Starmer plans Nato unity with Johnson but ditches bin workers

Just who is Keir Starmer trying to impress with his outspoken attack on the Stop the War coalition? He alleges the coalition members were “not benign voices for peace,” but would “actively give succour to authoritarian leaders.” The left in Britain is reading it as another blow in his campaign to isolate the Corbynite left. Andrew Murray, one of the founders of the coalition, writes that the attack only makes sense “as a further demarcation from the Corbynite past and a fresh front in his unceasing war on the Left in his party and outside it.”

But a second look at Starmer’s accompanying statements reveals another theme, that of national unity. In order to create a semblance of unity, he is pre-emptively identifying expressions of dissent as traitorous. He told the Times “The message is that we are firm and united in our support for Nato.” Visiting the Brussels headquarters of Nato, he took the opportunity to deliver “a very important message for our party and for our country, which is that the Labour party support for Nato is unshakable.” Shadow foreign secretary John Healey, on the same visit, underlined “the united UK support for Ukraine and stance against Russian aggression. The government has Labour’s full backing to help Ukraine defend itself.”

Starmer’s insistence on total support for Johnson’s foolish grandstanding over the Ukraine comes at just the moment that the political class is reeling under the multiple scandals of monarchy, government and police. The stability of the system is threatened because the government is floundering over its mishandling of the Covid pandemic and climate change, which has created a political requirement for Labour to neuter any kind of mass peace movement, since there is the possibility that these kinds of protests may attract wider support from popular opposition to the leap in the cost of living and escalating poverty.

In order to signal the reliability of Labour’s support for the British political and military establishment, Starmer rewrites the party’s history to airbrush out opposition to the western alliance from the Bevanite movement, Michael Foot, CND, and the Bennite left. Instead he tries to place himself in a line with Attlee, Denis Healey, and Ernest Bevin whose acceptance of a cold war alignment with the US came from a misplaced fear of a Soviet invasion of Europe after the Second World War. In the geopolitical present, when the US has lost its world economic and military hegemony, he claims that “our allies need our solidarity and – crucially – our practical assistance now more than ever.” What is “our practical assistance” in this context? Starmer is speaking for the British state, not Labour – unless he intends to send Paul Mason over on a delegation to the Ukraine … oh, wait … 

As Ed McNally pointed out in Jacobin, “For Labour’s Atlanticists, at least, foreign policy has long been comfortingly simple. Their maxim is one of unthinking deference to the United States, premised on a recognition that Britain’s ability to exercise imperial power rests on its status as a supporting pillar of the American empire. … [they] are wedded to an idea of the United States frozen in the unipolar past, and they are impervious to the catastrophic failure of the ‘project for a new American century.’ This has begun to result in significant disorientation, as the shifting geostrategic tectonics of the twenty-first century and cracks in the foreign policy consensus in Washington itself render the real world less intelligible to Labour’s aspiring hawks.”

It’s not just over foreign policy that the Labour right is living in the past: its dominance in the party is premised on the maintenance of the status quo, and any threat to it from protests or strike struggles needs to be quashed. This means resuscitating its Blairite campaign to marginalize the trade unions. Starmer’s pretensions of a national role may cause him to sneer at the idea that a strike in Coventry might cause difficulties for the relationship between the party and the unions, but this is the face of Labour that voters and union members are seeing. The strike in question involves about 75 refuse workers, who started a two-month strike over pay after talks with Coventry’s Labour-run city council fell through. The council opened several temporary waste collection sites, which led Sharon Graham of Unite to point out: “We have a so-called Labour council prepared to pay agency drivers to drive its bin lorries on more money than the union is asking for.” The council has already spent more than £3 million in just seven weeks trying to break the strike, according to Dave Nellist, a former Coventry MP who is now standing against the Labour party in the Birmingham Erdington by-election. This is far more than it would have cost to settle the dispute, he pointed out.

A Labour spokesperson said: “We’re not going to get into the specifics of this dispute. Keir Starmer’s Labour party will always act in the public interest. These sort of threats [of cutting union funding] won’t work in Keir Starmer’s Labour party. We would have hoped that Unite would have got the message that the Labour party is under new management.” Counterposing the “public interest” to the rights of workers in struggle is straight from the playbook of the moribund New Labour leadership. As if on cue, Peter Mandelson dragged himself out of the grave long enough to tell an event in Scotland that the party leadership “have got to show themselves to be in control, that we are no longer a party of the far left or trade union activists – that we are genuinely the political arm of the British people.” 

Starmer’s accelerating transmutation to a rewarmed Blairism is paralleled in the US with the reemergence of Hilary Clinton within the Democratic party. She is floating the idea of a presidential run in 2024, after a potential loss of Democratic control of Congress this year. Whatever her chances of gaining the nomination, her intervention is aimed at defining the party’s message as an attack on Trump’s legacy and turning away from the orientation of the Democratic party left to welfare programmes and extending Medicare. Translated, that means a rerun of her disastrous election campaign of 2016.

Reportedly, Starmer is ready to repudiate Labour’s 2019 election manifesto in a series of key speeches, joined by other members of the shadow cabinet, such as Rachel Reeves, who now say Labour is a “pro-business party”. A senior Labour party source told City A.M. that Starmer is expected to “slaughter the sacred cows of Corbynism” in the lead-up to summer, which is projected to include ditching any talk of energy or water nationalization. Since he has no ideas for addressing the crisis, like Clinton he will return to the failed politics of neoliberalism.

So how will Labour solve the problems of those on the poverty line, jobless, homeless, or struggling with the cost of living? The 2019 manifesto advocated fairer taxation to fund upgrades to schools, hospitals, care homes and council houses, and to train more doctors and nurses. Taking essential utilities like water or energy supply into public ownership would make them responsive to public needs – such as not swimming through raw sewage on the beaches or being faced with sky-high energy bills. These are some of the policies that Starmer is planning to abandon. 

