Finding Starmerism: an essay in the politics of evasion

The Labour Leader Sir Keir Starmer has today published an eleven-thousand word essay in which he seeks to define his political philosophy.

As a passing thought, it’s worth remembering that Tony Blair won his landslide on the back of five one-sentence pledges on a card; and Boris Johnson won his using a simple three-word slogan. To be fair, both had already defined their political outlook in advance of those elections; but the fact that Starmer feels a political need to expound his beliefs at such length suggests a lack of confidence that his position is widely understood.

And this essay is not an inspiring read. There is little to grab the imagination here; Starmer is not a writer who crafts resonant, memorable phrases. Plenty of commentators have already picked up on its turgid, cliché-ridden style. But in amongst the wordage, there is enough to pick out the main themes of what we must now learn to call Starmerism.

Starmer himself provides a brief summary at the end of the essay:

• We will always put hard-working families and their priorities first.
• If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be rewarded fairly.
• People and businesses are expected to contribute to society, as well as receive.
• Your chances in life should not be defined by the circumstances of your birth — hard work and how you contribute should matter.
• Families, communities and the things that bring us together must once again be put above individualism.
• The economy should work for citizens and communities. It is not good enough to just surrender to market forces.
• The role of government is to be a partner to private enterprise, not stifle it.
• The government should treat taxpayer money as if it were its own. The current levels of waste are unacceptable.
• The government must play its role in restoring honesty, decency and transparency in public life.
• We are proudly patriotic but we reject the divisiveness of nationalism.

It is obvious that in many respects, this is a deeply conservative framing of Labour’s mission — Blue Labour’s themes of flag, family, faith and work are the themes that unite it. It is very clear that Starmer has, for all his talk at the time of the Labour leadership election of being a continuity leader, allied himself with a Labour tradition whose roots are firmly on the political Right, and which is most comfortable using the language of the Right, in apparent ignrance of how mantras of flag, family, faith and work were historically used by the powerful to contain popular and democratic sentiment, not to empower it.

To illustrate this, it’s worth unpicking some of Starmer’s themes.

First, it’s clear that with all the talk of “hard working families”, Starmer continues to advocate the New Labour argument that citizenship is conditional: it is about what you do, not who you are, and is something that is earned, not a matter of right. It is a form of language that has always seemed to me to be calculated to exclude, not to include. And in doing so, it fetishises work: it ignores the fact that it has long been clear that there is a crisis of work in Western capitalist society as a whole, and in the UK in particular; people working longer and longer hours while falling real wages and soaring costs of living mean that the basic deal of capitalism — that you can earn a decent sufficiency by selling your labour — no longer applies. The idea implicit in Starmer’s language that work somehow brings moral dignity is not sustainable in a world in which the majority of poverty is in work. Moreover, Labour ignores the trend towards automation, and in particular the way in which economic investment increasingly seeks to remove human labour from the structure of economic activity. In short Starmer has failed — indeed, has not sought — to take Labour beyond the exclusionary and deeply conservative language of “hard working families”, and can only see “making work pay” in terms of adjusting tax and benefits, rather than attacking the growing crisis of work as a whole.

Starmer’s writings about nationalism and identity are just as problematic, and simply ignore the way in which the United Kingdom is changing. His essay posits a crude binary between patriotism (good, inclusive) and nationalism (bad, exclusive) but offers no understanding of the complexity of identities within the UK, and how they are changing. It’s underlying assumption is that patriotism is about the UK; but — speaking as an English-born Welsh-speaking Welsh resident of Scottish descent, who identifies as Welsh and European — I can assure him it’s not remotely as simple as that. Unless you grasp those complexities — and actually listen to what people in Wales and Scotland are saying, rather than repeating post-Imperial tropes of British exceptionalism — you cannot address questions of national identity in the UK.

