The supposedly "radical" conference about "renewing" Labour was decidely mainstream
A report from THE LEFT LANE on the weekend conference of a "soft left" Labour party pressure group.
By Alan Story
Two things are clear. A one-day conference billed as “Change: How? A decade of Radical Renewal” was anything but radical. Nor did it join the dots and propose how a supposed Labour “radical renewal” might actually occur.
Organised by the centre / soft left Labour Party pressure group Compass, Saturday’s well-attended event in London was aimed at figuring out how a Labour government could be transformed in a positive way between 2025 and 2035 after – to understate the matter - a less than inspirational launch in July 2024. This, of course, presumes Starmer’s lot – and the lot that Compass and most of its 3,000 members support - will be re-elected. That is a far from a certain proposition.
But the conference was disconnected along several more important lines.
THE WORD “MODERATE” FITS
Instead of being “radical”, that is, getting to the roots of things, most of the ideas presented by conference speakers were distinctly mainstream and liberal. “Moderate” would best describe the tone.
Although many in the audience of four hundred were clearly unhappy about how the current Labour government is performing, there was also a strange denial of who was responsible for their disappointment. It was all the work, it seemed, of some mostly unspecified political force. From the podium, speakers seldom mentioned Keir Starmer’s name. No one said up front that it was Labour Work and Pensions Minister Liz Kendall who had increased child poverty by her cruel cutbacks.
Certainly among some speakers there was a fear of even further resignations by Labour activists. “Stay and fight,” implored Labour peer and chair of the Compass management team Ruth Lister.
My own sympathies lie with long-standing members of the Labour Party, including in Compass, who have campaigned hard since 2010 to replace the Tories and have got only this dog’s breakfast of a government of broken promises and downright falsifications from Starmer, chancellor Rachel Reeves, Kendall, foreign secretary David Lammy, and others.
How much longer will it be believable for an MP such as Rachel Maskell to claim, as she did on Saturday, that “only a Labour government can bring a change in (levels of) child poverty.” What does she have in mind? A one-child tax credit?
WHAT ABOUT THE ISRAELI GENOCIDE?
Overall, while the audience was quite upbeat, there was also a strangeness in the air, a peculiar detachment from wider political realities and events.
These include the Israeli’s horrendous genocide of Palestinians; it was barely mentioned over the day-long event. Palestine played a second role in only one of 16 sessions. Is this what one should expect at a meeting of the “progressive left,” as Compass bills itself to be? Too much focus on Palestine and Israel would, of course, lead to a focus on how complicit this Labour government is in Israel's genocide and how this government sent a trade envoy to Israel (namely, Lord Ian Austen) at the very same time it was saying it does not want to cut a trade deal with Israel in the current circumstances.
Nor did the Compass event discuss that governments with a similar pro-status quo orientation as this Labour government are falling like tens pins across the world. Witness the recent German election. Social democracy is in a global crisis. Compass-style efforts that aim to buff off the rough spots of Labour are bound to fail without a wider philosophical discussion. To reduce the issue to “Labour has to tell stories”, as some suggested, rather misses the point.
More generally, the speakers did not come to grips with the fact that the purpose of a government such a Starmer’s is NOT to make bold or sweeping changes or to radically alter the domestic or global equality of access to wealth and resources. Its role is to be a manager, not a transgressor, of the capitalist order.
We will come back to this point in a few paragraphs when we discuss the analysis of such governments by Ralph Miliband. (Ralph was the father or Ed and David Miliband but had very different politics.)
First-term Peckham MP Miatta Fahnbulleh is a junior minister in the Starmer government.
Take the closing plenary address by Starmer government minister Miatta Fahnbulleh, described as on the “soft left” of Labour.
An economist, Fahnbulleh told the Compass audience that “about 30 per cent of British children live in poverty.” Yes, shocking and should be called out. So why then did her ministerial colleagues Starmer, Kendal and Reeves decide that the two-child benefit cap should be maintained, a Tory policy that social security experts say has increased child poverty? The hypocrisy is breath taking.
