Walk into Labour’s strangely anonymous new office block home down a side street in Southwark, and you can’t help but notice who sits where. Keir Starmer’s office is to the right, along with his closest aides: chief of staff, Sue Gray, and private secretary, Jill Cuthbertson. Next to these gatekeepers sit the New Labour veterans Matthew Doyle, Peter Hyman and Deborah Mattinson, all of whom worked for the party when Tony Blair was prime minister. And beside them are the new generation: policy chief Stuart Ingham, speechwriter Alan Lockey, political director Luke Sullivan, and media man Paul Ovenden. These people will soon be running No. 10, if the polls are to be believed.
And yet the first thing to catch your eye as you walk into this chic, open-plan room that will be the nerve centre of Labour’s general election campaign, are the desks right in the middle of the room: those of Morgan McSweeney and Pat McFadden, the party’s campaign director and coordinator respectively. Labour’s election generalissimos.
Both are slight-but-steely men of distinctly Irish extraction: McSweeney born and brought up outside Cork; McFadden the Glaswegian son of parents who emigrated from Donegal. Add Sue Gray, the daughter of Belfast parents who moved to London in the Fifties, and Starmer’s top team is strikingly Irish. Softly spoken but hard at the same time, each of them is expected to play a significant role in the coming Labour government.
Of these three, though, it is McSweeney who has the aura of power. He is the architect and owner of the Starmer operation. “This is his project,” as one senior Labour figure put it. “He designed it; he did the research; he drew the conclusions; and he delivered Starmer.” As such, McSweeney remains the untouchable adviser at the heart of today’s Labour party, the well-source of Starmerism.
McSweeney’s influence has become a source of much speculation in Westminster — and, of course, bitterness on the Left, much of which sees him as a kind of ruthless Machiavel who has delivered the party into the hands of the Labour Right through force of cunning and deception. And, it should be said, there is some truth to this analysis. In the immediate aftermath of the 2017 general election campaign, McSweeney took over as director of “Labour Together”, an organisation whose original intention was to shore up the Labour coalition, only to turn it into a tool to defeat the Corbynite Left as a first step on the route back to power. Even in the days after the Grenfell tower disaster, when it looked as though the Conservative government might fall, McSweeney did not waver in his commitment to remove Corbyn as leader.
In the two years that followed, McSweeney canvassed party members to identify what they needed from a Corbyn replacement, revealing a party membership that was not lost to a militant army of infiltrators, as some believed, but one that could be persuaded to back a figure from outside the Corbynite Left as long as they were not advocating a return to the failures of the past. It was from this research that McSweeney alighted on Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary who had returned to Corbyn’s shadow cabinet after his reelection as Labour leader in 2016 and remained with him until the defeat in 2020. With McSweeney’s guidance, Starmer offered Labour members a carefully constructed set of promises: to increase taxes on the rich, abolish universal credit, scrap tuition fees, defend free movement of people and initiate a green energy revolution.
Starmer has ditched many of them since becoming leader. Taxes will not rise, freedom of movement will not return, and green investment will have to wait until there is the money to pay for it. In the meantime, Jeremy Corbyn has been kicked out of the party, the Left has lost almost all its influence and the old Right has prospered. So, is New Labour on its way back? Pat McFadden’s elevation certainly suggests the Blairites are back at the heart of today’s Labour party. McFadden was Tony Blair’s Political Secretary in No. 10. and remains a committed devotee of the old master. His wife Marianna, meanwhile, is now McSweeney’s deputy, having moved over from the Tony Blair Institute, which Starmer has praised as “the very best of public policy innovation”. Is this, then, a Blairite reconquista?
No — and to see the McSweeney-Starmer project as a return to Blairism is to miss the point entirely. Over the past few months I have spoken to many leading figures in the party who have worked with and know McSweeney, Starmer and Blair well. Not only does McSweeney reject Tony Blair’s central analysis of politics and what Labour should do as a result, but for much of his time trying to retake the Labour Party, McSweeney was not just battling the Corbynite Left, who were determined to maintain control of the party, but the Blairite Right, many of whom had concluded it was already dead and were determined to create something new in its place.
The core of the McSweeney project, in other words, is not a restoration of Blairism, but a rejection of it.
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In 2017, the year Morgan McSweeney became director of Labour Together, Tony Blair created his Institute for Global Change. The TBI, as it became known, merged the various charities, businesses and other assorted organisations that the former prime minister had built since leaving office into one giant not-for-profit. Central to this venture was a new policy unit whose stated purpose was to “renew the centre”.
