Party Poopers
On Starmer’s complacency and the potential of a new socialist party
Keir Starmer’s assumption, as was Tony Blair’s, is that the left wing of the Labour party have nowhere else to go. The demographic of this ‘left’ has shifted, of course. In response to the so-called Red Wall’s collapse under Corbyn in 2019, LOTOs strategy (if it can be said to exist) has been shaped entirely by a genuflection to perceived social conservatism. Influenced by the psycho-social politics of cultural divide flogged so expertly by pop-psychologist Jonathan Haidt, Labour see their only route to power going through focus-group triangulation, either affirming Conservative policy (more police, more flags), or being outflanked by it (no corporation tax rise). There are many things wrong with this strategy, but most interestingly here are two mistakes: first, they essentialise the Northern Voter by assuming a general latent patriotism and allergy to radical policies of any kind; second, by insuring the whole electoral gambit pivots on this first group, they exclude the urban ‘new working class’: multicultural, female, service-working, and no less insecure (often more so) than the old working class. In keeping with his existence as a ‘1997 tribute-act’, Starmer mirrors Blair’s fatal mistake, an understanding of which allows us to avoid a narrative of 2019 that pins the loss of much of Labour’s classic heartlands on Corbyn. The truth is that the Red Wall was fracturing long before Corbyn became leader. Blair’s modernising vision of Third Way politics, detaching itself from the corpse of unions and redistributive agenda’s under the white-heat of globalisation, catalysed the neoliberalisation of Labour’s old heartlands, the concentration of wealth in the City, and the hollowing out of representative democracy. After his victory in 1997, he consistently hemorrhaged votes from the areas that have now been christened the ‘Red Wall’. The core point here, then, is that while Blair took the traditional left for granted, Starmer’s whole politics is premised on a misguided attempt to reintegrate them, while deliberately distancing Labour from the new, New Left.
Once again, the assumption in both cases is that this left has nowhere else to go: if it did, it may indeed change the calculation. So emerges the Northern Independence Party: starting as an internet joke, it is has now bagged Thelma Walker — an ex-Labour, thoroughly left-wing MP — to stand in the Hartlepool by-election on a platform of geographical equality, democratic socialism, anti-racism, green jobs, and anti-Westminster populism. This is fascinating, not least because the positions mentioned here is a roll-call of the kind of progressive vision Starmer presumes the homogenous Northern Voter is allergic to. He ignores strong traditions of anti-racist organising; the allure of high-tech renewable industries; and the emancipatory potential of a democratic regionalism, able to appeal directly to the palpable alienation the rest of England feels toward London. Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Leeds: the North is moreover not solely made up of bitter ex-industrial towns, but is also a site of exactly that new working class Labour disavows in their Bobbies and Beers Toryism-lite. Geographical dichotomies — that ‘progressive’ equals London, ‘regressive’ equals Northern — are exploded here. Time will tell how successful NIP is, but my sense is that a democratic-socialist populism that draws upon Northern ‘traditions of solidarity’ against the ‘Westminster elite’ — the latter as caretakers to our heavily financialised and extractive economic model — may prove a real problem for a complacent Labour party.
But NIP also serves to resurrect a certain bone of contention for the left in Britain: the viability or not of an alternative socialist party. My position on this is that, given First Past the Post, Labour is the only plausible route to government. Many, I think, would agree. But a plausible route to government is not the only goal of parties. Instructive here is the case of UKIP. In traditional metrics, they were decidedly unsuccessful — they barely ever won any seats; their party leader, famously, lost in Thanet South over and over and over again — but Farrage and his whole project is perhaps the most successful political force in Britain over the past two decades. They pushed the Conservatives to the right by peeling off votes and catalysing anti-EU sentiment, both in wider society — appealing to the anti-politics generated by neoliberalism’s technocratic ‘non-politics’ — and in the Tory party itself, bolstering internal Eurosceptic forces. UKIP no doubt benefitted from the concentrating effect of a single-issue programme, but this was only as potent as it was because it served as an implicit metonym for a wider crisis of legitimacy afflicting late capitalism. The question the left faces is whether or not a similar maneuver — a new socialist party emerging at Labour’s radical flank, dragging the country leftwards — could be pulled off.
A new party may be exceptionally useful in terms of cohering and articulating social forces that presently lack any kind of general organisation. Corbynism failed, in short, because it was a party without a movement; the problem now is that the left is a movement (of sorts…) without a party. The only organisations with any institutional footprint to come out of the Corbyn years are Momentum and The World Transformed. Both are very promising, but they still possess a certain periphery-ness when it comes to the world of Westminster. This is not necessarily a bad thing; indeed, it seems to very much be the point: to build social forces outside the state through education, agitation, and organisation. But they lack the condensing effect a party cold hold; to be able to channel energies directly into a political force with an explicit platform, with elected representatives, to provide the left with a voice in established channels that is not utterly saturated by bureaucratic wreckers. If it is properly resourced and properly populated, with high-profile orgs and individuals jumping ship, it would benefit from media logics love of conflict and get a seat on the table — a la Farage, who despite never actually being elected, was a routine fixture of current affairs programmes because of his (to speak euphemistically) ‘watchability’. If this party, freed from the strictures of Westminster respectability that bogged down Corbyn in Labour, could articulate an unapologetically oppositional politics, one that lobbs the political, economic, and media elite in one corrupt systemic bag, it might quite successfully re-articulate the radical anti-politics sentiment evidenced by recent protests, and that continues to come out sideways in conspiracy theories and apathy. It could hegemonise the new working class Starmer takes for granted, while rejecting the culturalist dichotomy between their interests and the idealised ‘Red Wall’ voter. Lean, biting, confrontational — it could be just effective enough to shift the balance of power, without pretenses to being a party of government.
The main risk, it seems to me, is that there may not be enough high-profile actors to jump ship while retaining a powerful organisational base in Labour; and if so, I’m not so sure the gambit would work. UKIP only succeeded because they emboldened the Tories right-wing; this tacit alliance is exactly what led to the parties purification of Cameronite big-society neo-liberals, and its present configuration under Johnson’s reactionary neoliberalism. The movement is spread thin as it is, and the central task should certainly be directed toward building power outside of traditional politics while staking a position within Labour as Starmer’s leadership continues to implode. Nonetheless, if it is indeed possible to fight on three fronts at once — extra-parliamentary community organising; the Labour party; and a new socialist party — it may prove a particularly effective grand strategy.
