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.