Starmer and Siege Social Democracy
Since becoming Labour leader in 2020, Keir Starmer, the former Head of the Crown Prosecution Service, has championed the erosion of democratic liberties in Britain. Under his direction, the Parliamentary Labour Party has supported legislation that will enhance law enforcers’ ability to harass Black, Brown, and Traveller communities, penalise trade unionists, and infiltrate social justice movements with impunity. Particularly zealous in stamping out the subversive internationalism associated with Corbyn, Starmer has vilified the Stop the War Coalition and Palestine solidarity activists campaigning against Israeli apartheid and British complicity. Just last month, he called for a government ban on climate protests.
In an immediate sense, Starmer represents a continuation of Blair’s project to convert the Labour Party to neoliberal orthodoxy and NATO expansionism. Oliver Eagleton, author of The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right, has explained how ‘proximity to the Anglo-American security agencies was a key part of Starmer’s intellectual formation.’ However, the New/Old Labour distinction – emphasised by those still insisting socialists should ‘stay and fight’ in the Party – can also obscure as much as it illuminates, including the ways in which Starmerism conforms to historical patterns of British social democracy.
Starmer’s response to the cost-of-living crisis by doubling down on Labour’s appeals to ‘law and order’ especially demonstrates the relevance of Stuart Hall’s underutilised concept of social democracy ‘adapted for siege conditions’, as well as his analysis of how reformist politics in Britain have been mediated by race and empire.
Hall on social democracy
Stuart Hall was a theorist who is primarily known on the left for his discerning analysis of Thatcherism. However, Hall also drew attention to the Labour Party’s role in laying the groundwork for Thatcher’s neoliberal counterrevolution. In his much-referenced essay ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ (1979), he argued that ‘[t]he contradiction within social democracy is the principal key to the whole rightward shift of the political spectrum.’
Hall was here restating the classical Marxist account of social reformism, as a contradictory political formulation that seeks class compromise within the parameters of capitalist exploitation. As identified by fellow New Left intellectual Ralph Miliband, Labour politicians seeking state power through constitutional means – including those claiming to be pursuing socialism – have reconciled themselves to ‘what Lord Balfour, in a classical formulation, once called “the foundations of society”, meaning above all the existing economic and social system of private ownership and private appropriation’.
This reality has been most apparent during unstable periods of social consensus breakdown, when the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy have opted to side with the capitalist state. In the midst of the depression of the 1930s, for example, Labour administrations denounced the Unemployed Workers’ Movement, which was protesting the draconian Means Test and use of labour camps for the jobless, and imprisoned Communists involved in anti-colonial activities during the Meerut Conspiracy trials. Similarly in the 1970s, the Labour government of Jim Callaghan (1976–9) responded to an economic recession by accepting an IMF loan in return for fiscal disciplining, and a crackdown on industrial militancy.
Labour was at its inception a hybrid Party, shaped by prior utopian socialist, Gladstonian, and Radical-Liberal traditions, and British social democracy has never been able to cast off its intellectual and institutional debts to liberalism. New Labour certainly marked a decisive shift of emphasis, with the decline of the once-formidable union bureaucracy and rise of the market fundamentalists. But the use of authoritarian measures to protect the capitalist economy has been a consistent feature of Labour’s governing record.
In his seminal 1978 book Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, co-authored with colleagues at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Hall wrote of a social democracy ‘adapted for siege conditions’, as the alliance between labour, capital, and the state was threatened by a combination of untamed industrial strife and organised Black and Brown resistance to racial violence. In its attempt at ‘disciplining the nation to consent’, Callaghan’s Labour presaged the ‘authoritarian populism’ perfected by Margaret Thatcher and the conservative New Right.
Hall defined authoritarian populism as ‘an exceptional form of the capitalist state which, unlike classical fascism, has retained most (though not all) of the formal representative institutions in place’. The historical record suggests that the ‘state of exception’ in which coercion comes to the foreground is not restricted to right-wing or neoliberal regimes. The idea that social democracy is, by default, a purely consensual mode of governance is part of its ideological halo.
Even the postwar Attlee government, which delivered the British welfare state on the back of heightened neo-colonial exploitation abroad, saw a need for ‘exceptional’ measures to deal with strikes in the newly nationalised industries. The National Health Service architect, Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, defended the government’s invocation of the Emergency Powers Act, previously used to undermine the General Strike of 1926, by telling the cabinet that it ‘would be prudent to have wide powers in order to deal with any trouble’ that might disrupt ‘essential services’.
