Dropping the Pilot

Keir Starmer's intention for Labour to supplant the Tories and hegemonise the centre-right of politics is now undeniable. Whether this was the goal all along, or whether it simply reflects the opportunism of electoral success, needn't detain us. What matters is whether it is sustainable. The party's success in the 2024 general election, planned or not, depended on splitting the vote on the right and leveraging an "efficient" distribution of its historically poor 34% share into an overwhelming majority of seats. Given the current unpopularity of the government, it is hard to see the party commanding a higher percentage of the vote at the next general election, and it's quite possible it will fall below 30%. As a result, you would expect Starmer to cling to the split on the right as a drowning man would to a raft, but his words suggest that he is actively hoping for a Conservative implosion and preparing the ground for a straight fight with Reform in which the nominal party of the workers becomes the establishment's bulwark against reckless populism, hence his emphasis on fiscal responsibility and the characterisation of Nigel Farage as Liz Truss 2.0.

You could argue that defining the next election as a run-off between Labour and Reform makes sense as a way of maintaining the split on the right, because the Tories are unlikely to fall below 20% in a general election, no matter how far they plummet in the current opinion polls or in local council contests. Indeed, a smart bet would be that Labour, the Conservatives and Reform all end up with a share in the 20s, with the main net movement relative to 2024 being from the first to the last of these, but with Labour still the largest party by votes and seats and quite possibly with a reduced but still viable majority. While first-past-the-post hasn't always been kind to Labour, it definitely aids it when the vote is fragmented (i.e. 80% spread across four parties with the Liberal Democrats in the teens), and that is largely because Labour has a core of urban seats that it is unlikely to lose even on a major swing, while it can pick up seats in a four-way contest simply by getting over 25%.

It might seem odd that so much attention is being paid to the polls at this time, and that so much of what the government says seems to be geared to positioning the party relative to a contest that is unlikely to happen before 2029, but that is to ignore both the nature of the Starmer administration and the dynamics of this parliament. Right from the off, the Starmer project has been about winning power: first in the Labour Party and then, almost as a continuation of that primary battle, at Westminster. As has become clear, this is power for its own sake, not power for a purpose, as Gordon Brown used to put it, hence the thrashing about in search of some philosophical underpinning that even sympathetic commentators like Stephen Bush are beginning to find embarrassing. This is not to say that Starmer doesn't have political goals, but they are not ones that he can be open about: securing the state against democratic accountability, cementing the UK's role as the US's wingman and making London safe for international capital. In key respects, you could say: job done. But Starmer clearly isn't going to retire at this stage, both because he feels there is more to do to copper-bottom the ship of state from popular challenge and because he does appear to be acutely sensitive to, and not a little baffled by, his unpopularity..

A consequence of the government's intellectual void is the need to create plausible enemies that it can define itself against. Just as the myth of antisemitism in the Labour Party under Corbyn provided a vector for an attack on socialism and even liberalism, so the spectre of Nigel Farage haunting Westminster provides a plausible target by which Labour's conservative policies can be dignified in comparison, even when Farage seeks to outflank Labour on the left over the two-child benefits cap and the winter fuel allowance (WFA). Indeed, this manouevre is helpful to Starmer because it additonally allows him to dismiss internal dissent by bracketing it with Reform. The result is Labour's steady march rightwards and the media's willing shift of the locus of political debate to the right of public opinion as a consequence. Evidence of this shift can be seen in the ratchet effect of the government's approach. Thus unpopular policies, such as the two-child cap and the WFA, are followed by hints that the government might relent, softening the rules but not fully reversing and certainly not conceding on the principle that benefits should be conditional and means-tested. 