Blair recruited a group of smart, young politicos to come up with the ideas he believed were necessary to save the liberal order. He headed up his team with the German-American academic and writer, Yascha Mounk, who had written a series of polemical warnings about the state of Western democracy and how to save it.
The central idea of the new unit was to promote Blair’s brand of “radical centrism”: the view that the real divide in British politics is no longer between Left and Right, but between those who are open to the modern world (the centrists) and those who are closed to its reality and only want to exploit people’s grievances about it (the populists). In this world, George Osborne and David Cameron are potential fellow centrists, while Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn are populists.
Blair, I’m told, believes that the Labour Party is essentially a product of the industrial revolution and must dramatically reform itself to survive the technological upheaval now taking place. Radical centrism, then, is not just a tactic for winning, but an idea built on a belief in irresistible technological and social change in an era of globalisation that is eroding the very idea of a working class which Labour was created to represent.
Blair has long thought this. When he came to power in 1997, he called for a new progressive alliance with the Liberal Democrats. This, he believed, would usher in a new century dominated by what he called the “radicals”, much as the 20th century had been dominated by the conservatives. Ironically, this progressive alliance died because Blair was too strong to need it. Yet, the idea was brought back to life in the wake of the 2017 general election when Blairism seemed at its weakest — with Corbyn in control of Labour, the Conservative government struggling to enact Brexit, and only Emmanuel Macron lighting up an alternative path in France.
In public, Blair insisted that he was not in any way “advocating a new party, organising one, or wanting to vote for one”. However, he had concluded that the Labour Party was finished, according to someone who shared his views, and was involved in discussions about a new party. “He would tell those who thought otherwise that they were being nostalgic,” said the same associate. “He felt that too many in the party could not reconcile themselves to the reality that Labour was simply irrecoverable, passed its sell-by date.”
And there were attempts to set up new parties at this time. In 2018, one alternative centrist party emerged called United For Change, backed by the Labour donor Simon Franks, which briefly held onto the notion that it could find success by capitalising on the anti-politics sentiment of the moment. It reportedly contacted political figures as divergent as Nick Clegg and Dominic Cummings to see if they were interested (they weren’t). One of its founders was Ryan Wain, now an Executive Director at the Tony Blair Institute. At the same time, there was a breakaway faction of MPs from across the political spectrum, many of whom would go on to form Change UK, another short-lived centrist movement trying to slay the old political divide.
McSweeney found himself competing for donations with another group yet trying to raise money for a new “En Marche” style movement. Some Labour donors were even presented with a formal proposal for a new party, written in September 2018, which was leaked to Labour Together and various Labour MPs. Those now close to Starmer believe it came from figures connected to Blair (though not from Blair himself).
I was recently handed a copy of this authorless, 72-page “Political Movement, Planning Document” calling for the creation of a new party that was being shared with Labour donors in 2018. In its “executive summary”, the anonymous author declares: “Britain is stuck. The promise that the next generation will be better off than their parents is broken. Inequality is tearing the country apart. Housing is too expensive, earnings are static, and the quality of work is too poor for too many. The world is changing fast and we’re retreating from it. The old Left-Right binary divide can no longer provide a platform that meets the challenges of today or the future.”
Such failure offered an opportunity for something new, the author argued. “The old parties cannot face the future because they have run out of answers, energy and leadership. Now is the time for Britain to move on and face the future.” A new “movement” to bring forward “a new political class” was needed. This new political class would then “scale the social innovation that is already happening in our communities” while “incubating solutions not ideology”.
Such solutions are then set out in distinctly New Labour language: early years education to reduce inequality; universal child care to help people back to work; a strong NHS and affordable housing. Planning reform is also mentioned, or what the author calls “rezoning land up, out and in”. Taxes should be on land, not work; the economy remain open; and “meaningless immigration caps” removed. Britain must also reclaim its role “as a global leader” by tackling international challenges such as climate change. “We can move on to this future, but only if we have the courage to face it.” As worthy as these policies may or may not be, they seem unlikely to form the basis of a great new popular uprising.
McSweeney’s view, according to those who know him well, is even harsher, seeing the document as everything that is wrong with progressive politics today, attempting to tap into an anti-political sentiment with a clarion call for a new political class wrapped in language seemingly from another era. At the core of his disagreement, however, is the document’s attitude to class. “Every century in Britain, a new force in politics has emerged as a result of big shifts in society,” the document declares. “These shifts create the new coalitions upon which a new politics can be built.” And the big shift in the 21st century?“The growing dominance of the middle classes and university graduates”. Among these “rising social groups” as the document calls them — “graduates, middle-class professionals, and ethnic minorities” — there is an openness to the world not found among those from “the once-dominant but now fast-declining groups” listed as “older white voters, the working classes, and school leavers”.