UPDATE: 11 left Labour MPs withdrew their names from a Stop the War statement which criticized NATO’s eastward expansion. They were threatened with losing the Labour whip unless they did so. In this way, the right in the party are policing ideological dissent as effectively as the Russian police are arresting protesters in Russia itself.

Johnson is a clown – but a necessary one for the Tories

The Tory party is unlikely to resolve their current leadership crisis by ditching Boris Johnson. He is the leader they need to hold together their electoral coalition, whose buffoonery is an attention-grabbing distraction from the government’s failures over Covid precautions and its systematic attacks on protests and asylum-seekers. He clowns in order to survive, but also for the government to survive.

The Institute for Government think-tank pointed out that the 2019 Tory manifesto contained pledges not to raise taxes or borrow to fund day-to-day expenditure, “while simultaneously committing to spend to address ‘substantial’ and ‘very expensive policy’ problems.” These contradictory promises were “highly unlikely” to be delivered at the same time, said their report, and the contradictions are what lies behind the resignation of Johnson’s ally, chief Brexit negotiator Lord Frost, from the cabinet – not any point of principle.

Patrick Cockburn commented that the gap between the promises and actual performance of populist nationalists like Johnson can only be bridged by lies. At the core of Johnson’s electoral coalition “is a party reshaped by the Brexit campaign which created an alliance of prosperous shires and suburbs with deprived, de-industrialised voters … This unstable grouping can only be kept together by a stream of contradictory promises from Johnson which means that somebody will end up being betrayed – the winners usually being the plutocrats. Great infrastructural projects – such as HS2 – billed as the cutting edge of ‘levelling-up’ are squeezed by born-again Thatcherites, and genuine plutocrats, like the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak.”

Johnson’s language when talking to Sky News’ Sam Coates is revealing. He rebuffed Coates’ insistent questioning about his personal responsibility for the North Shropshire by-election defeat by blaming the media for reporting “political” news, and not “stuff that is about them” – the electorate – citing the booster rollout, skills, housing, and “saving” the NHS. This distinction enabled him to deflect questions about his own accountability by citing the national interest, and rhetorically enables him to survive any leadership challenges. 

What is more important is how the hard-liners in parliament are changing the law to make dissent and protest a criminal act. Britain has no written constitution, and the Tories are taking advantage of that to gain public acceptance of dictatorial powers through a torrent of reactionary legislation. While the legitimacy of the government is wearing thin, Labour does little to challenge and expose these dangerous shifts. When Keir Starmer positions Labour to support the government’s Covid measures “in the national interest” he is essentially repeating Johnson’s alibis, instead of demanding more furloughs or adequate sick pay for the people who actually make up the nation so as they can survive isolation or another lockdown.

The extent of the Labour right’s distance from political reality is shown graphically by Luke Akehurst’s tweeted conviction that the Liberal Democrats had no chance of winning the North Shropshire by-election. He thought he could predict the result by extrapolating from electoral “evidence” that it was not a good seat for the Lib Dems, but this “handicapping” approach from past elections completely missed the political moment. The public is enraged with the Tories’ cavalier treatment of lockdown rules, but sees no opposition coming from Labour’s parliamentarians. So why vote Labour to protest the Tories?

Starmer’s cheerleaders seem to be highlighting Johnson’s failings in the hope that the Tories will implode and Labour will then have the chance for power. While this may be wishful thinking, there is one particular scandal that seems to have been overlooked by the Labour front bench, even though it involves top Tory politicians. Sajid Javid and George Osborne both put pressure on the City’s financial regulator – which is supposed to be independent of the government – to cap compensation payouts from big banks which mis-sold complex financial products to small businesses from 2001-2011. 

The compensation scheme was launched in 2013, after 30,000 small businesses were left nursing heavy losses from interest rate hedging products sold to them by major banks. That year, the regulator introduced a cap which effectively stopped those with swap deals over £10m from claiming, on the grounds they were “sophisticated” enough to bear the risk. The cap is thought to have excluded a third of potential claimants and saved banks billions.

Javid, then financial secretary to the Treasury, personally lobbied to cut the costs for banks, expressing concerns “about where to ‘draw the line’” as to which customers were eligible, and he and a Treasury official pushed for “flexibility”, said a review by the Financial Conduct Authority. Javid is a former investment banker at Deutsche Bank, which was not involved in the mis-selling scandal. The review “found no explanation” why the cap on payouts was imposed and said there was not a “level playing field” between banks and customers, who were shut out of talks. 

The Guardian reported minutes of a meeting between the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority (FSA) when a Treasury official said: “The Treasury had been lobbied hard by the CEOs of the banks, particularly the two state-owned institutions [Lloyds and RBS]. As a result, the chancellor [at the time Osborne] had come to the opinion that the total redress costs needed to be reduced, and that the purpose of the meeting was for HMT [HM Treasury] to understand the FSA’s proposals in order to find ways to cut the cost.” The Treasury had previously denied that Javid was involved, telling the Times in 2019 that the alteration to the redress scheme was solely the responsibility of the FSA. 

Has the “business-friendly” Labour leadership avoided the financial scandal because it agrees that the interests of the big banks take priority over those of their small-business victims? The contenders for Johnson’s position may have other skeletons in their closets, but they are all ideologically more rigid and so incapable of the kind of political story-telling that has enabled Johnson to hold Tory factions together by promising everything to everybody. Whoever is Tory leader, Labour’s hopes that the government will self-destruct will not put the Starmer-controlled party on the road to power any time soon.

