Keir Starmer's sacking of Rebecca Long Bailey as Shadow Secretary of State for Education is being applauded as evidence of his zero tolerance for antisemitism, and just as openly celebrated as the start of a constructive purge of the party's left, but Long Bailey's admiration for Maxine Peake, whatever the latter's error in associating US police brutality with Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, is a flimsy excuse. For some, that is evidence of Starmer's strength and daring, but a more jaundiced view is that it confirms both the continued instrumentalism of antisemitism and Starmer's own pettifogging and opportunistic approach to party management. Together with his "constructive opposition" in Parliament, it marks a reversion - after the blip of the Corbyn years - to a leadership that actively marginalises the left and is conservative about policy generation. The return of this style was reinforced by the coincidental and predictable announcement that the party will oppose a second Scottish independence referendum. This is business as usual. However, taken together, these two incidents may provide some pointers to Starmer's plan for winning the next general election. Worryingly, that plan seems to be predicated on a better yesterday, rather than a better tomorrow.
What is telling is that these pointers don't precisely dovetail with the strategy outlined in the recent Labour Together report, which rejected both a Blue Labour approach focused on the "Red Wall" seats and a revived Blairite centrism as inadequate in favour of "a strategy that builds greater public support for a big change economic agenda, that is seen as credible and morally essential, rooted in people’s real lives and communities" (pg 133). The report continues, "This economic agenda would need to sit alongside a robust story of community and national pride, while bridging social and cultural divisions. The message of change would aim to enthuse and mobilise existing support and younger voters while at the same time being grounded in community, place and family, to speak to former 'leave-minded' Labour voters. The bridging approach across divides would need to neutralise cultural and social tensions. Such a strategy could achieve more than 40% vote share, but would require an exceptional leadership team able to navigate building and winning trust of this very diverse voter coalition".
There are a number of questionable assumptions here: the idea that "leave-minded" voters are uniformly socially conservative; that cultural and social tensions can be bridged or at least neutralised; and that achieving more than 40% of the vote requires an exceptional leadership team. Firstly, while it is true that leavers biased conservative, it is also true that a significant number considered themselves liberal. The leave vote in the referendum was 52%, which means it was a coalition of interests, not simply a homogenous reactionary bloc. Secondly, the leave campaign was actually successful in bridging cultural and social tensions, not least between the Southern middle class and the Northern working class, proving that disparate interests can be united around a common purpose. Finally, Labour achieved 40% of the vote in 2017, despite the limitations of Corbyn's leadership and systematic sabotage within the party hierarchy. The lesson of both 2016 and 2019 is that you can win through a relentless focus on a unifying message and a refusal to be distracted by media demands for performative virtue.
But the biggest issue with the Labour Together analysis is the idea that British society divides neatly into two opposing camps and that this division runs down the middle of Labour's electoral coalition. In other words, that the country comprises "two nations that between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets", to quote an earlier Tory Prime Minister. This belief reflects the influence of opinion pollsters and focus-groupers in setting the terms of reference and providing the grammar for policy development. For Labour Together, Datapraxis first grouped the electorate into the usual marketing-style "tribes", such as "Young Insta-progressives" and "Centre-left pragmatists". These carry a lot of ideological freight, from the idea that politics is a consumption preference to the belief that centre-left and pragmatic are near-synonyms. BritainThinks then further refined this down to two groups, of "urban remainers" and "town leavers", for a "coalition-forming exercise". Given the constraints and vocabulary, this was little more than a question-begging exercise.
The economics versus values dichotomy remains remarkably tenacious in political science because it satisfies so many needs. The right can distract attention from the economic and usefully obscure the defence of privilege by appeals to emotion, while centrists can play one off against the other as circumstances require. As Steve Randy Waldman describes the latter manoeuvre in the US context, "Elites can make economic progress when Republicans govern, by deemphasizing the social issues that win the votes and enacting the less popular economic agenda. When Democrats are in power, elites pursue their agenda by emphasizing social progress while disingenuously lamenting constraints that thwart economic progress. Elites use our famous 'peaceful transfers of power' not as signals to change direction, but as the zigs and zags that constitute a tack in their prescribed direction". This helps explain why the programme of the state is often a combination - socially liberal and economically conservative - that has little organic support among the electorate.
In the UK, the dichotomy was foundational to the voter analytics developed by Philip Gould, Peter Kellner and Deborah Mattinson (of BritainThinks) in the 1990s to justify the normalisation of third way, neoliberal logic. The interplay of the dimensions could be used to construct an abstract electorate cautious on public spending, antipathetic to universal benefits ("something for nothing") but otherwise tolerant and fair-minded. Underpinning this was a paternalistic belief that voters are irrational and selfish: our old friend Plato's beast. As Mattinson described it back in 2010, "Always ready to complain, but unwilling to roll up their own sleeves, the electorate has colluded with the political parties to create a world of Peter Pan politics: where the voter lives in a perpetual childlike state and never grows up". The problem that this dichotomy presented for New Labour was that the values dimension was increasingly dominated by the search for belonging, as the economics dimension was voided of any sense of communal solidarity. Prompted by the barracking of the press over asylum-seekers, this drove the party into a xenophobic cul-de-sac and the rhetorical embarrassment of "British jobs for British workers".
