Labour, the Starmer Project, the Battle for Britain and Our Collective Future
Gerry Hassan
Sunday National, 24 November 2024
We are nearly five months into this Labour government – elected after 14 years of Tory government mired in scandal, division and failure which the public were desperate to see the back of.
Why then does it already feel as if this government is running to stand still, barely able to articulate what its vision, and nervous about the kind of Britain it wants to bring about? What consequences does this have for challenging the status quo; for healing a broken and bruised society, and for the UK and Scotland’s place in it?
Already this government’s poll ratings have cratered. Elected on a paltry 33.7% of the UK vote which rewarded Labour with a 174-seat majority – the second largest since 1945 (only exceeded by Blair’s 179 seat majority in 1997) – there has been a palpable sense post-election that this gargantuan victory was a bit grudging. This has reinforced by the absence of any electoral honeymoon which most incoming administrations enjoy.
This is an age of anti-incumbency. Yet the scale of Labour’s emerging unpopularity is striking. In the past week Labour’s poll ratings have fallen to 25%; the government’s satisfaction levels to 20%; while the proportion saying they believe they are better off is a mere 15% – with 41% feeling worse off and 37% neither.
This government is struggling. Surrounding them is an increasingly hostile environment of right-wing media, emboldened social media, paid interest groups, lobbying bodies and think-tanks, while significant and very vocal sections of the electorate already feel betrayed such as pensioners and farmers.
Next week sees the publication of the first major centre-left analysis of the long-term terrain, challenges and hurdles Labour and the left face in the UK. Britain Needs Change: The Politics of Hope and Labour’s Challenge (edited by myself and Simon Barrow) is published in association with centre-left group Compass who campaign for an egalitarian, pluralist and democratic politics.
The book brings together over two dozen leading authorities on UK politics – academics, writers, commentators and campaigners, most but not all on the centre-left. Their aim is to assess the state of the UK, scrutinise Labour’s plans, and consider if this will bring change – and if not, what more needs to be done. It is a big-ask but in such turbulent times we need honesty in politics.
The book covers all aspects of contemporary Britain – politics; the economy; why so many struggle in a land of plenty; the broken nature of public services and so much of society; the cost of the state failing so many people, and why all this contributes to a feeling of powerlessness and cynicism which only aids the forces of reaction.
Beyond this it extends its canvas to the terrain of ideas and interests which shape politics and Britain. This includes the changing contours of the public sphere and media, the contested values evident in “culture wars” and the crisis of Britain domestically and internationally. It frames these last points against the backdrop of the rise of Trump and Trumpism, and threats from their resurgence in the US elections.
The state of the economy
Labour’s victory underlined the limitations of its political offer. All through Starmer’s leadership and the election campaign Labour trained its fire on the Tories saying they had failed because of incompetence and division, rather than their core principles. Nowhere to be seen was a sustained critique of Toryism and its increasingly right-wing character.
Instead, Labour removed any ideological take on an increasingly ideologically dogmatic Toryism and reduced their charge sheet to managerialism. This distilled Labour’s offer to better management and promising to bring normalcy and stability back to the UK: underlined by their revealing “Stability is Change” campaign mantra.
This ambiguity was laid bare in the election campaign. Labour refused to be explicit about extra public spending beyond a couple of token examples and ruled out tax increases in income tax, VAT and National Insurance for working people along with corporation tax. It meant they won office on a minimalist programme trying to offer reassurance to groups hostile to Labour – namely the right-wing media, business and the City. There is a logic to this, but Starmer’s Labour took it to such a degree that it is self-defeating and restricting room for manoeuvre.
Britain in 2024 is in an unhappy state. There are huge waiting lists for the NHS; one-third of the working population has a long-term health condition; ten million people are officially disabled; there is a generational gridlock excluding millions of young people from buying their first home or finding somewhere secure to rent, while life expectancy has fallen for the first time since the Second World War.
The primary issue which will define the success or not of this Labour government is the economy, living standards and how widely prosperity is shared. Here the auspices are not exactly positive. The UK economy, wages in real terms and living standards have been flatlining since the 2008 banking crash.
UK economic growth has similarly been hit since 2008; with its long-term trend now severely reduced. This has hit UK GDP, resulting in a country significantly poorer now than if UK growth had continued on trend at pre-2008 levels. A Resolution Foundation study found that on average each full-time worker would be £11,000 per year richer if growth post-2008 had remained on pre-2008 trend.
One of the main drivers of this is the UK’s low rate of productivity per worker which has fallen post-2008 and consistently lagged behind UK competitors. This is a symptom of the UK’s low levels of investment, private and public, and appalling R&D investment in plant, machinery and technology which are central to growth.
Labour’s prospectus on the economy and growth is paltry. Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves claim they can get Britain “building” and “fix the foundations” by driving up growth via investment but they have no plans beyond exhortation to increase long-term private investment, while presiding over future cuts in public investment.
