Boy I bet Anthony Albanese and those who have to be led by him are looking with envy at the UK right now. Here, it’s chaos and the slog, and suspended above the pit. Nothing’s working, everyone’s realised Albo’s not a great leader — including perhaps Albo himself — and the bright vision has long since faded.
There? The exact same. But the difference is, Keir Starmer and co have 10 years. Surely. Even with the big swings of first-past-the-post, a 200+ seat majority surely gives you two terms at least. So Starmer’s UK Labour is a different sort of disappointment.
Some of it is simply the stumbling of a new government, of a party out of power for 14 years. That includes getting pinged for some freebies that MPs who are now ministers accepted. It’s always the petty corruption that gets you, because it often draws on dual forms of right. What sort of puritan bastard would not get her/his kids Taylor Swift tickets if they were on offer? Would you want to be ruled by someone as saurine as that?
But it’s also UK Labour administering the pain early, to get things done. Practically the first thing it did was to further restrict smoking in the UK, and to cut the universality of the Wenceslasian “winter fuel allowance”, the annual dispensation of groats and florins for the purchase of fat-soaked rags to burn through the British dark months, of which there are 12 per year.
The politics are clear. Labour can count on 10 years in power, might get 15 or more, in some form or other. That’s long enough for a government that imposes preventative health measures to see the benefit in reduced system burden — while it’s still in power, rather than gifting the other bastards with it.
Same with the winter fuel allowance. It will cause real hardship to people who own their little hovel in Much Sodding, but have low income. But de-universalising a benefit that the Duke of Westminster receives at his main property (the name of which is “London”) is hardly an anti-left thing per se.
That said, of course, Labour is getting down to the main business of selling out at a furious rate, lining up meetings with business to get the government’s ear, punishing the seven Labour junior ministers who abstained from the vote (a stunningly hard core response), making it clear there will be no further inquiry (a so-called “Leveson 2”) into press corruption, etc.
But the thing is, we expect all that. We expect that a Labour government will get into power, and turn against any leftism, for the sake of looking good to the centre, and the centre-right. We’re almost masochists about that. Leftism is 50 shades of Gary Gray.
But with that comes a demand that it be competent. That’s the trade-off. Labor is meant to use a rightward turn to stabilise the centre. It does that for its own survival. We support it, or continue to grudgingly support Labor in the last instance, so that we can do politics under cover of that.
That formula does not, to put it mildly, appear to be working at the moment. At Spiked, Tom Slater has an article “Why is he so bad at this?” Oh mate, hold my colder, better beer. You are living in a Bismarckian era compared to what we’re going through. The dominant emotion on la gauche in Australia at the moment is not so much anger at the sell outs, but that we have gained nothing by them.
With the sense that we are sailing towards a messy election and result, the disappointed are seeing this as an opportunity to force Labor into some sort of arrangement from a hung parliament. And it may be. But parliaments hang left or right, like, um, well they hang left or right.
Don’t count on the lower house crossbench to be an inevitable bulwark against a Coalition minority government. The Greens still face a hard battle in these large federal seats, we don’t know what new independents will emerge, and some teals at least will have no real choice but to listen to what a Dutton-led Coalition with a vote plurality has to offer.
How did we get here, some of us cry to the skies? For my generation/cohort, older Gen X/very late boomer, this is bitter bread indeed. We got an actual leftist in power, or so it said on the tin. And what was he and his governments main claim to preferment? That they were a safer pair of hands to do the selling out.
Yes, yes, yes. This government has done hundreds of good things, small, and somewhat larger among all the compromises, and someone needs to do the much less fun to write article listing them.
But what really galls is that the sell-outs were so momentous, and so early, and they’re still losing to the damn right. A “left” government has laced us into US forward defence for a war in their interests we don’t need to fight, while offering nothing by way of a really situation-altering housing or cost of living plan, and abandoning net zero.
And. It. Is. Still. Losing.
Or neck and neck.
M’colleague Rachel Withers has catalogued the possible personal and psychological explanations for this great mystery of our time: the failure of Anthony Albanese to, upon election as prime minister, shed the skin of the backroom faction man, and become the best, or least worst, national leader he could be.
This is the great gap in the record. Yes some of it is circumstantial. Withers quotes Katharine Murphy –now Albo’s spinner — that Scott Morrison was a man who had no “there, there” (quoting Gertrude Stein about California). But that’s exactly the misperception that self-satisfied knowledge class elites make.
Right-shifted and independent people never wholly warmed to Scotty from marketing, to say the least, but he was in their face, he was absolutely there. Did they believe he was really a carpenter when he picked up a hammer? Did they care he made fish curry? No, but he was there doing it, doing the things people do, Dad’s special recipe, Dad’s terrible songs etc. ScoMo was enough in your face to talk away the weirdness arising from his upbringing, a child actor whose father was a cop-mayor, and whose childhood was wreathed in low church Christianity
ScoMo knew he had to fake being like the humans, a trick he’d learnt with a career in tourism. His team were so much better on visual rhetoric, symbols, the propaganda of events, compared to all the arts grads in Labor, it’s embarrassing. Team Albo are so unerringly bad at the daily stuff that they shoot all the way past The Thick of It and end up at 3rd Rock From the Sun — aliens in a basement, trying to work it all out.
