I wanted to make a brief mention this week about a constellation of ideas I have found recently in various think pieces I have read.
These ideas revolve around the sense that there is a political and public exhaustion in the air at the moment, together with a lack of clear narrative on all sides (McTague, 2023).
I was particularly taken with the notion of the electorate having been ‘blackpilled’ (Bastani, 2023): believing that in fact governments do not in fact have the wherewithal to make genuine changes.
This definitely provides a way of reading Starmer’s pronouncements around social mobility that I mentioned last week (06-09-2023).
For all the conveyance of excitement around the future (and the post-liberal swirls on the icing), it is still more-or-less a return to the old message of 2004 that I mentioned in an earlier post (02-08-2023): just that the public may no longer really believe it.
Hence, the abiding theme is one of farce.
References
Bastani, A. (2023) https://unherd.com/thepost/labour-is-now-the-centre-right-party
McTague, T. (2023) https://unherd.com/2023/09/is-starmer-doomed-to-be-britains-merkel