Bad governance – now and to come

JVL Introduction

Philip Burton-Cartledge’s All that is Solid blog is concerned extensively but not exclusively with British politics.

Here, in two separate posts, he casts a jaundiced eye on the party political world, taking aim at the Tories following Gillian Keegan’s loose talk over the escalating crisis of crumbling concrete in British schools and then at Starmer as he moves to make his counter-revolution permanent.

“While the resemblance between Starmer’s programme and the Tories are often overstated,” he remarks, “he has already taken on their bad governing habits: to their shared authoritarianism, you can now add the propensity to short-termism.”

It will be great to see the back of the Tories but the doggedly authoritarian style looks set to continue.

With thanks to Phil Burton-Cartledge for permission to repost.

A Note on Tory Carelessness

All that is Solid, 5th september 2023

Speaking off the cuff while the mic was hot is now the least of Gillian Keegan’s problems. As probably the most gaffe-prone Tory minister since Oliver Letwin was shut in the cupboard, in response to the crumbling schools scandal we have deflection (it’s Local Education Authorities and councils’ fault that classrooms are caving in), and we (reportedly) have the cynicism. Of the RAAC concrete crisis, Keegan apparently said “We just need to keep the lid on this for two years and then it’s someone else’s problem.” I’m all for truthfulness in politics, and even telling lies about right wingers is bad. But at this point it has enough “truthiness” about it, whether she said it or not. Because this sort of devil may care attitude is not a bug, it’s a feature. Remember, when he was Chancellor Rishi Sunak vetoed rebuilding money for half the schools on the emergency repairs list. And what do you know, those are the ones now presenting a danger to their occupants and disrupting children’s education.

Mainstream takes on why this sort of thing happens time and again falls into two types. We have the idea it’s “incompetence“, which is a favourite accusation of Keir Starmer’s and will no doubt get an airing at Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions. The other is “ideology“, that Tories are so blinded by their dogma that no amount of reality will make them change their ways. They are puppets in thrall to a set of propositions that sit in their heads. The idea of “shit state Tories“, featured in the New Statesman to explain Tory actions, is a spin on this well-worn theme.

Neither explanation is satisfying because they don’t take the Tories and their project seriously. The Conservative Party is a machine for inequality. It serves to protect and consolidate capitalist relations of production. That’s its bottom line so the boss class can safely tend to their bottom line. This is how they manage British capitalism – policies that obviously undermine economic growth are preferred to GDP-enhancing measures if they keep labour dependent on capital, and work to disorganise it as a collective political subject. They employ a variety of strategies to varying effect to maintain this status quo. Of course, because this is politics this has to be continually performed and applied and is by no means guaranteed to be successful. Indeed, we’re at a conjuncture where the Tory capacity to manage on these terms is increasingly exhausted and Labour are signalling that Starmer is ready to assume their task.

But because the Tories are exhausted doesn’t mean they’re going to stop trying. As explained here on several occasions, Tory strategy after the initial wave of Covid was to effectively put politics back in a box. Corbynism, despite its failure, managed to push the political envelope just enough that the the consensus around austerity realism was thoroughly punctured. And when Covid exploded in early 2020, despite the Tories dragging their feet, the state had to intervene to underwrite the nation’s wage bill and reorganise public services to respond to the health emergency. It’s no accident that no sooner were curbs on movement and Covid support packages in place that Boris Johnson and the right wing press started undermining their own efforts by talking up “freedom days” and, particularly, agitating for returns to work. They were conscious that the sudden expansion of emergency social security was completely at odds with the miserly class politics practised by the Tories since 2010, how they could raise political expectations and questions about how society should be organised. The situation could not be allowed to persist. Therefore, everything the Tories have done since, from winding down Covid mitigations to a vaccine-only strategy, and from there a no-vaccine strategy, to effectively ignoring striking workers, to refusing local government the money it requires, to refusing to bend to public pressure on environmental issues, and preferring that school children should have roofs fall on their heads than make available the money necessary to fix crumbling classrooms all come from the same place.

‘Incompetence’ and ‘ideology’ comprise an anti-Tory ideology in and of themselves because they distort what the Tories are about. They ignore other, most important I-word: interests. Without putting that at the heart of an analysis, mainstream commentators and politicians will never get to grips with them or the class relationships the Tories champion. Which, you might say, is precisely why they continue to push these limited and wrong arguments. They have an interest in not recognising these interests, because it means admitting that theirs and theirs are fundamentally the same.

Making the Counter-Revolution Permanent

All that is Solid, 4th September 2023

A reshuffle plays to the absolute worst of political punditry. As if armed with a fantasy football score card, commentators delight in promotions and revel in demotions. Faces of old having spent eternities on the back benches are welcomed back, while gasps and shocks surround unexpected removals and resignations. And that’s about the size of it. Which demonstrates the paucity of the lobby hacks who steal a living from writing on politics in this country. For Keir Starmer, as it is for Rishi Sunak, any other party leader, and every single council leader the cabinet is always about balances of power. A leader has to weigh their preferences and strategic direction against the strengths of the different wings of the party, and usually dishes out positions to the extent factional buy-in is secured. This basic truism was lost on Liz Truss, but not on Sunak who has locked in the right from the beginning.

