The British definitely never do things like everyone else. The Prime Minister that the survivors of Brexit have just brought to power with an overwhelming majority seems an incongruity that goes against the populist wave of the West and its thunderous leaders. A reasonable, calm man, with an exemplary career as a lawyer and attorney general, but without any particular charisma, who does not shine in his speeches, does not promise the moon and does not seek in immigrants, the rich, the elites or the standards of the European market the scapegoats for all the country’s ills.
Like a bizarre reincarnation of Angela Merkel in a sea of triumphant Trumps, Putins, Milei, Le Pens and Orbans. Keir Starmer, whose wide-eyed eyes and strangely slicked-back hair always irresistibly remind me of Samantha’s husband in MA beloved witch, has become a pole of stability at the gates of a European Union shaken by war and haunted by the rise of national populism, facing a France in full political chaos which no longer knows where it lives.
The British have had their fill of national populism. Keir Starmer owes part of his success to their painful return to reality, after having allowed himself to be hypnotised, like Mowgli by the snake Kaa, by the illusion merchants of Brexit. The Conservatives in power and the tabloids had played on imperial nostalgia and delusions of national grandeur, stoked fear of immigration, flattered base xenophobic instincts, compared the EU to the USSR and promised that the liberation of Brussels would lead to the economic triumph of the Global Britain. The opposite has happened. Brexit has been devastating for purchasing power, for small and medium-sized businesses, for public services deprived of European labour, for foreign trade and even for the promised control of immigration. More than 70% of Britons believe that leaving the EU has been a failure. The OBR, the British budget watchdog, has just reiterated its previous forecast: the impact of Brexit alone is a 4% drop in potential productivity and a 15% fall in trade.
No theoretical debates
The new Labour Prime Minister is also going against the grain of European social democracy, which is even declining in Germany. He has succeeded, thanks to his patient obstinacy and his intransigence in the face of anti-Semitism within Labour, in doing what the French left has not been able to do since the Mitterrand years: building a large party refocused on the left, marginalising without excluding the most radical of the Jeremy Corbyn tendency, bringing together the working classes of the north of the country who had believed in Brexit and the Blairite pro-Europeans of London. A campaigner for social justice and workers’ rights but also pragmatic, pro-business, pro-nuclear, opposed to tax increases, except for the re-establishment of a 20% VAT on private schools, determined to limit illegal immigration and asylum applications, Sir Keir Starmer – knighted by the Queen in 2014 – is really not a French-style socialist.
He puts politics in its place, far from theoretical debates. He has armed himself with a serious government marked by social diversity. His ambition is not Promethean, he does not aim for the total upheaval of society and the country, but focuses on two priority objectives: the public health service (NHS) and education, both destroyed by the austerity imposed by the Tories for thirteen years.
Throughout his campaign, he avoided uttering the biggest of swear words: “Brexit”. The elephant in the room that has destroyed friendships and sowed discord in families, like the Dreyfus affair once did. To revive growth, restore infrastructure in a poor state, open up the north of the country, reduce growing social inequalities, and reduce debt, can Keir Starmer avoid breaking the code of silence? He refuses to do so. He will not return to the single market or the customs union, he assures us. But his authority as a leader will be measured by his ability to renew ties with his large, indispensable neighbour, the European Union. Even if it means reopening wounds.
Marion van Renterghem is a senior reporter, winner of the Albert-Londres prize and author of Nord Stream Trap (Arenas)
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