The changing face of Labour

Keir Starmer’s Labour is suffering an identity crisis. His government’s first year in office has combined a resurrection of old Blairite policies with an apparent rejection of Blairism’s embrace of globalisation, a turn to greater state intervention, and lurches to the right over racism, immigration and trans rights. This is more than just New Labour with extra bigotry. This noxious and chaotic mix is the product of a party struggling to adapt to a new global order where traditional neoliberalism is breaking down and Labourism has little room to deliver.1

In a Sunday Telegraph article in April this year, Starmer wrote that “these new times demand a new mentality”. Coming three days after president of the United States Donald Trump imposed swingeing tariffs on more than 180countries, Starmer argued that his Labour government would have to adapt its politics to fit the new world order that Trump was helping to usher in. “The new world is less governed by established rules and more by deals and alliances,” Starmer wrote. Labour had already “risen to meet the moment” by boosting arms spending in response to heightened imperialist rivalry. Now it must do the same “on trade and the economy” by using the state to “intervene directly to shape the market” and by using “industrial policy to help shelter British business from the storm”. The article was accompanied by briefings to the media from Labour officials that the government believed globalisation—the era of market liberalisation and a highly integrated world economy—“is over” or has even “failed people”.2

Two days later, Starmer made a speech that combined this turn with nationalism. Speaking at Jaguar Land Rover’s plant in Solihull, he promised he would “back British business” to produce “British cars for British workers”.3 Some commentators, wrote the New Statesman’s George Eton, viewed these developments as simply “a knee-jerk reaction to Donald Trump abroad and Nigel Farage at home”.4 However, for others, he said, it signified something more far-reaching: an attempt to reformulate Labour’s politics for a new era—one where, in Starmer’s words, “old assumptions, long taken for granted, simply no longer apply”.5

Yet, Starmer himself is said to be “uninterested in ideas and political philosophy”—an attitude sometimes described generously as pragmatism.6 Jason Cowley, a former New Statesman editor, argues that Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney is the one who “accepts that the government needs a philosophy, a set of principles, an ideology” and who is apparently spearheading a new brand of Labour politics. Cowley claims this has earned the moniker Hard Labour:

Hard Labour rejects default progressive orthodoxies and the pieties of left-wing virtue-signalling. It does not believe that liberalism will inevitably prevail in a disorderly world. It believes in the centrality of the nation state and strong borders. It champions rearmament and reindustrialisation… McSweeney, and by implication Starmer, want nothing less than to formulate a new post-progressive politics of the centre left that will set the political agenda for a generation.7

Despite Starmer’s claims to have discarded the “old assumptions”, much of what his government has done in its first year has been a repeat of Blairism, such as its assaults on benefit claimants, its adoption of “tough on crime” policies and “law and order” rhetoric, and its renewed enthusiasm for marketisation in the NHS. Just over a month after Starmer’s aides declared he believed that globalisation was dead, he announced with fanfare a trade deal with the European Union (EU) that sought to salvage Britain’s integration into an institution New Labour’s architects saw as central to the globalisation they embraced.8 James Meadway’s assessment that there is in fact no “systematic attempt at forging a Starmerite consensus” seems far more accurate than Cowley’s.9 In the last issue of this journal, Joseph Choonara wrote about Starmer:

He is caught between a desire to prop up elements of the old neoliberal centre of politics and a lurch towards a rapidly developing alternative set of pro-capitalist politics, represented by figures such as Trump, blending elements of neoliberalism with authoritarian statism and a highly illiberal attempt to escalate the culture war.10

This article seeks to explore that tension further, pointing towards a bigger crisis for Labourism than its leaders are now struggling to find a way out of.

New Labour and neoliberalism

The defining feature of New Labour was its embrace of neoliberalism. Labour’s commitment to managing the state means that, in practice, it has always governed in the interests of capital—mostly willingly, sometimes under duress. However, Labourism does contain the idea that the state should make at least modest attempts to regulate business, deliver reforms, distribute wealth and ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism, although only ever within the confines of what business will allow. Under the leadership of Tony Blair (1994-2007), Labour dropped that idea, becoming an openly pro-capitalist party in favour of open markets, privatisation and untrammelled profiteering.11

This was itself a response to changes in capitalism since the mid-1970s, when ruling classes adopted neoliberalism in an attempt to restore profit rates by> removing “distortions” to free trade, such as state subsidies or trade unions, and to open up industries to private enterprise through privatisation.12 Labour came to adopt these policies wholesale.13 Blairism was part of a broader shift within social democracy towards a variant of neoliberal policies that came to be known as the Third Way, with much of its ideological framework provided by the theorist Anthony Giddens.

Giddens contrasted the Third Way with “old-style social democracy”, which he said believed that problems caused by free market capitalism “can be muted or overcome by state intervention in the marketplace”.14 Social democracy sought to use the state to “provide public goods the market cannot deliver” and that “a strong government presence in the economy and other sectors of society too, is normal and desirable”. However, according to Giddens, “the economic theory of socialism”, which he said underpinned social democratic thought, “was always inadequate, underestimating the capacity of capitalism to innovate, adapt and generate increasing productivity”.15 The transformations wrought by neoliberalism and globalisation had exposed this inadequacy, demanding a radical change in social democratic thought.

