Petrified fucking terror. That's the first thing you think when you look at Labour. A barely-concealed, buttoned-up, can't-sleep-at-night anxiety, lurking just behind the eyes. They're scared they'll fluff it. They're scared that in the white heat of the election campaign, the Tories will find some policy in their manifesto to weaponise against them and the whole thing will come crashing down.
They adopt cringing defensive positions on issues like Brexit and then backtrack even from those when under fire. They lambast the government for North Sea oil development or HS2 and then refuse to confirm that they'd do anything different.
All of this is true. But there's another aspect to Labour that is also true. It's that underneath the petrified conservatism, they are proposing some genuinely radical progressive ideas - far more radical than anything we've seen from a British governing party for decades. And for some reason, no-one is talking about it.
This piece is about how the Labour ideas factory works, why it is so restrained, and how it nevertheless produced strikingly left-wing proposals. It's about the incentives and restrictions the party faces and how that can offer us a very good guide to how they'll behave in power. And it's about a political agenda that looks like Blairism 2.0, but in fact seems to come from a very different political heritage.
The policy machine
The Labour policy machine works like this. Ideas are fed from the shadow departments into Keir Starmer's office. They're then processed by two people: Muneera Lula, who is in charge of domestic policy and Mark Simpson, who is in charge of international policy. Lula used to be a civil servant in the Department for Business. Simpson used to be one of Labour's operators in Brussels.
At this point, there's still some fizzing excitement about all the things that are possible. And then Starmer's office will take that fizzing excitement and smother it to death with a pillow.
The euthanasia is done by committee. It comes down to the Blairite cabal at the top of the Labour party, which includes:
Pat McFadden, veteran of the Blair era and now Labour national campaigns coordinator
Miriam McFadden (very much a relation), previously of the Tony Blair Institute and now deputy campaigns director
Matthew Doyle, former press spokesman for Blair and now director of communication
Deborah Mattinson, director of strategy
and Morgan McSweeney, formerly of Peter Mandelson's Excalibur rapid rebuttal programme, then a party election organiser, and now campaign director.
McSweeney is particularly interesting. He's credited with the three stage plan implemented since the catastrophic defeat of 2019. Stage one: Medical intervention. Detoxify the party ranks, surgically remove Corbynism, take control of the candidate selection longlists so that no far leftists can get into the parliamentary party. Stage two: Become an effective opposition in parliament. Stage three: outflank the Tories on crime, defence and the economy.
Starmer has executed that plan to the letter. At every stage he's been questioned, mocked and disparaged. But he's gone from a historic defeat to a 20-point lead in just four years. He is now on the brink of becoming prime minister.
That is partly due to a succession of Tory leaders being uniquely dreadful - morally, strategically, politically, personally, intellectually, economically. I could fill a book with every human failing they have exhibited and still have material left for a sequel. But it is also because Starmer has approached the situation with one abiding concern: winning the election. Everything else takes second place. If it gets in the way of that mission - if it even hints at a potential threat to it - it will be taken out to the alley and shot.
The current Labour team is not a shadow governance machine. It is an election machine. They are not fucking about. Every idea, no matter how small, is forensically assessed for its capacity to cause trouble. Every possible weakness is discovered, isolated and liquidated.That's how they're playing it. And honestly, that's a pretty sensible way to play it.
But even if you can understand the reasons for it, the process itself is suffocating. I've spoken to several people involved - from think tanks, pressure groups, and the Labour party - who complain that it lacks imagination and confidence. And these aren't zany Corbyn types. They're smart, composed, realistic operators who think the process is much more defensive than it needs to be.
The worst instance of that caution comes in the economic limitations the Labour party has imposed on itself. Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has promised not to introduce a wealth tax and the fiscal rules pledge to only borrow for investment - and even then only in a way that will have debt falling at the end of five years.
It's utterly inane. A wealth tax on the top one per cent of households could bring in up to £130 billion, as this very good paper from the University of Greenwich points out. The five year debt rule is just electoral theology dressed up as economic credibility. Why five years? Because of political cycles. And why in God's name would a political cycle dictate your economic policy? No-one knows. It's just austerity-era claptrap, a colour-by-numbers solution to an advanced maths problem.
So that's the straitjacket. Those are the limitations. Now what's going on inside it? Most of the ideas in the policy programme are respectable but fairly humdrum. But there are two really interesting areas: labour markets and climate change. They're the points that demonstrate fresh thinking.
Labour markets
Labour's New Deal for Working People is a radical document. It is grounded in the idea of market failure - of a fragmented labour market creating shit jobs with shit wages and shit working conditions.
The chief response is sectoral bargaining. Instead of having isolated unions negotiating with individual employers, there will be full-scale talks bringing together all the employers with union representatives, establishing a baseline for pay, pensions, working conditions and the deployment of new technology. Unions themselves will be significantly strengthened, not least with a repeal of the 2016 Trade Unions Act, which put severe restrictions on the right to strike.
