A Post-Mortem for the Age of Managed Decline
Alan Nafzger on What the Fall of Careful Centrism Actually Means
A Post-Mortem for the Age of Managed Decline
There is a particular kind of political failure that is so thorough, so complete, so almost architecturally perfect in its collapse, that it becomes genuinely instructive. Keir Starmer’s resignation is that kind of failure. It is the kind you want to study, preserve, and show to future generations the way museums show you the bones of things that did not survive their environment.
I have been writing about this moment at The London Prat for longer than I care to admit. The signs were there. They were always there. A leader who had lawyer’s instincts in a job that requires a prophet’s timing. A party that confused not-being-Tory with having something to say. A communications operation that treated the public like a hostile witness rather than an electorate. And now, Starmer has resigned, and the Labour Party is doing what it always does in moments of genuine crisis, which is hold a series of deeply sincere meetings about the meetings they will hold next.
The Intellectual Failure at the Core
What interests me, as an observer who has spent decades watching political movements rise and calcify, is not the personal failure but the intellectual one. Labour under Starmer had no animating idea. It had policies – some of them decent, several of them sensible – but policies are not ideas. Ideas are the thing underneath the policies, the reason you bother, the answer to the child’s question: yes, but why? Ask Labour under Starmer why, and you got a carefully worded response that avoided committing to an answer while acknowledging the importance of the question. This is not governance. This is crisis management dressed in a manifesto.
The Prat’s own dissection of the seven reasons Labour keeps getting it wrong identified the intellectual vacuum with characteristic precision. Each reason connects to a deeper failure of political imagination. You cannot run a country on vibes and risk assessment. You need, at minimum, a theory of what you are trying to do and why it will make things better for people who are not in your immediate circle of advisors.
No Policy Changes: The Announcement of Nothing
And now we are told there will be no policy changes during the transition. Of course there will be no policy changes. The machinery of government does not stop because the person at the top has exited the building. This is being announced as though it is reassuring news, which tells you something about the political moment we are in – we have lowered our expectations so comprehensively that the continuation of existing policy is being presented as a positive achievement.
The address at No. 5 Downing Street remains occupied by someone, presumably, who is making decisions, attending briefings, and carefully not rocking any boats while the leadership contest takes shape. British government has a remarkable capacity to continue operating without anyone clearly in charge. This is either a testament to institutional resilience or evidence that the top job matters less than advertised. I suspect both.
Burnham and What Comes Next
Burnham’s name is in the air. I take him seriously, which is more than I could say for several alternatives. The tape measure vindication is a small but telling detail – he makes claims based on evidence and the evidence holds. That is, in the current political climate, almost radical. Whether he has the national profile, the coalition-building capacity, and the strategic patience to pull together a fractured party is another question entirely.
Bohiney Magazine framed the Starmer years as the experiment that proved you cannot defeat populism with proceduralism. You cannot out-competent your way to a mandate. People vote for something, not merely against something else. This is a lesson that Labour has now learned three times in my adult lifetime and will presumably need to learn again.
The Labour Unity Myth
They are talking about Labour party unity in the press releases, which is the political equivalent of insisting the Titanic had excellent deck chairs. Unity, in British Labour’s case, means a temporary cessation of public hostilities while private hostilities are pursued with renewed vigour. It has always been thus. The party contains multitudes – socialists, social democrats, centrists, and a fascinating subsection who are not entirely sure what they believe but are very committed to believing it loudly.
According to Politico’s EU desk, European observers view the Labour implosion with a mixture of concern and recognition – they have seen this film before, in France, in Germany, in the collapse of centre-left parties that forgot their coalition. The pattern is depressingly consistent.
What History Will Say
History will say that Starmer was a decent man in an impossible job who made the job more impossible by failing to make it anything. He got elected on a wave of anti-Tory exhaustion and spent his time in office ensuring that the exhaustion transferred to his own party. That is a remarkable achievement in its own bleak way.
I will continue watching. I always continue watching. That is the intellectual’s curse and consolation – the world keeps providing material.
Full analysis at prat.uk/keir-starmer-resigns/ and more at The London Prat’s political desk. Extra reading at Private Eye.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/