“I’m team Sue.” Nothing better captures the extent of the Labour Left’s defeat than that three-word sentence I heard at the party’s conference this week. Five years ago Labour’s progressives and socialists believed their movement could stop Brexit, herald a new era of public ownership, and break with US-led foreign policy. Today, by contrast, the same people — if they remain in Labour at all — have been reduced to cheering on a former civil servant.

Their decision to do so is not without reason. Sue Gray, like Keir Starmer, is viewed as a relatively anodyne, technocratic figure — someone who simply wants to execute on a policy agenda with glimmers of social democracy. Unlike Morgan McSweeney, with whom she is allegedly locking horns, Starmer’s chief of staff is not a campaigner. Her political skillset is that of government, not the ballot box. For Starmer to succeed, he will need both Gray and his head of political strategy pulling in the same direction. Right now, the opposite is happening. That was the background to a strange few days in Liverpool.

The best way to describe this year’s conference was that it felt exactly like the year before: a groundhog day of lanyards, corporate brochures and Madrí. Besides the vacuum on policy, which now typifies the party’s annual jamboree under Starmer, there was also an absence of expectation, let alone euphoria. “We’ve completely fucked it,” as one staffer put it to me. There were more smiles 12 months ago.

All the media wanted to talk about were freebie glasses, donor-funded birthdays and Taylor Swift concerts. That was primarily due to the hypocrisy of Labour’s leading lights, but it’s also because the Government hasn’t given them much else to talk about. Starmer’s reluctance to advance a substantial vision, with the policy programme that might entail, means journalists now set the media grid. Doing little beyond criticising the Tories worked well in Opposition. In office, it appears to be catastrophic.

That isn’t to say Labour doesn’t have a plan. Speaking at a panel on Monday, Josh Simons — formerly the chair of Labour Together and now MP for Makerfield — declared Starmer would be judged on his ability to deliver change over a parliament. What really mattered wasn’t the trivial fluff of the media cycle, but improving NHS outcomes, generating growth and getting a grip on law and order. Address just some of those, Simons insisted, and Labour would win another large majority.

It’s a compelling message. Yet Simons was most intriguing in his dismissal of “vested interests” — a term which seemingly ranged from pensioners upset at higher heating bills to those protesting against the war in Gaza. Against such vested interests, Simons said Labour must speak for the “silent majority”. But there’s a problem with minority interests if you take them on all at once: you find yourself marginalised.

What was missing from Simons’s analysis, and the conference more widely, was any understanding that ideology is necessary to achieve political transformation. Starmer’s objective, so he claims, is nothing less than national renewal. Trying to do that without an ideologically motivated movement is like thinking you can cure cancer with lemon tea and a hot water bottle. Without ideology, what will bind activists and bureaucrats in the trenches beyond naked self-interest? To find out, just look at how Number 10 is already turning in on itself.

The two longest-serving prime ministers of the postwar period, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, knew this. For all the latter’s claims to be a simple pragmatist, his heavy-hitters — from Charles Clarke to John Reid and David Blunkett — had been immersed in the world of activist politics. Forged by the battles against the Bennites in the Seventies and Eighties, their shared vision was the Third Way, and the idea that neoliberal capitalism could be shaped into a more inclusive creature.

This last week, however, has demonstrated that the new government is a different beast. With the emergence of the Independent Alliance, the growth of the Greens and the rise of Reform, Labour’s political strategy, as detailed by Simons, has many risks. That was readily obvious to a number of delegates, councillors and wonks I spoke to. All of them remained confident that the party would win the next general election. But will Starmer still be at the helm? They weren’t too sure.

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Aaron Bastani is the co-founder of Novara Media, and the author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism. 

AaronBastani

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