Conversion Therapy

Wes Streeting has developed a reputation for running his mouth off, whether accusing Jeremy Corbyn of being senile or dissing the NHS. But instead of deriding his tendency to pick unnecessary fights, it's worth attending to the language he employs, if only because he is one of the few shadow frontbenchers whose rhetoric rises above the mundane, even if only to reach the giddy heights of invective. This week he has taken to Twitter to berate those on the left who have criticised him for mistaking the willingness of confirmed Conservative voters to switch to Labour as the product of those voters' movement leftwards rather than the party's move to the right. His defence ignores the rationale of the voters entirely and opts instead for the usual left-bashing, but his choice of words is more interesting than that might suggest: "I'm from a centre-left tradition that seeks converts, not traitors. That's how we win elections and change the lives of people who don't have the luxury of settling for self-gratifying ideological purity under a Tory government."

In a retweet, James Meadway ignored the insults and focused on the mathematics: "I'm not from a centre-left tradition but w/out winning over Tories, we don't win. Not just about winning elections - it matters for winning strike ballots & workplace organising, for organising protests, for anything. Shouldn't be left to Wes Streeting et al to claim the argument." It's trivially true that you win a general election from opposition by attracting people who voted for the governing party in the previous ballot, but it's also true that much of the heavy lifting is actually done by demoralising your opponent's supporters and thus depressing their vote. New Labour was a famous case in point as they oversaw a fall in general election turnout in both 1997 and 2001 (the second, at 59%, marking a 19-point fall since the 78% turnout of 1992). Every general election in the post-2008 era has been determined by the parties relative success in getting out their vote (as was also the case with the EU referendum). The next election will almost certainly be decided by the Conservative's ability to motivate and re-energise their supporters. 

James's pragmatic focus on "winning over" reflects the traditional election model in which a decisive subset of the electorate can be swayed by convincing campaign offers - the premise being that voters select parties on the basis of which might best meet their short-term interests. But not only does this provide a poor model for understanding general elections since 2010, it also elides the more interesting idea that crouches behind Streeting's use of the term "converts". That suggests something beyond the merely instrumental: the scales falling from voters' eyes, a revelatory light from heaven on the road to Damascus. But does that reflect how the Labour Party has historically built a winning electoral coalition? You might make the case for 1945's "New Jerusalem", but the conversion to social democracy was clearly a product of wartime and a determination not to return to the political economy of the 1930s. In other words, it followed a shift in society that Labour reflected rather than inspired. The radical manifesto was popular before it was persuasive.

There are two parts to Streeting's claim. The less interesting is the strawman of a self-indulgent left, divorced from the real concerns of the electorate and contemptuous of the need to win. The interesting part is the idea that he comes from an identifiable tradition that actively seeks converts. But where is that tradition to be found? It certainly isn't on the centre-left of Labour - a space that few people would think Streeting occupies anyway - not least because that isn't a consistent intellectual tradition within the party so much as a demilitarised zone between the left and right. The received wisdom in the aftermath of the 2019 defeat - Corbyn was repellent on the "Labour doorstep" and the manifesto contained too many promises - highlighted the Labour right's historic aversion to zealotry and its policy conservatism, but what it didn't do is suggest that it had an alternative programme likely to attract anything as positive as "converts". At best, it's implicit offer was to avoid alienating "traditional Labour voters", and to do so by promising minimal change. This owed more to Anglicanism than Methodism, let alone Marxism. 

In the real world, conversion is rare. Inertia, as much as the stubbornness of belief, means that few people change either their politics or their religion (assuming they have either); and those that do so tend to be strong believers, not weak ones - hence the zeal of the convert. Politicians fully understand this, and they also appreciate what to them seems like the inescapable conclusion: that their message should be geared to attracting the shallow and lukewarm (the "floating voter"). This militates against any idea of evangelical fervour, let alone conversion. The result is performativity (patriotism, caution), vapidity (aspiration, innovation), and a refusal to get bogged down in policy detail beyond the emblematic ("We won't re-nationalise water"). So what is Streeting up to when he employs the word "converts"? Is it simply a hyperbolic antonym that allows him to justify "traitors" and so accuse the left of paranoid group-think? Or does he genuinely believe he represents a distinctive programme that is both persuasive and in tune with the times? Even Keir Starmer's fans in the media fret that the party lacks distinctive policies or a big idea, and nothing Streeting himself has proposed marks an advance on the New Labour years. His contribution has been rhetorical trenchancy, not original thought.

