord Alli. This counts for something.
“The objective around living standards shouldn’t be especially difficult,”
What weird world does the writer live in?
Living standards are falling every year. People are getting poorer every year.
I get it! It’s a pastiche of Starmer.
I’m sorry for my negative comment earlier. I thought you were serious. But, of course that couldn’t be so.
ha ha ha, ha ha ha
Instead of having to build 400k homes why don’t.we.simply not admit the next 400k unskilled migrants into Britain?
That would be cheaper and preferable by every metric.
I disagree with Bastani. Should Starmer wish to be a true populist, as a lawyer he is ideally placed to set a stake into the heart of the deep state. He only needs start by reversing the constitutional acts of Blair – particularly the Human Rights Act and the Supreme Court in order to start recapturing parliamentary supremacy. Whilst the torpid nature of the state bureaucracy would remain, technology could support change here, as would the guts to take out key Civil Service mandarins who obfuscate progress. What is stopping elected governments in the first instance is legislation that permitted decisions to be removed out and up from Westminster. As the old saw goes: you don’t pay a plumber for knowing how to tap, but knowing where to tap.
I see what he did there “taking on the deep state” just forgot to add, into his government.
Nothing witty comes to mind, so in all brevity: Starmer is part of the problem. Like in America, the UK needs a major system upgrade.
Article suggesting Starmer a bit more thoughtful and ‘gets it’ not going to play well with the Unherd base that’s created a caricature for itself it can chuck stones at. Half the time why some folks pay the subscription so crack on.
Getting stuff done is difficult. Rhetoric and Slogans aren’t. Tories and the Right been showing us that for more than a decade. One wonders though if much like perhaps it’s only Labour that can fundamentally reform the NHS and be trusted to do that it may be same for elements of Government depts? Starmer being clear he knows he has to take this on or he’s doomed. That’s an important revelation.
Starmer has decided that he has to be “seen to be acknowledging” that the blob needs to be tamed. Whether he has any intention to do anything is still a complete mystery.
I hope he takes them on, after all, “only Nixon could go to China”.
When I was younger and employed in the private sector I thought, like you, that everything should be run by the state. Then, as a consultant, I started working for public sector clients and, in the years since, have worked in every Whitehall department, local government, quangos and the NHS. This experience has left me with the unshakeable conviction that the only hope for this country is to dismantle the whole thing and return the powers that aren’t simply abolished to local government.
This view, unlike your uninformed take on the private sector, is not based on a ‘caricature’ but on extensive personal experience.
Starmer is not going to reform the state any more than any of his predecessors have.
Here’s what will (not might) happen: having run out of business taxation options and lacking the courage to take on suburban home owners, Starmer will follow Brown’s example and turn on the printing press. There will be inflation. Homeowners will get richer, the public sphere will become more squalid. Millions of the small businesses which provide most of the employment and create most of the wealth, will disappear.
Starmer is our Macron. By 2029 Britain will be where France is now. Watch and learn.
Now whilst my time has been spent in the RN and NHS I was certainly aware the missiles on the Frigates I served were private sector made, as of course were the Ships. In the NHS again everything we use is private sector made.
I think it personally helps you to characterise the debate in the way you do, yet occasionally missing out how privileged you yourself were. It’s just too simplistic HB and you lose something in the argument as a result.
As regards the concentration of asset wealth and how specific policies have driven that even more – QE, Covid loans and furlough etc, I concur. But you focus on the suburban home owner who may be asset rich but cash poor, whilst I’d zero in much more on the real wealthy who have accumulated and benefitted much more. In some regards you are a great foil for them as you distract away from that concentration.
The ‘real wealthy’ have billions. You have trillions.
Nobody believes anything Free Gear says, like so many on the
progressiveregressive left what he says is the opposite of his actions.I predict Labour will not serve a full term and will be forced out of office after the IMF bail out they will inevitably have to ask for.
Starmer IS the deep state personified.
The ‘Deep State’ is nothing more than a confected term favoured by those who realise it’s a nice tool that generates more clicks than if you write ‘long serving, mid rank civil servants and NHS managers’
Exactly. It is a catchy term that means very little. It’s like “woke”.
Not so. It also includes literally hundreds of NGOs and quangos you’ve never heard of whereby the metropolitan graduate class milks the state of £billions that ought to be spent in Rotherham and Blackburn, not Chiswick and Highgate, and then uses what’s left after their bloated salaries to lobby governments for more.
I very much doubt he will go as far as to take on the British bureaucratic Bloc, as M Gove described it.
For instance, since June, the British civil service has already gone back to working from home en masse.
What his handlers have done is advise him that the only pledge that will please Labour voters now is to build homes for young buyers.
But the reality is that the young are one portion of the vote, but the big left-liberal electoral Blob are existing home owners in the cities and suburbs.
The likes of Starmer are basically in a coercive, controlling relationship with the administrative state. They know it’s bad for them but think, if they stay, things might change.
They won’t. So, instead, Starmer will tinker and make speeches and deploy his spin doctors while Morgan McSweeney goes slowly mad and plots his post-Westminster memoirs / Substack / lobbying company.
Oh come on, Aaron. You know as well as the rest of us that the reason Starmer has no target for immigration – legal or otherwise – is that he isn’t going to do anything about it at all. Stop the gaslighting.
What on earth are you talking about? And what are you doing writing in Unherd? Surely the Guardian, Politico and Huff post would be the ecosystem of choice
Idiotic article. Starmer is the deep state
Beware, don’t underestimate Starmer.
Ha’s a pure deep state guy, but he is also very intelligent and bold. As much as I disagree with his policy options, he identified an energising program that provides him a solid progressive policy platform.
Whether you like it or not, what he promises are really 6 points where his constituencies can expect effective action from Downing Street, and there is no reason to underestimate him
While he currently polls quite low, as soon as he starts delivering on housing and public services his approval ratings will rise as fast as the new affordable apartment complexes he builds.
They’re coming to take you away..
Ignoring housing and kitchen issues sent tories -300 seats.
Why don’t you think that solving the housing crisis would not give that any seats to Labour ?