Business as Usual
Steven Methven
In his speech to the Labour Party conference, Keir Starmer pledged massive investment in renewable energy and a 2030 target for exclusively green energy in the UK. Accompanying this would be the formation of ‘Great British Energy’, a state-owned start-up for the ownership of green technology and energy production; the profits would be diverted to a new Sovereign Wealth Fund. Was this real? I wondered. Was the leader who had successfully routed large sections of the left from the party now grandstanding on essentially Corbynite policies?
Starmer’s speech got a rapturous reception not only in the conference hall but from the mainstream press. Gone are the days when Angela Rayner would be asked on Question Time if she planned to ‘nationalise sausages’. ‘Starmer more confident that I’ve ever seen him,’ Sky’s Beth Rigby said. ‘Hope turns to belief.’
The Labour Files, a four-part series by al-Jazeera’s Investigations Unit, was released to coincide with the conference. Based on perhaps the largest leak of internal party documents in British political history, it chronicles what it describes as the ‘lawlessness’ of the Labour Party in the years since Corbyn’s election as leader in 2015. The first episode examines the ways in which unelected staff working for the party’s general secretary sought to expel and silence Corbyn-supporting leftists. The second looks at how those same bureaucrats worked to silence supporters of Palestinian freedom. The third argues that the Labour Party supports a ‘hierarchy of racisms’ – a phrase taken from the independent Forde Report – according to which anti-Black and anti-Muslim bigotry is minimised. The fourth episode investigates claims that the party used hacked data to investigate critical members.
For those on the left of the Labour Party, the series is a visceral reminder of the hostility shown to Corbyn and his supporters by the party’s central bureaucracy, abetted by MPs and politicians on the party’s right. But it also provides documentary evidence of collusion among many of Labour’s most senior figures to undermine the possibility of a social democratic government.
To most people outside the party, though, the revelations may come as a surprise: following their concerted effort to see Corbynism discredited before the 2019 election, the media have declined to relitigate the events of those years. The long delayed and highly critical Forde Report into bullying, racism and sexism in the Labour Party was published in July – and met largely with silence. Al-Jazeera’s investigations have evaded the enthusiastic furore that attended the BBC’s controversial 2019 Panorama investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party.
Many of the facts broadcast by al-Jazeera were already in the public domain. An internal Labour report on antisemitism, leaked to Novara Media in 2020, showed the contempt and even hatred that party officials expressed towards Corbyn and his supporters in the run up to the 2017 election. A leak to Buzzfeed in 2019 revealed that it was those officials – and not Corbyn – who had stymied attempts to investigate antisemitism in the party. Neither of these stories found their way into the mainstream media.
To an extent, and however much they matter morally, the details of the al-Jazeera documentary no longer matter politically, given the decisive victory of centrism in the Labour Party. But the series reveals an organisation that is still deeply paranoid about what its officials refer to as ‘entryism’, but others might call ‘legitimate democratic change’. Part of the fear comes from the idea that control of the party might be transferred from one group of individuals to another: during the Corbyn years, there was revulsion on the Labour right at the idea that constituencies might deselect unsatisfactory MPs, even though no MPs were in fact deselected. That same faction is now celebrating the deselection of Sam Tarry, who was sacked as a shadow minister for remarks he made on a picket line in July.
But there is also, in the leaked files, tangible terror that the party might slip from the right-of-centre ground whose supposedly homogeneous occupants – property owners, pensioners and business people – are widely believed to be the people who decide elections. That fear has now passed: as Beth Rigby put it, Starmer’s conference speech was ‘cheered to rafters even as he positions himself heir to Blair’.
With a prime minister aping Thatcher and an opposition leader mimicking Blair, a pair of impersonators reviving the political struggles of decades past, this is politics as pastiche: detached from reality, from ideas and ideology, and from the future that bears down on us. It’s disastrous, as we’ve seen from the fallout of the Tories’ ‘mini-budget’, and as we’ll continue to see as we fail to make headway towards the demands of environmental and economic security for all.
The most important resolution to come from the Labour conference was the membership’s voting, for the first time, in favour of proportional representation. No doubt the parliamentary wing of the party will reject it, now that they’re a sniff away from power under first-past-the-post. But whether electoral reform is adopted or not, it’s an acknowledgment from within the Labour Party that it can no longer bear the contradictions which emerge from its own pursuit of power.
Contradiction is a nice word for ‘lie’. Two days after Starmer’s optimistic announcement about ‘Great British Energy’, the shadow energy secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, spoke to Utility Week. The envisioned company, he said, would be less concerned with energy production than with ‘the management of the investments, which we believe are essential to unlock these markets and opportunities’. Business as usual.
Comments
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13 October 2022
at
3:45pm
Howard Medwell
says:
I'll stick with the simple truth as expressed by David Runciman in an LRB article at the outset of Corbynism: the Labour Party is not a start-up. Indeed it isn't. It was established as an ultra-respectable, middle-of-the -road mouthpeace for the Liberal (with a capital L), and generally very non-militant, bureaucratic leaderships of the trade unions. Militant sections of the working class were never under any illusions. "Some people advise us not to bother with parliament, or with our Labour Party" complained miners' leader Herbert Smith, speaking to a mass meeting of Lnacashire miners in 1912, "I ask you, brothers, what kind of advice is that?" "Sensible!" came the immediate response, according to press reports, from several voices in the crowd. And it still is: parliamentary elections and rituals can never challege the power of Big Business in Britain; those who claim to be left-wing need to get on with the (somewhat belated) historical task of building an extra-parliamentary socialist party. Labour MP's need not apply.