There are two notable dynamics in play in a House of Commons in which Labour has 403 seats and the official opposition, the Conservatives, have only 120. The first is the inevitable temptation for MPs of the ruling party to rebel, whether out of principle, boredom or the desire to make a name for themselves. Where the government has a wafer-thing majority, this can lead to individual MPs enjoying a lot of leverage. Where it has a large majority, rebellions take a lot of organising if they are not to be futile. With the Socialist Campaign Group marginalised within the PLP, this has led to the liberal media attempting to disinter the mouldering corpse of the "soft left". That the media are leading this effort tells you that the soft left does not meaningfully exist, but also that there is no organic development of an internal opposition. As nature abhors a vacuum the result has been a proliferation of "caucuses" (the West Wing framing of the media is tiresomely predictable), often with no more members than you can count on one hand, e.g. Blue Labour, while some of the larger groups, e.g the Labour Growth Group, turn out to be nothing more than distribution lists for statements by Number 10.

Insofar as there is a discernible group within the PLP that has the insitutional heft and organisational experience to form a coherent opposition, it is those MPs that have come up through trade union ranks. The assumption that Angela Rayner is the most likely challenger to Keir Starmer as party leader is based on her own union background as much as her nominal appeal as the soft left standard bearer. She is, in fact, a bread-and-butter Labourist, so actually located on the centre-right of the party in historical terms, which her leaked suggestions made clear: "There is no doubt this memo setting out new ways of raising taxes on wealthy people as well as a proposal to clamp down on benefits for migrants is a way of trying to show her broader appeal. “She’s trying to put clear water between her and Keir,” one senior source said." It is simply the shift of politics rightwards that leaves her traditional and unimaginative views looking radical and allows the Guardian to call her "the most leftwing member of Starmer’s cabinet" and the Independent to fantasise about dropping the pilot: "a large number of MPs from the so-called “soft left” of the party are organising to try to force a change of direction, with allies of deputy prime minister Anglea Rayner urging her to organise a leadership contest."

Among the Labour-supporting commentariat, Stephen Bush at the Financial Times has been the most vocal is his belief that the election victory last year is in danger of being wasted. As he sees it, Starmer remains too preoccupied with legitimising himself relative to the party's history and culture: "People at the heart of the Labour government seem to be more preoccupied about whether or not it is governing within the Labour tradition than whether it is governing well. Because frankly, the only time that Labour has been able to secure two consecutive full terms in power is when, under Tony Blair, it had a clear theory of economic growth: that of economic liberalism, openness to the world and to the EU in particular. ... If Labour ministers stagger on as they are, with no economic project, no overarching plan for the public services, twisting and turning in the direction of public opinion, they will, like the Wilson government did, spend all their time losing and drifting before they lose the next election." That Blair's "theory" led to the global financial crisis of 2008 and the UK's exit from the EU does not give Stephen pause for thought.

Bush's depression doesn't stem solely from Starmer's inadequacies: his anti-intellectualism, his preference to cleave to the familiar territories of criminal justice and national security, his lack of charisma. It also arises from the belief that the window of opportunity presented by the fortuitous split on the right cannot last: that either the Tories recover their balance and Farage is once more relegated to the fringe, or the Conservative membership decamps en masse to Reform and regenerates it as a radical Thatcherite party, dropping the social liberalism but also re-establishing its role as the political wing of UK corporate interests and presenting itself as a competent national conservative party rather than a populist ginger group. It is likely that Kemi Badenoch is going to be walking the gangplank once her first 12 months are up in November. As Phil Burton-Cartledge notes, "a more moderate conservatism that actually conserves instead of destroys is ... the prospectus offered by no would-be successor to Badenoch". But that's because moderate conservatism is now the Labour brand. The push rightwards means that the space further right becomes congested, but that simply encourages merger. Labour's strategy remains the hope that such a reconfiguration can be avoided or, if it happens, that the Reformed Tories remain a Quixotic rabble. 

