What’s Starmerism? Socialism via moralising lawyers

Prime Minister Keir Starmer
Prime Minister Keir Starmer

The excellent Alex Burghart MP - a former university academic in Anglo-Saxon history, which makes me instinctively sympathetic to him whatever he does – stood in for Kemi Badenoch on Wednesday at Prime Minister’s Questions. What struck me was not so much his ability to put Angela Rayner on the back foot, which I had expected, but his attempt, the first I have heard, to define “Starmerism”.

Now one hesitates to dignify the approach of this Government with any term that implies it has a coherent plan or systematic vision. But I think the effort to define “Starmerism” is worth making, not least because Labour itself will be reluctant to do so, knowing as they do how unpopular their leader already is.

Alex’s definition – “High tax, high inflation, low growth, low reform: that’s Starmerism” – was a good start and was true as far as it went, though an uncharitable observer could fairly point out that it is a fair description of the last Tory government too. And certainly there is a socialist approach behind Starmerism. To be fair to Sir Keir, he did warn us before the election that he was a socialist, but no-one paid attention. Since then we have seen nationalisation of the railways, job-killing laws giving the trade unions more power, vast pay-offs to the public sector, all financed by huge tax and spending increases. The associated rhetoric of growth is just words: we can all see that Labour has only the crudest, most primitive understanding of what actually produces growth and prosperity.

But perhaps Alex’s definition didn’t quite capture what I think many voters are picking up – the sheer weirdness, the oddness, at times the nastiness, of the way this Government behaves and acts. Its style: that’s what’s distinctive about it. Starmerism is more a style than a philosophy, and it’s a style that is already grating badly on many Brits.

There’s the moral superiority. Labour ministers can do things – appoint non-civil servants, take freebies – that others wouldn’t get away with. They can junk historical paintings from their state offices. They can doctor their CVs and it doesn’t matter. They are open in telling us that the public sector is morally better than wealth-creating business and that we should be pleased to hand over more money to “save the NHS”.

With this moralising approach goes a very clear hierarchy of groups. At the top of the pyramid, obviously, are Labour ministers and their advisers.

Below them are NHS workers, the Labour aristocracy, followed closely by the public and quasi public professions like teachers and lawyers. Then the trade unions and the Leftist blob of NGOs and professional mega-charities. Then, a long way behind, comes the wealth-creating private sector.

And, finally, right at the bottom, are the modern equivalent of Soviet kulaks: farmers, pensioners, people who send their children to private school, anyone who owns more than one house, and of course anyone who doesn’t like the social change brought about by massive inward immigration. Labour is indifferent to what those people think. It sees them as “populists” and as potential victims, internal enemies in need of re-education.

Such a hierarchy can only be enforced with a high degree of authoritarianism. We all learnt that pretty fast with the crackdown on free speech over the summer. Many are now frightened to say what they think – one reason why the police investigation into the great Allison Pearson has struck such a chord. If they can come after her, we think, who is safe?

But it’s visible more broadly. Important decisions are taken without scrutiny and rushed out when no one is looking: the cancellation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act in July, or the re-subjugation of British courts to European Court doctrine in September. And we can all see Starmer’s visible anger when someone has the temerity to ask him a question.

Labour are fine with this because they aren’t politicians in the normal sense, but rather lawyer-politicians who see law as superior to politics. For them the law is not a way of enabling citizens of a democracy to conduct our political affairs in a fair and equitable fashion. They see it as a way of constraining us, of limiting politics to what they consider acceptable, a system to which politics must bend.

Their ideal is a constitution of lawyers, ultimately based on the ECHR, interpreted by judges, staffed by the great and the good, in which you, the voter, can’t change anything important. It’s all there in the speech by Lord Hermer, Attorney General and Keir Starmer crony, last month: “The Rule of Law in an Age of Populism”. Read it and shiver.

Want a visual image of all this? Look at that picture of Starmer on the plane to Rio: alone, stern, working on his papers. It reminded me of nothing so much as one of those Soviet bloc propaganda photos: “General Secretary Starmer works tirelessly to protect the British people.”

We know what that really means. Socialist economics. Imperious authoritarianism. Control. Disdain for you, the voter. And all coupled with a haughty moralism that says “we are the masters now”. That’s Starmerism for you. Better watch out.