After Starmer

Ever since the immediate aftermath of the 2024 general election, when Keir Starmer's favourability rating briefly flirted with positive territory before tanking, liberal commentators have been baffled as to why the Prime Minister is so widely hated. Given the ample evidence of his duplicity, incompetence and craven appeasement on the world stage this must be read as performative ignorance. They know perfectly well why public opinion is so negative but have too much invested in the project - the grown-ups back in charge - to admit that his election as Labour leader was a con-trick on the party membership, that the landslide general election win on a paltry 34% of the vote was a fluke, and that the government remains committed to preserving the status quo rather than delivering the change promised. The liberal press were central to that original sin, so there is a degree of pyschological transference at work here. Unless you're willing to admit that it was a con and that you played your part in it, it makes sense to assume that the hatred is directed at the one man rather than at the wider politico-media class.

Complaining about the irrationality of the mob has been common since the days of Plato, while the nature of political reporting has not changed much since the Early Modern period, with its emphasis on court gossip and the insider/outsider dichotomy. A good example of this was Peter Walker in the Guardian unironically using the phrase "herd mentality" and quoting the ubiquitous Luke Tryl, of the pollsters More in Common, to the effect that the shallow electorate prefers jolly cards like Boris Johnson to sober technocrats like Starmer: "One of my grand macro-theories of politics is that people relate better to politicians who look like they enjoy the job, and they react quite badly to politicians that look pained by it." Tryl is a consumate insider: a former Special Adviser to Nicky Morgan at the Department for Education and a long-time think-tank wallah. His insights into the electorate are carefully curated to meet the expectations of his clientele, which predominantly means the media.

But the era of bafflement may be coming to a close in the wake of the Mandelson scandal as more revelations about Starmer's path to the top and his performance in Number 10 have to be publicly acknowledged. As a result, we can expect to see more pieces, like the latest from Tim Shipman in the Spectator, that make abundantly clear that Starmer is not only hated by the public but is despised by many within the politico-media class as well. Shipman is also performing, but his sub-text is not that the public are ignorant and gullible but that the true king-makers are the press and the currency of king-making is unattributable briefings: "Every single quote in this article is from a Labour source: a minister, MP or party official, and most importantly eight serving and former Starmer aides." The meta-narrative of Shipman's tale is that Starmer is apolitical. He doesn't have strong beliefs, with the result that he is indecisive and inconsistent, he shows no interest in either political theory or practice ("incurious"), and he has no taste for gossip. This is a character study of an outsider made by an insider. 

While the Tory press long ago wrote off Starmer as a fraud, and while the more bovine centrists of the Guardian continue to praise the man as "decent", despite the many indecencies of his comments over Gaza and immigration, more thoughtful liberals, like Tom McTague at the New Statesman, see the fall of McSweeney as evidence that the marriage of convenience between Labour's Old Right and the Blairites is falling apart. The corollary of this is the supposed opportunity espied by the Soft Left to make Starmer its cats paw. At this point it is worth emphasising that the Labour Party no longer has discernible ideological factions. The Old Right long ago mutated from conservative trade unionists and Atlanticists to amoral bureaucrats who saw the fight against the left as simply a route to power and thus access to freebies and perks. The left itself has been largely extirpated, leaving only the rump of the Socialist Campaign Group. The Blairite true-believers have always been a small minority, and Blue Labour exists largely in the minds of the press. The Soft Left is simply the bulk of the party: careerists with shallow beliefs. The claim that it is an organic faction is belied by the absence of an actual political programme. The aim of the revived Tribune Group to create one will probably just lead them to reissue the 2024 party manifesto. 

What this points to, and which McTague at least seems to get, is that the Labour Party has run out of road. It no longer has a purpose, not just as the political wing of organised labour but as the electoral vehicle of social democracy. The shibboleths about equality and opportunity run up against the harsh realities of the Thatcher dispensation: embedded inequality, a fear of offending the rich, a hollowed-out economy dependent on the kindness of strangers. The social and cultural ambitions of the party, from decent housing and reliable welfare to non-utilitarian education and collective arts, have long since shrivelled to practically nothing. The interrogation and reform of the state has given way to the punitive inspection of the populace. The monarchy and the House of Lords stumble on while we are told we can no longer afford benefits for the sick and elderly. The NHS is bleeding to death and once it has gone Labour will have lost the last vestige of its commitment to the welfare state. A revived commitment to the warfare state, as promoted by the likes of Paul Mason, will not fill the void. The Labour Party has entered the terminal stage.

