What’s the point of politics?

Britain’s Labour Party, finally back in power after 14 years of opposition, are now having to navigate their many internal divisions. Over the last decade, the issue of welfare has proven particularly fraught. Founded as the party of workers, Labour went on to create much of the modern welfare state. Given this history, the choice to support a more generous provision of benefits might seem uncontroversial. In practice, it has proven anything but. Soon after Keir Starmer became prime minister in July, disagreements on welfare were already tangling him up in knots.

What is going on here, and why is the issue such a difficult one for Labour? A deeper analysis of the debate suggests it’s about more than differing takes on policy. On a philosophical level, the conflict might actually be about the purpose of politics itself.

The current drama over welfare dates back to 2015. Jeremy Corbyn had been picked by Labour’s left flank as its sacrificial candidate (they stood a candidate as a matter of course, but never expected them to win). But this time was different. Harriet Harman was interim leader, and thus heir apparent to lead the party into the general election. Only, she had made a miscalculation. She had ordered her party to abstain on the second reading of a welfare bill brought by the Conservative government, which would institute a two-child cap on benefit payments, alongside other measures to restrict welfare provision.

The cap meant that families with more than two children would not be given any additional support. The vote was a procedural one – the MPs would have a chance to vote against the final bill. Harman believed she was avoiding a trap set to get Labour on the unpopular side of a prominent issue. She was playing to the general public, and thought she could keep her party onside.

But the move backfired. The cap went through and the decision to abstain was presented by supporters on the party’s left flank as a betrayal of everything Labour was supposed to stand for. This surge of anger fuelled interest in Corbyn – the only candidate who rebelled against the whip – and helped create the wave of interest that propelled him to the leadership.

Fast forward to today, and Starmer’s commitment to keeping the cap is one of the ways in which he has distanced himself from Corbyn’s more radical politics. But now, as prime minister, he is under significant pressure from his party to remove it, raising the prospect that this policy issue may once again play an outsized role in shaping the fate of Labour.

Why can’t the issue be resolved? Firstly, it’s emotive: we’re talking about children, many of whom are living below the poverty line. But there seems to be another dynamic that is hampering communication. If you look more closely at the debate, the two sides appear to be speaking entirely different languages. One side – let’s call them the pragmatists – view politics purely in terms of policies enacted and material change on the ground. The other – let’s call them the idealists – see a role for demonstrating their principles and modelling them in public. It is a debate that has simmered for centuries, and yet seems to catch each new political generation unawares.

Idealism vs pragmatism

Applying this lens to the current welfare debate, the idealists in Labour objected to Harman’s pragmatic strategy. Even if the vote didn’t matter in practice, they believed that Labour should still stand up for its principles. (Later, this simple picture got more complicated, as Corbyn’s 2017 manifesto was in fact predicated on maintaining the benefit cap, which his supporters then seemed to accept.)

This is the history that Keir Starmer’s government was facing off against when it came into power and prepared its first King’s Speech and Budget. Not only did it have the weight of its own historical decisions on the two-child benefit cap to reckon with, but it faced significant pressure from almost every child poverty charity and policy expert, all of whom agreed that ending the cap would be by far the single most effective measure to reduce child poverty in the UK.

Many Labour MPs will privately admit that scrapping the cap is the policy they would most like to see the government enact, but in public there is no promise yet on the table. Labour has created a child poverty action group to present recommendations this year, but the issue is clearly a point of vulnerability for the government.

This created the opportunity for what was seen by many in Number 10 as mischief-making from opposition groups. When Labour presented its first legislative bill for 15 years in the King’s Speech, the Liberal Democrats, SNP and Greens took the opportunity to present an opposition motion on the two-child benefit cap, regretting that it had not been included in Labour’s agenda for its first year. They knew the amendment wouldn’t pass (it was a “cosmetic vote”), but it was an effective way to drive a wedge between Labour’s idealists and its pragmatists.

