But this time, we are to believe, is the real reset. The resetters’ reset. Perhaps, dare we say it, the Great Reset? Nope. For all his huffing and puffing about how the status quo needs to change, to deliver something called “strength through fairness” (er, what?) the effect was a very small reset: a profoundly conservative defense, in fact, of the status quo.

But that status quo ended in 2008. This is partly thanks to the tribalizing effect of the internet, which swiftly displaced “IRL” after the iPhone, and which has since fractured the managerial dream of universal culture into a million warring echo chambers. But more fundamentally still, it’s because Britain’s permacrisis began, as Starmer’s own speech acknowledged, with the 2008 financial crash. And the main takeaway from the Prime Minister’s latest Small Reset is how profoundly in denial he plainly still is, about how obsolete his project is in the ensuing politics of scarcity.

Having been trailed all over the press as offering a bold vision, departing radically from the incremental change Labour have attempted so far, Starmer’s Small Reset in fact began with whatever the opposite is of a big, positive pitch. Please stick with me, he pleaded; at least I’m not Reform or the Greens. He didn’t put it quite like this; rather, he warned about “very dangerous opponents” taking Britain down “a very dark path”.

By contrast, in the Starmerite path of light he set out against this ominous backdrop, we can discern Starmer’s positive vision, such as it is. His ideal Britain, the one he begs us to help him salvage from Reform and the Greens, is a “diverse” country characterized by “decency and respect”. It’s a nation broadly in continuity with the historic one, but with some friendly additional ethnic variety that makes our communities more colorful and our food more tasty, while the country as a whole stays cohesive and integrated.

The vision is familiar. It dominated in the latter half of the 20th century, and I think of it as “Floella Benjamin Britain”, in honour of the Trinidiadian-British actress and singer, and (now) Baroness Benjamin. She served as an early, upbeat role model of multiculturalism, ubiquitous on the children’s TV of my childhood, and as a defining exemplar of this postwar, post-imperial national vision. Starmer’s supposedly bold remedies for our ailing state, and the visceral hatred he now commands on every doorstep, reveal his core conviction that nothing divides the good people of Floella Benjamin Britain which can’t be solved by better administration, more funding, or more economic opportunity.

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More “fairness”, more youth schemes, more EU, and more handouts to local governments. It’s all in keeping with a vision of the country that, today, survives principally in leafy suburbs and CBBC casting: one in which there are no truly irreconcilable differences, no wicked problems, no painful tradeoffs. Instead, we blend social democracy with progressive identity politics, to produce maximum fairness and opportunity across the board.

With minor aesthetic adjustments, variants of FBB also appear in Tory and Lib Dem circles too. I would love to live in the Britain to which it would be well-suited. Starmer has put great effort into realizing this country, a project I would appreciate more if I didn’t think it delusional under current conditions.

Before 2008, FBB was just about expansive enough a vision to offer space for multiple, sometimes contradictory, factions within the overall Left. These included the swivel-eyed far-Left, which got behind the identity politics; it also included what was left of the trade unions, now largely repurposed from representing the “old Left” industrial working class to advocating for public sector workers and generous welfare. But the crash ended that coalition.

The industrial working class were already mostly deindustrialized, and the far-Left was already at war with New Labour. Then, New Labour first encouraged the 2000s financial boom, and — when the crash came — bailed out the banks, at the taxpayer’s expense. The decision wrecked the public finances. It also rendered obsolete the social contract for which Tony Blair had only just finished re-engineering the constitution.

The Blairite pact between government and electorates was: let us open Britain up, and in exchange everyone will get richer. With the bankers’ bailout, that died. This single act by Gordon Brown may have, as some claimed, “saved the world”, but the sheer injustice of it, and the lack of accountability, has never fully been forgiven. In the aftermath of this outrage, the electorate has punished every politician who has dared try and govern.

This is partly unspent rage. It’s also partly because keeping even a semblance of that former settlement in place is, increasingly obviously, no longer about a rising tide that lifts all boats. Now, it’s a matter of choosing which groups should suffer in order for others to stay insulated. Who is paying, and who’s still drawing down? That, as they say, is politics: the allocation of resources according to a calculus of friend and enemy.

