Keir Starmer: the man with no legacy

Sir Keir Starmer: the PM who did nothing about the sense of doom pervading Britain, but he did ban ‘doomscrolling’. The man who did zilch to mend our fraying social fabric, but he did stop kids from perusing its consequences on TikTok. The man who failed – catastrophically – to alleviate that bleak feeling many of us have that Britain is broken, but he did cover the next generation’s eyes to just how broken we are.

Starmer should be remembered for his social-media ban for under-16s, that mad, illiberal law, due to come into force in spring next year, that promises to liberate youth from the angst-inducing ‘doomscrolling’ inflicted on them by Big Tech’s wily algorithms. Not because it’s a ‘landmark’ policy, as he claims. And not because it will be effective – kids will find a workaround. No, it’s because leaving intact the social conditions of doom while tweaking the machine so that fewer people can ‘scroll’ those conditions is Starmerism summed up: a regime of hollow theatricality, devoted more to managing the optics of crisis than mustering up the competence to avert it.

Starmer is a man without a legacy. He promised competence over charisma and delivered neither. His was a phantom premiership: government without governing. You could ask a hundred Brits to name a policy he enacted and I reckon five, at best, could do so. Even his vanishingly small number of apologists usually only squawk about what he didn’t do. He didn’t drag us into the Iran-US War. He didn’t follow through on his promise to cut the winter-fuel allowance for pensioners. He didn’t murder anyone. A man so staggeringly insubstantial that even his fans prefer his inertia to his initiative.

For me, the terrifying nothingness of Starmerism is best summed up in the fact that he recently said his ‘proudest achievement’ was scrapping the two-child benefit cap, the Tory-introduced measure that meant families could only claim additional welfare payments for their first two kids. But Starmer opposed cutting that cap. For ages. In fact, in July 2024, he withdrew the whip from seven Labour MPs who voted to scrap it. It was only under pressure from his parliamentary colleagues that he relented. What can you even say about a man whose ‘proudest achievement’ is a course of action foisted on him by others? That’s Sir Keir: the political weathervane who mistook a gust of wind for his own internal moral compass.

As Starmer exits Downing St, to be replaced by his usurper from the north, Andy Burnham, there will be much chatter about his legacy and policies and character. People will remind us he recognised the state of Palestine (which of course wasn’t enough to appease the insane Islamo-left that lusts after the obliteration of the Jewish State). They’ll yap about his adroit handling of Trump’s tariffs frenzy. They’ll say he invested billions in renewables, while the rest of us still wonder why he didn’t just drill, baby, drill for all that oil in the North Sea. They’ll chirp about how he extended free school meals provision. They’ll say he stood up to Big Tech.

But for me, even these policies, if we can call them that, illuminate the rot in the hollow heart of Starmerism. The Starmer era was fundamentally a performance of government. Starmer gave the appearance of governing without actually governing. He was the ultimate busy fool – officiously rushing through the corridors of power while neglecting the nation outside. It felt flat-out surreal to watch him wang on about the importance of getting teens off TikTok even as thousands of men from fuck knows where landed on our shores every week and as the economy teetered on the brink of ruin. It was worse than fiddling while Rome burns – at least those emperors had some fun as the flames licked the walls of their empire.

To read about Starmer’s style of ‘government’ was to stare goggle-eyed into the bottomless well of state incapacity in the 21st century. His colleagues called him the ‘absent PM’. He has ‘no views’, apparently. He is the ‘least intellectually curious person I have ever met’, said a departing aide. Downing St under Starmer was apparently consumed by an ‘unnatural, overwhelming silence’. The PM pored with anal intensity over every policy document but had nothing to add to them: ‘He read everything [and] said nothing.’ He has no ‘theory of power’, insiders said. He has no idea ‘how power works’. He is wholly unlike any ‘historical figure’ who ‘got stuff done’.

Partly this is a Starmer problem: he’s a stiff, adenoidal, lawyerly type who was ill-suited to both the ideology and the intrigue of politics. But it’s also a state problem. Starmerism is the end product of the voluntary euthanasia of the British state; of decades of the state’s suckling at the teat of Euro-federalism and its outsourcing of economic life to the Bank of England and of political life to a vast quangocracy that is as aloof as it is unaccountable.

No one in politics has a ‘theory of power’. They haven’t needed one, because they abdicated their power to others. They are incurious and uncannily quiet and ‘absent’ because they made themselves the recipients of foreign law-making and of ‘expert’ economic advice, robbing themselves of any need to think, far less act. Anyone who thinks Burnham will turn this around is in for the rudest of awakenings. Managerialism with eyelashes is still managerialism. A technocrat who likes The Smiths is still a technocrat. Indeed, Burnham’s hyper-localism will create ever vaster layers of bureaucracy, further deracinating the decision-making capacity of the British state and birthing yet more incurious faux-leaders primed for ‘taking advice’ rather than remaking the nation.

It is precisely the thinness of politics in the modern era that bends it towards authoritarianism. Incapable, or unwilling, or both, of fixing the legion crises afflicting our societies, our leaders instead focus on policing what we the people are allowed to think and say about those crises. So Starmer called the rape-gang crisis a ‘far-right bandwagon’. He lamented, and sought to crush, ‘doomscrolling’. He spent ages coming up with a new definition of ‘Islamophobia’. There was even discussion about forcing YouTube to big up ‘trustworthy’ sources like the BBC and Channel 4 News over fresh, dissenting digital voices, like spiked.

Starmer’s instinct, always, was to manage and tame and drain the fury from public discussion. He couldn’t repair our borders, but he could demonise people who worried about the borders. He couldn’t truthfully confront the rape-gang crisis – and the state’s complicity – but he could call people ‘far right’ for talking about it. He couldn’t address the entirely legitimate concerns of the upstart media, but he could subdue the upstart media by strong-arming Big Tech to parrot the bollocks of the BBC. The great terror of the technocrat is that they have lost control of the narrative. Because they have. Demonisation and censorship are the natural, cancerous outgrowths of a state that is isolated and scared and searingly distrustful of the people it rules over. Tyranny is always more likely to spring from weakness than from strength. Starmerism shows that.

A confession: I doomscroll sometimes. My algorithm feeds me clips of Europe in crisis. I try to resist. I certainly refuse to bow to the idea that Europe is doomed, because I don’t believe it is. But not once have I thought, ‘Why is Big Tech feeding me this?’. Instead I’ve thought, ‘Why have our politicians done this to our beautiful nations?’. Starmer had no answers. Burnham won’t, either. Their cowardly despotism will endure for as long as we let it.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.