A Tale of Two Leaders: How Modern Labour Exchanged Confidence for Fear
Images By: The Independent (left) and Politico (right)
For reasons that have necessitated endless ink to be spilled, it is not often that the British Labour Party holds its current position: being the electoral favourite in this year’s general election. They had managed only to string together some eleven chaotic years in power between 1951 and 1997. The Conservative Party’s most recent spell – fourteen years since defeating Labour in 2010 – has been a cascade of disastrous leadership, a faltering economy, and a dwindling place on the world stage. These are the only conditions in which British voters seem willing to take the government reins from the Tories, if only for a moment. Labour’s settled-in leader since 2020, Keir Starmer, has a rare shot.
Those old enough to remember the 1997 election – clearly the bulk of Britain’s media talent – have fallen over themselves to describe Mr. Starmer in comparative terms to then-leader Tony Blair. Blair, too, took the reins at a time when the Tories seemed exhausted and disorganised. Blair, too, chose the path of reforming the party’s image and subduing the party’s left. Blair, too, conceived of governing Britain in a paradigm set ideologically by the Conservatives – him by Margaret Thatcher, Starmer by David Cameron. Yet there exists an important difference between the two leaders and these ‘eras of Labour’ they cultivated: Blair’s party had actual policy in 1997. Starmer’s, in 2024, does not. It may not change the forthcoming election results; the Tories after fourteen years in power are still likely to be bested, and Labour’s MPs should get to dazedly find their way to a side of the Commons only squinted at. But it has massive implications for an ailing nation’s future.
Political party reforms naturally have two stages, taken linearly and ruthlessly: destruction (the elimination of old policy, messaging, and leadership), and rebuilding. The retitled “newLabour” approach of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (his Chancellor-in-waiting and de facto deputy approaching the election) embraced the neoliberal, “Third Way” politics which exploded in the 1990s as a response to dominant 1980s conservatism. Left-wing Labourites, including ex-leader Michael Foot who may or may not have been a Soviet spy, were sidelined. Trade unions’ impact was stamped down. A long-time commitment to socialist nationalisation, Clause IV, was deleted from the party’s manifesto. Part one, the destruction, was achieved.
Keir Starmer has done this stage with merciless zeal. The left-wing has not just been sidelined, it has been cleaved off, as former leader Jeremy Corbyn learned with his suspension. The whip has been employed to force complete ideological unity in the shadow cabinet, as with the Israel-Palestine ceasefire vote which rooted out those wary of Starmer’s return to NATO-aligned foreign policy. He has also reformed the party apparatus to weaken the influence of grassroots members (who are typically more radically left-wing), including cutting down the number of debated issues at conferences and limiting leadership challenges.
The similarities in tact are striking, and invited the comparisons made here and in virtually every opinion piece since 2020 on the issue. Yet in spite of the underdog inclination towards caution in Labour campaigns, Blair understood that presenting a bold and clear vision at the ballot box is required to reliably win the successive terms so often eluding the British left. To truly govern in a democratic system where the movement of change is measured in millimetres, that often means at least a decade — necessitating a clear roadmap. And so, the British public was presented with the 1997 “newLabour” manifesto, virtually all of which was passed within two years of his victory. Blair vowed a new, standardised minimum wage for Britain’s most vulnerable workers – long overdue in Britain among major western democracies. He articulated a brilliant vision for constitutional reform, giving Scotland (and later Wales) devolved governance in an overture to the principles of federalism in a highly regional Britain. And, finally, he promised both greater investment in education and to address the famed inequalities of often-Dickensian British schooling. This manifesto constituted a far-reaching approach to reforming a languid nation, which found itself hurtling into a century far different than the previous one which had bent to its imperial will. It was energetic, clearly stated, and confident in its vision, however much Labour fatalistically sweated about yet another defeat before election night.
