As Andy Burnham delivered his conference speech to the Labour faithful yesterday, it was hard not to recall Jeremy Corbyn’s words after the party’s shattering 2019 election defeat. But when it comes to rhetoric, who can now deny that the left has won the argument? A Labour prime minister has declared that “Britain has been on the wrong path for a long time”, listing five villains: “Deindustrialisation, deregulation, privatisation, austerity, Brexit.” His speech was infused with class politics, as he condemned a society “run for vested interests, not in the public interest, with power held in too few hands”.
When he committed to break with the “flawed thinking of the last 40 years”, he lumped together Conservative and Labour governments. He has already repeatedly labelled the culprit: neoliberalism. This has long been the received wisdom of the left: that as Clement Attlee’s postwar government established a social-democratic consensus that the Tories upheld for a generation, so Margaret Thatcher bequeathed a settlement that New Labour maintained.
These beliefs were condemned to the fringes of Labour, even though Tony Blair himself eventually confessed: “I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them.” Any mention of neoliberalism was a sure way of provoking an eye-roll from a mainstream politician or commentator. We were denied any debate about an economic system based on extraction rather than investment; an economy based on financialisation rather than making things. Corbynism was an insurgency against all of this – until it crashed on the shores of Brexit.
Add to this the new foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, telling those who opposed Israel’s genocide and were infuriated by Labour’s position on Gaza: “You were right.” We should add, too, the disastrous past wars backed by Labour: Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. The left should feel vindicated by the political shift taking place. We were right – at home and abroad.
We were mocked, demonised and marginalised for making these arguments. Now most of the left’s worldview is embraced by the Labour top brass. This happened after Keir Starmer’s faction based their entire project on defining themselves against the left.
As the Labour activist Ali Milani – who was part of Burnham’s team – told me, that strategy nearly brought about the party’s destruction. Burnham only became prime minister because Labour’s leftwing voters rebelled – by defecting en masse to Zack Polanski’s Green party in the Gorton and Denton byelection, then in local elections in England, Scotland and Wales. That is clearly understood by Burnham’s team, or they would not be so confidently doubling down on their new strategy.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
