The faceless nature of UK politicians adds to the stakes this election

It’s not hard to see why. The expectation of recognition snatched away by some malevolent charm or trick, the window on to another soul rendered blank, the sense of being watched by eyes that you cannot stare back into.

To be subjected to this terror creates a sense of paralysis that is perhaps all the more intense in a world where real human interaction can feel increasingly scarce and hard to verify.

Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting and Rachel Reeves all have faces, personalities and identities that are plausible enough. But in this world of uncanny imitation of our own likenesses, their insistently mundane expressions and utterances leaves something of the inner mechanism exposed: only the singular, mindless pursuit of power for its own sake can lead to such absurd blandness.

Because the Labour right’s counter-revolution against Corbynism excised the messiness of politics connected to people so successfully, it also displaced the expression of humanising impulses – for care, solidarity, community – to the radical fringe.

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The faces of many members of the next cabinet are neither lined with relatable cares nor fresh with the energy of youth; they are an expressionless, featureless, image of supreme banality.

Democracy without widely dispersed knowledge is impossible. How, then, is it supposed to function when the individuals at the centre of that system are essentially unknowable? And let’s be clear: there really is nothing worth knowing.

If national leadership is the ultimate representative role, the next prime minister presents back to us an image of the void. Britain is about to elect the political equivalent of a chatbot to high office, a chatbot endowed with the immense powers of a sovereign parliamentary majority. He will tell you he is having a nice day and enjoys a pint of lager while listening to Sweet Caroline on his days off, before informing you, with deeply human sadness, that your service cannot be renewed at this time.

This insistently generic language is a mock rendition of previous transformations of the way politicians talk to us. Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign, or Churchill’s radio broadcasts demonstrated masterful transitions from old to new: announcing innovative forms of charismatic address demanded by an expanded franchise and collective struggle.

(Image: PA)

In contrast, Starmer’s monotonous customer service rhetoric reminds you that, in a world obsessed with the potency of artificial intelligence, there have always been plenty of humans willing to make robots obsolete too.

Although ridiculous, this elevation of automata presents a deadly threat to Britain’s precarious and decrepit democratic systems. It is also a symptom of our times.

Starmer’s favourite term is indeed “service” – a cipher for the dutiful centrism of his new electoral coalition, free of all radical thought and invoking Middle England’s nostalgia for a more deferential and ordered society.

But government defined as service also edges us away from democracy: instead of citizens and representatives, we start to think of politics as a relationship between users and providers. This is why Starmer’s austerity-mandated gutting of the Crown Prosecution Service represents his greatest achievement to date. Change is reduced to the mere pursuit of efficiency.

Previous UK leaders with a capacity for deep cynicism still understood that communicating who they were was a fundamental part of their role. Thatcher’s antique Methodism and Blair’s youthful charm were observable truths. While both politicians ended up building new Britains that betrayed those truths, they were still recognisable to many. More than any manifesto commitment, charismatic leadership traits provide a popular image against which the actions of government can be tested.

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It’s become commonplace to bemoan the current lack of hinterlands that politicians in the post-war era once referred to. While these were often overstated and confected, the living of lives beyond politics did reflect the realities of that era’s priorities. For a generation who had seen interwar austerity rob their parents of time, dignity and the smallest pleasures, a new affluence and place for leisure could now enrich life beyond the rat race. These ideals became expected of politicians too.

Today, single-minded competition has supplanted all of that inefficiency and indulgence. Who would dare step beyond the banal?

These singular political careers have always been a fundamental threat to pluralistic democracy by elevating power for its own sake and – through an ever-narrowing horizon of credible electoral choice – confirming the total dominance of markets over politics.

Labour’s “realistic hope” couples facelessness with an essential muteness on any issue beyond the panacea of economic growth, pushing the dumb lie that every increase in GDP represents an additional hospital bed or school desk.

In a Britain where people take cold showers to save on bills, skip meals, wait for buses that never arrive, ingest sewage and live in constant fear of eviction, Labour’s leader refuses even a rhetorical effort to channel that pain.

(Image: PA)

Why the silence? In this “code red” era for humanity, any politician who has seen the diminishing hope on the faces of those who deliver lifesaving care, or considered the implications of climate chaos and biodiversity collapse, would be moved to capture the bare fact that we cannot go on like this.

Even the most basic steps to lift children out of poverty, like removing the two-child benefit cap, is dismissed because it would acknowledge the victims of 14 years of austerity that haunt contemporary politics.

This is the precise opposite of playing it safe. By emptying a seismic electoral moment of meaningful content, the Labour Party are threatening democracy itself. As a result, this is the most profoundly dangerous election in British history.

Yet, because the reality that has emerged over the past 14 years is so bleak, retreating into the virtual world of politics as an electoral game, disconnected from what’s happening on the ground, becomes all the more tempting.

With an unprecedented number of people taking to the streets in order to demand transformational change, the 2010s have been described by the author Vincent Bevins as “the mass protest decade”. But despite the global reach and impact of those movements, the forms of established power that they sought to challenge now seem more embedded than ever.

For the current Labour leadership, the 2010s were an aberration – not because of the wilful social vandalism of austerity but because meticulously planned career paths were interrupted by unexpected new forces. Political formations like the Yes movement in Scotland and Corbynism in England were energised by opposition to austerity, the status quo and the established ways of doing politics.

Today, a faceless politics that seems increasingly alien to the people mirrors an economy dominated by tech billionaires with their bleak, hyper-individualised vision of humanity. They know so much about us in our private screen-lit worlds, inhabiting a public space becomes exceptional and daunting. How can politics function when so many of our most human activities have turned inwards?

Politics is all about shared acts of recognition. In a Britain that increasingly struggles to know itself, Labour’s coming victory – as empty as it will be total – speaks to a general lack of power and agency that is abroad in the land. In these anxious times, sweeping political power often means paralysis.

A 14-year period of political punishment of the poorest in society is about to end with a transfer of power vast and clean enough to stake out a new generational political settlement of the kind achieved in 1945 or 1979.

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But instead this mandate will be used to demonstrate to the popular political movements of the 2010s that there is no place for them within this return to machine politics. Labour are undertaking a great exercise in political hygiene: cleansing the corridors of power to ensure that they are free of the microbes of living social movements once and for all.

Only faceless banality could mount such a devastating act of betrayal: a betrayal of democracy, of the old, decent struggle for a moral economy, of the simple idea that your children’s lives might be better than yours. Still, all of that power accrued for such a limited purpose, through a broken electoral system, will collapse as swiftly as it was amassed.

Waiting in the wings, mask-like grin and all pinstriped bonhomie, is the man who will lead Britain in five years’ time out of the ruins of Labour banality and into the abyss of authoritarian nationalism. The automatons loyal to tech and finance will not be able to stop this.

So the only safe option is to vote for candidates that will be willing to refuse the terms of this anti-democratic moment and who might value something more than a secure career in Westminster.

Place some grit in the machine while you still can. Ask whether you might one day recognise the candidate’s face alongside you on the street, on a march, or in a food queue: in the places where our democratic rights were won, and where they must ultimately be defended.