The Cartel

A while back I noted that Labour under Keir Starmer's leadership was exhibiting many of the characteristics of a cartel party. What I particularly focused on was his aversion to activism. This could be excused in the early stages of Starmer's tenure as evidence of insecurity and a determination to control messaging after the free-for-all that characterised the Corbyn years (and in which Starmer himself was notably conspicuous, even to the point of making up Brexit policy on the hoof during his conference speech in 2018). Given the quiescence of this week's party conference (not a single expression of republican sentiment in the hall during the bizarre tribute to the dead monarch on Monday), it is clear that the lanyard-wearing layer of the membership has now been completely purged of leftwingers. While this is not (yet) the case at the level of constituency parties, it is clear that the struggle between left and right, and its expression in NEC elections, is now a sideshow as policy formation has been decisively taken away from the membership (whatever it may transpire to be, Great British Energy is clearly not the Green New Deal). Labour is no longer a party of activists. The bragging over the return of corporate sponsors was indicative of that.

The cartel theory of party politics is usually reduced to two key features: the interpenetration of party and state, and collusion between the parties. The former is not simply about professionalisation, by which politicians are increasingly drawn from a narrow social strata that spans media, advocacy and public administration. It also refers to the way that state functionaries are increasingly co-opted as technocratic experts, much as financiers and business tycoons were previously co-opted during the heyday of New Public Management. Recent, high-profile examples would be Mario Draghi (the head of the Bank of Italy), Emmanuel Macron (who straddled the worlds of banking and public administration), and Keir Starmer (former Director of Public Prosecutions). The record of all three indicates that political ineptness is no bar to participation in politics, which in turn suggests that the parameters of the political have changed over recent decades. It's worth noting in passing that much of the tone-policing by centrists in recent years has involved comparing feral politicians unfavourably to virtuous state functionaries, such as judges and public health officials.

Collusion is also less about formal coalitions or informal deals, let alone criminal conspiracy, and more about the tendency to eschew ideological confrontation and to find common interests as a professional class (think of Jess Phillips and her Tory mates, or the belief that expressions of class antagonism within the politico-media caste are bad form - e.g. the regular dismissal of Owen Jones). This isn't simply the result of neoliberal hegemony or (elsewhere in Europe) the structural incentives of proportional representation (where "finding common ground" usually means admitting common interests). It also reflects a more fundamental desire to insulate the process of negotiation between the parties and the state from popular scrutiny and accountability. As such it is a parallel process to marketisation in that it seeks to depoliticise politics. Whether popular alienation from politics is the cause or consequence of cartelisation, in either eventuality it leads to shrinking party memberships and a distaste for activism.

Many on the left derided Starmer, and his General Secretary, David Evans, for losing so many members that the party looked like it was headed for bankruptcy. Of course, the current turn in the political cycle, with the Tories looking vulnerable and Labour enjoying huge poll leads, means that significant donations from corporate interests and the rich are likely to start flowing again, not least because the need for a general election by January 2025 means that the coffers were always going to start filling up over the next two years. I think this derision misunderstands the strategy, which is not to shift the party's funding from labour to capital but to call into question the entire system of party funding, hence one thing that has been consistent under the last two Labour leaderships has been the attack on Tory sleaze. If that word in the early-90s meant sexual misbehaviour as much as financial, and in 2009 was reduced to the relatively small beer of expense-fiddling, the focus now is much more on the corruption of parties by major donors, notably foreign oligarchs (who, let us not forget, New Labour as well as the Tories courted). 

It's possible Starmer just wants to limit party funding to the native rich, but I suspect his instinct as a former state functionary is to go further and insitutionalise it. What I think he wants is greater state funding and to this end his current aversion to proportional representation, which would diffuse funds and make changes in party income levels more volatile, makes perfect sense. His preference appears to be to retain first-past-the-post, not simply to cement Labour's electoral advantage but to translate that into a funding advantage as well. He won't push this before an election, for obvious reasons, but if he ever makes it to Downing Street then I'd expect a supportive campaign to quickly emerge in the media. This would be presented as a necessary, even grown-up, measure to insulate political parties from undue influence by the reckless rich or nefarious foreigners, but clearly what it would actually do is insulate them from membership accountability. In the case of Labour, it would also weaken the influence of the trade unions, an outcome long-desired by both the media and the neoliberal elements of the Labour Party most sympathetic to the cartel model. If Starmer is moving Labour towards cartelisation, and given that this requires a degree of collusion by the other main parties, the question we have to ask is, Why now?

One way of answering this is to look at the impediments to cartelisation in the past. The political scientist Klaus Detterbeck noted in 2005 the historical and structural constraints that had hitherto limited the emergence of the cartel party in the UK. First, the adversarial style of politics, encoded in the first past the post system, militates against collusion and instead encourages a zero-sum approach. This was certainly evident in the 1980s when the Conservative government worked to undermine the Labour Party as an institution through its attacks on trade unions and local government. Labour's response in the mid-90s was to agree with the Liberal Democrat proposal for state funding of parties, to break the Tories' advantage, though it dropped the issue after 1997 when zero-sum meant it suddenly had the advantage. Its eventual tentative steps (notably the 2006 Hayden Phillips report) were prompted by the "cash for honours" scandal. Since then, the ideological convergence seen in the 2010-15 period and the cross-party effort to expel Jeremy Corbyn from the political sphere have led to a greater belief that the politico-media caste has common interests, leading to less antagonism (consider Starmer's "constructive criticism" during the pandemic).

