Newsletter #16: Labour’s choice
If Burnham wins, he will return to a Westminster utterly detached from the people it seeks to represent.
In which we write on Burnham’s opportunity to reconnect Labour with the country, and Siobhan Corbey Tobin reviews Half Man Half Biscuit’s album All Asimov and No Fresh Air.
For weeks, the pubs and bars of Westminster have been full of politicians, advisors and journalists giddy with speculation about who will depose the Prime Minister. Finally, Josh Simons, MP for Makerfield resigned his seat for Andy Burnham. Someone has acted, something has happened. In a party succumbed to inertia, this is an achievement in itself.
The communist Antonio Gramsci can help us make sense of this drama. He is the theorist of the conjuncture. This is the dynamic combination of events, circumstances, social forces and economic interests which structure a society at any given moment in its history. From the southern Italian jail where Mussolini had confined him, he sought to interpret and reimagine Marxism in his Prison Notebooks.
The by-election in Makerfield is such a conjuncture. The future of the Labour Party is at stake. Should Burnham lose to Reform, then Labour’s estrangement from the working class will reach its denouement. If he wins, nothing is resolved but not all is lost.
Gramsci makes a distinction between what belongs to the conjuncture and the longer-term organic trends that shape it. Labour’s tragic drama is its failure to adapt to the historically significant changes in society and the economy. Parties, Gramsci tells us, ‘are not always capable of adapting themselves to new tasks and to new epochs.’
Starmer’s government has failed to understand the organic forces shaping the new political era – deindustrialisation, sustained economic stagnation and the attendant breakdown of civic life; the metastasising of our state and its institutions into something at once hollowed out and bloated; demographic breakdown caused by low birthrates and high immigration; technological acceleration the effects of which extend beyond labour markets and intrude into every part of our daily lives; and the re-emergence of great power politics – and so speculation is confined to the conjuncture, to the drama of personalities and factions.
‘A crisis occurs’, writes Gramsci, ‘sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves, and that despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them.’
Labour is a party of ‘certain limits’. It cannot resolve the structural problems, nor break with the status quo. Andy Burnham wants change which means he must take the party beyond its limits, force it out of its comfort zone and structure a new political and economic settlement the contours of which are beginning to emerge.
If Burnham wins in Makerfield, the Labour Party at Westminster awaits him. It belongs to yesterday. Will Burnham follow Starmer and be remembered as a man who belonged to the past and paid the tragic consequences, or can he drag Labour out of its limitations and give it a future?
Jonathan Rutherford, Tobias Phibbs, Jack Jeffrey, Future of the Left
For the New Statesman, Mat Lawrence outlines how a public institutional architecture for the supply side of the economy would create a more dynamic, resilient and democratic Britain.
“Solving this problem requires an approach that transcends the dichotomy of private market provision and welfare state redistribution. What is required is a third pillar of political economy: the Productive State. It intervenes on the supply side by investing public money into public assets for public provision of the essentials required for a dignified life. Where the market coordinates and the welfare state redistributes, the Productive State produces: directly owning and operating capital in essential sectors, participating in markets as builder and provider rather than as regulator or redistributor. It is the return of sovereign economic control of the economy’s foundations. The name operates on two registers: the state that produces, and the state of productivity, because public provision of essentials is the institutional precondition for a genuinely dynamic economy above the foundation it provides…
The Productive State delivers sovereignty advantages that markets systematically underweight and that the current geopolitical moment makes newly urgent. Price sovereignty: the ability to insulate domestic households and firms from the transmission of global market shocks into bills and input costs. Supply chain sovereignty: maintaining domestic productive capacity for the equipment, components, and materials on which the energy transition depends, rather than trading one geopolitical dependency (imported fossil fuels) for another in the form of imported clean tech goods and capital. And ownership sovereignty: ensuring that essential infrastructure is not progressively acquired by owners whose interests lie elsewhere. In an era of weaponised interdependence, the optionality the Productive State provides – building excess capacity, maintaining strategic reserves, sustaining provision through disruption – is a strategic asset private ownership cannot replicate.”
For Labour Growth Group, Mark McVitie and Chris Curtis argue that Britain’s economic settlement now rewards asset ownership, scarcity and institutional capture more than work, contribution and productive risk.
“The dividing line is earned versus unearned, not rich versus poor. The test is whether reward follows from action ‐ work, enterprise, building, risk, invention, service and contribution ‐ or from position alone.
There is a difference between a surgeon earning through skill and effort and an asset holder receiving gains created by public scarcity. There is a difference between a founder building a firm in a challenging environment and an incumbent extracting from a protected market. There is a difference between a landlord improving property and a landowner banking permissioned scarcity. The framework rewards the first and confronts the second.
This drives tax reform, where the burden shifts from work, mobility and improvement toward rents, gains and fixed position. It drives market reform, where challengers are backed against incumbents. It will drive welfare reform, where engagement and contribution are supported rather than penalised. It drives enforcement, because gaming a failed system while others do the right thing must be confronted whether it occurs at the top or the bottom.”
