“Globalisation is over,” Keir Starmer announced in The Telegraph earlier this week. And for once he’s right: despite Donald Trump’s humiliating tariff climbdown at the behest of bond vigilantes, the world has changed dramatically. The five-decades-long fever dream of global growth driven by “Chimerica” is over, and America’s status as the free-trading world hegemon is on the rocks. The 90-day tariff hiatus will reassure markets but fail to restore investor confidence in an increasingly spasmodic administration. In three months time, Trump’s “medicine” might again be accelerated.
The British Prime Minister has clearly grasped the weight of the moment, but that’s not to say he will take advantage of it. If Starmer’s robotic, borecore demeanour is the perfect antidote to Trumpian bombast, then, perhaps, cometh the hour, cometh the man? After all, Churchill said of Clement Attlee that he was “a modest man, with much to be modest about”. But in spite of his understated tone, his temperance and his small-C conservatism, the postwar Labour Prime Minister built a very British social democracy, with nationalised industries, trade union power, and a welfare state existing alongside the monarchy and the House of Lords. It was an egalitarian model that suited the times.
Could Starmer become this generation’s Attlee? I doubt it. Rather than seeking to build a New Jerusalem in an age of geopolitical upheaval, Starmer resembles a rabbit in the headlights. He has never been a visionary, but vague nods toward a new social and economic settlement have been a feature of his leadership. Early on in his tenure as Labour leader, he promised a “1945 moment”. For think tank audiences he has heralded an age of “productivism”, a “different model of growth”, and “a different analysis of the state and its role in the economy”. And yet for all the woolly rhetoric about a paradigm shift, we’re unlikely to see totemic policy initiatives or seismic turns; no new model for a drastically changed world.
So far, Starmer has responded to Trumpian carnage by offering us “turbocharged” planning reforms, and the odd tweak to electric vehicle regulations. The nationalisation of Scunthorpe’s steelworks has been tentatively mooted, but not before the blast furnaces at Port Talbot, and the refinery at Grangemouth, and the car plant in Luton, have already been wound down. The front bench’s speeches on “securonomics” portend an era of regional growth and “reindustrialisation” backed by a dirigiste state. In practical terms, that seems to mean we’ll get a theme park in Bedford. This is the problem with Starmerism: it is good at diagnosing sickness, but not at curing it.
If he wished to, Starmer could harness this moment to reshape Britain. Now more than ever is the time for a quietly patriotic revival of the protective nation state: in order to drive industrial renewal through investment-led growth, Britain needs national capital. But Labour’s grey, ineffectual technocracy won’t bend the fiscal rules. Instead it explains that painful cuts have to be made to satisfy a faceless quango called the OBR. The idea of ironclad fiscal limits is a nonsense that even the German Right is waking up to. But in Britain, epochal shifts and new world orders will be met not with the spirit of transformative, active government but with a review into a staggered reform of cross-departmental regulatory frameworks.
By contrast, across the Atlantic, a top-down revolution has been initiated, inverting half a century of uniparty common sense in a bid to overturn the multilateral world order. While Starmer’s government is cautious and self-limiting, Trump’s approach is the policy battering ram. He has turned Washington into a postmodern theatre of the absurd, in which nothing is true and everything is possible. Starmer, meanwhile, merely confirms that everything is broken and nothing is possible. But it’s only by doing away with the arcane processes and rotten vestiges of a broken system that a radical agenda can be successfully applied.
Starmer, though, doesn’t have a radical agenda. To the extent that he has politics at all, the Prime Minister hails from a centre-left tradition that long ago embraced globalisation. His tribe acquiesced to the demands of European integration — freedom of movement of goods, services, labour, and capital — after 1988, when Jacques Delors promised them concessions of “a social Europe” that never quite transpired. And after the defeats of the Thatcher period, the more moderate voices of the labour movement abandoned class struggle in favour of internationalised systems of liberal rights. This is Starmer’s intellectual milieu.
Tony Blair said that globalisation was a positive inevitability: “you might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer”, he told a sceptical Labour Party at their 2005 conference. But winter is coming, and it’s the populist Right that now makes the weather. In such a climate, the Left might remember it wasn’t always this way.
In fact, Trump has achieved what the radical British Left never could. In the Seventies and Eighties, the Labour Party’s Left flank coalesced around the so-called “Alternative Economic Strategy”. As a young Bennite, Jeremy Corbyn was an early supporter. It was a manifesto for a siege-economy socialism: a flailing British industrial sector would be revived behind high, protective walls made up of prohibitive import controls and tariffs, insulating the working classes from foreign competition. A Trumpian-style dream.
“Now more than ever is the time for a quietly patriotic revival of the protective nation state.”
During this period, it was the Right which advocated closer trading relationships with continental and world markets. It promoted a form of globalisation that favoured highly mobile, borderless capital investing in just-in-time supply chains spanning across oceans. Margaret Thatcher campaigned vociferously in favour of the EEC’s free-trade bloc membership, while the Left, still dominated at the time by a strong trade union movement, was doggedly opposed.
As the old labour movement waned and Soviet socialism collapsed, a more diffuse, counter-cultural Left came to the fore. New radicals in the Nineties and 2000s based their efforts not on workplace organising or even on the old mission of proletarian liberation, but instead on the construction of more informal, autonomous, horizontally-organised networks. They could be found demonstrating against free trade in the “Battle of Seattle”, or against the G8 in Genoa, or adding a turf mohican to the Churchill statue in Parliament Square. Starmer himself even dabbled in some of the early manifestations of this new eco-Left crowd in the late Eighties.
This Left was more middle class, more socially libertarian, more anarchic. Some of its foot soldiers were influenced by Italian “post-workerism”, an obscure offshoot of Marxism, while others joined in New Age voyages of self-discovery in raves, squats, or direct action protests. They were the era’s primary face of anti-globalisation, although they were more concerned by ecology, Third World underdevelopment, corporate malfeasance, consumerist alienation, and cultural homogeneity than the plight of the British working class.
But neither of these distinct Lefts succeeded in overthrowing the system of liberalised trade and open markets that rendered the traditional nation state impotent. Instead, a real-estate billionaire — and a Republican to boot — has upended the Washington consensus. The final humiliation is that Trump not only succeeded where the British Left failed, but that he did so flanked by grinning trade unionists. After hosting grateful miners in the White House, he couched tariff policy in the language of pro-worker social justice. “I’m proud to be the president for the workers, not the outsourcers,” he wrote, “the president who stands up for Main St, not Wall St; who protects the middle class, not the political class.” It’s a screed that could have been delivered by any Berniecrat.
MAGA, in its mad belligerence, has reminded us that states can act; policies can be implemented; you can just do things. The Left used to say that another world is possible. And they were right. Another world is possible. It’s being built right now. Just not in the way that they hoped.
In the last decade it has become de rigueur in certain circles to quote the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: to remind ourselves that we are in “an interregnum”, in which “the old world is dying and the new struggles to be born”. In these periods, we have been assured, “morbid symptoms appear”. But the interregnum is coming to an end. The morbid symptoms are becoming a new normal. Without the vulgarity, the bluster, and the oligarchical nature of MAGA’s second coming, the Left needs to learn how to wield the populist playbook. For this is politics now. It is not an aberration. Labour must become a government of insurgency, or else be confined to the dustbin of history.