What will ultimately determine Labour's fate is whether the bitterness that it is currently cultivating persists. A government can be unpopular and still win if it is considered the lesser of two (or three) evils, but it can't win if it is hated, as Rishi Sunak discovered, and there is no question that a lot of people, including many who voted Labour last July, hate Starmer and his cabinet, and they have hated them right from the off. As Morgan McSweeney's amanuensis Jessica Elgot plaintively noted, "There is a barely concealed frustration among some Labour staffers about the intensity of the rejection. This is a government overseeing a huge boost to the minimum wage, protecting employees from tax rises, nationalising the railways and investing billions in the NHS." Leaving aside the sense of entitlement and the dubious claims, the point is that only one in three voters plumped for the party in 2024. It wasn't popular then and it isn't going to get any more popular with Starmer in charge. The last election was a fluke, but if you spent the previous 8 years insisting that only centrist managerialism and Starmer's "adultness" could propel Labour into office, you aren't going to admit that now. 

Starmer will continue as leader to the bitter end because the lurch to the right means there is no coherent opposition to him within the party, just a lot of unfocused personal ambition among the cabinet, few of whom appear to have any original ideas of their own, hence the excessive emphasis on their "life stories" as much as their appetite for the tired prescriptions of liberal think tanks and the Tony Blair Institute. A paradox is that while many Labour MPs, novices to the fore, know that they'll be looking for new jobs in four years, few fancy the gamble of a leadership challenge to try and change that doom-laden narrative now. As "Freebiegate" (which we should note occured within months of Labour taking office) showed, there is an air of fill-yer-boots about the current PLP, something that the public beyond Westminster appeared to pick up on well before the media did. If I can make one prediction with confidence, it is that this parliament will go down as one of the least talented and most underwhelming since full adult suffrage. When the most notable backbench initiative is a law to allow you to kill yourself, perhaps that isn't so surprising.

It's the Only Language They Understand.

If you want to shrink the prison population, reducing the tariff for murderers in exchange for the modern equivalent of the leg-iron (a "tag"), or chemically castrating a small number of sex offenders, will make little difference. Yet this recourse to the almost Medieval is the predictable focus of the media, and thus politicians, when the obvious short-term solution to over-crowding is a general amnesty for non-serious crimes. Outside of newspaper columns, there is no dispute that the reason British gaols are full is that we send too many people to them for often trivial reasons, not because we haven't built enough of them. It is standard to bemoan the failure of the prison system to rehabilitate, but while this can be fairly attributed to overcrowding and insuffcient resources, it is also the case that many people reading reports that prisoners spend 23 hours a day locked up will respond with "good". In other words, even if resources were infinite, it's unlikely we would prioritise rehabilitation over punishment. 

The government's current sentencing review, which was headed by David Gauke, the former Conservative Justice Secretary, is typical in reiterating this priority even as it admits the spiteful dynamic: "The purposes of sentencing, as set out in legislation, are punishment, reduction of crime, reparation, rehabilitation and public protection. The Review’s Part 1 report History and Trends in Sentencing found that over the last two decades, sentencing has focused disproportionately on punishment with a view from politicians and the media that 'the only form of punishment that counts is imprisonment.'" The response of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners was similar in its view: "The deprivation of liberty by imprisonment is a powerful tool, and Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) are clear it must be used to punish, and keep the public safe from, the most serious offenders. However, we support greater use of community supervision for those convicted of lower level crimes because the evidence shows short custodial sentences do little to rehabilitate repeat offenders". 

What we're witnessing in the latest floating of alternatives to prison is neither pragmatism nor idealism but a determination to maintain punishment at the apex of the hierarchy of purpose for the justice system. Convicts must suffer, hence even the mild inconveniences of tagging and curfews are preferred to the socially useful contributions and reparations of community orders that the press routinely deride as "soft". But the instinctive liberal response - that we should issue fewer custodial sentences, that prison conditions should be more humane and that we should properly support rehabilitation - has its own flaws, not least that it obscures the nature of the prison and the role it plays in society. For this reason, a decision to avoid the use of prison can potentially lead to worse outcomes. A famous example of chemical castration as an alternative to porridge was Alan Turing whose subsequent suicide eventually led to an apology by the last Labour government. No doubt Shabana Mahmood, the current Justice Secretary, is aware of the history, but she has a feral press to placate so it's (chemically, and with consent) "cut their goolies off". It's the only language they understand.

