In his own understated way, Andy Burnham has also profited from turmoil: first from the oddly dysfunctional Starmer years and, more broadly, nearly two decades of economic malaise. So while Milan and Tirana are beset by disorder, and French town halls are ablaze, British politics suddenly feels like a haven of calm — however fleeting that may ultimately prove. Normal without being boring, charming without feeling pompous, Burnham’s personal qualities are enhanced by the chaos preceding him. He is, for many, a welcome antidote to the broiling disorder of Southport, Southampton and Gosport in recent years.

It’s true, of course, that Burnham has reached the 100-day mark without facing any big challenges. And if tomorrow’s Budget risks changing that, it’s also true that the Prime Minister is better placed to endure the storms ahead than his hapless predecessor. Unlike Keir Starmer, after all, our latest prime minister is at ease with social media, especially when “out in the country” beyond SW1. His daily missives on parking fines, and people “sodcasting” on public transport, are guerrilla policy-making perfectly tailored to the attention economy. And if Starmer generally viewed such trifling issues as “noise”, Burnham’s No. 10 now recognizes that permission to address the big issues, from the social-care crisis to the pensions triple lock, requires getting everyday concerns right. Rather than playing a fatuous game for eyeballs, the objective is to win time and trust — two things in short supply when you’re the country’s seventh leader in a decade.

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There are strong echoes of Harold Wilson’s “little things that mean a lot” initiative here. There were no iPhones or Instagram back in 1974, of course, and the emphasis was less on a comms strategy that could connect with the public. But both Labour prime ministers are passionate about the local and seemingly mundane: back then it was local breweries and banning hare coursing, today it’s fly-tipping, potholes and bus fares. More than Wilson’s, though, Burnham’s politics are arguably best understood via the Great Helmsman himself — adopting a heavily personalised form of centralisation, which goes hand-in-hand with mass politics.

While fighting a guerrilla insurgency against both the Japanese occupation and Chiang Kai-shek, Mao developed his theory of the “mass line”. Put simply, this meant the party’s positions were informed by their engagement with the masses in the Chinese countryside — the very people Mao and his cadres relied on for survival. Those experiences were later codified, not least in a report written by Mao for the CCP’s central committee in 1943. Overall, Mao advised, leadership should consist in first going to the masses and learning from them, allowing the party to synthesize their experiences into clearly articulated principles and policies. From there, the party should disseminate formed-out ideas among the people, exhorting them to put principle into practice. Condensing the whole approach into a pithy sentence, Mao described the mass line as “to the masses, from the masses, to the masses” — though, this being Communist China, there was no actual voting.

Far from abstract idealism, these theories had huge implications, from the “patriotic health campaign” of the Fifties, which sought to address public hygiene and eradicate scourges like cholera and malaria, to the “Barefoot Doctors” who transformed healthcare in much of China’s rural heartland. Neither policy was overtly ideological, instead focusing on helping the working class, embodying the slogan of “serve the people”. And, notwithstanding genuine disasters like the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s efforts really did help create a literate, healthy and politically unified society. By 1978, when Deng Xiaoping became leader, life expectancy already stood at 63, far above the derisory 35 of 1945. At the same time, these successes laid the foundation for China’s system today, defined by some as “consultative Leninism”.

There’s a striking comparison to be made here with policy formulation in the Labour Party during the Corbyn years: and not because the tabloids cast him as an Islington Red Guard with an allotment. After all, following Corbyn’s surprise leadership victory in 2015, members increasingly determined party policy, a tendency which culminated in Labour backing a second EU referendum during its 2019 conference. Never mind that Corbyn objected — Rejoining proved disastrous in that year’s general election. This was, in essence, the Bennite vision of Labour: a party led by the wishes of its members, rather than the often exaggerated necessities of parliamentarism, or the compromises of the trade-union bureaucracy. It’s worth saying here that a similar approach is presently being tested by the Greens, though Labour’s conference was never sovereign over policy, something ultimately determined by the party NEC.

The approach of Burnham’s Labour, which embraces certain aspects of Left populism, appears to have entirely disavowed this activists-take-all approach. Instead, the Prime Minister seems to have adopted a kind of consultative Leninism, where centralized authority to actually do stuff goes hand-in-hand with input from below. That includes social-listening exercises on digital platforms, something Labour had started to get good at before Starmer’s demise, but which the ex-PM seems to have had little interest in. When Burnham used the term “Boriswave” on GMB yesterday morning, you can be certain that a great deal of data and analytics went behind it. Besides that is Burnham’s policy shop. Even before Labour won the by-election in Wigan, Josh Simons, the ex-MP for Makerfield, was reputedly taking soundings on policy development from a wide range of voices across the party — including think-tankers and campaigners close to the Labour Left. Anti-social behavior on trains, new powers on fly-tipping, and Burnham’s harsh words on HMOs are all downstream of that process.

Most important, though, is the role played by the party’s metro mayors, whom the Prime Minister appears to take more seriously than any of his colleagues in the Commons. Unlike MPs, mayors have the resources, and scale, to act as policy incubators. As a result, they are increasingly central to the policy-making process, regularly attending the National Economic Council, which meets at No. 10 North, where they work alongside the leaders of the devolved national administrations as well as Louise Haigh, Burnham’s deputy, and Chancellor John Healey. What makes this unique is that policymaking, and listening, includes figures from parties other than Labour: a precursor, perhaps, to a time when Labour must work alongside other parties under PR. Either way, its guiding animus is wholly different to the adversarial norms of Westminster.

While the appointment of Healey as Burnham’s Chancellor surprised many, it really shouldn’t have — not least because the veteran Brownite is happy to do as he’s told. It’s ironic, perhaps, that a Prime Minister who has promised to transfer power beyond Westminster is simultaneously concentrating more power in his person and office than anyone since Thatcher. Even before entering Downing Street, Burnham’s team was briefing about the need to move away from an “imperial” Treasury machine. And while the media may have focused its attention on the subsequent announcement of “No 10 North”, the creation of a new Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet was what really mattered. This is, in Britain’s own way, an emerging form of consultative Leninism: at least within the context of the country’s extraordinarily arcane, labyrinthine civil service. It’s a major development, but Labour’s critics — on both the Left and Right — are yet to see it. Some act like they’re still fighting Starmer.

But if Burnham understands the value of an outward-facing populism, but without much input from party members — then what about his colleagues? And while he’s transforming the government he runs, is the same happening within the Labour Party itself? In an inversion of Bennite orthodoxy, the PM is addressing the state, and indeed the public, before being particularly bothered about his own party. Might that backfire?

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Perhaps. But moves are certainly afoot, with Labour’s political culture on Burnham’s radar too. That can be discerned from last month’s appointment of Joe Fortune as the party’s new general secretary. Fortune, like Burnham, hails from the North-West, but the two men aren’t reputed to be especially close. Labour’s latest top bureaucrat is, however, an ally of soft-Left powerbrokers like Haigh and Annelise Midgley, Burnham’s chief whip, as well as enjoying close links to the big trade unions. Precisely what Fortune will do to placate members if they try to drive party policy on issues like Palestine, or removing the triple lock, remains unclear. What is certain, though, is that in the place of influence over policy, members will need other outlets. The idea, perhaps, is that they will increasingly focus on local concerns, not least as larger local authorities are created and more metro mayoralties established. At any rate, the notion of constituency Labour parties driving national policy, as the Left dreamed under Corbyn, seems farther away than ever. Of course, many won’t mind in the medium term: as long as progress continues to be made in the polls, and political defeat for Reform looms on the horizon.

The irony, here, is that in a strange way, the political foundations of Burnhamism aren’t so different to those professed by Nigel Farage: hyperleadership and robust policy-making in the center, driven by the perceived concerns of the public at large. Yet that’s where the similarities end. Because while Burnham does appear to have a genuine connection to the public, not least through powerful regional actors like Steve Rotherham and Tracey Brabin, Reform’s policy-making process is already subject to capture by the ultra-rich. This is less a criticism of plutocrats buying influence in the political process — though that’s certainly a problem — but simply an observation that it leaves Reform ill-equipped to address the grievances of the country’s downwardly mobile working and middle class. As a result, they are retreating to being a single-issue party.

Not, of course, that the next election is won just yet. But it’s been a hugely impressive first 100 days from the new prime minister, from reconfiguring parts of the state to delivering an effective comms strategy and taking votes from both his Left and Right. Perhaps, to paraphrase another Chinese statesman from the 20th century, Zhou Enlai, it’s still too soon to know the true consequences of a fraught, and often confused, decade of politics since Brexit.  The chaos might not be over — but Andy Burnham clearly intends to take advantage it.

It’s worth underscoring that Mamdani has himself consistently described events in Gaza since 2023 as a genocide. Indeed, right after that ceremony, he met Palestinian New Yorkers at a restaurant named after Hind Rajab, a five-year-old killed in Gaza two years ago. Nor have his interventions been solely symbolic. On his first day as mayor, Mamdani revoked several executive orders signed by his predecessor, Eric Adams, including the adoption of the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism and a ban on city agencies participating in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Whatever one thinks of these moves, they were clearly significant concessions to the pro-Palestine movement. Yet parts of the radical Left, including individuals who claim to have previously campaigned for Mamdani, now oppose him with a vigor usually reserved for the extreme Right. Actually, it would be more accurate to say, with a vigor that is rarely reserved for the Right. After all, Andrew Cuomo, JD Vance and even Donald Trump himself aren’t held to account for their stances on Gaza to such a degree. And yet an elected member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who has used his platform to highlight the Palestinian cause, is considered a suitable target.

To many not on the Left, this must seem hilarious. It’s the kind of thing you would do if you wanted to lose — a set of actions so politically obnoxious and self-destructive that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to speculate about the role of bad faith or even crisis actors. But no, this is simply how a minority on the radical Left now conducts politics. What’s more, far from being an isolated phenomenon, those opposing Mamdani symbolize a powerful trend in Western activism, specifically in the Anglophone world. This transcends Left and Right: and goes by the name of “virtue hoarding”.

To be clear, virtue hoarding is distinct from “woke” — by now a meaningless phrase generally deployed by old conservatives to disparage single-origin coffee and avocado on toast. Indeed, virtue hoarding is a far more precise term: and a political style that seeks to redefine “vanguardism”. It is also distinct from the old Leninist tradition of offering leadership to the masses. Here, the point is not to win power, but rather to display an unbreachable moral superiority over the rest of society. The point is to lose.

The term virtue hoarding was coined by the cultural theorist Catherine Liu in her 2021 work Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. It’s a book that, despite its brevity, helps explain a great deal of seemingly inexplicable behavior, not least the political peccadilloes of the professional middle class (“PMC”).

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Liu describes how the desire to hoard virtue has become increasingly central to a form of managerial liberalism that emphasizes bias over inequality, and visibility over exploitation. For the virtue hoarder, policies about economic deprivation and racism always circle back to enhancing their personal “sense of political agency and cultural and moral superiority”. In other words, this unspoken, often incoherent doctrine, allows powerful, credentialed individuals to feel good about themselves — all while failing to address actually-existing exploitation.

Last month, for example, the Boston Globe published an extraordinary report about an LGBT bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, where the heightened moral scrutiny of the Covid pandemic seems never to have ended. The Last Ditch, facing insolvency and rising debts having only been in business a year, had recently announced it would no longer require customers to wear masks on Saturday nights, though they would remain mandatory from Monday to Friday. That post, published on the bar’s Instagram page, led to a deluge of complaints and abuse — even calls for a boycott. As one comment put it: “I hope your venue gets firebombed”.

Never mind that there have been no recorded cases of Covid in Greenfield for months, and that almost every other venue in the state stopped enforcing masks years ago. Yet just as protesters branded the most pro-Palestinian politician in America a genocide apologist, so too did mask-supporting zealots attack the one venue anywhere close to agreeing with them.

The far side of the Atlantic is facing something similar. Once you recognize the phenomenon, countless political stories become clear — on both sides of the Atlantic. In the aftermath of the recent Green Party conference, for instance, some wondered whether passing a motion that “Zionism is racism” (which won by only a few hundred votes) was a smart strategy: not least because the Greens are struggling to deal with a Labour government now led by Andy Burnham. Just when the Greens needed to address the country with bold, broadly popular policies, critics argued, they had turned inward to debate the meaning of words.

And yet, once again, it was these same people — who are on the whole entirely sympathetic to the claim that Zionism is premised on ideas of racial superiority — who stood accused of being Zionists themselves. Some of the Greens’ newer members even called for the expulsion of the likes of former leader Caroline Lucas and Green MP Adrian Ramsay: someone able to win the Greens a seat in rural East Anglia. I myself was called a Zionist! I had said I understood why some European Jews, in 1945, were attracted to the Israeli cause in the aftermath of the Holocaust. But for the virtue hoarders, of course, that signaled little more than my own moral depravity.

Of course, such behavior isn’t entirely new, particularly on the radical fringes of politics. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud expanded on his idea of the narcissism of small differences, where minor disagreements with those closest to you assume an outsized importance. You can see this everywhere, from intra-city football rivalries to religious sectarianism and bickering siblings. Later still, in “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Lenin offered a sociological critique, arguing that political purism is a temporary habit of the anxious middle strata — as movements mature and learn — rather than a universal psychological feature.

Both theories are arguably in evidence in the stories I outline above. All the same, it does also feel like something else is going on too, not least when it comes to the internet. This is the argument made by James Marriott in his recent book The New Dark Ages: that digital media is taking us closer to a post-literate age, whose “mystical, tribal and autocratic” characteristics feel more reminiscent of our “pre-literate past”. In the same vein, Liu sees virtue-hoarders as trying to transform all social struggles into “individual passion plays” — a phrase that might sound familiar to anyone acquainted with Instagram.

Still, it’s worth questioning whether Liu’s definition of virtue hoarding goes far enough. She observes virtue hoarding most clearly in academia and in white-collar professions. But it’s clear the habit has spread to the downwardly mobile graduates of Britain and North America. Such people are less likely to own a home than their parents and grandparents and should, in theory, be more inclined to a materialist politics.

What’s more, virtue hoarding has made movement politics functionally useless, capable at best of intermittent gains before abruptly imploding. Compare that with, say, the Bolsheviks, whose very name came from the Russian term for “majority” (a label they were canny enough to adopt even when it wasn’t strictly true). For his part, Antonio Gramsci wrote extensively about establishing a majority common sense for Left-wing ideas through cultural production, something he referred to as “hegemony”. It doesn’t matter what you think about Lenin or Gramsci: for two centuries, the Left’s chief ambition was to win over the masses. But now that’s changed.

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That’s happened for two reasons. First, because vanguardism has seemingly become an end in itself. If virtue can only be hoarded so long as it is a minority position, then once mainstream opinion shifts towards you, you have to move once more. That is what is most striking about labeling Mamdani a Zionist, or declaring that Caroline Lucas should be expelled from the Green Party. It is precisely because power has made concessions, and the Left has made very real gains that the anger is directed at allies instead. If you’ve ever wondered why some on the Left can’t “take the win”, the concept of virtue hoarding should help explain why.

The second reason stems from the first. For Liu, the PMC rejects debate as a meaningful way of advancing knowledge or settling disputes. Instead, political disagreements generally assume a moral tone. As a result, the politics of virtue-hoarding proves unable to build coalitions around a minimal program — the basis for collective action and social progress. For virtue hoarders, the role of debate is instead replaced by a constant impulse to humiliate political opponents — another straightforward way to accumulate cultural currency on social media — or simply discredit their views as morally suspect because they don’t possess certain immutable characteristics.

It’s worth stating that none of this is limited to the Left, though it does remain most obvious there. Just look at the Right: no sooner had Reform stolen supporters from the Conservatives than Restore appeared to steal supporters off them. The point of Restore isn’t to win, but merely to be part of a vanguard whose prestige and sense of self-worth rests on isolation from mainstream opinion. Were Restore ever to usurp Reform as the default choice of the radical Right, you can rest assured that Rupert Lowe would be presented as a traitor to the faithful alongside Nigel Farage.

Perhaps the saddest thing in all of this is that those engaged in virtue-hoarding generally don’t recognize what they are doing. Still, there’s no doubt that they’re committed to bad politics. If you truly care about your cause succeeding, it’s worth isolating their behavior and explaining why they’re wrong. Because when you have the virtue hoarders on your side, who needs enemies?

This weekend, the Greens too will host their own conference, a scaled back affair in Brighton. Yet as Polanski’s resolute campaigning suggests, it’s the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, now less than a week away, that truly matters. That shouldn’t surprise anyone, not least because, this year, the great British by-election has re-shaped Westminster. Holborn is the fourth, and all but one, when Nigel Farage triumphed in Clacton against a man dressed as a bin, have been of national importance.

First came Hannah Spencer’s triumph in Gorton and Denton, the only by-election win in the Green Party’s history. Little more than two months later came a similarly strong performance in local elections, with success in London sealing Keir Starmer’s fate. Over the weekend that followed, Polanski emerged as a genuinely national figure, proudly asserting that two-party politics was “dead and buried”.

And so, in June, came Makerfield. More than simply deciding that constituency’s next MP, it was clear from the outset that it would also provide a launchpad for Andy Burnham’s ambitions: first into Parliament and then into Downing Street. Those vacillating members of Labour’s NEC, who had previously blocked the former health secretary from standing in Gorton, now changed tack, their endorsement underscoring how far, and how fast, their party had fallen.

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The Green ascent thus changed the fortunes of both themselves and Labour. Now controlling several London boroughs, a party which boasted a single MP before 2024 had triggered an internal revolution within Government. Yet a cruel irony to those accomplishments would inevitably follow. Polanski’s rise made Labour pursue otherwise unthinkably high-risk measures — measures which now appear to be paying off. No longer facing a moleish bureaucrat for control of the Left, Polanski’s struggle is simply to remain relevant.

Labour are confident of a win in Holborn and St Pancras, and the bookmakers have their candidate, Sagal Abdi-Wali, as the overwhelming favorite. And, to an extent, this makes sense. Camden Labour performed relatively well in May’s local elections, with the Greens failing to break through here as they did in less prosperous places like Harringey, Lambeth and Hackney. Polanski also doesn’t live in the constituency — which counts more than ever in Britain’s hyper-localized politics — as Reform found to their detriment with Matt Goodwin in Gorton and Denton.

Even so, having been to the seat, and spoken to campaigners and voters alike, Labour’s self-assurance does surprise me. As a campaigner, Abdi-Wali seems cagey and lightweight, with Camden Labour operating a “ming vase” strategy lacking the energy that infused the party’s Makerfield victory. Where Burnham was eager to talk to just about anyone in Wigan — from aging Lexiteers to people saying he was complicit in the grooming gangs scandal — Labour in Starmer’s old patch are protective and insular.

And while Burnham is pledging to “end neoliberalism,” Camden Labour — which controls the council, holds the mayoralty and, for now, represents both the borough’s parliamentary constituencies — is going full steam ahead. Among other things, the group is presently selling off a local recycling site, replacing it with one half the size. Their Community Investment Program, meanwhile, is regarded by critics as a giveaway to private developers. Public services, from street cleaning to  waste management, are all outsourced too, with some contracts renewed as recently as last year. Labour’s record at a local level is very much at odds with the rhetoric of its new leader.

Yet if Polanski is fighting hard against a politically exposed opponent — putting in the hard yards to win every vote he can — it’s also clear that his party has no real national message. From what I understand, the Green leader has been submerged listening to the concerns of local residents, from LTNs to parking. But that leaves little space for connecting those street-level worries to a broader set of principles, with Polanski more often reacting to the news cycle than defining it.  A case in point was his defense of the triple lock following Burnham’s speech on Tuesday, with the Green leader asking why Labour was “going after pensioners”. That might make sense — had the Greens themselves not pledged to end the triple lock at the last general election. Hardly Burnham’s conference-hall plea for hope through honesty.

Why, at their zenith, did the Greens take their foot off the pedal? There are many plausible answers, not least that some within the party view their role as being little more than a pressure group pushing Labour left. And so, with Starmer gone, some concluded it was mission accomplished. Then there’s the fact that building an organization in an age of frantic digital activism feels harder than ever, with ideological zeal on social media often masking lace-thin commitments off it.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the party’s core values remain unclear. The Green movement is stronger than ever: people, after all, are far more interested in the work of Friends of the Earth than the Fabian Society. So where were the Green politicians making vertical videos in Wisley this summer, when the Surrey village saw no rain for two months? Or when New Forest businesses were slammed after wildfires deprived them of peak-season tourist trade? Why, when the A31 was closed for almost a fortnight as a result of the flames, wasn’t the party making the case for temporary free train travel as an emergency response? In their defense, the Green leadership might say they were knackered after an extraordinary few months. That carries more than a grain of truth: rapid growth is often exhausting for insurgents. But national politics is utterly relentless, and things always move on. More reason, then, to focus on building an effective organization that transcends the gravitas and personal pull of any single individual.

Amid such frustrations, the Green conference in Brighton feels like a lost opportunity. It could have provided the party with a moment to reflect on a remarkable year, and debate their policy platform moving forward — especially in the very different context of a Burnham premiership. Instead, the party is offering refunds to members who’d paid to attend, but who now want to canvas in London. Holborn and St Pancras matters, of course, and the party is more competitive than many realize, but that also underscores a tendency of the radical Left towards “actionism”: where thinking, debate and theory counts for less than it should. Collective deliberation, and a vibrant intellectual culture, especially offline, are the lifeblood of any party seeking to transform society.

Not that it’s all bad for Polanski and the Greens. For even if it seems unlikely he’ll triumph in Holborn, he could come a close second — something which might end up benefiting both him and Burnham. The former never meaningfully expected to win, after all, and he’ll have built a formidable operation for when he stands (and likely wins) in one of the Hackney seats at the next general election. Making inroads into Labour’s majority, at the very moment that the Government is enjoying a honeymoon with a new leader, would remain an impressive accomplishment, whatever Polanski’s detractors might spin next Friday. As for Burnham, a narrow margin of victory might provide a valuable impetus to change his own party. The remnants of Starmerism would need to be dealt with.

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Yet whatever the tactical result next Thursday, that still leaves the Greens in the same strategic quandary. Are they building an organization, and a movement of their own —  defined by thick offline ties, a vivid intellectual and social life, and local experiments in politics — or are they simply a response, or indeed a symptom, to a collapse in two-party politics? The same question can be posed of Reform, of course, but then it’s rather easier to avoid existential angst when you’re receiving tens of millions of pounds in donations.

For all the enmity between Polanski and Farage it’s clear that, until now, both men thrived in part because they weren’t the big two — with effective strategy often requiring little more than opposition to a moribund “uniparty”. But what happens when one. half of that uniparty, Labour, explicitly admits their complicity in decades of failure, and openly says the country has been on the wrong path “for a long time”? Suddenly, being purely antagonistic no longer works, and can even start to resemble puerility. That the Conservatives won’t do something similar, and admit their own fiascos on austerity, migration and Europe, should perhaps provide succor to Farage and Zia Yusuf.

What, then, should the Greens do? At a national level, they need to determine where they are distinct from Labour, and craft their message and policies accordingly. Clearly a large part of the answer involves climate change. That, after all, remains the basis for a potentially vast coalition: from the Countryfile viewers in the shires to urban graduates who are more likely to watch Gary Stevenson. It’s worth remembering, too, that while the Greens, Reform and Labour all have memberships of less than 300,000, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds boasts over a million. The National Trust, Europe’s largest conservation charity, has a membership five times that.

Secondly, the Greens need to decisively become the party of struggling urbanites. But this means focusing on problems like fly-tipping and quality of life as much as the housing crisis or other immediately Left-coded issues. If Auckland can build a new metro, in a decade no less, why can’t the likes of Leeds and Bristol? Solving problems like that, from supply chain constraints to planning oversight, should be the party’s bread and butter. Britain’s cities are appallingly managed, and the Greens should relentlessly seek to provide answers, even when those aren’t especially ideological. To put it another way, the Greens should be the party most committed to making Britain a more pleasant place to live: advocates for lapwings, but public lidos too. For that to happen, though, Polanski’s team will need to dump the reflexive negativity — instead linking values to policies that forge a national movement, all while being open about the threats and opportunities of a genuine green transition. Yes, some risks will be involved, and yes, any endeavor on such a scale will include mistakes.

There’s another, easier option available to the Greens as well: wait. Wait for Burnham’s honeymoon to end. Wait for the Labour in-fighting to return, as the party’s perennially toxic Right attempts to take back control. That will inevitably happen — not least because it is the Labour Right that still controls the NEC and much of the party bureaucracy. And, when it does, the Greens will be there, an oven-ready alternative for progressive voters. That’s an alluring strategy for Polanski, not least because it isn’t really a strategy at all. “Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake,” Napoleon reputedly said. Fair enough: but, more often than not, that’s a line deployed by people who are simply unsure of what to do. Like the Prime Minister says, real hope comes through honesty. In these fractured times, that’s a line everyone in politics can learn from.

Defying inertia. That, in essence, is what protest means. And 15 years ago — as a wave of student protest morphed into opposition to austerity — I really was certain we were on the cusp of a political revolution. How could I not, when technological change was undermining legacy media, and when Britain was in an economic malaise that clearly couldn’t be resolved by the Coalition government? These truths, I was sure, would invariably smash a political class that, whatever its other internal disagreements, fanatically believed that growth would soon return. Debate over how fast to cut the deficit felt so small by comparison. 

That sense of revolution extended beyond these shores. Today marks the 15th anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street [OWS] movement, which began when hundreds of people camped out in New York’s Zuccotti Park, not far from Wall Street. They were forcibly removed a month later, yet Occupy heralded the strange rebirth of Left populism on both sides of the Atlantic. Bernie Sanders, the “Squad”, Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El Sayed — all are downstream from those 2011 protests, casting the “1%” against the rest of us. In Britain, too, Corbynism can be traced back to the same period, as can the more recent rise of the Greens. Today’s talk of a wealth tax feels impossible to separate from the populist rhetoric that entered the national conversation around the time of Occupy.   

Those transatlantic similarities are likely a function of the fact that both Brits and Americans were some of the first to exploit the opportunities presented by social media, specifically Facebook and Twitter. All of a sudden, coordinating a decent-sized protest no longer required historic brokers like political parties or trade unions, with the National Union of Students not organizing any of 2010’s post-Millbank protests. There was a global element here too, with Western radicals drawing lessons from the Arab Spring. Clearly, we thought, something was shifting on a planetary scale, applying Durkheim’s “collective effervescence” to our global, interconnected age. 

It certainly felt effervescent at the time, bringing to mind Wordsworth’s couplet from 1789: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!” Little wonder, then, that the “March for the Alternative”, which took place on 26 March in 2011, saw half a million people march against austerity in Central London. Some were happy to blow their vuvuzelas and amble serenely to Hyde Park; others smashed up the Ritz or occupied Fortnum & Mason to highlight alleged tax-dodging. I myself was later arrested for pushing a bin through the door of a (closed) HSBC bank, something which looked far more dramatic on camera because we’d breached a magnetic lock. I later pleaded guilty to throwing an empty plastic bottle of water too, and, as a result, spent dozens of hours sweeping leaves in South London and sorting clothes in an East Dulwich charity shop. One consolation was that I got first dibs on discarded Brioni polo shirts, an additional bonus to seeing how destructive outsourcing was for the probation service. 

Through it all was a mood of heightened repression. In November, after the Occupy protests had begun in Manhattan, and then been replicated in a pop-up settlement outside St Paul’s Cathedral, a student protest sought to march to the City of London instead of Parliament. Remarkably, the number of police that day matched those demonstrating: I recall calculating around 5,000 on each side. Earlier, in April, on the day Prince William married Catherine Middleton, a large number of arrests were made in central London. They famously included a snatch squad grabbing a guy for singing “We all live in a fascist regime”. When Right-wingers talk about “two-tier policing”, I cast my mind back to that bizarre episode. I’ve not seen anything like it since.

In hindsight, there were other glimpses into the future too — not least in the way we understood, instinctively, that the financial crisis had changed the world forever. This diagnosis had two aspects: economic and political. Economically, the Occupy movement asserted that the growth of what scholars now call the “great moderation” — expanding trade, financialization, and consumer spending powered in part by rising house prices — would not inevitably return. It’s easy to forget now, but the 2000s were a very different economic time: Vodafone was briefly more valuable than Intel, while RBS was Europe’s largest bank. After 2008, only the radical Left seemed to grasp that the house of cards had fallen for good. And that no non-radical futures were on offer.

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By Giles Fraser

From that economic diagnosis came a political recognition: that the West’s challenges were too big to be met by legacy parties, at least in their current form, not least because they found ideas so alien following decades of neoliberal rigmarole. At some point, between the economic challenges and the rise of platforms like Facebook, and the wider network effects they permitted, the two-party system would balkanize. Fast forward to 2026, when the Greens have won a by-election, Plaid Cymru came first in Wales and Reform control dozens of councils and, it’s fair to say our seemingly wild speculations have been vindicated. And while the primary system has meant the big two parties still endure in the US, between MAGA and Mamdani they have changed beyond all recognition. With the Democrats, especially, one suspects that process still has a long way to go. 

