How Labour Could Beat Reform

Labour can win the next election without pandering to right wing prejudices. That's not your run-of-the-mill left winger arguing this, but recent work undertaken by Steve Akehurst for public opinion researchers, Persuasion UK. The piece, 'Getting to Know Reform Curious Labour voters' presents lots of useful nuggets that puncture the media-confected myths around Reform's vote and Labour's exposure to them.

For example, 11% of Labour's 2024 coalition fall into the 'Reform curious' category. And if all of them switched their allegiance at the next election, all other things being equal the party would shed 123 seats. Blimey, that sounds serious. In other parts of the country the problems are worse. In seats where Reform came second, 13% of Labour voters are open to swapping Keir Starmer for Nigel Farage. In Scotland, potential defectors are pegged at around 18% of the vote. A case of keep calm, carry on scapegoating the immigrants, and everything will be alright. Right? No. The polling finds 29% of the 2024 Labour coalition are 'Green curious', and 41% are prepared to support the Liberal Democrats under the right circumstances. And those said circumstances cover substantive lurches to the right.

The Reform-curious tend to share similar demographic characteristics with Reform voters at large (white, older, disproportionately male), are more socially conservative than the rest of the Labour base, and for 66% of whom immigration is the key political issue. But these positions are "worn lightly". For example, p.34 shows the long distance between the Reform curious and actual Reform supporters, even though they're on the right of Labour's coalition. For the latter, anti-immigration, anti-Green measures, and their antipathy to "woke" is baked into their world views. For the Reform curious Labour voters, it's more of an inclination.

This is important, because it suggests rightist tendencies within Labour's coalition could be overcome without too much bother. However, capitulating to them would be devastating. The centrepiece of Akehurst's research is an experiment which measured the weighted sample's responses to Labour adopting certain policies (p.67). It finds that leaning right on immigration keeps a few percentage points of the Reform curious on board, whereas the most extreme position - banning all immigration - could reach into the Reform vote itself. But the price paid would be the mass abandonment of the party by left wing voters. And this is after many liberal and left wing voters had already gone elsewhere in 2024. Going right secures negligible benefits at significant cost.

How might Labour avoid this fate? By not shifting right. Akehurst establishes that many of the Reform curious are "economically populist", or in straight forward terms, left wing on materialist issues. Workers rights, tackling inequality, rebuilding public services, and wealth taxes are much more popular with this group than Reform voters at large. And, electorally speaking, it's the sweet spot. Avoiding the ground favoured by the right and pushing populist economic messages against entrenched interests loses no votes to the left, and crucially none to the right either. The study does not look at voters who went elsewhere last year, but as there is a growing progressive majority in this country, such positioning could recapture votes lost and go a long way to secure the party its second term.

Picture the scene when these findings lit up the Downing Street radar on Monday morning. Will Labour alter its policy direction in light of this evidence? Will it change their strategy where the ignominious collapse of the Democrats and its centre left brethren on the continent have so far failed to convince? I'm sorry to say Morgan McSweeney is likely to file this report in the trash folder. This isn't because he genuinely thinks the path to re-election lies through racist posturing, but that his project - and that of Starmer's more generally - is about managing the politics in capital's interest. This means patrolling the political terrain so things like hope and raised aspirations are shot down if they so much as peer out of their foxholes. This government has constructed a fiscal fiction designed purposely to dampen expectations, and is refusing to countenance taxes on capital and wealth because, well, the more class conscious sections of our rulers fear where that might lead. The data is inconvenient, because it's at cross purposes to the government's project. And so into the bin this useful and interesting piece of work will go, while the "Morganiser" carries on laying the foundation for a catastrophic rout four years hence.

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Data as Bourgeois Morality

Data pervades everything. For those of us whose employment does not produce data, our consumption does as phones, computers, televisions, and our purchases capture our activity and feeds that into vast datasets. Here, the ghosts of our agency are carved up into distributed fragments, which are utilised by the business models of the platforms to sell advertising, and shape our attention through algorithmic selection of content that will catch our further attention.

