Last weekend, as the world wondered whether Donald Trump would swipe Greenland, Keir Starmer made his own big geographic intervention: he published a map of which councils were fixing potholes.
Yes, potholes. Yes, a map. Barely 18 months into office, with crucial elections just ahead and his party lagging behind the ragtag troops of Nigel Farage and even Kemi Badenoch, this was how Team Starmer kicked off 2026. To be fair, as the young people say, the map is colour-coded.
Then the prime minister got tough. Spurred on by fury at Grok, the AI service that doubles as a factory for child porn, he threatened Elon Musk’s X with losing the “right to self-regulate”. No 10 doubtless considers this fighting talk, but no one would call it action. For that, look to other countries, which simply went ahead and suspended X.
This week, tens of thousands of families and schools and pubs and restaurants across Kent and Sussex have had no water. For the second time this winter South East Water has deprived customers of one of life’s essentials. So glaring is the company’s failure that Tory MPs – true-blue, laissez-faire, privateer-loving sprogs of Thatcher – are demanding its boss quit, while Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats want its licence confiscated. So how has Starmer responded? By declaring the fiasco – wait for it – “totally unacceptable”. That’s telling them!
This is not another newspaper column on the redundancy of our prime minister, because such pieces are themselves redundant. From day one, the public has been way ahead of most of the press and besides, when the cheap shops are flogging anti-Starmer Christmas cards, you know that next December Downing Street will have a new occupant.
Nor am I going to hymn the praises of Donald Trump, who is, as I may have mentioned here previously, a know-nothing vainglorious bully out to grab what he can for himself, his family and funders. Yet this extremist rightwinger offers the left a profound lesson. He shows us that political power really can matter, provided it is wielded with clarity and purpose.
Day after day, the most anti-government president since Ronald Reagan demonstrates the uses of government. And guess what? It turns out that the point of running a country is not to palm off tricky decisions to Ofcom or Ofwat. Not to announce yet another apparently essential policy, duly followed by yet another U-turn. Not to collect material for a crybaby op-ed about how some toughs in Whitehall (sorry, I mean a “political perma-class”) laughed at the size of your majority before legging it with your shiny new mandate.
Over the past decade or so, as politics in the UK, the US and elsewhere has become ever more reactionary, people on the left have looked across at their counterparts on the right for ideas. Then they write threads or columns or entire papers about how progressives need to learn TikTok or cut welfare or be a bit racist. The conclusion I draw is rather more basic: the centre-left could do with reminding itself what politics is for.
Because for Trump, change isn’t merely a word you slap on the front of a manifesto. He bends both the US and the world to his will – while the centre-left, whether in Washington or further afield, peevishly taps a big sign marked “RULES”.
After Trump’s troops illegally kidnapped a foreign leader, how did the highest-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, protest? “The Trump administration has not sought congressional authorisation for the use of military force and has failed to properly notify Congress in advance of the operation in Venezuela.” The more basic among us might worry about the morality or the fallout; sophisticates such as Jeffries know that what counts is the process.
You can see the same dynamic in Trump’s hounding of Jerome Powell, the head of the US central bank. The president has long attacked his central banker as a “numbskull” for not cutting interest rates more quickly; now his government is investigating him over the spiralling costs of refurbishing the Federal Reserve’s HQ. The pettiness here is rather tired and very squalid – Powell is in any case due to step down this May, while another Fed member, Lisa Cook, has already been hauled up on charges that look equally baseless. Still, ahead of tough midterms and with his donors on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley swimming in debt, it makes sense for Trump to ram-raid monetary policy. Yet commentators on the centre-left do not point out how such authoritarianism is deployed to empower and enrich an unpopular president and his court. Instead, they tut about the injury done to independent central banking.
Exactly when progressives fell into such neoliberal priggishness is a good question – we might start with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder urging their weakened industrial towns to euthanise themselves for the good of globalisation. But it has destroyed their voter base, leaving their chief source of legitimacy as an expertise in the rulebook. So while Trump bashes the Fed and faces down any storm in the bond market, Starmer and his lieutenant, Rachel Reeves, cite the bond market as the chief reason for keeping their jobs.
When Andy Burnham decried his party’s subservience to financial markets a few months ago, he was ridiculed by Labour’s leadership. Yet while his remarks could have done with nuance, they were based on good economic and political sense. Labour cannot govern against its own people and expect to hold on to power. A chancellor cannot devise inflexible rules for herself, then claim those rules as a reason for inertia. And it should not be left solely to a chancer such as Farage to question the unelected power of the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility. Government by wrecking ball – a la Trump – is not the answer, but nor is presiding over a failing status quo.
However hard he thumps the table about “delivery”, radicalism is not on Starmer’s agenda. It never was. He and his little men play politics as a game where the instructions are handed down from others and the stakes are miserably low: a purge of some annoying lefties, a few well-paid and unadmirable careers. Government in the hands of these pretenders is about grids, anonymous briefings and “getting both sides around the table”. Oh, and potholes, of course: lovely, tricoloured maps festooned with potholes.
All the while, voters in Britain for whom the system isn’t working look across at other leaders and other ideologies where politics is a means of doing things and getting results. However much you deplore Trump and Farage, the counter to their action isn’t to shrug your shoulders. It’s to act.
Curated by Aisha Patel
