Why Not Starmer

Announced mandatory digital ID cards at the Global Progress Action Summit in September 2025. "You will not be able to work in the United Kingdom if you do not have digital ID. It's as simple as that." His own cabinet ministers privately called it incoherent, a fantasy, too expensive and complicated. His own MPs called it un-British. Dropped the mandatory element in January 2026 after public and parliamentary backlash. Three months from announcement to humiliating climbdown.

The government consulted on abolishing jury trials for a range of offences in order to reduce court backlogs. The proposal was met with cross-party condemnation. The right to be judged by a jury of your peers is not a procedural convenience. It is a constitutional principle older than Parliament itself. The government did not abolish it. But it thought about it, said so publicly, and had to walk it back. The courts backlog has a solution that does not require removing one of the oldest rights in English law. The Burnham Programme sets it out in detail.

Hotels costing £5.77m per day. Three private contractors making £380m in profit. Yvette Cooper announcing hotels will end by 2029 with no plan for where 100,000 people will go. A minister asked directly on Radio 4 what the alternative accommodation would be refused to answer. The solution, hire caseworkers, train them in a week, clear the backlog in months, has been in National Audit Office reports since 2021. Every Home Secretary announced a crackdown. None hired the caseworkers. All approved the contracts.

Peter Mandelson was appointed UK Ambassador to the United States despite documented connections to Jeffrey Epstein, connections Mandelson himself acknowledged involved "a number of" meetings. Starmer appointed him anyway. When the backlash came Starmer defended the appointment. The message it sent about whose advice Starmer takes and whose concerns he dismisses was not subtle.

Keir Starmer trained as a barrister. He was Director of Public Prosecutions. He built a career on the application of law to state conduct. When asked repeatedly whether Israeli military operations in Gaza constituted violations of international humanitarian law he refused to say. The International Court of Justice made findings. Senior UN officials made findings. Legal scholars made findings. The man whose professional identity is the law found it impossible to apply it in the one case where it was politically inconvenient. That is not pragmatism. It is not ideology. It is the absence of both.