Great Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham
DON’T APE THE RIGHT’S RHETORIC
She was followed by Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, the last speaker of the day. About the rise of the Reform Party, the Labour Party veteran correctly made the point that the way “to take on the right is not by aping their rhetoric.”
For one second, you might have thought he was pointing the finger at Keir Starmer. But of course he was not, he never mentioned Starmer’s name.
Here, for example, was Starmer discussing immigrants at a Downing St press conference back in November 2024:
“Nearly one million people came to Britain in the year ending June 2023… It isn’t a global trend… Or taking your eye off the ball. No – this is a different order of failure… Policies were reformed…Deliberately …To liberalise immigration… To turn Britain into a one-nation experiment in open borders…”
THE LEFT LANE reported on that speech in a 12 December article titled: “ Starmer doesn’t challenge the rise of the far right. Instead, he reinforces it.”
One new theme being pushed of late by Starmer’s handlers surfaced several times in the Compass conference discussions. Looking ahead to the next general election, we are being told it will be primarily a contest between Labour and Reform: TAKE YOUR PICK. That approach is just about the oldest campaign tactic in the world and once again shows why so many people are alienated from our political system. It would require an article by itself to unpack this.
Not a single speaker at the five sessions I attended challenged the indisputable fact arising from the general election: Labour won only 34% of the overall vote, and from the recent local elections, where Labour lost hundreds of councillors. The party is rapidly losing its long-term working-class voter base. This is true no matter how many times both Starmer and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner prattle on about their proletarian roots.
ABANDONED THE WORKING CLASS
I waited in vain for someone within Compass to stand up and echo the same words about Labour found in a tweet by US senator Bernie Sanders on 6 November 2024. He posted it hours after Democratic candidate presidential candidate Kamala Harris had been thumped at the polls by Donald Trump.
Wrote Sanders: “It should come as no great surprise the Democratic Party which abandoned working class people would find that the working class had abandoned them.”
And if the ghost of Enoch Powell hangs over Starmer after his recent “island of strangers” speech attacking immigrants, what also comes to mind is another quote by Powell during a nastv 1964 by election. “In the end, the Labour party could cease to represent labour,” said the then-Tory MP.
Political scientist and socialist Ralph Miliband
At the Compass event you perhaps would not expect someone to repeat the analysis of Britain’s leading socialist political scientist Ralph Miliband as to how we should look at the attitude of governments such as Starmer’s upon coming into office.
Writing in his 1969 classic text, The State in Capitalist Society, Miliband explained how social democratic leaders - and Starmer is barely a social democrat even on a good day - often act upon being elected.
“… social democratic leaders, in their moment of victory, and even more so after, have generally been most concerned to reassure the dominant classes and the business elites as to their intentions, to stress that they conceived their task in ‘national’ and not in ‘class’ terms, to insist their assumption of office held no threat to business; and, in the same vein, they have equally been concerned to urge upon their followers and the working class is generally the virtues of patience, discipline and hard work, to warn them that electoral victory and the achievement of office by their own leaders must on no account serve as an encouragement of the militant assertion of working-class demands upon employers, propertied interests and the government itself, and to emphasise that the new ministers, faced with immense responsibilities, burdens and problems, must not be impeded by unreasonable an unrealistic pressures. The leaders, once in office (and often before ) are always more moderate than their followers… new governments to the left have always been a great pains to subdue popular expectations, and to emphasise that while there was much they wish to do by way of reform, capitalist interests would find, if they do not know it already, that they were dealing with eminently reasonable and responsible men.”
In a word, lawyer Keir Starmer is Mr. Reasonable … and the disabled, those without proper housing, those carved up by the cost-of-living crisis and others should understand this! So pipe down and be quiet!