Starmer might be (and in many ways, still is) limited about politics, but certainly not on this point. After the leadership contest his first shadow cabinet ranged across the entirety of the party. The soft left were the big winners while continuity Corbynism was given a few scraps. Very quickly, a pretext was found to get rid of the troublesome Rebecca Long-Bailey from Education and shifts right ensured her more junior colleagues resigned themselves away. When they were done, the soft left were evacuated from the Chancellery and Home Office shadows and in were drafted the horrors of Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper. Hilariously, Starmer tried removing Angela Rayner and was almost badly damaged when he found he could not. Yet , despite coming out of that episode strengthened, that has since been sapped by incessant anonymous briefings and her being powerless to get allies and supporters selected. That she couldn’t save her significant other from the deselection axe shows how narrow her writ runs. Now, Starmer has moved to make his counter-revolution permanent. Blairites and Brownites dominate the shadow cabinet, and the soft left are relegated to a supporting role. In other words, Starmer feels the balance has shifted so far his way he doesn’t have to bother with the big tent pretensions any more.

Still, it seems short sighted and unnecessary. His reshuffle demoted Lisa Nandy to shadow the non-existent international development portfolio, and in accepting it proves she’s willing to eat any shit to remain, in her words, a “team player”. It must be doubly galling to be junior to the foreign office brief she previously enjoyed, and especially having her loyalty rewarded with a bump down the ranks. Unlike nearly everyone else at the top table, Nandy can be a skilled performer when she dumps the dead-eyed wooden-top countenances mandated by front bencher media training. And she does have her own base, of sorts. You might recall that Nandy is commonly seen as being on the soft left – though she’s done nothing to merit this positioning. And during the 2020 leadership contest, after Jess Phillips dropped out Nandy became the favoured candidate of the PLP right (Labour First weren’t so stupid and constituted Starmer’s back office from day one). Though she didn’t win she showed a certain amount of across-the-party appeal – enough to be talked about as a future leader when a Starmer premiership hits the buffers. In a shadow cabinet of non-personalities, Nandy was at an advantage. She had to go.

The most serious miscalculation has been the ditching of Rosena Allin-Khan. In her resignation letter addressed to Starmer, she said “you made clear that you do not see a space for a mental health portfolio in a Labour cabinet.” As such, she would not serve in any other role if that position – whose introduction saw Jeremy Corbyn receive a rare moment of universal praise – was scrapped. And so back to the backbenches she goes. The politics of her removal aren’t too difficult to fathom, even if you don’t have a line on the gossip about shadow cabinet meetings. As a still serving A&E doctor, she has been an annoying presence in leadership meetings raising awkward questions about the role for business in the NHS. There is also a school of thought that she’s too close to striking NHS workers. Her presence in cabinet might lead to conflicts of interest and her being seen as the BMA’s woman on the inside. And lastly, her A&E work confers an authenticity virtually all her colleagues lack. Within government, she might have been seen as an embodiment of the NHS and its values, giving her a popular legitimacy independent of whatever position was doled out by Starmer, and with that a potential platform for a challenge. After all, Starmer has known for a year that she covets his job. Better neck the paracetamol of removal now than risking a splitting headache later.

While not on the left of the party, Allin-Khan is obviously a coming power. By giving her no choice but to leave, she’s now free to build up support in the Commons and in the country before and during the early days of the government. She has a justified grievance, and through her work on mental health has proven more in tune with medical need and popular expectations than her erstwhile boss. The second, more serious problem, is how Starmer has added to the problem of his divided base. Whether he doesn’t understand who supports him and why, or simply doesn’t care because polls and elections keep pointing to a thumping majority, the effect is the same. Among the professional managerial class there are serious jitters about Starmer’s leadership. That the more he talks about authoritarian modernisation, the less it resembles a programme of renewal. The prevaricating over fixing crumbling schools is a case in point. That makes some susceptible to lend their affections and their votes to other parties that diagnose the problem and have their own programmes of modernisation, threatening to fragment Labour’s base. And others, without any real choice, will be compelled to confront a Starmer government just as they have done the Tories. Who knows where that might all end up.

While the resemblance between Starmer’s programme and the Tories are often overstated, he has already taken on their bad governing habits: to their shared authoritarianism, you can now add the propensity to short-termism. Whether Allin-Khan and, to a lesser extent, Nandy will enact some sort of revenge down the line is neither here nor there, it’s the alienation of the constituencies in and out of the party that they represent that are going to do for Starmer if he persists with his do-nothing politics.