#blairism

The working class in the western industrialized world is being pushed to the breaking point. Whether its UK Blairism, US Clintonism/Reaganism, or EU austerity politics. 

As the demands and pleas of the poor and marginalized are continually ignored, their voices will inevitably become louder and more radical.

At 68, Jeremy Corbyn has been on the Labour Party’s left flank longer than many of his most enthusiastic supporters — the ones who nearly propelled him to an upset victory in this month’s British general election — have been alive. 

Bernie Sanders, who won more votes from young people in the 2016 primaries than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton combined, is 75, and has a demeanor that, honestly, reminds me of my Jewish grandfather. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Communist-backed candidate who, thanks to support from young people, surged in the polls ahead of the first round of France’s presidential election, is a sprightly 65.

What has driven so many young people into passionate political work, sweeping old socialists with old ideas to new heights of popularity? To understand what is going on, you have to realize that politicians like Mr. Sanders and Mr. Corbyn have carried the left-wing torch in a sort of long-distance relay, skipping generations of centrists like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, to hand it to today’s under-35s. And you have to understand why young people are so ready to grab that torch and run with it.

Both Britain and the United States used to have parties that at least pledged allegiance to workers. Since the 1970s, and accelerating in the ’80s and ’90s, the left-wing planks have one by one been ripped from their platforms. Under Mr. Blair, Labour rewrote its famous Clause IV, which had committed the party to the goal of “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.” Under Mr. Clinton, the Democratic Party cut welfare programs and pushed anti-worker international trade deals. Writing in 1990, Kevin Phillips, a former strategist for Richard Nixon, called the Democrats “history’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party.” Elsewhere in Europe, traditional socialist parties became sclerotic and increasingly business-friendly.

All of this left many voters with a sense that there is no left-wing party devoted to protecting the interests of the poor, the working class and the young.

Meanwhile, people my age — I’m 29 — are more in need of a robust leftist platform than ever. The post-Cold War capitalist order has failed us: Across Europe and the United States, millennials are worse off than their parents were and are too poor to start new families. In the United States, they are loaded with college debt (or far less likely to be employed without a college degree) and are engaged in precarious and non-unionized labor. Also the earth is melting.

There’s nothing inherently radical about youth. But our politics have been shaped by an era of financial crisis and government complicity. Especially since 2008, we have seen corporations take our families’ homes, exploit our medical debt and cost us our jobs. We have seen governments impose brutal austerity to please bankers. The capitalists didn’t do it by accident, they did it for profit, and they invested that profit in our political parties. For many of us, capitalism is something to fear, not celebrate, and our enemy is on Wall Street and in the City of London.

Starmer, McSweeney and the Collapse of the Labour Right

Source: DepositPhotos

By Honest John

IN THE context of the Peter Mandelson scandal, the overdue ejection of the toxic Morgan McSweeney from Downing Street and the image of a Prime Minister clinging onto office by promising his MPs that he really will change priorities and culture this time, it has been common for commentators to opine about the “death of Blairism” within Labour. The argument goes that the disgrace of the quintessentially New Labour figure of Mandelson, who bafflingly maintained extraordinary sway as to the direction of the Starmer project, and the fall of his protégé, McSweeney, denotes a collapse of a persistent belief within Labour that the Third Way championed by Tony Blair in the 1990s and 2000s, still has lessons as to policy and politics for the current Labour administration. It is a compelling narrative and not one without credibility, particularly when one takes into account the soap operatic, even sinister, ease with which New Labour figures moved within the ranks of the hyper-wealthy and the political corruption that accompanied the Blair approach - echoes of which can be found regularly within the Starmer regime’s shenanigans, whether this be the acceptance of freebies by Ministers from wealthy donors, the cynical blocking of Andy Burnham from standing as an MP to prevent his assumed leadership challenge or the careless appointment of a corrupt associate of an international paedophile to the most important diplomatic posting the U.K. has to offer, despite him having no formal diplomatic experience.