The attempt to escape this trap under Ed Miliband through a more positive patriotism led to the absurdity of Emily Thornberry losing her shadow cabinet role for showing insufficient respect to a St George's flag. That uncertainty over belonging and identity appears to have returned in force, hence the Labour Together report's use of glib phrases like "national pride". As historians such as David Edgerton have noted, the idea of a British nation is pretty much coterminus with the social democratic era, and it is this, rather than the more antique invention of tradition in the 18th and 19th centuries that Linda Colley and Eric Hobsbawm analysed, which has dominated its representation in culture. This is one reason why popular British identity has struggled to stretch further back in the imagination than World War Two, and also why we struggle with the history of empire. In the imaginative realm of the postwar British nation, the empire was always distant history, to be mocked or regretted through the lens of nostalgia and irony. The more recent rise of English nationalism, and its associated Scotophobia and disinterest in Ireland and Wales, is the product of Thatcherism plus New Labour's subsequent neglect of the regions and contempt for any social movements that did not fit neatly into the neoliberal framework.
There remains a suspicion that the rhetoric of "a big change economic agenda" will turn out to be simply a rebranding of the usual neoliberal nostrums, or even just an empty gesture towards the memory of postwar social democracy. The criticism of the 2019 manifesto as too busy is less a tactical assessment than a prejudice in favour of minimal change. There may be some emblematic nationalisations on offer, but there will also be the usual emphasis on human capital, the disciplining of labour and the insistence on benefits reciprocity. At this stage, there seems little reason to believe that Starmer is about to embrace a genuinely emancipatory UBI or advocate workers' control, not least because the increasingly pronounced correlation of party support by age suggests that Labour needs to attract the non-working elderly if it is to win. Equally, the nods to Blue Labour tropes ("community, place and family") suggest nostalgia more than any coherent policy programme. In this light, the sacking of Long Bailey is unlikely to have many ramifications for the party's education policy, though the criticism of her by some Labour MPs for being too close to the teachers' union suggests a return to technocratic managerialism is on the cards. More importantly, her ousting may herald a watering-down of the Green New Deal that she was instrumental in developing.
In Scotland, there is no obvious route to Labour's electoral revival through the centre ground. That territory is now dominated by the SNP who have the added advantage of a popular position on independence, while the Scottish Tories have decided to go all-in on consolidating the unionist vote. Starmer's decision to block indyref2 isn't surprising, but coming on the same day that he defenstrated Long Bailey it suggests that his strategy is to actively win over Tory voters with a combination of performative liberalism, cautious reform, and a commitment to the Union. This is unlikely to deliver a swathe of seats north of the border, but writing off Scotland will be considered an acceptable price if it retrieves the Northern English seats lost in 2019 and allows the party to make inroads into suburban seats in the South. This looks like a strategy to recover the position of 2015 but with the added hope that a majority can be secured if the Tory vote collapses due to post-Brexit blues and disgust with incompetence and sleaze (so a bit of 1997 too). I may be wrong and Starmer will surprise us all with a genuinely bold economic plan, but the dynamics of this potential electoral coalition suggest caution on the economic front, which may leave little more than a tired combination of Blue Labour and Blairism, echoing 2010.
" The more recent rise of English nationalism, and its associated Scotophobia and disinterest in Ireland and Wales, is the product of Thatcherism plus New Labour's subsequent neglect of the regions and contempt for any social movements that did not fit neatly into the neoliberal framework."
ReplyDeleteIs there anything that could really have been done to revitalize the North given that it has so many things against it? It is cursed by being on Europe's periphery, without the advantages that most other peripheral European regions possess: the oil of Scotland, the timber and hydroelectric resources of Scandinavia, the tourist-attracting sunshine of southern Europe, or the very low cost of living in eastern Europe.
The only thing the North of England really had going for it was coal, which isn't just largely exhausted but also fell out of favour for environmental reasons: first acid rain and then climate change.
The North of England is not on Europe's periphery. It fronts onto the North Sea, which is the "inland sea" of Western Europe. The Mediterranean is far more "peripheral". It has a temperate climate, good communications & significant urban agglomerations. Its struggles since 1979 owe more to London-centric policy than geography or geology.
DeleteDidn't you say yourself that Europe's economic gravity these days is more or less Frankfurt (ie southern Germany)?
DeletePerhaps Northern England's Euroscepticism is rooted in the fact that geography means that if Britain benefits from European integration, the lion's share of the benefits would go to the bit closest to the mainland: London and the South East? (But that doesn't explain Europhile Scotland though: hence my thinking that North Sea Oil must have something to do with it.)
Your notion of the North Sea being an "inland sea" and thus economically important also seems belied by the fact that eastern England is more Europhobic than western England.
Scotland is europhile because England is not & they bought the myth of "Europe of the regions". It has nothing to do with oil. The europhobia of Eastern England reflects a disenchanted rural economy, retirees & resentment towards London.
ReplyDeleteAre you referring to the fact that England saw the EU as a threat to its national identity (because it was divided into 9 regions on the EU's map) while Scotland (a single region on the EU map) saw the EU as respecting its national identity?
DeleteI'm increasingly of a mind to think that the nature of the UK union was itself an issue: you can think of the UK as being like the old German Reich (Imperial or Weimar: not so much Nazi as the Nazis sidelined the traditional German states in favour of their own party Gaue) with England in the role of Prussia and Scotland in the role of Bavaria.
Not only does England demographically dominate the UK just as Prussia dominated the Reich, but you can also see cultural parallels. Like Prussia, England formed its sense of self primarily from dominating other people (either colonial subjects or its own lower classes): while Prussia's inegalitarian and militaristic traditions were forcibly extinguished after World War II by the victorious Allies, England never suffered a comparably catastrophic defeat and instead became culturally lost in a post-Empire age.
If you think of stereotypes of Germans, the benign ones tend to be southern (thrifty Swabian housewives, Lederhosen, oom-pah bands, engineering brilliance) while the negative ones tend to be Prussian (militarism, arrogant aristocrats). Similarly, the Scots are much more at ease with themselves in the post-imperial era than the English are: what is English culture anyway?