Keir Starmer is being urged to explain what he believes in to save his leadership. That misunderstands the problem. This video argues that Starmer's failure is not one of communication, but of conviction, and that his total lack of belief reveals a deeper crisis in British politics, Labour, and democracy itself.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
The problem with Keir Starmer is that he has no beliefs. The Labour Party is saying to him right now that he must explain what he believes in and what he's going to do, and that doing so might create his last chance to survive as Labour leader, but that argument misunderstands the situation completely. The problem Keir Starmer has is not of communication. The problem is that he has nothing to communicate.
Keir Starmer has never known what he stands for, not tactically, not strategically, not morally. That is why he has always relied on others to tell him what to think. That's why he's in the mess he's in. Morgan McSweeney got him into it by telling him what to think. Leadership has always been beyond him.
Starmer is not a strategist. He is not a thinker. He has no political instinct. At best, he's a middle manager, someone who waits for instructions and then carries them out without reflection or grumbling. Politics for him has been a career move, not a calling, not a mission, and most definitely not a belief system.
And what is curious about this is that his absence of conviction is not neutral. The vacuum he's created is revealing. It exposes three deeper truths about Starmer and about the political system that produced him.
First, Starmer does not believe in the real role of government. He's never made a positive case for what government is for, not as a builder, not as a protector, not as a democratic instrument, because he has never wanted to govern in any meaningful sense. Politics for Starmer has always been about personal advancement. It's not about public purpose. That's what makes him a modern political apparatchik. He's a functionary of power, but not a challenger of it, and crucially, he's not the exception now; he is the norm.
Second, Starmer does not believe in democracy. Look at how dissent inside the Labour Party has been treated. It's been silenced. People have been excluded. There has been enforced conformity, but democracy tolerates argument. It requires debate. It encourages disagreement because out of it consensus is created. But Starmer has instead demanded obedience. This is not accidental; it's ideological, and as a consequence, democracy has been hollowed out. He sees democracy as a threat and not as a value, and that tells us something fundamental about how he sees power.
Third, Starmer is the political type I described in The Courageous State. I wrote that book in 2011, and I described what I called the cowardly politician. When faced with a problem, a cowardly politician retreats, they defer, they abdicate. They cling to the dogma that the market knows best, and as a result, they always say that government must stand aside. This is Starmer in action, of course. The result is not prudent. It is not realism. It is literally perpetual abdication. Problems remain unsolved. Institutions are allowed to decay, and trust collapses. As a consequence, politics empties out. That's why Starmer cannot now explain himself.
There is nothing that he either can explain with regard to his beliefs or that he would want to explain with regard to what he has done because he has literally gutted politics. He doesn't believe in Labour. He doesn't believe in what the party has done. He doesn't believe in what it could do. He cannot lead a movement because he does not understand them, and he does not trust them. There is no speech that he can make that can fix that.
But he is, as a consequence, the politician of this moment, and this is the crucial point. Starmer is literally representative of the political class right now because he is a neoliberal politician, and it's not neutral. This is the politics of destruction after all. That's an idea I'm going to explore more in further videos, but the point is, neoliberalism set out to destroy the state. It wanted to degrade government; as a consequence. It sought to destroy faith in democracy, and that is what Starmer has done.
He's not resisting this process; he is, in fact, completing it. He has destroyed value. He has undermined democratic credibility. He has left a void where politics should be, and in that sense, the long project of Blair, Mandelson, and their successors has succeeded within New Labour, just as Thatcher intended that it would in the Conservatives.
So the real question for Labour now is something quite different. It's not about Starmer's survival. The question is whether the Labour Party will recognise its historic task. This country has now had six Prime Ministers in a row, all of those since David Cameron. None of whom has had any idea why they are in office. There is no purpose left for government as a consequence of their serial failures.
So, if the Labour Party has any purpose left with its massive majority, it would now seek to restore democracy. It would want to rebuild the capacity of government. It would want to govern with purpose. But will it? Can you honestly believe that's going to happen when you look at the range of successors to Starmer, who are currently made available by the hollowed-out Labour Party that he helped create? Or will Labour accept managed decline and acquiesce in hollowed out politics and invite the authoritarian future that would inevitably follow that?
That is the choice, and it must be faced now.
I know what I want. I know I want a politics of care, a politics for people, a politics that funds the future, a politics that delivers hope, but none of that is on Starmer's agenda. We are poles apart, and so are most of those who might succeed him. That's the crisis of this moment. That's the crisis that Starmer has created.
Where do we go? I don't know.
What do you think? There's a poll down below.
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The hollowing out of Labour, destruction of its soul started with Blair/Mandelson. Are there any “major” LINO politicians with the ability/nous to find a new soul that actually benefits the majority of the UK population.
They are stuck in the neoliberal mindset, doom scrolling rather than projecting ” yes we can do it and afford it”.
They appear too stupid to understand that they are the cause of their inevitable defeat at the next election.
Wise without Morecambe
Laurel without Hardy
Dec without Ant
Dean without Torvil
Starmer without MacSweeney
Labour without the left
Politics without policies
Policies without people
People without hope
In a different context, the sentiments of 1 Corinthians 13 apply – you can have all the surface characteristics of a belief but if it isn’t in your heart, then you have nothing, you are a sounding gong and a clashing cymbal.
