u/Orwellian87

Keir Starmer once told a journalist that he does not dream. It was meant to be a throwaway answer. It turned out to be the most honest thing he said in two years as Prime Minister. He won the largest Labour majority in a generation on 33.7% of the vote, governed for two years, and left with an approval rating of -46. Lower than Liz Truss. Lower than Boris Johnson at his worst. The British public, having endured austerity, Brexit, COVID, and a cost of living crisis, had been promised transformation and received competent decline. Keir Starmer's ousting and Andy Burnham's coronation is the best hope Britain has, and it could still go horribly wrong. Both things are true at once, and most people commenting on this seem determined to hold only one of them.

The instinct amongst DGG seems to be to blame the usual suspects. Plenty want to pin it on the leftist populists on Starmer's flank who never forgave him for the purge. Others blame the right-wing media ecosystem that would have monstered any Labour leader regardless. (Sound familiar, Dems?) Both are real factors, and both will be factors for every Labour leader who follows. But that framing misses the actual story, which is that Starmer's own party and his own colleagues decided they no longer wanted him. Nobody marched on him from outside. His own side reached a verdict.

Starmer scored a lot of own goals: the constant U-turns, the vindictive purge of the left, the extension of austerity, the carrying-over of the Tories' hostile environment. To be fair, he had genuine wins, and pretending otherwise is as lazy as pretending the whole thing was a betrayal. He scrapped the two-child benefit cap, which is projected to lift around half a million children out of poverty. He passed the Renters' Rights Act, giving tenants real protection against no-fault eviction for the first time in a generation. He rolled out free breakfast clubs, began rail nationalisation, and pushed through an employment rights bill that, watered down as it was, extended sick pay and zero-hours protections to millions. He also kept Britain out of Trump's Iran adventure when half the Atlanticist establishment was pulling him in. A serious Labour government should have been able to run on that record.

He couldn't. What did him in was a lack of vision more than a lack of charisma. He was not a politician, and by his own admission he didn't enjoy the game. His media strategy was abysmal, a distant technocratic voice that only surfaced during clanky, stilted set-piece press conferences. He was the opposite of the influencer politician at exactly the moment that started to matter, and it began to tell. He was a blank space onto which voters projected their frustration. The Tory MP who shouted "he's not the messiah" across the Commons got the laugh because it caught the mood precisely.

And then there's Palestine. I know, I know - but whatever your own view on I/P, in Britain it functions as a moral litmus test in a way it simply doesn't in the United States. The movement here has far deeper roots, running through the trade unions, the universities, the mosques, the broader left, and Starmer's repeated refusal to confront Israel hurt him badly with the people he most needed. His government's decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000 was both a political miscalculation and a moral embarrassment. It led to the grotesque spectacle of pensioners being processed through the counter-terrorism apparatus. An age breakdown released by the Met showed that nearly 100 of those arrested were in their 70s, and 15 in their 80s. When your anti-terror policy involves arresting octogenarians for holding placards in silence, you haven't protected anyone. You've lost the plot.

Andy Burnham is a genuinely different proposition, but the fundamental risk hasn't gone anywhere. The "King of the North" built his brand outside the Westminster hothouse, by actually governing somewhere. He stood up to the Conservative government over its insulting pandemic support package for Greater Manchester and won. He renationalised the buses, built the Bee Network, capped fares while they were rising everywhere else. He's a real communicator, unattached to the factionalism that rotted the parliamentary party, and he is currently the only senior British politician polling net-positive. Most importantly, he has a story voters can repeat back to you: communities got ripped off, privatisation failed, and public control can restore both fairness and pride. Nobody could ever do that with Starmer.

But in 2026, having the right story isn't enough; you have to make change visibly and fast. So here's a controversial opinion for you. I think Burnham should steal Trump's communication format and strip out the lying. Trump's daily appearances manufacture a sense of radical transparency, and voters feel they're watching power being used in real time. Imagine that machinery without the fabrication: daily briefings from inside Number 10, the actual workings of decision-making on show, a human being talking instead of a press release. Mamdani did a version of this in New York, Obama did it at national scale.

Burnham has the substance, with water and energy back under public control and the largest council-house building programme since the war, and substance is exactly what the format amplifies. The real danger is that he governs boldly and still lets a press operation bury it under the same managerial fog that sank his predecessor.

Because what waits on the other side of a Burnham failure is not more competent decline. It is Reform: openly racist, intellectually bankrupt, and, this is the part people keep refusing to take seriously, electorally viable. So when people mourn Starmer's removal as some kind of institutional sacrilege, they should be asked a simple question: what exactly is it they want continued? An attachment to institutionalism settles nothing on its own. It is a mood, and it has no analysis underneath it justifying the loyalty.

Starmer was a vast improvement on the Tories. He just wasn't the right man for the age. Whether Burnham is remains to be seen. But Britain has had its manager, and it's still declining. It's worth finding out what someone with an actual story can do before Reform gets the chance to tell its own.

My wife called me at work yesterday to tell me the dog had jumped the fence and attacked the neighbour’s poodle.

There are calls that contain, in only a sentence, the whole shape of the disaster.

Further details were not really required. I sighed the long, exasperated sigh of somebody who knows something very bad has happened and that it is his own fault. Something I should have prevented had arrived with literal teeth.

I tried not to let my students see my reaction. I looked up from my phone and found my troubled gaze met by a girl named Emily, who had her hand raised, patiently waiting for me to remember I was a teacher in the middle of a class.

‘Yes, Emily?’

‘Oscar says I look like a snail.’

I sighed again.

His name is Kaine. He is not a bad dog. That is the useless sentence every owner says after blood has been drawn. Yet it is true, as far as truth goes in these private courts of love and negligence. He is affectionate, loyal, clever, handsome, and intensely alive to every sound beyond the gate. He has had a good life in many ways. Better than most dogs. Long walks, good food, patience, unconditional love, the hills of Hong Kong, the sea air.

