The Habermas Machine

The death of the German public intellectual Jurgen Habermas at the age of 96 provides a useful starting point to consider the current developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI). I referred to him as a public intellectual, rather than a philosopher or a sociologist, because his political role - and I do literally mean his performance of a role - is the bulk of his legacy. In the future, few outside of academia will read his works, such as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere or The Theory of Communicative Action, but his ideas about democratic discourse, suitably vulgarised, will survive in the memory of his liberal admirers. This memory was summarised by the Guardian's editorial that marked his death in two statements: first, "that our nature as linguistic beings puts reason and the search for consensus at the core of who we are"; and second, that Habermas was responsible for the "concept of the public sphere, where rational debate can take place and disagreements be brokered, implied pluralism, civility and inclusion." 

The first statement is little more than obeisance to the just-so story of the Enlightenment, which ignores the realities of power and the irreconcilable interests of class in favour of an essentialist abstraction: Rodney King's "Can't we all just get along?". In particular, it sidelines the key criticism of instrumental reason advanced by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was the intellectual context of Habermas's emergence in the postwar era as a junior member of the Frankfurt School before he struck out on his own. The second statement ignores the structural constraints on the public sphere that make a mockery of such terms as pluralism, civility and inclusion. An object example would be the closing down of debate on Gaza in Germany, which Habermas himself contributed to by co-signing a statement by established academics in November 2023 that Israel's response to the October 7th attack was "justified".

Being on the wrong side of history is an occupational hazard for any public intellectual, but in Habermas's case losing the public argument became a distinguishing feature. As Peter Verovšek put it: "While it is certainly true that Habermas was accorded a certain respect as the éminence grise of the German public sphere, this recognition is more visible in the vehemence with which he was attacked than in the agreement his interventions found. ... Habermas never lost his commitment to democracy — to the idea that he could only present arguments, leaving his fellow citizens the communicative agency to decide what they thought and what they wanted to do, even if their decisions would often go against him". What this highlights for me is the extent to which Habermas was engaged (perhaps unwittingly) in a performance, like the court jester whose lèse-majesté is indulged but ultimately ignored.

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas argued for a fundamental shift in the 18th century from a "representational" culture centred on the court, where power was imposed through ritual and splendour, to a "public" culture centred on dialogue, criticism and consensus in multiple, more modest and disparate arenas, from coffee houses to Masonic lodges, which arose as a result of capitalism. There are two points to make about this. First, that the historical reality was less clear cut, the simple disjuncture of Habermas's tale ignoring the epistemological traditions of scholasticism and the Rennaisance as well as the persistence (and even recrudescence under Fascism) of overpowering ritual and splendour. And second, that the public sphere birthed by capitalism was just as much of a performance of power, a point noted not only by Adorno and Horkheimer but by later theorists such as Michel Foucault. The quadrille may have replaced the minuet, but they were both dances.

So what has all this got to do with AI? One claim is that AI may help achieve consensus in the realm of politics by mediating discourse: a theory tested by Google DeepMind's so-called Habermas Machine. Large language models (LLMs) are built on discourse in the form of written statements. These may be assertions (discourse is not limited to dialogue), or they may be commentary on other statements: disputations, counter-arguments, critique. These statements may or may not have a truth value. Though the appetite for more training data has meant that more and more of what is fed into the machine is low-grade, and increasingly the recycled slop of AI itself, the original intent was to privilege academic and technical literature on the grounds that this would be more reliably truthful. This meant absorbing the academic (even scholastic) paradigms inherent in the data: exegesis, citation, disputation. This preference isn't novel in digital technology. Google's Page Rank is a paradigmatic application of peer review, after all. 

The result is that AI's determination to be authoritative leads it to "generate detailed “reports”, including names and dates, references and sources – the kind of material that suggests deep research and understanding, but may in fact be hallucinated or nonexistent." AI aims to be plausible by mimicing the forms and tropes of academic and scientific publication. Given all that we know about the institutional biases of academia, the prevalence of hoaxes and the crisis of replicability, is it any wonder that AI generates bullshit? AI's determination isn't a product of the data but of the programming. It has become fashionable to talk of LLMs as inscrutable, which leads to the anthropomorphism of "consciousness", but the reality is that they are curated and operate within quite strict boundaries. AI is problematic because of the biases inherent in the training data but also because of the trainers' own biases encoded into the guardrails - e.g. the pre-emptive interventions intended to stop it going full Mecha-Hitler - and the micro-decisions of thousands of human data "cleaners". 

