John Healey is different. Where the Prime Minister is all about the rupture, his Chancellor emphasizes “continuity” with his hapless predecessor. Never mind that Rachel Reeves has been voted the least popular recent resident of No 11 — as a former Treasury lackey of Gordon Brown, Healey was trained not to rock the boat too aggressively, lest the judgment of “the markets” and Fleet Street’s business pages condemn Blair’s Labour as “New” in name only. Presumably, in those halcyon days, the budding junior minister Healey didn’t slog away in the belief that he was complicit in the maintenance of some great four-decade injustice. If the last “40 years” are to be blamed for blithely destroying social-democratic Britain, then it’s as much the responsibility of Blair, Brown, and ministers like Healey as it is Margaret Thatcher, who after all left office when the Soviet Union was still around.

And herein lies the central feature — the central contradiction, some might say — of Burnham’s first Budget: the dissonance between his lofty promises and the policy reality. This was no “circuit breaker”, no fundamental shift, no new growth model. This was merely a placeholder, a tinkering exercise, a nothingburger of small-cash transfers and bean-shuffling. In short: about as much as we could have expected from a consummate Brownite. Since 2024, after all, we have been stuck in a half-baked rerun attempt at Gordon’s grand bargain: keep the financialized, globalized, FDI-dependent paradigm largely intact, but redistribute the proceeds of growth via cash transfers, statutory entitlements, and tax-and-spending. That was the modernizers’ Faustian pact. Alas for poor Healey, post-Great Financial Crisis, there is now little growth to speak of, and the whole Blair-Brown paradigm is dead.

In lieu of a replacement for this zombie model, then, we got what Healey called “a Budget for the working people of Britain”, the biggest item on which will be yet another energy-bill subsidy for poorer households (to be judged by council tax bands). There will also be some extra, modest, off-the-books investment via the British Business Bank and the National Wealth Fund. And there were some mild adjustments to capital-gains allowances, and some small rises to gambling and bank taxes. It could have been a lot worse, the spivs and the City will have concluded. Foreign bankers and hedge funds too: those omnipotent gilt markets were pretty relaxed about the Chancellor’s “steady-as-she-goes” measures. Sky’s Ed Conway tallied up the tweaks: 98 in total — a new record. But the average gross value of each pecuniary item was tiny — the lowest on record. Departmental cuts, meanwhile, are being shunted towards the end of the Parliament, rewriting St Augustine’s prayer: “Lord, make me fiscally sustainable, but not yet”.

All of which is to say: how long can this discordant Downing Street double act go on for? Surely the new dialectic between Burnham’s dad-socialist idealism and its conservative, Healeyite antithesis is bound to be resolved in an electoral and real budgetary synthesis before 2029? The prime minister cannot spend three years bobbing along with grammable titbits of cost-of-living policy while promising a post-election new dawn. Something will have to give, and despite the repeated denials, all other signs point towards an early poll. Burnham has restored Labour’s lead and has high personal ratings. Those will be slowly squandered as the inevitable compromises of power begin to bite, and as global stagflationary forces accelerate. Healey’s programmed cuts to Whitehall spending for the supposed year of the next election are testament to this. It would be suicidal for the Government that is promising post-neoliberal national renewal to begin a round of austerity heading into the year of a general election.

Burnham is caught between the cautious pledges of Labour’s thin 2024 manifesto and the necessities of a bleak fiscal outlook. The temptation to seek a fresh mandate for a more ambitious agenda — for a National Social Care service, publicly owned utilities and reindustrialization-through defense investment — will grow by the day. What’s more, running an election campaign against a still second-placed Reform Party, which rightly or wrongly the majority of the electorate is genuinely repelled by, is far more attractive to Burnham than waiting for the revived Conservatives to run a more traditional, less scary, less risky campaign against Labour profligacy.

But it isn’t simply political considerations, nor mere timidity, that is preventing a major Budget intervention before the next election, whenever that turns out to be. For Healey really is constrained by economic realities. Transformative investment that might finally change Britain’s economic geography is, whether the Labour Party likes it or not, currently precluded under the current framework, not least by spiking gilt yields. Somewhere along the way, the bond market, along with the OBR, has become a kind of unelected second and third chamber, fastening successive administrations to a narrow orthodoxy.

Yet there is nothing natural, pre-ordained or apolitical about this arrangement. The markets are not permanent, capricious deities that must be placated. They are institutions, governed by rules and political decisions. A radical Budget could have set out a major investment program to renew public capital stock, focusing on energy, transport and industrial capacity. It could have leveraged public financial institutions to finance it, and mandated pension funds to leverage their mountains of capital toward domestic investments. It could have instructed the Bank of England to use its balance sheet to hold borrowing costs down and invest in public infrastructure bonds for growth and revenue generating capital projects, all while bypassing Britain’s labyrinthine planning laws. 

More than Burnham’s abstract seismic shifts, the lesson of the postwar settlement is surely that it didn’t depend on ministerial speeches. It relied, rather, on capital controls, on directed lending, on nationalizations, on price controls, and close fiscal-monetary coordination. Ending these policies was integral to the “neoliberal” revolution that Burnham decries, and, in extremis, reimposing some version of them would be integral to any truly “post-neoliberal” order. Tellingly, two recent papers from Mainstream, the pro-Burnham parliamentary grouping, have nodded in this direction. The first, “The Productive State”, calls for extensions of public ownership; the second, “Reclaiming the UK’s Fiscal Space”, argues for an alternative macroeconomic strategy to facilitate a radical agenda.

None of this is costless. There would be losers, not least the substantial body of Britain’s asset-rich middle class. Any push to radically increase capital investment would have to be accompanied by demonstrations that ballooning current spending could be brought under control. The middle-class homeowner with a large, unearned rise in the value of their house, the landlord collecting rent from an increasingly scarce asset and the affluent saver accustomed to earning a safe return without productive investment in the domestic economy — all would face a different bargain with the state. But the purpose of policy would no longer be to preserve asset values, maximize private shareholder returns, then redistribute whatever income remained. It would instead be to end the Faustian pact, and begin a shift from a bureaucratic cash transfer and entitlement state, towards an investment-first, productive state. But Healey and his boss have chosen not to make the argument, accepting the orthodox framing and the market’s verdict before testing whether it could be challenged, managed or otherwise politically overridden.

When Burnham selected Healey as his Chancellor, there were reports that it was because he was a smaller beast than Ed Miliband or Shabana Mahmood, and could therefore be relied upon to roll over and impose No 10’s will. No 10 North has been conceived as the most significant breach in the Treasury’s monopoly on economic policy since Harold Wilson’s ill-fated Department for Economic Affairs. And yet for all the talk of a Prime Minister willing, finally, to get to grips with a proper political project, the offer of his first Budget is a thin gruel, totally at odds with the stated ambitions of his office. It seems that Healey is more powerful or persuasive than first thought — less willing to implement Burnham’s whims come-what-may, and more beholden to the Treasury mandarins. Never one to shy away from contradictory spitballing for political convenience, perhaps Our Andeh only ever intended a radical systemic overhaul at the level of rhetoric and vibes: unite the Labour Party and the progressive voter bloc by talking Left, but keep the show on the road by governing Right. Only time will tell.

Of course, it would be foolish to assume a real break with history could arrive in a single Budget. Labour’s “1945 moment” didn’t invent social democracy from thin air, but rather rested on decades of embryonic welfare state experimentation and the wartime command economy. Thatcherism had a prehistory too: before 1979, the IMF crisis and James Callaghan’s warning to his party that the Keynesian option “no longer exists” had already narrowed the field of acceptable economic policy. Perhaps Burnham’s rise, Healey’s cautious Budget, and the likely election to come will be remembered in the same way — not as the moment Britain emerged, fully formed, from “neoliberalism”, but rather as stepping stones away from a model that no longer works. Yet for now, at least, that much-touted new settlement remains mere aspiration — maybe until that election.

How times have changed. For Labour now has a Prime Minister apparently intent on reopening the Brexit debate, even as he frames his political project around reasserting state power over the market, something seriously undermined by EU membership. Never mind Andy Burnham’s attacks on the Brexit “status quo”, let alone Treasury plans to reignite “Project Fear” — for decades, the British Left understood this contradiction perfectly. Postwar socialism, proclaimed by Attlee in the hallowed year of 1945, relied too heavily on statist mechanisms, from tariffs to industrial subsidies, basically incompatible with the freedoms of the European bloc. Facilitating free trade through a giant continental single market was a concern for the capitalists, for the bosses — not for the labor interest.

As Gaitskell’s thundering speech makes clear, meanwhile, this approach to Europe was once near-consensus even on the Labour Right, uniting him with socialist firebrands like Nye Bevan. As Gaitskell’s rival once put it, supranationalism was a symptom of “political malaise” that “elevated the marketplace”, resulting from a failure of socialists “to use the sovereign power of their parliaments to plan their economic life”.

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Here, perhaps, are faint echoes of Burnham’s nostalgic lament for a social democracy sacrificed at the altar of market efficiency. Where Bevan identified Europe with mammon, and where the Right’s Friedrich Hayek rhapsodized over “Interstate Federalism”, today Burnham identifies Brexit as one of his “four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse”. The irony, of course, is that his other three riders are deindustrialization, austerity and privatization: each engendered as heartily by European technocratic elites as by Britain’s homegrown ideologues.

All the same, there is a political calculation at the heart of Burnham’s pre-EU shift. His immediate electoral challenge lies in reuniting Britain’s Left-wing voters behind the Labour banner, yet the fiscal picture is bleak. Manchesterism’s promise of large-scale renationalization, green investment, municipal housebuilding — all could potentially attract Labour-Green defectors back into the fold. But they would also raise the ire of gilt traders all too aware of Britain’s inability to either constrain current spending or manage major capital projects effectively. Europe, then, offers a cheap salve, a way of rallying the twin forces of urban Remainia and provincial Bregret, while reinjecting dynamism into “UK PLC” without imposing huge costs on John Healey’s Treasury.

The problem is that this sets Burnham on a path toward breaking his so-called “Makerfield test”: that policies should be judged against their putative benefits for blue-collar and postindustrial Britain, as exemplified by his Wigan constituency. Unfortunately for Burnham, though, Makerfield voted 65% Leave. And while that enthusiasm is sure to have declined of late, the idea that there would now be a natural majority for Rejoin remains fanciful.

The break in the collective Labourite omertà on Europe, then, could be seen as part of a grim, reluctant acceptance of a future divorced from “Makerfield Man”: with Labour a progressive party, not a labour party, one made up of public-sector workers in alliance with urban social renters and young, downwardly mobile graduates. Rejoinerism might represent the final breach of a historical obligation, emotionally preserved by party bigwigs even today, that Labour should reflect its roots as an electoral vehicle built by and for the organized working class.

That nostalgia likely explains why the next Labour manifesto ultimately won’t promise British re-entry or even another referendum. Burnham, too, is as romantic as Gaitskell. No amount of polling data on Labour’s new base of white-collar professionals will rid him of his belief that the party should orient itself, at least rhetorically, toward some notion of “the traditional working class”, however broadly conceived. Of course, Labour will be happy to nurture a pro-European vibe, not least around some amorphous “reset in relations”. But don’t expect genuine pan-Europeanism, in the style of the Liberal Democrats or, indeed, Tony Blair, anytime soon.

As with much of Burnhamism, the point is in the signaling, not the substance. We might therefore see some limited reassociation, or a new, closer customs arrangement. And, to be fair, these options could offer a way to cut Brexit red tape without reopening the broader constitutional question. Still, even an unenthusiastic rapprochement could quickly cause trouble. Dominic Cummings has noted the paradox of Europhile progressives who champion regulations at home, yet who bemoan the imposition of bureaucratic hurdles on multinationals around cross-border trade. Meanwhile, some Brexit stalwarts will see any realignment as an undemocratic capitulation. And if the Treasury does indeed lay out the modeling numbers for various options, from re-joining the customs union to the full hog, it would still be a brave party leader to turn freedom of movement into an electoral issue come 2029.

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If that again hints at a party in limbo — trapped between its old Makerfield base and its new professional-managerial one — there are more practical reasons to be suspicious of Brussels. After all, neither the single market nor the customs union have been panaceas for Europe’s long-term trend of relative decline. Indeed, Britain has outgrown both France and Germany since leaving the EU’s free-trade and regulatory regimes. If AI really is the sector of the future, then Europe’s data regulations exclude the continent from its windfalls. Besides, the bloc Britain would now rejoin is not that of Mitterrand or Kohl: it would be the Europe of Marine Le Pen and Alice Weidel. The dissonance between the Europe of the Remainiac imagination and the actually-existing EU grows wider by the day — not least given the recent disorder in France. Besides, Britain would enter this unhappy arrangement without exemptions from the Euro and Schengen, nor the significant budget rebate, all available before we left.

Through all this, Burnham could do worse than recalling the lesson of his predecessors: embracing their Labourism not just in romantic rhetoric but in practice. The Prime Minister’s program, as sketched so far, is an attempt to “roll back the Eighties”: public ownership of utilities and rail, and a reindustrialization drive that favors British firms in public procurement. Each of these risks being stymied by the legal architecture of EU membership. European treaties make nationalization and compensation processes far more complex. Procurement rules require open tendering and preclude preferences for domestic bidders. The free movement of capital forecloses the controls that Attlee relied on to steer investment. Rejoining would not deliver the “social Europe” promised by Jacques Delors in 1988, instead binding Labour to a settlement that Burnham’s own program is designed to escape. That’s why Gaitskell and Bevan opposed Common Market entry over half a century ago, and why Burnham can’t now both pass the Makerfield test and commit to rejoining.

Here, of course, Burnham would be swimming against the tide. Left Euroscepticism, once hegemonic, is now relatively niche. In the 2016 referendum, “Lexit” was backed by only a smattering of half a dozen or so Labour MPs, the Communists, the Socialist Workers, and the Rail Maritime and Transport Workers Union. One notable holdout was Jeremy Corbyn, who former allies tell me likely voted Leave. The eccentricities of this merry band don’t detract from the incompatibility of the EU with building a more cohesive national economy.

While frictionless trade and globalization will find few defenders on the Left today — not in an age of “securonomics” and so-called “post-neoliberal” growth models — freedom of movement was itself an integral pillar of economic liberalization. The creation of a single employment market, one stretching from Belfast to Bucharest, imposed a sham level playing field upon populations with vastly divergent employment practices and payment standards. The UK, with its relatively unregulated labor market, then became what Helen Thompson has called “the employer of last resort”. And, concurrently, the old Left transformed into an altogether different political tribe, more defined by what Wolfgang Streeck calls “cosmoliberalism”, far more concerned with preserving European constitutional arrangements than with adherence to traditional social democracy. Borderless capitalism, once trumpeted by Hayek and his ilk, should be as unloved on the British Left as it is still among British voters.

And, here, perhaps, is one more lesson of history. Whatever Burnham’s own muddled blend of romance and reality, politics and pragmatism, the basic truth remains: the grand European vision of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman never fully took hold in our small island nation. Even for British pro-Europeans, people like Gaitskell’s old protege Roy Jenkins, being “in Europe” long meant little more than inclusion in modernity, in the world of services and capital, and the competition it unleashed on old-fashioned British industry. It was a pragmatic arrangement, rarely viewed in romantic or grand historic terms. It was only after Brexit that the metropolitan middle classes began to get teary eyed about the 12 gold stars and Beethoven’s Ninth. And even then, the most regular complaint heard was over passport checks at the airport — not Anglophone exclusion from some lofty transnational demos. For peoples who had, on several occasions, engaged in mass slaughter over the constitutional status of Alsace-Lorraine, the EU may have felt like the realization of Enlightenment brotherhood after centuries of war. For Britain, though, its customs were alien, its languages incomprehensible, its people Other. Gaitskell understood that dilemma six decades ago, and changing Labour’s electoral coalition has not made it disappear.

Today, opposite the inebriated Labour spads and staffers jabbing furiously at their phones, Cammell Laird shipyard hosts Royal Navy frigates for repairs. One of only four remaining British oil refineries is visible in the distance to the south-east. And, out to the west, in the Irish Sea, a host of wind turbines turn limply in the sunshine. This, then, is the sweep of Labour Britain in microcosm: the one built by industrial laborers, and shaped by the trends of progressive interventionism. And you can see it all from within a sealed, airport-style security cordon full of lobbyists, millennial PR professionals from London, hacks-on-tour, wonks and assorted politicos. They all agree: “The vibe is very different from last year, isn’t it?”

In truth, of course, it’s the same conference bubble strangeness that we are subjected to every year. Each party has its own neuroses. Labour’s principal one is that it’s a party of progressive liberal graduates — but nonetheless clings to its original roots as a manifestation of genuine working-class ascendancy. And here it is encamped as a foreign object in an airless architectural carbuncle on the banks of the river, among the red-brick warehouses and shipyards and the very places that gave the labor movement so much of its original form. Its relationship with working-class Britain is akin to that of the adulterous husband, begging his wife for one more chance. One civil servant-turned-comms girl, here at Conference for the first time, has a slightly different observation. “There’s quite a lot of gimps, isn’t there?” But here, the gimps are king. This is their safe space, the place to indulge in all manner of comforting delusions.

During an extended visit in 1965, Allen Ginsberg called Liverpool “the center of consciousness of the human universe”. Brian Patten, Ginsberg’s weary host, later remarked that “I think Allen believed the center of human consciousness to be wherever he was at the time”. You could say something similar about most Labour types. They consistently engage in what the philosopher John Gray calls “the fatal conceit of the progressive mind”, namely “an invincible faith in its superior rationality”. In this world, if only everyone was party to the facts, nobody would vote Reform; if only more right-on types had their hands on the levers of power, then all would be well. With a straight face, one think tanker told me that the rise of populism could be put down largely to a lack of “up-skilling opportunities” in the left-behind English regions.

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Wherever “the center of consciousness of the human universe” is today, it’s not located in the Conference Fringe Guide. Instead, we have “How Can Employer Partnerships Create Genuine Pathways into Work For Young People?”, and “Closing the Sports Gender Gap with Sky and Lucy Powell”. The slogan of the conference, “Hope Again”, is deliberately broad and absolutely banal. It adorns screens and billboards. For now, drunk on warm wine and good vibes, most attendees are prepared to believe. 

But these dreams will inevitably meet contact with difficult realities: tightening fiscal constraints as a result of geopolitical crises beyond our control; those pesky gilt yields; the recalcitrant PLP, who will meet with hostility any attempt at constraining current spending. The cost of government borrowing is now at a 20-year high. And, 20 years ago, the national debt stood at around 30% of GDP, not today’s 95%. We’re spending three times more on debt interest than we are on infrastructure, almost twice as much as we spend on defense.

But the problems are for later: this is Burnham’s time to shine. A year ago, he was shunned for what was billed as a premature attack on Keir Starmer and the bond markets. Today, he is dominant within a party that has identified him as its last electoral hope. The PM seemed to have a slogan of his own for a speech that rang as hollow as Hope Again: “All together now”. But, for his part, the speech was a success, a classic of mawkish, progressive soft-Left Labourist eulogizing. There were perorations on 1945, tears for his father in an open display of Men’s Mental Health, odes to his “gran”, and the beloved, abstractly conceived working class: who in actuality have abandoned the party in droves. 

Burnham is an infinitely superior speaker to Keir Starmer, and he knows what the Labour faithful want to hear. He has the self-confidence of Tony Blair, and a coherent narrative of how Britain found itself in its current woeful predicament. “Homes, water, energy, transport, care, were broken up and sold off”, he told the gathered activists. “The British Right talk about taking back control”, he added, “but it was them who gave it away.” 

The Prime Minister, in short, is a man who deals in an anti-Thatcherite, progressive social democratic nostalgia — one he hopes can reunite progressive Britain’s warring tribes. He makes Labour people feel good about themselves, which is more than can be said for Starmer. Some in the conference hall wept openly, perhaps in a show of what they like to call “solidarity”. Perhaps they’ve been waiting to hear such a bold assertion of their Labour values since the days of John Smith. There were moments of whooping and shouting reminiscent of a Pentecostal church on Sunday, the congregation all filled with the spirit of Andeh, the spirit of ’45. He is good at this, delivering a broad-tent vision of a liberal Britain that seemed pitched towards uniting left-of-center voters against what he called “division” (which we can translate as still-burgeoning national-populist insurgency). 

And the delegates lapped it up. It was as clear a signal as we have yet heard of the kind of coalition he wishes to build come the next general election: the modern Labour bloc of liberal professionals, public sector workers, young renters, ethnic minorities, students and sections of the old working-class who haven’t been lost to Farageism (particularly in the North). In other words, it’s time for the Green, Liberal and soft-Reform defectors to come home. It may even be enough to win the next election, at least as the largest party in coalition with Liberals and Celtic nationalists, pointing us towards a future of proportional representation, an elected senate, and smug Euro-style consensual technocracy. 

Aware that, as time goes on, the popularity of virtually all political leaders fades, No. 10 would be foolish not to consider the possibility that waiting until 2029 for an election heightens the risk of a Conservative rebound and a Reform-Tory coalition. Certainly, the need to raise taxes to pay for a National Care Service could be the substantive excuse to U-turn on early denials and to go to the polls seeking a fresh mandate.

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Yet if all this makes sense politically, nothing Labour has proposed so far will break the doom loop, nor alter the fundamentals of Britain’s decline. As ever, the yawning gap between the diagnosis and the prescription is the most fundamental contradiction in the Burnhamite project. Though it offers a story of systemic rupture, a “circuit breaker” on “40 years of neoliberalism”, it’s all told to justify a handful of discrete, piecemeal, modest interventions: a revamped help-to-buy scheme by another name; £2 bus fares; VAT off electricity bills; a commission on electoral reform; a slightly modified triple-lock to pay for enhanced social care. Elsewhere at the conference, Shabana Mahmood has agreed to make her migration reforms more palatable to Labour’s metropolitan liberal castes: Blue Labour’s lodestar has gone full woke with safe and legal routes for Gazans and Afghan women. 

This, then, is a shopping list of policies adding to much less than the sum of a “post-neoliberal order”. It didn’t even reveal a new strategy for growth, simply for more fairness within the current ailing model. It was a paean to safe soft Leftism, not an extrapolation of what would really constitute post-neoliberalism: the hard, social-democratic radical reforms that would rebuild state capacity; put us on a pathway towards a more cohesive national economy; and usher in genuine industrial revival and investment-led national renewal. 

