Starmer’s government is no mere rehash of ‘New Labour’, in fact its something with even less content or purpose, and the Labour left is far weaker than before, argues Kevin Crane

‘The winter fuel payment was a great Labour achievement. When it was introduced by Gordon Brown in 1997, I was proud to vote for it … I could not in good conscience vote to make my constituents poorer. I will sleep well tonight knowing that I voted to defend my constituents.’

The above is just part of the statement by John Trickett, the one and only current MP of the Labour Party to have voted against prime minister Keir Starmer and chancellor Rachel Reeves’ brutal introduction of means testing for the pensioner winter fuel allowance. He may have been lonely within the party but was otherwise amongst a crowd. Every other party in parliament voted against the benefit cut; including a leaderless Tory Party, the far-right Reform, and the Scottish Nationalists that are imposing cuts in their own devolved budget.

The mathematics of this vote expose some serious anomalies in the way the British political system works: Starmer won the vote by a crushing margin in parliamentary terms but has done so without democratic legitimacy. It should be remembered that although well over 60% of MPs are Labour, only a third of people who voted in the election voted for them, so the losing side in parliament represents, in contradictory totality, considerably more actual people. But I don’t want to primarily talk about the British state right at this moment (although we should talk about it), I want to focus on what this event says about the party.

Starmer’s Labour enforced near-total discipline on its parliamentary group, despite the fact that MPs have been harangued by their constituents over this issue for weeks. Rumours abound that many of them burst into tears as they lined up to vote with the government, and it is certain that most of them are shocked that they didn’t get much over fifty days of ‘honeymoon’ after the election – double that length of time is considered usual – but line up they overwhelmingly did. As mentioned, Trickett was the only ‘official’ rebel, since seven MPs who still call themselves Labour are currently independents after disobeying Starmer over another aspect of austerity: the two-child benefit cap. Fifty-two Labour MPs did abstain, on which more later, but against three hundred and fifty this represents a party in an absolutely steely grip of control.

However much his lack of popularity and legitimacy may threaten him in coming years, Starmer exerts more power over both parliament and his own party than any recent prime minister, which means that he has a great capacity to put a political agenda in to effect. The short-term question is, what even is that agenda? Because, despite him having been Labour leader for longer than Corbyn was, and only a little less than Milliband before him, the public have very little to go on to understand what he actually seeks to do. This isn’t so much because he lies – which he does absolutely do – but because there is a fundamental lack of political vision in Starmer that isn’t often discussed.

Britain’s turn to the right

Centrist media has had a very clear vision, up to this point at least, of what they wanted to argue that the Starmer project was: a return to Blairism. The theory goes that with the horrible, embarrassing left swept away, the Labour Party has been free to return to the centre-ground politics that drove them to three electoral victories, starting in 1997, so that they can return to a combination of liberal politics and free-market economics that our social, economic, political and media elites regard as the fundamental ‘normal’. They believe the majority of the public love this, and that’s why in 2024, Labour has won again and it can now deliver those same successful policies again.

Almost everything in this narrative is a carefully curated myth. First the victory: Labour had been on course to win the 1997 election before Blair became leader, the Tories were in utter disarray after a huge financial crash at the start of the decade, and a lot of Tory weakness throughout the period was due to the much greater electoral strength of the Liberal Democrats.

But more importantly, certainly when we look at the situation now, Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997 did not actually resemble Starmer’s Labour in political or ideological terms at all. It’s true that Blair had always been a right-wing leader of the party, but he was anything but vague about what he stood for, and his initial cabinet was both much more ideologically diverse and consisted of much more highly regarded people than any Labour front bench does today. Blair came to office with big promises and big ideas, albeit ones that were very coloured by the conditions of the time, and where Britain found itself in the 1990s.

The Labour right love to tell the stories of their battles with the left in the 80s and 90s, they like much less to talk about what had been going on outside in wider society. Margaret Thatcher’s government had won a long series of major battles with the trade-union movement, and working-class organisation as a whole in Britain: purges of socialists inside Labour were a related, but secondary, issue. 

The transformation was huge: social democracy went out, and neoliberalism came in. Home manufacturing was done away with, in favour of globalisation, and the financial sector was elevated to be the most important facet of the economy. Labour’s working-class base didn’t just look defeated by the 1990s, it appeared utterly obsolete, and this was an existential worry for the party.

