Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
After fourteen years of Conservative government – combined with Brexit, a global pandemic, the rise of a populist far right and the existential threat of climate change – many see Britain as undergoing serious social, economic and cultural decline. This is the context in which Labour have taken office at Westminster after a decade and a half in opposition. With recent ways of doing politics, government and statecraft in crisis, how can a serious, humane alternative emerge? What scale and type of change is coming, and will it be for the better? All this raises serious questions about the future of the UK and its constituent nations, Labour's ability to govern progressively, and the incoming government's confidence and capacity to take on the entrenched vested interests of present-day Britain while also having an honest, mature conversation with the public and its own supporters about the nature of these challenges. In Britain Needs Change, some of our best thinkers and commentators dissect the challenges facing the new government in a series of wide-ranging, penetrative essays. Featuring contributions from Helena Kennedy, John Curtice, Mariana Mazzucato, Neal Lawson, Aditya Chakrabortty, Ann Pettifor, Gavin Esler, Hilary Cottam, Sunder Katwala, Savitri Hensman, Fintan O'Toole and Andrew Gamble among others, this is required reading for anyone interested in the future of our country.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 627
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
i
ii
Contents
Foreword
Baroness Helena Kennedy of the Shaws KC
No one should need reminding of just how hellish fourteen years of Conservative rule have been. It all comes rushing back as you read this collection of writings by some of our finest political commentators. Every single British institution is on its knees – the NHS, schools, universities, the court system, prisons, local authorities, social services, police, the military – driven into the ground by deliberate austerity policies, ineptitude, economic incompetence and a swaggering disregard for truthful engagement with the public. As well as destroying our economy and our welfare state, our global reputation has been trashed and our relationships with other nations have been seriously undermined. And in my own field of law, I see the Rule of Law being trampled underfoot if it does not suit the Cabinet.
The big lie was not invented by Donald Trump. His claim that Joe Biden had corruptly stolen the US presidential election of 2020 was born of his malignant narcissism. Here in the United Kingdom, the big lies of recent times started with the repeated mantra by the coalition government of 2010 that it was Labour that had caused the economic crisis of 2008, when it was in fact a global catastrophe caused by deregulated banking and disgraceful American mortgage practices, viiiwith knock-on effects internationally. Huge debt was created bailing out the banks, but the cost was born by the ordinary British public.
Lies feed on other lies, and the shameless lies told by Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and their ilk in the run-up to the European referendum were monumental and deceived many people into believing Europe and bloody foreigners were the cause of our national woes. But if lying is a way of life in some parts of our politics, it should have come as no surprise that it was the lies of a serving Prime Minister over the COVID-19 ‘Partygate’ scandal that led to his undoing. The sheer weirdness of Liz Truss and her self-delusion just added to public disgust at Boris Johnson’s behaviour.
The relief in the days after the July 2024 general election was not expressed in a festival spirit. It was all too glum for that. A friend said she felt like an abused spouse who had just got rid of a violent husband. But there was a sense of returning to honesty, a re-establishment of integrity and probity. Adults were back in charge. But, as the election guru and pollster John Curtice’s chapter shows, this landslide victory, of Labour winning by a majority of 174 seats, requires a deeper analysis. The pundit question was, ‘Did Labour win, or did the Conservative Party lose?’
Labour’s share of the vote was worryingly low, at a little under 34 per cent, and the Reform Party captured more of the electorate than they deserved. Farage’s ‘sour English nationalism’, to quote Fintan O’Toole, ‘tapped into the hopelessness many ordinary people feel’. Labour in its election campaign had been forced to tread with great caution, seeking to reconnect with working-class voters it had alienated but anxious not to overpromise and to look fiscally imprudent. In 2006, I chaired The Power Inquiry, a cross-party investigation into a decline in voter turnout and the disillusionment felt by communities about the whole political system. All the augurs were there. The people felt powerless and felt their future looked bleak.ix
Reading the essays in this book confirmed for me the need to acknowledge that neoliberal globalisation – an economic model pursued by New Labour as well as the Conservatives – has brought huge gains for those at the top but stagnant wages and often job losses for working people. We have even seen the de-professionalising of the professions because public service medicine and lawyering were being seriously defunded.
The winners under neoliberal economics used their windfall to buy influence in high places, affecting legislation and policy. Deregulation became the name of the game. We now have inequalities of income and wealth not seen since the Great Depression of the 1920s. Workers receive a smaller and smaller share of the profits they produced. The recent violent demonstrations against immigrants and asylum seekers, incited by a surge of online hatred from the far right, is our own version of populist nationalism, echoing events in Europe and the USA. Newcomers are blamed for our housing crisis, for low wages, for pressure on schools, for crime. Labour in government has a huge task (and a money squeeze), so honest messaging from ministers does not raise the spirits. What is missing is a governing vision about the common good, showing to the public that Labour’s purpose is to create a fairer society by checking corporate power, from water companies to banks and tech companies, to regulate markets in the interests of all, so that everyone flourishes. If tax has to be raised, why is income tax higher than tax on stocks and share dividends? Why not a tax on financial transactions? Why not pass legislation that requires companies to have employees given seats on the board? This is especially important, as we need more engagement by workers in dealing with the ways modernity will affect employment, e.g. artificial intelligence and ending the use of fossil fuels. And if we could borrow to the hilt to save the banks when there was a crisis, why not to save our economy by borrowing to resource new enterprises, new manufacturing and the creation of new jobs?x
The chapters in this book are full of ideas that our new Labour government might adopt or adapt. The authors argue for progressive responses to the challenges of our times. There has to be an overarching Labour ambition, a big picture that is about fairness, opportunities and dignity in decent, well-paid work. This book is a vital contribution to that debate, buzzing with energy, observations, analysis and an awareness of the huge challenges we face as a society and globally.