Giddens and other proponents of the Third Way regarded globalisation as central to this change. Mass communication and the collapse of the SovietUnion had led to a more integrated world economy, while institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) implied that economic policy had transcended the individual nation state. As Alex Callinicos put it in his critique of the Third Way:

Here, then, is the central thesis of globalisation succinctly outlined. Global economic integration, most evident with respect to financial markets, has radically undermined the autonomy of nation-states, producing “a world without borders”… It is, for advocates of the Third Way, economic globalisation that has rendered obsolete the statism of the Old Left, whether Stalinist or social-democratic.16

Yet, Giddens also argued that Margaret Thatcher and the “New Right”, which had implemented the first wave of neoliberal transformation, were failing too. Their adherence to conservative “traditional values” was notcompatible with “the dynamism of market societies [that] undermines traditional structures of authority”.17 The Third Way would overcome the failures of both old-style social democracy and the “New Right” by “restructuring” the state so that it would direct the markets and private enterprise towards dis>tributing wealth more equitably.18 Giddens is clear that this was qualitatively different to the vision of “old-style” social democracy: “Many social democrats…believed that capitalism could and should be progressively modified so that it would lose most of its defining characteristics. No one any longer has any alternatives to capitalism—the arguments that remain concern how far, and in what ways, capitalism should be governed and regulated”.19

In the 1996 book The Blair Revolution, Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle developed the Third Way into a programme for New Labour. “New Labour believes that it is possible to combine a free market economy with social justice; liberty of the individual with wider opportunities for all; One Nation security with efficiency and competitiveness,” they wrote.20 Mandelson and Liddle went on to explain that New Labour “firmly rejects the notion that centralised state planning and state control are the route to economic success”:

There are clear differences between past Labour governments’ view of the mixed economy and New Labour’s commitment to the rigours of the dynamic market… New Labour welcomes the rigour of competitive markets as the most efficient means of anticipating and supplying consumers’ wants, offering choice and stimulating innovation.21

Mandelson and Liddle put these changes explicitly in the context of “rapid economic and technical change throughout the world.” Their aim was a Labour government that would make sure Britain “can compete successfully in the new global marketplace”.22 Paul Foot described their shift a little more neatly:

The job of government was not to intervene in the economy, not even to buy a stake in the economy, but to hold the ring in such a way as to ensure that private enterprise flourished… [Mandelson and Liddle] were self-confessedly scared of a suspicious City and jittery financial markets. Nothing could be done unless the economy was stable.23

However, this was more than just another example of the markets dictating Labour’s policies. The change was much more far-reaching—so much so that New Labour’s champions sought to transform the party itself, weakening Labour’s trade union link while seeking greater donations from business and demolishing its democratic structures so that local party organisations had less say.24

The 1995 rewording of Clause Four of Labour’s constitution removed the party’s commitment to “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange [and] popular administration or control of each industry or service”.25 Its replacement says the party now believes in “the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition” and “a thriving private sector and high-quality public services where those undertakings essential to the common good are either owned by the public or accountable to them”.

The new Clause Four was more than symbolic. Mandelson and Liddle branded it “the most outstanding and significant” of New Labour’s changes: “More than anything else, this change demonstrates that Labour rejects its past as a seemingly anti-private sector, class-based trade union party”.26 Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein put it a different way. Together with attempts to break Labour’s links to the trade unions, it represented “an attempt to ideologically break with reformism” and to transform Labour into a liberal, pro-capitalist party in the model of the US Democrats.27

The outcome of this change was to funnel wealth towards the rich. New Labour’s Clause Four also commits the party to creating “a community inwhich power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many not the few”.28 Yet, under the New Labour governments, Britain became one of the most unequal countries in the EU and countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).29 In 2012, the now-defunct Labour-supporting think tank the Smith Institute admitted that “on all measures of income inequality the situation worsened somewhat under Labour… This was largely because the richest in society were seeing really significant increases in their incomes”.30 It quotes the Financial Times: “The very rich have grown richer at double the pace of most Britons under Labour”.31This was almost intentional, the institute admitted: “Labour had little to say about income inequality… Indeed, Labour saw the tax revenues generated by the City and top earners in financial services as essential”.32

At the same time, the New Labour governments went to war on public sector workers’ jobs and pay, provoking strikes by teachers, firefighters, postal workers and civil servants, and introduced greater privatisation into schools in the NHS. Fewer council houses were built under all three New Labour governments than were built in any year under Margaret Thatcher.33

While the rich’s wealth soared, Labour’s support collapsed—accelerated greatly by revulsion against Britain’s invasion of Iraq. Labour won the 2005 general election with almost 4 million votes fewer and 63 seats fewer than 1997, while its share of the vote had fallen from 43.2 to 35.2 percent. Yet, Blair’s devotion to neoliberalism never faltered. At Labour’s 2005 conference, he gave a speech that was in part an appraisal of eight years of New Labour ingovernment, and in part an attempt to reassert New Labour’s principles as it embarked on its third term in office. Just as Starmer did in his Telegraph article, Blair spoke in 2005 of a “changing world” to which Labour had to adapt. For him, the answer was to embrace globalisation:

The pace of change can either overwhelm us, or make our lives better and our country stronger. What we can’t do is pretend it is not happening. I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer… In the era of rapid globalisation, there is no mystery about what works: an open, liberal economy, prepared constantly to change to remain competitive.34

Blair went on to warn against the “temptation to use government to try to protect ourselves against the onslaught of globalisation by shutting it out; to think we protect a workforce by regulation; a company by government subsidy; an industry by tariffs”.35

Securonomics—a break from Blairism?

