Why is Keir Starmer so disliked (before the Mandelson scandal?)

I always find that on any thread about why Labour are liked/disliked, a crop of people will always immediately and angrily tell us that they are "better than the Tories". This seems specific to Labour, doesn't really happen vice versa.

I want reasons to vote FOR a party, not just because they may be less worse than the other lot. Where are the positives? All I can see are endless u-turns and more of the "we're not as awful as the other guys" - and that's before the Rayner/Leadership/Mandelson stuff. Their utopian manifesto seems to have vanished.

The media is majority owned by billionaires. They don't want a labour government. The Tories were utterly inept but got nowhere near the battering Labour are getting.

I don't dislike him, but he is so "beige".

Lacks charisma. Lacks direction. Lacks a strong personality to lead a country. A leader needs to be believable, have ideas and have the determination to follow them through, to be consistent. I just don't get that with him. Labour need to find a much stronger leader.

Oddly, I quite liked Maggie Thatcher. I didn't so much like her policies, but I liked the fact she had a vision and delivered it with passion. You knew what you were getting, even if you didn't agree - there was no jumping ship with her. (Let's see how many how many Mumsnet people don't read further than the line "I quite liked Maggie Thatcher" and go off on one without reading the rest of this paragraph...).

If Labour want to make this work, they are going to need a much stronger team.

Yep this and the previous posts. It’s obvious.

Despite everything you say in your OP he won the last election.

People hated every other option more than they hated Starmer.

Lots of us still do.

Are you ever going to come back OP?

I didn't vote for him, but I believed that with all the pious hair-shirtery he displayed in opposition that he might at least prove to be a clean and honest PM.

Unfortunately, he has shown us from the start he is greedy, dishonest, has very poor judgement and little vision.

Many of the policies he has tried to introduce are spiteful and intended to punish people who don't support his politics.

He is arrogant and seems genuinely to believe he is always right and that people who disagree with him aren't just wrong, they are evil too.

If he hadn't been so holier-than-thou in opposition, we might have been more forgiving of his failures. However, if there is one thing more dislikeable than a greedy, spiteful liar, it's a hypocritical greedy, spiteful liar.

Why he is so disliked is no mystery to me. It's obvious.

We’ve all been gaslit to dislike him from the very off. He inherited an absolute catastroshambles from the tories and yet, from day 1, he’s been presented as a failure, weak and dishonest and even as a national traitor.
The BBC, the right wing press and social media have all been feeding this narrative and the government haven’t managed to secure the cohesion of their own party enough to mitigate it. It’s all a mess.

sounds like Zippy from Rainbow

So, so true.

It's because of all his awful decisions.

He's a hypocrite - sold himself as being morally whiter than white and within months got caught taking freebies, bending lockdown rules and generally judging himself to different rules than others. He doesn't appear to stand for anything - he u-turns and flip flops on decisions and doesn't seem to have any convictions. He seems to hate Britain and wants us to be governed by a set of international laws that are all about virtue signalling as opposed to making the lives of ordinary UK citizens better. He can't control his back benchers so clearly lacks leadership skills. He also has no charisma and sounds like Zippy from Rainbow when he speaks. Other than that, he is great.

He is a Labour PM and people expected him to fix everything and we are a country of small c conservatives so Labour PM have to work that bit harder

he doesn’t connect well with people

very poor pr

I do not believe he is disliked as much as Thatcher and as many as equally loved her and similar with Blair in his last years. No one holds him up that high and I don’t get the feeling in 20/30 years time people will still be going on how much they hate him as they do with Thatcher and Blair

and social media makes politics appear so much more divided than what the majority of people feel

You mentioned a whole raft of options for why people dislike him except the for the reasons that are actually the point - he clearly doesn't know what he's doing.

Every government u-turns occasionally but he has gone back on policy time and time and time again. I voted for him and I'm not sure there is a party better than his right now but as a leader he has been truly awful.

The second reason is that he totally destroyed business confidence when they came to power. His first public statements were all about what a state the country was in. We know why he did - he was attempting to make the Tories look terrible and Labour look like our saviours, (and that has worked by fooling you by the sound of it!). The reality is that the country had been battered by covid, brexit and Putin but was on the path to recovery. Business confidence was increasing, inflation was recovering, NHS waiting lists were coming down. The country was already on the right path but they came in and told us everything was terrible and so in every Board room across the country, businesses started to panic. That is starting to get better as people acknowledge that the bleak picture that Starmer painted is not actually as bad as they claimed but there's a long, long way to go.

Finally, he has increased taxes so much, certain sectors (eg hospitality) are on their knees. At the moment, we have not seen any benefit from that. Maybe we will but right now there is zero improvement in public services. Whether he has set us back to leap forward remains to be seen. But right now, there is no tangible improvement to life that is a result of Labour policy and in many areas we have gone backwards.

Because he’s clueless, he doesn’t appear to do anything, doesn’t stand for anything or have an opinion on anything, he’s probably too scared of offending anyone to open his mouth.

He always looks scared, he sounds like an automaton, he walks as though they're are mines on his path and he's braced himself for certain death. He's a terrible judge of character, and a terrible decision maker. He knows he's out of his depth, and it shows in his every move.

I've never seen anyone less suited to the world stage.

Hurray (another) thread on why Starmer is / isn’t disliked .. to give all the same people, all the same arguments, they have been having for the last couple of weeks.

How did we end up with a choice of Starmer, Kemi, Ed, Nige or Zack/Dave? It beggars belief.

It’s a fair question.

I think the reason is that he’s an unpleasant, hypocritical arse with terrible judgement and grabby habits, and who’s painful to listen to.

Which in turn is a fair answer.

I think people saw an honest and decent man and thought that after the chaos of the last few Tory administrations he might make things better.

Unfortunately, the structural problems in the UK's economy allied to years and years of weapons-grade national self-delusion about what life should be like in a country of this size and wealth make it ungovernable, and that's before the rest of the Labour Party started holding him to ransom.

As I said on another thread the other day, there is a theory that the soul of the Labour party never really wanted Sir Keir to become PM. What they wanted was someone respectable enough to detoxify Labour after the Corbyn years, who would narrowly lose an election then quit before the right sort of proper socialist then took Labour back to power. The machinations going on in the party now were supposed to happen after Sir Keir lost in 2024, not after he won. The media are only too happy to help destabilise him, but they're not really the problem. His own party is.

From the moment Labour got in certain sections of the media have launched an relentless campaign against them. For years the left were criticised as hysterical, frothing snowflakes but Christ, the Mail, Telegraph et al have been crazed since the last election.

It would be interesting to see how people would you order the integrity and competence levels of Starmer, May, Johnson, Sunak, Truss and Cameron and then compare that to the press they receive.

It was clear he was weak and spineless in the shadow cabinet but as PM he's demonstrated he's also a liar and lacking in morals and integrity, as well as being utterly incompetent. He treats the British public with disdain and assumes they are all fools.

He's had a kicking from the start. The propaganda machine is powerful and very well funded. That's not to say he hasn't made some shitty decisions and said some fucking awful things ("island of strangers" comes to mind) whilst in post, mind.

No charisma. No deeply held convictions. No ability to articulate a vision for the country.

It was blandly obvious he didn’t have a clue before the election. No plan. No ideas. Just thought they could do better (tbf it was hard to see how they could be worse) but have clearly shown himself to be incompetent