Keir Starmer, Centrist

Robin McAlpine recently penned an interesting piece on the politics of current United Kingdom Labour Party leader Keir Starmer.

Not so long ago I addressed those politics on the basis of two of Starmer's major statements to the public (his February 2020 leadership contest pledges, and his February 2021 "New Chapter for Britain" speech). Here McAlpine offers a broader assessment with the benefit of greater hindsight (if, alas, not too much in the way of specifics).

McAlpine writes that Starmer, who has apparently endeavored to make himself known as "Mr. Rules," "views society as a transaction undertaken between an elite ruling class and a vast class of plebs and the job of a politician as to keep well out of that relationship except in the case of emergency," with that defined not as "starving children," but rather "enough starving children to risk the stability of the system in a way which might cause a breakdown in the relationship between the elite and the plebs," which is to say that "[h]e is there to protect the powerful, which means once in a while they might need to be protected from themselves, briefly."

This transactional view, with the politician as rule-minded mediator among contending interests, and whose highest priority must be maintaining stability via minimalistic adjustments that, at their most feather-ruffling, may occasionally entail compromise the elite may not love, rather than any vision for the country (of making it more just, etc.), is the very essence of "civil," "pluralist," centrist politics--which, of course, are fundamentally and deeply conservative in the political philosophy sense of the term, whatever those who get their information about what words like "conservative" mean from cable news may think.

McAlpine's rather concise summation of that centrism (even if, admittedly, he never uses the word) is, appropriately, rounded out by what centrism has come to in this era, with Britain since Tony Blair no exception, namely a "supply-side" mentality in which said politician "should be facilitating the elite as the way to get 'the best deal' for the plebs" (or at least, that's what they tell everyone), and one might add, his observation that commentators for a publication like the Guardian demand exactly that when they use punditocrat weasel words like "credibility."

Others, however--McAlpine among them--find this kind of credibility not very credible at all, especially in these crisis-ridden times in which centrism, for all its highly touted pragmatism and knack for forging compromises, looks more rigidly ideological than ever before.