Don’t blame the ‘boys’ club’ for bringing down Starmer
Labour’s female ministers, MPs and advisers are just as incompetent and out of touch as the men.
Unemployment in the UK is at a five-year high. Private-sector pay growth is the lowest since 2020. The number of young people out of work is at an 11-year high. Illegal migrants continue to cross the English Channel, and the welfare bill is spiralling out of control. Senior government appointees are embroiled in scandal, and there have been more than a dozen policy about-turns. By any metric, Keir Starmer’s government has been a spectacular failure.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. As spiked has long pointed out, Starmer is a prime minister who ‘has no idea what he’s for and no idea what he’s doing’. Scandals ‘are a feature, not a bug’ of a Labour Party high on sanctimony, but completely lacking in vision or competence. Yet acknowledging these blunt truths is a step too far for Labour lifers, so other explanations are being sought for Stramer’s struggles.
Spin-doctor-turned-podcaster Alastair Campbell thinks the voters must take their share of the blame. ‘We are becoming ungovernable’, he moans, ‘with dissonance, hypocrisy, short-termism, naivety, industrialised rage and wilful ignorance off the scale’. If this all seems a touch Brechtian, a bit ‘dissolve the people and elect another’, then the party’s higher-ups have another, more palatable explanation for Labour’s failure.
According to many Labour women, Starmer’s government is mired in difficulties because it is a ‘boys’ club’, where misogyny reigns supreme and back-slapping bros salute one another’s bad decisions. Grande dame Harriet Harman says Peter Mandelson was appointed as the UK ambassador to Washington because: ‘It was about the boys’ club not realising that once you’ve got somebody who has supported a sex offender against young girls that’s a showstopper.’ To turn things around, she argues, Starmer must create a new role for a woman to ‘transform the political culture in government around women and girls’. It’s almost as if she has someone in mind…
To continue reading, upgrade to a paid subscription, or go to Spiked.
