Transcript

 

Note: Some light edits. The episode is a mix of scripted and ‘off the cuff’ remarks. Obviously, the latter read a bit weird. Section titles added.

 

 

 

Uncle Jim drank heavily, and he liked to drink and drive. All the men in the family did. They weren't especially good drivers at the best of times, and when driving drunk would regularly crash, get into scrapes, damage the car, injure themselves.

 

But that was just the way they did things. Some of the younger members of the family had warned that this wasn't the best idea, but their concerns weren't addressed, weren't even listened to. 

 

One day, the inevitable happened.

 

Jim, blind drunk, swerved hard off the road and wrapped his car around the tree, fatally injuring himself and severely injuring his three children in the back. The larger family gathered around him in hospital, clinging to life on various machines, clearly on his way out. The children were upstairs in ICU. Maybe they would make it. Maybe they won't. 

 

The mood was a little awkward. Dumbfounded, even. What had happened? He had seemed like such a promising driver, after all. No one could understand how it had got here.

 

Bad luck, perhaps? Perhaps there was some sort of family curse? After all, this kept happening. No one really seemed to know. And eventually, after patting him on the hand and saying nice things that he probably couldn't hear, it was time to drive everyone home again.

 

Naturally, we would want some shots beforehand to do so. You've got to get revved up to drive, after all. Uncle Bob brought out a bottle of brandy and started pouring all the men in the family a drink.

 

“Shots! Shots! Shots!”, they chanted as they downed them. Some of the younger members of the family were a little uneasy. One of them suggested that, perhaps, given what had just happened, this wasn't a good idea.

 

This was not heard over the shouting of “shots!” Another decided to be brave. They stood up and said they would not want to be driven home by someone this drunk.

 

This outraged Uncle Bob. He roared at them. “How dare you? How dare you? Who do you think you are? Would you rather be driven home by a crack addict? Everyone has a few shots. Don't you know that's just what needs to be done?” 

 

Astute readers will by now have guessed I am making an extremely unsubtle parable of British politics. The Starmer government in the UK is about two years in now and has pursued in that time a strategy that can be best characterised as appeasement. In response to a rising far-right, in response to international fascism demand that we have closed borders, an ethno-state, that we expel huge numbers of migrants or that we functionally prohibit trans people from existing in public, the response has been, well, if we give them a bit of what they want, they'll calm down, shut up and go away. Their voters will come over to us and we will govern gloriously forever. 

 

I parody really only a little. If what people want is less immigration, then by God we'll give it to them. We will crack down brutally on illegal migrants who benefit the country. We will make the lives of refugees harder for no discernible reason and we will first ban healthcare for young trans people, then make it functionally very difficult to access for adults, and finally we will enact what (through a very complicated mechanism but nonetheless) what amounts to a national bathroom ban prohibiting trans people from using the toilet of their gender and in many cases, in fact, the toilet of their birth sex. 

 

This has not worked. We (meaning the Labour Party) have not gained any votes from the other side and meanwhile our own coalition has hopelessly fractured.

 

And I think now we're at a terminal point. After horrific by-election results and local election results, after months of dithering and dancing around the edge, it's finally safe to say we're done: The Starmer project is over and it was a resounding failure.

 

The man is still Prime Minister, but it's clear that that's in name only. The party would likely have moved on him already, but their preferred replacement, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, needs to return to Parliament to be eligible, so there's an odd and awkward stay of execution as we wait to see if he can win a by-election to do so. But even if he fails, the writing is now on the wall.

 

 

What’s the opposite of learning from your mistakes?

 

No one thinks Starmer will be PM a year from now, much less at the end of a full term. This is a catastrophic failure for a leader who came to power with a historically large majority less than two years ago. It is also utterly, utterly predictable.

 

Starmer was brought low by scandal and finished off by dismal local election results, but a more capable politician would have survived these. Had he retained at least his own base, he could probably have soldiered on. 

 

He's on his way out, in short, because he is astoundingly unpopular, liked by no one and loathed by many. And yet (even though I've predicted this all the way through, I still find it a bit shocking to see it) nothing has been learnt. Starmer himself is apparently being, on the low, advised by Morgan McSweeney again, the aide who was in many ways the architect of this strategy.

