Starmerism's Necessary Delusions

Keir Starmer's new head of strategy has spoken, and the words are ... nothing new. The strategic insights unveiled at a presentation Deborah Mattinson gave to Labour MPs last week revealed how Boris Johnson is becoming more annoying than endearing (a simple glance at recent polls would have told you that), and people aren't sure where Labour stands. Nearly 16 months into the job, one might ask who is to blame for that state of affairs. The big take home was how Labour has to win over voters who didn't vote Labour in 2019, and the party should adopt clearer positioning and more uplifting message. Money can't buy advice his precious.

Unfortunately, the whole piece is as lazy as the strategic guidance it reports on. Consider the line "millions defected to the Tories in 2019". This is simply not true. As most hacks are whizzes with Wikipedia, at the very minimum one would expect familiarity with the numbers our most recent general election yielded. There was a 3.7m vote gap between the Tories and Labour, but the Conservative vote increased by just 300,000 votes. What did for Labour was the splintering of the anti-Tory vote, with support bleeding to the LibDems, the Greens, the stay-at-homes and, oft-overlooked, the anti-second referendum protest attracted by the Brexit Party. This might be an honest mistake if the piece was penned by junior reporters as opposed to seasoned hacks, but an ulterior purpose is afoot. Further down we read "Some in Starmer’s team believe the party is still suffering damage from the Corbyn era, which ended with the 2019 defeat." Yawn. But we can see how the neutral reporting of this mood is tied with the spin on the election. If the evil doings of the former leader are the primary reason for the 2019 loss, we don't have to inquire too closely into the reasons why the previous coalition bled in all directions. Nor the role the party's current leader played in committing Labour to this vote-losing outcome.

To be fair to the Great Helmsman's chief navigator, I haven't seen Mattinson's presentation. There might have keen insights and worthy nuggets for all I know. But one thing that obviously wasn't mentioned, because the Observer piece doesn't reference it, is the 2017 general election. As the only time Labour has gained seats in an election since 1997, surely it would be reasonable to reflect on the hows and whys of an unexpectedly positive election - one depriving the Tories of their majority and seeing the greatest turn around in polling since 1945. There is an argument, though not a terribly convincing one, that the stars aligned in an entirely flukish way to grind out the result it did, but this doesn't feature in the report. This is because the Labour right aren't interested. To paraphrase a famous Blairism, even if going left was the only route to winning an election they wouldn't want to take it. Keeping their positions and securing future jobs as lobbyists, corporate executives, or star media people, it all depends on maintaining things the way they are. 2017 was a heart attack not just because it refused to conform to their strategy road map, but because it assembled a huge electorate behind a programme that broke with Labourism. It promised a politics in which managerialism was subordinate to the democratic impulse from below. What role for the social climber on the Labour benches when democratic input would have determined the fates of transport and public utilities, would have felt its presence on every company board in the land, and crucially would have reshaped the party around the aspirations of the many, not the careerist trajectories of the few? 2017 is more than a brush with collective death, it must be erased, purged from the party's collective memory while the screws are tightened to prevent its like from ever happening again.

As such, Mattinson's advice is shaped by the Labour establishment's chief desire and purpose - to remain the Labour establishment. The evidence is out there, don't take my word for it. Going from the past two elections, it's pretty obvious what Labour needs to do to win: consolidate the new base Corbyn was able to bring together and set about a twin track strategy of flushing out more potential voters from the pro-Labour demographics and winning over soft Tory supporters. This is eminently do-able. But instead, and going from how Mattinson's political imagination is stuck almost 25 years in the past, the thinking is going after hardened Tory voters by waving flags, bigging up the police and military, and opposing the Tories from the right will do the trick. Completely ignoring and disassembling the party's existing base, breathing more life into the Greens and LibDems is what they're actually doing. In their contrived forgetting of 2017 and partial view of 2019, the leadership are pulling together a strategy that just won't cut it. Couple this with the Labour right's habit to publicly broadcast how shit Labour is on every occasion, the destination Keir Starmer has set out for the party comes into view with increasing clarity: failure.

Image Credit