There are no doubt issues that I, and many young people now, have with Blair and newLabour’s 1990s policy platform. Its unrestrained support of neoliberal state-market interaction strikes one now as at once technocratic and shockingly right-wing. Vanity projects like the costly Millenium Dome were monoliths to made-for-TV arrogance. And with hindsight, it failed to address the more systemic ruts British institutions like the National Health Service (NHS) were in, offering band-aid solutions which could only ever temporarily alleviate a faltering system. Yet what one cannot say is that they lacked ambitious ideas. The ongoing debate on the legacy of newLabour, particularly that first term unshackled by the foreign quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq, is not centred on perceived aimlessness or fickle leadership. This is for good reason. There are few times in British history – save Thatcher’s 1979 campaign, or Clement Atlee’s in 1945 – where a party had a more defined vision of what it wished to achieve, and how to do so.
But what has Downing Street’s current heir-apparent, Keir Starmer, proposed? His Labour has a set of mission statements, which identify obvious problems in the United Kingdom today: inability to meet climate change targets, a dismal economy with low productivity, a failing NHS, and so on. Yet precise solutions to them can scarcely be found. For virtually every time a serious policy proposal is floated, Labour retracts it at lightspeed. Starmer’s 2022 pitch to abolish the House of Lords has been watered down to only a minor, almost inevitable elimination of hereditary seats. A commitment to social care reform, once one of the few overtures to Labour’s socialist origins remaining, has been shelved. A national £28 billion green investment – including stimulating renewable energy and battery production to restore some British competitive advantage whilst better meeting climate standards – has been somehow advanced, retracted, and dramatically pared down repeatedly. Starmer is indisputably running the party with an iron grip. But he does not seem to know what he wants, leaving confused shadow cabinet members like Rachel Reeves and Angela Rayner to dodge committing to their own proposals.
Starmer’s caution is expressly due to his concerns that offering specific policy proposals will open flanks the Conservatives can attack in a forthcoming campaign. Putting aside the baffling lack of confidence in his own party’s ability to participate in national debates and defend its goals, it does not strike one as a reasonable excuse. Starmer loudly proclaims Labour will somehow make Britain the fastest growing economy in the G7 (with almost zero specificity beyond this). That is a ludicrously ambitious goal in Britain’s current state, and likely to serve as an easy stone to cast at Labour should they fail to achieve it by 2029. One wonders why a cautious party is happy to shackle itself to vague and difficult-to-predict international economic trends, and not to the concrete legislative victories Labour could achieve in a first term.
Labour in 2024, of course, has a far more precarious situation to deal with than newLabour did back in the 1990s. If Tony Blair, by the end, flew too close to the sun, Starmer can expect mere threadbare wings in office. Despite the endless clamour from activists for mass nationalisation and a ballooned welfare state, that degree of change is not fiscally possible anymore. After fourteen years of the Tories hampering growth with near-ceaseless austerity and selling off the Crown’s revenue-generating assets – including stock in key domestic industries for short-term cash – the British government’s pockets are not deep. Angela Rayner, the Deputy Labour Leader, was right to admit recently, “[Labour] can’t do all the things that make us feel warm and cuddly.”
But planning to spend virtually nothing to meet Britain’s economic malaise, let alone on “all the things,” is simply not an option. Labour breathlessly promises a stable hand after the whiplash of the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss premierships, which at one point nearly triggered a financial crisis over the latter’s extreme tax cut proposals. But the issue with recent Conservative leaders has not been their boldness of ideas. It is that those ideas were incomprehensible, illegal, reactionary, or some combination of all three. Simple stability is not what Britain needs – the situation is too dire, the national ailment too malignant. And yet Labour has taught itself that to be bold is to fail, at precisely the moment when Britain desperately needs courage in leadership to lay tracks for long-term growth.
This is not just an issue of ideology. If Starmer is convinced that racing to the political centre, as Blair did, is the way to win, then that is his prerogative. But Blair’s approach took pains to build that reformed “New Labour” for a clearly imagined “New Britain.” He agonised over ambitious initiatives to achieve British constitutional modernisation, greater access to more equal and high-quality schooling, and fairer compensation for Britain’s poorest workers. So far, Starmer cannot, or will not, imagine what any sort of “New Britain” looks like. This tact will likely work in dropping the curtain on the tired circus the Tories have put on since 2010. That is well and good. But the question of what comes on the second, third, and fourth day of a Labour government cannot remain this opaque – lest the nation exchanges habitual chaos for placid lethargy.