Keir Starmer’s war on the left is a war on democracy – and it’s a mistake

While the Tories prepare a wave of brutal austerity, the Labour leadership remains doggedly committed to a series of internal fights. The sharply factional manner in which the party machine is intervening in parliamentary selections, and its wider hostility to internal democracy, is more than a ‘war on the left’ – it is part of a political methodology that involves ensuring that members have little or no say in the personnel or policy of Labour’s drive towards government.

The idea that electability and party democracy are counterposed is a core belief of Labour’s technocrats and the mainstream commentariat. But there is a problem with this assumption: it is nonsense. In recent decades, under leaders of the left and the right, the urge to impose candidates, shut down debate and fudge policy decisions has lost Labour votes and robbed it of the clarity it needs to win elections.

Policy blunders come from the top

Blairism was, on its own terms, an electoral success story. Its legacy, however, was a liability. For every mention of the minimum wage, Sure Start and devolution, there is an echo of PFI, tuition fees and Iraq. Had Labour had a functioning internal democracy, none of these things would have happened. The leadership was defeated at party conference on foundation hospitals, but in the great Labour tradition this vote was ignored. Polls and surveys of Labour members in the run up to the Iraq War showed overwhelming grassroots opposition to the invasion. There was a narrower but nonetheless undeniable majority against top-up fees among party members.

In the first half of the 2010s, Labour was defeated on economic narratives. New Labour pioneered the deregulation of the City of London, and the financial crash hit Britain especially hard. In the years that followed, the neo-liberal consensus mutated into a consensus about public spending cuts. The party leadership continued to support austerity in the 2015 election, despite overwhelming opposition from unions and party members, and the result was disaster. Labour was blamed for the deficit and lacked the tools to set out an alternative. Austerity became a huge political success for the Tories, despite being a clear policy failure on its own terms.

Had party and trade union members been in charge of Labour’s economic policy, it is difficult to imagine them opting for either financial deregulation or austerity. It is equally difficult to imagine a democratic policy process deciding on the disastrously ambiguous Brexit policy adopted during the Corbyn years. Had Labour wanted to win a ‘Brexit election’ – which 2019 undoubtedly became – it would have needed to pick a position early on and fought to convince the public of it. In order to obtain the necessary clarity, all the leadership needed to do was to let its members decide. Around 80% of them backed single market membership in 2017, and by 2018 the same majority backed a second referendum.

Instead, the Labour leadership opted for a standard party management model, using the muscle of trade union hierarchies and the motion compositing process to fudge the position. In 2017, it committed to delivering Brexit but softening the deal in an undefined way. In February 2018, it announced that it would support a customs union with the EU, but without free movement or remaining inside the EU’s wider regulatory framework. In September 2018, it shifted to supporting a labyrinthine policy in which ‘all options were on the table’. And, after the disaster of the 2019 European elections in which it lost most of its seats because of a Lib Dem and Green surge, it finally committed to supporting a confirmatory referendum on the Brexit deal with an option to Remain – but only after it had spent the previous three years publicly campaigning against this very policy.

The grown ups are incompetent

If your aim is to achieve radical change, one of the worst mistakes you can make is to confuse jargon and officialdom for effectiveness and seriousness, and to assume that loyalty and order will deliver better results than the chaotic, creative mess of a genuine activist democracy.

Under siege from the political establishment inside and outside Labour, the Corbyn project turned to the grown-ups, and to the long tradition of machine politics that has run through Labour since its inception. Democratic reform in the party, ‘a new kind of politics’ and a transformation of the trade unions were all casualties of this process. But so too were Labour’s electoral prospects. By closing down democratic decision-making in favour of an endless fudge, the adults made finding a clear and credible Brexit policy impossible. The closing down of Momentum’s democratic structures made the organisation a more efficient machine, but it also meant that its local groups collapsed. There was only so much that Momentum could be expected to achieve by bussing in hundreds of people from the outside whenever election time came around, however dynamic its operation was.

Now that the victory of Starmer’s Labour seems assured, many politicians and commentators will assert that the takeover of the party by the group of insurgent radicals was a blip, and that now it is time to trust in ever tighter party management.

Their method can and will deliver results, but technocrats and focus groups will lay booby-traps, just as they did for Ed Miliband and Gordon Brown. On the big issues of the day – public ownership, taxation, redistribution – the radical impulses of Labour’s members come much closer to public opinion than the fence-sitting credibility of the party leadership. If we have learned anything from the past decade, it is that not only do the grown ups and professionals tend towards control-freakery and conservatism, it is that they are – on a deep, political level – incompetent for the task at hand.

Part of this article is an extract from This Is Only The Beginning: the making of a new left, from anti-austerity to the fall of Corbyn, which is out now.