Newsletter #20: Make Labour Normal Again

Common sense in smart-casual garb

In which Jonny Ball (aka DespoticInroad) proposes a new vibes strategy for Labour, and Maurice Glasman explains why this time it really is coming home.

For all the talk of the age of populism, our populists tend to be decidedly unpopular. The personal polling for Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski is dire. In head-to-heads, voters prefer both of the staid traditional party leaders as PM over Reform’s Alan Partridge nationalist act, and the Greens’ desperate hipster eco-populism.

In our fragmentary era, instead of broad-based electoral blocs, each of the populist insurgents seek to construct cohesive political-cultural tribes. They adopt niche postures that energise their base, defining themselves against The Other, whether that’s the “metropolitan elite” and their supposed migrant allies, or the dreaded billionaires in alliance with deep England’s gammons, all imbued with the plebeian hatreds of rainy fascism island.

But between the poles of reactionary nationalism and utter woke nonsense we might find a new kind of Third Way. No, this isn’t a historic compromise between the Thatcherite settlement and old-fashioned social democracy. I don’t seek here to outline a new governing or policy agenda, but a view of political communications, a vibes strategy. Normie Populist triangulation finds fertile terrain in the vast lacuna that separates Farage’s oddball white grievance politics, and Polanski’s bizarre critiques of police brutality against rampaging terrorists. This is the gap in which most of the British public happily sit: more capable of nuance than any crude stereotype suggests, with most finding themselves profoundly alienated both by the threatening manias of the Right and the neurotic illusions of the Left. Most, without much effort, can gladly reconcile what Perry Anderson called “heteroclite demands”.

That’s not to say that there’s any great love for the tepid centrism of Labour and Tory Sensibles. The Westminster class is near-universally despised. And any stylistic or rhetorical construction must be accompanied by real substance – namely, a clear breach with a broken political economy and a new trajectory of national renewal. And that’s where Normie Populism comes in, framing a policy project authentically around community, security, and restored national pride. It steps to the fore to articulate a national-popular politics that’s counter-hegemonic, anti-establishment, “outsider” and insurgent. It engages in expansive appeals to ordinary people, to the Normies, while not succumbing to what George Bush might call the “weird shit” pushed by political sirens on the edges of the Overton window.

Keir Starmer was, of course, unable to articulate such a politics. Authenticity was not in his locker. In the end he became the quintessential representative of boring North London officialdom, personally embodying everything wrong with computer-says-no state incapacity. But perhaps Andy Burnham can succeed where he failed: the everyman aesthetics, the social imaginaries of “Manchesterism”, the “good bloke” performance as tribune of the people, the ease with which he engages and relates instinctually to an electorate tired of the leader-as-HR-manager. He is, in this respect, Labour’s Boris – protean, inchoate, scattergun, flawed, but potentially capable of bringing together Labour’s contradictory strands in a “unity of opposites” by force of personality, by the adoption of a Normie Populist common sense in smart-casual garb. Only time will tell.

Jonny Ball, UnHerd

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For the New Statesman, Dominik A. Leusder (aka NewLeftEviews) argues that rejoining the EU won’t fix Britain’s broken growth model.

“The choice to bet the house on finance and the private provision of public goods has proven a key inflection point…

We must discard the notion that the healthy productivity growth figures prior to the financial crisis meant that this bet was paying dividends. As Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s former chief economist, has argued, much of that growth was in fact illusory, driven by excessive, uncompensated risk-taking and debt accumulation in the financial sector. And as the financial sector grew in size, credit growth was channelled largely into mortgage lending, starving industrial finance and entrepreneurial ventures, while firms began to increasingly direct their own surpluses away from productive activity and into more-profitable-and- less-risky financial asset accumulation. Meanwhile, the privatisation of public providers in “demand-inelastic” sectors, where quasi-monopolies mean customers can’t realistically switch providers – such as energy, water, housing, transport, care – encouraged rent extraction.”

For Future of the Left, Jonathan Rutherford argues we must understand the grief and cultural dislocation that so many in our country feel.

“The sociologist Peter Marris has identified the negative psychological impact of social change. He describes how when change overwhelms a culture to the extent that people lose the ability to interpret it and so understand it, the thread of continuity in the interpretation of life is weakened or altogether lost.This loss is irretrievable – the past can never return - and what follows is bereavement. The dispossession of a meaningful environment threatens the whole structure of attachments and regulations through which purposes are embodied, and they cannot readily be re-established in an alien setting…

Marris identifies a number of principles for democratic politics. Those involved in negotiating change with government authorities must first be confident that no resolution will overwhelm their right to be themselves. Success means generating enough confidence in people’s collective identities to move them from distrust and defensive self-assertion to negotiation. This is akin to allowing a collective form of mourning that enables those overwhelmed by the confusion of change to take their bearings, lead toward the resolution of loss and develop a strategy for reconstruction (p102).”

For New Left Review, Anton Jäger extends his concept of Hyperpolitics from populist movements to an increasingly erratic and incoherent Western governing class.

“What if one were to explain this short-termism as a structural product and not just a personal quirk? As Jonathan White has noted, the disappearance of cross-class institutions in the post-political 1990s has also made it harder for elites to conceive of a shared future which would guarantee grip over a present open to alteration; the mass party had been ‘a necessary vehicle to mediate between futures near and far, between what is currently achievable and what is ultimately desirable.’ In a similar vein, Avner Offer has suggested that the blurring of the public-private divide has fused the older timeline of state policy with the instantaneous cycles of private markets. An increasing unplannability, or incapacity to gather elites around a long-term project, is one of its most visible symptoms. This is indeed a politics purely of events, whose primary concern is the impact any decision may have on the American media cycle—the revenge of Baudrillard’s vision of US politics as permanent spectacle.”