Telegraph article. While Blair’s speech warned against subsidies for businesses and asserted that the early 21st century was “not the era of the big state,” Starmer declared: “We stand ready to use industrial policy to help shelter British business from the storm”. In what could be read as a direct repudiation of Blairism, he argued: “Some people may feel uncomfortable about this—the idea the state should intervene directly to shape the market has often been derided. But we simply cannot cling on to old sentiments when the world is turning this fast”.36

This was securonomics—an idea that Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves had outlined in more detail in her Mais lecture to the Bayes Business School a year earlier. She declared it “an economic approach which recognises how our world has changed”. Reeves began with a clear-eyed assessment of the changing world the impending Labour government would find itself in: “We are in a moment of flux; in which old certainties about economic management havebeen found wanting, the economic mainstream is adapting, but a new political consensus has yet to cohere.” Even more honestly, it is “a moment of political turbulence and recurrent crises with the burden falling on the shoulders of working people.” Living standards and real wages had fallen, she acknowledged: “Today, the average British family is ten percent worse off than their French counterparts and a full twenty percent worse off than their German counterparts”.37

Her honesty stops there. Speaking to an audience of “senior practitioners” at an event that describes itself as “the City of London’s foremost event for the banking and finance community”, Reeves did not pin the collapse in living standards on the deliberate policy of holding down wages. Instead, it was “the collapse in our productivity”, rooted in “a failure to deliver the supply side reform needed to equip Britain to compete in a fast-changing world”.38

Reeves’s answer was a shift towards an “active” state that works not to regulate business but to facilitate trade, and bolster and protect industries that the government sees as key to economic growth, with “smart” and “strategic” investments and subsidies. This would not only spur new economic growth but also adapt to a world “where China looms large on the world stage and Russia is asserting itself more” and which “will face dramatically intensified competition for food, energy and water.” This competition would mean greater militarism too as “inescapably, questions of defence and security are entangled with economic ones”.39

To adopt this approach was to embrace an emerging “new Washington consensus”. Reeves explicitly characterised her securonomics as a version of the “Bidenomics”, which criticises neoliberalism’s belief that the market can “always allocate capital productively and efficiently” and declares globalisation to be “dead”.40 Her iteration of it entailed a partial rejection of New Labour. After some obligatory genuflection towards what she claimed as the achievements of New Labour, Reeves argued that the “analysis on which it was built was too narrow”:

An underregulated financial sector could generate immense wealth but posed profound structural risks too. And globalisation and new technologies could widen as well as diminish inequality, disempower people as much as liberate them, displace as well as create good work…our labour market remained characterised by too much insecurity. Despite sustained efforts to address our key weaknesses on productivity and regional inequality, they persisted, and so too did the festering gap between large parts of the country and Westminster politics. Most of all, the “great moderation” could not last. And as the global financial crisis unfolded, these weaknesses were exposed.41

Securonomics in action

Telegraph article was published, his Labour government seemed to put his words into action when it took over British Steel to prevent the closure of its plant in Scunthorpe. That March, Donald Trump had announced a 25 percent tariff on steel imports into the US, leading British Steel’s parent company Jingye to declare that its Scunthorpe plant was “no longer financially sustainable”.42

Afterwards, Reeves said the takeover was an example of Labour “using the power of government to back those sectors of the economy that can provide security for working people”. Just as Starmer did, Reeves reiterated that this shift was demanded by the changes wrought to the global order by Trump’s tariffs. Echoing her Mais lecture, she argued that Labour now believed in a “strong, smart and agile state to support key industries and back those sectors of the economy particularly affected by tariffs,” then announced “a new package of support for thousands of British exporters that are set to be affected by extending loans, guarantees and insurance to those companies facing significant short-term strain”.43

There was also a strong securonomics element to Reeves’s 2025 spending review a few weeks later. Private firms in the energy, construction, transport and Artificial Intelligence industries were all promised billions in cash from the government through various investment funds—essentially subsidies. The arms industry came first and foremost among the beneficiaries. The spending review included the “ambition” to spend three percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) on arms spending in the next parliament, as well as about £33 billion on nuclear weapons, lasers, drones, munitions and soldiers’ accommodation. What is more, the arms industry can look forward to more public cash in a coming “defence industrial strategy”, having been anointed “one of the eight priority sectors under the government’s modern Industrial Strategy”. 44

The alleged benefits are twofold. They would “counter” the “increased threats from malign actors and rapid technological change [that] have caused global instability and disrupted the rules-based international order”. Fortuitously, this “substantial increase in defence spending helps boost economic growth” with the government promising to “maximise the untapped growth potential of defence”.45

Nationalism and militarism

As much of this implies, this turn towards more interventionist support for British industry goes hand in hand with the nationalism that also characterises Starmer’s Labour. Starmer finished his “British cars for British workers” speech at Jaguar Land Rover by promising that Labour would “do everything necessary to defend our national interest. Strengthen our alliances, increase our defence power, support our businesses, jobs and workers”.46 In one breath, Starmer had made workers’ interests synonymous with their employers and made the defence of both of those inseparable from the interests of the British state.