This moment of recognition has been coming ever since the general election. All the chuntering about the government's lack of a clear purpose obscures that the Starmer Project, to borrow the title of Oliver Eagleton's enlightening 2022 book, was pretty much complete before the polling stations opened. Eagleton summarised the project as: "1) a 'values-led', non-antagonistic electoral strategy; 2) an unsparing crackdown on the Labour Left, seen as more dangerous than the Conservatives; 3) an Atlanticist-authoritarian disposition, combining intervention abroad with repression at home; and 4) a return to neoliberal economic precepts, overseen by Blairite leftovers". My own view is that the last 2 are essentially just business-as-usual, while the first is characteristic of a politics "disenchanted by economics", in Will Davies' phrase, and thus a by-product of neoliberal governance. What is distinctive about the Starmer project is number two, and insofar as the liberal press continue to salute Starmer, it is in recognition of his success in sealing the left's tomb (a phrase coined by Peter Mandelson). The problem is that without the left, the Labour Party is an empty shell.

The key to Keir Starmer is not that he is apolitical but that he has always been a state apparatchik. As I've noted on a number of occasions (and expanded on in the comments to my previous post), his brief was to restore the authority and gravitas of the state after the twin insults of Brexit and Corbyn, both of which saw democracy temporarily slip the control of the establishment. In practical terms, this meant firstly securing the Labour Party against the left, and then moving foreign and trade policy back into the domain of technocratic expertise (this is far more important than formal reaccession to the EU). What scared the establishment about Corbyn was not the possibility of a move towards social democracy in domestic policy but of the UK moving towards an unaligned position on foreign policy. With Brexit, the fear was that trade policy would be politicised and thereby made subservient to domestic policy. For that reason, a hard Brexit would always be preferred to a soft Brexit (let alone a Lexit), as the former could be more easily managed outside of parliamentary scrutiny while the latter would have demanded greater scrutiny in the Commons.

The Labour Party has been secured and the government is safely in the hands of the apparatus, even if its day-to-day operation seems chaotic and incoherent. The establishment is comfortable with this, hence who succeeds Starmer isn't really a pressing concern, despite the best efforts of Janan Ganesh to convince us that the government is already too leftwing and that Rayner or Miliband in Number 10 would announce a socialist republic. As Eagleton presciently said in 2022, "Those in line to succeed Starmer - Burnham, Rayner, Nandy, Streeting - have all indicated that they will adopt the same approach, albeit with more passion and less self-apology". That no one has a clear idea of the policy differences between any of the leading candidates tells you that there will be no ideological contest come the next leadership election. That is Starmer's legacy. What we'll get will be vibes because everyone agrees the problem with the current leader is poor presentation not bad politics. If the candidates cannot explain what they are for, they will struggle to convince voters what Labour is for.

Starmer's appointment of Mandelson as the UK ambassador in Washington was emblematic of his rejection of democratic accountability in favour of technocratic expertise, even if Mandelson's "expertise" was little more than plotting, schmoozing and maintaining an extensive contacts book. The apologies over his appointment are insincere. To the politico-media class that indulged him for so long, the public reaction to the revelations of his relations with Jeffrey Epstein is simply populist hysteria: a fit of moralising that has no place in the world of the "grown-ups". Their hope is that the madness will shortly pass and business as usual will resume. They may be disappointed in this simply because the press have the smell of blood in their nostrils. While many journalists will urge caution for fear of highlighting their own complicity in the shenanigans that first elevated Starmer, others will be unable to resist the pleasures of the scandal. Like the scorpion that stings the frog, it is in their nature. 

