Impunity Redux

It might seem paradoxical, but the vulnerability of MPs highlighted by the murder of David Amess has quickly led to a resurgence in their collective sense of impunity; something that also extends to their co-workers in the media. This has been exhibited not only in the illogical claim that a suitable response to the killing is to abolish social media anonymity, despite this having no bearing on the circumstances of the crime, but also in the bizarre suggestion that online sites like TheyWorkForYou should stop interpreting individual MPs' voting records as this simply provides the public with a stick with which to beat members of Parliament online. Inevitably there have been some, such as Margaret Hodge, who have engaged in an unseemly competition to claim that they have received the most abuse (implying that antisemitism is a greater problem than anti-black racism or Islamophobia), while others, such as Mark Francois, have sought to obscure their own murky history of abuse and invective. All are united in pretending that the smears, lies and insults of the last 6 years, predominantly but not only around Brexit and Corbyn, do not disbar centrist and right-wing politicians and journalists from claiming the moral high ground.

The last decade saw a growing dissatisfaction with MPs and journalists, from the no-winner result of the 2010 general election to the anti-establishment upsurge of 2017. While many in the press were keen to blame social media for this, as if the technology were creating anger and disrespect rather than simply providing a medium for its expression, it's clear that the roots of the turn in public sentiment lie in the preceding decade, before social media took off, notably in the response to the Iraq War and the financial crisis. The 2009 expenses scandal, which provided the tinder for the first wave of public anger with the political class en bloc, as opposed to the more focused protests of 2003 and 2008, was happily fanned by the press and TV, employing rhetorical charges, such as hypocrisy and self-interest, that they would later find offensive when deployed by civilians against them. Ten years later, the 2019 general election suggested a return to normality in the form of a decisive Conservative win on an explicit platform of action, but it is clear that the vote was largely a reiteration of the 2016 instruction, and thus a continuation of the anti-establishment animus, rather than a renewed sense of faith in the integrity of the political class. That such an obviously corrupt individual as Boris Johnson should be the prime beneficiary simply reinforced this.

The Leveson inquiry of 2011-12 was the moment when the politicians and journalists closed ranks, as they suddenly appreciated that the foundations of the politico-media system were under threat. It is illuminating to compare the press outrage at the expenses scandal, which involved trivial sums, with the much more muted reaction to multi-million pound government contracts awarded to under-qualified friends and party donors over the last two years. This wasn't simply an example of the tendency to be more appalled by minor breaches of etiquette than systematic abuses: the small lie versus the big lie or the singular human tragedy versus the statistic of mass murder. World War One generated an outpouring of contempt and loathing for the political class, which lived on rancorously through the 1920s and 30s, in the face of massive losses of life and wartime profiteering. At a time when we have experienced something north of 100,000 unnecessary deaths due to the government's handling of the pandemic and wasted billions of pounds shovelling money to favoured para-state enterprises like Deloitte and Serco, the media interrogation of the Johnson administration has been noticeably tame.

Even more glaring is the mountain of evidence that the current incumbent of Number 10 has routinely treated public money as his own and otherwise relied on funding by Russian oligarchs and other dubious sources. There has been a straight line from the near-death experience of the Leveson inquiry to the recent scenes at the Conservative Party conference of senior BBC staff partying with cabinet ministers who are on record as wanting to "sort out" the corporation. Whatever their tactical differences and contrasting imperatives, they share a strategic purpose: to maintain the politico-media class's monopoly on the interpretation of politics. In this light, the sympathetic coverage of the proposal to reduce visibility over MPs expenses on the spurious grounds that it will improve their safety from attack is illustrative. Equally illustrative is that the politico-media class so quickly moved to leverage the murder of David Amess into a demand that social media be restrained and made more respectable. 

What this shows is that the field of contest in the management of public political discourse has shifted from the traditional media to new media. The old debates about bias and lies, which were current up to and including the 2019 general election, have been replaced by establishment outrage over those parts of the electorate that refuse to be mediated. Phone-hacking, which should always be understood as a manifestation of contempt, has been consigned to the history books. While the new concerns are often framed in terms of the nefarious doings of companies such as Facebook, supposedly encouraging bad online behaviour for the clicks, this is largely to satisfy liberal media outlets that would otherwise be uncomfortable adopting such an obviously pro-establishment and anti-democratic stance. For the rightwing media, this is less of an issue, hence the greater emphasis on public impertinence and challenges to orthodoxy. Much of what we refer to under the rubric of the "culture wars" is really just conservatives revelling in their impunity once more. 