The American blogger Noah Smith recently claimed that "AI is a force for moderation. If I'm a Republican, and I talk to AI, I'm talking to something that was trained on data from both Republicans and Democrats. So the AI is more likely to pull me towards the center." The assumption that LLMs are big enough to avoid bias, like the idea of an equidistant "center", ignores the role of selection (both in the sense of what gets published and what is absorbed into the model) and misunderstands that there are real differences in political language. While to outside observers the Democrats and Republicans look like two wings of the same party, as Gore Vidal once memorably noted, they employ distinctive vocabularies and rhetorical forms. The Democrats also want to bomb Iran and provide more money and arms to Israel, they just deplore the vulgarity of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth. 

In simple terms, conservatives tend to be more assertive while centrists place a higher value on civility. Each can be considered a strategy of domination, arguably echoing Habermas's distinction between the representational (imposed) and the public (consensual). In other words, Republican and Democrat data (written statements that reflect their ideological positions) are not necessarily the same, not just in their differences of vocabulary ("liberty" and "wealth" versus "society" and "investment" etc) but in the force and style of their arguments (confidently normative versus cautiously empirical, for example). Consequently, there is no good reason to believe that AI will avoid bias in its interpretation. It depends on what it has come to value through training and what parameters it has been given by its all-too-human programmers. 

We also have to bear in mind that AI is backward-looking, just as the academic and scientific milieux it relies on are. It privileges established knowledge (which may be wrong), which means it is inevitably conservative: there can be no paradigm shift, let alone a singularity. It lacks the imagination that distinguishes genuine human intelligence. In Habermas's lifeworld, knowledge is advanced by research and the gathering of more data, ultimately through the continuing growth of the global population - i.e. by the reproduction of human intelligence and experience of the world. The problem for AI, which has been brewing for some years and cannot be offset by "more compute", is that the quality of fresh data has plummeted because we've already used all the good stuff. Its attempts to originate knowledge, to create novel data by inference, too often result in hallucinations that strive for the credibility of form, not of substance. 

Habermas fulfilled a necessary role for postwar Germany, advocating and personally exemplifying a theory of participatory democracy while the Ordoliberal establishment secured market liberalism from democratic challenge. At the crucial juncture of 1968, he turned against the socialist student movement. Thereafter, for all his denunciations of the right in the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute) and his later criticisms of the EU's shortcomings, he functioned as the tame conscience of German liberalism. Just as Habermas lapsed into irrelevance, so AI will become ever more conservative as it strives for authoritativeness (borrowing the name of an eminent German thinker without his permission being an example of this) and as the economic incentives encourage a dumbing-down for safety's sake (being sued for consequential damages is a bigger worry than being sued for copyright breaches). Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will remain as much of a Utopian ideal, just out of reach, as a public sphere where pluralism, civility and inclusion reign. 

Twofer

The signs that the Green Party was on course to win the Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election had been obvious for weeks. These included the desperation and negativity of Labour's campaign, which quickly identified the Greens as the real threat to its incumbency; Matt Goodwin's determination to use his media platform to demonise a sizeable chunk of the local electorate, a policy now adopted by the impeccably centrist Democracy Vounteers, despite their claims of Muslim "family voting" being dismissed by the returning officer; and the utter irrelevance of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. But perhaps the most telling was the sheer volume of reported "dirty tricks". This went beyond the traditional bar-chart abuse of opinion polling data by the Lib Dems ("winning here") to include obvious astroturf organisations, such as the Tactical Choice outfit claiming that only Labour could stop Reform, and the "concerned neighbour" letter posted out by Farage's crew early in the campaign without any party identification. 

The last of these was interesting because of its focus on the cost of living and its disappointment in Keir Starmer's government, two issues that the Greens also focused on but which were largely drowned in the media coverage of the final weeks with the emphasis instead being on who would be best placed to "stop Farage" or whether Farage was unstoppable. The letter included the time-honoured reference to how "Britain no longer feels like the country I grew up in", and sideswipes at the Greens for having "extreme policies like legalising drugs and letting men use women's changing rooms", but notable by its absence was any reference to immigration or Muslims. Goodwin's repeated references to "open borders", "Gaza" (in pejorative terms) and now "sectarianism" highlighted that what he was fighting for was not the Commons seat of a constituency with a significant non-white population but the further expansion of his media profile from GB News to the mainstream of BBC and ITV. 

