Muscle Memory

Even The Guardian is already expressing well-founded doubts. His Twitter would suggests that he was at least a Workers Party voter and probably a member, yet the day before this General Election, Dan Evans writes:

Keir Starmer, if you didn’t know it already, is the son of a toolmaker. It’s a line he has repeated often, reflecting his team’s wider strategy to highlight the Labour leader’s less-privileged roots and appeal to working-class voters. In fact, recent reporting about his camp has revealed a leadership intensely focused on class.

Starmer’s team is acutely aware of the challenge facing Labour after the long process of deindustrialisation – and the reporting suggests they are keen to put Labour back in touch with the parts of the working class and other low-income groups. Hence the “toolmaker” line and Starmer’s repeated, if slightly awkward, references to his love of football.

If Labour wins, as looks likely, this strategy will probably be hailed as a masterstroke. But if the party is serious about reconnecting with the working class in the long term, which it needs to do if it wants to actually hold on to power, there is a more complicated reality it must reckon with. Despite their humble origins, Starmer and much of his shadow cabinet are now representatives of a different class entirely – indeed, one that has a fraught relationship with the working class.

In 1977, the US sociologists Barbara and John Ehrenreich coined the term “professional-managerial class” (PMC) to describe the growth and consolidation of a technocratic class of managers and elite professionals. As the writer Kenan Malik has put it: “There had developed, [the Ehrenreichs] argued, a new class of college-educated professionals, from engineers and middle managers to social workers and culture producers, that was distinct from the middle class of old but essential to the functioning of capitalism.” The PMC is distinct from “white-collar workers” because of its specific role in managing the state, the workforce, and indeed capitalism itself, on behalf of the old ruling class. It not only developed and administered the technology that sped up the production process, but as social workers they managed the family and community; as advertisers they sold new goods.

The hope among the militants of the 60s and 70s such as the Ehrenreichs was that the PMC and the working class could join forces to take on growing corporate power. But this didn’t happen, and the class gradually came to believe it could run the state more efficiently and benevolently than the old ruling class, eventually reaching political maturity during the Blair and Clinton era of progressive neoliberalism.

Today, members of the PMC in the UK are clustered in politics and the public sector, media, advertising, law, social work and the third sector. They are concentrated in London, university towns and the home counties, but also form the governments of Wales and Scotland and make up much of the parliamentary Labour party. They are of all colours, genders and sexual orientations, but are united by a distinct ideology and culture: a strongly held belief in technical expertise and the power of education, coupled with an increasingly deep hostility to those who do not sufficiently respect these norms.

Starmer is in many ways the ultimate embodiment of the PMC. While he is evidently uncomfortable talking about himself, the interview in which he has appeared the most at ease, casual and animated, was on the High Performance podcast – on which “high-achieving, successful individuals” are questioned on the secrets of their success. He displayed an evident passion for leadership and management strategies, and a distaste for politicians “describing problems and not fixing them” – as if the job of political change was just a set of problems that can be looked at in isolation and ticked off, one by one. He also has a strongly held belief in tech and AI. His shadow cabinet is fixated on the possibility of “reforming” public service provision, particularly the NHS, for which Starmer has said technology will be used “to overhaul every aspect of delivery”. According to this view, there is little need for more money or investment when problems can be solved by better management and more “innovative” systems.

His fervent belief in education, and that it should primarily be used to facilitate social mobility, is similarly part of PMC gospel. But social mobility, by its very nature, means that inequality will be left untouched, while a chosen few with the “right qualities” will be able to make it. Worse, it implies that the lower orders are something to escape. And herein lies the historic paradox of Labour’s complicated relationship with the working class, an issue that goes much deeper than Starmer himself.

Because it was birthed to manage them, the PMC has always had a contradictory attitude towards the lower orders, whom it views with a blend of romantic paternalism and contempt. Working-class people need to be saved, goes the view, to be helped by us – the experts – because they are incapable of helping themselves. This technocratic paternalism has always been latent in the Labour party through the Fabian Society, a middle-class guild that was deeply suspicious of the working class, and whose vision was of a scientific, rational socialism delivered from above.

