Political Insurgency

An opposition party cannot garner a reputation for competence when it is not in power. That much is obvious. It can appeal to its historic track-record, if it has previously been in office, but that tends to be a double-edged sword. Beyond mere quibbling, it must either relentlessly criticise the government's handling of affairs as evidence of a comprehensive failing or try to decisively shift the debate to novel territory where the government cannot easily follow. In other words, it must rely on the relative incompetence of the government (e.g the Tories return to the gold standard in 1925 or Black Wednesday in 1992, both of which presaged Labour administrations), or it must advance a relatively unorthodox position that chimes with an approaching inflexion point in public sentiment. The Tories managed to do the second in 1979, by tapping into a widespread belief that the postwar settlement had run out of road, and repeated the trick to an extent in 2010 when they leveraged a global discourse on debt sustainability (which turned out to have been based on motivated reasoning and a spreadsheet error) to impose austerity. The common feature is that on both occasions the Conservative Party positioned itself at the head of a generational shift, leaving Jim Callaghan and Gordon Brown looking like yesterday's men.

You could argue that the Tories' gradual embrace of a hard Brexit after 2016 was of that ilk, but I think that was more a case of simple opportunism: riding the tiger rather than harnessing a fresh horse. They didn't lead the country, hence Theresa May's relative failure in 2017 and the eventual success of the most opportunistic senior Tory in 2019. This was quite different to Margaret Thatcher's period as opposition leader. What mattered between 1975 and 1979 was the Conservative Party's championing of an intellectual insurgency on economics whose foundations dated to the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947. In a more compressed timeframe, Cameron and Osborne led an insurgency between late-2008 and early-2010 (though one whose intellectual roots went back to the Treasury View of the 1920s). It may have been absurd ("expansionary fiscal contraction"), but it caught the mood. Both 1979 and 2010 were attacks on Keynesianism, but the first relied on a caricature (the inevitability of stagflation), ignoring the systemic issues evident in capitalism's latest reformation (falling profit rates, the reliance on fossil fuels, emergent globalisation), while the second invented a Keynesian orthodoxy (that borrowing in excesss of 90% of GDP would be destructive if monetary policy levers were unavailable due to near-zero interest rates) as a strawman. Despite those fictions, they were genuine insurgencies that caught the popular appetite for decisive change.

What both of these occasions highlighted was the importance of supportive media. Not just in the sense of providing a welcome for congenial ideas but in conveniently reimagining history to suit the new narrative. Consider the ubiquity of Milton Friedman and the usefulness of Kenneth Rogoff respectively (and incidentally the media occlusion of Anna J Schwartz and Carmen Reinhart's contributions to A Monetary History of the United States and Growth in a Time of Debt). Thus the focus in 1979 was on the apparently unconnected symptoms of union militancy and inflation, rather than the squeeze on profits or the implications of the oil crisis, while the discourse in 2009 quickly shifted away from the sins of the financial sector to the burden of bank bailouts on government debt. It's a commonplace to note that the BBC takes its agenda from the press, but this observation is often used to suggest that it does so out of fear: that a more independent line would bring down the wrath of Rupert Murdoch and jeopardise the licence fee. In fact, the BBC does this of its own volition because it shares the same centre-right worldview. This much is obvious from its coverage in the 1970s, at a time when Murdoch was still relatively weak and the Corporation dominated broadcast news.

The notable exception to this pattern was 1945, when Labour enjoyed a degree of support for its radical proposals among the more liberal elements of the press, which helped to neutralise many of the Conservative attacks. This was in no small measure because the Labour narrative of recent history - that there should be no going back to the failed policies of the 1930s and that a comprehensive welfare state was feasible - had been vindicated in wartime. The Conservatives' error was in failing to seize the enthusiasm of the moment and promise a more radical departure from its own orthodoxy, largely because Churchill, a reforming liberal in his youth, was now simply too set in his ways and distracted by nostalgic dreams of global leadership and the maintenance of the British empire. In the event, the Conservatives were able to recover and resume office six years later because they managed to mop-up a decisive number of centrist voters for whom the 1930s hadn't been that bad and who were prepared to give the Tories the benefit of the doubt in other respects (the Liberals lost almost 2 million votes between 1950 and 1951 as they failed to stand in most seats in the second election due to a lack of funds).

There's an obvious parallel here with the Covid-19 "war", as the Tories offer superficial radicalism in combination with the normalisation of future austerity, while Labour is constrained by its conservativism and adherence to a Keynesian orthodoxy once more being framed in much of the press as inappropriate to the moment. This isn't simply a lack of imagination or Fabian caution (though that is part of the mix). Without the sustained support of the media (or at least a larger portion than half of the Guardian's opinion pages and the occasional Kirsty Wark encomium on Newsnight) it cannot easily sell a break with the immediate past as the new common sense, as Thatcher and Cameron did. To make matters worse, the "ideas that are lying around" (as Milton Friedman put it in 1982), such as the Green New Deal and a national investment bank, are tainted by association with Corbynism. Consequently, it is disciplined into promoting fiscal orthodoxy (though it's worth reminding ourselves that the 2019 manifesto was also perfectly conventional). From the perspective of Annelise Dodds, simply getting the Keynesian idea that we should avoid tax rises during a recession onto the media agenda has been an achievement. 