The removal of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party and his replacement by Keir Starmer, a man now clearly dedicated to restoring the pre-2010 status quo, has been central to this development. With no electoral threat from the left, and the possibility of the left's future revival within Labour now receding by the day (one expulsion and rigged candidate selection at a time), the only challenge to the continued dominance of the politico-media cartel comes from civilians on social media. While the far-right is often fingered in respect of racist posts, it is clear that the main target for the ire of politicians and journalists is the left, which is broadly defined as anyone that Starmer would be happy to expel and all points beyond. This has even extended to self-policing by the press, hence the never-ending campaign to deligitimise left media, which now includes trying to blackball anyone in the mainstream media, likes Owen Jones, who appears left-adjacent. On the political front, it has led not only to the suspension of Corbyn but to the almost complete marginalisation of the parliamentary left.

This revived sense of impunity has shaped government policy since the 2019 general election in the most disastrous way, but without exacting a political cost. With the Conservative Party's standing in the polls unaffected by recently announced benefits cuts and tax rises, and with the Labour leadership offering only token resistance as it focuses on purging the party, the Johnson administration has now doubled-down on its laissez-faire approach to public health. The recent Commons report on the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic is a litany of failure, much of which can be directly ascribed to a  dominant attitude of "fatalism" (a polite way of describing contempt). With cases rising and too many people blithely assuming the pandemic is over we are facing the prospect of another grim winter under a government that will delay action as long as possible simply because it knows it can get away with it. Fussy questions will be asked in Parliament and the press will dutifully balance concerns against liberties, but the government will not be held to account. Instead, the people will be blamed for their lack of discipline, their vulgarity and above all their impertinence.

The Political Centre

If the meta-narrative of American politics since the millennium has been polarisation, the equivalent in Europe has been the dissolution or recomposition of the traditional parties of the centre. First those of the centre-left, the process known as Pasokification, and more recently those of the centre-right, notably in France and now Germany. This had led to much debate about where the political centre now lies, and even whether the centre can be located any more on a left-right economic spectrum or whether it is more determined by the orthogonal axis of cultural values. Is the "median voter", the traditional embodiment of the political centre, now a two-dimensional hybrid? In the UK, this has been interpreted to mean that Labour should compete with, and even outflank, the Conservatives on the axis of cultural values, from welfare authoritarianism through patriotism to the resistance of identity politics. But what does it mean in a country like Germany where the centre-right CDU/CSU was defeated in the recent federal elections and the centre-left, in the form of the SPD's Olaf Scholz, is likely to secure the chancellorship following Angela Merkel's retirement?

Georg Diesz in the New Statesman fears that "German conservatism is imploding". This is a rather incoherent argument that first accuses the centre-right of differentiating itself by indulging in a form of identity politics (a leitkultur, or guiding culture, based on Western, Christian norms) after the SPD embraced neoliberalism in the 1990s but then insists that its subsequent "disconnect from economics" led to a policy of "permanent austerity, via Germany’s balanced budget amendment, the much vaunted Schuldenbremse [debt brake]; and “the market”, in its most reductive and generic form", which sounds remarkably like a party very much wedded to Ordoliberal orthodoxy and a focus on economics. He also claims that Germany's handling of the Euro crisis of 2009-12 was "suffused with a moralism" arising from this identity turn - the jibes about feckless Greeks versus thrifty Germans - even though its policies were clearly driven by a hardnosed desire to protect German banks exposed by negligent loans to the European periphery. 

Even more odd, though perhaps easy to miss among the other bizarre claims, is the suggestion that  "Historically, German conservatism styled itself as a balancing force between the interests of capital and labour". The implication is that it habitually occupied the political centre, resisting both the revolutionary left and the irresponsible right. This is obviously not true. Not only has German conservatism been staunchly pro-capital and anti-labour throughout its history, but it famously responded to the leftward shift in public sentiment in the Weimar years by allying with the far right. That might have been a calamitous miscalculation on the part of German conservatives, but it arose from a fear of organised labour and the left in general and not, as some revisionists have claimed, the Communist Party alone. But Diesz's idea of a pivot between the interests of capital and labour is still a useful way of thinking about politics, both in terms of where public sentiment lies (what we might term the popular locus, if the median voter is too one-dimensional) and the politico-media representation of the political centre (what is commonly understood by "centrism"). It's particularly useful to look at the gap between the two.