UPDATE: An interesting comment on John Crace’s Guardian sketch: “Indeed he cannot resign without the entire populist adventure collapsing like a house of rotten cards. He is bullshitter supreme in a project which, as Bannon pointed out to Trump, requires the neutralisation of effective opposition by ‘Flooding the zone with shit.’ Johnson’s task is to juggle all the Gold-painted turds that need to be kept in the air simultaneously to achieve this. The Myth of the Benefits of Brexit, the sidestepping of Parliamentary Scrutiny, the syphoning of vast amounts of our money into the pockets of cronies, the Sham Concern about the Climate Crisis, The Sham Support of the NHS (and the risible claims of investment in new infrastructure and staff), The Vaccination Hubris, the Immigration Exaggeration, the Levelling Up Lie and all the manifold pillars of the project. Johnson has no other talent but the one required for this endeavour. He cannot be replaced in this by Truss or Sunak or Raab or Patel.” 

Book Review: ‘Falling Down: The Conservative Party and the Decline of Tory Britain’ by Phil Burton-Cartledge

The closeness of the Tory party to the British state means that an analysis of its history is important in understanding the character of the state and the way the class structure is reproduced. Phil Burton-Cartledge attempts to do this by following Ralph Miliband in considering the material connections between individuals who inhabit central positions in the economy and state as part of the way that various class interests are aggregated in a political formation. Given that the party privileges the role of its MPs, his analysis focuses on parliamentary conservatism and its top-down leadership.

He makes the counter-intuitive argument that, despite its 80-seat majority, the Tory party is in terminal decline. It has thrown in its lot with an electoral coalition created by the Vote Leave campaign, even though Brexit threatens the survival of the Union in its present form, and has narrowed its support to a shrinking demographic of older voters. The decline, he says, began with Thatcher, who alienated the traditional social bases of conservatism in Britain – doctors, lawyers, academics, civil servants, clerics, and manufacturers – for the sake of achieving electoral hegemony. She oriented the Tories towards rentier capitalists and financial entrepreneurs, and against the social liberalism that the growth of the welfare state had encouraged.

Burton-Cartledge’s analysis of Thatcherism is that it did not arrest Britain’s decline, but “recast class relations by liquidating the industrial backbone of the most conscious and militant sections of the labour movement. The restructuring of the state system introduced neoliberal governance and provided business with more opportunities underwritten by state money. The economy moved away from making things and increasingly into service provision, and through her restriction of the housing supply set in train the next round of dynamics that would produce Conservative victories twenty years after leaving office, but saddle them with long-term political problems from which there is no easy escape.” [p.88]

The corollary of Thatcher’s assertion of state power over the organized working class was a restructuring of the state itself, downgrading experts and centralizing authority in the government. She remade British politics “around the dominance of capital, an authoritarian state and citizenship defined in acquisitive terms.” Under her successor, John Major, the primacy of the executive in the state system was consolidated, but divisions within the Tory party over Europe and national sovereignty undermined its authority and led to election loss in 1997. 

David Cameron engineered a more socially liberal face for the party, and was able to form a coalition with the Lib Dems after the 2010 election, with the consequence of hiving off the anti-European right of the party to UKIP. After his unexpected election win in 2015, the government’s appeal to older voters through protecting pensioners’ incomes and encouraging second home ownership created a political polarization that had a marked influence on the Brexit referendum when the old were pitted against the young. Stoking up fears over immigration further increased the Leave vote. When Cameron resigned following the referendum’s result, Theresa May continued the government’s strategy of deregulation and protecting Tory vested interests, with the effect of firmly reinforcing the Tory vote and attracting UKIP voters with her tough talking on Brexit. 

May’s premiership was blown off course by Labour’s relative success in uniting the anti-Tory vote behind it in 2017. Factional divisions over the nature of Brexit intensified, but nobody in the party had the overall authority to face down internal opposition. The pro-Brexit European Research Group (ERG) put pressure on May’s negotiations with the EU and the protracted parliamentary stalemate weakened her position. So May tacked to a “hard” Brexit to hold together the Tory mainstream with the extreme right, preserving her party at all costs. However, members of the ERG voted against May’s withdrawal agreement, causing it to fail by 58 votes, and a disastrous result in local elections forced May’s resignation in June 2019. 

The author comments: “Theresa May largely held on to the [electoral] coalition she assembled during her triumphant phase right up until the 2017 election. Its evaporation in the summer of 2019 underlined how Brexit was the glue holding it together, and therefore Johnson doggedly pursued it.” It was also the glue holding together the parliamentary Tories. Johnson stood for the leadership and won it as the most pro-Brexit politician in the party, and soon after announced he would seek to prorogue parliament for five weeks in order to suppress debate over Brexit terms. He ruthlessly purged recalcitrant MPs who had voted against the government over extending the period of disengagement with the EU, and then called a general election. Since the opposition to Brexit was so divided, he was able to hold May’s electoral coalition together, and managed to add another 330,000 voters overall, some from Labour’s collapse in the “red wall” seats of the north and midlands.

However, Burton-Cartledge concludes, the concentration of Tory support among older voters and its cultivation of this base “presents them with an inescapable difficulty. People are not acquiring property at anything like the rates they were in the 1980s and 1990s, and therefore the link between ageing and asset ownership is becoming more attenuated. This means that the electoral basis for their 2019 triumph will, with time, grow increasingly difficult to repeat.” In other words, Tory voters will eventually die off, leaving a younger electorate more sympathetic to social liberalism.

The author gives a detailed account of struggles within the parliamentary group, and to a certain extent its relation with the Tory electoral base, but confines his analysis to the Westminster establishment. So he leaves out the documented link-up between the ERG and Donald Trump, via his envoy John Bolton, that made the Tory right the lynch pin of the international right’s efforts to influence the course of EU negotiations towards a hard Brexit. The idea that the Tories are headed for failure because they have not succeeded in reproducing a new generation of voters misses those influences which lie outside of the electoral system; in particular, the dark money from unaccountable oligarchs that bankrolled the Vote Leave campaign and the 2019 election.

