2023-01-20

Starmer

While I was producing a meal this evening, I caught half the interview of Emily Maitlis and John Sopel with Keir Starmer. I try to avoid listening to what politicians have to say. They occasionally have ghost-written pieces in the paper, but these are mostly excruciating. Active politicians are always so achingly careful to avoid saying anything that can be used in evidence against them. Corbyn might have let his guard down occasionally: I’m sure he gave his minders a few headaches, but people like Starmer come over as automatons.

The interview took place in Davos, at the World Economic Forum. Yes, that Davos. Google “Rutget Bregman, Davos” and understand why some people are invited back time and time again, and others not so much. Anyway, Keir was being chaperoned at Davos by Tony Blair and his retinue. Yes, the Tony Blair who handed the Tories thirteen years in power. Maitlis and Sopel described how a series of supplicants were ferried to meet Starmer, the king in waiting. “Business leaders,” members of the Davos set, given privileged access to the leader of the party supposedly representing the interests of labour, in opposition to capitalism.

Starmer waffled on about how every problem in the UK would be solved by investing more money in Green Energy.
He emphasized how he wanted Labour to be ‘business friendly’ (or ‘free market hostile’ as I mentally translate that expression). He was asked about Brexit, and replied, mechanically, how reversing it would be a huge mistake as would adopting a Norwegian or Swiss model would be a mistake (while saying how incredibly customized and dynamic these were). He spoke about how improving trade with the EU was hugely important, but how adopting EU standards would not, even though their standards were high, and that the UK needed high standards.

He talked about how because the UK has a ‘skills problem’ we will have to allow more immigration to boost our GDP but that we need to solve this problem ourselves, which will (presumably) allow us to not allow immigration. Given that the shortages seem to be in jobs that Brits won’t do, because the work is hard and the wages are modest (care work, for example), this seemed unlikely.

I don’t think that Starmer’s answers were particularly bad. Given the constraints of his role, they were as good as I could have expected. I don’t think it’s realistic to think that he could have refused to be interviewed, but the answers reminded me of a passionate speech by Tony Blair I once listened to. Blair was telling the audience, and the world, how serious the “Y2K problem” was, and how the consequences would be catastrophic for companies that failed to invest in purging the bug from their systems. As someone who had spend a decade or more writing systems that I absolutely knew would be totally unaffected by the change in the first two digits of the year number, I realized that Blair was simply saying something he had been told to say, that he really didn’t understand what he was talking about, but that it was necessary for him to say these things.

This is fair enough. Nobody can be an expert on everything. But by pretending that they have all the answers, senior establishment politicians make life a lot easier for demagogues like Trump and Farage (probably Johnson, too).

Wrap

Energy got more expensive. The US dollar went down a bit.