In scary enough circumstances, “stability” can be one of the most appealing words in politics. When a country has had years of political and economic chaos, as Britain has, who doesn’t want life to be more stable? More consistency in the provision of public services, in people’s incomes, in the behaviour of governments – things taken for granted in calmer times – becomes something which voters yearn for and which ambitious politicians promise.
So far, Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership has really been one long, sometimes ruthless exercise in creating and offering stability: for the party after the turmoil under Jeremy Corbyn, for the country after the collapsing policies of the Tories, and for 10 Downing Street, which most observers expect to soon be occupied by Starmer’s solid, methodical, largely unchanging personality.
If that happens, the relief may be more widespread and politically potent than his still underwhelming personal ratings suggest. Competence can seem an abstract and not very compelling quality until you actually experience it.
There may be a sense for many voters of waking up from a long nightmare. The shocks and disasters since the Brexit referendum, seven grim years ago, have been so relentless that if a Starmer premiership can bring this sometimes frightening time to an end, or even just reduce the chaos for significant periods, then the bulk of the population who prefer not to think about politics may be quietly grateful. “We should never forget that politics should tread lightly on people’s lives,” Starmer said in his conference speech this week. “Can we deliver the rock of stability they need to move forward in their lives?”
It was a typical piece of Starmer rhetoric: effortful rather than elegant, and bigger on generalities than solutions. Yet Labour’s offer of stability feeds an appetite that exists not just in the electorate but in other, arguably just as powerful, places. “One thing that the [financial] markets are really keen on is seeing a stable government,” said Paul Johnson, head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, on the BBC’s Today programme on Monday. Big businesses with plans to invest in Britain, an increasingly rare species under the Tories, are also attracted by the possibility of a more coherent, Starmer-led government, as the eager groups of corporate visitors at the Labour conference made obvious. For the first time since Blairism, Labour is much of the establishment’s favourite party.
In some ways, that’s a welcome change. Britain often lags behind other democracies, such as Germany and the US, in the willingness of its economic elites to support a centre-left party. One of the results of this almost unthinking corporate loyalty to the Tories has been frequently complacent and reckless Conservative governments, which damage many of the economic interests they are supposed to serve while making the wider economy weaker and harsher for the rest of us. A decent period of business-backed Labour government could begin to dismantle this Tory-industrial complex.
Labour people should not have any illusions, however, about the nature of the alliance being offered. Some businesses may like stability some of the time, but capitalism is a system with instability at its heart: the constant churn of markets, the starkly diverging outcomes of profit and loss, the creation of winners and losers, the roller-coaster of boom and bust.
When City of London financiers say they want a stable government, what they leave unsaid is that they want it to act as a political and social buffer, so that they can carry on chasing their destabilising but profitable goals. And if their business strategies fail on a dangerous scale, they expect the government to bail them out – as the last Labour one did – to prevent the market disorder destroying their companies and spreading into everyday life.
Labour has been in power during some of the world’s worst economic meltdowns: the 1929 Wall Street Crash, the stagflation of the mid-70s and the 2008 financial crisis. On all three occasions, Labour worked hard to restore stability with some success, but lost power not long afterwards. The Conservatives managed to persuade enough voters that much of the turmoil had been Labour’s fault, while the businesses that Labour had saved did not sufficiently speak up in its defence. The party had done its job from a business point of view, and could now be discarded. In all three cases, long stretches of Tory dominance followed.
Labour governments often act as political stabilisers in a similar fashion. When the Conservatives have ruled too badly or too long, Labour replaces them, fixes some of the problems created by the Tories that voters find least tolerable, and then, after a few years, the Conservative status quo returns. Even the one partial exception to this pattern in recent history – New Labour’s 13 busy years of social, economic and constitutional reforms – ended with many voters, especially in what would become known as the “red wall”, believing that Labour had not done very much, a view of the party’s record that it has struggled to correct since.
It’s possible that next time things will be different. So terrible is the Tory record since 2010 that if Labour exploits it effectively – and the announcement this week of a Covid corruption commissioner is a promising start – Labour has a chance of becoming a regular ruling party, and perhaps even the default one. The latter scenario may sound far-fetched but that was Labour’s status for parts of the 40s, 60s and 70s, and throughout the 00s.
Yet even if the party does manage to establish itself properly in Downing Street again, the pursuit of stability could still become a trap. A stable society is often one that isn’t changing. Britain has become hugely unequal, and there will be great pressure from some elites on any Starmer government to keep their privileges intact. Corbyn provoked so much opposition as leader partly because he threatened to turn Labour from a force for stability into something more actively egalitarian and therefore more disruptive.
It’s a point of principle for Starmer to scorn his predecessor. But if Britain is going to become a country where, as Starmer stirringly put it in his speech, “working people have the freedom to enjoy what they love”, and have “more time, more energy, more possibility, more life”, then stability won’t be enough.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