The Tories benefited not only from the extreme media bias in their favour, but also their willingness to manipulate and break election rules. The neutralizing of any effective parliamentary opposition goes together with their circumvention of rules governing corruption and attempts to restrict voting rights, directly inspired by the example of Republican-controlled states in the US. Johnson’s “chaotic” government, disavowing trade deals it signed, its disruption of accepted political conventions, bears a strong resemblance to Trumpism. It is no coincidence that Dominic Cummings had close relations with Trump’s advisors.

But did the Tories really reconfigure the state in their own image, as the author posits in his introduction? His unidirectional approach doesn’t account for the extremely porous boundary between public and private in British politics, the multiplicity of regulatory bodies that changed the structure of the state and also allowed the government to avoid responsibility for the catastrophic failure of privatized industries. Outsourcing corporations, together with small-time entrepreneurs with personal contacts in the government, have made massive gains from state contracts, both before and after the Covid pandemic. This is more than Johnson simply reaping what May and Cameron had sown. It reflects the reconfiguration of the Tories themselves to align them even more closely with the interests of major oligarchs and finance capital, even coopting top civil service mandarins in lobbying scandals. The Tories have been moulded by influences from outside of their parliamentary representation.

Examining the Tory party only in the context of the British political system, and omitting its important international connections, means that the author’s argument about falling down is unconvincing. The Tories may lose popular support, but the electorate will not turn against them decisively without a clear alternative. Their “mass appeal” in 2019 was cultivated not only by their single-minded focus on Brexit, but also by their demonization of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour party, involving multiple state actors and plentiful dark money. Tory Britain will only decline if in the long term alternative ways of life are built at the local level that will favour cooperative institutions and community wealth building.

Phil Burton-Cartledge, Falling Down: The Conservative Party and the Decline of Tory Britain, London: Verso, 2021

Labour’s Plan for a Corporate Makeover

The long-awaited review of Labour’s 2019 election result is more notable for what it doesn’t say than for what it reveals. It contains many details of experiences in the failed election bid, but never addresses a central question: was the election ever winnable by Labour, when after 2017 the Tories had focused on maintaining power at any cost, and had learnt from Trump and Erdogan that the way to win elections was blatant lying to smear and annihilate opponents?

The Tories were able to mobilise their base, the report says, turning out around two million of their supporters who didn’t vote in 2017. A major driver of this success was its campaign to “Stop Jeremy Corbyn”, that motivated the party’s previous non-voters and the swing voters Labour lost to the Tories. According to the report: “Among voters who switched from Labour to the Conservatives, concern about Jeremy Corbyn was intense … Labour Leave voters who switched to the Conservatives were likely to talk about terrorism, anti-Semitism, what they saw as extreme far-left policies, or unaffordability.”

What the report doesn’t make clear is that Corbyn’s unpopularity was manufactured. In 2017 Corbyn won many new voters and improved Labour’s ratings dramatically. But since then he was systematically and mercilessly vilified. The report cites by way of example a 52-year-old woman who voted Labour in 2017 but switched to the Tories in 2019. She said she was “Frightened at the possibility of a Marxist government. Disgusted at Corbyn being a terrorist sympathiser. Most disturbed about plan to nationalise BT as I fear it would allow a Labour government to spy on internet users.” 

Where did all these far-fetched ideas come from? Apart from the obvious suspects like the Daily Mail, the Sun, and the BBC, the report gives us some clues. It describes how the Tories invested heavily in digital media after 2017, intensively testing content for impact and setting up a network of “supportive outriders” like the Campaign Against Corbynism Rebel Media, Working4UK or Parents’ Choice, that did not acknowledge their political connection. The Tories’ professional approach “proved highly effective, particularly in exploiting negative perceptions of Labour’s leader,” says the report, and they began testing their messaging on Facebook as soon as Johnson was elected Tory head. Labour’s research found “a Facebook Group in Dudley which built followers by posting local news which hosted a large amount of anti-Labour and anti-Jeremy Corbyn content, with ‘comments’ being used to organise protests against Jeremy Corbyn’s visit to a local pensioners’ club during the campaign; this story later appeared in The Sun, with the headline ‘Jeremy Corbyn heckled as “dirty IRA scum” when he arrives in key Dudley marginal.’ The account hasn’t posted since 12 December 2019.” 

The Tories dealt with their shortage of skilled media personnel by handing over their digital campaign techniques to a commercial consultancy, but the report does not draw the obvious conclusion that the funding for such outsourcing was readily available from deep-pocketed donors. And it notes the intervention of at least one foreign government: “Labour support among Hindu voters fell significantly in this election, due to the extensive sharing of anti-Labour content across a network of Whatsapp groups.” Hindu voters who supported Labour in 2017 were 42 percent likely to withdraw their support in 2019. This is evidence of how Modi’s government directly campaigned among British Indians on the grounds that Corbyn was anti-Hindu because of the Labour conference position on Kashmir. 

But the Tories were aided in their campaign by the activities of hostile Labour MPs who accused the Labour leader of anti-semitism and demanded the party take a clear “Remain” position. “The sharp collapse in support both for Jeremy Corbyn and Labour between December 2018 and June 2019 coincided with the defection of MPs to form ‘The Independent Group’, disagreement over Labour’s position on Brexit going into the European elections and the controversy of the Party’s handling of anti-Semitism.” These MPs were vociferously in favour of a second Brexit referendum and amplified the factional activities of leading Labour MPs like Tom Watson and … Keir Starmer.