The PMC instinct is often to ban, prod and moralise to the working class, rather than empower it. Sure Start is lionised as a New Labour success story – and it produced important outcomes – yet it was accompanied by sanctimonious attacks on single mothers, problem families and asbos, while Labour embraced the Thatcherite economic policies of deindustrialisation and privatisation that partly caused community and family breakdown in the first place. Rachel Reeves has similarly demonised those on benefits, while Liz Kendall has promised to push the long-term sick back into work to boost productivity, while keeping the two-child benefits cap.

Every time Labour has got into power, from Harold Wilson to Tony Blair, enthusiasm for the party has waned among working-class voters. One could attribute this to the natural swings of politics, but it appears there is something far more concrete at play. The truth is that many working-class voters are turned off by the authoritarian paternalism that Labour governments exhibit. The progressive PMC has never really understood this, whereas the right has, and exploits it ruthlessly. Margaret Thatcher was so successful because her ideology of “freedom” was able to tap into a long-held working-class hostility to the state bureaucracy and these paternalistic tendencies. Indeed, the perceived officiousness and illiberalism of the PMC has repeatedly allowed elements of the ruling class to present themselves as outsiders.

Amid the speculation about the policies a Starmer government will actually enact, one thing we can bank on is more moralising and nannying – this is the muscle memory of the class he represents. Nigel Farage must be licking his lips.

Therefore, Daniela Gabor writes:

The Labour party has a plan for returning to power: it will get BlackRock to rebuild Britain. Its reasoning is straightforward. A cash-strapped government that wants to avoid tax increases or austerity has no choice but to partner with big finance, attracting private investment to rebuild the infrastructure that is crumbling after years of Tory underinvestment. Labour has already done the arithmetic: to mobilise £3 of private capital from institutional investors, you need to offer them £1 in public subsidies. But every time you hear Labour announce such an infrastructure partnership, think of the hidden politics. BlackRock will privatise Britain – our housing, education, health, nature and green energy – with our taxpayer money as sweetener.

BlackRock has long peddled the idea of public-private partnerships for infrastructure, climate and development. Yet its political momentum has recently accelerated. When its chair, Larry Fink, the world’s most powerful financier, sat with world leaders at the G7 summit last month, he promised the following: rich countries need growth, infrastructure investment can deliver that growth, but public debt is too high for the state alone to invest the estimated $75tn (£59tn) necessary by 2040. Trillions, however, are available to asset managers who look after our pensions and insurance contributions (BlackRock, the largest of these firms, manages about $10tn, as a shrinking welfare state pushes us – future pensioners – into its arms).

If governments work with big finance, Fink explained, they can unlock these trillions. But to do so, they will need to mint public infrastructure into investable assets that can generate steady returns for investors. Why does BlackRock need the state? Why can’t it deploy trillions without the government’s helping hand? The British public remembers all too well PFIs, the private finance initiatives through which the state ended up paying extortionate amounts to private contractors that designed, built, financed or operated public services such as prisons, schools and hospitals before handing them back to the state, often in poor condition.

But for big finance, there is more now at stake. In this golden age of infrastructure, financiers plan to own our infrastructure outright and transform it into a source of steady revenue. Since buying Global Infrastructure Partners in January 2024, BlackRock holds about $150bn in infrastructure assets, including US renewable energy companies, wastewater services in France and airports in England and Australia. It plans to expand aggressively, just like other private infrastructure funds. Direct ownership is the main game, but not the only one. Big finance can also invest in infrastructure indirectly, by lending to private infrastructure companies. The key is returns. For this, BlackRock wants the state to “derisk” investments. This financial jargon was included in the 2024 Labour manifesto, and it in essence involves the state stepping in to improve the returns on infrastructure assets.