Not only does Starmer have a hollow heart, he has discarded most of the external Labour trappings too.
He, his government and his party are irrelevant. Soon, no one will notice them. He will enter a room and people will carry on talking. He will make speeches that no one pays attention to.
His focus will increasingly shift towards repressive authoritarian maintenance – starting with his cabinet of compliant clones, and moving out to his zombie MPs, and of course, controlling the population, us, because, in his view, we are either with him, or we are extremists and terrorists, thinking independently, against the national interest, and rather than listen to us, he must silence dissent.
Then his house will fall with a mighty crash.
One final thought:
Q. How many Labour MPs does it take to change a light bulb?
A. 80, but they can’t find a spare bulb.
Agreed.
Starmer is the epitome perhaps of the ‘Turd Way’ (Third Way – Giddens) politician as described by Chantal Mouffe in ‘The Democratic Paradox’ (2000) p. 24, whose belief in it is based on:
‘…politics without adversary, which pretends that all interests can be reconciled and that everybody – provided of course that they identify with ‘the project’ – can be part of ‘the people’.
This sort of politics ignores real power structures (such as finance), the mitigation of winner and loser consequences and talks in almost Panglossian terms of some sort of general interest of the people without going any deeper than that.
But more than anything else, the Third Way’s main crime is that it does not seem to be genuinely politically pluralist in nature other than to accommodate market led solutions as if it were some sort of ‘secret sauce’.
For me, the Third Way is for people who just don’t like hard work.
🙂
It seems to me there are people in politics who know what they want. Many of them do not have money or much access to power.
There are also those who are fewer in number and do have money and put it where they can influence.
I found this site on donations very telling and suggestive of where power lies and why the public political agenda is as it is. 66% goes to the Right wing. And how little goes to the Greens.
If you click on donors you will see the biggest single donor is Christopher Harbourne for Reform. Then look up where he lives!
This is one area Labour could make a change but probably won’t.
https://donation.watch/en/unitedkingdom/2025-2029/overview
Donations should be illegal, along with 2nd jobs, bribes for honours, lobbying, revolving door employment and insider contracts. If in rection to this week’s crisis, ‘looking over the precipice’ ,Labour brought in an emergency ‘clean up politics’ bill it would go some way to assuaging the widespread belief among the public that ‘they are all in it for themselves’. But Labour – nor any other main party – will do that.
Political parties should be funded by two related sources:
a) The membership through fees + capped donations.
b) A State subsidy linked directly to the size of the membership.
I think it needs to also be linked to number of candidates standing.
looking at the totals, Reform received more than Labour and Lib Dems combined. And over a million quid more than the Conservatives. I doubt if they want to make life better for SEND kids or care for the elderly.
Some spending on democracy is necessary. In a non election year the major parties spent a bit less than £60 million. If replaced by the state – possibly- it would be equal to about £2 per taxpayer . Less than a coffee. I think it would be worth it.
Agreed
To paraphrase the now tarnished Noam Chomsky, “If you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you are sitting.” Starmer is sitting where he is sitting because he believes in nothing. When the Establishment was taking back control of the Labour party, Starmer was chosen as the empty void to fill the top spot, a void that could be filled with whatever the neoliberal establishment needed. Given neoliberalism’s Lovecraftian indifference to humanity, what else could it choose as its figureheads but men and women in empty suits, speaking empty words.
Begs the question: given the make up of the NEC one wonders who the next cipher will be?
Of course, there is a remote chance that something resembling a human will get elected – if that happens the usual suspects will burrow underground and do what they do best – undermine that person.
The rules are here:
https://labourlist.org/2025/11/labour-leadership-election-rules-keir-starmer-challenger/
The main scope for NEC fixing is a pre-election purge of the voting membership – rooting out those members with unsuitable views.
This was attempted during the leadership elections involving Corbyn in earlier years, but is is unlikey to be a significant factor.
Starmer could of course do to a rival candidate (he claims he will be a candidate in any election), or their MP nominees, what he did to Corbyn, and suspend the whip, or get the NEC to carry out an administrative suspension from membership, but it would be a bad look. The NEC could also suspend any constituency or affiliate organisation nominating a rival.
Then there’s always national security, the king dying, an unspecified Russian threat, a terrorism alert (possibly a cardboard recycling lorry could be accused of transporting terrorist devices for a PA protest).
As the incumbent is PM, he can introduce all sorts of complications, all the way up to a declaration of war (Faroe Islands? Barbados?) to get the election postponed. It’s worked for Netanyahu, but tens of thousands had to die.
Ridiculous? Well, it would have been once. But a sitting Labour PM has never faced a challenge before, ever.
Of course he might do a U-turn… (surely not!).
Starmer is just totally reprehensible and beneath contempt. He is the agent that is responsible for hollowing out the LP and creating the current political void. It was clear that this was going to be the case when he became PM. He established a government of blind obedience and ensured that any opposition was crushed. He then proceeded to lead nowhere. Parliament is now absolutely rudderless, Starmer is now just a clown and his followers (the cabinet particularly) a part of the same circus. Unfortunately for the vast majority of the people this is no joke. As your critique of the Resolution Foundation book today shows there is urgent work to attend to immediately, but no one is in charge!
To bring a bit of comedy in…try watching this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=666OKm08fRA