On the Starmerist Manifesto

According to the Fabians, Keir Starmer's essay was downloaded tens of thousands of times. Out of them, I wonder how many will languish in folders on flash drives, never to be opened let alone read. Deservedly so, many might say. All the charges about it being vacuous are right, but what it isn't is pointless. Recalling the build up to the piece, this was trailed as a 15,000 word statement of beliefs for the benefit of Labour Party members. As the intended audience, I can only imagine the unambitiously wonkish and the most limited political imaginations would find something here worth getting their teeth into. But then again, as with so many of Keir Starmer's "accomplishments", the intended audience are the gatekeepers and mouthpieces of capital's interests. And there isn't much here that would worry most of the vested interests Starmer has gone out of his way to court.

But is there more to it than that? Yes, if you happen to be interested in the lineage of Starmerism, its trajectory, and where this jerry-rigged sack of platitudes are likely to end up. As political credos go, this is as much thin gruel than anything Ed Miliband and Tony Blair served up, but it is suggestive of a certain mindset, of habits of mind and inclinations we've seen play out during the last 18 months and we're going to see in office on the off chance Keir Starmer becomes Prime Minister.

There are a few good things here. There is an outline of an extension of workers' rights in the first 100 days (p.23), which would be the first substantive enhancement of collective workplace powers since the 1970s. The measures promised come nowhere near the mark of the Corbyn era, but it's not a lapse back to 2010-2015 which, despite exhibiting more of an overt concern with equality, never had much to say on building up trade union strength. The green new deal is in there without using those form of words, but without much in the way of detail. And, most interestingly, what the essay does get right is the importance of security. Longtime readers might recall this was a major bee in this blog's bonnet during its detour (and therefore, mine) into soft left decency. Again, Corbynism took it up and dinstinguished itself by addressing the interests of the the rising class of workers. Starmerism steps back from this and, in the moments it affects to be interested in winning elections, is set on building a different voter coalition with large swathes of former Tory voters and without the millions who supported Labour during its last two outings.

Recognising the problem of security doesn't necessarily mean one has the right solutions, and Starmerism certainly doesn't. Genuflecting towards the problems faced by younger workers will get lost in the noise when the emphasis is on appealing to the insecurities of older cohorts of voters using Tory themes. Instead of talking about interests, we resort to recycled anti-crime populism of the Blair years, and getting more police on the street (another unacknowledged borrowing from Corbynism). In other words, make people feel secure at home in the knowledge the state is out there giving ne'er do wells a good hiding - a classic Tory ruse.

The other string to the Starmerist bow is the bastardised strand of Blue Labour running through it. Starmer doesn't quite evoke images of Spitfires and old maids cycling through the mist, but there's a lot about patriotism, values, and place. All classic themes and, if one was feeling generous, might out this down as an oversteer to counteract the media's confection of Corbyn's Labour as being anti-British. This is the lead in to his big wheeze, the "contribution society" in which everyone knows their place and does their bit. In the context of emerging from lockdown, he writes,

They want to see a contribution society: one where people who work hard and play by the rules can expect to get something back, where you can expect fair pay for fair work, where we capture the spirit that saw us through the worst ravages of the pandemic and celebrate the idea of community and society; where we understand that we are stronger together. (p.22)

Making the world less scary is a noble political endeavour, but doing so by mixing patriotic homilies with a revived "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" strapline and being beastly toward designated outgroups isn't going to win converts over when the next Tory election campaign, just like the last one, heavily runs these lines. The best way of cutting across this support is an appeal to interests, and this is where Starmerism mangles Blue Labour. While it is socially conservative and has an embarrassing reverence for institutions that have kept our class down, at least as Maurice Glasman originally articulated it, its conservatism extended not just to the preservation of working class identities, but its community institutions and tradition of (often militant) self-activity. The kinds of thing that would make a manager like Starmer nervous, such as protests, strike action, occupations, etc. And for a decade before he came to prominence, Glasman did his bit encouraging community organising alongside what became Citizens UK (a model that deserves its own critique, some other time). Starmer's Blue Labourism evacuates this stuff. He even pays no mind to Labour authorities who do value place and locality through their community wealth building efforts, because factionalism. For him, the sense of belonging is secured administratively, a unity - and your contributions - enforced from above.

And this brings us back to where we've been before mapping out the contours of Starmerism. It was fitting the Fabian Society published his pamphlet, because this fits entirely in their tradition. Enlightened managers know best, progressive social change is something that is done to people, there's no role for politics outside of parliament except for vote catching activity, and absolutely central - the thrust of his critique of the Tories - is the need to restore popular trust in the state after it has been frittered away by the Tories. Restoring trust in state institutions is fair enough as political projects go. It's certainly not my politics. But the objective is a non-starter when a leadership, Starmerism, systematically undermines trust in and talks down the institution - the Labour Party - that is supposed to restore this trust.

At one of the Labour fringes, John McDonnell quipped how this was supposed to be a 15,000 word essay and supposed the 2,500 missing words contained all the politics. A good line, but all the politics are there to see in its 30 short pages. It's not a politics for winning an election, nor a prospectus set on firing up millions of voters. It's a summation of Starmerism so far, an elitist boss-knows-best outlook, married to a list of vague sounding policies and aspirations designed to keep Labourist politics in this managerial mould. It might be better than the Tories, but when they're busy letting tens of thousand get ill and hundreds die of Covid every week, these days that's a very low bar.

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