Keir Starmer's NATO article has attracted much debate on the left, albeit positions that only differ on the shades of condemnation colouring the response. And rightly so. In recent years, we've seen the military alliance described in Labour circles as an example of "internationalism", and an institution up there with the European Union in the liberal/centrist imaginary. Some comrades have noted that making this intervention in the pages of The Graun was a curious choice, considering the militarist-minded tend to get their news and opinion from other outlets. But it seems to me Starmer was doing two things: letting the deep pockets of British capital know he's their man when bombing and drone strikes are called for, and getting his stance out there so the rest of the media could take it up and amplify his position.
But has Starmer miscalculated? The British public, whether left or right, tend not to be the warmongering sort. Indeed, the dominant attitude on the right remains the default Little England abstentionism on military entanglements. Something the Tories are well aware of, considering how their absurd, humiliating display on the world stage this week saw them talking tough with Russia on Ukraine while pledging Britain won't be drawn into any (unlikely) war. As far as Starmer is concerned, his posturing to the sceptical, socially conservative electorate he erroneously believes Labour has to win over is telling them he can stand up to Britain's enemies. It is an article of faith across the Labour Party that Jeremy Corbyn blew it when he (apparently) fluffed the response to the Skripal poisonings in Salisbury. Starmer's tough-guy affectation tells them he can be trusted on security issues, as well as giving the Tories no room to claim Labour are anti-patriotic. It's pretty transparent stuff - politics as cynical marketing and "brand identity" building.
As part of Labour's wider strategy, attacking Stop the War, rubbishing Corbyn, and tailing the Tories on Russia is designed to make the flanks impervious to the usual right wing gambits. Which, the leadership believes, gives them licence to go personal over the next few weeks - at least according to the latest HuffPo feature. As Johnson's doing a good job of trashing himself, the first priority is taking Rishi Sunak down a peg or two. Briefly the most popular politician in Britain, they rightly discern that not only is the Chancellor socially distanced from the majority of the electorate thanks to his ill-gotten fortune, he's not the political genius some think he is. As his energy bill discount reminds us. But, it seems, the accent is going to be on Sunak's evident cluelessness rather than how he is responsible for holding down people's living standards. We're back in Starmer's "competence" comfort zone instead of taking on the politics.
We see it too with their attitude to Liz Truss. According to the piece, the foreign secretary plays well in the focus groups, which just goes to show why focus groups should be put in the bin. Continuing their theme, leadership insiders are reportedly "impressed" with Truss and believe she would give Labour more touble than Sunak. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, *innocent face*, and all that. We also learn they plan on countering Truss by spotlighting Labour's leading women. I'm not entirely sure pushing the wooden Rachel Reeves is going to conjure the electoral magic they think it will. They are on a surer footing with Lisa Nandy, who can do relatable and "authentic" quite well, when she's not telling outright lies. Yvette Cooper and the (heavily signposted) rising Bridget Phillipson are going to get top billing too and, and, ...and, that's it.
To quickly summarise. Inflation is galloping away while real wages are falling, Covid hasn't gone away even though the Tories are pretending it has, and there's no real relief from rising energy bills. Labour's response is to pretend a VAT cut will fix inflation, keeping mum about Tory management of the pandemic, and saying "look, we have female politicians too." As pre-pre-local election strategy goes, this is the weakest offering Labour have served up to the electorate for many a year. It's pathetic.
But pathetic has its purposes too. Like the NATO showboating, offering little beyond weak sauce rhetoric tells the Tory vote they're targeting that Labour is nothing to fear. And what is meant by "nothing to fear" is leaving the asset economy pretty much untouched. Hence no hint of nationalisation for dealing with energy costs (can't have the FTSE taking a hit, can we?) nor, for that matter, suggesting anything fundamental needs changing. The idea is to get this layer who benefits from rising property prices and who, disproportionately, turn out to vote entirely chillaxed so when the Tory attacks come they make a shallow impression. It might work, and it might also mean Labour stays true to its word if it gets into government. And that means doing nothing at all.
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5 comments:
«weak sauce rhetoric tells the Tory vote they're targeting that Labour is nothing to fear. And what is meant by "nothing to fear" is leaving the asset economy pretty much untouched. [...] It might work, and it might also mean Labour stays true to its word if it gets into government. And that means doing nothing at all.»
As I keep saying, the thatcherites of the New Labour, Conservative, LibDem parties are not about "laissez faire", about stopping government interference in "the economy", let the cookie crumble whichever way, that was a "classical liberal" claim.