This Charming Man

Last week, a long time ago in politics, the Sky News presenter Sophy Ridge tweeted that "Peter Mandelson is obviously a very charming man". This struck me as odd because Mandelson has always seemed to me to be a particularly charmless individual - vain, cruel and pompous - and I can't imagine I am the only one who thinks this way. The emphasis of "obviously" was perhaps an attempt by Ridge to excuse her own gullibility, but it also serves to remind us that she is talking of his reputation within a rarefied social network. To be fair to her, the remainder of her anecdote belied her first sentence, noting that in her personal experience he was initially dismissive because she, as a trainee reporter many years ago, had neither status nor power. She then correctly notes that his "charm" was simply the currency of a "closed group of elites" expressed through gossip and condescension: "There are too many people in Westminster who look over the shoulder of the person they're talking to see if there's someone more important in the room". In other words, "charming" does not have its ordinary meaning here. It is simply a performance intended to confirm your membership of the "inner circle".

The key to Mandelson's character, I suspect, is that he is a snob: a middle class North London boy who grew up among Labour aristocracy in Hampstead Garden City and who has always sought elevation to the real thing, hence his acquisition of a posh accent and the accoutrements of country living - the purple Aga, the scruffy dog, the Beryl Cook print - straight out of a Jilly Cooper novel. For many journalists, his charm was little more than a readiness to make bitchy remarks about other politicians and a willingness to leak confidential information. Those political commentators expressing shock that he might have revealed commercially sensitive information to Jeffrey Epstein are obviously disingenuous, but no more so than those of a certain age who insisted that Mandelson's influence in the Labour Party during the 1990s was the product of his skills rather than David Sainsbury's money. And those skills were largely journalistic fantasy. The fact that he repeatedly got caught out and had to resign should have been a clue that he was neither as cunning nor calculating as the press routinely claimed. The moment the media failed to indulge him, he came across as an idiot or an importunate nuisance.

The responses to the revelations about Mandelson's abuse of position and his dishonesty over his relationship with Epstein can be broadly divided into two camps: those who see the affair as the tale of a reprehensible, possibly criminal, individual who tainted others by association; and those who see the peer and former minister as a symptom of a corrupt system. The politico-media class has tended towards the first interpretation while the general public has tended towards the second. This isn't surprising. The first response to political scandal by those in the vicinity is to establish its limits, how far the poison has spread, hence the focus on who knew what and when. The assumption is that the body is sound and we simply need to cut out the rotten parts and let the healing begin. The popular view is that the system itself, the entire politico-media nexus, is rotten and incurable. This is obviously dangerous. So dangerous that any number of individuals will be sacrified to preserve the system. Indeed, the renewed speculation over the position of the Prime Minister is proof of that. 

The recent emphasis on Keir Starmer's "decency" might appear odd even if you only had a passing acquaintance with his track record of duplicity and spite, not to mention his readiness to sack others to save his own skin. The explanation is that centrist political commentators know he has to go because, to borrow a phrase of Clement Attlee, he's just "not up to it", but they want him to go with his dignity intact. Not because they care about him as an individual. It's no secret that his unwillingness to cultivate personal relations with the press claque, which has created a full-time job for Tom Baldwin, has not endeared him, but they understand the need to protect the system. In their eyes Starmer's job was to restore the authority and gravitas of the state after the twin insults of Brexit and Corbyn. Though he purged the Labour left and won a massive majority, he has failed in this goal. The UK has looked shrunken and slightly pathetic on the world stage as Starmer has tried to appease Trump, while Starmer and McSweeney's authority is in freefall among ministers and the wider PLP.

Since 2008, "populism" - the centrist shorthand for any threat to the system - has either been diverted if it appears from the right, usually towards anti-immigration and transphobic sentiment, or bluntly extirpated if it appears from the left, usually through claims of antisemitism or the treasonous support of our nation's enemies. The obvious risk is that the further fallout from the Mandelson affair might lead to more embarrassing revelations about the latter manoeuvre, specifically in relation to the Labour Party between 2016 and 2024. The upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election already looks like a straight fight between the Greens and Reform, which means a competition between two anti-system critiques: one focused on the distance between Manchester and Westminster (which has been widened by Starmer's blocking of Andy Burnham as a possible candidate); the other on the proximity of Rochdale and Oldham and their history of grooming gangs (if Matt Goodwin refers to Mandelson, it will probably be in the context of sexual exploitation).

