UK

This government needs a lot more than a narrative

 February 10, 2025

Mike Phipps reviews Britain needs change: The Politics of Hope and Labour’s Challenge, edited by Gerry Hassan and Simon Barrow, published by Biteback.

From the outset, the editors of this collection are keen to emphasise that they take a more nuanced line than the standard view of Momentum and the left, which they characterise – simplistically – as: Keir Starmer is the betrayer of Corbynism and can’t be trusted on anything. The irony is that, in searching for what the essentials of Starmerism might be, one can’t avoid the fact that much of his leadership has been about defining itself against the left, rather than articulating a coherent set of policies that can tackle Britain’s multiple problems.

Some critics make a virtue of this incoherence: too much ideology, they argue, gets in the way of workable solutions. It’s better for Starmerism to be post-political, rooted in a technocratic managerialism. Yet behind this façade, we see the acceptance of the most pernicious ideas of neoliberal economic thinking, as in Rachel Reeves’ belief that the economy can be run like the finances of a private household. The likelihood of Keir Starmer’s government making a fresh start while clinging to such bankrupt notions seems remote.

Reeves’ orthodoxy is all the more bewildering, given that even Labour’s traditional opponents were expecting something more progressive from this government. Will Hutton goes so far as to say: “Starmer’s government faces none of the business and financial opposition and scepticism that Wilson, Callagan, Blair and Brown encountered. Rather the opposite.”

Labour’s ideological vacuum was filled in 2024 by short-term electoral tactics. Jeremy Gilbert argues the leadership positioned the Party to the right of the Liberal Democrats at the general election in order to more easily win Tory votes. The problem with this is that the ensuing government is basically a centre-right project, with the result that “Labour members who never voted for Corbyn are not going to be happy.”

Beyond diagnosing Labour’s problems, however, this collection does discuss some policy ideas that the Party could embrace, on the economy and public services in particular. The difficulty is with the more ambitious aim, on the part of some contributors, of constructing a narrative that Labour can elaborate regarding where Britain is and what can be done. The leadership’s adherence, however, to neoliberal economic errors, right wing talking points on immigration and stigmatisation of the sick and disabled makes this look like a lost cause from the outset.

This concern with the “story Labour should be telling” seems to have become a focus of some of the commentariat in recent weeks. John Harris wrote in the Guardian that Labour “needs a better story. Here’s one Starmer could tell.” He suggested a “solid social-democratic narrative.”

Jeremy Gilbert tweeted in response: “Starmer is never going to start telling the social democratic story that John wants him to. It would necessarily involve the government going in a direction that involves confronting some elements of capitalist power, and he’d rather lose an election.” It’s a harsh characterisation but  probably accurate.

Narrative is critically important during election campaigns, but is it so important to governments in office? Coherent policies should create their own narrative binding – and one can’t help but feel that the emphasis on “story” might be an attempt to shift the debate from what Labour is doing to how it communicates. It should hardly need saying that the government’s current woes cannot be reduced to a problem of communication.

This is not a new line of thinking. Anand Menon says in his contribution that the reason the Conservatives after 2010 found it easy to undo the Blair-Brown legacy was because Labour in office “practised social democracy surreptitiously”: they didn’t make the argument for it and embed it in the minds of the British public.

That’s one view. Another might be that the Tories were able to overturn some of the modest achievements of New Labour precisely because those achievements were quite limited and shallow.

The chapters on Britain’s place in the international order make even gloomier reading. Fewer than a fifth of people who voted for Brexit think it’s currently going well, but neither of the two main parties wanted to talk about that during the general election campaign. Unless the current government decides pro-actively what it wants its relationship with the EU to be, Britain will increasingly be defined as an adjunct of the Anglosphere, dominated by a protectionist and intolerant right wing United States.

Overall, this collection disappoints. The diagnosis of a Britain crying out for change is accurate, but the constitutional changes, favoured by the editors, which are necessary to make governance more effective, are unlikely to be top priority for either Cabinet or voters. It’s clear that Labour in office will be judged on how effectively it solves the cost of living crisis and repairs our derelict public services. Nor are these goals incompatible with a radical green agenda if the leadership has the courage to embrace it.

As for narrative, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour did quite well in 2017, when it turned the tables on its opponents, labelled them as ideologically motivated and doctrinaire, and proposed commonsense socialist solutions to fix Britain’s problems. That might be worth a second look.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.