The politics of the run-up to the election is omitted from the report. The wrangling over Brexit in Westminster facilitated a sustained propaganda effort by Johnson to portray Labour as delaying the country’s democratic decision from being carried out, through his “Get Brexit Done” slogan. However, the report doesn’t highlight the weakness of Labour’s response but instead focuses on the internal confusion caused by competing bureaucratic power centres. “There were multiple power centres with no clear chain of command – including an Executive Director of Campaigns, Leader’s Office, Party Chair, General Secretary, National Coordinators – with no single person setting the strategy.” 

Since it frames the problems with the election campaign as a purely technical question, the report concludes with a purely technical answer. What we need is “A coherent strategy to build a winning coalition at the next election” with confusion eliminated by centralising strategy decisions. The strategy should include a “big economic change for the whole country” – but this is no different from any Labour policy of the last forty years. The report recommends a “Strategy group chaired by the Leader and involving key members of the Shadow Cabinet and a political lead tasked with election strategy – responsibilities would be the development of political strategy and the plan to execute it.” “This strategy needs to be based on data and evidence and robustly scrutinised and understood by all levels of the organisation.” 

What this means in practice, the report tells us, is that “Keir Starmer has recently said that ‘we will be going into [the Scottish Parliament election] with a Labour Party position that is not for a second referendum.’ This position has now recently been agreed by the Executive Committee of Scottish Labour. This clarity is welcome, and as a party we should now unite around this position and focus on building a strong message for the 2021 elections.” Clearly, this strategy is being based on an agreement between the bureaucracies at the top of the party, not by data.  What surveys were done with those many Scottish Labour voters who deserted the party after its abortive unionist stance in the independence referendum?

The commitment to build “a genuine popular movement of party members, trade union supporters … deeply rooted in our communities through good local government” etc. sounds good – but is negated by a top-down messaging strategy that doesn’t engage community self-empowerment. The intrusion of corporate management-speak – such as “best practice” – ignores the actual experience of successful practice like the Preston community wealth-building model (perhaps because it was too closely associated with the Corbyn leadership’s economic policies).

The report is careful to state that the responsibility for internal party conflict “rests not wholly with one side or part of our movement.” I disagree. The factionalising that plagued the party in the election campaign was driven by an anti-Corbyn faction at the heart of the party machine and the parliamentary party. At the root of it was opposition to Corbyn’s policies, not his leadership style or personality. The avoidance of discussing this fact makes the document a recipe for a corporate-style makeover of the party, where hierarchies are preserved while paying lip-service to member involvement. The new anti-factional message means silencing Corbyn supporters while the opposing faction rules the roost.

As Ailbhe Rea writes in the New Statesman, “the report reads even more fascinatingly as a document, not about Labour’s past, but Labour’s future. It isn’t so much an analysis of Corbynism, as a blueprint for Starmer and Starmerism. … Keir Starmer and the parliamentary party took the knee for George Floyd and supported peaceful protest, but the Labour leader, on his new LBC phone-in show, which reaches exactly the voters Labour needs to win back, notably did not support the way in which the statue of Edward Colston was toppled.” This is Labour stripped of its politics, a corporate shell of a party.

Johnson incites right-wing violence in London

Patrick Collinson lifts an injured counter-protester to safety on Saturday.

Thousands of people all over the UK came out last week to support a diversity of multiracial and peaceful Black Lives Matter protests. The Guardian reports that more than 155,000 protesters gathered organically, “by word of mouth and social media, without networks or experience. In British towns from Ledbury to Prestwich, Darlington to Blackpool, anger and frustration at generations of racial injustice has burned up young, first-time activists. A DIY sense of community is palpable; scrappy homemade signs and face masks replace glossy placards and loudspeakers.” 

These are all signs of a spontaneous movement for social change, which was most visible in the tearing down of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol last week. It has sparked a reappraisal of the role of slavery in the accumulation of wealth in cities across the country.

However, on Saturday counter-protesters descended on London ostensibly to “defend” statues in the capital, but with a rightwing hard core intent on attacking anti-racist demonstrators and the police. Video footage shows some of them performing Nazi salutes and chanting “Eng-er-land” in front of Churchill’s boarded-up statue and the Cenotaph. Black Lives Matter cancelled a planned demonstration from Hyde Park because of the danger of rightwing violence, but many protesters turned up anyway. Hundreds of police in yellow vests maintained a physical barrier to keep the two sides apart.

Several hundred of the mainly white “statue defenders” had gathered in Westminster by mid-morning, many of them drinking. At one point the crowd broke into a chant of: “We’re racist, and that’s the way we like it.” At other points they chanted the name of the far-right figurehead Tommy Robinson, and “There’s only one Winston Churchill.” What really upset them was the idea of an attack on the symbols of imperial greatness. A placard held by a counter-protestor read: “Anti-antifa: Hands Off Our History.” War memorials are “sacred” for them, says Dr. Joe Mulhall of the campaign group Hope Not Hate, and their reaction to defacing statues could be compared to how religious communities would react to the desecration of holy sites. “It really is a culture war moment,” he added.

Journalist Andrew Anthony walked with a black protester named Clem, together with his friend, both in their forties, who were both busy breaking up fights,. “We marched peacefully last week and we came out as elders today to protect our kids,” said Clem. “As we spoke,” wrote Anthony, “another group of middle-aged white men in shorts and football shirts came out of a side street and Clem engaged them in conversation. ‘It’s not about race,’ the ageing football democrat said. ‘We don’t have problems with you. It’s about our history’.”

