This is an edited version of an introduction to some themes in his book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022)  that Mike Phipps gave at a recent conference organised by the journal Historical Materialism

I want to do three things: locate the rise of Keir Starmer’s politics in the crisis of European social democracy; look at what the demographics from the 2019 general election tell us about left strategy going forward; and focus on four areas where the left can make headway within the Labour Party.

The crisis of European social democracy

Many of the problems facing the UK Labour Party are shared by democratic socialist parties in western Europe. In 2017, the German SPD got its lowest vote since the Second World War – just 20%; and even though it won office in 2021, as part of a coalition, it did so with just 26% of the votes cast. The Netherlands’ Labour Party, which produced several of the country’s post-war prime ministers, is today a broken shell. It got its worst showing ever in the 2017 general election, reduced from 29 to nine seats, making it the seventh largest grouping in Parliament, a result repeated in 2021.

Ireland’s Labour Party, formerly the junior party in coalition government with Fine Gael, fell to just seven deputies in 2016’s general election and six in 2020, its lowest-ever share in the Dáil. Even in Norway, where the Labour Party topped the poll in September 2021’s parliamentary election, it did so with just 26% of the vote, one of its worst ever results. In France’s 2017’s legislative elections, the Socialist Party was reduced to 6% of the vote and just 29 seats. Only in coalition with other parties of the left has the French SP made a comeback, which is true also of democratic socialist parties in Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

One party bucking the trend is the Portuguese Socialist Party, which seven years ago formed a coalition which included the ‘hard left’ and embarked on an anti-austerity programme, which within the year halved the budget deficit and created sustained economic growth and falling unemployment – proof that the financial crisis could be tackled without destroying jobs and living standards.  In 2019, as Portugal headed towards a zero budget deficit, the party won re-election.

Portugal was the exception. From the 1990s on, many of these parties embraced the free market and the rampant individualism that underpinned it. Social solidarity, the guiding principle of the welfare state, was abandoned in favour of workfare targeted at an ‘underclass‘, created by preceding waves of de-industrialisation that crippled the organised labour movement and crushed its militancy. Commitments to social equality were reduced to equal opportunities. Even in the boom years, New Labour governments in the UK failed to eradicate child poverty. The economic crash, a priceless opportunity to demonstrate the perils of unfettered capitalism, found all these parties ideologically bankrupt. Only those that re-committed to redistribution and social equality appeared to stand any hope of success.

This was the position of Labour after 2015. Corbyn reset Labour’s core values back to community, cooperation and collectivism. “We understand aspiration and that it can only be achieved collectively,” he declared.

These are basic democratic socialist values. This helps us to understand, as I point out in my earlier book, For the Many, that Corbynism was less a populist disruption of the political system and more a return to a popular democratic socialist expression from within it.

What does Keir Starmer stand for? Not the continuity with Corbynism that he promised in the ten pledges he made when running to be Labour’s leader.

Starmer expounded his true values last year, repudiating these Corbynist principles, but not really setting out an alternative vision in the manner that Tony Blair did, who can at least be credited with an attempt to find a new ideological grounding for his political project, even if New Labour’s communitarianism ultimately owed more to one-nation conservatism than social democracy.

In 2021 Starmer published a 12,000 word essay, The Road Ahead, outlining his ‘vision’. The pamphlet’s overarching ‘big idea’ was the “contribution society”, a slogan masking recycled ideas about a partnership between state and private sector where “we don’t treat the economy as a battle for supremacy between public sector and private sector, but a joint effort.” The pamphlet ended with a set of ten unremarkable principles: “We will always put hard-working families and their priorities first; If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be rewarded fairly; People and businesses are expected to contribute to society, as well as receive,” and so on.

Theresa May’s former Chief of Staff Gavin Barwell said he agreed with eight out of Starmer’s ten principles and partially agreed with the other two, adding, “This either means I am in the wrong party or they are so bland that they don’t tell us anything useful.”

In practice, the content of Starmer’s politics appears to be based on two things:

• a triangulation between the politics of the government and the critique of it mounted by the left, where the left is still the main source of new policy ideas;
• patriotism, as seen in the abstention on the Overseas Operations bill, Spycops legislation and recent statements on migrant workers.

This may be what he really believes. Or it may be due to electoral calculation, based on a false reading of the 2019 election result and its demographics.

What the 2019 result tells us

In 2019, the Tories gained 329,767 more votes compared to 2017. Labour was down by 2,582,011 votes. Where did the other votes go? The Liberal Democrats gained 1,324,562 votes, and the Greens 340,032 votes. In the north, the Brexit Party made gains at Labour’s expense, in Scotland, the SNP benefited. Abstention was also a significant factor.

Age, as well as geography, was also salient in this election. The pollster YouGov reckoned that 56% of voters aged 18 to 24 voted Labour and although the Labour vote declined the older the voter was, it was only among the over 60s that the Conservatives had a clear majority.

The Devastating Defeat Report highlighted how in young cosmopolitan centres of the ‘new capitalism’ Labour won seats for the first time in 2017: diverse communities, with large numbers of private renters and graduates and high house prices. This was not because Labour was ‘woke’ or fixated on identity politics. As Owen Hatherley said: “Londoners were voting further left than anywhere else because they had less disposable income than anywhere else, worse housing than anywhere else, and were more obviously exploited than anyone else.”