Those were big bets to get right. So where were Occupy, and the movements accompanying it, wrong? That’s a worthwhile question to ask, not least because Occupy encapsulated many of the ideological assumptions of the moment, and indeed prefigured some of the weaknesses that have come to define the Left ever since.

First was the idea that we should make no demands. In part, this was tactical, with the relative absence of a propositional politics allowing Occupy to retain a broader coalition. But it also reflected an aversion to political leadership, informed by a desire to maintain ideological purity and not engage with what was perceived as a broken system. Here, then, was the politics of “beautiful souls”: the template for the kind of “influencer politics” we see today. This can still work with ad-hoc momentary campaigns — often with extraordinary alacrity — but it also means that long-term political vehicles are harder to build. What the Left lost, in turn, was a repository for collective political memory, and a space where a shared program could be built over-and-above sectional policy disagreements. In the Corbyn years there was talk of replicating the pre-war German SDP, or the Italian PCI, as an organization rooted in the associational life of ordinary Britons. The closest we got was the one-day music festival “Labour Live”.

Ironically, given how useful they were, this was partly a function of digital technologies. As Marshall McLuhan vividly put it, the medium is the message. In practice that meant Occupy coalesced around a distrust of large, legacy organizations — precisely because network technologies appeared to make them less relevant. Yet if this allowed protests to spread fast, it also came with downsides. After all, as Martin Gurri wrote in The Revolt of the Public, this bottom-up approach to politics tends to promote a kind of mass nihilism, a corrosive uncertainty about whether any “settled truth” institutions really merit trust, and whether any form of authority can ever be legitimate. We first saw that in Anglophone politics with Occupy. Today, though, it feels more applicable to anti-migrant protests, black-clad road-blockers in Dover and the likes of Danny Tommo in Portsmouth. All those movements — both Left and Right — grew through a blend of digital networks; charismatic leadership; an aversion to legacy actors; and the promise, in many cases, of a world remade. And if, on the Left, this curdled into a strange melange of anarcho-libertarianism combined with budgetary Keynesianism, we might expect something similar to happen on the other side of politics too. Indeed, you already see glimpses of it in calls for a leaderless movement that oversees millions of deportations, and the idea that Britain — the country which arguably gave the world modern secularism — should embrace Christian nationalism. 

There are, perhaps, other lessons of Occupy for the Right here too — not least in the way Leftist activists, myself included, failed to really grasp the nature of our coalition. Just as we often thought “graduates” had a shared interest in a wider political transformation, much of the Right now seems to think that billionaires should enjoy lower effective tax rates than provincial headmasters and senior nurses. Indeed, the radical movements of the early 2010s were largely constructed around that emergent figure of the “graduate without a future”. There was much value to the concept: today millennials remain the only generation in Britain to have become more Left-wing over time. But that formulation also missed something important: not all graduates are the same. Some, it turns out, had a future after all. 

The typical participant at Zuccotti Park was young and very likely to have a university education, with some 92% having either attended or graduated from college. Yet that didn’t make these people affluent; half of those involved in Occupy Wall Street earned $25,000 or less a year. My personal observations on this side of the Atlantic told a similar story. Whatever cynics might have concluded — often without going to an encampment and actually speaking to protesters — this really was a working-class movement driven by younger adults experiencing economic frustration. Today those concerns are central for millions of millennial voters, the backbone of the workforce in both Britain and the US.

At the time, I thought it was inevitable that this social base of downwardly mobile graduates would sweep politics. After all, without sounding grandiose, “elite overproduction”, as Peter Turchin has since termed it, helped drive the French and Russian Revolutions as well as the English Civil War. What sparked the downfall of the ancien régime, and particularly the rise of Jacobinism, was an alliance of lawyers and the sans-culottes. In the early 2010s, across the West, it seemed like something similar was starting to happen. As the middle class failed to reproduce itself, graduates — the spine of an ever-expanding lumpen-bourgeoisie — would throw their lot in with a class-based politics. The much maligned “laptop class” would be the lawyers this time round, Left-wing millennial stand-ins for Saint-Just, Danton and Desmoulins. 

Ultimately, though, something different happened. Because while the downwardly mobile graduates should have recognized that their interests aligned with other workers in the economy — particularly outside major cities — they often allied instead with their wealthier white-collar kin in metropolitan enclaves. Rather than cross-class solidarity, then, these people found themselves enmeshed in political projects which often focused on policing intolerance or defending what were perceived as cosmopolitan values. 

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A storm is coming for Labour

By Aaron Bastani

These matter, of course, but it also meant issues like the housing crisis, or the collapsing graduate dividend, failed to generate a wider coalition. Here, again, it’s tempting to cast blame on those bewildering new digital technologies. Because mobilizing large-scale protest suddenly seemed so easy, this itself became synonymous with change, rather than what it really is: a means to an end. Just as Seneca once wrote how “love of bustle is not industry”, nor do trending hashtags, viral videos and a national wave of protests necessarily constitute a genuine political revolution. Simply put, people failed to build organizations, and were swayed by whatever the latest trending issue was. The likes of the community union Acorn, or the excellent London Renters Union, stand out precisely because they are so unusual in this regard. 

The outstanding example of this, of course, became the campaign to stop Brexit via a second referendum. By then, the days of 2011, when students marched through London, and construction workers cheered from scaffolding — not least because students had repeatedly supported Balfour Beatty contractors on strike — had become a distant memory. The default of leaderlessness, and horizontalism, meant hard questions of strategy — “who is our coalition?” — hadn’t been asked for a good few years. In time, that meant a potentially powerful bloc of voters was abandoned in favor of protecting the relative privileges of the professional managerial class and their culture-war peccadilloes. And the worst bit? We didn’t grasp what was happening until the chance had gone. 

Today it now seems the Right, as with the Left before them, fail to understand how the digital environment alienates us from what real politics can be. So instead of building institutions, or developing a wider political consciousness, you see infinite online bickering and status games. Worse still — and perhaps because Elon Musk bought Twitter — what claims to be politics is instead an increasingly intricate, obscure sub-culture that, if anything, alienates voters. Those decentralized, diffuse protests look great on Telegram — but, to return to Seneca, bustle is easy to confuse for industry. And on the question of violence: cheering it on goes down like a cup of cold sick, not least with older voters. Farage’s response to the murder of Henry Nowak — that he felt “cold rage”, seeming to align himself with men who had scrapped with the police, was a rare misstep. In my view it was prompted by the fact he placed too much sway on the comparatively extreme online Right.  

Geopolitical disorder; accelerating climate change; a seemingly perennial cost-of-living crisis; spiraling inequality; state institutions that struggle to generate consent and legitimacy. The moment demands radical ideas —from the Left, I think. But there’s a great deal of merit in persisting with the political lessons of a century ago: build the party, serve the people. The Left, seduced by the glittering promise of new technologies and the futures they seemed to conjure, forgot how to be good Leninists. And now, with a certain irony, the Right is following the same path.

Even if it is about to rain, the damage has been done — with Britain’s arable harvest set to fall to a record low. No wonder the country’s most famous farmer, Jeremy Clarkson, has changed his mind on climate change. Wildfires offer a visceral intensity that other expressions of extreme weather do not. A hosepipe ban might be frustrating, but it isn’t potentially fatal (except for your much-loved begonias). In the South, an ongoing blaze in the New Forest has hammered local businesses, killed a great many ground-nesting birds, and is set to shut down the A31 for a fortnight. That’d kill businesses across the south if it extended to the bank holiday. 

And while that fire was largely unnoticed by the rest of the country, what really grabbed people’s attention was the blaze that engulfed whole streets in Stourbridge, razing almost 40 homes. Well, that and the national emergency alert sent to millions of phones warning of a “very high risk of wildfires nationally”. A major fire, which could kill many people, looked entirely plausible. Contributing to that heightened sense of panic was the fact that that two separate trains — both in the south of England — were derailed, with 20 people injured in one. While neither incident is yet to be attributed to the weather, high temperatures seem the most likely explanation. 

Water shortages, fires, critical infrastructure starting to buckle: it’s like a checklist for the early stages of climate-induced breakdown. Gradually, and then all at once, it has become clear we aren’t prepared for the world now coming into view. Least of all our politicians.

The politics of climate, for obvious reasons, dovetails with that of energy. In spite of their loathing for one another, deep greens and climate-skeptic capitalists agree on one thing: energy abundance cannot exist in a world without fossil fuels. In the short term, we can’t have both decarbonization while using more energy than ever. Thus, at the same time that Burnham is expected to respond to unprecedented heat and drought, others are saying he must grant licenses to the Jackdaw and Rosebank sites in the North Sea. The electorate wants competing things too: to respond to climate change — a recent YouGov poll showed 74% of the public care about the issue — but for that response to have a minimal impact on daily life.

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Malta's warning for the West

By Aaron Bastani

In the long term, energy abundance and decarbonization could go hand-in-hand — certainly if you include nuclear energy and hydrogen — but even an optimist such as myself will acknowledge a rapid transition will inevitably include delays, gaffes and mistakes.

Burnham has to navigate all this, not least because here — perhaps uniquely — Reform and the Greens believe they can snatch votes away from him. Until recently, both Zack Polanski and Nigel Farage have been playing national politics on easy mode, given that with Keir Starmer, they were up against the very archetype of a machine politician. But Burnham is a far more able opponent: a specialist in parasocial relations and political guerrilla warfare. Nonetheless, on climate issues, when it come to the Greens, and on energy and the cost of living with Reform, Labour still appears unsteady. The Prime Minister’s tactics-first approach won’t suffice. 

And the stakes are high. A key pillar of Burnham’s political project is to remove the Greens as a threat and make his party the electoral default for progressives once more. Should he fail, Reform would have a decent chance of winning a Westminster majority — a prospect that, owing to an embarrassing summer for Farage and his party, is currently underpriced. We should not forget that the reason Labour put forward Burnham for the Makerfield seat, where he won his fateful byelection, is that the Greens’ Hannah Spencer had won the Gorton and Denton by-election in February — from which Burnham had been barred from standing. A huge part of our now PM’s pitch was his ability to win back Green voters — a task that became existential for Labour after May’s local elections. 

And yet, however canny Burnham might be — and no matter how far his approval ratings diverge from Polanski’s — further climate-related disruption could see the Greens bounce back. It’s even possible that the party could scale new heights if the issue were to continue to grow in salience: something which does not seem unlikely as another heatwave is predicted for September. While Polanski has successfully expanded his party’s political offer beyond the environment and social justice, championing Gaza and the cost of living crisis, climate remains its bread and butter. At the start of August, after all, Polanski declared that climate change is the biggest threat to the UK since the Second World War. Naturally, his critics responded with rolled eyes and snorts, but even if you don’t think such rhetoric matches the reality, there are people who do. And it’s those people — some of whom voted Labour in 2024 — that Polanski wants to reach. 

Perhaps next time, borrowing from the social media-friendly tactics of the PM, Polanski will make a similar assertion, only in front of a smoldering woodland, or a fire-ravaged Dunwich Heath. And when the floods inevitably come in the winter, perhaps he’ll make like Farage and don a Barbour and Hunter wellies. Climate change — and the attendant increasingly chaotic weather patterns — means the Greens will remain a national political force. That undermines a central plank of Burnhamism: that Labour can re-hegemonize the Left vote. 

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The intensity of this summer’s weather also presents problems for Farage. Certainly, he’ll find it increasingly difficult to present “environmental issues” as a fringe obsession when Britain is literally burning. “This is just the weather now,” is how an electrician I recently spoke to put it, fresh from installing his own air-con. Farage’s outriders know there’s little upside in demonizing such people, even if the puritanical Greens may equally struggle to win over a public increasingly enthusiastic for the joys of air conditioning. 

And as the weather changes, views on climate change will do too. Right now, Farage disputes the science, and Badenoch rejects Net Zero, but there could soon come a time when both feel they have no choice but to explore other emission-reduction policies, from electric cars to nuclear power stations. In any case, don’t be surprised if figures from both Reform and the Tories start to lean into conservation issues: a kind of Countryfile centrism where Reform wax lyrical about painted lady butterflies, and domestic food supply chains, as a stand-in for fossil-fuel emissions. Equally, expect the conversation around North Sea drilling to focus on granting a license to the Jackdaw site, rather than Rosebank, which is larger. Calls to open fracking sites, or re-open coal mines, could also abate. 

Meanwhile, if things keep getting hotter, the next general election could be preceded by a catastrophic weather event. Imagine having to fight for votes with parts of the country beset by flame and drought. 

Burnham is likable, and is perhaps the most normal prime minister in living memory, something discernible from his encyclopedic knowledge of Bristol City football club. His t-shirted, everyman bonhomie makes people feel good about themselves, an invaluable commodity for a politician. But can he also deliver strategic thinking on energy security and climate change? In a moment of great disruption, football-coach charm won’t be sufficient. In the long Nineties, politicians could get by on charisma and effective media management. But that moment has gone, and isn’t coming back. 

That is because it has always been a crossroads, the rocky harbor in the heart of the Mediterranean. The Arabs bequeathed the islands their distinctive language, while the Normans began fortifying their harbor. It is said that Ottoman troops, taken hostage after the Siege of Malta, furnished the locals with coffee before even Venetian traders knew of its pleasures. Later still, Malta was French and British. Both contributed to the national character, yet it was the last which endowed Malta with its legal system, a fondness for beer, and red phone boxes.

If foreign influence was one constant in Malta, grinding poverty was another. Even after an Axis siege brought the country close to famine, a lack of opportunities also saw thousands of Maltese men — including my wife’s grandfather — taking their families to the furthest reaches of the Commonwealth in search of work. The maritime heritage of their homeland meant they often found employment in the docks of Australia, Britain and Canada: something which also explains why, when the Maltese came to Britain, they gathered in places like London and Portsmouth. Independence in 1964 brought sovereignty but not prosperity, much as the new state tried to embrace tourism and logistics. So, like Ireland before it, Malta became defined by emigration. Between 1948 and 1967 almost a third of the population left.

Today that history, of economic stagnation and depopulation, is a fading memory. EU membership, and an increasingly globalized economy, means the country has become a hub for not only tourism, but financial services and online gambling too. By one measure Malta’s output per person is now higher than that of Britain, France or Sweden. Of even greater cultural significance, though, is the comparison with Italy. As recently as 1990, Malta’s neighbor to the north boasted a GDP per capita almost 50% higher. But where Italian television, radio and football once offered the island a window onto modernity, today it is young Italians who cross the Maltese Channel in search of work. If you are an ambitious young person in Catania or Palermo, you might hear advice that nobody has proffered for a millennium: go south and get ahead.

Indeed, this economic revolution has been mirrored demographically. The nation that once watched its sons and daughters depart by ship for distant shores now draws workers from across the globe. Today, 41% of Malta’s labor force is foreign-born. First are the young workers filling labor shortages in lower-regulation sectors, from Italian hospitality staff to Indian workers in construction. Then there are wealthy foreigners, drawn by Malta’s favorable tax environment; the country’s millionaire population grew by 74% between 2013 and 2023. Finally there are the internationally mobile companies choosing warmer climes and 5% corporation tax. Last year SkyBet moved to the country, and it won’t be the last British firm to do so.

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All this is doubly noticeable given Malta’s compact size. At the turn of the millennium, the islands were already home to 400,000 people, squeezed into little more than 100 square miles. Since then, Malta’s population has risen by almost half, with one recent projection suggesting it could reach 630,000 by 2030. For all the claims that Britain is overcrowded, an equivalent surge would mean our population approaching 90 million. Nor does this extraordinary trajectory show any sign of slowing. In June 2023, finance minister Clyde Caruana even said the country’s population should rise to 800,000 by 2040.

Combine that with record-breaking tourist numbers — last year saw around seven tourists for every resident, the equivalent of almost half a billion visitors to Britain — and property prices are soaring. The average asking price for an apartment now stands at €414,000: almost 10% higher than a year ago and roughly 16 times the average wage (in England this ratio is seven-to-one). Because this transformation is relatively recent, Malta still enjoys high rates of home ownership. But for younger citizens, the ladder has effectively been pulled up; buying a home, and with it the prospect of starting a family, is increasingly impossible.

That is also new. Just a few decades ago, my mother-in-law and her husband could buy a two-bedroom holiday flat in St Paul’s Bay — Jesus’ favorite disciple is said to have been shipwrecked on a nearby island — despite being a seamstress and bus driver in Portsmouth. Today, such a purchase sounds fantastical, not least for blue-collar workers. Amid all this, the remarkable thing is that Maltese leaders don’t seem too concerned. As far back as 2014, Joseph Muscat, the then-Prime Minister, spoke of Malta emulating Dubai — where 92% of the population is foreign-born — through absorbing unprecedented amounts of overseas labor.

Almost universally, of course, this model has led to adverse social and political consequences. And if, for the moment, the Maltese economy continues to motor, some locals now have doubts. What, they ask, was all of it for? Does the average Maltese family now enjoy a better quality of life? The answer is far from clear — and their worries go beyond just surging house prices.

One of the things the Maltese are most proud of is their language. A Semitic tongue, it remains somewhat intelligible to people in Tunis or Benghazi. Centuries of contact have left their mark in other ways: the Latin script, for one thing, even as Italian words like ciao, allora (‘well then’) and kuċina (‘kitchen’) sit alongside the term “Al Madonna”, cried in moments of anguish. In other words Malta boasts a linguistic jewel arguably unique in Europe: ancient, resilient and deeply bound to the identity of the islands.

It’s ironic, then, that it wasn’t a millennium of colonialism that posed the greatest threat to the idiom — but self-government in an age of globalization. For while Maltese remains widely spoken, and is taught as the country’s official language, it is quickly being replaced by both English and Italian, with the internet and Sicilian baristas succeeding where Mussolini and the Luftwaffe failed. On more than one occasion I’ve gone to a restaurant with my wife — who speaks some Maltese — only to find that the staff can converse only in Italian.

Nor are such moments limited to the tourist traps of Valletta. Ghajn Tuffeiha — you say it “ayn tufiya” — is a stunning beach at the top of Malta and utterly unpronounceable to anyone north of Syracuse. Perhaps that’s why the beach has come to be known as “Singita Miracle Beach“: part of an Italian-owned chain of luxury beach clubs. Once again, all the staff there appear to be Italian. That’s no bad thing if you want a good espresso, but it’s another vivid example of how Malta’s unique culture is being overwhelmed by the forces of global capitalism. Is this how languages die in the 21st century? Not at the end of a Gatling gun, but because of hippy entrepreneurs performing “sunset rituals” using words you don’t understand.

Of course, one could argue that Malta has embraced the Promethean promise of modern capitalism: unleash growth first, solve problems later. Isn’t that the path China has followed for decades — a model that many on the Left, including myself, have praised? Yet Malta presents a more complicated picture. Unlike China, or the USSR, this is a tiny island rather than a continental landmass, boasting a fragile culture and delicate ecosystem. What’s more, despite its economic boom, the island’s infrastructure remains underwhelming. Simply put, the average Maltese has shockingly little to show for decades of development, besides a loss of tranquility and a spot on the beach.

Take public transport. Once upon a time, Malta had a railway. Built under British rule, it operated until the early Thirties and connected Valletta with nearby Floriana. But it would be abandoned as the combustion engine redefined island mobility. Presumably, however, nobody expected that, a century on, Malta would be home to almost half-a-million registered vehicles, making it the world’s most congested country.

What was once a tranquil pearl in the Mediterranean increasingly feels like a giant car park. Perhaps a Maltese Tony Soprano is involved in the highway construction business — because, failing that, the lack of alternative explanations is baffling. Either way, this moment of national prosperity increasingly feels strangely regressive, with growth becoming an end in itself rather than the means to a larger national purpose. As one Maltese commentator lately put it about language, the country spends “huge amounts of money protecting species and biodiversity, so why should it be that the one thing that makes us singularly human should not be similarly nourished and protected?”

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A good question. Being in hock to a certain idea of capitalism, where GDP charts in the back pages of The Economist matter more than a sense of local place, is clearly part of the answer. Another is the European Union, and specifically the Eurozone. Whatever the accomplishments of both, not least for the Maltese exchequer, they have served to fuel a politics of inadequacy in Europe’s south: where being a “normal” country came to mean adhering to the policy prescriptions of the Dutch and Germans. Eurozone membership itself became synonymous with escaping Mediterranean backwardness. As a result, and in order to overcome an absurd inferiority complex, the likes of Greece, Italy and Spain — to say nothing of Malta — sought to do neoliberal modernity better than their northern cousins. The idea of an identity and culture peculiar to the region became either secondary, or something to be actively assailed.

Step back and all this is arguably connected to the tsunami of falling birthrates right across the Greco-Roman basin. Where Maltese families were once large, today they are distinctly East Asian in scale, with the country ranked 224th when it comes to making babies. Perhaps, collectively, the national consciousness has come to regard the future as being tied with economic “development”, and infinity annual growth of 4%, rather than stewarding a sustainable future for Malta’s children and grandchildren.

It would be unwise to say Malta has clear lessons for other, larger countries — least of all on migration (it’s a nation the size of Edinburgh). But it’s also undeniable that Malta has taken certain global trends, visible across the West and beyond, to their logical conclusion. Unlike Maltese, English has hugely benefited from globalization, becoming the indomitable lingua franca of the 21st century. But the obsession with economic growth as an end in itself, and a flattening of cultural difference in the name of a consumerist cosmopolitanism, is just as visible in small-town England as in Melliha or Bugibba.

Indeed, if anything, Britain is further down the line than its one-time Mediterranean redoubt. Here, the boom years have faded, and we are coming to terms with failing to spend our treasure wisely. Despite the economic bonanza of the Thatcher and Blair years, and the jackpot of North Sea oil, we boast barely any high-speed rail or trams, and have failed for decades to build new homes or reservoirs. But Malta also shows how a critique of growth, and recognizing some things are worth more than money, can bridge conventional assumptions of Left and Right. Political scientists call these “post-material” concerns. They are anything but. Issues of identity, collective meaning and spiritual nourishment pre-date capitalism by millennia. They are perennial questions.

As for Malta, it has been blessed by nature and history. And yet, speaking personally, there’s a fascination that lies beyond its monuments and beaches, for Malta exhibits the defining contradiction of our age. Never before have the islands been so prosperous, even as young Maltese feel less able than ever to buy a home or raise a family. And while, after centuries of foreign rule, the country is finally free, its fortunes are ever-more determined by global capital and the European Central Bank. Capitalism wants to flatten what is unique about any place; in the words of Karl Marx, making all that is solid melt into air. But the islands bring to mind the call by Aimé Césaire for a different kind of cosmopolitanism, a “universal rich with all that is particular”. Call it rooted cosmopolitanism, if you like.

This, then, was the Downing Street clear-out of the decade, less a reshuffle than a political detonation of much of the Labour Right. And while the extent of the change is extraordinary, so too is the fact Burnham’s retinue kept the purge concealed. We should now recognize the endless briefings in recent weeks, from Mahmood being the next chancellor to Bridget Phillipson keeping a major role (she’s now equalities minister), for what they were: the Labour Right stirring the pot and hoping for a reaction. It never came. If nothing else, this has been the slickest announcement of a Cabinet by a Labour PM since Blair. It’s early days, but the narrative has been exceptionally clean — much to the chagrin of those now powerless on the backbenches.

For decades, the default of Labour’s “soft Left” — of which Andy Burnham has, in recent years, been a standard bearer — was to wax lyrical about “broad churches” and bringing people together. As leader, Ed Miliband’s two shadow chancellors were Alan Johnson and Ed Balls. Peter Mandelson was arguably the second-most-powerful person in Gordon Brown’s government. And even Jeremy Corbyn, before the attempted coup against him in 2016, had the likes of Heidi Alexander and Ian Murray in key positions.

This tendency, of trying to fit people who detest one another into the same project, even when they violently disagree, is a major structural deficiency for Labour. Good strategy is the result of saying no, and sticking relentlessly to a plan. For the present party of government, however, the opposite often applies, the general feeling being that giving out influence, and doling out concessions to almost everyone, is the foundation of political success. As should surely be clear by now, the opposite is true.

That’s certainly a lesson our new Prime Minister has seemingly learned. Even before he returned to Parliament, I said Burnham would need to be ruthless with high-profile Starmer supporters. In truth, though, I couldn’t see it happening, partly because of the institutional strength of the Labour Right within the party machine (though not its membership), and partly because Burnham seems like a people-pleaser. On that second count, I may have misjudged him.

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That’s not to say there aren’t disappointments for the party’s Left. Ed Miliband has been moved to the Foreign Office, a shift which may help the PM’s office dump certain aspects of his Net Zero agenda while giving the Doncaster MP what looks like a promotion. It also doesn’t hurt, as Labour tries to win voters back from the Greens, that alongside acknowledging mistakes on Gaza, Burnham has chosen someone to lead on foreign policy who’s trusted by center-left voters. There’s also the fact that Miliband has bags of experience and a sizable personal profile, all useful assets on the global stage.

The biggest shock, though, was surely the appointment of John Healey as Chancellor. While it’s true Healey was at the Treasury more than two decades ago, he’s not especially known for harboring a distinctive vision on the economy. Nor does he have experience in financial services, or even the private sector. But perhaps that’s the point, because rather than an ideologue, or a figure who wants to chart their own path, Healey will be a relatively loyal factotum at the Treasury, as Burnham seeks to re-configure large parts of the British state — not least by moving part of No. 10 out of London. Additionally there’s the fact that John Healey’s greyness — his political brand brings to mind the title of Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities — is something of a balm for bond markets while Burnham ponders further tax rises and higher public spending. Perhaps, if your prime minister is most comfortable waxing Mancunian about football and the Hacienda nightclub, you need a number two who resembles a bank manager from Wiltshire.

There’s a third aspect to Healey’s elevation though, and perhaps it’s the most important. Because while Burnham has ideas of his own, the economic agenda of his government will be, for the most part, designed by Lord Jim O’Neill (formerly of Goldman Sachs) and former Bank of England chief economist Andrew Haldane. So when Healey delivers his first budget in October, the words he’ll be saying, and the policies he’ll be proposing, won’t really be his. But what are those policies, and why would a former executive at Goldman Sachs be advising Britain’s most Left-wing leader since Harold Wilson?

The answer is that Burnham’s agenda is based on squeezing rentierism in the economy — from outsourcing and privatized utilities to buy-to-let landlords — and in its place investing in the core foundations of success from skills and housing to cheap energy. The two agree on a great deal, not least because Manchester has been the place they’ve most closely examined what works, and what doesn’t. They concur that the state needs to be more active, a critical partner to the market rather than its nemesis.

Still, it’s also true that Healey and Burnham are politically aligned, with the former supporting social housing in a way that was unthinkable for someone like Rachel Reeves. Besides, from his perspective Healey almost certainly accepted the job, with all the unique constraints it will entail, in exchange for more money for defense: the very issue that led to his resignation a month ago and which essentially ended Starmer’s premiership.

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Which leads to the most important question of all. If Burnham intends to end rough sleeping as a matter of urgency — something he said in his maiden speech as PM, and a priority I agree with — and he wants to retain the pensions triple lock, increase defense spending, build council homes and bring utilities back into public ownership — then how, exactly, will he pay for it all? The Prime Minister insists he won’t break the fiscal rules, which means borrowing can’t finance day-to-day spending, and also that the national debt will fall over the lifetime of this Parliament. But that second part, of a falling national debt before 2030, simply doesn’t seem possible given the scale of the commitments Burnham is endorsing.

In any case, there won’t be flesh on the bone until later this year — when Burnham aims to put forward a “10-year plan” for the country that lays “a path from where we are now to where I believe we all want Britain to be”. I’m expecting massive commitments on elderly care, housing, industry and apprenticeships. All important, but the money will have to come from somewhere.

Before then, though, the new government will turn to the cost of living, an issue that Burnham will address in a set-piece speech today. Expect a lower cap on bus fares, and perhaps even a return to the £2 fares scrapped by Starmer and Reeves when they entered government, but which Burnham wisely retained in Manchester. Rent caps and help with energy bills have also been touted, but both would surprise me, not least because they aren’t long-term solutions. For Burnham, Haldane and Jim O’Neill, not to mention voices on the Left such as Matthew Lawrence, the aim must be supply-side interventions that make housing and energy cheaper, rather than government intervention to prop up demand. Rent caps, before building more homes, could well prove counter-productive.

Regardless, Burnham is trying to be the bearer of good news right from the start of his premiership, lightening the load of the median voter. It’s a stark contrast to the gloomy naysaying of the opening months of the Starmer government, when he and Reeves either delivered bad news, raised the prospect of worse to come, or else made headlines for freebies, inaccurate details on their CV and Taylor Swift tickets.