BaronessHelenaKennedyoftheShaws
2024
Acknowledgements
This book examines the changing political landscape of contemporary Britain. It does so particularly within the context of the challenges and opportunities faced by a newly elected Labour government and the choices and debates flowing from this. Ultimately it seeks to explore the hope of making the nations of these islands better, fairer, more egalitarian, decent and humane for all who live here, as well as in relation to how the UK acts in the world.
In planning and commissioning this volume, our aim has been to examine the political terrain in an ecumenical, generous and non-tribal way. The overall perspective is broadly centre-left, arising from long and deep involvement in key debates on the left and within progressive opinion (in the UK and internationally), many of which are reflected here.
This book is the fifth that we, as a partnership, have undertaken in recent years. The previous four all related to the changing political debate in Scotland. Like this book, they were committed to exploring and pushing against the boundaries of official politics, questioning shibboleths and dogmas. We are driven by the need to nurture creative, forward-looking ideas and extend their role in political debate.
This book is undertaken in association with Compass, the advocacy and campaigning group that, over the past twenty years, has made a serious and important contribution to political thought both within xiiand well beyond the Labour Party, talking to and engaging with those in other parties (and none) in a spirit of genuine openness.
Compass has always advocated for, and championed, a different kind of politics, one that is more progressive but also more human and spirited. One that is connected to real life and lived experience, reflecting the diversity of the modern UK – something that too much current political argument sees as a problem, or even a threat. Compass has always embodied a politics of co-operation, collaboration and pluralism, challenging those economic and social orthodoxies that have cast a shadow over Britain in recent years and that have so conspicuously failed.
We would like to thank a host of people for their time and support on this project. First, the wide-ranging, impressive contributors who gave of their expertise and insights and who were a pleasure to work with. Second, another cast of people freely offered their views and opinions, reading draft chapters, checking facts and replying to queries and questions from us. These included Pauline Bryan, Lisa Clark, Craig Dalzell, Stephen Davies, Stephen Fielding, Alan Finlayson, Jonathan Freedland, Tom Hurcombe, Michael Keating, Karen King, Simon Lee, Ruth Lister, Helen McCarthy, Iain McLean, Henry McLeish, James Meadway, Robbie Mochrie, Dave Moxham, Henry Potts, Bill Ramsay, Richard Rose, Jordan, Shona and Oshin Tchilingirian, Hilary Wainwright, Lesley Wall, Stuart Ward, Karl Williams and Richard Wyn Jones. This is not an exhaustive list, and we apologise to anyone we have mistakenly omitted.
Third, we owe an enormous amount to the professionalism and encouragement of Olivia Beattie and the team at Biteback Publishing. They have been pillars of support, calmness and helpful advice. Olivia in particular has a diligent and meticulous attention to detail, way beyond the call of duty. This book is the better for her and everyone at Biteback’s contribution, for which we are enormously grateful.xiii
Finally, as in every book project that we have undertaken, we have been ably assisted by the encouragement, patience and intellectual support of our partners, Rosie Ilett and Carla J. Roth, for which we are most thankful and which we never take for granted.
We hope readers find this book as enjoyable, stimulating and thought-provoking as we did in assembling it at this time of immense change, disruption and flux – not just in the UK but globally. We have done this work with the express aim of pushing against the constraints of small-c conservatism and of the outdated ideological assumptions that characterise too much of politics in the UK. These factors have not only restrained the Labour Party but have inflicted self-harm and pain on millions of people in the forms of Cameron–Osborne austerity and a hard Brexit, to take but two glaring examples.
This is a book about the state of Britain; the new Labour government; why things must change and how; who will resist radical change, and different possible futures for the UK and its nations. Politics should ultimately be about positive ideas engaging with the real world of decision and action. We hope this book is a constructive contribution to that ongoing process.
August 2024xiv
Labour’s Paradoxical Victory: The End of an Era and the Beginning of a New One?
Gerry Hassan and Simon Barrow
‘When I was a child, I was taught to “know my place”, “do as I was told” and not answer back. And that seemed alright, because we believed that the vicar, the teacher, the policeman and the government could be trusted to look after us … All went reasonably well, until another ruling class emerged based on obscene inequality of wealth and education … For me, the lack of respect for this group is typified by Jacob Rees-Moggs’s comments about the people who died in Grenfell Tower. He said to an interviewer, “I think if either of us were in a fire, whatever the Fire Brigade said, we would leave the building. It just seems a common-sense thing to do.”’
Sheila Hancock (2024)
‘Could things have turned out differently? Looking back on the free market counterrevolution of the last half century, it is hard to avoid a sense of historical fatalism … This sense of inevitability has become so engrained on both left and right that it comes as a shock to realise that the neoliberal resolution to the capitalist crisis of the 1970s was by no means self-evident to those we now consider the victors.’
Melinda Cooper (2024)
xviSetting the Scene
The July 2024 election produced a historic result. Labour’s victory under Keir Starmer was only the fourth time the party has won an overall majority from opposition; 1945, 1964 and 1997 being the other three. It is only the eighth time the party has won an overall majority in its entire 124-year history – the others were 1950, 1966, 2001 and 2005.
Labour won the lowest share of the vote of a majority government since records began (33.7 per cent); the Conservatives won their lowest vote ever (23.7 per cent); the combined Labour–Tory vote of 57.4 per cent was the lowest since the two became the dominant parties in 1922. Add to this the re-emergence of the Lib Dems as ‘the third force’ in the Commons, with the largest Liberal group since 1923. There was the emphatic defeat of the SNP, falling back from their post-2014 Westminster bulge, the bridgeheads of Farage’s Reform UK and Greens, alongside the success of a host of independents.
The above is the conventional account, but beneath it is the atrophying of UK democracy and the failure of politics and government. One obvious disjuncture in British democracy is the long-term decline in electoral turnout: 59.7 per cent in the UK in 2024: the second lowest since 1945, only excelled by Tony Blair’s second victory of 2001 on a 59.4 per cent turnout. The 2024 figure flatters the level of turnout measuring share of registered voters.