Prisons are the product of another age, specifically the Victorian era of high industrialism and the consequent reduction of labour to standardised units, as explored by social historians such as Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Their mix of the modern (surveillance and regimentation) and the anti-modern (a regime predating all that nonsense about human rights) remains a virtue for many. The reason prisons are antiquated in their operation as much as their fabric is because as a society we don't want to let go of that Victorian regime. We find modern prisons, with their functioning toilets and air-conditioning, irritating because there isn't visible suffering beyond the boredom of incarceration. Insofar as there has historically been an aversion to the use of prison it has been wholly on the basis of class (nicely satirised in Kind Hearts and Coronets), hence the reluctance to jail whitecollar criminals or the preference to send them to "open prisons" if a custodial sentence was unavoidable. 

As some point, there will be a dissolution of the prisons as dramatic as the dissolution of the monateries. Prisons are costly and ineffective, in terms of punishment as much as rehabilitation, as indicated by the high levels of recidivism. There will still be a need for the incarceration of "dangerous criminals" for public safety, but that definition will inevitably elide with that of the "criminally insane" or the "terrorist", whom society is happy to consider as categorically different, not least in their obscurity (the old idea of the oubliette). For the vast majority of crimes we will inevitably drop custodial sentences. The problem is that we will do that by normalising the idea of punishment within society rather than apart from it. Like the leper colonies and madhouses of the late Medieval period, the first purpose of the recognisably modern prisons that emerged in the Age of Enlightenment was quarantine, a principle taken to the extreme of preventing any intercourse between prisoners themselves, or even allowing the prisoner to see his gaolers, as in Jeremy Bentham's famous Panopticon.

We have already shifted the idea of reparation out of the prison system into society with community orders and ritual apologies to victims. The next step will be to shift punishment out as well. It isn't a coincidence that there have been a number of high profile cases of prison staff being prosecuted for having sexual relationships with prisoners in recent years. The subtext is the evaporation of boundaries: the very antithesis of Bentham's regime. That these incidents are often explained as the result of a crisis within the prison service (low morale, poor vetting, inadequate training) is illustrative of the belief that prisons are no longer fit for purpose: that the system is breaking down. But the more telling feature of this trend (the prominence of reporting rather than incidence) is the sense of the outside world breaching the prison wall, whether in the form of drugs and mobile phones smuggled in by drones or the sexual opportunism of warders. It is in this context that we should see the government's plans. Chemical castration is a punishment enacted within society. Tagging and curfews likewise. Punishment is moving out of the quarantine of prison and into society at large, and once that happens the need for forbidding walls diminishes.

The reason the prison population has grown is because the high threshold for custodial sentences has fallen over time. The threshold was obviously very low in the 18th and 19th centuries, as prison became an industry in itself and a key component of industrial society, but it rose over the course of the 20th century, due to "reform", reaching a peak in the 1970s as part of the sociological turn in which institutionalisation was seen as failure. It then fell once more, as politicians under pressure from the reactionary press decided that sending more people to gaol was a reasonable compensation for not reintroducing the death penalty. Tony Blair's mantra "Tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime" was an early sally into social punishment, blurring the boundaries between society and its criminal element, the most famous example of this being ASBOs: a device that recognised a social ill but simultaneously insisted that redress should be social as well, so placing both crime and punishment beyond the penal system.

The danger is that the threshold will remain low but be transferred across to punishment in society. In other words, you could easily find yourself serving a non-custodial sentence for an offence that 50 years ago wouldn't have resulted in more than a caution. We could see a lot more people tagged and curfewed. Not just a handful of murderers who have served half their sentence but youth done for smoking weed or the poor for shoplifting (whitecollar criminals will once more tend to be spared the worst). The choice that faces us as a society is whether the priority of the justice system is punishment or restitution (i.e. the rehabilitation of offenders and the reparation, where possible, of victims). The discussion of alternatives to prison is being carefully curated to emphasise that punishment remains the priority. The full development of a prison industrial complex run by private companies like Sodexo has been ruled out on the grounds of cost and incompetence, but the privatisation of punishment in society, managed by the likes of Serco, continues apace, and despite the same failings. 

