Grey Labour, Labour Greys

On the fragility of British politics after the most boring election ever.

On the eve of the 2010 general election, despite my lack of interest in voting, I was hoping for the defeat of the party promising trebled tuition fees and scrapped Educational Maintenance Allowance. The morning after the 2015 election, I dragged myself to my job centre appointment in tears over the reality of five years of Tory dominance. In 2017, our enthusiasm with the insurgency of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign had turned into fury at the sight of the Grenfell fire a week later. In 2019, that enthusiasm, along with the possibility of a successful socialist electoralism, was shattered by Boris Johnson’s ‘Get Brexit Done’ triumphalism. The past 14 years, of millions facing the plunder and punishment of British capitalism’s primary representatives, ultimately broke the Tories at the polls. The celebrations may have been muted, especially given the exit poll’s pronouncement that the Conservative drop-off was less than expected and the Reform rise greater than anticipated, but the final results point to the ongoing stasis, disintegration and hollowing out of Britain’s representative institutions. With the two main parties achieving a combined voter share below 60% for the first time in over a hundred years and turnout historically low at 52% amongst those over 21 years old, politics remains unstable and disorder foreshadowed.

Tory contraction, Faragist expansion

Dominating the political commentary in the lead-up to polling day was the possibility that the most successful political party in Europe, the Conservatives, might cease existence. Whilst these premonitions may appear mistaken now, one should not write off the direction of travel. The Conservatives, producing the worst result in their history, lost 251 seats and almost half of their voter share. According to the Lord Ashcroft poll, the Conservatives lost amongst men, women, all social classes, all age groups except the over 65s, and dropped a whopping 42 points amongst those who voted Leave in the European Union referendum. The only other cohort the Conservatives won amongst were those that own their home outright. Tory Party notables such as Penny Mordaunt, Jacob Rees Mogg, Liz Truss and Grant Shapps lost their seats, and even figures such as Jeremy Hunt came close to defeat. Right across the ‘Blue Wall’, in places such as Chesham and Amersham, Chipping Barnet, Guildford, Wimbledon and Wycombe, the Tories were bulldozed out of the way by Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats - and by some Labour contenders too. Throughout Essex, in seats such as Thurrock, Harlow and Colchester, places which have seen an increase in outwards migration from young Londoner families unable to afford the capital, the Tories were decimated by Labour. In those ‘Red Wall’ seats where, in the words of Boris Johnson, voters had ‘leant’ their support to the Conservative Party in 2019, the Tories were all but wiped out. With the exception of serial defector Lee Anderson’s winning Reform ticket, Labour regained many seats in their postindustrial ‘heartlands’. Places such as Bishop Auckland, Stoke-on-Trent Central and Burnley all returned to Labour, whilst frequently showing Reform superseding the Conservatives. In Wales, Rishi Sunak’s party returned zero seats. With the Tories gaining just one constituency in Leicester East, the collapse of their vote and the transformation of large majorities into marginals throughout the vast majority of their 121 seats, marks an emergency moment for the Conservative Party. It should come as no surprise either.

Since the Tories took office in 2010, household incomes after housing costs have dropped by 12%, council funding per person has decreased by 18%, 148,000 people have died premature deaths as a direct result of austerity-related policies, and the use of food banks has massively increased with 3 million food parcels delivered by the Tressell Trust this year alone. Persistent underinvestment and stagnant real wages go hand-in-hand. As infrastructure crumbles and services break down, there is a palpable sense across Britain that nothing works anymore. The hard-proven capacity of the Conservatives to reproduce their electoral coalition has also come under strain. With central banks responding to inflation by raising interest rates, the absence of access to cheap credit has stymied the Tories’ ability to produce debt-fuelled consent. As a consequence, thousands of homeowners each month are entering the end of their fixed-rate mortgages and moving onto higher rates. On top of this, the shift of large parts of the population towards more progressive attitudes on race, sexuality, migration and economic policy has created fissures between a radicalising Conservative Party and the population-at-large. The Tories we see today, exhausted, riven with divisions and out of touch, are the result of its transformation into a party of rentier and petit-bourgeois reaction, vastly more wedded to nativism and culture wars than it is to securing amenable conditions for capital accumulation. The process of decline predicted by Phil Burton Cartledge may not be complete, but it is in full swing.

