Politics is a grubby business and it’s over in a flash. You’re in power, you win an election, and then you’re out, and all you have to show for it, all you have to tell people about, all you can fill your memoir with, is plain, feeble little boasts about the percentages you moved around in budgets, the ribbons you cut on pointless little embarrassments — and bitching about all the times people in your own party took against you and undermined you and sabotaged the things you were trying to do. That’s politics. That’s Hollywood.
Sir Keir Starmer, theoretically a sensible man, has won an immense majority on a fairly trifling percentage of the vote. He’s not a fool. He must understand what this means. It means that he’s toast, he’s history, he’ll be out the door — if he’s spared — before he feels his feet are comfortably under the desk in Downing Street. Unless he builds something that works, against the great tide of the British regime.
Why? Because his party is full of psycho strivers who want his job and fear a crushing electoral loss, because the country is fundamentally broken, quite close to violent civil disorder, and nothing works — and all of this, all of it, became his fault over six months ago. Tick tock, Sir Keir. The clock on the wall is watching, laughing, over you. Tick tock, Sir Keir. Tick tock.
Starmer has a few months left before he must consider his likely defeat in upcoming elections. He needs to use his immense majority now — this very instant — to save the state from itself. Reform planning, end mass migration, build state institutions that function and are run for their users, not their employees. Do it now, because in a year’s time, you’ll be bogged down in scandals, in resignations from the cabinet, in a recurrence of the sectarian tension, jail for Facebook posts, and sex crimes that for many around the world define modern Britain. Reform, reform, reform. Build, built, build. Do it now. Do it now. Tick tock.
But what has Sir Keir done? The precise opposite. A new review, a new enquiry, a new non-governmental organisation, announced every week. The review of social care — which won’t solve it, just as we can’t actually solve ageing without reordering society like Logan’s Run or miracle drugs — won’t report back until 2028. Weak, weak, weak. Playing for time the man does not have. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.
As is, the British state is pathological and cannot make things work. It destroys teams and whole departments that get things done. Courts that are open are a threat to the state, because — foolishly — they’ll only convict some of the nation’s vast criminal population of crimes, thus thoughtlessly threatening to overfill the already doublestuffed prisons. So the courts must be shut, more than a third of them every working day, and sentencing delayed, and justice held back so long accuser and criminal might just die of old age and take care of this terrible snafu before it becomes a problem for some civil servant somewhere requiring actual work.
Here’s an example. Anger and frustration (justified) in the Telegraph recently because it was revealed that illegal migrants are able to see doctors and book appointments with the faceless bureaucracy in a timely fashion, while native born losers such as us have to wait in line. But what’s the real source of anger here?
It’s unfortunate, of course, to be second class inhabitants of this great land (the others aren’t citizens, so we aren’t second class citizens). But there’s something we forget. It is possible for health care in this country to be good. It’s possible for it to be something other than an unresponsive drear machine which regularly turns murderous. It can be something other than an alien god to which we sacrifice our people in annual tribute. It’s possible for it to work. But not in the current system. The reason the migrants have better health care is because they’ve been given a non-NHS product. Something was stood up from scratch, with state money, free from the nationalised nightmare, and it worked.
Funny how that happens. You can, not in Britain, obviously, but in the world we inhabit, build things — outside the manslaughtering, evil state — that work. Those who temporarily, very temporarily, hold power, ought to think of that.
Because soon you’ll be gone, Sir Keir, ejected by your own party, by the crises you presided over, did nothing to change, to stop, to ameliorate. Sensibleness, legalism, international law, world opinion, judge-led enquiries — the things you esteem more than all others. They won’t save you now. Tick tock, Sir Keir. Tick tock.