The Myth of the Vaccine Bounce

If you haven't seen the latest YouGov poll, it makes for grim reading. 45% for the Tories versus 32% for Labour doesn't look too clever. For information, going back to the Jeremy Corbyn era YouGov didn't post a polling deficit of 13 points or more until mid-October 2016. In other words, for Labour to perform this badly it had to go through a bruising civil war, a failed coup and leadership contest, and another round of civil war. Events we have not witnessed in the 11 months since Keir Starmer ascended to the party's leadership.

Thanks to the NHS's success with the vaccine roll out, pollsters and pundits have talked up the possibility of a Tory bounce for about a fortnight. And consulting recent surveys, the prediction has come to fruition. The Tories are up again and accelerating away from Labour, so this much is true. But when we come to the myth of the vaccine bounce, we're talking about the very political uses to which this trope is being put by Keir Starmer's supporters. Responding to poll reversals, Polly Toynbee counselled patience. Last week, we had clever-clever strategy claims made by Ian Dunt, and before that the usual everything is fine, nothing to see here line. Joining the line-up is former head of research for Labour, Tom Hamilton, with another pro-Keir tract. Among its claims is the vaccine bounce and the crisis is crowding out Labour's messaging, that Keir Starmer is doing a good job in straitened circumstances, and he's having to rebuild the party's reputation after Labour's recent "difficulties".

Going in reverse order, perhaps Tom might be good enough to argue a little more honestly. That Jeremy Corbyn was unpopular among most is not contentious. What is is whether this proved fatal for Labour's chances, or whether the trust issues masses of voters have now in "the brand" lie elsewhere. Helpfully, we can answer that question using polling evidence. The Corbyn-led Labour Party between June 2017 and April 2019 had the main parties taking turns posting modest leads. If he was the unique electoral bromide some suppose he was, then why wasn't Labour lagging? The ratings started tumbling as the EU elections approached - the Tories were eviscerated by the Brexit Party while Labour got a pummelling from them, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and the SNP. However, while the Tories were able to recover their numbers Labour had, disastrously, lost a good chunk of its vote to the remain ultra parties and, crucially, hundreds of thousands of Labour leave voters to the Tories. Admittedly, by this point "constructive ambiguity" on Brexit was no longer an option and the party had to choose between a bad defeat or losing vast swathes of its core vote. The result was the preservation of the party's new constituency, but a legacy of distrust outside of it. Particularly among former voters who went Tory because of Brexit. Given that Labour leavers, in the main, accepted Jeremy Corbyn's leadership in 2017 and didn't in 2019 might owe something to the big difference between the two contests: how in the first it accepted the referendum result, and in the second went into the election determined to overturn Brexit. Keir Starmer was instrumental in changing this position, and plenty of Labour leavers know this to be the case. Hence any account for Labour's performance this last year neglecting the entirety of recent history and its consequences just isn't a credible argument.

On Keir is labouring under the burden of media disinterest, or he's doing the best he can, or he's hemmed in by limited options, or because objective circumstances. Some of this is obviously true. The reason why Jeremy Corbyn never got a 20 point lead had more to do with the character of the polarisation that still coheres British politics, itself a workthrough of the polarisation of the country's political economy. It's interesting how Keir's defenders never pay mind to the fact Labour wins among the under 55s, i.e. the working class, and the Tories are the party of the old and propertied. What was true of politics during Jeremy's time is true of now, also. Even if Keir Starmer's Labour were doing well, there is a relatively low ceiling stopping the party from climbing too high, and it will persist as long as the Tories look after their coalition at the expense of everyone else. The only way a 20-point lead is possible is if the Tory coalition is split and broken, and that is beyond Keir's power, even if he had made all the right strategic calls in his first year. It therefore follows reassembling Labour's coalition is the only way it stands a chancem and this requires understanding the political map of Britain. I.e. the sorts of people the party had in its camp on 2019, looking at how it can win back those lost from two years earlier, and seeing what can be done to chip away at the Tories in a war of attrition, a war which does not play to their strengths in the long run. Putting aside any cyncicism I have about Starmerist politics, the obvious difficulty here is Keir and the people he listens to do not have the right analysis.

