With Keir Starmer’s days in No10 seemingly numbered, many will be asking themselves what Starmerism will be remembered for. To millions, it will be for one trait above all: moral cowardice.
The plethora of recent u-turns are indicative of a government that not only has no principles, but also no backbone. Whether it be on welfare reform, women’s rights, free speech in universities, grooming gangs or the threat of Islamism, Starmer and his cabinet have persistently capitulated to intimidation from backbenchers, lobbyists or activists. Bridget Phillipson in particular, who continues to drag her feet in her two allotted briefs (education, and women and equalities), is hobbled by her dread of the trans lobby. Guidance for schools on gender-questioning children has sat unpublished on her desk for 18 months, while guidance on single-sex spaces has been similarly sat on for 148 days.
So what, you might say? That’s just politics. All governments are allowed to change their minds, and only bloody-minded dictators refuse to do so. Yet it’s the sheer scale of the volte-faces, and the fact that they’ve been undertaken for such transparently spineless reasons, that is so galling.
This timorousness borne out of desperate self-preservation is at its most egregious in Labour’s approach to Islamism and the emergence of a Muslim sectarian vote. In this capacity, Labour and its outriders had been carrying on in a craven manner long before this government came to power in July 2024. After all, the Labour Party was instrumental at a regional level in covering up or ignoring the rape-gangs scandal. Since gaining power, it has sought to codify an official definition of ‘anti-Muslim hatred’, threatening to shut down debate on the matter altogether.
Labour’s tendency to appease the Muslim bloc may once have had its roots in the party’s embrace of multiculturalism and identity politics, but it is now also motivated by raw exigency. Labour MPs face an acute fear of losing their seats to hard-left parties more willing to placate sectarian demands.
Admittedly, the Labour government is only a microcosm of a larger problem. As demonstrated by last year’s Maccabi Tel Aviv debacle, the blocking of a pro-Israel Labour MP from a Bristol school for ‘safeguarding’ reasons, and the recent ban on UKIP’s ‘Walk with Jesus’ march in east London, appeasement is a characteristic of our times. It is happening at every level of the state.
It goes beyond the woes of Britain, too. Moral cowardice is the spirit of the age – the weakness that permitted hyper-liberalism to proliferate and metastasise. It was the fear of what one’s peers might think if you said the wrong thing, the fear of the mob, the fear of being smeared as ‘right wing’, ‘racist’ or some sort of ‘phobe’, that permitted wokery to spread.
Starmerism will be remembered merely as one ephemeral, miserable symptom of it all.
The greatest meeting of minds that never happened
What if two of the greatest writers and curiously like-minded souls of the 20th century, George Orwell and Albert Camus, had met? It’s one of those tantalising ‘what ifs’ of history, and one which, according to a new book, very nearly happened.
In The Complete Notebooks (2025), the first complete English translation of Albert Camus’ notebooks written between 1933 and 1959, translator Ryan Bloom describes in a footnote the time when the two were due to meet. Bloom recounts the occasion in February 1945, with Orwell waiting for his French counterpart at Les Deux Magots café in Paris. Alas, at that time, Camus, the great existentialist writer, was laid low by one of his recurring bouts of tuberculosis. The meeting never took place.
What an encounter that might have been. As is often noted, they had much in common. Both were renowned for their simple, unaffected prose, whose work straddled journalism and fiction, and are remembered today for their non-fiction as well as for their novels. Both idiosyncratic characters opposed fascism and communism when it was unfashionable to do so. Both refused to be tied to ideology or party. And both suffered ostracism and denunciation for their independence of spirit.
Orwell’s break with the mainstream left in Britain – first foregrounded in Homage to Catalonia (1938) and cemented in his two last dystopian novels – was a product of his disdain for ossified thinking and an aversion to ‘orthodoxy sniffers’. Similarly, Camus came to see the French Communist Party as ‘apologists for premeditated, organised, rationalised murder’. This revulsion for the left in his own country occasioned the break with his friend, Jean-Paul Sartre, which happened soon after the publication of L’Homme révolté (The Rebel) in 1951.
That book remains requisite reading for any recovering idealist, and as much a warning against a naive belief in the good nature of man as Animal Farm. ‘All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the state’, Camus wrote. ‘The prophetic dream of Marx and the over-inspired predictions of Hegel or of Nietzsche ended by conjuring up, after the city of God had been razed to the ground, either a rational or an irrational state, but one which in both cases was founded on terror.’
Only a few years before, in L’existentialisme est un humanisme (published in English as Existentialism and Humanism), Sartre had argued eloquently – if unpersuasively – that being an existentialist and a humanist weren’t incompatible. He remained a critical friend of the French Communist Party. No wonder the two fell out over Camus’ cynical turn. But had things turned out differently, Camus might have found a new friend in his English counterpart.
Signs of the times
Sometimes it’s the most innocuous things in life that are the most revealing. A couple of weeks ago, Nick Buckley posted a photograph to X of a public sign indicating that defecating in public was prohibited. Anyone caught defecating in public, it warned, was liable to a maximum fine of £2,500. This is a sign for – and of – our times. It seems civic society has reached such a crisis point that people now need reminding not to shit in the street.
An even more pertinent image was doing the social-media rounds last weekend. This time, it was a poster at London Victoria station. Those on their way to boarding the Gatwick Express were told, ‘There’s no excuse for prickly behaviour’. ‘Our colleagues wear bodycams for everyone’s security’, the poster read. ‘Abusive behaviour will not be tolerated under any circumstances.’
There you have the woke mindset incarnate: a heady combination of over-sensitivity, the desire to take offence and an air of authoritarian menace, with all three deriving from the same impulse – the desire to make oneself feel more powerful and more important.
Patrick West is a columnist for spiked and author of Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas, 2017). Contact him on X at @patrickxwest.
