Review of Mark Perryman (ed) The Starmer Symptom, Pluto Press, 2025.
It may be a depressing time to be a socialist (and indeed to be alive) but at least it’s a golden age for scholars of the Labour Party. Between the Corbyn and Starmer eras there have been a wealth of studies on the party, spanning investigative journalism into both the Corbyn and Starmer camps; traditional academic political-science analyses; to more partisan leftist analyses of the rise of Corbyn; now replaced by scathing, forensic critiques of the Starmer regime.
Into this crowded field comes Mark Perryman’s collected edition ‘The Starmer Symptom’. It is a most welcome addition which brings together a wide range of impressive contributors and viewpoints from within and outside the Labour party, drawing on a nice mix of political theory, political science, political-economy, sociology and cultural studies to create a very well-rounded book.
Happily, the book is not strictly about Labour and Starmer. Instead, Starmer’s Labour forms the nexus around which various aspects of our current crisis are discussed. It includes useful chapters on- inter alia- the psephology of the 2024 election (Surridge); sociological explanations of the long-term collapse of the Tory party (Burton-Cartlege); the rise of the far right (Mulhall); ecology and the Green new deal (Simms) race and racialization (Bhattacharyya); the union movement (Gall); regional inequality (Dorling); economics (Meadway); democratic reform (Garland) and lots more. I would have liked a chapter on imperialism and foreign policy, but as someone who has edited a collected edition, I know first-hand you can never cram everything in.
Despite being theoretically informed, it is refreshingly readable with short, breezy chapters written in accessible, plain language which means it will appeal to readers far beyond the Labour party and indeed to anyone interested in contemporary British politics. It even includes a reading list. I learned a great deal from reading it.
The book brings these diverse perspectives to bear to collectively address the question posed by Michael Rustin in Soundings in 2024: whether Starmer’s Goverment is a simple continuation of the New Labour neoliberal project, or whether it has the potential to break with Blairism and become something even partially transformative.
At this stage, to even countenance the possibility of renewal within Labour will seem like heresy to many. Yet Your Party, the socialist party that many of us dreamed of for so long, finally emerged and immediately collapsed amidst a level of partisanship and incompetence beyond even the crudest parody. Wainwright’s hopeful chapter advocating a movement outside Labour defined by a democratic, bottom up approach- exemplified by the rise of community independents- now reads like a tragic monument to what might have been if Trotskyists didn’t exist.
The rise of the Greens on the other hand is undeniably very encouraging, but they remain- for now- a minor presence in former Labour heartlands. My own hunch is that the Greens may double down on social liberalism to consolidate their new, ex-Corbynite base; and therefore despite their recent successes nonetheless will probably have a natural electoral ceiling. As Perryman would put it- it is unlikely that the Greens can become truly hegemonic (although I hope I’m wrong).
So, despite everything, the Labour Party and whether it may be recoverable as a viable vehicle for socialist politics unfortunately remains the strategic question of the age for all socialists. In England at least.
The book couldn’t come at a more opportune time. Nearly 2 years in, Starmer- the forensic, safe pair of hands so beloved by the commentariat- is currently on course to become the least popular PM since modern polling began. At the time of writing, the most recent scandal (surrounding Peter Mandelson) has been displaced in the news cycle by Labour’s near wipeout in the local elections, including in Wales where 100 years of electoral hegemony has ended on Starmer’s watch. This latest failure has finally sparked open mutiny which may well do for Starmer before this review is published, but the issues facing this iteration of the Labour Party of course transcend one man.
Morbid Symptoms
Starmer himself has renounced the idea of Starmerism. So: what is the Starmer symptom? If it is a symptom, then what of? What is a ‘symptom’ anyway? Much of the book is informed by the work of Stuart Hall and the new left’s recuperation of Gramsci. The idea of a ‘symptom’ comes from Gramsci’s famous axiom about the emergence of ‘morbid symptoms’ during the interregnum, which refers to a febrile period in between stable epochs in which the new political-economic-social order has not yet emerged.
The book does not offer a singular conclusion as to what the Starmer symptom is. Instead, each chapter focuses on a particular feature of his disastrous tenure. Yet this equivocal approach is a strength rather than a weaknessand taken together these fragments provide valuable insights which allows us to greatly develop our understanding of the conjuncture.
Hall characterized New Labour as a ‘hybrid’ formation- a janus-facing Government which grafted a social democratic veneer (such as Sure Start, increased public spending; social liberalism) onto a project which took for granted many of the core tenets of Thatcherism (i.e., privatization and the centrality of finance to the British economy).
With Hall’s framework in mind, let’s very briefly look at the Starmer Government’s record. On the pros: the new deal for working people and the (partial, begrudging) repeal of some anti- union laws; the repeal of the 2 child benefit cap (under pressure from MPs); the establishment of Great British Energy; an improved childcare offer; protections for renters through the Renter’s Rights Act; a commitment to get building through the Planning and Infrastructure Act (2025); the ‘soft’ nationalization of rail and steel.
