MUCH of Westminster Labour found an electoral victory with Jeremy Corbyn as leader a more unnerving prospect than defeat.

From within the Westminster bubble Labour’s meteoritic rise in the weeks before polling day in 2017 challenged the collective sense of self and the foundations of their political thought.

The strategic assumptions which all Labour’s Establishment tendencies shared — the notion that the middle ground in politics is critical, that undecided voters in swing constituencies are the target demographic — were subverted by the runaway success of Labour’s radical manifesto proposals which reached parts of the electorate barely touched by electoral politics.

This was brought home to me when, on a tough London housing estate which as a youth worker I knew well, a crowd of young black people turned up at the polling station and were confused to find that the name of Corbyn — the man they were determined to vote for — was not on the ballot papers which, for the first time in their lives, they were scrutinising.

It took the best efforts of the polling staff to convince them that they were not being defrauded and that the their hero had a local standard bearer for whom they could safely vote.

This memory surfaced when I reread Labour Together’s post-2019 election review which argued that the institutional and cultural bonds that linked many voters to Labour have weakened.

In the most oblique commentary on the Blair-Brown years, Labour Together argued: “From the loss of local Labour clubs to declining trade union membership, Labour has lost many of the institutional roots it had within communities, resulting in  disconnection.

“Labour lost millions of voters before it lost office in 2010 partly as a result of political alienation from politics more generally and from the Labour Party particularly, including perceptions that there was little difference between the parties and the prominence of new cultural divides.”

This week, two years after this initial assessment Labour Together published Labour’s Covenant: A Plan for National Reconstruction.

Cut through the careful phraseology and this is a serious-minded attempt to grapple with the problems of Britain’s economy and chart a viable course of action for Labour.

You might think that Labour Together’s pitch — that it is a self-proclaimed network for people from all traditions of the labour movement — has been rendered redundant by Sir Keir Starmer’s purge and Rachel Reeves’s delight at the culling of 200,000 Labour Party members but, despite a systematic and symbolic absence of any account of the political basis of Labour’s divisions, the document rewards study.

It starts from the premise that the 2008 financial crash and the 2016 Brexit vote were preludes to the demise of the neoliberal political order of four decades.

It principal conceit is that the notion of a “social contract” — which is described as “the basis of a liberal political order” — excludes too much of human social life to provide a framework for Labour’s political renewal and that a new “covenant” is required which does not have the law or property rights as a court of appeal but instead involves relationships based on reciprocity between individuals and groups.

In this can be seen the influence of the Blue Labour tendency which, for the most part, understands that much of the working-class Brexit vote was as much a cultural as political response to Labour’s alienation from its traditional base.

Central to the project is a recognition that Britain needs a plan for the reconstruction of the national economy focused on “state-led action but also social and economic development from the bottom up.”

The document abounds with self-evidently sensible ideas which, at a stretch, might be achievable by a Labour government — the endowment of regional development banks, extra vocational training, the regulation of big tech platforms, patent reform, a shift to taxing asset wealth, a revision of council tax bands, measures to mitigate climate change, decentralised local government, reviving high streets — these are all ideas that naturally arise as the financialisation of the economy, the commodification of everyday transactions and privatisation impose their logic on all aspects of social and economic life.

Absent from this is any sense that the achievement of even these modest goals would bring a Labour or, implicitly, a “progressive coalition” government, into sharp conflict with a ruling class.

This mysterious entity, as such, makes not a single appearance in the document save as an oblique reference to “the governing classes.” It is as if there is no explicit connection between ownership and the class power that ownership confers.

We are told that more than other countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, British governments relinquished democratic control of national economic development and turned the levers of power over to unaccountable corporate interests.

Alongside a critique of Britain’s low productivity, low wages and unbalanced rentier economy there is a lament over the social dislocation that accompanied the “disruptive forces of uncontrolled capitalism.”

Whenever class makes an appearance the working class is cast as a social partner with its otherwise invisible antithesis. Where obstacles to a progressive agenda are rooted in the system of private ownership, the power of capital and its expression in the state apparatus, political institutions or the media class they remain intangible.

