On the eve of Labour’s Conference, Mike Phipps reviews The Starmer Symptom, edited by Mark Perryman, published by Pluto.

What does Keir Starmer represent? Does his wing of the Labour Party stand for anything beyond an unrelenting hostility to the left and a ruthless determination to acquire and wield power? It may be too early to say, but many people have already made up their minds.

Starmer defined by a contempt for the left

Clive Lewis sets the scene in his Foreword to this new collection: “The Jeremy Corbyn wave that swept Labour in 2015… represented a demand for genuine democracy, pluralism and transformative change… For many, it was the first time in living memory that Labour had felt like a movement rather than a machine. Yet even amidst the promise, a clear tension existed between traditional Labourist centralism and a more expansive, pluralistic politics. Today, Keir Starmer’s absolute determination to distance Labour from that era speaks volumes.”

For Lewis, “Starmer’s relentless drive to move on from the Corbyn era reflects Labour’s enduring aversion to genuine pluralism.” He notes “the pathologising of dissent while conformity is rewarded.”

This conformity is expressed in the political choices made: the rejection of public ownership, the government’s closeness to corporations, its timidity on climate change, its support for Israel’s war on Gaza.

Lewis is not the only contributor to see the essence of Starmer in his desire to distance himself as far as possible from his predecessor – notwithstanding the continuity pitch he made when running to replace him – and to resort to an unprecedented authoritarianism to do so.

Emma Burnell is no fan of Jeremy Corbyn, as is clear from her chapter – and her track record: she penned a Guardian piece a few years ago headlined “Rachel Reeves was right – Labour must reduce people’s reliance on benefits”. But she too is willing to call out Starmer Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney’s fanatical obsession with witch-hunting the left. She gives several examples of this factionalism as self-harm, particularly during the 2024 general election – the ousting of Chingford and Woodford Green Labour candidate Faiza Shaheen mid-campaign and the failed attempt to do the same to Hackney North’s Diane Abbott. The fundamental culture of the Party has been damaged, she argues, with rules enforced selectively and factional allegiance trumping basic fairness.

Burnell highlights the limitations of these manoeuvres, even if supporters of McSweeney credit him with masterminding the 2024 election victory, something which not everyone would concede. She warns: “If it turns out that McSweeney’s clarity of vision began and ended with his changing the Labour Party, it may well be that his usefulness to Starmer and the party will run out.”

Starmer’s war against the left of his Party has caused considerable disillusionment among the grassroots and contributed to Labour’s current dire poll ratings. None of this might matter beyond the confines of Labour’s ranks, except that, as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, points out, that contempt spills over into Starmer’s approach to many causes and movements in wider society: “Starmer sees anti-racist, left-wing, pro-human rights and pro-Palestine Labour supporters as pesky, out-of-touch saddos he can well do without. The approach is mad, bad and dangerous.”

Starmer the vacuum

Gargi Bhattacharyya identifies this attitude as a product of political impotence. She sees the Starmer leadership as a “government blown around, painfully, by a world in which previous levers of influence have all but disappeared.” And they know it: “Not until Starmer have we seen a government say so openly how little could be done.” What is distinctive about the government is their attempt to blame asylum seekers for their powerlessness, although arguably this does not break new ground as far as previous Labour administrations are concerned.

Joe Kennedy sees the vacuum of Starmerism being filled by other divisive strategies, such as his quest for “authentocracy”, an attempt to leverage claims about class identity against the left. This was born from the right’s efforts to attempt to neutralise the radical egalitarianism of Corbynism by portraying it as out-of-touch with the hopes and needs of ordinary people. This too has McSweeney’s fingerprints all over it.

The lack of a coherent vision to the Starmer project is deliberate, argues Eunice Goes. The Prime Minister wants to project himself as a practical problem-solver, rather than an inflexible ideologue. The danger of course is that if a conscious political narrative is rejected, then unconscious prejudices, often rooted in social conservatism, will occupy the space. This is exactly what has happened – even to the extent of echoing Enoch Powell in keynote speeches.

Starmer goes for growth

Jeremy Gilbert also tries to pin down the essence of Starmerism. He writes: “The Labour government’s overarching ambition is to signal to the voting public and business community that Labour is serious about its commitment to economic growth: a monomaniacal obsession that has become the only thing resembling a strategy.”

He contrasts Tony Blair and Keir Starmer: “Blair had the full support of his party, the left having been exhausted and defeated… Starmer, by contrast, deceived and tricked his way into leading Labour in an entirely different direction from that endorsed by most of its members, and a large section of the voting public. Both Blair and Starmer came into office with huge parliamentary majorities, but Starmer’s… is entirely an effect of the right-wing vote having been split.”

And unlike Blair, Starmer has no clear project for government, for two simple reasons. Firstly, “Starmerism was never an answer to the question ‘How could Labour govern?’ It was only ever an answer to the question ‘How can Corbynism be expunged from the Labour Party?’”

Secondly, as Gilbert, says, “There simply is no possible project available to a British government that does not involve either allowing life to get worse for a majority of Britons or making a genuine challenge to the privileges of certain powerful social groups.”

