I was reading Ian Dunt’s excellent Substack column today and came across this wonderful quote:
“I promise this – a politics which treads a little lighter on all our lives. That’s the thing about populism or nationalism…It needs your full attention, needs you constantly focussing on this week’s common enemy. And that’s exhausting.”
If I had been on some kind of tracks, railway tracks for example (never a good idea, to be fair), I’d have stopped in them, right there, right then. Because after something like 14 years of gaslighting, of ugly populism, of division, here was a glimpse of something a bit better, maybe a lot better. The quote was by the Labour leader Keir Starmer in his speech yesterday in Emersons Green, South Gloucestershire.
Full disclosure: I am a member of the Labour Party and have been on and off since the mid 1970s. I was off during the Corbyn years but joined again after he led Labour to electoral disaster in 2019 to ensure the party never again had a racist, anti-semitic, bad-tempered, thick as mince, hard left dimwit in charge, ever again. And of course, I rejoined to help Keir Starmer win the leadership.
As Dunt points out, Starmer isn’t the most inspiring person in the room. He’s an adequate public speaker. He’s a little bit ordinary. But do you know what? I desperately need some ordinary in my life. I am sick to the back teeth of the all the ugliness in public life. 14 years of it, give or take a few days, and it has been ratcheted up still further under the smug, self-satisfied and utterly inept leadership, if you can call it that, of Rishi Sunak. Like Johnson before, Sunak sees his way to victory by way of division, by playing us off against one another. Stop the boats, attack the LGBT community, attack us for being woke (which is actually a very good thing to be) and to pretend that the establishment is somehow the non-existent “liberal elite” and not the multi-millionares like Sunak who not only run the country, but own it. Starmer has worked out that we’re better than that, or at least should be.
For Starmer comes from the working classes. His success as a lawyer came about not because of him being afforded the best education money could buy, nor enjoying connections throughout the ruling elite. His dad was a tool maker (make your own joke, it’s fair enough) and his mum was a nurse. Sure, he made it to the very top of his profession, but who wouldn’t want their own children to succeed, to better themselves and, yes, to earn good money? And now he is bringing that understanding of the lives of working people, hopefully, into government.
I don’t know about you, but Starmer is talking about me when he says people are “exhausted” by the Tories’ culture wars. When Sunak or any of his ministers appear in the media, I am always reminded of the famous Jeremy Paxman quote: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” Because lying is all they do. Worse still, they want to frame the election so that people feel that all politicians are the same and there’s no point in voting for change. It is as cynical as that. But at some point of 2024 we will have the chance to elect a new government, with “a politics which treads a little lighter on all our lives.”
More than that, a government that actually serves people rather than serving itself because no one, not even the most dyed in the wool Tory, would pretend that the likes of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and now Sunak himself have been anything other than self-serving. They have handed out billions of pounds of our money – there is no such thing as government money – to all manner of dubious people and companies while at the same time running vital public services into the ground. They are bad people and there is no evidence that they weren’t and aren’t in it for themselves.
As I say all the flipping time, I’m a bit old fashioned and just want a government that works for and serves the people. Not just the rich elite, but the ordinary woman and man in the street who works hard and plays by the rules. I want to see people enjoying dignity in old age, I want to see NHS waiting lists ended, as they were by the last Labour government. I want to see our streets to be safe and our kids all getting a first class education. I want the next generation to be better off than ours. Also, I want us to be kinder and gentler to each other.
We do not know if Keir Starmer will succeed as PM but, even taking my Labour bias into account, I believe he has earned that opportunity. And even if change is slow, slower than maybe we would like, wouldn’t that be better than the chaos of Sunak’s worn out Tories?
I am sick at being shouted at by wild-eyed government ministers and the even more barmy Tory backbenchers who have conspired to bring about a country where everything is broken and nothing works, except for the ruling elite who run and increasingly own it.
Less enemies, more friends? It worked pretty well when things really did get better from 1997 under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, whatever the Mail might tell you to the contrary. And if politics really could become boring, wouldn’t that be the best thing of all?
