Note: These two short pieces written after the June 4th election result , are extracted from a collection of essays , Studies in the Grey Zone, due to be published by eyeglass books in October.
Take One: One Nation Labourism and the Great Moving Right Show
The question of just how and from where, and with whom it is possible to throw a spanner in the works of global capitalism has prompted the rise of ethnic nationalism and Alt-Right Populism , but remains unanswered on the Left . The quest for a new revolutionary subject to replace the industrial proletariat has continued apace in the long aftermath of ‘post Marxism’ , fed, by the implosion of the 1960’s student and youth movements, the rise of identity politics and the environmental movement . One section of the Left has found new principles of hope in neo-tribes (Maffesoli) or multitudes (Hardt and Negri). Here, it was argued, was a re-concentration of the power of social combination outside the point of production, organised through dispersed networks of popular resistance, operating in the interstices of state and civil society through social media platforms and often exemplifying forms of direct democracy linked to feminist or anarchist inspired practices of community. Others advocated the formation of rainbow coalitions, possibly convened around shared environmental concerns, to ginger up or replace the ossified ideologies and bureaucratic structures of the old social democratic parties. Yet others have located the hope for a renewal of radical politics in the new precariat into which diverse groups, young and old, middle class graduates and unskilled workers , carers and pensioners have been sucked .[i]
However the main revisionary thrust has been in the opposite direction. In Ukania, after the perceived failure of the Corbyn thought experiment in Social Democracy, the ideological quest has been to re-stabilise the political mise- en- scene through a return to ian imagined centre ground. Instead of engaging with the deeper crisis of political representation and the widespread public distrust of the political class which the Tories spearheaded ( its one lasting achievement of 14 years in government !) . Starmerism has followed the trend of what political scientists call ‘asymmetrical polarisation’. His project of one nation labourism attempts to occupy the ground abandoned by one nation conservatism by giving a patriotic spin to the rebuilding of a shattered economy and welfare state. In some senses it is a revamp of Ed Miliband’s attempt to revise New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ , but honed to address today’s cost of living crisis.[ii] Meanwhile large sections of the Tory Party have been pulled or pushed towards positions, viz on immigration, and ‘woke culture’, associated historically with the Far Right and now more authentically represented by Nigel Farage and Reform. In other words whether the pressure was centripetal (Labour) or centrifugal (Tories) the overall direction of travel involved an intensification of the Great Moving Right Show, effectively fragmenting what was once considered the centre ground of British politics .
That Labour won what has been described as a ‘landslide victory ’ in the 2024 election (ie a working parliamentary majority of 171 ) should not disguise the fact that there is a slow motion landslide taking place in the opposite direction, and one that, unless checked, is. likely to bury the remains of progressive democratic politics under the ideological rubble left behind. The hard fact is that while first past the post electoral system plus tactical voting may have done the trick for Starmer , anti-tory voters constitute a disparate and highly volatile bloc. If many middle class progressives voted for the Lib Dems or Greens almost as many, disaffected, working class voters supported the anti-immigration, anti woke agenda of Reform. It is worth noting here that Reform came a good second in almost as many Labour as Conservative seats, cutting often sizeable majorities , and ensuring that Labour’s huge parliamentary majority was secured by just 31% of the turnout. Under a system of PR, Labour would have recorded 228 seats, Lib Dems 82 and Greens 46 , while the Tories would have scored 159 and Reform 96 . But note that iIn this scenario there would thus have been a majority of about 100 for a broadly progressive policy agenda in which parties significantly to the Left of Labour on environmental and social issues would have exerted considerable traction .
The irony here is that in pursuit of a chimeric centre ground, Starmerism has helped to accelerate its implosion ; at the same time the refusal to countenance any power sharing through electoral reform will continue to pre-empt building a coalition of parliamentary for any leftwards policy shift whilst actively propping up a widely discredited political class and culture . Surely the worst of all possible outcomes. .