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14 October 2022
at
2:20pm
CarpeDiem
says:
@
Howard Medwell
Runciman ended the article you refer to by saying "if ever an election needed a bit of fixing it was this one" - to prevent Corbyn from becoming the Labour leader in the 2015 leadership election. The same article starts with "It's easy to confuse democracy with democracy". In between Runciman imparts his wisdom which drips with elitism and disdain for the hoi polloi should they wish to get very directly involved in the political process. And somewhere in the middle, he says "Corbyn is an intransigent independent trying to take over an established player". So staying consistent is "intransigence" when it comes to Corbyn and standing in an election is akin to "trying to take over an established player".
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14 October 2022
at
3:36pm
Ken Gelder
says:
@
CarpeDiem
"David Walter Runciman, 4th Viscount Runciman of Doxford, FBA ...educated at Eton..."
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15 October 2022
at
12:35pm
Howard Medwell
says:
@
Ken Gelder
no need to hold his family backgtound against him - his great uncle had the right idea about the crusades! It's true he is generally a pretty extreme centrist, but at the same time, he isn't firghtened of looking at parliamentary democracy from the outside. He's certainly got the right idea about kids voting, and has been attacked for it.
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14 October 2022
at
5:54pm
staberinde
says:
Corbyn and the Labour Left had two bites at the cherry and failed.
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15 October 2022
at
9:47am
XopherO
says:
@
staberinde
Or you can leave the country.
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15 October 2022
at
2:24pm
Howard Medwell
says:
@
staberinde
Attlee didn't just look like the Establishment. He was part of the Establishment.
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15 October 2022
at
2:36pm
CarpeDiem
says:
@
staberinde
It's all just a game, isn't it ?
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15 October 2022
at
8:38pm
staberinde
says:
@
CarpeDiem
Depends how you take your metaphors. It certainly isn't a critique of any argument.
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16 October 2022
at
3:43pm
XopherO
says:
@
CarpeDiem
If you insist on being trite. The choice is between an avaricious, depraved, toxic Tory party or an institutionally corrupt, visionless, Tory-lite Labour Party. Both have had a big hand in getting the UK (England in particular) to this terrible future for millions of deprived citizens - children in particular. Neither, nor Lib Dems, see a way out of their joint folly, only a continuation. If you can, leave the country even if it is only to Scotland or the Irish Republic. A cop-out. I'm in France, which still despite Macron's attacks has a more generous social security system which as in Sweden is paid for by substantial national insurance deductions on both employees and employers. For decades the Tories have described the French economy as a 'basket case'. Who is really that now?
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17 October 2022
at
11:59pm
ianbrowne
says:
@
staberinde
I wasn't aware that Corbyn had ever attended a terrorist funeral. If you know of such a thing, I'd be glad to where and when it was. I suspect that your statement is simply incorrect.
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17 October 2022
at
7:47pm
jamesmann
says:
".....from several voices in the crowd." Really? As many as 'several'?
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18 October 2022
at
8:30pm
Camus
says:
Let's slow down and take a look at the positive aspects of the conversion of the Conservative and Unionist party into the raving loony party (Westminster branch). There is a very good chance that the Labour Party will form the next government and take you back into a single market ending all of the malarkey about tariffs and customs duties, flights to Ruwanda with two teenagers still wet from the Cannel crossing, and all of the other ludicrous Brexit benefits which the Tories have bestowed on you.
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19 October 2022
at
8:03pm
Paul Wright
says:
@
Camus
Camus; When you have finished with those rose tinted Starmer glasses I could do with them to consider Stabarinde's patronising comment that I should be grateful for Tory-Lite, after all we all need to know our place.
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20 October 2022
at
4:21pm
Rory Allen
says:
@
Camus
I wish I could believe that Labour would take us back into the Single Market and Customs Union. But Starmer has shown no sign of possessing the backbone to stand up to the howls of outrage from the Brexit movement. In fact it doesn't require that much courage: the business community already knows the negative effects of Brexit: see a recent item on YouTube called 'The Brexit Effect' compiled by the Financial Times team. But the Labour leadership has been so traumatised by the whole Corbyn episode into flinching whenever the right wing media attack them, that they have been reduced to a state of learned helplessness.
Read moreRunciman's no impartial observer, he's very much invested in the status quo. So why pay so much attention to what he says ?
There's your problem right there...
The 2017 general election was their best chance, with May squeezed by UKIP and shooting herself in the foot with the Death Tax. Despite Corbyn's popularity with the young, his appeal was insufficiently broad.
Failing to learn his lesson, he proceeded to demonstrate that he couldn't live up to the foundational requirements of leadership: standing next to Union Jacks, condemning Russian murder on British soil, not attending terrorist funerals, not undermining the nuclear deterrent.
He and his followers fail to understand that radicalism is rarely accepted unless it is presented as anything but, and fronted by people who look like the Establishment. Like Atlee.
Will we get more than Starmer advertises? Perhaps; perhaps not. One thing's sure: if you wear your radical heart on your sleeve, you get nothing. You can wail about the rules, or you can play the game.