A Trip Down Memory Hole Lane

On Starmer's struggles with forgetfulness

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

-Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

I have spent the last two weeks visiting family on Merseyside, the Old Country. This has put me in a reflective and maudlin frame of mind, as it never fails to do. The passage of time is brutal and relentless, and the bittersweet pain of nostalgia seems to grow steadily more bitter and less sweet with each year that goes by. ‘Won’t nothing bring you down like your hometown’, Steve Earle used to sing. He wasn’t wrong - I feel sad, and old. I was the future, once.

At least I’m not the only one who has been preoccupied with gloomy thoughts this August. Sir Keir Starmer has been in the news again - it’s almost as though somebody made him Prime Minister - giving a speech at Downing Street in which he declared that Britain is in ‘ruins’, that there is a ‘deep rot’ in its very structure, and that his government has inherited from the Tories not just an economic black hole, but a ‘societal’ one. ‘Things will get worse,’ he told us, in a line that seems likely to become very well-worn indeed, ‘before we get better.’

That sentence does not quite parse (the social rot must have gone so deep as to affect even the syntax of Prime Ministerial speechwriters), but the British public will get the vibe Sir Keir is going for. This is what the inestimable Mr Chips has aptly labelled ‘the illusion of seriousness’, and it seems that it will comprise the tonal palette for the entirety of this Parliament. We’re going to get an awful lot of politicians ‘levelling with us’ and ‘telling us like it is’, not to mention making a great fanfare about ‘having the courage to take difficult decisions’ and refraining from ‘shying away’ from the truth. It’s safe to say it’s going to be a very long five years.

Labour’s strategy is in this regard as old as the hills, of course. ‘Society is itself broken, and I am the only one who can fix it,’ is a discursive practice of government that goes back to the time of Moses, as I have repeatedly shown (see, for example, here, here or here). This is all too often how political power justifies its own existence and legitimates itself, and in this instance the presentation is almost childishly transparent.

Yet Labour’s approach has obviously also been chosen because it chimes with what the public are thinking. There is no doubt that the combination of a change in government and the startling outbreak of rioting over the school summer holidays has put the country at large in a position to take stock. And the result of that exercise have not been pleasant. We have, collectively, looked around and noticed that we have rather lost the run of ourselves. Nothing seems to work. We all feel much poorer. Crime seems to spiralling out of control - the news is each day simply full to the brim with stories about random acts of violence, often committed in public. (There was a time when the stabbing of an 8-year-old girl would have been headline news and a public scandal; now it almost passes without comment.) And vast swathes of the country just look positively shabby: the roads are potholed and cratered; there is litter and dog turd everywhere; public buildings are abandoned to weeds and saplings; homeless drug addicts brawl and urinate in city centres, sometimes at the same time; our physical environment seems to reflect our moral malaise. Sir Keir would perhaps have been better off simply appearing on TV to recite the lyrics to ‘The Future’: ‘the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and has overturned the order of the soul’ would make a good opening line to a political speech.

Cognitive dissonance is a mighty force, though, and it can give effect to great feats of irrationality. There was an important sequence of events that took place in 2020-21 that seriously problematises Starmer’s narrative of ‘Tories chaotic, Labour sensible’, and which also goes some way to providing a plausible explanation for why it is that everything seems to have become noticeably worse in recent years. But that sequence of events has now been totally erased from the public memory as though by the pressing of a large ‘delete’ button.

Those events - let’s play a guessing game and see if you can figure out what I am referring to - caused State spending to balloon from 39% of GDP to 53% in a single year; caused the creation of a furlough scheme in which vast swathes of the population were paid not to work for months on end, at a cost of something like £400 billion; saw the National Health Service almost entirely cease functioning in certain respects, resulting in a vast increase in waiting times for operations and delays in cancer treatment; saw schools being closed for months at a time, with disastrous and long-lasting effects in respect of truancy, delinquency and illiteracy; and coincided - almost certainly causally - with a huge increase in mental health problems across all age groups that has yet to even look close to slowing down. Does any of this perhaps ring a bell with you? And do you think any of it might have anything to do with the ‘societal black hole’ which Starmer claims to have inherited?

The complete failure to even remember, let alone confront, what took place in 2020-21 and its consequences is no real surprise to anybody familiar with human psychology. Almost the entire political class, and indeed the majority of the population, have a very strong vested interest in making sure that lockdown and its ramifications are not scrutinised particularly closely, and there is absolutely nothing shocking in the discovery therefore that, lo and behold!, such scrutiny has not taken place. But it takes a particular kind of gall for Sir Keir Starmer, who at every stage during those years did essentially nothing but egg the government on to ‘lock down’ harder, faster, earlier, and for longer, and who ever since being elected has done nothing but trumpet his own reasonableness, probity, integrity and decency, to undertake such a deliberate act of forgetfulness.

This suggests there is a deeper issue at work here than cognitive dissonance alone. In the opening to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, in a sequence from which the quotation at the start of this article is taken, Milan Kundera recounts an episode from the Communist coup d’état in Czechoslovakia in 1948. Klement Gottwald, the party Chairman, had gone out onto a balcony to deliver a speech alongside a group including Vladimir Clementis, who was later Foreign Minister. Clementis, in a moment of exuberance, took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head, and a photographer took a picture of the moment for posterity. It became a famous image.