This evocation of “our history” highlights the ideological role played by Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings in inciting the “statue defenders.” While being forced to acknowledge public outrage at the police killing of George Floyd in the US, Johnson aims to discredit the Black Lives Matter protests by converting their goal of racial equality into an attack on the cultural values of white Britishness, as well as being a threat to law and order. In a series of eight tweets early Friday morning, he warned that Winston Churchill’s statue outside parliament was at risk of attack by “violent protesters,” by “extremists intent on violence.” To tear down statues is “to lie about our history,” he tweeted. Churchill’s statue “is a permanent reminder of his achievement in saving this country – and the whole of Europe – from a fascist and racist tyranny.” 

It’s irrelevant that Johnson distorts Churchill’s actual historical role. The importance of the statue for him is to symbolise Johnson’s own version of past British greatness. He singled out Churchill’s statue as in danger of attack, not that of Margaret Thatcher nearby, to appeal to the nationalist illusions of British exceptionalism, building on the mythology of countless film and TV dramas about the Second World War. His tweets were aimed at marshalling his Vote Leave base against the anti-racist movement, equating spray-painting slogans with violent attacks.

The Guardian totally misreads Johnson’s intervention as directed at Labour, commenting: “Throughout recent days, Johnson has sought to draw a sharp dividing line, and put Labour on the other side of it – alongside the ‘thugs’ disfiguring statues, and po-faced killjoys censoring the TV archives. With Brexit in the most part resolved as an issue, Conservatives hope ‘culture war’ issues such as these will serve a similar function, by severing the two parts of Labour’s electoral coalition – dividing its ‘red wall’ voters from its liberal city strongholds.” But this is not an electoral ploy. Johnson and Cummings want to isolate the social movement behind the protests and take the struggle to the streets. They are well aware of the role of the far-right, and want to deliberately associate Black Lives Matter with its violence. 

The most powerful image that came out of Saturday’s events did not support Johnson’s narrative, however. It was Patrick Hutchinson, who is black, lifting an injured rightwing demonstrator to safety. He told Channel 4 News that he attended demonstrations to keep others out of trouble. The man he helped had been separated from his fellow-demonstrators: “His life was under threat, so I just went under, scooped him up, put him on my shoulders and started marching towards the police with him.” “If the other three police officers who were standing around when George Floyd was murdered had thought about intervening like what we did, George Floyd would be alive today.” He added “I just want equality – for all of us. At the moment the scales are unfairly balanced and I just want things to be fair – for my children and my grandchildren.”

The government is now planning legislation that would give ten-year prison sentences for the specific crime of desecrating war memorials, supported by the Labour front bench. This is to distract from the real issues of confronting racism in British society. The dunking of Edward Colston’s statue has taught more people about the connection of slavery to the institutions of the British ruling elite than any number of learned treatises.

Book Review: “The Fall and Rise of the British Left”, by Andrew Murray

Andrew Murray was one of Jeremy Corbyn’s closest advisers and an influential Labour party strategist in the 2017 election campaign. Now chief of staff at the Unite union, he chaired the Stop the War Coalition for 11 years. His book is especially interesting, although written before the 2019 election, because it gives an insight into the ideological weaknesses of the Corbyn leadership. While successfully consolidating a movement in the Labour party membership, Corbyn’s ethical socialism proved inadequate on its own to overcome the opposition of most of the party’s MPs and the poisonous legacy of New Labour.

The novelty of Corbyn’s leadership campaign, says Murray, was the joining of spontaneous mass movements with trade union dissent in the Labour party. It “was a junction uniting a track leading from the New Left movements of the twenty-first century with one leading from the historic vehicle for working-class politics, a Labour party which … still rests in some measure on the mass organisations of the working class.” [154] The nostalgic references to mass organisations in his account omits the shift in the attitude of mainstream Labour members who rejected New Labour and were instrumental in placing an anti-austerity candidate on the ballot of the leadership election.

He must be regretting writing this Panglossian account of the 2017 media campaign: “The new media interventions of Momentum, sharing powerful videos; the new commentators emerging at Novara Media, at the Canary and other websites; the direct peer-to-peer message sharing; the get-to the polls apps; the Snapchat wraps – these turned out to be the media story of the campaign and, with a few variations, will be the story of elections to come too. The left leads the Tories by a mile at the keyboard as well as on the kerbside.” [189]

Murray attributes Corbyn’s support among the Labour party’s membership to his appearance on the platform of the huge demonstration against the Iraq war in 2003, drawing a straight line from the protest movements of that decade to the 2015 leadership election. He makes the claim that the correctness of the Stop the War Coalition’s position “underpins the anti-war movement’s political hegemony on international questions within the Labour Party and the left more generally today. Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is the expression of the advance of anti-imperialist policies.” [94]

Murray’s conception of anti-imperialist policies is the key to the weakness in his outlook. He is not wrong in his evaluation of the anti-war movement’s influence on the left, since it is really a continuation of the long anti-colonial tradition of the labour movement. What the left should take from the socialist and communist organisations of the past, he says, is “an internationalism which celebrates and supports the struggles of people all over the world against imperialism.” [164] And he even has a good word to say about Leninism: “It remains a stubborn fact that many of the successful challenges to imperialism in the twentieth century and all of the successful breaches with capitalism were led by organisations laying claim to Leninism.” [163] His romantic characterization of anti-imperialist struggle and Leninism has long been overtaken by events, however: successful challenges to imperialist rule, like those of Vietnam, Russia, or Algeria, for example, have been coopted into a global economic system and their leadership appropriated by neoliberals.

He implicitly assumes a Eurocentric conception of imperialism as a “centre/periphery” phenomenon. Its conclusion is the necessity of supporting anti-imperialist movements in the global South, and opposing racism at home. While this is an important position to take, it also contains a blind spot: it internalizes a metropolitan exceptionalism that supposes somehow the experiences of other countries do not apply to British parliamentary democracy. This is what lay behind the party’s indifference to the danger from the right in the 2019 election, its underestimation of Boris Johnson’s national-populist appeal that imitated the successes of Trump, Modi and Erdogan by campaigning on out-and-out lies.

