Absolutism

The major political event of the summer may turn out to be not the Uxbridge by-election but the public anointing of Keir Starmer by Tony Blair. This went beyond a simple laying on of hands to a very public mind-meld on the "tough decisions" that will have to be taken around public services after 2024. What was interesting in the press coverage was not simply the emphasis on ideological continuity, which won't come as a surprise to anyone, but the recognition that this public performance was also about rehabilitating Blair, or perhaps more accurately reassuring him that the party was now safe for him to approach. John Crace in the Guardian, who rarely manages to delve beyond the surperficial, made the point that "Blair needs Starmer to prove to himself that he’s still alive. That all those wilderness years were worthwhile. That he still means something. And Starmer needs Blair as a signpost to the future. That after four election defeats, there is a clear path to victory." What this does reveal, if unconsciously, is how much Labour's politics is now about personality rather than policy.

This was made clear in the aftermath of the three by-elections on the 20th of July. Having not unreasonably written off Somerset and Frome long before the count, Labour then managed to turn two excellent results, a gain in a traditionally Tory seat and a big vote improvement in one until recently seen as safe enough for an indolent Prime Minister, into a witch-hunt targeted on a slightly less right-wing Labour London Mayor. Together with the relentless briefing against the hardly-radical Andy Burnham and the blackballing of Jamie Driscoll, this emphasised how much Labour's politics have expanded from simple left-right factionalism to the personal factionalism that was a feature of the New Labour years, most obviously the division between Blairites and Brownites (predictably, Ed Miliband is still being briefed against and you can't help suspecting that the rowing back on green commitments is as much about discomfiting him as pursuing "fiscal responsiblity").

Historically, Labour leaders have tended to respect the separate democratic legitimacy of local government, even when at loggerheads. For example, Neil Kinnock's fulminations against Liverpool City Council in the mid-1980s were just that: fulminations. Though the party moved to expel Militant Tendency members, its attitude towards Labour town halls didn't go beyond chiding. This could be excused by the fact that Labour wasn't in power nationally, but the same approach was largely taken by New Labour when it had full control of central government. Blair famously blackballed Ken Livingstone, but after the latter ran and won the London Mayoralty as an independent, he was allowed back into the party and re-elected on the Labour ticket. Though the move by the Blair government to create London Underground as a public-private partnership was a clear attempt to clip the Mayor's wings, Livingstone was eventually vindicated as it was brought back under Transport for London control during the Brown years.

Under Starmer, there has already been a step-change in relations with local government that can only presage a more interventionist approach once the party is in control at Westminster. This goes beyond rigging selections and marginalising the left to actively undermining anyone who appears to be developing a personal popularity that might provide a focus for opposition to the leadership, hence the briefing against the likes of Sadiq Khan and Burnham, neither of whom has ever shown either the ambition or independence of Livingstone. The attack on the London Mayor in particular is telling given that he hails from the party right. While some assume the fuss over ULEZ and whether it had a bearing on the Uxbridge result is simply an excuse to further water down the party's climate change policy and reassure reactionary voters elsewhere that Labour is on the side of the "hard-working motorist", it shouldn't be ignored that this is also about pre-emptively telling Khan that local government policy will not be independent of central government diktat.

A sub-plot in the summer commentary was the election in Selby and Ainsty of the "briefcase child", Keir Mather: a 25-year old apparatchik from the right of the party who has reliably parroted Starmer's preferred lines on all policy matters. While this elicited complaints about a lack of real world experience and charges of ageism on the part of his critics in equal measure, the obvious message to the wider party is that loyalty to the leadership is all that matters while the message to constituency parties and local electorates is that there will be no let-up in the parachuting of preferred sons and daughters into safe or winnable seats. These three developments - personal factions, centralised control and preferment - are characteristic of the turn towards governmental absolutism. All of these features were there under New Labour, but they had to be accommodated with the other tendencies of the party, towards democracy and diversity, and reconciled with the institutional authority of the trade unions. That accommodation and reconciliation now appears to be rejected.

Blair was ultimately a product of his class: a manadarin dilettante (consider his naivety over technology) with delusions of grandeur (consider Iraq) and a messianic zeal for a shallow modernity (consider his overuse of the word "modernisation"). Starmer is different in two respects. First, despite all the quibbling about whether his dad really was a worker or a manager, his social origins are clearly more "mundane" than Blair's and this informs his innate cultural conservatism, notably his anti-intellectualism. Blair may not have fully read Anthony Giddens, let alone Jurgen Habermas, but he paid lip-service to the idea of "thought". Starmer, with his reliance on focus groups and pessimistic readings of sociology (in the Goodhart and Goodwin mould), is clearly more interested in "instinct". Second, Starmer, with his long stint as DPP and proximity to the intelligence services (notably in Northern Ireland), is a creature of the state rather than just another posh boy who thinks he might make a good Prime Minister.

What I think this all adds up to is a heightening of the absolutist approach, which ironically co-exists with a lack of fixed principles. The old argument about not being able to do good without first winning power is being replaced by the argument that winning power is all that matters and if good is eventually to be done that will be a matter for the Treasury and market sentiment. The problem is not simply that the electorate is not being offered a message of hope but that it is being reminded in no uncertain terms that hope is for the naive. The prospect is not of a genuinely reforming administration (the "reform" promised for the NHS will clearly be just a repetition of yesterday's failed policies) but of a permanent government of conservative bureaucrats whose loyalty will be first to the political cartel and then to the interests of property. Activism will be frowned on unless it takes the form of lobbying through the cartel itself (so the gender critical will get a hearing but Extinction Rebellion and even Greenpeace will be anathematised). The police and intelligence services will be further reinforced.

In many ways this is the logical conclusion of the work of both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. The creation of "politically constituted property" (in Ellen Meiksens Wood's phrase) through privatisation, allied with the growing importance of industry lobbyists at the public-private interface, has created an environment of sinecures and revolving doors. Corruption has dwindled in local government and the public sector not because of any moral revolution but because so much of it has been reclassified as legitimate market transactions. The pandemic did not reveal a sudden collapse in the due diligence of central government in awarding contracts. It merely publicised an already corrupt and compromised process. The worst people in the world (e.g. former MPs such as Angela Smith, Michael Dugher and Ian Austin) are held up not as paragons of virtue (that would be silly) but as valued non-execs and rightful office-holders. The glue of absolutism is hierarchy and the key message that the next government will deliver is: Know your place. That is the thread that runs from 1979 to today.