‘Labour types riff on Musk and Milei to impress journalists, not actual voters’

Last week Labour abolished NHS England in a move some have billed as part of “project chainsaw”.

Originating with the think tank Labour Together (historically, under Starmer, very influential, but these days seemingly somewhat beleaguered), the project takes its name from Elon Musk’s recent appearance wielding a chainsaw (to symbolise cutting the government).

Labour Together told The Guardian that it was hoping to channel “[Javier] Milei’s energy but with a radical centre-left purpose” (although no 10 distanced itself from the initiative when questioned by journalists).

This flourish to the right is not a new thing for Labour, but there has been a run of them of late. The Labour Party does not need to riff on Milei and Musk. It does not need to talk, as Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar did at his party’s conference earlier this year, about creating a Scottish DOGE.

Its MPs don’t need to talk about “making Britain great again”. Senior party sources don’t need to tell the Times that Labour has more in common with Trump republicans than with the democrats.

They do it because it sounds cool

I know why people do this, having spent a lot of time in the world of the party, listening to the people who run the think tanks and advise the politicians.

The answer isn’t very complicated: they do it because they think it sounds cool and thrusting, because they want journalists to think they are the cleverest and most hard headed boy, and then to say they are the cleverest and most hard headed boy in the newspaper and also hopefully in the pub.

But beyond the many aspiring cleverest boys, who is this for? Is this good politics? Is it popular?

A few years ago, Renewal published an article by one of its then editors, my friend Nick Garland, which I think about often. In the wake of some embarrassingly breathless coverage of the 2022 National Conservatism conference, touting the idea that the conference was a sign of an intellectual vibrancy on the right.

 In doing so it implied that simply doing things and having ideas was good, a kind of tautological approach to political intellectual production, where the quality of the ideas was basically irrelevant. The article argued that while this kind of breathlessness was something social democrats were prone to, actually, what those ideas are and whether they are any good or not does matter.

We’re not testing a kaleidoscope here: they need to be more than just vibrant, and, as Nick argued, the left has “nothing to gain, and nothing to envy, from bad ideas”.

Wielding a chainsaw on stage is a bad idea

DOGE is a bad idea. Wielding a chainsaw on stage is a bad idea. Associating yourself with Donald Trump in a country where he is consistently unpopular and polls worse than any domestic politician – that is, the one where we live and where Labour wants to win elections – is a bad idea. To get in the required line of tortured nuance, I am not saying that there is nothing to learn from these people – from how Donald Trump and Javier Milei are running their governments, from how their opponents failed to prevent them from running their governments – but there is nothing to emulate or ape.

People are not stupid; they know that the Republicans winning was not what the Labour Party wanted. In government, the party has to deal with the world as it is, and that might mean a certain amount of brandishing invitations from King Charles in the Oval Office (I remain not entirely convinced, but I certainly see the arguments). Down here, however, in the think tank project titles and the briefings and the MP op-eds, a world that ultimately not that many people pay attention to, this habit of posing with the language of the right does nothing but signal a crushing lack of ideological self-confidence, and not a hint of desperation.

Right wing phrases scattered through one’s briefings and articles are not a code that unlocks new voters or does anything, particularly, beyond catch the unhappy attention of more progressive parts of Labour’s base (not something that’s advised when we have good reason to believe that a fair few Labour voters might take their support to the Greens or the Lib Dems in future). The party will win the next election if it convinces people of the merits of its own platform and presents an ideologically distinct and self-confident set of policies that offers a vision of a country that is improving, run by a moral and sincere set of politicians. The embarrassing attempts of Labour figures to appear ‘based’ do nothing to aid this – so put down the chainsaw.

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