The result last night is fairly easy to parse in terms of the vote. The first point to note is that turnout, at 47.6%, was only fractionally down on the 2024 general election figure of 48%, but that this was a considerable drop from the 61.7% in 2019. By-election turnout is normally lower than for general elections, with the spread typically being around 20%. Yesterday's figure emphasises both the depressed turnout at the last general election and the fact that as a safe seat Gorton and Denton would normally track below the national turnout (by 5.6% in 2019). In other words, you might have expected turnout this time to be closer to 30% if it were seen as a continuation of 2024, but nearer 45% if it were seen as a continuation of 2019. One interpretation of this is that the popular appetite for electoral democracy that appeared to wane at the last general election has returned but the traditional parties are not going to be the beneficiaries of it.

The second point to make is that Labour's vote has plummeted, but that this didn't happen overnight, and it may not even have hit bottom yet. The trajectory is clear: 30,814 in 2019, 18,555 in 2024, and now 9,364  in 2026. Surely the McSweeneyite myth of "efficient vote distribution" in 2024 has finally run out of road. The Greens have jumped by roughly 10k votes from a base of 5k. Allowing for the usual caveats about voter rotation, 3k of that has probably come from the Worker's Party, which didn't stand this time round, which means 7k shifted over from Labour. Reform went from 5k to 10k. If we assume they gained 2k Tory voters (down from 3k to under 1k), then they gained 3k from Labour. Thus the governing party lost 10k voters: over 2/3rds to its left flank and just under 1/3rd to its right flank. The worry for Labour is that the extra 11k of voters who could be expected to turn out at a general election (i.e. assuming a 62% turnout) aren't obviously enthused by the prospect of another Labour government, whether led by Keir Starmer or anyone else, otherwise they would have turned out in 2024.

Despite the clear evidence that Labour lost mainly to the left, not to the right, there is no immediate sign that it will acknowledge this asymmetry let alone adjust its policy platform and electoral strategy accordingly. Keir Starmer is instead talking about Labour as the only party that can unite the country between the extremes of left and right. There was an implicit acknowledgment in Labour's focus on demonising the Greens as drug-pushers, but this appears to have simply alienated progressive voters, many of whom clearly have a more sophisticated understanding of drug-use and the advantages of a health-based approach to minimising it than the government front bench. It also made Labour sound too much like Reform, which once again reinforces the point that it is trying to attract voters who will never vote for it while repelling voters who traditionally did vote for it.

The great "what if" of post-count analysis has been Labour's decision to block Andy Burnham from standing for selection as the party's candidate. This has been attributed to Starmer's insecurity and jealousy. The personal dimension probably played a part, but the theory ignores that it was the party right, long-versed under Mandelson and his protégé McSweeney in rigging selections, that did the blocking via the NEC. It also ignores that Burnham wouldn't necessarily have won the selection contest, given the right's grip on the local party and his identification with the "soft left". The chosen candidate, Angeliki Stogia, works for the construction group Arup, which has created conflicts of interest in her role as a councillor because of the number of contracts they have with Manchester City Council. No one in the party appears to have wondered whether selecting someone who is essentially a corporate lobbyist was a smart move. All that mattered was that she was on the right of the party.

It's also not a gimme that Burnham would have won. A smarter politician than Starmer might have cleared the way for him to stand. A victory, however narrow, would have reflected well on the whole government and Burnham in Westminster would have been inside the tent pissing out instead of outside the tent pissing in. His history suggests he would happily have fallen into line, once given a ministerial brief, and he would have provided a counterweight to Wes Streeting more than an active challenge to the Prime Minister. If Burnham had lost the by-election, his political career would be dust and he would no longer be a threat to Starmer or anyone else. Meanwhile, Stogia or some other indentikit managerialist drone from the ranks of Labour councillors could have been put forward to the Mayoralty. Labour's miscalculation means that the Greens will now be hoping to make similar scale gains in the local elections in May.

In the final analysis, the Greens were nailed on to win the Gorton and Denton by-election because they offered a twofer for a plurality of voters: you could thwart Nigel Farage and simultaneously stick two fingers up to Keir Starmer. This appealed to left-wing voters looking for a protest vehicle, progressive voters disappointed by the government's behaviour over benefits and Gaza, and even some conservative voters disgusted by Reform and Labour's shared intolerance. Some will blame Starmer's performance as Prime Minister for Labour's defeat, but the reality is that voters had already made a damning judgement on him in 2024 when only 1 in 3 could be bothered to vote for the only party capable of getting the Tories out of office. Likewise, Reform's backers will insist on Gorton and Denton's atypicality - i.e. Muslim presence - while ignoring that even with the advantage of a Tory collapse they still couldn't muster 1 in 3 votes. 30% appears to be their ceiling in the opinion polls and the suspicion is that in the next general election they'll struggle to get much more than 20%. In contrast, the Green Party has shown that it has a much heigher ceiling.

