It’s hard to explain the feeling UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives me, but here goes.
For me, Keir Starmer is less a politician and more a mid-Ryanair-flight scratch card. A laminated ‘‘Live, Laugh, Love’’ quote blu-tacked to the wall of a Jobcentre. A “conscious” tech company’s big picture mission statement. Or a softly whispered ‘‘you got this’’, delivered with a slow, pitying pat on the back.
If you’re not following: he’s like something supposed to give you a bit of hope, but that leaves you feeling even more bleak and directionless than before. That’s Starmer. A semi-deflated, grey balloon at a resignation party and the UK’s very own numero uno.
Too harsh? I think too kind. Scratch cards, pitying pats on the back, and laminated quotes in Comic Sans are harmless, cringeworthy artefacts of modern life. Keir Starmer’s recent policy swings are harmful and so far, the harm has been aimed at the most vulnerable.
Just last week, Starmer reached a new low, declaring that the UK has become “an island of strangers.” A line so soaked in dog-whistle nationalism it could’ve been ghostwritten by The Sun and premiered on GB News. Which, in a sense, it was.
GB News was the only broadcaster granted access to the press conference where Starmer unveiled his new immigration white paper. Not the BBC. Not ITV. Not even Sky News. Just GB News, a channel where facts go to be softly strangled by bigoted opinions dressed in Union Jack onesies. Fittingly, the white paper itself reportedly reads like Reform UK fanfiction, just with cleaner formatting and no typos.
In its new Labour font, the paper takes a sledgehammer to legal migration: longer waits for settlement, stricter visa rules, reduced access to family reunification, and tougher language requirements. Starmer frames it as fairness—a way to reduce exploitation, boost British wages, and encourage integration—but in reality, it’s theatre. A crackdown crafted for clickbait headlines, not human lives. And the people who bear the consequences—migrants, workers, families trying to build a life—are left in greater precarity than ever.
It’s a clumsy attempt to peel off Reform UK voters by mimicking their language and posture. The problem is, the act doesn’t land. It’s like watching someone attempt to speak fluent populism after skim-reading a scribbled summary of Nigel Farage’s greatest hits off the wall of a pub toilet. The sentiment is borrowed, the delivery is lifeless, and the result is a favourability score continuing to nosedive across almost all party lines: too hardline for the left, too weak for the right, and too obviously rehearsed for anyone to respect.
But the failure of this performance isn’t the real danger, it’s what it enables. When the language of the far right becomes the language of power, hate is legitimised, and cruelty gets policy teeth. It doesn’t win over voters. It shifts the centre of gravity, with the cost most felt by those already living at the edge of safety and recognition.
Depressingly, Starmer’s record makes this shift feel less like a miscalculation and more like a pattern.
On trans rights, he also folded. He once supported gender self-identification but now he backs a legal definition designed to exclude trans women from recognition and protection. It’s not clarity, it’s cowardice, and a deliberate decision to appease a hostile conservative press obsessed with culture war.
A similar evasiveness defines Starmer’s stance on Gaza. Despite the murmurings of restraint and carefully worded appeals for calm, Labour has overseen an increase in UK arms sales to Israel—a quiet but bloodsoaked complicity that renders its appeals for de-escalation, or talk of trade pauses, entirely meaningless.
And even more revealing of Starmer’s character is the bizarre way he speaks about Israel: consistently gendered, imbued with vulnerability, he talks of “her right to feel safe, her need to defend herself.” In contrast, trans women, Palestinians, and asylum seekers, receive no such empathy. A nuclear-armed, genocidal state is granted personhood; real people are denied it, along with their safety, their dignity, and their lives.
For the record, I was never under the illusion that Starmer would return Labour to the Left. The man’s not exactly a Trojan horse for socialism, he’s a former cop in a suit. But there was, perhaps naively, a hope that he wouldn’t bend so completely to the altar of the right-wing press. That he might follow through on his own meagre promise of “evidence-led” policy making. That he’d show a shred of moral backbone or at the very least, behave like someone who understands what’s at stake.
Instead, he thinks the Daily Mail might warm to him if he clicks his heels and whispers “secure borders” three times. And to top it off, he’s not even good at it. He’s doing it with the conviction of a man so unsure of his own message, he could be replaced mid-sentence by a pop-up ad for tax-relief on pensions and no one would notice.
But all jokes aside: the result is politics that are not only empty and embarrassing, but dangerous and inhumane.