Thus the assertion that a “green politics must have leadership from all sections of society and be based on collective self-interest and a vision of a better way of living” does not account for the monopoly ownership of the oil and energy sectors and the power these exercise in national and global politics. Or of the measures that are required to negate these powers or of their probable response to any challenge.

Labour Together originated as a response to the defeat of Labour under Miliband and recognised, albeit in muted language, the redundancy of the New Labour project which it says “accommodated itself to the liberal market politics established by Margaret Thatcher.”

The “financialised business model,” the ”disaggregation” and commodification of public assets through private finance initiatives “turned the levers of power over to unaccountable corporate interests.”

The solution, it seems, is better regulation of markets and reform of the Companies Act.

It appears that the ills that affect British society under late capitalism culminated in a failure by “the whole edifice of class and cultural power” to honour its part in the covenant.

In this formulation — in which the contemporary and historical realities of capitalist exploitation and the oppressions rooted in capitalist ownership and power disappear behind an illusion of shared interest — we see the revival of illusions that social progress is possible without tackling the power that resides in private ownership or in transforming the state and institutions in which this class power resides.

The “labour interest” makes an appearance in proposals to reform corporate governance and industrial decision-making. That is it.

Everyone, we are told, “wherever they live, regardless of income, participates in the everyday economy,” and that, “the utilities, health, education, housing and care sectors are there for everybody…”

Thus uncomfortable facts about the realities of life in a class-divided society are left unconsidered.

While a significant minority of children are educated privately, private health is a parasite on the NHS and a fast track to treatment for the wealthy; housing is a prisoner of the rentier economy of private landlords and a parasitic finance sector; while social care is a private industry in which access is socially stratified by price, access to these common goods is regulated by class.

While price rises are imposed by the corporate owners of energy irrespective of a citizen consumer’s ability to pay, the notion that utilities, gas, water and electricity might be seen as part of the commons appears whimsical.

When the document imports wholesale Reeves’s notion of the “everyday economy” — the private, public and social sectors including transport, childcare and adult care, health, education, utilities, broadband, social security and the low-waged sectors of hospitality, retail, food processing and distribution — these are considered separately from production and ownership.

It is worth remembering that when Labour’s present shadow chancellor introduced her concept of the “everyday economy” she did so as a “contribution to the debate on how Labour can build on the success of its 2017 manifesto.”

It is something of a reversal to argue, as Reeves does today, that a “big swathe of nationalisation” would not be the priority of a future Labour government because she is not convinced that it would represent “good value for money.”

Odd really, when big business and the banks clearly think their ownership of these things represents good value.

Labour Together has set itself the task of devising a programmatic approach to government that recognises much of the malign character of the existing mode of production and the peculiar turn British capitalism has taken.

Its approach takes into account the superstructural and cultural forms in which the Labour tradition in working-class politics has been hollowed out by the strategic choices capital has taken in its postwar development and the consequent changes in the class structure.

But it avoids concrete proposals to tackle the question of ownership and has no strategy for dealing with the resistance which capital invariably mounts when its ownership and power is challenged.

And at the core of its credibility problem is a complete absence of any sense that Britain is an integral part of the global coalition of imperial interests and an active presence in the neoliberal global order.

Although Labour Together takes note of the shifts in global power and the vulnerabilities that beset modern Britain and sees Britain’s transatlantic relationship as “transactional and rarely reciprocal” it still sees our country in a nuclear alliance with the US — with all the obligations that that entails.

To assert that “Labour has always been the party of patriotism and internationalism, its foreign policy growing out of a realism that aligns national and international interests” is to dismiss the human costs of imperialism’s 20th and 21st-century wars; official Labour’s complicity in more than a century of colonial exploitation and repression and its present-day projection of imperial power.

The document hints at Britain “reducing its dependence on untrustworthy foreign powers” as if the largely bipartisan foreign policy moves of the last century were a series of unfortunate accidents rather than the inevitable consequences of British capital’s imperialist alliances and official Labour’s support for these.

Labour Together wants an accommodation with capital to sustain a new social democratic settlement.

It has a problem in that it lacks a willing partner in Britain’s capitalist class that itself has no illusions about the nature of class war.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com.