The revelations in the Sunday Times and Times this week about the Labour’s leadership in-fighting, backstabbing and contempt for each other, makes terrible reading for anyone who thought the ‘grown ups’ were really back in charge. Any successful political project needs deep ideas, or strong relationships. Preferably both. It’s looking like Labour’s leaders have neither.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been asking people whether you can be politically competent in the absence of ideas. Labour came to office (notice I did not say power) on the crest of a tiny wave in which there were two central claims; the first that they weren’t the Conservatives and the second that they were competent.

There was much talk of ‘sleeves being rolled up’, and ‘ground being hit running’. But what we heard much less about was where were they running to, why and how. 

Indeed Keir Starmer often appeared to make a virtue of the fact that his leadership was an ideas free zone. Instead he just wanted ‘to get things done’ and jumped back to the Blairite lexicon of ‘what worked’ as if that were remotely possible in some context, personality, values and practice free zone. He boasted that his would be a Government ‘unburdened by doctrine’.

Starmer made little secret of the fact that he was uninterested in general political ideas. He carried with him a big belief in human rights and social justice, and an emotional sympathy for the working class. But there was little beyond this. Look, I’m not the most interesting political thinker in town, but in my own brief dealings with him, an early leadership election ‘discussion’ about public service reform, his eyes glazed over and his mind was somewhere else – probably a 5-side football pitch in North London. From good sources I’m told that the only reason his infamous ‘Missions’ were invested in is that he refused to do vision. But Starmer was also the antidote to Corbyn, and Corbyn did ideas and therefore ideas were seen as a bad thing.  

As Labour tips to the right, they would do worse than reflect on the words of Ayn Rand who rightly stated that “You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”

And the reality is you cannot govern in an intellectual void.

Politics must be based on an intellectual argument, or it is nothing. Look at Labour’s post war Government. Read Paul Addison’s magisterial book ‘The Road to 1945’ and marvel at the streams of ideas and forces that converged over what David Marquand called ‘a 100-year conversation’ to crystallise that transformative moment. Leap forward to 1979, and, like it or not, the fact that Thatcherism was based on a profound set of arguments set out by the likes of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Von Hayek. Leap again to 1997 and a New Labour that back then thought hard and deep as the ideas of Anthony Giddens, Will Hutton and more created at least some framework for the ‘third way’. 

Famously, Blair said he ‘won as New Labour and would govern as New Labour’. Again, like it or not, it gave his Government consistency. Meanwhile Starmer won the leadership of Labour by pretending to represent Corbynism without Corbyn, before junking all that and turning on many of the people who voted for him. He then went on to win the election by simply not being the Conservative party and promising not to change anything of great significance. All of this in a poly-crisis world hurtling towards national populism just about everywhere. This is not to say that winning elections in a hostile media environment is easy, its not.

But it leaves you clinging onto office without a mandate to act in the service of the things that you believe in.  

So just seven months on from that election, there is a growing panic in Starmer’s Government because it has no foundations to do anything else. The order of the day is simply to survive. Governing is not just difficult without a plan, it’s impossible. The remnants of ‘securenomics’, Rachel Reeves’ well-received Mais lecture and just about all the other slim intellectual gruel Labour assembled is being thrown overboard in a blind panic dash of growth and cuts.

 

‘The Unprincipled Society’

Back to the personality and factional ructions being serialised in the Murdoch press. Here, I’m reminded of a conversation that David Runciman overheard at a Tony Blair Institute conference in 2022; “Do you know why British politics is so acrimonious?’ I heard one man in a dark blue suit and pale blue open-necked shirt say

In his brilliant 1988 text ‘The Unprincipled Society’ David Marquand made the simple but irrefutable argument that politics without a deep and abiding ethical basis, is prey to every and any slight gust of wind that blows it off course. It’s not just that your delivery mechanism has to work, it’s not just that any delivery mechanism itself is a profoundly political concept, it is that people need to know why you’re doing something, and it needs to resonate with them. As soon as it stumbles, which all projects do, they won’t stick with it. Increasingly though they won’t go for a ‘democratic’ alternative that makes the same promises and disappoints the same hearts. No, they will go for the people who are willing to tell them who to follow and who to hate.

In the 1982 American supernatural horror film ‘Poltergeist’, directed by Tobe Hooper and written by Steven Spielberg, a run-of-the-mill Midwest American family are terrorised by ghosts because, as they eventually find out, their new house was built on an ancient burial site, but the contractors only removed the headstones, not the tombs. Meaningful, grown-up politics means you have to dig deep into ideas, arguments and concepts as the only way to navigate towards a better society. If Labour’s leaders won’t do it, then we must. 

This article first appeared in the Byline Times on Tuesday the 4th of February 2025.