Tom Rachman is a contributing columnist to The Globe and Mail.
Less than 100 days after a smashing election victory, Keir Starmer – the slick-haired, bespectacled lawyer leading Britain – addressed his Labour Party as the new Prime Minister. He could have sounded triumphant, but that is not the man’s fashion. Instead, he ventured into a minefield topic – and found a novel way to misstep.
After calling for peace in Gaza, Mr. Starmer demanded “the return of the sausages,” hastening to correct himself: “the hostages,” he meant. Just a slip of the tongue, but Mr. Starmer seems only to slip lately: Since victory, his public support has plunged 49 points.
The honeymoon isn’t merely over. It never happened.
In part, the flop is his fault. First, he sullied his principled reputation by accepting more than £100,000 ($180,000) in freebies over the past five years, including suits, glasses, tickets to horse races and soccer games, along with fancy seats to Taylor Swift. Next, he disappointed many supporters by insisting he’d “make Brexit work” rather than courageously reversing its countless absurd features. Then, he cut payments that help millions of elderly citizens pay for winter heating – hardly a crowd-pleasing move for a new administration.
Yet Mr. Starmer’s greatest mistake is gloom.
Britain – after 14 years of Conservative Party rule marked by dishonesty, decline and disgrace – lashed out in the July vote, more tired of Tories than loving Labourites. The country ached for hope. Instead, Mr. Starmer offers an exasperated scolding, not pledging to “Make Britain Great Again” so much as saying “Britain Is Rubbish Nowadays and It’s Their Fault.”
In point of fact, that slogan would not be far from the truth. The Tories gutted public services, and delivered the dunce’s version of liberation, Brexit. They left the economy stagnant, and the National Health Service failing, with 6.4 million people on waiting lists, some for more than a year. Cost-of-living soars, but wages hardly budge. And prisons are so crammed that, when anti-immigrant riots broke out this summer, the police worried about arresting culprits for lack of cells.
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Mr. Starmer describes “not just an economic blackhole, a societal blackhole,” warning that “things will get worse before they get better.” The getting-worse is predictable (cuts and taxes); the getting-better is clouded in mist.
Even so, the insta-hatred of Mr. Starmer struck before he’d even had a chance to fail. That impatience speaks to a restlessness in many democracies, where rage at lack of personal impact (when your side loses power) alternates with rage at the sluggish system (when your side wins power).
This recalls my student days in the 1990s at the University of Toronto, where you bumped into nihilistic slackers bopping to grunge on a Sony Discman, who’d yank down the headphones, and remark: “What’s the point in voting? All sides are the same.”
Looking back at that period of relative global calm, when the self-destruction of humankind briefly seemed improbable, I wonder whether “no difference between the parties” can be a symptom of healthy politics, with candidates hewing to a broad consensus, preferring incremental change to radical lurches.
Gradualism feels intolerable when you consider the wrongs in society. Yet people who fantasize about transformation tend to assume it would go in their favour. If you believe in democracy, you must accept that radical lurches can also move in the direction you most abhor.
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These days, political impatience is not just for slackers. It sloshes across the mainstream, tinging both the Right and the Left, tempting a frustrated public to the extremes, where they imagine ripping apart a rotting system, ignoring what the repugnant other side wants.
What differs from the 1990s is that today’s impatience springs not from anguish that nothing changes, but from anxiety that all changes so fast: technology and global conflict and migration and prices and the climate.
Demagogues promise to “take back control” from murky conspiratorial powers, and finally fix life for the people. But in the world we’ve built, success derives from mass human co-operation. There is no single steering wheel to grab.
That is the challenge for political leadership today: How to describe the world truthfully, to admit complexity and the limits of democratic power – and not instantly lose public support?
Mr. Starmer has time to recover. His Labour Party won a large parliamentary majority, and the term lasts up to five years.
But fixing a country needs more than tough truths and deep sighs. A leader must create a new national mood.
If not, if Britain resigns itself to glum cynicism, Mr. Starmer will be nothing but a sausage to fortune.