 

Now that Starmer doesn't know what to do, he's seeking his advice again. Commentators do not seem to have learned at all. My usual example for this is John Rentoul, the chief political correspondent of The Independent.

 

He's someone who, towards the beginning of Starmer's premiership, said repeatedly he would succeed or fail by whether or not he reduced legal migration and was harder on refugees. Starmer did that. Starmer failed.And Rental's response has been bizarre. He's claimed that he actually failed because he didn't cut disability benefits enough. It is an astounding lack of accountability. An astounding inability to say that you got it wrong, to search out the one progressive thing that Starmer did, and say, “aha, that's where it all went wrong!” There's no argument given, no evidence. It's just asserted.

 

Tom Watson, a senior Labour politician, wrote an incredibly arrogant substack post after the Manchester by-election, furious that anyone would suggest that the Labour Party's lurch to the right had lost them votes with communities that contain many immigrants and many people who have family who are immigrants. He just couldn't bring himself to even entertain the idea. Tony Blair, our former Prime Minister—one of the most successful British politicians of the last hundred years—has just published a 5,000-word essay urging the Labour Party not to go left, saying that this is a perpetual delusion, that we think when the country goes right, we have to go left.

 

Never mind that Labour is losing far more votes on its left flank than its right. This is not the sort of thing Blair chooses to engage with. And, of course, John Rentoul (who is an avowed Blairite) said he thought this was getting it exactly right and praised Blair's intervention.

 

Most troublingly of all, Burnham, who has been held to be something of a centre-left alternative to our current track, already, in advance, before he's even won his by-election, much less become PM, seems to be caving to the reactionary-centrist worldview too. His team has already signalled that he will, as PM, support the Home Secretary's brutal and illiberal reforms of the immigration and asylum system. When asked about the recent EHRC code of conduct (a.k.a. the bathroom ban) he said that, yeah, let's do that, but do it in a compassionate way. I'm sorry, but there is no compassionate way to do that, and I would honestly have more respect for him if he said that more overtly.

 

He's also walked back progressive positions he used to hold on rejoining the EU and on benefits. The one, to be fair, the one area that he does offer some limited hope on is he's maintained his commitment to voting reform, saying that he still does think we need to switch to something like proportional representation, however, that, in his view, it would happen after another general election held under the current rules. So, even there, a bit of a long and winding path, but it's not nothing.

 

Overall, though, on the social issues that I've mostly focused my analysis of UK politics on, he's caved already. Like, apparently, in order to become PM in this country, you have to disavow every single thing you've ever said in your life, and the press is enthusiastic in forcing people to do so, and then we wonder why our PMs keep failing. What could possibly be going wrong? 

 

Now, to be clear, I don't think this story of appeasement and base fracture is the only reason the Starmer project failed. It's one of the big ones. I think, overall, this isn't complicated, and our analysis, you know, doesn't have to be doing some huge multivariable regression or something. I would say, here's a simple story, the Starmer project failed for three reasons.

 

1. He was elected on a change mandate, but committed to governing within the Tory economic framework, meaning he had set up his success criteria on delivering economic benefits, but was unable to do that. 

2. He has poor communication skills and zero charisma. 

3. He lurched radically to the right on immigration, refugee, trans rights, disability rights, and so on, directly harming core groups within his party.

 

Now, the first of these was obvious and predictable before the 2024 election, and I can cite myself predicting it (that they would win big, but then really fail in government because the problems of the country would become their problems, and they'd ruled out the necessary reforms to fixing them.) The second, communication skills and charisma, is what it is. Maybe Burnham can do better here.

 

I mean, it would be difficult to do worse. I suspect, though, if Burnham does become PM, which is far from certain at the time of recording, I suspect he will get at least a modest polling bounce. And he, you know, I'm always a bit underwhelmed by Burnham, but, you know, he doesn't sound like a malfunctioning AI in a person suit. He is a step up. 

