I Don’t Think Starmer Should Be Removed. I Also Think Labour Has Earned This Revolt.

Britain cannot keep replacing Prime Ministers every five minutes, but Labour’s slow political collapse is now becoming impossible to ignore.

I am a huge fan of technocracy, and out of all the broad schools of political thought, evidence-led, systems-focused governance has always made the most sense to me personally.

Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash

This goes straight to the kind of person I am: slightly nerdy, obsessed with how systems actually function and convinced that iteration, planning and competence are the long-term keys to making any system or institution really work properly.

There have been remarkable examples of this done well throughout modern history.

Singapore is a genuinely impressive country, and China became a global superpower through decades of strategic planning and state capacity, for better and worse. The European Union, endlessly mocked by populists and massive fans of “sovirinity” as bureaucratic and the root all of evil, is in many ways an astonishing example of what technical coordination and long-term planning can achieve at scale.

Which is largely why, when Sir Keir Starmer, the ultimate Fabian-minded manager, became Prime Minister after the GE in 2024, I was genuinely hopeful.

Here was a man who truly looked like he knew how to read a Gantt chart, identify root causes inside broken systems and understand that governing is less about grand, moving speeches than it is ultimately about competent execution.

And honestly? After fourteen years of the Conservatives treating the country like a late night WhatsApp group chat with nuclear weapons, that sounded bloody wonderful.

I’m writing this on a train to Birmingham, hurtling through the Midlands with the increasingly grim sensation that the knives have, since last week’s dreadful local election results, fully come out for Starmer. Or, to borrow from Boris Johnson’s own bizarre contribution to the English language, “the herd is moving”.

As of the time of writing, over seventy MPs have reportedly indicated that Starmer should “consider his position”, which remains one of the most magnificently British euphemisms ever devised. Somewhere between “we wish him well” and “an internal process has been initiated and Sharon from compliance is waiting to speak with you”.

Now, before people start frothing and screaming “traitor” into their keyboards at me, let me clarify this very early:

I personally do not think it’s a good idea that Keir Starmer should go.

I don’t think replacing Prime Ministers every five bloody minutes because Westminster has the emotional stability of a Labrador near fireworks is a healthy way to run a country. The United Kingdom has already spent the better part of a decade behaving like a collapsing regional theatre company where every week somebody storms out shouting about betrayal while the scenery catches fire behind them.

I will also add here that yes, Starmer has been hounded relentlessly by large parts of the British media. That is objectively true, and beyond this, in 2024 he inherited a genuinely catastrophic situation.

Public services are broken after the decimation caused by Tory austerity. Local government is held together with sticky tape and prayer. The NHS is exhausted. Infrastructure is crumbling. Productivity is stagnant. Housing is a disaster. Brexit has functionally amputated parts of the British economy while half the country still insists this is somehow a growth strategy. The level of catastrophe that Rishi Sunak handed over is truly hard to understate.

He has also, to be fair, had some genuinely decent achievements.

There have been sensible industrial policies. Workers’ rights reforms. Serious attempts at planning reform. Improvements in rail policy. Competent international diplomacy. On the world stage, Starmer has generally looked like a functioning adult who knows where Belgium is, which, after recent British political history, should not be underestimated as a spectacular win.

And yet, the hard truth is that he has still failed. Not necessarily as an administrator, I would say, and not necessarily even as a policymaker, but absolutely as a leader.

A good technocrat should, above all else, understand their own weaknesses. Systems thinking is not just about identifying broken processes “out there”. It is about understanding where you yourself are the bottleneck in the machine.

Starmer’s weakness is obvious to literally everyone with functioning critical thinking facilities - the man has all the natural charisma of a pair of grey socks drying on a radiator.

Now, contrary to what extremely online political people believe, charisma is not the alpha and omega of political success. Clement Attlee had the stage presence of an apologetic bank manager and still helped build the modern welfare state.

Attlee, however, understood coalition-building, political narrative and delegation. Most importantly, he surrounded himself with people who compensated for his weaknesses, with absolute bruisers like Aneurin Bevan, Herbert Morrison and Ernest Bevin, all of whom had enormous impact both on public perception and on the delivery of Labour’s agenda.

Starmer, on the other hand, seems to believe that showing any emotional warmth whatsoever might result in immediate disciplinary action from HR, and instead of compensating for that weakness, he has repeatedly made choices that actively worsen it.

Accepting Angela Rayner’s resignation was, in my view, a catastrophic political mistake. Whatever people think of her ideologically, Rayner possesses something Starmer painfully lacks: political instinct and human texture. She sounds like an actual human being. Sometimes a messy one, sometimes an impulsive one, but a fully formed human nonetheless.

