Does Keir Starmer subscribe to The Critic?
In an interview with The Economist last week, Starmer said that he could “sleep at night” if Conservatives replaced Labour in No. 10; a “right-wing government”, however, would be another thing entirely. Distinguishing between right-wing and Conservative governments is the kind of thing The Critic recommends.
According to The Economist’s interview, Starmer believes: “Jolting Britain out of its economic malaise is the main shield against a Reform government”. This, of course, will take time; how does one stave off the turquoise tide in the here and now?
A sceptical eye is turned to the government’s recent decision to delay four elections for new Combined Authorities in Essex, Hampshire and the Solent, Sussex and Brighton, and Norfolk and Suffolk. The elections were due to take place next May, and will now take place in 2028. Reform was on track to win all four.
The Government blamed the delay on local authorities needing more time to merge. As the Institute for Government argue, announcement points to one of two conclusions: the government misread the enormity of its own challenge, or it acted out of sheer partisan self-interest, “given Labour seemed unlikely to win any of the four contests, and may have a better chance in 2028 when the electoral system will have been changed.”
As someone who sits on an authority which underwent the exact same process, I am highly sceptical of the first claim. Given the number of similar reorganisations that have been enacted across the country in recent years, there should be plenty of institutional know-how in the Civil Service (if not within Labour) regarding how to get these deals over the line. None of the previous elections have required such a delay, and given the enormous financial advantages on offer (those affected areas are set to lose £215m in investment funds), all local authorities involved have been dedicating ample time and resources to the project.
Given Reform are set to win every authority and Labour attain at best a distant second in Norfolk and Suffolk — and possibly even be consigned to fifth by the Greens in Sussex and Brighton — they are happy to let the process drift on rather than enforcing a hard deadline to get these new authorities up and running. This amounts to a slow, almost imperceptible process of democratic backsliding.
Stamer did not emerge from the political world, but the legal one
Many of the commentariat have characterised Starmer as the last of the Sensibles, whose problems are downstream of a mistaken belief that “just getting on with the job” and decency in public office are enough. This isn’t true. Starmer’s problem is not even, per Stephen Bush, that he has no idea of who he is governing for. Starmer’s problem is that Starmerism is not a political ideology but a governing process — and a governing process that is incompatible with democracy.
Stamer did not emerge from the political world, but the legal one — which precious few of our commentators have much grasp of. In recent years, like many of our institutions, law has taken on an increasingly idealistic character, shaped above all by the language of rights. The discourse of lawyers today is dominated by public law rights; political rights, social rights, and of course human rights — the wellspring of Starmerism.
International human rights law rests on the claim that certain rights are intrinsic to our humanity, which are not contingent on the collective democratic decisions of societies. Since this body of rights exists independently of political choice, it is the role of the legal system to define and enforce them. In this worldview, legitimacy flows from a government’s inherent morality, not from the transient will of those who elect it.
The difficulty with embedding judicial values at the heart of governance is that it creates a legal model fundamentally at odds with Britain’s political tradition. By elevating judges above elected representatives, it demands that democracy itself take a back seat, subordinating collective choice to a secondary role — a deliberate limitation of the decision space of our elected officials to a set of judicially-approved options.
To defend judicial supremacy in lawmaking, as Jonathan Sumption warned in his latest book The Challenges of Democracy, its advocates tend to redefine democracy as the very values they see reflected in judicial decision-making. What follows is not a formal abolition of democracy, but a subtle and silent definition. Democracy “ceases to be a method of government, and instead becomes a set of political values, like communism or human rights, which are said to represent the people’s true wishes without regard to anything that they may actually have chosen for themselves.”
Our leaders … are confusing democracy with liberalism, and in defending liberalism they are edging toward a liberal autocracy
As he says in his interview with The Economist, Starmer sees Reform as a deadly political prospect because of the perceived threat it poses to Britain’s inherent moral values; a prospective Reform government would “do huge damage to our country, to our society, to our global standing, and destroy much of our country”. In his mind it is legitimate to delay the local elections as it will allow enough time for his raids on the public purse to buy votes to come good and for him to pack the Lords. He believes this is all justified because he will have protected our institutions from some temporary democratic paroxysm.
Democracy is in desperate need of reworking to make it fit for governance in the increasing complexity of the modern world. Our leaders, however, are confusing democracy with liberalism, and in defending liberalism they are edging toward a liberal autocracy. It leads down dark paths. Ed Davey has recently called for Starmer to launch a national investigation into “Russian infiltration” in Reform. This should come as little surprise — as Sumption notes, “the default position of human societies has always been some form of autocracy. The world is full of countries which have reverted to type.”
But at some point, the systematic use of coercion will no longer be compatible with any notion of collective self-government. To turn the apparatus of the state against a right-wing party on the cusp of power, whether by denying the vote or by harassing its supporters, would make plain that Britain has ceased to be a full democracy. It would confirm that we live under a liberal autocracy, or a “managed” democracy, eroding what little legitimacy the state still commands and setting the stage for a dramatic reordering of the political settlement. For all the desires of (in)human rights lawyers, sovereignty is not yet obsolete.