And, while acknowledging the wish of Brexiters to “take back control”, he has nothing to say about the aspirations of the majorities in Wales and Scotland for greater self-government; not only does he appear to conflate “desire for independence” with “nationalism” when the two are often very different, he ignores the debates around various forms of federalism. One of the most curious aspects of Starmer’s essay is the way it ignores the one nation of the UK where Labour is in Government — Wales — and where Labour politicians including Mark Drakeford, a First Minister who in his Welsh Labour leadership campaign defined his politics in contradiction to nationalism, are increasingly arguing that the Union in its current form is unsustainable, and that new forms of governance must be found. It is clear enough that Starmer’s view of patriotism and nationhood is a wholly English one, and simply ignores the way in which the polities of Wales and Scotland are increasingly moving away from Westminster.

Third, Starmer argues that the debates about Brexit are over, and chooses instead to focus on patching up Johnson’s deal — a deal that Starmer whipped Labour MPs to vote for. But that’s nonsense. It is obvious that a Brexit that has been far from fully implemented is already having disastrous economic and social impacts — and that these are not teething problems, but are inherent in Brexit itself and represent a long-term shift in the structure of economic activity in Britain, arising directly from the decision by British Conservative politicians to leave the Single Market and the Customs Union. Those decisions have cruelly exposed the inherent weaknesses of a British economy based on rentierism; it has been astonishing how quickly even a partial implementation of Brexit has shown up all the economic failings that led Britain to join the EC in the first place. If Starmer is serious about his economic ambitions, he has to address the economic problems inherent in Brexit.

But, more than that, he has to address the fact that Brexit is a political project of the neoliberal right; something that he and his predecessor singularly failed to do. Johnson’s TCA deal was appalling, and there is plenty in it that needs addressing (although Starmer was happy enough to order Labour MPs to vote for it, without any obvious understanding of its implications). But until Labour starts addressing both the politics and economics of Brexit, it will always be following Boris Johnson’s framing rather than challenging it; it is difficult to see quite how Starmer’s current position counts as leadership within the normal meaning of the word.

And, if he is serious when he talks about honesty, decency and transparency in public life, he has to start being honest about Brexit. He needs to understand that Labour’s refusal to talk about it is leaving the field open for Johnson’s narrative — and that the Brexit narrative is at the heart of Johnson’s story. Honesty, decency and transparency mean acknowledging the elephant in the room,.

The impact of Brexit leads on to Starmer’s concept of the economy — it appears that he advocates something close to the Nordic model of a largely private-sector economy surrounded by generous levels of social welfare. But the problem, of course, is creating the consensus around the significant increase in taxation that is necessary to pay for it — and to ensure, obviously, that the burden is fairly distributed. New Labour sought to govern on the basis that economic growth would fund the cost of social provision without the need for redistribution — something that worked up to a point in the 2000s, when the economy was running reasonably hot (and at the cost of soaring asset inflation and rising inequality) but which is not an option in the post-2008 crash world, least of all after Brexit. There is no conception here of how Labour intends to square the economic circle, especially in a world threatened by climate change. The fundamental problem of the UK economy — one that forty years of EU membership has masked — is that we have moved from being a productive economy to a low-investment rentier economy, based on the sweating of assets and the asset price bubbles rather than output of goods and services. Where is the understanding of this?

In summary, then, if this essay is intended to provide a definition of Starmerism, the limitations are clear. Not only is it a deeply conservative doctrine of politics, it is one in which citizenship is conditional, not universal; that accepts the politics of Brexit; that opposes Wales and Scotland’s aspirations to self-government; that does not address the big issues around work and employment, that offers little more than wishful thinking on economic issues. In summary, I’d characterise it as an approach to of politics that, rather than addressing the big issues, evades them; that accepts the framing of the right rather than challenging it.

And on this basis, Starmerism may well be a useful, indeed comfortable, doctrine for those who do not want to change the world very much; who find the expression of populist authoritarianism at Westminster distasteful but are not unduly troubled by the rationality behind it. But as a manifesto for change, with an election probably no more than two years away, it is woefully inadequate.