The fate of the government turns on its progressive theory of the state. Scrapping winter fuel payments for pensioners emits a reek of decayed Thatcherism not unlike that of rivers and beaches polluted by sewage, but it was not an unforced error that can be easily reversed. Leaving millions facing poverty or the forbidding labyrinth of a Tory system of means-tested benefits was a necessary move in a grand strategy, aimed at making the state into a machine that embodies and enforces radical changes in how people live. From preventative healthcare through to the war on junk food to energy policy, the goal is a fundamental transformation in society.
The image of Keir Starmer as a pragmatist dedicated to piecemeal change obscures the reality of an ideological administration. Contrary to the right-wing press, the ideology is not socialism or anything like it. Labour’s brand of progressivism, a compendium of ephemeral dogmas (mostly recent American imports), has little in common with any strand in the longer history of the British left. There may be echoes of Fabian paternalism in the mooted ban on outdoor smoking, but Starmer’s project is more of an assault on the traditions of the left than a continuation of them.
Labour emerged as a party dedicated to improving working-class living standards. But working-class communities in Port Talbot, Grangemouth and throughout the country will be ruined by climate targets that, even if they could be fully achieved in this country, would have zero impact on global warming. If gas and oil workers become “the miners of net zero”, as the general secretary of Unite union, Sharon Graham, has aptly put it, they will be sacrificed for nothing. Liberal and socialist feminists looked forward to a government concerned with the safety and well-being of women. What they have is one that shows no interest in safeguarding female-only spaces and releases potentially dangerous domestic abusers from prison before their sentences have been served. The progressive causes of earlier generations are being junked for the sake of faddish doctrines and short-term solutions.
In Starmer’s Labour, liberal legalism trumps the party’s historic commitment to social democracy. In obedience to a regime of rights that effectively prevents most of those who arrive in Britain from ever being deported, Labour has reverted to what amounts to an open-door policy on illegal immigration. Largely empty promises to “smash the people-smuggling gangs” do nothing to deter those – chiefly young men – who board the small boats. The result is to increase the strain on public services and nullify whatever can be achieved in housebuilding. An inflated regime of rights blocks the pursuit of the common good.
The damage is magnified by the fact that the bearers of rights are groups identified by protected characteristics. Labour is committed to extending the right to equal pay for women secured in Gordon Brown’s 2010 Equality Act to ethnic minorities. If it does, a key element of the US’s destructive identity politics will be embedded in British law.
The consequence of making justice a relationship between groups is that politics becomes a struggle for resources among self-defined “communities”. This is the practical nub of Starmer’s tacit theory of the state, and its fatal flaw. A state whose primary function is to distribute resources among warring groups cannot rely on support from any of them. As the past months have shown, instability is built into government designed on this model.
There is an inescapable contradiction between fiscal prudence, funding a universal welfare state and doling out large pay settlements to selected public sector workers. Heavily dependent on quicksilver global capital to fund a national debt that has ballooned, the British state today is an over-leveraged and poorly managed corporation whose shareholders could revolt at any moment.
Simultaneously, Labour is losing the muted endorsement it received from voters in its landslide victory. Talk of restoring trust is meaningless unless the bosses of water companies suffer materially for the dereliction of their duties to the public. The same applies to local officials and police who turned a blind eye to grooming gangs. Vigilantes who disable Ultra Low Emission Zone cameras will not be swayed by appeals to respect the law when rampant shoplifting, phone theft and burglary go unpunished.
Unease that the Prime Minister and other frontbenchers have accepted excessive gifts from Labour donors was not dispelled by saying that the gifts were within the rules, nor will it be diminished by an oddly specific announcement about no longer accepting clothes in future. As so often, legalism is bad politics – in this case, an accelerated rerun of Tory chaos and drift.
Many of Starmer’s critics expected his government to be a visionless but competent technocracy. The truth is stranger, and more ironic. The Labour leader and his party are the captives of an overweening project, which began to come unstuck even as he came to power. A supposedly omni-competent monolith is rapidly fracturing from top to bottom. What appears to be unfolding is not the rise of an all-powerful machine, but another chapter in the story of Britain’s failing state.
[See also: Andrew Marr: Starmer the grave]
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This article appears in the 25 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, All-out war