The central argument for the proposed new political party, therefore, is that class is no longer the central divide in democratic politics. “A voter’s views on multiculturalism, diversity, immigration and the internet are now a better predictor of political allegiance than economic interests,” the document argues. A majority of “open” voters in every region of the UK believe “multiculturalism, social liberalism, feminism, environmental sustainability, immigration, globalisation and technology” are positive. As such “for the first time in a century, a new national force in British politics could thrive”. To get such a movement off the ground, a charismatic leader was needed and an army of new supporters. Oh, and money — hence the proposal. The document suggested offering free membership to all with a higher £5.99-a-month “founder” tier with the offer: “Found the new politics for the same price as a Netflix subscription.”
For much of late 2018 and 2019, as parliament ground to a halt over Brexit and Tony Blair became ever more outspoken in his call for a second referendum to break the deadlock, McSweeney was fighting to persuade donors to boycott this proposed new party: not just because it posed an existential threat to his own attempt to take control of the Labour Party — but because he thought its political analysis was useless. McSweeney and Starmer fundamentally do not accept the idea that there is an ever greater number of “open” liberal graduates who can or should replace the working classes.
When one donor asked McSweeney why he should not support the proposal as a “lifeboat” in case Labour Together failed, McSweeney responded that, if Labour Together succeeded, the first thing he would do would be to blow the lifeboat out of the water.
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The formative moment in Morgan McSweeney’s career came long before he took over Labour Together. It was 2008, and he had been tasked by Barking and Dagenham Borough Council with promoting community relations. Under the Race Relations Act of 2000, public authorities had a duty to “promote equality of opportunity and good relations between persons of different racial groups”. In 2008, the Labour-run council concluded that this meant defeating the British National Party, which had gained a foothold in the area.
McSweeney found a place failed both by its Labour council and its Labour government. At the centre of the borough was Becontree, once the biggest council estate in the world, supported by the Ford car plant in nearby Dagenham. By the time Blair became prime minister in 1997, however, deindustrialisation and right-to-buy had undermined its social fabric. Homes had been bought by landlords, divided up and rented out, often to new immigrant families attracted to the cheapest housing in London. As the area became more transient, it became less maintained. As tenants came and went, landlords would simply dump their unwanted belongings in front gardens. When residents complained, the council produced pamphlets disproving this “disinformation”, and emphasising how much they had spent cleaning up the area. Enter the BNP, who simply blamed the foreigners.
For McSweeney the problem was not one of communication, but of reality. The area had got worse. Families who had lived here for generations were embarrassed that the houses next to them were suddenly a mess. They were also angry that absentee landlords from Hackney, Islington, Essex and beyond were able to act with impunity, while they could barely change the colour of their front door without council permission. In response, McSweeney encouraged the removal of the existing council leader and helped deliver one of the most popular policies in local government history: the “eyesore gardens policy”, proposed by the new council leader Liam Smith, whereby the local council sent in workers to remove the rubbish outside people’s homes — and then charged the landlords for the trouble. In 2006, the BNP had stood 13 candidates in the local elections and won 12 seats. In 2010, they lost them all as Labour swept the board winning every single seat in the borough.
McSweeney’s lesson from Barking was not just that voters should be listened to because that was good politics, but that voters should be listened to because they knew what they were talking about. They were right about Barking and the council had been wrong. Nationally, however, a similar story was playing out, McSweeney believed. In 2010, the Labour Party had gone into the election telling voters the recession wasn’t their fault because it was caused by a global crisis; they were acting like a giant Barking Borough Council. Voters had every right to blame the Labour government for the reality of falling living standards. Something new was needed, but Labour wasn’t offering it.
McSweeney carried this analysis into his job at Labour Together. And so, while he was battling the separatists trying to create a new movement to replace the Labour Party, he was also pushing away the advances of Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, who had set up the “Future Britain Group” to stop wavering Labour MPs from leaving the party. Though Watson’s aims seemed aligned with Labour Together, McSweeney concluded that his group looked too much like an attempt to resuscitate New Labour by uniting the old Blairite and Brownite tribes which had been bickering with each other ever since the party’s defeat in 2010. And New Labour, in McSweeney’s view, was not a solution to Corbynism, but a barrier to its defeat.