 

A caution would be that communication skills aren't just about ‘talking good’. That's part of it. They're also about having a coherent and compelling narrative about what is wrong with the country and how you will fix that. And I haven't heard that from Burnham yet, but he will probably do better on two. 

 

It's the third, though, the appeasement one, that I think we need to put a spotlight on, because this is bizarre, the lack of learning from mistakes here.

 

My example of the family learning that drunk driving is a bad idea was me being a bit silly. But, honestly, given the totality of the failure of this approach, I don't know how much of a hyperbole or exaggeration it even is, because what we have seen here is appeasement, a sort of governing philosophy of reactionary centralism, as I call it, in its purest form. We needed to harm vulnerable minorities to win over reform voters, and it was presented in exactly those terms.

 

The logic of Appeasement

 

“If we retreat to the comfort of fairy tales, a nightmare will follow, as those who follow us will have none of our restraint.” The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said in a statement last month, two months ago.

 

She was pleased with the line, using it as the poll quote for a Twitter post. This is in the context of the most radical reform of the UK asylum system in the last 70 years. What the Home Secretary is describing as restraint would make us one of the most illiberal developed democracies in the world with respect to refugees.

 

Her plans include inflicting on those fleeing war or persecution a 30-year wait of rolling reapplication deadlines before they can settle, during which time they, and potentially their children with British citizens, would be subject to deportation whenever the government deems their home country safe, which they can do at any point and for any reasons. Mahmood told Labour MPs to support this, not by appealing to its merits, but telling them that not doing so risked a Farage-led government deporting refugees, quote, to their certain death. End quote.

 

I could spend some time talking about how a senior government minister thinks following international law is a fairy tale, her reforms would take us well outside of both the spirit and the letter of the refugee conventions, something she overtly lied about, or how this is well to the right, not only of any position the Labour Party has ever taken, but to the right of any post-war Conservative government. But for my purposes, I just want to call attention to the justification on its own terms. The argument is directed to her left, using those to her right as a threat.

 

It's this, or reform, who will do even worse. For one thing, the idea that the basic mechanism she's trying to effect could be wrong has never even occurred to her. I think it's clear when you hear them talk that reactionary centrists have never even understood what the criticism of their position is.

 

What Mahmood is saying is, you may not like this policy, but the alternative is worse, and it is a sort of childish stubbornness to let the best be the enemy of the good. It's better to have some brutalisation of refugees than even more. But what we are saying is not ‘oh, well, this is the policy that we really like, but we haven't even considered if people are voting for it.’

 

What we are saying is, ‘you will not win anyone over with this’. You will not bring any reform voters over. That argument just hasn't gone through her head.

 

I don't think she's considered it. I don't think Starmer has considered it. Which is bizarre given the scale of decisions and the consequences of those decisions that we're looking at here.

 

I mean, just think about this from a more immediate perspective. Why would either group buy this, either those to her left or those to her right? The left are being dismissed as daydreamers, sentimental, unrealistic. The left is always dismissed this way, no matter how sober or data-driven we are, and consequently it tends to annoy us.

 

Conversely, though, reform is described as dangerous and pernicious. Why would their voters find this appealing? And this was a couple of months ago, well over a year into the total political failure of this strategy. Labour had lost half of its voters and sunk to mid-teens in the polling average.

 

It seemed so blindingly obvious to so many of us that appeasement wasn't working. And yet they stuck with it, and they are sticking with it, even as its failure is utterly undeniable

 

The world’s worst poker players

 

One of the fundamental questions to ask of any strategy, be it in politics, in business, in a board game, is how exploitable it is.

 

Put simply, if your opponents knew how you were making decisions, how much could they take advantage of that? And I was thinking about this a bit. Of the coincidence of exploitability and obliviousness that is reactionary centrism. And to sort of find some way to frame this.

 

Because I was thinking, ‘I've seen this before, this really reminds me of something’. And I eventually clicked what it was reminding me of. And so, if you'll excuse me, I have sort of a long analogue here, but bear with me.

