As Politico notes this morning:
The consensus that this [shadow Cabinet reshuffle] is a ruthless march of the Labour centre/right (delete as appropriate) at the expense of the soft left is unanimous. One MP tells the Times' Patrick Maguire: “Even Tony Blair didn't have this many Blairites in his cabinet.”
That commentator may well be right.
There is, however, a problem. As Owen Jones has noted in the Guardian, at least Bair had some big political characters in his Cabinet, and people with opinions. Starmer has almost none. Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband have to fill those roles, and they are clinging on, just about, to their positions and are unlikely to have any real clout. The apparatchiks have the day, but no one is ever going to suggest that Liz Kendall is going to create political excitement.
It could, of course, be argued that I am an old social democrat who was once to the right in the arena Labour occupied, who is just having another moan about the fact that Labour has now occupied the space the Tories have vacated since Cameron quit. And maybe those saying so are right. Except, that is, for one thing. And that is that right across the country there are very large numbers of us who think that way.
We want a proactive government that seems to meet real needs in society.
We want problems solved.
We don't want to watch Wes Streeting suggesting, as he implied on Sophy Ridge's programme last night, that Labour's fiscal rule is more important than providing schools, let alone safe ones, for children affected by RAACs.
We do expect a government to tax if that is required to meet the demand for public services.
And we mostly definitely expect that it will be the rich who will pay more because they are so grossly undertaxed now.
What is more, we do not believe that the market knows best because the evidence is overwhelming that on a great many issues it does not.
So, Starmer can build a party that is full of Blairites, but it is not clear that Blair ever really possessed the answers needed in the 1990s, and he most certainly has none for today. In other words, Starmer is building a shadow Cabinet that has no clue how to provide the active government that this country now requires if any of its problems are to be solved.
Starmer has won his battle with the left in Labour. But he's made a useless party of prospective government as a consequence. That will not be a price the country will think worth paying when it realises just how ineffective he intends to be in Downing Street because with this lot in his team, that is all he can be.
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“Starmer (is building) has built a shadow Cabinet”.. of yes men & women.
The modus operandi is identical to that of Stalin (for example): surround youself with talentless ciphers that make you look good
The Owen Jones article was good. What should frighten people is his last sentence:
“When the reality of Starmerism – and the Blairite coup – becomes evident in government, it will be their disappointment that will be the bitterest.”
“Their dissapointment” being UK serfs.
I guarantee, this will lead to proto-fascism as vile-liebore shows it can do nothing & the vacant political space is then occupied by … something/somebody offering “solutions”.
Popper in the Poverty of Historicism was highly critical of taking past events and using them as forecasts for future events. This overlooks one reality: people, and their reactions, views etc don’t change that much, they still expect results from politicos & if there are none – will turn to others to deliver a result. Vile-Liebore will have a honeymoon period & then having some fresh meat to feast on, the meeja will close in, whilst the political vaccum will be reoccupied by a more “solution orientated” party.
Let’s hope they aren’t oriented around some sort of ‘final’ solution. I really wouldn’t put it past the present players.
The Owen Jones article, Mike Parr and your note all concur with the people I have spoken to in the last fortnight – shopkeepers, SME owners, retail workers, cleaner, teacher, neighbour (Remain and Leave). All see the Tories as having wrecked the country, and all but one (SME owner and Labour councillor) see Starmer as offering nothing, being continuity Tory. If they are vaguely representative of ordinary citizens, the opening for a vaguely socialist party – or more likely a radical party of the far right – is a wide one with a receptive audience.
The councillor BTW said that if the ‘soft left’ got the boot, then he’d consider his position. Wonder how he interprets yesterday’s reshuffle? Allin-Khan’s valedictory snipe?
The sad thing is there is no coherent alternative. The Greens have financial and internal issues; the rest of the left are fragments, and the only icon tends his allotment, a bit like DeGaulle waiting for the nation’s call in Colombey-les Deux Eglises.
For me, this is very disappointing.
Even though I cannot wait to see the back of the Tories – indeed – I want them humiliated at the next election as they deserve to be – my concern with the Blairite faction is that that fundamentally it is a weak position to be in anyway.
Blair and Brown – by embracing certain thatcherite principles – always left the door open for the Tories to come back in and reek havoc (the NHS for example) and favoured faux cack-handed public spending deals like PFI to avoid the tax question.
What we need is the door firmly shut on thatcherism (no capital ‘T’ for me to spell out this malignant form of thinking) and something new.
But really, what Stymied and indeed what the Tories do is always play to the unseen crowd who really run Britain. They are signalling to them not to feel threatened. To be honest, it has nothing to do with you and me.
It’s pathetic really isn’t it, in this day and age?
The theory that a Starmer Labour government disappoints, leads to dissafection, and so that inevitably leads to a far-right NatCon Tory victory afterwards, ignores electoral demographics.
Younger and working age people who are overwhelmingly supporting Labour now (with Tory support in the youngest cohorts in single figures!), are not likely to flood to the NatCons in massive numbers. The Green party and Lib Dems are waiting in the wings to hoover up disaffected Labour voters. This is what happened after the Iraq war – the Lib Dems gained, and the ‘Green surge’ was (in large part) an outworking of Labour and Ed Milliband prevaricating on austerity.
In a few years time, the Greens and Lib Dems can (will?) be reaping big dividends of a disappointing Labour.
Good to see the point being made that New Labour, and the Starmerite New Labour Mk 2, do not represent views from the right and centre of the Labour party pre-1992.
Rather they represent views from beyond the right of the traditional Labour party, somewhere near the 20th century centre of British politics, in other words closer to the political ground occupied by the Liberals.
What Labour members think of it was clearly demonstrated in the post Miliband leadership election when the party voted for a leftier-than-thou old troublemaker like Corbyn, who was at least identifiable as representing part of the spectrum of traditional Labour views, rather than three Blairites.
I doubt whether disaffected labour voters under thirty will be voting for libdems. They are the ones who have large debts for their higher education because of the libdems.
I asked my sons about that.
They had no awareness of this and did not in any way associate it with the LibDems.
Really? My granddaughters and their friends do, one with a degree from Manchester and one from York, both with large debts that their parents and grandparents never had.
Being from socialist families they know that the libdems joined with the tories to put up the cost of going to university between 2010 and 15 from £1000 to £9000 a year.
Who pays your sons’ tuition fees?
Have you not told them that the libdems joined the coalition on the promise of not putting up fees, then promptly caved in?
No, in a word….politics moves on and I don’t choose parties based on past mistakes or I would not vote
The British ‘Left’ politics is kind of stuck in a cycle of following Conservative administrations. Starmer is to Cameron as Blair was to Thatcher.
I am at a complete loss to explain why the labour party feels the need to imitate Conservative administrations that failed and became internally divided. Though what it does say is that we are in age of imitation.
Only need to look todays eastern Europe to see that imitation leads to democratic failure.
I liked the “Sophie Ridge problem”.
Corrected
Against this backdrop of mediocrity, Starmer’s dull star will shine the brightest.