Hard Talk from the Soft Left

In February, Anneliese Dodds jacked in her international development brief following Keir Starmer's decision to raid overseas aid for weapons. It was significant in that Dodds's resignation represented the first overt rebellion by a soft left figure against the government's direction of travel. Therefore, when she spoke in the Commons on Thursday in criticism of the leadership's strategy Dodds wasn't just speaking for herself - she was giving voice to the rumblings of disquiet across the parliamentary party.

Being the soft left, and therefore the most loyal of oppositions, Dodds pointedly eschews finger pointing and goes for a very politic, almost Delphic critique. Mirroring her resignation statement, she said the world is "in flux" and government lacks "muscle memory". Hold on, I'm stopping this right here with a necessary digression. No "muscle memory"? Starmer wasn't in government until this year but, like the rest of us, he lived through Covid and the unprecedented interventions that crisis forced on the Tories. Indeed, he had a ringside seat and headed up an obsequious, spine-bending "opposition" to Boris Johnson's disastrous management. Before that, Starmer navigated the rough seas of Brexit to his political profit, came through Labour's internal wars against Jeremy Corbyn unscathed, and prior to entering the Commons led the Crown Prosecution Service through a period of Tory-imposed resource rationing. Readers here are unlikely to endorse how Starmer approached these challenges, but it's simply untrue to say he lacks experience dealing with "unprecedented crisis". Rather, it's been the default context since Starmer's career catapulted him into the upper echelons. If Starmer is carrying on with a business-as-usual mindset, it's not that he's an untested naif - he's choosing to. But as the soft left's role is to prick the conscience of the right rather than offer a distinct alternative, it's too much to expect Dodds to pick him up on that.

Dodds then raised her concerns about democratic backsliding and how liberal norms are being eroded, unwilling - of course - to acknowledge how these have been wrecked in the Labour Party which, after all, is as much part of our constitutional set up as acts of parliament and the House of Lords. This was why, for Dodds, we need to buddy up with other liberal democracies with UK-EU defence partnerships. But perhaps the most pointed of criticisms, which will undoubtedly be taken as a slight by Rachel Reeves despite the sugar-coated delivery, was the need to dump the "shibboleths". These are the "fiscal rules" and taxation, because "the very best-off have seen so little impact on their well-being from economic headwinds." Ouch.

From the point of view of mainstream politics, Dodds is right on the politics and the economics. To get around the costs of Donald Trump, the UK needs to turbocharge its domestic market. Reeves might not have any ideas of her own, but she did partially recognise this in her January infrastructure announcement. The problem is that stimulus policies are half-cocked if government is also sucking demand out of the economy, which it is with disability cuts and the increase on employers' National Insurance contributions. Our model for Dodds should be Germany and the huge spending splurge it announced to turn around its chugging economy. Seems quite sensible.

And ... it appears Starmer himself might be coming round to this view. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, his paper of choice for strategic announcements, he talks about the trading relationship with the United States and the possibility of a trade deal, and says "We stand ready to use industrial policy to help shelter British business from the storm. Some people may feel uncomfortable about this – the idea the state should intervene directly to shape the market has often been derided. But we simply cannot cling on to old sentiments when the world is turning this fast." People can read into that what they like, and Labour supporters hungry for the thinnest of gruels undoubtedly will. He adds "...these new times demand a new mentality. We have gone further and faster on national security, now we must do the same on economic security through strengthened alliances and reducing barriers to trade." A new speech on the British economy has been slotted into the grid, bringing forward a raft of announcements scheduled for the summer.

A vindication of Dodds and the soft left? More a case of fortuitous timing and the soft left being more in tune with economic realities, but whatever comes out is not going to be straightforward. "Protections" in Starmer's iteration of Labourism have to walk the tightrope of delivering the goods without empowering the workers and frightening capital-at-large. Whatever agenda comes means that the left have also got to adapt its politics to match - otherwise, why bother listening to us?

