Tony Blair rarely felt the need to apply such discipline. He tolerated numerous revolts, most spectacularly on the Iraq War vote in early 2003, and even serial rebels like Jeremy Corbyn or John McDonnell were allowed to keep the whip. The clique around Starmer today believe that the “sealed tomb” in which the Left had been placed during the Blair era wasn’t secure enough to prevent its re-emergence in 2015. The lesson learned by Starmer’s closest aide, Morgan McSweeney, and those around him was that the Left must never, ever be allowed anywhere close to power again. The munificence of the Blair years was, on this reading, a terrible mistake for which the price is eternal factional vigilance.

Such single-minded dedication is, as some on the Left suggested a while ago, a cause for concern. People who know little other than how to fight and win an internal Labour Party battle were, of course, going to try to apply the same techniques to their opponents, only now with the full force of the American state. The Government’s approach to Palestine protestors in recent months, even as ministers have been dragged into making some mealy-mouthed complaints about Israel’s behavior, suggests the Left’s fears were well founded. At least one retired vicar could be found among the more than 100 peaceful protestors arrested earlier this month for the crime of supporting Palestine Action, and smeared as terrorists using legislation originally intended to target Al Qaeda. This never happened under Blair: at the peak of the anti-Iraq War protests, when demonstrators broke into RAF Fairford and vandalized planes intended for bombing runs in the Middle East, they were charged only with criminal damage (and defended by one Keir Starmer QC).

Even so, the problem for Starmer is more severe than the party’s perennial factionalism. His authoritarianism speaks to a fundamental lack of confidence in his leadership, its goals and perhaps also himself. The contrast with Starmer’s presumed role model is, again, stark. New Labour involved a serious attempt to think through how the world was changing. It had an intellectual core: thinkers such as the LSE sociologist Anthony Giddens, doyen of the “Third Way”, or those on the policy side such as Geoff Mulgan, founder of the Blairite thinktank Demos, weren’t only ornamentation. Moreover, Gordon Brown was a serious political thinker, editing at the age of 24 the now-legendary volume of essays, The Red Paper on Scotland, which proudly bore the influence of Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci, and later producing a well-received biography of the Scottish radical socialist James Maxton. He had grappled with the dilemmas of what Marxism Today called the “New Times”: the decline of the traditional working class, the triumph of Thatcher and her co-thinkers, and the early years of globalization. If Brown reached conclusions about the global economy that the traditional Left did not agree with, they were at least substantive arguments, reinforced by a crop of new think tanks, including the Institute for Public Policy Research and Demos, to match the more established ones on the Right.

Suggested reading

Reform won’t save Britain

By Dan Evans

I say this with some jealousy: Corbynism had no want of academics, but landing, as it did, from a clear blue sky in the summer of 2015, the movement had to be assembled on the fly from the equivalent of bits of string and Fairy Liquid bottles. The one think tank whose radical history left it perfectly positioned to provide some intellectual heft and direction, the New Economics Foundation, where I used to work, chose instead a path of obscurity under Blue Labour veteran Marc Stears. The result was that where we might have had an intellectual anchor, we instead had an empty space. Corbynism lacked a deeper, shared understanding of the society in which we lived and a longer-term strategy for a future government.

This absence was felt keenly. Serious time and resources were put into developing economic policy, with detailed proposals on banking, finance and novel ideas such as a Universal Basic Income. If there’s an unexpected legacy for Corbynism, it is the step-change in the intellectual quality and focus of the British Left’s policy work. A new Left party, a rejuvenated Greens under Zack Polanski, or both together, are in a far stronger position today as a result. On this intellectual confidence and purpose, as on much else — promises of greater public spending, surges in party members, and general election votes — Corbynism and New Labour were far closer to each other than either is to Starmerism.

By contrast, Starmer has next to nothing. The closest thing to an authentically Starmer-aligned think tank, Labour Together, has seen funding cuts and redundancies since the election. Insiders have reported that it has become “listless”, without “purpose or sense of direction”, and has lost around one in six of its staff since the summer. The rest of the centre-left policy shops have either all kept some distance from the Government, or been kept at some distance. The tendency that has had the most obvious impact on Starmerism is from well outside the Left, in the form of the Yimbys whose demands for planning deregulation have been widely repeated by the Government. The odd senior think tanker has moved over to Downing Street or some ministerial advisory role, but there’s no systematic attempt at forging a Starmerite consensus equivalent to Blair’s promotion of the “Third Way”. The Prime Minister’s defenders claim this is a pragmatic government — choosing whatever works — but the reality is that in the absence of a clear orientation, Labour has ended up permanently on the back foot.