This in itself is nothing new in Labour. Nationalism and the national interest have been a central and defining feature of Labourism throughout its history. As Cliff and Gluckstein showed, Labourism means trying to make the aspirations of the working-class people who look to Labour fit within the confines of the British capitalist state it seeks to manage. Labourism holds this contradiction together with the notion that the interests of all are united under a shared national interest. However, as the ability to deliver rests on the health of the British state and British capital, the national interest is really the interest of the British state and British capital.47

Very quickly, the debate around the government’s takeover of the Scunthorpe steel plant became less about saving jobs and more about competition with China, with some commentators even speculating that Jingye’s attempt to shut down the plant had been a deliberate act of sabotage on behalf of the Chinese state. Although business secretary Jonathan Reynolds was careful to insist that the government had only acted against “one specific company that I thought was not acting in the UK’s national interest”. He also said that “over-production and dumping of steel products does come from China”, meaning he would “look at a Chinese firm in a different way”.48

Handily, this supposed threat to ordinary people from a rival state came as Labour sought to win support for billions of pounds worth of increased arms spending, effectively paid for by cuts to disability benefits. Under pressure from Donald Trump to increase arms spending as part of Britain’s commitment to NATO, Labour first promised in May 2025 to spend 2.5 percent of GDP on arms, only to agree a further increase in July—committing to 5 percent of GDP by 2035.

This too was lacquered with nationalism and an appeal to the national interest. On 8 May 2025, the anniversary of the Victory in Europe Day, Starmer promised a defence spending increase of £13.4 billion a year, in a speech where nationalism did all of the heavy lifting. Beginning with a misty-eyed tribute to the “lion hearted generation” of 1945, Starmer warned that “Western values” are under threat, and that “the state, business and society [must] join hands in pursuit of the security of the nation”. Arms spending would be the “pillar” upon which “a good home to live in”, “a well-paid job with strong rights at work” and “an NHS that is there for [people] when they need it” all stand.49 The fact that a real terms increase in defence spending year on year since 2016 has not delivered any of those things went unmentioned.50 More than that, the spending would deliver a “defence dividend” that would be “felt directly in the pockets of working people” and where the “British defence industry will be the engine of national renewal”. In particular, we were all to be proud of the F35s whose engines were made by “apprentices at Rolls-Royce”.51

War was, of course, also a defining feature of New Labour’s governments—as its enthusiastic participation in bombing and invading Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and Kosovo all showed. Yet, there was, rhetorically at least, a difference in how those wars were justified that reflected the different state of imperialist competition. The wars in the 1990s and early 2000s came as the US sought to extend and reassert its hegemony, militarily through institutions such as NATO and economically through those such as the IMF. As Callinicos wrote in his critique of the Third Way, in this context these wars were about disciplining or bringing into line those deemed “rogue” or “failing” states that were reluctant to be brought into the fold.52

Believers in the Third Way saw these wars as anomalies or aberrations in a world where globalisation meant greater cooperation. Giddens went so far as to argue:

It is no longer fanciful to say that large-scale war between nations is less likely to occur in the future. The world is no longer divided between two militarized power blocs. The boundaries between nations have almost everywhere been fixed and agreed by international consensus. In an information age, territory no longer matters as much to nation-states as in the past.53

Today, Labour entertains no such fantasies. Its leaders justify their planned massive increase in military spending with reference to the wars where territory does very much matter, such as in Ukraine, and speak explicitly of the rise of rival power blocs around China and Russia.

Similarly, the Third Way did not mean Labourism abandoned nationalism and the “national interest”, but it articulated this in terms of the role the British state could play in promoting globalisation and championing its interests “in active collaboration” with other nation states through neoliberal institutions.54 Starmer and Reeves’s nationalism is rather about defending and advancing Britain’s interests in much more open and direct competition with all other states.

Racism and immigration

The final component of Labour’s nationalism under Starmer is racism. Inherent in the myth of a common interest based on the nation state is the exclusion of those who do not share that national identity and who are marked out as alien to it. This allows governments to single out migrants as people who are not part of the nation and potentially pose a threat to it. Rarely has this been made more blatant than in a now-infamous speech in which Starmer, echoing Enoch Powell, said that immigration threatened to make Britain an “island of strangers” who had undercut wages as “cheap labour” and “put pressure on housing and our public services”.55

The speech came just over a week after local elections in England and Wales, where the racist Reform UK party had emerged as the winner, gaining 677 council seats and taking control of ten councils. As Choonara point out in his article, Starmer’s capitulation to Reform’s racism was about more than chasing votes; it was a result of the inability of Labour—limited by its commitment to the needs of British capitalism and the logic of the “national interest”—to articulate a class-based alternative to the problems of low pay, high rents, collapsing public services and falling living standards.56

Blue Labour

Much of this reactionary turn takes its cue from the Blue Labour project of a decade earlier. Formed after Labour’s general election defeat in 2010 and the 2008 financial crash, Blue Labour combined an apparent rejection of New Labour’s love of the markets and globalisation with an embrace of conservatism, nationalism and bigotry.

