RENEWING LABOUR
The line from the briefers on the eve of Starmer’s speech to the Labour Party conference is that Labour is now looking outward, to the future and is determined to win. The bleak reality is that it looks inward ever more, finding fault with itself, is obsessed with the recent past of the party, and is judging by the lack of political action, determined to lose.
Worst still its analysis of its own past is faulty. Far from the worst electoral result in eighty years, the 2019 election was bad but not the worst (take a bow Michael Foot, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband). In 2017 Labour deprived the Tories of their majority, a rare occurrence, and pushed vote share to 40% (take a bow Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn). Labour looked outward and brought people and ideas into party from the outside.
While it gets its own history wrong, Starmer’s programme has nothing to say about what has happened to the country and what is happening now. It dares not look outward. Indeed, Starmer’s recent pamphlet is eloquent in only one respect. Every line speaks to a failure to comprehend what has happened to the country. It is silent when it comes to serious analysis of everything important, whether the impact of Thatcher, the nature of New Labour, the nature of economy or society, Brexit or Covid. It looks only to its own fantasy Labour past, and to its own Red Wall concoction, and myths of wartime solidarity. It is trapped in its own headlights. Not surprisingly it has no ambition for the future other than to purge the left.
There are perhaps two glimmers of hope for Labour. The first is that as a party Labour insists on telling different stories. The other is that Rachel Reeves has found a new way of thinking about the economy.
This is perhaps not obvious, precisely because of its novelty. Aspiring Chancellors of the Labour right have usually been stuck in macro-economic I-will-do-this-and-that in the budget as well as a lot of fiscal self-flagellation. Reeves did some of the latter, but did much more. She made one spectacular announcement - £28bn per annum for ten years in Green capital investment. This is the scale of green programme proposed by John McDonnell.
There was also another echo of the novelties of the Corbyn era – a focus on buying from firms operating in the UK, and on a radical (but not specified quantitatively) programme of insourcing.
In both these cases there seemed to be an underlying argument that the state needed to achieve not short-term efficiencies by driving down costs, but long-term efficacy as well as efficiency. This is a significant return to the core claims of historic social democracy, to conceptualising a national economy and a state which acts for all, increasing equality, efficacy and efficiency simultaneously.
Even more significant is the conceptualisation of the economy in a new way. Instead of an implicit division between manufacturing and the rest, between globally traded high tech sectors and the rest, so prominent in Labour thinking, old and New Labour, she offered the concept of the everyday economy. This matters – the greening of the economy is the greening of the everyday economy – of housing, transport, public services, and very obviously infrastructure too. It points also to interconnection, rather than to atomised enterprises competing in a market. Especially striking was the formulation that the UK needed an industrial strategy not just for high tech manufacturing (the enduring fantasy of the Tories and Labour) but for the whole economy, specifically including social care. This was allied to the correct understanding that much of the UK economy is low productivity and low-wage and this needs to change. It echoes the forgotten argument of Harold Wilson that the UK out to scale back on pointless high tech beloved of nationalist Tories (and too many Labour people too) and look to improve the bread-and-butter industries and services which affect all our lives.
Unlike the zombie Blairism and stiff nationalism that Starmer offers, Reeves has mined Labour thinking to plant a seed of renewal. Will it grow?