Burnham will benefit from having just fought a by-election in a constituency where Reform romped home in the May elections. He would do well to trust his instincts as a result. Yesterday that meant eviscerating almost the entirety of the Starmer project. A memorable aphorism attributed to Teddy Roosevelt is that you should speak softly while carrying a big stick. Add to that dad-dancing, and wearing retro Everton tops, and you have the political management style of our latest PM. Where Starmer’s nastiness was often performative, perhaps the result of deep-seated insecurity, Burnham’s ruthlessness might be tethered to a modicum of humanity. Whatever the differences between the two men, his colleagues better hope it works.

That itself adds another layer to proceedings. Will the likes of Reeves and Lammy cause No. 10 problems from the outside? That is what would typically happen next. Only they all need Burnham to succeed — otherwise they’ll be looking for new jobs before the decade is out. The PM’s internal rivals will want him to succeed as well. Just not too much.

In theory, of course, we’ve been here before, with Starmer also trying to connect English devolution with a post-Brexit politics. In 2023, while still in opposition and riding high in the polls, Burnham’s soon-to-be predecessor said his plans for devolution would transform “‘take back control”’ from a slogan into a solution. Alas, things turned out rather differently. Indeed, if a single issue encapsulates the pathologies of the Starmer regime, it is local government reorganization (LGR) — the outgoing PM’s plan to streamline councils — as well as the introduction of more metro mayors. In the two years since 2024, when a flagship white paper was published to address both, quiet constitutional radicalism has met with ever more farcical incompetence. This is Starmerism: triple-distilled.

Because so much else has happened, it’s easy to forget just how ludicrous parts of that agenda are. From 2028, for instance, the largest city-region in Europe will be the combined “metro area” of Norfolk and Suffolk. Feted to have a single mayor overseeing a fiefdom of some 9,200 square kilometers, that mayoral authority will be around the same size as Cyprus — and six times larger than Greater London. The idea of Norwich being the administrative capital of a city-state, eclipsing Madrid or Paris in scope, sounds like something from an Alan Partridge fever dream. For Keir Starmer, it was simply part of re-forging the British state.

Almost as bad is the proposal for a single mayor to cover the whole of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Given the uproar when Emirates sponsored the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth, and planned to paint the iconic building in the same colors as Southampton football club, it’ll be interesting to see how the two places integrate. In Portsmouth, the nickname for the denizens of Southampton, some 17 miles away, is “scum”. Those who live in the home of the Royal Navy, meanwhile, enjoy the nickname “skates” (you’ll have to Google why). There is no history of collaboration between the two cities — both of which enjoy almost 1,000 years of continuous history. It’s a similar story with Cumbria, soon to be a metro area as well as a county, with the authority forecast to be over twice as large as France’s largest municipality. That’s despite the fact that Carlisle, Cumbria’s largest city, has a population of just 100,000, and the region is best known for the empty Lake District.

Would Burnham repeat such bizarre absurdities? There are grounds for cautious optimism. In February 2023, Burnham spoke to the journalist Steve Richards. There’s little reason to be cynical about his remarks at the time, not least because his chances of a national comeback seemed negligible, with Starmer riding high in the polls. And yet, for more than half an hour, the then-mayor for Greater Manchester spoke convincingly of a “place first” approach to devolution. “In a post-Brexit, post-pandemic world,” Burnham intoned, isn’t it clear “that Whitehall can’t cope with this? It’s struggling, and it’s because the wiring of the county isn’t right.”

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Throughout that conversation two things stood out. The first is how, for Burnham, any localist agenda must fit the needs of communities which already exist. “Legitimacy comes from the people and the place,” as he puts it. Which makes you wonder whether plans for an East Anglia super-region, let alone a South Coast version of Neom, will truly come to pass in his premiership. The second is how devolution isn’t merely a means to rewire Britain’s economy, but to determine which issues matter in the first place. Whitehall’s inability to craft solutions partially stems from the fact it has little idea what the problems are. Policy-making, in the argot of the former Manchester mayor, is thus divorced from place.

Three years on and it’s clear that, in other ways too, Starmer has continued with the very approach Burnham was skeptical of. For all Starmer’s talk of dispersing power away from London, and the public really taking back control, his faction essentially selected the Labour candidate for the west of England mayor (the now disgraced Dan Norris), while blocking Jamie Driscoll from standing in the North East. Then there were the times the leadership’s retinue made Richard Leonard resign as the party’s Scottish leader, and steered the controversial Vaughan Gething to the role of first minister in Cardiff. Starmer, and much of the Labour Right, were comfortable with devolution, and “giving power away”, so long as those who received it agreed with them.

That hints at another divide with Burnham, who, whatever his other faults, seems to have shed any factionalist baggage. He was certainly a Blairite upon entering Parliament in 2001. Yet in his speech on Monday, he took aim at the whipping system and its tendency to foreclose political debate. Looking further ahead, of course, it’s hard to see how a “place first” approach won’t clash with the political management of the Labour establishment: including its propensity to parachute in preferred candidates for “safe seats”.

Still, it’s a start, especially when you consider that Starmer’s approach to local politics — arrogant, entitled and defined from the center — was so inept that it actively undermined confidence in the need for reform. Starmer’s LGR was meant to be the biggest shake-up of local politics in England since the Sixties. If more mayors, furnished with greater powers, is about enhancing democracy, then LGR was about delivering a more standardized bureaucracy across England. Fair enough: my home county of Hampshire presently boasts 15 different authorities, including “two-tier” district and county councils. LGR means that number will fall to five unitary authorities, all enjoying the same range of competences.

While the changes make sense in theory, as has often been the case with Starmer the execution has been disastrous. Why? Because reforming ambition was encumbered by hubris, which in turn fed incompetence, something extending far beyond ambitions of conjoining old rivals like Southampton and Portsmouth. Starmer’s government, with its enormous majority, sought to remake key parts of national life at breakneck speed. As a result, many councils regarded the timetable as unrealistic, with authorities expected to develop new unitary structures, governance arrangements and financial models within months. It often felt like No. 10 was applying the principles of DIY SOS to the biggest overhaul of local government in over half a century.

Alongside the rush, far-reaching questions remain unanswered. For instance, will newly integrated authorities have to pool historic debts? Would a council broadly in the black (such as Portsmouth) have to absorb liabilities from another in the red (like Hampshire County Council)? And if an authority that runs surpluses integrates with another that runs crippling deficits, what help is on offer from the Treasury? These are, understandably, huge points of contention for council leaders across the country. Yet they have been met with little more than hand-waving and vague promises of things being alright in the end. Speak to almost any council leader, and you’ll likely hear shock at how blasé and reckless London has been throughout.

Which brings us to another major difference between our prime ministers, present and future. While Starmer viewed local government re-organisation, and more metro mayors, as a means of achieving growth within the existing model, Burnham regards empowering city-regions as a way of bypassing No. 11 and the most dysfunctional parts of Whitehall. That is, after all, the subtext of him opening an office in Manchester. While the primary aim is to take power out of Westminster and, as Burnham put it this week, create a political “circuit-breaker”, a secondary aspect would be to strengthen the role of the prime minister himself.

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Whatever you think of it, at least that’s a vision. Compare it to the LGR, whose preference for a “unitary layer” for local government emerged from a single paper published by PWC. The ultimate argument for those vast mayoral authorities from Hampshire to East Anglia, meanwhile, can be found in a report compiled by McKinsey. Why the need for such scale? Because, in order for regional governments to compete for investment, that’s what’s required — with two million inhabitants apparently the starting point to create sufficient capacity, generate adequate brand recognition, and access the right tier of investors.

In other words, those new mayors up for election two years from now are less about empowering local people, or reviving England’s smaller cities, than ensuring creditworthiness. This is why somewhere like Cumbria is suddenly expected to become a city-region. And while this again may sound coherent in principle, you have to question whether such contrived and synthetic entities will garner sufficient democratic legitimacy in the long-term. History and tradition — Portsmouth’s star-and-crescent flag goes back to the Third Crusade — is apparently irrelevant to a Treasury that regards city-regions as little more than economic zones. In a way, it’s strangely reminiscent of arguments for greater European integration made by liberals in recent decades. Reducing transaction costs matters more than anything else. For Burnham, though, if cities are certainly a locus for policy experimentation, they are also places with heritage, history and a continuous culture. His passion for Manchester makes that clear enough.

Ultimately, the two men view devolution as a path to different things — which makes you wonder whether Burnham as prime minister will move to re-assess LGR, let alone oddities like a city-region for Norfolk and Suffolk. And, while we’re at it, why not give the Southampton and Portsmouth city-regions a mayor each? That’s what would happen in any vaguely sane polity.

Which leads us to yet another major fissure between the current prime minister and his successor, with Burnham repeatedly criticizing much of the devolution agenda since 1997. He expressed as much in Monday’s speech, when he promised to offer “new opportunities to extend devolution” in the Celtic fringe by taking power “deeper down”. In words intended for the SNP and Welsh Labour, as much as the inhabitants of such places, Burnham remarked how the “people of Dundee and Bangor feel just as distant from Holyrood and the Senedd as they do from Westminster”.

Now, you might point out, Holyrood and the Senedd are consequences of Blairite reforms. Does Burnham, a former New Labour minister, think they were a mistake? The answer appears to be yes, with Burnham admitting as much while speaking on that podcast with Richards. The original sin of Scottish and Welsh devolution, according to our next prime minister, was the “same Westminster approach… where it’s all national and there isn’t that routing of power at the local level”. Rather than truly empower voters in Wales and Scotland, the Blair government created dysfunctional mini-mes in Edinburgh and Cardiff: places whose political cultures are every bit as complacent as London.

Starmer, by virtue of his connection to Morgan McSweeney and the Labour Right, could never voice such a critique. In theory, the same should be true of Burnham, given his past or present ties to Blair, David Miliband and James Purnell. Yet he’s broken ranks with his old comrades in stating that the city-based approach of the English North — whose champion is none other than George Osborne — has proven more successful.

Perhaps that’s exactly the kind of mold-breaking that’s needed. After all, the historic party of social democracy is betting the house on something which hasn’t worked for a century: pushing power to towns and cities far beyond the M25. Given Westminster’s tendency to hoard power, that’s a huge ask. Burnham’s localism agenda may ultimately end up giving him more influence — not least if he becomes ally-in-chief to existing mayors and council leaders, especially if he spikes the worst aspects of LGR — all while he undermines both the Civil Service and Parliament. As the incoming PM ominously added in Monday’s speech, the political direction he will set “will not be up for negotiation”. Still, even a President Burnham would probably be better than what we have now: spreadsheet devolution with voters a mere afterthought.

But if the nation’s eyes are fixed on Labour versus Reform, there is another story unfolding in this corner of Greater Manchester. It is ignored, because its roots stretch back much further, and its progress is more gradual. Yet it is no less significant. For amid the voters and canvassers and garden stakes I saw in Makerfield — cheering for Reform, Labour, Restore and the Greens — one name remained strikingly absent: the Conservatives. It’s not that voters in Makerfield despise the party. It’s just they don’t seem to care.

That might sound like a hackneyed observation, a contrarian effort to distract you from the main event. But it’s hard to emphasize just how non-existent the Tories feel in this patch of Lancashire. Especially so when you consider that, as recently as 2019, they came second in the seat, winning more than 14,000 votes. Pollsters now have them within the margin of error of zero.

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And things are getting worse. In the Gorton and Denton by-election, at the end of February, the Conservatives garnered less than 2%. In Makerfield, they are set for a similar fate, only this time slipping behind Restore Britain, whose candidate — Rebecca Shepherd — is a rare example of a populist candidate who doesn’t have much to say. For the first time in British politics, the most successful electoral vehicle in modern history, the party of Wellington, Churchill and Thatcher will finish third among parties of the Right.

That has no precedent. In 1922, the Liberals fragmented into two rival factions. It was a similar story with Labour after the emergence of the SDP in 1981. More recently, of course, there’s been the Tories facing off against UKIP, then the Brexit Party and now Reform. But Makerfield is new terrain. It’s akin to the Greens and Your Party outperforming Labour in what was, until as recently as seven years ago, a target seat. Under first-past-the-post, success often rests on persuading voters that going elsewhere is a wasted ballot, however alluring that might be. It’s a hard trick to pull when your most loyal voters have two credible alternatives.

Yet despite this looming watershed, you’re as likely to find that analysis in the media as you are to encounter a Tory voter on the high street in Ashton. In Daily Telegraph editorials, and BBC broadcasts, we are daily reminded what a formidable politician Kemi Badenoch is, and how impressively she’s performed given the circumstances. But each time I hear or read that assessment, I have to remind myself: her party is about to lose its deposit in two consecutive by-elections.

As I’m neither a national newspaper columnist, nor a panelist on Newsnight, I have the luxury of being honest. Whatever elements of the media might tell you, we are witnessing the slow, dull destruction of the Conservative and Unionist Party. While many regarded the last general election, when the Tories won just 24% of the popular vote, as a nadir — I suspect future historians will look on it with admiration.

Why could things get worse? Because, until 2024, there were no parties on the Right seeking to expose the gap between Conservative rhetoric and reality. Now, like billionaires starting commercial space companies, two have come at once. For all the critics of Keir Starmer — hardly an endangered species — I can count on one hand those I’ve met who claimed the solution was the Conservatives. Serious activists who remain in the party simply talk about survival.

The great Tory failure, and thus their most substantial vulnerability, is with immigration. In 2010, David Cameron promised to reduce numbers to the “tens of thousands”. Instead, immigration constantly increased over the subsequent decade. Then, in the aftermath of Covid, Britain experienced the “Boriswave”, with almost a million net arrivals in a single year. In years gone by, before Lowe and Farage grabbed the national megaphone, the Tories would have responded with cynical hand-wringing. They might have admitted that “mistakes were made” — but that things would have been even worse under Labour.

If nothing else, that highlights the modus operandi of the Westminster system, where your vote is about stopping what you don’t want rather than endorsing what you do. Such a politics of negation was the principal means by which the Tories disciplined and corralled their voters. The arrival of Reform, and Restore, has destroyed all that. The Greens have done something similar with Labour: which is why the party’s NEC allowed Burnham to run after the debacle of Gorton and Denton. Triumph for Hannah Spencer raised the stakes to an existential plane.

That FPTP allowed the major parties to mobilize large coalitions through negativity, rather than shared beliefs and policy objectives, also meant both Labour and the Conservatives were inherently unstable coalitions, especially in our post-ideological age. The media speaks about this positively, emphasizing the need to build a “broad tent” to win Westminster elections. But, in reality, this meant effective collective action always depended on people with wildly different views.

Understand that and you grasp why we have witnessed decades of dysfunction — and the inability of our political class to solve the most basic of problems. While Labour are generally regarded as the more erratic of the two parties, attempting to unite unabashed Marxists and senior partners at Magic Circle law firms, this criticism more readily applies to the Conservatives. They have long tried to be the party of free markets, and of the petit bourgeoisie; of a globally integrated economy, and of Brexit and reduced immigration; of low tax, and the generous triple lock on the state pension.

Indeed, this monstrous blend of interests, worldviews and priorities relied on some economic growth, as well as the country’s electoral system and the political habits it engendered. It also meant that, as soon as an alternative emerged, the party was essentially doomed. But what really did for the Tories wasn’t just the demise of a meaningful growth model — which one could argue evaporated before they returned to power in 2010 — but the end of cheap money. It’s no coincidence that the Bank of England started to raise interest rates at the end of 2021, around the same time that Labour surged in the polls. For all the supposed impact on the Tories of Partygate, or Keir Starmer’s sober style, neither came close to the end of cheap mortgages.

Most fundamental of all, though, is the fact that Britain’s economic model can no longer reproduce a sizable middle class. As a result, the Conservatives, supposedly a pro-market party on the center-right, are unable to reproduce themselves as an electoral constituency. This can be inferred from a litany of data points — from the rising cost of private schools; to declining rates of home ownership among young adults; to the proportion of 25-to-34-year-olds living with their parents. Where qualifications in law or engineering were once a route to success, today they’re anything but. Machine learning will do something similar for professions like accountancy and consulting, while journalism has long been a pursuit for children of the elite, or those willing to embrace decades of precarity. Doctors and headmasters, those venerable burgher professions of yesteryear, now take industrial action over pay and conditions. It is often said that the rise of Reform and Restore is the function of an aging population, but they are also what happens when fertile conditions for a politics of the center-right collapses.

After 14 years of Conservative government, indeed, the situation is worse than ever. There’s the £100,000 tax trap, for one thing, which means you pay an effective tax rate of 60% over that threshold. Elsewhere, student loans have become a de-facto tax on the middle class, for everyone from millennials down. Loan repayments, combined with income tax and National Insurance contributions, now mean a young professional on a middling income can face a marginal tax rate of over 50%. This has obvious implications for those saving to buy a home, or who wish to start a family or launch a business — in other words basically anyone who might formerly have thought about voting Tory.

If these shaky economic foundations go a long way to explaining the Tory nadir, dramatic changes in the media matter too. This is most obvious with the emergence of GB News and X under Elon Musk. As with our often-asphyxiating electoral system, the big two parties relied on journalistic gatekeepers to retain authority and manufacture consent. While print, progressively so after Rupert Murdoch entered Britain’s news market, reflected a conservative worldview, broadcast media — particularly the BBC — offered a liberal counter-balance.

As I note above, you can still hear echoes of this in the traditional media today. But GB News scrambled journalism’s uneasy truce by taking the politics of the tabloid paper and sticking it onto our televisions. Looking back, it is clear that breaking the Westminster duopoly was always downstream of disturbing the ideologically cosy world of TV journalism. Suddenly, the talking heads of the Conservative and Labour parties, spouting their arguments as glibly as press officers, seem even more incurious and boring than before.

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Restore’s media operation, for its part, is overwhelmingly online. To that extent, it is closer to the Greens than Reform. Rupert Lowe has a highly active Facebook page with twice as many followers as the prime minister. Then there are the young men circling around him, a group whose digital footprint is matched by their ideological stridency. This cohort includes the Lotus Eaters channel on YouTube, as well as Charlie Downes and “Young Bob” (who recently provided reams of evidence to Hampshire police while livestreaming dozens of individuals engaging in violent disorder).

Impressive as that growing cluster is, however, it’s no match to having one of the country’s leading news channels (GB News features two Reform MPs, Farage and Lee Anderson, as well as former parliamentary candidate Matt Goodwin). That helps explain the difference between the two parties in terms of exposure, and why Reform are contenders in Makerfield while Restore are not. Traditional stalwarts aside, the Tories are utterly lost in this new media world, and seem set to keep struggling as broadsheet circulations plummet.

Just as Jose Mourinho, twice a European champion, once mused that his greatest footballing achievement was to finish second with a Manchester United side replete with has-beens, Rishi Sunak might one day muse that winning 121 seats, despite the headwinds of history, was his political zenith. For Kemi the bar is lower still. If she slumps to 50 or 60 seats, even Times columnists will struggle to assert that lead is actually gold.

The scale of such riches is new, at least in the democratic age. At the turn of the millennium, it was Bill Gates who held the mantle of the world’s wealthiest person. Yet back then, when Britney Spears was a break-out teen sensation, and Vodafone was one of the world’s most valuable firms, Gates’s personal worth stood at a mere $60 billion, around $116 billion in today’s prices. Soon, though, Musk will possess a fortune ten times that.

Musk’s rise, as well as that of his fellow tech barons, is thus an object lesson in wealth inequality. While that is most glaring in the United States, where Wall Street rubs shoulders with Mississippi, a state where women are more likely to die in childbirth than Uzbekistan, Britain is far from immune. According to the Sunday Times rich list, the combined fortune of the country’s 200 wealthiest families stands at 20% of GDP. In 1994, long after the Thatcherite revolution had prevailed, it was a mere 6%. In France, meanwhile, the 500 most affluent families had a combined wealth equivalent to 6% of national output 35 years ago. Today, by contrast, that figure is 42%. If Musk is an eye-catching luminary of our gilded elite, his personal rise is just the most visible expression of a far broader transformation. 

While there’s little doubt these have been boom years for the ultra-rich, a conclusive explanation as to why that happened remains elusive. Some point to the demise of organized labor in the West, others to the increased centrality of high-value services in the economy, meaning productivity gains accrued to elite-tier knowledge workers. Then there’s long-term shifts in asset values over the last five decades, primarily driven by a decades-long collapse in interest rates, and more recently compounded by quantitative easing.

Whatever drove the growth of a globally mobile super-rich — and it likely includes all of the above — it’s important to clarify such a shift isn’t limited to countries with a low-tax “Anglo-Saxon” model of capitalism. If that were the case, then Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, all high-tax, high-welfare economies, wouldn’t boast more billionaires per capita than Britain. The same applies to France. While it has numerically fewer billionaires than here, the wealth of the billionaire class across the Channel is around three times greater. Yet tax still matters. Because whatever the other explanations for the West’s spiraling inequality, the fact remains that billionaires, and multi-millionaires too, pay relatively less of it than the rest of us.

The extent of such “tax efficiency” is shocking. In France, the average citizen hands over 51% of their income to the state once you account for consumption taxes. You might think that’s reasonable: given the republic’s outstanding healthcare system, high-speed rail and public infrastructure. Or you might feel it’s excessive, a moral affront to self-reliance and hard work. But that’s not really the point, because the kicker is this: the effective tax rate for the country’s billionaires, which includes the two wealthiest families in Europe, is less than half that, with just 13% going to authorities in Paris. Prefiguring today’s rhetoric of a rigged economic system, Marx once wrote that the modern state is a committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie. Given the deal billionaires now get, such an outcome would be outlandishly egalitarian. 

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What explains such a misalignment? The answer is income tax, and how it’s become a thing for the little people. As data compiled by Gabriel Zucman and his International Tax Observatory concludes, billionaires in France, Italy and the Nordics pay an effective income tax rate of between zero and 2%. Zucman suspects the figure for Britain is roughly the same, though the relevant data has, so far, proved challenging to collect. 

For inequality campaigners, this isn’t merely an issue of fairness, but of recursive dysfunction. By taxing incomes more than we tax wealth, we let the ultra-rich get wealthier, at a faster rate, by allowing them to re-invest capital into yet more assets. Often yielding rents, which in turn bring higher returns than government bonds or public equities, altogether contributing to pervasive rent-seeking across the economy — from land and private equity to the pursuit of monopolistic business models with venture capital. 

That all means wealth inequality widens further still. If you aren’t an oligarch, your best bet is to try something similar, albeit on a smaller scale: whether it’s becoming a buy-to-let landlord or entering the “gold mine” that is housing vulnerable children. No less dispiriting, this soon creates a vicious circle. Lower taxes on capital gains and asset ownership means more rentierism. More rentierism means more inequality and more state dysfunction. What’s on the line, ultimately, is the destruction of that central pillar of democratic society: the prosperous middle class.

In response, some on the Left have rallied around the idea of a wealth tax. Thomas Piketty first touted the idea more than a decade ago, but it has since been popularized in Britain by figures such as Gary Stevenson and Zack Polanski. In France, for its part, Zucman has influenced figures in both the Socialist Party and the more radical La France Insoumise. Even Wes Streeting recently spoke of his desire to equalize tax on capital gains with income, while Andy Burnham has spoken about a land value tax. While neither is an explicit commitment to a wealth tax, both Labour rivals seemingly agree the ultra-rich presently pay too little.

And yet despite such conversations on the Left, the center-Right — the very tendency meant to promote the interests of the aspirational, propertied middle class — is more likely to dismiss a wealth tax. In a stunning example of negative polarization, where your own position is based on the opposite of what your opponent says, the party of family capital often seems gleeful about its rejection of taxing the very richest. 

Why would pro-market conservatives, who claim to represent successful, affluent people, be happy for those richer than them to pay effectively zero in income tax? One explanation is ambition, and the fantasy that the middle classes might one day join such rarefied company; that a successful Home Countries accountant is merely a temporarily embarrassed oligarch. Talk of taxing the very wealthiest thus sounds too close to burdening them with more taxes. And, frankly, they pay quite enough already. 

But that’s exactly the point. Because such groups — generally pro-business and skeptical of the state — contribute an outsized amount to HMRC. Britain increasingly feels like a standard bell curve: at one end, those on low incomes and pensioners pay comparatively little to the Exchequer, except by way of consumption taxes (visit a Home Counties garden center on the Bank Holiday and you’ll see what I mean). The jet set, meanwhile, have landed themselves in the same category. All of which leaves the middle, who are left to support the system while withdrawing increasingly little from it. The most extraordinary example of this is the £100,000 “tax trap”, where earnings between £100,000 and £125,140 are subject to a 60% marginal tax rate, not to mention the loss of benefits such as free child care. 

Why would anyone facing such a situation support oligarchs paying so little into the system? And yes, they do exist. I’ve met them. To be clear: a wealth tax is not a silver bullet. The estimated revenue generated by a 2% tax on those with wealth above £100 million would be between £10-£15 billion. To put that into context, Britain spends more than £200 billion a year on health and social care. Yet such sums remain considerable. Last year, for instance, the policing budget for England and Wales amounted to £16 billion. The British Transport Police has been cut to the bone, and even with Starmer’s recent public largesse are subject to further cuts. So if you want fewer fare dodgers on the London Underground and less antisocial behavior on trains — both supposedly cherished center-Right goals — that means hiring more people to actually enforce the rules. 

Trading standards are another area that could be helped by a wealth tax. In response to a recent BBC expose, the Government awarded officers an additional £6 million a year to deal with the scourge of low-level criminality on high streets. But that’s a paltry sum when you consider that, in some areas, as many as half of convenience and vape shops are suspected to have criminal links. Nor do the center-Right arguments for a wealth tax end there. For one thing, the deficit, a perennial concern for fiscal conservatives, might be addressed if the very richest paid the same effective tax rate as the rest of us. Similarly inheritance tax — something I personally support but which raises huge passions on the Right — could be abolished in its stead. 

Yet the very same voices who claim to care for such things fall silent when it’s proposed that the wealthiest fund them. In part, certainly, this explains the demise of the Conservative Party, underscoring how beholden it’s become to finance, Big Tech and the ultra-rich rather than its petit bourgeois base. In Tory world, it is acceptable for nurses to graduate with over £50,000 of debt — and for solicitors to lose access to free childcare — while a billionaire landlord can effectively escape taxation altogether. Little wonder, then, that lifelong Conservative voters are flocking to Reform. There’s a problem with that too, however, given Farage and his friends similarly seem to believe that American tech billionaires and land-owning dukes share the same economic interests as Britain’s squeezed middle.

The counter-argument to a wealth tax — especially among those who claim to be otherwise sympathetic — is enforcing it. In a globalized economy, they muse, capital is too mobile, and millionaires and billionaires can go elsewhere. That is true to an extent, though recent events in the Gulf show the value in long-trusted safe havens like London and New York. And even for those willing to risk a move to the other side of the world — or anyway just Milan — a simple tool is available: adopting a system, like the US, that taxes nationals on global earnings regardless of where they live. 

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Some Right-wing ideologues will tell you this is impossible. Yet it’s precisely what the historic champion of free markets has done. Simply put, you make it illegal to not file, and pay the relevant taxes to, HMRC — even if you’re a British citizen and reside elsewhere. As with the United States, this would apply to lower-tax jurisdictions, so the Cayman Islands or Qatar rather than Sweden or France, where you pay the difference beyond a certain threshold (the Americans call this the “Foreign Earned Income Exclusion”). The idea, after all, is to tax ultra-rich tax dodgers, not simply those who work overseas.

For some, of course, that won’t make a difference. But the vast majority would want to play by the rules, whatever the online screeching: the inconvenience, bureaucracy and stigma of illegality wouldn’t be worth it. Besides, even with a tax of 2% on anything north of £100 million, most billionaires would still be paying a lower effective rate than a headmaster or doctor. All told, then, the arguments for a wealth tax have never been stronger, on the Right if nowhere else. If so-called conservatives want to preserve the middle-class prosperity of the last century, it will be a crucial, and I suspect inevitable, tool. 

Over the last decade, the Right has been proven spectacularly correct about certain things, not least the importance of place in political life. It’s all the stranger, then, how many on that side of the divide insist such thinking, somehow, doesn’t apply to the wealthiest. Maybe one day, after Musk starts his first libertarian space colony, affluent Brits will flock to Mars rather than Dubai, Singapore and Malta. Until then, His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs officers should be enforcing a wealth tax on our richest compatriots — wherever they happen to live. 

For Professor Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy — and one of the few experts on the subject who isn’t a charlatan — the formulation of effective strategy goes something like this. First, diagnose the problem. Second, adopt a guiding policy. Third, devise coherent actions, marshaling your resources to execute them. Everything else is irrelevant. Distraction is the enemy.

