Starmerism, what is it really?

Labour's leader is forging a new kind of party adapted to today's political environment

We all want to understand the new government and hence the general desire for a definition of Starmerism, a quest that even after 100 days of government has proved fruitless. The problem I think is that the idea of “Starmerism” comes with baggage. The word is an echo of “Thatcherism”, and that leads us to follow the pattern and look for a political ideology; we want to know what Keir Starmer “stands for”. And at this point we go wrong for while Starmerism is real and distinct, it isn’t simply an ideology. Just as importantly, it is also a particular approach to managing ideological tensions within the Labour Party.

The best sketch of the tensions I have so far come across has been provided by two academics, David Klemperer and Colm Murphy, after a field trip to the Labour Party conference last month. They have discerned three economic outlooks within the mainstream of the party: neo-Bevinite, neo-Blairite and neo-Croslandite.

In the telling of Klemperer and Murphy, the neo-Bevinite and the neo-Blairite tendencies are both primarily focussed on generating growth but disagree over how to achieve it. The neo-Bevinite tendency is statist in attitude and hawkish on foreign policy, the natural home of Rachel Reeves’ securonomics. Currently in the ascendancy, it embraces a contextually-dependent mixture of regulation, subsidy, direct state intervention, derisking of private investment and targeted instances of deregulation. It is:

“…supported by more moderate trade unions such as the GMB, and theorised by think tanks like Labour Together and the IPPR. Heavily influenced by Bidenomics in the US, this agenda centres on boosting growth and economic security through supply-side intervention and active industrial strategy. Core priorities for neo-Bevinites include increasing capital investment in infrastructure and the green transition through the National Wealth Fund and the publicly-owned Great British Energy.”

By contrast, neo-Blairites are techno-optimists. They are:

“…heavily oriented towards business, seeing private enterprise as the primary source of economic and technological innovation. … they are generally more sceptical about the role of the state, and so push for a more hands-off approach to the private sector. … attracted by the lure of foreign technology firms and sympathetic to internationalised businesses, neo-Blairites often downplay the geopolitical dimension of industrial strategy, preferring to emphasise the opportunities presented by openness to foreign companies, technology, and capital.”

The neo-Croslandites are motivated not by growth but by a desire for traditional social democratic redistribution. As such, it is the reflex attitude of party members. It is:

“…less interested in supply-side reform of the market economy than in using its proceeds for egalitarian ends, seeing fiscal redistribution through the welfare state as Labour’s central animating purpose. In practice, they primarily want to see more anti-poverty measures (such as the repeal of the two-child benefit cap), and an influx of cash into Britain’s crumbling public services.”

This instinctively feels right to me; as soon as I read it I felt that it had put into words my own impressions. At the same time, these are not terms, or even groupings, that people within the party use to identify themselves; the old language of the hard left (excluded altogether by both Starmer and this analysis), soft left (encompassing I would say the economic agenda of the neo-Bevinites) and right-wing (the label that is routinely stuck on and rejected by the neo-Blairites) is hard to dislodge. And they don’t simply represent power blocks that explain who will get their way; both Reeves and Ed Miliband on this telling are neo-Bevinites and yet his budget for the green transition has been the Chancellor’s first and biggest victim.

My only quibble is with the neo in the term “neo-Blairite”. Bevin and Crosland are both long dead and it is evident that their thought needs re-interpretation for the present day. Blair is very much still with us and exerting influence both via the huge Tony Blair Institute and his own direct patronage. I don’t see any re-interpretation of Blairism that is occurring without his seal of approval. So this remains an outlook defined by the man himself: Blairism not neo-Blairism.

The question then is how Starmer relates to these tendencies. Under Blair, for example, it was understood that the soft-left, represented in the Cabinet by figures such as Clare Short and Frank Dobson, were not part of the project itself but, for reasons of party unity, needed to be kept on side. Is this the pattern again now, with Starmer a neo-Bevinite who needs to keep the Blairites and neo-Croslandites on side? The answer I think is both Yes and No, and the reasons for both answers are to be found in Frank Dobson’s memorial service.

The service came at the end of 2019, a dark moment for Labour, after it had been trounced yet again in a general election. Corbyn had announced his resignation but the formal leadership process had not yet got under way. The service was held in the heart of Dobson’s constituency of Holborn & St Pancras, in the big church with the caryatids across the road from Euston Station. Dobson was a popular MP and there must have been the best part of 1000 people crowded in, including both Blair and Corbyn.

Dobson could be very funny, sometimes wielding his wit to make political progress. His eldest son Tom has inherited the talent and used the eulogy to brutally, yet to general laughter, remind both the Blairites and the Corbynites of their failings. In this way, he took his audience with him as he delivered a message that was never spelt out explicitly but was nonetheless implicit in everything in the service, right down to the choice of hymns: the party had to unite behind something like his father’s soft left position. The climax of the service came when the family gave the stage to the man who had taken on their father’s constituency and who, we understood, was well positioned to unite the party in this way, Keir Starmer.

It was an extraordinary piece of political theatre, all the more powerful for the setting in which it was performed. At the reception afterwards, I remember sharing with Margaret Beckett a moment as we both tried to come to terms with the emotional impact of the event we had participated in. To anyone who was there, which is to say almost everyone who was anyone in the party at that time, this was the moment at which Starmer became the heir apparent.

