EARLIER this week, Labour Together’s Josh Simons took to the airwaves to suggest shipping a barge of people-smuggler gangs to the north of Scotland. 

Speaking days before the start of the Scottish Labour conference, Simons’s suggestion was widely condemned. Well accustomed to dealing with such clangers from London, Scottish Labour described Simons’s LBC appearance as a “moment of cringe” from the “fringes” of the party.

This was disingenuous. Labour Together is central to the Starmer project, having propelled the London MP to the Labour leadership in 2020. 

Indeed, the think tank’s founder and former director, Morgan McSweeney, is currently in charge of Labour’s general election campaign. Simons’s comments — which he later apologised for, explaining that he was “half-Scottish” — offer an all too common insight into the politics of those running the Labour Party.

During the same LBC interview, Simons explained that his main concern about the British government’s Rwanda scheme “is not actually the human rights implications of it.” Instead, Simons worries the plan “will not stop the boats.” 

His sentiments mimic those of Labour’s front bench, who have time and again bowed to the government’s framing of the immigration debate. Labour offers only a more efficient immigration system, consciously choosing not to challenge the racism at the heart of the Home Office. 

However, making such an argument would require politics, something Simons and his ilk are determined to banish from the Labour Party.

One week before he appeared on LBC, Simons was rolled on to Newsnight to defend the Labour leadership’s decision to abandon the £28 billion Green Prosperity Plan. 

Claiming that Labour’s target voters had not noticed Starmer’s series of U-turns, Simons made a Freudian slip and explained the electorate would only notice “what Labour’s stance was when we get to the general election campaign.”

Of course, this is nonsense. Thousands of workers across Britain — most of all those in Grangemouth and Port Talbot — await the arrival of the promised just transition. 

Besides insulting the electorate’s intelligence, however, Simons’s slip should be read as a declaration of the Starmer project’s intention to shrink the political sphere, minimising popular engagement. Simons admitted that Labour has come to rely on the public’s alienation to excuse its lack of ambition. 

With an apathetic electorate, Labour can choose the path of least resistance, aligning itself as the primary party of capital and avoiding class confrontation. Fundamentally, this is the anti-politics of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.

This is clear from Labour’s economic policy. The economy, for Labour’s front bench, is siloed from politics and, consequently, the “fiscal rules” — Rachel Reeves’s codeword for the position of the IMF and Bank of England — must go unquestioned. 

On this trajectory, Labour’s ascendancy will not renew democracy, as has been widely touted by the likes of Gordon Brown, but default to confining power to the hands of the few. Starmer has made no secret of his disdain for the social forces and broader class conflict required to do otherwise.

However, as this weekend will convey, the focus groups upon which Simons bases his assumptions are not as representative as he thinks. In a dress rehearsal for the resistance an incoming Labour government can expect from popular movements, protesters will descend on the Scottish Labour conference. 

Most will do so as part of the Scottish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign’s national march, but climate activists will also protest against Labour's decision to dump its green industrial strategy. This will generate an important confrontation between the triangulating post-politics of Labour’s leadership and the mass politics of the movement.

This is the terrain upon which the left must to build opposition to the Starmer project, seeking to raise popular consciousness where Labour depends on dampening it. Ignoring the Labour Party, however, is not an option. Indeed, the development of links between the party’s left flank and the broader movement will be important to ensure that these efforts retain an orientation on national politics in addition to the local.

In Scotland, Starmer’s rightward shift has been handled intelligently by Anas Sarwar. No friend of the left, Sarwar has carefully sought to create clear dividing lines with the UK Labour leader. Most notably, he appeared on picket lines when Starmer banned his front bench from doing so and called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza while Starmer whipped his MPs to vote against one.

Like Starmer, however, Sarwar would rather prosecute the SNP on incompetence and bad management than articulate a political alternative. Scottish Labour’s much-reduced constitutional offering also bears the hallmarks of complacency evident in Starmer’s pitiful policy offering. 

The SNP having exhausted all viable routes to a second independence referendum, the opportunity for Scottish Labour to make inroads into their vote is clear. However, besides platitudes, meaningful overtures to the 50 per cent of the population who support independence remain minimal — and were certainly set back by Simons’s LBC appearance. 

The hope, presumably, is that these voters will default to Scottish Labour. Perhaps they will at the general election. However, attempts to successfully rebuild Scottish Labour’s electoral coalition in the long term will falter for as long as the party fails to confront the constitutional question. Anti-politics rears its ugly head north of the border too.

It is only right then that Scottish Labour’s conference slogan — “The change Scotland needs” — should riff on Barack Obama’s “Change we need.” What we actually need, however, is a strategy that defends political principle from those who seek to banish it from the popular domain. This will require an alliance of forces strong enough to reject the pervasive sense of hopelessness upon which anti-politics thrives.

Coll McCail is a Scottish Labour executive member and climate activist.