Every party develops an approach to statecraft before and during their time in government. This is their strategy to achieve whatever their goals are, which (among other things) always involves staying in power. Consider the lately departed Conservative Party. Their five Prime Ministers had an approach to governing within the shared problematic of managing existing class relationships and tilting the balance of power further away from labour to capital. For Dave and Osborne, deficit determinism and cuts to the public sector picked apart workers' freedoms and subjected ever more social life to the demands of capital accumulation and profit. It was an atomising strategy, and one designed to force millions more into the insecurity of temporary, part-time, and low paid work. Theresa May was most concerned with keeping her party together as the most reliable political vehicle of bourgeois rule under the contradictory pressures of Brexit. For Boris Johnson, it was a chaotic blizzard of half-arsed modernisation, bluster and boosterism, division and authoritarianism, and outright lying. Liz Truss didn't get much chance, but slashing taxes for the rich and hoping it would unleash an investment boom had a governance logic to it. And lastly, Rishi Sunak's depleted state approach was designed to manage political demands with lashings of egregious, Johnson-era scapegoating.
What is the point of knowing this? So oppositions can plan accordingly. If you have a handle on statecraft, you can try and exploit the tensions within it, the blind spots, and those parts of it that could succumb to mass opposition. It's the ABC of any radical or socialist politics.
"Starmerism", or authoritarian modernisation, is no different. Our new front benchers like being front benchers. They want to keep the perks and the ministerial motors. This requires strategy, giving us the approach that has come together during the four years of opposition. Except because they are the Labour Party with different constituencies and different relationships to capital, their approach to their self-preservation cannot be a simple cut and paste from the Tories. Hence instead of running down the state and its authority, Starmerism wants to improve it. Rather than trying to rule what's in and out of politics by undermining the state's capacity to do things, Starmer and Rachel Reeves have set about - via their "missions" - to renew national institutions with a seemingly apolitical and managerial accent. Managing the relations of production is the priority (the Starmerist state is a capitalist state after all), hence the monomaniacal emphasis on "economic growth" - the end to which all aspirations are subordinate. This is not a grand narrative, or even a pseudo-intellectual exercise along the lines of 1990s Third Way piffle. Though if you must the Fabian lines of descent are noticeable. Authoritarian modernisation - the continued evacuation of accountability from our politics, in lockstep with arbitrary and elitist decision-making married to a project of refurbishing the legitimation functions of state and making its institutions "work" - is the strategy of the Starmer government. And understanding this allows its opposition to prepare for where this could lead.
Some more discussion about authoritarian modernisation on this short (£) episode of Politics Theory Other.
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Most obvious thing to note is that their legitimacy is completely dependent upon actually succeeding in renewing something. If they can't manage to repair at least some of the most visible damage that the Tories did, then they won't have any legitimacy of their own, only the negative legitimacy of the Tories to fall back on.
They're certainly trying to make sure that nobody forgets the Tories too quickly. Presumably in case their program goes off the rails in directions that they didn't expect, and they wind up having to campaign on being the lesser evil again. And they're doing a lot of under-promising, giving themselves space to over-deliver, perhaps in the questionable hope that they'll get credit if they do.
But the Tories also left them a wide choice of social dysfunctions which they can be seen to repair a little bit, and reap political rewards far in excess of their real generosity. That's where we seem to be hearing them actually offering something, as if that's what they're hoping to make their strategy for staying in power.
Particularly interesting among those right now, for how it appeared to immediately and theatrically blow up in their face, is their promise of reining in domestic landlords... It's eye-catching that the Starmer government has barely warmed its seats and already someone else seems to have taken control of the narrative away from them. How can they respond, except with a "renter's reform bill" which is more performatively punitive (towards landlords) than they really wanted to deliver? Stall and hope for distractions and the memory hole to rescue them, perhaps?
The central problem is that "economic growth" was driven by cheap fossil energy for decades. Now that is no longer available (especially from Russia), Britain's moribund, decayed, post-Brexit economy is about as capable of economic growth as I am of being a Premier League football player. The aspiration is there...but...
