The sign on the lectern in Downing Street’s rose garden declared the prime minister’s speech would be about “Fixing the foundations”, but it did so in the manner of a demolition notice—with sans serif block capitals, white on black. Keir Starmer, likewise pale-skinned and dark-suited, was there to explain to the public why “things will get worse before they get better”.
At times his lament on Labour’s cursed inheritance and the state of Britain, a gloomy, broken place where Nazi thugs and arsonists stalk the streets, was so bleak and pitiable, so King James biblical, it resembled an offcut of apocalyptic modernist poetry, like lines excised from Yeat’s “The Second Coming”, or Eliot’s “The Waste Land”.
“The rot returns
In all the same places
And it spreads
Worse than before.
You know that – I know that…
… The cracks in our foundation laid bare –
Weakened by a decade of division and decline.
Infected by a spiral of populism…”
But the (fire) sermonising, taken together with the talk of “service” and the sudden, jarring shifts in tone (a reference to Johnson-era lockdown crimes briefly turned Starmer into a wistful balladeer: “Remember the pictures just over there? With the wine and the food…”), made this less a funeral and more a school assembly circa 1955. All that was missing was the assembled hacks being forced to stand and wheeze their way through a wobbly rendition of “He Who Would Valiant Be”.
A month earlier in the Commons, Rachel Reeves, neat and grave and prim, contemplated the specimens before her on the opposition benches. She didn’t much reflect on why they did what they did, what mattered was the offence: a £22bn black hole in the public finances, one unfunded commitment after another—a fiscal event horizon that overwrote all other considerations. Nonetheless, one foolish boy stood up and tried to argue back. He was given short shrift. “The shadow chancellor had a chance to admit what he had done,” Ms Reeves replied. “The word the country was looking for today was sorry.”
Those who criticise the new government for lacking boldness or ideological vision, and accuse it of grim, fiddling-at-the-margins technocracy, miss the point. This is largely because criticism itself is, for now, besides the point. There has been a revolution not in content but in tone. Never in living memory has a new government behaved with such dour superiority or tried to ingratiate itself so little with the public. Labour cares not, at present, for popularity not merely because it has an enormous majority, but because it won despite not being popular. Talk of Starmer’s “plunging ratings” is, more than four years before the next election, especially irrelevant, when they were already fathoms deep before he won.
After decades of post-Blair politics, of government messaging guided by spin doctor and opinion poll and focus group and Twitter feed, it is an extraordinary departure. Our new political masters and mistresses have seen fit to give not just their opponents but also their colleagues and the people who voted them into office an epic telling off. This is government by schoolmaster and schoolmarm.
The rioters and those who abetted them barely had time to pose for their misery mugshot before being dispatched to one of Britain’s overflowing jails. In the Commons, seven left-wing Labour MPs offered themselves as fodder for a tone-setting clobbering by voting for an SNP motion on removing the two-child benefit cap. They had the whip suspended for six months. Duly warned of the consequences of rebellion, the many MPs whose inboxes are full of constituents howling at the injustice of a cut to pensioner winter fuel payments were told to buck up. In the event 53 will need to present an absence note after missing the Commons debate on the measure.
It goes on. Smokers, inherently a dying breed, are to be cast out of Eden, or rather its pub garden, with a lecture from Sir Keir ringing in their ears about the burden that their filthy habit puts on the health service. Nimbys have been served notice that houses will be built whether they like it or not and, yes, maybe even on the Green Belt. Pensioners have been told to weigh the loss of heating support against increases to the state pension and the pay deals ending strikes on public transport and in hospitals—two things that undoubtedly offer handy ways of escaping the chill at home. In a pleasingly meta admonishment, even the school inspectors have been told to sit up straight and stop mumbling in monosyllables.
In so doing, Labour has drawn on one of Britain’s grandest traditions: pedagogic brutality. It invokes not the heroic teacher of today, who beyond their exhausting job variously doubles as social worker, carer, counsellor and post-austerity sports and arts volunteer, but our folk memory of school as a place of terror, and of education as an essentially punitive process. It is a theme that spans our literature, from Shakespeare’s matchless description of the “whining schoolboy, with his satchel/ And shining morning face, creeping like snail/ Unwillingly to school”, evoking even from the 1600s the September feeling of soggy grey weather and stiff new shoes, to Alexander Pope’s sadistic schoolmaster in The Dunciad flogging pupils with the “dreadful wand” and wearing a garland made of “infant’s blood, and mother’s tears”. On it goes to Dickens’ gallery of educational grotesques—Wackford Squeers, Mr Gradgrind and the arguably-a-bit-on-the-nose Mr M'Choakumchild—and George Orwell’s account of his dreadful school days, where he was caned for wetting the bed, right up to the recent spate of books by traumatised former boarding school boys, including Charles Spencer.
With such an inheritance, Britons instinctively grasp the idea that the formation of “character”, whether that of an individual or a nation, demands suffering, sacrifice and discipline, even if we reject its cruel excesses and underlying logic.
There is a long game, of course: blame the Tories for all the horrid things now in order to cue up the policies that might reward our collective pain ahead of the next election. You might say this strategy is as ultimately cynical and presentation-focused as anything that preceded it. Still, it is a break with successive administrations that have treated the electorate like indulged toddlers who need to be fed reductive, soothing buzz phrases and mushed up cakeism, the better to distract them from the mess accumulating in the body politic’s nappy: a trend that culminated in Boris Johnson’s government by Merrie England vibes. Maybe after all that, treating us less like babies and more like recalcitrant schoolchildren is progress.
And if you find the thought of at least five more years of this oppressive, think of what will ensue if the Tory membership is allowed to elect the serially punchy Kemi Badenoch as leader. The age of spin will truly come crashing down. The Commons will thrill to the strange spectacle of Labour miserablism versus Tory pugilism.
Either way, as Starmer told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, “Tough decisions are tough decisions.” This is politics that is not supposed to be popular. The country has asked for grown-up government, for a dose of starch and cod liver oil after years of booze-ups and impossible promises, and grown-up government it will get. Quiet at the back.
