Keir Starmer has already beaten Rishi Sunak and now he is scaring him off the cultural battlefield
The Prime Minister is in a tail spin and far from waging a culture war has failed to offer his vision for building a good society, presumably because he does not have one
Keir Starmer is now in such a dominant political position that he has felt able to return to the Woke agenda which characterised his early months as Labour leader.
Starmer’s speech today accusing the Tories of inventing a culture war is only possible because the governing party is in freefall. That he should make it when several schools are facing intimidation from Islamists and the police have visibly caved in to two-tier policing in London indicates just how much further progress corrosive identity politics campaigns are likely to be allowed to make under his looming premiership.
Starmer said the Conservatives had become “tangled up in culture wars of their own making”. He claimed: “In its desperation to cling onto power at all costs, the Tory party is undertaking a kind of weird McCarthyism, trying to find woke agendas in the very civic institutions they once regarded with respect.”
If he really believes this then we are all in terrible trouble. The Tories did not invent the BLM riots that sought to inject into Britain the poisonous race agenda of the US. Neither did they invent the invasion of women’s protected spaces and sports by male-bodied “trans women”. In fact they should have done far more to stand up against both of those cultural onslaughts and many more besides.
In publicly aligning himself with the culturally radical agenda of the new leadership cadres in the public and civic institutional sectors, Starmer is telling us not to look to him to resist their mad ideas. In doing so he is going against the advice of that great Labour election winner Tony Blair. Blair urged Starmer to “plant Labour’s feet clearly near the centre of gravity of the British people, who want fair treatment for all and an end to prejudice but distrust and dislike the cancel culture ‘Woke’ mentality.”
Instead Starmer is spending some of the vast reserves of political capital he has accumulated via a 20-point poll lead and a series of spectacular by-election wins to signal his support for the next wave of bien pensant do-gooding. Clearly the party chair Anneliese Dodds is going to be given free rein to advance such nutty ideas as favouring black-owned businesses in public procurement contracts and opening the way for Britain to pay reparations to its former colonies. Seeking to peg the proportion of the prison population to the ethnic proportions of society as a whole is another front that the cultural Left will open, despite hugely different crime rates among different communities.
The Keir Starmer who took a knee for the graffiti-daubers of BLM, gave succour to Harry and Meghan’s race-based persecution complex and couldn’t say what a woman was is now so confident as to invite Rishi Sunak to fight him on the cultural battlefield. Which of course Sunak will not do.
Because Sunak is being shown up as one of the most limited political thinkers ever to enter Downing Street. Having spent nearly all of his frontbench career in the Treasury, he apparently never bothered formulating views on the most important social questions of the day. The impact of mass migration on social cohesion is something that does not seem to have occurred to him at all. When he was Chancellor he refused to give his own definition of what a woman is, just telling his interviewer Julia Hartley-Brewer that he agreed with whatever it was that Boris Johnson had said a few days earlier.
In his recent reshuffle his attempt to compensate the Right of his party for the dismissal of Suella Braverman was risible: just giving chirpy Esther McVey the ill-defined post of “minister for common sense” – something to keep the plebs happy.
No wonder he has bounced around between almost as many different strategies as there are months in his premiership to date. The conference season idea that he represented change has been ditched for the proposition that we must reject change and instead stick to his plan.
The British electorate have picked up on his listlessness and lack of direction beyond his narrow determination to steer a steady course on the stuttering economy. Every pollster who measures his personal ratings reports the same basic story of him tanking in the eyes of voters.
Ipsos measures him at -48 net on whether voters are satisfied or dissatisfied with him, which is worse than Boris Johnson was scoring when the Tories dumped him as leader and only three points off the nadir of Liz Truss. YouGov’s leadership satisfaction survey tells a similar story. Last spring Sunak registered 34 per cent saying he was doing well and 49 per cent badly. Now the corresponding figures are 25 per well and 64 per cent badly. That’s a drop from -15 net to -39 net in nine months.
On the totemic issue of irregular Channel crossings his latest legislation has been rumbled as falling far short of his pledge a year ago to “strain every sinew” to stop the boats. Last week he found himself in the ludicrous position of claiming his Bill would allow for hardly any individual challenges against removal to Rwanda while at the same time preparing to recruit 150 extra judges to fast-track such appeals.
The truth is that the majority of the British public, who lean Right on social and cultural issues, yearn for a warrior to communicate a Conservative notion of the Good Society. Seeing the capital city being taken over by enormous and aggressive pro-Palestine marches every weekend has been an eye-opener for many. So has the Islamist campaign to impose sharia-compliant regimes upon schools. The Batley school teacher who showed a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed almost two years ago is still in hiding. An autistic schoolboy alleged to have “scuffed” a Koran in a school near Wakefield went through a terrifying ordeal. And now two schools in London are facing militant Islamist challenges over the banning of pro-Palestine political badges and the maintenance of a secular regime respectively.
No wonder the headteacher of the latter of those schools, Katharine Birbalsingh, told the Mail on Sunday that she no longer feels personally safe, such has the level of intimidation been. A proper Conservative administration should be exhibiting zero
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to State O’ The Nation to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.