Small Change

It's an unpleasant duty that I've been putting off for a while, but I can't do so any longer. I'm going to have to comment on the Labour Party manifesto. But before I do, it's worth looking at the context in which it has been launched. Labour has enjoyed 20-point leads in the opinion polls since the days of the Old Queen and current polling suggests a landslide win in the general election in two weeks time is well within its grasp. The irony, of course, is that this may come with a vote share, and even a vote quantum, little better than 2017. The rhetorical emphasis on the idea that Labour has changed, i.e. been purged of the left, is exemplified in the manifesto's timidity but also in its front-page focus on a stern-looking Keir Starmer. His persona as a ruthless operator (no one bothers any longer to deny that he lied through his teeth to become Labour leader) is the link between the party's internal change and the proposed change of government: the replacement of the incompetent Conservatives with a management team resolutely committed to financial stability and national security. 

This makes the manifesto an essentially negative document - it tells us much about what Labour won't do - which has predictably caused media liberals to simper about the positive vibes, regretting the lack of substance despite their utter commitment to not changing much and to not encouraging a hope that might escalate beyond their comfort zone. For all the attempts to introduce a sense of jeopardy into the election, with the tedious promotion of Nigel Farage and Reform by the BBC and the ever-hopeful attempts by the Guardian to revive the Liberal Democrats, the truth is that a Labour win has been nailed on since the end of 2022 because the Tories are toast. Sunak's failure to change the trajectory after Liz Truss is not simply a reflection of his own limitations as a statesman but an indication that we have passed the point of no return on a generation of Tory politics, now wholly exhausted, that sprang to life in the austerity mania of 2009. This has removed the need for Labour's offer to be anything beyond "change", which obviously suits the ideological preferences of the PLP. 

Just as predictable as the gyrations of media liberals, the demands of a two-horse race in a first-past-the-post electoral system have led economists who lean left to cross their fingers and praise Labour's offer as a positive step in the right direction, even as the Institute for Fiscal Studies correctly describes its promised public spending increases as "tiny, going on trivial" and the associated tax rises as "even more trivial". A more insightful commentary (here by Keir Milburn) is that what Labour are really offering is simply a different flavour of clientelism. Rather than dodgy deals for useless PPE or side-bets on the election date, we will see a return to the public-private partnerships of the New Labour years. A higher toned corruption. In theory, the state will underwrite risk while the private sector will generate profits that will in turn boost tax revenues and thereby raise all our public spending boats. In reality, this remains the same economic model we've had in place since the 1980s, so those economists are in danger of dislocating their knuckles if they imagine we'll see a different outcome, with growth boosted and the benefits trickling down to the needy.

The bottom line is that the UK has suffered decades of under-investment, not only in our public infrastructure and social fabric but in private capital formation. The result of this has been poor productivity growth and consequently weak wage growth. We don't have an industrial strategy to speak of, the finance sector remains too dominant (even as London steadily loses its influence to other global financial centres), our investment in energy renewables is paltry relative to the climate crisis and all of the parties claim that what's really hindering us is an excess of planning regulations. Labour's specific plan with regard to the latter is to recruit 300 more planning officers. There is airy talk of 1.5 million new homes over the course of the parliament but no explanation as to how this will actually be brought about beyond a single passing reference to "a new generation of new towns". Likewise, there is no explanation as to how the government will "kickstart economic growth" beyond "tough spending rules" and "a new partnership with business".

The passage of time since Gordon Brown left Downing Street means that Labour can blame the country's ills on 14 years of Tory misrule, but the structural failings clearly long predate that. Too much of the nation's accumulated wealth is trapped in the dead-weight of house prices; too much of the country's manufacturing and services base was sold off to foreign buyers who simply wanted an entry to the EU single market, and who are now disinvesting; and too many of our public utilities have been converted into cash machines for foreign pension funds. This all dates from the 1980s. The implicit claim of the manifesto, that we can return to the happy days of New Labour, is not only delusional in its belief that the clock can be turned back. It also fails to understand that the benign global economic environment of the late-90s was a one-off in historical terms. The Great Moderation was an anomaly, not the new normal. 

Though the manifesto is insubstantial, there are plenty of gestures that give us a flavour of what a Starmer government will be like, such as a "new Border Security Command" and a "crack-down on antisocial behaviour". Restoring the authority and gravitas of the state after the twin insults of Brexit and Corbyn is the mission. Should the expected parliamentary landslide transpire, leaving the government with a majority in excess of 200 seats, there are already signs that Starmer and his goons will blur the distinction between party and state in a manner that ought to be giving liberals the willies. Tories warning of a "super-majority" have been derided by unthinking centrists rejoicing in the prospect of the Conservative Party being "taught a lesson". Long-time opponents of party democracy have been cheered by the rumour that Morgan McSweeney wants "to give MPs the sole power to choose the next Labour leader if the change takes place while the party is in government", perhaps misunderstanding that this doesn't empower MPs so much as empower the para-state that Starmer has built in Labour's HQ.

The secular trend in the West has been towards greater democracy both in terms of candidate and leader elections. This is less due to the success of "activists" than a response to the decline of national democracy in a world of neoliberal hegemony. As the cartel has become the norm, and as electoral systems based on proportional representation have produced ever-more fluid coalitions over which party members have limited influence, so internal democracy has become the de facto arena for popular political engagement. Though liberals deride the US Republican Party for its anti-democratic impulses, the reality is that it is an example of vigorous democracy in action. In the UK, these forces have led to attempts to revive party democracy (in both Labour and the Conservatives) and to a reaction against it. Nigel Farage setting up Reform UK Party Limited as a private business in which he is the majority shareholder is the logical conclusion of that reaction in the register of a free-market Thatcherite. Barring candidates and imposing loyalists are traditional manoeuvres in the Labour Party, but they are also expressions of that anti-democratic reaction in the register of a bureaucratic apparatus.

The next UK government will be birthed amid multiple paradoxes. It will have an inarguable mandate for change, but has already indicated that it will change very little of substance. It will have a majority in the Commons, and an authority vis-a-vis the Lords, that will allow it to act radically, yet it is determined to excise all radicalism from British politics (the word "radical" appears nowhere in Labour's manifesto if you discount its promise "to stop people being radicalised and drawn towards hateful ideologies"). It has promised to "turn the page" after years of Tory lies and corruption, yet Starmer is widely regarded as untrustworthy and the party apparatus is stuffed with vicious factionalists operating a hierarchy of racism and parachuting their mates into safe seats. Perhaps the biggest paradox is that popular levels of expectation are so low that the great hope of progressives is that Starmer is once more lying through his teeth and will announce tax rises to fund public spending on day one. The real worry in all this is that democracy is dying before our eyes and that what we face is a one-party state. Starmer may well be the luckiest politician in British history, but he may also prove to be one of the most unpopular.