Starmer's lurch to the right stuns the left

His Shadow Cabinet reshuffle has Tony Blair running through it like a stick of Blackpool rock

You can’t ignore Sir Keir Starmer’s chutzpah. After a decade in the Labour Party closet, this unreconstructed Blairite is finally out and proud.  Starmer’s right wing reshuffle, appointing key Blairites like Pat McFadden and Darren Jones to key posts, completes a breakneck transformation of Labour from a radical neo-Marxist party into a patriotic fount of pro-business, sound money centrism.  It’s all in the hope of winning the general election that could be only a year away. But is Der Stürmer, as he’s sometimes called, going just a little too fast for his own good?

This blatantly Blairite reshuffle follows policy u-turns on everything from nationalising the utilities to taxing wealth.  He’ll do neither. Nor will he reverse Brexit or restore freedom of movement as he promised in 2020 when he was elected leader. It’s hard to find any of the pledges he made to Labour members that remain intact. He won’t scrap the two-child benefit cap.  He won’t scrap university tuition fees which was on of the central offers in the 2017 and 2019 Labour manifestos that appealed to the tens of thousands of young party members.  

Whatever happened to Momentum?  The World Transformed?  All those earnest discussions we heard at Labour conferences in the 2010s about Universal Basic Income and how Modern Monetary Theory meant governments could spend without limit.  Starmer even admits now that women are adult human females.

Of course, many will welcome Sir Keir’s rediscovery of human biology - myself included.  UBI and MMT have both collided with the reality of an inflation crisis and never made much sense even in the era of near zero interest rates upon which they were premised.  No one could take seriously the idea of taxing the many to give a hundred quid week in universal income to millionaires.  Governments cannot print money indefinitely.

But there is something disturbing nevertheless about Starmer’s ideological transformation.  How could he have urged voters to elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the country only three and a half years ago if he disagreed with almost everything his predecessor stood for?  He has now expelled Corby for alleged antisemitism. Didn’t Starmer know?

Was Sir Keir somehow absent whenever Tony Blair was cast as class traitor, privatiser and war criminal?  Even relatively moderate Labour politicians condemned Blair for retaining Tory trades union reforms, for pursuing market reforms in the NHS and for presiding over the cash-for-honours scandal.  Blair was ridiculed in the media for sucking up to Rupert Murdoch and going on holiday with the likes of Silvio Berlusconi and Cliff Richard. 

Now Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet has Blair running through it like a stick of Blackpool Rock.  Back comes the Liz Kendal as Work and Pensions Secretary. She famously won a miserable 4% in the 2015 Labour leadership election standing as a Blairite tribute act. And here too comes Hilary Benn, right wing son of Tony, who was accused of leading that front bench walk out against Corbyn in 2015. It was called the “chicken coup” if you recall. Benn is now Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary.

 Pat McFadden, who will be overseeing the general election strategy and Labour’s preparations for government,  was one of Tony Blair’s closest political advisers back in the day. His replacement as Treasury Secretary,  Darren Jones,  says Tony Blair was his “greatest political hero”. It can surely only be a matter of time before we see the return from the wilderness of the former Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls. His wife, Yvette Cooper, is already there. Arguably they were more Brownite than Blairite, but Balls was one of the key “modernisers” as New Labour politicians were called in the 1990s.

Sir Keir has decided wisely not revive the “New” tag. It would hardly be new anyway since he is essentially repeating what Tony Blair did nearly thirty years ago. Starmer hasn’t done anything quite as radical as scrapping Clause Four of the party constitution, which committed Labour to nationalising the means of production. But he doesn’t need to since it’s already gone. 

However he will find it hard to scrap the Labour left, which has remained remarkably, disturbingly, silent recently during Starmer’s frogmarch to the right. The left remains a significant presence in rhe Parliamentary Labour Party through groups like the Campaign Group of MPs. Whither now former Shadow Cabinet luminaries like Dianne Abbott, John McDonnell, Clive Lewis, Richard Burgon? What happens to ultra left MPS like Nadia Whittome who famously  identifies as queer and said Sunak’s election “wasn’t want a win for Asians”? Then there’s Dawn Butler who thought babies didn’t have a sex and Zarah Sultana who had to apologise for remarks about Israel.

Well Labour’s a broad church, as we’re invariably told, and it has been through this movie before. But rarely at double speed.  The hectic pace of change is of course because Starmer sees the general election heading for him like an express train. He already has left wing voters in his pocket, or so he thinks.  He is trying to appeal to the Red Wall voters who deserted Labour in 2019 and to the many centrist voters who are disgusted with the recent performance of the Tory government.  

Starmer’s triangulation strategy will probably work.  It has before. But unlike Blair, he lacks a coherent philosophy like the Third Way of the original “modernisers”.  He also lacks intellectual depth, a distinctive policy agenda, and has very little of Blair’s charisma.  

Moreover, Rishi Sunak is no pushover and the Tories have been given a number of attack lines - the most obvious being Starmer’s shiftiness, cynicism and lack of concrete ideas. Right now Labour is looking more like a Tory tribute act than a government in waiting.  That is not going down well in Scotland where Starmer desperately needs to win seats if he is to form a government in 2024. Der Stürmer needs to be careful that his triangulation doesn’t turn into strangulation.