Starmer might call this framing “division”, just a bad emotion whose remedy is better procedure (or perhaps more censorship). But when people perceive that money is taken from their pay packets and handed to those who don’t work, or who just arrived on a dinghy, scolding them for responding with anger is not going to assuage them. Nor is the promise of a new youth training scheme.

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Nor is trying to fix things within the terms of the existing system, as successive governments have sought to. That is, attempting to delay the inevitable via monetary and human quantitative easing, which is to say: simulating growth by printing money and inflating the population through immigration. But these are the only paths open at present. For the current constitution and economy have jammed the country open, in perpetuity, presumably in the belief that doing so would be to our benefit. It’s a bit like not bothering to fit a door on your house, because you think you’ve abolished seasons and no one will ever try and rob you.

Now, after 18 drafty years living in a house with no door, most have palpably experienced QE making them poorer. Meanwhile, the influx of human QE has chipped away at the sense of “imagined community” upon which the welfare contract was predicated in the first place. And far from behaving like inert economic units in a spreadsheet, the people flowing in via human QE programs have turned out, themselves, to be human. Surprise! People have preferences, loves, families, and political interests.

The result hasn’t, at least not uniformly, been everyone blending into a nice CBBC world that’s still the same Britain just with more takeout. The volume of new arrivals is now so great that in some areas there’s no established culture to integrate into at all: just infrastructure, and a transient, polyglot population. As time has gone on, this has begun self-sorting into enclaves, networks, and — increasingly — ethnocentric political groupings. Again, no surprise: when resources grow scarcer, politics gets more tribal. You can’t afford prizes for everyone any more, and want to focus on your nearest and dearest.

That was the driver of Brexit; that was ignored, and now it’s the driver of everything, including an alarming uptick in sectarianism, often internet-enabled. In turn, combining increased resource competition with rising ethnic Balkanization has severely undermined public faith in the imagined national polity that Starmer’s vision of “fairness” presupposes. How can you ask someone to accept their taxes being spent elsewhere in the country if TikTok videos have convinced them that others are getting more than they deserve? Or even that people in that area belong to a fundamentally different tribe, perhaps even one that is hostile to yours?

In response to this fraying solidarity, so far Starmer’s instinct has been to uphold the vision, and just clamp down on the videos. It’s not working. By contrast, Reform and the Greens both lean into the political fracturing Starmer is desperately trying to forestall. No wonder he views them, correctly, as “dangerous”: these parties aren’t just poaching Labour voters, they’re rewriting the rules of the game.

Where Starmer still dreams of a national, perhaps a universalist vision capable of encompassing everyone, and optimized managerially, both Reform and the Greens are far more frankly and unabashedly political: that is, advocating for their political tribes. The Greens’ tribe is that emulsion of students, Islamists, Third Worldists, and the far Left purged from Labour by Starmer himself. For Reform, it’s the long-ignored British working and lower-middle class, functionally abandoned by Labour circa Blair. Both these groups have assessed, correctly, that there’s no longer any point trying to coexist within a big-tent Labour Party: in the new post-crash politics of scarcity, the Omnicause Leftist and ethnic-majority working class tribes have mutually antagonistic political interests.

Is there a resolution? Almost surely, yes, but not within the Labour Party. The purported speech of Starmer’s life included nothing about asylum rules, or the welfare bill, or crime, or crumbling high streets, or tax, or anything really. It couldn’t, because that would mean implicitly picking a side, and thus admitting that what he calls “division” is actually a set of intractable contests whose resolution will produce winners and losers. In other words: politics.

In due course a political actor of some kind will resolve these seemingly intractable issues, and they’ll do so by making changes at the structural level. That is: we’ll eventually reconfigure the country’s political, legal, and economic constraints to align better with Britain as it is, rather than as CBBC wishes it was. But I doubt the person to achieve this will be the lawyerly, procedural, pathologically hands-off Starmer.

His best idea for saving his own skin seems to be restoring the pre-2016 status quo with more Europe. And, madder and more conservative still, appointing as his finance adviser Gordon Brown, the man who stared at the end of the world, in 2008 — then flinched, and gifted Britain the unreal interregnum we’ve inhabited ever since.

