Americans are not the only ones facing the agonies of the ballot box this summer. The British, too, will shortly be trooping to the polls to choose the lesser of the evils in an unappetizing contest between center-left and center-right defenders of the status quo.
As a previous column suggested (6/1/24 TPP), dissatisfaction with the results of what is called democratic capitalism has spread worldwide; it’s now reached Great Britain, where the Conservative Party government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has called for national elections on July 4 in hopes that a slight uptick in economic conditions will save its collective skin.
Sunak, the latest in a line of forgettable Conservative U.K. leaders extending back 14 years (Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, Theresa May, David Cameron), will try to squeeze a little more grinding austerity and Brexit isolationism out of the British system. Son of Indian immigrants, Sunak, a multi-millionaire alumnus of Goldman Sachs connected by marriage to high-tech money (his wife’s family owns Infosys), is perfect for the times. He was picked by the U.K.’s Conservatives in 2022 to replace the incompetent and unpopular Liz Truss and rescue the party from her extremist Thatcherite tax-cutting notions.
Sunak’s response has been to position the Conservatives squarely on the squishy center-right, with a program best described as “Don’t just do something, stand there.” His uninspiring initiatives include an anti-smoking campaign, a reform of England’s end-of-school exam system, and the money-saving termination of a proposed high-speed rail network connecting London to northern cities.
This should make Conservative incumbents easy pickings for a surging Labour Party; the problem: Labour’s leadership and programs are not much better. Like the Tories, Labour is cleaving to the center. In a perceptive New Yorker article (“Time’s Up,” 4/1/24) on the upcoming election, Sam Knight, a London-based journalist, reports British centrists are relieved the parties are not much different from one another. The system, in short, has little to fear either way.
The Labour leader and presumptive next prime minister (the party leads in the polls), ironically named after legendary Labour Party founder Keir Hardie, is one Keir Starmer, whom Knight characterizes as “an unimaginative former prosecutor with a rigidly centrist program.” That’s an understatement. To date, Starmer has made no firm commitments on reversing Brexit (Britain’s catastrophic withdrawal from the EU in 2016), or reinvesting in a depleted and diminished welfare state. Few know where he stands on anything, according to opinion surveys.
What Labour apparently intends under Starmer is a resumption of Tony Blair’s discredited pro-corporate, third-way approach to government, emphasizing economic growth over income redistribution or enhanced public services, and encapsulated under the phrase “modern supply-side economics.” Blair and his cronies are, in fact, being welcomed back into the Labour fold with open arms despite Sir Tony’s disastrous pursuit of neoliberal globalization and financialization (shared by Bill Clinton in this country), which ended in crash, recession and rising inequality. Rejecting left-leaning solutions, Starmer summarized his vision of an updated return of Blairism early on with the bland proclamation, “We are the party of the center-ground.”
Most noticeable about Labour’s rush to the center under Starmer is what The Economist calls its “striking courtship of business.” Party leaders have met with literally hundreds of top executives from Britain’s largest firms in what has been termed the “smoked salmon offensive,” a series of elaborate breakfasts in which Starmer and his aides have promised consultations and cooperation with CEOs as part of a “partnership” with business celebrating profit as the answer to the U.K.’s economic woes.
An obvious reprise of Tony Blair’s cuddly “prawn [shrimp] cocktail offensive” with London’s financial CEOs in 1997, the get-togethers formed a cordial backdrop for Labour’s proposed grand bargain with corporate Britain – relaxed regulation and taxation in exchange for job creation and labor-market adjustments.
Incentives calculated to win business support include the following: a five-year freeze of the low corporate income-tax rate (25%), retention of an investment-tax allowance previously enacted by the Conservatives; no new taxes on high-end salaries; limited interference with corporate development plans; a cancellation of previously considered nationalizations; and, most worrisome to the left, an opening to partial privatization of the socialized National Health Service (NHS) through outsourcing of services and “private provision” — something like what’s happening with the American Medicare system.
In return for these offerings, big business would only have to accede to a few limited labor reforms: some added worker training, enhanced sick pay and dismissal rights, and less overt resistance to union-organizing activity. But, significantly, there would be no collective bargaining across the economy (a former Labour demand) and no closed union shops as in the pre-Thatcherite 1970s. Little wonder that a recent poll of British executives rated Labour better for business than the Conservatives by 46% to 32%.
It’s all a far cry from what was proposed under Keir Starmer’s immediate predecessor as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who revived the moribund party in 2017, then lost to Boris Johnson two years later after being undermined by Labour’s now-triumphant centrists. Corbyn, the British Bernie Sanders, ran as an unapologetic social democrat attempting to break with the Blair legacy and return Labour to its pre-Thatcher roots.
His populist program included renationalizing the U.K.’s troubled railways and its top utilities, establishing a government-owned pharmaceutical firm, raising both the corporate tax rate and income taxes on the upper 5% of earners, enacting tuition-free college, and mandating large British companies to allocate 10% of their shares and one-third of their board seats to their employees.
It was heady stuff, recalling the halcyon days of 1945-50, when Labour created Britain’s welfare state, but the Corbynites didn’t reckon on modern identity politics. This took the form of charges of antisemitism unjustly leveled at Jeremy Corbyn for his career-long support of the Palestinian cause and his criticism of Israeli domestic policies.
Corbyn was victimized by the same argument lately used against pro-Palestinian demonstrators in the U.S., that lack of absolute, uncritical support of Israel is tantamount to bigoted antisemitism. The charge, which ultimately drove Corbyn from the Labour Party and marginalized his parliamentary supporters, was levelled at him by conservative party elements, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, opposed to his economically interventionist program. A good political purge is one way to derail a threatening reform movement.
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.
From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2024
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