Not doing the Labour thing is what Labour do
Scottish National, 30 March 2025
Gerry Hassan
This Labour government faces tough choices. Constrained domestically and internationally, they are hampered by the structural weaknesses of the UK economy; the legacy of fourteen Tory years; by Brexit and by Trump, along with the limits of Starmer and Reeves’ agenda.
Allowing for all this there is also the inherent conservatism of Labour; its lack of understanding of the British state; and the lack of political touch of this Labour government.
Reeves has shown a complete absence of political antenna and sensitivity. Combined with this is her comprehensive lack of understanding of the nature of political economy, modern capitalism and the broken nature of the UK model which has been flatlining since the financial crisis and defined by nearly two lost decades of near non-existent growth.
The problems go much deeper than Reeves and Starmer. Labour’s lack of analysis of political economy has deep roots. Labour frontbencher and academic Bryan Gould, who lost the party leadership to John Smith in 1992, slammed his colleagues’ lack of understanding in this area at the that time: “I found that most … had no knowledge of economics and either steered well clear of economic policy … or else they swallowed whole the current orthodoxy since they had no capacity to take an independent view.” He put Gordon Brown into this latter category.
Even with this backstory the lack of understanding of Reeves is shocking. She is Labour’s tenth Chancellor: a post held in the past by Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, Denis Healey, Jim Callaghan, Hugh Dalton and Hugh Gaitskell.
The predecessor she most resembles is none of these but Philip Snowden, Labour’s first-ever Chancellor in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour governments of 1924 and 1929-31. He embraced classical economics, fiscal orthodoxy and pre-Keynesian thinking. As the depression hurt millions at the start of the 1930s he and MacDonald dug in and tried to balance the books on the back of the poor. This led to Winston Churchill describing Snowden as “a Treasury mind”; the same words people use today to describe Reeves.
Doing the non-Labour thing
This should not come as a surprise and is what Labour governments faced with difficult choices do. The academic Tim Bale makes the point that Labour administrations are forced along this path because it is seen by many (including in the party) as “not a Labour thing to do” in the words of Ed Balls – all with the intention of winning favour with markets, business and elites.
Bale lists the litany of Labour decisions. In 1931 MacDonald and Snowden proposed cutting unemployment benefit to retain the Gold Standard; Labour in office would not wear it so they left and joined the Tories – the most infamous betrayal in Labour’s history to date.
In 1951 Hugh Gaitskell introduced prescription and dental charges to pay for the Korean War, resulting in Nye Bevan and Harold Wilson resigning from Cabinet. In 1968 Roy Jenkins reimposed prescription charges to placate the markets after the devaluation of the pound. Eight years later in 1976 Denis Healey committed to savage public spending cuts to secure an IMF loan and protect sterling. In 1997 in the first year of New Labour Gordon Brown cut single parent benefits to show his commitment to “iron discipline”.
The above pattern is consistent and damning. It turns out that doing what is not seen as a Labour thing is in the words of Bale “very much a Labour thing to do”. He points out that across the decades from the 1930s to the present: “On every occasion, these decisions have provoked outrage … But what we need to appreciate is that fallout is never merely accidental. Rather, it is a vital part of the drama.”
Bale continues: “The proof that sacred cows really are being sacrificed is the anger (ideally impotent anger) of those who cherish them most – Labour’s left-wingers” concluding that “the cruelty is the point” in this performative act which has real life consequences. Labour’s essential problem down the ages is that it is trying to advance mild social democracy in a capitalist political economy and increasingly hostile political environment.
Labour trashing of its brand on social justice
This is the context of Labour’s current crisis of confidence. Add to this the party’s trashing of its reputation of compassion and social justice which will be difficult to reclaim. Labour may have to traditionally do “non-Labour things” in office but central to the party’s DNA, in how it sees itself and is seen by voters, are ideals of compassion and social justice.
The top three issues for Labour 2024 voters were the NHS (68%), cost of living (56%) and addressing poverty (40%). Labour’s own base give them a +17% rating on the NHS, -20% on the cost of living and -9% on addressing poverty. Pollster Kieran Pedley observed that Labour, like all governing parties, need to remember: “You have to show the people that voted for you why they were right. Or they won’t again.”
If Labour lose a sense of what they stand for then it becomes unclear what is its purpose. How else can the remarks of Darren Jones, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, be understood? He thought it appropriate to justify welfare cuts of up to £4,500 for disabled people, comparing it to: “If I cut my child’s pocket money by £10 a week and tell them to get a Saturday job”. This sort of insensitive comment would be expected from a hard Thatcherite – not a Labour minister. His apology does not diminish its awfulness, underlined by Reeves making similar comments.
Labour and the limits of “Westminster as Britain”
Besides this, Labour now as in the past have shown their lack of understanding of the British state. This includes the nature of government, how power is used, the territorial and spatial nature of that power, and the unreconstructed nature of the political centre.
