‘If Reheated Blairism Is Keir Starmer’s Answer to Donald Trump Then He Is Asking the Wrong Questions’

As the world is radically reshaped and reframed in the US, we are seeing a strange and rather retrograde development in British domestic politics. Blairism has returned to stamp its mark on a now very ‘New Labour’ government.

The two headline appointments announced last week were for Jonathan Powell, Blair’s Chief of Staff, to become National Security Advisor and Liz Lloyd, who was Deputy Chief of Staff to Powell, becoming Head of Policy and Innovation in Downing Street. But these are just the latest in a long line of Blairites returning to the top of the Labour Party and the machinery of government.  

Peter Hyman, a speechwriter for Blair, worked for Starmer on his missions, Alan Milburn, the former NHS Secretary,  is advising Wes Streeting on health reform, Matthew Doyle spun for Blair and now does the same for Starmer, Pat McFadden was Blair’s political adviser and is now pulling the financial strings across the Government, Michael Barber did delivery for Blair and now does it for Starmer and Peter Mandelson is now being touted as the new US ambassador. 

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All of these people are talented and have experience.  But their preponderance begs a number of questions.  How has Blairism adapted since the late 1990s to a very different world today?

In particular what has been learnt about capitalism after the 2008 crash and the rise of the populist far right? In its accommodation with neo-liberalism New Labour unintentionally helped paved the way for the rise of UKIP and now Reform. Under New Labour the City and finance were under-regulated, the regions, beyond the southeast underfunded, and mass immigration was encouraged as a source of economic productivity, but with too little regard for the impact on wages, housing, education, health and the speed and scale of cultural change. The unbounded desire for a global future in which the state would educate you to become individually competitive but then leave you to sink or swim was undoubtedly part of the reason for Brexit, while the Iraq war poisoned the well of trust and belief in politics and democracy. The return of a hard-right Trump presidency only adds further to the pressures faced by centre left Governments in the West.

So what does it tell us about the talent pool on the centre left of British politics that leaves Blairism as the default and dominant option in this new world? 

Because this is an uneasy alliance between Starmer and Blairism. During his campaign to win the leadership of the Party, Keir Starmer and his team were defiantly clear about having no connections with Tony Blair or the Blairites. Starmer stood on a ticket of Corbynism without Corbyn, without anti-semitism and with professionalism. This was the platform that the Starmerite think tank Labour Together’s deep and prolonged polling of the party membership had shown was the only route to victory. Any hint of Blairism would have destroyed his chance of winning.  Of course, as we now know, that platform was just a mask, and as soon as victory was secured it was ripped off.

But the very fact that Starmer had gained control of the party was out of step with Blairite thinking. Since 2015 the Blairites, including reportedly Jonathan Powell, had been toying with the prospect of setting up a new party on the presumption that the hold of the Corbynites and Momentum was too strong. Their vehicle was the movement around a second Brexit referendum.  Meanwhile Labour Together had other plans and could see a route to regaining control.  They were to be proved right.  

But things didn’t go entirely to plan.  After the huge defeat of 2019 the working assumption on all sides was that the best Labour could do was to make itself competitive for the election after next. Starmer was to be a Neil Kinnock like leader, taking Labour back to the centre and electability, before someone else led them to actual victory. No one could see COVID or the Ukraine war coming, or the utter collapse of support for both the Conservative party and the SNP. Starmer wasn’t supposed to win. But he did. 

So, an unholy truce holds the Government together. Whatever Starmer is, he’s not a true Blairite believer. Not least because he served under Corbyn and voices a grasp of both the politics of class and a commitment to the Ed Miliband agenda on the environment. Eruptions like the Sue Gray affair are the surfacing of deeper political differences that are likely to destabilise the government as it tries to navigate the chaos of the modern world. 

The central problem of New Labour was always that it wasn’t ‘new’ enough nor ‘Labour’ enough. What was true 30 years ago at the foundation of the Blair project, is truer than ever. Corbyism, very much without Corbyn, could have been the foundation on which to build a modern, meaningful and popular political project. An over reliance on a technology and market obsessed politics found wanting 20 years ago, isn’t.