Starmer must prevail
By the Marquis
Gordon Brown is ‘shocked, sad, and angry.’ Gordon Brown has been shocked, sad and angry now for the better part of two decades. Gordon Brown has been shocked, sad and angry at the Leveson Enquiry. He has been shocked, sad and angry throughout the lockdown, shocked that ‘the regions’ had been, in some ill-defined way, ignored, and saddened, saddened even to the point of anger, over the Covid PFI cronyism that had been rife under Johnson’s premiership - the kind of cronyism that, to be sure, would not have flown in his day. He has been shocked, sad and angry about assisted death. Most recently, he has been shocked, sad and angry about the fallout of the release of the Epstein files, regarding Mandelson and Prince Andrew: ‘It is hard to find words to express my revulsion,’ he has thundered - ‘time is overdue to let in the light.’ It is in Gordon Brown’s nature, perhaps, to be shocked, sad and angry; he is, as we have let him tell us, the son of a Church of Scotland minister. A man of strong passions and few words, Brown is the man the Labour Party wheel out as the voice of dour moral clarity, ready to go tell it on the mountain and inject a note of hardy Presbyterian seriousness into the proceedings when things take a turn for the tawdry. Under circumstances not dissimilar to those under which he was made Prime Minister, in the wake of the Cash for Honours scandal, Starmer has rewarded him for his outrage with an appointment as ‘Special Reviewer on Global Finance and Cooperation,’ a job nobody knew needed filling until now.
And who better than Gordon Brown to lend Starmer a stern but sympathetic ear? After all, Brown knows better than most how persuasive dear old Mandy can be, with that naughty-but-nice disgraced-former-drama-teacher charm; knows better than most too, knows all too well, that Starmer is not alone in having, in some moment of madness, thrown caution to the wind and overlooked some bit of sordid tabloid gossip about whose yachts he likes to lounge on, and what he might have said there, and for what money. As an unnamed insider told the Guardian after Brown unleashed his tirade over the most recent Mandelson debacle, ‘Gordon might not even be conscious of it or acknowledge it but he will feel guilty.’
There is a personal note to Gordon’s fury here, not in his allegedly troubled conscience, but insofar as some portion of that corruption was indeed aimed specifically at him, in Mandelson’s attempts, colluding with Epstein, to oust him (‘Bye, bye, smelly’) from government at the twilight of the New Labour era. Gordon Brown, in his telling of things since, has held fast to a version of events in which he appears as the morally upstanding but ultimately naive ‘son of a Church of Scotland minister,’ betrayed and outmaneuvered by his conniving court eunuch. This is an attempt to frame these sleazy goings on as acts of corruption carried out by a rogue element against New Labour, rather than corruption within New Labour, of the kind that came so naturally to that den of thieves, irrespective of whatever petty interpersonal struggles might have broken out amongst them as 2010 closed in.
Difficult as it is to pin down just one anecdote from Blair and Brown’s joint tenures to illustrate the culture of that period, none disgust me so much as this. At a well-attended Mayfair fundraiser in 2006, a copy of the Hutton Inquiry’s report on the death of Dr. David Kelly, signed by Blair’s wife Cherie Booth and Alastair Campbell, was auctioned off for the princely sum of £400. Dr. Kelly had been found dead in the woods near his home three years prior, after failing to convincingly retract his earlier alleged comments, naming Alastair Campbell as the force insisting on a ‘sexed up’ dossier that would overstate the evidence of Saddam Hussein’s WMD program, in front of a House of Commons committee. By the most charitable interpretation, the government was gloating over the death of a preeminent scientist they had bullied into suicide - a feat he carried out by an overdose of painkillers and slitting a hard-to-reach artery buried beneath the tendon connecting the thumb to the wrist (miraculously, without leaving his fingerprints either on the blister pack or the knife.) In the less charitable view, this was a man they had murdered. Was this enough to make Gordon Brown ‘shocked, sad and angry?’ Perhaps, in his own quiet, pious, barely-conscious “Son of a Church of Scotland Minister” way, he feels guilty about this too.
