Back in 1981, a bitter battle was being fought for the soul of the Labour party. Two totemic figures of the party’s Left and Right wings went head-to-head for the deputy leadership. In the end, Tony Benn — a doyen of the Eighties New Left scene — lost by the tiniest of margins to Denis Healey, who stemmed the flow of moderate MPs to the breakaway Social Democratic Party, and set in motion Labour’s project of “modernisation”.
Today’s deputy leadership contest is being held as Labour faces a similarly extinction-level event — not that either candidate has a chance of resolving that. The party is in a double bind, with the Corbynite Your Party and a revived Greens under the “eco-populist” Zack Polanski snapping at their Left. To their Right, Reform is marching into Labour territory to demand nationalisation of the steel industry, a restoration of the winter fuel allowance, and an end to the exorbitant interest payments handed to commercial banks by a cash-strapped Treasury.
The Government has no response, and can only resort to characteristic prevarication and half-measures. The Prime Minister obsesses over process, managerial tweaks, and civil service procedure, while the dissonance between tasks and means grows ever more extreme. We’ve seen countless failed managerial resets: five “missions”; six “milestones”; three “foundations”; and 30 priorities. Starmerite policy ephemera is a feature, not a bug, of a PM with no coherent guiding philosophy.
The inanity of Downing Street’s triumphal announcement of “phase two” was already obvious. But the emptiness of its “delivery, delivery, delivery” sloganeering has now been brutally exposed by the personnel bloodbath and open mutiny by the victims of the chief of staff Morgan McSweeney’s reshuffle axe.
Amid the perma-chaos, the PLP has deigned to present to Labour members two near-identical candidates from the party’s mushy-soft centre-left as potential deputies: both, until recently, served happily in Starmer’s cabinet; neither is associated with the Corbynite ancien régime; and it’s difficult to discern what major ideas, policies and strategic approaches, if any, set them apart.
Lucy Powell, the recently sacked Leader of the House of Commons, is up against the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson. Both are very different politicians compared to their predecessor, Angela Rayner, who acted as the sine qua non of Labour’s claims to working-class authenticity. But the former deputy’s shadow looms: both Powell and Phillipson have made much of what they share with her, their northern roots and their gender, in a kind of glum replay of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch with fewer laughs, each presenting themselves as the deserving heir-to-Ange.
But the drama of this deputy leadership battle, lies not in bold ideological fault lines as it did back in 1981. For there are none. Rather the contest is a low-key proxy war between the Prime Minister and the party’s clear favourite to replace him, Andy Burnham — the King in the North, who gave Powell his early endorsement as “someone from these parts”. Burnham even has his own parliamentary faction, Mainstream, a fledgling outfit bringing together “radical realists”, who range from a benighted former Blarite policy adviser, Corbynite academics and soft-Left parliamentarians. Whether this hodgepodge of characters can actually achieve anything is another matter entirely. Labour has no shortage of internal groupuscules, some more effective than others. Little unites Mainstream’s founders other than a vague distaste for a spluttering Starmerism. But if Powell can mount a solid campaign as the unlikely voice of an aggrieved progressive membership, then it will be to Burnham’s ultimate benefit.
Manchester’s Metro Mayor isn’t the only ghost at Labour’s tragic feast. Jeremy Corbyn is here, too. It might be 10 years since he was elected leader of the Labour Party, spawning a movement of millennial socialism that set him at odds with a “modernised” party, but he is gearing up to prove a major irritation today. Starmer could try to ignore him, but Blair and Mandelson were similarly complacent when they described how they shut the awkward squad of socialists MPs — Corbyn, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott — in “their sealed tomb”. Look how that worked out. The seal was broken a decade ago by the Labour membership’s frustration with the tepid reformism on offer from party moderates. The Corbynites returned from the dead with a response to Britain’s secular decline that was red-blooded, full-throttle, and which promised transformation over tinkering.
Corbyn provided an answer after Blairism and its Brownite mutation had acquiesced to the political economy of Thatcherism — being “intensely relaxed” about people getting filthy rich, at ease with globalisation, and striking a Faustian peace deal with the City. Under New Labour, there would be significant private provision of public services, independence for the Bank of England, and a retreat of the state from the economic sphere. Pumping the tax revenues from deregulation, and privatisation drives into the welfare, healthcare and education budgets, they thought, would be change enough. The Gremlin in the machine back then was the global financial crisis, when the entire neoliberal growth model collapsed under the weight of the US subprime mortgage market. It has existed ever since on the life support of bank nationalisations, quantitative easing and state-backed asset bubbles.