On Twitter, the New Statesman's George Eaton heralded Diesz's article with "The centre right is out of power in the US, France, Italy, Canada, New Zealand, every Nordic country and, likely soon, Germany". For this to make sense, we have to categorise Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Mario Draghi as centre-left, purely on the grounds that they are not representatives of the traditional parties of the right. But none could be said to even-handed between capital and labour, despite Biden's sentimentality about unions. That Keir Starmer could recently praise business while resisting a £15 minimum wage suggests that the centre-left prefers capital over labour. That this preference should be seen as "centrist" is a perfect illustration of the shift that has occured over the last 40 years. Compare and contrast to the Liberal-SDP manifesto of 1983, which advocated industrial democracy and rejected privatisation of natural monopolies (this was classic triangulation, but it also reflected the status quo bias of centrism). What is notable is that while the political centre has moved right on the economic spectrum, the popular locus has remained pretty much where it was, hence the median voter's support today for higher taxes on wealth, rail nationalisation and a higher minimum wage.

This shift in the political centre has led to the past being recast as more radical than it really was, often to the detriment of the present. Thus Biden's stimulus must live in the shadow of the New Deal and Olaf Scholz's "continuity" will no doubt appear uninspiring compared to Willy Brandt's departure from the CDU's postwar conservatism. But this relativism can be misleading. For example, Roosevelt was never in any doubt that he was saving capitalism from the threat of socialism. His economic intervention might appear bold today, but it was common currency at the time. Similarly, Brandt rode the wave of cultural liberalism in the late-60s after the SPD had dropped its traditional social democracy for the social market in the 1959 Godesberg Program. Though there would remain local differences between their various policy platforms, most European social democratic parties shifted towards a social market model in the late-50s and early-60s. (Only the French socialists held to the principles of common ownership and workers' control, but that reflected their junior position on the left relative to the communists in the 60s and would eventually be abandoned under Mitterand in the 80s.) However, this didn't shift the centre of politics to the right so much as normalise a more profound leftward shift on social reform by neutralising economic issues. 

With nationalisation now a pragmatic tactic rather than principled strategy, and with a general acceptance of higher taxation in return for more extensive and generous welfare, the 1960s were marked by progressive social policies and the early stages of European economic integration. This trade-off was probably always going to lead to a political crisis. At some point capital was bound to resent the higher labour costs and taxation of wealth that the trade-off entailed. Equally, as social reforms highlighted inequities of power, organised labour was likely to return to the issues of workplace democracy and autonomism. The economic crises of the 1970s - the two oil shocks, stagflation and the crisis of profitability as globalisation accelerated - were exogenous events, but they arguably amplified an endogenous tension that could be traced to that historic accommodation by social democracy. As a result of these crises and the slowing of social democracy's progressive impetus, the late-70s and early-80s saw both the popular locus and the political centre shift to the right in the UK and US, a process that would later be echoed elsewhere. This was reflected not only in the clear imbalance between capital and labour expressed in falling union membership, but also in a new social authoritarianism (emblematically, the advance of the religious right in the US and the vogue for "Victorian values" in the UK). 

By the late-80s, centre-left parties across Europe were increasingly siding with capital (and the EU), self-consciously defining this as a centrist "third way" or painting neoliberalism as a progressive acceleration for hitherto under-developed societies, as in Spain and Greece. What should be noted here is that the hegemony of neoliberalism in Europe was very much a product of the centre-left, not the centre-right. While the CDU's Ordoliberalism might have looked like neoliberalism avant la lettre, it was never dominant on the continent, having too many features specific to German politics and history (notably the fear of state capture). The revival of the centre-left's electoral fortunes in the 90s reflected a leftward shift in the popular locus, reacting against the 80s' authoritarianism, but this didn't produce a corresponding shift in the political centre. In many countries, the failure of this counter-movement to occur at the political level contributed to growing electoral disillusion after the millennium, emphasising the widening gap between the locus and the politico-media representation of the political centre (a gap that subsequently helped fuel the rise of social media). While there were renewed gestures towards progressive social reform, policies like Workfare and Working Tax Credits indicated the continuing privileging of capital over labour.