In a contribution to a 2011 e-book that served as Blue Labour’s foundational text, co-founder Lord Maurice Glasman argues that the Labour Party was the child of a working-class yet traditional (read: conservative) “dad”, represented by trade unions, and a radical but middle-class “mum”, represented by liberal intellectuals.57 Although the “mum”, writes Glasman, was concerned with the “poorest and most vulnerable in our society” the “dad” believed in collective organisation to improve living and working conditions and to protect against “degradation, drunkenness and irresponsibility”.58 For Glasman, the root of Labour’s failure is that the traditional, working-class “dad” had been “estranged” throughout much of the party’s history.59 Old Labour ideas that the party could deliver improvements through state control and planning had been the product of a party “dominated by middle-class technocrats”. In the 1990s, this was then abandoned in favour of an “uncritical embrace of the market, in terms of its internal logic and consequences”.60

In Glasman’s account, the “positive outcomes of welfare spending” had been ditched for a “volatile and destructive form of finance capital on which we depend for our prosperity and growth”. He also associates this with the “plurality and diversity” that he says had “[undermined] the solidarity necessary for generating a welfare state and redistribution”.61 His solution is that Labour should aim to achieve “a condition of sustainable capitalism” built around “skilled labour” and “forms of mutual and co-operative ownership”, underpinned by an ideology that emphasises “the integrity of family life and the upholding of a Common Good”.62

In his contribution “The future is conservative”, Blue Labour’s other co-founder Jonathan Rutherford makes the fundamentally reactionary nature of this vision more explicit. He argues that Labour has “lost the ability to renew its political hegemony within the class which gave it life” because it had abandoned “a Labour language and culture which belonged to the society it grew out of”.63

Continuing on Glasman’s theme, Rutherford complains that Labour had come to be “viewed by many as the party of the market and of the state, not of society” and a party that “favours multiculturalism but suspects the popular symbols and iconography of Englishness”.64 It had “abandoned people to a volatile market in the name of a spurious entrepreneurialism” but also “stopped valuing settled ways of life” and “did not speak about an identification and pleasure in local place and belonging.”65 Deindustrialisation and low wages, along with the “the growing independence of women” had robbed men of their “traditional role of family breadwinner and head of household”.66

Meanwhile, he argues, immigration had come to be associated with “a wider loss of control over one’s working and daily life…and over the cultural integrity of the nation”.67 The recently-formed English Defence League (EDL) spoke for “much larger politically disenfranchised forces that have been unleashed by the transformations in capitalism and society” and was “powered by a resentful hatred of a metropolitan elite who it believes has heaped humiliation upon people and robbed them of their English identity and culture”.68 His solution was that Labour should adopt a supposedly more benign “conservatism that values what is shared in common rather than a liberalism that promotes individual distinction and difference”.69

What all this meant in practice soon became apparent. In 2011, Glasman recommended both that Labour should involve supporters of the EDL and that all immigration should be banned. Yet, despite misgivings from some quarters of the party, he became an adviser to Labour leader Ed Miliband, whose 2015 general election campaign notoriously featured a promise of “controls on immigration” engraved on a stone tablet and emblazoned on the side of mugs available to buy from the party’s website.70 Rutherford worked on Miliband’s policy review while another Blue Labour founder, Marc Stears, became the party’s chief speechwriter.

Blue Labour fell out of favour after Miliband’s failure and the subsequent left-wing leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Since then, Glasman has shifted further to the right, even appearing on the podcast of the fascist Steve Bannon this year to show enthusiasm for Donald Trump’s success and to describe “progressives” as an “enemy” who are “single-handedly destroying the Labour movement”.71

Such an appearance ought to make Glasman a pariah within Labour. Instead, Blue Labour has experienced a revival among some Labour MPs who think their time may have come in the era of Trump—including some who many might expect better of. Dan Carden, a former member of the Socialist Campaign Group of left-wing Labour MPs now leads a newly-formed Blue Labour group in the house of commons. Writing in the Mail on Sunday after the 2025 local elections, Carden argues that the world had become “very different” from the era of “globalisation, of free movement”, which had defined Tony Blair’s governments:

It is an era of nation states, of war, of industry. Donald Trump is pursuing protectionism in the White House as part of a Great Power rivalry with China. A land war drags on in Europe’s periphery. Suddenly, national production, where things are made and who makes them, matters again. It’s an era that demands security, sovereignty and solidarity. An era that cries out for Labour values—if only we can rediscover faith in our own tradition… The Chinese have the same symbol for threat and opportunity, and Trump’s election is exactly that. The world order is being shaken up and Britain must assert its place within it.72

Carden argues that working-class people are punishing a “political establishment [that] has for decades failed to provide a well-run health service, build the homes we need or control immigration”. His solution is “increased defence spending” as a “platform for rebuilding our economy. It can be the spark for wider re-industrialisation—reviving sectors that improve lives, from medical manufacturing to steel, aerospace and clean, homegrown energy—while creating secure, unionised jobs”.73

It is not just among backbenchers that Blue Labour has been influential. Glasman and Rutherford both claim to have the ear of Morgan McSweeney, who Glasman told the New Statesman was “one of ours”.74 McSweeney was certainly close to them, having spent the years when they were at the height of their influence in Milliband’s Labour working with and for them.75 Labour Together, which played a role in laying the ground for Starmer’s leadership, and which McSweeney was a director of, was launched by leading members of Blue Labour.76 Its review of Labour’s 2019 general election defeat, written while McSweeney was director, drew heavily on Blue Labour themes, concluding that Labour needed a “big change economic agenda that is seen as credible and morally essential” but that would “sit alongside a robust story of community and national pride”.77

Meanwhile, journalist and former LabourList editor Sienna Rodgers reports that a new project by Glasman and Rutherford, The Future of the Left, run out of the right-wing think thank Policy Exchange, is “feeding into No 10 via regular meetings and papers”.78 In an interview with Rutherford, she also places Blue Labour’s revival in the context of Trump’s presidency: “It is socially conservative and economically left-wing. Woke? Good riddance. Tariffs? Bring ʻem on. With Donald Trump in the White House again, it is easy to see why No 10 would be attracted to Blue Labour’s thinking”.79