Murray misunderstood the potency of Brexit in consolidating a rightwing nationalism, dismissing it as part of a culture war that diverts from the real issues. In Britain, he writes, polarization on the basis of identity politics “is expressed around the Brexit issue, leading to the collapse of all social contradictions into the singular black hole of Britain’s economic-political relations with the European Union…. the country’s membership of the EU makes relatively little difference to the reality of most people’s lives in the round. Capitalism is the problem, not whether the decisive location of its administration is London and the nation state or Brussels and the apparatuses of globalized market coercion.” [214-5] Despite this perspective, Labour’s attempt to focus on economic issues failed in face of the Brexit polarization of the electorate in 2019.

Four months before the election, journalist Patrick Cockburn presciently criticized the politicians who compared Johnson’s prerogation of parliament to Charles I’s attempt to impose arbitrary rule in the seventeenth century. In reality, “Britain is experiencing a slow-moving coup d’etat in which a right-wing government progressively closes down or marginalises effective opposition to its rule. … What we are seeing has nothing to do with the British past but a very modern coup in which a demagogic nationalist populist authoritarian leader vaults into power through quasi-democratic means and makes sure that he cannot be removed. … This is one of the strengths of the Johnson coup: many people cannot believe that it has happened.” While the Brighton Labour party conference applauded the Supreme Court’s ruling against the government, there was little appreciation of the danger Johnson posed.

From Murray’s book it is possible to see that the party’s main strategic error was to attempt to replicate Labour’s relative success in the 2017 general election and the tactics of Corbyn’s 2015 leadership campaign: to counter the insistent Tory drumbeat of “get Brexit done” a confusing plethora of alternative policies were hastily rolled out. This had the effect of increasing confusion about what Labour stood for, and its compromise Brexit policy was simply not convincing. A second referendum was perceived as an attempt to reverse the original 2016 vote, and in the event Labour and its leadership were simply not prepared for the onslaught of misinformation and media partisanship they faced. Far from commanding social media, Labour was swamped by billionaire-funded Facebook propaganda targeted at its vulnerable seats in the north and midlands.

As Cockburn pointed out: “Opponents of the suspension of the parliament have a touching faith that the present government will stick by the historic rules of the political game when everything it has done so far shows a determination to manipulate and misuse these rules to gain and keep political power. … Those in the Labour Party who were neutral about Brexit – or even saw it as a welcome disruption of the status quo and an opportunity for radical reform – only now seem to be noticing that Brexit was always a vehicle whereby the hard right could take over the government.” A more realistic account of the history of the British left is needed that combines the lessons of its fall and rise with a better appreciation of its weaknesses.

Andrew Murray, The Fall and Rise of the British Left, London: Verso 2019

The root cause of Labour’s defeat was 40 years of neoliberalism

The left is currently engaged in postmortems on Labour’s loss in the 2019 general election. Many of them focus on policy or leadership: but other factors need to be taken into account for an all-sided view of what the defeat represents. The most salient political difference between 2017 and 2019, it seems to me, was that the shock of Labour’s increased electoral vote galvanised the Tory right and its supporters in the international right to intensively prepare for a new election to overcome the hung parliament and give Johnson a clear path to “get Brexit done.” The avenues that enabled Labour to increase its vote in 2017 were ruthlessly closed off. The constant drumbeat of Brexit, from both the Tories and the centrist “People’s Vote” campaign, overshadowed Labour’s social message, and its compromise between Remain and Leave was unpersuasive.

How was this able to happen? I want to draw attention to cultural theorist Jeremy Gilbert’s epic six-part analysis in openDemocracy, “Labour’s defeat and the triumph of Johnsonism,” which attempts to make a comprehensive analysis of the various factors in the election defeat. He argues that exit polls show the most significant numerical voting shift from 2017 to 2019 was not the loss of leave-supporters, as many think, but was the desertion of “centrist Dads” for the Lib Dems, the Greens or abstention. At the same time, in the north and midlands, “a section of the ageing ‘traditional working-class’ population saw Corbyn’s commitment to implementing Brexit [in 2017] as sufficient indicator that he was ‘on their side’. There is no doubt that many of those voters becoming disillusioned with Corbyn’s leadership, and convinced that Brexit must be done at all costs, had a devastating effect on the 2019 electoral outcome.”

In those heartland seats, he says, older voters had been moving away from Labour for “hard economic” reasons since 1997: the erosion of the welfare state meant that the over-60s are concerned with “protecting their property wealth” against possible penury in their 80s. Corbyn’s support, by contrast, was based in the “emergent culture shared by young urban workers and older professionals, characterised by social liberalism, cosmopolitanism and an extremely-online lifestyle.”

Gilbert’s argument seems to infer the existence of discrete social groups from their political behaviour, then explain their political behaviour from the cultural attributes of these groups rather than making an effort to identify their ideology. “Protecting their property wealth” is not simply a rational economic response to the erosion of the welfare state but is an aspect of neoliberal thought that makes building “personal capital” the moral alternative to collective welfare. Likewise, the “emergent culture” of young urban workers is in fact created by neoliberal society, but it contains within itself an ideological opposition to the specific attributes of inequality and austerity that characterise the globalised economy, forming a large part of Corbyn’s support.

Message
Gilbert makes the very valid point that Labour should have argued against the last 40 years of neoliberal governments, not the last ten years of austerity. Focusing on austerity did not resonate with those whose communities had never recovered from the industrial devastation beginning in the 1980s. Canvassers in “heartland” constituencies reported that “voters showed no clear awareness of the profound difference between Corbyn’s Labour party and Blair’s, and gave their disillusionment with the New Labour years as a reason not to vote Labour again.” However, he says, “a large section of the Parliamentary Labour Party simply won’t tolerate any significant criticism of the New Labour policy regime.” This is certainly plausible, and indicates that Corbyn’s efforts to keep the PLP together hamstrung him from advocating policies that might have retained the support of heartland voters.

