Starmerism

The Politics Professor Alan Finlayson thinks it's time to define Starmerism. His reasoning is practical: "Political “isms” give movements a sense of direction and purpose. They redraw the lines of disagreement and provide a compelling explanation of what is happening and how we got here". In searching for hints about what Starmerism might be, he alights on The New Working Class by Claire Ainsley, the former Executive Director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Labour's recently-appointed Director of Policy, but what he finds is a notable absence: "Ainsley’s trenchant criticism of political and cultural elites’ 'systematic dismantling of working-class institutions' and 'denigration of what it means to be working class' is not matched by an analysis of economic elites. At times, her book treats shifts in labour markets and changes to people’s working lives and incomes as natural occurrences rather than things that are done by some people to others." 

I've not read Ainsley's 2018 book, but the impression I get from the limited reviews is that it is typical of recent politically-oriented, non-academic sociology in that it ignores actual social relations and history in favour of a dubious tale of cultural decay and fragmented identity. This may explain why it appears to have garnered as much interest on the right as the left. According to Mark Bergfeld, Ainsley assumes that the working class was historically homogenous and cohesive, and that the shift from manufacturing to service jobs, with a concommitant loss of pride and identity, has occured only in recent decades. The reality is that the working class has always been multifarious, while the service sector has been the largest by employment for over a century. It is also worth noting that the neat alignment of class and party affiliation that informs the myth of homogeneity was an artefact of postwar social democracy, just as today's alignment of party by age and education is the product of neoliberalism. 

This should be a clue as to how material conditions and social relations inform electoral choice, but Ainsley appears to be less interested in these than vogueish "values". Those she considers central to the new working class - family, fairness, hard work and decency - have a worryingly Blue Labour air about them, reinforcing the suspicion that the overlap between her and David Goodhart may be considerable. The lack of a structural critique may make Ainsley's analysis more palatable to the right, but it also risks treating the working class as the problem, with all that this entails in terms of policy coercion. What she has proposed is both modest and top-down (ironic given her critique of how the working class has been failed by political elites). As Bergfeld puts it in his recent review, "the book falls flat at times as it is by no means as inspirational as the Labour Party’s 2017 or 2019 Manifestos. Moreover, most of these policy proposals have been overtaken by the multiple crises of Covid-19, the environment and the economy". 

Ainsley's unwillingness to see class within an agonistic frame, and her consequent reluctance to point the finger of blame for the condition of the contemporary working class, may turn out to be more indicative of Starmerism than the policy specifics. As Finlayson notes, "Our leaders have harmed the economy by treating common interests as a hindrance to the wealth accumulation of a few, and neglected the institutions, people and professions most needed in a time of crisis. Alongside recognising these truths, Labour needs to offer a compelling explanation for why we got here, what we have to overcome, and who we need to be to create a better future than the overheating dystopia that we feel in our bones is already here". What has been notable about Starmer's public expressions since he became leader is not merely the narrowing of culpability to the political field and the focus on competence, but the absence of any story that explains "how we got here" in the manner of Thatcher (an overgrown state) or Blair (a lack of modernisation). Finlayson attributes this to Starmer's lack of a political career prior to 2015, but I think there are two other reasons for this.

First, a fundamental analysis that focused on economic injustice will inevitably end up sounding like "Corbynism without Corbyn", and it is now abundantly clear that Starmerism will be defined first and foremost as not-Corbynism. But for all its unorthodoxy, the policy platform associated with the former party leader was little more than mild social democracy and an open-mindedness to ideas circulating on the left. The unacceptability of that to the right of the party has limited Starmer's room for manoeuvre, but he has also consciously reduced the boundary of the permissible further by his embrace of conservative stances on emblematic issues such as pulling down statues. This isn't merely virtue-signalling to the readership of the Daily Mail, it is a reflection of his very identity as a lawyer. He is a proceduralist, hence his beef with the toppling of Colston was not that the statue should have remained in place but that it should have been removed legally by the council years ago. The second reason then is that Starmer sees himself as a defender of order. He may have progressive and reformist instincts, but he is, to use the vernacular, a "cop".

This reluctance to formulate an analysis of how modern Britain ended up the way it is extends beyond economic justice. As Phil Burton-Cartledge noted about the necropolitics of the Covid-19 crisis, "The Tories wanted to depoliticise the dead, and they've found a willing partner in the Leader of the Opposition. The strictly limited terms of Keir Starmer's opposition is a stress on Tory incompetence. A wider critique is off the cards: contesting the politics of coronavirus is limited to only nibbling at the edges". An even more obvious example of this arose at Prime Minister's Question time on Wednesday when Starmer decided to not question Johnson on reports that the government intended to legislate to give itself the authority to ignore parts of the EU Withdrawal Agreement. This was greeted as a masterly display of good sense by the same pundits who throughout 2019 condemned Jeremy Corbyn for asking questions on any topic other than Brexit, even after he acceded to their demands that Labour support a second referendum.

The reality is that Starmer avoided the subject not because he is a clever lawyer who adroitly evaded being labelled an obstructive remainer but because he is engaged in airbrushing the last two years from history, in particular the bad faith of the People's Vote campaign and the electoral sabotage of the likes of Alistair Campbell from which he, Starmer, ultimately profited. As Owen Jones (who was himself also culpable) ruefully noted, "as Brexit returns to the headlines and there is consensus in the commentariat that the opposition is cleverly sidestepping Johnson’s trap, let us conclude that that should have been everyone’s approach from the very beginning. We could have accepted the referendum, negotiated a close relationship, and pivoted back to the domestic issues that really matter." The apparent disappearance of Brexit as a live political issue confirms the suspicions of many: that the call for a second referendum would have remained a fringe interest had it not been leveraged by those keen to undermine Labour and remove Corbyn.

Keir Starmer's "clean skin" reputation helped him into Parliament in 2015 and it has now propelled him to the leadership of the Labour party, but he cannot pretend to have been elsewhere when the shadow cabinet argued over Brexit, not least because that was his brief, hence the collective decision of the liberal media to consign the history of "remainia" to the memory hole. It looks as if the electoral strategy is to continue to present him as both more competent than Boris Johnson and also unburdened by any socialist baggage. If British politics is becoming more presidential, Starmer's inspiration appears to be Barack Obama, and I suggest that the parallel would probably continue in government. Alan Finlayson is going to remain disappointed. There will be no "compelling explanation of what is happening and how we got here", both because that would risk unearthing too many skeletons, from the activities of rich donors to Tony Blair's baleful influence, and because it would distract from Starmer's own backstory of meritocratic mobility and competent (and conservative) public service.