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August 26, 2024 - 8:00am
For much of the last decade the lens of vanguardism has been applied to the politics of the British Left. Momentum, we were often told, was the Militant tendency reborn for the age of the iPhone, with several hundred thousand Trotskyists joining Labour to vote for Corbyn in 2015 (no matter that the largest Trotskyist organisation, the SWP, numbered fewer than 1000 members).
You would sometimes hear the same rhetoric against the pro-Brexit Right, although in their case that was a marker often enjoyed by its targets. Regardless of whom it was aimed at, such language was geared to discredit and delegitimise those political forces the establishment didn’t like. Corbynism and Brexit, and individuals such as Dominic Cummings and Seamus Milne, were treated in a different way to “normal” politicians and advisors because they were regarded as an invasive pathogen. This was clearly an anti-democratic impulse from the centre. So, by necessity, those pushing it claimed to be defenders of democracy.
But while the centrist talk show hosts were having daily aneurysms about mandatory reselection and the BBC delivered monologues about advisors who enjoyed no right of reply, a genuinely vanguardist organisation was emerging. Its name? The suitably anodyne “Labour Together”, which in recent days has been at the centre of a Government cronyism spat.
Jess Sargeant, who previously worked at Labour Together, was recently appointed as deputy director in the Cabinet Office’s Propriety and Constitution Group. Unusually, Sargeant was not subject to an independent recruitment process. That would be concerning for any Civil Service role. Yet in this instance it is especially troubling, because the body in question is responsible for the enforcement of Whitehall rules. If you were a secretive, vanguardist organisation that wanted to parachute chosen candidates into roles with outsized influence, the Propriety and Constitution Group is where you would start.
What the Sargeant story reveals is that Labour Together is not only trying to influence individuals and policy, but also capture key parts of the permanent state apparatus. Keir Starmer has been in Number 10 for less than two months, and already we are witnessing a masterclass in anti-democratic politics.
While it started life in 2015, it was only after Starmer’s ascent to the leadership that Labour Together became a political powerhouse. To understand the scale of its ambition, one need only glance at its finances. In March and April this year, Labour Together received more than £1.3 million from hedge fund manager Martin Taylor. Its second biggest donor, Gary Lubner, has donated more than £600,000 since the beginning of 2023.
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Subscribe“A party of service”.
One of the first actions of Rachel Reeves was to “pause” or cancel every single road and rail programme not funded to completion. The mood music for this has been the mystical “£20bn” hole in finances. Meanwhile Reeves has been handing out enormous pay rises to state employees and reversing immigration changes that will cost an extra £10bn this year alone. The cognitive dissonance is dizzying but a meek media refuses to dwell on the contradictions.
The reason for the pause of these programmes is quite simple: every single programme is being raked over for opportunity to replace state funding with private finance. The DfT and the Treasury have external consultants burning the midnight oil (and a huge amount of cash) to repackage programmes for private finance. We already are being warmed up to the idea private finance will finish HS2 to Euston.
Be under no illusion that this is market-based capitalist finance offering efficiency and good value for the taxpayer. This is simply swapping funding; risk and delivery will be literally unchanged. Instead of low interest rate government bonds, programmes will be funded with far higher interest loans off the books with eyewatering locked-in fees for decades to come. All risk stays with the taxpayer. This is the kind of low risk, inflation-proof investment bankers dream of. It is the astronomically poor value former Private Finance Initiative (PFI) back for another gouging of taxpayers.
It is no mystery why this is happening. Hedge funds have spent a lot of money buying the Labour Party. They picked the Labour Party precisely because the history, the brand, is the polar opposite of who they are. The financial vampire squid are wearing the workers’ clothes. And conveniently anyone who complains is far right (TM), a label that corals the doubters on the left.
Now hedgies want a return on that investment. And before you can say “conflict of interest” and before whistleblowers can reach for a whistle, the supposed Whitehall enforcers of government probity have been taken over by the money men too. This is naked cromyism, South American style. Our entire body politic is now just a battle between financial oligarchs for control of the fiefdom that was once a democratic United Kingdom. And we are now just economic units for them to harvest revenue, and the more people the bigger harvest.
An extraordinarily informed comment. Unherd should ask you to contribute an article
Agreed.
Yes wow…thankyou. screenshotting this to talk over with my family. All so true and one can feel it even…stick tony Blair institute and the future of British conference in search bar and it’s all there. Let’s go, let’s go!!! public private the lot…there’s money to be made
Rent seeking is baked into social democracy. As government becomes more and more centralised and acquires greater spending power so it attracts an ever-growing infestation of parasites. Eventually their numbers become so great that the productive economy collapses under the weight of their demands. France has already reached that point – surviving as a viable economy only thanks to German largesse – we’re not far behind.