Up to 8 million voters are now missing from the electoral register according to the Electoral Commission – disproportionately younger, poorer and from BAME communities (Simpson, 2023). This has been affected by deliberate Tory changes to voter registration, such as the switch from household to individual registration; appropriately, the new government have announced plans to act on this with automatic voter registration. xvii
Understanding Starmer’s Labour
Against this backdrop, how can Starmer’s Labour address the multiple challenges facing the UK? As the dust of the election campaign recedes into the rear-view mirror, this is what this book set out to explore, alongside larger questions about politics as a hopeful (rather than purely technocratic) project and the wider context of what is by any measure a significant change of guard at Westminster. Four distinct interpretations of the Starmer Labour project can currently be identified:
The ‘revolution betrayed’ viewpoint, associated with the Momentum left. This stresses that Starmer is the betrayer of Corbynism, that he was elected upon a left-wing platform of ten promises he subsequently jettisoned. Hence nothing Starmer says can be trusted. Labour, in this take, are not much more than ‘red Tories’, with little difference between the two.
The Tory/Daily Mail/Telegraph view. Labour have not really changed. They are still ‘tax-and-spend Labour’. All the changes that Starmer has made are merely for electoral expediency and to suit ‘flipflop Starmer’. He will revert to ‘Labour type’ when in office. This is the time-honoured Tory charge against the party: that, underneath, it is the ‘same old Labour’, which the Tories, if they successfully define, find easy to defeat.
Centrist commentary. This portrays Labour as facing many of the same issues it did in 1997, only now they are more entrenched. Hence, Starmerism is Blairism revisited and reheated, seen in the return of Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson as advisers. The Starmer Labour government will face the same choices as Blair and Brown did concerning growth, taxes and public services, just in much less advantageous circumstances.
A more nuanced left take. Labour governments do not happen that often in the UK, and with all its limitations this is a historic opportunity xviiithat has to be seized. That does not mean ignoring the shortcomings in Starmer’s Labour; its weak popular mandate and uphill battle intellectually, domestically and internationally; or the hollowed-out nature of what passes today for social democracy.
This book locates itself broadly in this final perspective while encouraging pluralism and diversity and also asking some much larger questions about the nature of politics and the global challenges it faces.
Labour came to office facing a set of hugely challenging crises and challenges. Some of these are of recent origin and the cumulative effect of fourteen years of Tory governments; others are the product of longer timeframes and consequences. These include a crisis of the UK political system, British state and government. These interlocking institutions have increasingly failed to adapt and respond to the challenges of a divided, unequal, fractious society, characterised by immense wealth, poverty and hardship, sitting side-by-side.
This introduction examines the political and intellectual background of post-1945 Britain that has contributed to the present. It attempts to avoid the simplistic dichotomy of posing the entire era into two periods – 1945–79 and post-1979 – acknowledges different periods in each and overlap between them. It explores the wider context within which Labour, party politics and debates develop, and from this, it assesses the constraints and opportunities for a more radical politics while recognising the nature of the UK economy, capitalism and global factors.
Labour has to address this on a popular vote of 33.7 per cent – amounting to 9,708,716 – which is less than their 10,269,051 in 2019 and 12,877,918 in 2017. The story is even more marked: Labour’s high watermark was 13,948,883 in 1951 – the registered electorate has grown by 14 million from then to now (and would be much bigger if all electors were registered).
In the context of a 59.7 per cent UK turnout, Labour won a mere 20.1 per cent of the registered electorate. This is half the share Labour xixgained at the high point of its appeal in 1951 when it won 40.3 per cent – polling more votes than the Tories but losing office because the vagaries of the electoral system gave Churchill and the Tories a small parliamentary majority. As an aside, in the three contests of Labour versus Tories in the Attlee–Churchill era, Labour won the popular vote in all (1945, 1950 and 1951). Churchill, the greatest hero of Toryism, PM for nine years, never won the popular vote. Labour’s inability to tell its own story makes this a relatively unknown fact.
Labour’s 2024 victory, a ‘loveless landslide’ according to the Daily Mail, saw the party win the same level of support as a share of the electorate as it did in 1983 (20.0 per cent): its worst electoral performance since it became a national party in the 1920s. The story underlying this as shown in Table 1 is that Labour’s electoral decline from its 1951 peak is more marked as a share of the electorate than voters driven by the fall in turnout. The Conservatives have seen their support fall massively as well; it has declined over the same period from 48.0 per cent of voters in 1951 to 23.7 per cent in 2014; and 39.6 per cent of the electorate in 1951 to 14.2 per cent in 2024 (see Table 1 on Labour support).
Table 1: Peak Labour and Labour’s Seven Elections Which Took Them into Government
Source: Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, British Electoral Facts 1832–2012 (2012), Cracknell et al. (2024).
xxOver forty-five years ago, Labour’s electoral prospects were the subject of heated debate – ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’ began an Eric Hobsbawm lecture reprinted in Marxism Today. He noted the inexorable decline of Labour’s support and class politics (Hobsbawm, 1978). This led to charges and counter-charges, most infamously Tony Benn claiming that Labour’s emphatic defeat in 1983 had been a victory for socialism because it was ‘the first time since 1945 a political party with an openly socialist policy had received the support of eight and a half million votes’ (Benn, 1983).
Labour’s 1997 victory saw the party win an unprecedented three elections in a row – but some of the long-term fundamentals remained unchanged. After 1997, Labour’s support continued slowly downward until the brief Corbynista wave of 2017, which came and went. The wider landscape has been the decline of Labour and Tories, the rise of multi-party politics since the 1970s and the decline of party identification and loyalty, alongside a more volatile electorate and the denationalisation of UK politics.