In the first place, they persist with the idea the voters lost in the so-called Red Wall are Labour's core voters. They are not. Those lost in 2019 tended to be older or retired, and tended to own property - specifically their home. They might have voted Labour all their lives previously, but this drift to the Tories among the people fitting this demographic has become a pronounced trend since around 2005. It's not that the class basis of politics has disappeared. It is, instead, changing and changed - an argument expounded here many times, both after 2017 and after 2019's debacle. What passes for Keir's analysis barely recognises this. The new base is consistently (some might say purposely) mischaracterised as big city-dwelling graduates and young people, and are treated like an optional extra. The path back to power demands rewinning Labour leavers, now codified as patriotic proles with no time for immigrants or equalities issues, while the actual mainstay of the party's coalition are treated as if they have nowhere to go. This is a very serious mistake. In 2019 Labour lost around 300,000 voters to the Tories which, combined with the Brexit Party also drawing in Labour leave voters, helped pave way for the cataclysm. The very people Keir's leadership is now (unsuccessfully) chasing. Yet no one discusses the 1.6m votes Labour bled to the LibDems and the Greens, nor the 600,000 or so who didn't turn out. This serves to remind us that because the new natural base is, well, new its support for Labour is much softer, more conditional, at least for the moment. While some of these have undoubtedly been won back from the LibDems, the Greens are enjoying something of a bump in support. Again, it might be worth reflecting on how attempting to outflank the Tories from the right on corporation tax, or waving flags, or not supporting key parts of the Labour coalition even when backed by public opinion, and a host of other missteps could be and is alienating the people Labour needs to support it to win. True, as Tom says, people might not be paying politics much mind. But it's certainly the case people drawn to Labour because of Corbyn's stand are watching proceedings, and a lot of them are not appreciating what they see.

If this argument is a load of rubbish, then why is it Keir's approach to opposition steadily rebuilt Labour's standing in the polls between his election to around level pegging with the Tories. That is until the turn toward flag waving and adopting George Osborne's position on corporation tax? Again, if one is being honest the timings suggest a relationship exists between party ratings and the chosen strategy, and might start drawing some political conclusions from the evidence dancing in front of their eyes.

And this brings us back to the vaccine bounce. That the Tories are benefiting from a feel good uplift is undeniable. The myth however is that this is responsible for Keir Starmer's difficulties. The polling this year suggests that while the Tory coalition is hardening, Labour's is softening and dispersing - not to the Tories, in the vast majority of cases, but to the Greens, the nationalist parties and in some polls, the LibDems again. The problem is Keir's difficulty holding the existing Labour bloc together, and these are thanks to the politics he's pushing. The party's travails aren't because the Tories are doing well, it's because the Labour leader is doing badly.

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Rishi Sunak's Two-Nation Toryism

I'm quite fond of contemptuously referring to "Dishy Rishi", but from time to time the broadcast institutions of the British state consciously, and without a shread of shame, push this framing. Consider the grotesque propaganda put out before the budget by the BBC. Decorated with friendly columnists who talk about how clever, nice and savvy the chancellor is, it resembles a Xinhua-style portrait of a rising princeling ascending the party hierarchy. So much for good old-fashioned British reserve.

Let's try and absent the politics from Sunak's budget for a moment and narrow our imagination down to wonkish dimensions. The extension of the Job Retention Scheme until September is good (but with limitations). Ensuring the £20 uplift remains until at least then is also welcome (though, of course, it should be permanent and be more). New mortgages requiring a five per cent deposit will be introduced from April, and should help a layer of younger people trying to buy a house. And green bonds are to be introduced over the summer, sounding a bit like recovery bonds that, coincidentally, were trailed recently. And then there is the big ticket item. Corporation Tax is set to rise but will not come into force until 2023 and, admittedly sensibly, introduces progressive taxation on profits with businesses operating at £50k or below staying on 19% followed by a tiered system up to a maximum of 25%. And so the eager burning of political capital to look pro-business we saw this week was effortlessly sidestepped by the Tories.

Back to the politics. Huge sums were sprayed here and there, but this was not a Labour budget, nor a centrist affair happened to be fronted by a Conservative chancellor. This was every inch a Tory budget. Remember, right wing statecraft is not beholden to principle. Its aim is the preservation of Conservative political dominance as a means of defending the class relations they stand on, and if this requires confounding small statist expectations and sinning against the collected works of Milton Friedman they will merrily trample his screeds into pulp. Consider the evidence. Support for the self-employed continues, but those who don't qualify for the scheme still receive nothing - people who, as it happens, disproportionately fall into the creative sector. The suspension of stamp duty extends into the summer, helping the loyal Tory strata of private landlords. Business rate relief was handed another three months, and VAT on food and drink for pubs, bars, and restaurants is cut to five per cent until September before rising to 12.5% for a further six months. More grants and cheap loans are available to start ups and small business. And to induce capitalists to pony up capital for investment, Sunak also announced a sweetener where businesses can reduce their tax bill by 130%(!) of the costs incurred. Last, but by no means least, buried in the small print is a further reduction to departmental budgets. In other words, a generous splash for businesses, help for the Tory coalition, but continued cuts to the public sector.

