The Starmer Problem...(18.5.26)

A confession: I find Keir Starmer genuinely irritating. There, I said it. 

I want to get that out of the way now because I am trying to make a broader structural argument about managerial culture, institutional thinning, and the kind of political class Britain now produces, and the hapless Starmer happens to be an unusually clear example of it. The structure itself is equal opportunities, and I am not seeking to single out Labour or declare my political allegiances, which are irrelevant.

Also, I don’t want anyone thinking I arrived at my irritation through dispassionate analysis. Nope. It came from prolonged exposure to a man who somehow manages to radiate the atmosphere of a compliance seminar while standing perfectly still. That voice. The prosecutorial cadence, nasalling away about international law. The rolled-up sleeves that are supposed to signal ordinary bloke but instead signal someone who has been briefed on what ordinary blokes do with their sleeves. He is, on a purely visceral level, very hard to warm to. 

The British public appears to agree. As of May 2026, Starmer's net favourability sits at around minus 45, three quarters of the country view him unfavourably, two thirds think he should not lead Labour into the next election, and three quarters think he would lose it. These aren’t numbers that happen to someone who is just unpopular. They happen to someone who has become a symbol of something the public can’t quite name but can feel.

What’s most striking is that he excites absolutely nobody. Even the people who voted for him don’t appear to like him. He has no base in the proper sense, no constituency that lights up when he speaks, no group of supporters who experience his leadership as the expression of something they believe in. He is the head of a governing party that won a landslide and has now been eviscerated in local elections after less than two years in office, and the striking thing about the response to the eviscerating is its complete inability to recognise what is being said. Voters are not signalling that Labour has been insufficiently committed to its current direction. They are signalling that they want something different. 

Starmer's response, audible in every speech since the May locals, is to interpret the rejection as a request for him to deliver his current programme more emphatically. Message understood, you want more of me, but harder and faster. 

This is not strategy. It is the only response available from someone whose entire instrument is the standard “managerial kit”, who has no other register to fall back on, and who cannot imagine that the rejection might be of the kit itself.

And that’s the interesting thing about Starmer. He is not an accident. He is what the system produces. And understanding why the system produces Starmer tells you more about the state of British politics than anything Starmer himself has ever said, which is convenient because nothing he has ever said has been particularly illuminating.

The mistake would be to read Starmer as a flip-flopper, a man who calculates and adopts positions strategically. Flip-flopping requires a self underneath that is doing the calculating, a private compass being overridden by public expedience. With Starmer there is no evidence of any such underneath. The positions he holds are not chosen against any internal resistance. They are the ambient temperature of the professional-managerial class he has spent his entire adult life inside, arrived at through ease of uptake – from sitting in rooms with people who “obviously” agree - expressed through a man who has internalised that environment so completely he has no distance from it. 

He is not insincere. Insincerity requires sincerity to be possible. He is something stranger again... A man whose entire orientation is the management of legible positions (he favours law), who has never had reason to develop any other instrument, and who genuinely cannot tell the difference between holding a position and being one.

What he holds, as far as it is possible to tell, is the portable kit of legible good-person ideas that has dominated British professional and political culture for the last thirty years (which I am not seeking to judge, just to observe). Supra-national globalism. Sensitivity. Proceduralism. The belief that all perspectives can be reconciled if only the correct framework of care and management is applied. The belief that applying qualitative judgements to competing cultural forms is inherently suspect, because tolerance is understood primarily as the refusal to rank. The careful avoidance of any position that might be characterised as “unkind” by people in the same room.

These are not convictions forged through difficulty – no tussle of ideas. They are the surface markers of belonging to a particular class that has agreed in advance what decency looks like. The kit has been the route to every position he has ever held, which is why he cannot put it down, and why even now, watching his party haemorrhage votes in every direction, he can produce no response except to brandish the kit more firmly. He can't retreat from it. There is nothing to retreat to. The kit is not unique to him either. It is the operating system of much of the parliamentary Labour Party, which has come to resemble less a workers' movement than a particular sociological type: graduates of similar institutions, holders of similar opinions, sharers of similar instincts, for whom the work of politics has become the management of nice decisions rather than the bearing of difficult ones.

