Member State of Mind

Keir Starmer has been the leader of the Labour Party for a little under three years now, so you would expect the lineaments of Starmerism to be clear at this point. But it remains the case that Labour is better defined by what it's against rather than what it's for, notably against the waste and dereliction of duty of Tory government. Its poll leads are clearly an inverse reflection of the Conservative Party's unpopularity. Even where the Labour leadership's enthusiasms are evident, such as in its unwavering support for NATO or Israel, this is defined not in a progressive tone but in the negative register of a defence against the enemies of the West. There has been plenty of policy development under Starmer, at least over the last year, but to date this has produced little more than opaque vibes (Great British Energy) or simply reheated New Labour positions. Where Starmerism has become more concrete is in the institutional dimension: the iron grip on the party structure, the chilly relationship with the wider labour movement, and the forever war against the left.

In an amusing attempt to psychoanalyse Starmer (or at least the political persona), Oliver Eagleton highlights how the return of the "grown-up", much celebrated by centrists in 2020, has led not only to a crushing insistence that a significantly better future isn't possible (we must stop being infantile) but also to the loss of the élan that distinguished New Labour in the 1990s (the boring dad is now in charge): "Passivity is the surprising but necessary image of adulthood in this mode, where the ambition to grow up resolves itself negatively – in the absence of clear content – into a quest to punish everything identified as childish, and emulate others past and present who seemed like grown-ups. There is no programme beyond that, only masochism and mimicry." With the Tories now uncertain what they actually stand for (are tax cuts still good?), the consequence is the current sense of vacancy. As Eagleton puts it in respect of Labour, but in terms that apply more widely, "This is a mood, not a politics. It represents a failure to face the present, to grapple with its multiple crises by honing a political project to meet them."

A symptom of this vacancy is the growth of what we might call celebrity political populism, whereby trusted faces from light entertainment pick up the cudgels on behalf of an exasperated public. Carol Vorderman offers a recent example of this, not just in her "speaking truth to power" about corporate corruption but in the media's uneasy recognition that the "normality" they imagined both Starmer and Sunak would usher in hasn't returned. This "populist" approach has always disfigured the tabloids (particularly at election time - "I'll leave Britain if Labour gets in" etc), but it has infected the broadsheets and television now. This trend has run in parallel with another: the tendency of politicians to want to become light entertainment celebrities. There's always been a degree of crossover (Gyles Brandreth, Gloria Del Piero etc), and even a conscious toying with the boundary itself (recall Harold Wilson's post-PM stint as a chatshow host), but in recent years there has been a growing sense that politics is entertainment and that politicians are playing parts. That the new Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party wants to bring back capital punishment is just the latest example of a poorly-written character lacking in nuance.

This has made the establishment uneasy. Not only has it led to the elevation of clowns like Johnson and Truss, and the dumbing-down of political and economic reporting (cf the recent BBC review), but it has also undermined the UK's international standing as a sober and reliable player on the world stage, most obviously in the fallout from Brexit. Starmer and Sunak represent an attempt to restore dignity to the state as much as to their respective parties. An important aspect of this is the "masochism" that Eagleton identifies: the acceptance that the road ahead will be hard, that sacrifices will have to be made, and that we muist atone for past sins, whether the deluded optimism of 2016 or 2017. The jouissance of Boris Johnson - the idea that there are easy answers and that resolute will is all that we need (a belief shared by Liz Truss but without the same panache) - is to be rejected. But as Johnson's boosterism was little more than vibes, what this requires is a different mood rather than a political project, so the hazy "levelling up" is replaced by the equally hazy "devolution" and the same slogans ("Take back control") are recycled.

Though a Labour government is not a nailed-on certainty by 2025, the development of Starmerism as an institutional form gives us an insight into how the post-Brexit state will be refashioned. Perhaps paradoxically, Starmer's rejection of any immediate plans for rejoining the European Union give us a clear indication of just how much the UK will continue to be a "member state" in all but name. As Christopher Bickerton describes it, "It is certainly possible that whilst the UK has formally left the EU, it remains a member-state. This view would imply that the most distinguishing features of member-statehood are not to do with EU membership at all but point to something deeper, perhaps to the pathologies of the 21st-century post-democratic capitalist state. In this case, EU membership is of little real consequence. We are talking about a far broader category of statehood, one that encompasses much of the West and is tied to the globalization of the post-Cold War era".

To berate Starmer for accepting Brexit is to ignore that his government will be a continuation of an EU member state. It is this, rather than an early referendum, that will ultimately prepare the path to formal re-accession. And the reason for that continuation is not some elite conspiracy but the very nature of neoliberal governance and economy, in particular the commitment to the transnational institutions of the informal American empire, from NATO to the financial ties of the City of London with New York and the US Treasury. The Conservatives could agitate for a hard Brexit in the secure knowledge that they would never challenge the UK's position within that transnational regime, any more than they would seriously seek to revive the North of England. Labour under Corbyn offered the only, if tentative, path towards a different future, and that was promptly crushed. While Eagleton not unreasonably describes the remain cause in 2019 as "one of the most spectacular own-goals in British political history", it's arguable that it preserved more than it lost.

In other words, though the offical line of a Labour government will be that we have cleanly left the political union but will pursue economic convergence, the reality will be otherwise: we will maintain the culture of political union, increasing the commitment to other transnational institutions like NATO and the IMF in compensation, while allowing a mild degree of economic divergence (which will be driven by US as much as UK interests). That culture will be embodied in the state, which means a return to punitive social policy, the valorisation of business, and the need for sound money. All of this has been well-trailed by the Shadow Cabinet in recent months. Within Labour itself, there will be no let up on the delegitimisation of the left and the routine abuse of democracy. If the left no longer meaningfully exists within the party, it will be invented so that it can fulfill this necessary role as the permanent threat - the eternal impulse towards childishness in Eagleton's reading. Starmer, whether you like it or not, intends to become the father of the nation.