Strong on the Weak

Acquiring a nickname like 'Sir Kid Starver' is very smart politics. Joking with Tony Blair about how people accept "tough choices" but not "that one" when it comes to the child benefit cap is super clever too. You don't need to take my word for it. Polly Toynbee has decreed it so. But it's even better than that. On Laura Kuenssberg's Sunday programme, he committed Labour to keeping a policy he'd previously called "inhumane". And since all the shadow cabinet have parroted similar lines about not doing what they want to do, and how unfunded commitments are bad. If only the Labour leadership were in a position to change "unfunded" to "funded", eh?

There is a perversity at the heart of Labourism. Slavish and forelock tugging, in its centrist and right wing manifestations it's almost embarrassed by its existence. As much as Starmer, for instance, fetishises "working people", Labourism as a politics of work is buried beneath denial. In the Starmerist imagination, workers are acknowledged as having some trade union rights but that's as far as it goes. The political interests arising from wage labourers doing wage labour are completely denied. They go to work, and then dissolve into passive, privatised consumers of market and public service-provided goods outside of it. Rendered as such, there are no real interests left to articulate apart from fairly vague gestures at tackling the cost of living, or making sure state-provided services are "responsive".

If this is how right wing Labour sees its constituency this gives them a politics without a working moral compass, because the magnetism of Labourism's class basis is negated by its erasure. Hence the Labour leadership has the conscience-free latitude to lean to the right almost as far as they want. And this 'as they want' is important, because there is a choice. Starmer has decided that he's okay with saying children in poverty is fine because he has chosen to cosy up to the powerful. While he lectures others about comfort zones, his strategy of not rocking the boat, not contesting the terms of even establishment politics, and refusing to commit Labour to anything beyond empty promises of "reform" are what he feels familiar and at home with. Punching down at poor people is easy. Expecting his kind of people to cough up for the crises they've benefited handsomely from, that's the real tough choice for Starmer. Which is why he avoids making them.

The wiseacres who keep the faith will say, and are saying, that Labour have to get into office and if this is the only way it can be done then there we are. But get in government to do what, exactly? The party wasn't formed simply so Labour MPs could swan around as ministers of the crown. When Starmer talks about reform, when Starmer avoids discussing public sector pay, when Starmer is committing to keeping children poor, are we supposed to take it on trust that this is gruel today for jam tomorrow, like his acolytes suggest? No. Starmer will govern as he has performed as opposition leader. Strong on the weak, weak on the strong.

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