Keir Starmer has welcomed the easing of the lockdown, saying he thinks ‘the government is trying to do the right thing and in that we will support them’. The Labour leader wants to scrutinise the details of the policy but recognises that keeping the economy in stasis for much longer will have serious consequences. Meanwhile, in another part of Labour land, Richard Burgon put forward his total opposition to easing. In the Commons, Corbyn’s former shadow justice secretary said the easing of lockdown restrictions was simply a way of ‘appeasing right-wingers on the Tory backbenches’ and that the prime minister was ‘gambling with people’s lives’. Many on the left-wing of the party seem to mostly support Burgon’s position. Being pro-lockdown has become a bizarre new kind of virtue signalling for many on the Labour left.
Presenting yourself as pro or anti-lockdown is the most recent in a long line of phony wars between different sides of the Labour party. Although this has been building for some time, as the lockdown is eased, this war will likely be ramped up further. It’s the latest front in the battle between Starmer’s push to make Labour politics relevant to a much bigger electorate than Corbyn ever managed, and the left of the party’s attempt to stop him from doing so.
From a purely political angle, being passionately pro-lockdown doesn’t make a lot of sense from a Labour perspective and particularly so for the left of the party. The longer the restrictions go on, the more they will affect the working class adversely. The furlough scheme was only ever going to be a plaster on the economic wound inflicted by the Covid crisis and its effectiveness over time is bound to see steadily diminishing returns, particularly given it was only ever a partial replacement of earnings. Arguably there should be a push from the Labour left – who constantly claim that one of the reasons the party’s electoral fortunes are in the dumps are due to it falling out of touch with the views of the working class – to get people back to work as quickly as possible.
In fact, the Labour left’s pro-lockdown passion makes little intellectual sense however you try and break it down. Burgon’s point in the House this week was that the government didn’t lock down soon enough and that this cost thousands of lives. Putting aside whether that was the case or not, Burgon then jumped straight to the idea that easing the lockdown now would be a disaster, as if the two suppositions flowed easily into one another. It is entirely possible that the government should have locked down earlier than it did and now happens to be a good time to start easing the restrictions.
I thought for a while that the reason the Labour left were becoming so pro-lockdown was because the Tory position was growing more and more anti-lockdown and it was a reaction against that. But I no longer think this is the root of pro-lockdown fervour on the Labour left. Instead, it is mostly a means of doing battle with Starmer. It seems clear that as Starmer has shown more and more that he is going to play carefully with his criticisms of the government in order to build credibility later when he wants to really go after them, the left of his party have moved more and more against that positioning.
What this means in the end is that you have a lot of positioning for the sake of it, with no recourse to what anyone actually believes to be truly real. The longer the phony war within the Labour party goes on, the longer the Tories will be in power.
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