Second, until the 1980s there was a clear social difference between Labour and Conservative MPs, with the former still often from working class backgrounds and the latter frequently part-time, with parallel careers in the City or law. This has been eroded since to the point where "second jobs" are clearly on the way out (a topic on which Starmer has been unusually robust) and the social origins and career trajectories of MPs are increasingly similar, giving rise to a greater sense of shared identity as much as common interests. We are currently in an adversarial phase of politics, not least because the Truss government has sought to step outside of the mainstream political consensus (i.e. the macroeconomic policies endorsed by the media) that has held since 2009. However, despite the rhetoric about a government of the rich, it is clear that Labour have no intention of rocking the boat, hence the City is still eulogised an an engine of growth, nationalisation is off the table and the emphasis is once more on "fiscal responsibility" after the levelling-up promises of Boris Johnson and the tax cuts of Liz Truss. But if the impediments to cartelisation are weaker, does that necessarily mean that it will happen?

One argument against the cartel party theory is that history has shown interpenetration by the state and collusion to be ineffective in defending those parties that turned away from the mass member model in the 1980s and 1990s. The obvious examples are the Parti Socialiste in France and PASOK in Greece, with the latter lending its name to a process by which centre-left parties were squeezed precisely because they failed to represent their traditional mass support among the working class and because they were corrupted by office, opening themselves to populist attack, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis. A counter-argument is that this actually proves the strength of democracy, and thus the relative weakness of cartel parties, rather than invalidating the theory. To complicate matters, the decline of the PS in France opened the door for Emmanuel Macron's En Marche, a party that appeared to be a cartel from its very inception: led by an énarque, with no real grassroots (hence the tone-deafness of the response to les gilets jaunes), and committed to a supra-political technocracy.

A second, related argument is that the very real, and historically extreme, turnover in parties over the last fifteen years suggests that the cartel party, if it ever existed, was a product of the "great moderation" in the period between 1980 and 2008. However, this fails to recognise that many of the populist or nationalist parties that have arisen in recent years, particularly in Europe, have been much less of a threat than hysterical liberal comment has suggested precisely because they have been quickly interpenetrated by the state and thus absorbed into the existing system. The rebranding of the Front National as Rassemblement National in France and the toning down of the separatist rhetoric of La Lega in Italy are recent examples. This isn't merely hypocritical positioning to meet the needs of electoral politics. As the acceptance of EU membership indicates, they are engaged in a negotiation with the state whose rewards will be access to funds that will indirectly benefit the parties themselves. Likewise, the electoral surge of Fratelli d'Italia has not seen the mass mobilisation of Fascist squadristi but simply the latest reconfiguration of Italian conservatism. With only 130,000 members, it is little bigger than the SNP.

In contrast, there has been a consistent refusal by the state to negotiate with new (or revived) parties on the left. The only real exception to this has been the by-force-of-circumstances inclusion of Podemos in the current Spanish coalition government, though it is clear the party is weakening electorally and is able to exert little influence over the PSOE. More notable was the blackballing of Jeremy Corbyn, not so much in the predictable undermining activities of the right-leaning PLP so much as in the briefings by former civil servants and military top brass that he was not to be trusted. This was a rare public appearance by the state that emboldened the political consensus (i.e. the collusion of the Labour right, the centre and the Tories) that in the event of a hung parliament there should be a party coup to prevent him entering Number 10. This repudiation of democracy was justifed on the grounds that the Prime Minister must enjoy the confidence of his party's MPs. But the supposedly hallowed principle of MP independence and personal conscience was clearly a flimsy fig-leaf for the reality of a PLP that considered it had a corporate right to reject the decision of both party members and voters.

The reason for the rejection of the left goes beyond ideological antipathy or the traditional bias of the state apparatus, and has clearly increased in intensity since the last great financial crash. We need a theory that can explain the virulent hatred that has been exhibited by the political establishment over the period despite the organised left being mostly harmless and certainly modest in its essentially social democratic, green-tinged politics. For all the talk about the revival of Marx and the renewed interest in Gramsci, the British left continues to be characterised by shallow theorising and organisational amateurism. Shit-posting and football-style chants do not pose a threat to the establishment. It isn't enough either to say that the centre has moved right when topics such as nationalisation and state-led investment have returned to the discourse. Talk of Putin-apologists or woke Nazis can be dismissed, and I think we can also set aside the notion of guilt arising from 2008. The angst over inequality has proved wholly ineffective at the political level and vowing to restore the 45% tax rate is hardly going to change that. 

It isn't the only reason, but I think one driver of liberal hysteria has been the fear that the left would not abide by the implicit rules of the game. As the established parties have drawn closer together both ideologically and socially, so they have come to view any challengers to the cartel with greater loathing. It might seem a stretch, but I think some of the current outrage directed towards the libertarians in Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street is simply the right-facing equivalent of the outrage directed towards Corbyn. What appears to irk the establishment most about the left is its activism and commitment to participative democracy (often dismissed as "populism"), which it fears would be destabilising, not just in terms of wresting policy formation from the politco-media caste but more precisely in offending newspapers that consider themselves the true tribunes of the people. If my theory is correct, one of the first things you'd expect to see would be the neutralising of Labour activism and the re-emergence of a supportive media portraying the party as a safe pair of hands. If you want a vision of the cartelised future, imagine the Labour Party conference respectfuly signing God Save the King - forever.