When Starmer claims he has changed his party to make it fit to govern, and implies that the same logic applies to how he will change the country to make it more and better governable we should take him at his word . For as leader he has been ruthless in promoting an ever greater concentration of power in the central party apparatus in the name of efficiency, while purging the Corbynista rump and neutralising any residual grass roots capacity to initiate internal policy change. Perhaps that is what he unconsciously means when he talks about ‘moving politics to the centre’. It is a form of centralism which only requires the most formal aspects of democratic process to legitimate it . Yet such a top down command and control system is fundamentally unsuited to gaining traction within the rapidly shifting patterns of de and re- centered allegiance that now characterise what ‘politics’is about on the ground.. Purely electoral strategies will have little or no leverage on these elective affinities, which now embrace an ever growing population of the politically disaffected for whom resignation is turning into active resentment. One nation labourism seems designed to create the Spectacle of consensual support through largely symbolic action ( for example flying the union jack at every possible opportunity) , but is showing little appetite for the actual ideological groundwork required to assemble and retain a democratic majority in support of a progressive policy agenda. To deliver material benefits to a range of potentially conflicting interest groups, including those who currently have little stake or trust in the body politic, requires thinking outside the current policy box, a task which involves a lot of heavy lifting and for which the Starmerites appear to have little enthusiasm [iii].
To achieve such a breakthrough would clearly require the party to go beyond purely electoral strategies (however effective) or to simply refresh the Blairite ‘third way’ package. It means deepening and widening democratic participation in civil society at every level , out of which a new bloc of support for progressive policies might emerge. In my view this implies , firstly, creating a new infrastructure of local governance dedicated to social well being . And , secondly, using these institutions to support and disseminate the idioms of what I have called Low Culture, the grounding of individual aspiration and anxiety in collective defences against private despair; this can be coupled with offering realistic principles of hope provided these are embedded through the new educational , cultural and public health initiatives which are focussed on the needs of the afflicted , the disadvantaged and the disaffected.
In other words ‘one nation’ labourism will only convince if it is grounded in a civic dimension . It has especially to reach out to those whose defences against despair are the weakest, and who are consequently most likely to grasp at the straws offered by conspiracy theories and scapegoating narratives peddled by the New Right , Fortunately there are examples of local labour administrations having already adopted this approach as a part of a revival of municipal socialism; despite being starved of funds by the Tories , there is sufficient evidence of these initiatives having delivered the goods to encourage their scaling up. [iv].These local success stories -so- far should at least provide some connective threads in a counter-narrative about what ‘ civic labourism’ might deliver..
In one respect Starmer has taken a leaf out of the Gramscian playbook in decisively rejecting the bi-polar political culture which both the Corbynista Left and the Faragist Right have promoted. From the outset , he called out the cruel optimism peddled by populists for the romantic fraud that it is , and addressed the deep pessimism that politics could change anything for the better to be found in large swathes of the electorate. Yet in formulating alternative principles of hope his brand of realism singularly lacks a critical edge . Closing down the pseudo-performativity of the Tory years is well and good but the call for an end to circus acts only works if you are offering more ‘bread’ , and that promise is unlikely to be met as long as fiscal policy remains within the constraints of the neo=liberal agenda. The new social contract offered by one nation labourism thus remains trapped within a self-imposed double bind: it can keep faith with the electorate in its offer to invest in ‘national renewal’ only on condition that it breaks its promise not to borrow, or to introduce progressive taxation ( viz increases in inheritance and corporation tax) . But if these initiatives are not properly funded , they are bound to fail, and yield a large negative dividend of disenchantment with the Starmer project which the New Right will duly collect.
To get out of this bind while retaining public support means challenging the common sense Micawberism of ‘ living within your means, and ‘balancing the books’ which still governs much of contemporary political economy as well as popular perceptions of debt and solvency . Here we have to recognise that winning the battle for hearts and minds means not splitting apart the hard intellectual arguments for redistributive economic policy from the ‘soft’ empathetic claims of building a kinder, fairer society [v].That means countering the emotional logic of digital capitalism, its forms of social atomisation and alienation, at the same time as practically re=animating the springs of human solidarity , as present in the nitty gritty of actual everyday encounters and struggles. At the same time we need to develop a ‘cool’ analytics which scope the limits and conditions of our actions in a realistic manner. That requires the kind of courageous pessimism, which as Nietzsche noted is required to keep on , keeping on in the face of adverse circumstances.[vi] That is a task for what Gramsci called ‘organic intellectuals’, people whose own life experiences remain rooted in the conditions they are seeking to transform . While there has been no shortage of prospective members of the political class touting their working class or ethnic origins as badges of authenticity , indeed there has been considerable credential inflation in this area , the genuine article is still hard to come by. For every Mick Lynch there are dozens of Keir Starmers. .