Labour’s straightjacket

Yet, for all that, Glasman is “angry” that Labour’s leadership has not adopted Blue Labour wholesale, describing his frustration in an interview with the New Statesman’s George Eaton in February 2025:

They’re not grasping any form of industrialisation, particularly around Ukraine and defence, where we could go into a really serious position as the leading military power in Europe… Rachel Reeves seems to have forgotten entirely our last conversation about “securonomics” and the “everyday economy”. Now she’s just a drone for the Treasury. There’s no vision of economic renewal.80

The problem, as both Glasman and Eaton recognise, is that although securonomics implies large amounts of spending, Labour has left itself with little scope to do so. “Glasman has alighted on the tensions that run through this Labour government,” writes Eaton. He adds:

At the cabinet’s away day, ministers were warned that there would be no extra money—leaving unprotected departments such as the Home Office, justice and local government facing real-terms cuts. Some in Labour fear that an austere Spending Review this June could gift victory to Nigel Farage at the next election.81

Choonara alights on the same problem in an article at the end of last year discussing the collapse of neoliberalism and the responses to it. Neoliberalism had failed to solve capitalism’s underlying, long-term crisis of profitability, while economic and ecological crisis and a sharpening of imperial tensions are driving ruling classes towards wider state intervention. Yet, at the same time, “The relatively parlous state of the global system limits even the most powerful states’ capacity to intervene… Here in Britain, which has since 2008 fallen behind its European peers in productivity, investment and wage growth, Reeves’s securonomics will need to be delivered on a shoestring”.82

Reeves and Starmer are operating under tight conditions set by the markets. They cannot fund their investment plans either through greatly higher taxes on the rich nor through significantly increased borrowing without provoking a backlash from the City. When Reeves increased capital gains tax and employers’ national insurance contributions in her first budget in 2024, investors responded by selling off gilts, pushing up the cost of government borrowing. Rather than tax the rich further, or borrow more, Reeves has placed strict limits on government spending, coupled with a return to austerity. Her “fiscal rules” mean that the government’s day-to-day spending—which does not include investment in infrastructure—can only be funded through taxes and not borrowing. They also say that the government’s debt must be falling as a share of GDP by 2029. Even the bosses quibbled that this left her with very little “headroom”—the amount spending can increase before the budget ends up in deficit, requiring either borrowing, higher taxes or austerity.

Reeves chose austerity, encapsulated in the hated cuts to winter fuel allowance and Personal Independence Payment (PIP) disability benefits. One of the more brazen demonstrations of the markets’ power over the Labour government’s spending rules came after the government retreated on its plans to cut PIP. As Reeves wept in the house of commons and Starmer failed immediately to back her, investors began selling off gilts, pushing up the cost of government borrowing. They “calmed” again after Starmer said Reeves would remain chancellor “for a very long time”, the Times reported. Investors had been worried that, if she left, “she might be replaced by a more left-wing chancellor who could jettison the government’s fiscal rules”.83

Back to Blairism?

The attempted benefits cuts were straight out of New Labour’s playbook. The government’s preposterous justification for cutting PIP—which is not means tested and is paid regardless of whether the recipient is in work—was that it would “help” or “encourage” people to find a job. That was precisely the attitude to welfare and benefits New Labour adopted.

When work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall announced the package of welfare “reforms” that included the PIP cuts, she said it was all about making sure “disabled people and those with health conditions have the same rights as everybody else, including the right to work”. There was, however, a sting in the tail: “If you can work, you must work”. The same package also contained a Youth Guarantee programme that would “help” unemployed 18-21-year-olds into education, training or low paid jobs such as apprenticeships. “But in return for these new opportunities, you have a responsibility to take them up,” said Kendall.84 In other words, you will lose your benefits.

If this sounds familiar, that is because it is. Mandelson and Liddle’s blueprint for a New Labour government included a “low-cost” plan for job creation. Employers would be paid to recruit unemployed people into work in the “voluntary sector”—with jobs such as gardening or decorating older people’s homes—or a “nationally led task force to tackle environmental decay, offering young people six-month placements”. This would be “offset” with “savings in the social security budget [that] must as far as possible be achieved.” Failure to take up this type of work would be punished: “In these circumstances, the young unemployed themselves have to accept obligations too…where new opportunity is being offered and refused, there should be no absolute entitlement to continued receipt of full social-security benefits”.85

As Charlie Kimber writes, the subtext of New Labour’s attitude to benefits was “to force people into low paid jobs” but also “to stigmatise claimants” with the implication that “a mass of poor people were too lazy to work”.86 New Labour’s promise to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” contained the same attitude. Claiming benefits was a characteristic associated with, in the words of Mandelson and Liddle, an “underclass” who were prone to criminality, responsible for their own poverty and who blighted the lives of the “decent” people who “work hard and play by the rules” and want to “get on”. They too had to be punished:

Too often in the past the left-of-centre’s natural sympathy for those affected by social ills has been soft on the criminal. Too often the man and woman in the street’s uncomplicated notions of justice have been set aside out of fear that punishment will constitute mindless retribution and vicious revenge.87