The problem with British capitalism and media wars
Nowhere are Labour addressing the fundamental shortcomings of the UK economy and capitalism. These include its failure to invest, its short-termism, its obsessional speculative nature, the dominance of finance capitalism over real businesses, and the disconnection of the City from the real economy: the reality of which can be seen in the collapse of UK pension funds investing in the UK which has fallen from over 50% in 1997 to a mere 4.4% now.
Past UK governments before Blair and Thatcher made attempts to address some of this. Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson in the 1960s and Ted Heath in the 1970s all tried and failed to change the basis of how the state, economy and capitalism work and their inter-relationship.
In Britain Needs Change Aditya Chakrabortty, The Guardian’s economic correspondent, and the global economic historian Adam Tooze address the UK economy. The former talks about “Labour’s silence on the fundamentals of the economy”, while the latter observes that despite everything “the right-wing economic narrative is still alive” when this is a historic opportunity in the UK and globally to tell a different economic story.
Economist Ann Pettifor notes that “economic orthodoxy” and how we think of the economy from the Treasury to the IMF and World Bank is a major problem. Similarly, Mariana Mazzucato argues that the case must be made for partnership which takes head-on the economic fantasies of the right with their simplistic narratives that “government is the problem and needs to get out of the way” – a line peddled by Tim Stanley of the Daily Telegraph in the past week.
Any attempt to challenge vested interests needs to deal with an increasingly partisan media environment and public sphere. A major factor is the degree to which right-wing media has been radicalised by Brexit. In the aftermath of the 2016 vote, right-wing media such as the Mail, Express and Daily Telegraph have shamelessly embraced a politics of the gutter and disinformation, lies and propaganda. Despite falling newspaper sales these papers, their increasingly hysterical headlines and the role of 24/7 broadcast media including the BBC’s insipid political coverage, mean that such a partisan agenda increasingly shapes political discourse.
Add to this the emergence of a plethora of new right-wing platforms such as GB News and Talk TV. The consequences are plain to see – the influence of Nigel Farage; the rightward shift of the Tories and the inexorable lurch to the right of the entire political debate with “culture wars”, “the war on woke” and rantings against “the liberal elite”.
This can be seen in discussions on asylum, refugees and immigration, with its obsession on small boats; pretend (and expensive) solutions such as Rwanda deportation; a climate of performative cruelty and dehumanising vulnerable people. Tories such as leadership candidate Robert Jenrick and former Home Secretary Suella Braverman now call for the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights so the UK can ignore international and human rights.
The above has contributed to the rise of a virulent right-wing politics which sometimes is described as “populism”, more radical and unreconstructed than mainstream Conservatism previously. This is not just a British phenomenon but can be seen across the Western world and will not disappear in the very near future. The many drivers of this include increasing pressures on government spending and welfare states, combined with global instability; the legacy of numerous wars in which the West has been involved, and the huge movements of peoples from and across the Global South.
There is a discernible illiberalism in sections of public opinion, but this has so far not affected the citadels of power and privilege. William Davies in the London Review of Books noted that across the West “the circuits of economic intelligence – financial media, elite business schools, global consultancy firms – are sufficiently well supported and capitalised that they can withstand the crosswinds of populism and conspiracy theory.”
Starmer, Reeves and “Dead Rhetoric”
Such times call for adept, skilled leadership with plans, principles and ability to communicate. Sadly, this is not a description anyone would recognise of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves. Starmer came late to party politics and rose to Director of Public Prosecutions – an administrative role; while Reeves, controversies about her early CV apart, worked as an economist at the Bank of England.
Their lack of political touch has already been evident. Starmer has a sense of public duty but is disconnected from the realities of party politics. Reeves has shown a similar lack of political awareness in her first months as Chancellor, both in her announcement on the winter fuel allowance cut for pensioners, and some of the intricacies of her Budget, which involved no serious groundwork for the rationale for increasing taxes to pay for public spending which aided the over-the-top backlash it received.
Starmer and Reeves are not compelling speakers in tone, content or the politics they promote. Starmer at the recent investment summit showed his empty rhetoric in declaring that he wants Labour to prepare for growth “by mowing the grass on the pitch” by “making sure the changing rooms are clean and comfortable” so that UK businesses are “match-fit.” Turgid stuff and illustrative of the chasm at the heart of government.
This is an example of what George Steiner called in The Death of Tragedy (1961) “dead rhetoric”: words and ideas which are “no longer spontaneous or responsive to reality.” Such “dead rhetoric” has damning consequences in limiting the potential of politics to reach out and be heard. This absence of political leadership is a gift to populists and disrupters on the right. It leaves a void where there should be animation and ideas. This matters in the core area of the nature of the British state and the domestic and international context in which it operates.