Understanding the Past to Change the Future: Labour and Post-War Britain
The Labour Party has to engage in the electoral and ideological realm, in the latter challenging the existing economic and political narratives that have defined the UK. Any Labour strategy in these areas has to understand where the party is coming from, its traditions, values and ethos (Drucker, 1979). Firstly, there is the enduring belief in a powerful political central state, parliamentary sovereignty and centralisation. A second factor has been and still is Labour’s weakness and inability to speak beyond the party’s constituencies and communities to non-Labour supporters.
Finally, there is Labour’s long-standing tradition of conservatism. The party has historically looked to conserve the collectivist gains it xximade and to defend public services and institutions against Tory attacks. Historian David Edgerton, author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation (2018), argues that Starmer’s Labour has now formed a new consensus with the Tories, breaking with the party’s own values and past:
It [Labour] believes in the sagacity of private capital and thinks it will unleash growth through financial orthodoxy and deregulation – exactly the policy not only of the past fourteen years, but the past forty. Labour very obviously no longer believes in the programmes of 1945, 1964 or 1974. Like New Labour, it believes in the power of capitalism, whether entrepreneurs or financiers. Labour no longer believes as it once did that it had a more truthful account of the country than the Tories: it believes and tells Tory stories about the nature of public spending or foreign policy.
(Edgerton, 2024)
The conventional take of post-war Britain splits it into two distinct periods – 1945–79 and post-1979 – one under the theme ‘the post-war consensus’; the other, the age of neoliberalism. This simplification obscures all sorts of nuance and change that went on in each period, as well as continuities over the piece.
The first era is now presented by left and liberal accounts as a ‘golden age’ of British society and capitalism, and by the right as the inexorable rise of government intervention, regulation and public spending (Hutton, 1995; Williams and Colvile, 2024). Labour’s social democratic tendency at the time saw the achievements of 1945 as creating a ‘post-capitalist society’ with Tony Crosland writing in 1952, ‘It is now quite clear that capitalism has not the strength to resist the process of metamorphosis into a qualitatively different kind of society’ (1952, p. 38).
xxiiAt the same time in Britain in the 1950s, a small part of the ideological right objected to the over-reach of government and rise of collectivism. This was marked by the set-up of the IEA in 1955, then a right-wing outrider swimming against the intellectual tide championing free markets; by Enoch Powell’s economic thinking in the 1960s pre-‘rivers of blood’ speech; and expanded in the ferment of the 1970s, with the establishment of the Centre for Policy Studies in 1974 by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher (Crockett, 1994). The latter think tank was described by current head Robert Colvile in the 1970s as ‘at the start … it is this guerrilla unit, this gang of outriders … testing the waters but also pushing at frontiers’ (Moore and Colvile, 2024, p. 20).
In the 1960s and 1970s, a major stand in this counter-charge was the claim of the UK being shaped by ‘a rachet effect’, whereby government intervention produced policy failure leading to greater intervention (Greenleaf, 1983). Joseph laid out how this contributed to an inexorable leftward shift:
Now since the left-wing always takes the status quo as its point of departure, it follows that the more the middle ground moved to the left, the further the left pitched their own demands, so the middle ground would shift yet once more. First, the Labour Party and unions would go more left under pressure from their extremes. Then the Conservatives in turn would edge along towards them to remain on the mystical middle.
(Joseph, 1976, p. 21)
The idea that ‘the middle ground’ was a quicksand leading to socialism and ‘the common ground’ something different where public opinion could be found gained traction on the right after the Tory defeat in 1974. It developed a critique on the overload of government, ungovernability of Britain and the need to curb the state and trade union power (Bosanquet, 1983). This shifting debate cannot be seen as a xxiiisolely British story, taking place in the aftermath of the collapse of the Bretton Woods international financial order, the floating of the dollar and other currencies, 1973 and 1979 OPEC oil price shocks, and New Right ideas being implemented in Chile and Argentina under military dictatorship (Klein, 2007).
All this can be seen as a conventional story, but the ideological shift did not just begin with Thatcher in 1979. Rather, in the midst of hyperinflation and economic problems the Labour government under Jim Callaghan was forced to accept IMF public spending cuts in 1976. In this context, Callaghan told the Labour conference in his first address as Prime Minister, ‘We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession,’ embracing right-wing monetarism prioritising controlling inflation over unemployment (Labour Party, 1976, p. 188). Three years later, facing electoral defeat to Thatcher he noted the changing political mood: ‘You know there are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics’ (Hennessy, 2000, p. 379).
A dominant thread of interpreting post-war Britain poses 1979 as the hinge year and the two periods either side as distinct. The year 1979 was one of change with the election of Thatcher, but the process of change began earlier. The 45-year era should not be seen as one homogeneous period characterised by the rise of neoliberalism, which can be defined as ‘the intensification of the influence and dominance of capital’ and ‘a project to strengthen, restore, or in some cases, constitute anew the power of economic elites’ in the words of one analysis (Thompson, 2005, p. 17; see Harvey, 2005; Monbiot and Hutchison, 2024).
Rather, the post-1979 era can be divided into three distinctive periods with a degree of overlap and common features. First, there was the period of ascendant Thatcherism, which saw the reconfiguration of the state through attempts to reduce public spending social programmes, to remake the government’s economic role, prioritise inflation over unemployment and push back trade union power. Second, the era that xxivbegan under the John Major administration and reached its zenith under Tony Blair and New Labour. This saw the advancement of an administrative and technocratic order via hands-off and intermediate agencies that diluted accountability and transparency and aided the emergence of a new class of bureaucracy.
Third, is the period that began under Gordon Brown and the 2008 banking crash, which revealed the underlying weaknesses of the UK economic model and saw an even more pronounced shift to an insider class of power across politics, society and economics, which could be characterised in Colin Crouch’s words as ‘post-democracy’ (2004).
