Playing 'The Blair Card'

Sacrificing your morality, integrity and courage might make you more popular with the establishment, it may even win you elections but at a time when the status-quo is threatening the very existence of human civilisation, it must be avoided at all costs.

Intro- ‘New Leadership’

As of April, Keir Starmer was elected as leader of the British Labour Party on a mandate of preserving the previously held progressive politics introduced by Jeremy Corbyn but with a new coat of paint. Instead we have seen a sharp shift rightwards, and a void of substantive alternatives to unending unemployment and poverty spurred on by what seems like the second-coming of the Great Recession. It is because of this that we must examine the appeal of his brand of politics and where it will inevitably lead.

Part 1- A Tale of Two Life Crises

At the height of suburbia induced depression, there is a practice that often consumes the lives of many alienated and discontented members of the middle class. In an embarrassing attempt to clench the proverbial cliff face of a joyful bliss built entirely on the misery of others, they will sacrifice their integrity, compassion, and individuality. They will buy cars with vomit-inducing colour schemes, they will buy lifeless clothes and scatter various hyperbolically priced pieces of jewellery across their wrinkling necks.

For Keir Starmer, age 58 from Southwark, this comes in the form of leading the British Labour Party off the cliff of morale courage and integrity for his own personal gratification.

For Keir Starmer, it is reassuring to be labelled as ‘sensible’ and ‘forensic’, whilst the fabric of society falls apart at the seams; for Keir Starmer is comforting to discuss civility whilst manmade climate change appears to be whittling away the prospects of human civilisation; and for Keir Starmer it is quite fun to dress up and bicker for hours whilst the British welfare state is being rapidly dismantled by an indifferent Tory government.

For the Labour Party, this crisis comes in a similar form to the previously mentioned examples, it has opted (under the leadership of Keir Starmer) to sacrifice all of its morality, integrity and courage in the name of saving the embers of a dying party and clinging onto the faintest hopes of electability, much like a middle-aged suburbanite would drown out their dissatisfaction with jewellery and cars.

Part 2- A New Coat of Paint

In 2015, MP for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership of the British Labour Party; it frightened a lot of powerful people. A multitude of coup attempts where launched in malicious and poorly planned fashion, of course they largely failed and when in 2017 Corbyn faced off with Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, Corbyn managed to expand his parties vote share to astounding levels. This was mainly attributed to his popularity with young people and his ability to tap into the fuming anger coming from the British working class.

In 2019, however, it didn’t go quite so well.

The Labour Party’s parliamentary gains were quickly dashed away by a Conservative campaign spearheaded by current UK PM Boris Johnson dancing around the edges of far-right politics.

After this devastating loss for the parliamentary Labour Party, there was bound to be a significant change in the party approaching in the next election for the leadership of the party.  The two most prominent candidates were Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long-Bailey.

Rebecca Long-Bailey ran an outspokenly socialist campaign for the leadership of the Labour party, campaigning on much of the same policies that were proposed in the last election. Keir Starmer on the other hand pitched his campaign in the direction of progressive politics with a more presentable, ‘Prime Ministerial’ face. He told the Labour Party membership he would stand by such policies as a Green New Deal and putting railway and water into public ownership but in order to salvage it’s electability it needed a new coat of paint. To anyone on the British left it was obvious what this coat of paint was, it was the same coat of paint that prior to the collapse of the British neo-liberal consensus in the form of the Brexit vote in 2016, dominated the British political sphere.

This coat of paint came in the form of a sharply dressed and eloquent Caucasian man, usually in his mid to late 50s, with a wistful, laidback smile as if they can’t see the searing pain in their country whilst they plunder their respective welfare states or overthrow foreign governments. The type of guy who’s primary political concerns include ‘civility’, ‘decency’, meaningless, liberal buzzwords designed to invoke a nostalgia in the British middle class to a better time, a time when it didn’t look like society was falling apart, a time when they didn’t have to concern themselves with the struggles of the working poor who were largely segregated in their council flats away from the suburbs. A time when they were young, and life seemed like it would go on forever. A time when Tony Blair was the Prime Minister.

Keir Starmer wanted to be what came to the mind of the British middle class when they thought about ‘leadership’. Of course Starmer has largely abandoned his supposed progressivism, marked all the more damning by the Labour Party’s recent decision to ‘abstain’ on a vote concerning whether or not MI5 be granted huge supplementary powers in the form of the ‘Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill’. Jarrow MP Kate Osborne described the bill as giving MI5 ‘free reign for torture, sexual violence and murder’. Furthermore, another decision was made for the Labour party to ‘abstain’ on voting for the ‘Overseas Operations Bill’ which makes it considerably easier for military personnel to get away with war crimes. We are now left with a party silent on issues of potential austerity and everyday veering towards a brand of politics that appears to have been rejected by not just the British public but Europe and America at large.

