Labour’s battle of ideas Who can fix Britain’s broken economy?

And so, Wes Streeting has fired the first shot in a “battle of ideas” within the Labour Party. Others will call it a civil war. Yet more will ask why such a conflict wasn’t waged when Labour was in opposition, when it was reeling from 2019’s defeat but determined to rise from the ashes of Brexit Britain’s Johnsonite “realignment”. Surely if there were a time for genuine, internal soul-searching, it was after the election in which the working-class heartlands rejected Corbynism in favour of Boris’s profligate national conservatism. But instead of a reckoning with who and what the party was for, the subsequent leadership election in 2020 was instead dominated by tortuous arguments over trans rights. Lisa Nandy also made some noises about towns and a Surrey nowhere man convinced the Labour selectorate that his renewed party would be a vehicle for Corbynism with a lawyerly face.

Whatever you thought of the millennial socialist experiments of the Corbyn years, it was hardly a hostile environment for ideological radicalism. Post-graduate hipsters in Carhartt advocated four-day weeks, universal basic income and a loud, often bizarre identity politics; they rubbed shoulders with old-fashioned trade union big-wigs on board for extra spending, nationalisations and higher minimum wage. A cottage industry of Verso paperbacks and new Left-wing media outlets theorised “post-work futures” and attempted to reanimate the corpse of Bennism for the modern age, calling it “socialism with an iPad” and “fully-automated communism”. In other words, mad as it may have been, there was a hinterland to Corbynism; roots, intellectual scaffolds, a mess of competing intellectual strands.

But if the Corbyn years were defined by a surplus of (often fantastical) ideas, the subsequent half decade was spent whittling them down into an empty husk of a project. “There’s no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be,” our beleaguered Prime Minister once quacked irritably, to confused colleagues. Rather than representing a philosophy, his motivation was simply to wrest factional control of the Labour Party from the loony Left. For Starmer himself, it was about fulfilling an unshakable belief in his own moral probity and punctilious legalism. If there were a governing agenda, it was rooted in an erroneous analysis that growth and stability could be restored via administrative competency. But that analysis failed upon contact with reality. Growth, stability and competence remained elusive. It quickly became clear that Starmer had outlived all his possible uses the minute he ejected the Conservative Party from office.

Just about surviving two years of aimless floundering, Starmerism is now reaching its mortifying denouement. To replace it, new prospectuses have emerged that promise deliverance from our impasse, roughly correlating to the whack-a-mole candidates that have emerged and disappeared, up-and-down and up again, as the Prime Minister once more attempts to disguise his own ineptitudes and deny political realities with reference to procedure and proper process. For Starmer is that Japanese soldier still at war long after the armistice has been signed. A pettifogger till the end, the stricture of the rule book must be followed. He is, he says, going nowhere until the bureaucracy is completed in legal triplicate.

Despite No. 10’s hunker-in-the-bunker approach to political crisis, three schools of thought have already emerged, vying to constitute a new, post-Starmer Labourism. There’s some overlap between the three models and their advocates, but they can roughly be summed up as follows: a pro-business, pro-entrepreneurial supply-side agenda likely to be associated more with the Labour Right (and encapsulated most appropriately by Labour Growth Group’s An Honest Day report); the “new fiscal framework” promoted by the Tribune faction of soft-Left MPs, enabling more investment spending by embracing longer debt reduction horizons and “fiscal-monetary co-ordination” (i.e. forcing the Bank of England to halt quantitative tightening to give the Treasury fiscal space – as set out in the Renewal journal); and finally, the “Manchesterism” promoted by one Andy Burnham, pushing for the reversal of many of the privatisations of the Eighties, for publicly owned transport, utilities and social housing, with a “pro-business socialism” approach to free market actors.

The most significant, if only because of its main proponent’s loud intent to become the next leader of the Labour Party, is Manchesterism. Followers of the local politics of Britain’s most successful regional metropole will cast a wry smile that its name is becoming synonymous with a kind of 21st-century socialist alternative. After all, under pragmatic, moderate Labour leadership stretching back decades, Manchester itself has acted as the poster child of municipal Yimbyism, pro-business and pro-developer entrepreneurial growth, public-private partnership and a collaborative and collegiate approach to working with Tory governments.

Nevertheless, those Corbynites who remain in Labour, having not joined the mass exodus to the Greens, have put their faith in this idea. Jez the Magic Grandpa has left the building, decamped to the Your Party disasterzone, and Andy is their last great hope. A protean politician, Burnham has undergone a radical Mr Benn-style transformation in recent years: from a bland New Labour apparatchik who twice failed as a leadership candidate, into a kind of bland Northern everyman — a normcore tribune of the people, blokey-but-unthreatening, railing against an effette Westminster elite.

Most of SW1 baulks at this, scoffing at the smart-casual clothes and emphasised Northern vowels that make up the aesthetic imaginary of Burnham’s Next menswear populism. But that is beside the point. He polls better than any other metro mayor by a country mile, and better than any other Labour option to boot. “He’s a Cambridge graduate!”, they rightly point out, “A Blairite spad!”. But he has still managed to build a personal popularity that vastly outmatches his own party’s. If he wins in Makerfield — about as difficult territory as can be found in his Greater Manchester turf — then he will be prime minister within months.

Manchesterism, then, might be coming for Britain. Bond markets are already pricing in the chances of extra gilt issuance if, and when, a more Left-leaning Labour administration begins taking water and energy into public ownership.