On the negatives: The Government has famously reneged on countless promises, including long standing commitments to nationalize water infrastructure and Royal Mail; much of the aforementioned energy and infrastructure pledges are largely going to be achieved by the private sector, including asset managers like Blackrock; releasing the pressure on the health service is being driven by allowing US tech parasites like Palantir to burrow in. On foreign policy, the Starmer Government has pledged billions more to defence spending while banging the war drum for NATO in Ukraine; British armaments have continued to flow to Israel during its flattening of Gaza and British spy planes have played a suspicious role throughout that conflict. The US empire has now entered its deranged, decaying phase, and yet Starmer’s government has displayed the same fealty to the empire as Blair, exemplified by the wildly irresponsible decision to let US aircraft use British bases to strike Iranian targets
Perhaps most damagingly- and as predicted by Eagleton and Blowe- this human rights lawyer led Government has been eye wateringly authoritarian, spearheading increased surveillance of citizens lives and criminalization of speech via the Online Safety Act; the clampdown on protest via the Crime and Policing Bill; and of course the obscene removal of trial by juries.
Certainly, based on its record so far, the Starmer Government seems to be nothing qualitatively new but rather a relatively straightforward continuation of New Labour’s hybrid form: a free economy and very strong state, with some very meagre scraps to the electoral base. Bhattacharyya claims that to call Starmer a symptom, or to attribute any coherent identity or even agency to his Government, is to give them too much credit.
Yet there are some notable differences between the Blair period and this one, some of which are structural/external, some of which are internal to the Labour Party. As John Clarke reminds us, it is important to zoom out and consider where the Labour party (and indeed the UK) fits within the global polycrisis, and how national governments reflect or transmit broader global trends. New Labour were the British iteration of the social or progressive period of neoliberalism. In the early years of New Labour, Hall speculated that the third way might prove to be the perfect superintendent for global capitalism by being able to absorb some of its contradictions through limited redistribution. Davies similarly suggested that centre-left governments were better suited to this new phase of neoliberalism because their electoral alliance with the public sector made them perfectly placed to inject new public management into the state bureaucracy. As Steinberg and Johnson argue, New Labour is best characterized as a ‘passive revolution’: a revolution from above which co-opted and satisfied some radical demands for change but which ultimately left neoliberalism untouched and indeed deepened it in new ways.
For years, Hall’s prediction seemed sound. Blairism appeared to be stable, facilitated by a mini-economic bubble. Yet as Gramsci notes, passive revolutions can never entirely contain the instability of capitalism and change always bursts through. The myriad economic, political and social crises wrought by neoliberalism’s internal contradictions erupted spectacularly in the 2008 crash, destabilizing and bringing down Brown’s Labour. These crises have now fully incubated and run riot.
Today, we are well and truly in the ‘crisis’ period of neoliberalism. Governments across the world of various stripes are far more disconnected from their populations. They increasingly appear irrational and punitive, far less interested in seeking the consent of their populations as they desperately try to force the lid back on. Lawson’s chapter ably sums up the brutal realities facing social democratic new left movements across the world (e.g. Syriza, Podemos, Frente Amplio) who have been unable to manage these contradictions, have inevitably wound up disciplining their own base to appease capital, and in turn been defenestrated and abandoned by said base.
This is all essential context for understanding this current period of the party as distinct. Unlike Blair, who took office amidst a period of optimism and was, as Gilbert puts it, able to ‘have his cake and eat it’, Starmer inherited what is essentially a failed state, both in terms of the moribund political-economic model and a broken social contract. Upon taking office, Starmer and Reeves resembled Monti and Papademos- sensible managers installed to right the ship. There has never once been the optimism or vitality of New Labour. From the get-go, Starmer’s labour has been ‘grey’.
Gilbert, Dorling and Meadway’s chapters eviscerate the political-economic approach of the Starmer project. They have not dared try and break Britain’s finance curse; parasitic rentierism has replaced productive capitalism; and we remain largely dependent on others for fuel, food and raw materials. Rather than build the autarkic economy that we need, Meadway explains how the Government is instead betting the house on military spending and US led tech, sectors which traditionally do very little for job creation and won’t address the painful regional inequalities detailed in Dorling’s chapter. Perryman suggests that Starmerism may, like New Labour, be seen as a passive revolution. But passive revolutions contain crises by satisfying demands from below in a partial, incremental manner. It is unclear what demands have been satisfied by Starmerism.
As Gilbert and Dorling powerfully argue, for any progress to be made in the UK, there will need to be a showdown with the fractions of capital which are strangling our economy and whole society, but this administration either will not or cannot countenance this.
An impossible task?
