Over the past few days, the momentum has swung behind Reform just one bit further. In two council by-elections, in Lichfield and Torfaen, Farage’s party saw councillors elected, and in a poll by JL Partners, Farage’s outfit are projected to win 102 seats, a result which would see almost a third of Labour’s cabinet deposed. In a recent survey commissioned by Find Out Now, Reform are not just leading the poll (the third example of some such outcome), they are projected to win a majority. The polling company’s methodology stands out from other voting models, asking respondents whether they are likely to vote at all before garnering their voter intention. These developments should make us ponder the fundamental reorganisation underway in British politics.
This country’s electoral makeup is potentially undergoing a transformation of the like not seen since the franchise was expanded in 1922, when the newborn Labour Party overtook the Liberals. But rather than a reorganisation of national politics in which the condition of possibility is a growth in the electorate, this change is facilitated by depressed voter turnout. The striking possibility that an over-achieving insurgent far-right political party has a pool of disillusioned non-voters to try and attract is a phenomenon which should press us into action.
The left has been far too complacent for far too long now and our weaknesses are on display everywhere you look. In many instances we refrained from effectively weaponising a classed antiracism, distancing ourselves from class politics to hold together local institutionalised antiracist alliances, whilst shrinking from antiracism in other circumstances for fear of alienating people. We even fooled ourselves into thinking that simply defeating the far right on the streets implied their broad political defenestration. When we did not entertain that dubious falsehood, we lapsed into an impasse, unsure of how to break the animating cycle between escalating state racism and popular hostility towards migrants, refugees and ethnic minorities I have written about before. The parties of the explicitly fascist right may have not been able to force a breakthrough, but the ecology between state racialisation, media hostility and far-right agitation has created a fertile ground for Faragism to shift the Overton Window enough to take advantage in the event of a crumbling Tory voter base and a dysfunctional Labour government. This process of normalisation has not happened under our noses, but in our faces, from Blairism’s hostility towards asylum seekers and its vitriolic campaign against Muslim communities to Brexit and UKIP’s role as a conveyor belt for radicalising Labour voters into Tory cannon fodder. We now have to embrace sobriety and reckon with how to deal with the Faragist right in a moment when it has de-exceptionalised itself.
Nowhere can this process of normalisation best be witnessed than in the gathering rethink amongst the Labour Party hierarchy. At a recent away day, Keir Starmer lambasted his colleagues for their queasiness towards taking a harder position on Britain’s border system, raising the distinct likelihood that he wants to emulate the characteristics of Trumpianism so that he can smash its British interlocutor. In this spirit, Labour released a video on Monday, showing off its deportation of asylum seekers, with Home Secretary Yvette Cooper bragging that 19,000 individuals had now been kicked out of the country. This has been accompanied by Labour advertisements, in Reform colours (no, that’s not a metaphor), gloating, “Labour hits 5 year high in migrant removals”. According to The Times, the party of government now boasts that returns of those with no right to be in the UK are up 20 per cent, deportations from prison are up more than 30 per cent, and illegal working raids are up to 23 per cent. Relatedly, it has been revealed that Morgan McSweeney found Donald Trump’s inauguration speech, “impressive in some ways”, reigniting his passion for the Blue Labourist politics of racial communitarianism. Downing Street’s Chief of Staff is increasingly attracted to the proposition that Labour wear Maurice Glasman’s garments in its efforts to halt Farage.
In a Times exclusive with Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire, authors of a new title on Labour under Keir Starmer’s leadership, the Prime Minister is compared to the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), a driverless train: “Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.” This metaphor is right in more ways than one. Transporting commuters between Bank, Canary Wharf and City Airport, Starmerism mirrors the DLR, as a shaky vehicle for the movement of financial and rentier interests. Expressing these interests without any meaningful compromise afforded workers, the party of Labour is throwing its historic coalition into jeopardy and shedding voters in a manner that would make François Hollande proud. In this environment, where racism and nationalism operate as the prisms through which decline is approximated, Starmerism clutching at Blue Labour’s cultural politics to rescue itself makes some sense.
Boosted by the emergence of a new caucus of Blue Labour MPs, led by ex-Socialist Campaign Group member Dan Carden, the dial is shifting. A project waged for redistributive economic policies, protectionism and reindustrialisation, against migration and identity politics, it is a project that has been tried and tested before. Glasman is seemingly back in vogue, invited to Trump’s inauguration, befriended by JD Vance and lauded by McSweeney. In a Politics Home piece, Glasman claimed that he took inspiration for the name from Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and Bob Dylan’s ‘Tangled up in blue’ (a detail that would leave Stuart Hall, a Davis aficionado, turning in his grave). Explicit about the depressive melancholia that defines the Blue Labour mission, it is in many ways the politics of Old Labour, contorted towards a world in which the classic white male industrial worker subject does not exist, where proletarian identitarianism defines itself against the apparent wokeness of globalisation.
