A Leg To Stand On

Ben Wildsmith

As liberal centrism becomes the whipping boy for global ills, Keir Starmer’s Labour government is attracting more international exposure that the UK’s importance would seem to warrant.

Its day-to-day concerns, largely focused on scrabbling together enough liquid cash to make the Chancellor’s sums add up this quarter, are at odds with a perception of it as the public face of supranational Eurocommunism.

The more frantic right-wing commentators believe that this unremarkable, unimaginative centre-right administration, bobbing along in the ideological quicksand between Ted Heath and Hugh Gaitskill, is somehow at the vanguard of a world revolution.

Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday is convinced that Starmer will be unmasked, Scooby-Doo-stylee, as a Trotskyite firebrand. Others note the ease with which Starmer slips into organisations like DAVOS.

Whilst our bequiffed, monotonal PM has yet to be photographed burning the world’s cares inside a stone owl at Bohemian Grove, he does look the type.

The truth is less dramatic. In common with governments across Europe, the Labour administration’s sins are of omission rather than commission.

Drawn overwhelmingly from the professional and managerial classes, European politicians of all traditional parties have overseen decades of widening inequality.

‘Growth’

Whilst GDP has kept pace sufficiently that nobody they know personally has been cast into penury, the ongoing quest for ‘growth’ betrays the extent to which value is being systematically siphoned upwards from poor to rich.

This process is the most significant economic fact of our lifetimes.

As this illustration from the IFS demonstrates, the problem is particularly acute in the UK.

Inequality is not just a blight on the life chances of people, but an expensive breach in the national fabric.

Put simply, if people are unable to afford meaningful lives, the impact on their health, family security, and socialisation eventually shows up on the public ledger as services contend with crises.

‘Fixing the foundations’ of the UK economy is a phrase this government employs to explain why it is prioritising fiscal credibility over social responsibility.

It is, in common with all post-Thatcher governments, pretending that delaying repairs on the roof is fine because the sun is bound to shine.

The sun, in this tortured metaphor, is economic growth, and Rachel Reeves’ apparent belief that growth is the only route out of our difficulties is the assumption that will define this government.

Cake

As I seem to be on a metaphorical roll this afternoon, it should be readily apparent that if national wealth is a cake and there are slices such as the one enjoyed by the Duke of Westminster, then trying to bake a larger cake, despite having less ingredients than before is hardly the only means by which those subsisting on crumbs might be afforded more.

Re-slicing the cake would, however, require iron discipline when wielding the knife.

Those aristocratic necks are so inviting.

As Starmer and his milquetoast counterparts in Europe cast around for unifying themes with which to challenge Donald Trump’s new order, they are rather missing the obvious.

If Europe is to be distinct; a recognisable entity with values that enjoy widespread public support, then it must reverse trends towards inequality.

It is no accident that the loudest political disquiet has been from the UK, where inequality is most entrenched and visible.

Political elites see disputes as something within the political sphere. This is the blind spot that Trump, Farage, Orban and the rest have exploited with such success.

When politics has become impervious to the people then the people will find a new politics.

Baffling

The behaviour of the nominative ‘left’ in western politics over the last few years has been baffling. A reluctance to challenge economic shibboleths that guarantee widening inequality has led to a wilful denial of its existence.

Inequality is, of course, far from geographically uniform. With every turn of the screw, areas of deprivation have become yet further detached from a political process that applauds their continued disadvantage.

Tiers do exist in UK life; they are obvious to everyone outside of the top one.

It is the job of left-wing politicians to explain them in economic terms. The failure of the left in Europe to do that has allowed old xenophobic and racial arguments to be wheeled out by populists once again.

That figures on the global right suspect dangerous ideological leanings in Keir Starmer is testament to the fearful paranoia which characterises their world view.

The danger in Starmer, and Macron, and Scholz, and the rest is that they are rooted in nothing at all.

They possess all the quivering rectitude they imagine derives from the European tradition but embody none of its virtues.

They lead countries that have been hollowed out economically and culturally by international capital yet are so indebted to it as to be struck dumb at its misdeeds.

With Putin on one side, and Trump on the other, it is time to find a leg to stand on.