Y-Traxx - Mystery Land

Hasn't the weather been gorgeous? Sitting in the office and peering out onto the sunkissed cityscape that is Derbados, it has brought back memories of summers of weather-perfect dance tracks. And here is one of those from a long, long time ago that somehow captures blue skies, sand, and kindly heat.

The Class Politics of Trump's Tariffs

Wednesday's announcement of tariffs by Donald Trump was styled by the President as "liberation day". A set of measures that, if the markets are anything to go by, liberated trillions of dollars of value from the largest and most important US companies. As measures go, tariffs - like everything else the Trump presidency has done - can only compound his country's relative decline by encouraging trading flows that eschew the United States for more reliable and stable markets. Like those offered by the European Union and China, for instance. These tariffs constitute the most extraordinary act of self-harm. This is pound-for-pound worse than what Brexit was for the UK, and could be as disruptive to the American domestic economy as the traumas East European states went through following the collapse of Comecon and the restoration of capitalism. Why set out on a course that can only impoverish the country? What is Trump trying to achieve?

Two very quick points looking at this from the perspective of bourgeois interests.

The first is the Liz Truss argument. I.e. What Trump has done is to short the market. The announcement leads to market turmoil and devaluation, and down in the dip the most short-termist sections of finance and commercial capital hoover up cheap assets which they can sell when stocks inevitably recover. Which depends on Trump rowing back on some tariffs, which seems likely given his erratic behaviour. Would some sections of capital be happy to see US capital as a whole take a hit for their profits? Absolutely. We saw some of their British counterparts do this two-and-a-half years ago during Truss's brief stint in Downing Street, so why not again? There are sections of American capital who are totally on board with libertarianism as a strategy for class politics. I.e. Blow up anything that amounts to a social or legal obligation on capital accumulation, even if it's against the interests of capital-in-general. Giving credence to this reading is the "idiotic" way the tariffs have been calculated, and to whom they've been applied - including uninhabited rocks in the middle of the ocean. The slap dash approach indicates a desire in engineering an outcome, not a serious policy orientation.

But supposing it is a turn away from global trade, what does the US stand to gain? It's worth remembering that capital is not unified, and there are competing perspectives within it regarding assumptions about the ways of the world, what policies are appropriate to it, and what strategies are best for advancing the interests of sections of business, and/or capital as a whole. For instance, Trump's slimy relationship to Vladimir Putin is entirely rational viewed in the context of this framework. I would suggest the tariffs are bound up with securing the oligarchical interest on the home front. While trade unionism is hardly in rude health across the sea, the street rebellions around Black Lives Matter and Palestinian Solidarity are read by hyper-class conscious oligarchs as trouble at t'mill; that something is shifting. The proxy for this is the elite's war on woke. They (rightly) discern that the take up of diversity and inclusion policies by big capital is a form of appeasement, of capital responding to the expectations and aspirations of labour rather than laying down the law. After all, how awful it is for business owners that workers resent their aptitudes and identities being used against them. It is a far sighted recognition that the becomings of immaterial labour presents a long-term threat to the stability of class relations. The development of so-called AI is one technique whose application is to head this off, but equally the reconstruction of the federal state as a decrepit do-nothing institution with no purpose beyond enforcing the power of the executive branch can also serve as capital's reply to this existential challenge, albeit one that is crude in its methods and brutal in its outcomes. Trump's new isolationism is a disengagement from US responsibilities and dependencies and is explicitly asserted in sovereigntist terms - Make America Great Again. But what the real consequence will be is not the much-promised economic renaissance, but the reconsolidation of the bourgeois power some class fractions feel is slipping away.

Whingeing and Hand-Wringing

Over the last few years, Keir Starmer hasn't just annoyed people on the left and in the labour movement, he had upset his core support as well. The base in the state bureaucracy, in the professions, and crucially in the media has been divided about his leadership since Starmer and Rachel Reeves explicitly said nothing will change. Because we live in an era where we can all take comfort in illusions of our own devising, a lot of this group overlooked - or accidentally-on-purpose did not notice - the pledges of allegiance to fiscal hawkism and bowing to far right culture warriors as disagreeable but necessary compromises on the road to Number 10. But this cannot be ignored any longer.