Part of this picture of Tory decomposition is the rise of Reform. Although the terrifying exit poll prediction that Nigel Farage’s party might get 13 seats did not bear out, the far-right platform made significant inroads. Gaining 4.1 million votes and a 14.3% share of the total vote, Reform expressly succeeded in converting 23% of 2019 Tory voters into their own. Claiming seats in Boston & Skegness, East Thurrock, Great Yarmouth, Ashfield and Farage’s new constituency of Clacton, the rightwing party also gained increased votes across poorer, postindustrial towns in the Midlands and the North, knocking the Tories off second spot in many places. Although Reform made strides pitching itself as the party best placed to fully prosecute the constitutional revolution inaugurated by Brexit and scuppered by Boris Johnson - with Reform voters claiming the “out of touch” Tories not delivering on their promises as the reason for them rejecting the party - Farage has made it clear that his sights are now set on Labour, who Reform trailed directly behind in 89 seats. As the gap between voter share and seats won highlights the inequities of the First Past the Post electoral system (the Liberal Democrats received almost a million less votes than Reform despite claiming 72 seats), Farage stands well poised to capture anti-establishment sentiment and frame it through the prism of tax, immigration and democratic reform.

Starmer’s ascent?

The mood music from financial markets on the eve of the election signalled a remarkable transformation when seen against the backdrop of Brexit, Corbynism and Trussonomics. Money managers welcomed the coming election of Starmer as a safe bet for investors, particularly against his neighbours across the English Channel, where the Left-Green coalition has topped the legislative election polls and crisis ensues. Yet, one wonders if this assuredness was not slightly misplaced. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a dramatic and historic landslide victory, gaining 211 seats, reasserting their dominance in Britain’s rustbelt towns, restoring their presence in Scotland where the Scottish National Party lost 39 seats, and making giant inroads in the traditionally Tory English South. Yet Starmer’s victory was hollow.

Throughout the night, TV journalist after TV journalist opined upon the masterful “voter efficiency” of the Labour electoral machine. In real terms, a party that received only 33.7% of the vote - a mere percentage and a half more than Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 showing - benefitted hugely from the concentrated distortions of the First Past the Post system. 48% of Labour voters said the main intention behind their choice was to get the Tories out. As the More in Common report has highlighted, the Starmerite coalition, whilst boasting a flatly distributed voter share, failed to reverse low turnout in high deprivation areas; failed to connect to the massive cohort of non-voters in the country who on average tend to be female, in their 40s, have less formal education and are struggling with the cost of living; and ultimately failed to raise expectations amongst the electorate. Starmer’s Labour also faced a huge revolt on its leftflank - the biggest in the history of the modern British state. In Bristol Central, Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer smashed Labour’s Thangham Debbonaire by a whopping 24%. The Greens won another 3 seats and came second in 40 more constituencies. Prioritising marginal constituencies, Labour suffered in safe seats, particularly those with large Muslim minorities in which Labour’s appalling position over Gaza acted as a totemic symbol for its wider abandonment of multiethnic working class communities. Its vote also decreased by 6.9% in the most deprived parts of the country, creating a new kind of marginal for the Labour establishment to worry about. Pro-Palestine independents caused major upsets in five different constituencies, with Jeremy Corbyn retaining his Islington North seat by over 7,000 votes and four Labour candidates, including former Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Jon Ashworth, losing seats across the Midlands, Lancashire and Yorkshire. Birmingham Yardley MP Jess Phillips’ saw her majority reduced to a stunning 1.9% in the face of Workers’ Party of Great Britain candidate Jody McIntyre; Health Secretary and self-declared privatizer Wes Streeting narrowly escaped defeat at the hands of insurgent Palestinian candidate Leanne Mohamad by less than 600 votes; and even Labour leader Keir Starmer had his majority slashed by 17.4% under the weight of Andrew Feinstein’s 7,312 votes.

In truth, despite the scale of their win, Starmer’s Labour enters Downing Street far more fragile than it would have liked. For a politician whose deeds often militate against any notion of popular accountability, this election has certainly left Labour vulnerable - and out of touch. Despite the fact that Labour can boast a fewer number of privately-educated cabinet members than any previous government, the break with privilege ends there. Of the Labour Party’s 411-strong Parliamentary cohort, those with past roles in lobbying or strategic communications are double those from a trade union background; consultants and those with backgrounds in finance and business far outweigh white collar workers; and almost a third of Labour MPs have worked as lobbyists on behalf of corporations. Jacqui Smith, the former Home Secretary disgraced by the expenses scandal, has been brought into the fold as a junior minister, and Alan Milburn, enthusiast for privatising the NHS, is also rumoured to be appointed. Labour, despite its trade union link, is undergoing a rapid process of ‘Americanisation’, looking more like a safe party of capital with every passing day.