And so no help for renters. No help with living costs for workers in th reduced circumtances of furlough. No let up on lashing civil servants, public services, and local government. There was no money for the NHS beyond £1.6bn for the vaccine rollout, nothing for education, nothing for emergency services, nothing for adult social care, nothing for the court system. The tax cut due from April as the thresholds rise will get gobbled up by the five per cent council tax increase thanks to the government's (intentional) failure to fund local authorities properly. This isn't just Toryism, it's two-nation Toryism.

More than 18 months into "Johnsonism", the contours are now obvious to everyone who looks for them. The state is back in a big way and is being used above board and below desk to lubricate the gears of British capital, and offer inducements to bits and pieces of their voter coalition. Meanwhile our class qualifies for no such largesse, helping ensure that when a semblance of normality returns (vaccine resistant variants permitting) there will be a large pool of labour desperate to take anything the reopening economy offers. And, the Tories hope, continued restraint on the part of de-furloughing workers grateful to still have a job and keen to crack on. At every step the Tories' political management of the Covid crisis is something of a master class. Not only have they avoided the blame for an unnecessarily high death toll, they have successfully headed off hops thing might get better after Covid, beyond bosses making some concessions over homeworking. If this is all the government and their system have to concede, British capitalism can easily live with it.

Rishi Sunak's budget therefore marks crowns the Tory triumph in the politics if the virus. A victory lap after a struggle that saw them afforded every advantage, including an opposition responsible enough to not offer opposition. The blizzard of bank notes is so much snow blindness for those who refuse to see what this budget was about. Boris Johnson defined "the war" against the pandemic, and now his party gets to define the peace. This is Toryism for the 2020s: a creed and a settlement, as it always was, for the bourgeois interest at the expense of everyone else.

Applauding Failure

What might Keir Starmer say to the gloomsters and the doomsters following the latest poll, placing Labour seven points behind the Conservatives? We don't know, but at least this is providing ventriloquising opportunities for some. Indeed, a mini-genre is growing up around Keir apologism and at this early stage we can discern three types. The first is everything is brilliant actually and Keir Starmer is doing a brilliant job brilliantly. The second, offered by those fancying themselves as knowing wiseacres maintain nifty 11-dimensional chess stratagems are in play. This stretches credulity, but whatever fantasy helps folks get through their day. And the third genre? For this we turn to the pen of Polly Toynbee.

Most of the article is flim flam speculation about a budget whose details have accidentally on purpose leaked out to the press this last week, and so can be put aside. What's more interesting are her two core arguments. The first, and one shared by the inane boilerplate of Alan Johnson, is the idea Labour are suffering because of a Boris Johnson vaccine bounce. The second thesis flows from the first. Things are rubbish and the polls will eventually turn as reality bites down, therefore no need for panic. Instead Labbour supporters must exercise patience.

Let's take a look at the evidence of a vaccine bounce. True, a lot of people are feeling optimistic about the future as the prospect of something approaching normality might be with us by late summer. So the Tories are getting awarded for, well, a NHS job well done? Survation recently reported a three-point uplift for the Tories, stretching the gap between them and Labour to eight. According to Opinium, the government are up one and "the grown-ups" trail by seven. and RedfieldWilton? A two-point bump and a gap of five. It's a mixed bag across the different pollsters. Some suggest growth in Tory support at Labour's expense, and others point to a modest dispersal of opposition voters across the minor parties. Given how Keir Starmer's leadership has gone backwards in terms of voting intention and personal ratings, this demands an explanation.