How did it go doubly wrong? How did the going wrong — the selling out — go wrong? The answer goes beyond psychology and personality, though that matters. It’s a shift in the world, resulting from the total defeat of any centre-left program, any one which had a genuine leftism to it.
Capital flows, financialisation, social atomisation undermining class existence… all these make a resistance to capital on the old terms — the terms in which Labo(u)r was constituted — absolutely impossible. The melancholy truth is that, even if some belly-fire had survived 25 years of major party finagling, the mere lack of possibility drains contemporary politicians of purpose.
Within that wider frame, their advisers insist on going with that atomisation, making a strategy out of it. There are no programs anymore, they say, there is no politics, per se. There are specific issues and problems to address. Your supporters calling for bigger stuff are just Whitlam/Hawke-Keating nostalgist wankers.
They are half-right in that. There is a diminished understanding by the knowledge class who are interested in politics, in the widest sense, en masse, about just how wide the gap is, in basic world conception, between them and the larger mainstream (and, once again, this is not about intelligence or νοῦς, per se. It’s about how your training shapes the way you think about the world).
The frameworks people had in the industrial/class era for understanding political relations — even by way of simplistic myths of them — are gone. Many, many people now lack the most basic handholds to understand how government works, in whose interests, the public/private division, and the left/right division.
The more that our contemporary society becomes a mix of monopoly capital, impersonal administration and intense social management by the state, the more people lose the ability to distinguish between institutions. For anyone under a certain age, Coles has the same social existence as the Navy or the Eastern Rite Orthodox Church.
There’s two possible responses to that. One is a direct politics of demand, siding with the people against the system, and not limiting your advocacy of the people’s legitimate demands by system concerns. That is called “populism”, by its enemies. We call it politics.
The other is to cleave to the side of the system absolutely, and defend its system-essence against the very people you purport to represent. You can see this with Labor’s defence of the Reserve Bank’s autonomy against the Greens’ argument for direct political setting of interest rates.
The Reserve Bank, any bank, is by definition concerned firstly with the reproduction of itself and money, and damn the people it was set up to serve. That said, there is a legitimate left debate as to whether direct setting of rates etc is a good thing to start off.
Labor’s reaction, possibly staged, is not merely slating the Greens for being alleged wreckers and vandals. Instead, it is a sort of visceral horror that they would defame the Reserve Bank or suggest any other way of running society, a disgust, as if Adam Bandt were suggesting going to Healesville Sanctuary to piss on a koala. As I say, probably staged, a tap dance for the markets.
But also, one suspects, a product of Labor’s assimilation to the system, and its maintenance with minimum disturbance. This is the sort of mentality arising from the think tanks Labor has established around itself, Per Capita and the Grattan, the McKell and others.
They do some good stuff, but are hopelessly crippled by centrist system maintenance thinking and an elitist arrogance of many of their principals. The arrogance is unearned, as is painfully obvious at the moment. Labor is losing politically to the Greens not because of lack of talent, but principally because it has the wrong ideas and way of thinking.
The right beats Labor through pig-ignorant rat-cunning, the laser focus that comes from a cultivated stupidity. But the left of Labor beats it through having better ideas, a better picture of the world. If the Greens are setting the left agenda politically, I suspect it’s because the party is now run by the sort of people who once read a lot of theory, and have finally found a use for Laclou and Mouffe.
Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking. But look, simply, at how badly Labor is handling everything. This is a party working off bad maps, and those maps are, to put it as simply as possible, the PPE worldview — the implicit theory of how society works that is at the base of public policy masters, McKinseys internships, left neoliberal journals and the like.
It’s an entirely false picture of how people relate to knowledge, power, institutions; it defines “rationality” as the institution’s point of view of the public and not vice versa; and a hundred other errors. It’s why Labor people get not merely irritated but absolutely exasperated at public reaction to what they do.
Labor hasn’t even taken advantage of siding with the system, and arguing for the ethics of doing such. To side with the “system as it should be”, Labor would both defend the autonomy of the Reserve Bank and introduce a full and fearless inquiry into robodebt.
That would show, and be, a certitude, a commitment to one part of the institution — the justice system — against another part of it — a cynical and nihilistic executive — in the name of the people.
Instead, no robodebt inquiry, and no stimulating the economy a little with a directed rate cut. Labor’s message to the people who might vote for it is you’ll get nothing, and like it. Or not like it. We don’t give a fuck. Also, we shot your dog. Vote for us.
Labour in the UK is screwing up some stuff, going right on other stuff, but getting some stuff done. Our Labor government appears to have been consumed by tactics and responsiveness, and then consumed by vanity whenever anyone attacks it for not having a plan.
God, every time one writes something like this, one reminds oneself also that this stuff is supremely difficult, that Newscorpse is simply a killing machine disguised as a media company, that Labor has 20 different sub-groups to satisfy, and the Greens have about three, that, that that…. .
But I mean surely there’s an awareness of the spiral effect? If you set out to have a program, impose a general political will, and you fall short and compromise, there is at least something that is guiding you. When you eschew that, it’s like when you point a TV camera at its own monitor. Mise en abyme, “flung into the abyss”, it’s called.
Sure feels like it, suspended above the pit.
What does Labor stand for, if anything? What good has it done since 2022, and what opportunities has it missed? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
