Introducing: The Starmer Symptom

AUGUST 21, 2025

A new book on Keir Starmer’s leadership is published today. Editor Mark Perryman introduces the book with this edited extract from it.

” The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Antonio Gramsci.

To start a book on Keir Starmer’s Labour Party and government with a quote of almost 100 years’ vintage from an imprisoned Italian communist is surely bordering on the intellectually perverse? Gramsci’s ideas had a certain appeal amongst a section of the British left intelligentsia through the 1970s and 1980s, but even that was 50-odd years ago.

So, a word of explanation and caution. There is an unhealthy habit of those who frame their politics in the words of centuries-old sages, Marx and Lenin in particular, to treat these founding texts as a kind of catechism, a religious order masquerading as revolutionary politics. That is not what is being suggested here.

Rather Gramsci’s idea of ‘symptom’ acts as a tool to help us develop and deepen our own understanding of this Keir Starmer ‘moment’. He is a Labour leader determined to extinguish all trace of the 2015-19 Corbynism experiment, leading the Party to end 14 years of Tory, with a little help from Nick Clegg, ‘progress’ via a landslide majority. He is a someone sparking both hopes, but also fears, of what this first Labour Prime Minister since the Blair-Brown era may or may not achieve in office.

Why ‘symptom’? The argument is that between the old and the new there’s a variety of ‘symptoms’, some negative but some positive. Symptom not in the sense of a disease, but a sign of we know not what comes next. In the post-2024 General Election issue of the journal Soundings, John Clarke echoed this approach by pointing out how multifaceted these ‘symptoms’ are. As a result any likely outcomes are likely to be the same: 

“As a starting point, Gramsci’s observations generate a set of difficult questions about the shifting alignments of consent and force; about who the ‘great masses’ are (and who they think they are); about the spatial and temporal conditions of the ‘interregnum’ (and how to address its ‘morbid symptoms’); and about how the instabilities of the interregnum might be resolved.”

John rather neatly sums up our daily lived experience of these symptoms: “from the shit in our rivers and seas through to the collapse of collective infrastructures, including welfare and care.”

Every day since July 4th 2024, these symptoms in some shape or form have shaped the Starmer government and how it has impacted upon us. 

First, whatever their differences, it was surely significant that Starmer and Reeves in at least one, crucial, direction echoed Corbyn and McDonnell via the centrality they gave to a green economics of sufficient magnitude to reverse the increasingly imminent climate emergency. The Corbynite ‘Green New Deal’ was replaced by ‘Great British Energy’. But at every twist and turn of actual implementation they have beaten a headlong retreat to the soundtrack of their mantra, ‘growth’.  

Second, Gaza marked out another very obvious dividing line, self-evidently obvious in Starmer’s instant response to the horrors inflicted by Hamas on October 7th 2023  that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” It’s a right he hasn’t once, before or after the Hamas atrocity, extended to Palestine, Lebanon or Iran.  And in the process he has established a dividing line that stretches considerably wider than what remains of the Corbynite left. Because this is a moment like Guernica, Vietnam, Soweto and Iraq that is defining a political generation stretching way beyond any preconceived definition of the ‘left’. And Starmer has ended up positioning himself and Labour in opposition to those defined in this way by Gaza.   

Third is the well-publicised strategy of recapturing Labour voters who deserted Labour in 2019, when immigration and asylum were identified as the key issues to make headway on. Fine, but heaven forbid this might mean making the argument that immigration is a foundational principle for Britain to have a functional economy and the social infrastructure we all depend upon. Or that asylum is a fundamental, human right, at least it should be. And when Jewish refugees who sought it in the 1930s escaping from Nazi Germany were refused entry because of a demonisation eerily similar to today, it didn’t end happily: rather it ended in the gas chambers Starmer very publicly visited ahead of the 2025 anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Labour seeks to trump the Tories’ ‘Stop the Boats’ with ‘Smash the Criminal Gangs’. No one should romanticise the trade that exploits the desperation of those seeking to escape oppressive regimes, war and famine, but what kind of argument is Labour making when it cannot bring itself to explain why people seek asylum and the consequences for them when it is denied? Having an argument: isn’t that what anything resembling a meaningful politics should consist of?                            

Fourth, ‘the bitterness of popular conflicts’ takes another, popular, form in the so-called ‘culture wars’, most obviously around transgender identity. It’s a subject seemingly almost everyone actively involved in politics, and beyond too, has a position on, usually entrenched and bitterly opposed to those who hold a different point of view, labelled as either transphobic or misogynist. I say “almost everyone”: prominent exceptions include Keir Starmer and the Labour Party, presumably in the hope this troublesome issue will go away. It won’t.

Fifth, for the ‘multiplication of forms of dissent’, a revived Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru cannot be ruled out. Meanwhile there is Sinn Fein’s increasing dominance of Northern Irish politics. All this points to how difficult it remains for a Unionist Labour Party, despite the landslide, to prevent the irresistible break-up of Britain.  And as for England, despite all of Keir’s occasional appearances in an England shirt to cheer on team, and country, Reform UK have successfully positioned themselves as the party of English nationalism.   

Add this list to John Clarke’s and together these are symptoms that spell F-R-A-C-T-U-R-E.

Mark Perryman is the editor of The Starmer Symptom. Contributors include Clive Lewis, Danny Dorling, Emma Burnell, Gargi Bhattacharyya, James Meadway, Hilary Wainwright Jeremy Gilbert, Neal Lawson, Phil Burton-Cartledge and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

Special Offer: just £11.89 via Labour Hub instead of the usual price £16.99. Use coupon code ‘STARMER 30’ at Pluto Press here