The formal political centre remained static for most of the period of the "great moderation" between the mid-80s and 2007. The differences between centre-left and centre-right were largely tonal, but in many areas there was notable unanimity, such as attitudes towards the finance sector, the privatisation of public services and foreign policy. The 2008 banking crisis and the subsequent Euro debt crisis changed this. Not only was there an upsurge of populist energy but the popular locus took a further step to the left, reflected in the revived interest (however shallow) in Marxism and support not only for traditional socialist policies but more novel ideas such as UBI. This wasn't a passing fad and in many ways it didn't begin to affect the political superstructure for some years. When it came, the adjustment saw many centre-left parties either collapse (typically where proportional representation meant there was already a range of left alternatives) or shift decisively leftwards, as in the case of the Labour Party. But just as fragmentation on the left in countries such as France hindered the realignment of the political centre to reflect the popular locus, so in the UK the resistance of the politico-media class proved enough to stymie the shift at the parliamentary level. 

The idea that the centre-right faces an existential crisis in Germany and that the centre-left has consequently revived is misleading. The SPD has been a junior coalition partner with the CDU/CSU since 2013 (Olaf Scholz is the current Vice Chancellor and Minister of Finance - the epitome of a safe pair of establishment hands). The likely new coalition will see the SPD combine with the Greens, who are distinctly non-radical these days, and the FDP, who remain radical free marketers. In terms of the political centre, it would probably be fair to say it has barely moved and the CDU's collapse owes as much to institutional exhaustion (its new leader, Armin Laschet, proved uninspiring) and regret at Merkel's departure as it does to any shift in the popular locus. Where the centre-left is in power in Europe, for example the PSOE in Spain, this is typically on the basis of a 30% share of the popular vote and the support of the left. It's worth noting at this point that the SPD won 26% of the popular vote in the recent Bundestag election, and will likely lead the next coalition government (excluding Die Linke), while Labour won 32% in the 2019 UK general election, which was widely greeted as a disaster by the soi-disant centre and centre-left.

The next significant European poll is the French Presidential election in April 2022. According to the Guardian, Emmanuel Macron is once more pitching for the centre: "He sought to reconnect with his promise in the previous election to build a 'start-up nation' – deliberately focusing on his favoured topic of the economy in an attempt to contrast with the right and far-right, who are concerned with identity and immigration, while the left is focusing on working hours and salary increases". This highlights how the "culture wars" have allowed the media to redefine the political centre as straightforwardly pro-capital, while the interests of labour have been placed firmly on the left. In 2017, Macron positioned himself as slightly left of centre, capitalising on the collapse of the Parti Socialiste to win 24% of the first round vote and 66% in the second round. His chief opponents were the Front National and Les Republicains, whose candidates polled 21% and 20% respectively in the first round. He won the second round with the votes of not only the grudging left but much of the centre-right. Since then, he has been a consistent champion of business interests. Macron is the centre-right and he needs a far-right candidate, whether Le Pen or possibly Zemmour, to secure the once-more grudging support of voters to his left, in the same way Chirac did in 2002.

In the UK, the politico-media class currently inclines to the view that Boris Johnson, a man not hitherto known for his love of theory or constancy of purpose, is redefining conservatism and thereby dominating the political centre. Though his actions to date, from welfare cuts to the "war on woke", suggest Thatcherite continuity rather than the revival of One Nation Toryism, there is a belief that "levelling up" and the talk of a high-wage economy (despite understandable scepticism) is a move towards the popular locus. This appears to fill the centre-left with something approaching dread, despite their notional support for precisely those outcomes. For pundits like Jonathan Freedland, it is easier to focus on Labour's supposed loss of the working class as it became "increasingly dominated by the concerns of the “hyper-educated” left, concerns not shared by the wider public". Johnson's success can then be painted as the result of Labour's flight from the political centre: "That leaves space for parties of the right to offer themselves as the voice of the mainstream – in tune with the less educated, lower-income voters that used to be beyond their reach". The idea that the 2017 vote was as much an indicator of the popular locus as 2019 will not be entertained.