These factors explain Starmer’s unpopularity. And if you wonder how this will play out, look no further than the US and the rise of Trump. “Disillusion with democratic politics is at an all-time high among the under-30s,” Gilbert tells us. “Young people know they live in a country governed by a political class that, for more than a decade, has shown nothing but contempt for them.”

Yet most people remain progressive: they voted for change, in particular a comprehensive curtailment of corporate power, including public ownership. Starmer hopes to avoid these challenges by delivering growth, which will lead to a trickle-down of affluence. It’s a misplaced gamble.

James Meadway agrees: “Whatever the question, Reeves has only one answer: growth. Which in terms of substance has more often than not meant simply grabbing the Treasury’s off-the-shelf big projects and presenting them as if new and decisive: Heathrow and other airports’ expansion on one side, a new ‘Silicon Valley’ between Oxford and Cambridge on the other. These are stale in the extreme as proposals, and do nothing whatsoever for Labour’s supposed heartlands – where, one presumes, a diet of migrant-bashing and occasional culture war jabs are supposed to keep the locals at least reasonably content – and are unlikely even to do much for growth.”

He points out that Starmer and Reeves’ economic strategy is in stark contrast to Germany’s, which has rediscovered the apparent virtues of government spending and debt funding. “In Britain, meanwhile, political economy is now tightly locked into attempting to maintain the primacy of finance and a growing military commitment. The losers in all this, whatever Starmer’s half-baked claims about jobs and investment via defence – research has consistently shown that military spending is extraordinarily inefficient in creating jobs – will be wider society.”

But growth has problems…

The dash for growth comes with a raft of problems. Danny Dorling suggests that it would be relatively easy for Keir Starmer to reduce economic inequalities by a greater amount than previous Labour Prime Ministers going back to James Callaghan. “But to do so means breaking with their, and his, fixation on a model of economic growth that contributes next to nothing toward such a reduction. More often than not, it does the reverse.”

In Dorling’s view, “Economic income inequality is the driver of more social ills than any other single factor.” What’s more, if people do not see their living standards rise, they will not vote Labour at the next general election. Already, three million fewer people chose to vote in 2024 than in 2019. “If a Labour government tackles inequality on the scale required, and that has a lived impact, it will galvanise a large proportion of the currently apathetic electorate to vote.”

Labour’s focus on growth brings further negative implications, argues Andrew Simms, from reneging on its pledge to reinstate a cap on bankers’ bonuses and relaxing rules on bank lending, to, more fundamentally, deprioritising the protection of nature. Fuel duty is frozen while the cost of cleaner, public transport is allowed to rise. Unwilling to take even minimal action against the major polluters, the Starmer government has at the same time abandoned its  pledge to invest £28 billion annually on green economic initiatives, leaving the country increasingly unprepared for the already impacting effects of climate change.

Challenges

What are the prospects of the Starmer government being forced to move in a more positive direction by outside forces? The trade unions might be in the best position to lead this, given their organisational and financial relationship with Labour. The 2022-3 fightback against the cost-of-living crisis saw the highest level of strike action for forty years. Yet, as Gregor Gall points out here, union membership fell by 200,000 in 2022 and now stands at just over 22% of the workforce.

“Ironically, this profound weakness has not necessarily made all in the leadership of the union movement more moderate,” Gall writes. “Some, like Unite’s Sharon Graham, have become more militant so that they have become trenchant critics of Starmer.”

But that verbal criticism rarely translates into action that could confront Starmer’s trajectory. The attempt, initiated by the RMT and CWU, to provide unions with an effective left-wing political voice, called ‘Enough is Enough’, quickly ended up being wound up. Even Unite has failed to fully use its influence inside the Party to work for greater democracy and a stronger policy agenda.

Public opinion, however, wants a more progressive approach. Hilary Wainwright contributes a hopeful chapter on the need for an independent left. But arguably the more immediate threat to Starmer’s government comes from the right.

There’s some useful material here on Labour’s opponents – the Conservatives from Phil Burton Cartledge and Reform from Joe Mulhall, who looks at the “emergence of an increasingly influential radical right ecosystem, comprised of think tanks, conferences, academics and media outlets, which has laid the groundwork for Reform’s rapid growth.”

While attitudes towards immigration, Islam and multiculturalism unite Reform voters most, anger at a perceived sense of national decline is another driver. “There is a clear correlation between economic pessimism and support for far-right alternatives,” writes Mulhall. “These insights into Reform voters suggest that the most productive tactic to stop Reform’s growth is, in the words of Hope not Hate’s founder Nick Lowles, to ‘identify softer Reform voters, for whom concerns about immigration might stem from economic insecurity and pessimism.’”

There is a lot to chew over here. As in the widely attended political discussions that he organises in his capacity as Political Education Officer of Lewes Labour Party, editor Mark Perryman, who contributes a thought-provoking keynote essay of his own, has deliberately cast the net wide in commissioning this collection. The result is a refreshing breadth of perspectives that makes this book probably the best assessment of Keir Starmer’s politics so far.

Special Offer: just £11.89 via Labour Hub instead of the usual price £16.99. Use coupon code ‘STARMER 30’ at Pluto Press here

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