Mandelson is the British political system incarnate. I don't say that to rehearse the usual guff about how well-connected he is, or to praise his acute understanding of party dynamics and personalities. My point is that he is typical: bitchy, anti-intellectual, venal. He is giddily impressed by wealth and status, which is why he was such an easy mark for an arch-manipulator like Epstein. What should surprise us about the cash gifts he received is how modest they were in the world he inhabited: small change for billionaires. Just as the average member of the PLP appears biddable through a couple of concert tickets and a new suit, so Mandelson appeared happy to bend over backwards simply for the passing attention of the rich, an attention that he used as currency in his dealings with the British media where gossipy name-dropping provided the seasoning for his otherwise stodgy vanity.

His 1998 comment, which will surely be his epitaph, that New Labour was "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they paid their taxes" was interpreted in the shadow of the "greed is good" 1980s. But Mandelson wasn't merely flipping the traditional ethic that saw greed as a deadly sin. He was advertising that the British political system was happy with dirty money and indeed keen to cultivate it, whether from Russian oligarchs or Silicon Valley techbros. The consequence is not just a House of Lords bursting at the seams with criminals and pimps of one sort or another but a House of Commons in which many MPs spend more time lobbying for business interests and foreign powers than they do for their own constituents. Mandelson was not a corrupt exception to the honourable rule. Expelling him from the Lords will do little when the problem is the Lords. Expelling him from the Labour Party will do little when the problem is the Labour Party.

Lost Futures

The suggestion that the "rules-based international order" is over, as a result of Donald Trump threatening to annex Greenland, is not the harbinger of a new international settlement, let alone a replacement for NATO, but a plea for a new narrative to explain US hegemony and excuse its attendant hypocrisy. 

It was notable that in his speech at Davos Mark Carney argued that we must move on from the "pleasant fiction" of the old order by quoting Václav Havel's fictional tale of an honest greengrocer "living in truth". The liberal commentariat predictably swooned at this display of muscular liberalism and the invocation of a humanist saint, but what they failed to acknowledge was that the Canadian Prime Minister wasn't arguing for the creation of a counterbalancing pole to American power but simply a more palatable story that could be sold to the electorates of the "middle powers". Inevitably, many spun the speech to suit their priors, notably those arguing for closer cooperation between the UK and the EU, but Canada is never going to seek accession (hilarious as that scenario might be) because its own interests necessitate a bilateral approach to its neighbour across a 5,000 mile indefensible border. Likewise, Keir Starmer knows that the UK is too entangled with the US security state and financial markets to be anything other than a rule-taker.

The idealised "rules-based international order", which obviously never lived up to the dreams of a Kantian perpetual peace, was a busted flush long before Israel invaded Gaza and proceeded to liquidate part of the civilian population, let alone before the US kidnapped Nicolas Maduro. As Larry Elliott notes, the economic and trade base of that order has been problematic for decades and the political superstructure increasingly dysfunctional. If you wanted to isolate a geopolitical moment when the veil was lifted, you could go back to the Iraq War or the wider War on Terror, but 9/11 was simply the moment when the narrower illusion of security that the long-90s depended on was revealed as a pause between the existential fear of the Cold War and our contemporary "polycrisis" anxiety over climate breakdown, novel pandemics, demographic decline, infrastructural decay and the deleterious effects of social media on fragile young minds. Fear has been the norm and it has been exercised systematically by politicians to discipline populations, particularly in the "sophisticated" democracies of those middle powers (that Carney's speech largely ignored the rest of the world, beyond listing Canadian trade deals, wasn't an oversight).

In this historical context, Trump's turn as a mobster who whacks opponents and demands both protection money (tariffs) and the signing over of property titles (Greenland, maybe Iceland) is frankly comical, or would be if it didn't translate to the murder and incarceration of civilians from Minneapolis to East Jerusalem. These deaths and imprisonments are the normal currency of hegemonic power. Long before Trump appeared on the scene, the US was jailing hundreds of thousands of its own citizens on racially-biased charges, and aiding and abetting murders by its proxy agents abroad, from South America to East Asia. ICE is a texbook example of how the methods of empire are inevitably imported to the metropole, but it is also an example of continuing imperial privilege: this abuse of process is not meant to happen to "us", even though it has happened to plenty of US citizens over the years. The problem now, for both the middle powers and liberal opinion in America, is the lack of a plausible narrative to whitewash the grim reality. 

