The Littling of Great Britain

On arrival at London’s Heathrow airport, an advertising campaign that looks to project both British tradition and diversity lines the walls. We see pictures of cab drivers, market stall traders, a bearskin-wearing guardsman, an actor at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, itself a reconstruction of a playhouse first built in 1599. These Londoners are men and women, they are white, black and brown.

The image presented is one of a former imperial metropolis now happily peopled by the descendants of empire, a modern country that has accepted the old slogan of anti-racist campaigners in Britain: “We are here because you were there.”

The story is different in the UK’s halls of power. Prime Minister Keir Starmer doesn’t celebrate the country’s diversity. He echoes Enoch Powell as he issues dark warnings about Britain becoming an “island of strangers”. He boasts about deporting a record number of asylum seekers. He is never far from a Union Jack flag.

The Labour leader was elected prime minister last year in a curious election. For 14 years, the right-wing Conservative Party, one of the most successful political machines in the world, had led a series of governments from one catastrophe to another, as the country decayed at home and became irrelevant abroad.

Domestically, Chancellor George Osborne took a hatchet to public expenditure, supposedly in response to straitened circumstances following the financial crash of 2008. Osborne’s austerity campaign would see 60p in every pound given by central government to local administrations cut. It would result in 190,000 “excess deaths” between 2010 and 2019, and prompted a UN poverty expert to brand poverty in the UK “not just a disgrace but a social calamity and an economic disaster”.

In 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union without having any real idea of how to do that and what it would mean for a country whose economic model was dependent on unfettered access to the EU. Rage at the state of the country was directed at Europe and foreigners, as a diffuse Leave campaign led by right-wing firebrands Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage easily defeated an insipid Remain campaign that offered nothing more than a depressing status quo.

As the Conservatives lurched from one leader to the next – the smoothly vacuous David Cameron, the sternly wooden Theresa May, the notorious liar Johnson, the shortest-lived prime minister in British history Liz Truss, the investment banker Rishi Sunak – Labour’s socialist left wing was revived under Jeremy Corbyn, who came from obscurity to win the party’s leadership contest in 2015.

By 2019, Corbyn had been beaten down by an implacably hostile media and by his party’s failure to come to a coherent position on Brexit, which had been mired in the mud as the Conservatives fought over how best to do it.

In that year’s election, held during a bleak and miserable December, Johnson’s Tories won a thumping victory campaigning on a simple message: “Get Brexit done.” Travelling across the country reporting on the campaign, the sense of futility – that politicians were liars and that they never changed anything for the better – could be found everywhere.

The navel-gazing did not end with Brexit. The corrupt handling of the Covid-19 crisis put paid to Johnson, who had partied while people up and down the land missed their relatives’ funerals because of pandemic rules brought in by his government. Both Truss and Sunak promised and duly failed to “unleash Britain’s potential” by securing trade deals with big international powers like the US and India, the former colony whose GDP, still dwarfed by the UK in the first decade of the century, overtook it in 2022.

After 14 years of the Conservative Party taking a hatchet to the state and turning Britain into a joke abroad – and with the hapless banker Sunak either disliked or ignored by the public – a Labour victory in 2024 was all but guaranteed.

By this point, the party was no longer the chaotically anti-establishment force it was under Corbyn. The grandees and financial backers – including former prime minister Tony Blair – who abhorred Corbyn’s scruffiness, his devout belief in socialist economics, his instinctive anti-Americanism and his longstanding support for Palestine, had taken their party back from the activists.

Starmer, who seemed to have no real political beliefs of his own, was their vehicle for doing that. A former human rights lawyer turned public prosecutor, he had served in Corbyn’s cabinet and had enough credibility with some of Labour’s socialist members, who were responsible for electing the party’s leader. But, crucially, he was a knight of the realm, a man of the establishment who, at heart, held leftwingers in contempt.

The campaign to install him as leader began in secret before the General Election of 2019, with Corbyn still at the head of the party. A Labour Party apparatchik called Morgan McSweeney, who came to Britain from his native Ireland as a teenager and lived on an Israeli kibbutz, had used a group called Labour Together to collect vast amounts of information on Labour’s members. McSweeney hated the left and wanted to return Labour to being a party that embraced more traditional cultural positions. He saw the pro-Israel groups that accused Corbyn of antisemitism as “heroes”.

McSweeney and his financial backers, including the octogenarian pro-Israel businessman Trevor Chinn and the hedge fund millionaire Martin Taylor, settled on Starmer as the man to succeed Corbyn and crush Labour’s left wing. To win the contest to succeed Corbyn, they positioned Starmer as a grown-up version of the former leader, a progressive leader who would wear a suit and tie.