Some questions to ponder.
1) Parties as institutions seek to hold on to office, but what about individuals? What is the motivation for a multimillionaire like Sunak or Margaret Hodge?
2) Why did established figures like Jenkins, Williams etc. leave safe seats and positions to set up the SDP? They didn't know in advance they would win. Indeed, the same can be said of Umunna, Soubry and Co.
3) Labour's core massively backs rejoining the EU, and there is a clear and growing majority of electors that do as well. So, why Starmer's insistence on continuing it, given that it is unpopular and also undermines the whole of his stated economic and political strategy?
4) These are rich people, who can have access to continued rich lifestyles even outside parliament. But, it seems to me that the explanation of Starmer's position is a desire to complete the job started by the SDP - that failed - and continued by Umunna et al - that failed even more spectacularly - of destroying Labour as a party with organic links to the labour movement, and to create a new European style centre-Right party. The continued Brexitism and nationalism is driving to a destruction of Labour from within, just as its equivalent in the Tory Party is driving a split of Tories to Reform, and the rest to a takeover of the Liberals. At some point, the Blairite wing of Labour will merge into that new political realignment.
As a founder member of the SDP, I reject this analysis. They and the LDs have always rejected the simplistic left right spectrum, but if you have put us on it we're centre-left not centre-right, and have been apart from the disastrous Clegg coup. Looking forward, we're certainly on the progressive side of Starmer.
Liberals pulled out of the Lib-Lab Pact in 1978, and helped Thatcher win in 1979. The SDP split at the moment that Foot's Labour was standing at over 50% in the polls, and the Tories were thinking of ditching Thatcher as unemployment soared, and the economy tanked. LD's joined the Cameron government in 2010, rather than backing Brown. The LD's under Swinson, tried to blackmail Labour members into getting rid of Corbyn, which was a delusional move, by her and them. They tried to undermine Labour with a new split.
Superficially, LD's are more progressive than Starmer, but who isn't? He's a Bonapartist and Zionist. The point is, however, why is he pursuing Brexit when its opposed by the vast majority of labour members and voters, and, indeed the electorate in general? It also undermines his agenda of growth, and his delusional, cakeist line of relations with the EU, which inevitably falls apart. Bonapartists are also usually populists, so this seems to make no sense, unless something else is going on.
The actions of Starmer seem designed to unnecessarily cause a rift with Labour membership, the trades unions and voter base. It seems designed to destroy Labour links with the labour movement, pushing them in the direction of the Liberals, Greens and others as a lesser-evil, and so create a new centre-right, pro-EU party, without the organic links that now exist, making it like European Social-Democratic parties, or like the US Democrats.
A footnote is necessary here - reports at the time strongly suggested that Brown's Labour wanted nothing to do with a Coalition deal with the LDs, preferring instead to dare them into bed with the Tories. Now, these reports did come from Clegg and his inner circle themselves... But the Labour leadership at the time certainly didn't give anyone much reason to doubt the veracity of those reports, and it was behaviour entirely in keeping with the cynicism of Labour in that era (and this one).
The big distractions certainly were not long in coming. But whether they would have chosen to have their blushes saved on housing-related scandals by the Grenfell report, of all things, seems questionable...
Whether Brown wanted a coalition with Liberals or not is not the point. Liberals could have given confidence and supply to Labour, but instead formed a coalition government with one of the most reactionary governments in recent times. That Clegg circulated these rumours, simply emphasises the point that rather like Swinson later, they wanted an oversized role compared to their representation in blackmailing Labour, and were more concerned in the former case with the smell of Ministerial leather than with principle let alone any concept of progressive politics.
I wrote at the time that the Liberals had opposed austerity and the ideas put forward by Osborn about its necessity, saying it was counterproductive, but in coalition its David Laws wing of Orange Book, free market Liberals embraced it even more wholeheartedly than the Tories!
Those who think that anything good can come from these popular front rotten blocs should learn again from history, and now the present as Macron allies with Le Pen to get the Republican Barnier as Prime Minister to implement his anti-worker agenda.
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