The choice here is not merely between public and private financing of public goods, but whether British citizens should tolerate the government handing out public subsidies for privatised infrastructure. Housing is only one example of the areas where these investors can already be glimpsed. Institutional landlords – the most prominent being Blackstone, the private equity fund – can acquire residential housing by participating in the privatisation of public housing. After the global financial crisis, the firm also bought up nonperforming mortgages, and since then it has gone on a global shopping spree, snapping up homes across the US and Europe. In the past year, Blackstone bought new rental homes in Britain worth about £1.4bn from the housebuilding company Vistry.

Look behind Blackstone’s returns – which come from rents and rising house prices – and you will find the state’s footprint. The government has helped to guarantee and derisk these returns through regulations that favour asset owners over renters, through economic policies that support house price inflation and through the provision of income support – such as housing benefit – that allows renters to continue paying their institutional landlords. Although we’re told that partnering with these investors is a means of solving the housing crisis, it often delivers the opposite: higher rents, the displacement of lower-income tenants who are often from minority groups, and less affordable housing. This explains the backlash against institutional landlords, from Copenhagen to Berlin, Dublin and Madrid. Yet such public pressure will only be effective once the state returns to building public housing.

Labour’s strategy raises a bigger set of questions about the type of state we want. Starmer’s vision for government-by-BlackRock reduces the question of state capacity to “how do I get BlackRock to invest in infrastructure assets?” This model involves the state in effect subsidising the privatisation of everyday life. This doesn’t only make it harder to bring public goods back into public ownership; it also allows big finance to tighten the grip on the social contract with citizens, and to become the ultimate arbiter of climate, energy and welfare politics, which will have profound distributional, structural and political consequences.

Already, BlackRock is betting on becoming a key provider of green energy infrastructure – though its actual commitment to tackling the climate crisis only extends so far. The firm has lobbied heavily against European proposals to regulate its lending to fossil fuel interests with penalties, and has instead called for voluntary climate commitments. It is aiming to rapidly grow its green energy profits by tapping the government subsidies that will probably be provided through Starmer’s GB Energy, and through the US Inflation Reduction Act.

But the profits BlackRock will hope to generate through investing in green energy are likely to come at a huge cost. In Britain, we know that the public ownership of green energy is more effective at lowering consumer bills, accelerating the green transition and creating good jobs. The risk is not only that our climate future will be vastly more expensive if actors such as BlackRock are driving it, but that this future will also produce a more unequal society, where citizens equate green measures with unaffordable public services. This may well provide the kindling for authoritarian, far-right fossil-fuel politics that reject the green transition and frame it as an assault on people’s living standards.

Instead, we should plan creatively for a future where extreme climate events necessitate permanent state intervention, from price controls to buffer stocks and public ownership. What’s needed is a big green state. For this, we first need to repair a serious failure of macroeconomic policy imagination that regards the public purse as too small to fund transformative public infrastructure. To do so will require a radical transformation of the state. The state that Rachel Reeves, the likely future chancellor, promises us must break down the neoliberal walls between monetary, fiscal and industrial policy, and scrap low-tax regimes for multinational corporations and individuals with high net worths. It must shrink the power of big finance. This would be a gigantic undertaking, but it is the only realistic one we have.

Thus, Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty write:

The first round of legislative elections in France produced an unprecedented surge of support for the far right. Next Sunday, 7 July, the National Rally (RN) and its allies could potentially make it to power. Not just with a relative majority, but – and there is a significant probability of this – with an outright one.

Some may argue that the far right is here and we should simply get used to it. Far-right parties have won elections in recent years in other European countries, including Italy and the Netherlands. But we cannot get used to it. A far-right victory represents a major threat to our basic social contract and our liberties. We face the implementation of policies that discriminate against foreigners, migrants, women, minorities and more. Because it has no credible economic platform, the far right will revert to the only thing it knows – the exacerbation of tensions and the politics of hate.

