{"id":89890,"date":"2026-02-10T07:02:28","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T07:02:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=89890"},"modified":"2026-02-10T07:02:28","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T07:02:28","slug":"the-hollow-man-why-starmer-is-the-ultimate-neoliberal-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2026\/02\/10\/the-hollow-man-why-starmer-is-the-ultimate-neoliberal-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hollow Man: Why Starmer is the ultimate neoliberal failure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Keir Starmer is being urged to explain what he believes in to save his leadership. That misunderstands the problem. This video argues that Starmer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/yd0I1Uqx2Jk?si=StejW-8Cp6qrHws_\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This is the audio version:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px); height: 150px;\" title=\"Is Starmer a hollow man?\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podbean.com\/player-v2\/?i=7vu2c-1a3f256-pb&amp;from=pb6admin&amp;share=1&amp;download=1&amp;rtl=0&amp;fonts=Arial&amp;skin=f6f6f6&amp;font-color=auto&amp;logo_link=episode_page&amp;btn-skin=c73a3a\" width=\"100%\" height=\"150\" scrolling=\"no\" data-name=\"pb-iframe-player\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This is the transcript:<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>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 \u200ahe'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. \u200aThe problem is that he has nothing to communicate.<\/p>\n<p>Keir \u200aStarmer 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. \u200aMorgan McSweeney got him into it by telling him what to think. \u200aLeadership has always been beyond him.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>First, \u200aStarmer does not believe in the real role of government. He's never \u200amade 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. \u200aPolitics 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.<\/p>\n<p>Second, \u200aStarmer does not believe in democracy. Look at how dissent inside the Labour Party has been treated. It's been silenced. People have been excluded. \u200aThere 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.<\/p>\n<p>Third, Starmer is the political type I described \u200ain 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. \u200aThis 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.<\/p>\n<p>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. \u200aHe 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.<\/p>\n<p>But he is, as a consequence, the politician of this moment, and this is the crucial point. Starmer is literally representative of the \u200apolitical 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.<\/p>\n<p>He's not resisting this process; he is, in fact, completing it. \u200aHe 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 \u200aBlair, Mandelson, and their successors has succeeded within New Labour, just as Thatcher intended that it would in the Conservatives.<\/p>\n<p>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. \u200aThis 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.<\/p>\n<p>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?<\/p>\n<p>That is the choice, and it must be faced now.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Where do we go? I don't know.<\/p>\n<p>What do you think? There's a poll down below.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>Poll<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"polls-321\" class=\"wp-polls\">\n\t<form id=\"polls_form_321\" class=\"wp-polls-form\" action=\"\/Blog\/index.php\" method=\"post\">\n\t\t<p style=\"display: none;\"><input type=\"hidden\" id=\"poll_321_nonce\" name=\"wp-polls-nonce\" value=\"ab94dacd84\" \/><\/p>\n\t\t<p style=\"display: none;\"><input type=\"hidden\" name=\"poll_id\" value=\"321\" \/><\/p>\n\t\t<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>What is Labour\u2019s real problem right now?<\/strong><\/p><div id=\"polls-321-ans\" class=\"wp-polls-ans\"><ul class=\"wp-polls-ul\">\n\t\t<li><input type=\"radio\" id=\"poll-answer-1424\" name=\"poll_321\" value=\"1424\" \/> <label for=\"poll-answer-1424\">A leadership without beliefs<\/label><\/li>\n\t\t<li><input type=\"radio\" id=\"poll-answer-1425\" name=\"poll_321\" value=\"1425\" \/> <label for=\"poll-answer-1425\">It is neoliberal and promotes the politics of destruction<\/label><\/li>\n\t\t<li><input type=\"radio\" id=\"poll-answer-1426\" name=\"poll_321\" value=\"1426\" \/> <label for=\"poll-answer-1426\">It's hollowed-out democracy<\/label><\/li>\n\t\t<li><input type=\"radio\" id=\"poll-answer-1427\" name=\"poll_321\" value=\"1427\" \/> <label for=\"poll-answer-1427\">All of the above<\/label><\/li>\n\t\t<\/ul><p style=\"text-align: center;\"><input type=\"button\" name=\"vote\" value=\"   Vote   \" class=\"Buttons\" onclick=\"poll_vote(321);\" \/><\/p><p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"#ViewPollResults\" onclick=\"poll_result(321); return false;\" title=\"View Results Of This Poll\">View Results<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n\t<\/form>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"polls-321-loading\" class=\"wp-polls-loading\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-polls\/images\/loading.gif\" width=\"16\" height=\"16\" alt=\"Loading ...\" title=\"Loading ...\" class=\"wp-polls-image\" \/>&nbsp;Loading ...<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Keir Starmer is being urged to explain what he believes in to save his leadership. That misunderstands the problem. This video argues that Starmer\u2019s failure<br \/><a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2026\/02\/10\/the-hollow-man-why-starmer-is-the-ultimate-neoliberal-failure\/\"><em> Read the full article&#8230;<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[204,35,16,118,224,106,235,223],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economic-justice","category-economics","category-ethics","category-labour","category-neoliberalism","category-politics","category-politics-for-people","category-politics-of-care"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89890"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89907,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89890\/revisions\/89907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}