After 1989, anti-communism was no longer effective at a geopolitical level, albeit it continues in weak form as a habitual recourse in domestic politics, now often combined with the charge of antisemitism. Russia may no longer be communist, or even remotely socialist, but it will forever be burdened with the psychic legacy of anticommunism simply because the charge that the Western left is "soft on Putin" remains too useful to dispense with. The 1990s narrative of liberal interventionism that succeeded anticommunism was never stable enough to survive either the raised expectations of those seeking genuine democracy, or the realities of its application on the ground by cynical realists, resulting in the anodyne compromise of the rules-based order. This was simply a rhetorical placeholder for want of anything better, and one that looked increasingly threadbare after the Balkan Wars.

The current attempts to construct a new narrative are struggling because they are being driven by the supporting cast rather than the lead character, and are consequently tentative and circumspect. Carney's frank truths aren't going to stop Trump dismissing him as a lightweight. Commentators who talk about the US President's unusual approach or unconventional style are really highlighting a void: Washington isn't providing hegemonic leadership to its empire, obliging the satrapies (those middle powers) to step forward and attempt to fill the gap. This raises two questions. First, can the "rest of the West" really constitute an independent power, whether as a collective posture in response to American unreliability or as a genuine competitor on the economic, military and geopolitical planes? Second, would their political establishments, so imbricated with American empire, even want to if they could? A third, more parochial, question is how the UK would fit into any new structure or narrative. 

The middle powers aren't going to gang up on the USA, or cut substantive deals with China and Russia. All they really want is a more palatable narrative in which their political classes aren't humiliated in public by the buffoonish head of a New York crime family. There will be much talk of realism and pragmatism, plenty of acceding to American demands dressed as compromise, and permanently clenched teeth behind fixed smiles until the Trump regime is deposed. Though the preferences of the middle powers mean nothing to the average American voter, the Democrats will, like latterday Bourbons, take heart from this international disdain and imagine that the liberal order can be restored. But the truth is that those middle powers are passing judgment on the inadequacy of that order, or at least the narratives that supported it. What the likes of Carney seek is not a Washington Consensus 2.0 but a return to the consoling fictions of the Cold War, hence the emblematic role of the Russian basket-case in current European thinking.

The UK will remain relatively isolated, still supposedly navigating between the imagined Scylla and Charybdis of America and Europe, despite the fact that we went all-in with the former 80 years ago. As Keir Starmer has made clear, the establishment is unwilling to adopt as provocative a rhetorical stance towards the US as the other middle powers and will insist that the special relationship remains sound and will show its value any day now. We will continue to make TV programmes like Downton Abbey and The Crown, for domestic consumption and American export, that highlight our uncertain self-image, somewhere between a thoughtless aristocrat and a pompous butler. We will painfully inch towards the EU to redress the impact of Brexit, while the City of London will become ever more a satellite of New York, and UK public services and government itself will be ever more penetrated by American businesses as we "embrace AI". We will continue to be haunted by the lost futures signed away at Bretton Woods and Nassau, and in June 2016.

What Is the Labour Government For?

Though noticeably obtuse when it comes to actual history, the Guardian's political coverage has a marked tendency to recycle the past, seeking parallels and portents to explain contemporary developments. The shadows of Thatcher and Blair loom large. This can give the impression that British politics is stuck in an endless holding pattern, which isn't entirely wrong. The latest example sees the political editor Pippa Crerar mining a more recent seam, the 2015 general election: "Before the 2015 UK election, the Australian political expert Lynton Crosby devised a strategy for the Tories that became known as “scraping the barnacles off the boat” – shedding unpopular policies that hindered the party’s electoral appeal. Instead, the party focused on core issues it believed would help win over floating voters: the economy, welfare, the strength of David Cameron (and weakness of Ed Miliband) and immigration. Everything else was deprioritised and the Conservatives stuck to their messages rigidly. It worked."