The culmination of these trends has reinforced the idea that politics and government is in cahoots with the rich, powerful and those who can buy access. It has seen the rise of a way of doing government that reduces the democratic sphere and the arena that can be discussed and changed. This has contributed to the hollowing out of public institutions, spaces and cultures, a process which had the ultimate effect of reducing politics to being a spectator sport and spectacle where the public are not active participants.
This is then multiplied in the UK by the lack of citizenship rights and fundamental law, which reinforce the disempowerment inherent in this situation. Think the Post Office scandal, Windrush, Grenfell Tower, the contaminated blood transfusion outrage – any number of examples in which the powerlessness of people in the face of system abuse and contempt is laid bare.
This account is often seen as synonymous with a left-wing take, but there is common intellectual ground across the political spectrum about the empty nature of what passes for political discourse and public space and how this assists a new political dispensation of power. Here is Stephen Davies, head of education at the right-wing Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), describing post-Thatcherite Britain: xxv
A central feature of this is that all of the major British traditions, and particularly the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal ones, have been supplanted by a kind of technocratic anti-politics that replaces actual debate and the clash and reconciliation of interests with supposedly neutral ‘problem solving’. This comes with social democratic, conservative, and liberal flavours, but the common reality is a procedure and rule-driven approach to governance and policy in which all kinds of decisions and debates are taken out of the realm of public debate.
(Davies, 2024)
Related to this is the framing of this debate in the UK. The mainstream UK media in the form of the print press and broadcast media do not cover politics in an ideological vacuum. The print press has always been defined by the right-wing and have shifted further right under the influence of Brexit – the Mail, Express and Telegraph in particular. Broadcast media operates with regulatory restrictions but has been influenced by this context and with the BBC being browbeaten by successive governments.
The BBC sits in an ideological space representing a particular vision of Britain: liberal, London-centric, condescending of much of the country; this version is now contested from right-wing and left-wing critics underlining that the BBC’s version of Britain is increasingly challenged (Mills, 2016). Related to this the pioneering work of the Glasgow University Media Group (GUMG) in the 1970s showed the biases of the BBC and ITV on a host of news and current affairs issues, such as how they covered strikes and trade union issues, often seen through the perspectives of employers and business; and similarly, the rightward shift of UK politics from the 1980s saw broadcast media follow and legitimise it, contributing to a framing of the political debate (GUMG, 1976; 1980). xxvi
Britain and the World beyond Neoliberalism?
The evolution of UK politics and its trajectory from the 1970s needs to be fully understood. There was no homogeneous era pre- or post-1979: no singular ‘post-war consensus’ in the former and era of neoliberalism in the latter. Such overarching and widely used terms are bandied about and become framing devices within political discourse.
Rather, post-1979 Britain has gone through three distinct phases – Thatcherism, the New Labour administrative and technocratic state and the emergence of a post-democratic class and political system, all contributing to government and statecraft becoming increasingly captured by a worldview at odds with looking after the welfare and well-being of the population.
Such has been the right’s ascendancy for much of this period that not only have the centre-left operated on their terrain, but the post1979 world has been defined mostly by the right. Hence, Thatcher describing the economy as a ‘household’, saying, ‘You cannot spend more than you have,’ whose influence is still seen in 2024 with Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves talking of the Tories ‘having maxed out on the credit card’ and there being no money left (Chakrabortty, 2024).
Yet it is salutary to understand the political landscape from multiple perspectives, and to many on the right, 1997 offers a breakpoint as well where Labour successes have become entrenched. Karl Williams, deputy director of the right-wing Centre for Policy Studies, puts it:
The broader discontinuities symbolised by 1997 are much more important in shaping thinking on the right, especially among right-wingers in their 20s and early 30s. New Labour instituted a constitutional, legal and cultural revolution – the Human Rights Act, devolution, the creation of a Supreme Court, the Equality Act 2010, the massive expansion in the welfare state and so on. These are all things Cameron and his successors failed to repeal, undo or reform, and which have and continue to cause xxviienormous problems for the country and any conservative agenda for government. An apt analogy would be the failure of Churchill/Eden/ Macmillan/Heath to roll back much of the 1945–51 settlement. (Williams, 2024)
The term ‘neoliberalism’ does not do justice to everything since the 1970s. For starters, it is not used much outside of left-wing and academic circles. More importantly, it attempts to offer a sweeping description of four and a half decades, ignoring significant political and economic shifts in this era in the UK and globally, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the 2008 banking crash. Will Hutton describes the post-1979 world in terms of a taxonomy of ‘1979 to 2008 – the era of market supremacy, and 2008 to the present – the era of contestation’ (2024).
This has not just been a British story, but one seen across the developed capitalist world as the forces of the New Right attempted to reconfigure the state and row back social public spending, then followed by an era of ‘progressive globalisation’ and accommodation, and subsequently – since the 2008 bankers’ crash – a systematic failure of politics and economics aiding the continued concentration of power and wealth.
A significant element of Labour, including much of the leadership, embodies the values of post-democracy, believing in an insider class elite politics that works by and for those who already have access, power and wealth. The political philosopher and writer John Gray has accurately described this in the aftermath of the election, saying that Starmer represents ‘a world without politics – for a legal bureaucratic and managerial mind’ reducing politics to ‘rational administration’ and rile by experts, technocrats, non-elected bodies, judges and judicial review – which is the progressive version of post-democracy (2024).
Peter Geoghegan, writing in the London Review of Books, analysed the role and funding of the advocacy and quasi-lobbying group Labour xxviiiTogether (‘a protean think tank’) and how in the 2024 election the big money flowed in one direction: to Labour and away from the Tories, with the potential consequence that the party may row back on reform of ‘cleaning up British politics’ which is in ‘Labour’s long-term interests’ (2024).
What Chance for Labour Resetting the Agenda?