Gilbert raises the important question of leniency: have we got them all wrong? Is this in fact an earnest Government doing its best, constrained by global instability, the falling rate of profit and the might of the capitalist state bureaucracy (ala Attlee or Wilson)? Meadway says emphatically no- that there is always an alternative. Yet Starmer’s Government has likely done enough thus far to persuade its partisans that it is trying its best in impossible circumstances. Undoubtedly the same blockages and restrictions- both internal and external- would’ve faced a Corbyn government and will face a Streeting or Burnham led Party. The book does not fully revisit the analyses of the state bureaucracy and the institutional blockages made by Saville or Milliband (and more recently described by Dominic Cummings) although Eunice Goes’ chapter is perhaps the most ‘sympathetic’ to the barriers. In a brilliant historical overview of Labourism, Goes locates Starmerism within the Labourist tradition insofar as he represents Labourism’s ‘kneejerk’ historic instinct to accommodate the capitalist economy. The problem, as Goes puts it, is this Government “only knows how to operate with the pre-crises remedial kit”. They are attempting to blindly mash a button marked ‘third way’ in a period wholly unsuited to it, in which crises can no longer be contained. The world has moved on.
Taking a less materialist view, Bhattacharyya channels Fisher, arguing the Government’s grundhaltung as symptomatic of the ‘there is no alternative’ neoliberal worldview that seems to permeate the modern Labour party at all levels. Certainly this is my experience dealing with local Labour politicians: even the most well-meaning are simply incapable of conceiving of another way of doing things.
A simpler but compelling explanation for this Government’s actions comes from Burnell and Gilbert who argue that what makes Starmerism distinct (i.e., outside the Labourist tradition) is its total capture by a small cabal of extreme right-wing actors. (That is, it is not even as complex as the gradual internalization of neoliberal ideology or the straitjacket of the state bureaucracy or downward pressure from capital and the media). This capture is ultimately the rotten core at the heart of the Starmer project, a black hole from which all other maladies flow. This theory echoes Rustin’s claim that Starmer is Labour’s first ‘post-socialist’ leader, a man with no ostensible connection to any Labourist or socialist tradition or principles. As Burnell notes, even Blair kept the left around (indeed, Gilbert notes the Labour left were relatively happy for Blair to lead!) and compared to Starmerism’s control freakery, New Labour seems positively pluralist. Gilbert, like Finlayson, explains persuasively that the clique behind Starmerism have made wiping out the left their entire raison d’etre, and appear to have little ideology or expertise other than those developed through this internal intrigue- ‘”lying, rigging votes, packing meetings, fraudulently suspending rivals from the party, and colluding with the Conservatives and the press” (65). This, then, is the Starmer symptom.
Gilbert’s chapter is particularly generative and frames the right’s capture of the party in class terms. Updating the Ehrenreich’s idea of the professional-managerial class, which unhelpfully amalgamated managers and professionals (such as teachers and social workers), Gilbert argues that Starmer’s Labour represent a ‘managerial-technical elite’ that has ditched the pretence of being ideological or caring about any political project and is instead scrabbling around to defend their institutional privilege and lifestyle. Various chapters detail the naked careerism of much of this cohort- many of whom have a background in lobbying- who are motivated by the prospect of lucrative post-politics careers in the private sector. Finlayson has similarly compared this cohort to the apparatchiks of the last days of the Soviet Union, scrambling around for the last sinecure before the gravy train pulls out of the station.
Another way to approach this layer might be through the narrower lens of a closed subculture with its own norms, rituals, iconography and praxis: cut teeth in Labour students, must worship NATO, be a Yimby, LFI. One could also deploy Will Atkinson’s Bourdieusian approach, in which the party constitutes a ‘sub-field’, in which these actors cultivate and deploy various forms of capital. I would also argue that given the collusion between this cohort, big business and the security services, British political sociology and the study of Labourism would benefit from engaging with criminological analyses of state crime and corruption as well as parapolitics in future.
Gilbert’s chapter shows we urgently need a new, Poulantzian analysis of the British state and the various classes and class fractions condensed therein, and the role of the Labour Right within this web. Whether they are a class, class fraction or subculture, the group around Starmer are widely despised. Echoing Graeber, Gilbert argues that the libidinal appeal of Reform is precisely its attack on this hated class and its manner.
Intellectual Wasteland
Finlayson argues that all parties face two interrelated questions: how have social-economic and cultural conditions changed; and how can they respond to or harness these changes? Nairn’s critique of Labourism was of course that it was innately anti-intellectual. But as Perryman and Lawson’s chapters demonstrate, Blairism certainly had an intellectual underpinning and coherent internal logic. This meant New Labour understood the terrain it was fighting on and was able to adapt, renew and modernize. Starmerism on the other hand is distinguished by its relative vacuity, as to be expected given it is led by a cohort with ostensibly no ideology other than self-aggrandizementand crushing the left..