Governing, when taken seriously, is the business of bearing costs. You’ll make decisions people loathe. Houses are built in the green belt or they are not, and either decision wounds someone. Public spending rises or falls, borders are managed at some imperfect level of openness, welfare is reformed or left untouched, and every direction produces people whose lives become harder. A serious politician is one who has internalised that there is no available position which does not cost something, and whose authority comes from the willingness to bear that cost openly rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. The kit cannot do this. The kit is built precisely to evade the question of cost, because the cost is what produces friction, and friction is what the kit was developed to manage out of existence. A politician fluent in the kit cannot answer the question of what they would actually do, because the kit was never about doing. It was about belonging to the class that gets to decide what doing looks like.

The kit was always a kit. But for a long time, the underlying conditions of British life were close enough to the kit's assumptions that the kit looked reasonable. A country that was still broadly cohesive, with functioning institutions, modest levels of migration, a public square in which most participants shared a baseline of common reference, could hold a politics organised around sensitivities and procedures without the politics becoming visibly absurd. That country, increasingly, no longer exists. Immigration at scale, public services visibly collapsing, social trust eroding, towns hollowed out, a generation that cannot afford housing, a tech revolution threatening young people’s career paths, a public discourse that has fragmented beyond the ability of any shared institution to hold. 

The conditions have diverged from the kit, and the kit has no mechanism for noticing. It can’t be calibrated against reality because it is not a tool for engaging with reality. It is a marker of belonging to a class. So, the politicians holding it can’t adjust when reality diverges. They can only become more strident in defending the kit, which makes them more visibly absurd and tone-deaf, which deepens the divergence.

This is why the dislike of Starmer has the particular quality it has. It’s not that he is wrong in the way politicians have always been wrong. It is that the wrongness is constitutive. He cannot be otherwise. There is no version of Starmer that can hear the electorate and respond to what is actually being said, because hearing what is being said would require having an instrument other than the kit, and he has no other instrument. When hundreds of thousands of British citizens took to the streets last summer with concerns about community safety, and the pace of cultural change, Starmer's response was to label them far-right thugs and to deploy a policing response so visibly asymmetric that "two-tier policing" entered the national vocabulary overnight. He could not hear the concern because his framework has no category for legitimate popular anger that does not align with his interpretive assumptions. There is agreement, and there is extremism. There is nothing in between. The millions of people who do not fit the categories of agreement or extremism are categorised as extremism by default, because the alternative would require acknowledging that the framework is missing something, and the framework is the man.

The deeper problem is that the “earthy” embeddedness Starmer has spectacularly failed to perform has, in significant ways, ceased to exist as a national resource. The civic infrastructure that once produced genuinely embedded leaders, the unions, the churches, the trades, geographical ties, the local councils with real powers, the working men's institutes, the apprenticeships that bound people to a craft and to each other, has been thinning for decades. Some of that thinning was inevitable, but much of it wasn’t. It was the result of an intellectual and political class that treated rootedness as parochial, institutional loyalty as naive, and national identity as something faintly embarrassing to be educated out of. The thinning was cheered on by the people best positioned to benefit from it, and now the same people are writing essays mourning the consequences.

Will Self published a piece recently about "holding his nose" and voting Labour in the Lambeth local elections. It’s a thoughtful piece, making the case for municipal government as a moral form, for the unglamorous machinery of drains and housing and social care over the spectacular politics of symbolic alignment. And he’s right about most of it. But it is hard to read without noticing that people like Self (who I don’t think is the worst culprit), who have spent forty years being very clever about why the institutions of ordinary British life were embarrassing, are now articulating with great elegance the consequences of a fragmentation their own attitudes accelerated. The metropolitan classes have spent decades treating national identity as embarrassing, borders as reactionary, institutional loyalty as naive, and anyone who raised concerns about the pace of cultural change as someone to be sneered at. Along the way they’ve celebrated every institutional capture as progress, mocking every objection as bigotry. And now they write beautifully about the collapse of the very structures their own intellectual framework helped to hollow out. The writing is lovely. The self-awareness? Not so much…

What is left, after the embedded forms of civic life have been thinned out, is not a vacuum. It is a country in which there is less and less for anyone to be embedded into. The bedrock has been chipped out. The institutions that once produced people with bearings of their own are gutted. The local powers that once required real engagement with real places have been centralised away. The basic, unglamorous forms of belonging that once produced loyalty and obligation have been culturally undermined. 

The result is not only that we have a managerial political class instead of an embedded one, but that an embedded one is no longer producible. The conditions for it do not exist. What remains is a thin professional-managerial ladder which selects, at every rung, for the people who create least friction with the prevailing assumptions, and those people rise to the top of an institutional structure that has been thinning beneath them as they rose. Starmer is not the cause of this. He is the output made flesh.

