Is "deliverism" dead?

Lawrence gave his first take on Iran at the weekend and will return to it later this week. But today we’re going back to British politics with a guest post from David Klemperer - one of the most insightful writers about the Labour party and the challenges facing the centre-left.

David works at the University of Bath’s Institute for Policy Research and co-edits Renewal – a journal of social democracy. Last year he wrote for us making the case for compulsory voting. In this post he looks at one of the big divides amongst progressives at the moment: is beating the radical right primarily about delivering a better economy and services or is narrative just as, if not more, important?

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It is commonplace for commentators in the UK to argue that the current Labour government lacks a clear or coherent strategy for winning the next election. Under the guidance of his former (and largely unlamented) chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer and his cabinet have flitted from slogan to slogan, and from professed focus to professed focus – veering from “five missions” to a “plan for change”, and from an initial rhetorical obsession with “growth” to a new emphasis on the “cost of living”.

Part of the problem is (as has been widely noted) that Starmer lacks either the ideological conviction or the substantive political project necessary to give his government a sense of direction. But an underappreciated contributing factor to Labour’s travails is a deeper, meta-uncertainty about contemporary political and electoral dynamics – a meta-uncertainty that currently appears to plague much of the global centre-left.

Specifically, Labour – like many other centre-left parties – appears to be unsure as to the relationship between government policy-making on the one hand, and electoral outcomes on the other. How far are a government’s chances of re-election determined by the practical impact or material success of its policies – whether on the economy, public services, or voters’ wider quality of life? Or, conversely, are policy outcomes largely irrelevant to electoral contests that might today be primarily determined by messaging, narratives, and broader [social] media dynamics?

This is a fundamental question, and one that in practice shapes every facet of Labour’s approach to government. Although it is not a binary choice, and answers to it generally fall within a spectrum, where people land within that spectrum will determine how they think about issues from choices over ministerial appointments (is it better to prioritise competence or charisma?), to policy trade-offs on tax or immigration (is it worth breaking a promise or adopting an unpopular policy if there is reason to think it could produce a better outcome?) Many tactical, strategic and policy debates within Labour are thus in effect implicit debates over this question of the relationship of policy outcomes to electoral outcomes.

This question, however, is rarely posed explicitly. To the extent that it is broached, it is via the concept of “deliverism” – a much-discussed approach to politics alternately either pronounced “dead”, or presented as the basis of the government’s outlook. What, then, is deliverism? And how have the debates over it developed?