Polly Toynbee chooses not to provide one. She laments the difficulty of getting noticed, and writes of this being "the worst of times for an opposition, a bystander carping at the government’s monumental blunders and disgraces ...". I suppose it depends on what one does with the mantle offered to them. Consider Jeremy Corbyn at the onset of the Coronavirus crisis. Defeated and miles behind in the polls, he tried offering leadership by criticising the government for their unserious response and made suggestions. Among them was a five-point plan demanding a rise in sick pay, a job retention scheme covering the self-employed, increases to social security payments, and help for renters. This was after he made the case for the effective nationalisation of the wage bill, which the government took up. Despite casting a defeated and, in the eyes of establishment politics, diminished figure his intervention ensured the pandemic wasn't as painful as it might have been. Keir Starmer's opposition is reduced to "carping" because he's not offering an alternative to the government. He has abdicated the responsibility for leadership to randoms picked for the focus groups over Zoom, and without a poitical critique, without even attempting to contest the Tory framing of the pandemic, then of course his criticisms about competence are going to look like carping. The punters, unimpressed, will switch off. This is not the force of circumstances staying his arm: these are the consequences of a conscious political strategy.

There are, of course, other issues too. Dear Keir is proving lacklustre, but he does so under circumstances not of his choosing. The polarisation that has marked politics for the last six years remains the unminstakable feature of the British scene, and yet LOTO and its very clever people pay it no mind. Therefore the second part of Polly Toynbee's apologia, the counselling of patience and the inevitability of a reversal in Labour's fortunes is based on the old Blairist assumption pissed off voters have nowhere to go. As the drop in turnout in 2019 and the loss of 2.5 million voters show, our people always have somewhere they'd rather be if Labour doesn't speak to or for them. And this, which shouldn't need spelling out, is a big risk. Remember, our people might be clustered in the cities but they have a presence in every constituency in the land. Alienating Labour's actual core vote to win over the imagined core vote seems like daft politics.

Toynbee then has set down the template of the third genre of Starmerist apologism. The nothing-to-see-here response. Less stupid than praising Dear Keir for all he does, like its stable mates it performs a superficial analysis of the moment, purposely avoids critical commentary - in this case denying the Labour leader any agency - and just assuming the fatalist tectonics of politics will grind out the support in the end. Good grief, is this feeble minded bollocks the best they can come up with?

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Emilie Oldknow and the Rare Comeuppance

Every day brings joy for some, tragedy for others. It might confer a windfall, or saddle one with crippling debt. Falling into the last category is the Labour Party's former head of governance, Emilie Oldknow. She took the party to court to force the release of the five names it suspects leaked last year's report into the disciplinary process. The report which, incidentally, repeated verbatim hundreds of 2016-2017 WhatsApp messages between the then head of governance and her right wing cohorts at party HQ. And in a rare moment of justice being seen to be done, she failed. Or, to give what happened the precision of accuracy, her legal bid completely cratered. The presiding judge rejected Oldknow's argument, did not grant her plea to make Labour pay costs (she's now on the hook for an estimated £120,000), and to rub it all in refused leave to appeal the verdict.

Readers will recall the leaked report revealed what many suspected all along: that senior staff sat on antisemitism complaints, sabotaged Labour's election campaign, leaked material to the press, and happily assisted MPs actively undermining the leadership. These magi who fancied themselves sorcerers of the dark arts were stupid and arrogant enough to not only document their scabbing but back the entirety of their conversations up on Labour Party servers. Their own words damned them and should, to put matters politely, be sent packing from the labour movement. In light of the report, the fact Oldknow persists at the top of the Unison bureaucracy is nothing short of disgraceful.

There's no need to review their abysmal shenanigans again. What does deserve consideration is how the revelations have been handled. It was an early test for Keir Starmer, and one he effortlessly fluffed. Announcing an inquiry into the report's contents, he appeared more concerned with locating the source of the leak than punishing the wrong doing at the heart of the party apparat. Almost a year on we still await the Forde report, ostensibly because the Information Commissioner's Office is peering into the party's affairs. A long delay then, a coincidence. And also a pattern of behaviour. Recall last July when Dear Keir shelled out hundreds of thousands to former staff members suing the party for having the temerity of defending itself against the rubbish John Ware Panorama documentary on Labour antisemitism. A case, incidentally, the party stood a good chance of winning in light of the leaked report. Keir ponied up the reddies to make the headlines go away. But don't worry, at least some of them were disciplined for their attacks on the party. It was subsequently revealed our scabs received a light tap on their wrist and allowed to carry on their merry way, pockets and purses bulging with members' cash.

