Thank God, Keir Starmer has finally said it
Thank God someone finally said it. Thank God Keir Starmer, specifically, said it. For the first time, after months of statements so cautious they’re the political equivalent of the colour beige, the Prime Minister has finally admitted that Donald Trump is a bad man doing bad things which will, as a side effect, have bad consequences for the population of Britain.
I paraphrase, undiplomatically – but by Starmer standards this really is very strong. In an interview with Robert Peston on ITV’s Talking Politics – a show which aims to cash in, one assumes, on the national wave of Runcimania – Starmer described himself as “fed up with the fact that families across the country see their bills go up and down on energy… because of the actions of Putin or Trump across the world”. He said the same about businesses, too, with a barely concealed subtext of “for goodness’ sake, we were supposed to have growth”.
The PM did not, despite what a quick scan of the headlines could lead you to think, say he was fed up with Donald Trump personally (although, who among us). But by both comparing him to Putin, and being willing to critique – or even identify – the consequences of his actions, he went a whole lot further than he ever has before. As a bonus, in a “good to see him catching up” way, he criticised Israel’s continuing attacks on Lebanon, too (“the question isn’t a technical one of whether it’s a breach of the agreement or not… they’re wrong”).
This was not just the sort of incoherent howl of rage of the sort we can all be prone to these days: it was also, at long last, an attempt to build a case for his government’s policies. Britain, he said, needs energy independence, to protect us from this nonsense, “and the only way to get energy independence is to go even more quickly to renewables”. He tied it to the need for British involvement in new European defence arrangements separate to Nato, too. Meanwhile Yvette Cooper is wandering round giving interviews about how we shouldn’t be “outsourc[ing] our foreign policy to anyone”. There’s an obvious slogan for this strategy going begging, if ministers want it: take back control.
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Is the Labour leadership finally finding its voice, or just pandering to what it thinks we want to hear? I’m not actually sure it matters. Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage are starting to look haunted as they realise they’ve lined themselves up with Donald Trump and against the British people. The Greens, meanwhile, now have a slightly smaller target to attack. Finally, Keir Starmer is on the right side of a dividing line.
More importantly, it is uncomplicatedly bad that we now live in a world in which we can spend a Tuesday on tenterhooks as to whether the US president was really, as that Truth Social post implied, on the verge of nuking Tehran. It is bad that the whims of an dysregulated shitposter can have a material impact not just on whether families can afford to take a holiday this year, but on our collective mental health. It is wrong – and it is good when our leaders say so.
And yet. It’s hard to fully embrace this as the real Love Actually moment, and not just because the world is on the brink and no one could ever mistake Keir Starmer for Hugh Grant. For starters it’s a lot easier to announce a new destination than to actually get us there. Attempts to move us closer to Europe still have to contend with a hostile media, the realities of the EU’s rulebook and the existence of France. There are an unnerving number of ways in which the basic infrastructure of national life remains tied to Trump’s America, too, from the tech we rely on to the maintenance of our missiles to the government’s embrace of US-built AI. These things can not simply be switched off.
Even if they could, Starmer’s change of direction may simply come too late. There’s a point in a stand-up gig where a comedian has so lost their audience they could make the funniest joke ever told and be met with stony silence, while the heckler who shouts “wanker” will bring down the house. Whether the Prime Minister has already passed that point remains to be seen.
If he has, it’s possible he’s just got himself a permanent spot on Trump’s naughty list for no political gain whatsoever. That might be, in the most literal of senses, good. That doesn’t mean the consequences will be pleasant, for any of us.
[Further reading: The Green Party is using housing inequality to punish Labour]
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