I disagree with much of this by @modernlockey.bsky.social, but I think the points he makes tell us something interesting about the shortcomings of the Starmer project and the problems that Labour faces today.
futureoftheleft.substack.com
In the first paragraph, you can feel the sense of frustration. Starmer's Labour had "a straightforwardly left-wing economic agenda", but still "the vibe was off" amongst progressive voters.
Yet the choice of economic policies show that Starmer's agenda was anything but straightforward. Labour suspended seven MPs for voting against the two-child benefit cap. Sure, it was an amendment to the King's Speech, but it still paints a mixed picture. bbc.co.uk
www.bbc.co.uk
The same is true for recognising Palestine. A generational change in UK foreign policy that will not benefit Labour in the slightest because it still provides arms exports to Israel. commonslibrary.parliament.uk
commonslibrary.parliament.uk
In other words, it's more a mixed picture than a straightforward agenda. So whose fault is it if the vibes are off? Not the voters. If people say “I’ve never felt worse about voting Labour” then the Labour Party has done something wrong. You can't wish for another electorate. To be fair, Lockey does go on to concede that "it is hard to see how Keir Starmer could have achieved" a poll bounce like the one Labour saw when it replaced him with Burnham.
(And I don't think it's crazy to think that Starmer's Labour could have beaten Reform either. But "strong delivery" probably seemed much more obvious inside government than in it did in the country. Can the average voter name a single example of anything that Starmer delivered in office?) But, though perhaps not intended to be, this concession is major: before Burnham took over, Labour were on *18%* in the polls and had been for months. If you reach that point and can't bounce back, you need to get out of the way.
The next paragraph highlights the persistent problem with Starmer's Labour: it lacked a clear philosophy. New Labour could be ruthlessly pragmatic because its leaders spent time working out a theory to explain the moment they faced, distilled it, then communicated it to the public. Starmer did not.
As Lockey says, this is partly because Starmer had to be both Kinnock and Blair. So the present iteration of Labour hasn't had time to work out what it thinks: it is, to some extent, flying blind. As for factional baggage, Blair ditched Clause IV just two years before becoming PM! (A side note, Labour-approved bombs fell on Iraq in 2003. To have voted for that iteration of the Labour Party, you would have had to have been born before June 1983. Those people are now in their 40s or older. Of course that isn't a factor for a lot of progressive voters today!) Expressive politics is not new. Gay rights were an issue in the 1980s -- 40 years ago! -- and no one in Labour would say that it was a mistake to pick a side in that fight. Likewise, second wave feminism in the two decades before. There was plenty of identity politics before the internet came along!
I also don't understand what Lockey means by "the purpose of politics is to change material reality". If material reality means economics, then it's flat wrong. Was, e.g., passing the Human Rights Act not political? And if material reality is more than economics, then it expands to vanishing point. This is a tacit admission that the media ecosystem changed but that Starmer's Labour didn't have a strategy to navigate it. There's nothing to stop "strong delivery" working as a message: Mandani does it. The difference is that he understands how to connect with people online.
For UK politics, the English language is a curse as it lets our politicos obsess over American politics. As such, the US looms large, despite its alien political system and culture. After the UK lurched towards multiparty politics, Labour strategists looked to a country with only two parties.
As for the claim that Shor has a robust theory, but Inglehart had a sketch: it shows a failure to engage with work that might diagnose Labour's problems today. If you depend on pundits, you will only ever have a superficial understanding. New Labour had Anthony Giddens for god's sake! Bemoaning post-materialist politics seems misplaced too. Sure, there are plenty of material issues left to solve. But post-material politics is a mark of success: we've solved some of the pressing issues that faced working people. Take Manchester's Victoria Baths. It has an exhibition showing how working people used to visit to bathe together in rooms full of bath tubs and launder their clothes in communal washing machines. This is a solved issue: homes now have washing facilities and people can think about other things. On economics and immigration, we should worry that the present resembles the 1930s more than post-material politics. And the government needs to reckon with the fact that conditions are outside of its control. There's not much it can do if Putin invades Ukraine or Trump bombs Iran.
This is why the obsession with US politics can be strategically dangerous too: the US is the global hegemony and *does* have the means to shape economic reality. The UK does not have the same room for manoeuvre, not even within its own borders. Another acknowledgement that Labour hasn't worked out how to communicate. Yes, but this is downstream of the fact that it hasn't worked out what it thinks. It's policy platform is basically a greatest hits of Labour past: nationalise, regulate, tweak.
As for "two tribes go to war", it reminds me of Merkel on Putin & war: "Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this." Parties resort to culture war crap because it's all that they have. Labour's not the only party that needs to work out what it's for. This passage strikes me as misplaced conservatism. The *Labour* Labour Party of Harold Wilson legalised homosexuality by passing the Sexual Offences Act 1967. I'm sure many thought that a sort of "hyper-progressive drift" in the 60s, but few now would doubt that it was the right thing to do.
For all his faults, Blair understood that this sentimentality is toxic for Labour's prospects and it is what made him so effective. You have to reinvent social democracy anew again and again and again, rather than hanker for the politics of yesteryear if you want to win and make lasting change. I would welcome more diversity in politics, but a focus on material issues rooted in this sort of sentimentality about who counts as working class is a death sentence for Labour. As @jamesdaustin.bsky.social says, you can't hold your own voters in contempt then begrudge them for not voting for you.