Having no desire to read his pamphlet I’m grateful you saved me the effort – but having sat through his dismal “Fork in the Road” speech at the beginning of the year, your critique comes as no great surprise.
Having learned the lesson from Miliband, at least he only wrote a pamphlet, instead of carving his 10 Commandments Principles on stone tablets. I rather suspect he and his team rattled off 9 completely unoriginal platitudes for Sir Keir’s “Starmon on the Mount” and then, having kicked around various ideas including something about not coveting your neighbour’s ass, settled on that old favourite – ‘Patriotism’. But as a sop to Islingtonians who might otherwise have suffered a pearl-clutching fit of the vapours, diluted the toxicity of the idea by distinguishing it from ‘Nationalism’.
Earlier in the year, Starmer’s woeful media advisors let it be known that, among their attempts at rebranding would be, “The use of the flag, veterans, dressing smartly at the war memorial etc give voters a sense of authentic values alignment.”
Sure, that’ll win round Red Wall voters, just by Starmer cynically draping himself in the flag because a focus group told him (much to his surprise) that most people don’t actually despise Britain, or wish to see the monarchy abolished.
And I’m sure his professed love of democracy will convince all those who watched his 4 year campaign to thwart Brexit.
Starmer really isn’t getting much help from his team, if that’s the best they can do. Blair’s odious-but-undeniably-slick media machine is a distant memory. The current Labour press team is embarrassingly amateurish by comparison and clearly don’t understand the concept of “Under-promise and over-deliver”. They breathlessly previewed his aforementioned speech, promising it to be “on the scale of the 1945 Beveridge Report”, and then had their man deliver a sub-Miliband yawnathon, droning on in increasingly dull and uninspiring platitudes, hidden within which were only 2 discernible policies – both of which had already been suggested (and better) by a Conservative think tank. Rather than a “Fork in the Road” it was more “Follow the same path, only 4 paces behind”
What Starmer and “Starmerism” – if that really is a thing – have yet again failed to answer is ‘What is the current Labour party for? Whose interests do they seek to serve and promote?’
It’s certainly not workers. Except maybe some of those in the public sector. Most of the working class, whose interests the party was founded to serve, have long been an embarrassment to the Labour leadership. Emily Thornberry’s Van & St George’s Flag tweet, and Gordon Brown’s encounter with Gillian Duffy, were just moments that publicly laid bare a view that has been prevalent within Labour HQ for years.
John McTernan, Blair’s advisor, put it most succinctly when he dismissed working class supporters as the “lumpen mass with their half-formed thoughts and fully-formed prejudices”, and urged the party to ignore them and focus instead on ethnic minority voters, who could be attracted to Labour by stoking their sense of grievance.
The Labour front bench of recent years, whether NuLabour centrists or unreconstructed Trots, seems to have an agenda completely at odds with the hopes, fears and aspirations of their former heartlands – yet still imagined those voters were theirs to command by right.
Nothing that Starmer has written, said or done is likely to win them back to the cause. Though plenty that he’s said and done will have persuaded former supporters that he is a duffer. A North London fauxialist who seems to have wafer thin policy positions backed up by no principles whatsoever.
Even the cheerleading Starmtroopers over at the Guardian are struggling to back him – with several conceding that he’s going nowhere and his only hope of gaining ground is for the Conservatives to do something to lose support.
Starmer is an uninspiring, charisma-free technocrat, with no instinct for leadership. The Tories will never need any campaign poster against him, other than showing the Leader and his gobby deputy kneeling to BLM.
The sole reason for Conservatives to kneel should be in thanks for only having had to face Miliband, then Corbyn and now Starmer, and praying their good fortune holds.
As for myself, I’d sooner have a functioning opposition, that will force the Govt to up their game. For the last several years it has been like playing tennis without the net, against a man without a racket …. who insists your Ace is merely a social construct.

Admittedly I haven’t read the whole 12,000 (or 14,000 if you believe the Guardian – but who does these days?) words, but lol at the reported “allow the public to take back control of their lives” from the leader of a so-called opposition party who has repeatedly goaded a maliciously incompetent government into ever more restrictions and tyranny. A Labour government would now have us all locked up for life – the public know that, Starmer’s MPs know that, Guardian journos know that, Starmer himself knows that, but none of them have the moral courage to stop it.

Great article, loved the ‘torpid air of British politics’