 

I sort of reframed it in my head, and I thought, not how do they, the reactionary centrists, appear to us, their left critics, but how do they appear to the fascists? How do they appear to the people who are exploiting them? And then it came to me. They’re marks. This is a term (I don't know if it's still used, but a decade or two ago, this was how we talked)

 

It is an archetype of someone at a poker game, who the more experienced players clock that they are someone they can win money off, but the person, the ‘mark’, themselves, is unaware of that. 

 

I used to make some money playing poker in my university days. There was a big influx of players into the game back then. This was called the poker boom. A lot of people started to play when poker started being televised and you started getting videos of tournaments became much more mainstream. I found that many of these new players thought the key to winning was betting big on bad hands and being more cautious when they drew good cards.

 

There's a certain intuitive plausibility to this. When weak, you represent strength. “Bluff”, in poker terminology, to scare people off. And then when you're strong, you represent weakness. “Slow play”, in poker terminology, to draw people in. 

 

But just think about how exploitable that is.

 

Once other players clock that's what you're doing (and experienced players will clock this reasonably fast) they know they can use you to “get paid out” for their good hands as your big bets actually signal weakness. As obvious as it sounds, you should invest resources and take risks when you are strong. “Big bets are for big hands.”

 

Bluffs and slow plays have their uses certainly in specific circumstances but the core of the game is to get as much money in the pot as possible when you have the strongest hand and to walk away when you don't. 

 

Yet, here's what's interesting. The players who started poker with that strategy would very rarely adapt. They would sit in a cash game all evening, essentially acting as ATMs for the more experienced players. And they kept playing that way, even if you told them. (Outside of competitive play, it's bad form to give people advice at the table.) But even if you told them why they were losing money, they'd reject it. “It's all about bluffing”, they'd say. As if they hadn't just spent hours paying for the better players' bills and funding their nights out. 

 

 

Theory and identity

 

Part of this is the theoretical framework they'd been given. A lot of them had read a book called Super System by Doyle Brunson, who was a very, very successful poker player at the time. Brunson urges a very aggressive style of play. You know, put your opponent to the test. If you get a vibe of weakness, put a big bet and push them out, right? Now, Brunson was actually a good player who knew when a bluff worked and knew when not to do it. And all of the new players just took that mean bluff in every single hand, which is not a viable strategy. 

 

More than that though, I think Brunson was writing for another age. Brunson had come up playing poker another generation before, in the 70s and 80s and so on, when most players played far too cautiously. Texas Hold'em, which is an unlimited betting system, was fairly unknown and unfamiliar. People were used to capped betting systems, and so they got scared by all-in moves. They tended not to bet enough.

 

They tended to... Their play was just too weak. When Brunson came up as a poker player, you could bluff people out all the time. However, by the time of the poker bloom, everyone had read Brunson, everyone was betting too aggressively, and so the strategy didn't work anymore.

 

What is optimal poker strategy depends on how frequently and how aggressively the other players at the table are betting. There's not some abstract best way to do it. And there were better theories out there. Someone like Harrington, I think, has a good series of books on how to play poker well, that was much more adapted to where poker culture was at during the poker boom. And this is well over 15 years ago now, so I assume the game has moved on since then. I wouldn't play for money now because I kind of don't know what the just general culture and betting patterns look like today, right? But that was one of the big reasons that people had read this book that perhaps in its day was quite good advice, but they'd applied it in an uncritical manner to a world that no longer matched that.

 

But there's something more than that, I think. I think it was also that they gravitated towards Brunson, and they gravitated towards this style of play, was because that strategy validated a self-image that they had started playing poker to reinforce, if perhaps only to themselves. They liked the idea of themselves as confident, clever, savvy, decisive, aggressive.

 

Bluffing someone out feels macho in a way that biding your time, folding bad hands and waiting for good doesn't. Changing strategy would invalidate the story they had in their head about themselves. So they couldn't do it.

 

You see where I'm going with this, right? Reactionary centrists have a model in their heads that the cultural right have legitimate grievances, and that these can be addressed and you'll win them over, to take the issue off the table, as Labour MPs love to say. As a result, they focus their time, their communication capacity, their core legislative pushes, on their weakest hands. They choose to compete, not just on their worst issues, I think immigration could potentially be reclaimed as an issue for liberals, but within narratives and framings that obviously disadvantage them.

