It's party conference season and the Labour leadership are ensuring its annual gathering goes without a hitch. That means no resolutions running counter to Keir Starmer's policy platform, such as it is. No defeats to trouble the smooth ascent to office. It is to be a stage-managed affair where the Great Leader's praise is to be sung, where shadow cabinet banalities are welcomed as profundities, and Labour's broad church are seen to be singing from the same hymn sheet. This is the new model Labour Party, a far cry from the times when Starmer himself went rogue on the podium and broke the discipline he's now enforcing. Another symptom of Starmerism's incipient totalitarianism?
Control freakery is in the DNA of Starmer's politics. As a manager before he was a politician, "governing" is a matter of issuing orders and expecting them to be carried out. This sensibility also has deep roots in the Labour tradition, of expecting workers (or "working people" according to Starmer's list of approved words) to shuffle their way to polling stations and elect very clever people who know so much more about politics and policy than they do, and will keep things ticking over so they don't have to think about such lofty things. However, it would be naive to trace the clamping down on party conference purely in terms of Starmer's personal predilections and Labour's Fabian habitus.
As Edward Potter rightly notes, the leadership are afraid of debate. Having captured the party on a false prospectus, there has not been any votes on or popular enthusiasm for the shift to the right. If the always-overrated Wes Streeting, for example, had to debate his enthusiasm for using private providers in the NHS, he'd be roundly humiliated. If Rachel Reeves had to account for her adoption of George Osborne's fiscal rules, her reputation as a serious economist would not survive the encounter. They know this craven servicing of vested interests is indefensible, so why discuss them at all?
But this doesn't go far enough either. You might add into the mix electoral calculation. The growing consensus in Westminster is that Rishi Sunak will call the next election in the Spring rather than next Winter. He thinks attacking climate change targets, curbs on vehicular emissions, and made up policies offers the Tories an opportunity, and one that won't be open forever. Starmer's office are of the same opinion, and so this is likely the last conference before polls open. Labour has to present itself not as an opposition debating what it wants to do, but as a government-in-waiting with a clear, business-like agenda that's ready to go. Democracy is amateur hour stuff. Conference is an opportunity to play up to the cameras and put a serious foot forward.
Taken together, this still doesn't entirely satisfy. We have to take into account the character of the Labour Party itself. It is the party of the workers, expressed institutionally by its trade union links and dependence on them for finance. But it's also a career ladder for aspirant members of the professional managerial class, as well as the favoured party of state bureaucrats. A section of British capital has, from the party's formation, always favoured it over Labour's Conservative and Liberal rivals and have worked to influence and accommodate it to their interests. In office in swathes of local and regional government, and occasional occupants of 10 Downing Street the party is to all intents and purposes part of the British state. It's a site of political contestation, an institution in whose bowels the class struggle plays out, and - historically speaking - capital's B Team when the Tories have exhausted themselves. Like now.
From the standpoint of the establishment, Labour is always a risk because its labour movement links and mass basis makes it "unreliable" in the way the Tories are not. The Corbyn surge came from nowhere and ruled Labour out of bounds for bourgeois politics for a brief time, which was also a period of severe political crisis. The right took it back and Starmer has tried his damnedest to make sure our interests are suppressed and those of capital are given free reign. This is the material root of Starmerism's authoritarianism, and that of the Labour right in general. Ruling the party with a rod of iron, intimidating, threatening, and expelling left wing MPs, councillors, and members, and turning conference into a showcase serves one purpose. To show capital and the establishment that the party is sensible, accepts their rules of the game, and that never will it succumb to the left again. Some - most - will happily accept that. But others, the most class conscious ones are going to stick with the Tories because they understand that as long as the party straddles the class divide there's a chance, however remote it might seem, that the terrifying spectre of socialism could come screeching back. And no amount of bully boy behaviour and anti-democratic thuggery will persuade them otherwise.
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