Following the election of Keir Starmer as Labour leader, all of the political forces are in favour of the status quo, so it strikes me as unlikely that Johnson is going to single-handedly carry through a revolution. He doesn't need to. Labour's attempt to occupy a political centre significantly to the right of the popular locus means that he can adopt a holding pattern for some years to come. Eventually, the gap between his rhetoric and reality will lead to popular disillusion, just as it did after 2000. That New Labour managed to win two subsequent general elections amid dwindling turnout was due to the Conservative Party resolutely remaining not just far beyond the popular locus but beyond even the political centre (the "nasty party" years). The reason Johnson is odds-on to win the next general election is that Labour remains focused on the media-determined political centre, with all its pro-capital assumptions, and interprets the popular locus as an appetite for more social authoritarianism rather than more socialism. In both the economic and values dimension it is trying to position itself on territory occupied by the Conservative Party. It is a strategy that will lead to electoral defeat, but importantly it will preserve the political centre and all the careers invested in it.

The Violence of the State

The fundamental problem with the police force is that it employs the wrong people. I don't mean that it attracts "wrong uns" and is poor at weeding them out. Rather I mean that there is a fundamental difference between the expectations of the majority of the population and the attitude of the state, which for argument's sake we can summarise as "policing by consent" versus "everyone is a suspect". The former is grounded in the assumption of mutual respect, while the latter is clearly asymmetrical. This is evident not just in the police service's institutional prejudice and abuse of power against the working class, ethnic minorities and activists, but in its routine dismissal of the population at large. It may be expressed politely if you're middle-class, but a refusal to investigate a burglary or bike theft on the grounds that they "don't have the resources" is still institutional contempt. In this context, the Prime Minister's rejection of calls for misogyny to be considered a hate crime isn't really a desire to avoid stretching resources but a refusal to accept that crime should be determined by public opinion, whether in respect of violence against women or industrial-scale tax dodging. 

This contempt is not just directed outwards, it also festers internally, hence the racism, sexism and homophobia reported by many who have ended up leaving the police service in frustration. One characteristic of the force is a suspicion of theory, which despite attempts to recruit more graduates remains pronounced. This is not just a conservative favouring of "common sense" or a pragmatic preference for the tried and tested. It reflects a fundamental rejection of epistemology: the idea that the police are in the knowledge business. The fictional image of policing, where a sympathetic detective doggedly sets out to discover the author of a crime, is obviously unrealistic, but it can be read as a popular desire for a style of policing concerned with truth as the prerequisite of justice. The reality is that the police often go out of their way to maintain their ignorance ("In my experience, too many police officers and staff lack investigative professional curiosity", according to one ex-officer). This is often assumed to be motivated by corruption, but that assumption (while not without grounds in some cases) reflects a public bafflement at the idea that the police might not be interested in the truth.

The tension between the ideal of policing and its reality can best be seen in the use of data. Despite decades of investment in IT systems, CCTV and the promotion of "intelligence-led" methods, the effectiveness of the police has not noticeably improved, measured either in raw crime numbers or rates of conviction. This isn't because criminals are cleverer, and nor is it proof that the value of data has been over-sold (see the many breakthroughs due to DNA testing). It is partly explained by incompetence (note the many lost records and compromised evidence in high-profile cases), and partly by systems being undermined in the field (note the racial profiling of stop-and-search), but more fundamentally it suggests that the effectiveness of the police is not highly-correlated with resources and thus the acquisition of data. Overall levels of crime tend to correlate with socio-economic factors, such as poverty and unemployment or the state of the drug market, while fluctuations between different crimes tend to reflect changes in material circumstances and technology.

This combination of a generalised contempt for "civilians" and an anti-intellectualism that verges on the celebration of ignorance isn't particular to any one country or indeed to the police. It is the culture of the state. It is perhaps most pronounced in the police, but it isn't limited to them, and one of the reasons why successive inquiries and reforms have made little progress is precisely because the remit stops at the boundary of the service. To blame the failings of the police on rotten apples is obviously a deflection, but it would also be naive to imagine that the systemic problem is limited to the barrel. "A drastic change that rethinks policing, so as to make it less open to abuses of power but also more effective" sounds radical, but it still assumes the problem is limited to a sub-system of the state and that it can be dealt with in isolation. Even the demand to defund the police suffers from this limiting focus. Diverting funds away from the police to mental health support might well help reduce crime, but mental health has its own problems of institutional neglect and the abuse of power. Perhaps we need to be more ambitious and talk about the failings of the state.

