Keir Starmer, leader of the sixth-largest economy, with a couple hundred nuclear warheads under his thumb, wore a regular white work shirt and a clip-on bow tie at a dinner in Rio de Janeiro earlier this month. It was not a complex visual metaphor. Starmer has negative charisma. Zero sauce. He handles a dress code with the same absence of grace as he does the levers of government.
But there’s another item in his wardrobe that is more revealing of the man, and more revealing of contemporary politics in general. It has gone remarkably unremarked-upon that Starmer is, as far as we can tell, the first British prime minister to wear a Stone Island polo shirt — formerly a calling card for football hooligans — off duty. It’s not unauthentic. He’s a middle-aged Arsenal fan. Of course he owns a bit of Stoney.
This is a leading aesthetic indicator of what we could call blokeism: a progressive, 21st-century incarnation of the middle-aged white working-class men who came of age under Tony Blair. They are not quite like centrist dads, whose equivocal politics are primarily shaped by comfortable middle-class upbringings. These progressive blokes owe their outlook to Britain’s blissful run of years in the late Nineties and early 2000s, when economic growth and cultural confidence gave Blair’s liberal refashioning of the country a weighty cosign, even to those with more hardscrabble origins.
They are earnest; mostly Left-leaning but not radical; patriotic but not nationalistic; worried about the future of the country, but not as much as they ought to be. They might be buying Gareth Southgate’s book, Dear England: Lessons in Leadership — the former England manager, a conservative tactician who mused on modern patriotism in a 2021 open letter, is blokeism incarnate.
Sources of authority recognise blokeism’s power and use its language to instruct the public: the British Transport Police’s “See it. Say it. Sorted” slogan; the Mayor of London’s “say maaate to a mate” anti-misogyny campaign. Blokeism’s working-class nature anchors its authority with a power rootless, middle-class centrist dads can only envy.
Blokeism holds sway at the top of the Labour party and in Left-leaning culture and media. As well as Starmer and Southgate we could pick out Andy Burnham; Gary Lineker, podcast empresario and Gaza advocate; Gary Neville, an on-off Labour outrider who recently said he tore down a Union flag put up at one of his construction projects for its nationalist implications; and John Fisher, the influencer better known as Big John, who found fame consuming hefty Chinese takeaways and saying “bosh” but has been drafted in as an icon of progressivism for his media appearances defending migrants.
“Blokeism’s working-class nature anchors its authority with a power rootless, middle-class centrist dads can only envy.”
Remember Burnham’s navy worker’s jacket, which went viral in 2020 when he wore it in a speech criticising the then Tory government’s Covid rules? Mix with his black North Face cagoule, and his black Clarks Wallabees, and you have a strain of dadcore with distinct class implications — no burgundy chinos here. The month before the 2024 election, Labour released a promo video of Neville lobbing softball interview questions at Starmer with a bucolic Lake District backdrop. Both were in black straight-legged jeans and technical black jackets. They talked about going on humble family holidays in the British countryside as kids; about the importance of government delivery. The purist of blokeism.
All these men were born within 14 years of each other, the youngest being Neville, 50, and the oldest Lineker, 64. They all have working-class backgrounds, or at least working-class affects. Lineker’s dad was a greengrocer; Burnham’s was a telephone engineer; Starmer’s was, as you certainly know by now, a toolmaker. Fisher used to run a small cheese business. Neville is a semi-exception: his dad, the emphatically named Neville Neville, was a cricketer and football administrator. Besides Big John’s outer-London home of Romford, none of them are from the capital, though Starmer and Lineker now have nice houses there.
In May 1997, when New Labour came to power, these men were between the ages of 22 and 37. What phase is that in a man’s life? Maturing. Marriages, mortgages, kids. If a political gear-change syncs with a personal gear-change, of course it’s going to seep deep into your understanding of the world. The Blairite liberal revolution came early enough in their lives that they were open to it, but late enough that they had a full sense of what it was replacing. John Major’s sleazy Tories to Blair’s shiny teeth and shiny government — the improvement was obvious. It’s no wonder they cling to “grown-up politics”, as the comfort-blanket phrase has it. This is the politics that came in when they were themselves growing up.
And so we have this reflexive rhetorical allergy to “division”, as if division wasn’t a fundamental part of politics itself. “Anyone else feel politically homeless?” Lineker tweeted in 2017, after the lose-lose election between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. “Everything seems far right or way left. Something sensibly centrist might appeal?” “You’ve got extremists on the left, and extremists on the right, and neither of them are any good for society,” Fisher told GQ in September. “We are reasonable people,” Starmer said of Britain in a New Statesman interview this June. When asked about the recent flag-raising campaign on his book tour, Southgate affirmed that “there’s more that bonds us all than separates us”.