‘What Powell says today…’
In order to suppress and conceal inconvenient class antagonisms, the reformist left has regularly taken its cue from the right in making appeals to public order and popular prejudices. As Hall demonstrated, the politics of race have been particularly key to deflecting crises of hegemony in Britain.
Callaghan and his predecessor Harold Wilson both responded to the breakdown of the class-collaborationist Social Contract by deploying the atavistic politics of race and immigration. At the height of the ‘mugging’ moral panic that was being effectively exploited by the fascist National Front, Labour put the ‘sus’ stop-and-search law into full force in Black communities. This racist policy culminated in the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival ‘disturbances’, where Black youths confronted an invading police force. The conflict is usually left out of discussions of ‘race riots’ in Britain which focus on the eighties.
Crucial to understanding social democracy in Britain is its prolonged entanglement with colonialism. As Matt Myers observes, the ‘“dogmatic” loyalty of the Labour Party to the British parliamentary system noted by Ralph Miliband also involved a commitment to maintaining the British Empire and its underpinning ideology of peoples “fit” and “unfit” (or “not yet fit”) to rule.’
The formative impact of racial ideology and colonial administration on Labour politics has been consistently underestimated. It involves a long history, extending back to the scapegoating of colonial maritime workers for unemployment after the First World War, and the anti-Black Labour movement campaign against France’s stationing of African troops in the Rhineland, during an interwar moral panic about ‘race mixing’ in Britain’s port towns. These episodes coincided with ruling class fears of social revolution focused on the red revolt on the Clyde.
Racist reaction again took prominence in the 1960s, with the waning of the postwar economic boom and the emergence of student protests against the Vietnam War and South African apartheid. Labour and Conservative politicians alike pointed the finger at Black and Asian immigrants, who were originally recruited to alleviate Britain’s postwar labour shortage, as a drain on the country’s resources. In 1968, Wilson’s Labour government rushed through the new Commonwealth Immigrants Act, barring entry to Kenyan Asian refugees. Race & Class’s Ambalavaner Sivanandan sardonically noted that ‘What [Enoch] Powell says today, the Tories say tomorrow and Labour legislates on the day after’.
While renewing Blair’s emphasis on ‘national security’ and aggressive Atlanticism, Starmer is then also following long-established practices of social democracy by responding to contemporary unrest with promises to be tougher on immigration, crime, and street protest.
The Starmer factor
The spiralling cost of living in Britain is a symptom of the wider structural crisis of the imperialist world economy, which has been exacerbated by the Coronavirus pandemic, and made traditional social-democratic reforms less and less viable. While ostensibly serving as Leader of the Opposition to the Tory government, Starmer has prioritised Labour’s status as a guardian of the besieged neoliberal state.
While people take to the streets to protest rising prices and stagnating wages, Starmer is attempting to outflank the Conservative Party from the right on law and order, claiming that ‘Under the Tories, criminals have never had it so good’, and promising that Labour in power would ‘crack down on crime’. This comes in the broader context of revived racialised discourses of gang violence and knife crime, and establishment pushback against what Starmer disparagingly termed the Black Lives Matter ‘moment’. Starmer has also parroted Priti Patel’s ‘moral argument’ for transporting asylum seekers to Rwanda, a policy universally condemned by liberal human rights groups.
As so often in modern British politics, the language of race and public orderliness is deployed to connect ‘“the crisis of the state” above with the state of the streets’. This linkage was particularly acute in responses to the 2011 London uprisings – spontaneous protests against economic deprivation and police violence, including the killing of Mark Duggan. In the aftermath, Starmer, then serving as Director of Public Prosecutions, ran all-night courts to ensure the rapid sentencing of ‘rioters’, while Tottenham Labour MP David Lammy blamed knife crime on absent fathers.
