The road ahead? Keir Starmer’s absent future
Renewal - ISSN 0968-5211
Volume 29 Number 4 (2021)
The road ahead? Keir Starmer’s absent future
Morgan Jones pages 21‑25
Abstract
Although Starmer condemns Corbynism’s ‘sepia-tinted nostalgia’, he overlooks its conviction that another future was possible. Starmer’s own vision of the future is curiously empty. He seems unable to imagine what we might find – or create – there.
Keir Starmer’s perpetual leadership re-launches are by now, in the seventeenth month of his leadership, approaching cliché.The first of them that I registered took place in January of 2021, in deepest lock-down. Keir Starmer had been leader of the party for eight months, months that had been defined entirely by the pandemic. It was the new year, and he was to give a much-briefed speech, which ran live on the BBC. Labour encouraged its staff to join a Zoom watch party; I sat and watched Keir Starmer give a speech about which I can now remember nothing beyond the concept of ‘British recovery bonds’, which I could not explain to you. What I do remember is a message a colleague sent to me shortly after: ‘it’s not exactly the welfare state, is it?’
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To cite this article
Morgan Jones (2021) The road ahead? Keir Starmer’s absent future, Renewal, 29(4), 21-25