When it comes to diagnosing our problems in Britain, there’s much consensus among the public. Those services which are, relatively speaking, well-funded feel inefficient — parts of the NHS especially, with military procurement worse but less recognized. Meanwhile, for less generously furnished services like the police, what was once sold as prudence has long been recognized as crippling austerity.

Elsewhere, the economy isn’t productive enough. Recent immigration has been too high, at least in the abstract. Work no longer pays. The country lacks a vision of the future. And there’s litter everywhere. These are the issues that matter most to those who voted in recent local elections — and others who simply didn’t see the point.

They also seem central to Andy Burnham’s pitch to return to the House of Commons. Just days into his campaign to win the Makerfield byelection, the former health secretary has blasted the two main parties, declaring that Britain has been on the “wrong path” for 40 years. As a country, we keep doing bad strategy. And both Labour and the Tories are complicit.

Whenever I speak to punters, from Runcorn and Birmingham to Winchester and the Welsh Valleys, they tend to agree — embedding their criticisms in what they can see rather than abstractions. Thus their disquiet generally boils down to the simple fact that the physical infrastructure of the community has decayed while people feel less affluent. Conversations invariably drift to high streets, the ground zero of our national malaise. Such places combine the sense of a fraying built environment with the recognition that our economy doesn’t work. It is here where we feel poorer, both in body and spirit.

And so, in response, we get the Government’s Pride in Place program. Unveiled last September by the prime minister and Secretary of State for Local Government Steve Reed, it was expanded in February and now has a budget approaching £6 billion. The plan? To throw pots of money towards disadvantaged neighborhoods, with tranches of £20 million allocated over a decade to almost 300 areas. Almost all the recipients are outside London.

Alongside that deluge of cash comes a democratic innovation: rather than local authorities determining how the money should be spent, newly formed “neighborhood boards” will “co-create” a plan alongside the local community, as well as the constituency MP and council. “Local people are best placed to determine what should happen in their neighborhoods” as Reed put it last autumn, “and they don’t need government to dictate it.”

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Where I live, in Portsmouth, two areas stand to gain £40 million from this largesse. One is Landport, labeled “Fratton West” by Whitehall mandarins. The other is Paulsgrove, in the north of the city. Each is a small part of a single council ward. In ONS-speak, they are “Middle layer Super Output Areas”: neighborhoods comprising between 2,000 and 6,000 households. Fratton West is on the low end of even that, with the area home to just 5,000 residents. Over the next decade, and thanks to Pride in Place, they can now expect additional spending of £4,000 per person.

But as more historically middle-class parts of the city are being given over to HMOs, halfway houses and student housing — as family homes become lucrative bedsits for landlords — Landport and Paulsgrove already have high amounts of social housing and amenities for young families. Both also have youth and community centers and are, by the squeezed nature of Portsmouth, Britain’s second-most densely populated city, rather green. Castle View Academy, in the heart of Paulsgrove, has been rebuilt in recent years. In 2022 it was described as a “Good” school by Ofsted.

My hometown of Bournemouth is an hour’s drive up the coast. Three areas there — West Howe, Boscombe West and Hamworthy West — will receive £60 million between them. While there is no doubt these are similarly disadvantaged areas, it’s again unclear what such tiny places (West Howe’s population is 7,000) will do with such large sums of money, and so quickly. What’s more, the directors of these newly convened neighborhood boards, who will be responsible for managing £20 million of public investment, and generating plans as soon as November, will be volunteers — and expected to hang around for years.

But what is even being measured? What counts as success? And given the scale of the scheme, and the hundreds of locations where it will apply, how can we guarantee there won’t be corruption, grift and poor value for money on an industrial scale? Nobody seems to have answers to such questions.

Which brings us back to good strategy. Throwing money at poor areas might sound laudable, and if there are specific objectives it can be. But it isn’t an end in itself. As with defense spending, the Government fails to grasp an obvious point: that conflating more cash with a strategy — or, in the case of military spending, a higher percentage of GDP — is moronic. It’s also a world away from the promise of mission-oriented government that defined Starmer in opposition. Where before he promised “laser-like focus” on key priorities, now the Government appears indifferent as to whether this spending will even create skills and jobs.

Given the Government is expected to spend £1.6 trillion over the next 12 months, £6 billion doesn’t sound like much. You might also ask why I, supposedly a socialist, would begrudge a few hundred neighborhoods such a tiny slice of luck.

That’s a fair question. Returning to my seaside roots — my now-wife and I left London in 2018 and came to Portsmouth, her native city — has shown me how far even a little money can go. The point, though, is it needs to be spent wisely.

The older I get, the more I realize how that undermines the argument for government-led investment. Profligacy has become the enemy of progress. This is particularly surprising given Starmer’s promise of “deliverism” before June 2024, and his purported desire to do politics differently.

If anything, indeed, Burnham’s promise of “Manchesterism”, combining public control and the elimination of outsourcing with a pro-business, pro-development instinct, seems truer to Starmer’s original vision. It’s certainly a more sensible political offer than maintaining the outsourcing debacle and intermittently hosing areas with cash.

In the case of Portsmouth, £100 million would move mountains in its revival — not least for Fratton and the city center, both abutting the Landport neighborhood set to receive funding from Pride in Place. In these particular areas, urban renewal, done assiduously, would serve working-class communities more than anyone.

The recent pedestrianization of Castle Road, a conservation area in the more affluent Southsea, could be repeated in half-a-dozen smaller streets in the area. Roads around major transport hubs could also be developed. The local authority could buy commercial property in both areas, anchoring investment by providing municipally-owned space for small business. Whatever’s left over could be put towards investment for tourism, and reversing some of the worst horrors of postwar development. Who knows: some money could even be found to fund apprenticeships for young people, a worthy idea given the rising problem of youth unemployment.

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Of course, a minimal tram network, as Portsmouth once boasted, and a connection to neighboring Gosport (thanks to Dr Beeching the largest town in England without a train station) would also be sensible, value-generating developments. But unlike the items listed above, these would be large-scale capital investments. The painful truth, which should also provide succor, is that many of Britain’s medium cities don’t even need that level of investment to kickstart a renaissance.

But money, spent wisely, still matters. A good example is the recently opened “Mid Cornwall Metro”. It may not be the maximalist option that locals wanted, the re-opening of a line that was also subject to Dr Beeching’s axe. But at a cost of £56 million it means that, for the first time since the Sixties, a direct train will run between Falmouth and Newquay, helping tourism and businesses as well as residents. A reminder: Pride in Place will be spending almost as much in Portsmouth, and more in Bournemouth, just without a clear vision or goals. These, apparently, are the options: either game-changing transport infrastructure, or youth clubs in a neighborhood which already has them.

Sometimes I wonder if we even want large towns and smaller cities to succeed at all. Bournemouth is a Victorian jewel on the South Coast, once home to everyone from Robert Louis Stevenson and Tolkien to Mary Shelley. Yet today its town center, a sort of Dubai for the late Victorians, is synonymous with vacant shop fronts and vape stores. Nearby Boscombe, another fashionable 19th-century resort, has long been home to innumerable bedsits — many of which are owned by DWP Housing Partnership. Those letters don’t stand for the Department for Work and Pensions, but a property company started by the notorious Dave Wells, a recently deceased slum landlord.

Where’s the wisdom of building a community center with taxpayer funds while letting such men run riot, and permitting what feels like infinity HMOs? A refurbished play-park is always welcome, but if the area is also warehousing recovering addicts — as Boscombe does — how is that meant to transform the life chances of those living there? Just as important, how does any of this help those addicts in recovery? Nor is Bournemouth alone: this is an issue that afflicts places right across southern England.

But rather than address issues like rent-seeking, outsourcing and the treatment of addiction, Starmer’s government has decided on the easy option: a Frankenstein of David Cameron’s “Big Society” conjoined with Fabian welfarism.

In fact, Pride in Place seems particularly bizarre when viewed against the long-heralded Local Government Reorganisation (LGR). Merging councils, and integrating services and back offices, is meant to reduce costs. For their part, new metro mayors, including one planned in future for Portsmouth, promise to create a singular point of local accountability. So why, at the very moment that the Government is trying to create efficiencies, and focus scrutiny on a single individual, is it creating more bureaucracy through neighborhood boards?

In 2020, The Economist wrote that “other countries have poor bits. Britain has a poor half.” The first step in addressing that should be to drive up productivity, and the quality of life, in our large towns and smaller cities. There’s no reason Sheffield should be poorer than Katowice, or Birmingham less affluent than Lyon. But turning things around requires good strategy — more even than money and the best of intentions. That means Westminster must stop looking at the world beyond the M25 as a basket case whose only hope is a one-off cash bonanza amid inexorable decline.

Boris Johnson was the first major politician to successfully harness the chaos. Back in 2019, as the Conservatives faced electoral collapse and the rise of insurgent populism, he posed as a maverick outsider and — despite leading a party that had been in power for almost a decade — turned government into a vehicle for revolt. He went on to win the largest Tory majority since 1987 and Got Brexit Done.

Labour is now facing a moment of similar peril. It has lost Wales and vast swathes of urban Britain, as well as towns and suburbs to Nigel Farage’s Reform. Much like the Tories before Johnson, Labour seems done for; remote and detached from the people it claims to represent.

So, as chaos consumes Westminster, the party is frantically searching for a political redeemer. Wes Streeting, resigning as Health Secretary yesterday, offered a diagnosis: “where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift.” But besides his impressive alliteration, the now former Health Secretary didn’t offer much by way of solutions. Indeed, at the time of writing, no senior MP has mounted a leadership challenge to Starmer. In fact, the party would seem paralyzed but for one man: Andy Burnham. And late yesterday, Josh Simons forsook his Makerfield constituency to allow the Manchester Mayor to contest the seat in a by-election which, should he win, will mean he can stand for the leadership.

Burnham probably doesn’t think he has much to learn from the tousle-haired Tory. But if he does win the seat, and later replaces Starmer, he will have to learn what Johnson instinctively understood: to build a coalition strong enough to stop Farage’s populist cavalcade, he must rescue Labour from elements killing it from within.

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Starmer has turned Labour into a party of cautious, insipid managers — adding credence to the caricature of centrist politics. Even on Monday, when he had to give the speech of a lifetime, the Prime Minister pledged to nationalize British Steel, but only “pending review”. Those two words sum up everything that has gone wrong during his premiership.

So Labour needs an insurgent — against the status quo yet, like Johnson, from inside the corridors of power. But does Burnham have it in him? To an extent, his uncontentious manner reflects the broader culture of much of Labour. There is a longstanding instinct, particularly on the “soft Left”, to reconcile factions and bring people together.  Gordon Brown, as his premiership took a turn for the worse, memorably welcomed Peter Mandelson back as Business Secretary. A few years later, after upsetting the odds, Ed Miliband offered an olive branch to the Blairites by making Alan Johnson — who later admitted to buying a copy of Economics for Dummies — his shadow Chancellor. Even Blair had Robin Cook, John Prescott and Clare Short.

Recent history suggests there’s not much evidence that such emollience, by itself, is a strategy. Mandelson’s prodigal return didn’t make the slightest difference for Labour in the general election that followed. Picking Alan Johnson, and later Ed Balls, as his shadow chancellors stopped Miliband from crafting a distinctive political brand. And right now, with Labour already in power, Burnham can’t afford to prioritize uniting several hundred MPs over uniting the country. The former, after all, might soon depend on him to save their jobs.

Instead, Burnham must concede that his own party is just as dysfunctional as the Conservatives were, and accept Labour’s shared culpability for decades of bad decisions: from PFI and privatizing utilities to the Iraq War; an economic model built on cheap migrant labor and, latterly, trying to thwart Brexit. That, after all, is at the core of Nigel Farage’s message: decades of failure are the result of a rotten consensus, overseen by the uniparty as it squatted in the “center ground”. This smug dogmatism insulated politicians from the needs and opinions of the public. It’s precisely why the potential Hail Mary presently being pitched by some Starmer supporters, re-joining the EU, will appall so many. And yet, Labour still doesn’t get it.

Burnham, then, must accept the accuracy of Reform’s diagnosis — before outlining his own alternative — a policy platform increasingly known as Manchesterism. At the heart of this agenda is a vision based on sovereignty, common ownership and a productive national economy: themes that aren’t offputting to the majority of Reform voters. It has the feel of a Left-wing, British version of MAGA, a prospectus that could attract a large bloc of voters.

Manchesterism, as detailed in a report this week, identifies the root of Britain’s permanent slide in living standards as the extractive nature of rentierism, be it buy-to-let landlords, private equity or foreign sovereign-wealth funds. Yet besides this critique, which unsurprisingly calls for public ownership of things such as water and energy, is a pro-enterprise agenda embedded in a state that protects. If you have £80,000 of student debt you are less likely to start a business, or begin a family — a self-evident truth somehow lost on the policy wonks of SW1.

In other words, Burnham should attack the prime movers of precarious Britain — from the architects of tuition fees to those who pushed outsourcing into every corner of local government. Successfully selling this platform must therefore be accompanied by upbraiding the likes of the Tony Blair Institute, ditching ID cards and asking questions about the wisdom of various constitutional reforms since 1997. I’m yet to hear a socialist argument for the Supreme Court, or Osborne’s even more idiotic OBR. And while I don’t favor a hereditary system, it’s hard to argue that the “reformed” House of Lords, built on cronyism and party patronage, is any better. For decades, Burnham should say, the Party lost its way. A vital connection with the toiling classes was lost. Implicating a government within which he served — that of Tony Blair — would only serve to underscore the extent of his critique, while blunting attacks from Reform.

Among all the figures currently being discussed as successors to Starmer, Burnham stands apart because he alone appears capable of building a coalition to stop Reform. Wes Streeting is simply the continuity candidate for the uniparty, associated with all those figures the voters distrust. Ed Miliband was rejected by the electorate once before, and would struggle to present himself as a figure of renewal. While Angela Rayner remains the preferred candidate of several trade unions, doubts about her authority within the party persist — and she has seemed increasingly lightweight since Labour entered office. Others floated — such as Al Cairns and Shabana Mahmood — have no hope with the Labour membership. Cairns has only been an MP for two years, and has no policy agenda or base within the party. Meanwhile Mahmood’s tenure as Home Secretary has arguably angered Labour members more than anyone.

Burnham, though, has that rare advantage. He alone among these purported rivals can command support from both his party’s parliamentarians and its members — as well as the general public. Such a convergence matters deeply as the party enters what looks like to be an existential crisis.

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To succeed, though, will take more than calling for a new comms strategy, “re-framing” the national debate or nebulous calls for unity. Labour’s most popular national figure will need to convince voters he understands why they have lost trust in the system — and that he has a plan for two decades of decline. This doesn’t mean he should overcook his radical credentials, and spook the bond markets. Rather he must start by conveying a sense of urgency and action, while re-connecting with the constituencies Starmer alienated in recent years — from those who support the cause of a Palestinian state to small business and the Labour Left. At the same time, he could do worse than purge, or at the very least alienate, a few Bluesky liberals. From the start, he’ll need to demonstrate what he’s against.

After all, that’s what Johnson did in 2019, when he dispensed with the pro-European awkward squad — a prologue to turning around the electoral fortunes of a Tory party in meltdown. Like Johnson, Burnham needs to show he’s on the side of the people against the Brahmin elite. What’s more, establishing political consent in the 2020s means governing as an insurgent, a fact that the spin doctors and ideologues of the long Nineties — who generally populate the opinion columns of this country’s broadsheets — are bewildered by. Listen to such voices for much longer, and Labour might well vanish for good.

In time, those uprisings — the birth pangs of democracy — gave way to a wider culture of trade unions and socialism. Little wonder, then, that at every general election since 1922, Labour has triumphed in Wales. And little wonder, too, that when the party finally gained a majority in 1945, it was Nye Bevan, a Tredegar native and miner in his teenage years, who symbolized the nation’s progressive currents. Alongside Bevan was another ex-miner, Jim Griffiths, the Minister of National Insurance and responsible for introducing child benefit. Even the party’s bureaucrat-in-chief, general secretary Morgan Phillips, was a colliery surface worker from the age of 12.

The story of those three men, the triumph of Britain’s organized working class in microcosm, felt like the culmination of something: from the red flag flying in Merthyr to a workers’ government at Westminster, and all in little over a century. The arc of the moral universe was long, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, but it bent toward political power for the proletariat.

Or so we thought. Because since that moment, the apogee of British social democracy, things have curved rather differently. Within two decades of the Merthyr uprising, Wales had become the world’s first industrial country — employing more people in collieries and factories than farms. Today, though, the nation’s economy is centered on services in Cardiff, where you’re more likely to find an artisanal coffee roaster than virgin steel. Little wonder, then, that a century of being a one-party state, with the politics of organized labor at its heart, Welsh Labour is now collapsing, its red flag a source of indifference rather than popular fervor.

Remarkably, the most likely winner of this May’s Senedd elections is Plaid Cymru. Pollsters currently have Reform just behind. Regardless, a victory for either party would be extraordinary, especially when the old stalwarts of Labour and the Tories face annihilation. In their place: the electoral expression of Welsh nationalism, and a party led by a man so English he could be from a Flashman novel.

Haven’t we been here before, though? After all, in 2015 Labour collapsed in Scotland, home to the party’s founder, Keir Hardie, and birthplace of two recent Labour prime ministers. And, then, something similar happened in England’s “Red Wall” a few years later. Yet the party’s demise in Wales is different. In Scotland, it was the SNP that uniquely benefited from an electoral slump, with Boris Johnson’s Tories likewise gaining in England soon after. But in Wales the threat is from two very different directions. Even the Greens are starting to make inroads, standing to gain from the “D’Hondt” system that will be used in May.

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Last August, indeed, even before the party elected Zack Polanski, the Welsh Greens won their first councillor in Cardiff. And now, at the end of March, YouGov forecast Labour only just edging them out. Labour has been the largest party at the Senedd since its inception; it’s not entirely implausible that it’ll finish fourth next month.

Another difference is how quickly the ground has shifted. As recently as 2021, under the leadership of Mark Drakeford, Labour matched its best-ever result in Senedd elections. Plaid, for its part, slipped to third. And at the last general election, less than two years ago, Labour gained 27 of 32 Welsh seats. Electoral disintegration in Scotland and England’s North was far longer in coming.

What explains such an accelerated turn? The Labour Right, for one thing. Vaughan Gething, the favored candidate of the Labour First faction — whose politics consist in little more than opposition to the party’s Left — was elected as Drakeford’s successor in 2024. But after just four months as First Minister, he resigned over a scandal centering on a £200,000 donation from a convicted businessman.

Four cabinet resignations finally pushed Gething out. So besides tarnishing the party’s brand, the saga also introduced something new to the nation’s body politic, with Welsh Labour engaging in a public spat. Whatever its other sins, the party’s discipline had been legendary, often proving a source of frustration for rivals. Unlike their colleagues at Westminster, Welsh Labour retained a splash of the labor movement in its DNA, meaning there was a greater respect, bordering on veneration, for collective decision-making. This not only reinforced trust, allowing identity-based voting to endure, but also meant that parties to Labour’s Left struggled. While socialists and Greens were winning seats to the Scottish Parliament as early as 1999, and Ken Livingstone became Mayor of London a year later, Welsh politics saw nothing comparable.

Beyond the Gething episode, an error as self-inflicted as the Peter Mandelson farrago, there’s also the disappointment of Labour’s return to national government. Free tickets to see Taylor Swift and gratis silk ties cut through in Bridgend as much as Blackpool. Instead of signaling a decisive change with the past, meanwhile, the Government immediately defined itself by removing the Winter Fuel Allowance from 10 million people. In response, Eluned Morgan, Gething’s successor, sought to put clear water between her party and Starmer, outlining a distinctive “Red Welsh Way”. A few months later, speaking to the Financial Times, she reminded readers that Keir Starmer wasn’t on the ballot in Wales. While the party’s chief in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, called on the Prime Minister to resign, Morgan kept her counsel. That’s evidence, again, of the Welsh party’s relatively cohesive culture — something Gething did his best to destroy.

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A host of other issues are refracted through the prism of Welsh subordination. While England gets HS2, albeit with a reduced footprint, Wales gets nothing. Indeed the funding formula for the ultra-fast connection between London and Birmingham means Cardiff misses out on £4 billion. As Will Hayward has noted, despite comprising 5% of the UK’s population, Wales receives only 2% of rail enhancement funding. Besides a deficit of infrastructure spending, there is a wholesale lack of opportunity. A shocking 40% of Welsh children under five live in poverty: so perhaps it’s not surprising that, after being the largest party in the Senedd for more than a quarter of a century, Labour voters are going elsewhere.

But while Wales is set for a controlled demolition of the two legacy parties, most probably prefiguring the next general election, a strange sense of composure reigns. Watching Merthyr Town at home recently, as they lost 2-1 to in-form Macclesfield, I was struck by the calm with which punters disagreed. In a stadium of a few thousand spectators, I met Plaid, Green and Reform voters while making a documentary, and spoke to a Labour MS at full time. Although people were happy to criticize national figures, there was an underlying respect for those around them. Mark, editor of the club’s fanzine — the fabulously titled Dial M for Merthyr — will vote for Plaid, but he was only too happy to point me towards a group of Reform-inclined guys in their twenties. “That’s their point of view isn’t it?” he said cheerily. When I spoke to the group, two of whom said they intended to vote for Farage’s party, there was a similar pragmatism. They understood why others might plump for Plaid or Labour.

It hardly needs saying that such relative restraint felt a world away from England. In Runcorn, and Gorton and Denton, two earthquake byelections of recent times, such views were virtually impossible to find (I tried, recording documentaries in both). Perhaps that’s because, in places like Merthyr, you find that thing so extolled by Westminster: community. These are small places built on generations of adversity — against bosses, London, geology itself. Geographically remote, an instinctive culture of solidarity remains the default.

The data backs this up: after Northern Ireland and Scotland, Wales has the highest proportion of people who feel they belong to their neighborhood. Indeed it’s arguably the nation’s very culture of solidarity and community — which furnished Labour with such seemingly impregnable foundations — that also explains the party’s rapid demise. Ties are thicker here, particularly in the Valleys. And if everyone you know has turned away from Labour, it suddenly seems easier, and perhaps even destined, to do the same yourself. The party’s collapse in Wales, to quote Trotsky on revolution, was impossible until it became inevitable.

That would certainly explain what happened in the Caerphilly by-election. Last October, in a seat it’s held at Westminster for a century, Labour fell to just 11% of the vote, finishing behind Plaid and Reform in a race for the Senedd. The generational ties that previously sustained the party’s hegemony meant it collapsed all at once. Expect something similar, across the country, next month.

Another problem for Labour is the underwhelming record of devolution. On key indicators, the NHS in England performs better, while child poverty is lower and employment is higher across the Severn Bridge. Such inequalities date back decades, of course, but it’s worth recalling that, before the 1997 referendum, the then-Welsh Secretary Ron Davies argued an Assembly in Cardiff would address such issues. That has simply not happened.

Yet though the Senedd has failed to deliver, there has been a growth of Welsh identity, particularly among the young. More people in Wales now say they feel more Welsh than British. Politically, that’s critical, with the nation’s electorate increasingly liable to vote on the basis of whether they feel one way or the other — the center-right block composed of those who feel British, the center-left block based on those who feel Welsh. Labour could ride the horse of emerging national identity while the Tories governed in London. But that has now gone, and a burgeoning sense of national identity wants more than managed decline, platitudes and nostalgia. As the writer Dan Evans puts it to me, only half joking, 7 May “could be our independence day”.

Devolution was always less about a belief in Wales’ ability to govern itself, and more an electoral calculation by New Labour to shore up votes against Plaid. Thus the former was happy to devolve power to Cardiff while having no real interest in state-building, or curiosity as to how Wales might be different politically. It’s remarkable to think that local authorities in England, via Metro Mayors, have more oversight of policing than the Senedd. Presumably Starmer has not corrected such an oversight because he doesn’t care.

Maybe, then, a precondition for Wales to interrogate what it wants, and who it is, means ditching the organization which has defined its identity for so long. The red flag no longer flies high in Wales. In its place, the battle to define the political substance of the dragon is about to begin.

One phrase is particularly associated with Mao’s diminutive successor. “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white,” the memorable dictum goes. “If it catches mice, it’s a good cat”. In other words: it is possible for a socialist society to have a market economy — or a capitalist society to have a planned one. What matters is which social interests are privileged. Understand Deng’s feline-themed refrain, and the thinking behind it, and you grasp how contemporary China permits private firms, and the profit motive, while warding off the worst evils of capitalism. The economic objectives of the Chinese state are determined politically by the Communist Party, rather than reflecting the sectional interests of capital. The planner state isn’t always kind — it’s generally best not to have your fertility policy designed by a missile engineer — but it has dragged China to the top table of geopolitics.

In his own inimitable fashion, Donald Trump recently offered a mirror to Deng’s famous saying. “I respect China, because it’s… a system that, in theory, shouldn’t work,” he told an audience in Miami last week. “But if you look at China, how well they do, how much they produce. I mean, they produce so many cars that they actually have competitions over who can produce the fewest cars.” If Deng’s words were immortalized as the “white cat” formula, perhaps Trump had articulated the less poetic “too many cars” theory. It certainly distills how Chinese firms, often backed by the state, capture huge market share through oversupply. A decade ago, that meant a sudden profusion of solar panels. Today, it’s electric vehicles.

Such an overt admission of the success of the Chinese system, not least by a Republican president, might be unexpected — but it shouldn’t surprise us. Deng re-calibrated the political and economic system of his own country; now, almost half a century later, it increasingly feels as if the United States will have to follow suit. The question is whether, after Trump, it can. While the People’s Republic has a system where the parties can’t change but the policies can, America seems to operate in reverse. The faces, factions and rhetoric constantly evolve — polarization is everywhere, and ever more ferocious — but the underlying economic reality remains the same.

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By Aaron Bastani

Even before the Iran War, it was clear that the US, and the “political West” more generally, were in relative decline. Their collective high point came at the turn of the millennium, when the OECD countries comprised 80% of nominal global GDP. Today, by contrast, that figure stands at 60%, with economic clout — and, by extension, political power — flowing east. By another measure, indeed, China is already the world’s largest economy, with India and Russia behind the US in second.

Though it might be tempting to point to recent growth across the Pacific, economic expansion in America rests entirely on debt. While it’s true American GDP grew by an extraordinary $9 trillion between 2020 and 2025, the country’s national debt ballooned even more, rising by $11 trillion over the same period. Even at the start of the year, before the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, the country’s jobs data, and stubborn deficit, were at odds with Trump’s rhetoric of an economic miracle. As with every Republican president since Reagan, his growth model is familiar: deficit-funded tax cuts while barking about smaller government. The Brookings Institution recently concluded that keeping tax breaks introduced by Trump would mean the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio will rise to more than 200% by the 2050s. Think Japan, just without the fast trains or social cohesion.

But it’s not just that the West is sluggish. China is increasingly competitive as both an industrial juggernaut and a global center for innovation. In the 2000s, when China was allowed to join the World Trade Organization, the assumption had been that, as America de-industrialized, it would move up the commodity chain, leaving the dirty work for poorer, less creative rivals. The avatar for such thinking was the Apple iPhone. While the handset was assembled in Asia, it was designed in California — home to the world’s largest company, and the first to reach a valuation of $1 trillion.

Today, however, China is building its own versions of the iPhone, from Xiaomi to Huawei, while remaining home to almost a third of global manufacturing. Then there is its burgeoning car industry. BYD is now the world’s leading manufacturer of electric vehicles, overtaking Tesla some years ago. Elsewhere, despite being banned from a number of Western markets, Huawei remains the global leader in 5G networks.

China also has a growing advantage in sectors like lithium-ion storage, solar cells and drones. Six of the world’s 10 leading battery producers are Chinese, while the country produces around 90% of all consumer UAVs. And the innovation gap in both fields is only set to grow. Emblematic of that is how BYD presently has more than 100,000 people working on research and development alone.

Finally, there is the country’s remarkable success with renewables. Nine out of every 10 solar panels are made in China. Given almost half of all electricity worldwide is now generated by renewables — with solar being the leading source by far — that means an exporting bonanza. Global solar capacity grew by 511 GW in 2025, and virtually all of that comes via panels made in the Middle Kingdom.

The war in Iran looks set to accelerate all this — not only emphasizing the industrial prowess of the People’s Republic, but underscoring its advantages as a so-called “planner state”, where private enterprise cooperates tightly with the state. Iran’s strategy of leveraging geography to close an economic chokepoint, and catalyzing a global energy crisis, means Beijing is set to be the conflict’s biggest winner.

