What Is the Labour Government For?

Though noticeably obtuse when it comes to actual history, the Guardian's political coverage has a marked tendency to recycle the past, seeking parallels and portents to explain contemporary developments. The shadows of Thatcher and Blair loom large. This can give the impression that British politics is stuck in an endless holding pattern, which isn't entirely wrong. The latest example sees the political editor Pippa Crerar mining a more recent seam, the 2015 general election: "Before the 2015 UK election, the Australian political expert Lynton Crosby devised a strategy for the Tories that became known as “scraping the barnacles off the boat” – shedding unpopular policies that hindered the party’s electoral appeal. Instead, the party focused on core issues it believed would help win over floating voters: the economy, welfare, the strength of David Cameron (and weakness of Ed Miliband) and immigration. Everything else was deprioritised and the Conservatives stuck to their messages rigidly. It worked."

The Tory focus on essentials in 2015 had the advantage that most voters considered it plausible. The Tories can usually be relied on to promote the interests of business, and enough people are convinced by the media that this is the same as promoting a healthy economy. Likewise, there were solid grounds in 2015 for believing that the Tories would be hard on welfare (excepting pensions), not least their track record as part of the outgoing coalition government that had embedded austerity. And it wasn't implausible that they would lower immigration relative to the "influx" of Eastern Europeans seen under New Labour. Of course, the last of these is now a busted flush, following the "Boriswave" that was the predictable consequence of getting Brexit done, which goes some way to explain why the party is down in the polls and Reform is up. Indeed, you could argue that it largely explains why Reform exists and now has 6 MPs (Robert Jenrick having defected from the Conservatives this week).

In contrast, the problem for Labour is that a dwindling number of voters are convinced of the party's core values, or even believe that they have any. As a result, a strategy of "scraping the barnacles off the boat" in order to focus on core issues like the cost of living doesn't convince, both because the commitment seems insincere and because the government seems incapable of dragging its attention away from the barnacles. The recent partial U-turns on ID cards, inheritance tax and business rates all suggest a government that doesn't really know what it is doing, or why it is doing it, given that all were battles it chose to fight and could easily have avoided. The emblematic ID card scheme, like the watering down of the Hillsborough bill and the proposed abolition of jury trials, suggests a government incapable of passing up an opportunity to indulge it authoritarian instincts, while its attempt to exempt the security state from the duty of candour is an example of its unerring ability to misunderstand public opinion. None of this is ever going to be popular with voters.

The bulk of the PLP also seems unwilling to let go of the issues that it believes helped it into power, hence antisemitism is once more in the news, with MPs apparently terrorised by teachers and the West Midlands Police accused of a secret agenda in banning the notorious ultras of Tel Aviv Maccabi. This is because the essential issue for many on the party right is the defeat of the left, the one issue that reliably unites the Old Right, the Blairites and Blue Labour. This has mechanically led to the promotion and protection of Israeli interests, which has in turn gradually morphed into a soft Islamophobia. This has presented the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, with a dilemma. She can't dismiss the WMP's poor handling of the affair as a trivial operational matter without being accused of pandering to the Muslim vote, and she can't dismiss the force's critics as hyperventilating opportunists without calling into question the seriousness of the charge of antisemitism. The result is that she has felt obliged to demand the Chief Constable's resignation. 

What these two cases highlight is that the right of the party are having to cast their net ever wider to find opponents now that the left has been expelled from Labour. In Bristol, it isn't the pro-Palestine protestors who face sanction but the school that sought to avoid conflict outside its gates, while in Birmingham Labour find themselves attacking the police because they too sought to avoid conflict on the streets around Villa Park. The Labour right - many of whom had little interest in antisemitism before 2015 - now find that they can no longer control the monster they created over the last decade, but also find that they cannot kick the drug, if I can mix my metaphors. They are now at the mercy of small, unrepresentative activist groups, like Labour Against Antisemitism, but they have also internalised the cause so completely that they are willing to credulously espy antisemitism almost anywhere within the institutions of the British state and the wider establishment, from the BBC to school governors and the police.This has the febrile atmosphere of a "terror", even if people aren't being routinely shot on the flimsiest of pretexts.

You can understand why the likes of John Mann wish to keep anti-antisemitism prominent, over and above a defensive posture in the face of protests over Gaza. Without it, he has no political utility for the British media and thus no public profile. But you would imagine that there are plenty of MPs outside Labour Friends of Israel who can see how self-defeating this has become for the party and how irrelevant it is for most voters. The demand that the government do more about the cost of living crisis is thus a veiled criticism not only of its lack of focus but of its chronic tendency to be distracted by the "barnacles". You could (generously) interpret the recent chunterings by Paul Ovenden about the "stakeholder state" as having a similar rationale. But what all the mutterings about a lack of focus and the ineffective "levers of power" avoid is the admission that the reason this government is failing is because it is run by people whose ambition (and whose expectation until quite late in the day) was limited to recapturing the Labour Party from the hated left.

Now in office, purely as a result of the Tory collapse, and augmented in the Commons by a generation of rightwing novice MPs who have only ever known factional struggle in draughty church halls and social club committee rooms, the Labour Party cannot shake its belief that the UK faces a greater threat from a fragmented and disorganised left than it does from a nativist right led by a genuine antisemite. The revelations about Nigel Farage's schooldays can be read as an attempt by liberals to shift the government's focus from the left to the right, and will succeed up to a point - Starmer will happily decry antisemitism on both flanks - but the effort will ultimately fail so long as the likes of John Mann and Steve Reed have a platform. They will always prefer to attack the left. This is reinforced by their not-so-secret belief that the political right will remain divided as the bitter and acrimonious defection of Tories to Reform continues. The focus of their ire will increasingly shift to the Greens, particularly if Your Party continues to spiral towards irrelevance.

The problem is that this still doesn't answer the question: what is this Labour government for? All it does is recapitulate the same arguments made by its media outriders in 2024: that here is a group of sober professionals who can be trusted to manage the country after Tory chaos, and who have proved their ethical credentials by their robust expulsion of the left. It fails to recognise that they won the last general election by default, that their authoritarian managerialism was never popular, and that their track record in office has underwhelmed even the pessimists. A change of leader later this year is unlikely to change any of that, but that in turn will only cause the party to redouble its efforts to remind the electorate that the real threat is the left and only Labour can counter it. More enemies will have to be found who can be tarred with the brush of objective antisemitism. The herbivorous teachers and nonplussed police officers are only the start.