Pity the Labour MPs huddling in the bars of Liverpool during their party conference. Most of them were elected for the first time last year. They might have expected to be swaggering in the annual shindig as masters of the universe. Instead, it is more of a therapy session.
Naturally, when things are going badly for a political party meetings become blame-storming sessions with the leadership being the immediate scapegoats. Under pressure, Keir Starmer seeks to placate his critics, only adding to the incoherence. U-turns, reshuffles, phase one, phase two. Mission statements that nobody can quite remember. Emphatic pledges of confidence in ministers who are sacked the next day. A refusal to express confidence in the Chancellor who then bursts into tears and is kept in office.
Bewilderingly contradictory signals keep coming out of Downing Street. This weekend we had the Prime Minister denounce Reform UK’s of policy of abolishing indefinite leave to remain for migrants as ‘racist’. Now there can be lots of valid criticisms of the policy – that it is unfair or unworkable, that it would apply too broadly to those who have integrated and are making a positive contribution. But there is no suggestion that it would not be applied to white people. So hard to see how it is racist. Nor does it seem much harsher than the Home Secretary’s plans to make it harder for migrants to qualify for indefinite leave to remain.
On welfare spending, we have Pat McFadden, the Work and Pensions Secretary, making some robust comments. I’m assured by someone who knows him that it is not just rhetoric – he is a true believer. Yet we also have briefings that the Government intends to lift the two-child benefit cap – adding billions more to the benefits bill and trap yet more households in worklessness cascading down the generations.
Amid all the gaffes, the splits and the spin seen each morning on the front pages, it was something of a relief to read an essay in The Times by Patrick Maguire. It suggested that away from Westminster during the summer, some Labour MPs had been thinking a bit more deeply into the predicament they find themselves in.
An anonymous paper has been circulated among them, which, despite its pretty brutal analysis, has met with some approval. Part of the allure is of a secret text being distributed covertly, at some risk. One thinks of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, the fictional book in George Orwell’s ‘1984’: ‘There were whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author, and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as “The Book”.’
Anyway, Maguire has blown the whistle. The content is on The Times website. It begins:
The government has reached a fork in the road. Either to follow its instincts and take the easy path of the status quo and failure, or make the hard journey of reform and national reconstruction. Which way? It does not know because it is divided in itself.
The Labour Party ‘retains its old atrophying instincts and repeats its mistakes, ad nauseum’. ‘The country is ungovernable,’ continues the cheery analysis. ‘The left, dominated by the professional middle classes and public sector, is the defender of the status quo.’
The challenges are cultural as well as economic:
There has ‘been the emergence of multiple ethnic communities, with no incentives to integrate, living in parallel cultures to mainstream society and its social norms and symbols of nationhood. Liberal multi-culturalism has led to identity politics, igniting an ethnic, class consciousness amongst the working and lower middle classes of the dominant ethnic group, driven by deep feelings of injustice and dispossession.’
The growth of the ‘professional managerial class’ has prompted a popular revolt. When Labour represented the working class it had ‘the political force for brokering minority ethnic groups into a common national culture. It no longer has the impartial authority of the labour interest to fulfil this role’.
The economic situation compounds the difficulty:
Providing a powerful dynamic generating the political energy of these conflicts, is a broken, debt laden, high tax, low productivity economy, characterised by wealth extraction and rentierism, and burdened by unsustainable levels of welfare spending and a bloated, wasteful, ineffective state.
No political party has a solution to the long term decline and stagnation of the economy and none are willing to confront the electorate with the trade-offs and hard choices that will be needed for national reconstruction.
It may be too gloomy about other political parties. I suspect both Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage recognise that some pretty drastic changes are required to restore both national cohesion and nation solvency. In other countries, such as Greece and Argentina, we have seen how dire the situation has to get before bold reforms are accepted to facilitate a recovery.
Yet for this Labour Government, it is hard to see a way through. Starmer probably has a big enough majority that would have allowed him to face down his left-wing rebels to cut welfare spending. But he has not shown the temperamental inclination to do so – even assuming he believes it to be necessary. For all those Blairites challenging the Government for being too feeble to take on the vested interests, there are plenty of others in the Labour Party yearning for undiluted socialism. ‘We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets,’ as Andy Burnham told the New Statesman.
In his Times essay, Maguire asks:
With a few exceptions around the cabinet table, this is not a government that has devoted much time to solving the conundrum that so few progressives have ever cracked: what exactly does it mean to rule from the centre left in an age where there is so little money to spend?
Consider all those Labour MPs who went into politics to speak up for the underdog, to champion the poor, to crusade for equality. It seemed so obvious that a bigger state was the mechanism to achieve this. Some now see a state where the rich are rewarded with fat cat public sector salaries and the poor are trapped on welfare. Where planning rules thwart the building of new homes – keeping house prices high and the gap between the haves and have-nots ever wider. It is welcome that they discuss this so clearly – albeit in samizdat form. But, as the dissidents themselves concede, there is precious little sign of their Government acting on the scale required.
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