Why Keir Starmer's gloominess is playing into hands of right-wing hate-mongers

The time was last Saturday afternoon, the place was the famously pretty town of Kirkcudbright in Galloway; and in blazing summer weather, I found myself in the cool, bright and beautiful space of its parish church, interviewing the Guardian’s hugely popular parliamentary sketch writer, John Crace.

The occasion was the annual Kirkcudbright Fringe, a jolly festival of books, music, politics and fun; and Crace had plenty to say – to roars of laughter from a packed audience – about the grand absurdities of Westminster politics, including his favourite target, the 49-day premier Liz Truss.

He received a specially loud laugh, though, for his deadpan characterisation of the new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, as “the ministering angel of death”, a prophetess of doom and “slayer of pleasure” who is apparently living her best life, as she crushes any vague shreds of hope that might have accompanied the election of the new government. “Onwards and sideways,” says Crace, capturing the wary resignation of a nation apparently trapped in a Groundhog Day of austerity and under-investment; and the Kirkcudbright audience seemed to agree, wholeheartedly.

Kamala’s smile

What seemed like a laughing matter on a sunny afternoon in Kirkcudbright, though, may have consequences more serious than Rachel Reeves – or her equally lugubrious boss Keir Starmer – care to admit. Just across the Atlantic, the American centre-left’s chosen standard-bearer Kamala Harris manages – even while striving for presidential gravitas, as in this week’s television debate – to look like a happy woman, who knows something about hope and joy. She smiles, she dances; and although some may find her cheerful demeanour offensive, given the Biden administration’s role in supporting and arming the current horror in Gaza, she seems to believe, wholeheartedly and happily, in a possible bright future for the United States.

Keir Starmer's repeatedly downbeat messages about the state of the country may be putting off investors (Picture: Alishia Abodunde) | Getty Images

In Downing Street, by contrast, the gloom is palpable. British premiers, they say, can always be divided into two groups, bookies and vicars. And if the last three Tory premiers took the country on a prolonged unsuccessful trip to the betting shop – lucrative for those running the show, painful for the punters – then Keir Starmer clearly belongs to the religious tendency. In his Rose Garden speech a fortnight ago, he even began to seem increasingly like a modern-day Malvolio, the killjoy Puritan steward in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night; no more cakes and ale on my watch, he seemed to warn, or the gods of the market will be revenged on the whole pack of you.

Gloominess putting off investors

In truth, though, it seems that Sir Keir and his Chancellor may be crucially failing to read the room, so far as potential supporters and investors are concerned. So, far from applauding the new government’s display of toughness on pensioners’ winter fuel payments, for example – or welcoming their retreat from their once-ambitious green investment plans – many far-from-radical business leaders and economic commentators now seem increasingly concerned about the government’s downbeat tone.

The Evening Standard, for example, believes that Labour is now “losing the big investors it is desperate to court”, because of the impact of the Prime Minister’s gloomy assessment on business and consumer confidence; while Guardian commentator Rafael Behr fears that Starmer and Reeves have succumbed to what he calls “Treasury brain”, an obsessive short-term book-balancing mindset that militates against the kind of far-sighted public investment that may substantially reduce costs in the long term.

Families struggling to feed children

After so many years of Tory austerity, not all business leaders, financiers or mainstream economists are such dedicated neoliberals that they cannot see the value of a strong and well-planned programme of government investment, not only in physical infrastructure and the energy transition, but also in the health, well-being, skills and resilience of the population as a whole.

A country where – as Barnardo’s confirmed this week – one in four families with children is struggling to put enough food on the table, is a country racking up massive future costs in terms of poor health, declining educational outcomes, and sheer social anger and alienation. And all of this is to say nothing of the impact of endless talk of austerity on Britain’s public sector, where scarcity of resources in relation to demand has become not only a constant exhausting reality, but a mantra, a style, and a management method that might have been designed to depress creativity and innovation, create unacceptable levels of stress, and drive many talented and imaginative people out of public service altogether.

Super-rich could fill £22bn black hole

The UK, in other words, needs an end to this culture of scarcity, and the petty and heartless atmosphere it generates; and to embrace a renewed can-do sense that where real and crying human needs exist, the money will be found, as it should be found by any self-respecting sovereign government. And it also needs an end to a shameful period of history in which these levels of poverty and misery have been allowed to grow, often behind closed doors, while the wealthiest in the land have accumulated further wealth at such a rate that a whip-round of the UK’s dozen richest families could fill Rachel Reeves’s £22 billion black hole tomorrow, without any of them even missing the money.

In another brilliant Kirkcudbright session last weekend, the magisterial Professor Sir John Curtice reminded us that despite its huge parliamentary majority, Labour was elected, in July, with the lowest share of the vote of any majority government in the past century. And that means that if the Starmer government doesn’t soon begin to offer Britain’s depressed millions the real change of mood they promised, and a substantial raft of reasons to be cheerful, their brief moment of popularity and opportunity will be gone for good; leaving a vacuum ready to be filled not by the modern, compassionate and imaginative social democracy for which a majority of UK voters yearn, but with the rogues’ gallery of well-funded, right-wing, hate-mongers and snake-oil salesmen, now visibly waiting in the wings.

The article has been updated to state that Joyce McMillan interviewed sketch writer John Crace in Kirkcudbright Parish Church, rather than St Mary’s Church, which closed some years ago