But it indicates more than this. What was the reason a large section of the PLP will not tolerate criticism of New Labour? There is an ideological reason, as well as the inability of the membership to effectively replace MPs. And that is they fiercely defend New Labour’s “third way” version of the neoliberal consensus against Corbyn’s challenge to the economic elites. They consider themselves guardians of Labour as a “responsible” party that accepts the economy should continue to be dominated by international markets sustaining financial speculation and real estate inflation.

Leadership
According to Gilbert, it was Corbyn’s “unique decency, his sheer humanity, that enabled him to usher a movement into existence.” Yet this did not enable him to mobilise the working class electorate in 2019: his “intensely moral condemnations of the social consequences of austerity” did not voice working class anger at what they were subjected to – and that lost him support. There may be some truth in that explanation, but what Gilbert leaves out of it is that in 2017 Corbyn was perceived as a refreshing break from the professional political class that had been running the country for years. By 2019, after two years of parliamentary stalemate over Brexit, it was possible to portray him as yet another conventional politician. The anti-establishment aura that initially boosted his support had worn off, and voters were susceptible to the argument that “they’re all the same.”

Strategy
The party needed to hold “centrist-leaning voters”, says Gilbert, who he describes as those who spent their 20s-30s “in the halcyon days of New Labour, who were the very last cohort to benefit from the long property bubble.” They voted Labour in 2017, but by 2019 many of them were driven back into the arms of parties who they felt represented their Remain views more unambiguously. Labour’s 2017 coalition “had fractured and shrunk” by 2019, while the right had regrouped behind “Johnson’s new type of anti-political nationalism.” For Gilbert, then, the key factor in the fracturing of Labour’s coalition was pro-Remain centrism.

“Labour’s electoral base was split, and the section of that base that was numerically much smaller than the other happened to be in a strategically crucial position because of the iniquities of the electoral system. … a large constituency of middle-class cosmopolitans in their 40s and 50s deserted Labour precisely because we seemed too concerned with pandering to this ageing, conservative section of their traditional base.” Labour, Gilbert says, must bring middle-class liberals into its voting bloc. “It was losing their support that cost Labour perhaps more dearly between 2017 and 2019 than anything else.”

There is a good case to be made for proportional representation – and Gilbert makes it at the end of his series of essays – but no need to exaggerate the significance of the Liberal Democrats and Greens. Indeed, the Brexit party had a greater impact on the election result, without gaining a single MP. More important was the fact that Labour had allowed the right-wing press to dominate the narrative on immigration and Brexit. “We inhabit a political system that is not only designed to prevent the socialist left of the Labour party from taking power. It is now clearly biased against every force other than nativist ‘platform nationalism’ … it makes no sense not to try to build as broad a coalition of anti-Tory forces as possible – from anarcho-communists to liberals – to try to challenge its and change it.”

While there may well be a good justification for purely pragmatic, tactical alliances with anti-Tory forces, Gilbert confuses this with recruiting them into an ideological campaign against right-wing nationalism. Labour, he says, “must start campaigning in communities … explicitly against the ideology of conservative nationalism that has cost it so dearly in this election. … But if we’re going to launch an ideological campaign against right-wing nationalism, why on Earth wouldn’t we try to enlist the liberals into it, given that favouring a liberal immigration policy would be one of the few positions that almost all Labour radicals would share with almost all Liberal Democrats?”

This is the key to his argument. Although references to ideology run through Gilbert’s account, he doesn’t attempt to define it. Instead, he bases his strategy on winning support from specific constituent blocs, based on their programmatic positions. But the ideology that needs to be confronted is the way that the rationality of the market has been internalised by many in the electorate and by politicians after 40 years of neoliberal governments: the ideology of conservative nationalism builds on this ground, which is why it is so hard to overcome. Since ideology has had such a powerful effect in history, Gilbert’s neglect of it is a significant omission.

Ideology
In short, I think the 2019 loss marked an ideological defeat for Labour at the hands of an extreme right current in the Tory ruling elite (assisted by generous financial support from billionaire oligarchs). But this would not have been possible if there was not already a nationalist strain in the electorate, amplified by neoliberal messaging, that resonated with Johnson’s propaganda. Acceptance of neoliberal rationality, what Thatcher called “winning the soul” of the nation, has morphed into a strain of nativism.

How did the Tories establish an electoral coalition that aligned both “highly affluent and ‘left behind’ areas”? Luke Cooper, co-author of a report from the London School of Economics on the election, commented: “Brexit has created a really tough situation for Labour. By making values and identity the central questions of the day it has broken the party’s traditional electoral coalition.” He adds: “If the economy becomes the most important issue then Labour can break up this potentially fragile Tory coalition.” In other words, the new Tory alliance is held together by a nativist redefinition of values and identity through Brexit rhetoric.

To break up this alliance, Labour needs a renewed socialist ideology underpinning a new common sense that rejects neoliberal values and redefines patriotic identity as pride in taking care of people’s basic needs and giving communities opportunities for control of their future. It requires a change in political practice – putting down roots in communities and participating in existing struggles to regenerate them – and building from the bottom up rather than relying on alliances with the tops of other parties. This would not be just an intellectual endeavour, but must rest on the sharing of an accumulation of experiences of alternatives to neoliberal society, such as cooperatives and community-owned assets, or building collective economic power through trade unions or groups of consumers. This would be the foundation of a movement to overturn the legacy of neoliberal governments.