In the first days of the war, one often encountered claims that attacks on both Iran and Venezuela were part of a new “Great Game”, with Washington hoping to undermine Beijing’s access to cheap fossil fuels. But besides Tehran only ever accounting for 12% of China’s supply, it was always the historic allies of America, not least in Europe and East Asia, that were most vulnerable to a blockade of the Persian Gulf. Pax Americana not only rested upon security guarantees for both regions, but in also ensuring a steady, cheap supply of energy. These assumptions are now imperiled and, with them, the credibility of the US global order.

Beijing prepared for this moment. Not only is China a net exporter of refined oil, but it also possesses a strategic reserve of 1.3 billion barrels of petroleum — enough to meet domestic demand for three months. So, as energy costs rise for competitors overseas, the Chinese state can offer price stability to domestic manufacturers. No less important, Chinese exporters stand to uniquely benefit — not only from domestic energy stability but also, for many sectors, increased demand. For the likes of BYD, CATL, which is a battery manufacturer, and LONGI, which makes solar panels, we are approaching a dream scenario. They’ve committed decades to creating the world’s most efficient renewable products, with highly optimized global supply chains. Until recently that seemed an uncertain bet. Yet in the weeks and months ahead, global demand will be unleashed.

Already, even before the deluge of orders materialized, China’s lithium-ion battery makers had seen their collective market values rise by $70 billion in the opening phase of the war. Last week, meanwhile, Indonesia’s president announced plans to increase solar capacity 10-fold over the next two years, from 11GW to 100GW. “We’ll convert all motorcycles into electric motorcycles,” he added. “All cars, all trucks, all tractors must [also] be electric”. Lee Jae Myung, the president of South Korea, has made similar noises, adding that the need to switch to renewables was so serious he couldn’t sleep.

If such rhetoric is to become reality, it means spending hundreds of billions on Chinese goods. And besides enabling an export bonanza for the country’s cleantech sector, which has benefited from decades of state support, something else highlights the acumen of China’s planner state: almost half of Congolese-mined cobalt will be in the hands of Chinese firms by the end of the decade, with around 70% of refining happening in the People’s Republic. That is important because the mineral is critical for lithium-ion batteries. While Washington waged a host of unnecessary wars in the Middle East, Beijing secured critical minerals for the backbone technology of the mid-21st century. The same is true for graphite and tantalum — the latter being a key metal for capacitors, central to stable wind and solar energy.

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When it comes to rare earth metals, meanwhile, China boasts a potential chokepoint of its own. The country has larger total deposits of rare earths than any other, a glaring concern for the United States given that its military is reputed to have reserves equivalent to no more than two months’ use. While it is true such minerals can be found outside of China, for instance in Australia, Beijing currently has a near-monopoly on refining and processing them. If it wishes for meaningful technological sovereignty, here is another industry Washington may soon need to start developing. From a military standpoint the importance of these minerals can’t be overstated. Each F-35 fighter jet, for instance, reputedly requires hundreds of kilograms of rare earth metals.

Yet as we’ve already seen, when your political consensus has long rested on the idea that industry is of secondary importance to financial services, technology firms and various forms of rentierism, that is virtually impossible to accomplish. The margin for such businesses can be large, certainly, but as enterprises they lack the scalability favored by US tech capital. If you view effective business through the prism of monopolies, as someone like Peter Thiel does, mining and processing, with its absence of network effects and high labor component, is deeply unattractive.

As NS Lyons wrote last year for UnHerd, the West’s lack of manufacturing capacity is its most glaring defensive weakness. Even now, despite years of fighting in Ukraine, Europe and the US can’t match Moscow’s ability to manufacture artillery shells. If the West is struggling to maintain parity with Russia — whose manufacturing base is nothing like as productive or wide-ranging as China’s — what hope would they have in a protracted conflict with Beijing? In 2025 China produced half a million consumer drones. The prospect of what that could mean in a war economy is staggering. The country’s shipbuilding capacity, meanwhile, is over 200 times greater than that of the United States.

China’s preparedness — a function of its aversion to market fundamentalism — together with the Iran war, now offers a historic opportunity for those advantages to be extended. Its power isn’t the result of a growing military-industrial complex, but the reflection of world-class civilian industries set to seize even more business. As these industries grow further in the months and years ahead, bolstered by Trump and Netanyahu’s war, that provides an even larger industrial base able to pivot in a time of war. The idea, therefore, that rearmament is the route to industrial renewal for Britain, as John Healey and much of the Labour party insist, is refusing to learn not only the major lessons of the last 25 years, but the last month. If a war with China ever came, the People’s Republic would defeat us for the very same reason it currently exploits demand for green technology: it makes stuff. Its defense capacity is built on its industrial base rather than the other way round.

While some have compared the unfolding events in the Persian Gulf to the Suez Crisis, the American-Israeli failure to inflict a decisive defeat on Tehran would more closely resemble the Fall of Singapore for the British Empire. It wouldn’t, in short, be the end of Pax Americana, but the beginning of the end. The erosion of its alliances; the declining confidence in its competence as a hegemon; the diminishing security returns on hosting American bases — all of these matter. But it is in starting a war which will see China’s leadership in industry and technology grow further still that reveals Washington has played its most foolish hand yet.

Quite suddenly, then, the future seems clearer. Energy stability, whether or not Europe uses more of its own limited fossil fuels, means more electrification, more batteries and more storage. In short, it means deploying more of the technologies where China is the unrivaled market leader. And with technology comes influence, with political realities then bound to shift too.

Deng’s second most famous quote concerned China on the global stage: “Hide your strength, bide your time.” With this kind of leadership — in technology, supply chains and, increasingly, moral authority — the time for hiding may now be at an end.

Davey, one might conclude, had joined illustrious company, becoming an heir to the venerable tradition of Lloyd George and the young Churchill. Yet few would associate the weighty hand of history with today’s MP for Kingston and Surbiton. Remember, Davey’s most noteworthy moment at the last election wasn’t a striking policy proposal or a clippable statement of principle, but his repeated tumbles off a paddle board. Over the weekend, at his party’s spring conference in York, the Lib Dem leader continued his unique brand of guerrilla marketing. Taking to the stage to “Daddy Cool”, the former Secretary of State was later seen “dad dancing” to Chappell Roan. Forget Keynes and Beveridge; even the hinterland and gravitas of Charlie Kennedy now feels as distant as the Edwardians.

More to the point, and given the meteoric rise of both Reform and the Greens, one might ask: why does Davey persist with the slapstick persona? A decade ago the Lib Dems, past masters of the by-election upset, would have fancied their chances in Gorton and Denton. Last month, by contrast, they lost their deposit. It feels, in short, like almost everything in British politics has changed over the past year and a half — except for the Liberal Democrats.

Advocates for Davey’s brand of leadership might reply that whatever one’s views on his style, the results speak for themselves. Beyond his party’s success at the last election, Nowcast and YouGov predict further gains at the next one, the latter putting them on 85 seats.

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But is that really so impressive given that the Lib Dems have long been Westminster’s third party, and that the big two are in freefall? While it’s true that Davey made hay in 2024, cruising home in Tory strongholds like Chichester, Witney, and Guildford, he has not managed to make comparable inroads into Labour territory. Instead, it seems that everyone but the Lib Dems is ready to feed on the carcass of Keir Starmer’s majority, from the Greens and SNP to Reform and Plaid Cymru. Rather than dancing to Gen Alpha bangers, Davey should be asking why Farage and Polanski are making the political weather instead of him.

One explanation is that such ambition is institutionally off-limits. The Lib Dems have learned the hard way — principally from the doomed SDP-Liberal alliance of the 1980s and Clegg’s disappointment in 2010 — that conservative gradualism is better than radical failure. In 2024, Davey delivered on the former, and then some, with a relentless focus on Tory seats in the south of England, especially those that contain a Gail’s bakery. But given the sudden rise of Zack Polanski, who has taken the Greens to more than 200,000 members and a by-election win for the first time in their history, that now feels like a limited strategy.

Perhaps Davey habitually affects a jocular manner because liberalism itself has become an unserious worldview —  so much so that any Lib Dem leader would struggle embody gravitas. Liberalism is bereft of thick ties across society; nor does it offer a deeper sense of meaning to its devotees, something one certainly can’t say for Reform or the Greens. Today’s liberals, in short, believe in little beyond the dying status quo. Their post-Cold War triumph was so utterly overwhelming that, almost two decades after the Global Financial Crisis, they lack the tools to change course.

Adrian Wooldridge, author of Centrists of the World Unite!, provides an insightful explanation of how liberalism conquered all while losing its mojo. As he wrote for UnHerd, liberals “reaped the benefits of the past 40 years of economic and moral deregulation”, yet are “now incapable of running the world which they have made.” It should therefore be little surprise that, over the last decade, the Liberal Democrats have been perennially negative: stop Brexit, stop Corbyn, stop Boris — and now stop Farage. They can’t stand for anything because this is the world they wanted. And it sucks.

That applies to both pillars of what Wooldridge persuasively labels “double liberalism”. Why double? Because it combines the excesses of economic neoliberalism, increasingly pervasive since the early Eighties, with the dismantling of any conception of a shared moral universe, a change that goes back to the 1960s. It is the combination of these two liberalisms that political and media elites have in mind when they talk about the “center” — an increasingly meaningless concept, not least because it is neither the middle ground of public sentiment nor popular. “The strength of the post-liberal argument,” Wooldridge notes, “is that it recognizes this synthesis is now producing more problems than benefits.” What is presented by elites as a politics of moderation often animates resentment and even hatred. The leadership class of the Long Nineties, Tony Blair more than anyone, appears incapable of grasping that.

Yet, left to itself, post-liberalism also gives rise to wantonly self-destructive pathologies. If Davey is incapable of taking himself seriously, then Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage can, on a range of issues, appear outright deranged. How else do you explain the allure of the MAGA-sphere for so much of the British Right? We can ascribe some of the blame to the demise of an ideologically curious liberalism. As a result of this intellectual seppuku, politics on the extremes have become ever more puerile. I say this as a socialist: a historically literate politics of the actual center only serves to refine my own views.

Consider the economy. For all the fanfare around Elon Musk’s cost-cutting DOGE unit, the Brookings Institute recently suggested that America’s fiscal situation is actually deteriorating. In other words, Trump, for all of his radical, disruptive rhetoric, has retained the default platform of the Republican Party since Reagan: deficit-funded tax cuts and rising public debt. As long as the petrodollar exists, that strategy might remain viable for Washington. But it certainly isn’t for the Europeans and Brits, because we don’t benefit from having the world’s reserve currency. That Reform is still barking about a British DOGE — even now — should terrify us all. The enthusiasm underscores the extent to which we are the backwater franchise for a political operation already discredited across the Atlantic. And because liberals at home are ideologically bankrupt too — or, worse still, don’t actually care about ideas — imitation of the Americans still passes for radical, cutting-edge thinking.

It’s a similar story with foreign policy. The radical Right is becoming progressively unmoored from reality over Iran and the wider region, partly because the center has no credible blueprint of its own. At the end of February, Farage was as eager as anyone to become embroiled in yet another overseas conflict, a position he quickly disavowed. The same was true of Badenoch, who initially demanded strikes in the Middle East. Matt Goodwin, who finished second as the Reform candidate in Gorton and Denton, said he was willing to pay more to fill up his car if that was the cost of depriving Iran of a nuclear weapon. Such opportunism has been exposed only because, on this one occasion, centrists — specifically Keir Starmer — took a position founded on reason rather than complacent liberal interventionism. As a result, and unusually for his time in government, Starmer finds himself aligned with public opinion.

Perhaps a decisive position on the war in Gaza would have achieved something similar — especially had that position been taken earlier on. Yet the Iran response remains instructive. On the one occasion that Labour has broken with the liberal default of recent decades, Labour has Farage on the back foot. It’s strange indeed to see both Richard Tice and Tony Blair knocking a Labour prime minister. This may also be part of a wider pattern, or at least the start of it. Before dancing the Macarena last weekend, Davey argued that the entirety of Britain’s nuclear deterrent should be built at home. It’s important to remember that our Trident missiles are actually from a “shared pool” housed across the Atlantic. Green shoots of pragmatism? Maybe.

Don’t expect a transformation, though. It’s often suggested that contemporary Left-wing politicians aren’t as talented as Tony Benn, and that their Right-wing counterparts are less erudite than Enoch Powell. But why wouldn’t they be, when the ideological school that reigned supreme in recent decades has been so disinterested in ideas? Peter Mandelson is perhaps the most grubby example here, but there’s also Justin Trudeau, who led a country afflicted by a drug epidemic while insisting on the gender-neutral term “peoplekind”, and Kamala Harris — whose presidential bid was a series of meandering speeches and clips of her dancing on social media.

Looking back on his rivals, it is obvious why Trump prevailed not once but twice. While trying to lean into the attention economy, rather than defend politics as a serious vocation, centrists were a handmaid to the very populism they claim to abhor. Trump’s endless, shambling monologues — despite being occasionally funny — were only captivating because what the alternative was a world of clipped soundbites devoid of personality or political substance. Ironically, this also fueled the rise of Barack Obama, whose singular ability to speak capsized the Clinton campaign ahead of 2008. But Obama was the outlier, and Clinton the default for double liberalism. Even then, there was little of substance to what the senator for Illinois actually said.

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All of this helps explain the allure of Mark Carney. The Canadian PM’s recent Davos speech was both brave and intellectually coherent. Notably, Carney acknowledged some of liberalism’s failings over recent decades. But his words were conspicuous precisely because liberalism so rarely produces politicians of substance. For Wooldridge, there is little to read into this shortage of great statesmen. But there’s an argument that it’s structural, emerging from the inherent contradictions of the tradition. Carl Schmitt, a critic of liberalism, claimed it seeks to “dissolve the political into ethics and economics”. Should it really surprise us, then, that given the culmination of the liberal project meant the abolition of politics, competent exponents of the craft would gradually vanish too?

So what might a reanimated liberal politics for the mid-21st century actually look like? First, instinctive complacency would be replaced by an acknowledgment of what has gone wrong. In Europe, particularly, we may be in the foothills of our own Century of Humiliation.

On the level of politics, the priorities should be clear: sovereignty is a tool for solving problems — and national identities matter. People want a state that protects them and that stands as a source of authority; if it fails to be either they view it as a useless, wasteful encumbrance. The national community is real. That doesn’t mean forsaking your fellow man in other parts of the world, but it does mean accepting the nation-state as the primary locus of political action.

The policies of a new liberalism should be an extension of such thinking. The wealthy should do their duty to others and their country by accepting the need for a new economic settlement. Wealth is, essentially, collectively produced — and a liberalism that is indifferent to exploitation deserves to die. A renewed liberal politics, retaining its old aim of allowing individuals to be the authors of their own lives, must also ensure that access to the basics is guaranteed: cheap housing, transport, cheap energy. Nobody is reading the collected works of Jane Austen, or learning Mandarin, when they are living in their overdraft.

A great advantage of democracy, of course, is that systems can self-correct. Yet even here there are warning signs. Some centrist commentators have claimed that the Westminster system should become less, rather than more, democratic. Unconvinced by the merits of party primaries, which keep politicians on their toes, they argue for a political class that is even more insulated from the public. It’s ironic that advocates of a worldview built on reason, public deliberation and Enlightenment values often argue for the kind of decadence you might associate with the Hapsburgs or the late Ottoman Empire.

Fortunately, however, such voices are becoming quieter. Given the benefits that serious-minded liberalism has brought to all of us — from defending the rule of law to upholding freedom of expression — its reinvigoration, in a form fit for the present day, would be a welcome one. Just don’t expect Ed Davey to lead the charge.

In the intervening years, with his bombastic style, and even his body language, Farage contributed to a fundamental reordering of British politics. The Clacton MP is sharp and his enthusiasm for a pint conveys an everyman bonhomie. More profoundly, though, he channels something lying deep within the national psyche: merriment. It’s no surprise, then, that his personality has so easily translated into a huge following on TikTok.

And as his star has risen exponentially, so too has his party’s — on current form, it looks likely to form the next government. All the same, what fueled Farage’s rise may not last forever. Reform’s political brand — like UKIP and the Brexit Party before it — used to be all conviviality and connection, but as the party has expanded, that merriment is increasingly being replaced by something else: whinging.

If anything, Matt Goodwin’s campaign to win the Gorton and Denton by-election was characterized by a complaining doomerism, failing to say much — if anything — that was positive about the seat, let alone the country. This constant focus on national decline undoubtedly bears fruit when building a popular Substack or YouTube channel. But if you’re trying to win over voters who can’t name the Home Secretary, you need something more hopeful. And even four days after his defeat, Goodwin was still at it. Nicknamed “Badloss” by some of his critics, he was relentless in his complaints that Britain’s electoral system was just as bad as Lebanon and Sierra Leone. Not that many people noticed, though. Let’s face it, if you lose by more than 4,000 votes, and proceed to say you were cheated of a deserved win, people are bound to switch off.

Indeed Goodwin’s failure, and Reform’s immediate response — imagine Donald Trump’s conspiratorial “Stop the Steal” campaign delivered with the hamminess of a Carry On film — is all the stranger given the Gorton result was objectively strong for both man and party. Pushing Labour into third anywhere in the north west is no mean feat. Goodwin simply lost to a strong candidate, Hannah Spencer, in a difficult race. So as the smoke cleared in a testing by-election, Reform sounded like losers.

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Spencer, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more different as she shrugged off the negativity thrown her way by both Labour and Reform. A Bolton-born plumber, she focused throughout on bread-and-butter issues: stopping fly-tipping, cleaning up litter, fixing the housing crisis and sprucing up high streets. During the campaign she even completed a plastering qualification. As she stood to deliver her victory speech, focusing less on ideology than daily hardships, Goodwin will have known that these were subjects that would appeal to his target voters: the Greens were no longer the po-faced identitarian liberals who like to tut at your package holiday. At that moment, Reform must have realised that its pitch as the only credible alternative to the uniparty was lost.

But what happened to Reform’s mojo? Whether you blame the veteran Tory influx, Goodwin’s performance anxiety, the outsourcing of strategy to consultants — it is clear that the party has lost its “aura”. This seemed pretty clear when I was canvassing in Gorton, and was repeatedly and politely told by party canvassers that they weren’t permitted to speak to journalists. Nor was Goodwin particularly keen on individual interviews. Yet this is a mass party and, managed correctly, its membership should be its greatest asset. Suddenly, the party machine feels preachy, with a very New Labour feel. Warm ale is out; a pint of control freakery, please.

This relinquishing of authenticity by Reform has started to be reflected in polling. At the weekend, as the Greens announced they had passed 200,000 members in England and Wales for the first time, FindOutNow placed them in second place; on Monday, Lord Ashcroft’s survey put them at third, just three points behind Reform, with almost 90 seats.

Then, on Tuesday morning, came the big one. YouGov — Britain’s most reputable pollster — put them on 21% of the vote and in second place, just behind Reform: five points ahead of both Labour and the Tories. In all likelihood, Reform and the Greens will have more members than Labour come the local elections in May. And, for those looking to dismiss the Greens as a party of students, bohemians and unemployed artists, think again. YouGov gives them a 6% lead over Reform among all Brits under 65.

Given the avalanche of attacks and negative campaigning against the Greens in recent weeks, from both the Right and the center, how is any of this possible? After all, similar attacks paralysed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour after 2017, and led to a drubbing two years later. Yet Polanski seems to go from strength to strength, leading to panic among some on the Right, with much of Westminster struggling to understand exactly why the Greens are soaring so high.

Traditionally, many of the party’s would-be supporters figured a vote for the party would be a vote for environmentally friendly policies. When Caroline Lucas was the party’s sole representative at Westminster, the Greens were able to push climate-related issues into the political realm in a remarkable way, from fracking to net zero. It only took one MP.

As the party has increased its MPs to four, the modern Greens have made the political weather on everything from renationalization to Gaza. Today, its MPs function as committed campaigners on strongly held policies at a national level — as well as effective constituency representatives at a local one. This understandably appeals to many of those voters disappointed by the traditional parties.

It helps, too, that Green supporters care about such a range of issues — from electoral reform to rewilding beavers to rent caps to closer ties with Europe. Some simply want to exert pressure on the Labour Party to move further Left. This broad, semi-coherent theory of change sees the party as an expression of social movements as much as an electoral vehicle.

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One downside is that the party risks becoming too successful. The uncomfortable truth is that too many first-place finishes mean the Greens will need to offer more than a grab-bag of progressive causes. For now, though, such problems remain in the future. My suspicion is that few Green voters expect Polanski to be the next prime minister. Many may not even want such an outcome, preferring the party to be a junior coalition member in a progressive government. Indeed, when I interviewed Polanski last week, soon after the Gorton and Denton result, he merely expressed an ambition to lead a party of several dozen difficult MPs in Parliament.

This, incidentally, is also why anti-Green scare tactics, from both Labour and the Right, will ultimately fail. It’s easy to make radicalism feel like an existential threat when it risks actually leading a government — as with Corbyn. That isn’t the case with Polanski. Certainly, comparing a by-election win in Manchester with Iran’s Islamic Revolution strikes most Britons as unhinged. In any case, it’s hard to present an organisation as much of a danger when all its MPs can fit in the back of a London cab.

Ironically, this anti-establishment vibe is also what is most winning about Polanski’s Greens. The party and its leader manage to couple radical purpose with fun — which, in a strange way, is reminiscent of Farage at his best. While I had to grab a few hours of sleep after Thursday’s result, Polanski stayed up all night. The following evening, he appeared on The Last Leg, full of verve and enthusiasm. This relentless energy is invaluable in politics.

Tramping around the sodden streets of Levenshulme a few weeks ago, with all those houses proudly displaying Green party placards in their front gardens, it was strikingly obvious that Reform’s success had opened the door to new possibilities for the Left. After all, if we are suddenly predicting that Nigel Farage can go from YouTube to No. 10, something previously viewed as impossible, then what’s so outlandish about the Greens overtaking Labour?

In terms of what is politically possible, Nigel Farage has — again — done more than blow the bloody doors off. Only this time it won’t all be to his own advantage.

In the event of Farage entering No. 10, we now know Robert Jenrick would become the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Richard Tice, meanwhile, will ascend to Deputy Prime Minister — as well as overseeing a new department of Business, Trade and Energy. Given the party’s plans for migration, which would mark a break with the post-war trajectory, it’s little surprise that Zia Yusuf, the party’s logistical supremo, will shadow home affairs. Suella Braverman’s focus, meanwhile, is education. 

Glossy press conferences in London may be part of Reform’s reality. But so too, increasingly, are the efforts of the party’s membership. It’s one thing to read headlines declaring Reform has overtaken Labour to become Britain’s largest party, or seeing Zia Yusuf share a viral graphic on social media. It’s quite another to observe hundreds of party activists making voter contacts and collecting data — the meat and veg of political campaigns. 

And that’s exactly what I saw on a rain-lashed Saturday in Gorton and Denton a few weeks ago. Some of those Reform activists, slogging through the mire, came from far away: I met one group freshly arrived from Shropshire. Others were from the seat itself, or elsewhere in Greater Manchester. Across all of those conversations, I was reminded of an important shift. Reform, for all of its brand recognition among opinion-makers — not to mention the fact that its candidate, Matt Goodwin, is a TV presenter — is now a mass party.

In races like Gorton and Denton, there is typically only one party campaigning in such a fashion. During the Corbyn years, the Labour hope was that deficits elsewhere — such as a generally hostile media — could be countered by mass canvassing, social media and in-person conversations. That approach yielded impressive results in 2017 before failing two years later. Before, and since, the Liberal Democrats mastered the art of flooding constituencies come by-election time. In the twilight years of the last government, they were the bane of the Conservative Party. 

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And yet, in Gorton and Denton, I saw something new: not just the rise of Reform as a serious national force, but three parties fighting a strong “ground war”. Labour remains a mass party, just. And besides the emergence of Reform as a genuine expression of popular politics, there is now also the Greens. Walking up a residential street, a little past six in the evening — as several St George’s flags fluttered from lampposts — it was hard to miss the party’s campaign HQ. From a distance it seemed reminiscent of a kebab shop: narrow glass shopfront, fluorescent neon sign, people packed inside.

But rather than jolly punters in search of a late-night doner, here were dozens of activists arriving to collect leaflets for delivery. That isn’t normal — most certainly not for a party which, until two years ago, boasted a solitary MP. Zack Polanski’s outfit, as with Farage’s before the last election, should not be discarded as a social media confection. There is real substance beneath the viral TV appearances.

But while the Greens and Reform are both mass parties, the similarities end there. Because for the latter, not only do connections flow down to activists and members, but also up to powerful figures in the media and civil society, like Jim Ratcliffe, as well as much of the disintegrating Tory party, especially donors. Left populism — think Bernie Sanders or AOC — seeks to juxtapose plutocrats against the people. That’s a powerful frame Polanski has adopted, with the Green leader — in his first speech on the job — contrasting a “nation of neighbors” against the billionaire class. The extraordinary thing about the gauntlet Reform has thrown down to the Left is an ambition to be both. Its members are as likely to own an Audi Quattro as a horse.

Multiple motivations drove Farage’s announcement yesterday. One is to signal how Reform is no longer a one-man band, with different figureheads responsible for discrete areas of policy. The bigger point, though, is experience. Remarkably, there are more politicians from the Liz Truss government in Farage’s top team than in Kemi Badenoch’s entire shadow cabinet. That is no accident. If Reform wishes to form the next government, it must perform the political alchemy of being both the party of change, while having familiarity with the apparatus of the state. After all, how else could it hope to change things? 

While rarely mentioned by its progressive critics, this is Reform’s greatest vulnerability. Polling last year revealed that a looming concern among the party’s “soft considerers” is they have no experience of running the country — even when those same respondents agreed with Reform across multiple policy areas. Though most agree that Farage’s insurgents are driving the national agenda, almost half the public believes the country would go from bad to worse with the former MEP in No. 10, not least because he has no experience in government. To take the top job having never been the Leader of the Opposition or served in a Cabinet would be without precedent in the modern era. It’s almost impossible to imagine.

So it is little surprise that while a frankly astonishing 42% of the public think Reform “understands the problems facing Britain”, they are still more likely to perceive Labour as “fit to govern”. The more data you see, the more Farage’s strategy of embracing former Tories — like Braverman and Jenrick — makes sense. Despite the personal popularity of both figures among the Reform membership, their admission to the party’s ranks at Westminster is intended as a signal to the wider electorate. Having built a mass organization, Reform is now trying to look like a party of government. 

It would be naive not to foresee a tension emerging here. Indeed, that has already come to the fore. Last week, Rupert Lowe, formerly a Reform MP for Great Yarmouth, launched a political party of his own: Restore Britain. Restore is the fully-leaded version of Reform, with one critical addition: its politics are, for better or worse, more heavily inflected by online discourse. Lowe’s virtuoso social media game is a big reason why the party has allegedly attracted tens of thousands of members in under a week, with Lowe himself announcing on X that it had overtaken the Liberal Democrats. But that strength is also a weakness, with the former businessman’s online superfans not necessarily reflective of the wider public. According to one poll, just 8% of voters even know who Lowe is. Perhaps Farage’s greatest strength over the years — whether it was judging public sentiment for a second Brexit referendum, or here — is to appreciate that Twitter (and now X) isn’t real. Besides being more fun, it turns out that going to the pub is a better gauge of public sentiment. 

Could a fragmenting radical Right, partly fueled by Reform’s pursuit of elite credibility, come back to bite Farage? It’s too early to say, but that by-election in Gorton and Denton could provide a clue. Standing for Advance UK, yet another Reform offshoot founded by a one-time Farage acolyte, Ben Habib (reputedly recognized by just 4% of voters), is Nick Buckley. A local campaigner around homelessness and anti-social behavior, Buckley was awarded an MBE in 2020 for his services to young people and the community in Greater Manchester. Intriguingly, his campaign seems more interested in attacking Reform’s Matt Goodwin than either the Green or Labour candidates, with Buckley even attacking academics who enter politics (Goodwin is a former professor of political science). 

Speaking on Tuesday, Farage sounded like one of the Gallagher brothers as he castigated Lowe, insisting that the two had never even been friends, and that the former Southampton chairman is someone defined by crises and needless confrontation. That enmity was tinged with a certain recognition, though. Of all the parties on the Right seeking to steal a march on Farage — from Advance UK to UKIP and the Heritage Party — it is Restore which presents the greatest challenge. 

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It is an inescapable fact that British politics increasingly resembles a proportional representation (PR) system, on both the Left and Right, only without the voting system. Hours after the Reform announcement yesterday, a new poll from YouGov put four parties — Reform, Labour, the Conservatives and the Greens — between 17% and 24%. Suddenly Lowe’s wrecking project feels like it could make the difference, while the need to win wavering Tories becomes ever more critical for Farage and his friends. 

