Why Labour, Brown and Starmer can’t break with the ancien regime

The Brown proposals come in a 155-page report which is not official Labour policy. It recommends the abolition of the House of Lords, creation of a new upper house which is a senate of the nations and regions, decentralisation and the encouragement of a new regionalism in England – all linked to trying to grasp the failures of Westminster and Whitehall.

The Brown report is filled with much warm rhetoric and mood music which recognises the broken British political system – but it does not follow through to wholesale system change.

Such transformation and democratisation needs widespread support, and this is one major failing of the Brown commission.

The Brown commission was not a proper, transparent body. Firstly, it was initially trumpeted as a “convention”, but that was seen as too ambitious and shrunk to become a commission. Secondly, it was run with little public-facing deliberations but came directly from Brown who asserted his right vis-a-vis Starmer to sub-contract this work to himself.

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Brown has no power and is not standing for office in the next election. It is Starmer who will decide what parts of this commission are implemented and which are left on the drawing board.

Brown has over-sold its potential, talking of “a plan for economic, social, political and constitutional reform” leading to “a new Westminster and Whitehall”. There is an explicit over-presumption always found in Brown’s analysis that the solution to this and any problem is everyone understanding the correctness of Brown’s analysis. That, after all, was his record during his 13 years in government.

The Brown report has raised tensions in Labour and showcased the limitations of the party’s advocacy of constitutional change. Already there is kick-back within Labour circles about some of Brown’s proposals, with senior Labour figures questioning whether the abolition of the House of Lords should be a priority of a first-term Labour government.

Even within the report, the shortcomings of Labour’s stance are self-evident. This is a report on democratising Britain’s broken political system. Yet it expressly excludes the idea of introducing proportional representation for the House of Commons because Labour remains wedded to first past the post. And there is no support for codifying fundamental rights and entrenching the rights of citizens in a written constitution.

There is also no progress towards federalism, or Brown’s previous mantra of moving to “near-federalism”. Such an omission means that the politics of absolutism, “elective dictatorship” and the unreformed absolutist centre which can remake, limit or abolish any rights or institutions in the UK remain.

Too often Labour constitutional thinking post-devolution has fixated on how to keep Scotland and Wales in the Union and doing so by proposing more devolved powers. What this has missed is that any new constitutional settlement has to be about remaking the political centre, and codifying its relationship with citizens and political bodies including the devolved parliaments. Brown’s report recognises this in its rhetoric but falls completely short in substance.

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If the above were just about Brown then a new Labour approach by the current Starmer leadership could build on this and go further. But there is a deeper problem that Labour has historically shied away from addressing.

This is because the time-honoured dominant Labour tradition has been one of the all-powerful central state – namely that the British state has unchecked power to deliver change and overcome resistance. The idea behind this is the Fabian notion of the state as an agent for redistributing not just between classes and people, but between nations and regions. This is the legend of 1945 which Labour still cling to and cannot let go of.

Labour throughout its 122-year history has been as much for parliamentary sovereignty as a fetish as any Tory Brexiteer.

Academic Ewan Gibbs of the University of Glasgow commented: “Labour is far too strongly committed to parliamentary sovereignty and the unitary state for anything but a mass movement of members and unions within the party and activism outside of it forcing it to change its mind. That would have to primarily be an English affair too.”

Labour's partial revolution of the Blair-Brown years post-1997 did not institute a completely new constitutional settlement. Instead, it brought about ad hoc change implementing individual changes (Scottish and Welsh parliaments, Freedom of Information, Human Rights Act), which critically did not fit together as a new coherent system and did not kill off the ancien regime of absolutism.

This meant that the Tories as beneficiaries of the old order have – under the auspices of “Taking Back Control” – set out to roll back and limit the impact of the post-1997 reforms and reinstate an omnipotent centre. This can be seen in their obsession with the Human Rights Act and want to go further, considering withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights established in 1950, so that the British state is unrestrained and can govern any way it sees fit.

The Brown report seems to have learnt little from the weakness of the New Labour reforms. The lesson from 1997 is that ad hoc reform is not enough; you need to confront the absolutism at the heart of parliamentary sovereignty and need to remake the political centre by codifying and limiting of its powers. None of this is in the Brown prospectus.

This brings us to the core problem at the heart of the British state: the endurance of Empire State Britain. This is something that the British political class, including Labour, never want to confront.

This was clearly demonstrated by one prominent pro-Union supporter who said to me after my critique in my recently published book Scotland Rising: The Case For Independence: “I do not understand this point you are making about the UK still being an empire state.”

The Empire State was founded on the propensity of the UK to engage in military conquest, expeditions and interventions, with one of the primary roles of the state being the administration and maintenance of colonial possessions and Empire.

The consequences of this changed the domestic British state, making it one less focused on the well-being of its citizens, and more on the imperial project, warfare and projecting British power, characteristics which have been maintained to the present day.

As sociologists including Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy noted, “the empire strikes back” with a vengeance to the detriment of the citizens and governance of the UK.

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The British Labour Party has been in existence for 122 years. Since its inception, it has for example been proposing House of Lords abolition but has tellingly never gotten around to it in the total of 33 years of single-party Labour governments spanning 1924 to 2010.

At the same time, Labour has remained committed to an all-powerful political centre, one which is not limited in what it can do and that remains at its core “an elective dictatorship”.

Added to that, Labour believe in the elixir of winning monopoly political power on a minority of votes as the gold standard of how Labour can and should operate in government.

It does not matter to Labour that the reality is that, since the creation of a mass franchise, Tories are more often in office than Labour, or that there are in reality only episodic periods of Labour government after the Tories exhaust themselves or self-destruct – a pattern which holds for 1945, 1964, 1974, 1997 and maybe 2024.

Wholesale democratic transformation is not something the UK political classes will encourage, as it works against their interests.

It can only come about through pressure from the ground up, by popular support, and in times of major constitutional crises.

Brown’s report is another attempt to tinker at the edges with the purpose of renewing the constitutional status quo while seeing the citizens of the UK as spectators who are not the creators of their own future.

One day, the Labour Party may break with clinging to the wreckage of the British state, but for now, sadly, this is Groundhog Day for Brown and Labour.