The many crises of the British state domestically and internationally
The British state is not in a good place. Despite devolution and UK constitutional reform in the New Labour era, this was combined with a failure to reform the UK political centre. Instead, there was a doubling-down on the absolutist credentials of the centre – parliamentary sovereignty and First Past the Post. This has come more to the fore with Brexit and the re-emergence of a centre and executive looking to reassert itself in relation to devolution, and unconstrained by EU membership and laws.
The changing dynamics of the British state domestically connect to how government has presided over austerity – savaging public services and acting in the interests of finance capitalism and consultancy class. This has occurred while the UK state has seen its place and status geo-politically diminished – with the rhetoric of the likes of Blair and Boris Johnson about “Britain punching above its weight” looking dated and desperate.
The UK governing class mantra of the country being a “bridge” between the US and EU and the so-called “special relationship” between UK and US looks even more inadequate. It is more challenging than this. The UK had in recent times pre-Brexit placed itself at the centre of three relationships: the US, EU and pivoting towards China. This is no longer the case. “From three friends in high places to essentially zero is quite the feat of statecraft” observed Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times, concluding “Britain is now outside its own regional club and exposed to a protectionist America and having to defrost its relationship with China after a period of mindless neglect.”
This state of the UK has contributed to a major problem at the heart of Labour and UK politics: what is the idea of Britain that Labour is attempting to articulate and champion? For Sunder Katwala, Director of British Future, this missing story could be about the “shared identities” and “multi-culturalism” which draws from the past and points to the future; while former Labour minister John Denham notes that at the heart of this government and centre-left there remains “the absence of a compelling story of Britain” which comes at a cost.
The fact that a Labour story of Britain is clearly missing brings the government’s defensiveness and pessimism to the fore. It stands in stark contrast with the ideological right who are beavering away in the Tory Party, Reform UK, media and think-tanks invoking a Britain where the problems are the usual villains – the state, bureaucrats and regulation, combined with “the woke”, professional classes and immigrants.
Big Questions for Labour, Scotland and Independence
All this has consequences for the nature of the union and Scotland and can encourage independence supporters to believe that the unreformable nature of the UK proves the need for Scottish statehood. Yet what this ignores is that the independence cause faces many of the same pressures and inconvenient truths that UK politics does.
Many of the same forces buffeting Labour – Trump’s populism, Putin’s aggression, an assertive China, regional and global instability, and an anti-incumbency mood across the West – affect Scotland and independence as much as the UK.
One of the unstated strands of the 2014 independence offer was that Scotland could become safely independent in this broadly peaceful corner of north-west Europe. It was not completely true even then as Putin annexed Crimea in 2014; and Scotland’s position in the north Atlantic has always mattered to powerful neighbours, the US and Russia.
For Scottish independence to prosper now, a reset is needed to address these harsh realities. The unfortunate reality is that post-2014 the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon wasted ten years of political capital with no serious strategic work and heavy-lifting to plan for the future.
Thus we are confronted with the hard truth that the UK Labour Government faces huge challenges and forces which may define and defeat it. But many of these are the very same forces which need to be addressed by Scottish independence.
What happens if this Labour Government is broken by the forces of reaction and privilege? The most likely outcome is that those forces will be embolden and come to office shaping the political zeitgeist. Many of the same issues can be identified, admittedly in less virulent form in Scotland. To take one example there is already significant support building behind Farage’s Reform UK for the 2026 Scottish election, and they could easily win representation currently polling in double figures and outperforming the Greens.
Many independence supporters and those on the left wish this Labour administration to fail. They claim that it is no different from the Tories. But this is wrong on the latter and failure will lead to the right feeling it can run amok and create carnage and disruption.
There is a battle of ideas underway about the nature of society, economy, capitalism and the future. The present Labour leadership are silent on many of these big issues. So are the SNP. Yet this wider battle about those ideas entails recognising the need to defeat the virulent right.
This cannot involve clinging to mantras of stability and yearning to return to normalcy while remaining wed to the broken economic orthodoxies which have caused such chaos, ripped up the social contract across the West, and seen the climate crisis set the planet on fire.
This means recognising that Labour are not the same as Tories, but the small “c” conservatism of Labour, SNP, Lib Dems and Greens is an open invitation for the right to continue its assault. Centrist managerialism, caving in to corporate capture of the public realm and dead rhetoric are the equivalent of waving the flag of surrender.
Appeasement does not work – whether it is to dictators or to the forces of reaction. Instead, there is a pressing need to call-out and break with the right-wing ideas which have caused such havoc in recent decades – and begin to map out a different direction. This is not just about defending democracy, public services and what is left of the welfare state but articulating the values we want to live by and starting to put them into action.
That would be a challenge to the right and its pessimistic view of human nature, but also the miniaturised ambition of the political class in the UK and Scotland. This is a battle for our future, for humanity, humane values and for the sustainability of the planet and it one that we must win.
Britain Needs Change: The Politics of Hope and Labour’s Challenge, edited by Gerry Hassan and Simon Barrow, is published by Biteback Publishing November 28.
