Smart, no-nonsense moves by Starmer show how toxic and incompetent the Tories have really been

I was delighted by the outcome of the general election. If I was an intelligent and rational grown-up, my response would now be about hope and optimism. And healing the wounds of division that have afflicted this country over the past 14 years. But I am not, so I can’t respond that way. Because the last 14 years were so painful, so shameful and so damaging to us all that the wounds can’t just heal overnight. In the days that followed Labour’s victory, the better Keir Starmer did, the more horrendous the past 14 years seemed.

Every astute appointment Starmer made, every smart policy announcement and every straightforward, encouraging, no-nonsense assessment of the national predicament that this new government delivered, just made me angrier with their Conservative predecessors.

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It was all so bloody obvious. Of course you appoint experts to government roles. Of course you make it easier to build houses. We had been gaslit by self-serving, incompetent and ideological politicians into believing that all of our problems were complex and unsolvable. And then decent, capable people come along and show us that it was so much simpler than that. 

A great deal has been made of the privileged, public school background of the Conservative government. Some people think that rich parents and posh schools made the likes of Johnson and Cameron out of touch with the people they represented. But the real problem was not their empathy deficit (although they definitely suffered from that) it was the toxic levels of self-assurance that had been drummed into them since childhood.

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That level of certainty in your own abilities renders you dangerously blinkered to other points of view. It means you only trust people who are just like you; this is why so many cabinets were formed by people who were mates at school. The world-view was narrow, the ideas were limited. No matter how badly their policies failed, no matter how much evidence stacked up to prove it, their cast-iron sense of superiority prevented them from changing course.

That’s why, from the moment George Osbourne unveiled his destructive austerity project, through the collapse of public services, the skyrocketing of food bank use, the widening of inequality, the disastrous economic fallout of Brexit, partygate, Trussgate, the insanity of the Rwanda scheme and the sad, undignified fag end of the Sunak era, nobody ever once thought: ”Maybe we ought to think again on some of this?”

That is what too much privilege does to people. The schools they attended were designed generations ago as training grounds for the Empire’s management classes – boys who would be sent to far-flung colonies where they would rule with unsentimental pragmatism. In order to do that, the schools needed to beat the compassion out of them and replace it with turbo-powered superciliousness.

There remain some ordinary folk in Britain who still think that the Tories must be better at managing the economy because, well, they’re posh and rich. This despite the fact that they have raised national debt to its highest levels in 70 years; despite the fact that every recession of the last four decades has been under Tory rule. Those posh boys have us believing they know stuff we don’t. It’s a confidence trick, no different to a spivvish conman on the Riviera seducing gullible divorcees with his shiny shoes and intoxicating cologne.

Now that Starmer has a cabinet full of super-smart state-schooled kids, with plans to slap VAT on private schools and maybe even raise a bit of tax at the expense of the top 1%, the Tory press cries ‘class war!’. Yet they never called it a war when they were in power, dishing out contracts and peerages to their dinner party mates while millions of kids lived in poverty. But the truth is, it really is a class war. It always has been. And for the first time in a long time, the posh people are losing.

Read more from Sam Delaney here.

Sort Your Head Out: Mental Health Without All the Bollocks by Sam Delaney is out now (Constable £18.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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