Another New Labour

A central theme of the study of political parties over the last 50 years is how they adopted forms and techniques from the commercial world. This was a reflection of neoliberal hegemony, in which parties presented themselves as competing in an electoral market and voters were imagined as consumers of policy offers (to the extent of suffering "buyer's remorse", on occasion), however it would be easy to forget that the presentation of politics as self-interested and transactional goes all the way back to Plato's criticism of democracy for responding to people's impulses at the expense of the common good. What neoliberalism did was not change the way that politics was conducted but provide a gloss by which it could be held to be as virtuous as business, at a time when business was idealised. The mimicry of commercial practice, from policy entrepreneurs to market-testing, in turn legitimised the political claim that there was no alternative to neoliberalism. This was simply the way the world worked.

But the "disenchantment of politics by economics", as Will Davies described neoliberalism, proved to be unstable and temporary, with the years since 2008 producing a return to the older models of populist revolt and the strong sovereign. Modern populism has taken many forms, from the Arab Spring through Occupy to the American right's recent assault on the Capitol, but a common thread has been the rejection of the political market, whether in a search for a new politics, a boycott of the limited goods on offer, or a claim that the market is rigged. The return to the political imaginary of the strong sovereign, variously presented as a bulwark against globalisation or the revival of a paranoid nationalism, likewise involves a rejection of the neoliberal frame of politics as a search for technocratic excellence in favour of a politics of autonomy and will. As the UK and China have shown in their different ways, an emphasis on sovereignty is not incompatible with capitalism, but it does lead to a winner-takes-all dynamic that is problematic for the concept of a political market based on recurrent elections, as in Britain. Competing sovereignties cannot take turns: there must be a decisive winner. 

One way of thinking about the British Labour Party's current travails is that while it understands the latter point - and so will not revisit Brexit or even risk doing so by heavily criticising the consequences - it remains invested in the idea that populism is illegitimate and can be successfully resisted (as has been done from Cairo to Washington). What this means is certainly a restoration of the old order, hence the conscious nostalgia of many on the party right (the weird obsession with "Trots", the fetishisation of SureStart etc), but we should be alert to what has changed as much as what they hope to continue. The move to one-member-one-vote was originally intended to reduce the power of the trade unions, and did so. But the sting in the tail was that it made leadership elections more difficult for the PLP to manage, in 2010 as much as in 2015. The current attempts to stymie internal democracy, such as in Liverpool this week, aren't a notable departure from past practice, but what is novel is the lack of any credible justification, whether in the form of the malign bloc vote or sinister entryism. Momentum isn't Militant, no matter how hard its critics try to suggest otherwise. 

Starmer appears to be quite happy to signal that he sees his chief internal opponent not as the unions or any organised left faction (the Socialist Campaign Group are hardly causing trouble), but activism in general. His careful distancing from the National Education Union and Black Lives Matter are both illustrative. This isn't a straightforward return to the politics of New Labour, even if many of the policy positions and personnel are the same. If anything, the Blairites prized activism - albeit of the right sort - whether in the form of internal factions like Progress or lobbyists within the para-state hinterland of think-tanks, charities and sympathetic business groups. Of course this was managed, top-down activism rather than the organic, bottom-up variety that was encouraged during the Corbyn interregnum, and you can see it still thriving in the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, with its policy entrepreneurship and easy access to the media. The recent reports of Starmer's dialogue with old New Labour stalwarts suggests both an anxiety that he isn't leaning on them as much as he should and also a recognition on his part that he needs to do so if only to get the commentariat on board. 

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Starmer appears to not trust the Labour party. This isn't simply the result of his own lack of political experience and a career within the "neutral" establishment, and it goes beyond the constituency left to include much of the PLP, even including elements of the right. It appears to stem from a belief that Labour should be an integral part of the political establishment, hence his ease with the "ceremonial" elements, such as PMQs, but also that it should rely on a small core of advisors whose strengths are more bureaucratic than political, hence some of the recent mis-steps and tone-deafness. Blair was criticised for his "sofa government", but we shouldn't forget that a lot of different people, both MPs and others, plonked their arses on that sofa at different times. It is that circulation that appears lacking in Starmer's regime, hence both backbenchers who supported his leadership bid and some shadow cabinet members are now signalling their dismay at the lack of engagement. What I think this suggests is that Starmer may be the vector for the introduction of a form of political organisation more familiar on the continent: the cartel party. Though the term is often used narrowly in the context of corruption, it also has a broader meaning that overlaps with the concept of the party as a business, which can be seen in famous examples such as Forza Italia and En Marche.