Once in power, the left-wing promises Starmer had made when campaigning to be leader fell away one by one. Rather than trying to take on Britain’s vested interests, the power of a wealthy elite entrenched in the City of London, and the attachment to a foreign policy in thrall to Washington, Starmer was simply going to be a bit more sensible than the Conservatives.

Labour won big in 2024. The party’s vote, though, was thinly and efficiently distributed. This was a clever way of winning an election, but it contributed to a situation in which Starmer’s popularity quickly began to tank once he was in power.

In the north-east of England for the election campaign, I moved from one immiserated town to another, witnessing first-hand the damage done by the deindustrialisation and sweeping privatisation brought in by Margaret Thatcher and her successors. Everywhere in the country, the underfunding and costly privatisations of parts of the health service have led to a situation in which people spend years waiting for vital treatment. People no longer bother calling for an ambulance if they need one – they know one will not appear, they know they will have to get themselves to hospital.

In Stanley, a former coal-mining town in County Durham, one man in his sixties told me he and his fellow residents were “waiting to die”. In Chester-le-Street, a town not far from Newcastle known for its international cricket ground, a group of teenagers said the most exciting thing that had happened to the place was the arrival of a shop selling desserts the year before. The Labour candidate in this constituency was Luke Akehurst, a pro-Israel lobbyist from the south who had not set foot in North Durham before the election.

An area once known for its shipbuilding, its steel industry, its coal mining, an area once defined by a strong labour movement, had been decimated, with some of its inhabitants drawn to the racist rhetoric of Farage’s new right-wing political party, Reform.

Reform told them a story about what had happened to their home, a place once imbued with pride and some prosperity. It told them that this was not the fault of neoliberal capitalism, of a system that transported working-class jobs to wherever they could be done cheapest, but of foreigners. It told them to hate the country’s elite, but only because they were letting black and brown people come here and take their jobs and claim benefits.

Reform is now riding high in the polls, partly because Starmer cannot tell a convincing story that challenges its rightwing narrative. He has, instead, been drawn into trying to imitate it, to denigrate foreigners, to present himself as a nationalist, to drape himself in the flag. His watereddown impression is unconvincing. An uncomfortable communicator at the best of times, the British public can smell Starmer’s lack of authenticity. His personal approval rating has now sunk to -46, the worst it has ever been.

While Starmer has lacked any real conviction of his own when it comes to many domestic and foreign policy issues, his approach to Israel’s war on Gaza, launched after the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023, has been noticeably single-minded.

Ignoring the advice of two prominent Jewish friends, the lawyers Philippe Sands and Richard Hermer, now Starmer’s attorney general, the prime minister has backed Israel to the hilt. This backing has been rhetorical and diplomatic, but it has also come in the form of hundreds of Royal Air Force flights over Gaza, launched from Cyprus and intended to gather intelligence, and in the sale of components for the F-35 jets with which Israel is destroying the Palestinian enclave.

Rhetorically, this support for Israel has shifted in recent weeks, earning the ire of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has accused Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron of “backing Hamas”. Starmer now calls the situation in Gaza “intolerable”. He is more open in calling for an end to Israeli aggression.

Alon Pinkas, an Israeli diplomat, told me recently that this change of rhetoric reflected the position European leaders have always held; it’s just that now it has become “unequivocal and public”. And yet it still has not been backed up by significant, concrete action.

The impact this has had on Britain’s standing abroad seems to be underestimated by the country’s powerbrokers. Across much of the world, the UK’s steadfast support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression has been contrasted with its steadfast support for Israeli aggression. Charges of hypocrisy have inevitably followed.

Britain has, of course, been here before. In the age of empire, there was much talk of the country’s “civilising mission”, alongside the development of a science of racism that justified the vast expropriation of wealth from far-flung parts of the globe. The highminded rhetoric ushered in by the European Enlightenment was forever at odds with the plunder practised by European empires.

In my own lifetime, Tony Blair’s misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq saw the UK mired in Washington’s war on terror, a racist endeavour that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and arguably continues to this day, with the heavy policing and criminalisation of independent thought and activism state policy in Britain.

The ghosts of empire continue to haunt these islands perched on the north-western edge of Europe. Britain still suffers from what the great scholar of race and culture Paul Gilroy called “postcolonial melancholia” – the pain of losing empire remains unprocessed and has produced many violent reactions.

Rather than defending humanitarian law abroad and supporting a multicultural society at home, British leaders continue to undermine both. Rather than take on the role of a larger version of a Scandinavian country, the UK continues to audition for the long-outdated role of Athens to America’s Rome. The result of this is a loss of standing on the global stage and a dangerous fraying of the social fabric in the domestic space.

As this old country continues to crumble, its ruling class unable and unwilling to do anything ambitious about the many crises it faces, it falls piece by piece into the seas that surround it, unloved and unmourned.