The politics of noticing has another spox today, the Graun's Rafael Behr. He writes about how Starmer is lining one policy atrocity up after another, giving little time for Labour MPs to catch their breath and salve their souls. It's an "unpalatable choice" buffet, and all wings of the parliamentary party are affected, from soft left to Blairites with instincts for electoral self-preservation. And what's driving all this? Nothing, it seems. There is no strategic purpose to this Labour government, and without that there is a "dwindling purchase on the growing cohort of voters who see Labour and Tories as interchangeable and equally contemptible." Steady on "Raf" for your own sake. We know what happened last time you got very upset with a Labour leader.

It's not just what Starmer is saying and doing that's upsetting. The positive vibes are gone as well. The project of state modernisation is still part of his emotional economy, but the feels are messed up by the telling. Labour's plan for the civil service, for instance, is the sacking of tens of thousands of workers and their replacement by unreliable technologies. The crisis in the universities and the piles of student debt, the very people who would otherwise be the next generation of support for Starmer and his heirs - they get increased fees and institutions Labour is seemingly content to bury. And any idea this is a government motivated by compassion is just not credible. Turning the page on the cruelty of the Tory years means overseeing brutal cuts of their own.

And so it's coming to pass, signs that the Starmerist base are peeling off are not difficult to discern. But while Behr's despair is symptomatic of how a layer of relatively privileged people are feeling, he does have one reason to be cheerful. He played the expected role as a mid-ranking media commentator at Britain's leading liberal daily in opposition to the left wing alternative to "sensible" centrism and Boris Johnson's buffoonery, and did his bit driving the foul scourge of socialism out of permitted politics. It brought them political peace of sorts, but left the landscape a desert. But in purging radicalism and new ideas, the arid vista is left for prospectors like Behr to describe and bemoan. In other words, while he is a voice of a strata Behr has unwittingly returned to the historic mean of people like him who work in the media: as paid-for whingers hand wringing at a state of affairs that keeps them in a job.

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Five Most Popular Posts in March

Let's get the monthly round-up done. What was hot on the blog in March?

1. Cruelty is the Point
2. Cuddling the Russian Bear
3. Why Labour Attacks the Disabled
4. Labour and the Social Workhouse
5. Laura Kuenssberg's Gotcha Journalism

Five strapping examples of digital agitprop. Occupying the first, third, and fourth places are pieces looking at Labour's performative cruelty, and like any accomplished actor they give every impression of enjoying the role they've cast for themselves. A commitment to a series of grotesqueries that's already biting them in the polls and will make re-election in four years that much harder. In at two is Trump's love-in with Russia. The irrational attraction of one authoritarian to another, or is there something deeper going on? To ask the question is to answer it, so you should read this post if you haven't already. And then in last is Sunday's missive on Kuenssberg's latest contribution to journalistic craft. Has this country ever been beset by a worse collection of political and media elites?

I have a couple of afters following these choice cuts. First is Labour's enthusiasm for artificial intelligence. TL;DR - it's more than ministers looking forward to post-politics career opportunities, it goes to the deskilling impulse at the heart of class exploitation. And in second, eschewing the science fiction we go back to hard science fact with revisiting class politics and Covid.

There are a few things waiting in the in-tray for the month ahead. I want to follow up the social workhouse post. Undoubtedly Trump will commit more crimes and upset allies again. Starmer will continue to wallow in the gutter, and unless I get hit by a bus I'll be around to offer considered reflections on all these things and more. As ever, if you haven't already don't forget to follow the (very) occasional newsletter, and if you like what I do (and you're not skint), you can help support the blog. Following me on Bluesky, Facebook, and for what it's worth Twitter, are cost-free ways of showing your backing for this corner of the internet.

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