On a football fan message board, a disagreement flares: “Starmer’s ruled out nationalising utilities. Well he’s lost my vote” opines one. A poster shoots back sarcastically that at least when the Tories win the next election “you’ll be able to look at yourself in the mirror and say ‘I’ve kept my principles’ while the rest of us starve…”.
In microcosm, it’s the crux of the debate that occupies thousands of column inches a year – many of which I consume – and provides a daily living for the commentariat of the Guardian and other news outlets. ‘Starmer must be bold, must present an authentically left-wing programme’ rage Owen, Paul etc. ‘No, he can’t go frightening the horses,’ counsel Polly, Andrew etc. ‘He needs to tickle the tummies of those quiet Tories, those middle Englanders that Blair triangulated to victory’.
So who’s right? Paradoxically, both are.
Those of us who wore out shoe leather canvassing for a Corbyn-led Labour in 2019 did not need to wait for confirmation that the fundamental untrustworthiness of its leader along with an infamously incontinent list of policies buried any credibility the party had. Starmer is right to prioritise the restoration of that credibility. Conversely, however, Corbyn’s elevation was a reaction to Ed Miliband’s anaemic offer of 2015 and its risible attempts to dog-whistle right-wing voters; Jezza’s heroic but ultimately doomed bid two years later at least fought on territory the party faithful recognised.
It’s worth remembering that part of the reason that ‘O Jeremy Corbyn’ was ‘successful’ that summer because his campaign was able to pick up votes among segments – the young and the so-called ‘underclass’ – that were previously non-voting. In this the movement mirrored that of the previous summer, the political shock par excellence, which continues to reverberate, to shape our politics even as its protagonists practise a tacit omerta with regard to its mention: Brexit.
I have just finished reading Zizek’s The Courage of Hopelessness, published in early 2017 and, one presumes, largely finished prior to the Brexit vote, which in consequence is only lightly touched-upon. Excoriated for appearing in the book to ‘support’ the recent ascent of Trump, which (the thesis goes) would result in the rupture with political normativity that might open the space for genuinely radical ‘emancipatory projects of the Left’, Zizek is nonetheless correct in his assertion that both Trump and Brexit were symptoms of the inability of liberal democracies to any longer ‘manufacture consent’ among demographics marginalised by falling wages and levels of home ownership, by the outsourcing of productive jobs and the privatisation of ‘commons’, and (who could forget) by mass immigration that allegedly contained newly-alarming dimensions:. Thus, [the liberal elites] “now complain about the ‘irrationality’ of the Brexit vote, ignoring the desperate need for change the vote made palpable”.
Zizek also attracted opprobrium for also appearing in the book to ride roughshod over the sensibilities of the clarion voices of identity politics, and prefiguringthe discourse that several years later would come to be known as the Culture War and that would increasingly dominate political debate; quoting the writer Alenka Zupanac: “PC is like lying with the truth. It says the right things but comes across as wrong nevertheless. Populism, on the other hand, is like telling the truth in the form of a lie. It says all the wrong things, yet we feel that something about it is nevertheless right”.
The malign genius of both Trump and Johnson was to harness this insight: to say what was wrong in a way that felt right; felt right because you were dispossessed, locked out of the esoteric discourse that appeared to prioritise marginal felicities of language over genuine class dislocation and anguish. And it is why Starmer’s awkward attempts to reposition his party in Blue Labour territory – with clunky flag placements, avowals of royalism and faintly menacing triads of abstract nouns – are nonetheless valid: nothing is finer grist to the cynical populist’s mill than the cold liberal sneer that mocks popular totems.
Where Starmer’s cautious messaging ultimately fails to cut through, however, why despite Red Wallers lending their votes at byelections we can all see him falling short, is that it fails to tap into the legitimate popular emotion that drove both Trump and Brexit: rage. Or ‘anger’, if you’d prefer a softer, more ‘liberal’ word.
Where’s the anger? As food banks proliferate, as people choose whether to heat or eat, we wait, (so far,), in vain for Starmer to shed his lawyerly demeanour and get downright furious. For as Zizek reminds us, “Trump [drew] his support from the same rage out of which Bernie Sanders [and Corbyn] motivated his partisans… “and what one should never forget is that popular rage is by definition free-floating and can be redirected”. As the fantasmic “uplands” of Brexit dissolve in ignominious failure, the impotent rage remains. Of course, it is too much to ask Starmer to appear as an anti-establishment candidate – despite the Old Etonian Johnson improbably pulling it off. Nothing stops him, however, from evincing a degree of righteous anger at the plight of the people he hopes to represent. Nothing, that is beside his seeming inability to think – and feel – on his feet, to depart from his scripted blandishments.
Returning to the touchstone of Starmer’s ‘lost voter’ whose dismay began this piece, I would identify two very obvious candidates in the Cosmology of Affronts, if you will, that in popular parlance ‘boil the public’s piss’ (and that both leave the Tories vulnerable): the ongoing rip off of the privatised utilities, and the offshoring of wealth. Both, moreover, allow Starmer to begin to knit together a meta-narrative that does not merely treat outrages as epiphenomena, but that reach back into a past, a Tory past, ‘when things began to go wrong’. We used to own it, then they sold it. Now they rip us off and do the other thing that they do: offshore the proceeds; avoid – or evade (what’s the difference?!) the tax we’re owed.
Beguiled by a shirt-sleeved charlatan who manufactured an ersatz rage against the EU that concealed a cynical attempt to further impoverish them with privatisation and anti-worker directives, and that delivered nothing save blue passports and further pain, the people’s rage is arguably keener than ever. Nevertheless, one suspects that unless Starmer learns to ‘speak indignation’, this popular force will remain unharnessed by the Left and instead the only force stronger than anger will once again rule electorally. That force is the one at which all iterations of Conservatism excel, the one that did for Corbyn, and the one that amidst times of deep uncertainty is always an easy sell to the 60+% of the electorate with still something to lose: fear.
It’s time to get angry, Keir; or prepare to die with a polite, Islingtonian whimper.
Exaltation Lies Down - a blog from Calum Law 