More in sorrow than in anger

There’ll be some changes happening on this Medium blog over the next couple of weeks.

Much of the material will be getting deleted and moved across to my professional blog that more clearly reflects my work.

What remains will be the posts entirely about the Labour Party. Separating them out from the other writing is important, because I want to be judged, in my work, on my work, and because my relationship to the Labour Party is changing.

That change is something that’s been coming for a while.

I’ve never voted for any party other than Labour, and I’m not sure I envisage that changing in the short term. I’m not just a lifelong Labour voter though. I’ve been a lay officer of the party, a local councillor, and a fulltime employee of the party. At times in my career in local government I’ve fought tooth and nail for the right to be active in the party, and to hold political office.

Tomorrow I’ll cancel my direct debit for my party subscription. I’ll do so with very few regrets, and over time, as the party reacts to my decision, my membership will lapse.

I’m fond of telling colleagues and friends that often, when a relationship breaks, there’s a clear precipitating event which only makes sense in the context of the whole relationship. I call it the shirt on the floor moment; the shirt casually cast aside isn’t the reason why the break becomes inevitable but it’s the moment at which it becomes obvious to at least one of the parties to the relationship that they can go no further.

The shirt on the floor for me has been Keir Starmer’s visit to Jesus House, a homophobic and transphobic Christian institution. As an incident it’s been revelatory about both the state of the party as a political operation, and it’s exemplified the culture wars within Labour that I no longer want to be part of.

One of the difficulties I have with Labour, and its political approach since Tony Blair’s leadership ended is that it is, fundamentally, situational and reactive. The result is that its policy positions have been, at best, incoherent, and at worst, incontinent, subject to revision at any time, and for any or no reason.

That’s not necessarily an unconditional endorsement of Tony Blair, by the way, simply a recognition that there was a confidence and certainty about his approach to leadership that has been absent since.

Why did Keir Starmer go to Jesus House? Why didn’t he know that there might be issues about the past attitudes of the church and its senior figures? The decline in the quality of Labour’s political operation, and the failure to read in advance situations that are obviously high risk seems to me to be emblematic of a party ill at ease with itself, and trying to resolve too many internal conflicts.

All those questions need to be answered before we even move onto the tertiary questions around why Stephen Timms felt the need, after Starmer had garbled his apologies, to further endorse Jesus House. If Starmer was consistent, and Jesus House were beyond the pale, what would the Labour party do about an MP who continued to endorse them?

Nothing, apparently.

It’s not as if Starmer is a leader who has qualms about using the party’s internal disciplinary processes to make clear which messages are acceptable or unacceptable. Quite the opposite. Under Starmer the party has taken a carceral turn, with the leadership happier using disciplinary processes than engaging in debate, especially over the vexed issue of antisemitism. That unwillingness to engage in debate means Starmer appears unable to critically engage with those around him who do not share his professed views on issues like LGBT rights. It’s why his apology has the flavour of one of those corporate apologies, which apologize for the fact that someone is offended, but not for doing the thing that caused offence. Less an apology than an act of appeasement.

I’ve had issues with Labour’s posture with regard to GSRD issues for most of the last two decades. I understand that I take a radical stance, compared to some, but my view is that the party’s stance on such matters is incoherent because it addresses them on a case by case basis, not as a subset of some fairly fundamental issues around bodily autonomy. If my body is mine it is no part of the state’s role to tell me what I can or cannot do with it once I have given my informed consent. That’s a principle that must underpin our approach to reproductive rights, to sexual freedoms, and to a whole range of issues around gender and relationships. I’ve thought that since I first engaged, as a student, with the issues behind the Operation Spanner case, and I’ve always been worried by Labour’s unwillingness to open the topic up to a wider discussion. The way in which the current leadership is willing to pander to all sides in a culture war over gender and sexual orientation is both the logical result of a posture of wanting to garner as many electoral votes as possible, and of the lack of any abiding message or outlook that can win over a coalition of voters willing to compromise to get a party they broadly agree with into power.

I’m cancelling my party subscription not just because I am troubled by the party’s incoherence and inconsistency around issues of bodily autonomy, but because it demonstrates no evidence that it has any idea about how to achieve that consistency. Not just on hot topics like bodily autonomy or gender; Labour appears to have entirely lost its way in terms of having any policy base or core beliefs. Every policy, every announcement, every pledge appears to have been summoned from a superficial analysis of some focus groups in a performance of cargo cult Blairism that is transparently shallow.

From this perspective, looking back, it’s clear that Blairism was both a dead end, intellectually, with the Third Way being nothing more than a subtle way of describing neo-liberalism with a gentle face, and the end of any pretence that Labour was anything other than a neo-liberal party. Even the National Policy Forum was ruthlessly gerrymandered to ensure compliance with the party line, then sidelined when even that degree of internal party democracy became too much for the leadership to allow. Nevertheless, compared with the shambles of a party that Starmer is now leading, it was possible to subtly self deceive oneself into a position of belief that the party might regenerate itself.

That belief has died in me. I cannot see how this Labour party can regenerate itself, or why I should do the intellectual or personal labour of trying to persuade Starmer’s bureaucracy to do some more thinking about key issues.

Let me give you a practical example. High streets. The government have made great play of their investments in towns and high streets. There’s a powerful argument to be made that the government’s current programme is more like palliative care than regeneration, and that what’s needed is a radical policy that moves away from gentrification and geriatrification of town centres towards an acceptance that fifty years of misguided development management and over-emphasis on retail have led to town centres that are stuck in an evolutionary cul de sac of our design. What we got from Starmer’s Labour, and what we’re being offered, is a version of the government’s high street fund, but with Labour in charge. Even to his best friends, that must seem like a pretty thin gruel, and from where I’m sitting it looks like the laziest kind of politics. As the opinion polls appear to be showing, if you offer voters a choice between Tories and ersatz Tories, they’ll choose the real thing rather than the shallow imitation.

There’s a similar shallowness about Labour’s response to the government’s latest announcement of funding for towns, and the criteria on which it has been built. Labour is right to argue that there’s something wrong, and almost corrupt, about the way in which the funding is to be distributed. It needs to make a more compelling case though than just bickering about who benefits or what criteria should be used. That would require Labour to dig into some difficult ground about the way in which tournament funding and central government control has created a neo feudalism, where loyalty to government and support for it is rewarded by grants like a medieval king handing offices and incomes to loyal barons. Instead we have Labour MPs whinging about the use of isochronic measures (how long it takes to get to places) in the criteria as being somehow unfair, when there’s a pretty clear correlation between a lack of public transport, long journey times and the unobserved but very real poverty of the unwaged or underemployed in small towns and rural England.

I could go on, but why should I? I’ll add one further point, then get on with the business of cancelling subscriptions. I attended the AGM of my local CLP a few weeks ago. Despite high party membership figures, it was far worse attended than the first Blyth Valley AGM I attended nearly two decades ago. The quality of the debate was, frankly, appalling, and the overall impression was of a party going through the rituals of being a party without knowing why. My time of doing such things because I have a belief that somehow, locally, we can make people’s lives better by winning local councils to Labour has come to an end. There is nothing in Starmer’s approach that suggests he’s about to embrace subsidiarity or the power of the local. Quite the opposite. Starmer’s Labour shares the Blairite adoration of the idea of devolution through the creation of local mayors; the antithesis of genuine devolution, in that the elected mayor is simply the baron who negotiates with increasingly centralized power. My time of hoping for better is done.