 

Accepting the premise that the main problem with the country is too much legal migration, as Starmer did in a speech a year ago, and that this is something that ordinary politics has failed to address, is a framing that inordinately benefits the far right. Again, think about how exploitable that is. If you, as the far right, know that your centrist opponent is committed to trying to give you what you want, you just keep asking for stuff.

 

If they deliver, you collect your weddings and ask for more. At no point do you give them what they want, i.e. your vote, or you stopping being racist, or you accepting a multicultural society because immigration has fallen a bit, because why would you? Part of what you want is their annihilation. You want an end to ordinary liberal democratic politics.

 

That's your end state. But you'll happily fleece them for everything they have first, because you're getting... they're moving along the road with you, right? Eventually they'll run out of road, but you won't. Here's another way of thinking about it.

 

Overbetting in poker, routinely committing too many chips to bad hands, is giving your opponent what they want. Reactionary centrists are giving the fascists what they want. You want us to reduce immigration. You want us to brutalise refugees. You want us to push trans people out from public life. And in doing all of this, you create formal and informal mechanisms of control that will then be used by the rest of us once the fascists take over.

 

It is no accident that what has functionally become Trump's secret police ice is nominally at least an immigration enforcement agency, right? A lot of these issues are about building up the tools that the fascists will need to rule. And they can get that without even being in power, without even winning an election, because they just demand that the reactionary centrists do it for them, and they do. I think like poker players, they're applying a theoretical framework that was developed for a different age.

 

In the early 90s, even the early 2000s, the theory of politics was that you targeted the median voter, that there was a broad, centrist chunk in the electorate, and you tried to go after the person in the middle, and you won elections on that basis. Maybe that was true, to an extent, for Blair or even Cameron. It is not true now.

 

When parties try to do that now, they get annihilated. You saw this with the Manchester by-election, you saw this with the Welsh results, with the Scottish results, to a degree with the English results. There are increasingly two global hegemonic cultural teams, a fascist one and a progressive one, with internal variation, of course, but two great cultural black holes around which all else is pulled into their orbit.

 

We can either have death camps and deportations, or tolerance and public transit. Those are the two options. Nobody wants reheated Thatcherism anymore, and electorates intuitively get that reality in a way that elites are just failing to.

 

What they are doing—and I think Blair's intervention (which I might write about actually) is telling for this reason—is they are trying to operate a 90s playbook when we are well into a 21st century that no longer resembles that world at all. Just like the poker players, right, what is optimal poker play will depend on how everyone else at your table is playing. What is an optimal political strategy will depend on what your opponent is doing, on where the electorate is at, on what the culture looks like.

 

There's no such thing as just a perfect political strategy in a vacuum that's applicable to all circumstances, but they seem to think that there is. And again, I think for the same reason. Like hapless poker players, reactionary centrists keep losing and doubling down, and when you point it out they just can't hear it.

 

And I think for the same reason. They have an image of themselves that their strategy validates, and that I think they probably got into politics to serve, and they can't let go of that. I think reactionary centrists always see themselves as the cleverest person in the room.

 

Like they've understood the savvy, pragmatic compromises that need to happen, and that's how they like to see themselves. So they just go on, casually throwing away our side's political capital, the well-being of the groups they were entrusted to protect, thinking themselves sophisticated, clever people, while all the time being the political equivalent of a mark. Someone everyone but them knows is exploitable.

 

 

The moral inversion

 

And again, it was entirely predictable and predicted that this would not work. For one, it would fracture our own coalition. So many of us called that out in advance. Look at it this way: There's a strategic inversion here. Systematically choosing to fight on the terrain most disadvantageous to you is not normally considered good generalship.

 

There's also a moral inversion. In day-to-day ethics, it is expected of people that they show respect towards their friends and try to protect them when they're in danger. As Liberal Currents executive editor Samantha Hancock-Li puts it, "...reactionary centrists like Starmer are simultaneously bullying towards their own supporters and grovelling towards their opponents." This is the exact opposite of how we normally expect people to behave.