“Starmerism”, such as it is, represents a return to Labour’s lowest common denominator: what Perry Anderson in the Sixties called a “complacent confusion of influence with power, bovine admiration for bureaucracy, ill-concealed contempt for equality, bottomless philistinism”. Labour’s principled, socialist past is still mythologised today, but at its birth, as the “Labour Representation Committee”, conservative trade union leaders squeezed out the radicals. Founded in reality on the principles of compromise and subordination, Labour’s first Parliamentary breakthrough in 1906 was the result of a secret deal struck between its leaders, Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie, with the Liberal Party. The party’s first government was a confused mess; its next ended in a catastrophic split that saw MacDonald leading a majority-Conservative National Government. It took further Left-wing splits and a world war to knock Labour into shape. But it has never lost its roots: a party born, as postwar Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin put it, “from the bowels of the TUC” has always had an ingrained suspicion of not only socialism, but abstract ideas and big picture thinking in general. If it had tolerated a Left wing, it was because, in a stable two-party system, elections could not usually be won without it.

The wrinkle is that Starmer was himself once keenly interested in ideas and in the Left. In the Eighties, he sat on the editorial board of a well-produced green-tinged Left magazine, Socialist Alternatives, which was closely aligned with the iconoclastic post-Trotskyist International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency. Later, he was better known as a prominent Left-wing barrister. When it came to his 2020 leadership bid, he could successfully leverage this illustrious past, promising Corbynism without Corbyn to a still-raw Labour membership. He has since done everything possible to distance himself from his own history.

He got lucky. After two years of drift, Liz Truss’ implosion at the hands of the Bank of England gifted Labour a majority. But without any serious work — an attempt to build deep roots, to win over broad swathes of the population, and to develop a coherent program for government — they would win a “sandcastle majority”, easily swept away with the turning of the tide. On some level, it seems clear now that Starmer and those around him really did believe they could rock up in Downing Street, declare the grown-ups to be back in charge, and wait for economic growth to return. This suggests an extraordinary level of naiveté about the British state and economy — as if all we needed to do was apply a new lick of paint, rather than rip out the rotten wood and rewire the entire house. It has left this government, more than any in recent memory, totally at the mercy of dysfunctional core state institutions like the Treasury and the Bank of England.

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Labour’s soft-Left insurgency

By James Meadway

The damage has already been immense, as Reform surges in the polls and turns over councils that had been in Labour hands for generations. It is not certain the party will last much beyond this Parliament, at least in its current form. This could be considered a tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of selfless and public-spirited people have given their time to the party, and many still continue to do so. Millions of voters in Britain, over decades, have trusted it with their support. In office, the party has delivered meaningful, even transformational, change for the good of the country, whether in establishing the NHS, the Equal Pay Act, or — and we should acknowledge this — in the socially liberal reforms of New Labour. Even its shorter-term reforms — the Sure Start centers or the significant boost to schools funding under Blair — had a positive impact while they lasted.

But the worst of Labour has been grim, and often arrived with the best. Blair had Iraq and the war on terror. Attlee had Malaya and Partition. Starmer has Gaza, and — he is unique in this respect, a Labour leader like no other, not even Blair — no contrasting upside. And if the economic projections of the Office for Budget Responsibility are to be believed, nor will he find one. The “achievements” the party leadership points to, primarily the addition of four million extra NHS appointments, are threadbare. Rishi Sunak saw an even bigger improvement in numbers during his last year in office.

Starmer will likely get votes at 16 through. This is not nothing, but not remotely approaching the scale of constitutional reform managed by New Labour, or even that proposed by Gordon Brown’s Commission in 2023 which was studiously ignored by Starmer in government. The Assisted Dying Bill has become a poorly managed farce — troubling for an issue so manifestly serious. Rhetorical flourishes about Starmer taking on the “bulging benefits bill” that is apparently “blighting society” end up as just that. Markets correctly smell frailty.

All the while, whispers of a leadership challenge grow louder. Labour MPs nervously look at their thin majorities — more than ever before have less than 5% as a buffer — and ponder their future. The much-admired Andy Burnham has been speaking far beyond his brief as Mayor of Manchester, and reportedly has a quick route back to Parliament, should the need arise. Angela Rayner’s leaked memo, setting out tax-raising alternatives to Rachel Reeves’ spending cuts, will not have hurt her leadership ambitions. But any leadership contender now requires the signatures of 80 MPs to stand, after changes brought in under Starmer: in a deeply factionalized Parliamentary Party this excludes anyone but the more milquetoast or leadership-approved from the ballot. The talk, over the past few weeks, was that Starmer loyalist Shabana Mahmood had been recruited as campaign chair for Wes Streeting.