Whatever else neoliberalism meant, after all, it really did entail a radical reorientation of the ship of state. It pursued a steady, deliberate retreat of the demos, the public, from ownership and direction over productive assets. It disciplined organized labor, outsourced services, and began to allow markets to allocate capital — in a way that used to be debated politically and enforced via industrial strategy, capital controls, trade barriers and incomes policies. The productive state, that engaged directly in investment and capital formation, became a regulatory state that taxed and tweaked with cash transfers from a financialized, privatized growth model. Nothing on Burnham’s wishlist approaches a reversal of this at anything like the necessary scale. 

Back on the Mersey, the tide is on the turn. Every political economy leaves its monuments here. The refineries and shipyards stand for industrial Britain; the regenerated docks for tourism, services and creative capital; and the turbines out in the Irish Sea for the net-zero revolution. Each epoch wasn’t built by tweaking the old ones. If Burnham truly wants a post-neoliberal order, he will have to build one, and that means large-scale investment in physical things meant to last generations: not regulatory fiddles while Britain smolders. Burnham’s problem, then, is a twofold gap: the first between a diagnosis of systemic rupture and a weak prescription of cheap bus fares and VAT cuts; the second between the hope in the hall and the grim arithmetic waiting beyond the security cordon. Even the grandest of speeches can’t bridge chasms that large.

There’s every chance, here, that Burnham was familiar with Trotsky’s quip long before he entered No. 10. Like many Labour statesmen — Tony Blair and Keir Starmer among them — he enjoyed a youthful flirtation with the Russian revolutionary’s ideas. That’s three out of the last four Labour PMs confessing to intellectual dalliances with the founder of the Red Army. Blair and Starmer, alas, achieved high office only to strengthen Britain’s nightmare political economy of bloated arms-length regulatory regimes, rampant rentierism, privatized national assets, and tragicomic levels of state incapacity, leaving us doubly vulnerable to today’s global shocks.

Labour’s latest prime minister claims to be different, promising a rupture in this peculiarly British mode of governance. But these kinds of epochal shifts, revolutionary premierships on the level of Gladstone or Attlee, are rare indeed. Burnham’s own Trotskyist fling was experienced via the contemporary protestations of the Eighties political celebrity Derek “Degsy” Hatton — a sharp-suited Scouse firebrand (and fellow Evertonian) with a predilection for gold watches, expensive tailors, personalized number plates and “vulgar Marxism”. Hatton was the larger-than-life de facto leader of Liverpool City Council when it thrust itself daringly into the national spotlight, setting illegal budgets and implementing mass housebuilding initiatives even as its Whitehall grant was slashed. Hatton offered a New Deal-style, localized and limited Keynesian stimulus effort dressed in revolutionary garb.

Yet that garb was important, as Degsy basked in a kind of belligerent, workerist anti-intellectualism, poking fun at the academic, London-based New Left scene. The Scouse Trot was quick to differentiate the kind of Liverpool socialism he was enacting with what he himself called the “Loony Left” — “more concerned,” Hatton said, “about black mayors and gay rights than… about building new homes.”

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A teenaged Andy, fresh-faced and idealistic, would have seen Hatton on TV every night, fighting his birth city’s corner against Thatcherism. And it’s hard not to compare it to Burnham’s own stint as a righteously indignant mayor of Greater Manchester, railing against Covid lockdowns. But where Burnham’s anti-London combativity earned him the moniker “King in the North”, his former hero Degsy eventually became known as “King Rat”. After Hatton and his posse almost bankrupted Liverpool, expelled from Labour, and removed from office, he used his newfound infamy to launch a career in low-rent TV appearances and Christmas pantomimes. Now 78, he’s a successful property developer, albeit one awaiting trial for conspiracy to commit bribery and intimidate witnesses. There’s another instructive lesson for the prime minister: revolutions do have consequences, and often they are not especially positive.

Perhaps that history explains the caution Burnham has shown towards governing so far. To be sure, “resilience” has become the center-left’s economic watchword, overtaking the “efficiency” of the high neoliberal era. And why not? As the economist Wolfgang Streeck has noted, that hyper-global age entailed a “dictatorship of the lowest marginal cost” — all just-in-time supply chains, outsourced production, and highly mobile capital in search of the cheapest possible inputs. Yet if Burnham has imbibed the critique, and talks about a return to public control, reindustrialization, and economic security, his fine words have yet to translate into action. Yes, Burnham seems to have learned from Degsy, be a rebel — but not too much. Yes, embrace socialism — but not yet.

The problem, here, is that Burnham’s party doesn’t necessarily have time for moderation. The era demands a radical rupture because the old order has so palpably failed. As one MP tells  me, the prime minister represents Labour’s “last roll of the dice”, to see if there’s life in the old dog yet. It’s a sentiment you can hear elsewhere too. A thoughtful essay by one of Starmer’s former speechwriters recently pondered whether the party would “go gently into the sociological night”, abandon a diminished working class, and lean into its minoritarian status as an institution for progressive public sector workers and professional urban graduates. The nadir of British social democracy experienced under Starmer required a forceful internal response. Yet if MPs acted to remove one serially unpopular leader and install the man that polls and focus groups deemed most acceptable, it’s unclear, as Burnham prepares to take the podium in an airless glass-and-steel convention center, whether that’ll be enough.

There are reasons to think it won’t be, not least given the looming geopolitical storm clouds. “We’ve all become accustomed to shit economic news over the past 18 years,” says one backbencher. “It’s baked in at this point.” Still, there’s an aching dissonance emerging between the inchoate Burnhamite message of hope and change, and the slow realization that the light at the end of the tunnel may turn out to be an oncoming train. Certainly, most of the public have not registered the implications of Iranian-backed insurgents holding the global economy hostage. The number of people who think they will be worse off next year has decreased from 40% to 33% since April, with 20% now thinking they’ll be doing better. Yet Britain is more exposed than most, especially since successive prime ministers — Hayekian free-marketeers and former Trotskyists alike — have created a service-based, import-dependent economy, one reliant on foreign capital inflows and buoyant international trade.

The irony, of course, is that Burnham always wanted to be a domestic leader, with cost-of-living salves held up as the great unifying totem of his new regime. But as Trotsky also learned — when, for instance, his plans for world revolution were stymied by the Poles in 1920 — exogenous events have a way of intruding on even the best-laid plans. With the Bab al-Mandab blocked, inflation expectations are likely to be adjusted upwards. From there, gilt yields will spike accordingly. John Healey’s first Budget anyway seems unlikely to be cheerful.

Perhaps the best Burnham can hope for in the short term is to borrow from Starmer’s book and act the statesman on the world stage. And, to be sure, sanctioning West Bank settlement goods will play well with sections of Labour’s base, just as action on AI safety does to wavering Lib Dems. But that hardly equals a revised settlement on Britain’s place in the new multipolar order. Nor does it solve the problem of our impotence in the face of a Washington hegemon seemingly intent on causing chaos. Burnham is no Mark Carney or Emmanuel Macron, progressive leaders with their own grand projets on “strategic autonomy” and the future of “middle powers”.

More than any particular policy, though, Burnham should probably take a more general lesson from Degsy and his Trotskyist forebears: if you’re backed into a corner, then fight. Thatcher may have beaten Degsy in the end, but the struggle was just and necessary. As Leon said, revolutions have a way of calcifying, recommending as an antidote a “permanent revolution” more than the settled “socialism in one country” backed by Stalin.

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By Dominic Adler

And there are plenty of candidates that a radicalized Burnham could choose to take on: the OBR and Treasury, which together treat investment as a liability rather than an asset; the Bank of England, which raises the cost of government borrowing by engaging in successive rounds of quantitative tightening; the ECHR, which would launch legal challenges against any moves to bring utilities back into public ownership without eye-watering sums being paid to foreign hedge-fund shareholders. “I think he’s doing well,” as one prominent backbencher puts it, but he “needs to grow in confidence… and generally speak and act with more clout and urgency.”

So rather than backing down against the legalistic instincts of the civil service, the orthodoxies of the Treasury, or the apoplexy of the business pages, perhaps Burnham should return to his roots, embody the tribune-of-the-people persona that served him well in the North West, and declare war against Britain’s established interests. An icepick to the head killed Trotsky’s revolution. Thatcher’s revolution killed Degsy’s in Liverpool. A ballot-box verdict, delivered with rather less drama, is what finishes leaders whose revolutions never even start.

On 8 October, the voters of this North London constituency will judge whether today’s Labour Party, a now tired vehicle born of Edwardian Britain, Methodism and industrial trade unionism, is still worth a punt against the siren calls of the radical Greens, who are offering “eco-populism”, festival aesthetics, youthful vigor and politics-by-meme. The result is likely to set the contours of Burnhamism over the years ahead, shaping the malleable politics of the new PM.

It marks a pivotal moment for both Burnham and his rival Zack Polanski: a contest over the viability of the Labour Party and its traditional hegemony over Left politics. It is freighted with expectations. Can Burnham reunite the Left’s broken voter coalition and reverse the precipitous decline stewarded by Starmer? Or will Polanski prove that his party’s poll surge can be translated into parliamentary seats, a first step on his path to “replace Labour” as the dominant Left force in British politics. Failure for either would be a humiliation: whatever the result, one man’s whole political raison d’etre will be deeply undermined, their respective coalitions left more fragile than ever.

For all his painfully awkward dilettantism, Zack Polanski has managed to turn the Greens from a kooky fringe outfit into a viable electoral force. Party membership has more than tripled to over 200,000 over the past year. As much as the march of Farageism across northern England saw off Starmer’s premiership, the Greens’ success in Gorton and Denton signaled to Labour MPs that his entire project was done for. It had failed to win back the disaffected postindustrial working class, and birthed a heightened national-populist insurgency — while simultaneously taking a sledgehammer to the Left coalition that won Starmer the 2024 election.

Part of that coalition found shelter in the warm embrace of the Greens, which briefly overtook Labour in the polls earlier this year, before settling more recently in the low double figures. That ceiling may well be down to Polanski himself and his enthusiasm for social media stunts. He has retweeted posts questioning the use of non-lethal force against an armed Islamist, mid-rampage in Golders Green, and reposted an image suggesting Nigel Farage should be guillotined. Nor is it easy to forget — or forgive — his mortifying history of promising to hypnotize women’s breasts bigger.

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Andy Burnham: King of normie populism

By Jonny Ball

Still, news of Polanskism’s early demise is greatly exaggerated, principally expressed as wishful thinking, and crucially missing the point: the Greens don’t need to appeal to the median voter, nor do they need to assemble a broad cross-class union of disparate social and cultural-political forces. Rather, their purpose is to energize, articulate and represent the interests of that small but significant portion of voters for whom Polanski’s Bluesky musings are not beyond the pale, but signifiers of superior virtue. Done well, that could be enough to wreck Labour’s prospects of being re-elected.

Altogether, the Green showing in Holborn will confirm whether Labour’s pains are principally superficial — the result of years of uniquely inept leadership under Keir — or structural. A Polanski victory would assert the latter narrative: if even Labour’s most popular politician is powerless in the face of the macro trend, then hope is surely lost. Perhaps, even under new leadership, the rot cannot be stopped; Labour’s decline is the terminal result of tectonic and sociological shifts that have plagued the movement since the decline of Fordist manufacturing. In this reading, Polanskism will flourish in a climate in which broad-based, rooted political projects have given way to mutually suspicious tribal bubbles.

But there is a paradox at the heart of this reading of defeat. For while losing his first by-election would doubtless embarrass Burnham, it would also temper the instinct for a more managerial, orthodox politics. His coalition problem cuts both ways: he needs the Green-curious metropolitan Left just as he does the Reform-curious disaffected working class. Defeat in Holborn would make this conundrum harder, not easier, to manage.

After all, efforts to mitigate the Green surge in North London could require a Leftward shift in all manner of tricky policy areas: not only on Mahmood’s immigration and asylum reforms, but also on North Sea drilling, wealth taxes, and Israel-Palestine. The seat has a decent share of Muslim voters (one in five), as well as stressed young renters in over-priced houseshares and thousands of students: all receptive to the central Green messages of inchoate anti-capitalism and Labour betrayal. The conflict in the Near East, in particular, has become a totemic struggle for the radical Left, the fulcrum upon which all social justice struggles now somehow hinge. For the fresh graduate class, the willingness to eagerly and interminably utter the word “genocide” has become the ultimate political axiom (simply “war crimes” or even “ethnic cleansing” won’t do). So Labour has been smart to select a hijab-wearing former child refugee as its candidate, a welcome reassurance for the Green-curious, for whom these markers of apparent oppressed minority bona fides really do matter. Not that Sagal Abdi-Wali is some tokenistic appointment. She has already been leader of Camden council, and has spent three decades as a well-known “community activist”.

Of course, Holborn is more complicated than just Camden, and not as straightforwardly Green as Hackney. As in much of London, there are pockets of urban deprivation, but the seat’s boundaries stretch to the smart facades of Doughty Street (home to Starmer’s former chambers) and includes the King’s Cross headquarters of Google as well as the homes of established liberal professionals in the Georgian terraces of Kentish Town. This seat is Rest is Politics, but it is also Novara Media. If that causes headaches for both Burnham and Polanski, George Galloway’s Workers’ Party candidature does too, proving attractive to conservative Muslims hoping to give Labour a bloody nose, and to those repelled by the vibes and coding of a party of hyper-liberal urban cool kids (the Greens’ cringeworthy efforts to appeal to Urdu speakers notwithstanding).

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Andy Burnham meets reality

By Jonny Ball

It is certainly true that running a party leader with an energetic local campaign might well turn the usual by-election distortions into massive swings. But even in May’s local elections, the absolute nadir of Starmerism, the Greens found themselves nine points behind Labour, and they will, according to the bookmakers, be relegated to second place in October too.

Still, even second place is no mean feat. Before 2024, the Greens were confined to a single electoral citadel: Brighton. Positioning itself rather smugly as a bastion of middle-class progressives, hedonistic students and New-Age crusties, the Sussex seaside town was practically synonymous with the old Greens. Then, at the last election, the party expanded its seat haul to four: Brighton, of course, and a similarly off-kilter hipster seat in Bristol, but also two true-blue rural constituencies concerned with over-development and nature conservation. This created a strange two-tier Green bloc. On the one hand, the party was for laptop-sticker postgrads; on the other for Countryfile-watching former Tories.

Needless to say, that is a shaky, contradictory political coalition, not unlike Labour’s own. And, under Polanski, the Greens have only looked to add further elements to the mix: northern mill-town biraderi networks, and Islamic migrant communities collectively appalled by Gaza. But Holborn doesn’t fit neatly into the new Green Party’s cultural-political triad: what you might call the Greta-Gaza-Gardener alliance. It is a seat where the Green coalition’s internal contradictions are hard to hide: a constituency of students, renters and professionals for whom Gaza is important, gardens are largely irrelevant, and where clan politics holds less purchase than elsewhere.

Even if Polanski cannot forge his Greta-Gaza-Gardener alliance into a winning vote here, his leadership of the Greens will continue. As long as his loss is respectable, it may even be read as portentous, further eating into Labour’s temporarily rescued Left hegemony. A Labour victory, however, will hand Burnham the argument that his party’s malaise was mainly Starmer’s: and that a mildly Leftward, pub-friendly patter and anti-Thatcher schtick is enough to reunite the Left bloc and hold off Balkanization.

Once in this North London seat, Marx sat at his desk, with Lenin a few years and miles away, and the Fabians busily drafting the machinery of a welfare state that did not yet exist. Today, we have a former hypnotist who can’t stay off his phone, going up against a Labour candidate whose task it is to prove that having a nice-guy leader is enough to stave off secular decline. That this will be enough for one of the candidates to succeed is perhaps the biggest indictment of the politics of our era.

Like the comrade-citizens of the Eastern Bloc — taught all the ways of brotherhood and abundance, but used to sclerotic central planning — we’re about to find out what “actually-existing Burnhamism” looks like. The recess is over, and so is the honeymoon. Making his prime ministerial debut in the Commons yesterday, Andy Burnham experienced something of a baptism of fire. He’s already faced a global sovereign debt fire-sale, with Britain looking predictably exposed, as well as a grilling by Kemi Badenoch. And, more awkwardly, Burnham now faces a by-election in Holborn and St Pancras, courtesy of an ever-helpful former leader. The North London contest will turn into a Labour-versus-Greens showdown. Though Makerfield proved that Burnham could turn Northern heads away from an insurgent Faragism, facing off Zack Polanski in a liberal metropolitan stronghold is a different task entirely.

Over the summer, Burnham had the opportunity to prove that he’s at least superficially different to his robotic predecessor: he played The Smiths to Ukrainian squaddies, and masterminded an impeccable TikTok game. Plus, he announced a set of nice, small-scale retail policies focused on the cost of living.

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Why the British Left has fallen for China

By Jonny Ball

Now he bemoans Margaret Thatcher’s legacy in the Commons, linking privatization to the rise in water and energy bills, and deregulation on the decline of bus travel outside of London. It’s all cogent Left-populist diagnostics: Tory spivs sold England by the pound; austerity in local government compounded the misery; and Brexit cut us adrift in a harsh geopolitical climate. We already know what is on Burnham’s big to-do list: a reversal of “40 years” of neoliberalism, public ownership of the core utilities, investment in regional infrastructure, devolution, constitutional reform. But what will this all look like in practice, in a country that is currently spending more than the annual education budget on debt interest? How will Burnham finance his grand plans with an incapacitated, outsourcing state that few trust to deliver on the most basic services?

Disappointment lingers on the horizon. Signs were there over the holidays: “Our Andy” was forced to watch his beloved Everton play Crystal Palace last weekend from the safety of the director’s box — rather than his usual seat on the terraces. And so the man of the people became the man of the prawn sandwiches. The idea of Burnhamism is all about normie populist swagger: his easy charm says “one of us”. But now he’s no longer one of us. He’s Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. And, in the land of actually-existing Burnhamism, the security arrangements for a prime minister at a football game present a considerable headache — as does much else besides.

In the doctrinal version of Burnham Thought — “Manchesterism”, as it is sometimes known — we might expect to see some municipally owned water and energy companies, even a “gas-and-water socialism” revival in the tradition of Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham. In actually-existing Burnhamism, however, the Government has been advised that bringing an ailing Thames Water onto the public books would add another few billion to the debt pile and make the state vulnerable to legal action.

Burnham has long been a champion of big capital projects: full-fat HS2, Northern Powerhouse Rail and more tramlines, to name but a few. All of them could conceivably facilitate higher regional productivity, job creation and private investment for decades to come. But in actually-existing Burnhamism, any signs that a cool hundred billion might be expended on concrete and steel could be met with a gilt rout by twitchy hedge funds holding mountains of British debt. Yes, the Manchesterism schtick plays ably on a boomer-coded social-democratic nostalgia: remember proper bin men and pork scratchings? Except that under actually-existing Burnhamism, Ofgem has just raised the price cap again, and we’re still paying our bills to a hodgepodge of competing private outfits.

Defense poses similar questions. When John Healey, the Chancellor of the Exchequer,  first hitched his wagon to Team Andy after resigning as Keir Starmer’s defense secretary, he presumably thought Burnham would be sympathetic to his plea for higher defense spending. After all, Burnham, unlike his predecessor, had decried the limiting effects of fiscal rules and being “in hock” to the bond markets. But, again, in actually-existing Burnhamism, the bond markets do exist. Healey is already facing accusations of hypocrisy for not immediately setting out the route to 3% defense budgets. And, in order to pay the triple lock to the wealthiest generation in human history, to fund PIP payments to anxious twenty-somethings, and to ensure ambulances turn up, the Government must issue gilts and remain in the bond markets’ favor. This is, of course, a situation entirely of our own making — reflecting a national desire for Scandinavian services without the taxes to match, along with a public purse that splurges billions on shoddy procurement deals.

In this context, change is likely to be incremental rather than wholesale. Transferring whole industries onto the public books would require an enormous amount of trust from our creditors. It would likely necessitate an ample demonstration that, while large-scale public investment in assets and infrastructure was the new growth model, day-to-day government spending could readily be balanced through a combination of cuts and higher taxes. That would mean either confronting Labour MPs with hard truths that they would be unlikely to countenance, or potentially stymying growth with more financial burdens on employers and high earners.

A third, more radical, option exists, discussed in hushed tones on the outer fringes of Labour circles. Some within call themselves the “Based Left”, only semi-ironically, and they speak of a “politics of production” and “national preference”. The offer involves going to war with the Bank of England over quantitative tightening and rate hikes, infringing upon central bank independence to facilitate a program of stimulus spending and de-privatisation. That is beyond the realms of probability today. After all, it would mean pursuing a kind of Left-nationalist siege economy replete with capital and exchange controls, postwar-style price commissions, incomes policy, and fiscal-monetary coordination.

Rather than reversing the Eighties legacy as promised, with a genuine return to a properly social-democratic political economy, something more akin to gradual reform is likely — think less Tony Benn, more Roy Jenkins. We could see the train routes gradually come under the purview of Great British Rail, perhaps an expansion of GB Energy, and some more public, regional or municipal options explored for water. Since Burnham is hemmed in by the 2024 manifesto commitments on tax, an early election will be required to really be the “circuit breaker” leader he promises. But, for now, this is Burnhamism in essence: the adoption of fiery Left-wing rhetoric on economics accompanied by a slight Leftward pivot on fiscal policy in actuality, plus better vibes.

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Britain’s common-sense crisis

By Aris Roussinos

And yet if the vibes have undoubtedly shifted from a lackluster Starmerism to a more dynamic Burnhamism, the latter has inherited the former’s central contradiction: the speeches extolling the end of globalization on the one hand, and a relatively limp policy offer to remedy it on the other. Though Starmer was said to have been captured by the Labour Right, he tried in vain to tell a national story not unlike Burnham’s: one of investment, the return of state ownership in energy and transport, and the failure of “trickle-down economics”. The problem was the story was told so inconsistently, insincerely, and with such a lack of gusto, that it was hardly noticed at all.

Burnham will be a better storyteller. But in the coming weeks, the unstoppable force of his grand projects will meet the immovable object of a recalcitrant Treasury and an economy on the ropes. Britain’s problems are still structural, requiring fewer technocratic tweaks and InstaReels from No. 10 North — and more of a systemic overhaul. We are experiencing a deep-rooted, overlapping polycrisis. The nation has experienced zero productivity or real wage growth since 2008. It still produces less than it consumes, and it remains dependent on inward foreign investment and the kindness of strangers in a world now beset by the end of liberal globalization.