During the pandemic and the recession that is following, Starmer has been utterly abysmal, abandoning all hints of policy for an endless stream of abstaining votes such as the two previously described. His only notable feuds with the government have been centred around extending the lifespan of existing government policies rather than proposing any of his own. They scurry away from difficult decisions in fear of polarising some minute faction of the British public. When Rebecca Long-Bailey, Shadow Education Secretary, came out in support of the teachers union who were demanding as postponement of the school openings, she was fired from her position under the seriously doubtable premise that she had endorsed anti-Semitic material.

However, Starmer has remained in complete continuity in regard to the aspect of politics perceived as the most important to his brand of liberalism, civility, and competency.

Part 3- Liberal ‘Civility’

Since Keir Starmer first entered the spotlight of the public eye when he became the Direct of Public Prosecutions in 2008 he has conducted himself in the blueprint of the concept of liberal civility, his role in government was of course to maintain the much praised concept within both liberal  and conservative circles, ‘law and order’. His issues with the Iraq War were primarily based on its legality, at present his issues with the Conservative governments abysmal pandemic response rely almost exclusively on their ‘competency’ and ‘consistency’

It is not the morale worth of the human being which the current Labour party focuses its arguments around (as the previous leadership did), but an argument centred around following the parameters of civility. An argument around preserving the social order of things, an argument around preserving ‘family values’ as Keir Starmer repeatedly exclaimed throughout his recent conference speech.

The problem with the social order liberals like Starmer are seeking to preserve, of course, is that it’s mired in immense suffering.

-          3.7 million children live in absolute poverty in the UK

-          222,000 renters face eviction

-          And migrant women are charged hyperbolic rates for the necessity of healthcare

For the liberals that seem magnetically attracted to Starmer and his brand of politics preserving this social order might seem attractive but for the countless individuals who suffered through the many burdens of modern British capitalism, it seems like just about anything could be better. When they were given the chance to break off from the European Union and the political orthodoxies it represented it seemed like the obvious option if the alternative was more suffering, more children going hungry, higher rents and more rough sleepers. And when the Labour Party presented the British public with a manifesto that despite its economic radicalism failed to recognise the decision that the British public had made it failed catastrophically. A policy of a second referendum, by the way, which Keir Starmer was one of the key architects of and which alienated much of the British public.

These middle-class liberals have failed to see the fact that the working class have, through countless electoral rebellions across the world, asserted themselves. They are no longer creatures that sharply dressed and eloquently spoken liberals can segregate, they are no longer political cattle to be herded into the left or the right. It is no longer possible to build a genuinely politically stable movement without appealing to the interests of the bottom 20%, those discarded by countless successive governments.

You can’t put the cat back in the bag, you either present a viable, populist alternative or obsess yourself over vanity projects for your own personal gratification, posturing about your perceived morale upper-hand whilst being complicit in the gutting of the British welfare state and the suffering of millions. You cannot sit around scoffing at the news for your own entertainment, pretending as if there isn’t a morale crisis in every county in this country. As if millions of children don’t go to bed wondering where there next meal is coming. As if arms manufactured in Britain don’t implode on the houses of impoverished Yemeni families. As if the very survival of human civilisation is not threatened by a process man-made climate change which our government is ignoring

Part 4- Starmer™

It seems obvious to many on the left, that one of the most depressing and alienating aspects of unfettered capitalism in the form it takes in higher income countries like the UK, US and France is the carnivorous monster that is consumer culture. After economic globalisation and austerity politics ravaged industrial communities in these countries they were encompassed by an unstoppable tirade of commodification.

 As Marx put it, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”; the social fabric of industrial communities was to be mercilessly ripped apart, education was to be deformed into an institution with the sole purpose of improving your economic viability, public services were either under-funded or sold off to private actors and these institutions were to be replaced by a constant stream of unfulfilling products manufactured in low income countries. Even spirituality was degraded into something used to entertain and distract, through televangelists lobbying for their next private jet rather than the liberatory force it often was.

Feeling sad about something but have no strong circle of friends to consult?

Try Oxycontin!

In precarious employment, terrified about your potential eviction and just wanting to distract yourself?

Try a McChicken!

Wanting to get an unfeeling conservative administration out of power but have no empowered labour movement?

Try Tony Blair!

You might be noticing a pattern, all of these things entertain us, distract us, they might even make life seem better for a fleeting moment, but ultimately they end up digging deeper into the gaping hole of discontent.