But for those who work with data broadly - not just the digitised kind - it is embedded in the job description. Data is a system of concretised ethics enforced by the employment relation, in the first instance, and horizons of credibility, of social conventions based on the the affirmation and demonstration of evidence. As I am an academic, the concern for data determines the character of the presentation of research, the marketing and student experience efforts that cover my programmes, and must be invoked to justify changes to course content and assessment, the launch of new degrees, and the business case for taking on new staff. This is the lot of other education workers, particularly teachers with the vast trail of paperwork cataloguing their practice as educators, and also civil servants, mid-level managers across the public and private sectors, buyers in retail - every job that requires making decisions about the delivery of a service or the provision of a product.

And it directly governs. Since the emergence of modern wage labour in the English countryside, targets have been one tool among many used by employers to individuate and atomise workforces to enable their management. Today, when immaterial labour predominates and is simultaneously being attacked and deskilled, targets as a method have proliferated into a matrix of performance indicators for managing post-industrial labour. The worker, from the lowest paid to the relatively affluent are subjected (and subjectivated) by streams of algorithms and targets that measure aptitudes, define productivity, and determine the character of one's tasks. They shove (rather than nudge) labour along prescriptive circuits. The data points workers are judged by are often conjoined with those outside of their control - such as market conditions - and they are held to account against them.

Data as employed in capitalist societies is not just a practice/technology for managing workers, it has the characteristics of a moral code. Of, more precisely, a bourgeois morality. Like religion, the moralities of law and order, and the explicit statements of bootstraps neoliberalism, their subjects are the objects of exploitation. Bourgeois morality marks the bourgeoisie's innumerable, multitudinous others, and works to govern them. They themselves are, by and large, left unmarked. The neutral term. The starting point. That natural way of the world. Therefore, moralities spiritual and secular do not apply to them. The same is true of data.

How many CEOs "abbreviate" the evidence-based decision-making they enforce on their employees? How many politicians are impervious to the data-heavy briefings handed them by civil servants when they push particular policies? The further up the hierarchy one travels, the employment of data becomes more episodic, and its status as a tool of governance becomes all the clearer. These exalted levels operate with different sets of priorities: not what data tells them about what decisions would bring the greatest benefit to the greatest number, nor even in the narrower terms of using data to prioritise economic growth. No, data plays second fiddle to the politics of class maintenance. The successful exercise and preservation of class privilege and class power requires flexibility and opportunist nous. The realpolitik of our rulers depends on instinct and the feels in the first place, and the enforcement of decisions that reiterate their power-over. In these mundane circumstances of capitalism's everyday, data that shows they're wrong is simply noise.

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Local Council By-Elections April 2025

This month saw 19,826 votes cast in 13 local authority contests. All percentages are rounded to the nearest single decimal place. Eight council seats changed hands. For comparison with March's results, see here.

Party	Number of Candidates	Total Vote	%	+/- Mar	+/- Apr 24	Avge/ Contest	+/- Seats
Conservative	13	2,589	13.1%	-7.1	-17.8	199	-1
Labour	12	3,891	19.6%	-1.5	-2.8	324	-4
Lib Dem	11	4,143	20.9%	+6.3	+1.7	377	+2
Reform*	11	3,901	19.7%	+3.6	+19.1	355	+3
Green	9	2,644	13.3%	+4.1	+8.0	294	+1
SNP**	1	1,439	7.3%	-1.6	-0.6	1,439	0
PC***	2	629	3.2%	+2.1	+3.2	315	0
Ind****	5	501	2.5%	-4.5	-11.8	100	-1
Other*****	4	91	0.5%	-1.4	-4.8	23	0

* Reform's comparison results are based on recomputing their tallies from last year's Others
** There was one by-election on Scotland
*** There were two by-elections in Wales
**** There were no Independent clashes this month
***** Others in April consisted of Christian People's Alliance (24), Communist League (8), TUSC (25, 34)

Two firsts this month! For the first time ever in a normal set of by-elections, the top two positions popular vote-wise did not feature either Labour or the Tories. The Liberal Democrats came first, and Reform pipped Labour to the post by just 10 votes. And the other? The Greens managed to outpoll the Tories. They haven't even done that to the Lib Dems yet. So credible results for everyone who are not the big two and wooden spoons for them. Particularly Kemi Badenoch's crew who registered their lowest level of support ever, sinking deeper than the 17% they scored in March 2024.