So when an increasingly confident Kemi Badenoch walks into PMQs today, she’ll be armed with plenty of ammunition: one-in-one-out prisons, spiking gilt yields, expected tax rises in a putative “Red October” Budget. What, then, does a Big State man do when times are tough? We are about to find out what existing Burnhamism can actually deliver.

But for some Marxism Today writers, there were also signs of hope. Just as the Left bid farewell to the old proletariat, a new, educated creative class would become the new agents of history. Arthur Scargill may have been picketing organized labor towards a heroic defeat, a final denouement of the postwar era’s powerful trade unionism, but the rising service industries, and a proliferating array of innovative consumer trends could also be interpreted as the rebirth of a latent spirit of progressive individualism, personal autonomy, and harmony in diversity.

When these new social forces failed to produce any kind of rupture with a dominant Thatcherite revolution — and when the response of the Left turned out to be Blairism and Cool Britannia — Jacques was despondent. The Soviet Union had fallen, and the cultural consumer fads of the new Eighties turned out to be ephemeral and superficial. And so, in defeat, his attention shifted to China, his interest piqued by a 1993 visit to the country. Where the Western Left had failed in the face of Thatcherite radicalism, the Chinese Communist Party was building the future. Some years later, Jacques wrote a bestseller, When China Rules the World, extolling the virtues of this grand “civilization-state” on the march. The Middle Kingdom was sui generis; it would develop in its own way without recourse to Western liberal ideas of nation-building. Its capitalism would be resoundingly statist. Its political model would be illiberal and collectivist. And it would come to dominate the world in a new Chinese century. He was, without knowing it, the first contemporary Left Chinamaxxer: indulging a foreign political fandom to mirror the Very Online Gen Z trend of adopting Chinese cultural mores, the frontier of algorithmic Chinese soft power combining with expanding ideological hegemony.

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The return of the loony Left

By Jonny Ball

Today, following the defeats and indignities of the Corbyn era, with the Left at a historic weak point domestically, Left Chinamaxxing has gone mainstream. And, indeed, the Left’s modern-day predicament has eerie echoes of the problems faced by its forebears in Marxism Today. For the old British working class, the offerings of the populist, insurgent Right look more attractive than anything served up by today’s socialist radicals, who remain electorally and demographically confined within a relatively exclusive milieu of urban graduates and young professionals. And if local prospects for power and influence look weak, new objects of enthusiasm must be sought in distant climes. China fills the void. Where Britain lacks vigor, China is dynamic. Where the Western Left is defined by impotence, Chinese Red Princelings command supreme authority. Left-liberal economists such as Adam Tooze marvel at the results of the CCP’s activist industrial policy and green manufacturing revolution. The Corbynite shock troops and progressive cool kids at Novara Media are spellbound by the results of state-owned EV factories in Chongqing. I myself have indulged in the trend and called for “Anglo-Dengism” as a tonic for Britain’s myriad contemporary ills. Whatever the example, the fundamentals are clear: Chinamaxxers today have less time for the more humanist strands of the Left tradition, for workers’ power, independent trade unions, or radical participatory democracy. What they instead have is a fetish for economic expansion and impressive feats of state capacity.

In a domestic context, where real income growth has been non-existent for nearly two decades, and in which state failure is the norm from HS2 to a one-in-one-out prison service, the subtle conversion to this developmentalist, production-oriented socialism is a predictable, understandable response to secular decline. It evidences a widespread, burning desire for the basic functions of the state to be adequately upheld. In the tradition of Jacques, the Chinamaxxers contend that China has resolved the contradictions of failed 20th-century socialism, applying ruthless pragmatism with Leninist zeal, Deng Xiaoping’s famous cat analogy — “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, if it catches mice it’s a good cat” — built in glass and steel. This may seem an inversion of the Western Left’s often-puritanical desire for moral and ideological homogeneity; the Chinese have broken with every taboo, broken every prerequisite of socialist orthodoxy to embrace a practical, utilitarian realism. But perhaps this signals a buried desire among some of the Left’s number to do what the critical theorist Mark Fisher enjoined over a decade ago: to “exit the vampire castle”, put a stop to the endless cycle of language policing and witch-finding that has become the hallmark of Leftwing “praxis”, and to actually build something instead.

There has long been a proclivity in sections of the Left intelligentsia to find solace in the exotic social-political experiments abroad. In The Reckless Mind, the political scientist Mark Lilla identifies the figure of the “philotyrannical intellectual” to describe the 20th century’s “useful idiots” who sullied themselves to cosy up to Stalinist Russia: Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and HG Wells among others. Despite the privations of the Great Depression, the British people steadfastly twice voted the Conservative-dominated National Government to power in the Thirties. For many on the Left, the actually-existing British working classes have long been a source of continual disappointment.

But the new Chinese mythos is unlikely to be punctured in the same way as Thirties Russophilia. Pro-Stalin sentiment was shattered as the scale of the Great Terror and the nightmare of collectivization became apparent, while postwar capitalism proved more amenable to the provision of social welfare than its prewar variants. There will be no similar reckoning for Beijing. The Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward ended long ago. And there are no contemporary equivalents of the Beveridge Report coming to rescue our sclerotic model from itself.

Besides, if Stalin’s despotism was incomparably more brutal than contemporary China, the latter’s naked authoritarianism is eclipsed in the minds of many by the dazzling growth rates, the TikTok-promoted public infrastructure, all a mirror-image of Western decline and crumbling prestige. What’s more, it’s all delivered by a Politburo of staid, practical Marxist engineers, themselves about as distinct from the average Western Leftist in habitus, manner and thought-pattern as is possible to imagine. The weed-smoking children of the provincial bourgeoisie may have chanted “Mao! Mao! Mao Tse-Tung!” back in the Sixties. But China is now a model not for ultra-Left utopianism, but for its technocratic, pragmatic refinement of a state-managed market system.

When the Left held the reins of authority within the Labour Party during the Corbyn-era proper — between 2015 and 2019 — explicit political alignment with “socialism with Chinese characteristics” might have been tempered by widespread concerns over the plight of the Uyghurs. That particular issue seems to have abated as an international concern. The Left’s enthusiasm for the Chinese model might also have been dampened by the status of the rising giant as the workshop of the capitalist world, a giant FDI magnet producing iPhone headsets for an insatiable Western consumer market. But China has changed and so has our unsteady geopolitical era. The CCP’s “Made In China 2025” plan, initiated in 2015, fired the starting gun on a decade of overhaul for the manufacturing sector. Since then, the country has shifted from producing Western-designed goods in low-waged, low-productivity factories to promoting domestic innovation and industrial automation in high-growth, high-tech sectors. What’s more, the mask of American global power has been removed: with Trump in the White House, Washington’s empire, it’s finally clear, sustains itself not for the spread of democracy, human rights or individual liberty, but for the protection of its own extractive rights. Given all this, the old, neat categorization of a benign Western hegemon versus a malign  “revisionist power” in Beijing becomes far harder to rationalize.

But the case against Chinamaxxing doesn’t depend on any of this. China’s successes are very real, but they are not directly replicable across all of time and space. Jacques was right that China would develop sui generis, but the conditions that made that development possible were sui generis, too: a vast supply of surplus rural labor; a young, growing population; an open American consumer market; and a steady process of globalization driving inward investment. There may be lessons for how the CCP has managed that particular historical moment, but not for how to manage a medium-sized, open market economy that is dependent on services, with a centuries-long tradition of liberal individualism, an anarchic political culture, entrenched property rights, and habeas corpus.

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Starmer's surrender to Beijing

By Wessie du Toit

Besides, to valorize the efficiency of a one-party state as if delivery and dictatorship go hand-in-hand ignores a more frustrating truth: Britain did used to build; the state did used to function, and, indeed, many of our democratic allies still do. Japanese infrastructure is a marvel, and is built and maintained despite a debt-to-GDP-ratio that dwarfs our own. State-owned South Korean firms build nuclear power plants in half the time that we do, and at a fraction of the cost. And closer to home, the French and Spanish countryside is criss-crossed with high-speed lines. Britain isn’t suffering for lack of Marxist-Leninist one-party foresight, but rather is struck with a peculiarly British disease. The prescription will never be a replication of Chongqing, but we can take solace in the fact that we have solutions that are more mundane: long-term capital budgeting; government departments that approach problem-solving by prioritizing investment over more cash transfers; planning reform that presumes a well-regulated right to build over a discretionary right to block.

There is a unique precision with which Western Chinamaxxing tracks domestic disappointment: the Left admires Chinese state capacity in exact proportion to the British state’s inability to build a railway line; it admires grand ambitions in proportion to the narrowing of its own political horizons; it admires a party that governs a fifth of humanity in proportion to its own distance from governing. The object could just as easily have been located somewhere else — and often has been, whether in Moscow, Havana or Caracas. And alas, the diagnosis sustaining the trend is largely right. Britain is stuck. Despite its failings, Marxism Today employed an admirable method in analyzing the conjuncture: it looked unflinchingly at the country and the people who lived in it and attempted to build a politics congruent with the historical moment. That was the method, the discipline. Despite being a Communist Party journal, it faced the problems of the Left head-on, and treated the Thatcherite enemy with the respect it deserved rather than fantasizing about either a new 1945 or a Soviet Britain with Five-Year Plans. Today, rather than a civilization-state, the Left needs to do what Marxism Today once did: be honest about itself and its own capacities and inadequacies, focus on the fundamentals, and pay unflinching attention to Britain. If the Left is to have a future, then the future is Britainmaxxing.

We like to think of ourselves as more rational today, immune to such disturbing outbreaks. But they still rear their heads — just in more subtle ways. And the Left — nominally the home of Enlightenment rationality and clear-headed secularism — is still just as susceptible to them. “Woke 1 was crazy”, we were lately told by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps once the very embodiment of “Woke 1”, at least in the realm of elected officialdom. It was an admission that a cultural-political tendency which had reached its apogee after the Covid lockdowns had perhaps gone too far. It turns out that attributing collective guilt to large groups of people actually wasn’t great; nor the neo-Catholic demand for confession and penance, albeit without absolution at the end.

But the implication that woke had gone away was always suspect. We now know it was merely hibernating, biding its time, as the Left’s reaction to the death of Jason Arday has shown. Rather than introspection, it’s instead doubled down — the universities made no mistakes, there was no malpractice, no sharp-elbowed self-promotion based on a cascade of absurd claims. Instead, we’re told, while the Cambridge hierarchy are unimpeachable, the attentions of accusers, black or white, can only be attributed to racism.

Jolyon Maughan, a former “tax-efficiency” specialist who has managed to furnish himself with unimpeachable Left-wing credentials as the founder of the Good Law Project, has launched accusatory broadsides against that infamous white-supremacist rag: The Guardian. His attack was based principally on a piece of detailed investigative work undertaken by a black journalist, and which found clear untruths in many of Arday’s claims. Jolyon attended a vigil in Trafalgar Square, in which he told a thousands-strong crowd that it was a day for white people “not to speak” — before speaking at length. The vigil was also attended by Labour and Green politicians, and Lord Woolley, a Cambridge don, who announced that Arday’s death was a “lynching” and a “public assassination”.

Prominent activists have posted hit-lists of journalists who have had the temerity to report or comment on the Arday case. And Left-wing commentators, who apparently indulged too readily in an onslaught that can be responsibly compared to Jim Crow violence, have been roundly harangued by followers until they film awkward mea culpas — all for describing a case of high-profile deception as a case of high-profile deception.

There is a mass delusionary kernel to all of this, this dubious post-mortem elevation of Arday to the status of a modern-day martyr. It is a troubling character arc being articulated, one of beatification and redemption through suicide, accompanied with either an explicit or implicit denial of the facts of the case. The professor had run marathons, his supporters insist, and Liverpool John Moores University had cleared him of plagiarism. This statement itself reveals that there is a sizable number of performative liberals for whom the self-interested conclusions of a self-appointed committee gathered by Merseyside’s second-ranked university can supersede what they can see with their own eyes.

The historian Tom Holland has posited how socialism and Marxism were ideological descendants of the Christian faith, their mores grounded in New Testament teaching for the post-Darwinian age. For some, the rituals of Left politics no doubt serve the same human need for narrative and group identity as the Church once did. But if the old Left inherited a more ecumenical appeal and a genuine Christian teleology — with its new unionism; the building and co-operative societies; the mutualism and reciprocity extolling the brotherhood of man and an inexorable progress towards Heaven on Earth — then contemporary progressivism, in contrast, embodies the tradition of the Catholic Inquisition, or else the Puritan Witchfinder General.

In practice, this fatal intolerance appears from several strands. First is the New Left, all post-structural liberation politics, and incubated principally within the academy. This tendency doesn’t have much deep organic connection to practical struggles, though it does retain an old-guard Stalinist taste for excommunication. Indeed, while it celebrates “deconstruction” and the particular, and treats race, gender and cultural-discursive politics as primary sites of struggle, it is nevertheless marked by a predilection for ideological homogeneity. It is a politics which, when it finds everyday expression, is putatively based on “kindness”, with a commitment to two or possibly three types of “diversity” and “tolerance” — but blended with the revolutionary ferocity of Thirties Bolshevism. Treachery is to be found everywhere, expressed through the incorrect combination of words, or insufficient loyalty to the cause. Reasonable people cannot disagree. And, if you dare diverge from the gospel, your motives are automatically assumed nefarious.

But while the motives of dozens of journalists or millions of members of the chattering public can’t reasonably be impugned, wholesale, as sudden outbursts of bigotry, there’s also a perfectly legitimate discussion to be had about the nature of some of the coverage of Arday. Certainly, the feting of the self-described “hereditarian” Nathan Cofnas on the more oddball hard-Right fringes leaves a bitter taste. Yet there can be no debate over the reporting of facts based on investigation, nor on people commenting and passing fair judgment on them. This, in the end, was a classic tale of ivory-tower eccentricity gone badly wrong, high-minded intellectualism found hollow once more.

But if much of the British academy has imported a strident postmodernism from Europe — and, by extension, critical race theory and social-justice campus culture from across the Atlantic — then it has only done so under pressure from large sections of its own student body: itself raised on a diet of Anglophone wokeism. The UK, to put it differently, may be experiencing a homegrown George Floyd moment, which began with a black man being killed by police in Minneapolis, and ended with deadly riots and a vast, globalized racial reckoning that set the boundaries of the contemporary culture wars across America and beyond. In the US, the institutions were subject to ritual purge, their practices “deconstructed”, “decolonized”, the online activists’ audit becoming the new arbiter of public standards.

Meanwhile, the once-ascendant radical millennial Left committed something like political self-immolation via slogans like “defund the police”. The manic reaction to Floyd’s death in Britain, which often played out as if US race relations could be transposed neatly to Nuneaton, revealed a graduate Left that nominally rejected American cultural imperialism, but was, in fact, trapped by the language of the campus and online activism. Today, of course, that special relationship is manifested in the comments of someone like Lord Woolley. Just as absurd is the bizarre spectacle of aging modernist authors publishing rambling tracts on X, accusing journalists like some pound-shop Zola.

It goes without saying that this is to misunderstand what’s happening here. There is obviously no equivalence between extrajudicial killing on the one hand, and exposing fraud on the other. What’s actually happening is a very typical Leftist meltdown, with breathless digital denunciation replacing actual praxis; an endless moral purification exercised as if from a position of strength. Locked from the corridors of power, the revolution turns inward, devouring its own children.

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This swings against what, for a moment, seemed like a great moderation. While it felt as if post-woke might be a sort of new normal, that ship has now well and truly sailed. In the US, as ever Britain’s upstream cultural-political lodestar, Trump 2.0 had apparently started a “vibe shift” — with the Left, for its time, finally enjoying a moment for introspection on why its brand of unpopular populism had so utterly failed. That, in turn, was shadowed by a new wave of socialist Democrats, finding political success by renouncing their former views and pivoting toward humdrum cost-of-living issues. In Britain, too, sturdy Left critiques of the most egregious excesses of hyper-liberal identity politics were hitting the bestseller lists. The new prime minister’s brand of normie populism meanwhile attempts to chart a middle course between the opposed extremities of progressive overreach and reactionary ethnonationalism, potentially reconstructing a bifurcated Labour coalition.

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But the Arday affair has shown that none of the Left’s neuroses have really gone away, and that there would, in the end, be no compromise. The graduate, activist radicals will not return to some prelapsarian past with a grounding in universalism, empiricism, or the practical representation of the labor interest. Instead, they will wallow and descend into a kind of collective madness, defined by petty internecine feud and driven by culture war ephemera.

While consensus reality, and majoritarian politics fragments, this Left seems compelled to push itself ever more forcefully into civil war. It’s apparently unable to comprehend that there is no viable political coalition to be built that doesn’t include people with views congruent or slightly to the Right of Aaron Bastani. The new social blocs that have coalesced are each defined by irrational hatred of the Other — less the “two great classes” of Marx’s Manifesto, divided by their economic interrelation — but rather a myriad of bewildering cultural-political formations: each living in their own ethical universes, and whipping themselves into separate forms of mass hysteria. Like the Strasbourg peasants of 1518, the Left will yield to its delusions and dance itself to death, or at least to political irrelevance.

Manchester had always been Labour for as long as anyone cared to remember. It was pro-labor before Labour even existed. This was a center of Chartism, Radical Liberalism and mass, industrial trade unions well before the Labour Party proper had even been conceived. But the King in the North had transformed it into an impenetrable Red Fortress, nested on the edge of the Pennines, with even the salubrious middle-class suburbs voting for the Left-wing Mayor. The narrow, New Labour apparatchik had transformed, butterfly-like, into a broad, avuncular tribune of all the Mancunians, fighting their corner against the Great Wen. He had transcended his bland ministerial origins, and mastered the art of the floating signifier, the vibes politician, letting people transplant their own desires onto his person. And yet such was the unique unpopularity of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, then barely 18 months into his premiership, that it was genuinely proposed that the mayoralty in Greater Manchester might be lost to the national-populist teal tide, should the Labour candidate not be named “Andy Burnham”. Rarely in politics does one hear such a willing confession of weakness. 

Labour’s hapless bigwigs were right to be afraid. In May, the local election results seemed to bear out their worst fears. Across the 10 Greater Manchester councils, Reform’s aggregate vote was 30% compared with Labour’s 24% and the Green’s 20%. Labour didn’t win the largest share in any of the local authority areas, with its voters pulled between the siren populisms of Left and Right. The old bloc had been blown apart by a tragically inept, dithering lawyer, who had sullied the party brand with his refusal to project any sense of purpose to a beleaguered nation desperate for an active response to falling living standards.

But barely three months later, Andy Burnham is Prime Minister, and Labour has retained Greater Manchester at a canter. Its candidate in the mayoral race, Bev Craig, won the election last night by a sizeable margin. In Labour’s first electoral test since the new Prime Minister entered No. 10, we see a glimpse of the Burnhamite electoral bloc coalescing: the Greens squeezed into a humiliating third place after boasting that they were in contention to win; the Liberal Democrats barely registering and subsumed into Labour’s orbit; and perhaps even some soft Reformers peeled off from the Faragist insurgency now that the national face of Labour is no longer so lacking in verve. We can see the Labour coalition being tentatively restored.

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The winner of the Greater Manchester contest matters now more than ever, as new fiscal levers are devolved to regional representatives. Two of our last five prime ministers have used their respective mayoralties as a springboard for national leadership. As a relatively new constitutional addition in Britain, combined authority leaders have, up until now, often acted as beefed-up ambassadors for their locales, corralling councillors and the private sector into some semblance of partnership, trying to drum up FDI, and bidding for investment from Whitehall in what the West Midlands Mayor Andy Street called a “begging bowl culture”.

But mayors will be beggars no more. Now that a proportion of income tax revenues are set to be devolved, regional executives will suddenly find themselves with the ability to implement their visions without sign-off from Westminster’s mandarins. Where previously Britain was an international outlier in terms of its political and fiscal centralization, the new policy puts the country more in line with most advanced democracies in which city and regional leaders are able to use local initiative to a far greater extent.

We are perhaps living in a new age of mayors. Zohran Mamdani has become an international figure, studied by anxious Leftists for translatable lessons and a winning formula. (It helps to stand a charismatic frontman in a liberal megalopolis, eschewing typical Leftist campaign obsessions in favor of strong, cost-of-living-first message discipline.) Burnham is consciously emulating Mamdani’s media strategy, communicating via vertical video rather than obsessing over the lobby, unread press releases, or meandering speeches that rarely cut through anywhere outside of Fleet Street and wonk-land. Mayoralism, based on a blurring of the personal and civic identification — “who do I call when I want to call Manchester?” — lends itself to TikTok-enabled soft personality cults. Meanwhile, Britain toys with the notion that mayoralism and English devolution could also solve a growth conundrum that has bedeviled politicians of all stripes since 2008.

In this regard, the work of two of Burnham’s reportedly close economic advisers is instructive. The former Goldman Sachs economist, Jim O’Neill, and the former Bank of England economist, Andy Haldane, have advocated for increased mayoral and city-regional powers as a productivity and growth-booster for many years — and the idea is finally in vogue. A recent well-received paper, co-authored by Ed Balls, made the case for an intensification of a regional rewiring of the British state, coupled with a lot of infrastructure spending. In line with O’Neill’s and Haldane’s long-term thinking, the formula of increased capital expenditure plus bolstered levers for local leaders is held up as a solution for the anemic economic performance over the last two decades. A figure of £200 billion over two decades is cited for transport upgrades outside of the capital, while it is calculated that bringing second-tier cities up to the standard of Western European counterparts would add £70 billion per annum to the receipts of the Exchequer.

Burnham’s heavy focus on devolution stands out in these early, honeymoon days of his leadership. The public clamor for increasing the powers of mayors is minimal. Most people are as likely to feel as estranged from their local Town Hall as they are from Whitehall: each represents a failing state monolith, long shorn of any vigor or capacity, rather than the latter being seen as an unfair colonial imposter on the rightful terrain of the former. Burnham’s dogged pursuit of this agenda, then, is a sign of his convert’s zeal. 

Those old-fashioned Labourites hoping for a premiership focused on old-school nationalization and state-backed reindustrialization will likely be disappointed. Burnhamism will be technocratic, not revolutionary, with any fiscal space or wiggle room on investment prioritizing infrastructure spending and mass transit in and between the great cities of the North and Midlands, not on transferring privately held natural monopolies back into the public sector. In office, Burnham will attempt to do the old model better, extending it outside of London, and pursuing the real economic drivers of “Manchesterism”: metropolitan agglomeration, city-based service and knowledge economy growth, and the so-called “triple-helix” model of innovation through partnerships between the local state, universities and business. 

