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Oliver Eagleton is an Associate Editor for the New Left Review and Sidecar. His writing has appeared in Novara Media, The Guardian, Jacobin, New Statesman, among others. His book, The Starmer Project, chronicling Keir Starmer’s tenure as the leader of the Labour Party, was published by Verso. 

In this piece, Eagleton traces the shifting plates of the UK’s electoral politics, as the Labour Party under Keir Starmer continues to eat into the Conservative vote share by emulating Tory style, policy, and presentation.

Eagleton makes the case that both Prime Minister Sunak and Opposition Leader Starmer are engaged in a “game of negation”, in which both leaders distinguish themselves by opposing their predecessors, rather than proposing a policy programme of their own.

A paradox of contemporary British politics: Rishi Sunak’s governing Conservative Party, complacent and directionless after a long stint in office, sees its public support fall precipitously; meanwhile, the Labour Party, under the right-wing leadership of Keir Starmer, makes every effort to appear just as vacant, just as devoid of ideas, and begins to surge in the polls. The opposition becomes popular by emulating the unpopular incumbent. Simulacrum beats reality. 

More accurately, we might say that this dynamic is one of mutual emulation and repudiation. Sunak, upon becoming Prime Minister in October 2022, excoriated the populist energy of Liz Truss’s administration and adopted a more cautious, professionalized approach resembling that of Starmer. Likewise, Starmer pulled out all the stops to banish the memory of his antecedent, Jeremy Corbyn, while mimicking the Tories’ programme – with near-identical positions on fiscal discipline, foreign policy, ‘law and order’ and so on.  

Political antagonism has thus become more of an internal feature of the two Westminster parties than a force animating the relationship between them. The imperative, in 2023, is to attack one’s predecessor and mimic one’s putative opponent. 

On this level, Corbyn and Truss were wholly different to the current crop of leaders. Their policies drew clear dividing lines with their respective rivals across the aisle: Corbyn advocated a new social-democratic settlement centred on rapid decarbonization and stronger trade unions; Truss attempted a smash-and-grab transfer of wealth from the lowest to the highest earners, aimed at stimulating investment and innovation. But these positive programmes were roundly defeated, and in their wake, British politics has become a purely negative pursuit. Starmer and Sunak feel they must distinguish themselves from Corbyn and Truss, yet the absence of any alternative vision means that this differentiation takes the form of simple opposition: against deficit spending, against green policies, against public ownership. What they are for is continually deferred. To watch them at the dispatch box is to grasp the endless play of différance.

This aspect of the British superstructure emerges from the secular crisis of its base. The country’s fragile financialized economy, propped up during the Blair years by cheap credit and asset-price bubbles, capsized in 2008 – with austerity and Brexit later compounding its problems. Now, its weak industry and crumbling infrastructure gives it little ballast against external shocks like Covid and the war in Ukraine, which will become more frequent as ecological breakdown and geopolitical conflict accelerate. Given the UK’s current trajectory – poor growth, falling wages, high inflation, underfunded services – there is every chance that it will fall out of the ‘convergence club’ of advanced Western nations and become relegated to semi-peripheral status. 

We saw what happened when Corbyn and Truss tried, in very different ways, to turn this ship around: both were defeated by an anti-democratic onslaught in which financial interests played a leading role. British capital, it seems, has little instinct for self-preservation. It is more comfortable with a condition of managed decline – steady-as-she-goes into the fringes of the world system – than with radical proposals to reorient the economy, whether from the left or the right. 

In Sunak and Starmer, it has found such willing managers. Their political authority comes from their self-conscious refusal to face up to the country’s chronic issues. Their essential outlook is repressive, both in their refusal to recognise Britain’s structural malaise and in their hostility to those – like climate activists or cost-of-living campaigners – who try to highlight it. 

This repressive register helps to explain Starmer’s surprising 20-point poll lead. For if what one might call ‘positive politics’ have been abandoned by the bipartisan establishment, the game of negation naturally favours the opposition. All it must do is capitalize on disaffection with the incumbent. As far as most people are concerned, a vote for Starmer is not a vote for anything in particular; yet in the simplest sense it is a vote against the status quo. And given how low public expectations have sunk thanks to the Great Stagnation, that is often more than enough.  

In this bleak conjuncture, one of the only glimmers of hope is the insurgent labour movement, with sector after sector launching strike action in recent weeks. The question is: will the unions form a coherent bloc capable of challenging Britain’s macroeconomic consensus, or will the government drive a wedge between them?

Overall, the level of worker militancy remains low, and the movement’s demands are largely conservative-defensive – aimed at protecting pay and conditions amid national decline rather than making a case for a new social settlement. In theory, this allows the Tories to buy off stronger sections of organized labour while crushing weaker ones in a throwback to the Thatcher era. 

But it is unclear whether Sunak has the tactical intelligence to take this step. His anti-strike legislation, brought to parliament last month, targets a wide range of workers in the emergency services and transportation sectors. As such, it lays the foundations for a coordinated response across an array of different workplaces. The upshot of this coordination could be the shift from atomized industrial disputes to a unified political programme – what one might call the politicization of the trade union movement. At present, though, the British left has no institution that could forge such solidarity. We must build one soon, or the politics of negation will reign supreme. 

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