In the history of organised British politics, genuine conversion (as opposed to careerist opportunism) has tended to flow from the centre to the left (i.e. radicalisation in the face of experience), with conversion in the other direction often bypassing the centre and heading straight to the right (e.g. Trotskyists becoming Neo-conservatives or the trajectory of the RCP). The Labour Right was long wary of zealotry and thus conversion because it was the implacable enemy of the left, but that changed with the neoliberal entryism of the late-80s and early-90s. At that point there was a conscious attempt to develop an orthodoxy (something to convert to that was more substantial than Labourism) based on the "third-way" and "radical centre" popularised by Anthony Giddens. One consequence of this has been a greater commitment to ideological purity, which in turn has led to an even more intolerant attitude towards the left and an unwillingness to compromise (there is no longer any pretence of a "broad church"). Streeting's comment about the left "settling for self-gratifying ideological purity under a Tory government" is obvious projection given the attempted sabotage of Labour's electoral chances in 2017 and 2019.

But while the New Labour years certainly birthed a comprehensive orthodoxy that spanned social policy as well as economics and the management of the public sector, this did not lead to any mass conversion among the wider electorate, comparable say to the cultural revolution of the early-1940s. The testaments of enlightenment and the acknowledgment of prior error were limited to members of the commentariat, as they busily readjusted their beliefs to suit the new regime. The most obvious evidence of Labour's lack of interest in any broader conversion was the declining membership of the party itself. While that was arrested and reversed during the Corbyn interlude, it is clear that normal service has since been resumed. Not only is the current leadership more interested in attracting old donors than recruiting new members but it is actively seeking to expel anyone who might be considered zealous. Proscribing groups and marking members down for liking tweets by Green MPs isn't about ideological conformity so much as a determination to winnow out anyone who joined the party because they held strong political opinions.

One of the defenders of Streeting on Twitter claimed that George Orwell was the author of the line: "The right seek converts, the left looks for traitors." Of course, he said nothing of the sort. The maxim originated with the American journalist Michael Kinsley and its original form was: "Conservatives are always looking for converts, whereas liberals are always looking for heretics". This doesn't even make sense in the context of US politics: conservatives cultivate their opponents as hate figures and would be at a loss if they were to convert en masse, while liberals are more likely to stop inviting you to their dinner parties than to burn you at the stake. And it is perhaps because it doesn't make sense that the line has been so easily taken up by British centrists who imagine it condemns both the right for its evangelical zeal and the left for its paranoid totalitarianism. But Streeting has changed the meaning to suggest that being a political evangelist is actually a good thing. Why would he say that?

Streeting's talent, for which he is hailed as a future leader, is emotional language, whether talking about his backstory or his determination to be the "patients' champion". His invention of a "centre-left tradition" of proselytisation could be categorised simply as hyperbole, but I think it also points to something else. There is an "inner party" in British politics that spans more than the PLP and extends to much of the supporting cast of the media (this is not a conspiracy - it's simply the establishment). Streeting's emotionalism gives us an insight into the inner party's thinking. They are not seeking to convert Tory voters into Labour supporters - the electorate are just ballot fodder to them - but there is a mission underway to convert the remaining spaces of resistance within the media, particularly those that arose in the wake of 2008, to the programme of the inner party, and that programme is the re-establishment of the neoliberal state after the neglect of the Tories and the unexpected threat posed by Corbyn.