The legislative programme basically tells the same story from the institutional side – across governments of all colours, but certainly this last one. More powers. More frameworks. More protections. More enforcement mechanisms. More regulatory bodies. More safeguarding. More hate speech provisions. More online safety architecture. Each one is a response to a real problem, even if you think the solution isn’t right. But together they describe a state that no longer knows how to produce solidarity and has replaced it with compliance architecture. The modern British government cannot generate trust, so it generates procedures. It can’t inspire shared purpose, so it mandates shared obligations. It can’t lead, so it administers, and administration, by its nature, selects for administrators.

The language of care proliferates even as the range of what can be said within it contracts. More frameworks for inclusion while the actual diversity of permissible thought narrows. More commitments to openness while the definition of acceptable opinion tightens. The guardrails multiply and the space between them shrinks, and anyone who notices this is told the guardrails are there for their protection. This is the structural double bind. Concerns about the direction cannot be expressed in terms the framework recognises, because the framework was built precisely to filter out such concerns. People who try to express them find themselves categorised as the problem the framework was built to address. This produces the strange feature of contemporary politics in which large parts of the electorate experience themselves as politically homeless, their concerns visible only to themselves and routinely mischaracterised by their politicians, while the political class continues to speak in a vocabulary that becomes more ornate as it becomes more detached from what people are actually living through. 

The migration of therapeutic logic into governance accelerates all of this. The assumption that the right response to every difficulty is more sensitivity, more accommodation, more institutional care, and more policing of tone. The conviction that if we refuse to name what we see clearly enough, the not-naming will resolve it. A population treated not as adults who can manage trade-offs but as a collection of vulnerabilities requiring management, and woe betide you if you “say the wrong thing”. The state as devouring mother, to borrow Fromm's image: protecting so completely that the capacity for independent action atrophies, and the dependence this creates is then cited as evidence that more protection is needed. The ratchet only tightens.

Starmer governs from distance, and the distance generates certainty. His speeches about working people have the quality of observations made from a long, long way away. They are bloodless and organised in a way that feels oddly synthetic - the toolmaker father, the ordinary upbringing, the repeated invocation of “working people” - and it all feels entirely untouched by the texture of the lives being described. They sound like someone who has read a briefing paper about ordinary life rather than someone who has been inside it. That quality of cleanness feels like competence from within the Westminster environment where it is produced, hence his selection in the first place. But from outside, it feels like something else entirely. The gap between the performance and the reality it claims to describe grows wider with every speech, and the people living inside the reality can feel the gap even when they can’t say exactly what it is they feel. 

The visceral dislike of Starmer, the mockery, the memes, the constant commentary on his manner, is the public trying to say something it can’t find the right words to say. It is not really about him. That is why the hostility toward Starmer has a quality of frustrated recognition rather than simple political disagreement. People are not just annoyed by him but by what he represents: a governing class that has become so distant from the lives it manages that it can describe those lives with perfect fluency and zero comprehension. It is about a political system that has selected so consistently for managerial fluency over substance that it has produced a leader who is, in some fundamental sense, empty of everything except the ability to perform seriousness to a bunch of people who already agree. He is not uniquely hollow. He is the hollowest product of a system that has been hollowing out for decades, and the fact that he rose to the top is not a failure of the system but its logical endpoint.

I don’t think this is fixable by replacing Starmer with someone more charismatic. The problem isn't personnel but structural, and worse than structural: it is foundational. The system that produced him will produce more like him until the conditions that select for robotic managerial fluency over genuine embeddedness are themselves changed. And those conditions can’t be changed simply by deciding to change them. They will now need the slow rebuilding of the civic forms that once made embedded authority possible, which is a generational project rather than an electoral one.

Reintroducing friction into political culture, tolerating leaders who say uncomfortable things and make choices people genuinely disagree with, reclaiming institutions that teach the young how to think, and rewarding difficulty over fluency - all of this is necessary. But it is not sufficient. Without bedrock to embed into, there will be no embedded leaders. There will only be more Starmers, holding the kit more firmly, expressing increasing puzzlement at why the country no longer responds. 

In the meantime, we have Starmer. And the drains are backing up.

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Steve Perkins is a Consultant Psychotherapist and Clinical Supervisor in private practice in Shoreham-by-Sea and City of London. He is the author of Moral Singularity: Life Inside Closed Moral Worlds and Why Moral Conversation Breaks Down (2026), and writes on therapeutic enclosure, conviction cascades, the interpretive ratchet, and the structural dynamics of closed moral systems.

MBACP (Accred)
www.whitestonetherapy.com