But there was one thing we could not give him: socialisation with other large dogs.

Real socialisation. The rough education of play. Wrestling. Chasing. Being knocked over and getting up again. Learning that another creature can be strong without being a threat.

Because he never got enough of that, the world outside the house became hostile territory. Every encounter arrived as a possible attack. He left the house tense, scanning, ready. A ball of anxious aggression wrapped in fur.

So I left work, got in a cab, and headed down the hills of Lantau.

The sea appeared. Little ships moved across it with the calm of things that still belonged to an orderly world.

I looked at them and thought, with the kind of self-pity only a guilty dog owner in a taxi can produce, that we have all become a little like Kaine.

Anxious. Aggressive. Defensive. Suspicious. Badly socialised. Living behind our fences, overfed on signals of danger, then surprised when we bare our teeth at the first thing that looks like a threat.

For a while, enough people believed in a future that felt manageable. The early 2000s now look ridiculous in retrospect. The internet still sounded useful. Globalisation still came wrapped in the language of opportunity. Flights were cheap. Europe was integrating. America could still produce Obama and convince half the world that competence had not completely left the building.

That optimism was always selective and often fake. Iraq happened. The financial system was rotten. Plenty of people were already getting screwed while being told to admire the gains. Still, people can tolerate hypocrisy longer than they can tolerate drift. A society does not need to be just. It does need to feel as if it is going somewhere.

Now that feeling is gone. Climate change is here. Housing is punitive. New technology arrives with the promise of convenience and the threat of redundancy. Politics has become a machine for producing dread. Even ordinary life feels unstable. Rent, work, dating, the weather, school fees, the news, all of it feels more fragile than it should.

That pressure shows up in private decisions. Falling birth rates get treated as a morality play because that is easier than admitting systemic failure. People blame selfishness, feminism, porn, immaturity, consumerism, whatever is closest to hand. But many people still want children. What they lack is confidence.

UNFPA’s 2025 State of World Population report found that nearly one in five reproductive-age adults across 14 countries believe they will be unable to have the number of children they want. Thirty-nine per cent said financial limitations had affected or would affect their desired family size. Nearly one in five said fears about the future, including climate change, war, pandemics, and environmental decline, had led or would lead them to have fewer children than they wanted.

This is a loss of faith. In the United States, recent research summarised by the Population Reference Bureau found a widening gap between wanting children and intending to have them. Money matters. Housing matters. Relationships matter. So does the basic sense that the future has become a bad bet.

A child is a vote for the future. More people are choosing not to cast it.

Politics has moved the same way. Brexit was more than a referendum. It was a signal that trust had already collapsed. Before the vote, distrust of government was a strong predictor of voting Leave. Will Jennings’ analysis found that 65 per cent of people who greatly distrusted the government voted to leave the EU. Afterwards, politics became less about disagreement inside a shared system and more about who had been lied to by it.

That pattern extends beyond Britain. Once trust drops far enough, every institution starts to look fake, every elite looks self-dealing, every loss feels rigged, and every compromise feels like surrender. Politics stops functioning as politics and turns into grievance management.

Social media poured fuel on that. A 2021 study of Covid discourse on Twitter found strong evidence of political echo chambers, with users sorting into partisan clusters and algorithms reinforcing the split. Anyone who was online during the pandemic knows the shape of it. The fights were rarely just about policy. They were about status, reality, and who got to define what counted as true.

That atmosphere changes people. It rewards certainty, speed, and aggression. It punishes proportion. Spend enough time in that environment and ordinary disagreement starts to feel dangerous. You begin to assume the person across from you is dishonest, stupid, or one sentence away from becoming unbearable.

Kaine, seen here workshopping his theory of pre-emptive self-defence

This is why the uncertainty feels deeper than a normal slump. Most systems still work in the technical sense. The bills get paid. The apps function. The trains usually run. Schools send emails. Governments issue statements. But fewer people believe the system behind those routines is healthy, fair, or even competent.

That leaves two weak answers. The managerial centre offers procedure and expertise, then seems confused that nobody finds this inspiring. The populists offer revenge and excitement, which at least has the virtue of sounding like a real emotion. Neither side gives people much reason to believe in the future. One sounds technocratic and lacking a coherent vision. The other sounds unwell.

So the uncertainty moves inward. People delay children. They avoid commitment. They retreat into private life, online factions, or managed cynicism. They become easier to scare and harder to reassure. Then everyone acts surprised when intimacy feels brittle and public life feels insane.

Kaine needed structure, exposure, and practice. He needed more than affection. He needed a world large enough to teach him that every strong thing was not an enemy. People need something similar. Trust will not be restored by slogans, fact-checking campaigns, or lectures about norms. It has to be rebuilt in the conditions of life: stable housing, decent work, public space, institutions that deserve loyalty, technology governed by something other than pure appetite, and a politics that can ask something of people without sounding absurd.

If there is a political hope left, it may lie in Europe. For all its decadence and self-importance, it remains one of the few places shaped by a tradition strong enough to criticise itself and civilised enough to care about the result.

By the time I reached home, the facts were what facts usually are. Less dramatic than I feared, more inconvenient than I hoped. (I must confess I had to supress a shameless flicker of pride when I learned that he had managed to sail clean over a six-foot fence). There would be apologies. Bills. Guilt. The neighbour’s dog would need care. Kaine would need stricter boundaries and, somehow, a better life inside them.

That is where we are. Looking at the damage. Making excuses. Knowing, somewhere beneath the panic, that none of this happened by accident. The future has jumped the fence. We can deal with it now, or keep acting shocked when somebody gets bitten.