The "centrist" "neoliberals" are very much for heavy-handed state intervention, but only in favour of finance and property incumbents, and then for those with sums and policies that are much bigger than even the most interventionist social-democratic governments. Things like the Greenspan Put, the Bernanke Swap, the Darling-Osborne bailout, the Major-Blair PPI, Right-to-Buy, Help-to-Buy, Crossrail and HS2, "forbearance" to bankrupt property owners, 0.5% loans to finance when inflation is 8%, cuts in stamp duty, etc. etc. etc.
Continuing to repeat the right-wing propaganda that the thatcherite are against state intervention in the economy leads to ridiculous claims about 10 years of "austerity" when instead "the economy" (that of "investors") has been booming since 2010, with millions and millions of right-wing voters celebrating the competence and reliability of Johnson (and May and Cameron before him) at rapidly raising their living standards (entirely redistributed from the "undeserving" lower classes).
To get an impression how how large is the "centrist" intervention in the economy on the side of finance and property, these are the sizes of the Fed and BoE balance sheets:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=M3ln
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=vVgD
Those are explosions of literally trillions of dollars/pounds in a few years to pump up asset prices and keep interest rates low.
George Osborne: “A credible fiscal plan allows you to have a looser monetary policy than would otherwise be the case. My approach is to be fiscally conservative but monetarily active.”
George Osborne: “Hopefully we will get a little housing boom and everyone will be happy as property values go up”
David Cameron: “«It is hard to overstate the fundamental importance of low interest rates for an economy as indebted as ours… …and the unthinkable damage that a sharp rise in interest rates would do. When you’ve got a mountain of private sector debt, built up during the boom… …low interest rates mean indebted businesses and families don’t have to spend every spare pound just paying their interest bills.”
Blissex, your exaggerated obsession with the impact of house price inflation on voting preferences is getting tiresome. I think we can all agree that for the very richest and quite wealthy, and indeed also those on more modest incomes, with house assets in the South East particularly, the last ten years were obviously not just about 'Austerity' in determining voting behaviour . But the last 10 years certainly were about an extraordinarily vicious and deep-cutting austerity offensive on multiple key fronts , a failing NHS, falling wages for masses of workers, a housing crisis for millions , the collapse of so many local government vital services. And many of these cuts in vital services did impact whole strata of voters who many well also have been superficially sitting pretty as their house values rocketed upwards (not everywhere though - in my rural Shropshire, and many other areas, house prices have moved very little) .
You are too obsessed with the rising , often purely nominal, house price inflation impact of voters supporting the Tories. After all the destruction of social housing and , rise of the new rentier class, and house asset inflation was well underway under Blair/Brown too.
The 'strategy', if a Peter Mandelson-driven fantasy to return to the Tory lite neoliberalism of the Blair years, but in an entirely different epoch, can be graced with the term 'strategy', of the Starmerite Blue Labour NuLabour Mk2 is profoundly mistaken. The new New Labourites, under Mandelson's malign guidance, expect by sitting almost inertly, spouting the occasional pro NATO, pro business, slogan, whilst waiting for the Tory government to collapse from its own corruption and 'incompetence' , they will win power by default, is doomed to fail to work. Labour is never going to win back those vital 50+ Scottish seats, or indeed most of the old 'Red Wall' seats (the ever dwindling corrupt, cronyism-infested Tory cuts administering local Labour Councils continue there to destroy the Labour 'brand' every day ). Peter Mandelson's Starmer-puppet led Labour Party can only ever hope to enter some sort of German-style 'Grand Coalition' with the Tories and Lib Dems somewhere down the line - when voter abstention and the rise of a radical populist Far Right mass Party has destroyed the ability of the neoliberal status quo maintenance parties to gain a Parliamentary majority via FPTP. That is what has happened across Europe. Why not here ? The British FPTP electoral system will not protect the political system from the fate of the collapsed political 'centre' across Europe for much longer.
«exaggerated obsession with the impact of house price inflation on voting preferences [...] not just about 'Austerity' in determining voting behaviour [...] But the last 10 years certainly were about an extraordinarily vicious and deep-cutting austerity offensive on multiple key fronts , a failing NHS, falling wages for masses of workers, a housing crisis for millions , the collapse of so many local government vital services.»
But that is not austerity, it is *redistribution*, a very, very, different thing. Cutting government spending for some and cutting taxes for others, pumping up unearned income and pushing down earned income, is *redistribution*, not austerity.
If there had been 10 years of austerity it would be indeed be a huge mystery why 14 million voters would be masochistically keep putting in power the parties that kept inflicting austerity on them. But a large majority of those 14 million voters are well chuffed about their booming living standards.
«And many of these cuts in vital services did impact whole strata of voters who many well also have been superficially sitting pretty as their house values rocketed upwards»
And so what? Would these voters rather have a £50,000 per year tax-free, work-free profit on their £500,000 1-bedroom flat, or higher taxes and government services worth perhaps 1/10th of that?
