Countdown To Starmergeddon?

Whenever it becomes obvious that the Conservative Party is going to be defeated, then a Labour Party that is already guaranteed victory transforms politically, and especially economically, into what it is about to vanquish electorally. Even 1945 was a far more partial exception than is generally conceded, while the pattern since then has been undeviating: 1964, 1974, 1997, and perhaps 2024.

Have you ever met the right wing of the Labour Party as it has existed since the death of John Smith? If we are to have the first Government with no roots in anything else, then prepare, both for the most anti-intellectual Government ever, and for the most unscrupulous and downright corrupt, each of which would be a remarkable achievement.

In the full knowledge that it would get back to those of us who would have no hesitation in publishing it, Labour’s paid, bussed in canvassers at Islington North are telling people that Jeremy Corbyn is the Labour candidate, so they should put their cross next to the Labour symbol on the ballot paper. Praful Nargund bought that nomination with money from private healthcare and with the promise of more to come. Welcome to Keir Starmer’s Britain.

Imagine, just imagine, that a Labour Leader with none of the personal popularity of the early Tony Blair really did deliver a victory beyond Blair’s wildest dreams. I spent most of Blair’s first term at university, constantly being told by the Tory Boys that they had won the argument, and that anyone who disputed that could take it up with the Leader of the Labour Party. They knew a week in advance what was going on in the Government, and that was only at Durham. The ones at Oxbridge must have been writing the legislation. Look over it, and that makes perfect sense. Starmer would be like that, only very much more so.

Later on, when I was still hanging around the place on and off in one capacity or another, they were annoyed about the hunting ban, although not, in policy terms, about anything else. But they always knew that, having been enacted purely to buy support for the Iraq War, that ban was never going to be enforced. Even so, in 2005 and 2010, at least one third of Conservative activists were on the campaign trail only because of foxhunting.

What, did you think that they cared about things like hereditary peers? Only the ones who owned nothing but Edwardian clothes and whom you were never quite sure were joking when they said that women should not have the vote. Immediately after the 1997 General Election, the Leadership of their own party had passed to a man who had been advocating the removal of hereditary peers for 20 years. The complete abolition of the House of Lords has been the policy of all main parties ever since. But it will never happen, because the place is too useful for pensioning off MPs to replace them with apparatchiki.

As in 1997, the frontman does not quite put the lower into lower middle class. Most people would assume the factory and the land to have been in Starmer’s family for a century by the time of his birth in 1962, and his Sir to be one of those Victorian or Edwardian industrial baronetcies. After the First World War, those Liberal dynasties went two ways, often within the same family, and the Starmers, it would be supposed, became Fabians. A private school, but not one of those. An Oxbridge degree, if only eventually, although Leeds also has quite a posh side, both as a city and as a university. The Bar, which is always popular with that sort. A constituency named after two Tube stations. It all makes such perfect sense that there is no reason to look too hard.

Labour is a party of extremely right-wing people who lack the social connections to make it in the Conservative Party, and whose two defining experiences were being brought up to spit on everyone below them, which was everyone else where they grew up, and discovering in their first 36 hours at university that they were nowhere near the top of the class system, a discovery that embittered them for life.

But Labour only ever wins uncontested General Elections. Blair managed that three times. Middle England ended up disliking Blair’s wars, and one in particular, but the Conservative Party had not opposed those wars, and in any case he never gave those voters any economic reason to turn against him. On cultural issues, he and Gordon Brown made a habit of following them several years later, eventually giving them, not even what they had wanted, but only heavily diluted forms of that, such as civil partnerships, or the mere reclassification of cannabis.

On everything that mattered to almost anyone, Blair did exactly what the Conservatives would have done if they had won in 1997. Even the surrender of democratic political control over monetary policy, which had not been in the Labour manifesto, was what the right-wing media and thinktanks had long advocated; Brown was right that in those days he could never have got it past the Labour Party, but Simon Heffer praised it to the skies on that week’s Any Questions?.

Having spent much of his adult life abroad, a bewildered Peter Hitchens tried to marshal a minority of his parents’ generation then, as he is addressing that minority’s ghosts today. Again, though, so what? Write up even ordinarily Conservative-voting Britain’s prejudices in highfalutin terms, and Pabloism insofar as Starmer understood it would be what you would get now, just as Eurocommunism insofar as Blair understood it have been what you would have got then, and was. “Look what they would do!”, howled Hitchens then, and howls Hitchens now. “That's just common sense,” came the reply from the small-town and suburban bourgeoisie then, and comes that reply now. “Look where their ideas came from!”, he attempted and attempts. “Good for that Gramsci,” they retorted then, it at all. “Good for that Raptis,” they retort now, if at all.

Antonio Gramsci and Michalis Raptis are much more interesting than Old New Labour and New New Labour. They are fundamentally and ultimately wrong, but you should still read them. Raptis went on to co-found Pasok, and in 1996 a member of NATO and the EU gave him a state funeral. How frightened is Worcester Woman supposed to be of such a person’s thinking even in the raw, never mind in a form so pasteurised as to be palatable to Wes Streeting? With which aspect of it might she disagree? She would disagree far more with Hitchens.

And so to the 2024 Labour manifesto. After 14 years, is that it? But they would not even do half of that. Yet their victory would still be Britain’s contribution to Europe’s lurch to the Far Right. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war. While pre-existing conservative phenomena have been known to ally with Fascism, usually to their own ruin, it is the liberal bourgeoisie that keeps Fascism in reserve for when it might ever face any serious demand to share its economic or social power with anyone who did not have it before the rise of the bourgeois liberal order, or to share its cultural or political power with anyone at all.

Just as Starmer has never sought to outargue the Labour Left, but has instead deployed the Rule Book to kick it out from Corbyn down, so as Prime Minister he would seek to restore as much as possible of the order that obtained between Blair and Brexit, much of which in fact pre-dated 1997 and most of which is still in place on paper, while simply criminalising in law and in practice anything like the dissent from it that first seriously manifested itself with the emergence of Corbyn in the summer of 2015, before exploding in, as and from the 2016 referendum result.

Vast areas of public policy, including the National Health Service in the form of a “Mission Delivery Board”, would be handed over to heavenly bodies that it would be illegal to attempt to influence. And where would the members of that Board come from? There is a word for such a merger of state and corporate power. Accordingly, the Office for Value for Money would be the last nail in the coffin of democratic political control over economic policy, while Community Payback Boards would deliver professional-managerial class justice without restraint, and those two changes would not be coincidental. In his manifesto or otherwise, Starmer is completely open about all of this. Believe him.