A sort of loathing

Some political commentators have said this already – Keir Starmer seems to loathe ordinary working people and everything not conceived in the sterile offices of officialdom. We could say much the same about many of his political colleagues, the UK Establishment and sections of the media.

We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something else? We don’t know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if our petulant prayers were answered.

Fyodor Dostoevsky – Notes from Underground (1864)

A related explanation for Starmer’s obtusely aloof political behaviour is a middle class loathing for the gritty compromises and trade-offs of real life, engendering a kind of contempt for those who must stoop to making those gritty compromises work.

I myself had already spoken to you of that middle class which hungers so ravenously for place and office, distinctions and plumes, and which at the same time is so avaricious, so suspicious with regard to its money which it invests in banks, never risking it in agriculture or manufactures or commerce, having indeed the one desire to enjoy life without doing anything, and so unintelligent that it cannot see it is killing its country by its loathing for labour, its contempt for the poor, its one ambition to live in a petty way with the barren glory of belonging to some official administration.

Emile Zola – Rome (1896)

It is far from being a new issue, this contempt shown by officials towards everyone else, this preference for blanket coercion over pragmatic administrative services. Taking political account of covert animosity of rulers towards those they rule is not easy, because it is shared and ignored by mainstream media. Yet our senior politicians clearly see themselves as a kind of superior gilded official, not an experienced person providing political oversight from the real world.

Starmer is unusually poor at hiding it.