It’s much more a feature of neoliberalism and later neoliberal social democracy, i.e. the third way.
Not really. It’s human nature. We all persuade ourselves that what’s good for us must be good for the world. I’m sure the grifters at Hope Not Hate or Stonewall are just as convinced as those at Best For Britain that they are doing good work and therefore fully deserve the very comfortable living they make out of it.
I’d say that’s not precisely ‘human nature’ but cognitive dissonance. Maybe things cannot be perfect but even recent history shows the cronyism doesn’t have to be this bad.
People who rail against “rent seekers” and “parasites” probably also think that they are “good” people with the best interests of the world at heart. After all, we each believe we are better than the others.
People who take responsibility for themselves and their families and who contribute value to society are better than middle class people who become wealthy by leeching off the state, I’m afraid. There is no equivalence.
QED
Not really.
Internally, its aim is cementing the grip of the leadership and the party’s Right. And the problem is? I mean, all the Corbynites have been purged, right?
Aaron’s simply jealous the Blairite vanguards are better at playing the game than his Commie vanguards.
Castro said, “If I did it again it would be with 10 or 15 men of absolute faith.”
Roger Scruton said, “(Utopians)…. see the world differently. They are able to ignore or despise the findings of experience or common sense, and to place at the centre of every deliberation a project whose absurdity they regard not as a defect but as a reproach against the one who would point it out… For the person who entrusts all problem-solving to a single final solution, reality is without hope and without solutions.”
The author of the article, Mr Bastani, is a self-confessed Communist, who does indeed see Communism as the only final solution. He makes himself seem more reasonable by criticising Labour. So we have a reasonable Communist.
In Aaron’s defence, he might well be a hardline leftie, but he’s definitely one of the more in tune ones and is willing to engage conservatives in discussion. Definitely need more like him.
We could add Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar to the roster at Unherd.
She always seems so reasoned and non-judgemental in her discussions!
That’s satire, right ?
Play the ball, not the man. Just because you disagree with somebody’s politics doesn’t mean that you should therefore ignore any points they raise, as that’s simply lazy
You are wrong. My point is that what he says is not what he thinks – he just says anything to get paid for it. I could write an article like that and pitch it for the audience. He is very clever.
I am not lazy. I read most of the stuff from his company, Novara Media. But he and his company are playing a game on UnHerd.
He seems to have changed the angle of the company’s content recently. I’m guessing it’s harder to make money with topical articles criticising Labour – than with those tired pages which diss the Conservatives.
Some people have a lust for power, probably due to some inadequacies. T S Eliot in the “Cocktail Party “ has a character say that the desire to feel important, to think well of oneself, can cause massive harm. For those who do not have a lust for power, their actions are absurd which is why they are so successful for so long. As Wilde “The only people who think more about money than the rich, are the poor”. Bernard Levin said single issue politicians can be very influential in democracies.
What is noticeable is that those who had massive authority in their teens and early twenties in WW1 and WW2 appear to be cured of this lust for power: a good example would be Group Captain Cheshire VC.
My Mother used to say the biggest threat to British democracy was apathy.
A little balance: Momentum expressed a wish by many for a new, more radical, approach; but it was hijacked by hard line ‘left’ – Seumas Milne, Andrew Fisher et al. The problem was that the general electorate would never vote for them.
Now we have Labour Together from a different angle, which the author claims is encouraging indebtedness to capitalism. While a risk it is obvious that government Debt cannot rise much further, while government setting the objectives while enabling private capital to fund projects can work. Rebuilding the National Grid will be very expensive.
Rachel Reeves made her first big mistake by giving an unconditional pay rise to train drivers while stopping Winter Fuel Allowance. We await what next.
And we were told that the Tories had a monopoly on cronyism!
Nothing this Starmer government does surprises me.
The only surprise is the lack of scrutiny and pushback from the mainstream media.
No surprise at all. The media is basically owned by the same financial oligarchs.
What a Harris administration would make Job One on Jan. 21.
The fact that Bastani loyally quotes the utterly undemocratic Castro as his heroic political point of reference shows what his politics are and why his illiberal band of hard Leftists lost.
Why are you complaining? Is the left a pick-and-mix stall? Where you can pick lots of the Cream Truffle and Hazelnut Delight, but eschew all the Toffee Penny? You cannot seriously say “I am left” but then say “no, not that left, this left”. This is *your* ideology and these are *your* people – own it, and all the horrors to come hereafter.