The Shadow of the Reaper

Ben Wildsmith

Whisper it, but there are signs that the Labour Party is exploring the possibility of visiting the country it’s supposed to be governing.

After decades in a hermetically sealed capsule where, alternately, everything is fine or everything is the Tories’ fault, the two expected contenders for Keir Starmer’s job have begun to discuss the factors driving their trajectory towards extinction.

Let’s start with Wes Streeting. It’s impossible to differentiate, I suspect even for him, between what Wes believes and what he thinks people want him to believe.

The nakedness of his ambition, which has endured into his forties, must have been startling when he began his political career in student politics.

In his opening pitch to the party, he dragged a big cannon on stage immediately. The UK, he said, should rejoin the EU.

Now, it’s wise to sniff the air for countryside aromas whenever politicians are politicking, and even more so when they are clearly driven by an internal need for advancement. It’s more than possible that this announcement was designed solely to cause trouble for Andy Burnham in the Makersfield by election: a solidly Leave-voting constituency.

Let’s be generous, though, and take it on face value.

That Brexit is at the heart of the UK’s current woes is an extremely comforting notion for many in the centre and on the left of UK politics.

The referendum campaign was so toxic as to have left behind a trauma reaction in anybody who wasn’t able to revel in the result. An MP was murdered, families set against each other, and xenophobia normalised in political discourse.

For many around the Labour Party, the first charge against Keir Starmer is that he’s failed to make a moral argument against Nigel Farage’s rhetoric on immigration.

By seeking to ‘understand’ its appeal to voters, Starmer has appeased a cancerous growth on the national debate and succeeded only in causing Reform to outflank his various attempts at flag-draped isolationism.

So, standing against the great victory of nationalist populism and proposing to rejoin the EU is a popular position for many. It hints at a return to saner times before division and tribal rhetoric made friendly disagreement all but impossible.

Then there is the economic argument. After it became clear that a free trade deal with the USA was neither possible nor desirable, Brexit fans went quiet on the economy.

A 4% drop in GDP is a hard, solid reality against which you’d expect luxury notions of national identity to splinter. ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’ as Bill Clinton’s election team had it.

Whilst support for Brexit has fallen, however, that dissatisfaction has not coalesced into a meaningful campaign to reverse the decision. Streeting represents Ilford in East London. The Labour MP for Normanton & Hemsworth, Jon Trickett, noted today that the average salary in his Yorkshire constituency is £12 000 lower than that in Streeting’s.

Against that backdrop, it’s possible to imagine why voters in Labour’s heartlands of northern England are less inclined to look back on life in 2015 as a rose-tinted idyll.

As in our post-industrial valleys, Brexit merely added a discordant screech to the familiar thudding of the demolition ball. It was broken before; it’s still broken now.

Deindustrialisation

Which leads us on to Andy Burnham’s opening turn before the cameras as he commenced campaigning. Burnham looked back further to the deindustrialisation of much of the UK that began in the 1980s.

This, of course, has been identified as the great error of our times by everyone who espouses traditional Labour values. I bang on about it here on a weekly basis. For Labour, itself, though, paying any more than lip service to this belief will require a confrontation that the party has been putting off for decades.

The fundamental problem the party faces is a schism over how wealth should be generated. Either Burnham is right, and a nation as densely populated as the UK must make things and sell them in order to thrive, or Tony Blair’s belief that the country can float on financial services and coffee shops is.

Conversation

These two propositions are wholly incompatible; there is no ‘third way’ and the collapse of consensus politics across the UK is proof of that.

So, this contest might just force a conversation that herds the UK’s politicians into reality as it is lived by all of us.

Whether the electorate has patience enough to allow Labour that latitude is far from certain, the party could have simply run its course. In the shadow of the reaper, however, it does seem, finally, to have noticed the seriousness of what it faces. We shall see.