Its been a disaster. Why hasn’t he gone?

The core problem for Paul Mason’s* argument – in his piece for Open Democracy entitled The left has a choice: unite behind Starmer or face Farage rising to power – that a Starmer government has the same potential as Attlee’s to set “a new political consensus”, is that Attlee’s reforms in the 1940s were underpinned by Marshall Aid from the United States, as was the restabilisation of other Western European countries like France and Italy. But, we are now in a period in which the United States – faced with the rising economic weight of China and the BRICs – is no longer able to afford to subsidise its junior partners. In fact we are in a period of a reverse Marshall Plan in which capital is being sucked into the US, not only from the Global South but also its allies; which is destablising them politically and economically.

This analysis of this new decadent and parasitic stage of the Pax Americana by the Tricontinental Institute shows how this works.

This is bad enough under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, attempts to divide the world economy through scanctions and tariffs, drawing the wagons ever tighter around its shrinking zone of economic dominance, while passing the ammunition for the wars they are engaged in in Ukraine and Gaza and preparing for in the South China Sea. Under Trump, if he does indeed have a Second Coming in November, this will be turbo charged, and we will all have to cope with his capacity for “unpredictable violence”, which, according to Boris Johnson, is “what the West needs”.

Mason’s assertion that “in a world where democracy is in peril, and where conservatism is merging with the far right, he (Starmer) stands a chance of making the UK a place of resistance and a model for the rest of Europe” is exposed as the nonsense it is by David Lammy’s attempts to build bridges with the Republicans and explain to us all that Trump has been “misunderstood about Europe”. The rule of Blair, that the key objective of British Foriegn Policy is to “get up the arse of the White House and stay there” remains hegemonic in the shadow cabinet.

Mason’s defence of Starmer’s “project” starts from a false premise, because Labour’s 20 point lead is not the result of a cunning plan by the Labour Right, but primarily a result of revulsion at the Tories. That is evident from

• polls that shown that only around a third of voters think Labour is fit to govern. Its lead comes from the fact that only a sixth of voters think the Tories are.
• a recent poll of who would make the better PM, Keir Starmer or Rishi Sunak in which the leading candidate was “neither of the above” on 49%.
• the second TV leaders debate, during which both Sunak and Starmer were laughed at. Sunak more than Starmer, to be fair, as he has pulled one dead rabbit after another out of his hat, but being laughed at before being elected, rather than laughed at on the basis of a dreadful record in office, is not a good sign.
• the March YouGov Leaders Standing poll, in which Starmer was viewed favourably by 38% of respondents and unfavourably by 53%.

So, this is not glad confident morning and does not bode well for a “honeymoom period”, let alone a “ten year mission”, whatever the size of the majority. Bubbles can be large, but burst quickly if they are thin.

A warning experience of what this might lead to is what has happened in the United States. In 2020, the vote for Joe Biden was primarily an anti -Trump vote. Biden’s record in office, even before his complicity in fuelling the attack on Gaza, means that Trump – despite everything – is back in contention as potential President. That in itself is evidence of a crisis of leadership in the US. In the UK, Starmer’s similarly cautious approach tees up a far right Faragiste Conservative revival – reeking of booze, fags, exhaust fumes and racism – exactly what Mason says he wants to avoid.

There are deeper currents at work here.

• The scale of the economic stagnation, drops in living standards, life expectancy and eroding public services since 2008,
• combined with the shifts in global power away from a previously unquestionable Pax Americana – that the UK (and Labour Right) has been an enthusiastic auxiliary of since WW2
• and the increasingly evident breakdown in the climactic conditions for human civilisation to survive, means that people can’t live comfortable, complacent lives within a “mainstream consensus” expressed in the “political middle ground” any more.

The strange death of steady as she goes, bank manager Conservatism, as the UKs long managed decline becomes unmanagable, is an expression of that. This isn’t yet expressed in any clear move towards solutions, but the presumption that this can only be expressed in a curmudgeonly negativity is used by the Labour Front bench to make change without hope palatable.

Nevertheless, the 79% of people in John Curtice’s recent poll that said the UK system of government needed to be improved “quite a lot” or “a great deal” shows that there is a preparedness for significant change bubbling under.

Its also quite apparent in this election campaign that, given the scale of the Conservative implosion, not only are forces in the ruling class already angling for a Faragiste/Tory rump realignment, they are also trying to rebuild the Lib Dems as the core of a centre ground regroupment on “Change UK” lines. Now is the time for the breaking of Parties.

The result in the same Curtice poll that 45% would not trust any politicians to put “country before Party” is more ambiguous than its presented. The interests of “the country” is often interpreted as the “common interest”, which a lot of people see as being the interests of the majority of the people. But “the interests of the country” is invariably framed in terms of the interests of those who own the country not that of the majority of us who live in it; in the same way that the interests of “the economy” is framed as the interests of those who own capital, not those who work.

The Conservatives seen no contradiction here. The interests of the “country” is taken to be synomymous with that of private capital, of established institutions (including the Conservative Party) and its symbols. The role of the rest of us is to know our place, doff our caps at the right times, salute the flag when its run up a flagpole, work hard, keep our noses clean and not cause any trouble, lest we get defined as “the enemy within”. So, adopting this slogan (and symbols) as enthusiastically as Keir Starmer has, amounts to a quite explicit tug of the forelock. With this formula, “the many” defer to the interests of “the few”.

Mason argues for a strategy of appealing to “patriotic left” voters by supporting what he calls “mainstream positions on crime, immigration and defence” (my emphasis). This presents right wing positions as if they are a consensus (mainstream) and leaves them unchallenged, helping a punitive approach to criminal justice, xenophobia and war mongering to be accepted as default “common sense”; when they are anything but, and widely agreed, when they are not. This actively alienates a large number of people who normally vote Labour looking for a more progressive alternative. Even if they vote Labour again this time, in desperation to be rid of the Tories, Labour’s grip on them is increasingly tenuous.