On this analysis, a renewed focus on class inequalities in social and economic policy could unite Labour’s younger metropolitan voters and its more traditional base of support. Speaking of which, Labour did not lose its working class base in 2019. Of the 20 constituencies with the highest level of child poverty in the UK, 19 are Labour.

The notion that low-income workers shifted significantly to the Conservatives in 2019 is also wrong. Figures suggesting otherwise include both the unemployed and, more critically, retirees. Once the latter are omitted, the margin of advantage enjoyed by the Conservatives among low-income voters not only disappears – it is reversed.

But it shouldn’t be too difficult to construct a voter base that includes the elderly as well. Given that Britain has the lowest state pension of any developed nation and nearly 2 million pensioners living in poverty, a commitment by Labour to improving pensions could be pivotal to winning back older voters. Equally significant could be a clear plan to reform social care, which bleeds away the savings of older people to fund the highly lucrative but appallingly managed private care sector.

In 2019, Labour also lost about 600,000 voters to the Liberal Democrats and Greens. If Labour triangulates too far to Conservative positions, the Party’s younger voters could easily fracture to the minor parties, as the May 2021 council elections in Bristol and the London mayoral election showed, Andrew Fisher has explained this and also pointed out that an estimated 1.4 million people who voted Labour in 2017 did not vote in 2019. “Non-voters require a different strategy. They haven’t voted, so you have to inspire them.”

Starmer chooses to ignore this and focus on the loss of ‘red wall’ seats – as opposed to the general change in the Labour vote. This has led him to focus on a politics that he believes will win them back. A leaked internal strategy presentation in February 2021 recommended that “The use of the flag, veterans, dressing smartly at the war memorial etc give voters a sense of authentic values.”  Of course, the very articulation of this underlines the lack of authenticity in the whole endeavour!

Ex-soldier Joe Glenton said about this recently. “The new leadership is not concerned about veterans; it is trying to use veterans and the military to bolster its authentocrat credentials.” He quoted one ex-soldier who said, “[Labour would do] better pointing out that the lowest paid and most dangerous jobs in the army get done by people from certain areas that had substandard education and a lack of options, who fought wars so others could get rich.”

The other aspect of the appeal to the ‘red wall’ is trying to attack Tory asylum policy from the right – for example, the Rwanda flights were denounced only as “unworkable” by the front bench rather than for the gross violation of human rights they are. Similar recent statements from Labour’s front bench take the same tone.

Besides alienating more liberal-minded voters elsewhere, this sort of stuff is unlikely to impress the ‘red wall’. The irony is that recent data suggest that the number of voters who believe immigration is an economic and cultural benefit has never been higher.

But it is not only on this issue that people are more progressive than Starmer thinks. Kenan Malik points out: “The key feature of Britain over the past half century has been not social conservatism but an extraordinary liberalisation. The annual British Social Attitudes survey has tracked ‘the onward march of social liberalism’. On a host of issues, from gender roles to gay marriage, from premarital sex to interracial relationships, Britain has liberalised to a degree that would have left the average Briton of the 1980s aghast. It’s not just metropolitan liberals but society as a whole, including the working class, which has embraced this change.”

Starmer’s politics rejects this. His stance is repugnant to many socialists and many have left the Party, unhappy with the direction of travel and also with the internal regime which has seen hundreds of members suspended and expelled, and left wing candidates barred from running for office, most recently Maurice Mcleod, Lauren Townsend, Emma Dent Coad and Maya Evans, as well as sitting MPs deselected, for example, Sam Tarry.

Opportunities for socialists in the Labour Party

But there are some good reasons for socialists to be in the Party:

1. 20,000 members joined since Party conference. They are not necessarily pro-Starmer or tied to any particular faction. They are probably repelled by the Tory government and want something better. If Labour does win the next election, probably in the worst economic circumstances an incoming Labour government has inherited since 1945, they are likely to be profoundly disappointed in what that government can do. The left needs to be present when those conversations take place.

2. Without overstating the case for a new municipal socialism, there is a lot happening at the level of local and regional government. The Preston model of Community Wealth Building; the work of Mayor Jamie Driscoll in North Tyne; Corbynist activists applying a new community politics to transform the way local government operates are all referenced in my book. This is important because it is prefigurative of what is possible and also because local government was, and in many areas still remains, the Achilles heel of Labour – its paternalist managerialism and imposition of Tory cuts helps explain why Corbynism did not cut through in many traditional heartlands.

Regional government is worth underlining too: in 2021, when Labour nationally was still losing heavily, as in the Hartlepool by-election, Welsh Labour got its joint best ever result in the Senedd elections – not bad, after 20 years in office – running with a different brand and distinct policies compared to Labour nationally. To some extent, that experience has been replicated with higher-profile city mayors, notably Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester.

3. Policy. The left under Starmer continues to win the battle of ideas repeatedly at Party Conferences and some of these ideas have been influential on shaping party policy. The policy debate is a lot less factionally polarised than the Party’s organisational battles.

4. The organic link with the trade unions. There are parallels between now and 1992 – the retreat from the left and purge of socialists – but the big difference is that the union leaderships are not part of the exclusionary project, but are fighting battles which are having an expression inside the Party. Conversely, attempts to build a socialist project outside Labour without that organic link are doomed to failure, replicating the worst features of personality and differentiation from Labour in every case, from the efforts of Arthur Scargill to those of George Galloway and Chris Williamson.

Mike Phipps’ new book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.