Keir Starmer and the myth of the metropolitan elite

We are supposed to live in the era of the “liberal metropolitan elite.” Professor Matt Goodwin and David Goodhart tell us that selection by merit has created a new ruling class of cognitively gifted people. This class, worldly and urban, finds its natural habitat in the cosmopolitan world warehouse from London. Unlike previous establishments, we are told, the metropolitan liberal elite looks with contempt on those who are less gifted than themselves, those who live in the provinces and cling to traditional lifestyles.

Hence the long fight that broke out between the two, populism being a revolt of the provinces against the liberal metropolis. This idea is now more or less taken for granted. Most authors, academics and even politicians who criticize the status quo always emphasize flattering Britain’s leaders as society’s natural elite, the cream of the crop.

What really sets British urban liberals apart is their relative weakness.

The Starmer saga should bury this idea forever. Metropolitan Elite spokesman Keir Starmer named football comedian King of the Rovers like his favorite book and has no discernible interests other than team sports. Much of his first week in office was spent watching football on television. He attributes most social problems to technology: to “autoplay, endless scrolling.” Liberal elites are supposed to have a flexible, postmodern outlook, but Starmer’s entire worldview is based on objective morality – human rights – the kind of oh-so-moral fables you might find in King of the Rovers. His main line of attack against other parties is that they are secretly in cahoots with foreign governments. It required a great feat of imagination to see a liberal metropolitan in this latter-day Colonel Blimp.

Starmer is representative of his class. This we know thanks to Tom Baldwin, his biographer and consigliere, who describes him as a fixture in Kentish Town society. Like Keir, England’s nominal liberal elites are narrow and desperate, bewildered by the problems of a new age and likely to blame them on some sort of general miasma, “polycrisis” or “anti-incumbent bias.”

They considered Dominic Cummings a dangerous eccentric for knowing who Bismarck was. They have almost unlimited faith in the power of football to heal national divisions. A certain cultural disenchantment with society and its institutions is supposed to be characteristic of liberal elites, but among British leaders it is quite the opposite: these people speak without irony of impartial judges, of neutral state broadcasters, of generals who think only of the nation. In temperament, they resemble Tory squires much more than Whig magnates.

Their educational benefits are small, certainly too small to matter. To an ordinary high school student in 1926, almost everyone living in 2026 is an imbecile. Much has been made of the decline of autodidacticism among the British working class; the decline in knowledge and learning among leaders has been just as dramatic, if not more so.

It is therefore absurd to speak of “educational polarization” in today’s society, much less to consider it as a determining factor in policy. As for meritocracy, Britain has spent the last 60 years getting rid of free selective education – an act which single-handedly revived the great state schools. The Equality Act 2010 means the country is, de jure, not a meritocracy. There is much less of a connection between talent and earthly reward than when Starmer’s parents were young adults.

What really sets British urban liberals apart is their relative weakness. Unlike other developed countries, Britain does not have a high intelligentsia capable of providing this class with moral leadership. His gifts are narrow and cloistered. There is no British analogue to Noam Chomsky or Bell Hooks, or even Bernard Henri-Levy. The task of public intellectualism is left to artists like Stephen Fry or Sandi Toksvig, or to children’s authors like Philip Pullman. The last real activist academic was probably EP Thompson, and he died in 1993. English academia always produces leading figures, but they are usually rather otherworldly figures like Quentin Skinner – who are not the sort of people to take an active role in the affairs of the nation.

Why is this the case? Britain does not have a confident activist intelligentsia because it did not experience the “1960s” in the ordinary sense of the term. There was no real student movement in Britain, and most of the liberal gains of the era were due to the brusque ruling of Roy Jenkins or liberal-minded aristocrats like the 8th Earl of Arran and Lord Longford. There was no British equivalent to the French of the 1968s, let alone the Red Army Faction or the Weathermen. Britain didn’t have a real New Left either; when it arrived, very late, in the magazine Marxism today, his doctrine was not that of postmodern skepticism but of objective morality – human rights. The idea that the ’68s were postmodern is quite false, but in Britain, unlike the United States or France, there was not even the pretense of it.

There is another reason for their weakness. In 1945, Britain went further than any other Western country in nationalizing its economy. In the post-war years, France and West Germany opted for a corporatist confusion that preserved the big capitalists as a class, but in Britain the liberal elites, the “managerialists”, actually came to run almost everything. As a result, when this system collapsed in 1979, Britain’s liberal elites saw an unprecedented collapse in their social position.

British metropolitan liberals no longer have a real agenda of their own and feel passive in the face of events. They hold on trembling old regime institutions like Whitehall, the courts, the monarchy. Watch the contents of Keir Starmer’s latest reset speech and you’ll simply discover the prejudices piled up on Hugh Dennis’s character’s breakfast table in the sitcom. Outnumbered. A vague feeling that leaving the EU was a bad idea, but that he was too lacking in imagination to become a Eurofederalist. That too many people go to college these days to study “Mickey Mouse degrees” and should probably get an apprenticeship instead.

In any case, it does not deserve to be flattered as “liberal metropolitanism”; those who don’t like the way things are done in Britain must oppose these ideas on their merits. Otherwise, it will be governed by King of the Rovers forever.