From Blair to Bleurgh

Grey Labour is a specific phenomenon in British political history, which follows largely from the hollowed-out Blairism of the Labour right in recent years. Though Labour under Keir Starmer is in some sense a neo-Blairite project, its main cosmetic change from the Blair model has been the replacement of the adrenalised ‘modernising’ spirit of Labour in the millennium years with a much narrower mode, one characterised above all by passivity, small-c conservatism, and pathological denial of the possibility of meaningful change happening in the near future.

This is essentially a shift from youthful to senescent versions of Labour centrism — and again the comparison with Blairism is a pithy one (as, more distantly, is the parallel with the recent evolution of the US Democratic Party under Joe Biden’s ineffectual leadership). In the mid-nineties, Tony Blair and his spin doctors made great play of their semi-official rebranding of the party as New Labour, thereby putting clear water between themselves and both ‘Old’ Labour and the end-stage ‘Back to Basics’ Tory regime then in power.

But in the Starmer years these caricatures have been ironically reversed. Despite his trad-Thatcherite values, there is no doubt that the relatively youthful BAME Tory prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is — or at least appears to be — an authentic product of twenty-first-century Britain. Similarly, there is an air of modernism — albeit of the very worst kind — about the more strident Tory right-wingers (Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman) often touted as Sunak’s likely successors.

Against these points of comparison — to which we might add Grey Labour’s true mortal enemy, the archetypal youthful idealist of the Corbyn years — Starmer has been left to inhabit the role of a dour, red-rinse John Major. Like Major in the nineties, Starmer is an ungainly, Prufrock-esque, end-of-an-era figure — a bumbling elegist for a bygone period of ‘service’, patriotism, and whatever other traditional values are imagined to have prevailed in the half-remembered childhoods of the nostalgic swing voters who increasingly decide British general elections.

Not the Hero We Deserve, But the Hero We Need?

To be sure, there is a school of thought which maintains that Britain needs, even craves Grey Labour at this point in its history. Notwithstanding the demands of electoral pragmatism (those nostalgic swing voters must be won over somehow, after all), the argument often advanced by hard-centrist commentators is that the best we can hope for right now is a calming, stabilising influence at the top of government — especially in light of the sociopolitical shocks of the last decade (read Brexit, Trump, Corbyn, Covid, Johnson, Truss).

In this view, the years after circa 2015 witnessed an alarming buffeting between equally undesirable forms of left- and right-wing extremism. As such, shouldn’t we now seek to return to the broad neoliberal consensus which started to unravel in the last days of New Labour, and which came apart completely in the late 2010s? Shouldn’t we now put the ‘grown-ups’ — grey though they may be — back in charge?

What is more, the same Grey Labour champions tend to argue, surely Starmer will prove to be a sort of Trojan-horse radical (or at least reformist) after he has entered Downing Street. According to this theory, Starmer is the natural heir of Labour hero Clement Attlee (rather than John Major), and like Attlee he will use his grey, inauspicious exterior as a necessary disguise to mollify conservative elements, before embarking on an ambitious programme of modernisation and structural renewal once in government.

Those sympathetic to this view gesture at the stray elements of reformism in Labour policy announcements over the last couple of years (especially its apparent focus on investment in green energy), and argue that this shows that the party under Starmer has broken decisively with Blairism to offer a new and timely vision for the 2020s. Surely, Grey Labour’s media cheerleaders maintain, pledges such as the ‘five missions’ announced in July 2023 show that the party grasps that zombie neoliberalism must now make way for a new era of intervention and distribution from central government — indeed, that it has no choice in the matter if we are to avert ecological collapse and reverse socioeconomic decline?

The Belatedness of Grey

There are three obvious problems with this line of thinking. The first is that, as the increasingly parlous state of the global environment proves beyond doubt, we are clearly not living in an era where a Grey Labour approach based on mere opposition to left and right extremes — and returning to an illusory bygone ‘sensible’ stability — is either viable or desirable. Similarly, after over forty years of neoliberal mismanagement, concluding with the austerity, social decay, and political crises of the last decade or so, the country is in need of radical modernisation, not a moderate clinging to established structures and habits. In short, we cannot simply put the grown-ups (whoever they may be) back in charge and return to a centrist Eden.