In a wide-ranging interview with Dean Kissick, Adam Curtis explains why the frameworks we’ve used since the mid-19th century to describe and stabilise selfhood and reality are fundamentally exhausted.

“I do think that what might emerge is a feeling that possibly the whole idea of freedom that we have at the moment—the image of the autonomous individual—is one of the most limited ideas of freedom. There are alternative ideas of freedom that have been largely forgotten— like giving yourself up to something beyond yourself. Like to God, for example— “in whose service is perfect freedom.” If you’re going back to religious ideas of freedom, they’re the complete opposite. What Christianity in its purest form offered people was an escape from those voices in your head that constantly keep you trapped, going round and round and round, by allowing you to give yourself up to something. The old idea of love was that it was like jumping off a cliff. You gave yourself up to someone without any idea of what it was going to be like, but you just knew that you wanted to do it. It was the old, romantic idea of love, that you transcend the voices in your head. You transcend that little universe you are in, and you reach out towards something else, but you have to do it with others. Maybe that’ll come back.”

For UnHerd, Michel Houellebecq argues legalising euthanasia is a symptom of the West’s terminal decline.

“For Kant — and for the thinkers of more innocent centuries — human dignity was linked, quite simply, to the fact of being human. We no longer see things that way. Human dignity is now something that gradually decays within us; our lives are themselves a process of decay, and we must be prepared to justify our existence at any given moment, both in our own eyes and in the eyes of others (if that even makes any difference). For nearly two centuries, the spectre of nihilism has haunted Western Europe. Now it is here — it is among us. But it does not take the form we expected. It is not dark or murky. It is colourful, even cheerful. To picture it, you shouldn’t think of Dostoevsky or Nietzsche, but rather All Is Beauty, an advert produced by a Canadian clothing retailer named Simons, which purported to depict a happy euthanasia. Here was a dignity to make you scream…”

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In ‘Regional Growth Two Years In’, Dan Turner et al argues that regional growth has stalled under Starmer due to weak No.10/Treasury leadership, spending still being concentrated in London, and unfunded devolved institutions.

The OBR’s Fiscal Risks and Sustainability report warns of an unsustainable 50-year trajectory for UK public finances, driven by ageing, health costs, and defence spending, with national debt projected to hit 300% of GDP by 2075.

For Economics Observatory, Paul Swinney argues that several UK regions run fiscal deficits worse than Greece did in 2009, and that fixing this means growing city tax bases rather than more spending cuts.

The Times argues that Boris Johnson’s health and care visa scheme has brought in far more dependants than workers at huge cost to public finances, and why the government must act retrospectively to restrict existing visa holders from importing more dependants.

Rather than waiting for a full overhaul of the underlying funding model, Re:State argues there are cost-neutral, practical solutions to adult social care’s chronic workforce shortages, such as cutting admin burden through technology, smarter commissioning, and improving workers’ pay, status, and wellbeing.

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There are certain moments when things align. Previously disconnected matter come into relationship with each other and things that were inconceivable become possible. Such is the moment we are in with England in the World Cup.

The fact that we are managed by a German is significant, as he has created a real England team that will win the World Cup. Resolute, powerful and cussed. The Anglo-Prussian Axis has defeated the French before, and it will do so again. Arise Sir Thomas, our football Prince Albert. The leader of the Gegen Press, the Counter-Revolution. Dan Burn at the back, Harry Kane up front. It’s as if Puskas and Hungary 56 never happened.

It is significant that English football has not produced a manager who loved English football as much as Tuchel does. A manager who didn’t pick Cole Palmer, Phil Foden, Adam Wharton or Trent Alexander-Arnold on the basis that they are too good for this team. He wanted strength and speed from his players. But then again he chose Jordan Henderson instead, who achieved the Anglo-apotheosis – he was booked and injured in a game he didn’t play in. That’s commitment lads, that’s belief. He ended up in hospital.

And the time is right. Last season was remarkable for the return of the long throw, the set piece, the long ball. Arsenal won the League on the basis of free kicks, corners and wrestling in the penalty area. The hegemony of Spanish football, with its stress on technique and spatial awareness was usurped by more traditional virtues of power and pace.

Thomas Tuchel is a disciple of Ralf Rangnick, who responded to the ‘tiki-taka’ revolution with the ‘gegenpresse’ counter-revolution in which the passing was interrupted by immediate dispossession. Fast and intense, it required athletic, supremely fit players who could tackle and counter at speed. He managed Austria, this time around. Jurgen Klopp was a big part of this. It was the marriage of two distinctive English inventions. Association Football and Heavy Metal. That is the kind of football Thomas Tuchel wants to play. The players know how to play it. It is traditional English football. Direct, robust and fast combined with modern fitness and organisation.

The refereeing of the tournament has allowed the game to flow far more freely than the Premier League. It is a very physical tournament. Everything is aligned. It’s coming home.

Maurice Glasman, Blue Labour

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For the LRB podcast, James Butler talks with Patrick Maguire and William Davies about why everyone hated Keir Starmer, Andy Burnham facing the same problems that defeated his predecessors, and whether Labour can neutralise its political opponents.