Labour at its peak became the party of centralisation with the central state as a force for good engaging in redistribution and resource allocation. This is what drove the achievements of the post-war Labour administration of Clement Attlee who saw the state and its organs as a “neutral” force politically that could be bent and shaped for progressive ends.
This deliberate elite blindness, known as Fabianism from the gradualist socialism of Sydney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw and others in the Fabian Society, sought to capture and use the institutions of the British establishment for socialistic ends impervious to issues of class, status and lack of democracy.
This peak Labour centralism saw before it a homogeneous Britain lacking localism, different communities and nations. This was true of the Labour right-wing of Gaitskell and Tony Crosland and the Labour left of Bevan and Michael Foot. The key text in how left-wingers see Labour’s historic sell-outs is Ralph Miliband’s (father of Ed and David Miliband) Parliamentary Socialism from the early 1960s.
Miliband’s thesis is simple. Labour has always been a dogmatic party in his view: committed to parliamentarism rather than socialism and always choosing the former over the latter. Yet in his account of treachery and betrayal which has influenced generations of left-wingers the Britain he presents is shorn of place, communities and the different nations of Britain.
It is a projection of “Westminster as Britain” whereby the rest of the UK exists merely to justify the existence of the UK’s political elites. The lesson that Miliband and others since have drawn from this is that all it takes to advance radical political change is to capture Westminster and then impose a progressive version of the world onto this elite, narrow Britain. It is a left-wing version of Fabianism and just as unlikely to deliver any socialist advance.
It is not surprising with the above history that Labour had failed to tell a convincing story of modern Britain for decades. The collapse of any sort of narrative about “Labour Britain” has left it adrift and impotent when challenged by events and crises as now.
The traditional Labour story of Britain reached its zenith in the 1940s with Clement Attlee and had a revival under Harold Wilson in the 1960s. This portrayed a Britain of increased opportunity, prosperity and choice for working people in which the old privileges and exclusions were slowly being pushed back by the power of government. In this story Labour stood for real freedom. Not the false freedom of the uncontrolled market, but instead about liberating people, and empowering them, giving them more agency over their lives.
Such an interpretation of Britain gave Labour a mission and projected it as a party of the future with a vision of the kind of UK it wanted to realise. But the limitations of Labour’s politics – its lack of understanding of the British state and its failure to modernise government or address the inadequacies of British capitalism – eventually exhausted and discredited this Labour story.
This is not some luxury good add-on. Without such an account in recent decades the British right have created a series of convincing, highly ideological stories of Britain: first under Thatcherism, then with Brexit, and now with the right-wing populism of Farage. Labour seem to have little resources or skills with which to counter such a high-octane politics, instead relying on technocratic, managerial policy-wonkery while trying time and again to appease the forces of the right. All of which results in an increasingly emboldened right.
Britain as a Warfare State
Labour has never come to terms with a fundamental part of what makes up Britain, namely that throughout history at its heart the UK is a warfare state. The UK state was constructed to run and administer Empire and to engage in military interventions; not to look after the welfare and well-being of its people. This central tenet of what the British state and Britain is about has been advanced by historian David Edgerton and sociologist Colin Crouch.
Britain’s warfare state has always been the unspoken underbelly of what Labour presented as the good stories of Britain. When the party felt it was powerful and persuasive it never wanted to look too closely at the nature of Britain and how it saw itself in the world.
At the point of peak Labour in 1945 in the aftermath of the Second World War it took iconoclastic writers such as George Orwell to point out Labour and the left’s silence on the British Empire and the uncomfortable reality that its nature, appropriated wealth and theft of resources, along with its worldview, did not just affect how Britain saw itself internationally, but domestically.
The idea of Britain as a warfare state is not just in the past. It was in the present when Blair launched his illegal war in Iraq and his “liberal interventionist” crusade. And it is evident in Keir Starmer’s current evoking of increased defence spending, in the UK serving as a policeman in Ukraine, and in the invocation of a new patriotism. This long story about a certain version of Britishness has always existed alongside how Labour has traditionally tried to present its progressive story of Britain.
Labour’s lack of confidence in what it has achieved
Labour has also been hamstrung by having to operate in a conservative political climate that has become systematically harsh, punitive and not conducive to the most moderate centre-left political views. Labour has as a result increasingly acted in a sheepish, even apologetic manner about its historic achievements and how it has in the past changed Britain for the better.
The party continues to exhaustively repeat its selective story of 1945 – about creating the NHS and welfare state; and on occasions a couple of modern achievements are included such as the post-1997 national minimum wage and devolution.