It has long been fashionable to accuse the left of stubbornly pursuing its venerable dogma in the face of the repeated rejections of the electorate and (after 1989) the judgement of history. This not only ignores the history of left thought, which has always been more various and mutable than its critics allow, it also distracts from the way in which the judgement not only of history but the earth itself (i.e. climate change) has rejected neoliberalism. Despite this, the Labour party under its current leadership seems incapable of offering anything beyond a resurrection of the decade after 1997. While the public presentation of politics emphasises the pragmatic and eschews ideology, that inner party remains wedded to neoliberal orthodoxy and vigilant against ideological heretics. This is not the evangelical mass-movement that Streeting's choice of words might imply but an elitist sect at the heart of the British establishment.

Discipline and Punish

One of the notable history books of the year was Nicholas Mulder's The Economic Weapon, which traced the development of international sanctions from the First World War to the Second and the replacement of the League of Nations, as the chief instigator and overseer of concerted action, by the United Nations. The book was timely because of the return of sanctions to geopolitical prominence as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but it also highlighted a parallel in the vexed question of NATO's responsibility, namely that Germany and Japan's pre-emptive strikes during the 1930s were informed by the negative fear of sanctions as much as the positive attraction of lebensraum or the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. But my purpose here is not to revisit that narrow issue of NATO's advance in Eastern Europe but to look at the role of sanctions outside of Mulder's window. This is both a matter of time - before and after the interwar period - and of the role that sanctions have played within domestic politics.

Sanctions as a weapon of war did not spring into being in 1914. There are examples from antiquity (e.g. the Megarian Decree), though the systematic enforcement of commercial sanctions only really develops with the spread of global trade. Napoleon's Continental System - an embargo of the British Empire that was a response to a British naval blockade of the French coast - was significant for its insistence that allies and even neutrals should observe it. In other words, its coercive nature extended beyond the nominal target. Obviously the use of sanctions as a weapon of war didn't end in 1945. Consider variously the Berlin blockade, the seemingly eternal economic war against Cuba, and the sanctions against Iraq after the First Gulf War that would provide the notional grounds for invasion in 2003. As Mulder notes in his book, citing a UN report, one third of the world's population currently lives in countries under some form of international sanction. But this growth in their use has occured as their effectiveness has declined: "the history of sanctions is largely a history of disappointment", as he puts it.

This ineffectiveness is partly because many sanctions are trivial - annoying individuals (often rich individuals who can easily bear the cost) rather than threatening the mass of the population - and thus unlikely to change behaviour at state level. In other words, sanctions are often a low-risk way of being seen to take action. But there is something else at work here beyond virtue-signalling or satisfying domestic opinion (e.g. the absurd demand to boycott Tchaikovsky). It is also not the case that the spread of sanctions merely tracks the spread of trade: that globalisation has fuelled the use of sanctions as a routine tool of geopolitics. Global trade levels have been in decline for some years now but sanctionism remains in rude health. I think the missing factor is that greater use of sanctions in international affairs long ago led to their greater adoption within the context of domestic politics, and this in turn has encouraged their further use internationally. 

In the initial phase - the long nineteenth century from 1789 to 1914 - organised sanctions were resisted domestically precisely because they offended doux commerce and the rights of property. The UK's Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 were motivated by the desire to resist the sanctions of the organised working class (the withdrawal of labour) and so were a domestic analogue and precursor of resistance to the hostile combination of the Continental System of 1806. In contrast, the right to not buy certain goods was respected, e.g. during the American War of Independence and the campaign against the slave trade, though largely because of the limited effect and the absence of enforcement (outside the Boston Tea Party). This attitude persisted through the century, though the class and colonial bias was evident in the case of the Irish Land League boycotts of the 1880s (that gave the practice its name), which met with far greater hostility. 