The exact same thing applies to Louise Haigh, who, despite her flaws and controversies, at least came across as somebody with conviction and a recognisable political identity rather than another interchangeable managerial placeholder drafted in from Central Casting’s “Competent Labour Person #4”.

There was also the astonishingly stupid decision to block Andy Burnham from standing in Gorton and Denton.

Burnham is popular, a genuinely excellent communicator and one of the very few modern Labour figures capable of speaking to both traditional working-class voters and progressive urban voters without sounding like he’s been assembled in a Westminster focus group laboratory. He could have been an enormous asset to Starmer politically, precisely because he compensates for so many of Starmer’s weaknesses.

Removing or blocking these seriously influential figures with actual political identity from around him has only intensified the sense that Labour is being run by a compliance department.

Technocracy without humanity becomes sterile incredibly quickly.

There are also the political mistakes that no competent systems thinker should have made in the first place.

The winter fuel payment fiasco is a perfect example. Not because reform itself was inherently evil, I think we can all agree that Sir Mick Jagger probably doesn’t need a winter fuel allowance, but because good governance is not merely about whether a policy works on paper. It is about sequencing, public trust and understanding second-order consequences.

You cannot spend months telling the country that ordinary people are broken, exhausted and struggling, then immediately walk into a row about pensioners losing support and act surprised when voters think you are disconnected from reality.

For me, though, immigration policy is where the deeper political failures of this government become most obvious.

Not because Labour believes immigration should exist within rules. Most people agree with that. And not because voters are incapable of discussing migration rationally.

The problem is that Labour appears to have fundamentally misunderstood what Reform actually is.

Nigel Farage is not winning because the British public has suddenly become obsessed with visa policy. He is winning because he offers emotional certainty in an age of institutional exhaustion. Reform is identity politics sold with the confidence of a bloke in a pub insisting he could fix the country if somebody just gave him a chance.

Instead of confronting that directly, Labour increasingly seems convinced it can contain Reform by mimicking parts of its rhetoric. Through triangulation. Through focus-grouped toughness. Through sounding just hard enough on immigration to reassure anxious voters.

But politics does not work that way anymore.

When mainstream parties start borrowing the framing of insurgent populists, they rarely neutralise them. They legitimise them.

Every time Labour talks about migration primarily through the language of burdens, crackdowns, caps, pressures or “strangers”, the public conversation shifts further onto Farage’s terrain.

That is an extraordinarily dangerous political trade to make.

And this is the bit that drives me absolutely up the wall when people accuse critics like me of somehow helping Reform. No.

I am criticising Labour precisely because I do not want Reform to win.

Because I have watched this happen before.

I grew up in South Africa. I know what politics looks like when fear, identity and grievance become the organising principles of public life. Once parties start treating social cohesion as something maintained through suspicion and exclusion rather than solidarity and competence, things get ugly very quickly.

And no, before the usual suspects arrive frothing into my mentions, I am not saying Keir Starmer is an authoritarian. I am not saying Britain is becoming apartheid South Africa. Calm yourselves down and maybe have a lie down with a rooibos tea.

What I am saying is that political cultures, language and framing matter.

And a supposedly technocratic government should understand that better than anyone. Keir Starmer was supposed to be the grown-up. The systems man. The calm administrator who understood that durable political success comes from solving root causes rather than chasing headlines.

Instead, too often, this government feels like it is governing reactively, nervously and tactically. Like it is permanently trying to survive the next news cycle rather than define the next decade.

And the public can feel that.

People will forgive leaders for being boring. They will forgive leaders for being awkward. Hell, the British public will forgive almost anything if they think somebody actually stands for something. What they do not forgive is drift.

Right now, that is what Starmerism increasingly feels like: drift managed by committee. Which is why the herd is moving.

Not because everybody has suddenly become stupid. Not because all criticism is media manipulation. Not because voters are too thick to understand “grown-up politics”.

It’s that people can sense hesitation and uncertainty that permeates this government right from the top. They can sense a government that seems to be more concerned with neutralising criticism than articulating a coherent moral and political vision for the country.

The issue being that once that perception settles in, it becomes incredibly difficult to reverse.

Which is why I find this whole situation so bloody depressing, because underneath all of this, I still think there was a genuinely good version of Starmerism that could have existed.

Competent government. Serious planning. Institutional reform. Economic stability. Long-term thinking. Actual state capacity. A Britain run like somebody finally bothered to read the instruction manual.

Instead, we ended up with a government that constantly seems terrified of its own shadow, and that, more than anything else, is why so many people who genuinely wanted this project to succeed are now sitting on trains to Birmingham staring out of the window thinking:

Ag, for fuck’s sake, man. What happened?

As to the question of whether Starmer should go or not, I think it boils down to this for me:

I think it’s a very bad idea for us to get rid of him. But I absolutely understand why it’s happening.