Starmer’s project is not about hope

In the white riots on display at the beginning of August, the new Labour government has found a useful foil for an early law and order offensive. Promises of swift and severe justice have seen hardened rioters, minors, anti-fascist counter-protestors and Muslim community defenders alike convicted and, in some instances, have unforgiving jail sentences already meted out.

This law and order-ism does not stand in isolation, but forms a core component of the Labour administration’s broader political project: depoliticisation.

Following a decade of political fragmentation, it’s clear from the government’s words and actions that they intend to flatten social, political – and therefore class – conflict, and reassert the state as the sole “legitimate” agent of politics in Britain. Their ultimate aim – “a decade of national renewal” – will rely on this flattening through attempts to engineer class collaborationism, alongside a distinct anti-populism. Such depoliticisation is premised, fundamentally, on a desire to contain antagonisms within the British social order so as to derisk it; to cultivate a climate conducive to British industry by buffering it from unexpected societal threats.

Such a promise of “stability” in an era which Starmer himself has labelled an “age of insecurity” is one that is necessarily predicated on an ever-deeper and closer cooperation between the government and its repressive agencies, and is laced throughout with a deeply racialised undercurrent. As the racist riots have shown, it is a promise destined to fail on its own terms, with dangerous consequences.

To the centre and upwards

Labour came to occupy the position of government as a supposed stabilising force for the British state and capital largely in response to the real-time ideological collapse of the Tories – a collapse illustrated by the Conservatives’ rapid acceleration to the right. The arc of this fall has directly informed Labour’s strategy of depoliticisation.

While the modern British far right have been ideologically nourished by classic touchstones of British fascism – race, nation, social purity, law and order – they have also been organisationally steeled through a series of racialised moral panics over recent years, aided and abetted directly by Conservative governments.

This ranges from the hard-right articulations of Brexit that were cultivated by the likes of Boris Johnson into an electoral platform, to the “Protecting statues” backlash to Black Lives Matter in 2020 – later instituted into law through provisions in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 – up to the move by then-home secretary Suella Braverman to all-but-explicitly mobilise the far right as a paramilitary force against pro-Palestine demonstrations during Remembrance weekend last November, in the process legitimising the notion of “two-tier policing” that formed the backdrop for the latest riots.

While railing against the EU and vestiges of post-war liberalism enshrined in Britain’s asylum treaty obligations, the Conservative government under Boris Johnson married “anti-elite” iconoclasm and deeply reactionary political positions with a seam of ostensibly redistributionary economic policies through the “Levelling Up” agenda to attract defecting Labour voters. This new post-post-war liberal project generated conflict between the government and some of its traditional assets and bastions of support within the state apparatus, leading it to turn to a wider coalition of forces than that of a “traditional” government, including through more intentional appeals to the street far right.

This project ultimately unravelled with Johnson’s fall from grace. This came amidst a series of “sleaze scandals” and the inability of the Conservatives to produce a charismatic standard bearer capable of holding together their new alliance of forces – and, equally importantly, the absence of a standard bearer from the left to galvanise such an alliance against it, following Jeremy Corbyn’s resignation from Labour leadership. Without that, the Conservatives became victim to ideology, leaning disproportionately on the reactionary iconoclasm without blending this with Johnson’s pragmatism or allusions to social justice.

Their project became increasingly overdetermined by the political impulses of their rightmost factions – as represented within the cabinet by the likes of Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch and, belatedly, Robert Jenrick. Johnson’s comparatively confident project of remaking 21st-century Britain gave way to a more shrill, ideologically shallow version of the “War on Woke” defined by pointless spats with cultural institutions and crusades against “Critical Race Theory” imported from US contemporaries and a closed coterie of paranoid British think tanks, while the contradictions of reconstituting a base around rightwing-Brexit reactionaries caught up with the party.

The result was a series of Conservative leaders compelled to pitch their politics ever-rightward to appeal to their party and electoral base, bankrupting themselves intellectually while fracturing their coalition of support from the British establishment. Labour deliberately sought to insulate itself from the fractious political conflicts consuming the Tories by disavowing ideological convictions, and extended a hand to establishment interests through a return to a more “traditional”, low-intensity model of statecraft.

By promising a return to technocratic, top-down government administration that considers itself above the “populist” rabble of any ideological stripe, the party cemented its establishment appeal by manoeuvring its politics both to the centre, and upwards. It was this pledge of depoliticisation that Starmer echoed on the steps of Downing Street upon his victory on 5 July: of “a government unburdened by doctrine”. This approach continued to colour Labour’s response to the riots themselves, with Starmer pitching his government’s appeal against the “snake oil of populism and nationalism” by building renewed faith in politicians. Eschewing engagement with the riots’ underlying political motivations, this seems to turn instead, with all the air of a service provider, to solving mundane day-to-day issues such as potholes and hospital waiting times.

The weight of ideology

In an era of intensified social, political, and class conflict in Britain, such attempts at depoliticisation are specious at best. But worse, the ideological coordinates of this depoliticisation strategy are inherently racialised.

The first plank of the strategy is the tactic of classic class collaboration, as laid out most unabashedly by Rachel Reeves’ pledge that this Labour government would be both “pro-worker and pro-business”, followed by the optimistic announcement that representatives of the government, trade union officialdom and British industry had “agreed to wipe the slate clean and begin a new relationship of respect and collaboration”.

But more ideologically charged is the theme of “national renewal” and of a zealous commitment to British and English patriotism on the part of Starmer’s Labour, which has historically undergirded such class collaboration, often in direct opposition to immigrants and foreign workers, and in joint support for British imperialism.

