The keynote speech by Leader of the Labour Party Keir Starmer has set out the new agenda of the party under his leadership. A list of things what ‘popped out’ to me:
-Labour will be offering “constructive opposition” of the Conservative handling of the coronavirus crisis.
-Starmer says that the [Conservative] government has lost control of its handling of the crisis.
-A commitment to putting “family first”.
-The Conservatives are responsible for an underfunding of the NHS and the neglect of social care.
-He spent his career “defending victims and prosecuting terrorists” and “fighting for justice and the rule of law” while Boris Johnson was writing about bendy bananas.
-Starmer announces that it is now time to stop banging on about Brexit – the priority is now a good deal for British businesses and working people.
-Labour’s win-loss record to the Tories: 4 general elections in a row. Three Labour victories in 75 years, while the Tories saw the same amount in five. Presumably Starmer wanted to avoid mentioning Ramsay MacDonald as even he recognises his premiership ended in ignobility, and he sold out to the Tories – Labour has to get serious about winning. And under his new leadership – it can become a credible opposition again.
-Starmer sees himself walking in the path of Attlee, Wilson and Blair and envisions a modernisation project as Attlee with the construction of the British welfare state and Wilsonian embrace of the “white heat of technology” in British industry. Starmer couldn’t seem to find many words to describe the transformation offered in the Blair era other than it brought us to the “new era”.
To be fair, that is succinct enough to define the times we exist in: A Labour Party confronted with the Thatcherite social facelift, and the Blairite modernisers telling us to embrace it.
-A ‘promise’ to abolish structural racism.
-A reminder of what the Labour is: The party of the NHS and NATO; The National Minimum Wage and the Good Friday Agreement.
Not all of these deserve further commentary, but I’ll try to address these as much as I can. Starmer, as with Miliband before him has embraced the influence of Blue Labour. The emphasis on family values, national defence, and getting a good deal for British workers has their fingerprints all over it. It’s also reminiscent of Gordon Brown’s “British jobs for British workers”. Starmer has made a cynical calculation to draw from the social conservative types who usually vote Labour up until they voted Tory over Brexit. This is a marked shift from the apparent insistance displayed from him as Shadow Brexit Secretary to keep the option of the second referendum on the Labour agenda. Now it’s “Get Brexit Done” and “Give Us A Good Deal”. To paraphrase Cornel West, Starmer reeks of political calculation.
Starmer has also already failed in his non-promise to end structural racism, becasue Starmer did not display any sincere commitment to root it from the party which he leads. Up to now, most of the Labour HQ staffers alleged to have partaken in racist behaviour or failures to respond to racism effectively have gone unpunished. Starmer even handed £600,000 of the party’s money to the so-called ‘whistleblowers’ at Labour HQ over the Panorama documentary – one of whom is one Sam Matthews. Sam Matthews, according to the”LabourLeaks” is alleged to have, at the behest of now former Labour MP Mike Gapes to have to have inentionally sat on complaints of Islamophobia for factional purposes. If Starmer is capable of that, you must never take anything he says on racism and discrimination seriously, save for as political calculation.
Starmer also failed to properly address structural racism when he called Black Lives Matter ‘a moment’ over calls to defund the police. Starmer also failed to recognise Kashmir’s right to self-determination in favour making nice with the unaffiliated Labour Friends of India (LFI). Starmer will continue to fail on race because Starmer – like much of the Labour Party leadership do not see anti-racism as solidarity with ethnic minorities so much as doing nice things for them. He has already undermined and failed in that endeavour even before the first hurdle.
Addressing Starmer’s comments on “Labour [deserving] to lose” the last general election: that election was the (3rd) Brexit election – which again, he openly and explicitly pushed as a wedge issue in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet in favour of Remain, through statements like “The Labour Party is a Remain Party”. That is his cross to bear, as much as anyone else responsible. Left-wing critics of the Starmer leadership should also consider his motivations for renouncing the previous leadership in this way by considering how the book Culture Wars: The Media and the British Left by James Curran describing the creation of the New Labour project:
“…Blair and the team surrounding him, clearly saw it as their mission to persuade voters that Labour was a radically changed party from the ‘loony left’. To effect this, following Blair’s election to the Labour leadership in 1994, he and his team had to invent not one but two parties. The first New Labour – had been germinating as the ‘project’ ever since Neil Kinnock confronted Militant at the 1985 party conference… But the second party that had to be ‘created’ was Old Labour – a party that existed only in the imaginings of the Labour modernisers and then, by osmosis, by the media. Old Labour was…an unlikely amalgam of urban left activists (including Militant and other Trostkyist grouplets), right- and left-wing trade unionists and MPs who were not paid-up members of New Labour.
Blair and his colleagues felt obliged to ‘create’ Old Labour because, even as late as 1994 it was clear, or at least clear to them, that the Party had still not succeeded in convincing significant sections of the Party’s change was real and fundamental…That this image might be, or might not be, a false one engendered by a hostile media was of little consequence to Blair and his inner circle – their job was to get Labour elected. Thus, rather than challenge this image he worked with it and, to some extent, sought to exaggerate it so that the differences between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Labour appeared greater than they actually were…
The New Labour leadership was convinced that Labour’s victory in 1997 was the result of their persuading a sceptical electorate that the party could, at last, be ‘trusted’…a conversation in 1996, with David Miliband who was then Tony Blair’s Head of Policy [insisted] that New Labour’s strategy was primarily to reassure the British people that Labour could be ‘trusted’. And Margaret Hodge, a former left-wing leader of Islington Council – the personification in many people’s eyes of the ‘loony left’ and who had become a convinced Blairite by the time of the election – conceded that she and her colleagues had deliberately avoided discussing issues such as ‘equality’ because they worried voters would see it as either being steeped in political correctness or as simply taxing them, and so we stood back from our traditional political terrain.”
This is what Labour “modernising” always entails and why the left-wing terrain of electoralism reguarly reaches a dead end. Contra Starmer on Blair, “modernisers” do not articulate a future where everyone can embrace. They reorient and triangulate to chase the vote of reactionaries with their secure pensions. That said, right now – it is not politically advantageous in the time of Black Lives Matter to not mention racism, which provides plausible deniability to the more credulous of Starmerites to any accusations of dog-whistling.
The future Starmer promises is no real future. In the era of late neoliberalism, he has provided no alternative to the power of capital over labour, or even any promise of a better pact between capital and labour. He has offered “good management”. That’s what the Labour Party is now, and that’s what Labour Party canvassers will be knocking on doors asking people to vote for. Labour can “manage” better than the Tories. When Labour had previously spoken the language of internationalism and solidarity, it now talks of ‘national interest’, ‘stopping terrorists’ and aggressive foreign policy. That’s the new Labour. Under ‘A New Leadership’. Labour will advertise itself as not being the largest “not-Tory” party. And in the event they lose, they will not realise it’s because of their soft liberalism, that they turned their back on the new working class, or their politics of triangulation writ large. They’ll just think the Tories did better, and deserved to win.
See also:
- My reaction to Starmer becoming the Labour Party leader
- Blue Labour
- What is triangulation?
- Labour Party Conference
- Is Labour a vehicle for change?
- Is Starmer a Blairite? (coming soon)
- “progressive-neoliberalism” (coming soon)
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