A Labour government whose main mantra is competence, service and stability would be a welcome break after the descent and moral abyss of Tory rule. But it would not be enough on any level. Nor is the current Labour offer in the words of James Meadway:
We’re already breaking out of ‘the post-1979 partial settlement’, although not in ways anyone on the left is likely to enjoy. This absolutely does not mean we are also getting a return to pre-1979 levels of social protection and state social spending. Labour is likely to be the exemplar here: plenty of talk of ‘securonomics’ as a driver for growth, plans for industrial strategy and trade strategy, but no real increase in social expenditures. What seems likely is a hardening of the insider–outsider mechanisms neoliberalism had already introduced – of an expanded means-testing and harder divisions introduced into the labour market between favoured ‘insiders’ and disfavoured ‘outsiders’.
(Meadway, 2024)
Politics has to engage with several different dimensions and players at the same time which address timescales; the importance of the short term, medium term and longer term, and which engage with immediate issues, set out reforms, has a long-term direction and recognises the importance of ideas (Crick, 1984).
The short-term agenda is obvious – addressing the failures of fourteen years of Tory rule; the medium term is to start healing the xxixdivisions, bruises and inequities of ‘broken Britain’; and the longer-term is to set a direction in terms of the kind of country we aspire to be and the importance of ideas and ideology, finally turning a page on failed free market dogmas but also the closed political order that is post-democracy.
This may sound like a Herculean task and setting up the new Labour administration to fail. But that is not so. Politics is about multi-tasking, and this multi-tiered politics is not just about parties, politicians and Westminster. Instead, it is about the widest version of political community, agency and actors imaginable, one that on an idealistic level can reach out and include every single one of us.
A politics of different dimensions and timescales has happened before. In the 1970s, Thatcherism gained ascendancy aided by right-wing think tanks such as the IEA and Centre for Policy Studies, by a shift in the intellectual climate against collectivism and Keynesianism and broader changes in the global capitalist system undermining the post-war managed system. Similarly, the Attlee government of 1945 drew on a host of detailed wartime plans, such as the Beveridge reports on the welfare state and full employment, the influence of Keynes and Keynesianism on recognising the role of government in the economy, and the establishment of a new international order of co-operation in the West.
Today we have not created the foundations for a new consensus in the UK or internationally. But we do know the free-market revolution has failed; that since the 2008 banking crisis living standards in the UK and West have stagnated; and that post-democratic politics anywhere are part of the problem, not a solution.
What can a politics that addresses these challenges look like? And what chances are there of it beginning to emerge in the UK? It has to start from understanding the interlinked nature of the crises and challenges the UK faces: that the dysfunctional, broken political system xxxwith its concentration of power, centralisation and lack of democracy has been critical in aiding economic and social policies that have not nurtured the public sphere and services and have not had the capacity and confidence to embark on reforming and modernising Britain.
We should be clear that part of the terrain needed to tackle what is wrong in Britain has been in part explored by previous Labour and Tory governments. The Macmillan, Wilson and Heath administrations all embarked on programmes defined by modernisation, only to be defeated by the ancient state, the cult of amateurishness at the centre and powerful vested interests – from the City to the Treasury and trade unions.
A Vision for a Different Kind of Britain and Future
Missing from Labour’s recent agenda is an informed critique of what is wrong with present-day Britain, beyond the superficial and the immediate, usually concentrating on fourteen years of Tory rule, incompetence and division. Previous Labour governments came to office with a rising tide and ferment of intellectual energy and ideas that the party had a relationship with: this is true of 1945, 1964 and 1997.
The conditions are fertile to start laying out this terrain. First, the British system of government is broken. It is undemocratic, centralist and at its core has embraced overload and micro-managing the UK economy and society. Second, the Treasury is a major part of this problem. This used to be pivotal to the Labour case and Wilson in the 1960s but became forgotten in the New Labour era. This terrain cannot be left to the radical right. The Treasury is not a department of economic growth but of managing public spending, and it needs radical transformation.
Third, the structure of power across the UK is not sustainable. It is a half-finished revolution with devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and with city government for London. This has been xxxiadded to by an ad-hoc system of regional mayors, none with popular mandates via referendums, all hailed by the Tories as innovation, but in reality the latest Westminster wheeze. A more democratic system is needed, and it must be entrenched and backed by referendums, with the English status quo seen as unsustainable.
Fourth, the art of politics has become reduced to the public being passive spectators with no real active involvement. Party politics has little living connection into civil society, which does not bode well; the fraud of Farage’s Reform UK, a private company masquerading as a political party, is a potential harbinger for the future.
Fifth, connecting all of the above, UK politics have become defined by the emergence of post-democracy: an insider class connecting government, corporate business, elites and lobbyists, defined by access, privilege and monies and inherently open to corruption. It is a closed system with more in common with pre-democracy, when government saw its business as acting in the interests of the monied and propertied classes.
Sixth, for all the talk of reform, the core dynamics of British capitalism have remained unchanged through successive governments and eras. It is remarkably short-termist, speculative and driven by shareholder value, rather than any longer-term and wider interests. Britain’s productivity problem and the gap between innovation and ideas and successful products and firms is due to the historic failure to invest and nurture research and development (Hutton, 1995). Moreover, the overbearing influence of finance capitalism has hurt the economy, with the City of London ‘crowding out’ investment and support in the real economy: in the way the right in the 1970s used to make such claims about trade union power (Bacon and Eltis, 1976). The Thatcher revolution for all its boosterist rhetoric about an ‘economic miracle’ addressed none of these fundamentals about the structural weaknesses of British capitalism.
xxxiiSeventh, is Britain’s geopolitical place in the world, where it positions itself, the values and relationships it embodies, and who and what it identifies with. Britain post-Brexit is a diminished entity on the world stage and internationally. The UK has weaker relationships with its two main post-war pillars – the EU and US – and neither of these can be easily put back. But the UK has to decide how it acts, builds alliances and what it wants to be.
