Are The Adults Actually Back In Charge?
In the leadup to last year’s General Election, one of my friends kept repeating that he was going to vote for Labour, as he was eager for “the adults to take charge” again, after nearly two decades of Tory psychodrama. Indeed, this was a sentiment echoed by Labour’s chief secretary to the Prime Minister, Darren Jones, in the aftermath of the July 2024 election results which secured Labour their initial majority of 181 (though it has now fallen to 156), who likewise declared, “the adults are back in the room”. However, a year on from Labour’s “landslide” victory — achieved as it was with the lowest voter turnout of the last 20 years — and I, like many, have been left scratching my head: are the adults actually back in charge?
Don’t get me wrong, the last 14 years of Tory terror has felt like the country has been the personal plaything of a bunch of egotistical, posh, petty toddlers — incessant infighting, bad behaviour galore, from sex scandals to fatal mishandling of a global pandemic, we’ve had to endure it all. But I fail to see how any of the decisions Labour have made over the last year are truly reflective of a different, mature, and adult stance on politics. Not to brag, but I never really did — I was never convinced by Starmer, and in the run-up to the election, given his ruthlessness towards the left-wing contingent of his own party, his carte blanche support of Israel, a rogue apartheid state under investigation for war crimes and genocide, and his generally weak-willed and spineless demeanour as well as a lack of any actual exciting and invigorating policies, I knew that I would not be voting for him or for what he had twisted the Labour Party into. Again and again, he and members of his cabinet repeated that the clue was in the name — that Labour is the party of working people, the insipid implication being that those who were not in work, for whatever reason, be that disability and such, would not be being represented by this party, nor deserved respect. This, needless to say, was not why the Labour Party had been setup in 1900 — it was not just a party formed to represent those in work, but to represent everyone who broadly belonged to the working class: people whose only bartering tool was their labour, who had to commodify that productive capacity to afford to survive. And, everyone who was incapable of taking part in that process, for whatever reason.
It’s worth noting that my friend, eager for the adults to take back power, has since, like most people, soured heavily on Starmer. And I mean, how could you not? It seems what Starmer and co. meant by being adult was the ability to make “tough decisions” on behalf of the public interest and the people. However, all of these so-called “tough decisions” they supposedly “have to make”, are (a) not really tough at all, and (b) not beneficial to the public interest either. For instance, Reeves, Starmer, and others insist that their refusal to cut the Tory’s cruel two-child benefit cap, which has pushed an estimated 350,000 children into poverty, is a fiscally responsible decision that they have to make in the interest of the public good. Bullshit! You know it’s bullshit, I know it’s bullshit, they know it’s bullshit. It’s not a tough decision to push children into poverty — it’s the wrong decision. The right decision would be to cut the cap and the crap — not only does spending on removing the two child benefit cap pay for itself as Richard Murphy has so eloquently explained here, but even if it didn’t, you could make up the losses elsewhere. Where else, you might ask? You know where else. We have money for war, but not for the poor. Hell, we’ll tax the poor more, but we’ll never properly tax the rich. We’ll tax work, but we’ll never tax wealth. Starmer’s Labour are echoing Tory sentiments, unsurprising really given how much they all love Thatcher. How are these justifications any different to Theresa May claiming that there “isn’t a magic money tree”?
I’m not saying a wealth tax, for instance, will be easy to implement necessarily, but just because it’s hard doesn’t mean we oughtn’t try. If anything, that makes introducing a wealth tax to make up for the shortfalls in public services, not only the right decision, but the tough decision as well — just because wealth tax implementation might be a tricky policy problem, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. The alternative is the easier, though far less palatable, moral, or electorally popular move of forcing children into poverty, or taking winter fuel allowances from pensioners so that they freeze to death, or suggesting you’ll take Personal Independence Payment away from disabled people. Reeves, Starmer and the rest aren’t making the tough adult decisions, they are, in fact, capitulating to capitalist realism, and taking the path that requires less work from them: austerity. This sort of lazy, corner-cutting, nonchalance, though parading itself in a the robes of common-sense adult responsibility, in fact, represents a kind of stereotypical image of the adolescent teenager — Starmer’s refusal to fix the economy is akin to a teenager’s refusal to clean their room. However, unlike the teenager, Starmer’s posse actually benefit from the broken system — the lobbyists and donors that now fund the Labour Party do so on the insistence that they do not take the one course of action that will actually solve the problems we face as a society. It’s like if the teenager were paid by some third party not to tidy their room or something — it’s nonsensical, right? But it’s what’s happening — not just in regards to austerity, but in regards to the climate as well. The rich are paying their way and the political elite are bending over backwards to appease them and give them what they want.