The Blairite Health Secretary is unusual amongst Labour MPs in being a genuine ideologue. Streeting has ideas about the world, and some desire to put them into practice. He would present Labour with the sharp break with its own past that New Labour never managed — he could finally complete the Blair Revolution. There are examples of this transformation elsewhere: Italy’s pure centrist Democratic Party were once the Democrats of the Left, and before that the million-strong Italian Communist Party. There is maybe 20% of the electorate who, as in Italy, could be persuaded to vote reliably along these lines: typically better off, more often employed in the public sector, moderate on foreign policy, and given something of a Blue Labour gloss to (it would hope) ward off Reform. This version of Labour could, in principle, leverage that support to claw its way out of the current political chaos as the dominant partner in future coalition governments. With a new Corbyn/Sultana party and the Greens to its Left, the political logic for a British “Democratic Party” is clear. There is a route out of Starmer’s quagmire, but it will require a conclusive break. A break to the Left inside the party has been made impossible; a break to the Right is all that remains.

This matters. National renewal requires a radical policy agenda, finally banishing the zombie economic model that failed in 2008 and only endures on life support. Yet it also needs a national narrative, an accessible story of decline and renaissance. This, of course, is a Sisyphean task even for the great political speakers of our time, such as they exist after a precipitous decline in the quality of our parliamentarians.

In an age of schizoid media, with the pillars of the national common culture giving way to takes, apps and newsfeeds, cutting through is hard. Rhetorical brilliance is rare even for skilled political orators, and Keir Starmer is not one of these. Yet at the root of his troubles is a policy agenda that’s almost as empty as his words, altogether speaking to a politician without any politics at all.

Perhaps the most obvious problem with Starmer’s reset was the language. In the place of inspiration, we were offered vague, laboured, soporific consultancy-jargon, and now the return of targets: sales floor KPIs transposed onto creaking hospitals and collapsing schools. “This plan will land on desks across Whitehall with the heavy thud of a gauntlet being thrown down,” the Prime Minister told his audience at Pinewood Studios, mixing his metaphors with Brent-like gusto. “Many people in Whitehall are comfortable with the tepid bath of managed decline.”

It’s not just that communication that’s lacking. If the form is grey then the substance is too. Compared to the gargantuan task of ending the longest-running dent in living standards since the Napoleonic Wars, Starmer’s vision is threadbare, painfully constrained by global economic slowdowns, geopolitical stand-offs, superpower rivalry, and bearish bond markets.

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Labour conference can only get better

By Despotic Inroad

Rather than an epic mission of national renewal — or even a new growth model based on Reevian “securonomics” — we’ve instead seen a reversion to Labourite tax-and-spend and a return of Blairite micromanagement. More than 92% of NHS patients will be seen in under 18 weeks. Three quarters of children will start school “ready to learn”. Laudable aims, but hardly memorable, totemic policies that you would put on the side of a bus. Nor are these ideas the basis for a grand national project. Ultimately, all Starmer’s speech involved was tinkering with the symptoms of decline without addressing the systemic cause.

After Donald Trump’s resurgence, then, there’s no sense in promising to emulate a defeated Bidenism. Britain’s ability to enact expansive industrial policies was always limited by our more modest fiscal and economic heft, with the Federal government and the Federal Reserve together presiding over a continent-sized economy. And even there, the “modern supply-side” playbook of Democratic policymakers, all manufacturing subsidies and Rust Belt investment, failed to halt populist revival in America. Whatever echo bounces back across the Atlantic to Whitehall is unlikely to do much better. No wonder steelworks, oil refineries, and shipbuilders have all gone to the wall since July.

A green paper has promised that an Industrial Strategy Council will be formed on a statutory footing, but the strength of the prescription is again dwarfed by the scale of the sickness. The solution to decades of industrial decline? A “national wealth fund” capitalised with £8 billion in public money — or around two weeks of NHS spending. GB Energy will do little to remedy among the highest domestic and industrial energy prices on earth. A dramatic deconvergence between the productivity and disposable income across Britain and its peers is met with a vague promise to deliver “rising living standards” over the course of this Parliament. That, at least, would be an improvement: the last session was the first in peacetime history where living standards didn’t rise at all.

