We now live, despite appearances, in an age of consensus. We should perhaps call it Starnakism, a much more profound consensus than Blatcherism (the portmanteau of Blair and Thatcher) or the postwar Butskellism (Rab Butler and Hugh Gaitskell). Its most telling feature is that the Labour party’s fundamental criticism of the Tories is their lack of competence, rather than their policies.
Yet the idea that Labour remains a progressive social democratic party hiding in plain sight is still in the air. While it is granted this is not obvious from its programme, it is held that deep down it is the party of change, of welfare, of state intervention; the party of labour rather than of capital, the party of international law, not war. It is held that in power, either circumstances or opportunity will make it more radical. That hope animates many.
Yet Labour is telling the world otherwise, and we should believe it. While the Tories promise tax and welfare cuts, it offers minor increases in tax and spend, premised on cuts in other areas. Labour says it will not increase benefits, or remove the two-child cap; it will only make improvements to education and healthcare that are trivial in the context of the challenges faced, adding only marginal numbers of appointments and teachers.
It tells us it is now the party of wealth creation and growth, not redistribution or equality (that is, people at the bottom will only get more if the size of the cake increases, and they will keep the same share of the cake as before). It sees no Israeli war crimes in Palestine. It will marginally retilt capital-labour relations, which one hopes will reduce inequality somewhat, but it does not differentiate between good and bad types of business – all business is good. Brexit is accepted.
Many will undoubtedly find this hard to believe. But the whole premise of Keir Starmer’s Labour is precisely that it needed to hug Tory dogma tight, perhaps to the point that it believes it. Starmer’s Labour does not believe that the key voting parts of the British public want change, and it may well not believe in serious change itself. That is a legitimate position for a political party to take, not least a party its leader calls “my” Labour party and which he constantly tells us he has changed.
But it is not the historic position of the Labour party, as is obvious. Labour was once, from its founding and into the early 1990s, and briefly between 2015 and 2020, something very different. In 1945, in 1964 and in 1974 there was a contest between capitalism and social democracy, between two different sorts of parties. Labour believed you couldn’t leave economic transformation to the private sector. It acted to decrease inequality between people and regions, which involved much more than growth. It wanted state pensions yielding 50% of final salary, plentiful public housing, free university education and much else besides, achieving much of its programme. It also believed in promoting a more truthful account of the economy and society than that provided by the dominant ideology.
Labour no longer believes any of this. It believes in the sagacity of private capital, and thinks it will unleash growth through financial orthodoxy and deregulation – exactly the policy not only of the past 14 years, but the past 40. Labour very obviously no longer believes in the programmes of 1945, 1964 or 1974. Like New Labour, it believes in the power of capitalism, whether entrepreneurs or financiers. Labour no longer believes as it once did that it had a more truthful account of the country than the Tories: it believes and tells Tory stories about the nature of public spending or foreign policy. It may be the cost, Labour people may say, of operating in a Tory world, but it may be an indication too that Labour has become like the Tory party.
The recent past suggests some warnings against such consensus politics. Under Blachterism, New Labour, far from becoming hegemonic, ran its support into the ground. This was obscured by the first-past-the-post electoral system, which at the time gave Labour high seat shares from low vote shares. In 2005, its vote share was down to 1979 levels; in 2010 and 2015, it was down to near 1983 levels. Meanwhile, the vote share of the Tory party increased with every election to 2019, when it reached 1979 levels.
Like other formerly social democratic parties in Europe, Labour was on the way out. It had nothing left to say. Indeed, the nadir of Labour support came not in 2019, as so often alleged by Starmer’s Labour, but in 2010 (with 2015 not much better). Jeremy Corbyn’s dismal 2019 performance was better in vote share than that of Ed Miliband or Gordon Brown, and indeed that of Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock in the 1980s.
What does this suggest for the future? Three possibilities arise: first that Starmer’s Labour, like New Labour, does not deliver the change that many voters expect and is replaced in office by a party even further to the right than the one it displaced. That is far from implausible, given the realignment we may expect involving hard-right Tories and Nigel Farage, and the political energy and money available to them. Many correctly fear this.
But there is a second scenario in which Starmer’s Labour succeeds, as New Labour did not, in fully marginalising the Tories; Labour would, in effect, becomes a new, competent, small-C conservative party. This would be welcome – a Starmer-led conservatism is infinitely preferable to a Sunak-led one. It also opens up the possibility that the stultifying consensus of the past 40 years is broken not by the extreme right, by new political forces of the centre and left – who have fresh stories to tell about where we have been and where we might go.
The third, and as things stand least plausible option, is that Starmer’s Labour becomes that party of change, rather than the party that has changed.
David Edgerton is Hans Rausing professor of the history of science and technology, professor of modern British history at King’s College London, and the author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation
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