What Starmer could learn from watching The Bear

Do you enjoy The Bear? You know The Bear, the TV series set in a family-run restaurant in Chicago. Series four has just started. Things are tense. Things are always tense in The Bear – it’s a base setting. It’s a brilliant show, though given there was a bit of a dip in series three we’ll wait to see if it can again become the best thing on TV.

One of the reasons for things being tense in the new series is that The Bear got a bad review in a newspaper. I don’t mean the show itself, we’re not being quite so meta – the restaurant of the same name got a bad review. And not just in any newspaper but in the Chicago Tribune, the once self-styled ‘World’s Greatest Newspaper’. So, you know, things have been better. It’s driven Carmy into a dark existential funk, even more than usual. Cousin Richie is feeling it too. 

I’m not deep into the series yet, so I’m in no position to provide spoilers. But an interesting aspect to all this is that when the people in The Bear are discussing the review, this thing of monumental import, they read it in a paper, not on phones, not on any other device, but in an old inkie.

They pass it around, they throw it angrily in the bin, they pick it out of the bin. I’m all for this. Papers are incredibly useful props for moving stories around in dramas, particularly spy films. Still, it’s a curious thing for the show’s creators to carry. Maybe it’s a quiet reminder that the characters are fighting an inevitable change – they can’t hold back the tide. Or maybe they just like newspapers.

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One thing that doesn’t ring true, though, is the headline of the review. The restaurant is accused of ‘culinary dissonance’. That just doesn’t fly. It sounds like a Frank Zappa song title, not good old-fashioned newspaper speak. Or at least not that which we’re used to in the UK.

Though daily print is going the way of all flesh, the language, that curious, unique language has easily moved online, despite changes in taste and search engine optimisation. Just ask Keir Starmer. Last week he became that thing that leading politicians never want to be – he became embattled.

For a while he was also under fire, but chancellor Rachel Reeves became that. Pretty soon her job was at risk. They’d both faced a backlash – blasted by backbenchers over their plans – and they needed to throw a ring of steel around the policies.

Things are probably tense on Downing Street. But they only have themselves to blame. Quite why they went about things as they did is baffling. They approached the cuts to the social security budget as a cost-saving exercise. There was initial talk about the need to help people into work – nobody would argue with a positive work agenda – but they kept returning to the argument that the budget was too big and £5 billion needed shorn. It became an accountancy correction forgetting the human cost.

There was an opportunity to run a deep piece of positive change research, to look at how the money as it exists could serve people better and so could help for the future. It didn’t need to be a massive Beveridge 2.0, but if you are on a change ticket, at least make the basis for change socially reasonable. It’s in the words, after all – it’s social security. 

It all feels like a squandered opportunity and now the narrative will move to tax cuts and broken promises. Keir Starmer will be moved from embattled to being under threat of being ousted. 

It won’t be the papers that will bring him down – though of course the thrill of the hunt frequently gets their sap up. But as Carmy knows, by the time you notice the language has shifted, the die is cast.

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.

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