Did the Windrush scandal show that the police were racist? No, it showed that the Home Office was racist. Did the Grenfell tragedy show that the police treated social housing tenants with contempt? No, it showed that the local council did. Did the Hillsborough tragedy show that the police regarded football fans as animals? Yes, but it also showed that the government of the day considered the reputation of the police to be more important than 94 (later 97) deaths. Another "independent review" of the Met's culture and standards, led by a seasoned state apparatchik, won't tell us much that we didn't already know. It is unlikely to inquire too deeply into the intersection of the political and psychosexual that came to tragic prominence in the case of Sarah Everard and in the Met's handling of the subsequent protests, despite the wealth of theory on precisely this dimension and how it can mutate into Fascism (e.g. Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies). The distinguishing feature of this culture is not its attraction to pyschopaths and petty tyrants, or its reliance on bigotry as a form of in-group bonding, but its protection and indulgence by the state. A state-led inquiry isn't going to highlight that.

The derisory response of the Met to the conclusion of the Everard case produced an immediate vote of confidence by both the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London in the Commissioner, Cressida Dick. This is consistent. That the Met is institutionally racist was officially established decades ago. Its homophobia and generalised contempt for the working class has never been formally identified, but there is little doubt that it exists. A futher inquiry to establish its institutional misogyny may satisfy some liberal commentators but it won't lead to a change in attitudes, any more than the Macpherson Report in 1999 removed all traces of racist thinking. This is because the police cannot be reformed independently of the state. Though the force is the most overt manifestation of the state's violence, it is merely the tip of the iceberg. The problem then is the violence of the state. It is this that elevates some of the worst people in society to positions of petty tyranny, and corrupts or intimidates others to the point where they acquiesce in the culture of contempt. So what can be done? 

The first thing we have to recognise is that it is an epistemological problem, in the sense of an institutional commitment to social ignorance, rather than a management failing that can be addressed by technocratic means. That might appear an odd claim given the history of the state: the ever-growing appetite for social data, the increased use of biopolitical techniques, the disciplinary demand for greater surveillance. But that secular trend has been an anti-humanist one of abstraction. Indeed, the state's violence can be seen as a resentful refusal to engage with the human as the technical ability to do so has increased. Again, this operates at two levels. For example, ignorance is displayed in both the police's external dealings with the public and in its internal lack of self-reflection (giving someone the nickname "the rapist" should have been pause for thought). The former can be addressed by diversifying hiring, so there are more officers with an understanding of and sympathy towards social diversity, but this is ultimately insufficient if the latter, the canteen culture, remains dominated by the social elitism of those who consider themselves the true nation - i.e. cis, white, male officers. There are two ways in which we can counter this. 

The first is a radical commitment to democracy. In other words, at every opportunity we need to expand the oversight of the public over the state and devolve it to the lowest practicable level. For example, instead of elected Police Commissioners covering huge areas of the country we need accountability at the level of the police station. An insensitive, failed politician seeking a sinecure is no substitute for open engagement with the local community. The second is for the state to become more consciously "woke". That's a provocative way of putting it, but we shouldn't shy away from admitting that "anti-wokeism" is a performative denial of respect and therefore central to the culture of contempt. The problem is that we have a political establishment that dislikes democracy and remains determined to defend established hierarchies and privileges. At present, the two main parties are operating like a tag-team, with Labour looking to stamp out participative democracy and the Tories seeking to reinforce the state through illiberal laws that curtail protest and the public's ability to seek redress against abuses. 