This is demonstrative, again, of the party's rotten culture. According to my little birds tweeting from their perch at Southside, the Keir/David Evans partnership are determined to modernise the party's operation. For them, scabby behaviour is less a matter of factionalism and more symptomatic of dysfunctional organisation. The management consultant nonsense is their way of overhauling everything and replacing broken processes and redundant roles with a fine thrumming campaigning machine focused on winning elections. This has meant (ludicrously) scrapping the community organising unit and clearing out perceived dead wood. These include a sliver of dabblers with infernal practices who've not only risked bringing the party into disrepute but might find themselves on the wrong side of the law.

The problem isn't just the modernisation drive is clunking and brutal and dumb. It is anti-democratic and authoritarian. "Professionalising" the operation means empowering the party's administrators at the expense of members' rights and decision-making powers. The haughty manner with which David Evans suspended 50 lay officers, only two of whom have been reinstated, is a naked imposition of the new regime, of treating volunteers as if they're employees expected to be on-brand and snap to attention. The three-part reasoning for this is the Fabianism at the root of "Starmerism", the self-evident clear out of annoying leftists, despite the costs, and following the road map to success according to one Tony Blair. Yet in the end this will give us a hollowed out party where bullying behaviour is the norm, and unaccountable apparatchiks are put in place to wreck the party should another left insurgency surge through the ranks. At least this is why the so-called hard men of the Labour right are riding the Starmerist bandwagon. The more things change the more they stay the same.

And this is way Keir's leadership has treated the scabs with kid gloves. They are his kind of people, the ones who were unlucky to get caught out but, when the chips are down, share identical political projects: keeping Labour a safe pair of political hands, a party that won't rock the boat for British capitalism if the B Team's services are called upon. Emilie Oldknow's case is rare because here's a creature of the Labour right fully caught out and now having to pay for her hubris. As for the rest? They have escaped sanction for now, and if Keir Starmer has his way they will escape sanction in the future.

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Five Most Popular Posts in February

What was the action like on the blog this February just passed?

1. On Labour's Poll Collapse
2. The Uses of Captain Tom
3. Boris Johnson and Thatcherism
4. The Right Wing Defence of Starmerism
5. The Green Threat to Labour

Keir Starmer and Starmerism was always going to feature this month as it became increasingly clear the strategy isn't working. Indeed, addressing Labour's reversals in the polls duly went to the top of my particular pops. Next up was the political uses of the nation's granddad, and then a few chin stokes about Tory strategy during and after Coronavirus. The problems with Starmerism hit the number four and five spots, covering an idiotic defence of Keir's record so far, and how its failings might bleed support to other parties - particularly the Greens. In other words, we're seeing the unfolding of a process this blog has long forecast.

February, however, has been another crap month for the left as we lost our comrade Ed Rooksby. Also essential reading on Ed's work is this longer piece from Alex for Tribune. The best way to remember Ed is by carrying on the tough work of making sense of politics and thinking through the problems of socialist strategy, and we must do this because his keyboard has fallen silent.

What's on the horizon for this month? The budget, of course. No doubt there are more Starmerist missteps to look forward to. The rumpus in Scottish politics might inspire a piece or two, and the episodic and contingent we cannot forecast.

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George Galloway: I'm Voting Tory

A putative leftist voting Tory? What kind of mixed up place is this? Welcome to the convoluted world view of Labourist unionism as manifested by our old friend George Galloway. Getting himself trending on the Twitter, he announced to the interested how he'll be voting Tory in the constituency section of the coming Holyrood elections. This is followed by a punt for his Alliance for Unity vehicle, itself an ego mobile and a popular frontist, um, front for his Stalin-worshipping Britnat sect, the Workers Party of Britain. To think he has the chutzpah to call others out for abandoning socialist ideas.

The politics of this aren't hard to fathom, but they might seem weird for comrades unfamiliar with the Scottish scene. Scottish Labour, despite dalliances with Home Rule and being the party of the Holyrood devolution settlement, is a thoroughly unionist party. In the post-war period the might of the labour movement rested on the Scottish economy being fully integrated into the UK's, and the Keynesianism practiced by successive Westminster governments more or less maintained full employment. Labourism which, among other things, is the spontaneous empiricist mindset of the workers' movement therefore identified its prosperity with the union and the necessity to return Labour governments to govern for them. As the post-war order fell apart and along came Thatcher's governments with a new settlement of their own, the Tories dismantled the material and institutional base for unionism. Politics lags behind economics so the old teachings go, and by 2007 the success of the SNP at Holyrood put the establishment on notice. They didn't listen and thanks to Labour's cretinous behaviour in the independence referendum, almost torched its entire base. What remained of Labour vote was old, nostalgia-tinged, and mourning for a unionist settlement long dead.