The exception to this disdain for sanctions was the "pacific blockade", whose purpose was to coerce foreign (and typically non-Western) powers short of a formal declaration of war, such as the embargo of the Ottomon Empire in support of Greek Independence in the 1820s. Blockades were a product of empire but one that saw no legitimate parallel within domestic politics, and that attitude lasted into the first half of the twentieth century. As Mulder explains, this changed: "Interwar sanctions were focused narrowly on the external goal of doing inter-state war. Multilateral and unilateral sanctions since 1945 have usually had internal goals: to address human rights violations, convince dictatorships to give way to democracy, smother nuclear programs, punish criminals, press for the release of political prisoners, or obtain other concessions." But this focus on the internal has eroded the conceptual boundary between sanctions as a tool of international relations and domestic statecraft. One reason for their increasing use in the former sphere, despite the poor return, is that they are no longer a means of coercion so much as a form of punishment. Likewise, their utility domestically is as a form of discipline.

Just as the type of lies once encountered exclusively in the realm of international relations has seeped into domestic politics in recent decades, so the chief coercive method of the postwar era short of outright war has also started to appear. This is evident not only in the formal adoption of the term in areas such as welfare benefits (the "sanctions regime") but in the workplace. Employers threatening to dock the wages and holidays of striking employees until they fully make up "losses" is not a return to the Victorian practice in which trade unions were liable for civil damages but rather the adoption of sanctions as an economic weapon in labour relations. The aim is to coerce workers so that they in turn bring pressure to bear on the unions, much as the citizens of a sanctioned country are expected to pressure their government as the shelves empty and hospitals run out of medicines.

This sanctionist turn is also evident in political party management. The treatment of dissenting Labour Party members since Keir Starmer's election as leader has been notable for its method as much as it aims. This is not just a systematic purge of the left but the institutionalisation of a regime of sanctions in which political rights - to stand as a candidate, to attend conference, to be given a hearing - are denied purely on the grounds of affiliation, and that decided arbitrarily or on the basis of trivial evidence - i.e. no more thoughtful or humane than sanctions applied against a foreign population. Too many on the left are shocked by this behaviour, believing that it breaches norms and offends established mores, which seems neglectful of recent history. Starmer's behaviour is not just the usual deviousness and brutality of the party right dialled up to 11 but the product of a wider cultural shift towards sanctionism during the Blair years. Beyond the bromides of progress and technological liberation, what distinguished New Labour was its sanctionism: the belief that the market would provide carrots and government should provide the stick. Being a former DPP is precisely the background required for the job of party leader now.

The techniques of resistance to power have often been forms of sanction as well, such as strikes, boycotts and shunning (what used to be known as "sending to Coventry"). The contemporary issue is that these have even less chance of success than international sanctions, due to deunionisation, monopolisation and the demonisation of "cancelling" and "wokeness". But if we think of sanctions in the international arena as punishment, rather than coercion, then they are successful in their own terms. The problem is that popular sanctions in resistance to the state or capital are unlikely to succeed as coercion because of the asymmetry of power, and the one form in which a popular sanction can have a genuinely disciplinary effect - the democratic election of a government - is being systematically curtailed by the political cartel and its media auxiliaries. We have moved from the idea of government as the enabler of interests within society to that of a policeman who sanctions the refractory in defence of the established order: which is essentially how it was before democracy. Labour's refusal to commit to repealing anti-union laws is the spirit of 1799.

The Noble Lie

John Mearsheimer, the great sceptic of American policy in international relations, has become something of a political black sheep in recent years because of his views on Russia and Ukraine. As a realist, he has been concerned by the failure of the West to fully appreciate the interests and rational motives of Russia, with the result that Ukraine has become an unnecessary victim of great power posturing. His critics have accused him of appeasement; his supporters have noted that like Cassandra he has been proved right and his warnings have gone unheeded. While his academic oeuvre has been dominated by inter-state relations, in books such as The Tragedy of Great Power Politics and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, he has also made a telling contribution to our understanding of domestic politics in his short 2011 work, Why Leaders Lie. Though this also focuses on international relations, it makes the useful point that leaders find it easier to lie to their own populations than to other states, and that this is more pronounced in liberal democracies. Unsurprisingly, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 provides his textbook example. 