Writing for the Telegraph in April, Starmer laid out his argument on how Labour was “now the true party of English patriotism”, tellingly placing both NATO and the NHS as equal national “monuments to collective sacrifice”, and announcing that he has “no time for those who flinch at displaying our flag” – mere months before we were collectively subjected to images of racist rioters in Sunderland, Leeds, Liverpool and beyond adorned with Union Jacks and St George’s Crosses.

The second component of this strategy of depoliticisation is the distinct anti-populist orientation of the Labour government. This is counterposed to the technocratic competency with which it appeals to middle England, and amounts to a disavowal both of Tory “populism” and of Labour’s recent history as a supposed “party of protest”. While often couched in the thoroughly patronising language of “grown ups being in charge”, this conceals both a general disdain for mass or grassroots self-activity of any ideological tendency, as well as the new administration’s specific, intense contempt for Muslims and racialised people exercising political agency.

One could reasonably suggest that the particular vitriol reserved for Muslims by the Labour leadership comes down to an as yet not-entirely-tameable internationalist consciousness among Muslim communities in Britain, and their proven willingness to exert this electorally – as evidenced in the cases of Bethnal Green and Bow 2005, Bradford West 2012 and the pro-Palestine independents wave this July – which defies easy attempts to fold them into Labour’s project of depoliticisation.

Renewal and repression

The final component of Labour’s strategy of depoliticisation – and that which they have been most candid about – is law and order. Behind the benign appeals to technocracy and class collaboration lies the true guarantor of Labour’s project of national renewal: violent state repression. Labour has been clear and conscious in communicating its ironclad support for policing both in opposition and since taking office – from Starmer’s sharp criticism of calls to defund the police during 2020 upsurges, Labour’s steadfast support for Britain’s shadowy security and intelligence agencies, and its failure to provide meaningful challenge to any of the draconian anti-protest laws introduced since 2019, as well as PM Starmer’s refusal to intervene in the obscene sentences recently handed out to Just Stop Oil activists.

Since the outbreaks in Southport this has been augmented by announcements to expand the use of invasive facial recognition technology, the formation of a new violent disorder unit to pool national police intelligence, along with the formation of a so-called “standing army” of specialist officers.

The interconnection between law and order and depoliticisation has been clear with the government’s condemnation of the rioters primarily for their “thuggery” or criminality, enabling ministers to avoid the thornier questions of their own complicity in legitimising anti-immigrant politics.

We have also been subject to a peculiar form of riot revisionism, with the likes of foreign secretary David Lammy declaring respect for the police as a core English value and home secretary Yvette Cooper arguing that it was “the strong police response on the ground and the pace of arrests and prosecutions” that led to the riots subsiding – with no mention of the mass counter-mobilisations that Labour representatives were forbidden from attending. In the same op-ed, Cooper outlined the Labour government’s enthusiastic support for police forces going forward and re-emphasised a cornerstone of Labour political programme as “tak[ing] action to restore respect for the police, and respect for the law”.

Without anything resembling a transformative social or economic agenda Labour will rely on the forces of state violence as the invisible constituency underpinning their fragile electoral success. Cooper’s op-ed is a clear attempt at signalling the government’s preparation for the uphill task of manufacturing support for police forces during a period of deep public disaffection with them, and illustrates their hopes that they can wash away the taste and memory of Black Lives Matter, of Sarah Everard, of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, and countless others that have rightly undermined “respect” for the police in recent years.

True to form

For now, the race riots have subsided, with the mass counter-mobilisations of 7 August serving as a powerful, but only partial, popular rejection of the far right. But the far right will undoubtedly learn from this latest experience, confident in the knowledge that a wider pool of support is available to them, as evidenced just days prior to the riots when they could marshall 15,000 to march in London behind Tommy Robinson, and in the poll finding that one in three Britons supported the “peaceful” anti-immigration protests after the Southport stabbing, if not their devolution into riots.

While the organisational connection of modern British fascism to the new Labour government may not be as direct as its Tory predecessor – replaced by a tighter synchronism between the street far right and their new parliamentary representation in the shape of Reform – they can still find their causes championed, laundered, and elevated by Labour’s continued indulgence of British nativism, Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant agitation alongside an assortment of moral panics.

Moreover, with the veneer of non-ideological competence that the Labour government presents itself, such ingrained reactionary politics will be projected as normative “common sense” rather than partisanship, likely helping to legitimise them even further. This has been most firmly illustrated in the debate over immigration control, the underlying logic of which Labour have enthusiastically adopted from the prior administration. One need only recall Ambalavaner Sivanandan’s adage decades ago that “What Enoch Powell says today, the Tories say tomorrow and Labour legislates on the day after”.

And true to form, just weeks after we witnessed asylum hotels in Rotherham besieged by rioters, the government proudly announced its plans to re-open detention centres, accelerate deportations and charter removal flights and oversee a “surge” in immigration enforcement: all while pledging airily to ensure that these would be “implemented firmly, fairly, and accurately”.

It is vital that the left in Britain regain its bearings and directly confront both the political substance of Labour’s rightwing social democracy, the components of their depoliticisation strategy, but also understand how building a popular base independent and in opposition to Labour will be the only antidote in the coming years of struggle.▼

Azfar Shafi is a researcher and organiser with a focus on race, imperialism, and national security. He is part of the Bangladeshi socialist group Nijjor Manush.

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