Labour’s Problems

Keir Starmer is in trouble. ‘Phase two’ of his government launched on 1 September and was immediately derailed by Angela Rayner’s tax dodging and resignation as deputy leader. Then Peter Mandelson’s long-enduring friendship with the deceased American sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein blew up in the government’s face. Starmer is mired in questions concerning what he knew about the relationship, and when, and whether he ignored warnings. The denials are unconvincing. The disaster was compounded on Monday by the resignation of a chief aid, Paul Ovenden, over newly surfaced misogynist remarks about Diane Abbott.

Telling the truth about the Mandelson affair is difficult for Starmer. He can’t say outright that he appointed a capricious, mercenary and cynical dealmaker, easily wowed by the vulgar display of wealth, because such a disposition might prove congenial in the current White House. Nor can he admit to rewarding a powerful ally. Nor can he say that he thought the squalid details already known when Mandelson was appointed ambassador – that the friendship with Epstein continued even after the financier pleaded guilty to procuring a child for prostitution – were a worthwhile trade-off for Mandelson’s acumen. It is a tale of two disqualifying failures of judgment: Mandelson’s inability (or unwillingness) to discern how sinister and criminal Epstein was, and Starmer’s failure to perceive the political and moral danger of such an association.

The government was ill-prepared to weather these squalls. Its real legislative achievements have made little impact; its economic policy remains imprisoned by Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules. November’s budget looms ominously. Britain continues to feel expensive, unjust and adrift. A supposedly social democratic government has offered only the most timid response to racism on its streets. Government approval ratings, and those of Starmer personally, are among the worst in Europe (only Macron outstrips him, on -55 to Starmer’s -47). New governments’ numbers rarely increase, but a collapse of this scale is unprecedented.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The press heralded the arrival of ‘no-drama Starmer’ at the head of the British state as a return to calmer, more competent politics, insulated by a staggering majority, laser-focused on delivery of Labour’s five missions (now MIA). Tom Baldwin, Starmer’s hagiographer, briefed the press that be may be ‘boring’, but he is ‘relentless in pursuit of his aim’. A fantasy of restoration was general across the media. Even now, the hope persists in some liberal circles that the turbulence of the past decade and a half – the austerity years, the blindside catastrophe of Brexit, the insolent surges of the Corbyn years – might roll back to Long Blairism’s status quo ante. To borrow the words of another Labour leader, that option no longer exists.

But what’s the problem? The journalist’s answer is usually about communication. Whatever Labour does well it fails to trumpet proudly: the partial renationalisation of rail, ending tax exemptions for private education, the incoming package of workers’ rights (however diluted). The party is ashamed of its instinctive positions on social issues. Starmer is a bad communicator, and his lack of a clear political vision (once seen as pragmatic flexibility) now infects the whole of government with uncertainty and inertia.

Too much can be made of the claim that Starmer is a cipher. The man’s insistence on stolid self-repression doesn’t help. (He once told an interviewer: ‘I don’t dream.’) Still, there is a relatively consistent throughline to his politics. He is strongly institutionalist and managerial, and believes in the institutions of the British state (though less obviously in funding them well). He is meritocratic rather than redistributionist, and dislikes bought advantage in education. He is patriotic and integrationist – the chief thrust of his notorious ‘island of strangers’ speech. Other qualities emphasised during his rise – his impassioned belief in human rights, the value of political protest or ‘compassion and dignity’ for migrants – have been jettisoned. He dislikes politics as such, and lacks the soft skills honed by politicians with longer careers. But it isn’t obvious that any other leader would be much better at handling Britain’s dysfunctional state apparatus, sclerotic economy, collapsing public services and powerful class of rentier parasites.

The deputy leadership contest has been described as a proxy battle between Starmer’s preferred candidate, Bridget Phillipson, and Lucy Powell, an ally of Andy Burnham. Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, is Starmer’s most significant rival in the party. The ideological differences between the candidates are slight, but if Powell wins, Downing Street will understand it as an admonition from an disquieted party. The authoritarian conduct of the government in parliament, suspending Labour MPs for rebelling over child poverty, has alienated many MPs; the party’s dwindling membership feels its programme is barely recognisable.

Labour’s instinctive aversion to regicide means Starmer is probably safe for now. Burnham doesn’t have a parliamentary seat, or a simple route to getting one. Reform would pose a threat in any by-election (as well as the ensuing mayoral contest in Manchester). Wes Streeting, who must now regret the many blessings that Peter Mandelson bestowed on him, has a tiny and fragile majority. Shabana Mahmood is so right-wing that even the current Labour Party would baulk at making her leader. But for the first time since his sweeping victory, it looks plausible that Starmer may not lead Labour into the next election.