 

It makes them seem abject, contemptible, weak. Neither worthy of respect nor affection, much less loyalty. Everyone is slightly grossed out by them, even the far-right who are getting what they want.

 

Because these are real material harms our side is being asked to suffer. In addition to refugees not being allowed to truly settle, millions of legal migrants will, under proposed changes, have a long and expensive legal limbo retroactively imposed on them. Care workers, for example, who have been given every reason to expect that they will receive permanent status, called indefinite leave, to remain in a year or so, may now instead have to go through 15 years of visa renewals.

 

The rules of these are obtuse and ever-changing, increasing their insecurity, and they are expensive, usually costing in the thousands. The upshot is many of the people who ensure our parents can spend their final years in comfort and dignity, many of those people will be pushed into poverty for no intelligible reason whatsoever. It is estimated that 90,000 children of legal migrants could be lifted out of poverty by simply not implementing these reforms.

 

But apparently this is something we have to do to appease the right. Likewise, toilet access for trans people is often framed as a silly side issue, something that, like, is a bit of a cultural concern but that doesn't really matter. In practise, right now, in the UK, scared trans people are meeting in groups and talking about we should start putting together lists of where it is and isn't safe for us to go.

 

I don't need to draw the obvious parallels to other systems of segregation and oppression. Many are delaying bathroom use, attempting to work from home, limiting how much they go out. Meanwhile, instances of harassment, abuse, and violence directed at people, cis and trans, perceived to be using the quote-unquote wrong toilet, have skyrocketed.

 

This is a radically oppressive state of affairs that the government chose to create. The thinking seems to be that trans people, or the family and friends of immigrants, should just tolerate this active oppression, that their experiences don't count, their material harms must be swallowed, uncomplainingly, to satisfy the entirely fictional fears of fascists and press-induced hysteria. This is not an ask a political party can realistically make.

 

Most people understand lesser evil voting. I certainly do. But there are limits.

 

And that we would hit those limits was so utterly predictable. Last year, when Starmer's direction of travel was becoming undeniable, I wrote, you'll forgive me for quoting myself

 

This is the limit of the appeasement. We reach it when policy concessions cease being normal political compromises intended to achieve and express a set of values, and become instead a validation of the convictions of the opponents of democracy. A party that passes this point loses the ability to persuade because it has conceded that its own side is wrong. Blair won a further two terms following his landslide in 1997. Keir Starmer may not make it through the current parliamentary term.

 

So I will have to say, as immodest as it sounds, I called it. Really, no different at all, then, to what I'm saying now.

 

All politics involves compromise, but the compromises Starmer was asking his base to make were a bridge—several bridges—too far. They were validating the far-right's narrative. It felt a bit outlandish at the time, saying that he wouldn't make it through the current term, but here we are.

 

 

The nature of fascism

 

We were not right by accident. We were right because we had correctly analysed the way politics was working. It sounds gauche to say it, but it is necessary.

 

Those of us who thought appeasement would be a political failure were correct in our analysis. Our models of the world proved much closer to it. Our first point was that this would fracture our own team, and surely this has been validated.

 

Our second is in some ways more fundamental. Reactionary centrists have just not understood the nature of the enemy. Even if, somehow, they could have berated their own voters into going along with this, they wouldn't pick up any reform votes by doing it. They would just harm a lot of people for no reason. But it would avail them nothing. To go back to the poker analogy, the experienced players never give the mark his money back.

 

This is a lesson that people all over the world are learning, and we must too. Modern fascism cannot be appeased. What they want is not real. What motivates them is a perverse fantasy of racial purity, and there is nothing that could ever satisfy that. If you give them power, they will eventually destroy themselves and everything else around them. And you've seen that.

 

Again, there is no point at which the mark is given his money back. Zero percent, that is a statistic, of those who voted reform at the last election are planning on voting Labour now. Zero.

 

And it's not only that. A little over a year ago, myself and Alasia Nuti of York University wrote an open letter to the Starmer government urging them not to go down this path. The well over 200 UK politics academics signed, warning them that this would only embolden the far right.

