Why should the left be ashamed to be left?

The National

28-05-2025

Labour never promised transformation. They campaigned on stability, on fiscal discipline, on not scaring anyone. The fiscal rules were locked in. Public investment was already constrained. Immigration rhetoric hardened before the first vote was cast. Still, many voters – including some on the left – held on to the hope that the machinery of government might offer opportunities for ambition, or at least decency.
But less than a year in, that hope is evaporating. Cabinet ministers are storming out of meetings. The Deputy Prime Minister is circulating an alternative budget memo proposing tax increases to avoid welfare cuts. A leadership contest is openly discussed. Not because something unexpected has happened – but because everything is happening exactly as expected.
What's missing is not just policy. It's narrative. Starmer offers fiscal discipline, praises business, restricts immigration and maintains brutal Conservative-era policies like the two-child benefit cap – which denies support to third children in poor families. Only when Nigel Farage's Reform UK began criticising the policy did Labour begin murmuring about change.
This isn't just caution. It's a failure to lead. Because what British voters want – like French voters in 2012 – is not just competence. It's transformation: an end to austerity, a belief that the state can be a force for good, a moral rebalancing after a decade of precarity.
And here's the danger: when the left refuses to offer that, it opens the door to those who will. In France, that is, ever increasingly, the far-right Rassemblement National. In the UK, it may well be Farage. Reform UK are now talking about child poverty, restoring fuel payments, helping working-class families – themes Labour once owned and have since abandoned.
Farage is no ally of the poor. But Labour's silence gives him room to pretend.
This keeps happening because too many centre-left parties have internalised the idea that they must apologise for their values. That being 'electable' means abandoning redistribution, avoiding the word tax and endlessly chasing the political centre. But you can't technocrat your way out of political collapse. You can't reconnect with working-class voters if you treat them as an embarrassment.
I've seen this before. I'm a French journalist now based in Scotland.
In 2012, I was a member of the French Socialist Party. I campaigned enthusiastically in the primaries for Martine Aubry (below) – one of the last political leaders I truly admired.
For readers unfamiliar with her, Aubry was the architect of France's 35-hour work week and a principled social democrat who placed care, justice and shared dignity at the heart of her politics. She stood for a kind of feminism rooted in working-class realities and state responsibility.
But Aubry lost the primary. François Hollande – a bland centrist and consensus-builder – won. And what followed was one of the most disillusioning experiences of my political life: a slow implosion of the French left, driven by a man who, like Starmer, confused caution with courage and management with leadership.
Hollande's 2012 victory was heavy with hope but light on substance.His slogan – Le changement, c'est maintenant ('Change is now') – was designed to be vague. And the result itself was far from a plebiscite. He won with a modest margin and limited enthusiasm, mostly because people wanted rid of Nicolas Sarkozy, not because they believed in his vision.
Starmer's path to power followed the same logic. Labour's share of the vote was historically low. The scale of the victory masked the thinness of the mandate – a rejection of 14 years of Conservative rule, not an endorsement of a bold new programme.
The moment Hollande took office, something broke. He tried to reassure the markets, surrounded himself with economic technocrats and embraced 'fiscal responsibility'. Early tax increases on the wealthy were reversed. Corporate tax breaks expanded. Labour protections were weakened. Investment in social transformation stalled.
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Then came the real rupture: a shift to the right on identity and security. In the wake of terrorist attacks, Hollande declared a state of emergency, expanded police powers and even proposed revoking French citizenship from dual nationals convicted of terrorism – a deeply symbolic, reactionary move that split his own party and alienated much of the electorate.
By 2017, Hollande was so unpopular he didn't even run for re-election. The Socialist Party collapsed. Emmanuel Macron took power. And the far-right surged into the space the left had abandoned.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, the story has played out differently – but not necessarily more hopefully. Labour's collapse created space not for a bold progressive force, but for the SNP: a party that, while rhetorically centre-left, has governed in a cautious, often managerial style. It has benefited from Westminster's failures more than from its own radicalism.
Still, within a bleak UK-wide landscape, the Scottish Child Payment stands out as one of the few serious policy efforts to reduce child poverty. It recognises, at least, that the state should do something.
While Labour drift, something interesting is happening back in France. In the coming days, the Socialist Party – the traditional party of the centre-left, once dominant and now largely eclipsed – will hold their national congress. For the first time in years, there is a real debate about what the left is for. How do we rebuild a credible alternative in time to prevent the far right from winning the presidency in 2027?
Among the candidates vying to lead the party is Boris Vallaud, a relatively little-known figure outside France but a serious and thoughtful one. A former Élysée adviser under Hollande and now an MP in the Landes, Vallaud has built a reputation as a consistent, principled voice on the democratic left. Unlike many in his generation, he never embraced Macronism or the hollow centre.
His campaign has resonated around a striking formulation: 'Socialism is orphaned of a strong idea.' His answer is démarchandisation – the reclaiming of life from the logic of the market.
It's a concept that avoids the nostalgia of full nationalisation and the clichés of 'big state' politics. Instead, it questions the market's expansion into every domain of life – from early years care to education, housing, even human relationships. It asks what parts of society should be protected from profit imperatives, and how the state, civil society and communities might reclaim them.
Vallaud is not alone: across the French left, from François Ruffin to Clémentine Autain, a common diagnosis is emerging – that the unchecked commodification of everything fuels not only inequality, but despair, loneliness and, eventually, the far right.
In this sense, démarchandisation isn't just a policy tool. It's a way to reconnect socialism with meaning, power and emotion – and to name the unease so many people feel in a world where even water, old age and education are for sale.
That kind of language – of meaning, purpose, direction – is strikingly absent from British politics.At a time when so much of the debate here has been reduced to numbers, caps, thresholds and reviews, it's worth noting when someone tries to articulate a broader horizon.
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Because what I learned from campaigning with Aubry – and what I still believe — is that the left is strongest when it speaks from a place of care. Not sentimentality, but care as structure: interdependence, dignity, shared wealth. The 35-hour week was never just about hours. It was about balance, collective life, and rejecting the idea that growth is all that matters.
Aubry didn't just manage. She inspired. Hollande didn't. And Starmer isn't.
When the left retreats from these principles, it becomes cold. When it retreats from redistribution, it becomes irrelevant. When it copies the right, it legitimises its ideas. That's what Hollande did. And now Starmer is walking straight down the same path.
In 2017, the French Socialist Party collapsed into irrelevance. The lesson wasn't that the left is doomed. It was that a left that forgets what it's for will not survive.
Starmer should take note. Otherwise, like Hollande, he will be remembered not just for failing to deliver change – but for extinguishing the hope that change was still possible.
As for whether démarchandisation could be that long-lost strong idea – well, that's for another column.