Today in what is left of the Left we often find ourselves defending institutions and policies that we once critiqued and opposed. Certainly, as I have argued, the political landscape has been silently shifting away from under our feet in often unpredictable ways. The risk is that One Nation Labourism may be too terrified of losing the mythical centre ground that its actions do no more than dramatise its radical disconnect from an emergent political geography that pivots around a new tactical alliance between the wokeless and the workless. The Starmerite ambition was to regain an electorate that was sick of the Old Corruption and had nowhere else to go than return, like the proverbial sheep, to the Labour fold .The emergence of Reform as a political force has given the lie to that bit of wishful thinking . To change the metaphor from land to seascape, why would anyone climb back aboard what it hitherto perceived to be a sinking ship, by a programme that offered only a few more life jackets and an upgrade to the existing safety boats, as it heads into a perfect storm of economic, environmental and geo-political chaos?
The question is not merely rhetorical. Fear of the unknown is the great enemy of hope and it drives people to fall back on counsels of premature despair or false optimism. It has been left to psychoanalysis to remind us that the unknown object relation is constitutive of human curiosity and desire, fundamental to the impulse to experiment and explore,[vii] And unless the Left can mobilise that will to knowledge all its analyses and manifestos will remain so much sound and fury signifying nothing.
Take Two : Enter the Authentocrats : the electoral sublimation of class identity politics
At this point I can sense the reader getting more than a little restive while my inner devil’s advocate whispers ever louder in my ear: Yes, yes, that is all very well as a vision for the future but just look at the actually existing Labour Party as presently constituted under the leadership of Keir Starmer and its post – election agenda, now that, thanks to first past the post, winner takes all electoral system , it has had a substantial election victory
The original Starmerite project was to make the Labour Party electable again after its historic defeat under Corbyn, to transform it from, quote, ‘a party of protest into party fit for power’ and to do so by any means possible. Those means have been largely internal and ruthlessly pursued. They include the systematic purging of the Left, the streamlining of a command and control structure to impose ‘iron discipline’ on MP’s, vetting the selection of candidates, and eliminating as far as possible any initiatives from the grass roots. This has been accompanied by an outward facing strategy of ‘flying the flag’ for a patriotic one- nation labourism, in the hope of winning back the so called ‘left behind’ red wall and even some traditional Tory voters. There is the prospect on offer of a less corrupt and more efficient style of governance, which will attempt within the limits and conditions established by 14 years of Tory economic mismanagement, to mitigate some of its worst effects on the most vulnerable sections of society, while, at the same time going for economic growth, especially in the Hi Tech sector to support increased public investment in housing, education, welfare and the NHS, and a transition to green energy.
So far so positive if predictable . But what is genuinely new is the explicit attempt to break out of the current bi-polar political culture. Great care has been taken not to raise expectations of what a Labour administration might achieve, at least in its first term. As Starmer himself put it, ‘false hope is worse than no hope at all’. The welfare state may be broken but there are no quick fixes on offer. The Starmerites have learnt from the Corbyn fiasco that making more and more lavish promises, many of which you know you can’t keep, in a manic attempt to win popular support, is the quickest way to disenchant the whole enterprise and fuel abject defeatism.
Unfortunately by adopting a version of ‘sociological realism’, based on the view that under present circumstances the best that can be hoped for is to manage capitalism ‘for the many, not the few’, Starmerism ignores the fact that present circumstances, both local and geo-political, cannot be addressed by business-as- usual politics, still less by adopting Tory fiscal regulation. The retreat on pushing forward the transition to a green economy is symptomatic of Starmerism’s failure to grasp the complex nature of the conjuncture or to imagine ways in which the levers of power, in both state, economy and civil society could be synchronised to address it[viii]. A risk averse approach to crisis management, led by someone who personifies a techno-bureaucratic style of governance is guaranteed not to win the battle for hearts and minds which is traditionally required for the success of any political project. But is this still the case in our increasingly illiberal, chaotic and unrepresentative democracy?
Certainly, given the temperamental character of the contemporary body politic, no amount of navel gazing or detailed scrutiny of corporate excreta will enable us to remain sanguine about the prospects for a better world. That requires an altogether more phlegmatic approach and a sense of humour which does not come easily to a Left more accustomed to adopting a choleric or melancholic disposition. Perhaps, after all, it is Starmer’s stolid presence with its reassuring ‘keep calm, don’t panic, carry on as usual’ body language which ultimately made the party he leads seem so electable. Maybe bland and boring is the balm we secretly longed for after so much histrionic egoism in our political leaders. All the same, let’s not forget that phlegm, before it was spit, was flame….