Jonathan Hinder, Blue Labour advocate and MP for Pendle and Clitheroe, evidences the extent of this defeatism when he lauds Starmer’s embrace of Blue Labour politics at the same time as he demands from it, “bold, left-wing economic policies, much lower immigration, a complete rejection of divisive identity politics, and proudly reclaiming our patriotism.” Whilst this cohort of Parliamentarians may claim that they combine social conservatism with leftwing economic policy, it is rarely ever anything but the ethnonationalism that is prioritised and triangulated upon. It is a politics of images, articulated to protect Labour’s embattled representatives in the rustbelt regions and inculcate its leadership into more parochial racial thinking.
Whilst it is certainly the case that adopting this anti-migrant politics of communitarian nostalgia will only validate Faragism and discombobulate the Labour coalition (especially without an accompanying embrace of redistributive policies), the movement of socialism in this country which values both its internationalism and its commitment to egalitarianism has no right to rest on its laurels in the face of the Blue Labour revival. The mission to resuscitate a national social-democratic dream of spatial rebalancing, dignity at work and national pride is a hauntology which begs the question of what our alternative is.
Dan Carden’s passing comment that the Blue Labour Parliamentary caucus is asking deeper, philosophical questions about what “the good life looks like”, frustrated me. One could take comfort in all kinds of truths about how distant the vision they conjure up may be, but if, as Karl Marx warned, revolutions draw their poetry from the future, the internationalist left is in a bind. We are faced with a dual problem: on the one hand, the historic orthodox Trotskyist claim that our side faces a “crisis of leadership” has been superseded by a far worse problem. Despite the mass Palestine solidarity movement of the past two years and 2023’s mini-strike wave, it seems to me that we face a crisis of subjectivity. The absence of independent working class political action on a societal scale, expressed through mass, collective, democratic institutions with power and clout, has perpetually hamstrung socialist politics throughout the 21st Century. We have seen mass movements rise fast, exhaust themselves, and leave little durable infrastructure in their wake.
Relatedly, the modesty of contemporary working class subjectivity strikes right at the heart of how we see the future. Simply put, we do not have a compelling rendering of the Good Life. Corbynism, in some of its more controversial policies, broached upon a notion of what this may look like. A four-day working week, ‘broadband communism’ and a publicly-funded pharmaceutical company for example, though all monstered in 2019, speak daringly today to the realities and anxieties of proletarians in a post-pandemic world. Against a conception of the future which simply wants to reheat the past, we should ask ourselves whether we want an industrial economy at all. Of course, a transitional society will require an expanded manufacturing sector to cope with the strains of climate change and mend our crumbling infrastructure. But the problem with an economy built around health, social care and reproduction is not that those kinds of work are the largest sector, rather it’s that decades of dominant ruling class power and naive commitments to growth have ensured that those jobs are predicated upon shit conditions, maximised exploitation, crap pay and rampant insecurity. A vision of the Good Life must prioritise interdependency against the productive/parasitic divide. It must seek to re-conceptualise space and time around leisure, care and public affluence against loneliness, sickness and privatised luxury. We need a notion of the Good Life which seeks out the transformation of human beings against the recriminatory, suspicious politics so innate to Reform and contemporary Labourism. Our sense of futurity must also speak to a set of class subjects increasingly fed up and conscious of the fact that work does not pay, is no longer the chief way in which we construct our everyday identities and routinely wrecks our bodies and brains.
But in making this a reality, our side must escape the straitjacket of capitalist realism. As I have argued before, Corbynism’s defeat in 2019 was in no small part what happens when our class has won so very little over such a prolonged time, making the ‘Get Brexit Done’ commitment far less remote than any social-democratic policy agenda. A good friend remarked to me the other day that what the Trumpian right has done so successfully is conjure up a “felt imagined community”. Without the luxury of ownership over the relations of representation, assembling a social majority in Britain requires us to forge a felt community that identifies in an antagonistic, furious idiom who our enemies are (Farage and Starmer: two cheeks of the same arse!), focuses on two or three areas of struggle that we can build a popular sense of confidence and capacity around (3-day weekend and price controls!), and generates through community self-repair and associational institutions (free breakfast programs and therapy for all!) a vision of what the Good Life is and how we will both prefigure and generalise it.
So beautifully put