Free Trade and Blasphemy

Back in January, Izabella Kaminska, formerly of the Financial Times, outlined an interesting take on Trump's then-impending tariff policy in a Politico article:"The era of Bidenomics is already being eclipsed by a new vision rooted in what could be called “national capitalism.” It’s a philosophy of radical liberalization that rejects state intervention, embraces privatization and leans heavily on market forces to reshape the economy — albeit within the confines of a protected system." The US's interpretation of capitalism has always been nationalist so you might question whether there has really been a departure. You might indeed wonder what Bidenomcs was if not a harbinger of a more assertively nationalist view of trade as a matter of national security. In Kaminska' view, "The tariffs aren’t being fueled by beggar-thy-neighbor trade objectives or crude protectionism; they’re resetting the rules of the game. Their purpose is to insulate the U.S. as it embarks on a radical market-oriented recalibration, stripping away the distortive, and often corruptive, influence of other countries’ state-driven economic models. ... Put simply, the U.S. has to build a wall against products from the global economy so that it can roll out a far more radical liberalization at home."

The opposition in these two excerpts between a "protected system" and "crude protectionism" highlights the fuzziness of the argument, which in turn reflects the incoherence of Trump's policy to date. A lot has happened since January, and we're clearly not in calm waters yet despite the climbdown from an all out trade embargo with China, but you'd be hard put to claim that a plan is successfully coming together. It's estimated that Trump has made more than 50 separate changes to the tariff regime and issued over a dozen executive orders on trade policy this year, which doesn't suggest a lot of joined-up thinking let alone a systematic plan. It's hard to disagree with the liberal conclusion that the last 6 weeks have been a lot of nothing: "2 April 2025, is not yet remembered as the day American industry was reborn. Much of what was announced that afternoon has already died." Kaminska's implication back in January was that the US is consciously returning to its Hamiltonian roots: protecting domestic producers by tariffs but otherwise giving capital a free hand to sculpt the US economy as it sees fit. Occam's Razor suggests Trump is off his nut and doesn't know what he's trying to achieve beyond some nebulous "deal of the century".

I think this reflects Kaminska's desire to see a more vigorous capitalism, as well as her longstanding disdain for the EU, but that has led her to misread the signals. As evidence for the change in policy she notes that "Trump’s America plans to eliminate subsidies for green energy and electric vehicles" and that this "will see fossil fuels compete on an equal footing, after years of being sidelined by preferential policies for renewables." Next to this she cites an "aggressive antitrust agenda that puts competition first" and the intent of Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, "to break up entrenched relationships between the Pentagon and contractors". The former are things already happening or clearly in the works. If there was one thing you could predict knowing Trump's history and who funds him, it was that the oil industry would be favoured. The latter two are pious hopes that probably aren't going to happen. Even more ludicrously, she claims that "His exploration of a bitcoin reserve — which advocates believe would make it impossible for central banks to prop up banks with money printing — indicates that the era of state-supported banks is likely over." Occam's ever-useful Razor suggests that Trump's interest in crypto is a lot simpler and boils down to a pump-and-dump scheme run by his sons.

More recently, Kaminska has commended an FT article by the American conservative think-tanker Oren Cass who employs the same free-trade versus national capitalism dichotomy. This is a more defensive piece, written after the bulk of the tariff chaos. Cass crticises free-traders for "imagining a global economy that operates like the friendly free market on the economist’s blackboard in which competitors sharpen one another and capital flows to its best use. Productivity rises, prices fall, everyone flourishes. In the real world, by contrast, the global marketplace is dominated by government-built national champions. Capital flows towards the biggest subsidies and the most exploitable labour." This is a cogent critique, but Cass's purpose is not to suggest that the US might do likewise, which would be anathema, but to reinforce the idea that there is a choice to be made: "The bet on tariffs is that the free market, even at more limited domestic scale, can deliver better outcomes than a global market dominated by state-subsidised national champions. Perhaps the free-traders are betting on the latter, and would abandon American-style capitalism altogether before allowing so blasphemous a word as “protection” to pass their lips. What they cannot have in the modern world, no matter how ideal in theory, is free trade and a free market at the same time."