For more than two decades, I’ve heard the arguments against electoral reform. A first-past-the-post system guarantees strong mandates, I was told as a student of A-level politics. It provides stable, competent government, I was informed a few years later as an undergraduate. Most important of all, as I learned in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, it means — in contrast to the Continent — that the extremes can never define the center. Increasingly, none of this makes sense, and it feels curiously similar to the cope pumped out before the Brexit vote in 2016. Nobody believes this stuff anymore, least of all those with any power. If anything, our first-past-the-post system seems to contribute to the abiding sense of permanent dysfunction. 

Lord Hailsham was right when he said that the Westminster system can lead to a form of “elective dictatorship”. It’s just, in the case of contemporary Britain, we persistently concentrate power onto two parties incapable of running the country. They are both, ideologically and in terms of personnel, exhausted. Farage’s job, as witnessed on Tuesday morning, is to convince enough people that he offers a genuine alternative. But it’s a sign of the times — and an important one at that — that the radical Right could be balkanizing before it’s even achieved power.

How else can you explain three extraordinary scandals in a single day? By Monday morning, it was clear that Peter Mandelson’s behavior, specifically while serving in the Brown government, could warrant a criminal investigation. Here was a man who reputedly received tens of thousands of pounds from Jeffrey Epstein, and who later sent the pedophile financier internal government memos and market-sensitive information. Even more troubling, Mandelson, through Epstein, advised JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon to subtly “threaten” the then-chancellor in an effort to stop a tax on bankers bonuses. This chancellor, of course, was Alistair Darling, Mandelson’s colleague in government. By Wednesday, the Prime Minister said Mandelson had lied to him “repeatedly”, though one wonders why he chose to believe a man who resigned twice from cabinet in disgrace. Accompanying that claim was a promise to publish documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment, by Starmer, as the Ambassador in Washington.

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Meanwhile, with the media scrambling to comprehend the scale of the debacle, two other stories were breaking which, under usual circumstances, would lead headlines. The first concerned Dan Norris, elected as Labour MP to North East Somerset and Hanham in 2024. Norris was arrested last April for a string of offenses including the rape and abduction of a child. This week, he was arrested for a second time. Though previous investigations relating to minors were dropped, it emerged that a second rape investigation had begun, as well as one concerning the potential sexual assault of a third woman. Norris may also stand accused of voyeurism and upskirting.

Then there was Tulip Siddiq, the Government’s anti-corruption minister until last January. In November, she was sentenced to two years in absentia by a Dhaka court for her role in a scandal centering on her aunt, the former prime minister of Bangladesh. On Monday afternoon, as the Mandelson revelations grew increasingly salacious, Siddiq’s sentence was upgraded to six years. The assertion that Labour are less prone to scandal than the Tories suddenly feels as dated as the Metaverse.

None of this is bad luck. Indeed such stories reveal something deeper, specifically about the modus operandi of the Labour Right. Mandelson, a decades-long tribune for that political tendency, was open to briefing an investment banker about developments from within government precisely because, for him and his comrades, the truth is always defined by the contingencies of the moment — whether it was “sexing up”’ the pretext for war in Iraq or exchanging cash for honors. It’s easy to forget now, but the highest law during the New Labour years, particularly for its staunchest advocates, generally revolved around status and personal advantage. This was politics, at its worst, at the end of history.

Philip Gould, New Labour’s polling supremo, wrote that the aspirations of the post-industrial working class had significantly shifted, now revolving around things like buying a new washing machine. Ideals and utopias were a thing of the past, he contended, replaced by consumerism, Pareto optimality and public management speak. But discarded alongside the ideological refuse of the Twentieth Century — by many of Gould’s fellow travelers at least — was any belief in an ethical life. For the faction’s most senior figures that intensified into a veneration of power for its own sake. It’s no accident that Jonathan Powell, formerly Blair’s chief of staff, and now Starmer’s national security adviser, wrote a book titled The New Machiavelli.

Rather than politics being an instrument to achieve a particular good, such as social democracy, national renewal or a flourishing free market, it became an end in itself. That would, in time, give rise to some of the ugliest pathologies in public life: if politics was about technique, and not morality, then how one behaved didn’t matter — and one certainly shouldn’t be concerned about the consequences. Understand this and suddenly the actions of not only Mandelson, but Blair and Alastair Campbell, become easier to comprehend. An obsession with making money, a vice typically ascribed to the Conservatives, is far more intuitive to the common man.

To grasp how insidious this particular mindset goes, consider the case of Andrew Gwynne, whose recent resignation triggered the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election. Gwynne officially stood down for “health reasons”. In reality, though, it was a series of nasty posts — written in a secret WhatsApp group — that ended his political career. They included Gwynne wishing that a 72-year-old constituent would die: simply because she had the audacity to write to a local councilor about bin collections. Elsewhere, his wife, also a councilor, joked about local children playing in sewage. The story’s toxic postscript, with Andy Burnham blocked from standing for Labour’s nomination in the seat thanks to NEC fiat, just adds to the episode’s squalor. An ugly cliqueish culture and a presumption of impunity – combined with an instinctive aversion to popular democracy. In one small story you have distilled the outstanding features of the Labour Right.

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Similar skulduggery is evident in the case of Matthew Doyle, who became a peer after serving as the Downing Street head of communications. Almost a decade ago, however, he campaigned for a councilor to be re-elected, despite the individual in question being one Sean Morton — who had been charged with possession of sexual images of children. Such was the severity of the charge that Morton, who maintained his innocence, stood as an independent after being dropped by Labour (at that time controlled by the Corbyn faction). But that didn’t stop Doyle from joining his friend on the campaign trail, and even at the election count. Morton was later found guilty of possessing indecent images of girls as young as 10.

Why does the Labour Right receive a comparatively easy ride on stories like this? One potential answer is political sympathies. While the country’s press undoubtedly leans towards the Tories, the orientation of most in broadcast media is instinctively New Labour (hence they didn’t mind Cameron). It’s no coincidence that Mandelson himself worked in television before leading on Labour’s comms in the 1987 election. The new worlds of public affairs, political consultancy and satellite TV all emerged at the same time, as the embryo of Blairism began to grow. A snapshot of that can be found on Sky News every Sunday morning: not only did Trevor Philips know Mandelson from their time at Carlton Television, but Mandelson was also the best man at Philips’ first wedding. Adam Boulton, another iconic face on Sky in the decades since its inception in 1989, is married to Anji Hunter — a former Blair spin doctor. Derek Draper, who died in 2024, and who was central in the rise of New Labour’s ‘innovative’ PR strategies, was married to ITV’s Kate Garraway. TV news and New Labour go together like the sun and shadow. Perhaps that helps explain Starmer’s ongoing struggles. In an era of social media, and GB News, the old rules are changing.

While in opposition, Starmer tried to cast Labour as the party of public probity — a foil to a bungling, contemptible government. But glance at the party’s roll call of shame, from Gwynne to Morton, and the claim looks downright absurd. And now, with the revelations of Epstein and Mandelson, which could be the country’s most seismic political scandal since the Profumo Affair, Labour faces a tainted brand for decades to come.

Why are the two major parties like this? Why is the electorate constantly forced to choose between the Tories, whose parliamentarians included a man who took pictures of himself with cocaine, and a Labour party which appears more at ease with child abuse than a Gary Glitter garden soirée? Whatever Britain’s wider problems — its widening infrastructure deficit, the increased tolerance by the state of low-level anti-social behavior, and a lack of economic vitality — nobody would claim such degeneracy reflects the general public.

The blame must certainly include our electoral system. The point of first-past-the-post, indeed some argue its advantage, is that it generally guarantees the stability of a system resting on two major parties: a government and an opposition. If you are unhappy with one side there is always a strong, albeit limited, alternative. Yet beyond its many failings, not least an inability to generate original thinking in areas such as foreign and industrial policy, FPTP means a deliberate, systematic foreclosure of the political marketplace. This inevitably gives rise to venal, self-serving cultures across the spectrum — not least because whatever happens, and no matter how poorly your party does, it will still access the accoutrements of opposition. The public now grasps this, which is why both Labour and the Tories — if polls are to be believed — face an existential challenge.

But even if one or both were replaced, by Reform and the Greens say, the electoral system would, in time, give rise to the same pathologies. FPTP, especially without primaries, as in the United States, encourages an insular culture that is hostile to the wider public, as Andrew Gwynne’s messages — however trivial — reveal. Instead, the political process is captured by individuals who excel at factionalism, undermining opponents and learning how to gerrymander bureaucracy: none of which is particularly useful in administering the state, building houses or having a police force that actually solves crime. In short, our system selects for politicians who can’t meet the challenges that matter to voters, and who prefer to obsess over internal power struggles.

Yes, the American system is plutocratic, indeed more so than our own. But primaries permit an openness — to new ideas, actors and policies — that ours does not. Without primaries there would be no Mamdani, Trump, Obama, Ocasio-Cortez or Marjorie Taylor Greene, and by extension there would be no challenge, or possibility of renewal, for public life. When Labour activists in this country called for something similar during the Corbyn years, and the mandatory re-selection of all party MPs, it led to a ferocious backlash from the political and media class. Why? Because it would take power away from Westminster elites, and re-distribute it — however imperfectly — to ordinary people. These political pressures, and the impossibility of internal regeneration within the Westminster system, are what gave rise to Brexit. Had Conservative associations been able to choose prospective parliamentarians in a manner that registered Republicans can select candidates for Congress, then Brexit might have been a more serene, efficient affair.

Such systemic dysfunction is only compounded by the second chamber. “Need a Lord on the board?” Mandelson cheerily asked Epstein in one email from 2010, a pithy distillation of what the upper house is really about: creating sinecures for has-beens and bag-carriers, who can subsequently leverage their status for personal gain. All the evidence suggests that the reforms to the Lords under Blair have been a disaster. And yet nobody with power seems capable of acknowledging that fact, let alone offering an alternative.

Of course corruption is inherent to political life. We all desire status, and mostly want money. Inevitably some people will pursue such things to the detriment of the public good. Yet our present electoral system incentivizes such appetites, rather than seeking to mitigate them. It is ridiculous to presume that only two parties might have a monopoly on good ideas, or people. The same applies to moral conduct.

It’s worth recalling that this scandal would never have surfaced were it not for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, an unthinkable piece of legislation in this country. That should raise questions about how we do politics in Britain and, I hope, prompt a conversation about an electoral system that only generates more than two plausible parties of government at a time. If we are to retain this status quo then, at the very least, it should require primaries and mandatory reselection. During the Corbyn years the media often described such proposals as Stalinist, despite their being the default across the Atlantic. I would simply say they keep politicians honest. In the context of SW1 that increasingly feels like a revolutionary demand.

Wanzhou, known as the “Princess of Huawei”, also happened to be the favorite daughter of Ren Zhengfei, the telecom giant’s founder. So Canada had detained, and the US intended to prosecute, the heir apparent to China’s most successful technology firm. As her lawyer argued, the then president Donald Trump’s attitude to Wanzhou was “the very definition of ransom”; her freedom would only come as part of an economic deal.

But then, in 2021, Washington dropped the case. Bail restrictions were lifted and a saga which began under the Trump administration ended under Joe Biden. The arrest and detention of a senior Chinese executive had gone hand-in-hand with escalating sanctions on several Chinese technology firms and export controls on advanced microprocessors. The political implications couldn’t be clearer: one part of America’s political class made it personal, another had walked things back.

Five years on, Canada’s relationship with Washington and Beijing has flipped. Last week, Mark Carney paid the first visit to China by a Canadian prime minister in a decade and tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, a symbol of the country’s technological rise, were reduced from 100% to just 6%. In return, China reduced tariffs on canola oil — a $4 billion market — as well as on a host of other Canadian agricultural products. Travel between the two countries will also become visa-free. Most important of all, Carney views the deal as a boon to domestic manufacturing, driving “considerable” Chinese joint-venture investment in Canada. Unlike its neighbor to the south, Canada has no domestic car industry. Its new partnership with Beijing could change that — besides bringing cheap EVs to the masses.

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“We’re recalibrating Canada’s relationship with China, strategically, pragmatically, and decisively,” Carney wrote on X last week. Despite his understated delivery, it is now clear that those words marked a significant change: Canada was positioning itself as the first G7 economy to seize the opportunities and mitigate the risks of a post‑Trump world. Those hazards became starker in the intervening days, as Trump ramped up his rhetoric on the seizure of Greenland. But the Canadian PM’s intent only clarified as Europe panicked. “Middle powers must act together,” Carney said in his barnstorming speech at Davos on Tuesday, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” Unlike the empty grandstanding of Barack Obama, or the rambling theatrics of Trump, his speech was deeply significant — acknowledging the falsehoods that underpinned a now-dissolving world order, while emphasizing the need to build a new era of co-operation.

This shift has never been more urgent. The American President sees the globe in tripartite terms, with Russia and China as fellow apex players to the US — albeit of lesser standing — each deserving their own spheres of influence. Hence his argument for acquiring Greenland, reiterated yesterday, was made in hemispheric terms — this is our continent. He insisted that Canada, and Europe, wouldn’t even exist had it not been for America’s war effort eight decades ago. For middle powers such as Canada, as well as South Korea, the UK, France, and Germany, this poses a challenge: their economic models and diverse security frameworks have long relied on a globalized order that the White House seems intent on discarding.

Carney’s speech was a muscular response to that challenge. “Great powers can afford for now to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not.” In other words, the West’s future — beyond Washington, and particularly for Canada and the nations of Europe — depends on collaboration. Alone, neither Canada, nor any European country rivals Russia, China or the United States. Together, however, they wield remarkable economic — and to a lesser extent, military — clout. Carney was calling forth a formidable fourth force on the world stage.

“When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon,” Carney declared, “we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.” “This is not sovereignty,” he continued, “it’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.” Unfortunately, this aptly describes No. 10’s strategy since Trump’s return to the Oval Office. Starmer’s plan to protect British interests was to send the President signed letters from the King, and elevate a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein to the role of Washington ambassador. At no point has the British Government considered anything beyond meek genuflection.

Lofty rhetoric is usually just that — pieties untethered from reality. But in Carney’s case, words are matched with action. Between finalizing the China agreement and speaking at Davos, he also secured a strategic partnership with Qatar. Next: free-trade deals with India, the South-East Asian trade bloc ASEAN, and the South American equivalent, Mercosur.

Who could have imagined that the world’s most polite, apologetic people (yes, even more so than the English) would be the ones fomenting geopolitical upheaval? But if this strategy is bold, it is also pragmatic. After all, China and Russia, faced with measures designed to damage their economies, still generated growth and found new markets. Beijing, despite US import tariffs exceeding 50%, not to mention sanctions and export blocks intended to cripple its leading tech firms, managed to shift its export focus and achieve a record trade surplus of $1.2 trillion, even as exports to America fell by 20%. Russia, having lost access to most of Europe’s energy market after its invasion of Ukraine, pivoted East — and saw growth of 8% in two years.

To those two civilizational powers who turned on a geopolitical sixpence, we can now add the home of ice hockey and maple syrup. Crucially, though, Carney is offering a blueprint that extends beyond Canada’s borders, and its success depends on his country not acting alone. Others appear to be with him already. Emmanuel Macron followed the Canadian’s lead, openly inviting Chinese investment “in some key sectors” to drive growth and facilitate technology transfer. More than vacuous aviator-clad posturing, his speech reflected a long-standing French proclivity for technological autonomy that reaches back to Charles De Gaulle, not to mention that China is a leading market for the country’s luxury brands. In a striking reversal of the early 21st-century status quo, Europeans are now seeking partnerships with Chinese firms — on European soil — to tap their capital and expertise.

So where on earth is Britain in all of this? On paper, we are a leading contender to help catapult the middle powers to a new world order. London is a tier-one global city; we have a permanent seat on the UN security council; we are one of only two European nuclear powers, albeit with missiles leased from the US; and, in finance, AI and the creative industries, the country remains a global force. But Britain isn’t even at Carney’s table, as Keir Starmer scrambles for crumbs at Trump’s feet. Perhaps he lacks the political experience of Carney, or the braggadocio of Macron. But while both accusations contain an element of truth, the key reason is structural. Britain’s political class is more firmly committed to Atlanticism than anyone else, propped up as we are by the crutch of American imperium.

Remember, Britain does not have an independent nuclear deterrent without the consent of Washington. The country’s model of being a center for globalized professional services is more exposed to the peccadillos of this White House than anyone else’s. Ours is the least sovereign of the middle powers. While Zack Polanski recently called for a British departure from Nato, and the expulsion of the 12,000 US troops stationed in the country, a US reckoning might be delivered in response: America is hardwired through Britain, literally, from payment systems to servers, production and work platforms. The global economy, as Carney reminded us in his speech, has been weaponized to suit the interests of Washington. Now imagine the hardships for British business without Visa, Stripe, Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft or Apple. Even minor friction with any one of these would come at immense cost to the economy. And what of Britain’s great power characteristics, if not status, without Trident or Five Eyes? A hard break with the US-led order would hurt Britain more than anyone.

It might be painful, but there is no alternative. Trump’s argument to annex Greenland is that Denmark cannot defend such a large territory from Russia or China. Isn’t the same true of the Falklands? Or the British Antarctic Territory? Or Bermuda? What if Trump, or a like-minded successor, unilaterally decides to suspend collaboration on Trident? A French politician once declared it unwise for Europeans to base their security on swing voters in Wisconsin every four years. Why is it any different for us?

Britain, just like Canada, has no choice but to pursue sovereignty through cooperation with other middle powers, becoming that fourth force in global politics — by following the Carney Doctrine. But we can only do this if we can deepen our technological autonomy and improve our infrastructure.

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Could we come to an arrangement with China, like Carney? While Starmer is unlikely to ask Huawei to return to the UK and repair the damage inflicted after we banned the company in 2020, an element of cooperation with Beijing could be useful. Why not also harness some of their expertise in high-speed rail or nuclear power? How else can we hope to wean ourselves off America? Of course a measure of autonomy is lost in any transaction with a major power — whether China, Russia or the US. But the former, for now, seems like the most pragmatic option if Britain hopes to reindustrialize.

Alas, Britain’s political elite are terrified of conducting diplomacy like Carney. Economic integration with Europe, and military dependence on Nato and the United States, has atrophied the basic skills of government, which is in large part why the prospect of Brexit terrified them so. Just as the country of Boulton & Watt now manufactures vanishingly little, the nation of Lord Palmerston is unable to secure itself a place in an emerging global order. This is less an issue of competence than a reflection of the fact that nobody in mainstream politics has thought about it for more than a generation. After all, they entered politics during the End of History. Carney’s admission that the “rules-based international order” was a convenient lie will horrify many of his British peers who all own DVD box sets of the West Wing, listen religiously to the Rest Is Politics and worship at the Atlanticist altar.

And yet, despite our precarious situation and inadequate elite, Britain remains a prominent middle power. If any country should be attempting to restore the sovereignty of the wider West, it is us. We shouldn’t think twice about joining France and Canada as a midwife to a world order beyond MAGA, Moscow and Beijing.

“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies,” declared Palmerston in 1848, addressing the Commons about Britain’s response to events on the continent. “Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” The same is true today regarding a “special relationship” which has left Britain beleaguered. If Canada’s Prime Minister recognizes that, why can’t our own?

If sovereignty was the backbone of the mainstream campaign for Brexit, independence was the cry of its populist tribune. Acknowledging his triumph on the night of the vote, Nigel Farage declared that 23 June would go down in history as “our independence day”. The constitutionalism of Gove and Johnson recalled Dicey and Bagehot, while the then Ukip leader came closer to Tom Paine or John Wilkes — the 18th-century rabble-rouser and MP. More than a restoration, Brexit was something radical. The country was unshackled and free. 

The allure of such lofty rhetoric is understandable, particularly for a country that had so recently turned much of the globe pink. And even as the empire crumbled, Britain was a serious player. In 1951, when the European Coal and Steel Treaty, the predecessor body to the EEC, was signed, Britain exported more cars than any other nation. If the country had done extraordinary things before submitting to the Continent, the thinking went, it could accomplish great things after. In contrast to such rarefied ambition, the Remain camp’s arguments felt insular and bloodless. In the 21st century, they intoned, sovereignty was pooled, furnishing the country with more, not less, agency to act in an unpredictable world. 

This may have been intellectually coherent, and potentially even right, but it had the drawback of sounding like a footnote in a legal textbook. As is so often the case, progressives brought a knife to a gun fight; facts to combat vision. Nor is any of this just history. Ten years after the referendum, these debates around sovereignty, independence and self-government feel more relevant than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Such matters are no longer the province of political theory, or electioneering, but integral to the life and death of nations. 

So what is sovereignty in our own time? Beyond a monopoly on the legitimate use of force at home, it includes the capacity to defend one’s borders against military threat. Syria is not, therefore, a properly sovereign state. Nor is Venezuela, Lebanon or Georgia. Qatar’s sovereignty is certainly in doubt given it was bombed by two countries that were previously bombing each other: Israel and Iran. Particularly noteworthy about the Qatari example is that Washington seemingly permitted a strike against a country under its suzerainty. Precisely what that counts for with the Trump presidency is less clear by the day, as Denmark is now discovering. Despite spilling blood in the “liberation” of Iraq, and recently spending treasure to purchase 41 F-35s (total cost: $4.5 billion), the White House is openly talking about acquiring Greenland from Copenhagen — by force if necessary. 

Given the increasingly ad hoc nature of the US umbrella, it feels like the basis of real sovereignty, in this new world, is nuclear weapons. When I spoke to Ukrainian historian, Serhei Plokhy, late last year, his sense was that nuclear proliferation was close to inevitable over the decades ahead. If the United States couldn’t guarantee the safety of Japan, for instance, or sought to depose a government in Brazil or Mexico, perhaps these countries might look to acquire the bomb. Two nations in particular underscore this point: Ukraine and North Korea. For a brief moment in the early Nineties, the former possessed the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, something it renounced in exchange for security guarantees from Moscow. North Korea, meanwhile, developed an impressive nuclear and ballistic missile program, and is yet to receive the same treatment meted out on Syria, Iran, Libya, and now Venezuela. 

Besides nuclear weapons, there are other markers of sovereignty as we enter 2026. Technological autonomy is one. In 1994, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei told Jiang Zemin, then the CCP’s General Secretary, that “a country without its own program-controlled switches is like one without an army”. In other words, national independence was impossible without an advanced industrial base. Zhenfei’s reported words were oddly reminiscent of Charles De Gaulle, who wrote in his memoir that, “there is no independence without power, and no power without modern means”. Rather than being divided by ideology, then, perhaps we should look at both men as economic nationalists forged by struggle and misfortune. De Gaulle, after all, led a government in exile, while Zhengfei cut his teeth as an engineer building jets on the Vietnamese border to support the war effort in the Sixties.

If there is one great or middle power which has not acted according to such principles in recent decades — perhaps because it has been spared such calamities — it is Britain. Think, for one thing, about technology. Far from seeing high-tech autonomy as key to the country’s status, successive governments have claimed that greater globalization was the yardstick they wished to be judged by. “Globalization is not something you can hold back,” Tony Blair informed the Labour Party Conference back in 2000. “It is driven by technology and communications and it is the key to future prosperity.” 

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Five years later, as BT sought to spend £10 billion to refit the country’s digital networks, eight companies were selected for the job: and not a single one was British. “No other advanced country would allow such a strategic investment decision affecting its national infrastructure,” lamented Peter Skyte, an officer for the union Amicus. By the standards of Blair, and much of the country’s political and media class, those were the complaints of a throwback failing to keep up. Later that year Marconi, one of the British firms that had failed to win a contract, and whose history stretched right back to 1897, was snatched up by Ericsson. Today, Britain has no domestic companies capable of building 5G infrastructure. To paraphrase Zhengfei, how powerful is an army without the technology suppliers to match? Britain may have F35s, but it can’t make microprocessors. Meanwhile Algeria and Kazakhstan produce more steel, and Tajikistan and Bosnia more aluminum. When it comes to machine-tool production we lag behind Switzerland and the Czech Republic, let alone Germany. France, meanwhile, has a lead in cutting-edge fields from sovereign cloud to first stage rockets.

It’s a similar story with our nuclear deterrent. For De Gaulle, it was pivotal that his republic maintain its own capability. “France must possess the means to defend itself by itself,” he said in 1959. Britain, meanwhile, was moving in the other direction, signing up for the American Polaris system in 1963. Rather than admit a new-found dependence on Washington, Whitehall heralded the shift as a tribute to the “‘Special Relationship”. We no longer have the Polaris system — it was replaced by Trident in the Eighties — but this most critical of technologies remains “interdependent”: while Britain builds its nuclear submarines, and fabricates its own warheads, the missiles are leased from a “shared pool” held by the Americans. Let’s not forget those missiles can only be serviced on the other side of the Atlantic, 3,000 miles away in Georgia. 

Economically, too, Britain increasingly resembles a vassal state. Heritage brands such as Boots, Clarks Weetabix and Cadbury all have American owners. If you fancy a coffee you’ll likely plump for one of Costa, Starbucks or Cafe Nero. While it may not be obvious, all three have American ownership. Indeed, US corporations employ more people in Britain than in Germany, France, Italy, Portugal and Sweden combined. But it’s at the level of basic infrastructure that things become especially pernicious. Most Government departments, and even our security services, rely on Amazon Web Services for their internet servers. In extreme circumstances, there is no guarantee that US pressure — political or legal — won’t affect the access and oversight of London. Is that really “taking back control”?

As our Government struggled to respond to Trump’s attack on Venezuela, perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that political clarity came from a politician with whom I agree on very little: Marine Le Pen. “There is one fundamental reason to oppose the regime change that the United States has just brought about in Venezuela”, she wrote on X the day of Maduro’s capture. “The sovereignty of states is never negotiable, regardless of their size, their power, or their continent. It is inviolable and sacred.” Today it might be Venezuela, Le Pen pronounced, tomorrow it could be a little closer to home. Whatever else, she heralds from a political-historical tradition in French politics that extends beyond Left and Right, and which stands for domestic sovereignty. Compared with Britain’s “podcast Right”, which unthinkingly cheers on everything the White House does, this intellectual heritage at least has the advantage of being coherent. 

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With America’s potential withdrawal from Europe, and the collapse of NATO now possible, it is ever more apparent that France’s post-war approach was the pragmatic one and Britain’s which was driven by ideology. Rolling over for the global hegemon and presuming we’ll forever dine at the top table feels presumptuous, now more than ever. Ironically, some of the most vociferous champions of British sovereignty over the Brexit years suddenly appear indifferent on the matter — with “global Britain” backers, like Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell, to name but two, seeming to aspire to little more than subordinate status to Washington. 

This is an attitude which, ironically, reflects the reasoning of many pro-Europeans before 2016. They wanted issues such as trade and migration to remain at Brussels, not because they necessarily believed in such a settlement, but because it made domestic politics far easier. After four decades, Westminster had lost the muscle memory to conduct trade deals — as we have since discovered. Returning such competences to Britain was always the difficult choice — which is why much of the establishment resisted it. The same is arguably true here. Surely it’s easier, as a patriotic Right-winger, to simply talk about Britain’s leading role in world affairs rather than trying to achieve its material reality.

Britain might yet enlarge its scope for sovereignty. If we truly wanted to take back control, we could, for instance, end our reliance on the US for the country’s nuclear deterrent, and return to the status quo ante before Polaris. We could develop a domestic space actor similar to Ariane, a pan-European organization that is, nevertheless, majority owned by the French government. We certainly need to produce at least some microprocessors for domestic consumption. And we need a strategy for meaningful energy security. 

Because of the strategic importance of such shifts, the state should hold at least some equity in these enterprises — in a manner similar to France’s APE (Agence des participations de l’État). Not as excessive as it sounds, it simply means reversing the more egregious mistakes of the Thatcher and Blair years. If uncorrected, these errors — such as discarding the importance of industry — will only create an increasing national vulnerability as the old order fragments,

Taking back control can’t just be rhetoric. To mean anything, those words can’t be constrained to borders, money or laws — they must encompass vital strategic industry. Otherwise, Britain will remain the least sovereign middle power of all. We may have left the clutches of Brussels a decade ago, but in a perverse inversion of the Boston Tea Party, we now risk becoming the 51st State of America — just without the voting rights. 

And yet 2025 was an annus horribilis for Number 10. Entering 2026, Reform now boasts the largest membership of any party in Britain, taking that mantle from Labour last December. All available polling indicates a drubbing for the Government at the next election, with some forecasts even placing them in fifth. One poll by Ipsos declared Starmer the most unpopular PM on record since 1977 — and that includes Liz Truss. In October, another poll, this time by YouGov, suggested Prince Andrew was more popular than the Government.

Why are things so bad for the PM, particularly given the avoidance of a fiscal crisis, and successive interest rate cuts? The first is Zack Polanski, with the Green’s attention-grabbing leader disrupting Labour’s political calculus. The idea of an anti-Reform coalition, pledging to “stop Farage”, only works for the Government if they are the ones to lead it. The second is that first impressions count. Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, he quickly came to be associated with cuts to the winter fuel allowance, gratis Taylor Swift tickets and a party benefactor buying dresses for his wife.

