Three hundred years ago, the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, putting the finishing touches to his great critique of British governance, Gulliver’s Travels, dashed off his sketch of the unhappy land of Balnibarbi. The people of Balnibarbi were ruled by a distant governing class on the floating island of Laputa, literally removed from their everyday concerns and instead devoted to the application of novel and abstract theorems of their own devising, which aimed to improve the general lot of mankind. Yet the “only Inconvenience is, that none of these Projects are yet brought to Perfection; and in the mean time, the whole Country lies miserably waste”. Of Balnibarbi, Swift writes, “I never knew a Soil so unhappily cultivated, Houses so ill contrived and so ruinous, or a People whose Countenances and Habit expressed so much Misery and Want.” And yet, “instead of being discouraged”, Gulliver finds the governing class of Laputa “Fifty Times more violently bent upon prosecuting their Schemes, driven equally on by Hope and Despair”.
Swift was, no doubt, inspired by his native Ireland, until now the historical benchmark for poor British governance mismanaging a nation under its purview, and inspiring spasms of inchoate anger among its benighted people that led eventually to revolution. Yet the portrait of a distant governing class obsessed with extracting solar energy from cucumbers as the cities they rule fall into squalid ruination, trying and failing to make reality conform to their ideal theories, is an uncomfortably apposite one for the British mainland today. British politics now looks less like the collapse of a party than of an entire regime.
If Keir Starmer did not exist, the governing caste he represents would have had to invent him. Indeed, so rigid and robotic are Starmer’s certainties, so unwilling to face reality and so strangely devoid of interior life is he, that we half-suspect they did: the Prime Minister seems less a person than a tulpa collectively dreamed up by this class at its moment of terminal trial. An idealist of a failed Utopia, a technocrat who cannot govern, a manager who cannot control the underlings who despise him, his failings are those of his caste as a whole; he is, it increasingly seems, the final incarnation of the old regime. Over just the past couple of years, the British electorate has eviscerated both parties of its two-party democracy: historic landslides have immediately crumbled into electoral extinction, rendering power illusory and the country ungovernable. Five prime ministers in a decade have tried and failed to impose some order to the chaos. And what is surely now the most revolutionary electorate in the Western world is drumming yet another leader to the scaffold.
It is useless, in these circumstances, for Starmer to remind his rebellious party that he won power barely a year ago with a landslide mandate; that he is, as his allies desperately brief the press, just one of two living persons to have ever won an election for Labour. Starmer’s devious and sharp-elbowed internal climb to power, then, reveals him as probably the most competent and successful politician that the modern Labour movement can produce. That he is already so weak, so luckless and so widely despised highlights the essential problem neither he nor any Labour successor can overcome: he is the incarnation not so much of a party as of an entire cohort about to be swept from the stage.
“Keir Starmer is, it increasingly seems, the final incarnation of the old regime.”
In a democracy — we are told often enough, anyway — governments win and hold power by giving voters what they want. Yet British democracy works in quite other ways: those who hold power are fearful of what the voters want, repelled by it on moral grounds, and instead see their role, like a stern Victorian nanny, as forcing down the bitter and improving medicine it is their duty to administer to its ungrateful charge. That the voters may grumble, sulk and spit it out is all, for them, an expected part of the process. The very existence of British democracy is, we may say, a testable proposition: in its greatest test so far, the Brexit referendum, our governing caste entirely failed. Viewing the result as a tantrum to be ridden out, rather than a demand for total reform, every element of our governing caste congealed together in a single mass to frustrate and subvert the vote. Brexit’s winning voters were, they told themselves, merely deluded and misinformed.
There is a pleasing synchrony, then, in the collapse of the Starmer project, and of the BBC’s latest and perhaps last great scandal: they are both, after all, the death pangs of an elite that has lost its legitimacy. When we see the BBC’s defenders mobilising, like worker ants scurrying to defend their threatened queen, we see revealed an entire class struggling to maintain its grasp on power. The narrow sweep of those who, in declaring the BBC’s non-partisan nature, reveal how precisely partisan the organisation has become, underlines the scale of the problem. From the Sixties onwards, through to winning power in the Nineties, a set of ideological assumptions became dominant within the Westminster State and its class allies in what we euphemistically term “the professions”. The BBC transmits the worldview of this class, whether those who pay for it wish to watch it or not. Gleefully adopting a role as combators of “disinformation” — that is to say, opinions conflicting with this worldview — the Corporation has veered ever more tightly to its own narrowing set of approved beliefs.