At least with the Tories, they had no shame — their name literally means robber, and that’s exactly what they did for 14 years right in the public eye. By the time of Sunak’s tenure, it was desperately clear: they knew they were out, so they were just going to secure the bag, take the money and run, asset strip the hell out of government to make a pretty penny. With Starmer’s Labour, I believe it’s exactly the same, only they are less unabashed about their theft.
To return to the teenager analogy once more, it is not just in the best interest of the teen’s parent, but the teen themself, if they clean their room, as it gives them a more conducive environment to inhabit. And the same is true in terms of fixing the economy, the climate crisis, the society at large — if Labour were to implement a wealth tax and use those funds to actually cut NHS waiting times, end austerity measures like the two child benefit cap, invest in renewable energy and net-zero policies, and just generally improve our standards of living and our public services, that would be a massive win in terms of electoral popularity. The teenager’s parent is happy with the teen for cleaning their room and keeping it clean, and might reward them. Likewise, an electorate would be happy with a party that improves material standards of living drastically, and would reward such a party with re-election. That party is not the present Labour Party.
But also, by framing themselves as the adults and the grown-ups, there is the implication that their opponents are childish. This certainly tracks for the Conservatives, but what about Reform and the left-wing, Greens, Lib Dems, and whatever Corbyn and Sultana’s new party turns out to be called? The implication of course is that leftists are naïve children, utopian idealists who don’t know how the world, let alone politics, really works (for proof of this, just look at Sadiq Khan’s Mayoral Question Time recently, where, when grilled by newly elected leader of the Green Party, and Member of the London Assembly, Zack Polanski about the Gaza genocide, referred to the Green Party’s politics as “sixth form politics”). Neoliberal parties claim that socialists offer simple solutions to complex problems — but they don’t, they offer challenging solutions to problems we really oughtn’t have. If Corbyn, Sultana, and Polanski are all ready to take up the challenging though necessary policy procedure of introducing a wealth tax, then they are being adult about the situation — that is the solution to the problem of falling standards of living. That is how we combat the far-right. It is naïve to think the problem could be solved any other way. And it is immature and childish to abnegate your responsibility as a political leader to solve the problem of growing wealth inequality.
Looking across the pond, it’s obvious to anyone with eyes that the adults are certainly not in charge over there — Trump plays the child, whose sole imperative to his political subjects and spectators is to just enjoy the performativity of his circus-like administration. Frankly, he plays the angry happy baby, and this is so effective because the liberals of America represent an almost superegoic mother figure, superficially caring, but powerfully punitive. Trump’s transgressive attitude has been so successful against opponents who virtue signal, who chide and condescend to people as if they were their moms, telling them to care about things they don’t. And it seems increasingly that Farage is modelling himself in this Trumpian vain — offering a circus of cruelty against the most downtrodden in our society, to distract from the policies he will be implementing at the behest of the fossil fuel giants who line his pockets. Farage will do anything for money and attention — hell, the man was on the celebrity shout out platform Cameo, where he accepted requests in exchange for cash, not just to quote Gen-Z internet memes which I’m certain he had no clue about prior, such as Big Chungus etc, but also to infamously declare “Up the RA!”. Now, this desperate cash-and-attention grab may have served him well in the long-run, as it popularised him as an internet meme amongst younger voters who may have otherwise been repulsed by him, or at any rate unaware of him (Farage is currently the UK politician with the most TikTok subscribers, a worrying fact), but it also represents something about his character. Nigel Farage is a man who will do and say anything for money — the man that pays the fiddler calls the tune with Farage. And in this way, Farage and Starmer are not so different — both don’t really have any firmly held personal beliefs, principles, or convictions; they simply parrot whatever their wealthy donors tell them to. It’s just that Farage is more charismatic in selling himself and the policies of his donors, whereas Starmer has all the charisma of…well I was trying to think of something that lacked charisma, and all I could think of was Starmer. It’s as if the dictionary has a photo of him under the words dull, bland, and uncharismatic.
And what with the seemingly never ending rise of Reform, one is simply left wondering: will the adults ever be in charge again? Perhaps the so-called ‘Polanski bump’ (a YouGov poll has the Greens polling the highest they’ve ever done at 12%, a 2% increase since Polanski’s election as leader of the party two weeks ago , which was matched by a 2% decrease from the frontrunners, Reform, after their gawdy party conference last week) offers some hope…