The most significant feature of the cartel party for my argument is not its reliance on state resources (whether formal funding or informal patronage) or collusion across party lines (though 2019's ludicrous government of national unity vogue was suggestive) but its wholesale rejection of party activism. As Colin Crouch explained in Post-Democracy (2004), this springs from a fundamental suspicion: "Tensions occur within any organisation basically resembling the democratic model when the leadership suspects that the activists are a very biased sample of even the loyal electorate; since they are self-selected, this is likely to be true. It can then be expected to use other methods of discovering voter's views". The party then looks beyond itself for policy direction, a characteristic evident in the Labour leadership since Neil Kinnock. As Peter Mair described it in Ruling the Void (2013): "The articulation of popular interests and demands now occurs more and more often outside the party world, with the preferred role of parties being that of the receiver of signals that emanate from the media or the wider society". 

This goes beyond suppressing internal democracy and fixing selection contests. Established lobby groups that are integral to the politico-media caste, such as movements for electoral reform or greater female representation, will be encouraged and celebrated, along with evanescent civic campaigns committed to orderly conduct and a narrow reformist platform, such as the People's Vote, but dynamic groups rooted in protest, such as Black Lives Matter, will be treated with suspicion rather than being seen as potential allies or even as recruiting sergeants. New Labour was famously obsessed with opinion polling and focus groups, but the indirect approach was combined with the direct approach of lobbying for privileged interest groups, such as business and the third sector, and a careful cultivation of the media. The pandemic has obviously limited Starmer's ability to schmooze, but there is little evidence that it is how he intends to operate anyway. His regime looks like it will rely much more on the indirect, hence the prominence of the likes of Claire Ainsley and the mounting concerns of the old guard.

For all the attempts of the Conservatives to link Starmer in the public mind with the bogey of "activist lawyers", the Labour leader is clearly not an activist of any stripe. His appearance on the Wapping picket line was long ago. He didn't fight his way to the top of the party, but glided into a safe seat and shadow cabinet role before joining the 2016 coup and finally securing the leadership by making promises he had no intention of keeping. He is at ease with his own entitlement and the necessity of public deception for the common good of the establishment. Activists are destabilising, because contention can be presented as division, and risk painting the party into a corner by forcing it to adopt policies deemed electorally problematic (Starmer's decision to commit wholeheartedly to NATO and Trident this week is pre-emptive). Given the nature of Labour, this means that the problem of activism is largely the problem of the left. Blair's attitude towards the left was "they have nowhere else to go", which implied a willingness to keep at least some of them under the same roof but without any influence. Starmer's attitude appears to be more hardline: a determination to drive the activist left out, whatever the cost.

The salutary lesson of the SDP convinced Labour's neoliberals that they had to work from within the existing institutions of party and trade unions. This bred a procedural contempt for the left but also an emotional tolerance that was lacking among the old Labour right, composed of equal parts sentimentality (many Blairites had themselves started on the left, or at least espoused leftwing views to reach the first rung of the ladder) and pragmatism (you still needed canvassers). I think the mayfly of Change UK provided another lesson, which is that the possibility of a challenger party of the centre cannibalising both Labour and Conservative electorates is nil, no matter how much media support it garners. The SDP failed because of first-past-the-post, but Change UK failed because party loyalty is too entrenched in Britain (Labour's "terrible" result in 2019 saw it win 32% of the vote). There could be no En Marche, with or without a charismatic Macron. Faced with these constraints, Starmer appears to have settled on a strategy of constructing a cartel party by stealth. Ironically, the chief threat to this may turn out to be not the left but the habit of activism on the right, and in particular the expectation of privileged access by the Blairites and their camp-followers.