Keir Starmer: a bad man who identifies as goodFrom the winter-fuel cut to the mass release of wife beaters, he’s clearly not the saint he imagines himself to be.
Julie Burchill
Columnist
12th September 2024
Keir Starmer: a bad man who identifies as good
The rise of identity politics has led to an interesting new category which has been little noted, compared with the usual oddities like men who ‘identify’ as women and snobs who ‘identify’ as socialists. We now have bad people who identify as good people. Think of those men who are all over the internet, threatening any women and Jews who stand up for their rights with rape and murder, while telling us to #BeKind. Or think of Keir Starmer, probably the most prominent of these weird creatures yet.
Labour swept The Heartless Tories away at the last General Election with promises of a new dawn. But the grim reality of the morning after, just a few months on with a long hard winter ahead, is one of unalloyed bleakness. I believe that the Starmer paradox – the bad man who identifies as good – is at the heart of it.
At first glance, the way he has behaved during his short rule so far appears to be mere hypocrisy, so common in politicians that we rarely remark on it anymore. The wonder is here that it’s so utterly upfront. The former anti-corruption crusader now revels in cronyism, allowing a plutocrat to kit him out, as if he were a 20th-century Hollywood gold digger hooking a sugar daddy. The man whose own pension is so big it required its own act of parliament plans to take the winter fuel allowance from the elderly, which may be the difference between security and misery for thousands. The man with the Jewish wife, and who is keen to observe Friday night suppers, who dealt yet another blow to grieving Jewish families by punishing Israel for fighting back against Hamas, just a few days after more Israeli hostages were murdered.
Most strikingly, he is the man with the happy family life who will sacrifice the happiness of hundreds of women and their families by releasing actual attackers of women prematurely, in order to free up prison places for committers of thoughtcrimes.
Among the first 1,700 prisoners released yesterday are hundreds of men who have attacked women, leading the domestic-abuse commissioner, Nicole Jacobs, to say that domestic-abuse survivors will be ‘paying the price’ for prison overcrowding. Thousands more are to be released over the next two months.
Steven Ling was granted parole in July, but Labour’s justice secretary has failed to use her powers to force the parole board to reconsider – no doubt with prison overcrowding in mind. Ling murdered a woman by stabbing her 60 times after raping her. He will now be able to continue his life as a free man still aged only 49. Sentencing him for the sadistic slaughter of 29-year-old Joanne Tulip on Christmas Day 1997, the judge told Ling that he would ‘never be released so long as it is thought you constitute a danger to women’ – or, perhaps, until his prison place might be needed for someone who posted something racist on Facebook.
In a final grotesque twist, Ling carved swastikas on the dead body of Miss Tulip. I can’t help thinking that if his victim had been a man, he wouldn’t be released, as it would have been judged as a racially motivated crime – and therefore important. But it was ‘just’ misogyny – and therefore not really all that worth making a fuss.
Starmer’s overseeing of this mass prison-break with absolutely no regard for frightened victims and grieving families is his worst act of inhumanity yet. But there was always something not quite human about him – something of the uncanny valley. He now has a new kitten named Prince, which he bought after his children asked for a dog (Computer says: ‘They are all pets’). Starmer is like Hal 9000 telling us that he’s doing bad things to us because he wants the best for us. But the glitches are adding up to something more sinister now than silly, as they seemed when he had no power. There is a very real sense that he doesn’t like people at all, that he sees them as algebra problems to be solved. ‘I don’t like images and pictures of people staring down at me… I’ve found it all my life… I don’t like it’, he said of a painting of Mrs Thatcher. ‘I like landscapes’, he added, presumably with no messy humanity spoiling his view.
Starmer seems only able to operate strictly within a pre-planned schedule. See the flashes of anger when he is asked something he wasn’t expecting, or his curious referring to Rishi Sunak as ‘prime minister’ a whopping five times during PMQs last week. Then there was that incident in the pub during the pandemic, when a landlord ordered him out and Starmer just kept going towards him, offering him a pen, as a gift – because it does not compute!
Maybe Starmer is fully aware of what he’s doing and is, as I have suggested, a bad man posing as a good one. Sometimes it definitely feels like he’s trolling us. Using the word ‘reset’ during his recent European jaunt was a sure way of getting us Brexiteers agitated about his possible nefarious plans to overturn an historic democratic decision (52 per cent of the vote is, incidentally, a lot more than the pathetic 34 per cent Labour won this July).
Or maybe he is something far, far darker than a troll. Maybe the humble toolmaker’s son is a nihilist. I know it seems unlikely. One doesn’t imagine a nihilist looking like a Davos-loving technocrat – but maybe it’s the perfect disguise. There are certainly similarities – grounded in nothing, loyal to nothing. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines nihilism as ‘a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless’; ‘a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths’; and ‘a doctrine or belief that conditions in the social organisation are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility’. Ronald Nash called nihilism a ‘condition in which all ultimate values lose their value’.
Starmer’s victory speech in June already seems like a sick and knowing joke in retrospect: ‘Now we can look forward, walk into the morning, the sunlight of hope, pale at first but getting stronger through the day, shining once again, on a country with the opportunity after 14 years to get its future back.’ If only he’d given a pantomime twirl of an imaginary moustache and recited Hughes Mearns’s ‘Antigonish’ instead:
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…
If Starmer were merely a hypocrite, that would be a relief – but this Hollow Man may well be our first ever nihilist prime minister. What comes next is anyone’s – and no one’s – guess.
Just Me
Starmer needs to realise that blaming the Tories is not a plan for government
Originally Posted by Gunny
Speaking of "I promise it'll be different and new" Harris. Obviously sharing the playbook
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