In recent years, months and weeks, we have seen the Blair era’s leading lights presented as the wizened old guard of the soft left, waiting in the wings to put a firm hand on the rudder of H.M.S Starmer and steer the ship of state clear of the Rocks of Populism. We have watched Alastair Campbell shoving the wing of his glasses half-way down his flabby gullet on The Rest is Politics; we have watched Anthony Seldon declare that Britain has apparently suffered a dire shortage of grey-faced crooks from the New Labour era representing the country abroad in recent years, and called for Blair (a man whose finances looked dodgy even to Epstein himself) to be appointed Foreign Secretary; at last, we have watched Harriet Harman and Gordon Brown drafted back into government.
Nobody can explain exactly what advice it is any of these people have to offer, what change in electoral strategy, what change in policy direction, because fundamentally, whatever differences there are in the successes and failures of Starmer’s government and those of the New Labour period, none of these are down to any difference in the philosophy, intelligence, or moral fibre of the squabbling crooks involved; they are born entirely out of material conditions that Blair and his comrades did not create the first time, and nor are they capable of recreating them now.
It has become somewhat of a lazy truism to call Starmer a ‘Blairite,’ so it’s worth explaining precisely what we mean by this, beyond the self-styled business-friendly ‘pragmatism’ around the economy common to both leaders’ public image. New Labour was, at bottom, the regrounding of the Labour Party as premised, rather than on the discrete, material interests of one particular class, on abstract, universal commitments to human rights and democracy; the victory of the charity fun-run over the miner’s march. Alongside this, it meant the evacuation of decision-making power out of Parliament to safer territory, to the deep interior of the state - to courts, to the regional assemblies, to international law, and various advisory bodies and QUANGOs - where those hallowed “commitments” will not fall prey to the petty bickering of party politics, the whims of the government of the day, or the judgement of reasoned debate. There is not one point of this on which Starmer has deviated even slightly.
May the reader forgive the slightly pedestrian pop-Marxist analysis I am about to squeeze out like a small, hard turd. The opening of the Chinese and ex-Soviet markets at the turn of the 90s had the dual effect of both diminishing the size of the working class in the West, as it became easier and cheaper to offshore industrial labour, while also unleashing vast sums of new capital, which the financialisation under Thatcher put Britain in pole position to reap the benefits of, far beyond our neighbours in Europe. By 1995, the stock of inward direct investment had tripled in the space of a decade and foreign investment sat at around 21% of GDP (this is compared with 3% for the UK today) drawing the children of the working and lower-middle class into the major cities, swelling the ranks of the fast-expanding professional class. If the Blair era showed a predilection for QUANGOs and advisory committees and NGOs, it is in part because, by 1997, the country had produced a surfeit of the kinds of people who might staff them. The stereotypical Guardian reader, the Northern diaspora in Islington, with his harissas and his tahinis and his steelworker grandfather, might regard the Reform-loyalist ‘Mondeo Man’ in Essex as a political enemy, but the fact is that both of them are children of the same phenomenon: the long Indian summer of Thatcherism, dragging on all the way until 2008. And, if we look at where Labour made its more unusual gains in 1997 - Basildon being the most obvious example - both, in all likelihood, voted for Blair.
Starmerism then is not a novel development on the New Labour project but its reactionary rear guard, attempting the same program under less friendly circumstances. In the context of the late 90s and 2000s, changes in the economy had created an electoral constituency that, while they might have had lingering sentimental and ancestral ties to Labour, no longer felt this to be tied to the politics of the trade unions, the old domain of the political left; the public purse was plump enough to allow for showy demonstrations of state benevolence, in new schools and public libraries; the internet was newer, and Blair and Brown’s governments were free to bully the press into compliance in a way Starmer cannot; the religious dictums of international law and human rights had a kind of happy confidence in the wake of the end of the Cold War which has since been lost, buffeted by the winds of Trump and Brexit. New Labour’s program, for all its faults, enjoyed a kind of synchronicity with the material conditions of the 2000s; Starmer’s program might also have enjoyed a kind of synchronicity with the material conditions of the 2000s, but unhappily for him, the 2000s have since ended.
In America, when the Democrats have felt the need to project a sense of preacherly moral seriousness, they have fallen back on the black church; unlike the Democrats, the Labour Party lacks a native pool of thundering Jesse Jackson figures to recruit from, so has to seek out another set of folksy accents to deploy. That of ‘The Regions.’ Gordon Brown, naturally, is a product of this but so too is a man I find even more irritating - Andy Burnham.
