Over in the UK, it looks like prime minister Keir Starmer is blowing it big time. It was just a little over a year ago that the party swept the Conservatives out of power, winning 412 seats in the 650 member body, a gain of 211 seats from before, giving them a massive majority. The Conservatives had held power for 14 years and the public had clearly had enough of them. But as soon as three months after the election, the popularity of the Labour party had cratered and it has not recovered since, as it lurches from one self-inflicted would to another, accompanied by a feckless leader who seems to have no vision, other than to be a slightly less right-wing version of the Conservatives. The government, rather than improving the condition of those in need, has refused to do so, keeping in place some of the former harsh anti-poor policies and even adding to them. Adding to that have been image-damaging shabby scandals about Starmer and other party leaders accepting gifts such as clothes from wealthy people, cementing the idea that they are on the take and in the pockets of the plutocrats. Just yesterday, deputy prime minister Angela Rayner was forced to step down over allegations that she had evaded paying the appropriate amount of taxes on her properties.

Before the UK election, I linked to a very interesting interview given by Rory Stewart who was at one time an ambitious and upward bound insider Conservative politician before becoming disillusioned with Boris Johnson’s Brexit policies and quitting parliament. He described Starmer as conducting a ‘Ming vase’ election strategy.

The interview mainly dealt with what Stewart described as the soul-killing nature of political leadership but he also had interesting things to say about the general election that was due to held in the UK this year. Labour party leader Keir Starmer had been criticized for not detailing specific policies that he would implement if elected, choosing instead to speak in broad generalities. Stewart described this as the ‘Ming vase’ strategy, where you are holding a precious Ming vase and walk very carefully so as not to break it. Starmer had clearly decided that the country desperately wanted to throw the Tories out and were not that interested in specifics of Labour policies, having the general idea that they were more on the side of ordinary people than the Tories.. They had a general idea of what Labour stood for and that seemed to be enough. Starmer did not want to make specific promises that might alienate some voters and thus break that consensus. Stewart said that this can be a successful strategy for winning elections (as it was for Starmer) but can cause problems after you win office because you do not really have a mandate for anything specific.

That turns out to have been remarkably prescient. Not only does Starmer act as if he had no mandate, he seems to have no vision whatsoever, let alone any progressive ones. He seems to have embraced all the neoliberal orthodoxies that work against ordinary people, preferring to cut benefits for the poor and needy instead of taxing the wealthy more. He is very much in the mold of the feckless Democratic leadership in the US Congress who have refrained from vigorously attacking Trump on every front, as they should be doing, and instead seem focused on suppressing all the progressive voices within their own party who are doing that very thing, and even trying to prevent them from winning elections. The most shameless example of this is their effort to have Zohran Mamdani lose the New York City mayoral election even if that results in the very worst people like Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams becoming mayor.

The most decisive actions Starmer has taken involve harsh retaliatory measures against party members who have had the temerity to criticize him. Back in July, actor Steve Coogan issued a pointed rebuke, and warned that the party’s disillusioned supporters may well vote for Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the next elections, not because they particularly like him or his policies but because they have nowhere else to turn to now that Labour seems to have forsaken them. It is not unlike how many Democrats turned to Trump.

Here is Jonathan Pie from two months ago, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the government’s landslide election, blasting the Labour party for is ineptitude, saying that they do not seem to understand the fundamentals of politics, messaging, and governing,