The commentariat has a tendency to talk-up the potential of third parties to "break the mould" of politics, but in reality these occasional campaigns simply reflect the strength of the centre-right orthodoxy among British newspapers and TV channels. In practice, whatever the originators' intents, these folies des grandeur are invariably repurposed by the media into a means of disciplining the main parties. Consequently, novel policy offerings tend to be marginalised while criticisms of the established parties are foregrounded. Who today remembers that the SDP advocated an integrated benefits system (i.e. what would become known as Universal Credit), or that UKIP wanted constituencies to have the power to sack MPs? In the most recent example, the party finally known as The Independent Group for Change, there was never any serious attempt to suggest that it was motivated by a coherent (let alone novel) worldview beyond a hatred of Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn. Genuine political insurgencies are rare. Not only must an established party have the conviction that a sea-change is underway, it must have the confidence that this can be tied to a narrative in which its own historical blemishes are pushed to the background while the government's incapacity to respond is brought centre-stage. Labour clearly lacks that confidence today.

That the party has been wrongfooted by the Tories' emblematic focus on Corporation Tax shows that the debate has already moved on from whether we should fund a stimulus to who should pay for it. This is partly due to a change in the global discourse. The IMF and others are now sanguine about debt in the short-term and the longer-term expectation is that it should be paid down by a mixture of growth and tax rises rather than further spending cuts (though this week has confirmed that the Tories will still cut). But it also reflects the success of Labour after 2015 in reframing the domestic debate towards the reduction of inequality and the progressive role of the state in the direction of the economy. Conservative proposals for levelling-up, recovery bonds and free-ports are all indicative of this. The idea that opposing a Corporation Tax increase now gains Labour credibility with business, or will insulate the party from the usual charge of fiscal debauchery in 2024, is naive. Once the pandemic is over, the priority for most firms will be to restore lost turnover rather than shield profits, while the Tories aren't about to lose their undeserved reputation for executive competence by the time of the next election. For all too many of their supporters, austerity was a success: it maintained asset prices and punished the poor.

The significance of Corporation Tax is that Labour is shying away from the opportunity to reframe the economic debate, specifically the need to move the tax burden from labour income to capital income and accumulated wealth. This need is widely recognised, even among many conservatives, and reflects a generational shift that was already underway before the 2008 crash and the salience given to inequality by Piketty et al. This was stillborn in 2010, largely because the political right were able to divert popular sentiment into an obsession with government debt, but partly because the political left had become so compromised under neoliberalism that they couldn't envisage themselves leading a popular insurgency as opposed to continuing with the top-down technocracy to which they had become accustomed. So what we got was Gordon Brown "saving the world" for asset-holders and PASOKification. Inevitably, as nature abhors a vacuum, we then saw the steady rise of political populism. But the moment hasn't passed because the underlying contradictions haven't been resolved. Inequality has worsened over the last decade and the public fabric is increasingly threadbare.

In other words, there is still the potential for a once in a generation political insurgency. So why is Labour - like most other centre-left parties worldwide, it should be said - reluctant to put itself at the head of one? Debilitating technocracy and the alienation of the left's organic roots in society provide a common explanation across the globe, but is this enough to explain Labour's particular predicament in the UK? The chief reason for the party's slowing deflating poll numbers is clearly the combination of its self-denying ordinance on criticising the government's handling of the pandemic (and the consequences of Brexit) and the caution of its vision. This in turn suggests that "not Corbyn" is also steadily losing its power, despite the continuing insistence of many in the media that this remains the only card Labour needs to play. It's not that it lacks detailed policy prescriptions, as is often claimed (it's actually published more than it's given credit for), or that it lacks an all-encompassing narrative (the claim that the Tories will return to austerity fits that bill and is demonstrably correct). The problem is that it isn't offering a clear departure from the past, hence the loud noise of Blairites jockeying for influence. 

I think this is partly a reflection of Keir Starmer's self-image as a pillar of the establishment and his preference for Labour to be a bureaucratic cartel party that eschews activism, but I also think it reveals a learned helplessness in respect of the media that increasingly expresses itself in a startling defeatism. Having spent so long undermining the party (not just under Corbyn but under Miliband too), the PLP and their media mates have apparently internalised the idea that not only is a Labour-led political insurgency impossible but that the party's prime directive is the maintenance of order in the face of a variety of populist "threats". This isn't entirely a departure from Labour's history as the parliamentary block on democratic socialism, but it does suggest that its anti-leftism has been expanded to the point where any disruptive political development is to be resisted. In that sense, the farce of Change UK's policy void becomes more explicable: you can perform insurgency so long as you do not offer anything beyond a return to yesterday's certainties. This leaves the field clear for the Conservatives, who clearly learnt the lesson of 1945, to once more become the insurgents of British politics, successfully running against themselves for years to come.