Corbynism’s rise in 2015, then, coincided with the beginning of a second term of austerity, in response to the implosion of the City. Despite negative real interest rates, capital spending was squeezed by the Coalition and the Cameroons in all-out efforts to eliminate the deficit. State capacity was diminished, productivity and real incomes squashed, and the country was left with a starkly depleted public realm.
Which is where we find ourselves today, at a political and economic impasse, with an economy that cannot grow and a polity that is becoming ungovernable. This is the origin story of our current economic and social malaise, a harsher, zero-sum politics, the rise of Reform, Brexit, intensifying culture wars and, of course, Corbyn. Osborne’s Notting Hill set had succeeded in unlocking a set of morbid symptoms that cumulatively destroyed their world view. Today, anybody advocating a return to end-of-history economic liberalism has been relegated to the status of hopeless nostalgists on the sidelines of the political stage; Rest is Politics fans tutting into their phones in the local Gail’s.
Corbynism played a crucial role in that shift. But its core base was concentrated among young, downwardly mobile graduates in larger cities, rather than “the many” (not the few) who were at the heart of the movement’s promise. Corbyn was never a working-class hero — more allotment radical — and much of Labour’s traditional vote was profoundly alienated by his foreign policy stances as well as the social milieu he so awkwardly represented. Your Party is a further retreat from that zone of mass politics and the construction of viable electoral coalitions. As well as being riven by the kind of personal and political divisions that have become the hallmark of the non-Labour Left, it is a capitulation — a recognition of permanent exclusion from real proximity to the levers of state. Even its potential as a “UKIP of the Left” is being hindered by early factionalism, as former Corbyn staffers and trade union heavyweights brief relentlessly against his putative “co-leader”, Zarah Sultana. Her vision of a progressive ultra-liberalism clashes with the views still held by the coterie of Leninist ideologues surrounding the former Labour leader. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that she is out-manoeuvred and defects to Polanski’s Greens.
True, the minoritarian tribe attempting to fuse disaffected urban progressives with socially conservative Muslim voters may yet act as a successful disruptive force, but it is unlikely to wield direct influence in the corridors of power. Instead, it will assuage the consciences of its members and supporters, safe in the knowledge that no compromises will ever have to be made with anyone outside of their small fractions of the electorate. It was ever thus on the fringes of the Left.
In any case, Starmer has expunged this kind of politics from his Labour Party. It’s unfortunate that he is yet to land on anything with which to replace it. Instead, we have a void. Vague, inchoate nods towards a more interventionist, activist state are hinted at, then forgotten. We hear snippets of critiques of neoliberal growth; Reeves’s “securonomics” model is floated but never realised. Implementation, after all, would require the arrival of the promised “insurgent government”. Instead, the Prime Minister disavows his own speeches and sacks ministers hours after giving them his fulsome support. It’s hard to see how he calms this chaos of his own making.
“It’s unfortunate that he is yet to land on anything with which to replace it.”
In the past, Starmer would have turned to the talismanic McSweeney. But today, his svengali is vulnerable. Not just tainted by the Mandelson appointment he approved, the party strategist’s relentless enthusiasm for bashing the Corbynite Left and achieving maximum seat-to-vote efficiency has been matched only by an ability to alienate Labour MPs. No. 10’s authority is shot among a parliamentary party in a funereal but restive mood, with many backbenchers nervously eyeing their wafer-thin majorities as their party languishes in the polling doldrums.
It seems Downing Street has forgotten the dictum from Harold Wilson, that the Labour Party, like a bird, “needs the Left and Right wing to fly”. The progressive activists are exhausted by Starmer’s half-hearted pandering to Reform; and voters, disillusioned by record levels of legal and illegal mass migration see nothing but a stiff North London lawyer flip-floppings on policy, over-promising but under-delivering. It’s no wonder Britain’s working class, the hallowed hero-voters of McSweeney’s imagination, are abandoning the Labour Party in droves. There should surely be howling embarrassment, recriminations and recalibrations at the top table at the idea that Labour has now definitively become the party of the rich.
Instead, the public gets Phillipson v Powell. This vapid struggle to become Starmer’s ceremonial number two is not only a symptom of the quality of our MPs but also a stark illustration of the existential troubles of a listless Labour party, and a broader Left in crisis. And meanwhile, the populist Right advances with the spirit of the age billowing in their sails.