What does it mean? It suggests that a Tory recovery is just not happening, portending a real bloodbath next Thursday. Labour, who did dismally here by dropping four seats, are not in as bad a way as their official opposition, but there's room for them to drop further as stupid and counter=productive policies keep getting rolled out. In all, what might the shape of next month's results look like? A lot like this, I'd wager.

3 April
Lincoln, Park, LDem gain from Lab
Neath Port Talbot, Cwmllynfell & Ystalyfera, LDem gain from Lab
St Helens, Sutton South East, Ref gain from LDem

10 April
Gwynedd, Teigl, PC hold
Haringey, St Ann's, Grn gain from Lab
Sutton, Sutton Central, LDem hold
Tameside, Longdendale, Ref gain from Lab

17 April
Horsham, Colgate & Rusper, LDem gain from Con
Torridge, Appledore, LDem gain from Ind

24 April
Arun, Marine, Ref gain from Ind
Fife, Glenrothes Central & Thornton, SNP hold
Suffolk, St John's, Lab hold
West Berkshire, Thatcham North East, LDem hold

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The Return of Tory/Reform Coalition Talk

The turning of the politics windmill has brought back chatter about a Tory/Reform coalition. Actually, it was recorded remarks made by Robert Jenrick to an audience of Tory students at UCL back in March that has occasioned this topic's unwelcome return. After disparaging Reform, he said "I want the fight to be united. And so, one way or another, I’m determined to do that and to bring this coalition together and make sure we unite as a nation as well." This has been taken to mean that Jenrick would like a lash up with Reform, with the hapless Kemi Badenoch copping a load of flak for his defying her position (something he's done before), and Reform itself wanting to put distance between themselves and the Tories. It's not often Ann Widdecombe is right, but her "I'm not teaming up with any losers" riposte demonstrates the truth of the broken clock adage.

A read of Jenrick's comments reveals that he was proposing a united coalition of the right in a general sense rather than an alliance with Reform. He confirms what has often been highlighted by this corner of the internet, that his (as well as the project of the Tory right) is a doomed effort at "rebuilding the coalition of voters we had in 2019 and can have again." That said, Jenrick is a slippery politician without an ounce of character, so if there is a Conservative front bencher tipped as leader material and capable of forming a Faustian association with Nigel Farage, it's him.

We've also talked many times about how and why and Tory/Reform alliance is a non-starter for both parties. The Tories simultaneously need to consolidate their base, which has been annexed in large part by Reform. But heading to the right is not going to win many of those disgruntled former supporters back, because Boris Johnson, Brexit betrayals, etc. etc. But as the Tories bear right to prove their politics, which in a certain light makes a bit of sense, they're abandoning the traditional Tory heartlands to the Liberal Democrats. Where Reform are concerned, an alliance with the Tories is unlikely to go down well with their Mr Angry brigades. And recent polling backs this assertion.

Ways around this? An arrangement in 2029 where both parties encourage a low key tactical voting campaign from the right is a possibility. An alliance can't be ruled out in the event of the combined Tory/Reform seat share being enough for a majority, and if that happens all thought about what the base thinks goes out of the window. We saw the Lib Dems torch themselves in 2010 for the chance of ministerial jobs, and one can't suppose Farage would be held back by what the good people of Clacton thinks if similar opportunities open for him. He hasn't demonstrated their limiting influence vis his support for Donald Trump and Russia so far. Similarly, Labour are also machine-gunning their feet, so Reform would be joining what is now an established tradition common to all electorally successful parties - if they do form a government with the Tories.

This is all crystal ball stuff, but does say something about how politics on the right are going to play out over the next four years. Badenoch and her successor, should she suffer the ignominy of the Iain Duncan Smith treatment, are menaced by Reform and cannot conceive of any strategy beyond absorbing them by, effectively, becoming Reform. Life for Farage is much easier. He can rely on the media to continue framing politics around his programme, causing the Tories and Labour to jig along to his racist dirge. The Tories are only a bother when they get too close and too chummy to his party this side of the next election. However this all plays out, the psychodrama on the right, the Conservative inability to cope with a serious rival for the right wing vote is ensuring more bitterness, more poison, and more toxicity will spread from there to the rest of mainstream politics.