Will Farage be the one? Who knows. But eventually it will be somebody. Since the permacrisis began, a whole generation has reached adulthood with the door on Britain’s figurative house jammed open. These young adults have no memory of things ever having been good, and many are willing to take drastic steps in the hope of something better. 

These young people also came of age during Covid, and have taken on board what lockdowns taught them about the real scope for authoritarian action. What will they do to Britain’s constitution? Perhaps they’ll fit a door. Perhaps they’ll knock down all the walls. Either way, whether Starmer lasts till next week or till Christmas, the real, eventual reset will likely entail the end of everything he sought to preserve.

Wasn’t it strange, he suggested, that after the CIA had failed for years to find Osama bin Laden, somehow a regular camera crew had found his secret hideout and conducted an interview? Bin Laden was a US intelligence asset, Cooper asserted, and something was now afoot. “I’m telling you to be prepared for a major attack!” he declared.

This attack, Cooper asserted, would be blamed on bin Laden. Two and a half months later, two planes flew into the Twin Towers. On that day, Cooper made a number of further predictions: the US would respond with bombs, somewhere or other; and shortly after that, new laws would impose draconian restrictions on the rights of American citizens.

Cooper later made one further forecast: “They’re going to kill me, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. Less than two months later, it happened. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Or perhaps it really was just a case of a far-Right nutjob resisting arrest for fraud. Cooper was certainly eccentric: among many other things, his 1991 book, Behold A Pale Horse — reportedly one of the most shoplifted titles in America, as well as one of the most commonly read in prison — claimed JFK was assassinated to prevent a secret pact with space aliens.

But whether or not his death really was a political assassination, the paranoid, colourful mindset inaugurated by his book is no longer unusual. In the course of what Venkatesh Rao calls “The Great Weirding”, the triumph of digital over print media has brought a sense of reality coming somehow unstuck. In its wake, conspiracy discourse has become so common it barely registers as such. Recent headlines on train derailments in Ohio, Texas, and South Carolina, for example, swiftly coalesced online with the Chinese spy balloon and three other mysterious “lying objects” shot down recently to become a lively new thread in the ever-evolving conspiracy narrative.

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And this mindset isn’t confined to America: according to UnHerd Britain polling this week, 38% of Britons agree that “the world is controlled by a secretive elite”. This rising tide of feral hermeneutics has prompted a great deal of anxious commentary in recent years, as well as a growing corpus of (often themselves highly politicised) censorship regimes and self-appointed organisations dedicated to “fighting disinformation”. But it is a mistake to imagine that myth-making can be always “debunked”, no matter how superficially absurd its claims. And pointing out that conspiracy stories aren’t literally true misses the important sense in which, very often, they are.

I get most of my updates on the conspiracy front from my hairdresser, who is always abreast of the latest twists, from Pizzagate to tortured children in tunnels under Central Park to Joe Biden being a deepfake (you have to look at his ears, apparently). I look forward to our appointments at least as much for her chat as for her skill in civilising my hair. But it would be a gross insult to this intelligent, practical woman to suggest she uncritically views these stories as factually accurate. Rather, they exist in a space that’s neither true nor false, but closer to a mode of thinking that has fallen somewhat out of fashion: allegory.

Today, tales of gods, monsters, and heroism are largely treated as nonsense for kids, or at best confined to the deprecated category of “fantasy fiction”. But prior to the modern world, stories that had both a literal meaning and a secondary one as an extended metaphor — allegories — were a high-status literary form. So much so, in fact, that the cosmos was understood as a kind of allegory, full of secondary meanings written by God.

And you can view conspiracy theories as a kind of crowdsourced allegory: pooled observations about the world, conveyed in story form. This is perhaps easier to see with a bit of historical distance, via an older form of such story: fairy tales. The Grimms’ stories, for example, emerged out of a folk culture profoundly scarred by the Thirty Years’ War: a 17th-century conflict that turned into three hellish decades of rapine, starvation and bloodshed for the peasantry of Central Europe.

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In this context, Hansel and Gretel makes perfect sense as an only lightly embellished account of the dangers faced by orphaned or abandoned children, in a time of brutal scarcity. It’s probably not true that there was ever a witch with a gingerbread house; but there might well have been cannibalism. (There was in the Russian famine of 1921.)

