Keir Starmer's Trade Union Dramarama

At a stroke, Labour is set to lose £700k worth of funding next year. This follows Unite's decision to cut its donation to the party after the large "shut up and go away" payments made to the so-called Panorama whistleblowers. Seen as a shot across Keir Starmer's boughs, Len McCluskey warned the party must stick with leftwing policies or receive less monies. Fair enough, you might say. And why not, unions are the self-defence of organised workers. They're not a piggybank.

Truth be told, Keir's success in eschewing the left has proved successful so far - if you judge success by the metrics of the Tory press playing nice, good personal ratings, and the slow collapse of the Tories' polling position. As discussed here many, many times, an opposition ostentatiously going out its way to not be too oppositional and saying nothing policy-wise is quite deliberate. And by the yardstick the leadership have set themselves, it's working. Though of late there has been a frecon of a change, less a nod and more a wink to the left. Last week, on the occasion of Black History Month, Keir said this should be on the school curriculum. Later, he reiterated his commitment to the Corbyn-lite pledges that sealed his leadership deal, including higher taxes for the well off.

None of this is enough. Weighing the politics of Starmerism, the balance is visibly, undeniably tilted toward the status quo. Even banging on about Tory incompetence instead of challenging the politics of Covid-19 isn't the cleverest. This blunts the Labourist critique of what the Tories are doing, and disarms the party when Johnson is replaced by dishy Rishi or another horror off the Tory benches. But for the pointy heads on the Labour right, this is totally fine. The numbers speak for themselves and moving left threatens to undo the work already done. In fact, some will be very happy with Len's criticisms of Labour. They despise trade union leaders who insist on speaking out when affiliation fees are misused, so their ears are closed on that score, but seeing Len is a bogeyman of the Tory press, having him criticise Keir sends a message to those soft Tories who like the cut of the Labour leader's jib but find Len and the strawmen confections of trade unionism off-putting. It hammers home the fact of Labour's "new management".

As this blog has argued before, you don't need to go back to Tony Blair to understand Keir's strategy. It's a rinse and repeat of what Ed Miliband did a decade ago. Having won the leadership on a weak but nevertheless recognisable social democratic offering, Ed immediately pivoted to the right, accepted Tory commonsense on the deficit, debt, and the "need" for some cuts, and kept tightlipped about policy for the next couple of years. Remember how opposition to the introduction of the bedroom tax was slowly and painfully extracted from him? The danger is that, in many ways, Labour's position now isn't as advantageous as it was then. The Liberal Democrats were in government, eliminating a mercurial third party alternative to the Tories, and the debacle of Labour's leadership of the Better Together campaign in Scotland hadn't yet manifested. In the early 2020s the party is hobbled by this disaster, and the LibDems are back as competitors in swathes of seats - though the possibility of a deal with their new leader can't be discounted.

Under these circumstances, Labour needs its left. Awkward trade union leaders and #StarmerOut trolls all. Present triangulation has, as a by-product, contributed to the decomposition of Labour's left. As people are put off, they leave. But this carries with it a negative multiplier. In 2017, the size of the party became an electoral factor in and of itself thanks to the scale of the activism it directed at the election, and the fact Labour was so large practically everyone knew someone who was a party member who'd be making the face-to-face and immediately familiar case for putting Jeremy Corbyn in Number 10. This feat was not repeated in 2019 for a variety of reasons, but the more people the party sheds its weight diminishes faster than even a Johnson crash diet can achieve. It reverts back to the pre-2015 type, a free-floating party with little to nothing anchoring its policy propositions.

This matters, because it makes Labour's job of winning much more difficult. With huge votes piled up in the big cities, some Labour people might be tempted to think this doesn't count. The party can afford to lose tens of thousands of left wing and radical votes in the urban centres if it means getting back socially conservative former Labour voters and liberal centrist voters in the marginals. I know this is what their attitude, I've heard it with my own ears. This perspective is utterly self-defeating. The people they sneer at and think don't count aren't just present in the big cities, they're spread across the country. Not evenly, but enough in enough places to make a difference between whether a seat stays or becomes Labour, or doesn't. The precarious workers, the immaterial labourers of our changing working class are everywhere, and cannot be taken for granted. Not voting is an ever-present threat to Labour.

Perhaps, following the Ed strategy, we'll see a pivot back to soft left policy in the future. But this will likely be diluted just as his pitch was by compromises with Tory positioning and clever, clever efforts at triangulation. It didn't work then, and it's unlikely to do so while the underlying political economy of voter polarisation persists. This means making choices: acknowledging colourless managerialism is almost at the end of the road, and start making political criticisms of the Tories to contest the ground now on which the election will be fought later, or carry on alienating significant swathes of the base, making it much harder to win them back when the party really needs them. This is what needs to be done and, unfortunately, I have very litte confidence Keir Starmer and his inner circle of wonks, nerds, and evil bastards understand the dynamics of Labour's support, let alone the need to switch it up.

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