FlyTheNest

Blessed with a massive majority, in a country that is functionally a legislative dictatorship, Starmer radically transformed UK policy on social issues. Rather than try and get out of (or at least perceive) the straitjacket they had put themselves in on the economy, their political strategy was what I term reactionary centrism. In a nutshell, this posits that electorates are moving right because they have ‘reasonable concerns’ about immigration, asylum, and the excesses of social liberalism (particularly on trans rights). The fascist resurgence can hence be understood as a ‘backlash to woke’. In response, center-left parties should give ground on these issues to ‘take them off the table’.

The queer vote, the, for lack of a better word, ‘internationalist’ vote, are invariably going to be core pillars of any modern centre-left party’s coalition. They’ll put up with a certain amount of performative moderation, given how frightening the alternatives are, but their patience is not infinite. People will not cast ballots for a party that is actively oppressing them, removing longstanding rights, or describing them in dehumanizing terms.

In the elite blindness to these basic facts we see something not instrumentally rational but identitarian. A common feature of all of the worst elements on our side—from reactionary centrists like Starmer, to centrist columnists in the US, to anti-alarmists who scold us for being scared of Trump, the dirtbag left who can’t get over their hatred of ‘normie resist libs’—is the contempt they have for the people who actually vote for centre-left parties in the 21st century.

gilsey wrote: Tue Jul 07, 2026 10:00 am From a couple of weeks ago, apologies if we've already seen it. I believe it's a US publication but a UK author.

Starmer did not "do nothing": he made the country radically more regressive. No wonder he fell.

" Quo Vadis
I keep hearing about how Starmer is a decent man, albeit perhaps not one cut out for the bareknuckle world of politics. The Guardian article cited above ends with this quote from historian Anthony Seldon: “He is this decent, hard-working, serious-minded figure, who could have made it – but critically, fatally, didn’t have the ability to learn how to do the job.”

I’ve never seen it. Indeed, Starmer gives every indication of having no core values whatsoever. The inescapable conclusion is that to many people ‘decency’ is a sort of middle-class affect. A Republican politician might brag about having personally thrown a trans person out of the “wrong” toilet. A Labour minister urged us to “alert a member of staff” when “a person of the opposite biological sex enters a single-sex facility”, a near perfect encapsulation of how they talk and think.

To those who are baffled by the hatred of Starmer from the left, ask yourself, if you were to be prevented from using a toilet, would it matter to you if it was done directly, or through an intermediary? Ask yourself also how people who work service roles might feel about those who outsource ugly, discriminatory conversations to them, in order to keep their own hands clean, to maintain their self-image as ‘decent’ people.

And this is what’s so galling about the press analysis of this moment: They can only see the middle-class affect, not the substance of what it’s being used to deliver. One gets the terrible impression of people who would not notice any amount of oppression providing it was presented in this simpering way. "

gilsey wrote: Tue Jul 07, 2026 10:00 am From a couple of weeks ago, apologies if we've already seen it. I believe it's a US publication but a UK author.