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The Lure of the Racist Self-Own

Having accomplished an unprecedented hollowing-out of support during a general election, Labour remain committed to testing the resilience of its electoral coalition. Among the latest in a long line of tawdry announcements is news Yvette Cooper will publicise the nationality of foreign criminals. The plan involves drawing up league tables of nationalities by crime, which has become possible after wonkish twiddling with how Home Office stats are generated. But why? A "source" says the government wants the public to be better informed, but also to show how much tougher Labour is on foreign criminals than the Tories were, boasting how the government are deporting more than Robert Jenrick did while providing more information about them. And right on cue, up popped Jenrick to say this data should have been available long before now. Falling into the very trap set by the cunning masterminds behind the party's strategic direction.

The politics are, on the surface, pretty straightforward. Because in Starmerland the working class are coded as Reform-supporting racists, pandering to scapegoats will turn the heads of this largely imaginary constituency. You can picture it on the nation's mobile phones. The BBC News alert pops up with Cooper's initiative, and the couple of million looking to vote for Nigel Farage at the upcoming council elections will look at it, curse the Tories' softness, and head to the polls with Labour voting intentions in their hearts. But, of course, this is not going to happen. Reform, you might recall, is a difficulty for Labour but an existential dread for the Tories, making this in strategic terms a fool's errand. Why chase after voters breaking to the right of the Tories on cultural issues instead of shoring up one's own fraying base, or making an offer that might appeal to the apparently "economically progressive" side of the artefactual Labour-Reform switcher?

There is no political mileage for Labour in pandering to the racist mischief thr right stirs up about foreign criminals. So what's the attraction? There is a joy a certain kind of middle class politician has in bureaucratically squishing little people, and especially so if one expects plaudits. Who cares about foreign criminals? They are the perfect out group, a scapegoat tailor made for scapegoating. And Labour needs its scapegoats. But there's more! Anything that is adjacent to cracking down on immigration and immigrants, according to the Tory play book is the route to political success. That Labour have imbibed this as their political common sense is illustrative of how far Keir Starmer's leadership has moved to the right. And then we have the obscene displacement activity of massaging the organs of the repressive state. Because this is a Labour government that doesn't want to do too much that might encourage people to expect more from politics, it's much easier to give the impression of being very busy. And the comparatively risk-free way of demonstrating activity without upsetting the apple cart is to lean heavily into the politics of immigration. And in so doing, the government are contributing to the huge effort made by the media and Labour's political opponents in keeping that as one of the country's top three issues.

And yet, the stupidity is their entering a race they can never win. Galaxy brain Morgan McSweeney is implying that if deportations are ramped up, work and student visas curbed, and foreign criminals seen to be getting their just desserts, then the issue will be neutralised. But it won't be. Labour supporters who are concerned about immigration are more motivated by other issues, and if they're leaning toward Reform it's in a manner akin to those who flirted with the BNP 15-20 years ago. I.e. mostly as the nuclear option among the protest vote buttons. And those that prioritise immigration do so on culturalist and outright racist grounds, and are never going to be impressed by nationality league tables of sex offenders and shoplifters. Except as ammunition for racist scapegoating, which Labour knows is likely to happen as a result of this policy. The headlines of the gutter press write themselves.

Racism as a tool of divide and rule is just as attractive to this crop of Labour ministers as it was to the Tories. And in the mean time, the base - one it can ill-afford to lose with the post-election collapse in its polling - will carry on unwinding and finding a welcome in the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and where they're available, independent leftists.

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Independent Candidates or Left Alternatives?

Week before last there was an interesting article in Socialist Worker. The paper's editor, Tomáš Tengely-Evans, has indicated that the SWP are about to break from their routine movementism and begin standing in elections. The occasion is one of their comrades standing as an independent for Chesterfield council on 1st May. Something of an about turn since it exited the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition just over eight years ago and gave up elections for "the streets". Why the sudden switch?

There is the appalling record of Keir Starmer's Labour government in office. For every crumb of improvement conceded by Number 10, they've dished out a bellyful of crap. They've attacked the most vulnerable members of our class, and are sensibly salting the earth for themselves in time for the local elections, never mind the general election four years hence. They're upsetting their media outriders too. Even those who loyally shilled for the Labour right between 2015 and 2019 are finding their frequent Faragist forays hard to stomach.

