By Nicholas Reed Langen
The Mandelson affair, Britain’s former U.S. ambassador being deeply enmeshed in Jeffrey Epstein’s network of powerful contacts, has led to the resignation of the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. As a result, Keir Starmer’s already shaken government finds itself in yet another crisis. However, McSweeney’s departure may also present an opportunity to repeal failing policies and rhetoric. Nicolas Reed Langen analyzes the roots of the Labour Party’s current malaise and explores prospects for change to prevent a further ascent of the far right.
Remarkably, Sir Keir Starmer is still living in Number 10. By any measure, he should be back at the Bar, waiting for an invitation to chair a commission or to lead an inquiry. The protocol of legal bureaucracy is his natural habitat, where rules and procedures hold sway, keeping the world in check. Formal proceedings are where Starmer’s liberalism and progressive values are best expressed, in the staid environment of legal argument and precedent, rather than in the florid rhetoric and freewheeling policy of government. But partly because of the Labour Party’s reluctance to wield the knife and partly because of the devastating dearth of talent on the front bench, Starmer remains.
This should not be the state that Starmer’s government finds itself in. Crisis should not have hit a government with a 174-seat majority mandate for change. Nor should it have been a crisis brought about because of Starmer’s inability to express, execute, or even defend progressive values as though he didn’t believe in them. For all of the criticism of him from the left, Starmer’s principles are progressive ones. Plenty of people go from socialist firebrand at university to reactionary conservative in middle-age. But they rarely advise the human rights organization Liberty, help found a radical barristers’ chambers, or represent death-row convicts in the Caribbean. Buried underneath the bespoke suits paid for by Lord Alli are principles and values that could – and still perhaps can – drive a transformative government.
It is not as if the opportunity is not there. Labour took over from a Tory government that had tossed the economy in a waste-paper basket and flicked in a lit match, before following it up with an accelerant of race hatred. Given its behemothic majority, Starmer’s government should be full of swagger and poise, ready and willing to rebuild the state. Instead, so far, it has shuffled in like it is grateful the Tories allowed it to be there, and has done absolutely nothing. Yet with the right impetus, Starmer’s bureaucratic progressivism and anodyne liberalism can be seized upon.
Blame for much of the present malaise has been laid at the door of Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s former chief of staff. A longstanding Labour operative on the right of the party, McSweeney’s ideological links are with Lord Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour. This socially conservative faction of the Left came to prominence during Ed Miliband’s leadership in 2011. It fell precipitously, with Blue Labour ‘effectively disbanded’ after a series of interviews in which Glasman took increasingly nationalist stances, including advocating for a total ban on immigration in an interview with the Telegraph. Yet figures sympathetic to Glasman’s philosophy remained in the party, including McSweeney. While Corbynism was in the ascendancy, Blue-Labourites lurked and plotted, biding their time, before seizing their opportunity to clear the supposed anti-Semitic stables of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow government.
This done, McSweeney cast around for a figure to supplant Corbyn. Starmer was ideal. A knight of the realm with a profile straight from prime-ministerial central casting, Starmer was one of the few Labour ministers who would be welcomed by the party and could be sold to the people. This he duly was. After handing Starmer the keys to Downing Street and Labour’s greatest ever majority to boot, it was only fair that Starmer return the favor, appointing McSweeney his chief of staff. Judging from the glowing accounts of the McSweeney electoral operation, Starmer and his allies considered Sweeney a political mastermind. From the perspective of anyone with eyes to see and a mind to think, McSweeney was just in the right place at the right time. Liz Truss was still a horror so fresh in voters’ minds that even the technocratic banality of Rishi Sunak could not erase her from memory. So long as Labour put up a candidate that didn’t play into the hands of the right-wing press, it should have been possible to return three toddlers disguised in a red-rosetted trenchcoat to Westminster. Reality bore this out. Almost half of the voters said they cast their ballot to get the Tories out. Not an indictment of McSweeney’s campaign, but hardly a ringing endorsement.
Yet the scale of victory was significant, and the cynicism of McSweeney’s operation was almost certainly a factor. But sweeping majorities are not a good in and of themselves, but only in terms of the ends they are put towards. Almost two years into Labour rule, no one – on the right, on the left, or in the centre – understands what these ends are supposed to be. In part, this vacuum is because Labour hamstrung their economic policy before crossing the threshold of Number 11 Downing Street. Promising not to touch taxation in their manifesto may have won over a few uncertain voters, as did promising to keep the EU at arm’s length, but it did so at a major cost. It cut the government off at its knees, blocking two of the most effective ways to deliver on its promise of growth. Rachel Reeves’ Treasury has been reduced to economic contortions to try and fund government spending.
