He is in a hole that is too deep to climb out of. The prime minister’s persistent unpopularity is best understood as the result of abundance: there is simply, in Starmer, something for everyone to deplore.In policy, he has taken stances that have established him in the minds of many people as devoid of principle and compassion.
He's still got the shovel in his hands, Nesrine, and there's no sign yet that he's finished...
On Gaza, Starmer got it wrong from the start. From his early assertion that Israel had the right to cut off water and power, to refusing calls for a ceasefire and then cracking down on protest (a move now judged as unlawful by the high court), the prime minister positioned himself against a huge domestic swell of distress.
'Huge domestic well', Nesrine? Hardly. Only emanating from those people we should really be looking to remove from the country at the first opportunity, the ones we regret ever inviting in....
And then there is Starmer himself. Personality alone does not make a politician, and God knows we have suffered enough from big personalities such as Boris Johnson – but you need something. Not necessarily fireworks and charm, but at the minimum just a sense of tangibility.
Starmer is impalpable; not in the sense that he isn’t there, but that he is hiding. He doesn’t dream, he says, nor does he have phobias, nor favourite novels. He communicates in only the most generic terms, in staccato sentences using repetitive themes – “change” or his working-class roots – connected by meaningless “let me be clears” and “make no mistakes”
I agree here, it is strange that someone who was a lawyer could be such a poor public speaker.
Who is this person’s constituency? Not the left, to which he has made clear in policy and in purges that this is not its Labour party. Not the right, which will never be at home in Labour, no matter how many people it deports or how much capital it courts. And not the centre any more, for which Starmer’s incompetence and lurching from one debacle to the next is becoming increasingly hard to rationalise.
His constiturncy appears to be himself.
No comments:
Post a Comment