But there is a difficulty buried in all this, and the story of Greater Manchester epitomizes the problem. The agglomeration model works, in the narrow sense that it has already worked: central Manchester’s impressive skyline is the product of three decades of precisely this formula. What it has conspicuously not done is reach the same impressive heights in Rochdale, or Leigh, or the stretches of Oldham where the promise of spillover from the core has been renewed at every electoral cycle, without ever quite materializing beyond the improved Bee Network: all roads lead to Piccadilly Gardens. And yet Burnham’s political achievement as mayor was to hold both constituencies at once — the defender of the left-behind town and the apparent originator of the glass-and-steel city boom — without ever being made to say that the growth model had a primary beneficiary in the Northern laptop class. That is a considerable trick. The question is whether it can be repeated on a national scale. 

The academic Paula Surridge’s extensive quantitative research into the British electorate reveals a majoritarian appetite for the active state, public investment, and the economic populism of the Left. And yet Labour’s potential voters are split according to their divergent values, between the cultural conservatism of (broadly speaking) the patriotic, non-graduate working class, and the liberal-progressivism of the graduate urban salariat. If Burnhamism can bridge those gaps with an inclusive social imaginary of dad-rock, professional Northern cheeky-chappiness, football, pints and pies — molding the projected cultural offer with the common-sense social-democratic nostalgia that forms the vague political economy of his normie populism — then the Right has cause to be very afraid.

Reform is in disarray nationally and has been roundly beaten in Greater Manchester, where it was ahead just in May. And this coincides with a symbolic turning point: the first polls in over a year in which Reform has lost its lead. The contradictions within Burnhamism are real, but only as real as those on the Right, which is suffering its own version of tribal-electoral fragmentation. Permanently welding together the post-industrial, provincial proletariat with the petit-bourgeois and affluent middle-classes of the Home Counties and Southern England was always a tall order, which Boris Johnson’s Tories only momentarily succeeded in doing for a short-lived “realignment” in 2019. Those discrete blocs have since bifurcated into a more plebeian populist movement and remnants of Sensible Conservative ultra-loyalism. The current state of politics is this: Reform is in defensive mode, the Tories have stabilized, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats are going backwards, and Burnham is outpolling every rival leader by margins Starmer never once managed.

In 2007, a new Labour prime minister with an inherited mandate and a commanding lead decided against going to the electorate while he was ahead. Burnham was sitting in the Treasury when it happened. Now, he finds himself in a similar position. He could extend his own lead over the coming months — but only as long as he is able to maintain his everyman status, as long as the ambiguity of a difficult-decision-free Burnhamism allows him to ride two horses at once. That won’t be easy: at present, we have a perilous fiscal inheritance that means promises will be reneged upon. We have a Downing Street staffed by former Blairites; a soft-Left and Brownite Cabinet; and Socialist Campaign Group, Progressive Britain and Blue Labour MPs alike on the government payroll. Those elite-level contradictions are accompanied by deeper, population-level fissures in the composition of Labour’s electoral demographics. Greater Manchester has taught Burnham that the Labour coalition can be rebuilt, but not how long it holds. In September, when Parliament returns, with a Budget due soon after, we will see how good a floating signifier Burnham can be.

When Burnham describes his political awakenings, he likes to hark back to his Eighties boyhood, and to where he thinks it all started to go wrong: when the country adopted something he calls “neoliberalism”. He likes to describe it as a free-market economic model through which “political power was centralized, economic power privatized, large parts of the country deindustrialized”.

But if Burnham the wool came of age in the physical space between Liverpool and Manchester, he also finds himself torn by their different civic responses to this supposedly neoliberal age. Where Liverpool “dared to fight”, railing against budget cuts and the harsh medicine of monetarism, Manchester would become a model pupil of civic governance: sensible, moderate, business-friendly, and co-operative (the divergent fates of the two cities since is instructive). And Burnham the politician wavers between the two poles, the consummate wool: unsure of whether he is more a radical Scouse shop steward, raging against the dying of the light, or an industrious, pragmatic Mancunian.

But what exactly is Burnham railing against? What does it mean to describe our system as “neoliberal”? After all, state spending and the overall tax burden is currently at a 50-year high. Britain hasn’t run a current budget surplus for two decades. Public and private developments alike are constantly blocked by Nimby councillors who act as the political gatekeepers to growth. And, what’s more, core sectors, from energy to transport and a monolithic NHS, are either in public hands or heavily regulated by cumbersome public bodies.

It’s true that the country did experience something of a neoliberal revolution in the Eighties. Deeply ideological actors — some self-identifying as “neoliberals”, others as followers of Friedman or Hayek — set about transforming the country’s modes of economic governance: capital controls were removed, industries sold off, the trade unions emasculated. The neoliberal advance was very real.

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But it was halted in 2008, when the whole edifice of City-friendly, financialized, borderless, free-trading capitalism came tumbling down. It may have taken a few years to register with the political classes, but by the time of the Brexit vote, it was clear that a realignment, a correction, was on the cards. Since then, politicians of all stripes have tentatively experimented with a more activist, strategic statism, trying to resurrect the Leviathan without ever finding or settling on a viable growth model that can deliver prosperity.

Theresa May, for one, softly embraced a more statist red Toryism, rejecting what she called “ideological templates provided by the socialist Left and the libertarian Right” to found a short-lived “post-liberal” settlement, even. But she had neither the political dexterity nor a mandate from her market-liberal colleagues to both free us from Brussels and impose “post-neoliberalism” on a post-Brexit Britain. Then came Boris, whose profligacy was infamous: the biggest capital budgets since the Fifties; nationalized steelworks; hiked corporation tax; and £300 billion to bail out insolvent businesses and pay workers to stay at home.

Perhaps the most obvious neoliberal revolt has already occurred within the Labour Party itself, beginning 11 years ago under Jeremy Corbyn. And, contrary to the generalized apoplexy from the Left, this wasn’t all washed away by a Right-wing Starmerite reaction. If you’d revealed to an inconsolable Corbynite in 2019 that within half a decade they would have a government committed to nationalized railways, a publicly owned green energy company, higher taxes, closed non-dom loopholes, VAT on private schools and more money for “our NHS” — I suspect they would have assumed that a decent, progressive, prime minister had taken charge, and that Corbynism had effected a real, lasting legacy on the party after all.

So, Andy, where exactly is this 40 years of “neoliberal consensus”, and how will your remedy be any different from what came before? We can already see the inevitable dissonance between lofty rhetoric and Cabinet picks. This, Burnham triumphantly claims, is to be the “most significant change moment” in decades. The surprise Chancellor is then revealed: John Healey, a creature of Labour’s trade unionist Old Right, a Brownite Treasury alumnus, hard-headed defense man and all-round “safe pair of hands”. The big, signaling policy opener? Around £50 a year off energy bills — unfunded, as helpfully revealed by a mischievous Darren Jones, the outgoing chief secretary to the PM, already keen to take swipes at his successors.

Yet the Healey pick also signals a seriousness around the strategy of leveraging procurement and defense spending to invest in the domestic manufacturing supply chain: drone factories for every depressed Northern town, or so the story goes. Healey, of course, resigned from Starmer’s cabinet in a row over inadequate defense-industrial plans. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that the Chancellor served in Corbyn’s Cabinet as shadow housing secretary, at a time when party policy revolved around major public investments in municipal housebuilding.

It’s possible, then, that a Burnham government will veer from an orthodox, laissez-faire, small-state approach to political economy. But it’s also clear that the roots of the PM’s anti-neoliberal tirades aren’t born of any fully developed view of recent economic history, let alone a detailed reading of the country’s very real structural predicaments. Instead, they are built on a romantic and nostalgia-tinged view of Britain, on the folk memory of postwar social democracy: the economic equivalent of Facebook’s “who remembers proper bin men?”

The Eighties were hard years for many in the woolyback mill towns and pit villages, as well as in urban Britain. As Merseyside became known as “the Bermuda Triangle of British capitalism” — any firms that went in were liable to never come out — iconic local employers from Tate & Lyle to Meccano to Dunlop moved operations to more peaceable climes. The growth model of Butskellite, post-Imperial Britain was undergoing a major restructure.

Thatcherite ministers looked at the old-fashioned, uncompetitive (and often nationalized) industries of Britain in the postwar era and saw only waste, inefficiency, and an opportunity for creative destruction. The security of a gray, plodding collectivism had to be replaced by dynamism and animal spirits. But Burnham saw it all differently, perhaps in the manner expressed in his favorite Boys from the Blackstuff episode. In the classic, Liverpool-based TV show that inspired his entry into the Labour Party, an old boy on his dying day delivers a wistful soliloquy from his wheelchair, an ode to “the ship repair men, the scalers, the dockers, the Mary Ellens who used to swab and clean the big liners”.

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In the Burnhamite reading, neoliberalism killed that old world off. That’s why our seventh PM in a decade chose in his first speech as Labour leader to deliver a paean to “the mills across the Pennines”, “the shipyards on the Clyde”, “the coalfields of South Wales”. It echoed the mawkish sentimentalism of the Blackstuff. And that’s why the Blairite modernizers accuse him of pandering to a hopeless nostalgia.

But, in all likelihood, the anti-neoliberal crusading will remain in the rhetorical, romantic register — rather than being reified by a concrete, systemic break, whatever Burnham’s talk of “circuit-breakers”. The fact is that the new prime minister is hemmed in on all sides: by a recalcitrant gilt market, an unwieldy parliamentary Labour Party, an orthodox Treasury apparatus, and by his predecessors’ fiscal rules and tax pledges. Nor does he possess a national mandate to veer radically off piste from the 2024 manifesto.

In response to jitters from the financial establishment, a radically post-neoliberal Left might install a new, more pliant head of the Bank of England to support their political program. They might also impose exchange controls to prevent capital flight, as they nationalize industries and direct capital towards domestic investment. But François Mitterrand found out how difficult such a paradigm shift could prove way back in the Eighties, as currency traders piled pressure on the Franc and forced a return to austerity. Don’t expect Burnham — who championed Gulf investment and public-private partnerships as mayor of Greater Manchester — to try the same trick.

Some on the Right clutch their pearls at the prospect of a mild pivot Leftwards, then, but Burnham is unlikely to seriously unsettle markets beyond moderate yield spikes as ministers talk of a smidgen more fiscal “flexibility”. For the Left to expect any different would be to grossly overestimate the sorry state of their own tired movement, and the very real material constraints that any government is now operating under. To that extent, Burnham will persist with incremental divergence from the neoliberal mean — just like May, Johnson, Starmer and the rest.

Of course, it’s risky to disregard the power of nostalgia, of vibes, of stories about security, collectivity and control. The vanished world of dockyards and factories offered a more comprehensible place and a more rooted common life which were shattered by the neoliberal settlement. The rhetoric can potentially act as a powerful tonic, in electoral terms. But governments can’t prosper with only an elegiac register and a robust moral tone.

Burnham will therefore eventually adopt a model of politics defined less by defiance and revolutionary change, and more by tweaks and accommodation. He’ll sell the legacy of Starmerism — the public railways, the publicly owned wind turbines — as a radical rupture. He’ll make the Left feel like they have a home in the Labour Party again, without adopting any of their harder-edged demands. That leaves the Wool Mandela roughly back where he began, somewhere between Liverpool and Manchester, radicalism and pragmatism. A wool can belong to several places at once, but as Prime Minister, he eventually has to choose.

“Blue”, we are variously told, refers to the small-c conservatism of the movement, as well as to “blue-collar” voters themselves. Suffusing Blue Labour discourse is an understandable nostalgia for old-fashioned ethical socialists, influenced by such mainstream texts as Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum of 1891. And so “blue” also connotes the group’s inherent melancholia: how could it not, when their successors operate in a party overflowing with all the technocratic dreariness and cultural coding of contemporary liberal progressivism?

But forget the melancholia and the suffering and penance for the moment. There’s a glimmer of hope on the horizon. And not just because the bone-dry managerial style of a Remain-campaigning Surrey lawyer has been replaced with the more palatable normie populism of the Manchester everyman. Whether the Westminster chatterati believe the affectations of Andy Burnham’s persona or not, the incoming PM can at least earn Labour the chance of a second hearing with its former supporters in working-class Britain.

Hope begins in Burnham’s Makerfield constituency. Just 25 miles separate the Stubshaw Cross Labour Club on the outskirts of Ashton, and the high street in Gorton, a diverse, multicultural area south of Manchester city center. But the political distance between the two could have huge ramifications for the future of Britain. Stubshaw Cross — a flat-roofed working-men’s club with England flags, cheap lager and sun-faded banners of Bobby Moore lifting the 1966 World Cup — was the center of the Labour firmament for several weeks during Burnham’s recent by-election campaign. Gorton, of course, was the scene of the Greens’ first ever by-election triumph earlier this year.

The former Mayor of Greater Manchester, according to all the polling evidence, would have trounced the Greens’ plumber-turned-parliamentarian Hannah Spencer in Gorton, just as he eventually trounced Reform’s plumber-turned-candidate Robert Kenyon in Makerfield. But he would likely have done so having been dragged Leftwards by the Green insurgency, into the social and cultural space of the young, ultra-liberal Left, and their incongruous Muslim allies.

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Makerfield is different. The Green insurgency is nowhere to be found, and until our PM-in-waiting was elected, the seat was near the top of Reform’s target list. There was an image of the constituency as a post-industrial wasteland — a quintessential Northern outpost, “left behind” and populated by the angry and white working class. Never mind that it’s far wealthier than Gorton, its rougher estates leavened by villages scattered among green fields, new cars in driveways, and neat front gardens overlooked by well-kept pebbledashed semis. For a certain breed of Labourite, seats like Makerfield remain ideological catnip: the collieries have long closed, but the area still represents something romantically assumed must always be fundamentally Labour. It’s the Britain of the non-graduate workers, the blue-collar salaried staff, the tradesmen.

Gorton and Denton, of course, was prime Labour territory too, until the Green victory anyway. But there’s always been a slight embarrassment in some of the more nostalgic party circles about Labour’s relationship with metropolitan Britain. For one, there’s an electoral logic to it: there’s no route to Downing Street through the inner cities alone. But there’s also an ideological aversion, a feeling that Labour can’t simply be the party of what Michael Lind calls “the hubs”, full of rootless “anywheres”. While the cities house the demographic fusion that makes up the party’s newer base — graduates, public-sector employees, the youthful urban precariat and ethnic minorities — Labour support among older, less mobile, and whiter workers in the smaller towns has long been in abeyance. Their struggles in seats like Makerfield, at least without Burnham on the ballot, is a sore reminder of what the party has become: the vehicle of choice for the buzzy urban citadels, while old proletarian Britain abandons them in droves.

That’s what makes the victory in Makerfield remarkable, and what makes some Blue Labour figures hopeful. A week after the by-election, on the hottest June day on record and in the upstairs of a Manchester pub aptly named The Briton’s Protection, I chaired a meeting of two Blue Labour MPs, 30 of its local supporters, and a gaggle of the politically curious gathering to discuss the tendency’s future. The room was full of an unusual positivity, as a strange unity broke out between warring intra-party tribes.

Burnham’s candidacy in Makerfield had seen him renounce his previous positions on rejoining the EU and gender self-identification. Last week, he posted about the release of a Rochdale grooming gang leader from prison, telling followers that “like everyone, I want this vile criminal out of the country”. Burnham is combining this no-nonsense, Rightward tilt on culture with a robust critique of what he calls “40 years” of market-liberal economic logic.

The unofficial radical pole of Burnhamism’s prescription has already been set out in “The Productive State”. The brainchild of Mathew Lawrence and Alex Williams, a pair of Left-leaning thinkers, it’s a detailed document that advocates for a whole new growth model based not on ever-increasing, welfarist distribution of tax revenues — but on a reassertion of public control over core sectors and natural monopolies, including the privatized utilities, transport and social care.

This will, the authors say, facilitate a new social infrastructure: one based on national investment rather than rentierism and dividend extraction by endless outsourced corners of the public-private para-state. From there, out-of-control departmental budgets will soon be brought to heel, as layers of procurement parasitism are removed in favor of in-house delivery. The growing benefits and post-hoc subsidy regime will be reined in too, once the state has made the transition from distributism and entitlements to production and investment.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these proposals have caught the eye of Blue Labour, with whom there’s significant ideological overlap. In the sweltering upstairs function room of The Briton’s Protection, Jonathan Hinder made the case for a more robust, workerist socialism based on public investment, trade-union power and a developmentalist state that just builds things. “We’re a socialist tradition,” he tells the comrades, “against an economic consensus we’ve had since 1979” — an echo of Burnham’s own pronouncements. “Some people call us socially conservative,” Hinder adds, in a nod to what we might call the incoming PM’s Radio 6 aesthetics. “I’d just say we’re ‘normal’.”

There’s every likelihood, of course, that this vision will be eclipsed by a less radical interpretation of Burnham’s fledgling “Manchesterism”. That could constitute something like a mild increase in capital spending in the regions — made possible within the fiscal rules by allowing arms-length bodies such as the National Wealth Fund to issue their own bonds — alongside extra devolution and symbolic moves like No 10 North. Certainly, the Blairite Right of the Parliamentary Labour Party would love to strangle Hinder’s ideas at birth, as would a media establishment hostile to transformative economic policy. Those dreaded bond vigilantes wouldn’t mind a go at the garrote either. All the while, some on the Left have called for more radical measures still: fiscal-monetary coordination, financial repression, price controls, and nationalization.

The substance of Burnham’s agenda, then, is yet to be fully formed. Just weeks away from Downing Street, as advisers still jockey for influence, the direction of the project is still very much in flux. Indeed, that question of personnel could prove decisive. There never was a consensus among its backers whether Morgan McSweeney’s flirtation with Blue Labour’s broad messaging was based on a genuine ideological position or hard-nosed politics — the public, British Social Attitudes surveys regularly show, lean Left on economics and Right on culture.

McSweeney’s recent interview with Nick Robinson suggests the latter, with Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff expressing open hostility to any politics based on ideas, and showing himself to be little more than an adept campaign organizer, possessing no political economy, no theory of state, and little interest in policy. With the disappointments of Starmerism finally interred, the new Blue Labour lodestar within the incoming camp is Josh Simons, the former MP who gave up his seat to force the Makerfield by-election, and who is tipped as head of a No 10 policy unit. Several Blue Labour sources describe him as “aligned”, adding that he “gets it”. One says “Simons is broadly a good thing, but I don’t know him well”.

Burnham’s future cabinet sparks greater uncertainty. One Blue Labour-adjacent figure tells me that “loads of Northern MPs” are “very concerned” about the potential appointment of Ed Miliband as Chancellor. “It’s not just his policy,” they explain, “but his actual personal unpopularity with a large chunk of the electorate.” Miliband is, in their estimation, “a real bogeyman”, confirming the worst suspicions of those “who already worry that Labour are full of luvvies”. To be fair, some Blue Labourites tell me the Energy Secretary’s monomaniacal Net Zero obsessions are fueled by a genuine belief that climate policy can be used as the fulcrum of social-democratic industrial policy, a catalyst for building a new, green, big state capitalism. Again, though, not everyone’s convinced: one insider simply calls Miliband “a crank”.

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There are broader questions too. The progressive wing of the PLP will make welfare reform a difficult sell. Burnham is said to support Alan Milburn’s much-vaunted review, but any tweaking of benefits rules will have to be accompanied by genuine pathways to work, to avoid rebellion on Labour benches anyway. Similarly, there’s a disconnect between the public’s desire for harsher immigration and asylum policy and the soft-Left’s queasiness on Shabana Mahmood’s Home Office reforms. A staffer from her camp tells me she’ll “probably” stay in the role. Time will tell.

The truth is that whatever the success of an emergent Blue Burnhamism, it won’t be because the faction — if we can start calling it that — revives flat caps, smokestacks and Catholic social teaching. The industrial proletariat of old has gone, and the old Labour Party with it. The new working class of Britain are as likely to live in Gorton and Denton as they are in Makerfield. They don’t work in factories or down pits, but in call centers and shops, construction sites and care homes, warehouses and soulless offices.

Burnham the endlessly protean politician understands the performative nature of politics, and the necessity of broad-based appeal. As a Home Office minister in the Blair era, his stances on crime were so tough that he earned the nickname “flog ‘em and Burnham” from civil servants. He then went on to tease the Corbynites by attending Universal Basic Income fringes at conference, and positioning himself as a born-again Leftist. Where Blue Labour has had a tendency to over-correct, to lean into outmoded political archetypes, Blue Burnhamism can shapeshift on culture. The New Left sage Perry Anderson has written that political movements must be “capable of synthesizing heteroclite demands that [have] no necessary connection with each other… into a national-popular unity”.

That is the task of leadership. Burnham must succeed where Starmer failed and simultaneously appeal to the old and new working classes by articulating a positive national renewal project, a normie populism combining civic, progressive patriotism, matter-of-fact socio-cultural positioning and comfortable regional identity with a new economic direction for the country. But if Makerfield has given his leadership some early ideological shape, the challenge will be in translating Burnham’s cosmetic difference into a real-world, concrete politics. Fail, and Blue Burnhamism will be remembered as little more than a Northern campaign dialect.

Where Starmer seemed perplexed by Labour politics, Burnham is Mr Labour, and now hegemonic in its structures. MPs have kissed the ring, and crowded for their selfie; once-hostile factions find themselves in strange, unprecedented agreement: “Andy” is their last hope, and the soft-Left, hard-Left and Blue Labourites are, for now, jostling behind an inchoate vision of “the productive state”, and other vague Labour things.

But Burnham must soon govern the country, not just his party. And he’ll find that compared to the unwieldy beasts of city-regional governance or the NHS, the pressures of No. 10 are of an entirely different order of magnitude even at the best of times. And these are not the best of times. We’re in the middle of a once-in-a-century fragmentation of the two-party system, while smartphones cheerily obliterate our collective sense of what reality even means. Add two decades of wage repression and a collapsing public realm; meanwhile, the tax and debt burden only ever seem to rise, and international gilt traders circle like sharks.

This, then, is Burnham’s unenviable inheritance. Which is why, if he wants to survive beyond 2029, the PM-in-waiting should call an early election.