Lifetime Learning

There are a number of irritating features in Gaby Hinsliff's Guardian article on student debt. The first is the framing of a "generational injustice", which plays to the idea that the young are getting a raw deal. This ignores that many young people don't have any student debt, because they never went to college, and nor did many older people. In other words, the issue relates to the difference in treatment of the 38% who currently go on to tertiary education and the 15% of the older cohorts that did so by the early 1990s. The second irritation is the claim that what we now have is a "stealth tax", which is correct only in the limited sense that the Chancellor has frozen the income threshold for repayments (i.e. a form of fiscal drag). It also ignores that graduates may eventually have their debt wiped out, which is not a privilege HMRC extends to other taxes, stealthy or otherwise. The reason why the issue is causing so much angst among the press is precisely because it is seen as an added tax on the non-wealthy middle-classes. Rachel Reeves' comment that it's "not right that people who don’t go to university are having to bear all the cost for others to do so" makes this clear from a (traditional) working class perspective.

As a good centrist, Hinsliff cannot resist the temptation to berate the irresponsible left in passing. Thus she notes that "Last week, the Green party leader, Zack Polanski, called for “a conversation about student debt forgiveness”, echoing a rallying cry among young Democrat voters at the last US election for loans to be written off faster (though he didn’t explain where he would find the billions that would cost)". I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Polanski didn't bother to explicitly state where the billions would come from because they can only come from taxation. Hinsliff could probably work this out for herself. The "magic money tree" of borrowing against futrure prosperity is not relevant here, despite the routine trope of further education as an investment and the youth of today as tomorrow's fiscal infrastructure. Like state pensions, state education is paid for by current workers (the Chancellor's point). The student loan scheme is anomalous not because it seeks repayment from the beneficiaries, rather than funding the cost out of general taxation, but because it expects future workers to pay for historic costs. Beneath the wails about injustice, you can spot the traditional conservative argument about not "saddling" future generations with debt. 

Hinsliff notes that graduates may face a marginal tax rate of 49% when even the highest rate of income tax is currently only 45%. As she puts it, "why are young people being squeezed proportionately harder in some cases than their bosses?" But it's no secret that the poorer you are the higher the total tax burden, when you include VAT, Council Tax and other indirect taxes. And it's also no secret that the rich can avoid paying the headline rates of income tax by converting income to dividends or capital gains. The Guardian, like other newspapers, has had to tread a fine line here: emphasising the "injustice" without admitting that it is one among many that currently characterise the UK tax system and arguably nowhere near the worst. Hinsliff suggests that "The fairest option is probably to cap how much any student should have to pay over their lifetime, so that loans bear some resemblance to what was borrowed rather than just morphing into a kind of stealth graduate tax." But she immediately dismisses this on grounds of expense, i.e. lower tax revenues, indicating that fiscal rigour still matters more to centrists than social justice. The discussion should really be about how we shift the tax burden onto those who currently pay proportionately less.

So who would those others be? Back in 2012, I noted that the proposed changes to increase the qualifying age for the state pension would be regressive because of variations in longevity (and thus years enjoying a state pension) across socio-economic groups. On average, the richer you are, the more state pension you will get in cumulative terms, regardless of lifetime contributions. A few months later, I suggested that the worries about a lack of skilled employees could be alleviated by applying differential state pension ages based on further education. In simple terms, if you left school at 16, you'd retire at 65; if you left at 18, you'd retire at 67; and if you went on to do a 3-year degree course, you'd retire at 70. This would skew the composition of the working population towards the skilled, which is helpful if you consider the adverse trend in the dependency ratio (the number working who must support those not working). As there would be nothing to stop anyone saving into a private pension, the rich might still retire at 65 or even earlier, but in aggregate across the economy we should see a staggering of retirement dates in line with education.

