Fish Don't Recognise Water

My last post looked at the consistency of Labour governments over time in terms of innate bias and how this relates to policy, specifically adherence to the Treasury View ("sound money", the horror of deficit-financing, self-imposed fiscal rules etc) and the tendency to give with one hand while taking with the other (the other party to the transaction invariably being the poor). In this post I want to sketch a comparative analysis between Labour governments and those of other stripes since 1997. I've chosen that date not because there weren't clear continuities with the preceding Conservative governments but because it marks a termination point for Thatcherism in the narrow sense of the style of governance introduced in 1979 that lived on, in however debased a form, under John Major. 1997 is the point when we see a synthesis of historical trends in a new formation, the so-called "third way". Every government since then has been judged in terms of that synthesis and in particular where it sits on the axes of economic and social policy, with little attention paid to how much those axes have shortened since the 1980s to the point where you struggle to discern much difference between different administrations today. 

A good example of the liberal press's reluctance to accept this reality is Andy Beckett's intepretation in the Guardian of the current government as "an attempt to create a new political hybrid: part leftwing, part rightwing, intended to appeal to a much more fragmented, politically fickle, less generous country." Beckett is usually an astute observer of the Labour Party, but on this occasion he has bent over backwards to give the government, and specifically Keir Starmer, the benefit of the doubt in a manner that wouldn't have been out of place in a Polly Toynbee column. This means running through the usual litany of nominally leftwing initiatives, such as nationalising the railways and putting VAT on private school fees, that on closer examination turn out to be underwhelming, with the result that he cannot avoid damning the government with faint praise: "Most of these measures are on a smaller scale than their equivalent proposals under Jeremy Corbyn. But they remain more egalitarian, class-conscious and restrictive of capitalism than the policies of Tony Blair or Gordon Brown."

Beckett proceeds to undermine his case by noting that "Reeves and Starmer seem to have accepted the self-serving argument from big business and its many media champions that increasing taxes on the rich is both impractical and undesirable". This leads to the depressing conclusion that this "toughened-up Labour party prioritises “working people” over the poor, the arms industry and the City of London over the wider economy, and traditional patriotism over more nuanced expressions of British identity. Rather than confront rightwing populism, the government tries to co-opt some of its arguments, for example about the danger of “open borders”. More and more of Labour’s current policies seem designed to appeal to actual or potential Reform voters." All pretty leftwing, I think you'll agree. While there is harmless fun to be had pointing out the gulf between theory and practice, this is another example of the tenacious delusion that tomorrow Labour will reveal its true social democratic colours.

In the Financial Times, Stephen Bush sought to diffrentiate between the Starmer and Blair iterations of Labour government by reference to the economic/social axes, but ended up simply reinforcing the point that everyone is clustered around an imaginary centre: "Both governments are in a sense “centrist” but the accommodation Blairism represented was between rightwing economics and leftwing social policy, while this Labour party is reaching for leftwing economics and a traditionally rightwing approach to social policy." This obviously doesn't chime with the history. The national minimum wage and working tax credits were not examples of rightwing economics, or at least not in the narrow sense of the Thatcherite legacy. Likewise, the Blair years were marked by a "tough on crime" approach that ended up delivering the spiteful authoritarianism of ASBOs, and by the ramping up of hostility towards asylum-seekers. The idea that the Starmer government is "reaching for leftwing economics" is absurd given the nature of its self-imposed fiscal rules, while the cosying-up to business has precluded genuinely leftwing economic radicalism such as industrial democracy and nationalisation (the railways really aren't a counter-argument), let alone higher taxes on wealth.

Bush's attempt at pop-sociology involves the invention of a "type" that could only exist in the mind of an FT reader: "Starmerite centrism is about making the party the natural home for working age voters who feel economically insecure themselves but are uneasy about what they believe to be overly generous spending on support for the poorest, at home or abroad. They care most about Labour’s election promises to fix the NHS and not to raise income taxes, value added tax and national insurance." This is a chimera. There are obviously some voters who are economically insecure and blame the poor and foreigners as a result, but they mostly vote Reform or Tory anyway. That bloc can only be a tiny fraction of the Labour vote, even under the depressed circumstances of 2024's 34%, so it hardly makes sense as a strategy to be appealing to it. In reality, the electoral pressure for parsimony at home and obliviousness abroad comes from the comfortably well-off and is articulated via their preferred media, i.e. the rightwing press such as the Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail.

The confusion over what kind of beast the current government is (I'm assuming that neither Beckett nor Bush is being disingenuous) highlights the difficulty in discerning any clear difference between the governments endured by the UK since 1997. There are of course contingent differences: their reaction to events, such as the great financial crash and the pandemic. But a closer examination shows little evidence of choices made outside the neoliberal consensus. Thus austerity didn't start with George Osborne but with Alistair Darling, while the unpreparedness of the state in the face of Covid-19 was the result of many governments habitual unconcern, the steady erosion of public health capabilities through local government cuts, and the belief that the NHS's capacity constraints should be addressed by marketisation and recourse to the private sector. All governments since 1997 have accepted the frame of the Thatcher dispensation, hence the hostility to public ownership, the prioritisation of private property over social housing, and the belief that business knows best.

One result of this homogeneity has been that major political divisions in society, such as Brexit, have had to find a non-parliamentary route for their initial expression, often only entering the formal political domain at the latest possible moment, with predictably disruptive results. Even when one party adopts a social movement or interest in an attempt to differentiate itself, as the Conservatives finally did over "leave" and are currently attempting to do over "net zero" and "wokeness", the other parties have quickly shifted their own position to adopt much the same stance. In the case of Labour, ruling out any compromise on Brexit and turning against trans rights have both been rationalised as an attempt to woo small-town conservatives, but this is pretty obviously a top-down manoeuvre driven by the press, not an organic development feeding up through constituency parties. The latter have been ringing the alarm bell about the alienation of Labour supporters since the earliest days of this government, over such issues as the two-child benefit cap and the winter fuel allowance, all to no avail.

The popular contempt for politicians of all stripes is not simply due to their failure to do what they promised once in office but springs from a sense that they don't really have any fixed beliefs and are mere opportunists, whether in respect of the management of the economy or the receipt of free concert tickets. Starmer's claim that he isn't ideological - that "There’s no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be" - isn't greeted warmly as evidence of his grown-up pragmatism, as many dim centrists imagine. Instead it prompts the suspicion that he is a slippery chancer. In reality, Starmer has a very particular ideology, as has been made clear this week by the decision to cut public spending rather than raise taxes, it's just that it is the ideology shared by almost the entire political class. Fish don't recognise water. Both Beckett and Bush have a professional interest in claiming that politics is more varied, even that governments may be inscrutable, but all the evidence suggests that we are living through an era of little ideological differentiation and almost no variety in governmental practice.