New Labour found new ways to criminalise working-class people, including the notorious Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO). These were not criminal charges and could be imposed on mostly young people to prevent them from almost any non-criminal activity a magistrate chose. Yet, breaking one was a crime, bringing many people into the criminal justice system who might otherwise not have been. ASBOs were scrapped in 2014, but Starmer has plans to resurrect them in the form of “respect orders” which, among other things, will “give the police and local councils powers to ban persistent offenders from town centres”. Like ASBOs these are targeted at “anti-social behaviour”, such as street drinking and riding electric scooters, rather than crimes. Like ASBOs, breaking one will be a criminal offence.88

Despite Reeves’s adoption of securonomics, some of Labour’s economic strategy is reminiscent of New Labour. In her November 2024 Mansion House speech—the chancellor’s annual address to the City of London—Reeves spoke of Labour’s plan to “catalyse private investment”, which she explicitly presented as the counterpart to the state investment she’d emphasised in her Mais lecture. This involved tearing up financial services regulation imposed after the 2007-8 financial crisis, as it, according to her, had “sought to eliminate risk taking” but had now “gone too far”.89 She continued the theme in her second Mansion House speech in July 2025. “In too many areas, regulation still acts as a boot on the neck of businesses” she said, while also boasting of how the government had “ripped up the planning rules” to make it easier for developers to get planning permission, and “swept away regulation”.90

State support for private enterprise was a major theme of the Third Way and New Labour’s early thinking. For Giddens, “government has an essential role to play in investing in the human resources and infrastructure needed to develop an entrepreneurial culture”. “Competitiveness” and “wealth generation” would “not be developed… if individuals are abandoned to sink or swim in an economic whirlpool”. Investment in “human resources” meant spending on education, health and welfare, albeit with “reforms” such as the benefits system described above designed to ensure business had a pool of trained but low-cost labour to draw on.91 As Giddens put it, “welfare expenditure should remain at European rather than US levels, but be switched as far as possible towards human capital investment”. Public services would also be run in “partnership” with private business, giving “private enterprise a larger role in activities which governments once provided for”. They would also be geared towards helping industry profit by “[providing] resources that can help enterprise to flourish and without which joint projects may fail”.92

So, for New Labour, the state did have a role to play in boosting British business. Mandelson and Liddle embraced the changes ushered in by Margaret Thatcher but criticised her Conservative governments for having “ignored the potential for active government” and having “failed” to encourage investment.93

Firstly, “governments can still take action to enhance skills, promote investment, and enlarge economic capacity—to strengthen the so-called supply side” and seek “public-private partnership in modernising Britain’s infrastructure”.94 This would involve “a modest injection of public money to lever a much bigger amount of private capital into projects which in the past would have relied exclusively on taxpayer finance”.95 The real-world application of this, the Private Finance Initiative, meant getting private companies to build new schools and hospitals, then leasing them back to the state for decades to come—saddling councils and NHS trusts with millions of pounds of debt that they are still paying off. That is another idea that Labour is considering reintroducing to the NHS.96

Secondly, the state would continue with its traditional roles of supplying business with a pool of trained and educated workers: “There is an important role for government in encouraging responsibility and promoting enterprise: in providing first-rate education, in offering training and work to unemployed youngsters, not benefits for idleness”.97 Under New Labour, welfare, health and education remained the three highest areas of government spending, with each getting an increase in funding as a proportion of GDP. This increase was accompanied with the introduction of the private sector into these public services, such as the private sector “choice” in NHS foundation hospitals, and the beginnings of academisation, which saw state schools handed over to private companies.98

This journal has argued that neoliberalism has never meant the complete liberalisation or retreat of the state. As Jane Hardy and Joseph Choonara write:

The rhetoric of neoliberalism is one of free markets and competition, yet the reality is the existence of monopolies and oligopolies and the constant intervention by the state to attract and retain capital in its own borders as well as enhancing the competitiveness of its own capitals in the context of global capitalism.99

Seen in this light, the state support for “key industries” that securonomics heralds is not the complete break with neoliberalism and New Labour that it might first appear to be. There is continuity. The direct subsidies Reeves’s spending review granted to private industries are probably not what New Labour’s architects would have envisioned in the 1990s, but they do have precedent. During the 2007-8 financial crash and the COVID-19 pandemic, governments, including Gordon Brown’s, intervened to prop up their banks and industries in spite of the neoliberal doctrine that said firms should be allowed to fail.

Starmer’s government’s nationalism and racism are also far from incompatible with neoliberalism and New Labour. Though New Labour recognised the importance of migrant workers to British business, it counterposed them with “illegal” migrants and asylum seekers, introducing an immigration and asylum bill that sought to make it almost impossible for refugees to reach Britain legally. Just as Starmer does, New Labour also made concessions to racism. In 2009, facing a rise in support for the fascist BNP, Gordon Brown adopted its slogan “British jobs for British workers”.100

The difference, perhaps, is that New Labour’s government did oversee some progressive advances, for instance in the legalisation of gay marriage. These were the product of years of social struggle and could be co-opted. For Mandelson, advancing progressive reform was about equality of “opportunity”—removing some of the barriers that might help more women and black and LGBT+ people to reach university for training, and for a handful more to make it to higher management positions.101 By contrast, under Starmer’s government, such rights are being rolled back, for instance through the supreme court ruling that excludes trans people from single sex spaces. Blair, Mandelson and Giddens were all keen that, at least initially, New Labour and the Third Way should be seen as liberal and progressive. Whereas, to quote Jason Cowley again, Starmer’s Labour “[r]ejects default progressive orthodoxies and the pieties of left-wing virtue-signalling. It does not believe that liberalism will inevitably prevail in a disorderly world”.102

