On Notice

While Keir Starmer's promise to resign if he is fined by Durham Police may actually be a covert admission that he wants out of the job as Leader of the Labour Party, the media reaction has seen it as either an out-of-character gamble or a cunning ploy that will heap greater pressure on a shameless Prime Minister. Both interpretations focus on personality, which seems to have become the entire domain of British politics in recent months as the Conservatives run out of ideas and Labour seems unable to get beyond defining itself solely in terms of "Not Corbyn". The local election results have likewise been interpreted in these terms: the Conservatives going backwards due to disgust at Boris Johnson's behaviour and Labour struggling to advance in its target Red Wall seats (Scotland and Wales have received less coverage than Northern Ireland). But this imposition of national political narratives on hyper-local contests is unhelpful. For example, Labour's advance in Cumbria, its huge reversal in Tower Hamlets and its long-predicted victories in Wandsworth and Westminster all spring from different sources.

If there are broader lessons to be drawn from the results they amount to little more than the traditional observation that incumbents tend to be vulnerable and that the Liberal Democrats remain a repository for disappointed Conservatives in rural and suburban areas. This hasn't stopped the usual suspects cherry-picking to suit their priors, thus the Blue Labour contingent at The Guardian insist that more must be done to bridge the gap between the graduate elite and the white working class (a term that Julian Coman delicately avoids using by instead regaling us with anecdotes about football fans). Predictably, Labour's victory in Barnet has been cast wholly in terms of moving out of the shadow of you-know-who (the Jewish Chronicle has decided to stop naming him, preferring euphemisms such as "toxic brand"). In contrast, the media coverage of Labour's setback in Croydon, which it won in both 2014 and 2018, has tended to ignore the corruption and incompetence that contributed to it declaring bankruptcy in 2020.

Insofar as last Thursday was a judgment on national politics, the message appears to be one of frustration at the government's failure to address the growing cost-of-living crisis, but equal frustration at Labour's inability to offer more than limited amelioration. That the press has been full of nonsense about cake, beer and curry for weeks isn't simply down to partisan bickering and a preference for the theatre of moral squalor. It reflects a lack of substance in our politics, both in terms of the Tories' legislative programme and Labour's alternative. Today's Queen's Speech was a grab-bag of administrative tinkering, reactionary gestures and empty rhetoric. And while many commentators have strained to cast Labour's policy proposals as progressive and serious, few can remember what they are, beyond a hazy Green New Deal. The terms of debate may well have shifted as a result of the pandemic, making government intervention and spending respectable again, but the reluctance to pursue this vigorously - consider the swift decline of levelling-up and Labour's timidity over tax -  suggests that we remain trapped in the discourse of austerity that emerged after the 2008 banking crisis.

Simon Wren-Lewis made this explicit in a recent blog post entitled, 'How Austerity created Brexit, and the economic and political decline of the UK'. The common thread he espies is a refusal to listen to experts, which is obviously special pleading but does have some plausibility: "In this sense austerity was the first central policy move that ignored the wisdom of experts. Brexit was the second, and government actions throughout the pandemic have been the third. But the links between austerity and Brexit may be rather more causal than that. This is the thesis of an AER paper by Warwick economist Theimo Fetzer ... What Fetzer suggests and shows is that the impact of austerity was strongest on those with few qualifications, and as a result support for UKIP grew. In other words support for UKIP started to grow in areas with significant exposure to specific benefit cuts. It was the threat from UKIP that led Cameron to promise a future referendum. More importantly, as support for UKIP is closely correlated with support for the Leave side in the referendum, then Fetzer uses his estimates of the impact of austerity to suggest Remain would have won in the absence of austerity."

But what is the mechanism here? Why would specific benefit cuts lead to growing support for UKIP and indirectly Brexit, rather than say growing support for Labour? Let us return to Wren-Lewis: "What this does not show is why cuts in welfare and other support led the less skilled to vote for UKIP, rather than some other opposition party. However that gap is not hard to sketch in. First, in many voters’ minds, Labour were at least equally to blame for austerity as the Coalition government, in large part because of the highly successful (and largely uncontested) lie put out by the Coalition government and their press that the Coalition were clearing up the mess that the Labour government had left. Second, the Coalition and its press used immigration as a scapegoat for much of the impact austerity was having, yet the Coalition also failed to bring immigration under control. For many, therefore, UKIP was an obvious choice."

I don't find this entirely convincing, given how much UKIP's support was driven by older voters, many of whom were protected from the worst effects of austerity by the introduction of the pensions triple-lock in 2010. And the "lie" about Labour's responsibility for the crash was effective both because there was an element of truth in it - i.e. the failure to adequately regulate the banks - and because the narrative of public debt being bad was well-established long before 2010. Labour were elected in 1997 on a promise of "prudence" and matching Tory spending limits. However, I think it is more persuasive to argue that a stronger anti-austerity line by Labour in 2015, and perhaps even a challenge to the anti-immigration rhetoric of the time (those infamous mugs), might have prevented an outright Conservative victory and thus the EU referendum (though whether this could be put off indefinitely is another matter). 

Of course this is a counterfactual, so unknowable, but it does highlight an important point which is that the electorate has not been offered a clear choice in a general election this century with the exception of 2017 (and that was more mood than substance). You can argue that 2019 was a clear choice, in terms of manifesto commitments, but the election was obviously decided on the singular arguments of "Get Brexit done" for most voters and "Keep Corbyn out" for those liberals determined to avoid responsibility for the catastrophe of 2016. It is this lack of a clear choice that has marked our politics for decades now. Even the generational change offered in 1997 was more about form than substance, with the famously clear choice of 1983 ("the longest suicide note in history") being held up as a warning for Labour to not diverge too far from the economic and social settlement established by Margaret Thatcher. 

Is it any wonder that politics has descended into a contest over virtue? Just as in the early 1990s, the convergence of the leading parties (e.g. Labour insisting that Brexit is a done deal and we must move on) has caused the political space to be filled with tales of sleaze and bad behaviour, from breaking lockdown rules to watching porn on the job. The difference between then and now, which the Blairites have repeatedly emphasised during their recent 25th anniversary celebrations, is that Labour's current leader cannot represent youthful hope. At best he is "Mr Rules": the embodiment of integrity and probity, and thus a massive turn-off for most voters. But to focus on Starmer's personality void, and to imagine that a fresh face like Wes Streeting would make all the difference, is to repeat the error of assuming that what the electorate is crying out for is more tone (if not more Tony), rather than more public spending or help with rising prices. 

Labour is going nowhere fast because at a time when the government is bereft of compelling ideas, and apparently powerless in the face of the country's economic distress, it is incapable of "taking back control" of the political narrative, to coin a phrase. The sight of Starmer putting himself on notice is a bathetic example of his limited room for manoeuvre in a landscape devoid of any serious debate over economic policy. The lesson of 1997 was that at a time of relative economic security for most voters, the electorate was prepared to give a hearing to the novel and different. Labour isn't offering any novelty now, either in Starmer's attempts to channel Hugh Gaitskell or Rachel Reeves's attempts to resuscitate New Labour, but more pertinently it isn't offering any clear route to that economic security beyond pabulum about being on the side of business and aspirational, hard-working families. Most voters are worried that they'll soon be unable to afford a takeaway curry, not that the leader of the opposition might have had a cheeky korma.