Whether he likes it or not, Burnham’s strengths lie not in his policy platform, which is a confused set of woolly principles, but in his charisma — both within Labour and among the public. He should exploit that, during his Mr Labour honeymoon period, while he still is their unassailable king, before the cultural-political projections of his putative “Manchesterism” have been sullied by time and close reading. And he should hew close to the image that the public holds of him, with a manifesto stuffed with radical constitutional reforms: the replacement of the House of Lords with an elected Senate of the Regions; maximum devolution to municipalities and city-regions; proportional representation for the Commons.

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The latter would lock in center-left coalition governance for a generation. Labour’s existing record of incremental Leftward shifts could meanwhile be repackaged as the start of a genuine project of national renewal: encompassing nationalized rail, a public energy firm, a sovereign wealth fund, and a higher minimum wage. In addition to these nods to a more “pro-investment” political economy with greater public ownership — now painted in proudly progressive colors — a reforming constitutional package would allow for additional radicalism at a time of fiscal constraint.

Taken together, then, a Burnham manifesto could be framed as “taking back control”, as rebuilding Britain while giving power back to the forgotten places, the provincial Britain ignored by distant elites. Burnham’s task in all this would be to articulate a broad, positive vision for the country, one that adapts what the cultural theorist John Clarke has pejoratively called the “vernacular ventriloquism” of populist tendencies. For Clarke, this ventriloquism involves claiming to speak for England — for “The People” — while in practice pushing an agenda that blends turbo-Thatcherism with mass deportations (or at least their promise).

Against this, Burnham must set out a new paradigm for British politics: he’ll have to triangulate between a Right-wing populism on the march and the Left-wing instincts of many of his voters and supporters. In this space, he can root his normie populism, reassuring voters nostalgic for the imagined community of secure, social-democratic Britain, while also seeming positive and forward-looking. But he’ll have to unite discrete political positions into a coherent whole: seeming both patriotic and inclusive; both radical and insurgent, yet with operational competence; both comfortable with multiethnic diversity, but alert to the mess of a broken asylum system and the disordered chaos of a low-waged, low-productivity Deliveroo economy dependent on cheap foreign labor.

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Could Mr Labour really pull it off? The vibes are currently in his favor. One Labour MP tells me that “Manchesterism” has the power to “take out the toxic component of nationalism” just like “the civic nationalisms of Scotland and Wales”. “Andy” they say, “has the potential to do that for England.” The “place-first politics”, the Northern identity, the soft-disruptor vibes, the unthreatening, mum-friendly pneuma — all of it can appeal to that sweet spot in the electorate which both despises the political classes yet remains largely anti-Reform. We saw a hint of this strategy in his invocation of “HMO Britain” during his next-day victory rally in Makerfield: this was as close to a dog-whistle as is safe to blow in Labour circles, shifting blame onto negligent landlords but also hinting at asylum seekers. In a similar vein, the return of utilities and natural monopolies to public ownership satisfies voters across the spectrum, initiating a kind of economic patriotism that leans Left but pleases many on the Right.

And, for now, the public is willing to buy into the story of Burnham-as-outsider. That might be ridiculous — given his New Labour pedigree — but his easy manner makes him the very opposite of Starmer. Which is why it’s only downhill from here. To be sure, More in Common has positive polling on the incoming Prime Minister, and focus group and survey data suggest he could give his party a second chance. But as Lenin said, politics is about “who does what to whom”. The moment Burnham enters Downing Street, he’ll learn that governing involves picking losers as well as winners, and that someone will always be alienated. Better, then, to snatch his mandate now, and attempt to secure a full term he can call his own, rather than run in 2029 and fail as a paid-up member of the dreaded Establishment.

That’s especially true when, at the moment, a mandate is so obviously lacking. Old tweets are already resurfacing from Labour MPs — including Burnham himself — demanding that new Conservative prime ministers go to the country rather than serving the rest of a parliamentary term. The longer he waits, the louder cries of hypocrisy from Britain’s hostile media will become, especially when Nigel Farage is cheering them on. The fact is that outrage sells, and the national atmosphere turns fast. At low ebbs, and during the inevitable crises that beset any government, the noise will become deafening: get “the squatter” out, the public must have their say. Indeed, Burnham can seek to appear magnanimous as he reintroduces himself to a public that already leans towards thinking that an election should be called. Any kind of radical program, either a new path on the political economy or major constitutional reforms, will anyway need public consent.

The counter to all this, of course, is that we live in a parliamentary democracy, whereby the legislature can oust prime ministers at a whim. Yet it would be wrong to ignore the smuggling of presidential norms into our unwritten constitution. MPs have the right to change their party allegiance as often as they like. But this in-built malleability masks the fact that when most voters enter the polling booths to back a party, they’re in effect stating their preference for an institution represented and embodied by the leader-as-godhead, the personification of the party’s current values and political direction. Recall, if nothing else, that Labour’s abysmal showing at the recent local elections — the ultimate trigger for Starmer’s resignation — was largely to do with its association with the leader himself.

The mandate of a prime minister, then, is deeply personal. And not only with the electorate at large. Even before he’s officially prime minister, cracks are beginning to show (or reappear?) in Burnham’s strange parliamentary coalition. One Left-wing Burnham-supporting MP has complaints about the centrality of Josh Simons in Burnham’s operation: the former Makerfield member, who stood down to give the future PM his by-election, is “toxic, and it won’t end well”, they tell me. “I think,” they add, “he’s an Achilles heel.” The PLP as a whole isn’t much better. “There’s so many groups,” my source tells me, “so many factions.” The point of leadership, though, is to bind colleagues together by setting out a clear direction of travel, crafting a common project that each of Labour’s weird strata can, roughly speaking, get behind. “The fights have started”, according to the MP, but there’s still plenty of goodwill. “On the Left generally, the feeling is that we would have given our left testicle to be in this position six months ago.” Why, then, not take the plunge, trusting that a successful campaign — even with a reduced majority — would strengthen Burnham’s position in the PLP yet further?

Not every new leader triumphs after rushing to the voters. Theresa May’s doomed effort to “crush the saboteurs” is remembered as an instructive blunder, after which Corbyn’s Labour Party made up a large polling deficit to deny her the supermajority she needed to push through a Brexit deal. But on the other side of the ledger, we have Gordon Brown, who hesitated and eventually failed to call an early election in 2007, only to see his popularity plummet thereafter. Jim Callaghan, too, plowed on after Harold Wilson’s resignation in 1976. By the time election day came round three years later, the Winter of Discontent was fresh in the memory, ensuring the avuncular, well-liked Callaghan, who easily out-polled the grocer’s daughter on his personal ratings, was beaten regardless.

In other words, an election would be a gamble. Many Labour MPs would doubtless be out of a job. The party has a dismal reputation after two years of hopeless, directionless dither. But there is unlikely to be a better time for Burnham: before too many difficult decisions have to be made, too many Labour tribes disappointed, too much of the general public frustrated by the slow untangling of Britain’s countless problems. Burnham has restored Labour’s hope and, at least in Makerfield, made his party normal again. His best chance to do the same across the country is now.

But in the end, none of what the skeptics had to say mattered. Any other Labour candidate would have been trounced yesterday, and we would be writing yet another obituary for social democracy. Instead, today, there’s only one story. The new Makerfield MP has done what seemed to be impossible: he has reanimated the corpse of Labour, depressed and moribund after just two years in power; he has Made Labour Normal Again in a coalfield town where its brand has never been more despised, outperforming his own party’s dismal ratings by several lengths. That is the point of Andy Burnham.

Bound by the same fiscal constraints and without a nationwide mandate for radical divergence from a thin 2024 manifesto, the naysayers have claimed that Burnham would simply be Starmer with better comms. But these criticisms will struggle to be heard within Labour this morning — at least for now. Right now, this is Andy Burnham’s party. The current occupant of No. 10 might be labouring under the undignified delusion that he can defy reality and fight on. But everyone knows the game is up. Whether by bloody contest or smooth coronation, the King in the North will be crowned.

This was Labour’s “last chase to change” Burnham said in his victory speech. And it’s probably no exaggeration. For now, Britain’s gaping political divide has been temporarily bridged with woolly, Northern intonations, with an inchoate normie populism clad in Next blazers: “one of us”; “vote hope”; “coming together”; “changing the way this country is run”. Plenty of pictures with pints. Plenty of chatter about football in front of St George’s Crosses. Plenty of invocations of regional grievance against distant elites.

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That vague articulation of a blokey but unthreatening, common-sense progressivism bought Burnham 54% of the vote; that empty signifier united the British Left, from the Communist Party’s Morning Star and the Corbynite Momentum’s diehards, to the most moderate, politically limp frontbenchers lining up to kiss the ring under the flat roof of the Stubshaw Cross Labour Club.

The late Republican campaigning guru Lee Atwater said that you could learn about swing voters by watching WWE. Citing Atwater, Dominic Cummings has remarked that the fake wrestling star the Undertaker understands communication “better than all SW1 pundits combined”. To put it another way, the Undertaker’s secret is that he grasps that character is key, emotion trumps policy, vibes trump detail, and a simple goodies-versus-baddies narrative goes a long way. It’s easy to scoff at Burnham’s “Northern Soul” projections, but the well-honed everyman aesthetic, the five-a-side matches, the morning jogs are the total obverse of Starmer’s buttoned up, pointyheaded anti-spirit. And the voters, in the Northwest at least, are seemingly buying it.

But as the Left’s euphoria subsides, awkward questions will inevitably surface: what about the project? He may have the common touch, but does our PM-in-waiting have a vision? Burnham has waxed lyrical about “business-friendly socialism”, about ending “40 years of neoliberalism”, casting his defining purpose as a reversal of the Eighties. The demographics and political mean of Makerfield voters have dragged him further to the Right on social policy than many of Labour’s more urbane professional liberals would have liked. In the past month, he shifted from a default position of hyper-progressive Remainerism, to voicing support for Shabana Mahmood’s asylum reforms, rejecting Rejoin, and supporting the Supreme Court’s decision on single-sex spaces.

All this worries Graham Stringer, the Labour MP who for 12 years led Manchester City Council, and who has more of a claim to “Manchesterism” than the upstart King in the North. “I’ve known Andy since he was first elected in 2001”, Stringer told me the day before the vote. “He’s a nice bloke, happy to have a pint with him”, he conceded. “But nothing he has done has led me to believe that he would be a good leader of the Labour Party or the country.”

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Activists have taken to calling Makerfield a “proof of concept” — testing a model on how to beat the hard Right’s insurgency: peel off a few Reformers and the Reform-curious with a quietly patriotic soft-Blue Labourism; present Labour’s few Left-wing achievements — nationalized rail, employment rights, GB Energy — as part of a transformative project that is just starting to pay off. Meanwhile, reunite the Left bloc, and bring those freshly minted Greens and Liberals back home. Do it all with a chappie that England’s aggrieved Facebook mums can get behind, and that its footie Dads wouldn’t mind watching the game with. To top it off,  Labour could even lock in a “progressive majority” rainbow coalition for years to come, were Burnham to make constitutional reform and proportional representation a key plank of his platform.

This may well work, in purely electoral terms. But, in reality, the real “proof of concept” isn’t Makerfield. It will be whether Burnham can deliver a new political economy. Reversing a four-decade economic trajectory is easier said than done. Decoupling the Treasury’s decision-making powers from the whims of gilt traders would require a harsh balancing of day-to-day spending and revenues that soft Left, spendthrift Labour MPs are unlikely to countenance. This is, after all, the same parliamentary party that Pat McFadden aptly described as having an approach to fiscal policy amounting to “who can we tax more to pay benefits to others?”

But creating the fiscal space for growth and future-oriented capital projects and infrastructure requires serious curbs on current spending. Renationalizing swathes of our utilities is incompatible with sticking to the fiscal rules. The same goes for a new wave of regional investment. Promises to “reindustrialize” clash at least partly with the country’s pursuit of Net Zero — a project unlikely to decelerate if, as expected, Ed Miliband replaces Rachel Reeves in the Treasury. Even the touted local model of so-called “Manchesterism” is a bundle of contradictions: the city’s recent success has been less about a novel version of municipal socialism, and more the consistently favorable attitude that local authorities have taken towards inward private investment, big developers and speedy planning decisions.

Shadowing a group of Labour canvassers, I heard two local women shout “don’t bother asking us anything, we’re sick of all of you!” Last night’s result has shown this to be a minority view across Makerfield. Yet door-knockers still reported widespread disillusionment and despondency on the campaign trail as this patchwork of outer-Wigan towns and villages was placed under the glare of the media microscope. This was, supposedly, England in microcosm: angry, listless, lacking vitality and in serious structural decline. That Reform has failed to capitalize in this England is a serious failure. But Makerfield is only the 243rd most deprived of Britain’s 650 constituencies. Indeed, many of the journalists reporting on Makerfield as the epitome of broken Britain will go home to places that are, statistically, poorer: Camden, Islington, Hackney.

This speaks partly to Britain’s confusion about class, education and culture. But more significant is what it reveals about how the economy is endured on the streets: we’ve created a country where, beyond the buzzy, dynamic urban citadels, even where people are relatively comfortable, with high rates of home ownership and secure employment, it feels, according to one local at a bus stop like “there’s nowt’ doin’”.

Here, then, is the end result of a half century in which graduate and “knowledge work” has been privileged as the way to make it; smart kids want to leave these streets, go to university and not return home to a place where the industries and the institutions that once gave provincial Britain a sense of purpose are long dead. It’ll take more than platitudes, personal branding and social justice homilies to fix that. What this country ultimately needs is a serious, painful rupture with the dominant consensus — and whether a politician so desperate to be liked can initiate such a breach is questionable.

“The reason Burnham keeps changing his mind on issues,” Stringer tells me, “is because he’s not thought deeply enough about how to apply any set of principles… I just don’t think he’s done the intellectual work which would enable him to be a good prime minister.” Andy the empty signifier will soon have to decide the meaning of Burnhamism: whether it represents the clean break he promises, difficult decisions and-all, with winners identified and losers sent packing; or whether he is content with Starmerism-plus. Andy Burnham may have made Labour feel normal again — but is this new normal enough?

Today, alas, things feel very different. Where “the Left” once connoted strike-prone shop stewards and horny-handed socialist rabble-rousers, today the new bogeymen for the City, the business lobbies, and the political Right tend to be soft Left MPs, picked from the serried ranks of Russell Group Labour Students societies and the progressive middle classes. And if the TUC is currently looking to downsize from its Bloomsbury pile, hardly surprising when the labor movement is now so diminished, the unity so vividly inscribed in Meadows’ sculpture also feels very far away, and it’s unclear whether even Andy Burnham and his protruding Northern vowels can do much to bring it back.

The most obvious example of union fracturing is in its schools. The NEU, Britain’s largest teachers’ union, is currently in a bitter dispute with three of the country’s largest general unions: Unite, Unison and the GMB. In essence, the disagreement centers around who gets to organize teaching assistants. That, you might think, is a rather arcane, technical dispute. Yet it has ignited fury within the Labour-affiliated mega-union, and could, according to a source familiar with the matter, even result in the teachers’ suspension from the TUC.

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How to explain these oddly high stakes? Because, I’d argue, they reflect broader divisions at the heart of the union fraternity — on how to combat new threats to the Left and Right, and how to deal with the realities and disappointments of the Labour government now in office.

The old Labour Party’s Clause Four once promised to “secure for the workers, by hand and by brain the full fruits of their industry”. That was because there was an acceptance that cognitive, intellectual labor was a core part of the production process, a commodity to be exploited by capital just like any other. Sections of the Left still maintain a similarly expansive definition of class identity. Mick Lynch, the former transport workers leader, recently claimed that “if you don’t own the means of production, you are working class. If you have to get up when the alarm clock goes off and do a job and you depend on your earnings rather than your assets then you are working class.”

But this Marxian approach, attempting to unite all wage-earners within a diverse proletarian cause, is broad enough to deprive the term of any useful meaning or specificity. A definition that includes doctors, academics, bank managers and creative consultants within the same category as minimum-waged warehouse workers strips the former of those nuanced and overlapping privileges, accrued through what the French sociologist Bourdieu called habitus: the social mores, soft skills, personal tastes, lifestyles, education and values of people who share the same background.

These differences aren’t merely superficial — least of all in Britain — but indeed result in wildly opposed political visions. Polling last week revealed that trade unionists were more likely to support Reform than the Labour Party. The Unite leader Sharon Graham, who has openly toyed with the idea of disaffiliating from Labour, said that the numbers were “damning but not surprising”, that “Labour has abandoned the working class”, and that, therefore, “the working class have abandoned Labour”.

But that isn’t quite right. Instead of a homogeneous blob moving en masse away from their traditional partisan loyalties, we find that the working class is no longer an intelligible or coherent political bloc at all. The masses have been replaced by a networked mess of competing cultural-political factions, separated by educational, generational and linguistic chasms. Certainly, those headline polling figures conceal predictable fissures. Among trade unionists with a university education, for instance, Labour was still the more popular party, gathering 34% to Reform’s 19%. Among non-graduates, however, the percentages were roughly reversed, with Reform gaining 36% to Labour’s 22%. While the Greens performed well among younger trade unionists, winning among 18-24 year-olds, their support nosedives for older members.

Beyond the numbers, meanwhile, these tensions are clear enough on the doorstep somewhere like Makerfield. In this Reform-friendly, white working-class seat, whether Burnham can still make the old language of work, place and solidarity sound vaguely plausible is being billed as an existential test for broad-church Labourism. It is, one activist tells me, a chance for “proof of concept”: reuniting the Left’s core vote under the Labour banner while also peeling off a nice chunk of Reformers. If the labor movement’s inherited unity is now more bronze sculpture than living reality, Burnham allies pray that it can now be revived by his inchoate brand of Mancunian normie populism.

If it’s tempting, however, for the Left to appeal to the putative “common economic interests” of lecturers and Deliveroo drivers, the country’s actual conditions prompt the opposite conclusion. Whether they like it or not, for example, professional-managerial workers are the beneficiaries of low-skilled migration, providing them with a cheap services class and the pleasant air of cosmopolitan vibrancy so beloved of the urban creatives, hipsters and the boho intellegentsia. No less important, these same professionals are largely insulated from the worst effects of intensifying competition for housing and jobs. That may explain why pollsters record that the white collar so-called “ABC1s” are less likely to think immigration is too high than the manual workers in the “C2DE” cohort; the lowest decile of earners saw an over-supply of cheap migrant labor squeeze their wages even before the Boriswave.

On climate policy, meanwhile, adherence to net zero and all its commandments might be sacrosanct for some workers — a general mark of basic decency, say, for a sociology professor. But for those remaining in our dilapidated manufacturing sector, “net zero” is more likely to be associated with high energy costs and the decimation of heavy industry.

Unite and the GMB, both representing workers in the oil and gas fields, are regularly found arguing in favor of North Sea drilling, setting out the case against net zero, and questioning the “just transition” and “climate jobs” rhetoric of the mainstream center-left. They support Heathrow expansion, heavy infrastructure spending and a robust, developmentalist industrial strategy. Both unions are also reticent about adopting aggressive anti-Reform attack lines; they’re fully aware that a significant part of their membership base fully supports a Right populist agenda.

In contrast, though, the NEU has willfully engaged Nigel Farage in public rows, describing Reform as “racist” and “far Right”. The Reform leader has reacted in kind, last year telling a meeting that he was “anticipating a teachers’ strike very quickly” if he wins a general election. Why? Because, he claimed, “they are poisoning our kids” with critical race theory. For his part, Zack Polanski has spoken at both the NEU’s annual conference, and at the University and College Union, the body representing lecturers.

In the end, that rather abstruse row over teaching assistants should be seen in this context. For the teachers, flirtation with the Greens and a kamikaze approach to relations with fellow trade unions represents an opportunity for a political breach — with a movement that it thinks has become too conservative, too set in its ways, too unwilling to confidently challenge Reform with a strangled cry of “No pasáran!”.

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All this is new, even compared to the glory days of Meadows’ statue. Way back in 1900, the Labour Party was formed as the Labour Representation Committee, intended as the parliamentary wing of the trade union movement. Now, though, the old congregation is splintering into sects. And if it’s too early to know what all this means for the future of trade unionism in Britain — let alone for the party that receives around £10 million in union funds a year — the question now must surely be: what will Andy do?

Happily for Graham and the other union bosses, Burnham is surely better placed than most Labour politicians to paper over the movement’s fractures. With a bold economic offering, he may even persuade enough voters that Labour can go beyond the comfort zones of the progressive graduate class, rediscovering its radical roots. But a byelection victory, if it happens, will not by itself restore the lost unity of the Left, because the seams now running through the labour movement are not merely failures of what Westminster calls “comms”. They are rooted, rather, in our nation’s divergent experiences and incentives. As the old rallying cry went: “The workers united will never be defeated.” But the next defeat, especially if it comes from an insurgent Faragism fueled by working-class disaffection, could leave a decaying broad-church labourism with little more than rusty statues.

Today I find the idea of drinking cans of Polish lager to mark the passing of a former prime minister rather pitiable. From a solely political perspective, of course, it is counterproductive, for it tells the general public that the contemporary Left resembles little more than a misanthropic, detached subculture found mainly among the younger, over-educated denizens of gentrifying urban enclaves. But beyond any strategic consideration, it also signifies the strength of Thatcherism, against which my fellow Brixton revelers and I were pathetically impotent.

In contemporary discourse, Maggie’s enduring legacy is taken to be something called “neoliberalism”, a system of political economy apparently dominant for the last 40 years, and now undergoing a critical appraisal, not least because of certain Labour leadership hopefuls blaming it for British decline. In his slick Makerfield campaign video, Andy Burnham says he “saw what Thatcher’s government did to places like this”, citing “deindustrialization” and “the draining away of economic, social and political power” from provincial Britain. As Reform positions itself as the party of the Northern working class, in alliance with small traders and the Home Counties’ petit bourgeoisie, the Left delivers dire warnings of a Thatcherite revival — the better to hold onto those working-class Northerners. Farage and the Reform leadership clique are, after all, longtime disciples of the monetarist creed.

