Sir Keir Starmer has left a dark cloud over the last few days of summer - Jayne Dowle

I’d expected better of Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer, but already I’m sniffing again the unmistakable odour of public manipulation.

In his speech this week, delivered from the highly-significant location of the Downing Street rose garden – scene of the infamous Dominic ‘Specsavers’ Cummings press conference and notorious for the lockdown cheese and wine ‘gatherings’ enjoyed by No10 staffers – he warned us that things will get worse before they get better.

There’s the calculated choice of location for a start. Starmer shares some guff – sorry, that’s the only word for it – about “inviting people who serve our communities and our country into the rose garden at Downing Street. This government, this building and this garden are now firmly back in their service”.

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When I first heard this, I imagined he was planning to open up his backyard, Buckingham Palace-style, so we can all go and have a poke around, perhaps on organised day trips (if the LNER trains aren’t on strike, despite their drivers being awarded a bumper pay increase).

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer during his speech and press conference in the Rose Garden at 10 Downing Street, London. PIC: Stefan Rousseau/PA WirePrime Minister Sir Keir Starmer during his speech and press conference in the Rose Garden at 10 Downing Street, London. PIC: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer during his speech and press conference in the Rose Garden at 10 Downing Street, London. PIC: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire

If it was intended as a clumsy attempt at inclusivity, it failed, serving only to underline the fact that most of us are so busy working to keep the wolf from the door we haven’t got time to prune our own roses.

Then there’s the timing. Stern old Starmer has decided to blight the last week of August. It’s a precious time when many people will be eking out the final days of holidays and hoping for a bit of Indian summer sunshine. Instead, he’s plunged us all into a winter of discontent before we’ve even had an autumn.

Nothing like putting the fear into people just as the prospect of dark nights and rising fuel bills – oh Great British Energy, where art thou? – looms.

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George Orwell, in his 1948 dystopian classic, 1984, chillingly predicted how modern British politicians have used the ‘culture of fear’ to keep the population subdued and submissive.

We’ve lived through it, starting with Tory Chancellor George Osborne’s austerity years, which Starmer holds up as the start of the “rot set deep in the heart of the foundations of our country”, and the Covid pandemic obviously, when it became illegal to do so many things we’d long taken for granted, such as sitting on a park bench.

It is duplicitous of Starmer to exacerbate already chronic national levels of anxiety by making us feel even more terrified about the state of the nation and our place in it.

In May, the government’s own Census 2021 researchers found that almost one in four (23.5 per cent) British people, when asked how they felt yesterday, reported high levels of anxiety.

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This was down from the pandemic high of 25.2 per cent in October to December 2020, but it is still above the estimates of the same period five years ago at 20 per cent.

Last weekend, as I came off a telephone call with my sister-in-law (so traumatised by constant train delays/cancellations she’s now too scared to even commute), having spent an hour on the phone earlier with another close relative who told me she had been signed off work for two months due to finding life unbearable after a bereavement, it struck me that anxiety really has become a national disease.

Criticism is made of ‘feeling low’ as an excuse for not getting on with things, especially employment. But everyone I speak to these days seems to be suffering, from young people struggling at school to older people lonely living on their own, with nothing but the prospect of an ill-funded dotage to look forward to.

The callous decision of the new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to remove the £300 winter fuel allowance from all but the poorest pensioners, and the refusal of her government to instil the long-awaited £86,000 lifetime cap on social care costs, not only makes seniors feel sidelined, it gives the rest of us nothing much to look forward to.

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Whilst there is a strong argument, especially after the populist antics of Boris Johnson, for levity and honesty in government, there must also be hope.

And ideas. What are these sacrifices we must all make? Is Starmer coming for our first-born children in a rehash of the Tories’ ill-fated national service notion, another political ‘strike terror into our hearts’ move that fizzled out, thankfully.

What the Prime Minister has failed to appreciate is that fear is not so much a galvanising force, especially when people are already exhausted, but a crippling one.

If he wants us to feel confident enough to help him fill the “economic black hole” with entrepreneurship and enterprise, he has to embolden us. And if he’s expecting us to sew up that “social black hole”, he needs to give us the tools to mend the rips.

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Are we being subdued and browbeaten so that when the bright new dawn finally arrives, those of us still standing will be so exhausted we’ll be grateful for even a glimmer? If so, that really will be worse than any of us can imagine.

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