In 2000 when George W. Bush made his pitch for the presidency and thereafter, he was a brand. The mild-mannered, firm but fair evangelical who cared about family values. He was a product; conservatives used him as a perfect, transcendent figure, a protagonist in the dreary landscape of a post-NAFTA, post-9/11 America. Liberals used him as a goofy spectacle, something to gawk at, as an incompetent buffoon to watch on the Daily Show, a piece of entertainment to distract them. Just like a pringles can, bottled water, a McChicken, or an opioid pill, George W. Bush was there to entertain us, to distract us from the dreary realities of life, he was a product. The powerful used him to pacify us, to distract us, whilst the government cut taxes for the wealthy, enforced a brutal system of mass-segregation and whilst the blood of our fellow human was being spilled in the streets of Baghdad.

In 2016 we had Trump the product, a reality TV star embedded in American consumer culture to hyperbolic degrees, he was the inevitable consequence of the commodification of politics and frankly everything which had been bubbling up into a dangerous cocktail for decades.

In 2020 we now have Starmer the product. It is of course undeniable that Keir Starmer has improved the poll ratings of party, so what has changed? Well as Adam Smith laid out in his theory of supply and demand, a market must supply products in order to satisfy an existing demand. In the case of Starmer it is the demand for the previously mentioned perceived neo-liberal utopia in which a serious of competent, polite, eloquent and sharply dressed monsters drove Britain into recessions, plunged Britain into interventionist wars which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and plundered public services. But for parts of the British middle-class this was quite a nostalgic period. It was when the bottom 20% of the economic ladder, those who did not have enough in population or in money to challenge the establishment which assaulted them and their communities without fail, could be discarded. But a time when they could trick themselves that those who governed Britain did not have contempt or indifference for those they were meant to govern. Keir Starmer is selling Resistance™, the misguided delusion popular within the British middle class that the entirety of a citizen’s morale obligations can be watered down into the solitary act of ticking a box every five years. The delusion that they can be morally permitted to splurge on cars and houses whilst masses of the working poor are left for cannon-fodder by an indifferent government. The delusion that systemic flaws are non-existent and as soon as their brave protagonist takes the wheel all suffering will be non-existent. Even the most important human value, that of dissent, has been stripped of it’s meaning and transformed into a bland product, churned out and mass-produced as an accessory.

An accessory just like the rest of the meaningless crap made in clammy sweatshops that the middle-class use to drown out the screams of the toiling masses, just like the cars with the stupid colour schemes or the designer clothes. Similarly to the existential dread symbolised by the shining jewellery scattered across the wrinkled neck of the crisis-ridden suburbanite, this accessory symbolises a looming sense of existential dread not just for the Labour Party but for the political establishment and the social standing of it’s middle-class supporters.

Like bratty school children skipping wistfully away from their morale responsibilities into a utopian centrist fairy-tale land, the British middle class plugs their ears.

A fairy tale land where GDP has more worth than human life.

 A fairy-tale land where politicians are not really that bad.

A fairy-tale land where they can sit in their newly renovated condos and watch reality TV without a care in the world for those outside of their segregated suburbs

A fairy-tale land where Tony Blair is still the Prime Minister.

Part 5- The Hard Alternative

We don’t live in 1997 anymore, the left no longer has the time to sacrifice it’s principles putting aside the morale implications. The many existential threats to the survival of human civilisation cannot be countered by complacency and compromise, there are times when we must accept our roles as unpopular outsiders. We will be shunned, ex-communicated by the centre and treated as incompetent serfs to be supressed. But history has shown the ability of obscure outsiders to shape the seemingly ill-fated course of history. With the mounting threats of mass-poverty, mass-unemployment, mass-privatisation and mass-extinction there may be no other course of action but to break the from the crowd.

If this effort fails, at least we will have the comfort of our integrity as we leave this burning rock, at least we will not have sat and did nothing as incomprehensible suffering befell other human beings.

If politics is to be compared to a criminal, oppressive card game, the British left has two cards left.

‘The Radical Card’, is unpopular with the establishment, largely shunned by the press and on the edges of British political discourse but when the game seems to be coming to a close and the legs of the table seem to be fragmenting and it seems as if it could collapse it any time, what choice do we have?

‘The Blair Card’, is a tried and tested method of achieving political power, huge swaths of the middle-class will be singing your praises and the establishment will line your pockets, don’t worry about the table you’re playing on, don’t worry about the millions suffering, just concentrate on how great it’ll be when you win!

For the love of God, don’t play ‘The Blair Card’.