Defeating Labour’s Left wing liberated the Right to appease the global elite. Don Flynn argues this has led to a current crisis of credibility that engulfs the whole party
Still stuck with a stagnating economy, an ongoing cost-of-living crisis, under-funded public services, early signs that unemployment is growing, a drive for housebuilding that is going nowhere, and then the Peter Mandelson crisis comes along.
The Starmer project centred on the task of making Labour electable again by shoving its erstwhile left wing into a sealed tomb. The push-back against the millennial moods which had supported the Corbyn movement in the mid-2010s, centred on an attack on its values – populist identification with the “99 per cent”, hostility towards NATO and the leadership of the United States, and, iconically, its long-standing pro-Palestine stance.
All these things stood in opposition to the politics the centre-right wanted to rely on, which hinged on a pro-business stance and a vision of Britain as a mover-and-shaker within an alliance of free-market liberal nations unquestionably led by the United States. Once upon a time, a moderate leftist current would work within this framework, seeing it as still providing opportunities to advocate for fairness and equality and a redistribution of wealth in favour of the less well-off. This was the reason why politicians representing this position were always found spaces in the 1960s and 70s cabinets put together by Harold Wilson and even the much later New Labour government of Tony Blair. But no such accommodation has been possible during the leadership of Sir Keir Starmer.
Less room for the Left
Why is this the case? Starmer has been criticised by some of the political commentariat for marginalising the left to the extent that he has. While not necessarily sympathetic to the policy proscriptions of the few who might be included, the party’s overall image might be improved if a few leftists were admitted, showing there was still interest in promoting social democratic values and setting a direction for change. But what had been possible for Harold Wilson and even Tony Blair was more difficult for Starmer, particularly with the advisers he has had around him, including Morgan McSweeney and Lord Mandelson, who required something as close as possible to the complete eradication of the left.
The principal reason for this intransigence has been the fragility of the political scene, which is violently battered by challengers coming from the populist right and left, and also the descent into policy incoherence caused by the crisis of American leadership of the free-market West. Chronically ill-equipped to project a political message that would stand out above the clamour, Starmer’s only recourse has been to proclaim that, with me, at least you have an adult in charge. Policy and the direction of policy are less important in times of turbulence than having a sensible chap in the top spot who can be trusted to make the right decision at the right time without any ideological baggage or prejudices. The rest of the world can be entertained by the three-ring circus that has brought the likes of Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski into prominence, but I am the guy who will be saying and doing the right things when it comes to governing Britain.
Rational capitalism
That might have been a good trick providing it had worked. It presumes, in a way that is consistent with the revisionist current of international social democracy that has been around since the 1950s, that capitalism really is a rational system whose energies can be channelled in positive and progressive directions by politicians, working in partnership with other prominent actors, to push forward in positive and progressive directions. It is not insignificant that Peter Mandelson’s only attempt to set out the theory which has guided his approach to politics, as in the 2002 edition of The Blair Revolution Revisited, makes exactly the case. At that time, presented as a plausible set of policies which aimed at a renewal of the social contract supporting the welfare state, the text hints at a way to achieve this by giving the man or woman on whom historical destiny has alighted the space to sit down with all the other figures of the moment, and hammer out a strategy for going forward.
When the book was written, it looked like the other people a Labour government would be doing business with were eternally youthful Silicon Valley types with exuberant liberal values more motivated by the fun of inventing new technologies than maximising profits. They didn’t look conservative, and so it could be assumed that they might incline to the sort of soft leftism that Blair represented in his early days. Meetings were held minus ties and sometimes clad in hoodies , and the world seemed to be moving towards a better place. Until it didn’t, and we found the radicalism of the tech brotherhood was founded on trading government contracts and inflationary asset bubbles. Then came 2007 and the subprime mortgage crisis, morphing into the sovereign debt debacle and the Great Recession.
Schmoozing becomes strategy
Nevertheless, the preceding years had established a way of doing politics that wasn’t to be shifted simply because the facts had changed. The habit of meeting the important and influential at places like Davos, or private Caribbean islands, or super-yacht cruises around the Mediterranean continued, even though the views of participants were shifting away from the direction of “progressive” and more towards “What’s in it for me?”. Mandelson was now comfortable in a place where he could do business in his underpants with paedophile hedge-fund manager Jeffrey Epstein, and Tony Blair was becoming obscenely rich giving advice to reactionaries and dictators, and anyone else willing to pay for it.
The professional class of political commentators are now having great fun poring over the Epstein files and expounding on what they reveal about the shockingly poor judgment of a British prime minister who had gone along with the idea that politics was a matter of schmoozing with the world’s power brokers, either abasing himself directly as required by the occasion or appointing someone with a proven record of playing that game.
Ending the Left’s marginalisation
The Corbynite left of a decade ago got tipped out of the top positions largely because they had shown themselves to be insufficiently adroit at pandering to the world’s great power brokers. The Labour right, on the other hand, is now being given its comeuppance precisely because that has been the only card it could play. Pushed to the margins back in 2019 by a disastrous general election result, the left has fragmented into factions which seem a long way from being an influential force within the political mainstream. The right is still able to demand order and obedience from the parliamentary party, but its association with discredited figures have shown just how feeble its political judgment has been across all the recent years of its hegemony.
Meanwhile, dangers loom large that the beneficiaries of the chaos will be the authoritarian far-right, probably emerging from a fusion of Farage’s Reform UK and Badenoch’s Conservatives. The one policy that seems to be agreed across the spectrum of centrist Labour to the right Reform/Conservatives is the need to push a big share of the blame for everything onto the shoulders of immigrants. It is hoped that the early signs of a response to this development in the form of the Together Alliance, backed by trade unions and other sections of civil society, will rally the discontented fragment of British society to a cause that gives the Left a degree of coherence and much-needed unity.
Beyond that, a message needs to be developed and projected into the wider political debate about the challenges that the pro-capitalist character of the British economy is now posing for efforts to eradicate inequality and poverty, tackle broader social injustices, and also achieve a just transition to zero carbon. Labour is going to need a new leader in the very near future. It is on the question of how these issues are addressed and popular support for the radical answers needed is won among the population, that we should judge candidates when they finally put their heads up.