The Tory focus on essentials in 2015 had the advantage that most voters considered it plausible. The Tories can usually be relied on to promote the interests of business, and enough people are convinced by the media that this is the same as promoting a healthy economy. Likewise, there were solid grounds in 2015 for believing that the Tories would be hard on welfare (excepting pensions), not least their track record as part of the outgoing coalition government that had embedded austerity. And it wasn't implausible that they would lower immigration relative to the "influx" of Eastern Europeans seen under New Labour. Of course, the last of these is now a busted flush, following the "Boriswave" that was the predictable consequence of getting Brexit done, which goes some way to explain why the party is down in the polls and Reform is up. Indeed, you could argue that it largely explains why Reform exists and now has 6 MPs (Robert Jenrick having defected from the Conservatives this week).

In contrast, the problem for Labour is that a dwindling number of voters are convinced of the party's core values, or even believe that they have any. As a result, a strategy of "scraping the barnacles off the boat" in order to focus on core issues like the cost of living doesn't convince, both because the commitment seems insincere and because the government seems incapable of dragging its attention away from the barnacles. The recent partial U-turns on ID cards, inheritance tax and business rates all suggest a government that doesn't really know what it is doing, or why it is doing it, given that all were battles it chose to fight and could easily have avoided. The emblematic ID card scheme, like the watering down of the Hillsborough bill and the proposed abolition of jury trials, suggests a government incapable of passing up an opportunity to indulge it authoritarian instincts, while its attempt to exempt the security state from the duty of candour is an example of its unerring ability to misunderstand public opinion. None of this is ever going to be popular with voters.

The bulk of the PLP also seems unwilling to let go of the issues that it believes helped it into power, hence antisemitism is once more in the news, with MPs apparently terrorised by teachers and the West Midlands Police accused of a secret agenda in banning the notorious ultras of Tel Aviv Maccabi. This is because the essential issue for many on the party right is the defeat of the left, the one issue that reliably unites the Old Right, the Blairites and Blue Labour. This has mechanically led to the promotion and protection of Israeli interests, which has in turn gradually morphed into a soft Islamophobia. This has presented the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, with a dilemma. She can't dismiss the WMP's poor handling of the affair as a trivial operational matter without being accused of pandering to the Muslim vote, and she can't dismiss the force's critics as hyperventilating opportunists without calling into question the seriousness of the charge of antisemitism. The result is that she has felt obliged to demand the Chief Constable's resignation. 

What these two cases highlight is that the right of the party are having to cast their net ever wider to find opponents now that the left has been expelled from Labour. In Bristol, it isn't the pro-Palestine protestors who face sanction but the school that sought to avoid conflict outside its gates, while in Birmingham Labour find themselves attacking the police because they too sought to avoid conflict on the streets around Villa Park. The Labour right - many of whom had little interest in antisemitism before 2015 - now find that they can no longer control the monster they created over the last decade, but also find that they cannot kick the drug, if I can mix my metaphors. They are now at the mercy of small, unrepresentative activist groups, like Labour Against Antisemitism, but they have also internalised the cause so completely that they are willing to credulously espy antisemitism almost anywhere within the institutions of the British state and the wider establishment, from the BBC to school governors and the police.This has the febrile atmosphere of a "terror", even if people aren't being routinely shot on the flimsiest of pretexts.

You can understand why the likes of John Mann wish to keep antisemitism prominent, over and above a defensive posture in the face of protests over Gaza. Without it, he has no political utility for the British media and thus no public profile. But you would imagine that there are plenty of MPs outside Labour Friends of Israel who can see how self-defeating this has become for the party and how irrelevant it is for most voters. The demand that the government do more about the cost of living crisis is thus a veiled criticism not only of its lack of focus but of its chronic tendency to be distracted by the "barnacles". You could (generously) interpret the recent chunterings by Paul Ovenden about the "stakeholder state" as having a similar rationale. But what all the mutterings about a lack of focus and the ineffective "levers of power" avoid is the admission that the reason this government is failing is because it is run by people whose ambition (and whose expectation until quite late in the day) was limited to recapturing the Labour Party from the hated left.