As its latest scandal shows, what is objectively true is now of less importance to the BBC’s tastemakers than what ought to be true, or simply feels true to them. From history documentaries to morning pabulum to the tired, court satire of Have I Got News For You, whose doddering panellists still trot out flaccid jibes at their caste enemies, it is now impossible to watch the BBC’s content without wading through its intrusive ideology at every step. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us”, Keats wrote: yet having long foregone any pretensions to artistry, all that is left of the BBC’s output is the designs its makers wish to impose on those who fund them. Like the rest of their caste, in Westminster or in Whitehall, within the BBC’s management there is not the slightest hint of self-doubt or wavering, even out of self-preservation, in the face of the nation’s growing contempt.
This caste, when expressing the righteousness of its beliefs, likes to think of itself as the Sensible Ones, setting itself against the base enthusiasms of the British public. We may instead call them, as the ancient Greeks euphemistically did the Furies, the Kindly Ones. For the early results of their imposed ideological project are in, and their punishing regime of self-regarding kindliness has brought both daily horrors and petty humiliations into the routine of British life. Indeed, the collapse in wealth, liberty, public safety and basic capacity to govern that has so rapidly ensued is so dramatic that Britain has become, to America’s reigning Right, the whipping boy for an entire failed ideology — the cautionary Ruritanian end state, as Hungary once was to its liberals, of the opposing domestic faction’s worldview. From the American government’s perspective, a narrow ideological and cultural class has seized control of the entire British state, and the mismanagement that has ensued may yet be fatal. With all the unsentimental precision of an imperial bureaucrat taking stock of a failing colony, it is a more accurate assessment than anything in lobby commentary.
That Reform will come to power now seems increasingly certain. That the party is capable of governing Britain now — or that anyone can — is doubtful in the extreme. For Reform to win power, it must transition into a middle-class as well as working-class party, a process that is already well under way. After all, the Epping homeowners protesting migrant accommodation beneath their sea of flags are surely a more affluent demographic than the average Leftist wavering between the Greens and Your Party. Yet as Starmer’s fate reveals, winning power is not the same thing, in modern Britain, as wielding it. Reform’s ability to actually govern rests on either inspiring mass defections among the current professional class, or in the total personnel renewal of the entire British state. The BBC’s fate, under the incoming regime, will serve as a useful benchmark for their progress: does Reform intend to disestablish the Corporation, and all the other lavishly funded, senile and corrupted monasteries of the British state, or does it wish to reshape it in its own image? Will the crisis of the British state be resolved by the renewal of its failing institutions, or in starting afresh?
Yet unseating, or replacing, an entrenched and unelected shadow state, firmly convinced of its moral right to eternal rule, is not a simple task. Let us imagine that, in assuming power, Reform were to embark upon a great rolling series of referendums on the questions dividing the nation from its rulers: on immigration, on crime and punishment, on the headlong rush to Net Zero. Would the governing class, spread across all its perches in the British state, accept the likely results, or would it seek to frustrate and undermine them? Would the democratically expressed will of the British people be respected, whatever the nation decides, or would it be delegitimised as the populism of the base urges, with the establishment’s role being to protect the British people from their own desires? We already know the answer.
British politics now resembles, rather than a crown in the gutter, an ancient sword of great power asking to be drawn from its calcified and rusting matrix, with the current establishment preferring instability and collapse than deigning to touch it. As long as their grasp on power lies beyond the reach of British democracy, the worst is yet to come. Just like Swift’s Laputans, “instead of being discouraged” by their failure, those who rule us “are Fifty Times more violently bent upon prosecuting their Schemes, driven equally on by Hope and Despair”. The nation has not yet escaped Laputa’s burdensome shadow. If the failure of the Starmer project was an inevitability, the failure of Farage’s last-ditch attempt at reform presents a far more worrying prospect.