George Galloway was schooled in the politics of Labour unionism when it meant something, and imbided a commitment to the UK state (and a certain soft spot for the Queen) - along with the usual left (statist) commitments to nationalisations, trade union rights, public housing, etc. His animus against separatism and Scottish nationalism is hard wired into his political DNA. Therefore what he is expressing is merely Scottish Labourism. Because it locates its (class) politics as a supplicant to the UK state, then this (small l, but often big L) loyalism is the anchor point for politics. Because the Tories, as the traditional ruling class party, unsurprisingly identify with their state the common ground between Labour and the Conservatives (and the Liberal Democrats) on the state trumps the divisions between them. Their common enemy is the SNP and any other nationalist party. Hence, in the recent past, we've seen leading Scottish Labour figures call for tactical votes for the Tories because, believe it or not, they are the lesser evil.

This politics is utterly bankrupt. For all the giddy Galloway goading of Scottish nationalism, Labour loyalism overlooks British nationalism and how its politics disrupts and disperses the possibility of (re)founding the party on class politics. One of the contenders in Scottish Labour's leadership election recognised this (in part), but then Monica Lennon didn't win. Nor does Galloway appear to understand the first thing about class and class politics in Scotland. If he did, he wouldn't be buddying up with Tories for a start.

Then again, the Galloway project has always been about him and his notoriety. He happily foxtrotted across the class line by aligning with Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party, enjoyed cosy "debates" with Steve Bannon and, how could we forget, jumped on the Donald Trump train and called November's election result "a coup". This is sans the well-documented fondness for certain strongmen who incur the displeasure of the US State Department.

There are going to be people very disappointed in Galloway's positioning, particularly those who've signed up to his "left wing alternative" to Labour. I suppose for some the red, white, and blue branding, the explicit "anti-woke" politics, and the repugnant Stalinophilia weren't warning enough. Galloway and his politics might belong to a bygone age, but the "leftist" British nationalism he's taking to its logical endpoint is not his political make up alone: it's in the genetics of Scottish Labour too. And for as long as it clings to this pitiful, declining tradition, the party is doomed.

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Dunce Cap for Dunty

I see low corporation tax rates are 2021's "tuition fees are progressive, actually." At least according to Ian Dunt, Brexit flip flopper, self-regarding sweary man, and one of the most consistently wrong people making a living from writing about politics badly. His argument? Keir Starmer's corporation tax positioning is actually good and the left should support it to stop the government returning to austerity. Having seen one rubbish defence of Starmerism, is Dunty's any better?

He argues Tory plans to put corporation tax up are the first phase for a new programme of cuts. It begins with taxes on businesses as a means of Dishy Rishi getting the public on side, and then austerity comes later - a proper one-two punch to the economy and Britain's post-Covid recovery. Apparently, (unspecified) "focus group research suggests many members of the public – including in Red Wall seats – are already starting to murmur the killer words that all this spending will have to be paid back sometime." Delivering unto business a new tax bill establishes the narrative of the requirement to balance the books, and from there?

Here's comes the killer argument. The left are enabling Tory positioning by attacking Keir Starmer. He argues the left aren't paying attention to Sunak's scheming, otherwise his nefarious plan would lie exposed and the Campaign Group would be joining Dear Keir in the no lobby. Instead its "growing hatred" of Dear Keir is becoming an identifying location, and this is blinding the left to the extent which they have changed the politics of the Labour Party. "The Labour leader, for all their attacks on him, is fighting for the principles they hold." Because Dunty was an exponent of the "any other leader" crowd, rather than take his argument at face value we should examine the evidence underpinning it. And there isn't any.

For one, while Keir Starmer has ruled out a return to austerity, framing opposition to corporation tax rises as an anti-cuts move is all Dunty's. Consider how the policy put across by the leader and Lisa Nandy during the week. Their argument was entirely Hayekian and based on the assumption lower taxes means more funds available for investment. Theoretically true, but with a dearth of profitable opportunities for capital this is just a recipe for big business to carry on banking their returns and doing nothing with it: a situation that has persisted now for almost a decade. Austerity wasn't mentioned at all. A sense this is a cunning trap was entirely absent. Instead, there is a more likely explanation even hard-of-thinking Dunt-esque types might comprehend: the "SLT" saw an opportunity to appear more pro-business than the Tories, and steamed into that space thinking it a smart political move.

