By John Pickard
We have noted many times that there is little confidence shown in their system by the serious media representatives of capitalism. Leaving aside the outright propaganda sheets of the gutter press, the more sober commentaries in the serious press are full of foreboding about the future.
Robert Shrimsley, for example, is a regular contributor to the Financial Times and as you expect, he sees the world from the point of view of an advocate of the market system and as an enemy of socialist ideas. In one of his gloomiest columns to date, on June 28, he wrote about the coming election as the “hopeless” election, “a contest between two parties for the support of voters who do not believe either will materially improve their lives or the country”. For good measure, he added, “The lack of hope is palpable”.
The main source of Shrimsley’s pessimism, although probably not something from which he suffers personally, is the fact that the big majority of the population “feel battered by inflation, falling living standards, strikes, public service crises and a general sense of decline.” He is not wrong there.
A battle of low expectations
But given the awful polling of the Tory Party at the present – more than twenty points behind Labour – and the fact that Labour’s policies look like so much smoke and mirrors, politics, he suggests, “feels like a battle of low expectations”. Quoting the writer Aaron Sorkin, Shrimsley feels that voters are being asked “to choose between the lesser of ‘who cares?’”
For the left and Marxists especially, there is a serious side to this gloom and doom of Shrimsley. As Left Horizons has pointed out on numerous occasions – and Labour’s right wing have studiously avoided – the personal standing of Keir Starmer in opinion polls is little better than Rishi Sunak’s. It is the Labour Party, not Starmer, that has raced ahead in the polls, and that is only because of a widespread disgust at the policies of this government.
You cannot preside over the deepest cuts in living standards in generations – and offer no relief in the foreseeable future – without a significant part of the population desperately yearning for something different. “Polling for the left-leaning New Britain Project” Shrimsley writes, “shows nearly three-fifths of voters say “nothing in Britain works anymore”.
Sunak’s only strategy, according to him, is to admit that the Tories are bad, but that Labour would be worse. It is fortunate for Starmer that this is not (yet) believed by most voters, and that is why there is huge gap in the polling between Labour and the Tories.
Starmer himself is not held in particularly high esteem, even by the man and woman in the street, notwithstanding the fact that they will probably vote in large numbers for his party come the next election. He is seen as a grey and uncharismatic character and in so far as he has ventured into talking about policies, he is perceived as slippery and unreliable. His ‘pledges’, you might say, are there to be broken.
“We have a cunning plan”
For those of us in the Labour Party who are following Starmer’s tortuous path to high office, it is clear that he has no real policies beyond offering to manage capitalism better than the Tories. “We have a plan”, he keeps saying. It might even be a “cunning plan”.
But as for solid commitments, there are none. Everything that has been promised in the past two years has been watered down or abandoned. The only lasting commitment that Starmer and Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves holds onto firmly, is the idea that public spending under Labour will be kept to a bare minimum. That is a copper-bottomed guarantee.
The reasoning, Robert Shrimsley explains, is this: “The UK faces immense technological, environmental, financial and geopolitical challenges. Public services require major reform as well as funding. Yet both parties appear to offer only painless solutions. Labour will not discuss the taxes it knows it must raise to fund public services; the Tories will not discuss spending cuts. All play up reform as a magical, cost-free option”.
That is one of the reasons, Shrimsley explains, for the public lack of faith in politicians. “For Starmer,” he writes, “confidence in Labour’s control of the public finances must be the foundation for all policy. And voters may not be wrong to have little faith”. Again, he is not wrong and Labour’s right wing are desperately looking for ‘no cost’ policies that they can offer in a manifesto.
Public ownership of the main levers of the economy
Socialism, either as an idea or even as a word, features nowhere in Starmer’s consciousness. The argument of socialists, including this website, is that the main levers of the economy ought to be in public hands so that national resources can be democratically planned in the interests of all. That would provide a basis for tackling the issues of living standards, housing, education, health and other services. It would be policy in the interests of “the Many, not the Few”
But even leaving this perspective aside, there is not the slightest effort by Starmer or Reeves to look, for example, at taxes on the super-wealthy, or tackling the running sore of tax-dodging, for which the city of London and British overseas territories have a world-wide notoriety. Either of these could provide the Exchequer with tens of billions of pounds.
The world view of the current Labour leadership is based entirely on the preservation of a rotten, corrupt and bankrupt system, but although that is clear to most labour movement activists, it will require the living experience of a Labour government before it becomes understood to a wider layer of workers.
There is already a huge reservoir of scepticism about all political leaders. Only a fifth of voters, Shrimsley argues, “believe politicians have the ability to solve the UK’s biggest issues.” That being the case, the next election may be characterised above all by a high rate of abstention. We will see.
For Robert Shrimsley, the absence of any real hope for the future is “chilling”. That’s as may be, but from a socialist perspective, a Labour government is an opportunity to spell out what socialism really means – not the preservation at all costs of a dying system, but a thorough-going economic and social transformation to save livelihoods, democratic rights and ultimately, the planet.