The government argued that given the vote was intended to embarrass the party, it would take a hard line on any Labour MP voting for it, suspending the whip for a minimum of six months – not least because those MPs would be voting against Labour’s first King’s Speech. Eight MPs nonetheless voted for the amendment, and were punished accordingly.

For them, the logic of the “cosmetic vote” cut both ways: if Labour argues that it would like to end the benefit cap, but doesn’t think it can afford to do so yet, why can’t its MPs at least agree in principle with ending it? The vote didn’t commit to spending, after all, so why can’t parliamentarians show what they believe in? Is that not what they have been elected to parliament to do?

Max Weber’s ‘Politics as a Vocation’

Perhaps the definitive authority on these questions, at least when it comes to electoral politics, is the theorist Max Weber, and in particular his 1918 lecture “Politics as a Vocation”. Weber begins modestly, apologising to his audience that he is about to disappoint them by steering clear of the “actual problems of the day” – but the loftier and deeper problems he addressed instead made the lecture one to last through the ages.

At first, Weber’s sympathies seem to lean towards the idealists. He expresses irritation at the politicians who merely enact the will of their party bosses. “Nowadays the members of Parliament, with the exception of the few cabinet members (and a few insurgents), are normally nothing better than well-disciplined ‘yes’ men,” he complains. By contrast, “to take a stand, to be passionate – ira et studium – is the politician’s element, and above all the element of the political leader,” he argued. (Ira et studium is Latin for anger and enthusiasm, or passion.) “His conduct is subject to quite a different, indeed, exactly the opposite, principle of responsibility from that of the civil servant.”

However, like orators through the ages, Weber is merely setting out the argument he intends to side against. He goes on to identify “vanity” as a fatal weakness in a politician, not least because it leads to what is in his view a cardinal sin: irresponsibility.

He contrasts the “ethic of responsibility” with “the ethic of ultimate ends”. The latter places the politician in the role as the keeper of the flame: “for example, the flame of protesting against the injustice of the social order”. From that perspective, handing on that flame to a next generation of politicians is victory enough, whereas compromising to deliver a lesser goal would be seen as a failure.

For Weber, that rendered the “ethic of ultimate ends” on its own untenable – but without some measure of it, the “ethic of responsibility” was similarly vacuous. The “politician may serve national, humanitarian, social, ethical, cultural, worldly, or religious ends,” but ultimately “some kind of faith must always exist.”

With his conclusion that “politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards,” Weber lends a little credibility to both the passionate and the pragmatic, but tips his hand towards the latter.

Labour’s pragmatic history

Labour is a party with a long tradition of – to borrow Weber’s analogy – making the effort to drill holes in hard boards. The party is decidedly anti-revolutionary but has nevertheless managed to enact transformational policy. Proof of this can be found throughout the party’s history. Clement Attlee was anything but an ideologue, despite the change his post-war government brought to Britain: the birth of the NHS, the modern welfare state, a huge homebuilding programme and more. Attlee is remembered as an almost milquetoast chairman-like figure, balancing off the huge egos and factional interests that surrounded him at the cabinet table. It was through his skill in buying off and mollifying the ideologues around him that their plans became reality.

Harold Wilson modelled himself after Attlee, who gave him his first cabinet position just days after he became an MP, and who became the godfather to one of his children. Wilson might have convinced some of the party’s idealogues that he was one of them when he stood down alongside Nye Bevan over prescription charges for the NHS, but his nuanced reasons for doing so belied the pragmatist within. Wilson did not oppose the principle of introducing charges for NHS dentures and glasses, but he did oppose doing it to fund a rearmament effort he believed (correctly) was doomed to failure – he was not willing to introduce charging for something that would deliver no benefit.

That is perhaps the essence of Weber’s idealised politician: not abandoning principle, but moderating it through the lens of pragmatism.

Through shiftiness and a reputation for being “too clever by half”, Wilson achieved transformative change that remains under-appreciated to this day: the biggest programme of housebuilding ever achieved in Britain, massive expansion of access to higher education, the Equal Pay Act, the Race Relations Act, the end of the death penalty and the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

Of Tony Blair, little more need be said than that very few of even his closest friends would accuse him of being a man whose ideals were not tempered by pragmatism. What sign of compromise with the electorate could be clearer than a full rebrand of your party as “New Labour”?