What looks like complacency from a lower generational rung makes more sense when you consider that the Blair settlement is associated, in these men’s minds, with long, sustained prosperity. By the time of the 2008 crash, since which UK real wages have stagnated, our blokes were between the ages of 33 and 48 — more than old enough to have established a career and bought at least one house. Hence their tenuously founded optimism about Britain’s prospects. “I don’t agree when Farage and others say we’re a broken country, I don’t subscribe to that, and I actually think it’s unpatriotic. True patriots don’t say their country is broken,” Starmer has said. “There is no place like Britain,” thinks Big John. “When we’re down on the floor, we can joke about it, do you know what I mean?”
Blokeism has always been pretty relaxed about moneymaking. Lineker first advertised Walkers crisps in 1995; was the BBC’s highest-paid employee for seven straight years; and co-founded Goalhanger, the media company behind the podcast phenomena The Rest is History and The Rest is Politics. Neville has a Manchester-centred property empire that includes co-ownership of two hotels and Salford City football club; his company, Relentless Developments, is in the middle of a private-equity-backed £400 million redevelopment in central Manchester.
It’d be easy, then to cast the Garys’ social progressivism as hypocrisy. Easy but wrong. The young online Right’s mockery of middle-aged men reverent of “diversity” ignores how prominent xenophobia was in everyday life until quite recently. Lineker says he was subjected to “racist abuse” at school and by fellow footballers, for having “darkish skin” despite being white; monkey chants and banana skins were still being directed at black players in the early years of his sporting career. In 2004, monkey chants were also being directed at Neville’s black England teammates during a friendly against Spain in Madrid.
For football players, and for football fans like Starmer and Burnham and many other blokes, the Premier League’s modern pre-eminence is a lesson in the virtues of cosmopolitanism. Look what happens if we let in talented people from around the world! What works for Arsenal and Everton must surely work for the rest of the economy! The uptick of migration in the Blair years, and the adoption of diversity as a hegemonic establishment value, was twinned with, again, economic prosperity. If life is good when X thing is happening, surely X thing is itself good?
Blokeism emphasises that, contrary to what the new Right think, social liberalism is not just an elite practice. From 1983 to 2022, the British Social Attitudes survey found that the proportion of people who thought same-sex relationships were “always wrong” fell from 50% to 9%. In the World Values Survey conducted in two dozen countries from 2017 to 2022, Britain presented itself as impeccably tolerant, with citizens the least (or among the least) bothered about having neighbours who are gay, immigrants, or of a different race or religion.
As for the hyper-online derision for a purely civil conception of nationhood in the form of “British values” — 2024 BSA data shows that, of all ethnic, religious and civic markers, “to respect British political institutions and laws” is the most widely supported test of being “truly British”, with 86% agreeing. These numbers are more than capacious enough to swallow up a good chunk of middle-aged, white working-class men, and perhaps explain why the Blairite liberal settlement has lasted so long after Britain’s post-2008 slump. Cultural predilections that have successfully filtered down through society are hard to attack and hard to shift.
Britain has changed a lot over the lifetimes of our blokes. Maybe to the point where they can’t believe things can change much more. But we are where we are, with insurgent populist parties, Reform and the Greens, now often outpolling the traditional, sensible duopoly of Conservative and Labour. Blokeism is not oblivious to this — it is, by virtue of its demographic basis, more tapped into Britain’s discontent than blissfully ignorant middle-class centrism. “I’m a bit disillusioned by politics as a whole”, Fisher told The Sunday Times, and said he understood why people felt they had to “take it on themselves” and raise the St George and Union flags on lampposts across the country. He even tweeted that he planned to vote for Reform himself, “as a protest against the big 2”, until Zia Yusuf accused him of being an establishment “counter signal” to Thomas Skinner.
Skinner is another “bosh”-loving influencer, but one who’s distinctly Right-leaning – and, at 34, of a notably younger age than Fisher. Skinner was six when Blair entered government. That’s the only political settlement he knows, and as such, he has no particular love or sentimentality for it. Younger blokes do not subscribe to blokeism. That’s one of the things their older peers are worried about. Burnham, for his part, has spoken of an “existential” threat to the current order from Reform, and how politics has to “change quite radically” to face it. But in general, the rest are too old, and too entrenched in their worldviews, to understand this. Blokeism’s power came from it being a generational phenomenon, the very same thing which will make it helpless in the political world to come.