What is the alternative? The left alliance, the New Popular Front (NFP), is France’s best chance.

This alliance takes its inspiration from the Popular Front – which in 1936 emerged under the threat of fascism to govern France. This leftwing coalition of socialists and communists represented a real change for the working classes, with policies such as the introduction of a two-week paid vacation and a law limiting the working week to 40 hours. Such social change was made possible by electoral victory, but also by the demands of civil society and by pressure from the trade unions, which organised a wave of factory occupations. There was a clear sociopolitical competition between working people and the ruling classes that led to a political conflict between the left and right.

The NFP is following a similar path today, with ambitious policies to improve the purchasing power of poor and lower-middle-class people. These reforms include a substantial increase in the minimum wage, wages indexed to prices and free school lunches. Most importantly the NFP wants to prioritise investment in the future by increasing public spending on infrastructure – throughout the country, including in isolated rural areas – as well as in health, education and research. This is the only coherent way to plan for the future and to increase labour productivity, which under Macron has declined by 5% since 2019.

The detailed NFP economic manifesto was launched last month with full costings. Because – and this is new – the NFP’s plans are balanced from a budgetary viewpoint: investment in future growth and productivity as well as in energy and climate transition could be made affordable through progressive wealth taxation, the introduction of an exit tax, effective taxation of multinational firms and a long-awaited fight against social, fiscal and environmental dumping. This programme would also give workers more power within the companies that employ them by improving corporate governance (for example, reserving a third of seats on company boards for employees’ representatives, following similar provisions that have existed for decades in Nordic countries and Germany).

These plans are the complete opposite of the path pursued by Emmanuel Macron since 2017. His agenda has exacerbated both income and wealth inequality, while there has been no change in investment, job creation or growth. To counter support for the far right, Macron’s strategy was to seek support from both the centre right and centre left. In practice, this came to look more and more like a coalition of well-off voters, and as the recent elections have shown, you cannot sustainably govern a country with such a narrow electoral base.

Some now seek to scare leftwing and centre-left voters by claiming that the NFP’s programme for government would be dangerous for the French economy. They are wrong. We are not claiming that this manifesto is perfect – how could it be given that Macron only allowed three weeks to organise for elections? But in historical context, it should be considered a pragmatic, social democratic set of proposals aimed at reducing inequalities and preparing for the future. There is nothing radical in this agenda.

Perhaps more importantly, this programme will allow the left to look towards winning back votes in rural areas and smaller cities where people have gradually turned to the far right.

Last Sunday, the RN won a 1.6 times higher vote share in small and medium-sized cities (50,000 inhabitants or less) than in large urban centres (with populations of above 250,000). The reverse holds for the left. We digitised all commune-level results for legislative elections since 1848, and we have not seen such a large geographical gap in voting patterns since the late 19th century and early 20th century.

In cities with populations of between 20,000 and 30,000 such as Hénin-Beaumont, a former coalmining town in the north-east, and Marine Le Pen’s constituency, the RN scores 60% of the vote. Even in more populous cities such as Cambrai, in a region that has suffered big manufacturing shutdowns in recent decades and is relatively poorly served by infrastructure such as hospitals, universities and public transport links, Le Pen’s party is achieving scores above 40%.

As we show in our book A History of Political Conflict, people in smaller cities and rural areas are drawn to the far right first and foremost because of socioeconomic concerns: they lack purchasing power, they suffer most from the lack of investment in public infrastructure and they feel that they have been abandoned by governments of all stripes in recent decades.

The NFP’s policy platform credibly addresses how to finance a strategy of inclusive investment. By contrast, the far right argues in favour of repealing the existing tax on real-estate multi-millionaires. It claims it will finance its policies by targeting foreigners and welfare recipients, but this will simply generate more economic disillusionment and more tensions.

The only threat in France next Sunday is the one posed by far-right victory. We hope that centrist voters understand what is at stake and turn back to the left.

On the eve of Britain’s turn to Starmerism, think on.