His explanation for the difference between international and domestic lying is tendentious - that democratic electorates are more credulous than state actors and that liberal democracies must invest in greater media-management - not least because it recycles older prejudices about the demos (the Platonic saitiating of the beast) and assumptions about the fellowship of diplomacy (we understand each other because we are members of a transnational elite). The current resignation and cynicism of the Russian population, despite a massive PR campaign by the government to encourage an enthusiastic chauvinism, together with the obvious strategic miscalculations by Putin, suggests that state actors may be more prone to self-delusion that the people and that the construction of an edifice of lies may ultimately be about reassuring the state itself rather than the notional electorate. There's an amusing historical irony here if you remember the apocryphal tale of the faux-village built by Prince Potemkin to impress Catherine the Great when she toured the newly-acquired Crimea in 1787. 

Mearsheimer is ultimately seeking to preserve the separation of the realms of domestic and international politics, which is a conservative instinct. To this end he notes that lies on the international stage can, if extreme enough, backfire and thereby corrupt politics at home. My own view is that this distinction is false: that there is no boundary and the lies are not categorically different. One reason for saying this is that the habituation of domestic lying can encourage lies about international relations. To take Iraq as an example, both George W Bush and Tony Blair had already established a reputation for deceit and dissembling in domestic politics before they agreed on the invasion. It was partly because they were already distrusted that scepticism about their claims of weapons of mass destruction found fertile ground. A famous example in the UK, because it so earnestly sought to deny the truth, was David Aaronovich's comment: "If nothing is eventually found, I - as a supporter of the war - will never believe another thing that I am told by our government, or that of the US ever again". You have to have seen a lot heaped on a camel's back to reach that "final straw".

Mearsheimer's inventory of lying in international relations is useful because we can easily apply it (with the exception of his first category) to the domestic scene as well. He names seven types: inter-state lies (misdirection for strategic geopolitical advantage); fearmongering (inflating a threat to alert the population); strategic cover-ups (obscuring incompetence to maintain morale); nationalist mythmaking (rewriting history to foster group identity); liberal lies (disguising illiberal behaviour); social imperialism (diverting attention from domestic problems by emphasising the deficiencies of other societies); and ignoble cover-ups (dissimulation to protect state actors or privileged groups from criticism). If Martin Forde had had the balls to write a properly corruscating report on the Labour Party, rather than attempting a sober assessment that allowed the media to dismiss his findings as "fault on both sides", then the last six of these categories would have provided a useful template.

And that neatly segues to arguably the most startling example of political lying in domestic politics since the time of the Iraq War (and I'm not excluding Brexit in that assessment), namely the election of Keir Starmer as Leader of the Labour Party. What stands out here is not that Starmer lied but that his lies have been simultaneously exposed and commended as noble lies - i.e. obvious untruths that serve a higher purpose, in the Platonic tradition. Centrist commentators, who clutched their pearls over the lies of Johnson, Farage and Trump, have taken to admiring Starmer's lying as a "single-minded focus on winning", partly because they can't find much else to enthuse about. To understand how odd this is we simply need to recall how previous Labour Party leaders were criticised for simply having a reputation of untrustworthiness (e.g. Harold Wilson) or a tendency to embellishment (e.g. Neil Kinnock). Clearly a lot changed with the election of Tony Blair as party leader, but perhaps more changed with his becoming Prime Minister, which seems to have convinced many that not only were lies acceptable in the service of a political goal but that deliberately lying was itself a mark of statesmanship.

