Keir Starmer’s lethal legacy

A friend tells a blood-curdling anecdote about visiting Moscow for work, in that End of History interregnum, when the West still did business with the Russian bear. Even then, it was risky: my friend booked a driver to take him from the hotel to a client’s office, only to realise after a few minutes that the driver was heading at speed in entirely the wrong direction. When he queried this, the man simply pretended not to understand, and drove even faster. He realised with cold certainty he was being kidnapped.

The relation between British voters and the people elected to govern us feels a little like being stuck in that taxi. I know many decent people who voted for this Labour government, in exasperation at 14 footling years of the Tories, and who simply hoped that Starmer would deliver what he seemed to be promising: sensible centre-left policies plus a bit less psychodrama.

Instead, all those votes seem to have granted a thumping majority to a man who has U-turned on everything sensible and centre-left he ever promised, while showing a steely determination to ram through, either personally or via proxies, a whole shadow programme of policies which weren’t in the manifesto.

Of these, none is more egregious than the Assisted Dying Bill. This was never Labour policy. It was brought as a Private Members’ Bill, with the transparent connivance of government , and given the airiest of rides by a committee packed with supporters. Except then it ran out of time in the House of Lords, under the weight of 1,200 amendments brought against its shortcomings on behalf of the great many charities , experts , nurses , carers , GPs , psychiatrists , abuse campaigners , priests , and others who raised concerns about its lack of safeguards. But apparently that wasn’t enough to scotch it: tomorrow, another Labour MP, Lauren Edwards, will re-introduce the very same bill again, after coming second in the Private Members’ Bill ballot. Under existing Parliamentary procedure, if the Bill passes again in the House of Commons, it cannot be blocked in the Lords .

It’s like some sort of fever dream, in which you vote again and again for sensible taxation and functioning borders and public services, but every time you go outside there’s just the same Labour MP chasing you with a syringe. And what makes this so wearisome is that this will be the third attempt in five years to legalise suicide. Baroness Meacher’s 2021 bill in the House of Lords didn’t get much traction; Kim Leadbeater’s 2025 effort was stymied by the Lords. Now the gerontocide enthusiasts have donned the mantle of Our Democracy, insisting that the Lords doing what it’s supposed to do — scrutinise legislation — is somehow not constitutionally licit. Edwards called the bill’s failure in the House of Lords “the decision of a minority” blocking “long-overdue change”. It should be, she asserted, a “fundamental democratic principle” that the Lords shouldn’t be able to veto legislation in this way.

“It’s like some sort of fever dream, in which you vote again and again for sensible taxation and functioning borders and public services, but every time you go outside there’s just the same Labour MP chasing you with a syringe.”

Now, perhaps you can correct me, but I don’t remember any such high-minded objections when the Lords threatened to block the invocation of Article 50 following the Brexit vote. Lord Falconer, for one, cheered on the Upper Chamber’s obstruction of Brexit , only to condemn it recently for affording assisted suicide the same level of scrutiny. It’s remarkable how swiftly constitutional safeguards can morph into anti-democratic obstruction when it’s your pet policy being scrutinised.

But surely, you might say, this is just politics? Well, it’s true that living in a democracy implies sometimes having to put up with political outcomes you don’t like, because some other lot voted for them. But the way people vote is supposed to be based on the publication of election manifestos. Of course hardly anyone actually reads them, but in theory the party publishes a list of pledges, the people assess them and vote to elect the party whose policies they like, then the winning party tries to get them passed in Parliament. Even the Brexit referendum was a Cameron election promise.

Most governments deviate in practice from the manifesto. But in most cases there’s at least an attempt at resemblance. Starmer appears to have begun in that spirit: barely two years ago, in his first speech as prime minister, he pledged to tread more lightly on our lives — which sounded like a welcome relief, and perhaps even what people voted for. Wrong. What we got, instead, was a party that had promised to spare a thought for ordinary people and not be a total hot mess, but which has instead dedicated a startling amount of energy to resigning, U-turning, and pursuing a weirdly post-humanist agenda, whose policies were never in any manifesto.

Digital ID wasn’t in the manifesto. But it’…