If this is the broad challenge, then the political case for change has to be made, intellectual ground prepared and specific policies devised for the short, medium and longer term. The success or not will not just be down to the actions of Keir Starmer and the Labour government but the wider political community and public sphere. In an age of discontent and disinformation, alongside cynicism and falling trust, it is a monumental task: a once in a generation task to rebuild and remake Britain and break out not just of the legacy of fourteen Tory years but the broken political system, fossilised institutions and lingering hold of discredited, outdated dogmas that have wreaked damage on the UK and its people (Toynbee and Walker, 2024).
Who aspires to speak for Britain matters and has consequences. For too long this has been the Tories and the right, with Labour apologetic even in office. Yet, if we examine the nature of public opinion and the fallacy of ‘the centre ground’, we can see most voters do not tidily sit in the middle but lean left-wing on economic issues, public spending and public ownership and right-wing on law and order and immigration.
This takes us back to Keith Joseph’s ‘common ground’, cited earlier, which he described thus: ‘The middle ground consensus is only the middle ground between politicians. It is an ephemeral political compromise. It has no link with achieving the aspirations of the people’ (Joseph, 1976, p. 25). This take was used to undermine the post-war welfare statism and Keynesian economics and holds relevance in today’s Britain, where public opinion supports railway nationalisation (76 per xxxiiicent), GB Energy (75 per cent), imposing VAT on private school fees (60 per cent), alongside being hard on law and order and immigration. This is the potential terrain of Starmer’s Labour and common ground (Smith, 2024; Conner, 2024).
That will require a political project as ambitious and far-reaching as undertaken at previous hinge points in the UK’s history. In the case of 1945 and 1979, the tide had already turned on the previous order by the time a general election ushered in a new administration with a new set of ideas. In 2024, we already have one set of conditions met: the bankruptcy and discrediting of the ideas of the right, which have been so dominant for so long. The second part of the equation is mapping out a prospectus for the future, credible policy ideas and a picture of what the future could look like have yet to be made.
John Kay observed of debates on the nature of business, the economy and capitalism that ‘business has evolved but the language that is widely used to describe business has not’ (Kay, 2024). The same is true of the language of politics, its left-wing version and social change. The inconvenient truth is that the forces of reaction have been better at describing the world after neoliberalism, invoking divisive framing terms such as ‘culture wars’, ‘cancel culture’, ‘the war on woke’ and ‘virtue signalling’ as well as having a right-wing print press and well-funded platforms to promote these tropes. The forces of the left and progressive opinion over the same period have conspicuously failed to offer a convincing set of descriptions and names beyond speaking to itself about neoliberalism.
All around there are dismissive takes from sections of the left of Starmer and Labour, as Robert Saunders notes, peddling ‘stories of doom’ (2024). This includes right-wing framing as ‘same old Labour’ and centrist commentary that sees present day events through the lenses of Blair and New Labour. A more nuanced reading of present-day Labour, the centre-left, and the challenges the UK faces, is more xxxivaccurate and constructive, acknowledging that this is a story still being written.
This book offers a contribution to that debate: one engaged and involved in the battle of ideas in a way that is nuanced and drawing from that fourth strand. We are at the end of one era and the beginning of the next. The future is being created in the actions of the present.
The pluralist range of perspectives in this volume reflect that this is a moment in flux. The positive potential of Labour in office, understood in a particular way, is emphasised by Will Hutton. A more critical analysis is offered by Jeremy Gilbert; a more historical take from Tom Egerton and Anthony Seldon, and a more qualified sense of possibility from Neal Lawson and the editors. Similarly, how Labour understands (or not) the economy, political economy and British capitalism will have a critical bearing on the direction and chance of success of the government. Mariana Mazzucato and Ann Pettifor make the case that Labour have to break with the past, with economic orthodoxy and the Treasury mindset, while Adam Tooze and Aditya Chakrabortty highlight the alternative economic ideas of 1980s UK municipal socialism as one potential source of inspiration.
In the first months of the Labour government, tensions and limitations are already self-evident. There are at least two distinctive voices to Labour in office. The first, from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, is driven by the need for reassurance, fiscal rectitude and the politics of Treasury spreadsheets. This reflects their desire to not scare former Tory voters who switched to Labour, the right-wing media and the City, but it also embodies Starmer and Reeves’s respective backgrounds – as Director of Public Prosecutions and a Bank of England economist. Focused on putting government back together, competence and efficiency, at its core this is administrative and technocratic, lacking soul or an obvious popular and galvanising story. The core aim has also been undermined by widespread reports of infighting, the removal of xxxvformer senior civil servant Sue Gray as the PM’s Chief of Staff and grubby public arguments about the receipts of gifts and large corporate donations.
Sitting alongside this is the centre-left pressure from a host of ministers. These include Ed Miliband’s plans for a publicly owned energy company (albeit with limited assets); Louise Haigh renationalising railways and regulating local buses in England; and Angela Rayner restoring some rights at work stripped away by the previous Conservative government. This more progressive agenda has been overshadowed by Starmer and Reeves, combined with a clearly missing proactive No. 10 Downing Street communications strategy and political antenna.
The dominance of the Treasury, with its micromanagement and financial short-termism, is a predicament seen before under Labour governments. It mitigates against long-term investment and support for public services and can lead to major political own goals, such as scrapping the winter fuel allowance for many pensioners. Labour under Wilson in the 1960s attempted to bypass the Treasury and failed. Gordon Brown addressed this by building the Treasury into a centre of alternative power to Blair’s No. 10.
Combine this with the current absence of a coherent economic policy and narrative about how ‘broken Britain’ will be put back together, or how to tackle vested interests and the long-term problems of British capitalism, and this for now does feel an ominous mix made for failure and disappointment. But these are early days, and the UK needs more than a Labour government fixated on balancing the books and spreadsheet politics. It requires an idea, not just sketching out the journey of the next few years but a vision of the ultimate destination and shape of a future Britain.