And then there’s migration. Though Starmer at least acknowledged its bewildering scale, with Britain welcoming nearly one million net arrivals in 2023, he made no definite commitment around how and when numbers would fall. If, moreover, the Government’s target of 300,000 new houses a year was actually achieved, that would only just be enough to keep our dwellings-per-head steady at current levels of migration. What it certainly wouldn’t do is spur on an expanded supply that dramatically lowers prices.

In lieu of any big ambitions, the Prime Minister instead fell back on Fabian technocracy, a formula surely repeated more in hope than expectation, especially without the buoyancy of a healthy world economy, and when state capacity is flatlining and migration soaring. Dovetailed with the Prime Minister’s congenital inability to frame an attractive story, and there’s no question that won’t be answered by a review, a consultation, a taskforce, a commission, an inquiry, or the formation of some gormless NPC committee.

In a sense, Starmer’s legalism is the inevitable upshot when skull-crushing rhetoric and policy mediocrity come together. Wallowing in process, viewing himself as an administrator-in-chief with the utmost respect for even our most plodding institutions, the Prime Minister never needs to actually change things — much less bring the public along with him. There are nods to anti-SW1 iconoclasm, to that “move fast and break things” energy briefly associated with the early Johnson premiership. Yet the real vibe with Starmer is ultimately much more cautious. Rather than driving his missions forward by any means necessary, we instead get yet another relaunch.

Nor do Starmer’s latest personnel decisions offer much either. The appointment of Chris Wormald as cabinet secretary is again indicative of the bifurcation between the mammoth task and the proposed solution: the “complete re-wiring of the British state” touted by Labour was followed by the appointment of a consummate establishment insider and famed grey bureaucrat in the most senior role of the sprawling Whitehall system.

With that in mind, Starmer’s claim at Pinewood that he’s dissatisfied by Whitehall sluggishness rings rather hollow, especially when the targets he announced actually add yet another layer of bureaucracy to public services already drowning in a maelstrom of directives, unintegrated systems, outside consultants, and the legacy of failed top-down reforms. Rather than a Leninist zeal to take on the inertia of the Blob, then, Starmer will instead fall victim to his over-identification with the institutional architecture of a state that has long since given up on transformational projects, and now seeks merely to administer stagnation according to strict HR overtures.

Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, once described her boss as “the least political person I know”. That is a highly unusual accolade for a resident of No. 10. It’s even more unusual for a man of his background. The young Keir, in the heady days of the late Eighties, sat on the editorial board of Socialist Alternatives: the in-house magazine of a Trotskyist micro-sect, followers of a Greek Marxist called Michel Pablo. The miners had been defeated, recalcitrant socialist council rebellions squashed, and the trendy New Left dominated progressive politics. Socialist Alternatives advocated a kind of deep entryism, what was called “entryism sui generis”: communist radicals would join mass parties like Labour and influence politics by embedding themselves in established institutions.

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Rachel Reeves has no vision

By Despotic Inroad

The kind of people that advocate such strategies are deeply political. They mix in closed, bizarre circles, and obsess over grand theories of history, political philosophy and strategies for power. Most of it is faintly ridiculous, fanciful, quixotic. But it does, at least, constitute a vision. If Starmer is still subscribing to Pabloism and entryism sui generis — as still postulated by Peter Hitchens — then it is the deepest, dullest form of covert political subterfuge in political history. In this reading, the Prime Minister isn’t hiding his real political radicalism under a more respectable veneer, but rather trying to convince the world he has no politics whatsoever.

The reality is far more disturbing. There’s no secret Marxism — there’s nothing. Starmer’s youthful idealism has been dumped. If it’s been replaced at all, it is by a cold desire for efficient administration and an instinctual aversion to bombast, radicalism, grand theories, narratives, gestures, or bold ideas. His dry, administrative approach to politics would suit the measured ordoliberalism of Germanic polities, with their traditions of consensus, Lutheranism and the Protestant work ethic. To be painfully measured is a virtue, in Starmer’s reading. The public disagrees. Britain is impatient, volatile, restless, tired of the politics of polite automatons. The party system is breaking apart.

And yet there’s one area of legislation that counts as an easy win for a cold utilitarian like Starmer. The passing of the Assisted Dying Bill portends the most significant change in social legislation since the Abortion Act. Starmer’s administration, like Harold Wilson’s, will likely fail in its attempts to re-make Britain or initiate a renaissance of our industrial base, no matter how many “relaunches” we get. A new economic model is difficult to build, particularly if you’re unwilling to challenge a status quo of broken middle managers. But the dawn of British assisted dying will be a morbid and lasting legacy that could define Starmer’s premiership, even as the country slides further in behind in economics and growth.