Mearsheimer's typology is useful in providing a checklist of Starmer and his supporter's behaviour: fearmongering (the great antisemitism flap); strategic cover-ups (the behaviour of Iain McNicol & co); mythmaking (the claim that Labour lost in 2019 solely because of Corbyn rather than Brexit); liberal lies (the systematic purges); social imperialism ("the SNP are worse"); ignoble cover-ups (evidence of Islamophobia and rigged selections). But we can further distill what is going on by focusing on who is being lied to. As a popular party - i.e. one that depends on grassroots enthusiasm rather than simply financial donations by the rich (regardless of how much the current leadership wish it were otherwise) - Labour must always face two electorates: the party membership (and by extension the labour movement represented by affiliated trade unions and societies), and the broader population of voters. There is an obvious desire in the media to insist that the two are not merely different but poles apart, a strategy that was hugely succesful in 1979 and arguably defined politics until as late as 2017, but Labour leaders, of whatever stripe, have traditionally sought to bridge that gap and insist on the (massive) overlap. 

What is unusual about Starmer is not simply that he accepts the media framing of two distinct constituencies with conflicting interests, but that he deliberately accentuates it. He appears to want to win a general election by deliberately and very publicly disavowing arguably the most loyal element of Labour's traditional electoral coalition: those socialists who have nowhere else to go. And this leads to the paradox of an ostensibly anti-populist politician (the liberal media have assured us of this, and who are we to doubt it) emphasising populist tropes (his humble beginnings, his success, his blokeishness, his love of country etc) that are clearly meant to distinguish him from the politics-obsessed "weirdos" of the left. Without lurching into hyperbole, I would note that every populist leader - and in particular every Facsist leader - was initially dismissed as inadequate and unpreposessing. But what I want to focus on here isn't Starmer's rebarbative style but his instrumental attitude towards the electorate, which is arguably more worrying.

To justify a lie directed at a particular subset of the population you need to define them as not being worthy of the truth. This usually takes one of two forms. The first is delegitimisation, in which the group is deemed beyond the pale of political participation and consequently rights are limited or curtailed. This can be seen not simply in Starmer's brazen lies to party members during his election, but in the way that subsequent moves by the General Secretary and the NEC have systematically disempowered constituency parties and increased the power of the PLP to determine future leadership candidates. On the right of the party, this instrumental lying has been publicly celebrated with overt cynicism. If you were taken in by Starmer's "Corbynism without Corbyn" pitch then you revealed yourself to be a naive fool and your outrage at being lied to simply proves it. If you recognised at the time that Starmer was lying, and were perfectly happy to go along with it, then you proved yourself to be a political "grown-up".

The second form is one of intellectual contempt: a belief that the group is both innately stupid and easily led by the press or demagogues (i.e. popular democracy). The obvious example here is the mythical Red Wall constituency for whom Brexit and immigration controls are "red lines". In this case the lying is both expedient - the necessary action to build a winning coalition for a general election - and an example of lying for the greater good: the noble lie. The assumption is that the electorate can be persuaded to accept a particular course so long as you frequently deny the objective and advance incrementally. A good example from recent history is the marketisation of the NHS, which Labour promised to reverse in 1997 but once in office decided to expand, with added targets and quangos to ensure "quality" and "value for money", laying the foundations for the increasingly fragmented and dysfunctional health service that we see today. The contemporary elephant in the room is Brexit, with centrist commentators keen to signal that Starmer will reveal his true europhile instincts once in Downing Street.

Mearsheimer's book is a fascinating, if not altogether convincing, analysis of political lying, but it suffers from the fundamental limitation of all realist critique, which is that it assumes that state actors are rational and that the behaviour of states is thus predictable. In this view, conflict is typically the result of either inescapable material constraints or miscalculations by the elite about each other's intentions. This is a reasonable perspective in international relations, but it's explanatory attraction owes much to the fact that it removes politics, and more particularly democracy, from the equation. And it is the contempt for democracy that provides the key insight into Keir Starmer's lying. It should be obvious now that he is committed to re-establishing the authority and capacity of the state after the neglect of the Tory years, and the authoritarian turn of the party is a precursor to this. This not only requires disavowing any hint of socialism but refusing to present the electorate with a meaningful choice on any major policy, whether that be Brexit or nationalisation. The willingness to lie and deceive is proof that he is the embodiment of the establishment; and the continued failure of the public to warm to the man is evidence of their recognition of this.