July 5th dawned with the news that Labour had won the UK General Election. The combination of tactical voting meant it was a huge win. The Tory vote fragmented three ways in a perfect storm with Reform, the LibDems and Labour all profiting. The political landscape of the UK has been entirely reset. Drawn in a map showing seats distributed in proportion to population, Britain is now a sea of red and orange:
Inevitable complaints about the unfairness of First Past the Post (FPTP) have been raised. They weren’t so strident when successive Tory governments benefitted from FPTP to push divisive policies including the EU Referendum on the populace. The possibility of a uniquely distorted result was one that John Burn-Murdoch of the FT covered before the election predicting more or less exactly what came to pass. It seems likely that the momentum towards proportional representation (PR) in the UK will now only increase over the coming years.
However, to leverage a phrase common in tech startup land to accept reality, it is what is it is 🤷. FPTP yielded Labour working majority of 181 providing a substantial mandate for the change their campaign repeatedly promised they stood for. No time has been wasted in pulling together a cabinet which met the day after. To purloin another risible refrain, let’s go 🚀.
Thoughts inevitably turn for those of a certain vintage to the prospects for a return of social democracy which was last a force in the UK in the 1970s. Newsnight appropriately started their Election special with Bohemian Rhapsody, Rishi Sunak playing the part of Freddie Mercury’s poor boy. Whether intended or not, the lyrics felt strikingly apt:
Polly Toynbee on Question Time later in the day announced that it was “the end of Thatcherism”. It’s a recurring claim with a dubious history. Hanif Kureishi used it back in 2009 soon after the financial crisis which many really did think would be its death knell. Instead neoliberalism mutated and continued to prosper throughout the last 14 years of drift:
It seems to me that at last we've probably come to the end of Thatcherism. I'm glad she's still alive to see the whole thing collapse.
The Labour Party first came to power in an unstable form a hundred years ago in 1924 under Ramsay MacDonald since when it has formed the main opposition to the Conservatives. Clement Attlee’s government of 1945-51 which created the NHS is widely seen as its greatest incarnation. However, outside that landmark triumph, Labour administrations have been the exception rather than the rule. There has only been one period of Labour governance in the forty five years since Margaret Thatcher’s ascent to power in 1979. That was the thirteen years either side of Millennium when New Labour was in power. It was a regime that was openly aligned with the much of the political philosophy that preceded it and ended up seen as continuity Tory in nature. Is this new dawn a New Labour retread or truly recidivist, turning back the clock to the Old Labour of the late 70s that Thatcher toppled? In the intervening years, Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha have been born and grown up without any direct experience of what it is like to live in a social democratic state. Jeremy Corbyn very nearly achieved that goal in 2017 and as many have pointed out, received several millions more votes than Starmer yet still ended up on the losing side. What would Mark Fisher, who long dreamed of the return of social democracy, have thought of this incongruous Labour victory? Sadly we cannot know but now in 2024 we can ask an LLM for a view. Here’s a response to the question courtesy of Perplexity:
Fisher would probably have seen a Labour win as a potential crack in the edifice of "capitalist realism" - the pervasive sense that there is no alternative to capitalism. He argued that this mindset had become so entrenched that it was difficult to even imagine coherent alternatives. A Labour victory, especially with a more left-wing platform, could represent a shift in that paradigm.
However, Fisher was also deeply skeptical of mainstream party politics and would likely have scrutinized Labour's actual policies and actions once in power. He may have questioned whether they would truly challenge the underlying structures of capitalism or merely offer surface-level reforms.
During the middle of the last Old Labour regime, at the high point of social democracy in 1977, the BBC released an extraordinary dystopian vision of the near future in the form of a TV series called 1990. The whole first series is available on YouTube here.
Set 13 years in the then future, 1990 painted a dark vision of a post-socialist state that had emerged from the one in power at the time. It’s creator, Wilfred Greatorex was inspired by Orwell’s totalitarian vision of an all-seeing paternalistic state intervening in every aspect of everyday life. At the heart of it was the Public Control Department (PCD), a sinister body within the Home Office “riding roughshod over the population's civil liberties”. The event that led to its formation was another kind of financial crisis, a national bankruptcy, a constant preoccupation of many UK business leaders during the late 1970s following the Sterling Crisis and subsequent IMF loan to bail out Britain:
There was an irrecoverable national bankruptcy in 1981, triggering permanent martial law followed by a general election in which only 20 per cent of the electorate voted. The economy (and imports) drastically contracted forcing stringent rationing of housing, goods and services. These are distributed according to a person's LifeScore as determined (and constantly reviewed) by the PCD on behalf of the union-dominated socialist government. The higher-status individuals appear to be civil servants and union leaders. An exception to this are import–export agents, who appear to be immune to state control due to their importance to the remnants of the economy. The House of Lords has been abolished and turned into an exclusive dining club. State ownership of businesses appears to be close to 100 per cent and prohibition of wealth and income appears to be rigorous.