If the property profits were worth £500 a year probably they would not influence voting behaviour that much, but they are so large that they do. For many incumbent longer term owners, in the south-east, property-based redistribution *doubles* their after tax income. Who cares about the NHS if they can easily go private, who cares about buses if they can easily afford a BMW or at least taxis?
Of course those tories don't care about "left" parties or labour unions: how could those parties or unions win them tax-and-spend funded social insurance and government services worth £50,000 per year? What silly "leftoids" have not come to terms yet in over 40 years is nost just mass rentierism but how big it is for those who benefit from it.
The other important detail is that the redistribution via fiscal squeeze and finance-property largesse has largely impacted different areas differently: while Labour voting areas have got a hard fiscal squeeze side and not much of a finance-property boom, Conservative, New Labour and LibDem voting areas have got a much softer fiscal squeeze and a much bigger property-finance boom.
I usually mention this map that shows that 2005-2015 (and subsequently too) property prices have *fallen* in real terms in *most* of the UK:
https://loveincstatic.blob.core.windows.net/lovemoney/House_prices_real_terms_lovemoney.jpg
The Conservatives have adopted nationally since a long time Lady Porter's "Westminster model" of politics:
Stephen Bush "NEW STATESMAN" 2018-03-16: "One Tory minister in a safe seat told me that when she used to ask Osborne for something, he would first ask her how big her majority was — and then reply, with a smile, that it was too large for her enquiry to be worth considering”
Ian Duncan Smith, "Andrew Marr Show", 2016-03-20 "we need to make sure we widen the scope of where we look to get that deficit down and not just narrow it down on working age benefits [...] otherwise it just looks like we see this as a pot of money that it doesn’t matter because they don’t vote for us"
«the fate of the collapsed political 'centre' across Europe for much longer»
That "political 'centre'", once upon a time called "butskellism" in the UK, collapsed over 40 years ago... Wake up!
«they will win power by default, is doomed to fail to work.»
I would not be so sure, in 1997-2005 New Labour won not because it was popular, but because the Conservative vote collapsed,and the New Labour collapsed less, and someone must win every seat:
YEAR TOTAL CON LAB LIB,SDP,UKIP
1979: 31.23m 13.70m 11.53m 4.31m
1983: 30.72m 13.01m 8.46m 7.78m
1987: 32.57m 13.74m 10.03m 7.34m
1992: 33.65m 14.09m 11.56m 6.00m
1997: 31.29m 9.60m 13.52m 5.24m
2001: 26.37m 8.34m 10.72m 4.81m
2005: 27.15m 8.78m 9.55m 5.99m
2010: 30.00m 10.70m 8.61m 6.84m
2015: 30.70m 11.33m 9.35m 6.30m
2017: 32.17m 13.64m 12.88m 2.37m
2019: 32.01m 13.97m 10.30m 3.70m
Look at it this way: if in 2017 and 2019 the Conservatives had got the same number of votes they got in 1997, 2001, or 2005, or even 2010, Corbyn would have won landslides or majorities. A fall in the Conservative vote bigger than a fall in the New, New Labour vote is all that the Mandelson Tendency wants, and eventually they will get it, and then their historic role to provide "continuity thatcherism" will be realized, as well as their personal greed to sit in those historic Whitehall offices.
«Peter Mandelson's Starmer-puppet led Labour Party can only ever hope to enter some sort of German-style 'Grand Coalition' with the Tories and Lib Dems somewhere down the line»
Would that be so bad for them? I think that the big dream of the Militant Mandelsoncy is to make impossible for the Conservatives or Labour to get a House majority without the liberals, or at least for Labour. For while there are differences between right-wing "whigs" and "tories", they both much prefer the other to be in power than Labour with a social-democrat like Corbyn. Sure New Labour/Blue Labour people like Umunna or Smith or Starmer or Streeting would rather it were them in the Whitehall offices, but most likely both their personal interests and those of their "sponsors" are much more compatible with a Conservative victory than a Labour victory.
What I think many people don't get is that for the mandelsonians ensuring that thatcherism wins is more important than winning themselves.
«the rise of a radical populist Far Right mass Party»
That has already happened: that party is the Conservative Party post-UKIP, and indeed the "whig" elitists are fighting back hard currently.
«has destroyed the ability of the neoliberal status quo maintenance parties to gain a Parliamentary majority via FPTP.»
The big point about FPTP is that regardless of how many people someone must win the seat. Then the legitimacy of whoever wins the seat is impaired, but the collapse of the turnout in the 1990s-2000s was, strangely enough, rarely mentioned in public discussion, because it would belittle the glory of Tony.
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