LIVERPOOL happens to be my city of birth, and my family is generational CIA (Catholic, Irish, Alcoholic). I get back there when I can, usually for funerals family reunions. I can confirm that if you don’t mention Thatcher, the Sun, any Manchester band, the Wirral, or ask a native to pronounce the word ‘chicken’, you will be made to feel more than welcome as a visitor there. Scousers are rightly celebrated for a quick, if chippy, wit and unique sense of humour. Not least by ourselves.
Hopefully that last quality will help the city survive this week’s invasion by activist lawyers, Islington familiars, boilerplate career MPs, lanyard fetishists, lobbyists, and the process algorithm who was slush-funded to the Labour leadership.
For years Liverpool dodged hosting the Labour conference and was probably resentful at the snub. Now its rejuvenated docklands are the go-to venue for this annual festival of enforced fun/confected joyfulness. It’s probably resentful at that as well.
I’m not sure British politics has seen a speech as bad as the one the Prime Minister gave to this year’s wake gathering. And before you mention Enoch Powell and ‘rivers of blood’, that speech was ‘bad’ only in the minds of those who never read it or were unable or unwilling to appreciate the deep truths Powell was advancing behind the veil of metaphor.
The Prime Minister was vindictive and politically maladroit in equal measure. Powell, a genuine member of the British working class, was a trained classicist who thought, spoke and wrote in the languages and metaphors of the ancient world. Powell’s lack of condescension and unwillingness to dumb down created room for bad faith and mischievous interpretation.
Starmer, who thinks and speaks the language of the petty bureaucrat, has no such defence. Where Powell made his predictions in poetry (which have proven correct, let’s not forget), Starmer rams home his malevolence in bullet points and crass soundbites.
I make this unhappy comparison partly to draw attention to the decades-long decline in the culture of political speechcraft, which TCW recently wrote about, and to affirm that even by the standards of today Starmer was awful.
We expect our political speeches to be unlovely now. Starmer’s went beyond that and managed to be offensive and yet boring all at once. As I said, the Prime Minister is an algorithm, and there are three things you can say about algorithms: they lack memory, have no sense of humour, and are unaware that they are, well, an algorithm.
As he moved through the script it became clear that the murder of Charlie Kirk had been forgotten completely. The Prime Minister who locked up Lucy Connolly on the basis that words on X cause violence in real life seemed to think it was fine to disapply this maxim when it comes to words spoken by him on a national platform in prime time.
If, as seems likely, this contribution to the anti-Farage pile-on, which is turning into a leftist psychosis, results in political violence, it will probably be an attack not on Farage himself but on a sympathetic commentator or leaflet volunteer. And at this point you can bet that the causal link between words and deeds, so clear apparently in the Connolly case, will suddenly become vague and unquantifiable.
The left in general has maxed out the ‘racist’ line of credit. It’s not working for them now. People are alert to this Government’s systematic linguistic chicanery. They no longer want to be part of this wonderland in which the meaning of words is alterable according to the whims of the governing class.
People are waking up to the scam, and especially in Liverpool, I imagine, where the aforementioned sense of humour comes with a seriousness about language and what words mean.
They might have been too busy in lively and muscular debate, but if they happened to catch Starmer’s spiel the regulars in my old haunt would have concluded it was very incompetently delivered bullshit.
Again, algorithms can’t laugh. Not authentically. The irony will therefore have escaped Starmer that in his obsession with Farage he turned himself into a warm-up act for the Reform leader who, with his usual opportunistic genius, got to swoop in and play both victim and Prime Minister in waiting at once.
There is no point wondering how Keir Starmer is feeling today because there is ‘nothing it is like’ to be an algorithm. He is of interest, at a stretch, to anthropologists but not psychologists unless they are of the radical behaviourist school.
I like to imagine he escaped his programmers and the sanitised conference zone and wandered into the city proper whistling an Oasis song and carrying a copy of the Sun if only because the consequences would not have been ‘cinematic’.
I suspect not though.