The ‘new’ in Labour

Thatcher would, in fact, eventually succumb to working-class revolt against her government, albeit one of mass protest against the ‘Poll Tax’ (a regressive replacement for previous British property taxes) rather than one of organised workers in industrial action. But Labour wasted their initial opportunity to come into office once she was gone, and while an increasingly corrupt and incompetent Tory government limped on for five further years, the party’s right-wing developed New Labour.

Tony Blair’s government was once described by Thatcher as her greatest achievement and it is not hard to see why. New Labour entirely rejected the idea of rolling back her neoliberal counterrevolution, instead seeking to adapt itself and its wider social base to the new economy. This was absolutely not done in secret. Blair and his advisors would cheerfully declare that the old politics and vision of a working-class, social-democratic Labour were dead with phrases like ‘We’re all middle class now!’, and to no small extent they believed in this. Their propaganda for this mission – ‘spin’ as it was known at the time – was relentless in the media, but it absolutely worked at getting public support.

The first Blair cabinet was a diverse set of largely well-regarded politicians – figures like Mo Mowlam, Robin Cook and Michael Meacher were personally popular in ways that are virtually unheard of for politicians today – with a very coherent agenda. This was to make use of the post-Thatcher financial boom to fund social spending that could improve living standards, lean into the globalisation agenda to keep the financial boom going, and redirect the younger working-class people that were now never going to be working in the old industries their parents had known into new, more prosperous jobs. These jobs were envisioned to be strictly white-collar work in the creative/media fields, or in what we now call the tech sector thanks to the rise of computing and the internet. To make that happen, a huge expansion of higher education was needed so that young people could become graduates, hence another Blair saying, ‘My three priorities are education, education and education’. They wanted to transform the young working class into members of a global professional elite: we were told we were moving from a manufacturing-based economy to a knowledge-based economy.

 Meanwhile, using big capitalist surpluses from finance, the government made efforts to fund welfare for many of those who’d missed out, which is where positive reforms like Sure Start for children and winter fuel payments for pensioners came in. Thus, Labour believed they had solved their apparent crisis of purpose in the world.

The Blair project would exist in its pure form for only four years. By the time of their second term in 2001, the absolute stability of the 1990s collapsed somewhere between the interrelated traumas of the Dot Com crash and the start of the War On Terror.  New Labour’s ideology, like it’s vote share, would decline slowly across the 2000s, until the terrible Credit Crunch of 2008 brought it to a screeching halt from which it never really recovered. Even those days, however, were less tumultuous than the times we live in now, and what’s happened to the Labour Party today reflects this much more unstable world.

Fake nineties revivalists

Keir Starmer’s government has almost none of the features of the first Blair administration. Few of his ministers have much public profile, even fewer are either widely liked or respected, and none are being given any leeway to pursue agendas independent of his personal control.

If we were to take Tony Benn’s old advice, and place policy ahead of personality, the differences are just as stark. Starmer and Reeves have been at pains to emphasise that they will offer no improvements to working-class living standards, despite the fact that these have been obviously and measurably declining for years. Another striking difference between Starmer and Blair isn’t just the content of the policies, there is also the delivery: there is no ‘spin’ now, nor any vision of the future. Starmer’s propaganda game, such as it is, is entirely based on a stern and bleak lecture to the public about how terrible everything is, and that would be a stark contrast with Blair even if it didn’t also have a baffling air of amateur hour about it.

As the vote on winter fuel payments loomed – and MPs became aware just how great public anger about it was – Labour’s leader of the commons, Lucy Powell, made the amazing statement that not to implement the benefit cut would cause a ‘run on the pound’. The economic absurdity of this claim should be obvious, but the political danger of it is even greater, since it massively elevates pessimism and fear throughout society. Additionally, it is strengthening far-right arguments that money must be taken away from ethnic minorities because there is literally not enough cash to go round. This is pretty much the stupidest thing you can do when the dust has still barely settled on fascist-lead riots round the country.

The messaging was even more badly timed from the point of view of the energy economy: fossil-fuel costs took a predictable swing upwards almost immediately after the government had completely committed itself to the policy. I struggle to imagine what public relations professional would look at such a pitch and not say ‘Are you mad?’. It’s not even as if Labour hadn’t been campaigning on energy policy in the general election – you can still pull this quote off the 2024 manifesto on Labour’s website:

‘Energy bills have shot up so much. I’ve lived in this house all my life and I’ve never struggled this much to keep warm. I can only afford to heat one room with a small portable heater. Sometimes I sleep in my armchair to save money. It’s no way to live. Labour is the only party with a proper plan to cut energy bills for good and get us back on track. The savings people will get through things like Great British Energy will make a real difference to me. No question.’

