23 APRIL 2025 | OPINION
In the movie ‘Alien’, the sole survivor discovers that the monster is hiding in her escape pod. She presses buttons to release one poisonous gas after another; at last, she finds one that galvanises the alien into frantic escape action.
What triggered Sir Keir in PMQs was Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch’s demand for an admission that he had been wrong about gender – for an apology to Rosie Duffield MP, driven out of the Labour Party for her perfectly sane views on the subject, and to Kemi for the ‘transphobe’ abuse his myrmidons had hurled at herself.
Since the Supreme Court (a 2009 New Labour invention) determined last week that gender has a biological basis as far as the Equality Act is concerned, Starmer could not repudiate the ruling. A man whose political power depends on legal and procedural technicalities cannot defy the law. But to concede that he had previously been misguided on this, or about anything at all? Unthinkable!
Instead, the PM resorted to a panicky non-reply counterattack – Tory failures on the NHS, US trade deals and British Steel. He went for an advertiser’s copywriter-like slogan: “They are not Conservatives; they are a con.” He spoke of people threatening Kemi’s position – “the shadow Justice Secretary, who is away plotting” and “the Honourable Member for Clacton [Nigel Farage] fighting over the bones of the Tory party.”
What a performance!
It’s not as though the PM is wedded to the trans issue – “He does not know what he actually believes,” said Kemi. His approach to the truth is post-modern: what counts is the ‘narrative’, a principle that underlay Alastair Campbell’s successful manipulation of the public’s perception (Tory sleaze, Labour ethics) that gave us thirteen years of socialist misrule. Now, the narrative is that Starmer is never wrong.
As for the Supreme Court, the philosopher and commentator Peter Hitchens says it shouldn’t exist; it is one of the many Blairite cuts at Parliament’s supremacy. Now Labour finds itself hoist by its own petard. Nor is this the biggest problem the Court has presented: its just-delivered £44 billion compensation ruling on car finance is twice the size of Sir Keir’s favourite ‘Tory black hole’, and is an existential threat to the already beleaguered banking industry. Already the sky is darkening with compo-claim vultures gathering overhead.
PMQs these days are mostly a melancholy run-through of scripts. This session was briefly enlivened by Badenoch’s saying that Starmer “doesn’t have the balls” to do the right thing. Quentin Letts says (in the online MailPlus version) that she “flattened” him, but also correctly calls the remark “coarse”. It was perhaps inevitable that when TV first entered the Debating Chamber (1989), our representatives would end up playing to the groundlings.
It is a sad thing to see them fighting like rats in a Birmingham garbage sack, for we are in a multifaceted crisis that took decades to develop and for which both sides are responsible. Partly, it is owing to the desire to stay in power at any cost – think, for example, how David Cameron led the un-parliamentary applause for the now-Sir Tony Blair at the latter’s retirement from office, and took ‘the Master’ as his model for electoral success.
But it is also down to preconceived ideas – plans that turned a blind eye to the key issues facing the country and instead focused on the obsessions of activists. When New Labour swept into Downing Street in 1997, followed by the BBC’s worshipping helicopter, it was on a tide of hope that our economy would be set right. Instead, it put into effect a grand scheme of constitutional rearrangement based on policies developed following their 1987 General Election defeat, as Mark Bevir shows here. Yet “Labour Listens” was not really about consulting the general public; the sort of person who joins a party and participates in policy debates is obviously atypical.
The people themselves spoke emphatically in 2016. What did the Blues do then? What are the Reds doing now? As in the late eighteenth century, we begin to ask on what basis government has the right to rule.
Starmer’s arrival has brought in another detailed programme smelling of the lamp – this time provided by the Brown Commission (at his request). The flaws of devolution exemplified in Scotland, London and Wales have not served to deter him from furthering what is in effect Blair 2.0. The Seventies generation that ran barefoot through Oxford’s streets and stencilled Ho Chi Minh’s image on college walls is seeing their destructive dream coming to fruition.
Is Sir Keir really so passive as to have his clothing and his policies arranged for him, his strategy from ‘the Master’, his Parliamentary replies written by assistants in a two-ring binder? Was his over-reaction to Badenoch’s barbs prompted by a fear of looking inside himself and seeing emptiness?
He apologiseth not, neither doth he explain. When Zara Sultana (Independent), a Gazan supporter, asked why he had “blocked the arrest of an unindicted war criminal” (Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar), Starmer simply replied: “I didn’t”. He offered no elaboration, which might have involved the role of the Foreign Secretary in offering assurances to Sa’ar.
Otherwise, there was the usual mixture of quibbling, begging and fawning.
The SNP is always a good foil: Scottish Labour’s Kenneth Stevenson “commended” the PM for his achievements in respect of the NHS, contrasting them with the SNP’s waste. Yet, when the latter party’s Dave Doogan called Starmer an “incompetent-in-chief” whose failures justified the eleven-point poll lead for Scottish independence, Sir Keir answered that “the electorate in Scotland answered that question in July of last year”.
Hubris tempts Nemesis: effectively, Labour won the General Election by default and has since made itself heartily detested in only nine months. The local elections on 1 May will likely show that we ‘live in interesting times’, to quote the Chinese curse.
