Keir Starmer is likely to be the prime minister in a few short weeks. Is there another, similar leader who could give us an insight into how he might behave in office? Starmer’s early promise was similar to that of Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, the electable face of an amicable centre-to-left. But Starmer abandoned that pretence the second he became Labour leader. He wishes he were Joe Biden, to the extent that he has followed the US line on foreign policy so closely as to alienate voters over his stance on Gaza.
In terms of his demeanour, he is reminiscent of Germany’s Olaf Scholz, and if elected, he may find himself similarly buffeted by history and unable to revive a stagnating economy. But lately, as reports have emerged of Labour enthusiastically courting consultants and lobbyists, Starmerism increasingly resembles the politics of France’s leader, Emmanuel Macron.
Under Macron, French governance has been opened to a veritable orgy of lobbying and the outsourcing of state functions to consultancies. In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, the French state was found to have spent €2.5bn on consultancies, up from €657m in 2018.
Rosie Collington and Mariana Mazzucato looked at Macron’s case in their book, The Big Con, and argued that the early failure of the vaccine rollout compared with France’s neighbours was likely down to McKinsey and other consultants becoming “central to decision-making processes and the management of the vaccine rollout”. Indeed, the centrist senator Nathalie Goulet even argued that the French state’s consultancy habit was undermining national sovereignty.
When I spoke to Collington, she gave me the example of the climate crisis: “The more that governments rely on consultancies for the production of core tasks and functions, the less they are able to learn from the processes, because they are happening elsewhere.” She told me that a government that outsources crucial functions will be less prepared for shocks in advance, and less adaptable when they arrive, and will have spent a ton of money in the process.
In other words, consultancies are to government what Monsanto terminator seeds are to farmers. A product that keeps the client coming back, because the information that would allow them to become independent is gatekept by design – never mind the democratic questions that are raised by policy and governance being outsourced to opaque corporations.
Labour has claimed it will halve the use of consultancies compared with the current government. However, Starmer’s actions suggest he may not keep this pledge. The practice of internal use of consultancies was ended under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, but it is back with a vengeance. Labour’s spending on consultancies quadrupled in the year to September 2023 in anticipation of an election.
Will a government staffed largely by people with no experience of pulling the levers of state swiftly kick out consultants as promised, or use them as a crutch? Opening up Labour to consultants also leaves it more vulnerable to lobbying, as the consultancies have access to likely future government ministers whom they can attempt to influence on behalf of other clients.
We know that consultants are scrambling for access to Labour: the Financial Times reports that lobbying firms are snapping up people from the Labour leader’s circle in a bid to influence the (probable) next government. Labour MPs have received large donations from banks, property developers, gambling firms and pro-Israel lobby groups.
We are seeing the impact of lobbying before they have even taken office. Of Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidates, 35 are current or former corporate lobbyists, consultants or work in public affairs. More than one of them has hosted meetings between shadow ministers and the business interests they currently represent. Executives are paying £3,000 for tickets to “business day” at this year’s Labour party conference, and the new deal for working people has been watered down, with businesses to be consulted before labour laws are implemented, and the pledge to ban zero-hours contracts quietly dropped.
Macron’s leadership has been dogged by these close relationships to lobbyists and special interests. When he was economy minister in François Hollande’s government, Macron secretly helped Uber disrupt the French taxi market and was later unapologetic about it in the face of the taxi drivers whose wages he’d helped push down. An agriculture adviser in Macron’s first cabinet was the former chief lobbyist for the wine industry. Several of his ministers were also former lobbyists and the Macron government found itself, at various points, facing allegations of successful lobbying by big pharma, high finance, the automobile industry and marketing firms.
There is an implicit understanding among many liberals that corruption is the preserve of the hard right: Trump, Bolsonaro, Johnson, Putin. But Starmerism, just like Macronism, may be about to institutionalise a politics of permanent conflict of interest.
The affinities between Macronism and Starmerism don’t stop at consultants and lobbying; in fact, the two share a class politics that can explain their prevalence. Macron won power in France first by assembling a coalition of the upper middle class of the left and right – a “bourgeois bloc”, as the French call it.
According to YouGov, as of February 2024, Starmer has a similar coalition. He is 8 points more popular with people in ABC1 social grades than he is with C2DEs. He is most likely going to win a majority, such is the strength of the negative polarisation against the Tories. But the core base of his politics is managers, lawyers and assorted technocrats. That these candidates’ political projects are mainly popular among affluent professionals helps explain why they are so open to capture by the class of professional lobbyists.
Ahead of the 2017 election, the French film-maker turned MP François Ruffin wrote an open letter to the “already hated future president”, a prescient document that pointed out the defects that would play out during the Macron presidency – and indeed Macron’s approval rating cratered the moment he entered office and has remained low. His bloc is projected to come a distant third in the snap legislative elections he called earlier this month.
We find ourselves in a similar context to the one Ruffin was writing in. The mood in the country seems exhausted and lacking in patience, even as Starmer is set to be elected. A new Labour government may well end up improving the profits of the interests lobbying the party, but not the lives of the majority that will put them in power.
If this happens, Starmer will quickly come to be seen as cold and out of touch, in hock to unaccountable lobbyists and business interests with a dwindling support base of true believers. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect we are looking at a soon-to-be-hated future prime minister.
Oliver Haynes is a freelance journalist, and the co-host of the Flep24 podcast, covering the French legislative elections
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