As Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves rounds up her tour of the US, it’s worth reflecting on its overall meaning. For the New Statesman’s Rachel Wearmouth, the trip is of real importance: ‘if Labour does win the next election, I wonder if people will look back at Rachel Reeves’ visit to the US as quite a significant moment.’ Having written March of the Moderates – the tale of the Tony Blair-Bill Clinton relationship from opposition to power – I’m all up for putative sequels, but the politics today and our contemporary challenges are clearly of a different order.
To deal with the fluff first, if even the Daily Mail’s Dan Hodges – who fell over himself trying to make ‘Beergate’ happen – can’t be bothered to get angry about this, the brief furore over how Reeves travelled to the US doesn’t seem a major issue. People do work on planes when on business trips. It’s probably best that the confidential work of a shadow cabinet minister isn’t being done elbow to elbow in the middle seat of Economy.
The more significant question is where this sits in the canon of British and Labour political history. Certainly, there’s long precedent here.
Reeves is in the States for a few days with a ‘packed schedule.’ Compared to twentieth century politicians this is lightning pace. In the late 1930s the former Conservative cabinet minister Alfred Duff Cooper signed a lucrative $15000 (about $300,000 today) contract for an almost six month long speaking tour of the States where, soon after the war started, he harangued the Chamberlain government’s previous record on appeasement. This was great money, but it also meant he was out of the Commons for some pretty crucial months across 1939-40.
Two decades later, in the autumn of 1959 Roy Jenkins – the then Labour frontbencher and author – arranged a lecture tour of the US eastern seaboard. This didn’t speak much to Labour’s election prospects in a General Election which then looked pretty imminent. But the trip would be, he remarked, ‘a nicely-timed consolation prize for the victory we didn’t achieve.’
Using his economist friend J.K. Galbraith as an informal agent for lining up lectures and television slots – whilst also telling him to keep the fact he thought Labour was about to lose ‘private’ – Jenkins saw out the November 1959 election defeat before taking a month in the States to work the university circuit, network with Democrats, and a bit later, meet the future President Kennedy and his advisors. Given the shifts seen in both the UK and US, and the watchful eye of other likeminded future Labour ministers like Tony Crosland, the socially liberal reforms of the 1960s owed something to the early cultivation of such transatlantic links.
Having lived and worked in the twenty-first century US, Reeves will be less star struck about the scale and busyness of the US than her predecessors, but the opportunity to (re-)broaden horizons – given the day-to-day pressures of Westminster politics – remains welcome.
Where these visits matter most is in terms of mood music and profile. Here we must be a bit careful – there’s nothing more annoying than British people quoting the West Wing religiously or pretending to know the ins and outs of Broward County, Florida on Presidential election night. But in terms of the contours of what is politically possible the US remains significant.
Like Biden to (hopefully) Starmer, Bill Clinton won power years before Tony Blair. Given the British media focus on the US presidency this therefore meant he served as an avatar for what a leader of the moderate centre-left – with actual power – might look like to the British voter. At the very least, he had power.
Unlike Ronald Reagan’s curtailing of a meeting with Neil Kinnock – then reported as a snub to the Welsh leader – Blair and Clinton looked comfortable in each other’s presence when the former visited the White House as opposition leader, and then acted in concert on Northern Ireland, Kosovo, and elsewhere in government. The presentational test was passed.
But, beyond the optics, the prospect for governmental action is also crucial. Here, certainly, there were straight policy steals. Gordon Brown’s decision to go big on tax credits owed much to the US Earned Income Tax Credit rises under Clinton, and arguably Blair’s comfort in moving forward on a National Minimum Wage must have been derived in part from the presence of a Federal Minimum Wage since 1938. Clearly, there was some crossover between US charter schools/the British academies programme, too.
Despite such direct borrowing, it was more the overarching framework that mattered. Stuff happens in government. Pledges change. Short term problems need to be managed. But the parameters of ‘the project’ should be fixed. In the 1990s case, using the proceeds of growth to fund strong public services, freeing the frontline to innovate, and a relatively, by left wing standards, conditional welfare system to encourage people back to work were some of the broad lessons learned.
Importantly, this mood music setting role of the US is not limited to the ‘moderate’ end of the party. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal is sometimes seen as a bit of a ‘big state’ prelude to Clement Attlee’s New Jerusalem in the UK, but his government had two other lessons for the British left.
Firstly, it taught visiting British Marxists like John Strachey that democratic government could actually work – work imperfectly maybe, but improve people’s lives. Strachey would go on to serve as a minister in Attlee’s government after 1945.
Secondly, its hedging on whether to stand up to Hitler – less the fault of Roosevelt and more of Congress passing various Neutrality Acts – saw British pacifists like Mary Agnes Hamilton (who travelled the US to promote her books) mould their world view somewhat. US dithering in the face of a dictator suggested that occasionally force, in extremis, might be necessary. Both the left and right have used America as a prism through which to test, and occasionally, change, their politics.
As for the US Reeves is encountering, Joe Biden in opposition appealed to moderates far more than, say, Bernie Sanders, but since becoming President has been keen to work with the policy goals of the left. As The Guardian’s David Smith has noted, ‘with a gossamer-thin majority in Congress, Biden has pulled off four big wins worth trillions of dollars: coronavirus relief, a sweeping infrastructure law, a massive boost to domestic production of computer chips and the biggest climate crisis law in history.’
Labour’s evolving agenda is of a piece with all of this – most obviously the proposed £28bn annual green investment programme, but also nods to getting more women into high paid jobs in science and tech. The space provided by the Conservative cavalier approach to governance – into Liz Truss’ tanking the markets and beyond – has allowed Reeves to make a Bidenesque pitch to use the power of government to grow key industries like life sciences and thereby leverage private sector investment. If they are not already, hammering home the recklessness with which the Conservative Party has approached peace in Ireland since the Brexit vote is an obvious further open goal.
A Chancellor Reeves, then, would look to the US as Labour has been wont to do. For now, if this is in as broad brush strokes as wanting to work together in a stable and predictable way, borrowing from Biden’s productive approach to new investment, and asserting the fact that ‘Britain is open for business,’ then this is a pretty good start.
If you enjoyed this piece, check out another recent blog on foreign policy, Gary Kent’s Local to Global: Facing the Threats of Tomorrow.