Where Cass goes wrong is in imagining that a free market is possible, even if only within a protected domestic economy (and implicitly at continental scale - this isn't an option for mid-size countries like the UK or France). The suggestion is not only that free trade and the free market are at odds but that all the latter needs to flourish is the limitation of the former. There are two issues here. The first is that a truly free market has never yet arisen at scale and across all significant areas of the economy. What we have is a melange of freeish sectoral markets, state-controlled monopolies, commercial monopsonies  and cartels. Likewise, there has never been consistent free trade despite all the attemps from GATT onwards. International commerce is subject to diverse tariffs, non-trade barriers and regulatory constraints whose practical effect is to favour certain producers or importers. Capitalism is everywhere a managed system. The invisible hand is a convenient myth.

There is a sense in the arguments of Kaminska and Cass of another attempt to revive the health of late capitalism with "one weird trick". Rather than asking why capitalism produces the negative outcomes that it does, the suggestion is that true capitalism hasn't been tried yet (the old mocking critique directed at socialism), or that we have at least diverged from the true path due to a faddish globalism. Seeing free trade as antithetical to a thriving domestic capitalism doesn't make much sense. As Cass himself notes in reference to "export-led growth", there is no lack of examples of successful capitalist economies that have thrived on free trade, but he dismisses these as the product of state subsidies to national champions. In other words, cheating. The reality is different. Other economies are not as dependent on subsidised national champions as he suggests, while the US itself is hardly a stranger to both open and disguised subsidies, hence those remarks about an "aggressive antitrust agenda" and the Pentagon's "entrenched contractors". Making subsidies more overt was central to Bidenomics, after all. 

What both Kaminska and Cass fail to mention is that the great change in trading patterns that occured towards the end of the last century had nothing to do with the trade in goods or services but was to do with the free movement of capital. It was the removal of capital controls in the 1980s that led to the offshoring of American industrial production (and that of many other developed nations) and consequently the diversion of US capital to foreign investments. That, rather than the state subsidisation of national champions, stimulated export-led growth in developing nations. The problem for the US is that the free movement of capital works in both directions. This has led to increased foreign investment in America since the millennium, notably by Europe and the Far East, that has acted as a beach-head for the import of goods and services, producing both trade deficits and growing liabilities (i.e. the outflow of earnings). This has not been offset by a comparable growth in US earnings from foreign investments. The end result of Trump's chaos is a default 10% tariff on other countries. This is a tax. Whether you see it as an attempt to redress the US's international investment position, or simply as an excuse to cut domestic income taxes, it is an example of the use of state power to benefit native capitalists. 

We're now at a point in the history of neoliberalism where the domestic demand for increased taxation to repair the degraded social fabric is becoming irresistible. Astute conservatives know that this will mean the increased taxation of wealth, either in the form of property taxes or taxes on the earnings of property. To date, the political response to this has been the cultivation of the populist right. This is because the defence of property is the defence of privilege. Historically, that would take an anti-democratic course and later an anti-communist course, even where the left was weak and no threat. Since the eclipse of communism and the socialist left, it has tended to take a populist course in which the defence of property is married to the defence of the privileges of citizenship and the native against a traitorous establishment and feral immigrants. The vision of American capitalism outlined by Kaminska and Cass, in which tariffs reinvigorate the economy and free trade dwindles, is unlikely to come to pass, both because US capital remains international in scope and because a hegemonic tax on other countries depends on healthy trade. If they were serious about rebuilding industrial production, they would be advocating capital controls but that, not protection, would be the real blasphemy.