Britain Can Always Get Worse
Britain Can Always Get Worse
Keir Starmer is dire, but his possible replacements offer no improvement.
Being in England at the moment, I suffer not so much from a state of cognitive dissonance as from a state of emotional dissidence.
On the one hand, I have nothing but contempt for the prime minister, Keir Starmer. He is dull and humorless and has the soul (or perhaps I should say he appears in public to have the soul, since I do not know him personally) of an apparatchik advanced to the rank of the nomenklatura. His ideas are pure gimcrack, and therefore he has only to be faced by a choice to make the wrong one. Although claiming to be working class (which he assumes to confer on him the status of moral aristocrat), he made an excellent living, before turning politician, in that most parasitic and destructive of all branches of the law, human rights. Even his face, his very hair, is boring. He is the kind of man who is able to bore at a distance.
On the other hand, I do not want him to resign as prime minister because he would be replaced only by someone worse. As the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins put it with regard to depressed states of mind, “No worst, there is none.” This, perhaps, is not strictly or literally true, for it is difficult to imagine anyone’s regime worse than that of Pol Pot or Macías Nguema, but within quite wide limits it is always possible to wrest deterioration from a bad situation. And the lamentable fact is that the possible replacements for Starmer, were he to resign or be forced to resign, are yet worse than he.
He does have one card up his sleeve against his rebellious troops, the members of Parliament of his own party: namely, that it is within his power to call an early general election, in which case the great majority of those members of Parliament would lose their seats, for no government has ever been more unpopular than his. (Interestingly, I heard a professor of political science, a subject in whose existence I do not really believe, predict, before Starmer was elected, both that he would be elected and that his government would within a few months be the most unpopular in history—a prediction so uncannily accurate that it made me almost believe that political science was, after all, a real subject.)
The general consensus, however, is that Starmer’s days as prime minister are numbered. I saw one article with the headline “Starmer has to go but his successor will be worse,” and I thought that was similar to a suicide note. If his successor will be worse, why should he have to go? In politics, the usual choice is between the bad and the worse, not between the bad and the good—and history shows that those who elect a politician because he is good, and not because he is merely better than the alternative, usually end up disappointed, disillusioned, and even embittered. Politics, at least in the modern age, is not a metier for good people.
Of course, it is a matter for profound pessimism that a man like Starmer, of no known ability except that of getting on in a bureaucratized hierarchy, should be better than the likely alternatives, but realities must be faced.
The belief that change from a bad situation can only be for the better is what brought him into power in the first place. His predecessors in the job were terrible, but less terrible than he. We are now in danger of continuing that downward trajectory. This is the natural consequence of believing in the good rather than in the less bad.
There is, in addition, a crisis of political legitimacy in Britain (as in France). With his dim brain attuned to nothing as finely as to power, Starmer has always burbled about his mandate to rule. In the legalistic sense, he has such a mandate, but in a wider and more important sense, he has none. He was elected with 20 percent of the electorate eligible to vote, and with 34 percent of the votes actually cast; the procedure was followed, and no fraud was alleged. But on this rather fragile foundation was erected his supposed mandate to do what he wished or thought right to do, with an alleged justification greater than that of the divine right of kings. Vox 20 percent of the populi, vox dei.
The problem is that almost any conceivable government in the near future will be illegitimate in the same sense that Starmer’s government is illegitimate. The old two-party system has broken down, and whatever the faults of the two parties, they did confer legitimacy on the elected government. And legitimacy of the government is one of the important preconditions of social peace or harmony, at least in the modern world with its belief in the forms of democracy.
The declining legitimacy of government, with the consequent rise in the possibility of real social unrest, is the result of a belief, partly right and partly wrong, that whatever the government, nothing important really changes. The captain at the helm of the ship of state may change, but the ship continues in its direction, generally toward the rocks, for there is nothing to connect the wheel with the rudder.
It is true that the national debt continues to rise whoever is in power or office (and there is nothing like the national debt to ensure the enslavement of a population to its outwardly democratic state). And yet still there is better and worse, at least at the margins, among the politicians on offer. Since life for most of us is a matter of many small things, changes at the margins matter.
Therefore, people who say (and I have heard many say it) that they do not vote because they—the politicians—are all the same, all out for their own advantage, and because nothing much will change, are mistaken. Even the threat of a change of personnel in government will exert some restraining effect on politicians.
That Starmer should stand between a ghastly present and a worse future make me think of one of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, the one about Jim who was taken to the zoo, ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion. The moral of the story is
Always keep a hold of nurse
For fear of finding something worse.
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