Back during the Labour Party's leadership contest in 2020 Keir Starmer presented to the world a social democratic platform of
"ten pledges," promising higher taxes on the rich, the end of college tuition, "common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water," the repeal of the Trade Union Act, and "the Green New Deal at the heart of everything we do."
He won the contest of course--and
then quickly distanced himself from the ten pledges. Already by the time of his speech in answer to the government's budget a year later he limited himself to milder criticisms than would have been expected given his purported vision for Britain, and the "effective opposition to the Tories" that was itself a promise (#10). Not long afterward he officially scrapped the pledges.
Subsequently,
as his 2022 Labour Party Conference keynote speech made clear Starmer has, if sprinkling his speeches with radical touches (throwing around references to "the 1 percent" as if he were an Occupy Wall Street activist), consistently stressed "fiscal responsibility" (for which purpose he repeatedly declares himself ready to defer the accomplishment of "good Labour things"), and only grown more emphatic in his expressions of a desire for "partnership" with business and exaltation of entrepreneurs, with this much more than this leader of the
Labour party says about labor, toward which he is at best insultingly aloof. Even his most ambitiously leftish project of 100 percent "clean energy" by 2030, with this done partly through a state-owned firm which could facilitate the transition, appears a pious desire rather than a firm promise (whatever that would mean from the same man who not only made it clear that everything else is secondary to austerity economics, but so casually discarded his prior pledges). And to read his subsequent speeches is to be numbed by the repetitiveness of what have come to seem Starmer's clichés.
The result is that Starmer early on more than confirmed any suspicions that he was a Blairite neoliberal-centrist posing as a leftie to neutralize a leftward challenge, and then as soon as it was convenient reverting to his actual sense because, as he keeps saying "I want to be Prime Minister." Indeed, in his justification of his scrapping of the pledges he exemplifies that particularly neoliberal habit of seeing the correct response to every crisis as a right turn (i.e. "disaster capitalism"), of always dealing with the troubles made by neoliberalism with . . . more neoliberalism.
Of course, Starmer might still "lead" Labour to victory in the next General Election for all that. At this point Britain has already seen over twelve years of continuous, catastrophic (
austerity, Brexit, a badly bungled handling of the pandemic in all its facets, a post-war era-style currency crisis and IMF bailout, and now, as always, more austerity in its wake) under a string of unfortunate Prime Ministers it seems almost impossible to say
anything positive--David Cameron (who staged the Brexit referendum as a bluff on behalf of the regulation-haters in the City--some bluff that), Theresa May (
whose tears were only ever for herself), Boris "let the bodies pile high in their thousands" Johnson (
even if he didn't actually utter the words his actions spoke them), Liz Truss (who thinks imported cheese is a disgrace and in the wake of presenting her fiscal vision "got outlasted by a lettuce head"), and that Rishi Sunak (who in his youth bragged about having no working-class friends, and probably isn't making many now with his austerity on steroids). In the process they have made it very, very easy for the official opposition to beat them--especially when it is led by a neoliberal who will be treated far more gently by business and the press than his predecessor, after which victory he will, of course, get hard at work disappointing whatever slight hopes he managed to raise in the voters in another turn of the widening gyre.
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