And then there is the question of Tory austerity itself. In Saturday's Financial Times, Sunak makes grave faces and promises to level with the British people. Sounds bad, and it is. Corporation tax is the thin end of a wedge alright, but a wedge that sees the enforcement of tax rises across the board. Instead of a carbon copy of 2010-15, which seems to exercise Dunty's imagination more in the remembrance rather than his writerly output at the time, Boris Johnson's schemes are going to be "funded" by taking cash out of the pockets of workers. You'd think this would exercise Labour more, even if only from a wonky, semi-Keynesian multipliers standpoint, but no. Johnson has repeatedly said he's not returning to an austerity programme. His words and the government's plans are more than clear on this. Even the committed Thatcherites are ruling out cutting. No one should trust the Tories, of course, and it is very clear that for all their big statism they mean to rig it in favour of big business. There is more than one way to skin a cat, just as there are multiple strategies for restabilising British capitalism around the class interests the Tories represent.

Read the room, Dunty. If Labour aren't talking about its new flagship policy in anti-austerity terms, and if the Tories aren't about to unleash a wave of public spending cuts, then your argument is empty spin. The struggle over tax is where punitive policy is coming from, not Osborne redux, despite Sunak's ideological pedigree. Still, nice try at giving Keir Starmer's prostration before the hungry gods of capital a principled spin. But I don't think LOTO are going to be in touch about a job any time soon.

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The Use and Abuse of Shamima Begum

1. Friday's court victory for the government is horrific. The Supreme Court's decision to reject her application to return to the UK to fight her case and upholding Sajid Javid's decision to strip her of UK citizenship sends a message to everyone born of migrant parents that they're here under sufferance. At any time their rights can be taken away at the flick of the Home Secretary's pen and be treated as if they're a foreign national of a country they didn't grow up in, do not know and, in all likelihood, wouldn't accept them either. Shamima Begum has been denied the right to a trial, the right to a defence, and a right for the chance at rehabilitation. And now the same shadow is cast over millions of Britons if the government of the day deems it politic to revoke their citizenship.

2. This is a reprieve for national security, so argue some dickheads. Apparently the very presence of this woman would lead to "increased risks of terrorism." There's the suggestion she's an unrepentent jihadist, that returning to Britain to stand trial would somehow embolden radical Islamists, and there's a good chance securing a conviction would be difficult thanks to the lack of evidence beyond hearsay. In other words, the UK state should wash its hands of a troublesome citizen and dump her on the Kurds because she presents too many unknowns. Talk about a lack the state has in its own legal system.

3. The politics of all this doesn't really have anything to do with the specifics of Shamima Begum. She was a useful foil who came along at the right time for the Tories to burnish their tough-on-terrorism credentials. That she was a schoolgirl effectively groomed by her recruiters doesn't matter: here we have a brown Muslim woman onto whom was poured every Islamophobic trope, every doubt about the "loyalty" of British Muslims, and every punitive cruelty the Tories and their base reserve for appropriate non-people. For Tory divide-and-rule to work, they need scapegoats. And scapegoats need their demon figures. Begum fit the bill.

4. Legal judgements are never just legal judgements. The law, especially the peculiarites of the English legal system, is class rule codified. And as the Supreme Court is an arm of the state, it is hyper conscious of this fact and how the government are minded to curb its powers following its ignorant waffling about "activist judges" - rhetoric imported directly from the United States. Having ruled against the government on prorogation and noting lower courts had recently ruled Matt Hancock's procurement practices unlawful, self-preservation dictated a certain interpretation of the law in Begum's case.

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Keir Starmer Means Business

Just look at the headline. Look at the bloody state of the headline. Yesterday at Prime Minister's Questions, Keir Starmer made plain his opposition to tax rises ahead of next week's budget. "Now is not the time for tax rises on families and businesses", he confidently asserted. He's right to a degree, working people are already paying the price for our Downing Street depression. But businesses? This raises the curious prospect of Dear Keir voting with rightwing rebels on the Tory benches against the coming budget and the Labour left ... supporting the government increasing the corporation tax rate to 25%. How do we explain this curiously discombobulating state of affairs?