Rather than base our assessment of Keir Starmer’s project on wishful thinking, we should listen to him and observe those in his inner circle more carefully. His declaration on the eve of the election that he had “changed his party”, and he will “change the country” may be right, but it is not certain that it will be for the better. The claim that we sit on the cusp of a period of “national renewal”, ready to “rebuild Britain” is a bold one. Labour Chief of Staff Sue Grey’s ‘shit list’, consisting of the water crisis, public sector pay negotiations, overcrowded prisons, bankrupt universities and municipalities, hospital waiting lists, and indebted, crumbling schools are just a few of the issues that will confront this government in office. The purported solutions of Starmer and his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves - to assure investors, play by the fiscal rules laid down by the Tories, refuse tax rises on the wealthy and, in the words of Daniela Gabor, “get BlackRock to rebuild Britain” - should concern us all. Having ruled out both Capital Gains Tax and changing interest charged by the Bank of England to commercial banks, Labour’s room for maneouvre has been hemmed in by its opposition to wealth redistribution and its gospel-like belief in economic growth. Walking straight into a trap laid down for them by Jeremy Hunt, the possibility that Labour will slash public services and return to austerity is genuine.

In the recent King’s Speech, Starmer and Reeves set out their agenda to modernise Britain. Amongst 40 pieces of intended legislation were plans to create Great British Energy, a publicly-owned clean energy company supplemented by public and private investment, and reform the planning system to enable a flourishing of YIMBYist private sector investment in housing, infrastructure and renewables. Such is Labour’s devotion to capitalist stability that Reeves is assembling a “committee for managing the whole affairs of the bourgeoisie”, in the form of a council of economic advisers advising the Treasury on growth.  The declared reliance upon asset managers and private investors to revive Britain’s growth trajectory and fix its crumbling infrastructure will likely only exacerbate the country’s reliance on private capital, the distance between human beings and the infrastructure they use every day, and crucially the emphasis on shareholder maximisation over social reproduction. They certainly will not, as Reeves’ abandonment of their £28 billion a year climate pledge and the watering down of their employment rights bill indicates, rise to the challenges the country truly faces. Grey Labour, insofar as it is a conjunctural phenomena, represents an amalgamation of both neoliberal and postneoliberal ambitions. It seeks to modernise Britain in a world characterised by climate change, geopolitical instability and supply-side shocks. Yet it does so by mobilising national state power to unleash private financing. Transport Secretary Louise Haigh’s claim that Labour want to “move fast and fix things”, a twist on Mark Zuckerberg’s internal Facebook motto, is a perfect encapsulation of this new government’s mission.

But if Starmerism as an internal party project defined itself through the repression and ruin of Corbynite aspirations, Starmerism in government will likely be a rearticulation of this impulse. Faced with drastic rises in poverty, recurrent inflationary spikes, Britain’s productive stagnation and an increased reliance on social care and welfare amongst an older, sicker population, expect Starmer to adopt a magnified rendition of Tony Blair’s social authoritarianism, developing new methods of population management and social control. Their respective crime and policing, and border and security bills already reveal glimpses of the direction being pondered. Labour’s support for a “nuclear-deterrent triple lock”, increasing military spending by 40% over the course of the 2020s, and his promise to maintain the current levels of support for Ukraine’s war effort shows a government committed to rearmament. Whilst many have welcomed the appointment of progressive lawyer Richard Hermer KC, a critic of Israel and an opponent of Michael Gove’s anti-BDS bill, the good news ends there. Foreign Secretary David Lammy has made Labour’s stance clear: reversing his promise and continuing British obstructions of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Israel’s Benyamin Netanyahu, as well as visiting some of the top génocidaires of the Israeli administration, including the Prime Minister himself. The fact that leading Labour lights have repeatedly taken to the airwaves to discredit pro-Palestine Independent MPs suggests the emergence of an islamophobic moral panic against sections of a multiethnic working class seeking to organise independently of the party of government. The decades-long struggle between Labour Atlanticism and proletarian internationalism continues.

It is not just on its left that Starmer will face problems though. Despite widespread division and disorganisation on the British right, the propensity of vehicles such as Reform to politicise the popular mood over tax, agriculture, climate regulation and broader issues of political economy has proven itself enormous across Europe throughout the 2020s. A minority Faragism with Parliamentary representation may thrive in an oppositional movement dynamic between Grey Labour and the exurban and rural social movements that could arise throughout Starmer’s term. If Reform can marry its social conservatism with a bread-and-butter policy package more akin to the European far-right than its own economic libertarianism, it may be able to expand its current coalition in dangerous new ways.