The second, counteractive, problem is that through a combination of external and internal pressures (namely the anaemic state of the British economy and Starmer’s rigidly parsimonious ‘fiscal rules’), an incoming Labour government will not have the economic impetus to mount any kind of reformist programme on even a modest scale, let alone on the Attlee model. This was underlined, once and for all, by Grey Labour’s recent wholesale abandonment of almost all the notable progressive policies it has articulated over the last two years (most grievously, the key pledge to invest £28 billion in green energy, now a mere ‘ambition’).

The third, and perhaps the most insurmountable, problem is that the source and ongoing power base of Grey Labour lies in the contemporary right wing of the party — one of the stupidest, most intellectually moribund tendencies in the history of British democracy. For the key greyite personalities — from the sadistic constituency Labour party (CLP) and National Executive Committee (NEC) jobsworths who delight in stifling left voices at the local and national levels, to the drearily adenoidal members of Starmer’s shadow cabinet — the mere notion of substantive political reform is anathema, whatever they may protest in speeches peppered with feeble references to ‘hope’ and ‘change’.

Given the collective psychology of this morbid vanguard of the amoral and the careeristic — which views opposing Corbynism and its remnants as an all-consuming raison d’être, and which regards even moderate social democrats like Andy Burnham as beyond-the-pale radicals — the chances of a Grey Labour government playing out a Trojan-horse strategy of surprise renovation of Britain’s terminally ill socioeconomic infrastructure once in government would appear to be vanishingly small.

Return of the Rainbow

And yet there is hope amid the gloom. From the vantage point of early 2024, with a Grey Labour election victory almost certainly on the horizon, it might appear that there is little room for socialist manoeuvre — that there is no alternative to the Grey Labour status quo. But from the moment the final poll results are announced (whenever the election is held this year), the window of opportunity for a left revival both inside and outside the Labour Party will start to grow and grow.

The first step in moving beyond Grey Labour must be psychological. We need to realise that the whole nature and purpose of the Grey Labour counter-revolution has been to shore up the power of established interests in the party and further afield — many of which were badly wounded in the Corbyn years — by smothering the hopes of the young and the radical in this country beneath a miasma of pessimism and apathy.

After taking the time to acknowledge this, we then need to realise what a fragile and vaporous phenomenon Grey Labour is: that it represents a desperate attempt to cling to a pre-2015 past rather than having anything to do with a twenty-first-century future, that it is founded in weakness rather than strength — and, crucially, that it has decisively opted for being the end of something rather than beginning, leaving the field open to the Left to dream and to plan and to enact what comes next.

This is not to say that the disillusionment many on the Left have felt since 2020 is illusory or easily banished. It is one thing to remain hopeful about the possibility of change in the abstract — it is quite another to remain optimistic about the prospect of a left Labour revival if you have been expelled or marginalised from your local CLP, or if your repeated attempts to see the buried good in Grey Labour have been undermined by ever-more unforgivable misdeeds and pronouncements by the party leadership.

Nevertheless, the time for understandable disillusionment is now over. A Labour election victory in 2024 will open up all kinds of possibilities for renewal of the Left, from a scattering of left success stories in the election itself (a Labour victory will, at the very least, be better than any of the available alternatives), to the widespread questioning and challenging of the Grey Labour worldview that will follow when it soon becomes clear — for the umpteenth time — that of all political approaches currently in circulation, extreme centrism is perhaps least best-positioned to help us tackle the crises, shocks, and sudden global power shifts that will only get more frequent and more perilous as the twenty-first century unfolds.

In the meantime, keep organising — in your union, your CLP, your reading group, your pressure group, your local campaign, your workplace — or resume activities if you’ve taken a break from them over the last few years. Above all, dare to be optimistic. Nothing is certain in life, but what is pretty much impossible is that the Labour Party can continue for very long in its current regressive, ineffectual, hollowed-out state of unbeing, even allowing for the short-term shot-in-the-arm that will follow from likely electoral triumph. After this pivot point, the Left needs to be ready to enter a new phase of rebuilding, renewal, and — eventually — power. The present is grey, but the future comes in colours everywhere.