In respect of the police, both are determined to give the force more power and resources while the media remain obsessed with crackdowns on dissent and migrants. So long as that remains the case, the reform of the police will be superficial at best and any attempt to moderate its culture of violence will be undermined by moral panics about threats to the social order. The media will never lose its prurient interest in crime, nor its structural bias to exaggerate its prevalence, so the focus of attention has to be on the politicians, while acknowledging that many are negatively influenced by the media, particularly newspapers. It may appear a bit of a stretch, but one thing that might help prevent another Sarah Everard tragedy would be for some rightwing Labour MPs to be deselected for their bigotry. We need to reform the state before we can properly reform the police, and that inescapably means reforming the Labour Party. Despite advocating increased police numbers, Jeremy Corbyn was seen as a threat precisely because he wasn't prepared to unequivocally endorse the violence of the state. That the party is now led by a former Director of Public Prosecutions isn't a coincidence.

The Road Not Taken

Keir Starmer's recently published pamphlet, The Road Ahead, is notable chiefly for its lack of novelty. There is no new vision here, not even a new frame of reference. It talks of a society that rewards "hard work" and in which the private sector is the engine of progress. It harks back to postwar social mobility and promises to revive the meritocracy from which he himself benefited. It is actually the road already taken, given that absent the genuflections to Blue Labour it is essentially the blueprint outlined by New Labour in the mid-90s: the state's role in promoting and guaranteeing markets, moulding a modern workforce through education and welfare incentives, and disciplining the antisocial and refractory. This is summarised in the pamphlet's foreword in the now somewhat stale language of neoliberal futurism: "It is a future where a modern, efficient government works in partnership with a brilliant, innovative private sector to create good jobs and harness the potential of technology. One where workers can expect more flexibility and fair pay for a fair day’s work. One where we update our public services, education and health for the challenges and opportunities of the future". 

Though the road metaphor is defined as a binary choice between the route he outlines and the Tory alternative, he repeatedly uses the term "crossroads" (five times) rather than "fork" (only once), implying a ghostly road not taken as well. That is presumably the left turn, which now has a big no left turn sign beside it and a no entry sign for good measure. To labour the metaphor, Starmer is proposing that we go straight ahead - the centrist choice - rather than turn right, but the possibility of the "less travelled" road, that might in Robert Frost's words "make all the difference", still haunts his thoughts. This may explain both his determination to continue to withhold the whip from Jeremy Corbyn and to disempower the membership, not only by changing the leadership election rules and making MP deselection more difficult but in explicitly reducing the role of the party conference in determining policy. Presenting the electorate with a clear and consequential choice is what you do at election time, but building your political philosophy on the idea of choice itself, when there are few substantive policy differences between you and your opponent, looks like a concern over which end of a boiled egg you should crack open.

The attempts to place Starmer politically within the spectrum of the Labour Party have always struck me as futile. He has at various times been labelled soft left, centrist and even Fabian. He has employed Blairite rhetoric and Blue Labour themes, but also the tropes of the old Atlanticist right, though without showing much enthusiasm for any of them. I suspect this is less a reflection of his undemonstrative style and more a clue to his worldview. Fundamentally he is a member of the establishment, which means his politics are conservative, his ideological instincts are anti-democratic, and his approach is that traditional mixture of fussy managerialism and anti-intellectualism that characterises the British state. He may well have started out as a trendy lefty and "activist lawyer", but his steady march to the right is hardly unusual for someone formed in the 1980s. He is also much more dangerous than either his opponents or supporters give him credit for. It is clear that he has no sentimental attachment to Labour, despite the dutiful respect paid to 1945 and all that. With his hostility to the idea of a mass movement and preference for the cartel party model, Labour may be heading towards an existential crisis greater than either 1931 or 1983.

Starmer's retelling of Labour history emphasises building and modernisation ("Labour in government has always been about rebuilding and reconstruction") over personal empowerment and social reform. It is a statist, managerialist perspective couched in the language of venture capital: "There are vast resources of untapped potential in our people, our businesses, our towns and our cities". As in modern management theory, the emphasis on assets and potential sits alongside a eulogisation of teamwork and shared goals. But just as the concept of the team obscures the inequality of effort and reward in the workplace, so Starmer emphasises contribution over autonomy: "a society based on contribution: being part of something bigger, playing your part, valuing others not just because of what they can offer you". Where Blair's rights and responsibilities mantra could be reconciled with the neoliberal idealisation of the individual, Starmer's interpretation is closer to the labour battalion. Indeed, he talks of individualism "receding in society's rear-view mirror", which seems a bold claim in the face of history.

