Because it cannot be avoided, once more on the state of the world.

What it means to pursue a hegemonising project, then, is to have the clarity to see what is actually happening in the present and to have the courage to respond not by reworking old and stale ideas to describe what is new and different, but with the ambition to struggle on many fronts and to seek to construct a new common sense, not simply advance a slew of policies – even if those policies are good, correct, and necessary.

Counter-revolutions are difficult to circumscribe because they belong both to the past that preceded the revolution and make the future that succeeds it. Or to put the issue in more prosaic language: when does counter-revolution begin? And, what does it counter – does counter-revolution simply restore the past, or make its own new present? What does counter-revolution preserve?

Starmer was both a mute object onto which working-class people were supposed to project their desires, and a speaking subject who would render them sufficiently enlightened to vote Labour. Expected to simultaneously say nothing and say something, his disquisitions grew ever more phatic, torpid, vacant. 

Conservatives counterpose distant, alienated social forces against British ones. The way in which people can regain control over their lives – on this argument – is through authentically British institutions. This sense of Britishness can then easily be turned inwards: although the British judiciary is British ‘in name’ they act on behalf of these unaccountable forces, and so in substance are not ‘British’.