There has been a familiar feeling in the air for a while, but not one I could identify until last week, when it finally settled. It is a sense that this Labour government is just as terminally dysfunctional and directionless as its predecessor. I am beginning to feel the same sense of frustration, confusion, anger and depletion that I carried through all those years of Conservative government.
Here we are again, with the pettiness and authoritarianism, the performatively cruel rhetoric and crackdown on immigration, the ridiculous posturing on flags, the empty sloganeering – and with the constant rebooting in order to jumpstart a broken machine. The result is that government has been reduced to the same intrusive and meaningless background noise: Keir Starmer droning on about “phase two” or “delivery, delivery, delivery”. There is a sense that it’s pointless to insist that Labour can do better, be better – because it is structurally incapable of doing so.
