4 - Moving on: Labour’s democratic socialism

Summary

Introduction

Chapters 1–3 have argued that since 2010, the Labour Party has reached important judgements about its political direction on the basis of what its leaders – and a wider group of people in and around the Labour Party – thought about New Labour. On ideology, the party rediscovered ideological debate and enhanced the significance of confronting inequality within the party's ideology. In relation to democracy, the party turned against “machine” politics and, while not always succeeding, arrived at a vision for greater community participation. And with politics, the party saw the need for a rebalance between the electoral imperative and political conviction. Since 2015, something of a counter-reaction has been underway. Keir Starmer's leadership has been far less critical of New Labour, sometimes with just cause. Part of Starmer's strategy to distance his project from the Corbyn years has been a rejection of attacking New Labour and an embrace of some of its famous rhetoric. But a difference of interpretation when it comes to New Labour – and a difference in reaction – is not the same thing as a readoption of New Labour's politics. Starmer's Labour is not a New Labour tribute act, certainly not in substance, which is near impossible when the world has changed so much anyway (Garland & Pike 2023: 9). More precision is required in drawing comparisons, which I attempted in Chapter 3 with the more specific idea of a shared “utilitarian presumption”.

What is the ideology of Starmer's Labour? This chapter locates the contemporary Labour Party in a simultaneously recognizable yet amorphous political tradition: something called “labourism”. Labourism has had a number of critical definitions thrust upon it over past decades (Shaw 2004). For Marxist critics, labourism stood in lieu of a full-throated socialism propagated both inside and outside of parliament (Miliband 1972: 331–2). For critics of a more social democratic disposition, labourism was constituted in part by the conservatism of the British labour and trade union movement and reluctant to embrace ideas outside of this narrow tradition (Marquand 1999: 17–25). I define labourism in one form that takes something from both of these critiques: it does not set a clear direction towards the “good society”. This omission always betrays a lack of confidence. When Labour lapses into something close to labourism, it is neither clear nor confident in its ideological objective. “Equality” gives way to a vague expression of “fairness”.