Constantly emphasising your passive inability to make choices feeds conspiracy and fuels disaffection – so why does Labour under Keir Starmer keep returning to this favoured excuse?
When Foreign Secretary David Lammy stood up in the Commons to announce a restriction of some arms sales to Israel, he solemnly declared that “the assessment I have received leaves me unable to conclude anything other than that, for certain UK arms exports to Israel, there exists a clear risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.”
This came a week after Keir Starmer in the Downing Street rose garden warned that “There’s a budget coming in October, and it’s going to be painful. We have no other choice given the situation that we’re in.”
Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves has spent years explaining how her fiscal rules will necessarily and virtuously constrain her ability to do things the Labour government wants to do, as if the fiscal rules, and the OBR forecasts, and the rest of Labour’s economic straitjacket architecture were immutable laws of physics, as opposed to political choices with political consequences.
Naturally, the Germans already have a lengthy word for this phenomena Alternativlosigkeit or ‘alternativelessness’. Clearly, this is not a new political rhetorical device. It is, however, instructive that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party keeps returning to this framing to justify their decisions to the electorate.
Whilst party strategists and spinners know this framing to be dishonest but judge it to be expedient; unfortunately, there are plenty of people who will take this as further evidence of an honestly held belief, or a brewing suspicion, that the political system is rigged. Further evidence that they have, literally, no choice in the political decisions that shape their lives and their country.
On one level, this simply encourages the low-level cynicism and disaffection, the why-botherism, the they’re-all-the-same-ism that has taken hold slowly but surely over recent decades; leading to a decline in the public’s opinion of, and confidence in, politicians, a splintering of the two-party system, and low levels of turnout in general elections since 2001 that have never returned to the levels seen between 1922 and 1997.
Why bother turning up to vote if you’re one of the 74% of people whose vote was wasted under first past the post at this year’s election? An election that produced the least representative (read least democratic) result on record. And even if you live somewhere where your vote might mean something, if politicians tell you they have no choices when it comes to policy, then you’re just voting for which colour rosette you like best.
Even more worryingly, however, Labour’s no choice narrative also risks fuelling dangerous alt-right conspiracy theories, such as the New World Order and the Great Reset, that scare and outrage people into believing that a cartel of economic elites secretly dictate global politics – with national governments simply puppets of big business and international political and economic institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank.
So why do Labour keep returning to the ‘no choice’ narrative?
Partially, it’s because ‘no choice’ is the path of least political resistance, it’s the easiest way to avoid having to argue, to expend political capital, to draw a dividing line. To disabuse oneself of responsibility is to recuse oneself from blame. To govern is to choose, except when there’s no choice.
It’s also, probably, about justifying these unpalatable decisions to the politicians and advisers themselves as human beings with morals and values. Labour’s comprehensive refusal to embrace the fundamental economic reforms needed to do away with a decade and a half of ‘tough choices’ austerity means that the people responsible for taking, implementing and justifying these decisions need to find some way of being able to sleep at night.
But self-exculpation and taking the easy way out don’t tell the full story. The ‘no choice’ narrative is symptomatic of something deeper, the timidity, paranoia and irresolution at the heart of Starmerism, that has dogged the project since the very beginning.
The word so often reached for by those looking to summarise Keir Starmer’s approach to his tenure as Labour leader is ruthless.
Cast your mind back to the expulsion of former leader and one time ‘friend’ Jeremy Corbyn. The purging and deselection of left-wing MPs like Sam Tarry. The vice-like grip LOTO and the NEC had on candidate selections. Party rule changes on the selection of the leader, and most infamously, Keir Starmer’s (mis)handling of the 2020 leadership election and those 10 pledges.
These aren’t the actions of someone who wholeheartedly believes in their ability to win the argument, to lead and bring people with them. You don’t change the rules and purge dissenters if you are confident that you’re crafting the next hegemonic political project. You don’t win the leadership under one guise and then spend the rest of it disowning and disparaging the very same policies and principles. These are the actions taken in a fit of paranoia, a crude, underhand attempt to finish Peter Mandelson’s work of putting the left of the party into a sealed tomb.
Last year Wes Streeting infamously declared that no hope was better than false hope. It seems, not content with declaring the end of hope, Labour now feel the need to proclaim the death of choice, too.
Perhaps Keir Starmer’s enthusiastic rejection of hope and choice, and steadfast refusal to place himself on an ideological spectrum isn’t, as some speculate, merely a result of his apolitical nature – Sir Humphrey turned Jim Hacker; but is instead a manifestation of his brand of technocratic anti-politics. The tool-makers son who favours function over form.
The irony is that, in a way, Labour are right to highlight the complicated nature of the role of ‘choice’ in politics. The United Kingdom, coming to terms with reduced influence post-Brexit, in a world scrambling to reckon with the consequences of the climate emergency, and living with Thatcher’s abolition of exchange controls in 1979 which paved the way for the free movement of capital has lost a lot of control, over economic matters in particular.
But a government with an annual tax intake of £1 trillion and the sixth largest economy in the world does have choices. It will, however, require conviction, imagination, and a sense of moral clarity that Labour governments of the past have so often lacked in contrast to their ideology-proud Conservative opponents to produce the changes that our society is in such desperate need of.
Timidity, paranoia and irresolution might have been good enough to win a sandcastle majority, but the problem with an ultra-efficient vote share strategy, which, to their credit, Labour strategists executed perfectly, is that even a small reduction in how efficiently Labour’s voters are spread across the country, could present a very big electoral problem. First-past-the-post giveth, first-past-the-post taketh away.
If the former director of prosecutions and his government don’t start passionately prosecuting their argument, start being honest about their choices, and begin to confront the conspiratorial right head-on, then Keir Starmer may just find that the public feel that at the next election they have no choice but to vote Labour out.
Jay Jackson is a political commentator who has written for outlets including Labour List, the Mile End Institute and Politics.co.uk.
Opinions in the above article are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or beliefs of Compass as an organisation. Compass seeks to platform a wide range of progressive viewpoints that reflect the diversity and plurality of the democratic left.