Gary, pensioner

I do not doubt for one minute that Gary is a real pensioner and that these are his real concerns. One can only wonder what that same man would have to say at this point.

In any case, flushed with twisted success, Starmer has of course turned his sights to an even more ambitious project, which is finally destroying the NHS. In a statement just as stark as Powell’s on the pound, he proclaimed that there are only three options on the table: ‘reforming’ the NHS – which means its effective abolition as a free-at-point-of-need service – with raising working people’s taxes or letting the NHS die as your other two choices. Taxing the rich was explicitly ruled out by Rachel Reeves before the election, and that’s one campaign pledge in which we can believe.

Where does Starmer believe he’s going with this? Honestly, I don’t think he gives it much thought. He’s doing what the civil service and the Bank of England tell him, and his utterly authoritarian personality is completely content with that. Whereas Labour in the 90s, as previously mentioned, had grand plans for the future, Labour today basically doesn’t discuss the future. The closest we get to any sense of inspiration or idealism is a tacky, shallow nationalism, long on Union Jacks and slapping the word ‘British’ onto the names of things, but basically absent of actual vision. They’ve even abandoned all three of Tony Blair’s top priorities: this government cares about education so little that it has basically committed to allowing universities to fall into bankruptcy. It seems we may be moving from a knowledge-based economy to a nothing-based economy.

There’s nothing left

Another huge difference with a quarter century ago is the state of the Labour left. That is to say, there used to be one of those back then.

New Labour’s Peter Mandelson famously declared that the radical left of the party would be contained within a ‘sealed tomb’, which was an acknowledgement that it would still be tolerated to exist. The Socialist Campaign Group (SCG) of MPs did indeed play a very minor role during the early years of the government, but as Blair and company began their hard shift rightwards to keep pace with US President George Bush and his war agenda, they actually found something of a renewed relevance. Once Labour was out of office, they were useful tribunes for the movement against austerity, and it was this situation that opened the way to SCG member Jeremy Corbyn becoming Labour leader. And even if literally everyone else in Britain is well over that experiment, the Labour right never will be.

Obliterating Corbynism is so utterly central to Starmerism that, in a sense, it has no other ideological goals. The first move was, of course, to expel Corbyn himself from the party, using the manufactured accusation of anti-Semitism against him as a pretext. The SCG were spectacularly useless in their response to this, and basically did nothing to defend him. Then SCG MPs, like Sam Tarry, were deselected by their Constituency Labour Parties on a variety of dubious bases, and still the group did nothing. Worse was, however, to come.

When Russia illegally invaded Ukraine in 2022, as a result of a long process of deadly brinksmanship on the part of the USA and Nato, the Stop the War Coalition immediately put out a statement urging the world to pull back from the horror of great-power conflict and call for negotiated peace. SCG MPs initially signed up to this … and then promptly withdrew it when Starmer threatened them with the Corbyn treatment. This was a huge betrayal of the group’s ideology and history, and also the beginning of the end of the SCG as a meaningful ideological block. Within a year, SCG members John McDonnell and Nadia Whittome had in fact signed a pro-war statement calling for America to send more weapons to Ukraine, more even than was White House policy!

 Within weeks of the 2024 general election, seven more SCG MPs were in fact removed from the Parliamentary Labour Party when they voted for a reversal of the Tory cap on child benefits that was proposed by the Scottish Nationalists, McDonnell among them. This actually caused some disquiet beyond the ranks of the left: they were all backbench MPs, and it is considered very harsh and irregular to punish backbenchers for voting with their consciences. The majority of this group did then vote to oppose the fuel payment cut, which will surely ensure they never be allowed to sit as Labour MPs again.

But what did the remaining SCG do? Well, if indeed the group does officially still exist, the answer is that with the aforementioned exception of John Trickett, they abstained from the vote. Trying to work out who would be an SCG member, if it still exists/ed, is frustratingly difficult to do, but as best I can work it out, they were overwhelmingly just not in the voting chamber, being some twenty-or so of the absent MPs. A larger number of Labour MPs were simply on leave, and it’s difficult to be 100% sure who’s who. An exception would be Liverpool Walton’s Dan Carden, who voted with Starmer, something for which I very much hope he gets a traditional scouse tongue-lashing.

It is not hyperbolic to describe this situation as a collapse. The Labour left is, to all intents and purposes, actually dead and not merely trapped in the tomb. As the wider left, labour and social movements begin to assemble a challenge to this government and its vicious assault on the working class, this is one of the aspects of the changed world that we will have to consider in our strategy from now on.