In addition to appeals to law and order, Starmer has also picked up the Blue Labourist concoction of ‘family, faith, and flag’, as exemplified by his courting of trans-exclusionary radical-‘feminists’ who have latched onto the transphobic moral panic accompanying the breakdown of traditional gender roles. Like Blair before him, Starmer is willingly operating on post-Thatcherite terrain. The difference, as Eagleton puts it, is that ‘while Blair injected an illusory optimism into capitalist realism, Starmer can only act as its grim enforcer’. Starmer appeals to the myopic professional-managerial class, while simultaneously emulating the right-wing strategy to foster ‘a hegemony that stretches up through the Midlands to the north-east, and whose chief identity is a post-Brexit, weaponised Englishness’ – although, as Aditya Chakrabortty points out, this is carried forward much more effectively by the Tories.
In the first instance, the Starmerite reaction is the anticipated response of the Labour right to the Corbyn interregnum, which placed dangerous ideals of equality and wealth redistribution back onto the political agenda. Starmer’s anti-left vendetta echoes Neil Kinnock’s war on the ‘loony left’ in the 1980s, and earlier anti-Communist witch hunts in the civil service under Attlee. Corbynism was though itself a highly contradictory formation – a fact which remains relevant for those wishing to confront the present impasse of the left.
Corbynism’s compromises
Corbynism presented a novel opening for the left, emerging as it did out of the intersection of an internal Labour Party crisis and the post-2010 anti-austerity movement. At the same time as achieving a victory over the Blairites, however, Corbyn and his intellectual backers reinforced an unhealthy romanticisation of Old Labour and the ‘golden age’ of postwar British social democracy. Relatedly, grassroots activism was inhibited by a general naivety about the parliamentary Labour left which, as identified by Trotsky a century ago, can function as ‘a sort of safety valve for the radical mood of the masses’.
Serious limitations to the Corbyn movement quickly became apparent, which underscored the parliamentary left’s seemingly unbridgeable distance from movements pitted squarely against the state. As argued by Gargi Bhattacharya et al. in Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press: 2021), it ‘is particularly significant that the issues Corbyn’s Labour conceded on most – the case against police, prisons and violent borders – became the very issues around which one of the most geographically and racially diverse street mobilisations in generations galvanised.’
Labour’s 2017 and 2019 Manifestos reaffirmed support for NATO militarism and hard borders, while Labour councils across Britain continued implementing cuts. Corbyn himself adopted the classic carrot and stick approach of siege social democracy when he said that social services and the police are ‘two sides of the same coin’, ‘prevention and cure’. In another call back, he argued that a purported ‘rising scale of violent crime’ should be resolved through ‘community policing’ – a soft-counterinsurgency concept which first attained prominence as a state response to the 1980s inner city uprisings. These and other concessions played directly into the hands of the Labour right, while leaving Corbynism’s social movement wing disoriented and demoralised.
It is doubtful that Labour can persist as reformism without the promise (however remote!) of reforms, and so long as the Labour left remain within the Party on Starmer’s terms – as with the opportunist Socialist Campaign Group MPs who dropped their criticism of NATO after being threatened with whip removal – they serve the role of a ‘useful opposition’. To effectively respond to the authoritarian populist conjuncture, the non-state left thus needs to demystify the real class basis of social democracy, and face up to the contradictions which pervaded the Corbynist approach of pursuing socialist advances ‘in and against’ the capitalist state.
We can take heart from the fact that siege conditions mean resistance: on the streets, in the workplace, and within communities. The past two years alone have seen the remarkable emergence of Palestine Action, the civil disobedience movement targeting the operations of Israeli arms company Elbit Systems. That these activists have successfully shutdown an entire weapons factory, while so far evading prosecution points to the space that exists for developing anti-systemic politics outside the parliamentary orbit.
Charting a progressive counter-hegemony which embraces popular mobilisations against both racial violence and economic insecurity will ultimately face deep obstacles beyond the question of the state, not least imperialism’s structuring role in class formation within Britain. Corbyn’s backtracking over borders and NATO was partially responsive to nativist and social-imperialist impulses within the trade union movement: his major union backer Unite successfully opposed free movement, and campaigned to protect skilled jobs in the bloated ‘defence’ sector.
Post-2019 attempts to formulate an emancipatory working-class project beyond Labourism, including renewed discussions on the role of a revolutionary party, are welcome and urgent, but they have largely neglected the fundamental issues of imperialist unequal exchange and attendant bordering practices. Moving forward, the more dynamic sections of the left need to bring on board insights from the great critics of ‘empire socialism’, from R. P. Dutt and George Padmore to Sivanandan and Hall.