Communing with Dead Voters

If you wait by the river long enough, goes the proverb, the bodies of your enemies will float by. Likewise for the left in this country. Sitting and watching politics journalism means points made years ago will find themselves laundered for mainstream consumption. And with the noticing underway - the realisation that Keir Starmer and co aren't much cop - the sub-genre of repackaged observations and arguments is picking up.

There were two such examples from the last couple of days. In her mail out to subscribers, The I's Katy Balls reported on growing disquiet among Labour MPs about the party's strategy. One (anonymous, of course) insider said "If we’re doing Reform-lite policies, we shouldn’t be losing to Reform.” Balls observes that the government might, therefore, need to shore up its left flank with policies that, shock, left wing voters might like.

And then in The Economist we have Duncan Robinson laying into the delusions that have captured the Labour and Conservative Party leaderships. Starmerism and the Tories are beholden to a zombie politics in which their favourite voter is ... dead. This constituency, which haunts the imaginations of Morgan McSweeney, commits the government to the nonsenses of Brexit and the rejection of anything amounting to a sensible accommodation with the EU. He writes, "If, like everyone else in British politics, one is looking for right-leaning, Leave-voting non-graduates with particularly authoritarian views to attend a focus group, then the best place to find them is the morgue."

Long-time readers of this blog might be experiencing dejavu. Labour's right wing turn is unsustainable? You don't say. Right wing authoritarian politics is in long-term decline, and with it the parties dependent on these constituencies? Where have we heard that before? The basic, almost banal position of this corner of the internet is in the first instance the Conservatives, and Reform are subject to the aforementioned declinist pressures. Their base in wider society is ageing and dying, and not getting replaced like-for-like. For the moment, their support turns out disproportionately but any advantage the right holds here is time limited. It's therefore foolish in the extreme for a party like Labour, which still holds leads among working age people despite the collapse of the polling position, to hitch their wagon to a bunch of gee-gees ready for the knackers yard.

So we have an identification of a problem facing bourgeois politics, but what's missing from Balls's and Robinson's account is the explanation. It might seem puzzling that Kemi Badenoch's hapless leadership is abandoning efforts at winning back thw swathe of Tory seats lost to the Liberal Democrats for the sake of a handful of constituencies they conceded to Reform. However, the Tories - not unreasonably - believe Nigel Farage is the existential threat. To stand any chance of winning again, the Conservatives have to monopolise hardcore right wing voters. At least where the thinking of leading Tories are concerned. Only when the base is secure and the interlopers seen off can they think about taking back ground from the Lib Dems. The people Badenoch and friends have to attract might be dead, but their shades continue to animate the right wing media, which is still viewed as the voice of Tory England. Though these institutions are shedding readers to the Grim Reaper daily, their editorials are so much ouija spelling out what the Tories have to do.

And Labour? Being "responsible", the "grown up" thing is to put as much political distance between their management of British capitalism, and the aspirations of the party's base. Fiscal rules, attacks on the disabled, pretending to be Brexit true-believers, the expired, ex-voters of 2019 vintage are convenient ghosts summoned from the spirit realm to haunt the excuses for inaction and cruelty. But the Labour leadership are deeply cynical mediums and lack the credulity of a Derek Acorah. Their conjuring is a fraud to alibi a politics of managing expectations. The promise of doing very little and continuing attacks on the most vulnerable and the scapegoats favoured by the Tories dampens demands on them to do progressive things, while also reassuring the ruling class that Starmerism means safety where the stability of class relations are concerned. This means the last thing the government want is to reject the dead in favour of the living, because securing Labour's future as an election winning machine that can bury the Tories and see off Reform will only happen if they strive to be capital's master, not its handmaiden. And I'm sure you don't need me to tell you how unlikely that is.