Wand live in an age of perpetual conflict. The global crash, the pandemic and now war and the cost of living crisis have shown us our economic and political systems are not fit for such chaotic times. The tide is now going out on one era, and the Labor party seems to have been left behind. It appears perpetually out of step, most recently when it sacked MP Sam Tarry, the now former Labor transport spokesperson who dared to stand on a picket line with striking workers, and lost his job shortly afterwards.
Labor in its post-Corbyn period is desperately searching for a playbook that will win it the next election, or at least keep it electorally afloat. But the only one to hand is apparently New Labour’s – and they offer a desiccated, joyless, and stripped bare version of that more interesting but long-gone moment.
Keir Starmer’s game isn’t to inspire with hope and a grand vision, but to play a glorified game of whack-a-mole with every possible Tory attack line. He promises, for example, “no magic money tree economics”, no nationalization of public services, that Labor won’t talk to the SNP or deal with Liberal Democrats. And the unions must be held at arm’s length so as not to frighten the horses of the right or some fictional middle England swing voter. When really, even the more conservative voters he hopes to reach are concerned about wages and the cost of living.
Labor puts itself in a terrible position. It won’t spend its way out of the cost of living crisis and the recession to come because it’s busy tying itself up in orthodox Treasury knots, spewing out the line that governments are like households and can’t spend what they don’t have . Which is absurd, first, because households often spend what they don’t have, not least through mortgages. Governments can both borrow like that (with better rates and terms) or they can print money – as they did throughout Covid. But Labor is determinedly shutting this door, playing-acting at what it thinks political grownups do.
It is also shutting the door on one of the best solutions to the cost of living crisis. One of the jobs of a union is to negotiate better wages from company profits, and it’s clear people are willing to go on strike rather than suffer eye-watering real wage cuts that leave their families short. It is the job of the party of labor to back them. To be clear, none of this is some Scargillite game of revolutionary toy soldiers. This is ordinary union action, using methods – such as strikes – familiar to all and protected by law. Moreover, this is a real-life crisis for millions of scared ordinary people. Labor cannot afford to be seen as anything but on their side.
The Starmer project, if we can give it such a grand title, knows how brittle and exposed it is in all this. It won on a Corbynism-without-Corbyn ticket and then ruthlessly and cynically kicked that all away. What matters here isn’t an adherence to Corbyn himself, but an analysis of the current situation, and a set of ideas and movements that stand at least a chance of addressing the age we now live in. Jeremy Corbyn was an implausible leader, but there were genuinely popular ideas and a willingness to take on modern challenges found in his movement. Not least revitalizing trade unionism.
Enter Tarry, one of the stormtroopers for Corbyn’s leadership and an advocate of Labor backing people who actually labor (in 2010 Tarry and I both worked for the campaigning organization Compass). This landed him in the crosshairs of the leadership’s panicked attempts to both rid the party of any voices of hope and reason, and pivot back to a fifth-form play of the New Labor era. It will not work.
What would work, or at least stand a chance, is to learn the lessons of Joe Biden in the US and Olaf Scholz in Germany, who both embraced the left of their parties and at least enjoyed the electoral spoils. What also works is the way Andy Burnham has used the platform of mayor in Greater Manchester to address the cost of living crisis via ownership and control of the buses and therefore lower fares. Burnham has also made democracy and proportional representation a first-order issue by saying that whatever we want, we won’t get it until we change the political system. Or the way that Mark Drakeford, the Labor leader of Wales, has put ideas such as a universal basic income on the map.
Meanwhile Labor turns its face against the moment. Complacency about a Liz Truss premiership could rebound in the way the left’s complacency about Margaret Thatcher’s election to the Tory leadership did in 1975. Parties have to win office to do anything. But without a purpose, a vision and hope, Labor is doomed to fail at that.
But that’s not the worst of it. Rachel Wolf, a former Conservative adviser, wrote recently about “the specter of a rise in populism haunting (us)”. If the Tories continue to crash and Labor fails to offer any desirable or feasible alternative, waiting in the wings is something much worse.
The choice between a terrible party and a less terrible one is no choice at all – not when the planet burns, and people are starving. Maybe the widespread reaction to Tarry’s sacking will be a wake-up call. It can never be too late.
www.theguardian.com
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism