2024: The year Starmer's government served the few over the many

If the UK were a functional democracy, 2024 would have been the year where the electorate decisively rejected the agenda of national asset-stripping and managed decline of the last Conservative government.

Alas, while the personalities have changed, the institutions of the Thatcherite Consensus have dug in hard enough to continue to tick over regardless.

It hasn’t taken long for the majority of the public to sour on our new government. Ipsos has most recently reported that ‘Keir Starmer’s personal satisfaction ratings after 5 months are the weakest of all Prime Ministers measured by Ipsos going back to the late 1970s’. Additionally, the first seat-by-seat poll after the election projects that Labour would lose nearly 200 seats if an election was held today.

While it would be unwise to treat that as a projection for an election which likely won’t happen until 2029, it is still meaningful to know in the present, that we’re facing a government that’s suffered an unprecedented collapse in public support almost immediately after entering office. At the heart of this is the reality that while you can vote out individual politicians, the mechanisms for members of the general public to meaningfully change government policy have mostly been dismantled.

So we’re now getting a ‘reset’, with the government announcing their new strategy: more deregulation in order to achieve higher economic growth. The idea is decades old, that well-meaning regulations intended to protect the environment/consumers/workers have gone too far and now wider society is being harmed more by the restrictions on business than the potential harms they were preventing.

The problem with this understanding, regardless of where you stand politically, is that UK regulators have been thoroughly institutionally captured by the very industries they’re supposed to be keeping in check. A clear recent example of this is the news that water companies have been fined a whopping £2 by the industry regulator Ofwat since 2021, despite their very public atrocious behaviour in dumping billions of litres of raw sewage into rivers and seas because their infrastructure is collapsing, whilst paying out massive dividends and bonuses.

Indeed, the people Starmer has written to “demanding ideas for growth” are none other than the industry regulators themselves. The letter and wider strategy is reportedly the brainchild of his special advisor Varun Chandra, a former management consultant and investment banker for Lehman Brothers before it went bankrupt.

Keener observers may remember that Chandra was, until July, the managing partner of Hakluyt, a London-based consultancy founded by former MI6 intelligence officers (add that to the strangely long list of Starmer’s intelligence connections). The embarrassing ineptitude of running to regulatory agencies for ideas on how to achieve economic growth (which is not their job!) is just about all this government has left after they’ve already ruled out doing anything that would even slightly challenge the interests of capital.

There’s also the ghost of 2015-19 still haunting them, terrified that if they do anything to benefit the interests of the many over the few, it’ll only lead to an avalanche of further demands.

This attitude was encapsulated by MP Helena Dollimore’s strange comment, blaming the WASPI women debacle on “Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto for raising the expectations of Waspi women.” As if the real problem they face is the public having any sort of expectation that the government might do something to benefit them.

None of this is likely to assuage the public anger at their continually falling living standards. Furthermore, barring some unforeseen economic miracle, we’re set to see the 2008-24 trend continue over the next few years, which means the chaos that’s characterised UK politics in recent years will likely continue in some form or another.

In 2024 this took a particularly disturbing turn when false rumours that a stabbing of children was committed by a Muslim asylum seeker sparked days of anti-Muslim race riots across England. Many were dismayed that the government spent days not mentioning that the riots were racially motivated despite participants hardly shying away from fact that they were targeting random Muslims. But as morally reprehensible these riots were, they are also a predictable outcome of a society where everything seems to gradually get worse and it’s practically forbidden to talk about the real causes in public.

The reason why the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO has truly disturbed the US elite, is that it was a rare example of a radicalised man choosing violence but accurately identifying the cause of societal woes.

While UK politicians do like to lament how they’re under constant threat of violence, this is more an attempt to depict themselves as brave idealists standing up for principles in the face of danger than anything real. This government is unusually insulated from public anger in that so many of its new MPs are corporate lobbyists of some form or another. They are therefore less likely to be panicked at the notion of losing their seats as they’ll have lucrative alternative jobs lined up.

So, don’t expect them to start demanding Starmer adopt some popular policies just out of a political self-preservation. What that dynamic won’t stop, however, is electoral defeat when polling day finally does come. With the Tories likely to still be massively hated, the one untainted potential saviour of the British state will be Nigel Farage. Well, that’s how he’d like to be presented anyway.

I’m now going to throw out the theory that – whether he knows it or not – one of Keir Starmer’s jobs in office is to effectively pave the way for Nigel Farage & Reform to become major players in the next Parliament. This could possibly include some kind of informal electoral alliance with the Conservative Party to avoid vote-splitting.

It is rather telling that a decisive factor between the 2019 and 2024 elections is probably that in 2019, Nigel Farage’s party stood down in Conservative held seats in order to maximise damage to Labour, whereas in 2024 they did the Conservatives zero favours. 2024 was not the seismic year of political realignment it may have initially appeared to be, but that doesn’t mean 2029 won’t be.

Daniel Lindley is a trade union activist in the UK.

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.