Now in office, purely as a result of the Tory collapse, and augmented in the Commons by a generation of rightwing novice MPs who have only ever known factional struggle in draughty church halls and social club committee rooms, the Labour Party cannot shake its belief that the UK faces a greater threat from a fragmented and disorganised left than it does from a nativist right led by a genuine antisemite. The revelations about Nigel Farage's schooldays can be read as an attempt by liberals to shift the government's focus from the left to the right, and will succeed up to a point - Starmer will happily decry antisemitism on both flanks - but the effort will ultimately fail so long as the likes of John Mann and Steve Reed have a platform. They will always prefer to attack the left. This is reinforced by their not-so-secret belief that the political right will remain divided as the bitter and acrimonious defection of Tories to Reform continues. The focus of the Labour right's ire will increasingly shift to the Greens, particularly if Your Party continues to spiral towards irrelevance.

The problem is that this still doesn't answer the question: what is this Labour government for? All it does is recapitulate the same arguments made by its media outriders in 2024: that here is a group of sober professionals who can be trusted to manage the country after Tory chaos, and who have proved their ethical credentials by their robust expulsion of the left. It fails to recognise that they won the last general election by default, that their authoritarian managerialism was never popular, and that their track record in office has underwhelmed even the pessimists. A change of leader later this year is unlikely to alter the trajectory, but that in turn will only cause the party to redouble its efforts to remind the electorate that the real threat is the left and only this iteration of Labour can counter it. More enemies will have to be found who can be tarred with the brush of objective antisemitism. The herbivorous teachers and nonplussed police officers are only the start.

Leverage

In the latest issue of The Economist, Matt Holehouse has an article that purports to reflect the consensus of the political class: essentially, that the levers of government are ineffective. He opens with an anecdote about the denizens of Number 10 Downing Street fiddling with redundant thermostats that fail to alter the temperature. This is, pretty obviously, an invention, though it does serve more purposes as a metaphor than the author perhaps intends. Rather than focusing on the systemic disconnect between dial and boiler, perhaps we should note the British state's unwillingness to rip out old fixtures and fittings (the House of Lords inevitably springs to mind), or even to wonder whether people who persist with a futile action (the very definition of madness) should really be in a position of power. Holehouse then quotes Keir Starmer: "Every time I go to pull a lever, there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations and arm’s-length bodies that mean the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be". Is this credible coming from a former DPP, who was supposedly so well-versed in the machinery of the state that he was seen as a natural for Prime Minister?

This bathetic introduction provides an opportunity for Holehouse to cite the recent complaints by Paul Ovenden, Starmer's former director of strategy, who quit the chilly building when vicious messages denigrating Diane Abbott came to light, about the supposed "stakeholder state: a sticky nexus of campaigners, regulators and lawyers who gum up government business with fringe causes." Ovenden's diatribe barely qualifies as analysis, but the language employed by Holehouse to summarise him is revealing, both the emphasis on a "nexus", which implies a common interest, and on the "fringe causes", which is a condescending way of describing attempts to hold the government to account. Whenever a politician talks about the ineffectivess of the levers of power, they are simply demanding fewer constraints on their ability to exercise that power. Holehouse makes this clear when he claims that "Focus groups increasingly see Reform UK’s leader, Nigel Farage, as a “just do it” politician." That bowdlerised phrase originates in the world of business - The Economist 's natural audience - and is usually abbreviated to JFDI: just fucking do it. In other words, execute my will without demur. If you want an example of what that means in practice, consider an unarmed civilian shot in the head by a masked agent of the state on a street in Minneapolis.

But Holehouse is not interested in impunity so much as unanimity: "This appetite for a stronger, faster, politically charged centre of government amounts to a curious consensus between Sir Keir, the Tories and Mr Farage. ... Like Mr Johnson during covid-19, Sir Keir has talked of “mission control” nerve centres in Whitehall, with large screens displaying data feeds. Reform UK shares the same vision. The party promises a cull of civil servants and quangos, and a shock-and-awe legislative campaign, to “ensure that the state apparatus obeys the will of the people”." The current experience of Reform in running local authorities - i.e. their realisation that far from cutting council tax they must increase it simply to keep the lights on - should have prompted some scepticism on Holehouse's part. And the ridiculous image of large screens, like something out of a James Bond film, should have stirred the memory of New Labour's obsession with fatuous and misleading metrics. But these are ultimately distractions. What matters is the claim of consensus, which might seem paradoxical if you were expecting the next general election to provide a clear choice between Labour and Reform.