Shall we begin with the official reason? This was outlined by Lisa Nandy on Politics Live Thursday lunch time. She suggested the time wasn't right for raising taxes, despite business enjoying the lowest corporation tax in the G7. She went on "this is a real concern among businesses in my constituency because they just simply can’t afford it at the moment." A straightforward managerialist observation, you might think. Corporation tax rises, which falls on all profits, isn't a good idea for business restarts as the Covid restrictions are relaxed. Seems sensible, is utterly ludicrous. To dust off jolly old Keynes, getting economies moving isn't dependent on fiddling with the tax rate but putting money in people's pockets. Boris Johnson's Tories are showing an instinctive affinity to right wing Labour's former guru just as the Starmerist front bench have rediscovered obsolescent Hayekism. What makes Lisa's positioning even worse is the fact business remains on investment strike long before the pandemic, and the neoliberal schlock forecasting an investment boom if taxes were low was debunked by the real world. In other words, the Tories now have a better position on economic growth than Labour does.

So much for the foibles of the formal politics, what about the real reason? Believe it or not, there are strategic considerations in play here. This has nothing to do with the so-called red wall voters, who our Blue Labour gurus tell us are socially conservative but economically radical. Saving Amazon tens of millions isn't about to set the 1950s-were-so-much-better-than-today Facebook groups alight. And as for winning over Tories who like small state dogmatism because it means the undeserving poor get the punitive treatment they deserve, they aren't about to find themselves converted to Starmerism off the back of opposition to tax rises three years away from a general election.

Consider Labour's record. The party has consistently offered pro-business manifestos. Even under Jeremy Corbyn. In office, Labour has never once threatened the rule of capital. Not even in 1945. In more recent years, Tony Blair, following his predecessors, marketised the public sector and offered business guaranteed markets and handed them juicy procurement and outsourcing contracts. He also helped his bourgeois friends by disassembling and disaggregating Labour's position in wider society, pushing atomisation further and making matters next to impossible for workplace collectivism. And then we had Gordon Brown, whose efforts ensured he saved capital from a 1929-style cataclysm, but as Blair's chancellor helped exacerbate the crisis tendencies that exploded in 2007-8. Yet Labour's commitment to business is always questionned, and whose past proposals for modest regulation were made to sound like the liquidation of the Kulaks. Tacking to the right of the Tories on corporation tax certainly makes these media-driven narratives harder to sustain. But even then, Labour's positioning isn't about thwarting the right wing press either.

This is about business. It is a direct message from the Labour leader to big business that they have nothing to fear from a Labour government. There won't be any experiments with economic democracy nor the enforcement of alternative forms of ownership. Labour will protect their privileges, power, and say over how the country is run, and Dear Keir's occasional mention of social security, inequality, and scrapping tuition fees won't ever place additional responsibilities on business. This is different to Blairism because we're in a different age, but preserves its explicit embrace of big capital (which, in the UK, always means commerical and finance capital). Keir Starmer has wound the Labour clock back and we find the party in the position it occupied before Ed Miliband's predators vs producers speech. Coincidentally, perhaps this pitch to business might win over a few wealthy donors now members are leaving and taking their subs elsewhere.

The reason why Labour has to continually demonstrate and protstrate its fealty to business is because fundamentally, structurally the party is an unreliable partner. It plays the Westminster game. It offered light touch regulation, stuffed contractors' mouths with PFI gold, cut social security and held wages down. Policy-wise it can be and often is as throughly bourgeois as the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and, yes, the SNP, but what makes Labour always suspect are its institutional links with the labour movement. Its class basis can never be fully integrated into capitalist realism, though this will never stop most Labour politicians (and not a few trade unionists) from trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. Underscoring this is how, seemingly in the blink of an eye, the party went from pale pink social democracy with neoliberal characteristics to an anti-austerity insurgency, resulting in a mass explosion of socialist and (shudder) communist ideas and politics. Dear Keir's rubbish sloganising is ultimately the Labour right pleading with their bourgeois betters for another chance, and their seriousness of intent is demonstrated by the recrudescence of egregious stitching, happiness to shed tens of thousands of members, the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn, and refusing to back unions on issues of major national import.

It's not going to work. With the Tories having won the framing battles of Coronavirus, which Dear Keir didn't even bother contesting, as Johnson sets out to win the future with high spending, infrastructural investment, and the (usual) promises around levelling up and sorting the regions out, Labour are stuck defending Dave and Osborne's corporate tax regime. Labour voters can always go elsewhere, or they can stay at home. And Keir Starmer, the "grown up in the room" who's serious about winning elections appears entirely fine with that.

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