 

It is not just about electoral outcomes. Instances of racism in our society, of racial harassment, of even core workers like NHS nurses have skyrocketed. I mentioned anti-trans harassment. Everyone I know who is LGBT or non-white has some sort of story to tell and feels, for the most part, feels like it's getting significantly worse. This is the world that people have to live in. We are radicalising people by validating them.

 

And again, all of that was predictable and predicted, and we have to hammer that home. I think perhaps one final reason why reactionary centrists in the Labour Party specifically couldn't hear what we were saying is they perceived every criticism from their left as an unreasonable and unreasoning, disaffected, Corbynite dead-ender who was never going to accept anything that they did. My view here is nuanced.

 

I mean, I think on the one hand, the party clearly needed a change of direction after Corbyn. On the other, disaffected Corbynites did clock the direction of travel of Starmer early, and I'm all about giving people credit when they got things right. And I think they got this right.

 

I think that what the Corbynites got wrong was that Starmer would win big in the 24th general election. I think what they got right was the character of the man, that this was a liar, that this was someone who had no moral compass at all, and I think we should credit them in being right about that much. But with that said, plenty of those of us who warned that this would not work were not in that camp.

 

 

Told you so

 

I thought, and I predicted, and I can show receipts for this, that Starmer would win big in 24, but then it would immediately collapse around him. That was my prediction. I'm just eyeballing this, but of the 225 academics who signed that letter, they run the gambit from far left to mainline Labour people to Liberal Democrats to Greens to whoever.

 

A broad ideological cross-section of people thought in advance that this would not work, because it was obvious that this would not work. And this is who we should be listening to now, and this is who we should be empowering now. A broad cross-section of the left that includes mainline Liberals in the Liberal Democrats or the Labour Party, that includes traditional democratic socialists, that includes the far left.

 

I think, like I said, the Corbynites have been right about a certain amount, and I think they should have a seat at the table. I said before that I thought there were probably three reasons for the collapse of the Starmer project. Failing to deliver economically, lack of communication skills, and appeasement.

 

I think a lot of political commentators have really only clocked the first two. “I don't understand why Starmer is so hated”, is something I've heard a lot of centrists say. “Sure, he's a bit bland, and the country isn't great, but where's this real venom coming from?” Well, to use my short list, you know, the venom is coming from number three.

 

He would probably be merely disliked if he had failed to deliver economically and was a bit bland. If that was all it was, he'd probably still be not doing great. But the venom, the hatred, has come from three.

 

From... I think people who say, “oh, I don't understand the hatred of Starmer” haven't even thought about what day-to-day life, what it is like to live as a trans person in this country. And this is one of the reasons I think we have to bang this home that we were right about appeasement. Because even in pieces that accept that left concerns have been ignored and the Labour Party needs to reorientate itself, even when we are written about sympathetically, our concerns tend to be presented as largely symbolic. That, oh, ‘Starmer needs to draw a clearer rhetorical contrast with reform’, which he certainly does, but that's not my primary concern.

 

My primary concern are the things that you are actively doing that are hurting people. And one of the consequences of that is that you're losing what I would call left activists, people who are strongly politically knowledgeable, politically engaged, people like me who maybe have a medium-sized following on social media and yell about it in politics all the time, or people who volunteer for causes. We're maybe not a huge percentage of the population, but we matter because we're the people who often less politically engaged people get their perceptions of politics through.

 

Most people are not spending 10 hours a week reading about political developments, but if the person they know in their family or their friendship group who is doing that is suddenly really furious about Starmer, even if perhaps they don't listen to every detail, if that's someone whose values they broadly align with and whose opinion they broadly trust, they're going to absorb that opinion and they're going to start processing events through that. And this is something that the Democratic Party has learned and sort of adjusted for, is even if you think the sort of Bernie rebellion got some stuff wrong, you can't just accept a status quo in which a big chunk of very politically disengaged people hate you.

 

You have to make bridges there. You have to offer olive leaves, right? Just as a matter of coalitional necessity. And that has, whatever the opposite of learning that lesson is, is what's happened within the Labour Party.