But so much more is missing from how Labour presents its own past. For example, Tory politicians reading from their Central Office briefing note continually repeat that “every Labour Government has left office leaving unemployment higher than when it entered office.” Leave aside that it just isn’t true. The 1945-51 Labour government of Clement Attlee presided over an average unemployment rate of 1.5% of the working age population according to the Resolution Foundation. They estimate that this was the UK’s best achievement in full employment but Labour politicians never single out this record.
Where are the Labour call-outs on issues like introducing one person one vote in 1949 that finally abolished the plural voting of businesses and separate university constituencies which gave the Tories a built-in advantage? Or the cultural reforms that they undertook in the 1960s – such as the abolition of theatre censorship and the creation of the Open University?
One other example is that it took until the 1997 Labour government for workers to have the legally enforceable right to paid holidays. Before this it was at the discretion of employers. I recall this because before the 1997 election I worked for Citizens Advice Scotland, the national body which supports the brilliant work of CABx. During that time, we received a query from someone who had worked for 35 years for the same small employer in Montrose without having had a single paid holiday and retired without any acknowledgement. The legal right to paid holidays was introduced to protect such employees but I have never ever heard a Labour politician sing its praises.
The bankruptcy of mainstream politics – including Scotland
Today the struggles of the Starmer Labour government bring home the shortcomings of mainstream politics. This is true the world over. Nowhere do moderate centre-left parties understand how to navigate the pressures and challenges they encounter and seem to have little to no comprehension of the gathering storm they face.
The unrepentant, unapologetic right-wing populism that we are currently witnessing do not play by the old rules but instead present themselves as kicking against the establishment and giving vent to a rage against the machine. The forces of Trumpism and others are repugnant and believe they can act to a different moral code. A code that is clearly amoral and which rejects business as usual adopting the cloak of rebellion and disruption. In attempts to combat this, centre-left voices get indignant about due process, the rule of law and US Constitution – inadequate responses which fail to acknowledge the huge stakes and issues at play.
What happens if, as is likely, Labour fail in office? Failure here is measurable. It would include not renewing the NHS and other public services; not addressing the cost of living and not reducing the endemic poverty and hardship which scars the UK and the lives of millions.
The future UK in these circumstances is grim. Labour’s appeasement of the right will lead unsurprisingly to politics shifting further to the right. In such an environment voters disillusioned with Labour will turn to a radicalised right. They will have been conditioned for years by the normalisation of once extremist right-wing views on immigration, Islam, the UK’s international obligations, “lefty lawyers” and the need for a “war on woke”. And they will in numbers embrace the populist, full-on, unapologetic right with what is left of the mainstream centre-left defenceless because they laid the groundwork for their ascendancy.
Things don’t have to be like this. But people need to wake up to the trajectory of politics in the UK and across the West. Mainstream politics are not fit for purpose. Huge numbers of voters feel betrayed by a political class who have ripped up the social contract between government and citizens while looking after themselves and the interests of the insider class.
In Scotland we see the irrelevance of Scottish Labour and Anas Sarwar. The 2026 elections will see the three mainstream parties – SNP, Labour and Tories – all carrying baggage and negatives, unable to present a convincing politics of the future or a repost to the forces of rage swirling about. Next year will also see the emergence of Farage’s Reform as a major force in Scotland as is likely in Wales, while the Scottish Greens will also do relatively well.
What do both forces – Reform UK and the Scottish Greens – have in common? They sit outwith our suffocating centrist consensus and gain the ire of liberal commentators who see them as an affront how things are traditionally done at Holyrood. Talk of the mainstream parties coming together to shut Farage out will play into Reform’s hands. While the mild-mannered Scottish Greens set alight some inner fury in a host of commentators with one talking about their desire to take Scotland back “to the dark ages.”
The appeal of Reform and the Greens is a harbinger of the gathering storm coming – and apologies to Green supporters for putting them in the same category as Farage and his gang. Beyond their obvious differences what unites them is being political insurgents, and what they both do is highlight the shape of the future.
Mainstream politics and parties have failed us. We have a broken UK political system and economics. The UK economic model of the past 40 years has failed, and produced negligible to no growth for the past 20 years underlining that Thatcherism had no economic miracle but rather a mirage.
Mainstream centrist politics have merely fed the politics of rage and anger. Only a politics of insurgency and disruption that challenges vested interests, and the privileges and closed shops of our elites can speak for people and their concerns.
The forces of the virulent right are busy building an eco-system to support their brutal politics across the West. Those of us who oppose this had better get busy building new forces and agencies not just to resist them but to offer an alternative vision of disruption and the future. Without it the forces of Trumpism and Faragism will appear restrained with what could come next from the right.
This Labour government is unlikely to reshape Britain for the better and change for good the broken economics and politics which have so let people down. Voters the length and breadth of the UK have repeatedly shown they want change and when this does not happen again they will turn to more radical forces proposing far-reaching change. This cannot be an offer the right have a monopoly on otherwise we will all pay a very heavy price.
