https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/prospects?pc=1621
Caitlín Doherty
16 August 2024Society

How is the Starmer regime likely to govern? The election period yielded more questions than answers. As a succession of blunders by Sunak’s campaign – the PM’s early exit from a D-Day memorial assembly in Dunkirk, the revelation that several of his close confidants had placed suspiciously accurate bets on the date of the election before its public announcement – filled the rolling news chyrons, the opposition played dumb. Labour’s strategy was to do nothing and let the government fall, breaking its silence only occasionally with monosyllabic yelps of ‘growth’ and ‘change’. The Labour manifesto was light on detail – 136 pages of large-point font outlining amorphous commitments to focus-group-tested quangos in the energy and transport sectors – but heavy on photos of Starmer, Reeves and Lammy, their furrowed brows and rictus grins framed by turbines and terraced houses. Throughout May and June, the Labour leader appeared on the nightly news, tight-lipped, clutching unsipped mugs of tea as pensioners relayed the impossible costs of heating their homes; in interviews he claimed to have no favourite novel, to have suffered no childhood fears and never to dream.

If Starmer was reluctant to announce new policies, he was eager to rule them out: taxes on wealth, corporations, VAT or income; spending commitments that might contravene his ‘iron fiscal rules’. Now, after a month in office, neo-Labourism continues to assert itself through a series of negative propositions. ‘If we can’t afford it, we can’t do it’, Rachel Reeves told Parliament in a dour reversal of Keynes’s dictum, as she claimed to have discovered a £22bn ‘black hole’ left by her predecessor. That means no significant funding boost for the nation’s vitiated health service, no automatic winter fuel subsidies for retirees, no repeal of draconian restrictions on child benefits, a halt to infrastructure spending and further cuts to departmental budgets. It also means an end to some of the Tories’ most expensive culture-war gimmicks – among them the deployment of the Bibby Stockholm, an offshore barge to house 500 male asylum seekers, and the pledge to deport others to Rwanda – although Labour may yet substitute these with its own.

To forecast the likely trajectory of Starmerism, it is necessary to grasp the UK’s domestic tensions and global position – for these are the parameters within which the new government will have to operate. A victory by default is not necessarily pyrrhic. But given Labour’s deliberate lack of political vision, the party’s fortunes are uniquely dependent upon external events. Already, it has been forced to confront a series of far-right riots which spread from the deindustrialized north-west to impoverished coastal and semi-urban peripheries in late July. The signs of decline – economic, societal, geopolitical – are clear. If the election was marked by a shrugging acceptance of this, as the neutral background on which British politics plays out, then the next half-decade may thrust it to the fore.

‘Change’, the byword of Starmer’s campaign, has hardly been in short supply since the start of Tory rule in 2010. Britain has not only experienced the rapid dissipation of its internal civic structures thanks to austerity, but also a series of external economic and political shocks. Hollowed from within and buffeted from without, the country rattles as it falls. After leaving the EU, it proved incapable either of enacting nativist protectionist measures or of becoming a ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ super-city-state (canard though the ambition may always have been). Instead, it has improvised its own inversion to Pyramus’s denouement: staggering across the world stage mortally injured while proclaiming its good health, inflicting further damage on itself as it tries to hide the wounds. In power, the Tory Party could no more ‘take back control’ than it could control its own frontbench. As a proxy for national self-determination, it pledged to safeguard England’s southern border from the perils of French supermarket dinghies bearing Syrian, Afghan and Eritrean teenagers. But even its immigration targets proved elusive, allowing Farage’s Reform UK to outflank it on the right.

While other parts of the world have begun to shift from ‘frictionless’ trade towards industrial policy and defence investment, the Ukanian economy has remained reliant on the mobile capital that flows through the City of London: a significant liability, as demonstrated by Truss’s ‘fiscal event’ and the subsequent bond market crash in autumn 2022. West London’s townhouses, along with rate-subsidised ghost developments elsewhere in the country, continue to act as brick-and-mortar piggybanks for international investors. Meanwhile, stagnant wages and high inflation have fuelled the decline of working-class living standards (with ‘cheapflation’ driving up everyday costs at an accelerated rate). The number of impoverished individuals is roughly the same as it was in 2010, but the severity and entrenchment of household poverty is much greater, with more children suffering from deprivation. NHS waiting lists have doubled from 2010 levels, and with them the need for life-saving interventions, as benign conditions are left to metastasize. Cases of type-two diabetes have risen to five million, an affliction indicative of a populace that struggles to feed itself healthily and relies on foodbanks in record numbers.

Economic ‘growth’ is presented as a panacea for the fractured kingdom. Yet the only hope for this is ambitious, targeted investment of the kind which is not forthcoming from Labour. The party is straitjacketed by its self-imposed fiscal rules: the current budget must ensure that day-to-day costs are met by revenues, and debt must be falling as a share of the economy by the fifth year of the forecast. Even the FT and IFS have scoffed at Reeves’s plan to dynamize British industry within this framework. Her formation as a Bank of England economist, which played an essential part in casting her as the most ‘qualified’ candidate for the role, now prevents her from taking any of the measures that might begin to fulfil her pledge to ‘restart’ the economy. Yet in contrasting such hallmarks of ‘discipline’ with the previous government’s ‘reckless’ approach, Labour has clearly made a political calculation. It reckons that a return to the austerian discourse of the Cameron–Osborne era is useful to lower expectations amid a set of structural economic problems which the government is unwilling to confront. If national rejuvenation is out of reach, middle-managerial competence is the best for which we can hope.