One of the most interesting aspects in what was otherwise a distinctively low key campaign, was the way Starmer’s version of one nation labourism not only attempted to re-animate a popular patriotism around the task of post Tory renewal but re-introduced the language of class into the electoral discourse, not as an address to chronic structures of social inequality, but in the idiom of identity politics . Starmer lost no opportunity to mention his own working class background ( his father was a skilled manual worker ), as well as that of colleagues,(notably Angela Rayner) and much was made of the fact that a majority of his cabinet were educated in state school ls, before going on to university . The implicit message was that this social formation of the party leadership authenticated their political message – they could be relied upon to uphold working class values and interests against those of the powerful and wealthy elite represented by Richi Sunak and the Tories. This new authentocracy are in fact a meritocracy, products of the kind of state sponsored social mobility that has always eluded -and increasingly actively excluded – those fractions of the working class who continue to be apprenticed to a diminishing cultural inheritance in post-industrial capitalism , and who have found themselves socially immobilised as much by New Labour as by Thatcherite policies . Flagging up their position as part of a mobile working class- from- itself trajectory was not perhaps the cleverest strategy for urging immobilised and disenfranchised sections of the class to return to itself by voting for a party that had once abandoned it to the mercy of market forces = and was now proposing to constrain its own ambition for economic recovery to those same forces . In doing so, Starmer and Co are committing an act of bad political faith which may yet rebound against them. In the authenticity stakes , a party led by a stock market trader may prove to speak in a voice that is recognised by the ‘left behind’ as more their own , than that of a knighted public servant whose dad was a tool maker.
There will be no shortage of critics on the Left, including many disillusioned ex-party members, to argue that the party simply lacks the courage of its true convictions. The truth is more banal and more serious than that. Whatever political values (viz social democracy) might once have been marshalled under the rubric of labour’s core commitments, have been increasingly junked as a driving force of most party careers; they only appear now from time to time as fringe benefits articulated by marginalised individuals or groups around egregious instances of social injustice and capitalism’s failure to deliver the goods. Meanwhile the populist New Right are there in the wings, poised to move in with their anti-immigration, anti-woke rhetorics whose passionate intensity is expressly designed to fill this ideological void. The success of Reform in the 2024 election, coming a good second to Labour in many of the so called red wall seats, is indicative of the threat to what may still prove to be a pyrrhic electoral victory..
Certainly nothing can be taken for granted and the new uncertainty principles I have outlined mean that it is always going to be too soon to reach a conclusion and too late to alter it. The renewal of the Labour Party, as a support of working class hopes for a better future still depends on its capacity to transcend Labourism and its associated tribal factionalism and embrace the politics of the new post -industrial multitude. Central to that is the need to explore new ways to reach out to those who are still growing up working class, together with their parents and grandparents who for too long have been abandoned to the vast condescension of sociological analysis, and burdened either with unrealistic political hopes or counsels of premature despair.
[i] See Guy Standing, The Precariat: The new dangerous class, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011,and Isabel Lorey, The State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, Verso, 2014.
[ii] On the Third Way see Anthony Gidden Neither Left of Right: the future of radical politics Cambridge University Press 1998. On Starmerism see Oliver Eagleton The Starmer Project: a journey to the right Verso 2022
[iii] On Istvan Bibo s theory of political hysteria see the discussion in Emmanuel Terray, ‘Headscarf Hysteria’, nlr 26, 2004.
[iv] For attempts to revise municipal socialism as a bottom up not top down enterprise see discussions of the Preston model , and also initiatives in Sheffield, Manchester, Hull, and Birmingham in Renewal published by Lawrence and Wishart
[v] See for example Mariana Mazzucato Mission Economy Penguin Books 2020 and Thomas Piketty et al Time for Socialism :dispatches for a world on fire Yale University Press 2022
[vi] See Friedrich Nietzsche Human All Too Human page 56 Discussed in Terry Eagleton Hope beyond Optimism Yale University Press 2019 . See also Rebecca Solniy Hope in the Dark Canongate 2018, which as the subtitle suggests is an affirmation of popular resilience in the face of adversity.
[vii] See Guy Rosolato, La Relation d’inconnu, Gallimard, 1978.
[viii] See Mazzucato (2020) and Piketty (2022) op cit