The economic backdrop is central to why there is no prospect of a Starmer-led government achieving the relative stability of New Labour’s early years under Blair.
In 1997 the economy grew by 4.9%, the fifth successive year of relatively strong growth.
The national debt was 40% of GDP.
New Labour had promised to maintain the Tories’ spending plans and did so for their first three years in office, but beyond that were able to increase public spending, albeit linked to privatisation and the accumulation of huge PFI debts.
They embedded private capital into public services, but new hospitals and schools were built.
NHS funding, for example, has increased by an average of 3.6% a year in real terms since 1955.
However, under New Labour Mark One it increased by an average of 5.5%, compared to just 1% under the Con-Dems and 2.8% since.
Waiting lists did come down as a result but are now at a record 7.5 million.
Despite Starmer’s determined refusal to promise to deliver anything for the working class, there will still be an expectation that his government will substantially improve this situation, but – given his total acceptance of the diktats of the market – he will at best be able to marginally reallocate the pain.
It is not only the economy, however, that could push a Labour-led government into crisis quite quickly.
It will also lack authority among the working class from day one.
Historically, British capitalism has relied on Labour governments, when Labour was a ‘bourgeois workers’ party’, to introduce measures which the Tories could not.
In 1974, for example, the Labour government, in power during a period of economic crisis, was able to get away with implementing wage restraint for some time before mass struggle erupted against it.
Labour was then a bourgeois or ‘capitalist workers’ party’, with a working-class base which, via its democratic structures, could exert pressure on its capitalist leadership.
This was a Labour government elected after Tory prime minister Heath had gone to the country in February of that year, asking ‘who runs the country – us or the miners?’ The vote for Labour was a conscious vote by workers for a party they saw as ‘theirs’, which had implemented real reforms in the recent past.
For a period, trade union leaders were therefore able to hold back struggle on the basis the government had to be ‘given a chance’.
A Starmer-led government will not have one tenth of the authority with the working class that Labour had in the 1970s.
Nor will the situation be comparable to 1997.
Labour by then had been transformed into an unalloyed capitalist party.
Its democratic structures, through which the trade unions could exert pressure on the leadership, had been largely destroyed.
None of that is fundamentally different today, but the world has changed dramatically.
This was the period after the collapse of Stalinism, where capitalism was widely seen as the only viable option, and support for socialism was marginalised.
As we’ve already outlined, it was a time of relative economic growth and stability for capitalism.
Illusions existed in Blair’s alleged ‘third way’ – which claimed to combine neoliberal economics with ‘progressive’ social policies.
The trade union movement was in retreat.
As a result, there were no national strikes against the Labour government until the firefighters’ strike in 2002.
In contrast, today most of the generation that have grown up in the years since the Great Recession would consider themselves left wing.
Their consciousness has been shaped by their experience of capitalism.
Even today, those born in the late 1980s are earning an average of 8% less at 30 years-old than the generation before them.
No wonder one recent YouGov poll estimated that only 12% of 25-49-year-olds intend to vote Conservative at the next general election, whereas 67% consider themselves to be ‘socialist’.
The popular support for Corbyn despite his mistakes, especially among the young, was a reflection of the search for an alternative to capitalism.
At the same time the working class, far from being in retreat, has begun to recover its fighting capacity.
Last year we saw the highest level of strike action for over three decades, since the collapse of Stalinism.
All of these ingredients, combined with the dire state of the British economy, mean that Starmer will have an infinitely rougher ride than Blair in his first term.
