Why Starmerism Can’t Survive Contact With Reality

There’s something almost surreal about the political situation in the UK right now. You would generally expect local elections after a landslide victory to favour the new government in its honeymoon period. Instead, Labour looks set to lose the councils it has up for grabs, while the polling momentum is all pointing in the direction of the far-right Reform party.

This is, quite frankly, not what was supposed to happen. It’s not what we were promised, or what everyone in the know blithely assumed would happen. Even Keir Starmer’s fiercest critics didn’t expect him to balls it up this badly, this quickly.

A Labour government under Starmer was supposed to bring the power of Sensible, Serious, Moderate politics to bear on all the problems, and chancellor Rachel Reeves’ stern commitment to sticking to the rules should have calmed the markets and produced growth via confidence and seriousness and whatnot. We were supposed to transition from the fractious, chaotic decade of Corbyn and Brexit and Johnson and Truss to one of quiet competence and tidying up. It was supposed to just work.

Instead, the Starmer project has pretty much immediately collapsed upon contact with reality, polling down in the 20s less than a year into government, level pegging with Nigel Farage’s outfit of incredibly obvious chancers.

You could argue that we live in crisis-stricken times and that any government so buffeted by the winds of fate as we are in 2025 would be struggling. But Starmer’s government isn’t acting like we are in the middle of an omnicrisis. It’s not just responding badly – it’s not really responding at all.

We are witnessing a government locked into a kind of zombie state. Like someone suffering from a rare brain lesion which makes them unable to form a new mental model of the world, who keeps sitting in chairs that aren’t there because they remember where the furniture was ten years ago but who can’t tell where it is now.

This government’s political pedigree might be generously described as ‘pro-Nato muscular Atlanticism’, and ungenerously as being the result of watching The West Wing one-handed for decades. The highest offices of state, therefore, are full of people whose brains have a slot for “the president of the USA” that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or preferably Martin Sheen could fit into, but which is utterly incompatible with Donald Trump. 

The president of the USA, as they understand it – indeed, as they are able to understand it – would not strap a suicide vest to the economy of the United States to prove how tough a negotiator he is, and therefore that can’t be what’s happening here, right in front of their eyes. Labour MPs have even been reported to remark that they think Starmer should be more “Trump-like”, and what can you even say to that?

Reeves’ fiscal rules ought to have been quietly nudged onto the back burner because, if nothing else, Trump’s chaotic tariffs rightly ought to be considered a “significant negative shock”. But Rachel Reeves has no plan B. Reeves is showing off her skills as a chess player, having utterly failed to notice that the game she’s actually playing is Russian roulette with live hand grenades.

And the situation in the US is just the most obvious example of a world which does not look like the one the UK’s government thinks it’s living in. From its commitment to retaining the two child benefit cap to keeping Thames Water privatised at all costs, Labour is furiously trying to find problems that fit the solutions it wants to use, while ignoring the problems that have solutions it doesn’t like.

So what has happened here, then? Why has the UK got itself into a situation where the supposedly sensible ‘tidying up’ government is walking into walls and delivering keynote speeches to the silverware, leaving the field clear for an even more ludicrous bunch of rightwing wreckers to take over in a single election cycle?

I would like to offer a hypothesis. What if the Thatcher-Reagan consensus resolutely self-demolished in 2008, and subsequent politics has been a series of frantic rearguard actions to pretend this hadn’t happened?

What if the UK’s tiny, insular political establishment coalesced around an orthodoxy in which the only two legitimate political positions were “pretend the status quo is absolutely fine and we just need to double down on what we’ve been doing” and “whatever neo-fascist conspiracism they’re writing in the Daily Mail comments section”?

What if everyone who mattered has spent the years since 2008 not trying to adapt to the post-crisis world, but shoring up the barriers around themselves specifically to prevent such an adaptation from taking place?

Would not 20 years of that kind of Herculean effort of self-delusion produce something akin to what we see today? Would we not expect that a political establishment unable to let go of the past would give itself a kind of brain damage and end up, just as we observe, putting its dinner down on a table that was there in 1997 and wondering in bafflement why there’s omelette on their shoes again?

Maybe the Reform surge will be ephemeral. Perhaps it will evaporate in a cloud of scandals this time around. Who can say? But if you foreclose any option except “increasingly out of touch and unlikeable management suits” and “the actual far-right”, then eventually the latter will get in by default. It’s just a matter of time.