Above all, the 2024 election affirmed James Kanagasooriam’s hypothesis that we have entered a moment of “political sandcastles” in which political impermanence, electoral volatility and dwindling consent prevail, all to Labour’s potential detriment.

The days ahead

In the place I call home, Stoke-on-Trent, just days before the election, we organised a ‘They Don’t Represent Us’ election event, trying to cohere some of the local activist energies which could begin to fight for working class power in the face of British democracy’s representative crisis. Outside of the event, two interactions struck me. One woman, a counsellor running a mental health group in the same building, loved the idea of what we were doing and backed up her enthusiasm with her assertion that the ‘white working class’ were no longer being represented, ‘left behind’ by non-white kids and elites instead. Another person, an attendee at the same event, was similarly enthusiastic, telling me he was torn between the Greens or Reform, passionate about the environment, but also worried that ecological catastrophe will bring more climate refugees to our door. The instincts presented by these two individuals, residents not of the city’s leafy suburbs but of an area characterised by poverty, drug addiction and - in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s words - “organised abandonment”, indicate the challenge posed to the possibility of a radical leftwing majoritarianism.

Whilst the socialist movement should complicate the portrait of the ‘left behind’ as simply white workers in postindustrial towns, we must also return to the strategic question which shot right through the Corbynite coalition. Much has been made of the fact that Labour under Starmer received over half a million less votes than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour in 2019 - and rightly so. But this does not solve the puzzle of how we unite proletarians in the cities and workers in towns on an internationalist, sovereigntist and egalitarian basis? For too long, our side has failed to confront the scale of the crisis facing us. We live in a country eviscerated by neoliberalism and austerity, entrenched in a process of long-term decline, enmeshed in a crisis of post-Brexit statecraft, increasingly shaped by a planetary lurch towards climate devastation, with all four dynamics inhibiting the popular sense of what’s possible. After Brexit we recoiled in dreaded surprise. We did the same after Johnson’s triumphant 2019 result. This election, the burgeoning class dealignment and the performance of independent leftists, shows that there is real space to the left of British politics at the same time as it alerts us to the real dangers waiting in the wings. The socialist movement nationally, in the big cities, the postindustrial towns and rural areas, has to find real ways and mechanisms of planting roots amongst the people, staring class composition blindly in the face, and working out ways around the institutional volatility which characterises the major parties. The existence of a revitalised left bloc in Parliament is no small boon to these aspirations.

Ultimately, this election showed the socialist movement three things. Firstly, we live in an era of crisis politics in which stability is redundant and no political force is guaranteed hegemony. As Adam Tooze has recently gestured towards, the oft-quoted Gramscian nostrum that the “old is dying and the new cannot be born” is not abstractly true. It is the crisis terrain of real historical struggles, contradictions and tensions. Nothing is guaranteed and the socialist movement needs to see itself as an active agent, not a passive conduit. It will take a giant collective push to birth new social arrangements capable of destroying the old state of affairs. Secondly, the thread of Palestinian liberation runs right through domestic politics and any attempt to distance ourselves from it is self-debasing and counter-intuitive. The struggle for anticolonial liberation is constitutive of an independent, internationalist left in Britain and the return of 5 independent left and pro-Palestine MPs, plus 4 Greens, is indicative of this. Palestine is both the litmus test and the engine of our own struggles. Thirdly, the growth of Reform, performing well and frequently coming runner-up in dozens of postindustrial towns and cities, should unnerve us. The right is well-rehearsed in portraying a compelling narrative of national decline - defined against ‘wokeism’, mass immigration and intrusive statism - and that is a story which is cutting through in some of the most deprived parts of the country and may even thrive under a Keir Starmer-led government. This narrative is now also proceeding apace ahead of the left, politicising the terms of climate adaptation in the process. If the socialist movement is to succeed in the coming years, it will have to narrate its own story - one that recognises the challenges posed by Labourist “deliverism” whilst identifying clear winners and losers, rejecting the zero-sum politics of Faragism, and telling a story of egalitarian futurity, popular multiracial sovereignty and civilisational transformation in the face of runaway climate disaster.

To compose a left bloc capable of rising to this challenge, we need to escape the ‘political sandcastle’ effect of the two major parties, and discern the kind of mass, national political architecture necessary to win demands and battles against both Starmerism and Faragism. A bold idea perhaps, but we could begin by calling a conference of the social movements, elected representatives and labour movement activists committed to such an undertaking. Maybe we can even agree on a set of common demands to collectively organise for. The moment requires that we both build the “community power” so central to Jeremy Corbyn’s independent campaign, whilst we work towards a national organisation or bloc that can build class power and maybe contest the next general election. Seize the time comrades, before it seizes us.