Owen Jones is not happy

Keir Starmer is conducting a culture war against the left

Last year, Keir Starmer said he was turning the Labour party “inside out” and he's been as good as his word. The Labour leader wasn't content just to expel his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, to outer darkness. He proceeded to crush almost everything he stood for, from nationalisation to the monolithic NHS.

He has even turned the culture war inside out. This week Starmer belatedly opposed the SNP's gender reform legislation that his own Scottish leader, Anas Sarwar, had whipped Labour MSPs into voting for only the previous month. That gave Rishi Sunak the green light to block the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill that was passed by a two thirds majority in the Scottish Parliament.

Sir Keir loses no opportunity to wrap himself in the Union flag. He got the Labour Party Conference last autumn to sing the national anthem. He doesn't give speeches apologising for colonialism and the British Empire and even says that “the days of cheap [immigrant] labour labour must end”. That's what Twitter calls a “racist dog whistle”, and is almost word for word what the Tory PM, Boris Johnson said only a year previously.

The Labour left has been stunned into silence, though there are occasional squawks from the Guardian columnist, Owen Jones, on Twitter, who accuses Keir Starmer of betrayal. “Keir Starmer, you are a liar, a conman and a joke” he averred in a social media rant accusing centrist Starmerites of appealing to “Waitrose voters” instead of the working class.

You can sort of see his point. When Starmer stood for election as Labour leader after the 2019 general election defeat, he promised not to “trash” the Corbynite legacy. He made a series of ten pledges to promote Labour's “radical values”. These included public ownership of, “rail, mail, energy and water”, a promise that he would “defend freedom of movement as we leave the EU” and a commitment to stand “shoulder to shoulder with trades unions”. He also pledged to scrap Universal Credit and restore free university tuition.

Well, now he says he will reform the NHS by “using the private sector”, and get rid of “bureaucratic nonsense”. He has banned Labour front benchers from the picket lines in the public sector disputes and repeatedly refused to endorse the public sector strikes, though he now blames the government for not ending them.

The promises on Universal Credit and tuition fees have been quietly dropped as has nationalisation of the utilities. On Brexit, the former arch remainer told Andrew Marr in July that he will “say no to the single market and no to freedom of movement FOREVER” and will instead “make Brexit work”.

Many activists in the Labour Party and some MPs have been in recent years been attracted by the doctrines of Modern Monetary Theory which hold that governments can borrow, effectively, without limit because they can always print money to pay for the debt. This is sometimes called “socialist quantitative easing”. But Keir Starmer and his Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves have ruled out any big expansion of the state and say that they believe in “sound money” and controlling public debt. He promised bankers that Labour will go into the next election as the guardian of “fiscal discipline” and will not impose windfall taxes on the bankers.

Rachel Reeves initially opposed Boris Johnson's proposed increases in corporation tax too and Labour has rejected increasing National Insurance Contributions. Sir Keir appears to have abandoned Labour's traditional demands for higher taxation except for non-domiciled residents who don't pay UK tax. This is despite the fact that the current Non Dom regime, under which they are charged a flat fee, was installed by Labour in 2008.

Labour likes to talk about Tory “culture wars” against climate protesters, strikers and transgender people, but it is becoming hard to tell the difference between the Tory approach to “woke” issues and Labour's. In November, Sir Keir bluntly told Just Stop Oil protesters disrupting traffic to “get up go home” and said he supported “longer sentences for people who glue themselves to motorways”.

He has also allowed shadow cabinet members like say things which have been hitherto been all but unsayable on social media. The shadow Heath Secretary, Wes Streeting told talk radio last year that: "Men have penises, women have vaginas, here ends my biology lesson." Labour has come a long way since its former Equalities Spokeswoman, Dawn Butler, said in 2019 that “babies aren't born with a sex”.

In a more fundamental sense Starmer has moved Labour further and further away from socialist culture, at least as it is expressed in social media and the left wing press. In his New Year address he made the clearest statement on Labour's new direction in a passage which could just as easily have come from team Sunak.

“Let me be clear” he said attacking Tory neglect of public services, “none of this should be taken as code for Labour getting its big government chequebook out again....we won’t be able to spend our way out of their mess. It’s not as easy as that. There is no substitute for a robust private sector, creating wealth in every community.”

The suggestion that capitalists are “wealth creators” is the kind of thing that makes Twitter go into meltdown. It's the workers that make the wealth, say the left, the capitalists just steal it! Starmer has not only been advised to ignore what the legions of the left say on social media, he appears actively to be provoking it. On Brexit, immigration, gender, tax, climate protests, privatisation and spending he appears to be taking a consciously contrary view to the likes of Owen Jones.

Presumably the calculation is that the left have no where to go at the next election. They are not going to vote for the Tories, clearly, or the Greens still less the Liberal Democrats, so Starmer can afford to ignore them. He is the one who has built up an apparently unassailable lead and no one in the Labour Party wants to sow divisions that might be exploited by the Tories.

The left are anyway increasingly muted even on Twitter, perhaps as a result of their favourite propaganda vehicle being taken over by Elon Musk. Starmer is setting his sights firmly on the small ‘c’ conservative working class voters in the North of England who deserted Labour under Corbyn.

After a decade in which politics in the UK appeared to be polarised between the old Labour leftism of Corbyn and the Brexit populism of Boris Johnson, the big two parties appear to be closer than ever. It's rather like the ideological convergence of the late 1950s when people talked about “Butskellism” a mash up of the liberal Conservative Chancellor, Rab Butler, and his centrist Labour equivalent, Hugh Gaitskell. It was shorthand for what was called “the post war consensus”, a recognition that state institutions like the National Health Service, nationalised industries and the welfare state were now part of the fabric of British life.

This represented what was regarded at the time as a kind of settlement of the class war. Academics began talking about the “end of ideology”. It was assumed that economic growth and full employment, while not guaranteed, could be largely achieved by Keynsian demand management. Laissez Faire economics, the idea that the state should leave the market to its own devices, was in the dustbin of history along with Marxism.

Labour didn't abandon Clause 4 of its constitution, which committed a Labour government to taking the means of production, distribution and exchange into state ownership until Tony Blair came along in 1994. It didn't seem necessary, because everyone agreed that certain public utilities like rail, telecommunications and energy should be managed by the state.

As someone who lived through the era of New Labour, and the collapse of Blairism following the Iraq War, there is a unavoidable sense of deja vu observing the evolution of the Starmer version of Labour. Sir Keir has of course restored Tony Blair to the fold after years in which he was persona non grata. He commissions Gordon Brown to write reports on constitutional change. Sir Keir hasn’t actually called the party New Labour, but you feel it can only be a matter of time before he revives it.

Tony Blair was of course Labour’s most successful leader - the only one ever to win three consecutive general elections. Starmer wants a bit of that, and you can hardly blame him. But by goading and baiting the left he may be storing up trouble for the future - if and when Labour win the 2024 general election and Keir Starmer enters Number Ten. That’s when they will try to get their own back.