Stuart Hall and the Labour Right in 2024

Stuart Hall remarked in his 1988 book The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, that what he called "the right wing of the labor movement" (which I think can be identified with a Labour right that had not yet cast aside any pretense of being a labor movement at all) "has no ideas of any compelling quality, except the instinct for short-term political survival." Indeed, "[i]t would not know an ideological struggle if it stumbled across one in the dark," while coming to the matter of struggle generally "[t]he only 'struggle' it engages in with any trace of conviction is the one against the left."

The remark has become the sort of thing quoted again and again--recently appearing in Taj Ali's piece on Keir Starmer's long and rather dirty war on the left in The Nation back in June. This is because, as the nearly four decades that have elapsed since Hall wrote those words demonstrate, many of them have rung true again and again. Ideas of compelling quality? What the longtime face of the tendency he wrote of, Tony Blair, had to offer was the non-idea of the "Third Way," Keir Starmer his "securonomics"--whose unimportance is exemplified by how one need not refer to them at all in analyzing their statements and actions, and might indeed simply distract themselves from that object by attending to them. (Certainly reference to the "Third Way" seemed to me quite beside the point when I wrote about Blair's record, just as the one reference to "securonomics" in the 136 pages of Labour Party's 2024 General Election Manifesto that never rises above banality seemed far from essential to analyzing that document as a statement of Starmer's economic vision, or fulfillment or non-fulfillment of his past promises in that area.) And Starmer in particular has demonstrated that "[t]he only 'struggle'" that this tendency "engages in with any trace of conviction is the one against the left."

However, I am not in full agreement with the rest of the statement. The precise reason that the Labour right does fight so fiercely against the left is because it does know ideological struggle. It just happens to be firmly on the side of the right against the left in that struggle--as has generally been the case with "centrists" of this variety, who (like everyone else in politics) are most definitely ideologues themselves even as they lamely equate "ideology" with the intellectual and political sins of the left. Indeed, their ideological position can seem to me to take precedence over "the instinct for short-term political survival," focusing on which too much confuses the issue. If the courtiers of the powerful delight in inflicting on their readers the image of a right-wing Labour leader at election time as "a man carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor" the reality is that it was in each case the left of their party rather than the opposition of those who would look right that they most feared, with the right giving the centrist their excuse to demand left-leaning voters hold their noses and vote for them, in spite of the strategy commonly producing dismal results, as indeed it did in July 2024. Though the conventional understanding was that Starmer's ming vase-carrying Labour defeated the Conservatives by a landslide, the reality was that Labour won the election on the basis of very few votes indeed. Where Labour's comparable victories had typically seen it get the votes of 30 percent+ of the electorate, and even Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 managed to get 28 percent, Starmer got the King's invitation to form a government on the basis of a mere 20 percent, even amid a genuine (if perhaps temporary) collapse in support for the Conservatives under Rishi Sunak. The result is that the Labour right's "instinct for short-term political survival" has already proven less than impressive, and is going to be very severely tested in what promise to be the crisis-filled years ahead.