The themes explored in 1990 while focused on the UK remain highly relevant in today’s world; population control, state surveillance, social conformity, circumscribed leisure, labour shortages. They are handled entirely differently in the series reflecting the political hauntology unique to the period in which it was created. The PCD is focussed on trying to stop illegal emigration not immigration in an echo of what was going on in East Germany at the time. Closely surveilled so-called “leisure centres” have replaced pubs and those frequenting them are limited in what they can imbibe. Microphones and cameras are ubiquitous, monitoring for subversive activities. The technology in use is curiously peripheral to proceedings and serves primarily to aid bureaucratic use cases. This is a world without AI, data and computers with videotape and paper prevailing. It connects directly to the espionage paranoia that was a key part of popular culture at the time with the elevation of fictional as well as real spies and intrepid reporters. The chief protagonist, Jim Kyle, played by Edward Woodward is amalgam of both personas as “a journalist on the last independent newspaper, called The Star, who turns renegade and fights the PCD covertly”. Episode 1 opens on what feels like a faded council estate, a doctor nervously watching his back as he ducks and dives through grey walkways. At one point the camera pans to a state official points a gun at a dog, a jolting reminder of another 1970s mainstay, the fear of stray dogs and rabies. The series is almost entirely devoid of any capitalist reference points. The obsessive, claustrophobc atmosphere portrayed here would have been understood by viewers in the before times prior to Thatcher but would be largely alien to anyone born since then. Many of the ideas showcased in 1990 arguably did arrive and were realised albeit through a decisively capitalist imprint. Individual self-interest actively encouraged in the 1980s rather than state oppression drove society apart. Hyperstition doesn’t always manifest precisely as predicted, but it does rhyme in line with the spirit of the age. One year after 1990 aired, Thatcher was in for a decade, and the future took an entirely different path. Social democracy was concreted in, buried and progressively paved over by neoliberalism.
The possibility of a partial return of social democracy under Labour in the UK is polarising. On the one hand, many will be hoping this result signals the point at which the door is firmly closed on the neoliberal turn. Others, including presumably many Reform voters, fear the spectre of social democratic authoritarianism almost 50 years after the last time it stalked the land. Labour do appear at least on the surface to advocate a more interventionist state. The plan to create Great British Energy to “make Britain a clean energy superpower” is hugely ambitious and conveys a distinct Big State vibe:
It’s a name that has an Orwellian ring to and would not be out of place in 1990 or indeed 1984. Neither would the desire of the incoming government to exercise more directive centralised control over planning.
One can learn a lot about the concerns of the recent past by examining how those living at the time saw their own future. However, what is eventually instantiated overwrites hope and nullifies that which was once imagined. Labour are unlikely to disinter the social democratic past or summon up a 1990-style totalitarian nightmare. Neither are they elevated by the spirit of sunlight that accompanied the initial days of the Blair dawn of 1997. Both pasts are long gone and the world Labour find themselves in is very different, exhausted by sixteen years of torpor. A Ribbonfarm post entitled The Ooze Grows sketches out the parameters of our current state. The twin dysfunctions of extreme politics and enshittification lie at the core of what it terms the “Shitty Shitty Bang Bang” age. Democratic political power is lurching from one end of the spectrum to the other as voters fracture into cohorts increasingly isolated from each other. Personalised social media grooms their view of what is real in separate echo chambers. Meanwhile, in the background, unimpeded market forces encourage ad proliferation and AI-generated slop and the Climate Catastrophe increasingly impinges on every human activity. The result is a background degradation of the quality of life for living beings. Navigating a path to power here requires triangulating an uncertain path across this three body problem, an approach that is inherently prone to uncertainty and collapse. The good life for most of us feels increasingly far away and out of reach. The focus for many is on avoiding the worst rather than elevating the human condition:
The world is becoming ungovernable even as visions and attempts to govern it are getting ever more outlandishly delusional and ineffective.
The only conclusion we can reach is that we’re in for a period of increasingly ungoverned anarchy. Sure, some sort of theater of governance will continue everywhere. There will be bang-Left and bang-Right theaters piously strutting about on their respective stages pretending to govern, to captive audiences desperate to believe they are being governed, confined within ever-shrinking and increasingly exclusionary islands of stable prosperity, secured with growing amounts of low-grade localized boundary-integrity-maintaining violence. Lots of individual lives will get destroyed in the process. There will also be marquee showcase things built just so there are things to point at as examples of governance doing something, even if not well. The facade will last longer than we expect, even if you’re expecting it.
But all around, the ooze will grow. The ungovernability will grow.
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How do you ignore and sidestep the bang-bang governance theaters, and feel and think your way into the ooze, to begin co-evolving with it? That’s the question. Fortunately, it’s mostly not a question for you or me, but for the next generation.
Labour will need to operate in an increasingly tired and frayed land. If they possess a core ideology, it seems to involve a combination of public service and predictable, unfussy delivery competence. Or, Deliverism. The best one can hope for is a focus on steering the ship of state through the ooze, holding back the polycrisis chaos. Improving everyday life as much as it is possible to do through deliverance given frightening externalities. A form of protopia rather than either dystopia or utopia. It will require hard work and some luck. Azeem Azhar in his letter to Keir Starmer outlines the terrain:
Britons have become fearful of the future. Nearly two-thirds of our citizens claim they want less artificial intelligence in their lives—yet that wave has barely begun. Their fears are reflected in our culture. Our books speak less about progress and the future and more about anxiety and risk. Technology does not deliver belief, security and possibility to people on its own. As we have learnt for the past decade or more to trust in innovation, people have to come to trust those overseeing it.
Your guiding light should be the belief that the future will be better than the past: that the rest of the decade can still be a Roaring Twenties.
Yet, to give those words meaning, we need to give them structure. Call it pragmatic optimism — acknowledging that we have the tools, the ingenuity, and the will for the future to be better. But it all takes work.
As they set sail, the ghost Labour need to keep an eye on is the more proximate shadow of Margaret Thatcher. Decades on, it still retains the capacity to haunt and traumatise the party to a greater degree than any spectre that social democracy can muster. Meanwhile, swirling around them, the water is rising and threatening to overwhelm everyone aboard:
Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory. For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, time is up. We are seeing the manifestation of those predictions as an alarming and unprecedented succession of climate records are broken, causing profoundly distressing scenes of suffering to unfold. We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.