Over the last few days, we have been tentatively introduced to something called ‘Manchesterism,’ the opening salvo in Burnham’s much gossiped over plans to throw himself against the immovable force that is Keir Starmer. Ben Judah has taken no time at all in latching on to this portmanteau, presumably in awe that somebody has come up with a neologism in British politics somehow even more meaningless and annoying than ‘Anglogaullism.’
What exactly “Manchesterism,” Burnham’s pitch, might mean is vague and boring. Apparently, we can run the national economy along the same lines as Manchester’s “Bee Network” of buses; that means public ownership of things like transport, water and housing, but with greater authority on how those services are run divested to local assemblies. Rousing stuff from that shining city on a plain, home of Dan and Phil and ‘loaded spuds.’ What has gone unsaid in these discussions is that, unlike London’s Elizabeth Line, the ‘Bee Network’ was funded (some back pocket fruit machine change notwithstanding) overwhelmingly with money that arrived from outside of Manchester, to the tune of £1.07 billion, with a further £2.5 billion pledged in June of last year. By contrast, the funding raised locally comes to less than £150 million.
For another example as to what ‘Manchesterism’ has looked like so far, let us review the persecution that befell the English National Opera back in 2022, when Arts Council England threatened to cut their funding to zero unless they agreed to relocate up North, where they would be allocated a grant of less than half of what they had been operating on previously. When they understandably objected, Burnham felt it diplomatic to respond: ‘If they think we are all heathens here, that nobody would go, I’m afraid it doesn’t understand us and therefore it doesn’t deserve to come here. If they want to come, come willingly. If you can’t come willingly, don’t come at all.’
Listen to the entitlement, the provincial chestbeating, that just oozes out of those sentences and their miserably flat vowels. ‘It doesn’t deserve to come here.’ Nobody in France whinges that the Opéra National de Paris should move to Marseille, Leon, or Calais, but alas this is not France, and as with the BBC some years prior, eventually the ENO did in fact come, though I suspect not willingly.
Whatever ‘Manchesterism’ means, you cannot export it to the rest of the country, because at the local level, ‘Manchesterism’ has relied on Manchester being given preferential treatment, along with large sums of money from the rest of the country, by the government on DEI grounds; for reasons to do with the ‘left behind’, ‘levelling up,’ and in pursuit of ‘a more diverse array of regional voices.’
When the messiah claimant Shabtai Tzvi was closing in on death, leaving the world dim and unredeemed, he hobbled along the beach at Ulcinj and, gesturing across the bay, asked his remaining disciples: ‘How will you cling onto me? Perhaps until we can see beneath that cliff on the far shore.” This closing point has been made in these papers already, but is worth repeating in light of this week’s events. Starmer must stay. Starmer must not leave me. I will cling to him until I can see beneath that cliff on the far side of the bay.
Unlike with the leadership changes within the last Tory government, nobody who has put themselves forward within Labour to take the reins can explain exactly what it is that separates them from our Prime Minister, how they would turn this government around. Should he give in to the braying mob and announce a leadership contest, the British public will be subjected to a far more tawdry, pointless, unprincipled period of inflighting than anything we saw under the Conservatives between 2019 and 2024. It is a period that, in his most recent address, Starmer has described as one of unique chaos and indecision, but at the very least, Sunak could explain to the public that he thought the Liz Truss budget was a disaster and that he would’ve acted differently: which of Labour’s bickering mandarins can articulate a critique half so concrete about Starmer’s program so far?
Now is the time to rule with an iron fist. As of this morning, 81 Labour MPs have called on Starmer to resign; tell them to expect a knock on the door from Officer Mike Tapp and his well-fed attack dog. Tell them they’re in for a long, cold summer breaking rocks somewhere North of nowhere, and a long, cold winter after that. Tell them it’s time to turn around and face the wall. Tell Wes Streeting that if he keeps popping his smooth, round neck above the parapet, one of these days somebody might mistake it for a half-time orange and shut him up for good. This is ground control to Major Keir. Hold until relieved.