If anything, according to those who know him, McSweeney believes Blair has only become more removed from the reality of people’s lives in the years since he has left power. Instead of trying to improve the living standards of the ordinary poor in places like Barking, the radical centrism he proposes now seems to be based on an idea that progressive parties would be better off if they simply assembled a new coalition of voters who were not so poor. Forget the council house tenants who voted Leave; target the landlords who voted Remain.
As director of Labour Together, McSweeney advised Starmer that the only way to win over the party membership and the wider electorate was to reject such an analysis and move beyond New Labour. This was necessary politically, if Labour was to stand a chance of winning again. But it was also a reflection of reality. Even before the financial crisis, ordinary people were not seeing the benefits from the national economic growth in the way they should, McSweeney argued. The BNP was growing in Barking before 2008.
The Labour MP for Dagenham, Jon Cruddas, told me that Barking was the canary in the coal mine of British politics — and it took a man from Cork to find it.
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The radicalism at the heart of the McSweeney-Starmer project is that it is, in effect, trying to prove Blair wrong — but using many of the tools Blair mastered to do so. When Starmer appeared alongside Blair on stage at the TBI’s Future of Britain conference last year — widely reported as their coming together — Starmer actually delivered a subtle rebuke of his predecessor’s political argument. “The project,” he declared, speaking of his own designs on power “is to return Labour to the service of working people, to become once again the natural vehicle for their hopes and aspirations.”
There were other projects available, he admitted. One alternative was what he called the “rabbit hole of identity politics”. But the other was more pointed. “You could even completely unmoor from the concerns of working people,” Starmer said as Blair watched on. “That sounds ridiculous to me, but some people did seriously suggest it after the Brexit referendum.” Starmer here, is of course conveniently skating over his own support for a second referendum at this time, but there is little doubt where his remarks were pointing. Starmer then went on to add that, while he agreed with Blair that the technological revolution would be game-changing, there was “one place where I do take issue with Tony: the idea that this is somehow beyond Left and Right. No, for me, this is a progressive moment.”
For Starmer,the lessons of recent history are not really Blairite at all. The Left won elections, he said, when it persuaded voters that it would “deliver, no matter how volatile the external world, security for your family, your community and our country.” This, in fact, is exactly what Labour had failed to do in 2008.
Perhaps this is why Blair has never been entirely sold. Peter Mandelson, who remained close and talked to him during this period, believes that Blair was at first not convinced Starmer or indeed McSweeney, the architect of the project, could succeed. For much of Starmer’s first year, Blair thought Starmer could not possibly turn things round. Mandelson, in contrast, saw in McSweeney a version of himself. Those who know McSweeney well say he has a healthy respect for Blair, and sees him as a gifted politician who was at his best in his early years when he had a clear sense of ordinary people’s concerns. Yet, McSweeney also believes Blair has since lost touch.
In September last year, McSweeney and Starmer flew to Montreal to attend the “Global Progress Action Summit” where the world’s leading centre-left politicians met to discuss “bold new ideas and directions in progressive governance”. The summit attracted some of the biggest names in centrist politics: Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ahern, Mark Carney, David Miliband, Tony Blair.
McSweeney hated it. According to those who spoke to him afterwards, McSweeney felt too many of the arguments on show were disconnected from reality. The world had moved on, but so much of the content appeared to be rehashed versions of Clintonism. During his session, Blair was joined onstage by the Canadian Liberal MP Anna Gainey, who claimed, almost as an aside, that populism was the product of “anxiety” — the opposite of McSweeney’s view.
Blair, in turn, restated his case that the coming technological revolution was the central issue in the world today. “The mission for progressive politics now… is to understand this revolution, master it and harness it,” he said. In essence, then, the mission is technocratic.
The analysis is Blairism applied to the modern world. Today, Blair sees the world from on high: great oceanic swells, tectonic movements, epochal changes and the like. Flying from capital to capital, talking to leaders and plutocratic billionaires, he sees trends way beyond national borders: countries rising and falling, populations changing, policies developing and technology upending everything. “He really does operate in a stratosphere no other British prime minister has ever operated in before,” remarked one of his friends.
It is not hard to see how Blair might have grown frustrated at the parochialism of day-to-day British politics, unconvinced by the importance of “eyesore” policies. And perhaps he has a point. The challenge for Starmer and McSweeney, should they enter Downing Street later this year, will be to tell a convincing story about what they are trying to do that doesn’t begin to feel small the moment they enter No. 10. They will need a project for governing, as well as for winning, taking into account the great global forces of the sort that fixates Blair today. If Starmer is to be a council leader at large, he needs to do so in imperial robes. How he does so will depend in large part on the role he finds for the keeper of “the project’s” flame: Morgan McSweeney.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/