Why Labour isn't Serious about Winning

At school, fashion just wasn't my thing. Not having two ha'pennies to rub together had something to do with it. But many decades later, words pour out from these fingertips and are arranged in semi-coherent diatribes and, well, despite myself they're consistently ahead of the curve. I never asked to be a politics hipster and will forever eschew the manicured beard to match, but today we learn the Labour leader has got his excuses in ahead of May's Super Thursday, which includes the ham-fistedly stitched Hartlepool by-election. If Labour don't do good, Keir Starmer argues it's because of the vaccine bounce. As it happens, this place discussed it, or rather the myth of the vaccine bounce a fortnight ago. Just call me Nostradamus.

Let's quickly recall the argument. Have the Tories lately enjoyed a poll boost that can be attributed to a speedy vaccine roll out? Yes. But is this why Labour is doing badly? No. Having recovered Labour's position by December time to level pegging, this has disspated and gone into reverse since the beginning of the year. You can pinpoint refusing to stand by core components of Labour's voter coalition, clumsy posturing, and dumping principles to explain how Dear Keir has demobilised part of the vote. More significant in my view, particularly among Labour adjacent/soft voters is a lack of opposition. The myth of the vaccine bounce is political cover for these reversals. It's not his fault. In fact, Keir is doing a brilliant job. It's just, well, the circumstances. Funny how the sorts peddling these lines were never as forgiving and attuned to wider politics when Jeremy Corbyn was operating in tougher conditions.

This failure is rooted in the kind of project Keir Starmer and the Labour right are trying to build: a prospectus of centralised, statist managerialism, but one that is doomed because it doesn't understand the Tory party. Whether this misunderstanding is innocent or wilful, we'll come onto in a moment. But it's obvious to anyone with a passing acquaintance to Stuart Hall's work, have read a bit of Gramsci, and paid any attention whatsoever to British politics that Johnson's Tories are in for the long haul. They already have mobilised a powerful voter coalition which, thanks to its age distribution, is more likely to vote. They have a policy agenda that responds to and articulates the fears of this bloc, and they have a helpful and suppine media that allows them to set the terms of debate. Furthermore, this isn't just about winning future elections: it's a matter of strengthening the class relationships that sustain the interests the Tory party is a container for, and ensuring the post-Covid settlement departs as little from the pre-Covid settlement as possible.

There are two ways to contest a hegemonic project. It can be challenged with a counter-hegemony, or one can choose to go along with it. This is exactly what Tony Blair did upon assuming Labour's leadership in 1994. It worked for him, so why not for Keir Starmer? Consider recent evidence. The Fabian pitch is better than what the Tories have on offer, but it would be a stretch to describe it as a qualitative break. Labour also routinely abstains on key authoritarian legislation, attmepts to steal the mantle of better pro-business managers of the settlement the Tories are building, it courts and refuses to take on the media, and is intent on putting distance between itself as a party of responsible Westminster-centric politics and the efforts Corbynism made to turn the party outwards. Nowhere do we see this capitulation to the Tory hegemonic project more than in Labour's response to the Coronavirus crisis. Tailing the government, focusing on process issues, challenging only when it's deemed politically safe to do so. It's a sad state of affairs when Boris Johnson cares more about the opinion of recalcitrant backbenchers than the official opposition facing him. To all intents and purposes, Keir's feeble opposition has assisted the Tories in striking their new authoritarian settlement. And they didn't even have to offer him a peerage.

In their own way, Keir and his little helpers aren't stupid people. They have reached the top of the second party of state, after all. They can see what's in front of them. They know the arguments pinging around Labour left discourse and why the Labour leadership aren't setting politics alight. And yet they persist. The Labour right have run the party for the bulk of its history, and they've never been made accountable for Westminster defeat after Westminster defeat, so we have to ask why they do keep failing. Crap leadership is only half of it, the other is the structural predisposition of the Labour Party itself. As a proletarian party, i.e. a party set up to represent everyone who sells their time and their labour in return for a wage or salary, the middle class and professional stratas have dominated the party politically and intellectually. Their world is one of organising capital, or selling specialist services to capital, or being placed in positions that oversees and manages the hoi polloi. Their top down being conditions their top down consciousness, which is imported unmediated into the Labour Party. The workers here are a populace to be led, and the establishment a partner to negotiate terms with.

Yet this outlook is entirely congruent with mainstream Labourism as it emerged from and continues to dominate the trade unions. Class struggle since the late 19th century has, in the main, been a ceaseless guerilla struggle. At times militant and noisy, but most of the time quiet and negotiated, improvements were wrung out of the ruling class in endless battles of attrition. How this appears is not as the truth of the class antagonism at the heart of capitalist society, but presents as isolated battles against employers who are short-sighted/greedy/bloody-minded. Trade unionism therefore has to be pragmatic, flexible, and patient. And with incremental steps, every wage and salary earner has benefited from workers so organised. This consciousness informs and conditions the union officialdom that inevitably emerges, and indelibly stamped the politics of the early workers' representatives who made their way to Westminster. The plodding velocity of compromise, talking, bargaining, and leveraging (latent) collective power not only fits the constitutionalism of bourgeois democracy like a glove, those who've risen within the labour movement have imbibed an outlook not a million miles from the middle class professionals. They were organisers of workers, and in all too many cases set themselves apart from the rest. Hence why Labour emerged at the very beginning as an alliance between the progressive middle class and the growing workers' movement: there was a fundamental meeting of minds.

Why is this relevant to the Labour right and Keir Starmer's leadership? The leftist appreciation of trade union organisation is always accompanied by critique: the fact trade union officialdom has a material stake in the persistence of the wage relation in the same way professional associations maintain status through enclosure strategies. The role of trade union bureaucracies after 1945, through the Thatcher period, and well into the Blair/Brown years were, with some exceptions, as bulwarks against the left. Some still are. They struck at trends, movements, entryists, and activists who were a threat to their authority over organised labour, even if it meant dividing our movement and giving the Tories an easier time. This preoccupation is where the historic roots of the Labour right lie. Their position is thanks to the labour movement, and can only continue by keeping the lid on the labour movement. Everything else is secondary. Hence the Labour right's scorched earth and scabbing during the Corbyn years, the greater enthusiasm they have for combatting the left than the Tories, and ultimately why the only power they're serious about winning and keeping is their own in the party and the movement.

The daft strategies, the wrong politics, the fetish for focus groups, the incompetence and ineptitude, contrast this with Keir Starmer's single-minded ruthlessness inside the party. The right's will to self-preservation is the Labour Party's death instinct in full doom drive, an insatiable appetite for defeat, loss and decomposition as long as their authority and privileges persist. High office is a nice bonus if you can get it, but not the be all and end all. Hegemony shmegemony in other words. Expecting Keir and his sidekicks to be serious about winning a general election is as naive as taking compassionate conservatism at its word.