In most of the polls, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party now leads the Tories by over 20 per cent. While polls can be wrong, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Tories have a huge mountain to climb if they are to avoid defeat at the next general election. But what will a new Labour government – the first since Gordon Brown’s administration left office in 2010 – mean for the country? What policies will they enact to change the depressing vista we see before us today?
Starmer’s lead in the polls reflects neither his personal popularity nor the popularity of his policy agenda. Rather, it reflects the dour negativity that pervades British politics today. Many voters aren’t planning to support Labour because they’ve identified something positive in Starmer’s project. They plan to vote Labour because they’re sick of the Tories. Starmer’s incremental rise in the polls reflects nothing other than the electorate’s growing exasperation with a gaffe-prone Tory party paralysed by the fear of taking any positive action to correct any of the problems we face. Beset yet again by allegations of sleaze, unwilling to take any meaningful action to curb inflation – save for applying the time-honoured and deeply anti-social measure of making people poorer in order to encourage prices to fall – the Tories seem simply to be biding their time and planning for a prolonged period of opposition.
Starmer’s apparent success in the polls is simply the inverse of the Tory party’s deep and multifaceted failure. Thus far, his strategy seems to have been to stay quiet on matters of policy while trying to draw as much attention as possible to the failures of the government. In a two-horse race, Starmer has opted for the time-honoured, sensible but deeply uninspiring strategy of endeavouring not to lose. But what will a Starmer government mean for the people?
The sad fact of the matter is that Starmer is as committed as the Tories are to reproducing neoliberalism’s orthodoxies. He has no interest in abandoning an economic model that has made the poor progressively more insecure and the rich a lot richer. He will not intervene in any meaningful way to address the huge gulf between rich and poor, and nor will he do much to boost the living standards of those who suffer most. Ultimately, he has come to the view that his hands are tied, and he must work within the system as it stands. He believes absolutely that money is in short supply and the country cannot use the power of its sovereign currency to embark upon a new era of public spending and investment. He no doubt hopes that the choppy waters of the global economy calm, that no new crises emerge, and that his time in office will be relatively uneventful. Our public services will continue to degenerate, our infrastructure will become yet more dilapidated, and our towns and cities will be ruined by the various forms of blight that inevitably follow a lack of care and investment. He will no doubt remain unconcerned that imminent global economic decoupling will be managed in the interests of existing elites and that the energy transition will be led by private investors and profit-obsessed corporations.
The absence of genuine political antagonism is a dead weight upon our nation. In terms of economic policy, the differences between the Conservative and the Labour parties are so tiny as to be insignificant. No matter which party is in office, we see the reproduction of what already exists. No real alternative to current orthodoxies can be seen on the field of mainstream politics.
When faced with a political impasse of this kind, it behoves us to ask how we got here and what we might do about it. Across the political spectrum, there is a general desire to restart the engine of history and move into the future with purpose. And yet our technocratic elites continue to care only about maintaining our socioeconomic system in its current form. Armed only with a cacophony of banal soundbites – about why we can’t fund our public services adequately, why we can’t afford to pay frontline workers a living wage, why we can’t invest in infrastructure and rebuild manufacturing industries, why we can’t offer immediate help to the poorest, why we can’t secure full employment, and so on – they have no positive message. They want every one of us to accept that any attempt to make things better will inevitably make things worse.
It is now high time that we engaged in some genuine truth-telling. There is no longer any comfort to be found in voting for the least-worst option. Given the huge scale and variety of the problems we face, we desperately need to construct a new positive politics. In The Death of the Left, we chart the forces that have led us to this bleak destination. Why is the left so obviously incapable of articulating an appealing alternative to our present system? Why is the left unable to unite the people around common interests? Why are so many notable leftist radicals concerned only with the injustices of the cultural sphere, and apparently disinterested in the injustices that develop from our existing model of political economy? And perhaps more to the point, how can we break out of the present deadlock and create a new left genuinely committed to the interests of ordinary people?
Simon Winlow is Professor of Social Science at Northumbria University.
Steve Hall is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at Teesside University.
The Death of the Left by Simon Winlow and Steve Hall is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £12.99.
Bristol University Press/Policy Press newsletter subscribers receive a 25% discount – sign up here.
Follow Transforming Society so we can let you know when new articles publish.
The views and opinions expressed on this blog site are solely those of the original blog post authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Policy Press and/or any/all contributors to this site.
Image credit: Ryan Underwood on Alamy