None of this is to say that my opinions on the Iron Lady have altered much. Even from a purely conservative standpoint, she caused a lot of harm to the country, much of it perhaps irreparable. Though her project invoked a parochial conservatism, it nevertheless radically altered our mode of production according to an imported set of continental (namely Austrian) ideologies. It projected a vision of British patriotism that sold off national assets by the pound, exposing a relatively coherent and regionally balanced national economy to all the volatilities of globalized, financialized capital and international trade flows, as well as leaving us dependent on the kindness of strangers and cap-in-hand foreign patronage. And while its libertarian streak was applied ruthlessly to “free market” actors, an authoritarian traditionalism and throwback Victorian morality dominated in the socio-cultural sphere and in law and order — as exemplified by the battle of Orgreave.

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Thatcher, then, is as significant a figure in discourse as she was when she died. In that sense, it is an auspicious time to be putting on a play about her. At Liverpool’s Everyman Theater, an adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novella, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, is nearing the end of its first run. It’s a fitting venue: 13 years ago, as I drank cans of Tyskie in Brixton, groups of fellow Scousers spontaneously emptied out of the dockers’ pub The Casa just yards from the Everyman to mark Thatcher’s death. It’s a fitting time, too, as a famous son of Liverpool promises to reverse the legacy of the city’s — and the play’s — bête noire (Burnham the Scouser has spent around a decade posing as a Mancunian — a rare boon for someone born in the nether regions between the North West’s two great metropoles, with a shifting dual identity that mirrors his political oscillations).

Mantel’s original story attracted controversy at the time of its publication in 2014. For all the brouhaha, one would have expected it to be historical fiction in the philosophical tradition of Frantz Fanon — the French psychoanalyst whose writing on the efficacy and superior morality of Left-wing political violence is still a bookshelf stalwart of many a LARPing student revolutionary. Conservative MPs led the chorus of condemnation, but, in all likelihood, they had never read the text, despite its short length. For Mantel was no frothing-at-the-mouth extremist advocating the progressive or, like Fanon, mentally rehabilitative, qualities of revolutionary murder. Her epic on the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, reveals no sympathies for the cold, utilitarian, socially cleansing properties of the guillotine. Instead it focuses on some of the human costs of political upheaval.

In that vein, the Scouse IRA sniper featured in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is fundamentally more melancholic than heroic. He seeks a personal catharsis in his act, as well as political change, but it’s highly questionable whether he will attain either. The play adaptation carries this mood forward — the assassin portrayed more as a sad, disturbed reject than a hardened, cocksure ideologue. The terrorist tricks his way into the home of a single widow, whose bedroom window happens to overlook a hospital entrance on the day of a prime ministerial visit. The widow tries gently to persuade him of the errors of his ways — and it is she who carries the audience’s favor in this two-person performance.

Nor is Mantel’s choice of terrorist surprising. Such is the hold of the Thatcherite decade over the collective Liverpudlian imagination that local politicians still frequently invoke the Toxteth riots along with Maggie’s supposed plans for Merseyside’s “managed decline”. It was, in fact, her chancellor Geoffrey Howe who suggested the policy of allowing a city-wide gradual atrophy, rather than attempting to guide water up a hill in what was known as “the Bermuda Triangle of British capitalism”. Eventually, Howe’s plan was rejected in favor of a Heseltine-branded plan of city-center-focused urban regeneration. But since then, the “managed decline” epithet has stuck — a Scouser never forgets, of course.

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What the Anglo-Gaullists get wrong

By Jonny Ball

The cultural influence of the era is still broad. The industrial wastelands and mass unemployment portrayed in the Liverpool-based TV series the Boys from the Blackstuff was apparently what inspired Burnham to go into politics by joining the Labour Party aged 14. It is as if our local political elites (all Labour, still, for now) are afflicted by a collective, 40-year hangover induced by the transition from a bustling, Tory-voting, mercantile port (the “Second City of Empire”) into a belligerent poster child of urban decay (“Smack City”). Though admittedly the anti-Thatcher finger-pointing might also help redirect attention from the likes of “Chippy tits”, a recent mayor who awaits trial over charges of bribery and conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office. Many in the audience of The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher will no doubt hope that Makerfield’s Labour populist can prove the final antidote — the acetaminophen and bacon sandwich — to cure the lasting Thatcherite headache.

The rich nuance of the play is undermined by the limited-edition tote bags proclaiming “REJOICE! REJOICE!” on sale behind the theater bar. They will have sold well. But how much can we still claim to live in Thatcher’s world when the tax burden is at a 70-year high? Where is the Thatcherite free market when a bureaucratic welfare state takes ever-increasing tax revenues from productive labor and investment, redirecting it toward the ever-expanding army of the indigent and indolent? Certainly, few business owners will see in today’s stagnant Britain a portrait of laissez-faire nightwatchman governance.

Two political tribes offer opposed diagnoses for the UK’s dismal situation, with each identifying different starting points for the Fall. For the Burnhamite Left, the decline began in 1979, when Thatcher came to power. For the Right, decline began in 1997, on Blair’s arrival. The Right posits that the source of our ills is the lingering effects of too-much-state, of an overbearing, Cool Britannia lanyard socialism. This is a story of radical constitutional renewal and the empowerment of quangos, arms-length bodies, international organizations and the judiciary at the expense of executive ministerial authority and the Crown-in-Parliament. The result is an omnipotent regulatory deep state that hampers individual initiative and state capacity alike.

But what we’re really seeing is a grotesque blend of the worst of Thatcherism with the worst of Blairism: bad aspects of “neoliberalism” coexisting with bad aspects of bureaucratic statism. The result combines top-down statist nitpicking with Thatcherite ownership models; corporate, Whitehall and town hall management structures amalgamating into a public-private-partnership blob, administered and lobbied by armies of LinkedIn-posting hangers-on. Blairism is, after all, a development of Thatcherism, as Thatcher herself recognized when she described New Labour as her greatest achievement.

The consequences of this Frankenstein blend are clear to see. Utilities, critical industries and infrastructure are in the hands of privateers, many of them foreign. Collective bargaining outside the public sector is virtually non-existent, contributing in no small part to a 20-year stagnation in real wages. We suffer from an over-reliance on financial, corporate, and legal services, low levels of public and private investment, and an extremely open, low-wage, low-productivity economy addicted to imported cheap labor and foreign direct investment. But we’ve matched that with a vetocracy that stymies development; with rule-by-NIMBY; with a New Labour-style dispersal of executive power across bureaucracies and professional bodies; and with often excessive meddling in the private sector. Our emasculated politicians are engaging in after-the-fact distributionism, doling out the proceeds of an old, broken growth model without knowing how to kickstart a new one. This is the legacy of Blair: a legalistic, top-down progressivism rather than anything resembling the very British socialism which Thatcher set out to destroy.

It was the One Nation Tory Ian Gilmour who held that Thatcherism had more in common with the free-trading Gladstonian Whigs than with the patrician tendency of his own party. No doubt Britain’s postwar social democracy was in a sorry state by the Seventies, requiring fundamental reform, not least a compromise with the realities of profit and loss. But the grocer’s daughter, steeped in a low-church Methodist ethos, took a polity rooted in the communitarian institutions of mass democracy, million-member political parties, the trade unions, churches, industrial mass production and security in work, housing and therefore family life, and replaced it with a rugged, dog-eat-dog, atomized individualism.

In trying to alter what she called “the object” of man’s soul through “the method” of rigid economism, she initially attempted to model Britain on her native Grantham — a staid Lincolnshire market town full of people who embodied the sturdy, middle-English values of thrift, self-reliance, respectability and quiet, Christian philanthropy. Instead we got the economy of the spiv, the City slicker, the consultant, the agency, with every job outsourced, every project put out to tender, a vast network of email-senders and middle managers vying for a procurement contract, a teat on the underbelly of our swollen PLC state.

Thatcherism’s pivot towards the great circuit of Mammon invited the criticism of even the conservative philosophers, such as Roger Scruton, for whom “the emancipation of the market from the constraints of small communities, territorial loyalty and the jurisdiction of the nation state” had more than an air of deracinated cosmopolitan liberalism.

After watching The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, I thought back to 2013, getting too drunk on Tyskie. The futility is obvious now: we’ve had Corbynism, Brexit and much else besides, but none has brought us true deliverance, and the debate on Thatcherism has never been settled, instead congealing into two different tribal mythologies. The Left hope that a charismatic mayor with a warm smile will exorcise Thatcher’s ghost, and with it that of her New Labour successors, while the Reformist Right prays that it will one day complete her unfinished revolution.

Any genuine savior, Burnham or otherwise, will have to topple the mongrel system we currently inhabit, which displays neither the features of efficient entrepreneurialism nor those of state competence and capacity. We have neither the comforts of collectivism nor the dynamism of the market, neither the cradle-to-grave carer nor the sovereign individual. Mantel understood this better than most; her assassin seeks a personal and political redemption through violence, but the lead man can’t find salvation by killing what has already metastasized. There are no easy escape routes. At least in 2013, drunk on cheap lager and high off my own supply, I knew who the enemy was.

Whatever you thought of the millennial socialist experiments of the Corbyn years, it was hardly a hostile environment for ideological radicalism. Post-graduate hipsters in Carhartt advocated four-day weeks, universal basic income and a loud, often bizarre identity politics; they rubbed shoulders with old-fashioned trade union big-wigs on board for extra spending, nationalizations and higher minimum wage. A cottage industry of Verso paperbacks and new Left-wing media outlets theorized “post-work futures” and attempted to reanimate the corpse of Bennism for the modern age, calling it “socialism with an iPad” and “fully-automated communism”. In other words, mad as it may have been, there was a hinterland to Corbynism; roots, intellectual scaffolds, a mess of competing intellectual strands.

But if the Corbyn years were defined by a surplus of (often fantastical) ideas, the subsequent half decade was spent whittling them down into an empty husk of a project. “There’s no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be,” our beleaguered Prime Minister once quacked irritably, to confused colleagues. Rather than representing a philosophy, his motivation was simply to wrest factional control of the Labour Party from the loony Left. For Starmer himself, it was about fulfilling an unshakable belief in his own moral probity and punctilious legalism. If there were a governing agenda, it was rooted in an erroneous analysis that growth and stability could be restored via administrative competency. But that analysis failed upon contact with reality. Growth, stability and competence remained elusive. It quickly became clear that Starmer had outlived all his possible uses the minute he ejected the Conservative Party from office.

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Just about surviving two years of aimless floundering, Starmerism is now reaching its mortifying denouement. To replace it, new prospectuses have emerged that promise deliverance from our impasse, roughly correlating to the whack-a-mole candidates that have emerged and disappeared, up-and-down and up again, as the Prime Minister once more attempts to disguise his own ineptitudes and deny political realities with reference to procedure and proper process. For Starmer is that Japanese soldier still at war long after the armistice has been signed. A pettifogger till the end, the stricture of the rule book must be followed. He is, he says, going nowhere until the bureaucracy is completed in legal triplicate.

Despite No. 10’s hunker-in-the-bunker approach to political crisis, three schools of thought have already emerged, vying to constitute a new, post-Starmer Labourism. There’s some overlap between the three models and their advocates, but they can roughly be summed up as follows: a pro-business, pro-entrepreneurial supply-side agenda likely to be associated more with the Labour Right (and encapsulated most appropriately by Labour Growth Group’s An Honest Day report); the “new fiscal framework” promoted by the Tribune faction of soft-Left MPs, enabling more investment spending by embracing longer debt reduction horizons and “fiscal-monetary co-ordination” (i.e. forcing the Bank of England to halt quantitative tightening to give the Treasury fiscal space – as set out in the Renewal journal); and finally, the “Manchesterism” promoted by one Andy Burnham, pushing for the reversal of many of the privatizations of the Eighties, for publicly owned transport, utilities and social housing, with a “pro-business socialism” approach to free market actors.

The most significant, if only because of its main proponent’s loud intent to become the next leader of the Labour Party, is Manchesterism. Followers of the local politics of Britain’s most successful regional metropole will cast a wry smile that its name is becoming synonymous with a kind of 21st-century socialist alternative. After all, under pragmatic, moderate Labour leadership stretching back decades, Manchester itself has acted as the poster child of municipal Yimbyism, pro-business and pro-developer entrepreneurial growth, public-private partnership and a collaborative and collegiate approach to working with Tory governments.

Nevertheless, those Corbynites who remain in Labour, having not joined the mass exodus to the Greens, have put their faith in this idea. Jez the Magic Grandpa has left the building, decamped to the Your Party disasterzone, and Andy is their last great hope. A protean politician, Burnham has undergone a radical Mr Benn-style transformation in recent years: from a bland New Labour apparatchik who twice failed as a leadership candidate, into a kind of bland Northern everyman — a normcore tribune of the people, blokey-but-unthreatening, railing against an effete Westminster elite.

Most of SW1 balks at this, scoffing at the smart-casual clothes and emphasized Northern vowels that make up the aesthetic imaginary of Burnham’s Next menswear populism. But that is beside the point. He polls better than any other metro mayor by a country mile, and better than any other Labour option to boot. “He’s a Cambridge graduate!”, they rightly point out, “A Blairite spad!”. But he has still managed to build a personal popularity that vastly outmatches his own party’s. If he wins in Makerfield — about as difficult territory as can be found in his Greater Manchester turf — then he will be prime minister within months.

Manchesterism, then, might be coming for Britain. Bond markets are already pricing in the chances of extra gilt issuance if, and when, a more Left-leaning Labour administration begins taking water and energy into public ownership.

If Burnham is beaten by Reform — and Britain Elects polling indicates that the Faragists would trounce any other Labour candidate but the Mayor — his ambition may be quashed. But the danger for Starmer will not abate. The Prime Minister is way beyond the point of no return, and another figure of the soft Left is sure to challenge him. And those that could beat him in a contest — Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband, or some combination of the two — would draw heavily from Manchesterism’s promises with the addition of Tribunites such as Louise Haigh taking prominent roles in policy formation. The soft Left Tribune’s analysis of fiscal and monetary policy is, ironically, shared by some in Reform. Both have criticized the Bank of England’s role in creating a pressured environment for any Chancellor: the independent central bank offloads gilts from its balance sheet, pushing yields up even as public finances feel the squeeze; and inflation-linked gilts issued in the Osborne era leave the taxpayer on the hook for enormous interest payments, with the governor not countenancing a more tiered interest rate system. Echoing the Right-populist calls for a more pliant, accommodative central bank that facilitates spending, the Tribunites call for a debt-financed investment in infrastructure and capital projects, while promising to keep current spending within those famous iron-clad fiscal rules.

It would be wrong, though, to present Manchesterism and the Tribunite Left’s vision as somehow antagonistic towards the Labour Growth Group’s more pro-market agenda. While the latter might trace its intellectual genealogy to the Labour Right’s tradition of social-democratic reformism, and while Manchesterism and Tribune’s proposals are more rooted in the Left-Keynesianism of the soft Left, the return of public ownership and investment-led growth doesn’t contradict supply-side reform.

A consensus is emerging that Britain is locked into a worst-of-both-world’s Frankenstein economy, displaying all the negative features of neoliberalism but with a cumbersome, meddling, bureaucratic state that impedes business agility and individual initiative. We have critical national infrastructure and assets held in private, often foreign ownership, and twin trade and sovereign deficits that make us dependent on the kindness of strangers. UK plc is an extremely open, over-financialized, unbalanced economy, exposed to volatility in global trade and relying heavily on imports, not least energy and cheap labor. Britain built an economic model designed for the “end of history”, ever-increasing liberalization and reduced trade frictions. But it now finds itself, as the historian John Bew put it, as the “last man at the bar in Davos”, watching in horror as the Washington Consensus collapses. Meanwhile, successive generations of legislators have attempted to ameliorate our current predicament by regulating, dictating and redistributing the diminishing proceeds of a broken growth model via the pensions and benefit system.

This is a model that blends a socialism of permanent welfare and the retrospective palliatives of cash transfers with Thatcherite models of ownership. In its place, Labour factions are beginning to coalesce around the articulation of a politics of national production, of creating the conditions for market dynamism and overcoming the long-term, sclerotic doom-loop by facilitating investment-led growth. Even the nationalization proposals of the Burnham camp are framed as a solution to rising fiscal burdens on the entitlement state — an energy, housing, work and transport subsidy regime that compensates workers and consumers for the failures of the very privatization model that brought arms-length regulatory omnipotence into being.

But unlike previous incarnations of Labour Leftism, this combines with the recognition that pro-market measures are necessary. The Labour Growth Group wants to harness the dynamism of the private sector by implementing the kind of full-fat planning reform that constrains any building, as well as shifting the tax burden away from work and productive investment and towards the beneficiaries of unproductive rentierism. Similarly, Tribune has signaled that planning reform is “central to any growth strategy”, and that the tax burden should incentivize work, employment and patient investment over rent-collecting and short-term speculation.

Where, though, has this maelstrom of ideas emerged from? Why, barely two years after an election that delivered the Labour Party a decisive majority, is the policy model being relitigated? In orthodox Marxism, the social and political “superstructure” of any given society is taken to be a reflection of its economic “base”. The economy, Marx wrote, was “the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure”, corresponding to “definite forms of social consciousness”. Or, as Bill Clinton might have had it: “It’s the economy, stupid!” Whatever you think of Nineties New Democrats or bearded 19th-century revolutionists, the framing provides a sharp insight into what has been happening to Britain since 2008: our growth model broke back then, and our politics along with it. It is the pecuniary fundamentals that defines our politics. And the fundamentals are broken.

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Cosmic Scallies are radicalising Liverpool

By Jonny Ball

The reason why we are cycling through prime ministers with the attention span of a Love Island contestant isn’t just down to the personal shortcomings of the contemporary political classes. It is because something structural, something more tectonic than mere personal idiosyncrasies is taking place.

Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Northern Rock almost two decades ago, Britain has seen virtually no real wage growth. Productivity, perhaps the most important underlying metric of economic wellbeing, has stagnated. Through Labour’s post-war social democracy, Harold Macmillan and Ted Heath’s big state Tory paternalism, and indeed through Thatcher and Blair’s liberalization projects, British workers could roughly expect their pay packets to grow neatly along an ascending 60-year trend line. But that trend line is now a two-decade plateau. The lack of any increase in our per-capita GDP has combined with the inexorable march of demographics to push taxes upwards even as services deteriorate. Britain is broken. We have been promised various means of salvation: fiscal tightening, deregulation and privatization under Cameron; Brexit-means-Brexit under May; post-Brexit leveling up under Johnson; deficit-funded Reaganite tax cuts under Truss; and now an amorphous technocratic reformism under Starmer. All have looked like different versions of managed decline.

This battle of ideas, then, is Labour’s first honest reckoning since 2019. But the danger is that it is just too late, and that none of the Left’s new projects will alter the path of Britain’s secular decline. If so, as the spiral quickens, the party risks existential crisis at the next election. But for Labour, that is a risk worth taking, as messy as the current Westminster travails appear. For if there is no change of course, a vengeful electorate is poised to punish the entire political class with a blunt instrument of anti-politics: Reform. The victory of Faragism with a new base of support among the British working class would represent a final nail in the coffin of social democracy. It would signal the last conversion of the political Left from a project aimed at representing the labor interest, into one focused on the discourse and neuroses of the professional managerial strata. Continuing with managed decline will invite the whirlwind, and Westminster will reap it. We’re in a populist age, business-as-usual won’t cut it, and drift is no longer an option.

As with any founding myth, a kernel of truth lies within the layers of hyperbole and self-aggrandizement. But it is hard to square Liverpool’s self-referential and pre-supposed Leftism with some of the results from this week’s local elections in neighboring boroughs within Liverpool City Region (the city of Liverpool proper doesn’t go to the polls until next May). In Halton, just a stone’s throw away from Liverpool John Lennon Airport and Halewood car factories that were once the sites of legendary strikes, Reform has just swept the board. To the north, Sefton council has swayed towards Nigel Farage’s barmy army, reducing Labour’s once-mammoth majority, with Reform taking five seats and missing out on many more by a whisker. Three years ago, this Merseyside enclave, the birthplace of Jamie Carragher, was home to 51 Labour councillors. Today, the streets that Carragher – a Labour donor – once played football in as a boy are represented by a Holocaust-denying Reform councillor. Then there’s Knowsley, which in 2023 experienced some of the first violent anti-migrant hotel riots in England. This week, the Labour seats that were up for grabs were decimated, with Independents and Reform benefiting from the Left’s collapse.

Liverpool, then, the quintessential “Red City”, currently stands within a soft, mushy doughnut of turquoise populism. Today’s results could well portend those of Liverpool City Council next May: Labour activists and councillors tell me that their once-solid wards in the north of the city are being dragged rightwards.

Merseyside’s political culture is clearly in a state of flux. And this is in no small part down to the emergence of a new, peculiarly Liverpudlian subculture: the Cosmic Scallies. “Scally” for their roots in Scouse working-class street culture, and “Cosmic” for their predilection for bizarre, New Age-coded, anti-systemic worldviews and lifestyles. These track-suited eccentrics don’t conform to the stereotype of the Leftist Scouser, backing Labour come what may. But they’re certainly not Tories either. Rather, the Cosmic Scallies are Liverpool’s own manifestation of the very online reactionary Right.

This is a broad church without a single, well-defined school of thought — a diffuse medley of influencers and their followers. But, generally speaking, the Cosmic Scally combines a devotion to deranged conspiracy theory, alternative medicine, gym culture, self-help, and men’s mental health discourse, with a side-helping of anti-migrant hostility and “common sense” anti-wokism. Some advocate for the use of psychedelics. Others swear by meditation. Still more are ex-addicts celebrating their sobriety on socials. And their rise, in the streets and online, is part of what’s driving a slow divorce between Liverpool and its Labour traditions.

The Cosmic Scallies were born out of the city’s distinctively proletarian customs. Think not of what tabloid Britain might have called the “chav” — an archetype that was rarely found in Liverpool — but of young(ish) lads in head-to-toe sportswear, Under Armour tracksuits and Nike Air Max trainers. In many cases, the short back-and-sides of yesteryear have been replaced by the “ketwig” — a huge mop of curly, unkempt locks, so-named because of many of its wearers’ enthusiasm for ketamine. Many of these Scouse denizens will be footsoldiers of the Cosmic Scally multiverse.

A typical Cosmic Scally is the lad in North Face with a joint behind his ear who insists on regaling you with muddled tales of Masonic control, chemtrails, corrupt police and the Great Replacement theory at a pub on North Liverpool’s Country Road. Or the taxi driver I met not long ago who turned down the TalkSport phone-in to tell me that the Labour Party was a thinly disguised front for paedophile elites intent on “importing the Third World”, before warning me not to “pump shit” into my body via vaccination.