Whatever the explanation for Starmer’s poor performance, it must be tempting for his retinue to surmise they’ve hit rock bottom. That’s the bet of Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s chief of staff, who claims that 2026 will be the “year of proof”. Yet if there’s an iron law of politics, it is that a sequence of bad events creates its own inexorable pull. Just ask Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May. Some other fiasco will likely befall the PM in the months ahead: and it could well involve local government reorganization in England. It has, so far, remained beneath the national radar. That will soon change, as the implications of the shift becomes clear — and more elections are likely postponed.

It is hard to believe that a single report, compiled five years ago by a consultancy, provides the blueprint for the largest reorganization of local government in decades. And yet that is precisely what is happening with the English Devolution White Paper. Published little more than a year ago, it draws extensively from a PWC report of 2020, whose conclusions can be summed up by the phrase “bigger is better”. This is specifically true regarding savings. If all 21 of England’s “two-tier” authorities were successfully merged into larger “strategic authorities”, PWC claims, the taxpayer would save more than £700 million a year.

Insisting on economies of scale is hardly unusual — and the number of two-tier authorities, where some services are administered by a district or borough council, and others by the county council — needs fixing. It’s also clear that larger authorities are better placed to plan ahead and recruit the right people, and if England is to have more metro mayors — which have generally worked — the combined authorities they oversee would need more streamlined, uniform parts.

Even so, the logic’s seemingly brutal application to one of Europe’s oldest nations, and some of its most venerable towns and cities, is striking. Places like Southampton and Portsmouth are set to have a single mayor for instance, despite being two rival cities both dating back almost a millennium. At one point, even distant Bournemouth, whose needs are entirely different, was touted as being in the same mayoral authority. Among the political class, though, the past is often seen as trivial, with place and experience a distant second to the spreadsheet. For them, England’s great towns and cities are as fungible as an NFL franchise.

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Alongside that heavy-handedness, a political crisis is also brewing. “Strategic authorities” and “accountability frameworks” may be abstruse terms, part of a purposefully inscrutable lexicon. Suspending elections, however, is an extraordinary step — underscoring that something strange, and perhaps even sinister, is afoot.

Last year, ministers delayed four mayoral elections set for this May. As a result, Greater Essex; Hampshire and the Solent; Sussex and Brighton; and Norfolk and Suffolk must all wait until 2028 to elect their inaugural metro mayors. Reform was competitive in each of those races, and its supporters allege a fix. But despite their protests, the postponement is the result of ineptitude rather than conspiracy. The relevant local authorities had not been given the time, resources or bandwidth to prepare.

Yet if suspending these four elections is bad, the Government has a defense of sorts: these metro mayors are entirely new. The same can’t be said for what is set to happen next. In all, 204 councils, across 21 so-called  “areas”, are subject to re-organization. Sixty-three of those councils are set for elections in May: and which Labour now hopes to postpone.

Rather than simply postponing these contests, however, as the Government did for the four mayoralties, it has “invited” local authorities to request delays, which ministers will review from January. In other words, after widespread criticism the first time round, Number 10 is eager to spread the blame in the months ahead.

Unfortunately for Labour, council leaders have so far rejected the prospect of suspending democracy. One example is Hertfordshire, where a cluster of six district and borough councils have stressed they harbor no appetite for postponement. Or there’s Hampshire. Last week, Steve Pitt, Portsmouth City Council’s leader, told The News that there would be no request to delay, saying that “…democracy cannot be interrupted because of the Labour government’s chaotic handling of both devolution and local government reorganization”.

Pitt reflects a consensus among Hampshire’s senior local politicians. That includes Labour-controlled Southampton whose leader, Alex Winning, was eager to highlight how any decision to postpone rested “entirely with the Government”. Labour councils have been left high and dry by the national leadership, with Number 10 trying to deflect some of the blame on them. But on the doorstep, those same councillors will be telling voters the truth: this is Westminster’s mess.

And here, again, it’s hard not to return to history. To the north of Hampshire lies the ancient Saxon capital of Winchester. “Winchester City Council has only ever suspended elections in the event of war or pandemic,” declared its leader, the Liberal Democrat Martin Tod. The city’s modern electoral history began in the 1830s, but it has had a mayor since the 1190s, meaning a continuous process of political representation stretching back almost a millennium. That could be halted this year.

Precisely why Labour would do all this depends on your perspective. While it’s true the party is set to fare terribly this May, most authorities facing the prospect of no elections are not administered by them. At the same time, though, these are generally places where Reform was looking to build on last year’s successes. Then there’s the fact that many of the councillors returned would have to step down before their term ended — because their authorities would no longer have existed. Either way, it’s increasingly clear that merging authorities, and introducing a plethora of new metro mayors, was always going to be hard over a two-year turnaround.

Besides, it’s also uncertain whether the much-vaunted re-organization will even reduce costs in the end. Last year, then-Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner declared that “a significant amount of money” could be saved, citing that 2020 PWC report which projected £2.9 billion of savings over five years. And yet the same organization that commissioned the 2020 report, the County Councillor Network, wrote in March how newly enlarged authorities below 500,000 residents would see no financial benefit.

This is important because some authorities — like Brighton — will likely be permitted to remain at around 300,000 residents. By PWC’s own accounting, that will mean no benefits. In which case: what’s the point? And if Brighton were an exceptional case that would be one thing, but it turns out around half the new authorities will be below the 500,000 mark.

Just as remarkable is that the Government hasn’t conducted a cost review of its own, so even the forecast savings remain uncertain. This merits repeating. The financial forecasts behind local government re-organization, something so important that hundreds of millions will be spent up front with elections likely postponed — they simply weren’t made, or indeed scrutinized, by the very Government proposing them.

So who did commission that 2020 PWC report? The County Council Network, which is itself a part of the Local Government Association (LGA), the national body representing councils in England. The CCN’s partner organizations include, you guessed it, PWC.

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Indeed, that the Government hasn’t conducted its own review is especially concerning given PWC arguably stands to benefit from the radical streamlining of local authorities. Merging areas like payroll, human resources and IT departments are any consultancy’s bread and butter. The same applies to the inevitable redesign of management structures, rationalization of assets and integrating council services.

At the same time, one might even argue that consultancies such as PWC stand to gain from making any new bodies as complex, and the process as disruptive, as possible. After all, maximal opacity means a greater dependence on outside help — and more billable hours. The consultancy-industrial complex, alongside outsourcing, has, to borrow a phrase, enshittified local government. But the political class has so far failed to catch up.

“Trust in politics is falling,” declares the 2024 White Paper. That is certainly true. But surely not even Keir Starmer thinks the design of English local government should be based on a paper commissioned by a consultancy which stands to benefit from as much disruption as possible?

Beyond the possibility of suspending democratic elections, and there being scant evidence for tangible savings, there is a final, terrifying point to consider. Authorities which run surpluses are expected to merge with authorities running deficits — with little to no financial assistance available from Westminster. Surpluses and reserves will be pooled, as will liabilities.

In other words, some authorities, which have been managed comparatively well, will have a form of austerity imposed on them to provide a soft bail out for those which have not. When ministers talk about “financial scale” and “resilience” what they essentially mean is merging stable, solvent councils with struggling neighbors. Things could go very badly wrong: imagine the political equivalent of RBS swallowing up ABN Amro before the last financial crisis, or Lloyds acquiring HBOS straight after. In some places, anyway, residents and local leaders are concerned that the net result will be higher council tax and poorer services.

Local government reorganization could come to define English politics this year — and ease Starmer’s exit from the top job. But beyond its short-term consequences, not least suspended elections, it also distills so much about our political class: identify a genuine, existing problem; adopt a technocratic blueprint devised by consultants; implement the whole thing with maximum incompetence. We’ve seen it before with the “NHS Programme for IT” and HS2, and will likely do so again with ID cards.

In his masterful Ruling the Void, political scientist Peter Mair claims political elites have retreated into institutional “safe havens”, focusing on governance procedures rather than representation, with this only disconnecting them further from the electorate. But even Mair would struggle to believe that a PWC report could lead to the suspension of elections — all in the name of saving money, even if nobody really knows how much.

From the moment it opened, in 1881, Beales was at the vibrant heart of my hometown. Called the “Fancy Fair and Oriental House”, it was more palace than department store — feeding the then appetite for Japanese wares, as well as selling photo albums for beach-going visitors. And back then, the Hampshire beach resort wasn’t about vulgar postcards. It was in vogue. The same year Beales opened its fancy doors, John Galsworthy had his protagonist, Soames, meet Irene in Bournemouth in the Forsyte Saga. Not long after, Robert Louis Stevenson moved to the town to enjoy the sea air. Bournemouth had arrived.

Christmas was always central to the Beales appeal. Some declare that the Bournemouth flagship welcomed the world’s first ever real-life Father Christmas: a now all-pervasive yuletide tradition that it allegedly started in 1885, five years before Edgar’s department store in Massachusetts claims to have invented it. And not content with a solo Santa, the company even devised a massive annual Christmas parade which entertained the town for decades.

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Christmas at Beales is stitched into my childhood memories. My mother and I lived in a flat a few hundred meters away, right in the thick of things, and I was five or six when I was first taken to meet Father Christmas. Bournemouth was only a modest seaside town back then, and the parade long gone, but between Hollywood films and these sparkling halls of consumption, it still felt like you had been granted access to a larger, almost cosmopolitan culture of shared affluence. When I watched a VHS of Kevin in Home Alone 2, as he wandered around Macy’s, it wasn’t completely incongruous with what activists would now refer to as my “lived experience”. The wealthy and the poor might have bought different things, but they did so in broadly the same spaces.

Not anymore.

Today, almost all this is gone. Beales finally shuttered its Bournemouth store in 2020, a fate shared by all but one of the town’s department stores. Earlier this year, Cas Paton, the CEO of OnBuy, chose to relocate his business to London citing Bournemouth’s “deserted high streets”, and high drug use. While John Betjeman may have once described the place as a “garden with houses in it”, these days, you wonder what he would make of the empty shops and rough sleepers. Behind the boarded-up Beales site is the grave of Mary Shelley; in front are “Trident casino slots” housed in a building that used to be a bank.

None of this is new, of course. Britain’s department stores began to shutter up in 2008, hit by the twin hurricane of the global financial crisis and a collapse in consumer spending, as well as the widespread adoption of online shopping. The role of the latter, though, with Big Tech playing an ultimately decisive role, is hard to exaggerate.

And as it devastated offline retail, Silicon Valley didn’t just kill the high street. It also did its best to ruin Christmas too. Before 2008, business reporters would gleefully assert how, with each passing December, record amounts were being spent by frenzied shoppers. For some, the increasingly commercial nature of the season was an outrage — but looking back, with people actually sharing space and time, those days feel almost wholesome. Bournemouth clung on for longer than most, but those scenes from my childhood, watching crowds of people coming together — even if it was to buy Buzz Lightyear toys and laugh at Santa’s fake belly — are now only memories. If our grandparents made gifts, and our parents bought them down Beales, today, we simply press “buy now” in a frictionless act of real time logistics.

The general response to the escalation in rough sleeping, empty shop fronts and shattered sense of place is to say that this is the price of progress. Convenience has trumped ritual and community because people prefer it that way. But I’m not convinced. Why do some places feel just as convivial as they did 30 years ago? Why does somewhere like Winchester, or Godalming, boast so few empty shopfronts compared with Bournemouth? And if people don’t care about the experience of Christmas shopping, then why is Liberty fit to bursting, and why does Regent Street’s LED extravaganza burn brighter than 10,000 Lumie SAD lamps? We clearly still yearn for spectacle and congregation. It’s just that now, with our economic model, only the more affluent can enjoy such a luxury.

These might sound like the whining ruminations of a man who refuses to accept the inevitable. Perhaps. But it’s also true that the rules today are rigged to suit Big Tech. We are gleefully, in the words of Cory Doctorow, enshittifying our culture, Christmas included. In It’s a Wonderful Life, George, the film’s protagonist, is rescued by his local community, including a panoply of small businesses he had previously championed. Yes, it’s a somewhat confected vision of an idealized America, but let’s imagine the analog today: the staff at the local William Hill? Deliveroo drivers and the lads behind the till at the vape shop? For many places, that’s all that survives.

All of this is built by design. Consider Amazon’s “most favored nation” policy. This means that merchants who sell products on the platform must offer their lowest price there. Failure to comply results in sanctions ranging from being demoted in search rankings, to being completely unlisted. In other words, it is impossible for the likes of Tesco or Asda — let alone a local shop — to sell the same product at a lower price than the $2-trillion online giant. The official line is that the company’s bargain prices are a result of its hyper-efficient logistics. But if that is the case, then why are such anti-competition policies necessary? Not only does this kill competition and shutter beloved shops, but the survivors end up increasing their prices. Only the wealthy can afford to visit the stores that remain.

Amazon’s search rankings are similarly sinister. When you look for an item on the site, the products it displays aren’t there because they are the highest quality, the most purchased, or even the best reviewed. No, the results you see are the consequence of sellers paying to skew them. De-optimizing customer search is a lucrative side hustle, making around $38 billion dollars for Amazon last year — a figure which has now reputedly risen to over $58 billion. That is more than the total revenue of British corporate giants such as AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, something to remember the next time you see a string of empty shopfronts.

Not content with decimating our high streets, though, big tech is also eviscerating our cultural rituals. Once, Christmas blockbusters were released to take advantage of holiday audiences. Like It’s a Wonderful Life, Home Alone was not only set during the festive season, but released then as well. Elf, Love, Actually, Die Hard…they were the definition of holiday viewing. I remember when we queued every year to watch the latest Lord of the Rings — not particularly Christmassy, but still a seasonal ritual.

Of course, some people still visit the cinema in December. But the shift to online streaming means that we’ll be watching this year’s big release, the finale of Stranger Things, on our smaller screens. It’s quite the cultural statement that Netflix is releasing three episodes of this story about interdimensional demonic creatures on Christmas Day. Where British audiences once indulged in homemade comedy after the annual belly-buster, from Only Fools and Horses to Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, today we tap into a globalized, increasingly Americanized media culture.

It’s ironic that this same culture seeks to channel a sense of nostalgia for the recent past — Stranger Things, after all, is set in the Eighties, Perhaps the explanation is all too simple. For whatever reason — a near-infinite archive of digital images; fewer young people; lower economic growth — our culture is simply much less vital than before. The rise of streaming isn’t just an expression of that paucity, it’s a contributing factor, and the same applies to the demise of your local high street.

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Cassandras have long warned that we are losing the true meaning of Christmas. But my point here isn’t theological or moral, it’s something profoundly prosaic. In his 2006 novel Spook Country, William Gibson writes how “cyberspace is everting”. No longer is it a distinct, separate reality which we plug into. Rather, it is colonizing the physical world. The collapsed high streets of countless towns and cities are the result of digitally coordinated logistics. Christmas is just one more victim of that: the magic of the season replaced by the distraction economy and next-day delivery.

Is this trajectory fixed? Could we tame the beast of multi-trillion-dollar US companies swallowing our country? Could we edge towards a post-American internet? Shifting direction won’t be quick, or easy. After all, our payments systems, business tools, means of communication — and even the web servers of the country’s security services — run on American software. It is impossible to disentangle that reality, and our shriveled industrial and technological base, from our wider, deeper cultural malaise.

Perhaps the starting point, then, is to simply agree that what went before was better than what we have now. That busy streets, with colorful shops, and children running amok, is good in itself. An intellectually honest Left might concede that while many things have improved, something far more important has been lost. And faced with technological and cultural vassalage to the United States, a politics animated by nostalgia need not necessarily be conservative.

Who knows, maybe Bournemouth could set things in motion by bringing that parade back.

Generosity is fine, the critics therefore concede, if you can afford it: but Britain no longer can. Certainly, that explains the second part of Reeves’s confected metaphor, with the Chancellor sure to offer voters plenty of less pleasant fare alongside a lifted benefit cap. Yet if this balancing act is more about politics than economics, with Reeves and her party running scared by radicals to her Left almost as much as her Right, it does little to deal with the fundamental problems of Britain’s lopsided tax system: one where median earners pay surprisingly little, and receive rather a lot in return.

Perhaps the first question to ask here is: why now? Why grapple with something as controversial as the benefit cap, especially as the Chancellor faces relentless scrutiny to find taxpayer value? And why increase welfare spending, having drawn such attention to the need to reduce it? Just 16 months ago, seven Labour rebels lost the whip after voting for an amendment calling to end the benefit cap. Then, such a position was dismissed as asinine posturing by the leadership. Now, it lies at the core of a make-or-break budget.

So what gives? Any explanation must begin with the increasingly omnipresent Zack Polanski. The Greens have polled above Labour several times, with one pollster, FindOutNow, even putting them in second place. According to a recent survey by YouGov, meanwhile, Polanski would be the next prime minister if only under 50s were eligible to vote. However readily his critics’ rebukes spring forth — such as the assertion that the Greens are only favored by “woke” undergraduates — the fact is that Polanski is clearly galvanizing much of the country’s working-age population: including much of Labour’s urban base.

If local elections earlier this year represented a national breakthrough for Reform, it is plausible that elections next May — in Scotland and Wales as well as England — offer a similar springboard for the Greens. On the doorstep right now, Labour canvassers have vanishingly little to entice their supporters, even among those willing to personally embrace higher taxes. Scrapping the two-child benefit cap immediately remedies that: it’s the political equivalent of the Bat Signal for those who voted Labour in 2024, but are now tempted by other parties of various progressive hues. In its own way, this illustrates the extent of Labour’s desperate predicament: powering the Budget are policies designed to scupper a rival fueled by often vague commitments to anti-austerity, and which anyway has only four MPs.

But removing the two-child cap serves an ancillary function, too, because the Chancellor regards it as a downpayment for future cuts to the welfare bill. It has been consistently reported that Starmer was always more amenable to ditching the cap than Reeves, with Morgan McSweeney, his most senior adviser, aligned with the parsimonious Chancellor. What has changed is that, after failing to deliver £5 billion of welfare cuts in June, Reeves and McSweeney now view the abolition of the cap as a necessary expedient to belt-tightening elsewhere.

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Reeves hinted as much when writing for The Sunday Times over the weekend, emphasizing the need for welfare reform to “ensure it doesn’t pay to be off sick instead of in work”. Rather than adhere to her instincts — means-testing and egg-headed penny-pinching — the Chancellor now seemingly grasps the politics of gradualism. Ditching the cap represents a tactical retreat for Reeves. Ditching the cap represents a tactical retreat for Reeves. But as Macaulay once wrote about conservatives embracing reform to preserve what they cherish most, the Chancellor intends to increase welfare spending now only to cut it later. It’s not an incoherent strategy given the political capital the Chancellor stands to gain among defiant backbenchers. Without them, the Government has no working majority, and no meaningful reforms can be passed at all — something as important to the bond markets as economic growth.

How Reeves will fund her other spending commitments — from increases to the defense budget to freezing rail fares and much higher infrastructure spending — remains unclear. Until a fortnight ago, the Government’s preferred option was the first increase to the basic rate of tax since James Callaghan’s premiership in the Seventies. But that has since been replaced with a range of smaller, piecemeal measures. One is the touted introduction of a mansion tax on properties worth over £2 million. Significant tweaks to inheritance tax could help too. Other measures might include changing the rules on VAT for taxi fares, and a raid on pension savings. The Exchequer’s central pillar, though, remains freezing income-tax thresholds: something now expected to continue through to 2030.

For all the criticism Reeves faces, her spending priorities are more sensible than those of her predecessors. Jeremy Hunt sounded like a cheerful fantasist when, as Chancellor, with the country’s borrowing costs soaring, he talked of scrapping employee national insurance contributions altogether. Reeves, whatever her faults, is less prone to breezy hyperbole. Not only has the Government backed Sizewell C; it has also allocated £2.5 billion towards research and development for nuclear fusion. At the spring spending review, the Chancellor promised a total of £113 billion in new capital investment for homes, transport and energy. Though far from perfect, the orientation of this government, despite its bludgeoning by much of the media, is more long term than anything we’ve seen over the last 15 years.

But while an emphasis beyond day-to-day media cycles is a welcome change, how the Government intends to raise more revenue still rests on a fatal mistake. Reeves has so far dismissed a wealth tax — an increasingly global cause championed by everyone from Gary Stevenson and Zohran Mamdani to the French economist Gabriel Zucman. Yet while senior Labour figures have publicly dismissed such a move, it is, nevertheless, the affluent they intend to hit for more tax. The thing is, many of them aren’t that rich.

So permit me to say something that might surprise you. Alongside some of the necessary tax rises announced by Reeves, and a potential wealth tax, we need to get serious about higher taxes for those on median incomes — which at the time of writing is £39,000 for someone in full-time work. And before you accuse me of anything, I should add: that includes me.

Over the weekend, the Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch reflected on how Britain has the most “progressive” tax system of any advanced economy. While 45% of top earners’ salaries now go towards taxes and social contributions, that figure falls to just 29% among average workers. Burn-Murdoch compares Britain’s 16-point “top-to-middle” gap to Scandinavia, where it is just 12 points. In the Nordic social democracies, everyone pays tax at a “moderately high rate”. In the UK, on the other hand, high-income earners are taxed like Danes, while those on average incomes more closely resemble Americans. Reeves has, so far, completely neglected this fact — one presumes out of political necessity. While understandable, the truth is that national renewal, an ambition so often invoked by this government, is impossible without accepting change is needed.

Take the personal allowance, the threshold at which one starts paying income tax. In Britain, this is £12,570 (approximately €14,000), a higher figure than anywhere else in Europe. In Sweden, conversely, income tax kicks in at €2,000. In Denmark, it’s just shy of €7,000. Even in France, you start paying at €11,500. It was the Cameron-Osborne duo that really shifted the dial on this side of the Channel, with the tax allowance going from £6,500 in 2010 to £10,000 by the end of the coalition. Like the pensions triple lock, that move received gushing praise from much of the media at the time — “tanks on Labour’s lawn” and so on. And yet it has inflicted extraordinary damage on the country’s long-term fiscal position.

That these tensions are rarely touched on in our political debate reflects the interests of both the Left and Right. Similar to their promise to reduce immigration — only to raise numbers to record highs — the Tories have substantially increased taxes on the previously prosperous burgher class over the last 14 years. The Left, meanwhile, is understandably hostile to the idea that middle-income earners, a constituency they have tried to woo amid Tory collapse in recent years, should be paying more tax.

Yet perhaps the hour of reckoning has arrived. High inequality is bad, not least because people on lower incomes have a higher marginal propensity to spend. And it’s true that we mistakenly tax labor more than capital — a historic error in the context of runaway property prices over the last 30 years. The last Liberal prime minister, Herbert Asquith, was wise enough to observe the iniquity of such a state of affairs more than a century ago. Shamefully, his modern successors don’t share such sagacity.

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But it’s also the case that Britain will be unable to correct its varied problems, from under-investment in public transport to private ownership of energy and water, without more tax from a range of sources. A more civilized public realm; re-funding local authorities; addressing the crisis of elderly care; scrapping tuition fees for nursing and engineering students — none of this will be cheap. But there’s little alternative if the country wishes to remain a stable, pleasant place to live or start a business. Until the Chancellor makes that admission, and bases her spending commitments on broader tax rises for median earners, every budget will feel unfairly punitive on those earning even modestly above the average. Increasingly, they will look to move elsewhere. Worry less, then, about the high-profile departure of Lakshmi Mittal than the industrious deputy headteacher, or the ambitious medical graduate. They are happy to pay their taxes, provided the system is fair and the benefits are clear. Presently, neither feels especially true.

Labour are often fearful of speaking in grand terms. Decisive action is even less forthcoming. And yet, as with the ongoing debate around national identity, precisely that is needed on tax and the role of the state. People wish to be protected by the Government, and to be proud of where they live. To a large extent, such desires transcend the old binaries of Left and Right. But neither is possible with a defunded police force, a packed prison estate and local government having meager resources beyond elderly care. What Reeves should do, then, is sell a vision of the country, an exciting one at that — and then explain how she’ll pay for it.

For a prime minister who won bigger than Thatcher to now be more Frank Spencer than Frank Underwood feels remarkable. Yet if you understand Starmer, and the wing of the Labour Party from which he comes, the explanation is actually quite simple: the Labour Right has always been allowed to play on “easy mode”. Rather than their inter-party disputes and policy integrity being scrutinized, they are, more often than not, given an easy ride — allowed to come to power without offering an actual plan for government.

This might seem surprising. After all, the Conservatives have always enjoyed greater support from the rich and powerful. And theirs is, since its inception, the party of the landed interest. Why would the “establishment”, as broadly conceived, have more sympathy with a nominally socialist party they don’t actively support?

The answer is structural: while the Tories are expected to generally run things, and guarantee a low-tax, low-regulation economy, the Labour Right is the linchpin holding the national stage of politics together; the metaphorical policeman enforcing an ideally static Overton Window. It undermines, and subverts, the Labour Left, so it can never exert any real power (though the Labour Left does its bit in this regard as well), while ensuring the Tories never swing too far to the Right — particularly on migration — especially if this conflicts with the perceived interests of business.

Rather than standing for anything, then, the Labour Right represents resistance. The triumph of Thatcherism, and the end of the Cold War, dissolved the old truths, so now their politics is one of negation — Tories to their Right, socialists to their Left. This is why “stop Corbyn” and “stop Brexit” will invariably become “stop Farage” at the next election. The Labour Right defines itself against propositional politics.

That posture makes for a puerile relationship to enterprise. In the mind of the Labour Right, the definitive “‘voice of business” is an investor on Dragon’s Den. The reality of commerce, to them, isn’t family firms, high street independents, or even manufacturing, but big supermarkets and “consultants” with large followings on LinkedIn. These are people who wax lyrical about business, and yet rarely seem to have worked in it themselves.

It wasn’t always like this. Before the triumph of Thatcherism, the term Labour Right referred to social democrats who were socially conservative and vehemently anti-communist: Ernest Bevin and Hugh Gaitskell being the tendency’s standard-bearers. Now, it simply means the microwaved imitators of Blairism: Liz Kendall, Peter Kyle, Wes Streeting, Labour Together. For these figures, anyone to the Left of Gordon Brown is considered untouchable, with even the former chancellor often under suspicion.

Despite not being the default party of government, then, the Labour Right is more important in holding the national “consensus” together than anyone else. It is this quality which endows it with a certain goodwill from much of the media. Nobody seriously thinks a Tory with Peter Mandelson’s rap sheet could have become the ambassador to Washington. The temptation might be to punish the transgressions of such people — but if the likes of Jonathan Powell, Mandelson and Alastair Campbell were discarded, then the party of labour might actually represent the working class. And of course that can’t happen.

This arrangement functioned for as long as the economy grew and the fundamentals of political life — like membership of the EU, or subordination to Washington on foreign policy — were settled. Under such conditions, which prevailed between the fall of the Soviet Union and the financial crash of 2008, the Labour Right didn’t need to offer intellectual leadership to the country. Indeed, the very essence of Blairism was to intensify what preceded it, from PFI to privatizations and an emphasis on finance and real estate as the country’s economic engines. But in 2024, after 16 years of economic stagnation and growing political discontent — from Brexit to asylum policy, and even the very idea of what it means to be British — that was precisely what the moment demanded.

Writing in the Financial Times earlier this week, Martin Wolf observed the “disturbing victory of Old Labour over New Labour”. A rise in the basic rate of income tax, almost certain to be announced in the budget later this month, will mean others diagnose Starmer’s as a Left-wing project. But that is to misread what is happening. The Labour Right didn’t do any original thinking in its wilderness years. Not even Jeremy Corbyn stuffing them twice provided pause for thought, apparently. They believed — correctly as it turns out — that they simply needed to wrestle the party’s leadership back and wait their turn.

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An attendant assumption was that the economy could manage itself, and growth would inevitably come back, a premise resulting from that same ideological capitulation of the Eighties. Its task was simply to be a more competent, humane administrator of a model not of their design. But that model is now broken, from migration to productivity, compounded by a crisis in elderly care: which means that taxes are ratcheting up. None of this has been the result of ideology, as Wolf might insinuate, for there is none. Their pitch was merely competence — and that has been thrown to the wind, as Starmer scrambles wildly for support, scrapping the two-child benefit cap, and even reconsidering compensating the WASPI women. It has no answers for a low-growth world; hence its disastrous first 18 months in office.

Unlike Blair, who inherited fiscal surpluses and rising productivity in 1997, Starmer really did have to make “difficult choices” on tax and spending. He swerved them and no one asked him the hard questions.