NOTE: Miliband’s entire 294-page book can be read online HERE
+++++++++
THE LEFT LANE asked Compass Deputy Director Frances Foley for a brief statement on what she thought the 31 May event had accomplished. Here is her full 125-word response:
“Thanks for your interest, Alan. At a time of political uncertainty and malaise, Change: How? demonstrated that there is a broad and deep coalition - of ideas, approaches and most importantly people - that this Labour could tap into if it chooses to invest in a decade of national renewal. From inside Labour, there are confident and courageous leaders like Lou Haigh, Mark Drakeford, Nadia Whittome, Miatta Fahnbulleh and Andy Burnham. And beyond the party, there is an ecosystem of thinkers and organisers from the wider left, working from the grassroots to international solidarity campaigns, all willing and able to help the Party make the most of its time in government and give the country that injection of optimism and ambition it so desperately needs."
At this piece reveals, I saw the event rather differently. It was same old, same old, tilted 2 degrees to the left of an official Labour event.
++++++++++++
A brief point on finances:
Travelling to London by rail, registering for the Compass event, and buying my lunch cost me exactly £60.00. Those funds came of my back pocket. $60.00 is also the cost of a paid subscription to THE LEFT LANE for 12 months. A few more would be appreciated.
Just click on the link at the top or bottom of this issue.
+++++++++++
A LETTER FROM MY MP TO PM STARMER
To: My MP Clive Lewis
From: Alan Story ( one of your constituents in Norwich South)
Clive:
This is an excellent and I am sure heart-felt letter below that was shared on the Whats App of our Norfolk Palestine Solidarity Group.
Thanks for speaking out on behalf of me and many others in the UK.
One suggestion … and speaking as one former professional journalist to another: If you resigned from the Parliamentary Labour Parliamentary Party and sat as an independant MP, your righful indignation would have real UK-wide impact. News of your stand might even reach the people of Palestine. Any editor here with a nose for newsworthiness would put this story on the front page or near the top of the radio/tv news.
This is not the time to be timid.
Alan
++++++++++++++++
Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe
You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com
Read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE ( 78 in total) here
Follow us on THE LEFT LANE Instagram and on THE LEFT LANE Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/leftlanepolitics.bsky.social
It's always a difficult position to decide whether to stay and fight for reform or to jump ship and work on something new. In the UK, Labour has had three key moments in recent history that would seem, to this Canadian observer, to warrant jumping ship. First, Tony Blair's third way and Iraq, Second, the purging of Jeremy Corbyn based on obvious lies and, subsequently the purging of left-leaning Jews. Third, Starmer's rise to the leadership based on outright lies, his rise to the Premiership similarly based on outright lies, and his actions that clearly demonstrate his hatred for the working class and those who are vulnerable to the whims of a capitalist society. Here in Canada, those who consider themselves socialist have a similar conundrum with the New Democratic Party (NDP), Canada's allegedly social democratic party. No doubt they've done some good things such as: six decades ago forcing a Liberal minority government to introduce medicare, Canada's single payer, universal health care system (minus pharamacare and dental care); last year forcing another minority Liberal government to introduce a watered down version of a limited, single payer, pharmacare and dental care. We still have a mix of public and private delivery of all. However, the NDP having become the official opposition party federally in the early 20teens and poised to take government in the 2015 election, chose an ex-Liberal politician to be there leader who promptly promised not to raise taxes and to balance the budget (austerity for the masses in everyone's book). That, coupled with Canadians' desire to rid the country of the far-right Conservatives, caused a stampede of NDPers to vote Liberal. They have been the only party to call what is happening in Palestine "genocide", but they (federally and provincially) still give the boot to candidates who openly criticize Israel or Zionism or support Palestine. Where the NDP has formed government provincially, they have governed largely like small "l" liberals or like what we used to call "Red Tories". As with Labour in the UK, I don't see any realistic chance of reforming the NDP into a really progressive, left-wing party, let alone into a socialist party. Time to leave a ship that, if it is not sinking, is headed in the wrong direction.