And yet, in reality, Blair was a continuation of Labour’s tradition in government, not a repudiation of it. That did not happen until Corbyn came along, a man who had previously never served in any frontbench role, whether in government or opposition, and who had never given the party whip much regard: Corbyn voted according to his own conscience, come what may, and left the compromises of governing to others. He had never pretended otherwise – in fact, this drove much of his appeal.

Turning to the ideologues

The current allure of the idealists is perhaps understandable. The “centrists” or pragmatists have not had much to show for their work in the last decade – the financial crisis of 2008 was followed in the UK by austerity, Brexit and the pandemic. Public services are underfunded, and real wages are still lower than they were in 2007. If compromise doesn’t deliver, why should voters accept it? Around the world, they are turning to ideologues, whether on the left or the right – Donald Trump in the US, Javier Milei in Argentina, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or Gustavo Petro in Colombia.

This changing calculus seems to be troubling the Conservative Party too, in recent years. Liz Truss’s disastrously short premiership showed the danger of rejecting the oft-repeated mantra that to govern is to compromise. By producing a Budget in which she included almost every tax cut she’d ever dreamed of delivering – with the hard work of reform pushed to a future date – she demonstrated what happens when ideology wins, and it looked a lot like the “irresponsibility” of which Weber warned.

Truss herself seems determined not to take that lesson from her tenure, insisting instead that she was brought down by the incompetence of her officials and the malign efforts of her political enemies – many of them outside the ambit of parliamentary politics, such as the Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund. It is clear which course the Conservative Party wants to take next, having chosen another ideologue, Kemi Badenoch, as its current leader.

If pragmatic compromise, albeit underlined by principle, is the true purpose of politics, then someone needs to make that case afresh to the public. Joe Biden’s presidency was marked by quiet delivery for the working people of America: he was pro-union, funded billions in investment, delivered the best economic growth in the western world (by some margin), and had record employment numbers.

None of it mattered and almost no-one believed it when Democrats tried to highlight that record. America looked instead to Trump, a man who doesn’t compromise and who doesn’t worry about delivery. Trump’s promises might often be dark – deportation in the millions followed by a global trade war – but they are not tempered by caution.

Politicking, done well, is the act of finding the right blend of principle and pragmatism to create positive change. But after two decades of relentless financial shocks – the subprime loans crisis, austerity, Brexit, Trump, the pandemic and more – the public is tired of the art of the possible. It is looking to the dreamers, and historically, dreamers don’t deliver, at least not within democratic systems.

Someone has to make the case to reclaim pragmatism from the political graveyard. The only way to do that is to show that it can actually get results. With incumbents round the world falling and populists taking their place, the pressure is on for Starmer and his 170-seat majority to do that.

But Starmer risks his brand of pragmatism being associated with the politics of “no”: no, you can’t have a pay rise; no, we can’t fix the NHS; no, we can’t do anything about the leaking roof of your school. If he wants to try to redeem pragmatism, he would do well to take lessons from Weber and from Wilson, and remember that pragmatism is there to deliver on the promise of principle. Wilson might have been known as shifty, but when he left Number 10 he could look back on a set of accomplishments that would be the envy of any of his party’s purists – his clever-clever approach got stuff done.

Starmer spent his election campaign, and now his first months in government, telling us what isn’t possible. We will have to compromise, he said, with the difficult circumstances of reality. That message is safely received. But even Weber or Wilson would tell him that it’s possible to take pragmatism and compromise too far, and that at some point you have to try and deliver something you really believe in. Does Starmer have anything he can point to that he’s getting done as a result of his hard, unpopular slog? If he looks around and decides the answer is “no”, then it’s time to step up. Perhaps ending the two-child benefit cap would be a good place to start.

This article is from New Humanist’s Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.