Their dubious intellectual gurus can mostly be found on social media, where Cosmic Scally influencers push a bewildering range of insidious political messages. Rescuing children from unnamed malcontents is a common theme. After the Southport murders in 2024, it was a “Save Our Kids” protest promoted by the Cosmic Scally cyberspace network that descended into a riot that spread across the country. Other political themes include Stop the Boats, Islam, and migration.

One of the most well known of the bunch is the former Olympic boxer Anthony Fowler, who has built a solid fanbase of more than 200,000 followers selling CBD oil alongside Kerry Katona and Katie Price. He extols the benefits of staring at the sun to avoid sunburn and claims he cured his infant daughter’s cancer with his own CBD oil and an organic diet. Peppering his endless face-to-camera sales pitches are nods to stories of migrants attacking children: “Dont [sic] touch my little sister she’s 12,” he posted, after footage emerged of a Scottish girl brandishing knives, apparently to protect her sister from a migrant attack. “If her parents or legal team can be contacted I am happy to help cover any legal fees,” Fowler said. He implores followers to “Protects [sic] your children”. “If your daughters in the bathroom you see who’s in there [sic],” he once posted, alongside an AI image of a sturdy MAGA man blocking a trans activist from a toilet.

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Then there’s the former crystal-meth addict, Muay Thai fighter and stuntman Billy Moore, who makes a tidy living documenting “raise the flag” street protests, talking to the residents of homeless encampments and making fun of the people on Liverpool’s Antifa demos. Last month, he posted footage of a man confronting him and calling him a “little Rightwing piece of filth, taking advantage of homeless left, right and center”. Moore said that his accuser was “a Leftwing bigot” who “voted the Green Party, loves LGBT stuff” and was “probably gay”. His videos regularly garner several hundred thousand views — the stuff of dreams for any beleaguered local Labour politician.

The unofficial King of the Cosmic Scallies is perhaps Sine Missione, an elusive, Banksy-style local graffiti artist. He played a central role in anti-lockdown protests, pushing QAnon, flat-Earth theories and “sacred geometry” psychedelia on his socials. He has since been overtaken by newer, self-styled gurus and accounts, and has deleted his socials. But his message lives on.

When the digital crosses into the real, it can take strange forms. In a Liverpool park, Cosmic Scally-coded “We Stand for Freedom” protests push every slogan and conspiracy under the sun: from “Stop the Boats” to dire warnings of man-made weather, mind-control techniques, and government planes spraying unknowing citizens from gray skies overhead.

The local poet and author PJ Smith (aka Roy) lamented the rise of the Cosmic Scallies in his hip-hop track, “Loss is not infinite”, listing, in doleful resignation, some of the core features of the subculture: “5G conspiracy scalls / Ayahuasca nuts in Mammut kecks… Meditation meatheads / Anti-vaccine stoners.”

Antonio Gramsci might have described these influencers as the “organic intellectuals” of the Cosmic Scally movement. Not intellectuals in the sense of their academic credentials, of course, but in their bottom-up articulation of a “new social type”, giving a “homogeneity”, a kind of collective consciousness and projected voice to the Cosmic Scally strata. Theirs is a diffuse and hybrid identity, combining  the solidly plebeian traditions of the modern Scouser with an incredulity towards any-and-all established authority and an unusual blend of back-to-nature hippydom, individual self-empowerment and blood-and-soil nationalism.

The Cosmic Scally influencer is what Alan Finlayson, a Professor of Political & Social Theory at the University of East Anglia and researcher into the digital Right, calls “a new kind of ideological entrepreneur”. No longer constrained by the “old institutions” that once defined the city’s politics — political parties, newspapers, broadcasters, the Church, the trade unions, working men’s clubs — these online influencers act as “independent operators producing new ways of thinking about the world”, creating novel, unconventional political thought.

Social media, the great leveler, has been the driving force behind this. No longer do the gatekeepers of traditional broadcasting keep the Overton window narrow. Where once the realms of political debate were kept focused and respectable, today all sorts of ideas and symbols compete for likes and subscribers in the infinite nexus of “content”.  The Cosmic Scallies are a product of the evolution from top-down, one-to-many media communications to a schizophrenic, many-to-many mesh of ideas, poses and products.

This isn’t a self-conscious political tribe: there is no coherent ideology, leader, or formal organization. There’s no Tommy Robinson-type at the top giving orders, nor are there ageing National Front or BNP hard men talking about white supremacy over warm beer in flat-roof pubs. Instead, the Cosmic Scallies constitute what the Marxist cultural critic Raymond Williams referred to as a “structure of feeling”: an ephemeral collective imaginary, a shared vibe or atmosphere.

But while the movement may be amorphous, it is influencing the reconstitution of the politics of Liverpool. While voting for the Conservatives is still anathema to most Scousers, the Reform brand is untainted enough to satisfy the very real anti-establishment culture of the city’s popular classes, particularly in the poorer North End.

“We’re going to get torn apart in the locals next year,” a door-knocking Labour activist tells me over text. “We’re fucked. Bricking it.” Every ward in Liverpool goes to the polls in May 2027. In traditionally solid Labour areas, where “Tory” is used as an insult spat out by contorted faces, many voters are likely to join the Faragist insurgency, just as some of their neighbors have in Knowsley, Sefton and Halton. The demographic here, the miserable Labourite tells me, includes a lot of “very young, semi-drug dealing, or make-up artist-y, Cosmic Scousery renters”. Their fuck-off Scouse animus that once found expression through the labor movement and militant trade unionism could now be set to banish Labour entirely: “The issue will be Reform, or independents,” the campaigner tells me. After several seats in nearby Knowsley fell to Reform, including the home ward of the Corbynite Labour MP Ian Byrne, the activist texts again: “I never thought it would be this bad.”

Part of the problem, they tell me, is that the contemporary Labour Party has alienated so many on Merseyside. Liverpool’s brand of Leftism was once solidly workerist, rooted in industrial struggles and class warfare. Now, the Cosmic Scallies are uniting in opposition to what the US Right have called “gay race communism” — a New Left degradation of the labor movement tradition, dominated by studenty, middle-class cohorts and rooted in politically-correct discourses and the pained language of the perma-activist class. If this is what the modern Left is, says the weary door-knocker, then it’s driving a wedge between itself and many Scousers.

Then there’s the fact that nobody in Liverpool is listening to Labour HQ’s increasingly desperate comms. Labour politicians have no idea how to adapt to a world of short-form vertical video in which the currency is outrage and eyeballs-at-all-costs extremity. They’re still giving speeches and hoping to be featured on the Today program, while the old bastions on the Mersey are being dragged towards an outfit that does understand the new times — perhaps aided by the mad, anti-systemic obsessions of the Cosmic Scally ecosystem. Finlayson’s “ideological entrepreneurs” have filled the void left by the collapse of Christianity, socialism, and syndicalism, channeling the combative spirit of the city towards paranoiac fantasy and Right-wing populists.

Further fueling Liverpool’s collective disenchantment are the usual culprits of economic decline and rapid demographic change. Merseyside has never truly recovered from the containerization of global shipping, which mechanized the loading and unloading of merchant ships, obviating the need for a city full of raucous dock-laborers. That occurred in tandem with the rapid collapse of the commercial trade routes of the British Empire, as well as with the painful move from goods-producing heavy manufacturing to a local hodgepodge of public service behemoths, hospitality, tourism and the culture industry. Add to the mix an inward flux of mainly poor migrants requiring housing, jobs and services, and you have a recipe for political convulsions.

This sense of political despair was accelerated by the pandemic, when locked-down Liverpudlians found themselves traveling deep into online rabbit holes. Rumor, half-truth, and hearsay proliferated as the city’s common culture gave way to the addictions, neuroses, and alienated hyper-individualism of the tailored feed. Liverpool emerged from the crisis with an economy defined by uncertainty and a postmodern epistemological model to mirror it: nothing works, trust no-one, anything is possible. It was the ideal breeding ground for would-be gurus, mini-Caesars and quasi-political entrepreneurs on the make — boom time for the Cosmic Scallies.

During the anti-migrant riots in Liverpool in 2024, a library was burnt down only a few miles from the gleaming city center waterfront. Minority-owned businesses were attacked. The severity of the disturbances here surprised some — though none of it shocked those who had glimpsed the new Cosmic Scally phenomenon percolating through cyberspace.

The result of all this is a city with a very different complexion to the one it had not long ago — a city that imagines itself as a Labour citadel, but in fact looks rather different. No doubt, Liverpool is still a bastion of anti-Toryism. You’ll still find MMA fighters and sportsmen here indulging in popular scorn against established conservatism. That kind of default anti-Tory politics is as much a marker of local identity as the accent — the only English dialect that is strengthening rather than being subject to slow homogenization into “estuary English”. But anti-Toryism won’t stop the populist Right. Reform seems to be emerging as the vehicle of choice for those Liverpolitans who swim in the broad waters of counter-cultural conspiracy and nativism.

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This is no aberration. Set aside the myth of Scouse exceptionalism for a minute — that familiar story of class struggle, with Scousers as the plucky subalterns and everyone else the effete bourgeois — and you’ll see that Reform’s insurgency is fully compatible with Liverpool’s history and character. For while its recent civic story is replete with political and industrial militancy, Liverpool was never really a socialist or progressive urban area; that was always a myth. Right up until the Seventies, when religious sectarianism was alive and well, a local “Protestant party” fought against Irish immigration and apparent papal influence, with an effective Tory operation keeping Labour out of power for decades while other Northern cities became Left-wing heartlands. For every famous historical Liverpool strike or uprising, there’s a local race riot or an Orange Lodge firebrand successfully mobilizing working-class Protestants against their Catholic neighbors. We may not like to admit it, but the Left-aligned “Rebel City” origin story is a recent invention.

In fact, John Belchem, a local historian and specialist in so-called “Liverpool exceptionalism”, tells me that many of the wards flirting with Reform today would have had a strong Protestant Party presence in the mid-20th century. There is, then, nothing new about Right-wing populism here. Indeed, the plague-on-all-your-houses symbolism of a populist protest vote sits well with Liverpool’s innate us-against-the-world mentality.

The Cosmic Scally is not, then, an imposter bringing alien politics into a Leftist heartland; on the contrary, he is a product of Scouse culture. He is as much an outgrowth of Liverpool’s supposed exceptionalism as the striking docker, the loud Scouse separatist, or the footballer decrying Thatcherism more than 30 years after her downfall. There’s a spirit of communitarian togetherness in Liverpool that gives the city an unusual sense of cohesion for a large urban area. But that same spirit also creates a punishing environment for those who get “too big for their boots”. Labour may have become too establishment, too arrogant, too complacent, too middle class, too metropolitan to fit in with that all-in-it-together plebeian Scouse pneuma. The Cosmic Scally is merely the strange, Scouse reification of national trends. Perhaps “the magic of Liverpool”, is that it is England, after all.

The No. 10 aide had fallen on his sword, sacrificing himself on the altar of Keir Starmer’s continued reign of error. The press, the public, and even the Parliamentary Labour Party, with one eye on its dismal polling, demanded someone’s head on a plate — and it certainly wouldn’t be the man who was ultimately responsible for the decision to appoint the thrice-disgraced friend of a convicted paedophile as US ambassador. Advisors advise and ministers decide, yes. But who in their right mind would want to see an otherwise successful PM, delivering essential reforms, resign over such a trifling matter?

The feeling was by no means universal. One aide told me that they wanted to reply with “[waving emoji] Off ya fuck”. That aide will be pleased that McSweeney is being hauled over the coals for his alleged role in pressurizing Foreign Office officials to expedite Peter Mandelson’s appointment, with or without due process. To the McSweeney skeptic, yesterday’s pitiful Foreign Affairs Select Committee performance would have been no surprise. Here sat a man whose image, as a Malcolm Tucker-esque fixer, had for years been carefully cultivated, not least by his allies’ incessant briefing to journalists. By this telling, “Morgan” was the real power behind the throne, a latter-day Thomas Cromwell steering the government while Sir Keir was plonked obliviously at “the front of the DLR”.

But who among us isn’t tempted to believe in an enigmatic Rasputin, the political éminence grise to which we have recently become so accustomed? Bumbling Boris lacked political consistency, but Dominic Cummings would provide operational rigor, as well as an overarching vision: a lean state, shorn of the constraints of European law and recalcitrant bureaucracy, using science and technology to facilitate post-Brexit growth.

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McSweeney was supposed to be cut from similar cloth — the consummate political fixer and wily operator on whom the PM relied for his organizational, political and ideological moorings. But in the cold light of Emily Thornberry’s camp, incredulous questioning, he wilted. Here was a diminutive, shy Cork man whose answers to the committee were anodyne deflections and polite, sometimes flustered, denials. He began with a profuse apology for recommending Mandelson as ambassador. At one point in the proceedings he had to correct himself after initially seeming to claim that he had always doubted the Prince of Darkness’s answers to questions posed in his vetting. “In September I realized I didn’t get the truth back”, said McSweeney. “At the time I thought I got the truth back. I might have mumbled my words. I got the answers back to him. I thought he was telling the truth. I thought he answered truthfully”. Clear as day.

On display was none of the panache, the charm or even the quiet menace that we might have associated with an ultra-effective operator, Labour’s backroom svengali. That isn’t to say that the dark arts of political skulduggery and intense factionalism haven’t taken place on McSweeney’s watch and at his behest. They have. The Irishman’s rise to the top is a story of furtive dinners, calculated untruths, strategic sleights of hand and discreet inner-party campaigns whose funding broke electoral law. But it’s all been done in a way that mirrors the political project that he and Starmer personify. The essence of that project is inner-party, internecine factional warfare carried out by people without any idea of their ultimate political purpose, without any conception of their ideal Britain.

With Cummings, there was an ethos behind the mythos. Whatever one thought of the Vote Leave guru, he had a theory of change, and a set of coherent, radical proposals that he had concluded would work in the national interest. His was a move-fast-and-break-things approach, to be delivered by small, accountable teams full of “weirdos and misfits” and Leninist fervor, committed to a Whitehall package reversing the influential reforms of Northcote-Trevelyan report. In contrast, McSweeney’s philosophy seems to have lacked substantive weight. What were his efforts in service of? Five ditched missions that nobody vaguely normal can recite? Or was it the six milestones, or three foundations?

Perhaps the paucity of ideas reflects McSweeney’s familial politics in the mother country. The McSweeneys are a Macroom clan of Fine Gael supporters. His aunt was Fine Gael councillor, and his cousin has been an advisor to two recent Fine Gael Taoiseachs. This kind of grounding in the anti-revolutionary, pro-Treaty traditions of one of Ireland’s conservative parties lends itself not to grand narrative or transformative agendas, but to quiet pragmatism in the service of established institutions. From rural Ireland to London, McSweeney is the college dropout who found purpose in Labour’s backroom. There, around the turn of the millennium, he punched information on New Labour’s political enemies into a primitive database, “Excalibur”, for use in Mandelson’s own Blair-era machinations. It was then that McSweeney learned the tricks of the trade, under the tutelage of the epoch’s factional enforcers.

But his emphasis on discipline outmatched anything that came before him. McSweeney oversaw a Stalinist approach to party management. He purged political rivals and suspected malcontents; he was all too willing to remove the party whip from recalcitrant MPs. But this is Stalinism without the five-year plans. It’s authoritarianism for authority’s sake. Dirty tricks must be employed, power must be exercised and maintained, simply to stop the Corbynites, to “rescue the party” from all the parasitic tendencies of the loony Left. But there was no vision for the country. Pure means, with no ends, beyond sinecures for your allies, what Thornberry called “jobs for the boys”.

In Starmer’s image, a new Parliamentary Labour Party has been created. Out of the 403, not a single one of them represents a plausible alternative Prime Minister. This is the only thing that keeps Starmer in place, in spite of his unprecedented unpopularity, itself about to collide with a coming recession and inflationary spiral. McSweeneyism, in pursuit of political professionalization, has produced a Labour-dominated House of Commons packed with legislators whose chief achievements center not around representing workers, rising through the ranks of trade unions in a variety of sectors, and sit still less upon building organizations or creating successful institutions with national impact. Instead, it is a hollowed-out parliament of junior managers armed with humanities degrees, specializing in internal slideshows for corporate public affairs departments or the third sector. Gone are the organizers, the rabble-rousers, the barnstorming autodidacts, and in are the dull young things, delivering speeches in the manner of weekly updates on Microsoft Teams. Once it was a party of labour; today it is a party of LinkedIn.

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And now, languishing in the polls, mired in scandal, hit by economic crises, and about to lose Wales and much of London to insurgent parties, even the LinkedIn PLP is restive. The putative footsoldiers of Starmerism are unmoved by claims that they owe their jobs to the Irishman. A No. 10 insider texts to say that “everyone says he’s a genius” but that McSweeney was “just a kinda sensible pair of hands… no real narrative, just data-driven.” The insider concludes: “That’s fine for winning but not for leading the country”. McSweeney’s construction of a historic majority rests on the thinnest of margins of support. This was the shallowest of victories — winning by appearing as a default option, as simply “not Tories” after the years of Partygate, Trussonomics and stagnant living standards. For all the clever vote-to-seat efficiency, it’s likely that any leader of the Labour party, a team of monkeys in red rosettes, would have fought a hard campaign against a hapless Rishi Sunak. McSweeney and Starmer’s efforts in 2024 garnered fewer votes than a Hamas and IRA-adjacent old hippy-dippy Leftist could muster in Labour’s 2019 wipeout, and significantly less than the same bearded radical won in 2017.

Without McSweeney, Starmer is less anchored. He has burned through all his goodwill and political capital. There will be no recovery. A timetable for his exit, imposed on the Prime Minister by his own Cabinet, is not out of the question. In January, Starmer blocked Andy Burnham from contesting a Denton and Gorton by-election; this time, the Prime Minister will be too weak to repeat the trick. If Starmer is given an exit timetable, Burnham will have time to gain a seat and to launch a challenge in time for party conferences in September. Among many MPs who previously gave Starmer the benefit of the doubt, the general feeling that the PM is a good man doing a bad job has given way to near-universal contempt for him on a personal level. He has shifted blame and thrown colleagues under the bus rather than take responsibility. Operation Save Keir could yet claim more scalps.

For all the fawning goodbyes crediting McSweeney’s “genius” with saving Labour “from the brink of destruction”, it may all be too late in any case. If trends continue, his legacy won’t be saving Labour, but overseeing its slow self-destruction. He may have proved adept at conquering a party machine, but far less capable of maintaining the political coalition that the machine was meant to serve — an electoral bloc currently being torn apart by competing populisms of Left and Right. McSweeneyism treated power as the destination rather than the instrument, and a party and a Prime Minister that forgets the difference rarely survives for long.

Downing Street this week has essentially confirmed this assessment. The recurring nightmare of the Mandelson-Epstein scandal cannot be banished with a backroom reshuffle alone. In an effort to rescue Starmer’s zombie premiership, the current line is, in essence: the Prime Minister did nothing. He knew nothing. He was not told, he did not ask, and he could not have reasonably been expected to do so. Nobody told him and so the man deemed responsible, Sir Olly Robbins, has been fired.

So we’re back to an unedifying ministerial dance of defending the least bad of two options. The first is that a party grandee and New Labour factional ally was appointed “our man in Washington”, despite his known close links with a convicted pedophile financier, and with the Prime Minister ignoring his inability to pass the vetting process. The second option — and this is the official position of the Government — is that a party grandee and New Labour factional ally was appointed US ambassador despite his known close links with a convicted pedophile financier, but with the Prime Minister unaware that he had failed his deep security vetting. While the first implies that Starmer has misled Parliament and the public repeatedly, the second merely signals utter incompetence.

For a Prime Minister who lacks the ability to define his own politics and communicate a moral purpose for his government, either account is terminal. In contrast with the ideological crusading of Brexit, Corbynism, and Liz Truss’s doomed Reaganite experiment, the Prime Minister promised to tone down the big ideas, dial down the politics and lock in. He based his appeal on personal probity and his supposed abilities as an administrator. To that end, he said, “there’s no such thing as Starmerism, and there never will be”.

But this “post-ideological” offer is ironically rooted in a premise that is, in fact, deeply ideological: if we strip back the partisanship, steering the ship of state is a technical problem to be solved by getting to grips with the details. Certainly, it explains Starmer’s embrace of our system of rule-by-committee. The relevant stakeholders shall be consulted.

But politics is not the equivalent of watchmaking, tinkering with the nuts and bolts of a complex machine until it ticks soundly. Rather, it is a never-ending process of managing and choosing between conflicting interests. There are (or were) people around Starmer who clearly understand this. Morgan McSweeney, for one, was fully plugged into the weird Matrix of Labour factionalism, with all its competing visions of Britain and the world. Here’s another irony, as Starmer’s aides pushed hard for Mandelson as an appointee. Whatever the Prime Minister’s own commitments to post-ideological technocracy, the people around him knew Mandelson represented a kind of politics that they themselves were invested in — the world of Cool Britannia, liberal globalization, and the transatlantic alliance.

Those two currents — the stakeholder state and the hard-nosed politicking — have long been in tension. On the one hand, after all, New Labour created for itself a kind of diffuse parallel state of arms-length bodies, expert appointees and independent regulators, neutral in theory but which nonetheless reshaped the constitution. The “old Labour” view of meddling, top-down governance would give way to a new understanding of power. “New public management theory” introduced marketization and competition into the public sector. New committees and modern bureaucracies proliferated to oversee the shift. But while ministerial authority was dispersed across this new quangocracy, Blair himself attempted to circumvent the unwieldy machine with his adoption of “sofa government”. He ceded power with one hand, and tried to grab it back with the other.

Starmer has fallen into the same trap. His instinctive legalism holds international law and an activist judiciary as superior to every state on Earth; the law must protect the individual from the unseemly power of the demos. It’s notable, here, that the Prime Minister’s whole professional life — he entered No. 10 at 61 — was spent defending the victims of government overreach. The professional-managerial classes that he represents so vividly are the very administrators of the contemporary, post-Blairite public sector, the very civil servants that may have waved Mandelson through and ruined Starmer for good.

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One of Starmer’s supposed selling points was his experience running public prosecutions at the head of a major public body. This was the serious Roundhead to Boris Johnson’s clownish Cavalier. And yet his grip on power is as elusive as everyone since Blair. The Prime Minister is unable to live up to his promise of delivering easy efficiency through the Whitehall networks. “Mission Units” have been set up, then scrapped. Every new season seems to come with a relaunch focused on a “delivery phase” that never quite arrives.