It's telling that this policy will first be introduced in social care. It's a classic case of market failure - a sector with low union density and a fractured labour market beset by insecure work. A ferocious approach to cutting costs has driven standards down to the point that visits to clients are timed down to the last second. There's no dignity for the person receiving the service or the person delivering it. And the failure hits the NHS, by making it harder to get people off the wards and back into the community. The market failure triggers a cascading public service failure.
The expectation is that sectoral bargaining will lead to better jobs, with higher wages and productivity, boosting demand in the macroeconomy and ultimately providing healthier tax revenues.
Net Zero
There's a similar pattern of thought in the net zero policy, but at a much greater magnitude of ambition. It involves a new publicly owned body called GB Energy to build jobs and supply chains, a National Wealth Fund to invest alongside the private sector in green technologies, and a Warm Homes Plan to insulate properties.
The ultimate plan is to fully decarbonise the grid by 2030. The previous target was 2035 and most people in the sector thought it would be very challenging. 2030 is close to impossible. It suggests that Labour is going to put the country on a war footing.
What kind of thing would you need to do to hit that target? We can get a good idea by looking at offshore and onshore wind.
Earlier this month, a subsidised offshore wind contract auction collapsed. Developers told the government it was going to happen. They warned that the price of labour and materials had shot up - big surprise there - and that the reserve price at the auction would need to reflect that. The government didn't listen. Labour's first task will be to get it running again, by ramping up the reserve price of the subsidised contracts to the point where developers participate.
There are also problems with onshore wind. In 2015, something called Footnote 54 was added to the National Planning Policy Framework. It was a death sentence for onshore wind development. Among other things, it stated that community-identified impacts had to be "fully addressed" and there needed to be "community backing". This was interpreted very strictly, as if one person complaining was enough to halt the project. It was a de-facto ban.
Earlier this month, Michael Gove said he would fix it. The media reported it with a really quite inconceivable degree of gullibility. It's extraordinary, really. These people have been lying to them for years and yet they wake up every morning and diligently report their nonsense all over again without bothering to check if it's true.
In fact, Gove altered the footnote very slightly - from "fully addressed" to "appropriately addressed" and from "community backing" to "community support". It's all very tiresome linguistic bullshit with a sum upshot of fuck-all. No new development is likely to be unleashed. It costs a lot to get to the planning stage. You're not going to do it only to be met by a wall of disingenuous sophistry at a late stage.
What needs to be done to change things? Well first of all, just delete the footnote. No massaging of words, no silky lawyerly smoothing out of meaning. And then, if you're really serious, you designate onshore wind farms as 'nationally significant infrastructure projects' so that they sidestep the normal planning rules and get signed off directly by the secretary of state.
The governance machine
Will Labour do this? We just don't know. But we can predict it with a moderate degree of confidence on the basis of the incentives and restrictions they face. Sectoral bargaining is free - it doesn't break the fiscal rule. That's one of the reasons they like it.
Similarly, tearing up the planning system is free. If you are heavily constrained in one area but have set yourself a requirement to achieve a very ambitious target in another, you are likely to opt for the options still available to you. Increased prices at subsidised auctions, on the other hand, cost money. But they fall within the fiscal rule, which allows borrowing to invest.
The fear among progressives is that Labour will then lose its nerve, as it currently does on a daily basis. You can see the Mail headlines already. 'Labour's union paymasters take over the economy', 'Labours green tax bombshell', 'the mutilation of England's green and pleasant land'. And then Labour will slump back defeatedly to its defensive positions.
Except this is very unlikely to happen. At this stage, Labour will no longer be an election machine. Indeed, many of the people in the campaign team, like Mattinson and McSweeney, are expected to leave after the election. It will be a governance machine. One with a clear democratic mandate for radical action on climate change and labour markets. That's the thing with big policy proposals before an election. If you win on the back of them, you really have to see them through.
The direction of travel is therefore pretty clear. But something else is clear too.
For all the Blairite interference in the party's election posture, the ultimate destination is not Blairism. These are not the ideas of a party which is in awe of the free market. In fact, nearly every sentence is about market failure and nearly every solution is about state intervention - not in a stale old 1970s Arthur Scargill sort of way, but in a far more interesting and innovative manner.
It's Keynesian radicalism in an austerity straightjacket. An odd mix, to be sure. But one which is a damn sight more radical and exciting than you might think.
Congratulations on your first post. Very interesting. I think Labour and Starmer have been at their best when speaking with a degree of optimism and confidence. When they’ve proposed bold policies like when he went all out on housing a while back.
I'm sick to the back teeth of all this fucking Kremlinology. If Labour want us to believe they have any progressive policies then I expect them to announce them out load, officially. Not read them from the entrails they've chucked around. So far their stated policies are not significantly different to the fucking Tories. So it's a hard pass from me.