For UnHerd, Jonny Ball brings together Mat Lawrence and Mark McVitie’s work and defines the emerging consensus in Labour – spanning the soft left, Blue Labour, and Blairites – on political economy.
“A consensus is emerging that Britain is locked into a worst-of-both-world’s Frankenstein economy, displaying all the negative features of neoliberalism but with a cumbersome, meddling, bureaucratic state that impedes business agility and individual initiative. We have critical national infrastructure and assets held in private, often foreign ownership, and twin trade and sovereign deficits that make us dependent on the kindness of strangers. UK plc is an extremely open, over-financialised, unbalanced economy, exposed to volatility in global trade and relying heavily on imports, not least energy and cheap labour. Britain built an economic model designed for the “end of history”, ever-increasing liberalisation and reduced trade frictions. But it now finds itself, as the historian John Bew put it, as the “last man at the bar in Davos”, watching in horror as the Washington Consensus collapses. Meanwhile, successive generations of legislators have attempted to ameliorate our current predicament by regulating, dictating and redistributing the diminishing proceeds of a broken growth model via the pensions and benefit system.
This is a model that blends a socialism of permanent welfare and the retrospective palliatives of cash transfers with Thatcherite models of ownership. In its place, Labour factions are beginning to coalesce around the articulation of a politics of national production, of creating the conditions for market dynamism and overcoming the long-term, sclerotic doom-loop by facilitating investment-led growth. Even the nationalisation proposals of the Burnham camp are framed as a solution to rising fiscal burdens on the entitlement state — an energy, housing, work and transport subsidy regime that compensates workers and consumers for the failures of the very privatisation model that brought arms-length regulatory omnipotence into being.”
In ‘Understanding the entity known as Starmer’, Will Self reflects on why the Prime Minster is so disliked.
“Because the important thing about Starmer is not that he is uniquely unpleasant, nor uniquely managerial, nor uniquely hollow. The important thing is that he is the long historical result of a society that has proceduralized itself to the point where procedure no longer mediates trust but replaces it. Starmer is not an aberration within contemporary Britain. He is one of its purest expressions.
This is why the old heuristic of the “good bloke” matters. A good bloke is not simply a nice person. The good bloke belongs to an older and thicker social world: trade union branches, pubs, regiments, chapels, bowling clubs, football terraces, local parties, old Labour wards, Masonic lodges, working men’s institutes. The good bloke may be flawed, even corrupt, but he is legible. You know where he stands. His authority arises from embeddedness.
The nice person, by contrast, emerges from the lower-middle-managerial order: respectable, conscientious, emotionally literate, permanently anxious to appear decent. The nice person follows procedure because procedure has replaced organic trust. The nice person says “I completely understand your concerns” while mentally opening a safeguarding flowchart.”
In ‘The Crisis of the West Isn’t About Who Governs, but That No One Can’, Ross Douthat argues that temporarily defeating your political opponents does not change the underlying social and economic conditions.
“This toxic landscape is the post-liberal situation. It’s a crisis of normal politics brought on by three great forces: the rapid aging and low birthrates of developed economies, the turn to mass immigration as a demographic solution that brings various racial and religious tensions in its train, and the internet as a source not just of radicalization but also of doomerism and paralysis and an insta-disillusionment with political leaders.
Because the situation is so multifaceted, with social and cultural and technological components that persist no matter what happens in elections, you cannot get your hands around it simply by having a set of designated villains and planning their defeat.
If you think the right-wing academics and scribblers who identify with “post-liberal” politics are thickheaded and semi- fascist and making the Western crisis worse, by all means say so. But don’t deceive yourself that the reason that Nigel Farage is likely to be the next prime minister of Britain is that too many impressionable Brits were misled by Patrick Deneen’s book “Why Liberalism Failed.”
In ‘Is it too late to re-industrialise?’, Rian Whitton argues we need to confront hard trade-offs if we are serious about reindustrialising Britain.
“Some argue that it is a task not worth pursuing. The staple criticism has come from free-marketers like Daniel Hannan, who argues there is “nothing special about manufacturing”, and that globalisation is good for the consumer and the economy. Prior to becoming an MP, Labour thinktanker Torsten Bell argued that Britain should stay focused on being a world-leader in services. But the productivity statistics are on the side of the reindustrialists. Beyond the most rudimentary wood and textile craftsmanship, manufacturing is more productive per worker than average. Britain’s energy-intensive and resource-extractive industries employed 1% of the workforce, but accounted for nearly 3% of gross value added (GVA), an important metric of economic value. The average heavy industry employee contributes 77% more in GVA than the average worker. As for the advanced manufacturing sector — defined in the Government’s 2025 industrial policy as chemicals, transport, aerospace, machinery, and electrical equipment — it accounts for just 2% of jobs (721,000) but 6% of GVA (£80 billion). For context, London’s creative sector, the most culturally prestigious sector in the country, encompassing computer programming, video game development, film and TV production, generates just £64 billion with 730,000 workers.”