Much has been made (mostly by the government) of the government’s proposed changes to planning reforms, easing restrictions on new building sites to create more homes. But Britain does not suffer from a lack of houses, it suffers from an excess of landlords – even as buy-to-let mortgage holders have been selling up in response to rising rates that render small-time real estate investments unprofitable, increasing costs in an already over-inflated market that sees many tenants spend nearly 50% of their income on rent. The only real solutions, which Labour refuses to contemplate, are new social housing and rent controls. In their absence, attempts to stimulate a construction boom through deregulation will have little effect. At best, they might yield new opportunities to indebt oneself for flimsy newbuilds on so-called ‘grey belt’ sites: aptly named zonal designations for areas in which no one wants to live.

Behind this is a tale of diversification among the fractions of Britain’s capitalist class. While the City’s multinational finance firms are insulated from the most immediate shocks of interest rate rises, large and mid-size domestic retail and real estate firms have felt the brunt of monetary climate change. Starmer’s fiscal rules are intended to please the former, while his hazy promises of ‘growth’ and ‘stability’ are pitched at the latter. Rallying behind him early on were CEOs of companies such as Iceland, nationwide market-leaders in discount frozen foods, fed up with a Tory Party that presided over steep price rises for shipping, storing, selling and refrigerating consumer goods. Meanwhile, smaller businesses and the self-employed have a new electoral option in Reform, who took chunks out of Conservative majorities in its former heartlands across the commuter-belt south-east. The party is enmeshed in a web of petty commercial property holdings, guest houses, bust TV production companies, bed bug removal firms and, in one instance, a ‘social enterprise’ established to promote ‘White Rights’.

Historically, many have hoped to ‘solve’ the perennial problem of British decline by breaking up the polity itself. But today this prospect looks more distant than ever. It was neutralized by the electoral rout of the SNP last month: the culmination of a slow unravelling in which sapped enthusiasm for independence coincided with a series of damaging corruption scandals among the party leadership, with cause and effect impossible to parse. In Northern Ireland, the power-sharing impasse has ended and Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill has become the first Republican to lead the assembly. But her appeals for a united Ireland remain rhetorical. The end of British occupation could only be brought about through a referendum triggered by Dáil Éireann and authorized by the British executive – something neither is likely to permit for the foreseeable future.

Labour has promised a change from Conservative government-in-absentia. But even if it is more proactive in managing the state, there is nothing to suggest that this will check the process of decline – which may, in turn, force the government to make some unappealing zero-sum decisions: fill in the potholes or stop the prisons overflowing, free up medical appointments or clear the asylum backlog. In foreign affairs, Labour remains committed to a series of hawkish propositions that are increasingly beyond its political-economic means. Arms will continue flow to Ukraine for ‘as long as it takes’ to reclaim every inch of territory from Russia. The UK will try to reclaim its role as America’s head-prefect in the New Cold War with China. A closer relationship with the EU will be sought, though the prospects for a more favourable post-Brexit trade deal remain uncertain. Continued support for Israel is essential to safeguard the ‘special relationship’, yet this has already begun to damage Labour at the polls, as young and Muslim voters seek a non-genocidal alternative.

Fealty to a standard notion of ‘electability’ – in which the least possible change is promised, for fear of disturbing the markets – has until now locked Labour and the Conservatives into a battle for the votes of a population that increasingly doesn’t. As Peter Mair foresaw, the parties have outlived what once passed for capitalist democracy; electoral choice now amounts to deciding between two cartels dominated by a clutch of ‘special advisors’ and their increasingly scandal-prone proxies on the frontbench. In 1997, when Labour won its last low-turnout ‘landslide’, the newly elected parliamentarians had a bright future, with better-remunerated positions in policy and finance lined up after they left office (note David Miliband’s smooth transition from baying for Iraqi blood to CEO of the ‘International Rescue Committee’). In 2024, by contrast, the Labour candidates seemed to have secured nomination only after exhausting all other opportunities for professional advancement.

Herein lies an important feature of Starmer’s neo-Labourism: an assertion of working-class identity without any commitment to working-class politics. The Starmerite formula demands having once been proximate to wage-labour, then using ‘public service’ as a means of social mobility. Of the new MPs that make up ‘Generation K’, more than two-thirds emphasized in their election literature some early personal or familial link to the constituency in which they were standing. But by drawing this connection, they also emphasized having left. Unlike former generations of working-class Labour politicians, the return of these middle-class small-town émigrés is packaged as a messianic managerialism. Prodigal pragmatists sent back to oversee decline. At least no one speaks of a classless society anymore.