Lacking an economic centre of gravity, the government has flailed domestically, unable to coalesce around a coherent future for Britain and so articulate whatever values it is supposed to represent. Faced with self-caricatured opposition, the Tories becoming nasty nationalists and Reform goosestepping ever further to the right, the obvious – to say nothing of only – course of action should have been to track left. Badenoch and Farage could have bickered among themselves about Channel crossings and English genetics, and Labour could have crafted an effective, humane and responsible immigration strategy. But Starmer’s government slid in on the issue two-footed. Another Glasman acolyte, Shabana Mahmood, was appointed Home Secretary and promptly set about maintaining a hostile environment. Longer residency requirements were introduced for citizenship, foreign students lost their right to working visas after graduation, and the flag of St George became a ubiquitous symbol of hate and intolerance as the country spent last summer preoccupied with the question of whether an ethnic minority could ever be truly English. Then Starmer gave a speech reminiscent of Enoch Powell’s premonition of ‘rivers of blood’, calling Britain an ‘island of strangers.’
The taint of McSweeney’s Blue Labour is palpable here, as is the stench of incompetence. On taxation and on Europe, a more adept advisor would have maneuvered the campaign through these rocks. She might have emphasized that Labour had been out of power for fourteen years, and that in those fourteen years, the country had been put through Brexit, the pandemic, and Liz Truss. Each a calamity, and collectively, a catastrophe. Only once a new government had inspected a decade and a half of economic mismanagement could promises be made. On the home front, policy-makers, analysts, and writers on the left had repeatedly warned about stretching the Overton window to the right. Embracing the narrative of flags and nationhood would normalize bigotry, not keep voters onside.
Now free of McSweeney, whose defunct political antennae finally led him down a one-way street he couldn’t shuffle back out from, there is the chance for Starmer to do something effective, something good, and something that he might actually believe in.
The first two years of his premiership were guided by a guru sitting on the knee of Peter Mandelson. A ‘master of the dark arts’, Mandelson was comfortable with people getting ‘filthy rich.’ He told those same people how to avoid paying their taxes while feeding insider information to his paedophile pal, Jeffrey Epstein. Freed from Mandelson and his vizier’s clutches, Starmer must put himself in charge.
The government’s rhetoric would be a good place to start. Already, there have been glimmers of this. Last week, Sir Jim Ratcliffe – billionaire Manchester United owner, tax dodger, and Monaco exile – valorized Nigel Farage as ‘highly intelligent’ in an interview where he also invented magical migration figures and damned immigrants as ‘welfare seekers’. In response, Starmer declared Ratcliffe’s prejudices ‘wrong and offensive.’
The prime minister maintained this transformative tone at the Munich Security Conference this weekend. Delivering a speech, he set out plans for closer integration between the EU and Britain on defense, before telling a discussion group that ‘we are not the Britain of Brexit years’ and that the government understood that ‘turning inward’ means surrendering control, not taking it back.
But as well as talking a good game, the government has to deliver. Voters should not be pandered to by the government tacitly pretending that the reason it takes a month to see a General Practitioner is illegal immigration.
Immigration is a necessary fact of life, and vital for a country with Britain’s demographics. It needs to be managed, not stopped, and more must be done to distinguish between economic migrants and asylum seekers. The latter should be welcomed where needed, and the former should be provided with safe routes to the country.
In terms of global affairs, we are back in the nineteenth century. Great powers are eyeing much of the globe, but this time Britain isn’t among them. Closer ties with the EU are the only way of taking Britain off America’s (or China’s) menu. Much like immigration and asylum, this might be something the voters don’t want Britain to do, but it is needed nonetheless. This century’s governments have been obsessed with polling, forgetting that they are asking people who struggle to name the prime minister what they think the domestic agenda should be. More time should be spent telling voters what governments will do, rather than asking them what they’d like.
As it stands, Starmer is set to be a one-term prime minister, damned by history for ushering in the rule of Nigel Farage. His options are to continue to float along this River Styx, knowing full well where it leads, or to try and govern with principle, rejecting popular prejudice. At the time of writing, the High Court found the Home Office’s proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization unlawful. Responding, Home Secretary Mahmood declared, ‘I will fight this judgment in the Court of Appeal’. If Starmer wants to stay in office, the ministerial stables might need a second going over as well.
Nicholas Reed Langen is a writer and legal commentator. He is editor of the LSE Public Policy Review.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