The stakes are high. This Labour government could succeed in resetting the political agenda, making the UK a better place to live, and begin to embark on fundamental reform. Or it could muddle through xxxvimaking the UK a more civilised country but not addressing any of the big issues. More seriously, it could fail and the forces of virulent reaction and populism on the right rise up, claim they are speaking for the dispossessed and pretend that they are the voice of those ignored for too long. No one should say as we start on this new journey that politics do not matter or that we do not face fundamental choices about who we are and want to be.
Section I
Past Times Revisited2
1
After the 2024 Election: Parliamentary Strength, Electoral Weakness
John Curtice
The principal challenge facing the new Labour government would appear to be obvious. How can it turn around a flatlining economy and ailing public services against a backdrop of severe fiscal constraint? Still, difficult though that task may be, at least it can comfort itself with the thought that it will be doing so on the back of a landslide election victory. That surely means that, initially at least, voters will be inclined to give a fair wind to its efforts to tackle the country’s difficulties.
Except that it was not a landslide victory – at least in terms of votes. As Table 1 shows, while support for the outgoing Conservatives collapsed by twenty points since 2019, leaving the party with its lowest share ever, Labour’s vote increased by less than two points. At a little under 35 per cent, the party’s share of the vote in Great Britain was the lowest ever enjoyed by a majority government, let alone one with a parliamentary majority as large as 174. Its vote was not only well short of the 41 per cent Jeremy Corbyn secured in 2017, but it was also a pale 4shadow of the 44 per cent vote that underpinned Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997. Indeed, the party’s support in 2024 was lower than at any election between 1935 and 1979.
Table 1: The Result
* Change in seats is as compared with estimated outcome of the 2019 election on the new parliamentary boundaries introduced in 2024 (Rallings and Thrasher, 2024).
Source: Calculated from BBC website.
Labour’s leadership tries to argue its electoral success in the election is the product of the change that Keir Starmer brought to his party. However, in truth, voters seem to have rejected the Conservatives much more than they embraced Labour. As a result, the party’s parliamentary strength obscures the fact that its success is built on rather weak electoral foundations and, despite Keir Starmer’s changes, a pattern of support that in many respects looks remarkably unchanged since 2019. Consequently, the political challenge of maintaining public support for the government as it tackles the difficult legacy it has inherited from the Conservatives looks not inconsiderable too. 5
Conservative Calamity
Three developments were central to the outcome of the 2024 election. They are all ones that concerned the Conservatives, not Labour. The first is ‘Partygate’. Until the first stories suggesting the COVID-19 lockdown regulations had been interpreted in Downing Street in a uniquely liberal fashion appeared in the media in early December 2021, the Conservatives had never been consistently behind Labour in the polls. In particular, the government’s success twelve months earlier in securing an early roll-out of a COVID-19 vaccine boosted its support, as reflected in its success in May 2021 in winning the Hartlepool by-election. At that point, Labour and Starmer appeared to be on the ropes. However, following the first Partygate stories, Conservative support fell on average by five points in four weeks. By the end of January 2022, Labour, on 40 per cent, were five points up on the party’s standing at the end of October, enough to put them as much as eight points ahead of the Conservatives.
The second key event was the adverse market reaction to the Liz Truss ‘fiscal event’ of September 2022. As with all previous governments that presided over a market crisis – from Harold Wilson in 1967 to John Major in 1992 and Gordon Brown in 2008–9 – the drama on the financial markets severely undermined the government’s reputation for economic competence. Whereas six months earlier, Ipsos had reported that the Conservatives were six points ahead of Labour on ‘managing the economy’, following the ‘fiscal event’ they were as much as thirteen points behind. In similar vein to what happened in the wake of Partygate, support for the Conservatives fell precipitately – by six points – during Ms Truss’s short tenure in Downing Street. By the time it came to an end, Labour, on 50 per cent, were briefly as much as twenty-five points ahead of the Conservatives.
In short, the political and economic turmoil that accompanied the 6regimes of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss were the decisive political events that turned the electoral tide during the 2019–24 parliament. True, voters noticed Labour’s move to the centre. Shortly after the 2019 election, YouGov reported that 46 per cent reckoned Labour were ‘extreme’, but by the time the Partygate scandal erupted that figure had more than halved to 22 per cent. That change may have helped Labour gain the confidence of Tory supporters who became disenchanted with the Johnson and Truss regimes. However, without the self-inflicted Tory turmoil of Partygate and the ‘fiscal event’, it is unlikely that Labour’s electoral prospects would ever have been as bright as they proved to be.
Meanwhile, the third crucial development was the rise of Reform – at the expense, primarily, of the Conservatives. Support for the party began to edge up in the wake of the Liz Truss fiscal event, though only enough to put it at 5–6 per cent. However, the party’s standing began to rise more markedly in the autumn of 2023, just as the government decided to make reducing both legal and ‘illegal’ immigration one of its policy priorities. Trouble was, that focus on immigration helped amplify what many of the Brexiteers who backed the Conservatives in 2019 regarded as one of the government’s policy failures. According to polling conducted by Redfield & Wilton for ‘The UK in a Changing Europe’, by the time of the 2024 election, 42 per cent of those who voted Conservative in 2019 believed that immigration was higher as a result of Brexit, while just 15 per cent reckoned it was lower. In any event, by the time the election was called in May 2024, Reform had risen to 11–12 per cent. That proved enough to entice Nigel Farage into returning to the political fray, and, as Table 1 shows, by polling day the party had reached nearly 15 per cent under his leadership, even more than the 13 per cent UKIP registered in 2015.
It was Reform, not Labour, who in the end drew most support away 7