 

One of the things the Corbynites have always said is that they (meaning Labour leadership, Starmer et al) they would rather have fascists in charge than us (the left) in charge. If it was the choice between Farage or giving us the keys to the Labour Party again, they’ll choose Farage. They believe they are entitled to rule and that they will burn it all down rather than accept their left critics.

 

That might have sounded like hyperbole before the 2004 election. But we have to sort of hand it to the Corbynites—this is seeming to be correct. At the very least, those who pine for a return to the 90s, to the “sensible centre”, who keep on trying to force onto electorates something that they clearly nobody wants anymore, seem to find this a hard choice.

 

The idea, as I said before, is either death counts and deportations or tolerance and public transit. That's the choice. And it is such a condemnation of British political and press and elites that one, they struggle to even understand that that just is the choice now. And two, if they could accept that that is the choice, seem to find it a difficult one. That is such a condemnation. 

 

So I think what has to happen is we have to discredit them. They'll never learn. But we can point at them as a warning. And this is why we have to say we called it.

 

We got it right. Even if it feels immodest. Even if it feels like you're being a jerk.

 

I have this realisation in the American case. I think a lot of Americans who've argued for Trump, who have created the resistance there, that resistance did not come from nowhere. It came from people saying appeasement has failed and we have to fight back.

 

And I think one of the ways they were able to make that argument for their viewpoint, for their approach, was by saying we were the ones who were right. We were the ones who predicted it would get this bad. And that works as political messaging because people who might have followed politics less closely, might be apathetic, are starting to clock that something is going badly wrong here. That this isn't just politics as normal. And as they're looking for who to trust, it is very important for us to stress these people got it badly wrong. Do not trust them.

 

 

They’ll never learn

 

We got it right. And we got it right for reasons that were clear at the time. And again, this is obvious. This is all so obvious. It's obvious from the other side of the Atlantic. It has become a common talking point, both for American mainline liberals and American lefties alike.

 

I'm not just talking like the hardcore left in America. Fairly normie, resist libs make this point a lot now, that Starmer is proof of concept that reactionary centrism won't work. Like, it's actually a common talking point when people in America urge Democrats to substantively moderate on immigration or trans rights, to say, OK, well, why didn't that work for Starmer? And there's been a lot of essays written about this.

 

I'm being immodest in this one, as something of a pioneer of that type of analysis. I think it's entirely correct. But the point I'm making here is that it's frankly pathetic that liberals, socialists, progressives generally across the Atlantic can take a quick glance at our politics and draw the correct conclusions, yet somehow that is utterly beyond our own commentariat. Again, the defining quality of being a mark is that they do not know they are a mark. 

 

You can fleece a sheep many times, but only skin him once, a characteristically ugly poker proverb goes.Marks will accept losing a bit of money, but if you really take them to the cleaners, they'll stop playing. Marks require validation. You want to tell them how clever they are. You want to reassure them that they're playing well. You want to encourage them in their foolishness, professional poker players know.

 

Likewise, the fascists will always sort of egg on the reactionary centrists. Tell them that they're being clever. Tell them that, oh, of course, the far left can't be permitted ever to return to leadership.

 

Reactionary centrists have been fleeced many times. But is this the ignominious collapse of the Starmer Project, the moment when they're finally skinned? Probably not.

 

This is where the poker analogy breaks down. Poor poker players are losing their money. Reactionary centrists have been bought into the game, as it were, with our votes. They are playing with our lives. At least in the short run, they won't be the ones to suffer. Indeed, they may well be rewarded for their foolishness once they lose election with cosy sinecures, a magazine to edit, some high-paying job at a think tank.

 

Ultimately, there will be a bill to be paid by all of us. But I just don't think they're thinking that far ahead. Again, they're not playing with their own money.

 

That's the core difference here. If the marks in the poker game were getting bankrolled by someone else, they would just continue losing money forever. But that money in the analogy is, again, our rights, our freedom, our dignity, the type of society that we live in.

 

Reactionary centrists will go on insisting on appeasement. Loudly. They will continue to dismiss even the most careful, evidence-based critiques as fairy tales. They will never, ever, ever admit that they were wrong. 

 

So we have to say, just as loudly, that they were.