In the aftermath of the local elections, social democrats face a reckoning. Keir Starmer’s tepid, self-flagellating brand of managerial Labourism has hit an electoral wall, undermined by his persistent refusal to either define or defend the nature of his government’s project. Tax-and-spend fiscal policies have been repackaged as austerity, while genuinely socialist achievements on housing, transport, climate, and workers’ rights have gone unheralded – obscured by an ignominious reluctance to assert progressive values, or to openly confront the rising politics of oligarchy and far-right nationalism. Devoid of outriders and repudiated by voters, Starmerism is now clearly in its terminal phase.
When it comes, a new Labour leadership will need to quickly dispense with the more destructive elements of the current government’s political strategy. They must clearly articulate a new project for the country – one that builds on recent reforms, but integrates them into a more radical project of social and democratic renewal. Only with such a project can Labour re-unite the progressive bloc and face down the threat of Reform.
But the challenges for contemporary social democracy go far beyond the failings of the current Labour Party leadership. On an economic level, persistent low growth, geopolitical instability, and the urgent demands of the climate emergency have combined to create an increasingly zero-sum world in which fiscal and distributional trade-offs are becoming ever more acute. On a political level, ethnonationalist identity politics is on the rise, traditional party attachments are breaking down, social media is accelerating the fragmentation of the public sphere, and new forms of private power threaten to overwhelm our creaking democratic institutions.
In this context, social democrats need to find new ways of governing, new ways of communicating, new ways of building and sustaining lasting political loyalties, and new ways of tackling menacing concentrations of wealth and influence – while also delivering the kind of economic growth needed to sustain a wellresourced public realm. The essays contained in this issue set out a range of arguments, strategies, and perspectives on how social democrats could begin to address some of these challenges.
Three essays advance arguments about the kind of civic outlook and practices necessary to sustain social democratic politics. Kirsty McNeill writes about the crisis of solidarity, arguing that social democrats need to tackle growing atomisation, and what the sociologist (and Renewalcontributing editor) Sacha Hilhorst has described as the ‘radical domestication of existence’. Drawing on the history of working-class and trade union social clubs, McNeill calls for a sustained effort to rebuild the kind of egalitarian associational life in which casual encounters can develop into reciprocal relationships, and in which democratic habits are nurtured.
If McNeill asks us to rebuild the daily habits of solidarity, A.E. Snow considers the broader narrative frame in which a solidaristic politics should be couched. Inspired by the American philosopher Richard Rorty, he argues that we need a more imaginative form of progressive patriotism – one that is oriented towards the possibilities of the future, rather than a celebration of the present. For Snow, associational life has always depended on a strong sense of common purpose. To generate it, he calls on social democrats to cultivate an ‘optimism of the intellect’, and to ‘propose forms of life that do not yet exist’.
More provocatively, in an argument that echoes classical republican ideas of democratic vigilance as civic virtue, David Moon defends the merits of a (tempered, disciplined) form of political paranoia. Highlighting the revelations of the Epstein files, he contends that social democrats need to start paying far more attention to ‘parapolitics’ – those shadowy forms of private power (whether located in informal social networks, the security services, organised crime, or in the worlds of business and finance) that act upon democratic politics, while being largely hidden from public view and shielded from democratic scrutiny. While insisting on the need to avoid succumbing to a conspiratorial mindset, Moon reminds us of the reality of genuine conspiracy, and calls for social democrats to develop a programme of democratisation centred on combating elite corruption.
Three other essays address contemporary issues of social democratic economics. John Chowcat discusses the phenomenon of ‘de-globalisation’ within the world economy, driven in part by the rise of authoritarian politics (above all in Trump’s America). Rejecting economic nationalism, Chowcat calls for the British left to embrace a new global strategy centred on regional integration, pointing both to developments across the global south and to the striking resilience of the European Union. For Chowcat, a UK re-entry into the EU offers the best means of redressing our current overexposure to American economic power.
Björn Bremer and Sean McDaniel tackle the problem of fiscal constraint, responding to recent centre-left arguments (in particular those made by Patrick Diamond and Renewal contributing editor Colm Murphy) calling for social democrats to adopt a politics of ‘prudence’. They critique the idea that European economies are currently operating at near-to-full capacity, and instead insist on the urgent need to ramp up public investment – above all in the context of the climate emergency. While acknowledging that this will necessitate greater taxation (above all of wealth), they also call for a more flexible approach to fiscal rules, and for states to develop new instruments for mobilising private capital. For Bremer and McDaniel, ‘prudence’ is a dead end: what social democrats need is ambition.
Finally, Hannah McHugh reviews Stuart White’s recent book on republican political economy. She finds in it not only a concrete reformist project – including proposals for redistribution, ‘workplace republicanism’, and ‘investment democracy’ – but also a new ‘moral grammar’ for social democracy. Analysing the economic in terms of public power and civic freedom, White adds a vocabulary of virtue, citizenship, and the common good to the traditional social democratic language of opportunity, fairness, and growth.
Social democracy cannot be divorced from place. This issue explores the struggles, persistence, and prospects of social democratic cultures and institutions across radically different local and national contexts. Carla Rocavert discusses the legacy of Lyon’s radical silk-workers, the Canuts, and what two centuries of working-class activism can tell us about progressive politics in contemporary France. Ana Oppenheim reviews a new study of how a decade of ‘illiberal democracy’ reshaped politics in Poland. And, amid enthusiastic discussions of ‘Manchesterism’, Charlotte Sellers considers a more prosaic, yet perhaps more instructive, example of social democratic devolved governance: ‘Bristolism’.
If ‘Manchesterism’ is a story of success built on long-term vision and unity of purpose, ‘Bristolism’, Sellers argues, has until recently been one of failure – the product of incoherent leadership and political fragmentation. In contrast to Labour’s (until now) single-party dominance in Greater Manchester, control of councils in the West of England has long been divided among rival progressive parties – a prefiguration of the kind of politics we are now seeing across much of the country. In this context, the apparent success of Labour’s new regional mayor Helen Godwin’s efforts to govern on the basis of a ‘progressive alliance’ is thus a highly significant development. In spite of previous difficulties, Sellers suggests that ‘Bristolism’ may yet become a by-word for the kind of collaborative social democratic politics that Labour now needs to embrace.
Together, these essays collectively point towards the kind of social democracy we need – one that is radical on economics, pluralist in politics, moral in its language, and optimistic in its intellectual outlook. Only this kind of social democracy, practicing a robust and inclusive politics of belonging, can generate and sustain the kind of purpose and loyalty needed to enact a successful governing project from office.
Most importantly, these essays remind us that social democracy is based on a commitment to a particular kind of democratic society, animated by an ethos of civic equality and sustained by the realities of common life. Such a society can never be taken for granted, and is never achieved in full. Rather, it can only ever be the product of constant creation, and will always impose demands on us as citizens. As social democrats, it is our role to practice the democratic habits of participation and solidarity, to defend and expand the domain of the public, and – above all in an age of resurgent oligarchy and Big Tech overreach – to be evervigilant against the threat of private power.