Sympathetic journalists castigate Labour for defaulting to its favourite pastimes: anxious introspection about its purpose and assembly of a circular firing squad. It took the Tories ten years to reach this degree of perpetual crisis; Labour has managed it in fourteen months. If only the party could look to the country, and provide the government it needs. But this lament reverses cause and effect: the Conservatives turned inwards as they were torn apart by Brexit, between the repudiation of the Cameron project and corrupt vainglory of the Johnson ministry. Political crisis leads to infighting, not the other way around.

In the preface to his 1964 edition of Bagehot’s English Constitution, the Labour minister Richard Crossman observed that, until the formation of the working-class parties, politics was conducted as an argument ‘within the social oligarchy’, a condition to which many believe it has since returned. Crossman was interested in Bagehot’s cunning discrimination between appearance and reality: between the way government claims to work and how it actually functions. By Crossman’s time, Bagehot’s own account had ossified into myth. Crossman proposed that, mirroring the wider postwar cultural oligopoly, power was concentrated at the apex of political parties, and politics itself was conducted by opaque power struggles inside party machinery rather than in parliament – of which we hear only the garbled gossip that reach the press. As such, ‘politics is inevitably personified and simplified in the public mind, into a battle between two super-leaders appointed for life or until they are removed by intra-party coup d’état.’ The intervening fifty years have only intensified this phenomenon.

A system in which a plurality of people feel unrepresented and ignored, and in which professional politics is so insulated, will eventually fracture. Duopoly endures because it uses crisis to reinvent itself, but reinvention depends on the parties’ ability to represent broad sections of the people. In Labour’s case this was always an alliance between the organised working class and the progressive, educated middle class (the very old joke about the Rodmell branch of the Labour Party, which met at Virginia Woolf’s house, was that one half worked for the other half). But the structure of politics is changing: class determines vote much less clearly than age or education; the bonds of party loyalty are very weak, and no longer handed on intergenerationally.

The Brexit referendum, sporadic protest votes in local elections and the long rise of the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales might be seen as symptoms of this changing structure. It isn’t new. But for the first time, credible challengers to the right of the Conservatives and the left of Labour will make many seats an unpredictable five-way contest at the next general election. So far, Labour’s response has been to lay jealous claim to Green or Corbyn-curious voters in the name of anti-Tory hegemony, rather than to make any political effort to attract them ‘home’. The parties of the historic duopoly are both languishing at around 20 per cent in the polls. Optimistic strategists think this is the core vote around which prodigals will agglomerate in an election campaign; pessimists, backed by recent polling, suggest this might just be the residual duopolistic glue, prone to further collapse as alternatives look more viable. Some of those who have abandoned Labour hope the smaller insurgents might at least pull the party back to the left.

Two related phenomena make governing Britain even harder: the collapse of the public sphere and the resurgence of the nativist right. The question is sometimes posed as: how are social media changing politics? Even forming the question assumes that ‘social media’ simply displace the old media – press and TV – as a place where politics is conducted, equally susceptible to grid-based messaging strategies. But for many, and not only the young, politics is chiefly mediated through an anarchic and externally opaque torrent of short video, in which fraud is rife, critical thinking rare, and trust accrued through charisma and parasocial identification. The public sphere is shattered into countless non-overlapping private feeds. Nigel Farage has amassed more followers on TikTok than the rest of Westminster combined.

The digital firehose of attenuated information, lies and rage has energised the resurgent right. Misinformation, xenophobic paranoia and conspiracy theories accumulate around issues such as small boat crossings. Tommy Robinson’s 100,000-strong nationalist rally in London at the weekend drew heavily on the organisational capacity and viral culture of this transatlantic digital sewer.

Robinson’s street movement is more likely to find electoral expression in Reform than any of the minuscule fascist parties. Labour’s approach to this electoral threat has so far been incoherent. Some strategists hope that a Farage-Starmer head-to-head will shore up the Labour vote. Attracting prodigal voters through fear rather than hope is always dicey territory. Some in Labour are genuinely fearful of the politics that Faragism presages. But the party’s response is vacillating: attempts to take localism, community pride or rootedness seriously tip into implausible, low-fat mimicry of Faragist positions. Part of the problem is that Labour is unwilling to articulate why its voters should fear Farage, or to condemn outright the attempts to erode Britain’s social taboo on explicit racism. There are some small signs that Robinson’s rally is beginning to provoke some action at the top, but it remains too timid and too slow.

It is hard to understand Starmer’s position without a granular sense of the way power operates in Westminster and Britain more widely. But such an account, without a wider sense of the country’s structural problems, inherited traditions and peculiarities, or parallel phenomena in other countries, can degenerate into a form of court gossip. On Politics, a new strand of the LRB podcast, aims to bring these two streams – the structural and the acute – together. In its first episode, available today, we ask questions about Labour’s stalled government and the country’s uncertain future. Politics is changing very rapidly, in an increasingly violent and zero-sum world. Old certainties are rapidly liquidated. Trying to make sense of that change with reason and clarity seems the best way to chart a passage through it.

Listen to On Politics now and subscribe to the LRB podcast on Apple, Spotify and all other podcast apps.