What Keir Starmer's Rhetoric Tells Us About 2021

In writing about the records of specific political figures I have tended to focus on those heads of government whose tenures ran their course years ago, such that the subject of their record is more or less complete, and we have a measure of perspective on it, aided by the accumulation of a journalistic and scholarly literature that had sme opportunity to take in the whole. Thus did it go with Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and even Barack Obama.

However, while writing about Blair I could not totally ignore the crisis in the party caused by austerity, Brexit and General Election defeat after General Election defeat, all as opponents of neoliberalism endeavored to retake the party from the Blairites. This endeavor seemed to have been defeated by Jeremy Corbyn's fall and Keir Starmer's election as leader, widely read as a Blairite restoration.

But was it?

I decided to check two of Starmer's more significant statements, namely the ten pledges he made during the February 2020 leadership contest, and his "New Chapter for Britain" speech of a year later.

After looking at them I have to admit that Starmer departed a good deal from the Blairite script. Much as Blair's defenders deny that he was a neoliberal, the fact remains that not only was Blair a neoliberal policy, but he was that too in his rhetoric, and indeed, reading the Labour Party's 1997 General Election Manifesto I was struck by his eagerness to persuade his audience that he was a neoliberal--as might be expected at that high water mark for the ideology, with its New Economy boom peaking and its hosannas to globalization.

By contrast in 2020, almost a generation away from that peak, and association with this never-really-popular-and-often-subject-to-backlash ideology thoroughly discreditable in the eyes of the broader public, Starmer went to great lengths to persuade his audience that he was not a neoliberal. This was not only the case in his rhetoric (Starmer was unafraid of the word "Socialism," and saluted Old Labour where Blair had only sneered at it and everything it ever claimed to stand for), but in his declared policies (which promise higher taxes on the rich and corporations, the end of Universal Credit, the return of free college, the renationalization of key services, and a Green New Deal, among much else).

Of course, Blair quickly justified the confidence that anyone who voted for him wanting a neoliberal government placed in him by delivering a decade of such policy (in fiscal and monetary policy; in maintaining and advancing the Thatcherite line on privatization, unions, the social safety net; in his commitment to high finance; etc.). Starmer is not in a comparable position (never mind the prime ministership, even a General Election is still quite some way off), but has not inspired much confidence that he could do the same (indeed, he was already toning down such leftishness as he displayed in the leadership contest, and sounding more like Blair in the February 2021 speech), and not unsurprisingly.

The simple truth is that if neoliberalism is more unpopular than ever the climate remains such that mainstream politicians have yet to challenge it in ways other than ill-considered and disruptive gestures like Brexit, or emergency patches like the stimulus seen in the wake of the pandemic (which pale in comparison with the extreme lengths to which governments and central bankers have gone to prop up the neoliberal growth model--the ultra-loose monetary policy, the quantitative easing, the bailout money, dwarfing the already vast efforts of the Long Recession).

All this would seem to bespeak a situation in which anyone near the center of politics remains a neoliberal, simply refuse to admit it, and hope no one notices--a policy which works entirely well with the mainstream media. But then the mainstream media remains squarely for neoliberalism. The general public, however, is quite another matter--while, one might add, its confidence in that media is ever-plummeting, a fact going for the left as well as the right. Naturally it would be complacent to assume that its reaction would be the same.