An example of this conceit is Labour’s engagement with the concept of social class. As Burnell notes, on paper the McSweeney strategy (making Labour the party of the working class again) is entirely smart and defensible. Moreover, Starmerism’s rhetorical focus on class and repeated attempts to articulate a working-class identity specifically also represented a break with the classless rhetoric of new Labour and indeed with the Corbyn project.
Yet clearly something has gone drastically wrong, either with the plan or the application. Both Byrne and Finlayson blame Claire Ainsley’s muddled theorisation of class that underpins Labour’s strategy, arguing that Labour are relying on a grave misunderstanding of the modern class structure and a one dimensional understanding of ‘the working class’. Finlayson puts it brutally: “Labour’s leadership is relying on a quite substantive non-political and non-social theory of politics which encourages, in a way even requires, the party leadership’s thinking to be disconnected from, and maybe even hostile to, actual historical, philosophical or sociological analysis of our social, economic and political situation”
Joe Kennedy’s chapter skewers Labour’s rhetorical strategy- that he dubs ‘authentocracy’- exemplified by Starmer’s ridiculous repetitions about being the son of a toolmaker. He argues that this discourse of gritty, hard-nosed reality and ‘tough choices’ was originally designed to delegitimize Corbyn and render the idea of redistributive politics as ridiculous, out of touch metropolitan. To do so it relied on a caricatured idea of a ‘real’ working class to launder neoliberalism and far right ideology. Kennedy perceptively suggests that Starmer’s studied ordinariness was never actually about winning over the ‘red wall’- indeed, the idea of a knight of the realm being the frontman for a campaign to win back the working class is utterly, laughably absurd- but instead reassuring capital about Starmer’s reliability, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary.
Unsurprisingly, Labour’s flawed understanding both of class itself and its actually existing base has allowed it to be easily outmaneuvered by Farage who correctly identifies the increasingly immiserated middle classes as the most important force in modern politics. (One minor criticism of the book- which treats class very well- is that multiple discussions on ‘hero voters’ don’t seem to grasp the importance of the lower middle classes specifically). While Starmer flails with ham-fisted anecdotes about football and toolmaking, Farage’s own class rhetoric of producerism (i.e., the hard-working majority) flattens out thorny questions of working/middle class and manages to cohere a broad class alliance of the skilled working class and small self-employed against the lazy, parasitic other.
They have not learned from New Labour’s naïve assumption that their base has nowhere to go. Like the greedy dog with the bone staring at in his own reflection, Labour has pursued a crude caricature of its old base in ‘the working class’, not won them over, and in the process lost their new progressive metropolitan base who have now defected to the Greens or Lib Dems. The fragility of Labour’s 2024 class coalition is presciently outlined in Garland’s chapter, which now stands as a monument to the hubris of the Starmerites.
Renewal?
The evidence put forward in the book (and in front of our eyes everyday) eviscerates the ridiculous narrative- central to the worldview of the liberal commentariat- of ‘competence’. While skillful spin and obfuscation was central to new Labour, Bhattacharyya points out that Starmer’s messaging and rhetoric has been incoherent and contradictory. His government has been rocked by scandal after scandal and has shown a remarkable capacity for unforced errors, displaying consistently shocking political judgement. The decision to remove the winter fuel allowance, for example, will likely go down as one of the worst political decisions ever made by an incoming British government, an inexplicable misstep which exploded all its political capital and goodwill in one fell swoop. It has never recovered from it.
It should now be clear to everyone that the right’s capture of the Labour Party has been a strategic disaster of epic proportions which has gutted the party’s strengths at every level. The decision to entirely purge the left has been entirely self-defeating, depriving the party of much of its intellectual energy and youthful vigour as well as some of its most reliable foot soldiers for canvassing.
If Labour continue on this course then the outcome is very predictable: a deepening of frustration and anger in society which will lead to a Reform govt in 2029 if not sooner. As the book repeatedly suggests, this likely matters not a jot to many of the Labour MPs who will scuttle off to their next cushy number, but of course it matters to the rest of us who stand to suffer.
We all know what way this is going and have a short period of time to change course. So what is to be done? Solutions here range from those who reject Labourism entirely (Bhattacharyya); those who think Starmer himself may yet be rehabilitated (Burnell); to those like Lawson and Gilbert who suggest that a pluralistic, left-ish Labour can still be returned to with a different leader (but who- Burnham? Streeting? Rayner?). Perryman, Lawson and Garland argue that in the long term, electoral reform is vital to rejuvenating not just the Labour Party but the entire British left.
The time to change course may well have been and gone, but any current apparatchik or leader in waiting (are you listening, Andy and Wes?) could do worse than read this excellent book for inspiration.
Dan Evans is a lecturer in Sociology and Criminology at Swansea University.