In practice, this team effort is just the usual alliance of the state and capital: "In order to put contribution and community at the centre of our efforts, we would build an effective partnership of state and private sector to prioritise the things that we have seen really matter: health, living conditions, working conditions and the environment". There are some obvious echoes in "the contribution society" of the older social democratic tradition of the contributory principle and collective endeavour. Where Starmer departs from that tradition is in his recognition that opportunity and security are lacking in contemporary society, which makes the social compact more difficult to realise. Of course, it would be a remarkable omission for any politician after 2008 to pretend that these weren't pressing issues. The problem is that, beyond airy aspiration, Starmer's solution remains the same duopoly of state and capital, but this time with a bit more of a Blue Labourish emphasis on community ("the ties that bind us all together") and patriotism ("Nationalism is about the casting out of the other; patriotism is about finding common ground"). 

There is no lack of ambition in Starmer's rhetoric when he turns to the future ("A nation remade"), but every gesture towards a genuinely new social order is hampered by the insistence on the dominant role of the state and private sector alliance, even when ostensibly advocating subsidiarity: "That means a new settlement between the government, business and working people. It means completely rethinking where power lies in our country – driving it out of the sclerotic and wasteful parts of a centralized system and into the hands of people and communities across the land". The commitment to localism is partly a way of outflanking the demand for greater devolution, just as his version of patriotism is meant to sidestep Scottish nationalism, but putting real power in the hands of the little platoons necessarily means reducing the power of the state and private sector, and there is little evidence that this is what he intends. Nothing in Starmer's history, from his role as Director of Public Prosecutions to his time as Shadow Brexit Secretary suggests that he is sincere in his desire to put power in the hands of the people.

At heart, Starmer's vision is one in which capital is the dominant interest: "Business is a force for good in society, providing jobs, prosperity and wealth. But business has been let down by a Tory government that has failed to plan for the long term and provide the conditions in which long-term decisions can be made. When I speak to business leaders they are deeply frustrated by this". This reads as naive, but whether it reflects a cynical appreciation of the limits of state power or a genuine belief in the sine qua non of business confidence is unclear. While parallels will be drawn between Starmer and previous Labour leaders, what is absent in his formulation is their even-handedness, balancing the interests of business and society. For example, Wilson's "white heat of technology" line was a criticism of both capital and labour: "The Britain that is going to be formed in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for the restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry". Likewise, Peter Mandelson's famous line that came to characterise New Labour is usually truncated: "We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes". 

What is clear is that he intends to use the state's power to its full extent to manage labour in the service of capital, hence the increasingly authoritarian tone of his statements and of official party policy. This was particularly evident in his conference speech on Wednesday with its paeans to the dignity of work and the importance of education in preparing the young for the workplace. While some observers will pick up on the support for more police, or the slightly cringeworthy attempts to celebrate patriotism, the authoritarian instinct is most clearly seen in the idea that a Labour government should above all focus its energies on disciplining the workforce. Combined with the renewed focus on anti-social behaviour (knife-crime, not asset-stripping), this suggests a return to some of the most coercive aspects of New Labour's programme, in which work never quite pays and those who stand beyond the boundary of the hard-working are repeatedly penalised. It's notable that the word "work", in it various permutations, appears 69 times in the speech, more than "Labour", "people" or "government". 

There were two notable motifs in the speech, the tool and the road. The former was used to fetishise the atomised worker, finding dignity not in himself or through solidarity with others but in his loving care of capital. The latter was again employed as a metaphor of choice: "I see a government lost in the woods with two paths beckoning". The wrong path would lead back to where we came from, but the other path "leads to a future in which a smart government enlists the brilliance of scientific invention to create a prosperous economy and a contribution society in which everyone has their role to play." Scientific invention might appear a relatively neutral term, but his references to specific inventions in the speech once more suggest the care of capital. Those of the eighteenth and nineteenth century - the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny and the power loom - not only drove productivity increases and rapid expansion in the textile industry but also suppressed wages. Those of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - the personal computer, the Internet and the iPhone - were central to offshoring and now the gig economy, first driving deindustrialisation and then suppressing wages. If capital is his theme, the corollary is wage-restraint. It's hardly surprising he isn't keen on a £15 national minimum.