Keep On Keeping On...

Just an observation on where we currently seem to find ourselves in the political world of 2026 UK. We are at the moment only two years into a Labour government that inherited the poisoned chalice of a UK economy that had effectively been dismembered and its body parts scattered far and wide by a succession of Tory governments following the precepts of a political philosophy that by now should be outlawed at the very least as a dangerous drug or rather more as a lethal weapon of mass destruction. We all by now know what this heinous excrescence of a theory is called, and most of us are indeed very much the victims of its inevitable dire economic outcomes: neo-liberalism in all its forms and guises is the scourge of all but the very wealthy.

Keir Starmer was elected to the leadership of the Labour Party by us, the membership; not because of his personality or charismatic qualities, but because of his skill set: a lawyer with a forensic attention to the detail of law and process: given the lawless quality of previous, Tory governments, not an unreasonable choice. There are two things that are currently trying to scupper this government.The first is obviously the right wing establishment, which in the UK means a considerable majority of the media, commentariat, and the money that enables them. The second is rather more troubling, if no less annoying or influential: class. Yes, the C word again: class is still one of the key driving factors of UK politics even now in the twenty-first century. Working class voters are still, at heart, uncomfortable with working class men in positions of ultimate power, still less working class women. Unpleasant, but true.

Push comes to shove, and when things aren't happening Instagram instantaneously, the gravitas of people with non-RP accents such as Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves' credibility as performers on the political stage is called into question far more rapidly than that of public school educated politicians. This inherently shorter shelf life, coupled with an increasingly shallow short-termist perception of the world by a population whose attention span is now trammelled largely by the micro-scope of social media, has already pushed this infant government into virtual cannibalism before it has had any real chance of getting going. I said at the outset of this administration that real change and reform in this benighted archipelago would take at least two terms of a Labour government, but more likely a generation to achieve; and I stand by that. Heads down and ignore the noise, people...