Starmer’s Thermidor: The Blairite Restoration

In June this year, I wrote The Fire under Keir Starmer and Why Labour Will Win the Next Election. In this, I argued: the ruling class had tired of the Conservatives; their corruption and incompetence had made them unusable; Labour was the only alternative machine. Starmer was chosen, not because anyone believed in him, but because the system needed a new team of clerks. I then argued that the Starmer Government had failed to understand what the ruling class wanted, and that it was under notice of dismissal. I can now say that it has been largely dismissed, and we are getting a new government without the trouble of an election and change of seats.

This is how we should see the September reshuffle. It was no ordinary adjustment. It was a purge. The soft left was expelled. The Blairites were recalled. To understand why, we must recall how power operates in Britain.

The ultimate authority in Britain lies not with governments or parliaments. It lies with the monied interest: the financial oligarchy that operates from the City of London and its global satellites. Its interest is simple and permanent—to maintain Britain as a safe and profitable base for international rentier capitalism. The governing class—politicians, civil servants, academics, media figures—are its subordinate agents. They are not usually bribed, not even directly instructed. They absorb the agenda by osmosis, and carry it forward through a mixture of ambition and cowardice

What complicates government is that there is more than one layer to the strategy. Alongside the primary objective, there are supplemental objectives—policies designed to secure the political environment in which the rentier system can flourish. These secondary objectives change as circumstances change. And changes of and within government can be explained as responses—in much the same way as changes in a pattern of iron filings can be explained as responses to the shifting of a magnet out of sight behind the paper.

Between 1979 and 2020, the objective was atomisation. Independent centres of resistance were destroyed. Industries that sustained working-class autonomy were dismantled. Communities were broken. Immigration was encouraged to fragment what remained. The Thatcher governments began this process with interest rate policies that wiped out manufacturing and coal. It ended inflation by strangling industry. Interest rates were raised, the pound soared, exports collapsed. A quarter of manufacturing vanished between 1980 and 1983. Whole communities were destroyed. Coal mining was eliminated not because it was uneconomic, but because miners were independent. Their defeat was celebrated as a victory for freedom, but in truth it cleared the way for the managerial state.

The Blair and Brown governments continued the demolition. They opened the borders, broke the constitution, flooded the culture with propaganda. The Conservatives after that deepened the same course. This strategy worked as designed. The result was a people reduced to dependence, demoralised and unable to resist. The country was turned into a playground for finance and speculation.

But the world has moved. Russia is winning the Ukraine War. China continues its rise. The United States has itself turned back to economic nationalism. A Britain reduced to service work and surveillance cannot project power abroad. A corpse cannot serve as a host.

And so the supplemental strategy has changed. Atomisation is no longer useful. The people must be given back some cohesion, some industry, some confidence, some reason to make the country powerful again. This is not for our sake. It is only so they we can again serve as instruments of Western power in a world less friendly to rentier capitalism than it seemed before 2020.

The French Revolution’s Thermidor was not a restoration of monarchy. It was a retreat from chaos, a stabilisation of tyranny. The guillotines stopped, the clubs were closed, the nation was allowed to breathe—but the revolution’s essence survived. So it is now. We are not being given liberty. We are being given stability. Britain is to be partially restored. Industry must be rebuilt. Immigration must be managed. Welfare must be reformed. Again, this is not to revive the nation, but to make it once again serviceable as an enforcement agency.

Angela Rayner’s departure over an unpaid tax bill was the occasion. She had been a symbol of Labour’s working-class credentials. Her resignation opened the door for a purge. Ian Murray, loyal but soft left, was sacked. Lucy Powell, cooperative but tied to inclusivity rhetoric, was dismissed. Justin Madders, Angela Eagle, Diana Johnson, Daniel Zeichner—cleared out.

In their place came the Blairites.

• Douglas Alexander: back from exile after his 2015 defeat, now Scotland Secretary. He once managed foreign policy under Blair and Brown. His return is the ultimate symbol of restoration.
• Pat McFadden: Blair’s lieutenant, now head of a “super ministry” at Work and Pensions, charged with benefit reform and skills. His task is to discipline welfare and produce workers.
• Peter Kyle: promoted to Business and Trade. His brief is to cut business regulation by 25 per cent. A rising star of the Blairite school.
• Steve Reed: now Housing, chanting “build, baby, build,” meaning planning reform to release land for development.
• Emma Reynolds: Environment Secretary, with a record of Treasury alignment and growth rhetoric.
• David Lammy: Deputy Prime Minister, the safe pair of hands, a man who will never depart from American policy.

These are not leftists, or anything else ideological. They are apparatchiks. Their virtues are an ability to sniff the wind and competent delivery of what is expected. They gave the ruling class what it wanted in 1997—mass-immigration, constitutional change. They will now give it what it wants in 2025—growth, skills, industrial revival, immigration control.

This is why the purge was necessary. The Starmer leftists never understood the change. They never felt the osmosis. They clung to censorship and identity politics. They were liabilities. The Blairites are free of ideology. That is why they are useful. The Blairites will not undo the system. They will not touch the banks. They will not restore freedom of speech. But they will give enough stability for the rentier system to endure.

So, what should our reaction be? I will paraphrase Tocqueville again: the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform. It is then that the people can remember all that has been done to it, without balancing what may now be done for it. We should take every liberalisation offered, and keep demanding more.

To do this, of course, we shall need a political front. That will not be the Conservative Party. Their last governments were a procession of mediocrities:

• David Cameron: avuncular fraud.
• Theresa May: paralysed, unable to act.
• Boris Johnson: a clown who wrapped failure in bombast.
• Liz Truss: a week-long absurdity.
• Rishi Sunak: an accountant with no imagination.

And beneath them, you see the ideological trash. Jacob Rees-Mogg, a pantomime squire, promised tradition and liberty while voting for every extension of tax and surveillance. Steve Baker, once preaching free markets, ended as a spokesman for lockdowns and Net Zero. They embodied the Conservative Party’s function: to harvest discontent and feed it back into the system. Their record is clear: high spending, high taxes, vandalistic regulation; the embedding of cultural leftism in every institution. I repeat mention of the lockdowns, the censorship, the political policing. No external enemy could have done more. They were not failures but collaborators. These men deserve not a second chance, but to rot in oblivion.

The Reform Party? This is no vehicle for counter-revolution. It is a gang of Conservative refugees, men and women who cheered through every betrayal of the past decade and now seek pardon by changing their letterhead. They have no programme beyond recycled press releases about immigration and tax. Their only asset is a Twitter platform where they perform outrage for likes, while offering nothing that touches the structure of power in this country. They are a holding pen for discontent, not a movement. To mistake them for an opposition is to mistake noise for force.

As in France after 1793, the old order is gone. What comes next is a new start. That new start may be less a party than a man. We must see who our Bonaparte will be. Whoever this may be must begin with the understanding that Britain is ruled by a financial oligarchy, and that all else is subordinate to its will. He must aim to cut away the censorship and surveillance. He must rebuild industry as a base of independence. He must speak not of “growth” but of sovereignty and survival.

Until then, the corpse has been jolted into life, not to restore the nation, but to serve its masters. Whether it walks again as a people, or staggers on as a puppet, depends not on the Blairites, but on us.

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