LABOUR’S crisis of organisation expresses itself as a financial crisis but it is, at root, a crisis of politics and policy.
The downsizing envisaged by party general secretary David Evans is the inevitable consequence of Labour’s disastrous decline in electoral support and a catastrophic collapse in membership.
When Jeremy Corbyn relinquished his leadership, he left the party grown to a size unprecedented in modern times, stuffed with cash and with an opinion poll rating that filled every sister party in the socialist international with envy and admiration.
This week the serious business of downsizing Labour’s political machine begins.
The main management technique employed is “shock and awe” combined with a systematic torture of the English language. Labour’s paid staff were told that the key driver of the party reorganisation process was to “achieve substantial cost reduction” and do it now.
In this “new model Labour Party” things mean the opposite of what they say — and thus staff were told that while the management was “not following a process of redundancy” 90 jobs had to go.
Cue for the staff unions to threaten a strike ballot and the management to bump up the redundancy package to four weeks’ pay for every year worked with a floor of £5,000. Small compensation for their precipitate entry into a difficult job market.
Evans, if not the author of this self-mutilating scheme, is the one who will carry the can at this autumn’s party conference. He was in full Price Waterhouse mode holding out the enticing vision of “winning, voter-centric policies.”
Voter-centric policies are, by definition, the policies voters like to vote for. We have strong, fairly recent evidence of that in the package of policies which delivered Labour’s biggest increase in votes in years and even more recent evidence of what turns them off.
However, Starmer’s weekend briefing was that the 10 policy pledges which he inherited from Corbyn and which formed the basis of his appeal in the party leadership contest are now to be replaced by a focus on “crime, anti-social behaviour, the stability of jobs, British manufacturing, climate change and the damage done to children’s education during the pandemic.”
Evans’s bid to “meet the needs of voters” entails mobilising new, innovative “lean and agile” structures based on a “hub and spoke” model.
Lean and agile in this context means sacking many of the party’s video, data and targeting teams and closing down the entire membership mobilisation team.
The remaining staff will work “collaboratively” in “multi-disciplinary teams.”
Apparently this will enable Starmer’s slimmed-down Stakhanovites to “adopt a product-mindset using agile ceremonies” and be “empowered to make decisions and encouraged to focus on rapid prototyping, deployment and iteration.”
Behind the bullshit is a clear strategy. The model of an activist party, rooted in trade-union and community organising and armed with a broad range of policies which tackle the principal features of exploitation and oppression in modern Britain and envisage a fundamental and irreversible change in the balance of power and wealth, is abandoned.
The priority now is a careful and constant repositioning to finesse an appeal to a shifting mid-point demographic and suppression of any hint of class politics or system change.
We can grant Starmer the insight to know that on current form he is unlikely ever to become prime minister. The inescapable logic of the transformation undergone by Labour is that this leadership sees its task as convincing our ruling class that, in event of the main party of capitalist continuity becoming electorally toxic, Labour is a trustworthy custodian of the system.