We can blame Britain’s electoral system for his easy ride: our two-party battles necessarily obscure political alternatives. The baton is simply passed back and forth, with the Labour Right operating as a “B team” for the Tories when they flounder. But rather than provide stability, this setup is now generating the opposite. The Labour Right openly defines itself against heterodoxy, self-criticism and dissent. So when it is wrong, like on Iraq or light-touch regulation with financial services before 2008, the consequences are uniquely disastrous. Something similar again appears to be unfolding.

Small wonder, then, that just as Labour is looking at other leaders, the public is looking for other parties. Last week one pollster, FindOutNow, gave a combined vote of more than 50% to Reform UK and the Greens. While the media might focus on both Farage and Polanski as talented communicators,, that shouldn’t obscure the fact that each is offering distinctive alternatives to the rinsed-out status quo. Polanski wants to equalize capital gains and income tax; Farage wants to drill, baby, drill and leave the ECHR.

Britain no longer benefits from how the establishment treats the Blairite wing. The old mechanisms of stability — with the market disciplining Westminster, the two parties disciplining one another, and unelected Quangos whatever’s left — has led to a dysfunctional politics which delivers us the worst people, at the worst moment.

Starmer wasn’t the only member of Labour’s front bench to cheer on a declining membership. In an interview six months earlier, Rachel Reeves actively welcomed the loss of certain supporters. “Membership in my constituency is falling and that’s a good thing,” the Leeds MP told the Financial Times. Those who were leaving the party, said Reeves, “never shared our values”.

Today, less than 18 months after Labour’s general election triumph, those statements already feel like relics of a bygone era. Labour is failing to balance its books this year, and is battling to properly resource next May’s local council elections. On Tuesday, UnHerd asked the party whether Reform now has a larger membership. The party’s press office referred to the figure of 333,235 that was published at the end of 2024. That figure was reported in February to have dropped to 309,000. By now, it is highly likely that Reform’s surging membership, at a self-reported 265,000 or so, has either overtaken Labour’s or will do so imminently.

As Labour’s membership and funding contract, so is its wider support — to a more severe extent than senior politicians are publicly acknowledging. Last week’s Senedd election in Caerphilly, a constituency which has voted for a Labour MP every time since 1918, was won by Plaid Cymru. The Labour candidate, thumped by Reform, didn’t even come second. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, compared that defeat to the Hartlepool by-election in 2021, where the Tories snatched what had for generations been a Labour stronghold, declaring it “rock bottom”. But such a comparison is wholly inadequate. After all, in 2019 Labour retained Hartlepool only because the Leave vote was split between the Brexit Party and the Tories. The south of Wales is a whole other matter.

What is more, coming back from what just happened in the Valleys is immeasurably harder. In that Hartlepool defeat, Labour finished second. Last week, by contrast, they gained just 11% of the vote. There’s much to suggest that the fate of Welsh Labour at the next general election could resemble that of its Scottish sister party in 2015. Wipeout.

It is always easy for political journalists to become breathless about events such as these. The attention economy constantly demands new twists and turns in public life: a perpetual churn of new figureheads and takes. But to underscore quite how bizarre British politics has become, consider this. Not only might Reform have more members than Labour, and not only are Welsh nationalists winning in places Labour have held since universal male suffrage, but there are now national polls putting the Green Party on a higher share of the vote than a Labour government — one that commands a larger majority than Margaret Thatcher ever enjoyed.

For now it is just one pollster, FindOutNow, that has Zack Polanski’s party in third. But that reflects a wider shift in the party’s performance in the seven weeks since he was elected leader. On Monday, a poll by Lord Ashcroft had the Greens on 17%, a solitary point behind both Labour and the Tories. YouGov, often viewed as the gold standard in British polling, now has the party on 16%, with Labour’s 17% its worst on record. According to that same poll, the Greens now lead Labour, and Reform, among those under 50. Among the young, specifically those aged 18 to 24, the Greens now have almost twice Labour’s vote share. Votes at 16 may ultimately harm Starmer’s re-election efforts more than it helps them.

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These are not figures that befit a party in government. But Keir Starmer’s view of power has long been that only one of two parties matter in British politics. As long as the Tories were neutralized, the thinking went, he would remain in Number 10. But in less than two years, that logic has shattered. Labour are threatened not only to their right by Reform, particularly on issues like immigration and law and order, but to their left as well. Since Polanski won the leadership, the Green Party’s membership has doubled: it now stands at more than 150,000, and has even surpassed the Tories. There is a non-trivial chance that, before next May’s local elections, Britain’s two largest parties will be Reform and the Greens. For all the naysaying of pundits in London, who often argue for an inverse correlation between electoral success and membership size, the membership surges matter. More members doesn’t just mean more activists, but more direct debits too. Money is critical if you want to seriously contest Westminster politics.

Besides members, and money, Reform and the Greens are also led by two of the most effective politicians in England. Both Farage and Polanski excel in the modern media environment, where chat shows matter as much as political interviews, and vertical social video draws more eyeballs than any appearance on Newsnight. One of Polanski’s videos, with the title “Let’s Make Hope Normal Again”, has been viewed almost 12 million times on X.

The two men might agree on little regarding policy, but in one key respect they are similar. Both, according to the thinking of political scientist Paolo Gerbaudo, are “hyperleaders” — more similar to President Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than Kemi Badenoch or Keir Starmer. Hyperleaders enjoy strong personal recognition, which arguably supersedes that of their parties. They leverage unmediated digital relationships, speaking directly to their audience: Farage has GB News, Polanski a podcast. Both present themselves as authentic outsiders to the political class. And despite the superficiality of digital media, both have real substance on matters of policy. You know what Farage thinks about immigration, or Polanski on taxing the super-rich. But what are Badenoch’s or Starmer’s views? As much as anything else, the hyper-leadership of both Farage and Polanski serves to make the leaders of the Big Two appear almost insincere. Both Labour and the Conservatives increasingly look like Diet Coke versions of everything they claim to be. The real problem for Starmer is that Polanski is saying many of the things he himself asserted while in opposition, whether it’s on the virtues of industrial action or the case for public ownership. It’s just that Polanski seems to mean it.

For all the talk of a grim Budget in November, next May will be the deciding moment for Starmer’s premiership. Besides a likely drubbing in both Wales and Scotland, all of London’s 32 boroughs will choose councilors. It’s increasingly plausible that Polanski’s party won’t just pick up wards in the capital, something which is now close to certain, but become the largest party in one or more councils. It will be in those authorities where the Greens perform best — most likely Hackney, Lambeth and Southwark — that they will subsequently select as leading targets for the next general election.

But even if May is an unprecedented nadir for Starmer, it could be just the beginning of the party’s woes as growing success for electoral rivals, Left and Right, leads to a wave of defections at a local level. Ideological alignment is part of that, certainly, but in many cases they will simply stand a better chance of re-election if they jump ship. Others could face the choice of defecting to the Greens, or being blocked from re-selection if they are too critical of the Starmer leadership. (This happens every year, under a range of pretexts.) That cascades upwards too: would Clive Lewis, Olivia Blake or John McDonnell rather join the Greens or be blocked from standing again? For a post-ideological politician like Starmer, what keeps the show on the road is the adhesive of power. Take that away, and the wheels come off.

Confronted with electoral doom-mongering, Labour supporters are now arguing that the wipeout in Caerphilly was a result of tactical voting designed to keep out Reform. To an extent that is true: Green and Liberal Democrat voters flocked to Plaid Cymru’s Lindsay Whittle last week, with both parties losing their deposit. What is more, that is precisely what happened in elections to the French legislature last year. Despite coming first in the popular vote in the first round, the National Rally ultimately finished third. Senior people in Reform are savvy enough to know something similar might await them. Even Tom Watson, Labour’s former deputy leader, recently declared that the country is heading for a “Stop Farage” election. Stop Corbyn, stop Brexit — and now stop Reform. It begs a question: what is the Labour Right, of which Watson is a standard-bearer, actually for?

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More importantly for the party, though, is that leaning into a progressive alliance, and hoisting a banner proclaiming “stop Farage”, may actually accelerate Labour’s demise. That narrative might work if you are the leading progressive force. And yet for Labour in Wales, and Scotland, that appears to no longer be the case. London, and other parts of England, might not be far behind — especially after next May. It’s a dangerous game for Starmer’s party, played on fine margins. Get it right and you remain in power. Get it wrong, and you kill the idea that Labour is the default choice for progressive voters. Labour’s willingness to jettison members might soon look like naïveté.

It may be a platitude among Labour circles, but it is nevertheless true: Labour only wins as a broad coalition. That was the case with Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair — a man who even came to an accommodation with Ken Livingstone as the Mayor of London. Starmer, who, uniquely as leader, wanted a smaller party, appears incapable of such sagacity. In Britain, general trends at a global level, of center-left parties fragmenting and failing to adapt, have now converged with the particular: a small-minded man incapable of building alliances.

Rishi Sunak surprised almost everyone by calling a snap election in May, including the former Labour leader — who remained a party member but had lost the party whip in 2020. It was clear he would never be permitted to stand for Labour again, but as Sunak stood outside No. 10 — resembling a bedraggled school prefect — Corbyn moved quickly. Two days later he announced he would run as an independent. The party he first joined in 1965 was firmly in his sights.

For many, the move against Corbyn several years earlier was primarily driven by the desire to break with his socialist politics. Indeed, it was the first in a series of moves that the leadership undertook to defang the party’s Left. Later came top-down deselections of Faiza Shaheen and Lloyd Russell-Moyle, while Sam Tarry lost a close vote with the controversial “Anonyvoter” system being deployed. And yet, in the election itself, confounding historical precedent, Corbyn  – as an independent – retained his seat. The battle for Labour, and the future of the British Left, had begun.

Expelled from the party, and outside the tent, Corbyn is arguably more trouble for Starmer. He now sits under his own flag, alongside four other outsiders propelled to Parliament by their opposition to austerity and trenchant criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. And while their election campaigns weren’t coordinated, these five independents are now getting organised, announcing a formal Independent Alliance earlier this month. That makes them the fifth largest grouping in Westminster. Alongside four Green members, moreover, theirs is the largest gathering of “Left of Labour” MPs in history. What was initially an inchoate rejection of Starmer across a grab-bag of seats is becoming a national movement.

Worse still for Labour, this all began during what was supposed to be the pinnacle of Starmer’s appeal. Yet within three months of forming a government, one recent poll has Labour as low as 29%. Six-in-ten voters now say the Prime Minister can’t be trusted and, most remarkably of all, Starmer is less popular than Rishi Sunak.

Not that the Conservatives will benefit from Labour’s deepening woes. Despite his penchant for freebie designer glasses, the public still views Starmer more favourably than leader wannabes Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick and James Cleverly. More broadly, the electorate remains more critical of the Tories than Labour. All those years of ineptitude haven’t been forgotten overnight.

And it is that presumption — that winning consists of being the “least worst” option — which perhaps explains the decision to cut the Winter Fuel Allowance for 10 million pensioners. In a two-party system, all that matters is being slightly less despised than the other guys. But Britain is no longer a two-party system, something Labour ignores at its peril. With the Lib Dems, the country now has its largest third party for a century — business has even started paying attention to them — and the SNP are looking to hit back under stable leadership. Elsewhere, the Greens and Reform are now truly national players. It wasn’t just Carla Denyer saying Labour should scrap the two-child benefit cap, but Nigel Farage too. Despite having more than 400 seats, the optics are that Labour is not only at odds with the country, but that electoral alternatives are increasingly conspicuous.

Yet the biggest problem for Starmer arguably remains his former comrade in Islington North, with Corbyn and his fellow independents a lightning rod for what was the Labour Left. The potential repercussions of his zero-tolerance approach on dissent can already be seen. Last month, Labour suspended seven MPs after they voted in favour of an SNP amendment to scrap the two-child benefit cap. A day later, Corbyn and his band of merry men signed a joint letter in support of those rebels, saying they looked forward to working together — and that they represented an alternative to the two establishment parties. The subtext was obvious: leave Labour and sit with us.

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But as Starmer’s difficult inheritance becomes clearer, there will be increasing dissent within the party as to how he approaches various challenges. Those who disagree with the party line are already considering other options — including the Independent Alliance. In August, Labour announced its membership had fallen below 400,000 for the first time in a decade. For the party’s Right — anti-democratic fixers by disposition — that is considered a good thing. But many of those leaving will go elsewhere and campaign against the red rose. In Chingford, Faiza Shaheen, whose independent campaign denied Labour the seat in July — it was held by the Tory incumbent, Iain Duncan Smith — has several hundred supporters who have left the party with her. If Shaheen chooses to stand at the next general election that could matter.

For socialist MPs in parliament, subject to intimidation from the party machine, joining the Independent Alliance is less risky than it might sound. For those seven suspended MP’s, for example, the choice is not between standing with either Corbyn or Starmer at the next election — but being an MP at all. In all likelihood, if they continue to rebel, the Prime Minister and his retinue will use the same tactics they deployed against Shaheen earlier this year, and failed using against Diane Abbott: as soon as an election is called, their candidacy will be revoked by the party’s NEC. The sensible solution — from a purely self-interested perspective — is for those such as John McDonnell and Zarah Sultana to assume they’ll never be allowed to stand under the Labour banner again. As that becomes clearer expect them to sit alongside Corbyn.

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A wider recognition of Starmer’s authoritarian style among Labour MPs will test his disciplinary approach. Rosie Duffield, hardly on the party’s Left, has already said she owes more to her constituents than the PM. This is dangerous ground for Starmer, who needs his big majority if he wants to address difficult challenges like the housing crisis. Some will stand up to Starmer — playing a game of political chicken in the knowledge there is an alternative with Corbyn. Meanwhile other, less courageous MPs, will pretend that abstention is somehow an act of defiance (more than 50 Labour MPs abstained on the Winter Fuel Allowance Bill). But that will prove bad politics — with a poor voting record manna for independent challengers at the next general election. Had Jess Philips not defied the party whip on calling for a ceasefire, for instance, she would most probably have lost her seat.

My bet is that a new party won’t happen, even with Corbyn open to the possibility. The strength of the five independents is that they are masters of what they don’t say: their platform of opposition to war, support for public services and criticism of Israel is overwhelmingly popular with the median Labour voter. Having a more detailed programme, where they’re liable to disagree among themselves over things such as LTNs or biodiversity, comes with too many downsides. An expanded alliance of independents at the next General Election — which does politics in the broadest of strokes — makes the most sense for now.

While covering the Batley and Spen by-election in 2021, I had the chance to meet some of Batley’s business families (the Yorkshire town is the cornerstone of the nation’s bed-making industry). Even then, it was clear that a generational shift was happening, especially in Muslim communities. “Our grandfathers voted Labour, but now we are saying it doesn’t have to be like that,” one told me. ”We want to shape things.” These are precisely the kinds of thick associational networks that powered independent candidates like Shockat Adam and Adnan Hussain to victory in Leicester South and Blackburn respectively. Because they are outside the M25, and don’t make sense through the prism of two-party politics, Westminster presumes they don’t matter. But soon they may have to sit up and notice.

Next year’s May elections will primarily focus on Tory-held county councils, so expect the Lib Dems, Greens and Reform to flourish. But elections in 2026, especially in Birmingham and London, could be a flashpoint for Starmer. As the Greens demonstrated before their success earlier this year, building power in councils is an effective first step to winning at Westminster. Wes Streeting and Jess Philips will be paying close attention.

This year, Labour’s victory wasn’t as definitive as it should have been. Their mandate was achieved with only 33.5% of the vote. Five years from now, they could still win a decent majority, albeit on an even smaller share of the vote. But to their Left there could be dozens of coordinated independents and Green Party MPs. As the contours of national politics shift, such figures could yet prove as influential as Reform, whether that is peeling off angry voters on issues such as corporate pay, inequality and cuts to the welfare state, or more potentially Tory-coded issues such as failing to clean up Britain’s rivers and coastlines.

For the first time in its history, the Labour Party is exposed on its Left, as well as its Right. This resets the parameters for what “centrism” actually means — a significant shift given the absence of a compelling orthodoxy at present. The Tory majority of 2019 proved to be volatile, and fleeting. And with Corbyn and his awkward squad snapping at its heels, come the next election, Labour may find itself in a similar position.

What is not asked, however, is why? Why did Britain, and much of the West, suddenly insist on remaking the built environment at such speed? The idea this resulted from a sudden bout of cultural self-loathing is supported by no evidence. The same is true for the notion that despite founding Nato and trying to maintain its empire, post-war Britain was somehow stuffed with surreptitious Marxists, from the commanding heights of Westminster to the planning offices of your local town hall.

Like most simple, comforting stories, this is wrong — a convenient narrative for inaction and self-satisfied moaning. What is needed instead is a Marxist, materialist account of why the built environment changed as it did. History, after all, is not forged purely by ideas.

What does a materialist analysis tell us? Firstly, that conservative concepts of beauty are incongruent with a devotion to the free market, something which Marx identified 150 years ago. Capitalism, driven by a relentless quest for profit, requires constant spatial transformation. This means we have the buildings we do because, for the most part, somebody somewhere is making a buck. This is difficult to grasp for many on the Right because they have elevated profit into a kind of ethical value (although this wasn’t always the case). But it should be relatively obvious, and far less outlandish than the idea that your nearest Wilko or TK Maxx looks the way it does because of the malevolent influence of Oscar Niemeyer. As Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned.” This is why a commitment to the free market, and to social and aesthetic conservatism, are irreconcilable.

This is most conspicuous today with Purpose Built Student Accommodation (PBSAs), those modular ziggurats afflicting skylines across Britain, from Altus House in Leeds to Beckley Point in Plymouth (each is the tallest building in their respective city). In Cardiff, more than 7,000 student “flats” were built in just three years.

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These buildings are springing up like medieval Bolognese towers for two reasons: firstly, because the building standards are lower for student developments than either residential housing or housing in multiple occupation; and secondly, because building them is lucrative. Forget Marxist council officers and architects with fantasies of becoming the next Frank Gehry. These buildings are being assembled in the quest for profit.

In Portsmouth, the city centre has now essentially become a student campus, the city’s sense of civic pride sacrificed to corporate student accommodation and fast-food outlets zipping deliveries to them via smartphone. It’s a grim vision of what our smaller city centres are becoming, with spaces for interaction in short supply. In Bournemouth, where I grew up, a seaside town synonymous with Victorian and Art Deco architecture looks increasingly like the set of the Teletubbies. Any sense of place is out of the question, the objective instead being to turn the town into a giant airport terminal.

Another important reason for those tragic “before and after” pictures so beloved of Trad Architecture Twitter is the popular adoption of the car in the mid-20th century. As with the failure to grasp the contradiction between free markets and conservation, this too is lost for many on the Right (although, in his defence, Scruton once referred to cars as “dangerous weapons”). This shouldn’t be overly surprising given the automobile was synonymous with personal freedom, an avatar of the sovereign individual conquering the elements. What is forgotten with this blanket projection of personal autonomy, detached from society, is that the dense patchwork of urban settlement that preceded it was lost. You may be able to go anywhere in a car, but you do so by cutting yourself off from others. In the words of Kafka: “you are free, and that is why you are lost.”

The reconfiguration of streets around the car is the principal reason cities such as Birmingham, Glasgow and Bristol lost much of their lustre. This was not limited to Britain, of course. Take the story of Robert Moses, the subject of Robert Caro’s magnificent biography The Power Broker. Over several decades as a public official in New York, Moses gleefully destroyed downtown areas often marked by cultural and racial diversity, as well as high density construction. The reason? To build expressways.

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The Cross Bronx Expressway offers the best example of this, ripping as it did through the heart of what would become the northern and southern parts of the Bronx. Things could have been worse, however. And it was only because of civic resistance, led by the likes of Jane Jacobs, that the construction of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway was stopped. Had she failed, it would have destroyed much of what is SoHo, Little Italy and Chinatown.

While it’s true that an infatuation with the car was central to post-war planning, today it is the Left leading the movement for low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs). By contrast, it is Conservative councils, such as in Southampton or Wandsworth, that are reversing them. This is not to say all LTNs have been executed well, but it is clear that reducing our dependence on cars has become a part of the culture wars, with conservatives often on the wrong side. It’s one thing posting nostalgic pictures of yesteryear; it’s another to do the hard political yards to reverse mistaken choices since.

This bizarre confusion is most obvious in Poundbury, the experimental community built on land belonging to Prince Charles. Even here, in a place whose premise is a return to tradition, the civic centre of Queen Mother Square is a car park. Even if you embrace the orthodoxies behind the project (I personally find it more akin to a Las Vegas theme park), it’s hard to see how rows of hatchbacks and people carriers continue the legacy of Victorian or Georgian architecture. It’s the same in the village of Wickham, home to the second largest medieval square in England. The Visit Hampshire website refers to the village’s “15th century cottages” and “beautifully preserved Georgian houses”. Yet such wonders are also now obscured by the fact that the village square is now a rather large car park.

When it comes to the built environment, it’s easy to lapse into mistaken binaries. On the Right, conservatives wish to retain a distinctive architecture. They claim to want to “conserve” buildings whose qualities transcend present, fleeting sensibilities. They believe in objective standards of beauty — be they from antiquity, or the work of Palladio or Wren. The Left, meanwhile, is apparently driven by a fixation with the future, a permanent experimentation with forms and an impulse to discard the old.

And yet much of this narrative doesn’t align with reality. Councils of all stripes are gleefully granting permission for hideous student blocks, while a Conservative government oversees our rivers being pumped with effluent. Meanwhile, it is progressives who make the arguments for more humane environments where we use our cars less and enjoy a slower pace of life. They don’t always get everything right, but there should be no doubt that active travel, living streets and low traffic neighbourhoods are the simplest ways to begin making our towns and cities beautiful again.

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All of which is why the socialist case for respecting architectural heritage should not be at odds with a small ‘c’ conservative approach. This should be the opposite of the promethean road-building projects of the last century, while also avoiding a swivel-eyed hatred of more recent architectural heritage, whether that be the Barbican in London or Berlin’s Palace of the Republic. Take the brutalist Trinity car park in Gateshead. Conservative critics may think such buildings shouldn’t exist by default, and so it was demolished in 2010. Yet it has been replaced by a Tesco — hardly a win for Scrutonian beauty and the public good.

Finally, socialists and conservatives alike must understand that the built environment, as with every human endeavour, is an inheritance from one generation to the next. We should be humble rather than dismiss the ideas of those before us, regardless of which century they come from, while also asking what kinds of structures will fill our descendants with wonder. As Stephen Nachmanovitch wrote: “If we operate with a belief in long sweeps of time, we build cathedrals. If we operate from fiscal quarter to fiscal quarter, we build ugly shopping malls.” The enemy of beauty isn’t “modernism”; it’s a society built on maximising profit and shareholder value.

To Labour’s Right wing, Blair remains the closest thing to a living saint. The former PM is their yogi, whose “rare interventions” — on Brexit, on Covid lockdowns, on higher education — are holy writ. But for normal people, who do not dream of May 1997 each night, Blair is a scoundrel.

To some extent this is to be expected. Blair governed for a decade. His mistakes were made in the public gaze — a gaze that tired of seeing his grin in the newspaper every day or his studied sandbagging on the evening news. Thus it is somewhat unfair to compare him to Alan Johnson, a Labour figure who is liked not because of any political accomplishments but because, to most, he is an affable TV raconteur. The same applies to Ed Balls and his ongoing rehabilitation via Strictly Come Dancing and Good Morning Britain.

The hatred Blair inspires is much more reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher, a similarly divisive yet successful politician who remade both party and country. Yet a decade after her death, she sits among the most popular of all Prime Ministers. She retained admirers, even as she was savaged by her enemies, and savaged them in turn. 

Blair was much more ameliorative than Thatcher, or at least he tried to be. Here was a mainstream leader who consciously aimed for the centre of public opinion. What Blair wanted, more than anything, was to be loved. So why is he so widely reviled?

The most common answer is Iraq. Without that war, moderates often argue, Blair would be remembered as a successful national leader. But even if we remove Iraq — the gravest British military blunder since the days of General Gordon — from an assessment of Blair’s legacy, he was a failure. One could argue he is even oddly fortunate that the scale of the debacle both there and in Afghanistan overshadows his domestic record.

More from this series

Cherie Blair's class war

By Joan Smith

Yes, there was Sure Start, and the introduction of a minimum wage (though that one belongs as much to John Smith as Blair). And yes, Blair funded the NHS properly for the first time in decades — though it belies the limits of his tenure that this was wiped out in a few years of Tory austerity.

Today, Blair’s most overwhelming legacy, and the one that affects millions of ordinary people in Britain every day, is housing. In 1997, as Labour won their largest ever parliamentary majority, the average income was £15,000 a year while the average property cost £65,000. By 2007, as Blair left office, average pay had risen to £20,000 — but house prices had surged to an extraordinary £190,000. In other words, relative to wages, and under a Prime Minister who spoke relentlessly of expanding opportunity, the cost of housing had doubled.

Given this, it is unsurprising that Gen X pundits, more socially liberal than boomers but whose cultural zeitgeist was defined by unprecedented property price rises, are the Blairite vanguard across much of the media. As any Marxist will tell you, conditions (often) determine consciousness. For Britain’s Gen X, the New Labour rise in property values — with its attendant sensation of prosperity — still feels like a successful project which merits defence. Yet the flip side to that phoney progress is today’s housing crisis, with home ownership falling from 70.9% in 2003 to 63.9% in 2018, and those between their mid-30s and mid-40s three times more likely to rent today than 20 years ago. The phrase “property-owning democracy”, on which the popular conservatism of the last century rested, is withering on the vine.

For now this remains primarily a problem for younger adults — although the ONS recently warned that the majority of older people will be living in rented accommodation in the future. Those same people burdened with thousands in student debt, another New Labour bequest, are increasingly likely to give up to half their post-tax earnings to a landlord. The Blairs, meanwhile, own a property portfolio worth approximately £35 million. Cherie Blair now oversees not one but two property management companies, including dozens of one-bedroom flats.

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Tony Blair's war on reality

By Mary Harrington

The surge in house prices after 1997 was no accident. Buy-to-let mortgages increased 30-fold under Blair while his government built fewer council homes than Margaret Thatcher. And while Blair certainly isn’t the prima causa of today’s housing crisis — the policy of right-to-buy in the Eighties was the catalyst, while supply issues are a major variable — it is remarkable that something as elementary as home ownership was permitted to become a luxury under a Labour government. 

Alongside this abysmal record on housing, New Labour oversaw a historic collapse in British industry. Between 1997 and 2007, output from all manufacturing, value adjusted for inflation, fell by 3% — while a million workers lost their jobs. Despite the post-industrial paeans of New Labour this was not inevitable: over broadly the same period, between 2000 and 2006, manufacturing output rose in the US, Germany and France. Most striking of all, manufacturing as a share of the overall economy fell more under Blair than Thatcher and Major combined.

All this was presented as a cause for celebration. For New Labour, deindustrialisation was a necessity. A small bump on the road to the “knowledge economy” that Britain must become. At the the turn of the century, Blair’s ambition was that Britain would become the best country in the world for “e-commerce”. The land of Newcomen, Watt and Bessemer, transmuted to a nation powered by lattes and online shopping.

Whether Blair had the faintest idea what he was talking about is unclear. This was a man, after all, who didn’t use a mobile phone until 2007 and whose first text message to his fixer Alastair Campbell read: “This is amazing, you can send words on a phone.” So Blair’s evangelism for the digital age wasn’t the result of any acquaintance with the possibilities of the internet. Rather he had found a compelling story to distract from the continued, and indeed intensifying, disintegration of national industry. Conveniently, this same story allowed Blair to present himself as modern and the blue-collar base of his party as backward.

A mixed domestic record is leavened by a series of foreign policy disasters. Blair is synonymous with Iraq and Afghanistan, and always will be. Britain spent £37 billion in Afghanistan, and lost more than 450 military personnel. For what? Two decades later, the Taliban have returned and the country is facing widespread starvation. In Iraq, the most secular country in the Arab world at the turn of the millennium became a hothouse for sectarian militias, then ISIS. Mission accomplished.

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New Labour was beyond parody

By Ian Martin

In the long-run the New Labour project, and Blair’s stewardship of it, can only be seen as a failure. The broader economic context of the Long Nineties — a goldilocks era of cheap energy, low inflation, and high growth — could not have been more kind to New Labour’s Nero. And yet, as Chinese consumer durables flooded the West, and cheap credit fell from the skies, Blair and Brown praised themselves for abolishing boom and bust. At the very least, New Labour might have built council homes, a national network of high speed rail, and prepared for climate change. They did none of it.

When asked about her greatest achievement Margaret Thatcher replied: “Tony Blair and New Labour.” The real legacy of Blair is that he not only cemented much of the Thatcherite settlement but, worse, made many believe that doing so was somehow progressive. Until that’s recognised for the mistake it was, Britain’s broken economic model, not to mention its housing crisis, will only get worse.