Holehouse then pivots to present a more subtle argument. As he correctly notes "For governments that know what they want, arm’s-lengths bodies are not obstacles to their agenda, but instruments for executing it. Margaret Thatcher created “executive agencies” to run services like passports and patents, reckoning that a new cadre of business-minded managers would be more efficient than the Whitehall old guard." What he doesn't explore is the patchy record of the agency approach. He also accepts at face value the claims of decentralisation: "Such centralisation is a big intellectual break from the past 40 years. New Labour saw decentralisation as synonymous with modernisation. David Cameron came to power in 2010 with ideas of localism, volunteerism and personalised choice in public services." As any fule kno', the UK state has undergone massive centralisation since Thatcher opened her multiple fronts against local government, industrial coordination and the welfare state, and that direction of travel has continued up to today. The problem is that the antipathy towards the men from the ministry - the Civil Service - has seen that centralisation made deeper but narrower through the agency state: the parcellisation of power across "independent" regulators and commercial outsourcers.

As befits The Economist's ideological position, what Holehouse is really arguing for here is a continuation of the neoliberal state. The whining about ineffective levers is seen as an unflattering reflection on the political inadequacies of the government: "Sir Keir promises a “fundamental reform of the British state”, but his remarks reflect frustration with government more than a plan to remake it ... Sir Keir has, his colleagues say, no real theory of the state ... by lamenting that Labour feels powerless, Sir Keir only makes the case for his populist rivals." The worry then is that if capitalism's B team is admitting its inability to govern, at the same time as the A team have spiralled off into irrelevance and culture war posturing, then the way may be opened to a party of rightwing chancers whose approach to the neoliberal state will be a mixture of vandalism, cupidity and gross incompetence, in the manner of the latest Trump administration in the US. The Economist was against Brexit and remains in favour of closer economic ties with the European Union. It is disappointed in the timidity of the current government in achieving that. This is a vote of no confidence in Keir Starmer.

Coincidentally, Larry Elliott published a more centre-left variant of this critique in The Guardian on the same day. This was again heavy on the ineffective levers trope but did at least acknowledge the role played by "obeisance to market forces", the "dominance of the Treasury" and the "British cult of the amateur". Where Holehouse is happy with the neoliberal state but dismissive of the quality of the politicians tasked with presenting it to the public, Elliott wishes for a return to the indicative planning of the 1960s and the marginalistion of the Treasury, which (briefly) empowered politicians. This is hardly likely, not least because the political courage and imagination required to make it happen is lacking in a Labour Party now deeply imbricated in the agency state (Ovenden's bitter screed noticeably ignores the revolving door). As a high-profile Lexiteer, Elliott ignores rapprochement with the EU, but it should be clear that his desire for a more dirigiste economic policy would be in tension with any move towards greater integration, not least in attempting to "pick winners" in a single market hostile to preferential state subsidies.

The flurry of press articles about the ineffective levers of power is best read as a withering judgement on the calibre of the cabinet in general and the Prime Minister in particular, rather than a systemic critique. Indeed, the very emphasis on levers, buttons and dials tells you that these are not synecdoches of the machinery of government but metonyms of the politicians - the hands - meant to operate it. Significantly, these articles don't propose substantive policies ("picking winners" is an aspiration) or forward-looking structural reforms (recreating the NEDC is just nostalgia). This is because the authors have no confidence that Starmer, or anyone else among the senior ranks of the Labour Party, is capable of putting the machinery of government to radical use. As Elliott notes, "Only rarely, and then usually as a result of extreme circumstances, has the British state been geared up for transformative change." The chance was missed with the 2008 financial crisis and again with the Covid pandemic. Should another opportunity, offering similar leverage, arise over the next four years, it will be studiously ignored.