Thus, fairy tales may be directionally true — even if not literally so. And the same goes for conspiracies as well. It’s probably not true that there are mutilated children and dead babies in tunnels under Central Park, kept so their organs can be harvested by Satanists. The following things, however, are true: firstly, that the Satanic Temple wants to secure abortion rights in America. Secondly, that foetus tissue has been used in medical experimentation, drug development and sometimes transplantation. And thirdly, that many American children have had their bodies amputated based on a view of gender theory whose modern proponents lean ever more enthusiastically into Satanic associations and iconography.

In sum, then: it’s not literally true that there’s a secret conspiracy of child-mutilating Satanists threatening the world. But it’s less that this has no relation at all to reality, than that it represents an allegorical, highly coloured folk-interpretation of data points that — while perhaps unconnected — are real. In this sense, we can view conspiracies as a shout of defiance against a defining characteristic of the “educated” elite worldview: its blanket prohibition on everyday pattern recognition. You don’t have to be well-educated to notice normative patterns in everyday life, and sometimes larger trends too; in fact education is a positive obstacle to noticing — for in the liberal world typically reinforced by university education, normative patterns are dismissed as “stereotypes”. The proper attitude to such stereotypes is firstly to insist that they’re socially imposed and harmful, and, secondly, that they should be eliminated.

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And yet, “stereotype accuracy” is one of the most replicable effects in social science. In other words: by and large, at the small scale, folk pattern recognition is on point. And it’s on point, too, in many allegorical narratives that get dismissed as “conspiracy theories”. For example, it’s probably not literally true that the world is controlled by a shadowy elite. But it’s not directionally wide of the mark to notice that the same set of policies keep reappearing, no matter what people vote for. To take one recent example, Britain voted to leave the EU because of widespread objections to the downward pressure exerted by low-skilled migration on domestic wages. But after a brief blip in which migration really did go down and low-skilled wages went up, last year net migration was higher than ever. No one can point to any single factor that seems to have caused it; it’s just somehow, inexplicably gone on happening. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

I’m joking, of course. But the “Great Reset” isn’t a paranoid fantasy either: the WEF website devotes a whole section to it. Central Bank Digital Currencies really do grant governments vast new powers of surveillance and control. The vaccine passport infrastructure assembled during the pandemic really is being touted as a blueprint for future governance. The whole point of the Bilderberg Group is elite collusion, as it is with Davos. The WEF really is proud of having highly-placed members throughout world governments. Underage girls really were trafficked to Epstein Island to provide sexual services, and Epstein was linked to many famous individuals.

I sincerely doubt there are cabals of suit-wearing Dr Evil types, or lizards in human costume, setting out to enslave us all by genetically modifying us, tracking us with microchips, and imprisoning us under “climate lockdowns” to eat mealworm slurry, while distracting the restive masses with UFO stories. But there really are numerous government bodies keen to see advances in mRNA therapies, more centralised digital IDs, further emissions reductions through reduced travel monitored by surveillance and enforced by fines — not to mention top-down pressure to reduce global consumption of animal protein.

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There are (probably) no space aliens involved. Groups such as the WEF are probably not omniscient or omnipotent. But from a pattern-recognising perspective, this is secondary to the directionally accurate sense that the direction of travel is unnervingly post-democratic, in ways that have to do with digital technology, surveillance, biotech, and collusion between government and big business. If, where larger-scale political trends are concerned, this becomes a bit embellished, this isn’t so different from adding a gingerbread house to a plausible 17th-century story of abandoned children narrowly escaping death at the hands of a cannibalistic adult stranger, during a period of widespread famine.

This in turn points to why conspiracies really thrive. It’s not because people are stupid, or gullible, but because allegory is an efficient shorthand for disturbing but indisputably real patterns. For if these patterns form a single narrative, we can go on believing everything could still be induced to make sense; that there actually is someone in charge, even if their plans are nefarious.

And ultimately, this is at least slightly less disturbing than the prospect that the increasingly baroque chaos of 21st-century politics is just happening, without anyone at the helm. For if no one is causing it, that means no one can stop it either. And that is truly frightening.