Is this the future liberals want?
Starmerism, the wet dream of every centrist pundit and strategist, is a morally bankrupt political train wreck
The most deeply held belief of every centrist pundit from Washington to London is that their worldview, if actually given the chance, would be both politically successful and wildly popular. Substantively, the exact contours of that worldview might vary — the centre, after all, is defined by what it sits between and centrists are the last people anyone would accuse of practising ideological consistency — but since the Clinton/Blair projects of the mid-1990s, it has generally had the same ur-form.
In policy terms, neoliberal centrists want a government that hungrily embraces markets and abandons the old social democratic delusion they can be meaningfully regulated or contained. When there’s a backdrop of economic growth and they’re feeling generous, they might tolerate a few drops of social liberalism too. But even then, they usually want a dollup of social revanchism to run parallel: directed, perhaps, against migrants, welfare recipients, or anyone else without political power they think might be a useful foil. This, they insist against all evidence, is actually a common sense formula for broadly-shared prosperity and the best all you fucking little piggies are ever going to get.
And even better? Absolutely everyone is going to love it. In every suburb and exurb; on every street where people care about their neighbours, have legitimate concerns about rising crime rates, and the sweet scent of means-tested tax credits drifts wistfully upon the air; in every erstwhile manufacturing town hollowed out by deindustrialization where former machinists and coal miners (one imagines) talk of diligence, personal responsibility, and the urgent need for deficit-reduction around the water cooler, the centrist political offer is going to win big if given the chance.
