Behold the spectacle of Keir Starmer, a man who possesses the raw, unbridled energy of a legal document left in a damp basement, as he attempts to pivot the United Kingdom’s sputtering engine toward the icy wastes of Greenland. The latest ‘row’—a word journalists use when they are too bored to say ‘petty bureaucratic squabble’—revolves around the UK’s desperate need for a trade agreement with a territory that has more glaciers than it has functioning hospitals. According to the BBC’s Henry Zeffman, who treats every Starmer utterance with the reverence a priest reserves for a bleeding statue, this is a moment of high stakes and diplomatic finesse. In reality, it is the geopolitical equivalent of two neighbors arguing over the ownership of a dead shrub on the property line.

Starmer’s speech, a masterpiece of beige oratory, was designed to signal a ‘new era’ of pragmatic cooperation. It is the Labour Party’s favorite word: pragmatism. It is a linguistic shroud used to cover the rotting corpse of any actual ideology. The PM stood there, looking like a man who has never enjoyed a meal in his entire life, and explained that the UK must ‘reset’ its relationship with Greenland to secure fishing rights. We are, it seems, a nation that has traded its seat at the head of the European table for the right to bicker over the entrails of a cold-water shrimp. The irony, of course, is that Greenland had the good sense to leave the European Economic Community back in 1985. They saw the writing on the wall while we were still busy arguing over whether Margaret Thatcher was a savior or a sociopath. Now, the UK—having performed its own clumsy, self-inflicted amputation via Brexit—is knocking on the door of an autonomous Danish territory, begging for a scrap of relevance.

Zeffman’s analysis suggests that this is a test of Starmer’s ‘competence.’ What a charmingly low bar we’ve set for our leaders. If the man manages to walk to the podium without tripping over his own shadow, the media treats it as a Churchillian triumph. The ‘row’ itself is a classic of the genre: a dispute over how much access British trawlers get to Greenland’s waters versus how much Greenlandic fish can be sold in British supermarkets without tariffs. It is a race to the bottom where the prize is slightly cheaper frozen cod. Meanwhile, the Right-wing press screams about the betrayal of British sovereignty, as if the ability to catch a specific type of fish in someone else's backyard is the cornerstone of national identity. They forget, or perhaps their collective memory is too ravaged by lead paint and xenophobia to recall, that they were the ones who cheered for the very isolation that made this groveling necessary.

On the other side of the aisle, the performative Left will find a way to make this about climate change or indigenous rights, ignoring the fact that their own leader is currently engaged in the most soul-crushing form of neo-liberal resource management. Starmer isn’t interested in the melting ice caps or the plight of the Inuit; he’s interested in a spreadsheet that shows a 0.001% increase in trade volume so he can claim he’s ‘fixing the foundations.’ It is the politics of the spreadsheet, managed by a man with the soul of a lukewarm cup of tea. There is no vision here, no grand strategy for a post-industrial island. There is only the frantic attempt to find a new master to serve, or at least a new partner to disappoint.

The absurdity of the situation is compounded by the fact that Greenland is essentially a ward of the Danish state, meaning Starmer has to play a three-dimensional game of checkers with Copenhagen, Nuuk, and his own shadow. It is a testament to the hopelessness of our current era that we are expected to find this gripping. We are watching the slow-motion decline of a former empire as it tries to negotiate with a rock. The world is burning, the oceans are rising, and the British Prime Minister is worried about the specific gravity of a turbot. It’s not just depressing; it’s an insult to the concept of human progress. We have gone from the Enlightenment to arguing about cold-water fishing quotas with a population smaller than the capacity of Wembley Stadium.

In the end, Zeffman and his ilk will tell us that Starmer ‘navigated a difficult path’ or ‘demonstrated his statesmanlike qualities.’ They have to. If they admitted that the whole thing was a pointless exercise in managed decline, they’d have nothing to write about. And so the charade continues. Starmer will sign a piece of paper, the fishermen will still be poor, the fish will still be gone, and the British public will continue to slide into a grey abyss of their own making, comforted only by the knowledge that their Prime Minister is very, very sensible. It is a tragedy played as a farce, and we are all stuck in the front row, forced to clap as the curtain falls on our collective intelligence.