The New Nasty Party? Keir Starmer’s Great Moving Right Show
The late Stuart Hall published in Marxism Today in January 1979 just before Thatcher’s Election victory an analysis headed ‘The Great Moving Right Show’.
http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/mt/index_frame.htm
Looking back the analysis was a decent one, at least posing questions about the appeal of right-wing politics
It was however reviled at the time by the left, myself included, and in a 2012 interview with the New Statesman, Hall touched on the reason why:
“There is a tiny kernel of truth in the assertion that [Marxism Today] created Blairism, in the sense that the ‘new times’ stuff was addressing the change of the whole terrain. But what we recommended was that you needed a project on the left of the same breadth and depth as Thatcherism. New Labour understood it as meaning that you needed the same project!”
We knew of course that Thatcherism was very right-wing. The real Great Moving Right Show for those of us on the left however meant people breaking not just from socialism but from social democracy to argue that Thatcher had a point. That in part, as Hall notes, was where New Labour came in.
The backdrop then as now was economic crisis, and the question of who pays for it and how.
Starmer seems to be falling into the same error that New Labour. Labour’s latest attack on Sunak underlining that Labour as well as the Tories can be the Nasty Party; claiming that Labour can be more efficient on stopping asylum seekers, in the moment, than the Tories, equivocating at best on Trans rights and criticising teachers for taking action on a well below inflation pay offer, instead of offering a counter project to the Tories industrial and culture wars, Starmer suggests an echo of them and to be honest sometimes more than an echo.
It was and is the politics of defeat and retreat. Unless the left is active, perhaps particularly now outside of Parliament in workplaces and communities, it can happen again..
Leave a Reply