The left's disgust with Starmerism long precedes the shameful attempt to sack Diane Abbott's candidacy prior to the election. But, for once, this does not come from a place of electoral impotence. The re-election of Jeremy Corbyn in the teeth of the Labour machine, and the so-called Gaza independents - plus, you might say, the Greens - shows that constituency-level left insurgencies are possible. It is disappointing that nothing has come from this, nor the suspension of left wing Labour MPs where the development of a new working class party is concerned. And the vacuum has meant the Greens have leaned into their left wing credentials without much pushback from anybody. Meanwhile, reports continue circulating of behind-the-scenes efforts to cobble something together, without (it seems) much enthusiasm from Corbyn nor the other independents. Yet the party gap remains.

Which is something the SWP has noticed with their latest front, We Demand Change. An effort to link up (capitalise on) the new struggles emerging in reply to the cruelties and stupidities of Starmerism, its broad-based orientation makes it well-placed to pivot from anti-cuts to anti-corruption to anti-racist to anti-Trump campaigning in the blink of an eye. But at the inaugural rally in London on 29th March, the question of building a left electoral alternative kept cropping up, despite the customary SWP emphasis on building demonstrations and organising rallies. Being confronted with this appetite for something more, Tengely-Evans writes "There are two dangers - one is to stand on the sidelines of this debate about elections, the other is to go into it without fighting for revolutionary politics." But, as ever, the silences are significant too. What's missing is any justification for "SWP members ... standing as independent socialists". Sure, having seen the Jane Hindle - the Chesterfield candidate - literature, there is no doubt where she stands on Labour, war, capitalism, and the centrality of the working class. But why stand as independents instead of straightforward SWP candidates?

The reason? None is given. Could it be that, sadly, independent candidates for several reasons are more likely to do better than socialist candidates that stand under a socialist banner? The obvious answer is yes, if the TUSC experience is anything to go by. But it has the happy side effect of any campaigning not generating an organisational dynamic for a wider body the SWP might otherwise sit in and lose activists to. Thinking about the relationships the SWP wants to cultivate, it does not put the Corbyn/Collective crew on the spot, nor pressurise the three remaining Labour MPs without the whip, nor the Gaza Independents, nor the conservatives in its own ranks wedded to the SWP's customary syndicalism. A smattering of "independent" councillors also gives them a bit of heft if a new party/umbrella alliance does eventually emerge too.

The problem with this approach is the anti-party logic independent candidatures play to. The SWP say they want to enter electoral politics to fight for their revolutionary views. But central to any understanding of Leninism is the irreducible nature of party organisation, which subordinates the individual to the collective will. How are they going to make the principled case in the coming years for a common and united leftist approach to elections if, between now and 2028/9, the SWP and anyone vaguely associated with We Demand Change are going to build election campaigns around individuals as individuals? This is not the stuff a cohesive, solidaristic politics is made of. And how then are those voters going to be carried over if, the next time, they do stand as socialists on a socialist outfit's ticket? It appears to me the Socialist Worker article forgot their ABCs even as the editor wrote them.

If the left, regardless of which part we're talking about, want to build an organisation to tackle elections as the left, they need to take a leaf from bourgeois politics and Labourism. Unite around a party identity, promote it over and above petty factional projects while rooting it in communities and workplaces, and when elections happen stand consistently. This is not a silver bullet, but it is the minimum level of seriousness required if Labour is to be taken on and taken out at the ballot box. The SWP's offering, despite their turn to elections, puts them on the path to ensuring such an outcome will come about very, very slowly.

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New Left Media April 2025

A little bit out of sync with the routine, but who cares? Here are some more new left media projects that were picked up by the radar since last time.

1. BattleLines with Owen Jones (Blog) (Bluesky)

2. Heatwave (Magazine) (Bluesky)

3. Interregnum (Blog) (Bluesky)

4. We Demand Change (Campaign website)

If you know of any new(ish) blogs, podcasts, channels, Facebook pages, resources, spin offs from existing projects, campaign websites or whatever that haven't featured before then drop me a line via the comments, email, Bluesky, Facebook, or Twitter. Please note I'm looking for new media that has started within the last 12 months, give or take. The round up appears hereabouts when there are enough new entrants to justify a post!

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.

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.