If Burnham is beaten by Reform — and Britain Elects polling indicates that the Faragists would trounce any other Labour candidate but the Mayor — his ambition may be quashed. But the danger for Starmer will not abate. The Prime Minister is way beyond the point of no return, and another figure of the soft Left is sure to challenge him. And those that could beat him in a contest — Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband, or some combination of the two — would draw heavily from Manchesterism’s promises with the addition of Tribunites such as Louise Haigh taking prominent roles in policy formation. The soft Left Tribune’s analysis of fiscal and monetary policy is, ironically, shared by some in Reform. Both have criticised the Bank of England’s role in creating a pressured environment for any Chancellor: the independent central bank offloads gilts from its balance sheet, pushing yields up even as public finances feel the squeeze; and inflation-linked gilts issued in the Osborne era leave the taxpayer on the hook for enormous interest payments, with the governor not countenancing a more tiered interest rate system. Echoing the Right-populist calls for a more pliant, accommodative central bank that facilitates spending, the Tribunites call for a debt-financed investment in infrastructure and capital projects, while promising to keep current spending within those famous iron-clad fiscal rules.

It would be wrong, though, to present Manchesterism and the Tribunite Left’s vision as somehow antagonistic towards the Labour Growth Group’s more pro-market agenda. While the latter might trace its intellectual genealogy to the Labour Right’s tradition of social-democratic reformism, and while Manchesterism and Tribune’s proposals are more rooted in the Left-Keynesianism of the soft Left, the return of public ownership and investment-led growth doesn’t contradict supply-side reform.

A consensus is emerging that Britain is locked into a worst-of-both-world’s Frankenstein economy, displaying all the negative features of neoliberalism but with a cumbersome, meddling, bureaucratic state that impedes business agility and individual initiative. We have critical national infrastructure and assets held in private, often foreign ownership, and twin trade and sovereign deficits that make us dependent on the kindness of strangers. UK plc is an extremely open, over-financialised, unbalanced economy, exposed to volatility in global trade and relying heavily on imports, not least energy and cheap labour. Britain built an economic model designed for the “end of history”, ever-increasing liberalisation and reduced trade frictions. But it now finds itself, as the historian John Bew put it, as the “last man at the bar in Davos”, watching in horror as the Washington Consensus collapses. Meanwhile, successive generations of legislators have attempted to ameliorate our current predicament by regulating, dictating and redistributing the diminishing proceeds of a broken growth model via the pensions and benefit system.

This is a model that blends a socialism of permanent welfare and the retrospective palliatives of cash transfers with Thatcherite models of ownership. In its place, Labour factions are beginning to coalesce around the articulation of a politics of national production, of creating the conditions for market dynamism and overcoming the long-term, sclerotic doom-loop by facilitating investment-led growth. Even the nationalisation proposals of the Burnham camp are framed as a solution to rising fiscal burdens on the entitlement state — an energy, housing, work and transport subsidy regime that compensates workers and consumers for the failures of the very privatisation model that brought arms-length regulatory omnipotence into being.

But unlike previous incarnations of Labour Leftism, this combines with the recognition that pro-market measures are necessary. The Labour Growth Group wants to harness the dynamism of the private sector by implementing the kind of full-fat planning reform that constrains any building, as well as shifting the tax burden away from work and productive investment and towards the beneficiaries of unproductive rentierism. Similarly, Tribune has signalled that planning reform is “central to any growth strategy”, and that the tax burden should incentivise work, employment and patient investment over rent-collecting and short-term speculation.

Where, though, has this maelstrom of ideas emerged from? Why, barely two years after an election that delivered the Labour Party a decisive majority, is the policy model being relitigated? In orthodox Marxism, the social and political “superstructure” of any given society is taken to be a reflection of its economic “base”. The economy, Marx wrote, was “the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure”, corresponding to “definite forms of social consciousness”. Or, as Bill Clinton might have had it: “It’s the economy, stupid!” Whatever you think of Nineties New Democrats or bearded 19th-century revolutionists, the framing provides a sharp insight into what has been happening to Britain since 2008: our growth model broke back then, and our politics along with it. It is the pecuniary fundamentals that defines our politics. And the fundamentals are broken.

The reason why we are cycling through prime ministers with the attention span of a Love Island contestant isn’t just down to the personal shortcomings of the contemporary political classes. It is because something structural, something more tectonic than mere personal idiosyncrasies is taking place.

Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Northern Rock almost two decades ago, Britain has seen virtually no real wage growth. Productivity, perhaps the most important underlying metric of economic wellbeing, has stagnated. Through Labour’s post-war social democracy, Harold Macmillan and Ted Heath’s big state Tory paternalism, and indeed through Thatcher and Blair’s liberalisation projects, British workers could roughly expect their pay packets to grow neatly along an ascending 60-year trend line. But that trend line is now a two-decade plateau. The lack of any increase in our per-capita GDP has combined with the inexorable march of demographics to push taxes upwards even as services deteriorate. Britain is broken. We have been promised various means of salvation: fiscal tightening, deregulation and privatisation under Cameron; Brexit-means-Brexit under May; post-Brexit levelling up under Johnson; deficit-funded Reaganite tax cuts under Truss; and now an amorphous technocratic reformism under Starmer. All have looked like different versions of managed decline.

This battle of ideas, then, is Labour’s first honest reckoning since 2019. But the danger is that it is just too late, and that none of the Left’s new projects will alter the path of Britain’s secular decline. If so, as the spiral quickens, the party risks existential crisis at the next election. But for Labour, that is a risk worth taking, as messy as the current Westminster travails appear. For if there is no change of course, a vengeful electorate is poised to punish the entire political class with a blunt instrument of anti-politics: Reform. The victory of Faragism with a new base of support among the British working class would represent a final nail in the coffin of social democracy. It would signal the last conversion of the political Left from a project aimed at representing the labour interest, into one focused on the discourse and neuroses of the professional managerial strata. Continuing with managed decline will invite the whirlwind, and Westminster will reap it. We’re in a populist age, business-as-usual won’t cut it, and drift is no longer an option.

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