Soft Left on the Rise? 

Is leftism being revived in the Labour Party in reaction to the failures of Starmer?  It’s possible, argues Don Flynn with this account of some of its features. 

There’s a warning, though, that making a virtue of “pragmatism” will leave many important issues completely unaddressed.

In the years following the defeat of the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party in 2019, the left appeared to have disappeared from the “people’s party” and diluted itself within numerous groups and tendencies.  In time, some reconfiguration has taken place, and the contenders for the title of “the left” have shrunk to either Zack Polanski’s Greens or die-hards clustered around Your Party.  Further scrutiny of Labour has not seemed worthwhile: under Starmer’s leadership, the party reverted to a Blairite template and seemed to have achieved its ambition to put its left in Peter Mandelson’s “sealed tomb”.    

They might still be there but for the fact that Starmer and his circle have been so badly tested by, in Harold Macmillan’s mournful phrase, “events, dear boy, events”.  It’s not that the son of a Southwark toolmaker hasn’t been given all the opportunities that a very conventional politician could ever have dreamed of – a massive Parliamentary majority, pliant MPs by the score, a humiliated opposition – the government after its election victory in 2024 had an open field in which it should have been able to make its ideas work.  The real problem is that so many of these have been truly dud conceptions on how to govern a country like Britain in today’s conditions of today. 

It is because of the mess Starmer is making of governing that the space for something that might yet be a left has been created.  But if this is happening, it is not marked by a vigorous, self-confident cohort of critics who have anticipated the mess and prepared themselves for it: timorous and apologetic, this nascent left is being sucked into the vacuum of mainstream politics almost against its will and on the grounds that, for God’s sake, someone has to step up and do it. 

Enter Andy Burnham.  Yes, always known to be ambitious and looking for ways to make his voice heard, but also genuinely knocked back by the turns taken by mainstream politics from 2015 onwards, using the mayoralty of Greater Manchester as a place to do some fundamental rethinking. 

There is no in-depth consideration of “the future of socialism” in the path he has taken.  What is being called “Manchesterism” is an attempt to ground his politics in a place and community, and the priorities it has projected onto the policy agenda.  Better public transport, a stab at solving the problem of homelessness, and a rhetoric of public accountability to ordinary citizens have become the terrain on which Burnham has marked out his leftist challenge to Starmer and his allies. 

There is a need to add more to this if Labour can present itself as a party that has undergone some sort of renewal.  This is not likely to come from Burnham himself in the immediate future, given the pressure he has come under from the Parliamentary regime to roll back on what he has already offered – new fiscal rules, fairer immigration policies and a reformed voting system.  Assuming he wins the Makerfield by-election (campaigning still underway at the time of writing this article) he will still face the task of placating a badly rattled Parliamentary Party that doesn’t know which way to turn to get itself out of its current troubles.  The heavy lifting in the way of ideas will have to come from other places – think tanks and the like, and most of all the faction that has gone furthest in anticipating the mess we are in – the Compass “progressive left” pressure group. 

Compass’s ideologues have been marking out the sort of leftism they represent.  Pragmatic and pluralist are the words that feature most often in their descriptions. Insisting that so much of today’s political scene is “bloody complicated” (the title of a series of pamphlets the group has published), Compass has refrained from advocating any set of policy initiatives save one – the replacement of “first-past-the-post” voting with proportional representation.  They argue that the two-and-a-half-party system has broken down irretrievably.  The task is no longer to herd the population into the tribal camp of either Labour or Tory, but to construct majorities for particular sets of policies that might be supported by factions which cross party boundaries.  The construction of progressive majorities which facilitate the introduction of as-yet-undefined progressive policies is the objective.  Once there, we can see the opportunities that open up for even more ambitious actions. 

That said, Compass is canny enough to know that the nut that needs to be cracked is the direction of economic policy.  Its recent gathering in central London was organised in partnership with the Progressive Economy Forum, which furnished the event with the bulk of its heavyweight thinkers, ranging from Guy Standing, Ann Pettifor, and Gary Stevenson.  A narrative was offered up which explained how the world of work has become increasingly precarious, producing an explosion of inequality, and how a tax on wealth is urgently needed. The chief instruments for managing the economy – the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility – need to be made to work together rather than spook blind markets with conflicting messaging. 

Given the low point from which the left has to attempt recovery, it is not surprising that its first thoughts are about how its politics can be made credible as they are offered to the mass of citizens, with bolder claims of advance towards socialism being reined back.  Underscoring this point seems to be the intention of recent Compass publications, which try to define the leftism it actually stands for, with the term “soft left” being prominent. 

Eric Shaw’s “What is the Soft Left” is the most straightforward of these.  It described its ideological profile as being defined by the principles of equality, collectivism and pluralism. It points to “radical pragmatism” as the path to achieving its desired ends.    This is contrasted with the “Hard Left” stance – never precisely defined but which seems to be viewed as a more dogmatic insistence on a “correct” programme and a confidence that, if explained to them in sufficiently clear terms, the masses will flock to the true cause. 

A realistic scenario for the near future is one in which the Chosen One, in the form of Andy Burnham, will challenge Starmer for leadership, and in the ensuing furore, opportunities will arise for the soft, progressive left to build support for ideas which have moved beyond their current sketchiness. With a bona fide northerner at the head of the party, it will escape from the stigma of being a creature of the Westminster elite and working-class people will return to voting for it in general elections.  Much like the strategy of the Chinese in the days of Deng Xiaoping, the way forward will be like the peasant farmer fording a stream, patiently feeling for the stones that lie beneath the current. 

It is encouraging that there are these signs of recovery of interest in leftist democratic politics within the Labour Party after the battering inflicted on this venerable tradition after 2019.  The ideas are there, and mobilisations across civic society in their favour suggest that it is not just a feature of an out-of-touch elite, but rather a genuine response to cost-of-living pressures, growth of inequality, and the threats posed by the surge of far-right nationalism.  It would be helpful if the movement’s ideologues stepped back a bit from an obsession with defining itself so distinctly as a “soft” left which serves no real purpose other than to mark out a boundary with colleagues who put more weight on understanding the contours and convulsions of modern-day capitalism and rather less on elevating something like pragmatism to its highest principle. 

In the event that Labour undergoes a degree of transformation in the coming months as it shifts from Starmer to a possible Burnham leadership, we should not kid ourselves that turbulent capital markets and viperous global power struggles will be finally tamed and made placid. Britain is not likely to be given the space to pursue an experiment with a re-energised social democracy either by the global hegemon or, for that matter, its near neighbour, the European Union.

The most glaring absence from current soft left perspectives is the absence of detailed engagement with the international context in which a Labour government will have to forge a path forward.  If it faces up to that task, don’t be surprised if the dissection of neo-imperialism and the fecklessness of the unrestrained flows of rent-seeking, tax-avoiding capital makes us all seem a lot closer to the hard left than anything more squishy.