The recent news from Britain is dire. The Prime Minister’s office mistakenly briefed against one of its own ministers in what appears to have been an overreaction by Starmer’s chief strategist to rumors of internal party maneuvering. Instead of neutralizing a perceived rival, the episode elevated its intended target, Wes Streeting, to a new level of prominence. Such is the political incompetence of the current British administration.
This was merely the latest episode in what would be a comically mismanaged Labour government if the consequences were not so serious. Labour is in power during a moment of profound economic fragility. Britain faces a mounting debt burden, stagnant growth, deteriorating public services, and a population that is visibly losing faith in the state’s capacity to act. Yet the government appears paralyzed. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, has already walked back what once looked like modest plans for tax increases, clinging instead to campaign promises designed for a different political moment. The resulting budget continues Labour’s habit of tinkering around the edges of a system that reliably produces weak growth, social decay, and political volatility.
Debt servicing costs consume an ever-growing share of government spending. This is not a future problem; it is a present constraint. Starmer’s refusal to pursue anything that might plausibly be called a structural or transformative response is not prudence. It is abdication. It guarantees stagnation in the short term and political collapse in the medium term. And it all but ensures that the next election could deliver power to Reform, led by the grotesque but electorally effective Nigel Farage, whose incoherent blend of tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, and grievance politics would deepen every structural weakness Britain currently faces.
Starmer and Reeves are not anomalies. They are exemplars of a governing philosophy that has dominated nominally center-left parties for more than three decades. That philosophy was forged in the early 1990s, shaped by the electoral defeats of figures like Michael Foot in Britain and Michael Dukakis in the United States. These losses—very different in context and content—produced a shared conclusion among Democratic and Labour elites: left parties could no longer afford to challenge the basic architecture of the market economy. Instead, they would accept neoliberalism as settled fact and compete with conservatives on competence, tone, and social liberalism rather than economic substance.
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were the purest expressions of this strategy. By the narrow standard of electoral success, it worked. Both men built broad coalitions, dominated their political opponents, and governed during periods of aggregate economic growth. But that success came at a cost that their parties are still paying. They presided over an economic order that systematically weakened labor, privatized risk, inflated asset values, and hollowed out the material security of working- and middle-class voters. Growth continued, but wages stagnated. Productivity gains accrued upward. Public capacity eroded.
The wager was explicit: short-term electoral viability would be purchased by abandoning any serious attempt to reshape economic power. The long-term consequences—disaffection, cynicism, and the collapse of class-based political loyalty—were ignored.
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris represented continuity, not rupture. Their rhetoric differed, but the underlying claim was consistent: the system broadly works. The economy is fundamentally sound. Inequality is regrettable but manageable. With the right technocrats, the right incentives, and the right regulatory tweaks, capitalism could be made humane. Nowhere was this clearer than during the Obama administration, where the language of hope and change masked an almost obsessive commitment to stability—especially stability for financial institutions whose failures had devastated millions.
The problem is that almost no one believes this anymore.
In Britain, the disbelief is especially acute. Neoliberalism was implemented there with unusual intensity and ideological confidence. Privatization, financialization, and regional abandonment were not side effects; they were the strategy. Brexit then stripped away what little insulation Britain retained against global market pressures. The country is now economically exposed, institutionally brittle, and politically volatile. Under these conditions, the idea that competent management alone can restore growth and legitimacy is fantasy.
Starmer governs as though the crisis is rhetorical rather than structural. His Labour Party behaves as if voters are merely exhausted and need reassurance, when in fact many no longer see the state as capable of improving their lives at all. This is not a messaging problem. It is a material one.
What Starmer represents is not leftism but what might best be called left conservatism: a commitment to preserving the institutional settlement of neoliberalism while mitigating its most visible harms. That approach might have been defensible in the late 1990s, when growth was strong and the social fabric less frayed. Today it is politically suicidal.
A successful left cannot be about moderating neoliberalism. It has to be about dismantling it.
That does not mean abandoning the state or embracing a vague populism built on resentment alone. Quite the opposite. The left must reject the anti-state reflex that neoliberalism itself cultivated and return to a class politics rooted in material security. That means defending the middle class as a class, not as a cultural identity. It means confronting monopolies rather than celebrating “competition” that does not exist. It means taxing wealth, not merely income, and using the proceeds to rebuild public capacity rather than subsidize private failure.
Above all, it means rejecting the fiction that markets are neutral or natural. Market-centrism is a political choice, sustained by law, regulation, and power. So is its alternative.
Starmer appears incapable of making this break. He is trapped by the lessons of the 1990s, by a political formation that mistakes caution for seriousness and timidity for realism. In doing so, he risks repeating the central error of the past generation of center-left leaders: mistaking electoral victory for political success, and mistaking stability for legitimacy.
If Labour continues down this path, it will not only fail to resolve Britain’s economic crisis. It will prepare the ground for something far worse.
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