On the right of politics, Bukes argues in ‘Everyone is a British Nationalist Now’ that Brexit, geopolitical decline and economic vulnerability are pushing every part of British politics into a contest over who can best define and defend the national interest.
“… The role that Britain has played for the last half century no longer exists. Being the Milchkuh for American capital interests in Europe once gave us lucrative opportunities, but now all that remains is what we are: a cold, rainy group of islands in the North Atlantic.
Britain, going back to the Acts of Union 1707, has never had a set of conditions which meant that it had to conceive of itself as principally a nation first and a nation only — without interests outside of the British Isles, and unconcerned with the goings on of the outside world. Moreover, a truly historical people, such as the British have been will always seek to answer the question of their place in the wider world, and cannot be satisfied with life in the Shire. Simply whiling the time away, living to perpetuate a way of life, is not enough — even outside of the economic costs usually incurred by isolation.
Neither of these conditions continue to hold in the Britain of today. As the left is beginning to recognise, we are caught in a set of economic and political circumstances which guide us towards a new isolationist period. As a people, we have been laid low enough, for long enough, that our horizons have shrunk to precisely those things which would previously have been insufficient. We remain capable of achieving great things, but not of imagining them.”
For Renewal, Yuan Yang argues for a more active, agile state that can stabilise prices, shape markets, and raise public and private investment.
“High and volatile prices for government debt are constraining the Treasury’s ability to borrow to invest. But that does not mean taxation is the only route to higher public investment. When comparing the UK’s public investment levels with higher-achieving peers, what stands out is the lack of a powerful policy bank that can produce stable, long-term investment plans beyond the political cycle, surviving austerity-loving governments.
The Government’s new investment vehicle, the National Wealth Fund, does not have the size of balance sheet to make enough of a dent in the problem of growth. That is because, as the Treasury Select Committee’s inquiry notes, it is ‘financed by taxation and borrowing, which means its investments are likely to attract public, political and media scrutiny’.
Instead of keeping vehicles like the NWF on the Government’s balance sheet indefinitely, they should be made to earn their own keep and issue their own debt, much as the French and German policy banks do. Such financial independence would not only enable them to expand the quantum of their investment, it would also allow them to take riskier, longer-term bets that don’t need to pay off within a five-year Parliament…”
In case you missed it, read Future of the Left’s dispatches from across the country after the local elections here.
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All Asimov and No Fresh Air (2025) is Half Man Half Biscuit’s 16th album. Birkenhead-born frontman and lyricist Nigel Blackwell, who left school at 16, diagnoses the state of the nation more economically and comedically than the rest of us and proves the intellectual life of the working class isn’t dead yet.
Blackwell’s portraits of male loneliness begin in “Goodbye Sam, Hello Samaritans”, a parody of Cliff Richard’s 1970 bachelor-pop confection “Goodbye Sam, Hello Samantha”: the bachelor’s hello-to-the-girl rewritten as his hello-to-the-helpline. The opening litany of badlies — badly parked, badly lit, badly in debt, badly in need (of a goal) — turns badly from an adverb into a state of being. What can you do? Phone the good Samaritans.
Blackwell’s diagnoses are as astute as his caricatures. “The Bliss of the Hereafter” was religion’s promise, and the song’s narrator has tried the secular substitutes. Charity-Britain’s public cheerfulness — the bike-athon, the half-marathon; ten thousand steps, stygian depths — proves to be the Fitbit-as-ferryman to Hades. Once summoned by bells, he is now summoned by bills; the parish has been replaced by the utility company; he reaches for his Betjeman pills — an imagined prescription for the melancholy, or the metre.
The final elegy is for industry: in “Falmouth Electrics”, a man made redundant after seventeen years turns down work at Morrisons and instead embarks on a career as a puppeteer, buying a ventriloquist dummy in Redruth and tarting it up with eyeliner and hair gel until it looks like post-punk Pete Murphy. The dummy becomes more charismatic than him, gets all the girls, demands a signature song. He sets it on fire. There’s no twist, he’s not coming back in my head, he sings, as he asks for his medicine and bed. The dummy is the post-industrial unheimlich double. The worker becomes puppet when his tradition dies: dissociation via ventriloquism. Where industry was, medication is.
‘In someone else’s song, this would be a bad dream, and I’d wake up now in the groves of Academe’ is Blackwell lucid-dreaming inside his own verse: a depressed northern punter, reaching for the dons’ life and landing on Horace-via-Milton buried in the final stanza of track two on an album that did not make the Guardian’s end-of-year list. Blackwell is at once diagnostician and patient, don and punter, post-punk artist and post-punk puppet. Look for the last vestiges of the autodidact tradition, and you’ll find them, self-diagnosed, on a Birkenhead B-side.
Siobhan Corbey Tobin
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Next month, Catherine Liu will launch the Palm Springs School for Social Research, a new initiative dedicated to revitalising critical theory and promoting ideological and historical consciousness. The school will host in-person events and champion work that furthers this mission. Its inaugural conference, “What is the Social of Socialism?”, will take place in Frankfurt on June 12-13th and will also be streamed online. DETAILS HERE.