Donald Trump says the outgoing British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was brought down by his inability to put a brake on immigration and his wrongheaded energy policy. Nonetheless, he thought he was “a lovely man.”
Unfortunately for Starmer, few of his own compatriots find him as cuddly as Trump apparently does. It was precisely because a large majority saw him as a preachy, self-righteous and robotic technocrat who was doing great harm to his country that the politician who less than two years ago had led Labour to a thumping electoral victory felt obliged to call it quits. If the opinion polls can be trusted, Starmer quickly became the most despised PM on record. Large numbers of Britons positively loathe him not just for what he has done in office but also for being the “lovely” person he is.
Of course, that famous electoral triumph was a mirage; Labour got a mere 33.7 percent of the vote but, thanks entirely to the first-past-the-post system, it won a huge parliamentary majority with 411 seats in the House of Commons. Half a year earlier, in Argentina’s presidential election Sergio Massa got 44.35 percent, which immediately established him as a loser who deserved to be shoved down the memory hole. Since then, he has kept a very low profile.
However, from the word go Starmer behaved as though he enjoyed the support of most of his country’s population, an illusion that was encouraged by the worshipful treatment he received from “progressives” in the media who appeared convinced that, at long last, after suffering years of Tory incompetence, the United Kingdom had a government that merited their approval and would save the country from the threat allegedly posed by the “extreme right.”
The public rejoicing was short-lived. Almost immediately, it became clear that Starmer was simply incapable of understanding why so many Britons were upset by the accelerating demographic transformation of their country, with large parts of major cities such as London and Birmingham looking increasingly like Karachi or Cairo. For a while, Starmer got away with telling those who complained about what was happening that they were bigoted racists who should be clapped in jail for “hate speech,” as some were, but as the inflow of illegal entrants arriving after crossing the Channel on small boats continued and, with it, a growing number of sexual assaults committed by newcomers whose approach to such matters may have been normal in their countries of origin but did not go down well in the UK, by speaking in that way he offended most of the working class.
For Labour, which started life as a devoutly working-class party, with flat caps de rigueur among the trade-union faithful, this is a major problem. After the arrival of Tony Blair towards the end of the last century, it turned into a decidedly middle-class organisation full of university graduates, civil servants and the like, whose members tend to despise those who are not on board with multiculturalism and, what is worse, like waving their country’s flag. Some even go so far as to say they are proud to be British.
Much the same has happened on the other side of the Atlantic where the Democrat Party has been taken over by credentialled progressives who quite openly detest those who have been hardest hit by economic change. Not just in the English-speaking countries but also in much of Europe and elsewhere, people on the upper half of the social pyramid now tend to be far more left-wing than those nearer the bottom who are drawn to movements that are habitually denigrated as right-wing or even fascist.
This has happened because it is widely assumed that voicing supposedly progressive opinions is a sign of moral superiority. For many, this is irresistible, but on occasion those on the receiving end dislike being lectured to in this way. Starmer grew so accustomed to speaking down to those who questioned his views that he stoked the resentment that led to his political demise.
Will the same happen to his presumed successor Andy Burnham, the “king of the north” who is being hailed as the saviour of the Labour Party and all that is decent in British life? It is generally agreed that he is a better communicator than Starmer, but nobody seems to know what it is he will see fit to communicate. Those who have followed his career regard him as something of a chameleon – one humorist said that over the years he has adopted more positions than can be found in the Kama Sutra – but even so it will not be easy for him to live up the hype that has been generated around him.
The prospects facing Burnham, the Labour Party and the UK look anything but promising. The gap separating the political elites from much of the population seems certain to get wider. To make the situation worse, Starmer’s successor will have to reduce welfare spending and invest far more in the Armed Forces, a necessity that is bound to infuriate Labour MPs who want to be seen as generous friends of the people in their constituencies.
Like their fellow politicians in continental Europe, the British have finally realised that the problems caused by immigration on a truly massive scale have already become barely manageable and that unless strong measures are taken, the consequences could be catastrophic. Many fear that it is already too late for them to head off the communal violence they see coming their way. Needless to say, efforts by open-border activists and human-rights lawyers, as was Starmer before going into politics, to prevent deportation schemes from going into effect are merely ensuring that, when crunch time finally arrives, keeping things under control will be even more difficult than it would have been had the European governments acted far earlier.
As Trump pointed out, mass immigration, whether legal or illegal, was one issue that contributed to making Starmer’s position untenable. The other major problem he mentioned, energy policy, was also a factor. By adhering to “net zero” and in effect banning fracking and winding down oil production from the North Sea in order to help “save the planet” by giving a good example to less virtuous countries, a series of UK governments have made energy costs higher in their country than in any other in the industrial world, so it is not that surprising that in recent years its economic performance has been far less vigorous than that of the United States though, in comparison with France and Germany, it has not been as bad as fans of the European Union would like to think.