The moral (or "justice") case for differential state pension ages based on educational attainment is that people who started work at 16 are likely to die an average 5 years earlier than people who started work at 21. This is both a reflection of a person's socio-economic class origins and the greater likelihood that an earlier start in the workplace will have led to a liftetime of manual or routine labour and consequently greater health issues (the result of physically demanding labour, unhealthy workplaces and the long-running effects of income inequality). The fiscal case is that while manual labour is difficult to maintain into your 60s, cognitive or other skilled work is much easier. In terms of productivity, there is no significant falling off and this is reflected in a lower likelihood of a rapid downturn in earnings in the final decade of work, and thus taxes paid. As cognitive and skilled work broadly correlates with educational attainment, it makes sense to defer state pensions for that healthier, more productive and higher-earning cohort. 

That cohort's extra years in work will typically be at above-average levels of pay. The current difference in median salaries for graduates and non-graduates is about £12k per annum: £42k versus £30k. If we conservatively assume that difference generates £2.4k in additional tax from the typical graduate (i.e. at 20%, though many will actually be higher-rate taxpayers), then the 5 years of further education required for a typical degree should recoup a further £12k in revenue if the individual works till 70. At this point you might note that this is significantly less that the £53k cost of tuition fees and maintenance loans for a three-year degree. So how would we bridge the gap of £41k to match costs with income? The answer, once more, is through income tax. The follow-up question is: whose tax? Do we simply raise rates across the board? The answer to that question is no, we raise taxes on that part of the salary distribution where graduates are mostly to be found, which is above £40k.

A graduate tax is cumbersome to administer because it is geared to the persistent person rather than their variable income. The graduate who through career choice or ill-health doesn't earn enough to make repayments means that such a tax would be punitive unless waived below an earnings threshold or written off at the end of a fixed term, which is why the current loan replayement scheme has those features. A far simpler solution is to make income tax more progressive so that those on higher incomes, who will disproprotionately be graduates, pay more. You could do this by lowering the higher rate threshold to a point where it recoups an extra £15.6k over 40 years (that's the difference of £41k but at a 38% rate to match the graduate share of the working population). This would be £47,700 in today's money, which, you'll note, is significantly higher than the median graduate income. One way of implementing that would be to continue with fiscal drag. At 3% inflation, it would take only 2 years for the curent higher rate threhold of £50,270 to depreciate to £47,700.

You could argue that this would penalise successful non-graduates who earn high salaries but who never benefited from higher education, but this is to forget that they will have the option to retire at 65 on a full state pension (worth £60k, i.e. 5 years at £12k per annum in today's money). Also, bear in mind that we're not increasing the burden on basic rate taxpayers, which should please the Chancellor. The difference in tax for a graduate on the median income of £42k would be nil, because they're below the £47.7k threshold. A graduate earning £50,270, i.e. at the current higher rate threshold, would pay an extra £1,028 in income tax a year. Across 40 years, that graduate earning 50k (assuming they stay at the same relative level of income) will pay roughly an extra £41k (in today's money) in income tax. If you add in the extra £12k they can be expected to pay by working till 70, that recoups the £53k spent on their college education. In summary, differential qualifying ages for the state pension, plus an income tax higher rate threshold geared to (but higher than) the median graduate earnings, would allow us to revert to fully-funded tertiary education.

As well as encouraging more students to go to college, and thereby help boost the long-term productivity of the country, putting the burden of student debt onto higher-paid and older graduates (and to an extent on higher-paid non-graduates) has the advantage of going with the demographic flow as the population ages. We are approaching a wave of graduates in their 60s, most of whom incurred no student debts, reflecting the expansion of higher education starting in the 1990s. More broadly, this approach helps redress the bias of the last 40 years that favoured the (now) well-off elderly - who benefited from lower housing costs and better private pensions as well as free education - relative to today's youth. And it does so without penalising poorer older people, who will disproportionately have left school at 16 or 18 and are dependent on the state pension. 

The sketch I've outlined here is simplified and not meant to be definitive, but it does prove, I think, that a fairer and more efficient method of funding higher education is available if we get away from the cursed idea of student loans and view it in terms of working lifetimes and the returns to income arising from higher edcuation. At heart this means reverting to the time-tested principle that today's dependents are paid for by today's workers, whether they be pensioners or schoolkids (no one is proposing student loans for A-levels, after all). The impediments to this are not economic but political, and at their root is both the persistent anti-intellectualism of a public discourse that assumes many degrees are "worthless" and a government culture that prefers universities to operate as commercial enterprises rather than as sites of dissent and crtitique.

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, neither as the political wing of organised labour nor 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.