It’s amazing to think Keir Starmer was sold to us Brits as Mr. Sensible.
He’ll be gloriously boring and that’s just what we need, said his media cheerleaders when he was elected prime minister in July 2024.
After the tumult of Brexit, the wacky Boris Johnson years and all that lockdown lunacy, we need a little calm, they said.
Enter Sir Keir.
He’s a “safe pair of hands,” said every talking head.
“The grown-ups are back in charge,” cried The Guardian.
Fast-forward 23 months and Starmer has thrown in the towel.
Far from steadying the good ship Britain, he’s left it in an unholy mess.
Starmer’s Britain is a nation scarred by riots, fractured by social division, overrun with illegal immigrants and full of fuming Brits demanding to know how it all went so wrong.
I’ll tell you how: Because while Starmer posed as a sensible centrist, he let himself be dragged ever more leftward.
He promised to put out the fires of the Culture Wars, but ended up taking the side of the crackpot left in their infernal battle with normalcy. He bowed to the progressive bigotry that treats patriotism as racism, criticism of radical Islam as a “phobia” and freedom of speech as a threat to the social fabric.
Starmerite socialism
There’s a lesson here for America’s Democratic Party: Fail to make a break with your lunatic wing, and you too could end up in the garbage pail of history alongside Sir Keir.
Starmer bowed out with tears in his eyes as he announced his resignation outside 10 Downing St. on Monday.
He says he’ll oversee an “orderly transfer” of power.
Britain could have a new prime minister as early as next month.
We know who it will be: Andy Burnham, the long-serving mayor of Manchester who won a seat in the House of Commons in a by-election last week.
Burnham has gone to Parliament with one aim: to push out Sir Keir and take his throne.
If it is an “orderly transfer,” it will be the only orderly thing Starmer has done.
Everything else lies in ruins.
The economy has been sacrificed to the cult of welfarism.
Under Sir Keir the UK reached the grim milestone of paying out more in welfare than it receives in income tax.
Our broken state now forks out $441 billion a year to the workless, while pulling in just $438 billion from people who work.
This isn’t an accident — it’s Starmerite socialism in action.
Earlier this month, a WhatsApp message sent by one of Starmer’s Cabinet ministers was leaked.
It moaned that the only thing they discuss in government these days is “Who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?”
Decent Brits are fuming over this hiking of their tax bills to pay ever fatter salaries to the lanyard classes. And worse, to fund the four-star bed and board of the hundreds of unvetted men who land on our shores every week.
We are forced to pay for the upkeep of blokes from backward countries who commit heinous crimes against our women and girls — true madness.
Our energy infrastructure is decaying too, thanks to Starmer’s appointment of Net Zero nut Ed Miliband as his environment secretary.
Like a true “End is Nigh” cultist, Miliband thinks Earth will burn if we frack for gas or drill for oil in the North Sea.
‘Immigration & energy’
President Trump was bang on when he said Starmer “failed badly” on two big issues: “immigration and energy.” Our borders are broken and our abundant natural resources are stuck underground — all because of woke ideology.
Then there was Starmer’s disdain for everyday Brits.
When people hoisted up the England flag last summer, in defiance of the fashionably ashamed elites, he sneered.
One of his MPs said her “stomach churned” at the sight of these “tatty bits of cloth” — what a way to talk about the national banner.
Starmer tried to enforce a definition of “Islamophobia” to curb what us oiks can say about Islam.
His patrician impulse was always to tame public feeling.
Back in 2020, he took the knee for career criminal George Floyd; this year he flat out refused to take the knee for Henry Nowak, the sweet British student who was brutally murdered by a Sikh and then manhandled by police who falsely suspected him of racism.
It was Starmer summed up.
He genuflected to the BLM idiocy — but wagged his finger when Brits took the knee for white Henry Nowak.
Starmer shows where leftist nuttiness leads. His Labour Party, like the Dems, has turned its back on the working classes and thrown its lot in with the elitist drivel of graduate radicals. We end up with ever stiffer taxes, infinite “asylum-seekers,” woke censorship, an energy crisis and working-class anger.
Let Starmer’s downfall be a lesson to leftist parties everywhere.
Brendan O’Neill is chief political writer for the British online magazine spiked.