Certainly the political behaviour of Starmer and much of his Cabinet does appear to lean into the contested example of Blairism, but the problem with this analysis is that it emphasises the influence of individuals, factions and superficial playground power plays, so beloved of the likes of McSweeney and Mandelson, and fails to assess what Blairism meant as a political programme. The truth is, as any meaningful guide as to how the United Kingdom should be governed in 2026, the approach championed by Blair, and to a large extent by Gordon Brown, ceased to have applicability long ago. It is the fact that the current Labour Right possesses so little conviction and new ideas that leads it to look nostalgicallly at the three extraordinary successive election victories won by Blair and to cling to the belief that surely Blairism must still have something to offer a Labour government apparently devoid of consistent direction.

Born into a world of free trade, cheap money and a neoliberal economic orthodoxy, Blairism was never the comprehensive ideology its founders in their more messianic moments, claimed it to be. Its combination of Thatcherite economics, exemplified by an uncritical belief in free markets, deregulation and market discipline in public services, combined with high public spending on social programmes, funded by cheap borrowing and protected by the shared risk intrinsic to EU membership, “Blairism” was always an opportunistic and unoriginal model. At base, it was conceived by Blair and Brown as an electoral device after Labour had suffered four successive defeats at the hands of a right-wing Conservative Party and the slow demolition of public belief in the social democracy that characterised postwar U.K. politics. It retained this shallow, slippery quality throughout its existence and its success was entirely contingent on three major factors that are simply no longer in place.

The financial crash of 2008 signalled the end of the bonanza of cheap borrowing that had enabled New Labour to grow the economy, tackle certain social injustices and fund public services to an unprecedented level, but without increasing taxation or addressing social inequality. The fourteen years of Tory rule that followed Gordon Brown’s defeat in 2010, were characterised by an austerity that claimed to be an essential remedy to the profligacy of the New Labour governments that had led to the crash (a blatant lie unchallenged by Labour in opposition) and became a self-fulfilling prophecy as a chastened financial system applied ever higher interest rates to borrowing. A fundamental strut of the Blairite approach had been removed, never to return.

Secondly, the withdrawal from the EU in 2020, ended free trade for the U.K. with its most important and proximate markets. Blairism depended on frictionless access to European markets to keep goods inflation low, provide a wide lucrative market for the UK’s significant financial service sector, and the tax hike that went with that, and the freedom of movement within the EU that kept workforce costs relatively low and trade unionism weak. EU membership also protected the U.K. economy from global trade turbulence, providing a guaranteed supply of relatively inexpensive essential goods and services despite the increasingly individualistic behaviour of major powers such as the USA and China. The franchising out of sovereignty and national economic self-management that EU membership entailed, was essential to the globalist worldview of Blairism. Outside the EU, the Third Way simply could not function.

Therefore by the time Keir Starmer came to power in 2024, Blairism as a realistic means by which to run the economy was a dead duck. As a final malign afterplay, the Liz Truss attempt to revive Chicago Economics has made the costs of UK borrowing particularly prohibitive - a national economy worth £3trn now sits on a debt interest repayment figure of … £3trn. Borrowing to get out of trouble is impossible. To compound a transformed economic context to the world of 1997-2010, the introduction of tariffs as a weapon in international relations, wielded most aggressively by the Trump regime, demonstrates graphically that globalisation, once admiringly described by Blair as a force of nature impossible to oppose, is finished, and with it, the very worldview that framed Blair’s complacent and naive approach. Therefore Blairism, whether as ideology, political programme or just faith, has simply run out of road.

Unfortunately for this government, the key figures who fashioned Starmer into the flailing premier he is today - McSweeney, Rachel Reeves, Pat McFadden, Wes Streeting, Mandelson - who saw revanchist Blairism as the magic formula that would transform Labour, following the electoral catastrophe of Corbynism, into the vote-harvesting machine of 1997, was powered by no more than belief. The inconvenient facts that should have ruled out the New Labour model entirely, were ignored, leading to the serial dropping of all remaining radical Labour policies in opposition, the self-imposed torture of the fiscal rules, a willingness to cut public spending and, most egregiously of all (and to be fair, not particularly Blairite), the hapless pandering to Reform and framing immigration and asylum seeking in entirely negative terms. The dominance of the Labour Right, which has characterised the Starmer regime throughout has brought Labour to the brink of electoral ruin and almost destroyed the premiership of the man it chose to lead its wrong-headed, self-defeating and fantasy-fuelled charge. Now however, very suddenly, the Labour Right itself appears to have collapsed.