Conclusion

The speculation from early 2025, then, that Starmer’s Labour had broken from Blairism, appears overblown. Cowley’s assertion that Starmer and McSweeney have been formulating “nothing less than a new post-progressive politics of the centre left” looks like wishful thinking—a desperate attempt to convince himself and others that the confused and contradictory mix of Blairism, securonomics and Blue Labour has purpose and coherence. Unlike Blairism or Blue Labour, Starmerism has no theory of its own. Blair was intensely ideological in his commitment to the Third Way and desire to change the Labour Party. Starmer is proud to say that he has no politics, that “there is no such thing as Starmerism, and there never will be”.103

Earlier this year, Sunday Times journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund published Get In, an inside story of Starmer’s leadership based on interviews with those involved with it. Even those closest to Starmer say he has no politics to speak of. In the first organising meeting of his leadership campaign, Starmer remained almost silent: “When he did speak. he spoke not of his political vision but of tedious bureaucratic process… He did not say why he wished to lead the Labour Party, or what he wished to do with power”.104

For his part, McSweeney is defined by a visceral hatred of the Labour left and a desire to drive out Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters from every last corner of the party. His own politics are a vague mixture of Blairism and Blue Labour, held together with a selective reading of opinion polls and focus groups. He backed Starmer for leader precisely because his politics were ambiguous enough to be acceptable to Labour’s members and its right-wing MPs. After becoming leader, this “constructive ambiguity” became a problem: “He would never see himself as an ‘ite’ or think in terms of ‘isms’, but recognised more definition was needed”.105

Without a worked out politics of his own, Starmer seems to have fallen instinctively back on Blairism, populating his team with old New Labour figures.106 As Cowley himself reports, Blair’s fingerprints are all over the Starmer government’s policies: “Because Starmer’s policy unit is underpowered, and the government lacks a thriving ecosystem of think tanks and ideological production, the Tony Blair Institute operates as a kind of shadow policy network for the government”.107

Yet, Blairism and the Third Way were designed for a different period. They no longer work for Labour in the context of the breakdown of neoliberalism and the rise of a world order that rejects globalisation. So, Labour’s leaders are left struggling to adapt, accentuating New Labour’s reactionary and authoritarian tendencies while grasping for an alternative by incorporating elements of Bidenomics and Blue Labour conservatism.

This concoction is far from a recipe for stability. Starmer’s capitulation to racism has helped to legitimise and fuel the growth of the racist Reform UK, now Labour’s main electoral threat.108 More dangerous still, it fuels the violent street movement, led by fascists, aiming to start riots and pogroms outside hotels housing asylum seekers.

Starmer also faces challenges from below. His retreat from PIP disability benefit cuts was on the surface a defeat at the hands of his MPs, but their revolt was driven by the revulsion at the cut among people who might once have voted Labour and are now turning away from the party. Individual but significant strikes, such as by bin workers in Birmingham, have put workers in confrontation with Labour councils and the Labour government. Members of the Unite union, at one time Labour’s biggest trade union funders, voted to suspend then deputy leader Angela Rayner from membership and vote to “re-examine” their relationship with the party.109

Meanwhile, the largest, most sustained, and most powerful challenge to Starmer from below is the movement in solidarity with Palestine, driven by horror at the genocide in Gaza and disgust at Labour’s refusal to stop arming and supporting Israel. Not only has the movement consistently put hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets for two years, it has also begun to challenge the crackdown on the right to protest. Hundreds of people have been willing to defy Labour’s ban on support for Palestine Action.

A broader crisis for Labourism underlies all this. The erosion of Labour’s support under New Labour governments took place over a period of several years. Except for a big spike under Jeremy Corbyn in 2017, Labour’s support did not recover during more than 14 years out of office. Labour won the general election in 2024 with 34 percent of votes cast—just over nine million in total, fewer than Labour lost the 2019 general election with. What is more, Labour has less space to deliver reforms than it did even under Blair. New Labour came to office at a time of relative economic expansion, though fuelled by credit. This meant there was some funding available for public services and more room for reform that did benefit some working-class people—such as the introduction of the minimum wage—even if these were geared towards giving neoliberalism greater stability. The limits placed on Starmer’s Labour government means its offer is even more paltry. So, while it took three parliaments before New Labour was kicked out of government, Starmer’s plummet into unpopularity was almost instant.

Labourism now cannot deliver even on its own terms. Its attempts to meet the needs of capital in the hope that this will give it room to deliver some reforms have, over the decades, left it unable to do either. Beyond the warnings from Unite, there is little sign that the trade union leaders are ready to abandon Labour, meaning the party does not yet face complete annihilation. However, it is difficult to see how its support might recover without a drastic change of direction. Unwilling to do anything that would put it on course for a confrontation with capital, all Starmer can do is lurch even further to the right, while trying to hold down control with increasing authoritarianism, both inside and outside the party.110

At the time of writing, former Labour MPs Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn are setting up the left-wing Your Party. This process is stalling now because of disputes among the leadership. Sultana and Corbyn must come back together. Then, to mount a proper alternative to Labour, Your Party must break decisively with Labourism. It would face the same constraints—the same threats from the ruling class—that Labour capitulates to. To avoid that fate, it needs not a strategy of managing capitalism, but of confronting it. For that, it needs a focus on building resistance outside parliament, on the struggle from below that is still so desperately lacking.

Nick Clark is is a journalist. He covered the Labour Party for Socialist Worker between 2015 and 2023.

Notes