So there is a neo-Bevinite aspect to Starmer from the beginning and his programme in government might also be termed neo-Dobsonite. Dobson it was who, as leader of the council, hugely expanded Camden’s stock of social housing. Dobson it was who mercilessly flayed the privatised utilities for their failures. Dobson it was who moved the NHS decisively towards an evidence-led approach with the creation of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence. Dobson it was who set up NHS Direct, using technology in a down-to-earth way to provide a step-change improvement to the service. In a very neo-Bevinite way, this kind of soft statism works, achieving things the private sector can’t.

Today, I think Klemperer and Murphy are right to see neo-Bevinites in the ascendency. They ascribe this primarily to Reeves, Miliband and Johnny Reynolds, but who chose them? At the same time, it is noticeable that the ministries given to figures Klemperer and Murphy identify as (neo-) Blairites, Wes Streeting and Peter Kyle, are the kind that Dobson and Short got, semi-detached from the core economic questions.

All of this is evidence in favour of the Yes, Starmer is governing as a neo-Bevinite. But there is also evidence in favour of the No.

In his first speech as Prime Minister, Starmer told the electorate, “You have a government unburdened by doctrine.” Sure enough, the absence of doctrine can be found in the programme the government is setting out, in which there is an almost complete absence of general principles. So one can look at the King’s Speech and see the various bits of legislation that are on their way, but there is very little in the way of explanation for why the government is doing these things and not others. There is no equivalent of Blair’s Third Way. It’s just a list.

And the absence of principles extends into the detail. Klemperer and Murphy cite Reyonolds as saying his approach is different not just from the last 14 years of Conservative government but also from the last Labour government. But in what way is it different? You will find no explanation in his green paper on industrial strategy. There is nothing there that says what was wrong with past approaches, what needs to be repudiated or why, nothing in fact that can explain his use of the word “modern” as the defining characteristic of his approach.

This No aspect of Starmerism again reflects the path laid out by Frank Dobson’s family. The point of the memorial service was not for the soft left to dominate the rest of the party in the manner of a new Blair, it was for the soft left to provide the leading, convening impetus that would allow the party to unite and return to power. It was by following this playbook and recruiting support from all sides that Starmer won the leadership contest. Thus an intrinsic part of Starmer’s role is not to project any particular ideology but to hold the ring and reconcile distinct outlooks within the party.

At the outset, I think the broad church sketched out was sincerely open to at least parts of the hard left, as reflected in Starmer’s appointment of a militant but young and pro-European MP, Nadia Whittome, as his PPS. However, the boundary has since been redrawn with the hard left effectively excluded. Klemperer and Murphy don’t even bother to mention it. I know MPs softer than Whittome who fear it is only a matter of time before they have the whip withdrawn.

To sum up, Starmerism is a neo-Bevinite approach to politics tempered by a self-denying awareness that, for the sake of unity and victory at the ballot box, Blairism and neo-Croslandism have to be accommodated rather than confronted. The difficulty that many have found in defining it arises from the fact that part of its character is to avoid too clear a characterisation of its ideology, the better to accommodate the secondary ideologies.

One advantage of this approach is that it might allow Labour to avoid the kind of tensions between Blair and Gordon Brown that beset New Labour. Another is that it makes it easier to maintain the unity of the party against potential splits. Starmer’s own share of the vote in Holborn & St Pancras went down thanks to an incursion from a George Galloway-style hard left candidate who assiduously courted the muslim community. Blair’s central contribution to shaping the direction of Labour in office is A New National Purpose, a techno-optimistic report that has set the agenda for Streeting and Kyle and which he co-authored with William Hague, a cross-party intellectual alliance that could easily form the basis for a new party.

At least for now, Starmerism’s favoured way of moving forwards is to avoid any discussion of underlying principle in public. It is happy to tell us what it is going to do, but not why. As Rachel Coldicott has put it, “Reading the Data Bill. My considered comment is that having to work out policy positions from draft legislation absolutely sucks. This way of doing things means that we don't get the big conversations about purpose or direction; everyone has to focus on detailed concerns about specific measures and outcomes as they are set out.”

The innate obscurantism of this approach has echoes of Brown’s habit of redistribution by stealth. As then, one price is a missed opportunity to shift public opinion and the potential for rapid unravelling once Labour leaves office. Unlike then, it also means there is no overarching narrative coming from the government, a void others will happily rush in to fill. And, since only insiders are involved in the discussion of principle, it involves a deep centralisation of power that is vulnerable to avoidable mistakes.

Part of the reason for the obscurantism is I think a kind of emptiness arising from the collapsing plausibility of a Green New Deal in the UK. This was supposed to be the centrepiece of Starmer’s first term and would have cemented both a coalition within the party and an electoral coalition. But the original £28 billion a year has been hugely scaled back as the poor fiscal position has become clearer and no clear path has emerged to capturing vast new green industries. There is no clearer acknowledgement of the impossibility of repeating Bidenomics in the UK than the crystal clear opposition to tariffs in the green paper on industrial strategy.

Now there is no unifying mission. Instead, there are the five “missions”, which are less missions and more statements of predicaments. It is thin gruel, and again just a list. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Starmerism will eventually have to become more overtly neo-Bevinite and start to make the principled case for the soft yet often radical and effective statism at its heart. It’s not an easy sell, but neither was Tom Dobson’s.

PS Yes, I’ll happily call myself a neo-Bevinite.