As well as digging deep into these toxic trenches, Mason argues that “growth strategies based on borrowing, taxing and spending are precluded by … high bond yields and high inflation”. This is wrong on so many levels.

• There is enormous room for higher taxes on the wealthy. In not proposing to raise them, Labour has left room on its left that even the Liberal Democrats and, especially, the Green Party have moved onto. The Green proposals to raise £50 billion a year by these means have been classed as viable by the BBC fact checker; so its not a wild outlier. So, why does Labour refuse to do so, especially with the Tories having set a £19 billion black hole in the public sector budget as a trap? Starmer and Reeves seem to be walking into this with their eyes wide shut. Their line that this gap will be filled by “growth”, that will appear solely by dint of managerial certainty, what Mason calls “creating the conditions for long term private investment”, is already visibly wilting in the election debate. This line won’t even hold in theory; even less so in fact.
• Moreover, borrowing only makes any sense if the return on the investment is likely to be lower than the cost of the interest on the additional debt. This is explored in detail here.

This is doubly dangerous because, as Mason points out, “climate change means we need to invest massively in decarbonised energy” (my emphasis). The problem, and Mason knows this, is that Starmer and Reeves are not proposing to do that. They are proposing to invest modestly.

The National Wealth Fund and GB Energy are good steps, but on a very small scale. This has been described by the Guardian as likely to create “tepid” progress towards mitigating climate change. The result of that will be an accelerating drag on “the economy”, as the costs of coping with current impacts – like that of increasing winter rains on sewage systems and farming – get worse and worse. Every 1C increase in temperature hits GDP by 12%. More than the 2008 crash. More than Covid. So a failure to invest, even for people who think getting the books balanced is more important than the survival of human civilisation (and there are a lot of them in the Treasury) is bad for getting the books balanced too.

Voters motivated by “patriotism”, and politicians wanting to pander to them, might note Sir Nicholas Stern’s recent report that for the UK to keep up with the EU and US in infrastructure investment it needs to invest an additonal 1% of GDP. 1% of GDP is £26 billion a year. That figure has a familiar ring to it. Doing less than this is managing decline, no matter how many Union Jacks you surround yourself with. Most of this investment would necessarily be green, to avoid building in carbon emissions that would have to be undone later at greater cost. This is a key point when considering what the proposed Planning reform to build 1.5 million new homes is going to look like.

Putting the constrained resources that will be available in this context into increased arms manufacturing, beating ploughshares into swords, will copper bottom austerity. Mason should recall that the austerity of the Attlee government, that led to its fall in 1951, was driven by the level of military expenditure required to sustain a global Empire under threat from rebellion, to develop nuclear weapons “with the bloody Union Jack on it” (as Ernest Bevin put it) and show its commitment to the US in the Korean war. History in the 2020s could rhyme in this respect, if this course is followed again.

Mason’s argument that this is necessary to counter “Russian aggression” in Ukraine ignores the way the war grew out of NATO’s refusal to even negotiate with the Russians about mutual security guarantees during the Winter of 2021, let alone the national rights of Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea whose rebelion against the NATO coup in 2014 led to them being bombed by the Ukrainian air force and a civil war that lasted for eight years before February 2022.

Had the Labour line quoted with some disdain by Mason, that a Labour government would attempt to “lead efforts to secure strategic arms limitation and multilateral disarmament” been the general view of NATO in 2021, instead of consciously pushing through the well known red lines of a nuclear armed power, there would have been no war. Instead we have “security through strength”. Gaza shows us where that ends up.

Instead of seeking a peace settlement that would enable us all to put resources into stopping climate breakdown – Mason envisages a forever war in a militarised and impoverished Europe, with an entire generation of Ukrainian men fed with understandably increasing reluctance into a horrific meat grinder as dispensible armed henchmen fighting for the retreating US world order, or a possible escalation that is more and more likely to stumble over a final nuclear red line the longer it goes on.

The bottom line here is that we can’t afford a war drive and to invest in stopping climate change at the same time. It is stark how easily the US and its allies find the resources to balloon their military budgets and how difficult they find it to provide the Global South with the climate finance needed to avoid dependence on fossil fuels.

Choosing to play down the chronic certainty of extinction through climate breakdown by building up to a nuclear confrontation that will wipe us all out just as certainly, but quicker, is a bit like President Trump thinking he could stop a hurricane by bombing it.

Mason’s notion that supporting NATO and the Ukrainian oligarchy is “anti fascist” is also a piece of semi conscious self deception, because he knows full well that the European and North American far right have sent some of their most dedicated cadre to fight against the Donbass Republics in Ukraine since 2014; taking Andriyi Biletsky of the Azov battalion at his word when he said that Ukraine’s national purpose was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen”. Funny kind of “anti fascism” to link up with people like that.

Mason says Starmer is “not playing for a five year stint in power” and Reeves talks of “ten years of national renewal” but from an electoral point of view, the problem with their approach is that, because there will be insufficient state investment to generate green growth, especially if they prioritise guns over butter, we will continue to stagnate on our existing unsustainable basis, in conditions of deepening crisis that provide insufficient resources to shore up crumbling public services, leading to a mass rejection of the government presiding over this at the next election – be it in 2029 or earlier – as the current mood gets even angrier.

*Spook warning; Its important to bear in mind that whatever Mason has written is probably run past what he describes as “the official side”. Whether he does or does not have an MI6 handler, as Grayzone allege, is nevertheless, not something he has directly denied.