The full article On National Centrism is published in Tribune and is part of Alameda’s After Order project.

Starmerism’ has been defined by absence rather than a firm plan for government. Now the Labour leadership is tending towards passive acceptance of the nationalist spirit of the age.

The world as we knew it has gone’, declaimed Keir Starmer in The Telegraph in early April, with all the acuity of someone who, having slept through an earthquake, wakes up amid the ruins. But though he recognised the redundancy of ‘old assumptions’, his register granted to the new world a familiarity — a hint of farcical repetition, even. ‘We know this approach works,’ he boasted of his government’s investment plans, evoking Third Way pragmatism. The means to stability, he went on, is ‘national renewal’ — a central promise of the New Labour manifesto of 1997, which he has reiterated since 2023.

Almost a year beforehand, once a date for the general election had been announced, Starmer belatedly, but unsurprisingly, set up camp on the political terrain of New Labour. ‘I think you win from the centre ground,’ he affirmed in an interview for The Times. ‘The centre ground is where most people are.’ Tautology, lest we forget, was the centrepiece of the high-neoliberal comms repertoire. But deployed by Starmer, such shibboleths transmit none of the conviction of turn-of-the-century centrist ideologues.

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