The Starmer “project”, if indeed it can be termed such a thing, led by the arch-manipulator McSweeney, has never had anything very much in the way of ideas, or intellectual curiosity, much less an ideology. It was animated entirely by a visceral and vicious hatred of Corbynism and a sectarianism that was as destructive as it was ultimately pointless. The merciless pursuit of any Labour Party figures who could even remotely be identified as on “the left”, resulting in purges, exclusions, proscriptions and blockings, has resulted in a sadly diminished party with few ideas as to how to govern or even what its priorities should be. The result is a halving of the number of Labour's 2024 voters, a full two thirds of whom have apparently shifted their voting intentions to parties on Labour's left. The Mandelson affair may have been the tipping point, but the objective failure of the Labour Right to achieve any form of success for the government, electoral or otherwise, put the skids under the faction long ago. The ejection of the thoroughly malign McSweeney may be the most symbolic part of what will surely be a changing of the guard, but most of the other high profile members of Starmer's Right-dominated cabinet are similarly compromised: Streeting, tainted by association with the Dark Lord; Reeves haplessly incapable of securing the growth her fiscal rules were supposed to guarantee; Cooper forever damned by her quixotic attempt to imprison agitprop pro-Palestine students as terrorists, and Mahmood cosplaying Reform to the horror of large swathes if the PLP and Labour's voting base. With the eminence grise of Blairism disgraced in perpetuity, and his familiar at last gone, any pretence at a political programme for the Starmer regime has departed with them.

I summarised the essentials for the Labour government’s recovery and survival in my previous blog. In essence, the fiscal rules must go, and growth generated by full implementation of the Green Prosperity Plan, in tandem with government backed inward investment, comprising a comprehensive stimulus package to generate jobs, and improve living standards. In addition there needs to be an honest conversation with the electorate about tax to enable public services and local government to be re-funded and reverse the damage done by years of austerity. Such a package would not be without electoral risk, but it would give Labour the “story” so cripplingly absent from the Starmer regime and would provide that elusive ingredient yearned for by a disappointed and sour electorate - the government could yet provide hope.

Labour in power would need wholesale change to deliver anything resembling the above - the so-called “grown ups” would need to be cleared out and replaced by clear-eyed ideas people with passion, ideals and administrative skill who want to take the generational opportunity of a Labour government to improve the lot of ordinary people, and not squander the chance with playground politics, dreary outdated solutions, and doom and gloom narratives which have been the hallmarks of Starmerism. All this surely means Keir Starmer himself must quit the stage as soon as possible, right?

And yet he remains, defying gravity, the party unable to depose him because his would-be replacements are too compromised, distant or unwilling. The thought of an eighth Prime Minister in sixteen years is indeed a horrifying indictment of U.K. politics, and this may also have led the PLP to rally behind their wounded leader, at least for now. Starmer without McSweeney is indeed a tantalising prospect. Little seems to motivate Starmer beyond personal advancement and his very political emptiness may yet serve him well as the illusions of the Labour Right to which he so unwisely hitched his wagon, are exposed for what they always were. It would be ironic indeed if after so much talk of leadership change, Starmer tacks left in a desperate attempt to survive and his party accepts it, simply because credible alternatives to him do not currently exist. Keir Starmer may yet indulge in yet another piece of successful political shape shifting. However, whether that will be sufficient to save the government Starmer himself has done so much to undermine, is impossible to say.

Peter Mandelson, "The Blair Revolution revisited", May 2002

His vision is a strong Britain leading Europe in partnership with an engaged United States to promote freedom, justice and security in the wider world.

http://novaramedia.com/2018/01/15/ink-it-onto-your-knuckles-carillion-is-how-neoliberalism-lives-and-breathes/

The brand name Carillion was invented in 1999 when Tarmac discovered that the PFI and privatisation contracts being issued by Tony Blair’s Labour government had become more lucrative than actually laying tarmac.

At the time I worked in the construction press. I remember old-timers being mystified about PFI and the related new industry of facilities management. It will never take off, they said, because to make it work the state would actually have to underwrite the profits of the private sector, and assume its risks, for no tangible reward other than a pile of debts that would one day become unserviceable.