Here, again, is another irony. For it was the PM himself who last year told the Liaison Committee of his frustration that “every time I go to pull a lever”, the machinery of government is so clogged and sclerotic that “the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be”. This is an interpretation of the British state’s cumbersome, bloated nature that’s equivalent to the common spectacle of Conservatives bemoaning the dire state of public services — as if they themselves weren’t responsible.

Even so, even after almost three decades of the quangocracy, these latest revelations have the power to amaze. Defenders of Robbins have emerged to say that it is routine for ministers not to be told of the outcome of deep vetting. Permanent secretaries — the most senior civil servants — can, apparently, overrule vetting advice without the knowledge of secretaries of state or MPs. This suggests a level of dysfunction in the relationship between elected politicians and the deep state that’ll shock most Britons, giving life to Dominic Cummings’s oft-repeated claim: the Government does not run the country.

Next week, meanwhile, Robbins may address the Foreign Affairs Committee investigating the scandal. In other words, this chapter is by no means closed. Bad news, of course, for Starmer — but also his successor. For prime ministers will continue to be hoisted by their own administrative petards until they tackle a central issue of our time: the diffusion of state capacity across the bureaucracy. The spectacle of political leaders claiming impotence in the face of the state apparatus is deadly to democracy, and reversing the trend requires a reassertion of real executive and ministerial authority, to say nothing of a fundamental change in the mindset of a political class that would likely interpret such a development as an authoritarian power grab. On the contrary, it would constitute a return of the political to domains that have for too long remained in a technocratic abyss.

That’s for the future. For now, Labour MPs watch on in grim resignation. Yet there is no alternative: a Blairite health secretary with an ultra-thin majority representing clean-shaven Davos Labour, tainted both by Mandelson and by the fact that he’s disliked by the membership; a more plausible King of the North, but stuck sulking outside of Parliament; a less plausible Angela Rayner, who struggles to convince colleagues that she wouldn’t represent a serious liability in the highest of offices.

And so the Starmer era totters on. Perhaps until May, when a local election disaster awaits his hollowed-out party, or until the clamor from senior ministers reaches a crescendo, as MPs recall their fragile majorities. Until then, Starmer lurches from scandal to scandal, less the hapless child at the front of the DLR and more the passenger on a ghost train, careering wildly across the broken railroads of the British state.

Such was the pre-Suez balance of power that these ideas were seriously entertained: not as idle reveries but as genuine strategic debates, with the outcomes backed up by the hard power of Britain’s military-industrial strength. Nor was this thinking the preserve of public-school soldiers and jingo adventurers; it was common in the Labour movement. Clement Attlee himself remarked that “we ought not to give the Americans the impression that we cannot get on without them”, while Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin called the Middle East a “lifeline” for the Commonwealth.

Today, such confidence has passed into history. The idea of a mighty Albion projecting her influence in the Gulf is laughable — whatever Donald Trump might now demand. Such is the state of our armed forces, indeed, that we are unable even to play the supplicant role afforded to us two decades ago during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Instead, Britain looks on in horror as Trump adds his own forever war to America’s growing list. Meanwhile, our prime minister makes a virtue of necessity. For once, his anti-interventionist position chimes with the public mood, even if it has been forced upon him by the ascendancy of Labour’s soft Left and the impotence of a mostly ship-free Royal Navy.

Common to many national disgraces, these embarrassments become an opportunity for a kind of military palingenesis: a rebirth of national prowess like a phoenix from the ashes. From the humiliations of the last decades, and with Britain confined to a spectator role as the “rules-based order” burns, a new political tendency is gaining popularity in the more intellectual corners of the Labour Party. A substratum of “Anglo-Gaullism” is now concentrated among the Left’s self-proclaimed realists, hawking a message of salvation-through-defense spending, with rearmament presented as a catalyst for national renewal.

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Already last year, the government’s Defense Industrial Strategy promised military spending would become an “engine for growth”, creating a “strong industrial base” and a “defense dividend” for “every nation and region”. Starmerism’s media outriders have demanded a “new political economy of defense” that integrates “Labour’s goals of economic, social and climate justice”. A defense-industrial “securonomics” will, they claim, reindustrialize Britain’s left-behind regions. If Glubb Pasha’s British Monroe Doctrine is no longer available, at least the hardware of defense-industrial capability can be restored, not least as it offers the kind of secure manufacturing work that makes nostalgic Labourites dewy-eyed.

The Iran War has turbocharged this new thinking, which sees war-like preparedness as the panacea for a policy trilemma: the solution to low growth, persistent regional inequality, and our newfound irrelevance on the global stage. Learned essays in the house journal of Labourism have lamented the unsustainability of the welfare bill, while bemoaning a Treasury orthodoxy for which “reindustrialization through defense spending will never meet a value-for-money test”. The argument has found fertile ground among Blue Labour types, with Maurice Glasman declaring upon the invasion of Ukraine that the return of war to Europe’s periphery “has given us the possibility of an industrial strategy”.

As far as it goes, this argument is appealingly simple. As the transatlantic alliance falters, now is the time to reallocate capital away from the benefits bill — and towards gleaming new arms factories, cyber war labs, drone swarms, frigates and the new domain of space. The New Jerusalem, in short, will be built with a bomb factory in every drab provincial town.

But the new military Keynesianism is based on a delusion. It refuses to confront the fact that defense spending is, in strictly economic terms, one of the very worst ways to promote broad industrial rejuvenation. The growth multipliers are weak and the long-term productivity gains are non-existent. Unlike, say, investment in large-scale capital projects, building things, creating new fixed assets in energy, transport or digital infrastructure, there’s little diffusion of defense spending through the wider economy. While the construction of new roads, power stations or tram networks might provide decades of cheaper inputs, rearmament has a severe opportunity cost. An arms factory might create demand for steel and provide jobs for workers in much the same way as a high-speed rail link — but the former produces few positive spillovers, while the latter can regenerate whole regions. Rather than building the lifeblood of work, jobs and economic activity for the next century, in short, this khaki-clad Keynesianism sacrifices domestic prosperity for a real or perceived threat from without, or else because of an illusory attachment to the idea of Britain as a “global player”.

In truth, building and maintaining a world-class military exists downstream of a serious level of industrial capacity that Britain now sorely lacks. In the days of Bevin and Glubb, Britain built over half the world’s exported cars. Today it’s around 4%. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the UK was second only to the US in its steel production. Today, it manufactures less than Iran and Brazil, not enough to satisfy even half our own national demand. For all Labour’s rhetoric about a manufacturing renaissance, we simply don’t have the basic foundations of a durable industrial ecosystem: steel production; petrochemicals; plastics and advanced materials; energy independence and abundance; and a self-reliant productive base that isn’t subject to the whims of international oil shocks or geopolitical wrangling.

Each, in turn, has been allowed to atrophy. Against this backdrop, the notion that Britain can will itself back into great-power status through defense investment alone is incoherent at best and fanciful at worst. You simply can’t build a credible military in an industrial void, and military spending is a terrible option for closing our yawning productivity gaps. If the opposite had been true, the Soviet Union would have been buoyed by the Politburo’s excessive commitment to the Cold War arms race — rather than brought low by system-wide sclerosis.

Bevin’s Britain was able to take a seat at the Potsdam conference as a global military superpower because postwar Britain was a great industrial exporter, not vice versa. Today, by contrast, we are a country disastrously unsuited to a deglobalizing, dog-eat-dog, protectionist age of competitive national production; a poor country by OECD standards, with Eastern European levels of GDP in some regions, but with a rich capital city that distorts our more dismal averages. If resilience is the watchword of our age, it is surely economic, not military, resilience that should take priority. This is a country facing its second major energy shock in less than a decade, and without any significant per-capita growth in the last two.

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Then arises the question of which war we are preparing for: a counter-insurgency; a neo-imperial intervention in the Gulf; a standoff with China in Taiwan; or a continental land war with Russia? Given the parlous state of procurement at the Ministry of Defense, are we to spend billions building yet more faulty hardware? Will we make the common mistake of every general, fighting the last war, building old-fashioned ships that can be destroyed by a naval drone costing a few thousand dollars in an age of asymmetric warfare?

If the principal threat today comes from Putin’s revanchist nationalism, it will be up to the new military Keynesians to explain why Britain must stomach yet more years of belt-tightening to prepare for war with a country that has failed to occupy even the Russian-speaking territories of a poor, dysfunctional, non-Nato country in which many voters habitually plumped for Russophile oligarchs. Having turned its nation into a pariah, and almost suffering a palace coup after attacking perhaps the most propitious place on Earth for a Russian invasion, is the Kremlin really about to attack Nato? That uncertainty is shadowed by the societal challenge here at home. In the dilapidated high streets of Britain’s regions, it is doubtful whether a beleaguered public see our capacity for military deployment, let alone the protection of some far-off military base, as an urgent daily concern.

Rather than busying ourselves with the dead end of Gaullist posturing, in short, perhaps we should start thinking of ourselves as the developing country that, in many ways, we so obviously are. Certainly, financial analysts have already begun tempering their investments in Britain, a country now displaying the dysfunctional features of an “emerging market”. Rather than Anglo-Gaullism, then, surely a far better model is Anglo-Dengism. Echoing the Chinese example, Britain today should look inwards, focus on problems closer to home, build, develop, reform, innovate, and Make Britain Rich Again, before finally concerning ourselves with the global status games beloved of men-of-a-certain-age who played too much Risk as a child.

As the pro-market reformers of the Chinese Communist Party understood, following the privations of three decades of peasant communism, to project yourself abroad, you must “hide your strength, bide your time”. Before sending aircraft carriers to reopen faraway straits or threatening foreign regime, we must first become a country capable of raising real wages and living standards for our own British citizens.

Ernest Bevin once demanded a nuclear bomb “with a bloody Union Jack on top of it!”. The Anglo-Gaullists fancy themselves his heirs. But Bevin — and Glubb before him — knew that power had to be consistently built at home before it could be brandished abroad. Today, we are attempting a reverse Bevin: indulging in a fantasy of power without the necessary foundations, painting the flag onto imaginary weapons we no longer have the means to sustain.

Most importantly, this new “crypto” would be decentralized. Transactions would remain anonymous, carried out directly and without intermediaries, between digital wallets across the world. And while advanced liberal democracies were busy printing money and injecting it into an insolvent banking system via quantitative easing, the total amount of Bitcoins would always be limited to a hard cap of 21 million. Where over-spending governments could stimulate hyperinflationary spirals, the new software would act as a “digital gold”, strictly rationing tokens to “miners” who used their computer processing power to create new Bitcoins.

In the midst of a financial crisis unmatched since the Wall Street Crash, a new techno-utopian movement was born. And it’s perhaps no surprise that Nigel Farage became an evangelist. An instinctive iconoclast, the Reform leader is temperamentally attracted to anything that’ll shake up our fusty old institutions. At a crypto conference last year, he told delegates he was “your champion”, promising to “bring crypto in from the cold”.

Lately, though, Farage has gone from fanboy to investor, putting £215,000 into a crypto startup headed by the former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng (of mini-budget and Trussonomics fame). Kwarteng quickly claimed that the Farage link would help his firm gain “institutional credability” (sic), a useful asset in a crypto world that remains murky, unregulated, and dogged by associations with tax avoidance and money laundering.

Quite apart from his general enthusiasm for crypto, this isn’t Farage’s first foray into unorthodox financial schemes. A former City metals trader, he’s spent years touting the benefits of commodities investments as part of his partnerships with Fortune and Freedom, a financial advice outfit, as well as doing ads for something called Direct Bullion.

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With Farage now getting more involved in the crypto game, advocates doubtless hope their man will help Bitcoin disrupt finance just as he did British politics. Or, if we believe the naysayers, the crypto craze is a symbol of our intellectually decrepit age, a modern-day Tulip bubble inflated either by the dangerous or deluded, eager to sell assets with no underlying value beyond providing dark web services and anonymity for illicit activity. In this reading, the flow of money into Bitcoin and other digital currencies is less a sign of frontier innovation and more an emblem of our era: a damning indictment of the decline of productive, patient, long-term investment in favor of speculative gambles in unproductive assets.

Ultimately, though, Farage’s enthusiasm for cryptocurrency exists at the intersection between grift, personal self-enrichment, and an inchoate political ideology. Nor, of course, is he alone here. Bitcoin and the broader crypto phenomenon has become indelibly associated with the populist Right, from Javier Milei in Argentina to Marine Le Pen in France, who lately performed a screeching U-turn on her party’s opposition to what she once called a tool of the “ruling elite”. For his part, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele instructed his fellow citizens that businesses large and small must accept Bitcoin as legal tender. Farage has promised he’ll let people pay taxes using crypto, and has committed to setting up a sovereign wealth fund of digital currency assets.

If a vague libertarianism is part of the appeal here, there are other draws too. “Drain the swamp” was the rallying cry of Donald Trump, who netted a large fortune through the launch of his own crypto memecoin on the eve of his second presidency. The slogan most obviously referred to Washington’s insider networks, the liberal think tankers, corporate lobbyists and the captured elites in the Republican old guard. But it might just as well have been aimed at MAGA’s other adversary: the finance capital establishment, whose donations allowed Kamala Harris to outspend Trump by three-to-one in 2024.

Wall Street’s cliques sit atop the apex of the world’s dollar-denominated reserve system. They may have been tempted by Trumpian tax cuts, but not at the expense of losing those most valuable of commodities: predictability, stability, and borderless, frictionless open markets. Then there’s the Federal Reserve top brass, who Trump has wasted no time in attacking once back in the White House, not for their money-printing splurges, but for their parsimony, and their refusal to run the economy on hot at the President’s behest.

The crypto world serves as a strange mirror to the traditional Wall Street-Fed nexus. It’s the wayward brother, the rebellious trustafarian that nonetheless remains committed to sharing in the outputs of an over-financialized service economy, reliant on the proceeds of what Marx liked to call “fictitious capital”. The embrace of the technology by an ascendant Right-populist wave reveals an emptiness and superficiality at the heart of their projects. These are Janus-faced movements. On the one hand they feed off popular resentment at the ruling classes  — the deracinated, ultra-rich “citizens of nowhere”  — and instead promise nationalist, patriotic revivals. Yet all the while, they advocate for the further entrenchment of an unrestricted, borderless world, one facilitated by new financial technologies.

The collapse of the postwar Bretton Woods system, over half a century ago, preceded a new phase of globalization, with the expansion of consumer credit and financialization replacing industrial exports as the engines of the global economy. But whatever they might imply, the populists don’t propose to reverse these trends. Rather, they want to deepen them, with the further sublimation of national boundaries and the coherent economies they imply for digitized, globalized transactions. They rail against a globalist elite while promoting a technology that facilitates and smooths global economic integration. They promise to halt national decline while actively boosting digital assets — assets that undermine the capacity of nation-states to fully control their own fiscal and monetary destinies.

For Farage, then, this is less “Take Back Control”, and more “Cede More Control” — to software that has an anti-statist, anti-national ethos embedded into its very code. All the while, crypto involves not the replacement of globalized capitalism, but merely its rejuvenation. And how will this be achieved? By pushing deregulation-on-steroids, turbocharged market liberalism without the mediating forces of the Federal Reserve to shore it up. That’s what’s at the very heart of the crypto phenomenon: the desire for a peer-to-peer currency functioning without the oversight of banks, legislators or indeed law enforcement. And, again, this isn’t so surprising. Faragism has always focused its ire on the free movement of people, of labor, while the transnational nature of capital mobility was taken as a given, or even an unalloyed good. And what all this shows, under proper scrutiny, is that the most mainstream of populisms can operate as a vehicle for intra-elite, rather than anti-elite, competition.

In Reform’s case, meanwhile, its leader’s crypto moment also speaks to a profound identity crisis. Yes, the party wants to stop small-boat crossings. Yet as Nigel began growing his collection of failed Tory ministers, his outfit has lost its outsider edge. We saw another symptom of its ideological confusion in its flip-flopping over Iran: should it remain attached to Trump’s transnational ambitions at all costs, or should it focus on the blunt economic fears of voters back in Britain.

All the while, the party is caught between pledges of reviving industry, rebuilding state capacity, and reorienting the economy towards manufacturing on the one hand — and its roots in the free-market, Austrian School dreams of City-based eccentrics on the other. In a world of burgeoning protectionism, and massive state-capitalist subsidies and aggressive mercantilism practiced by both the Americans and Beijing, the idea of reconciling both approaches is a fantasy. Industrial revival will require an active, agile state that shapes and directs market forces towards strategic, long-term goals.

Perhaps most of all, though, Farage’s crypto mania looks out of step with the times. Where the promise of bitcoin was a future of prosperity driven immaterially, with newfound wealth accrued in the digital ether, conflict in the Gulf reminds us of the centrality of hard goods: energy, steel, secure trading routes, and military-industrial capacity. In a world returning to the politics of production, Farage’s crypto evangelism feels less like a rebellion than strange nostalgia for a fading, borderless age.

And yet, according to reports leaked from Labour’s National Security Council (NSC) this week, Miliband was crucial in preventing Keir Starmer from deeper embroilment in Trump’s Iran war. Far from appealing to an idealized, imagined Britain, one full of Ottolenghi-loving Fabian podcasters and policy wonks, that position leaves him closer to the public than most of the British Right. Both Reform and the Tories have either sycophantically embraced MAGA militarism, as an American client faction attached to the body politic, or else indulged in forlorn nostalgia for a prelapsarian imperial age.

Conservative commentators and politicians bemoan our inability to project power and state capacities on the world stage, demanding a reassertion of military prowess even as industry, services and the social fabric continues its inexorable decline at home. They live in a parallel dream world; the idea that there exists any latent jingoistic desire among Britons to sacrifice limited butter for inconsequential guns is as delusional as any ivory tower Left-liberalism.

Apparently Miliband’s cabinet interventions on Iran were “petulant, pacifist, legalistic and very political” — strongly reminiscent of his attitude in 2013, when he urged parliament to block UK military action against then Syrian President, Bashar al Assad. To which the only rational response can be: thank God. The Americans may not be happy (“This is not Winston Churchill we’re dealing with,” an irritated Trump told the White House press corps). But, thanks to the insistence of Red Ed, history may yet absolve the prime minister in what proves to be his finest hour, particularly in the not-unlikely scenarios that the Islamic Republic endures, re-radicalizes, or else descends into anarchy — with all the stagflationary pressures and refugee flows that implies.

To be sure, Starmer’s characteristically stiff reaction to the violence seems perfectly calibrated to alienate all sides. His sclerotic legalism has put off advocates of intervention who decry the Government’s initial hesitance in allowing US use of British bases, while opponents baulk at the subsequent U-turn giving the green light for operations to defend Gulf states from Iranian missiles. But the outcome of the NSC meeting shows where the Labour leader is politically: in his post-McSweeney and post-Gorton era, with the pivot-to-Reform strategy roundly discredited, he is a puppet of the party’s resurgent progressive forces.

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There’s little doubt that Miliband is enjoying an extended second wind in his political life. Milibandism 1.0 was an amorphous thing, bound by the residues of New Labour and the orthodoxies of the period. Post-financial crisis populism was still in its infancy, the Overton window was narrower, and any antagonism towards the post-Thatcherite settlement had to be couched in conciliatory language. A Labour figure once remarked that the Corbynite 2017 manifesto was “basically the programme Miliband would have loved to have presented” to the country — with all its paeans to nationalization, regional investment banks and the recreation of postwar social democracy updated for the 21st century.

In the end, though, Miliband was bound by Brownite instincts and the curse of his insiderism, unable to see the appeal of promises of totalizing, systemic change. Perhaps that’s why he was always something proto-Starmerite in his awkward adoption of the rhetoric of faith, family, flag. In the wake of Emily Thornberry’s St George’s Cross furore, the Labour leader told us he felt “respect” when he saw a white van. The problem wasn’t so much the odd phrasing or sentiment, but rather the dissonance between Miliband’s words and his party’s palpable disdain for overt displays of plebeian nationalism in the provinces. The issue typified his and his party’s estrangement from what might have once been their natural base of lower-paid, non-university-educated voters.

Yet Miliband’s stint as leader of the opposition also included heavy flirtations with Blue Labour: it was Miliband who ennobled Maurice Glasman, and appointed another of its thinkers, Jon Cruddas, as policy co-ordinator; it was Ed again who earned the ire of the activistocracy by stamping “controls on immigration” onto a campaign mug.

For all its faults, then, Milibandism 1.0 at least attempted to shore up the marriage between the Hampstead intellectuals and the working class that constituted the unsteady coalition of the post-Blair Labour party. It’s only in its later guise that Milibandism has become so unabashedly associated with Labour’s soft Left — the woolly, liminal space between the ultra-Atlanticist and pro-American Blairite Right, and the niche “anti-imperialist” causes and foreign guerrilla fetishism of the Corbynites. But as the cabinet doyen of that loose band, Miliband may this week have acted as the country’s foremost Left sovereigntist, a “Britain First” Left patriot, as uninterested in dissolving the country’s capabilities into the arsenal of a mercurial Washington hegemon as he was back in 2013.

Of course, it is his departmental role, rather than his non-interventionist foreign policy, that has defined Milibandism 2.0, with a more self-confident, assured performer emerging from his 2015 election loss. His name has become synonymous with the Government’s mission to decarbonize the energy grid by 2030, and as a result Miliband himself has become the whipping boy for a Right which has broken with the once-tight net zero consensus. Preventing new drilling and exploration on British territory, even as we continue to depend on volatile imports from abroad, is pure magical thinking, sacrificing pragmatism in the interests of His Majesty’s Treasury and the British balance of payments for the kind of idealistic virtue signaling so familiar to Milibandism’s core milieu.

But, he would respond, in pushing the transition to renewables so mercilessly, Miliband is in fact attempting to assert “energy independence” with “home grown” clean energy — reducing our reliance on unreliable and expensive imported sources. This isn’t a position shared by many energy economists, and it does little to assuage fears that our green transition is coinciding with the decimation of heavy industry and a rise in industrial energy costs, while new grid technology and infrastructure are sourced largely from China and Denmark. Yet whatever the problems of actually-existing Milibandism, he at least remains one of the cabinet’s few doers: his project may be incongruent with our new age of Great Power resource competition, but it is being pursued consistently, and with more alacrity than any other of the Government’s scattergun agendas.

So even if they disagree with him — whether on Iran or North Sea oil — the Right would do well to take Miliband seriously. After all, there is surely space in British politics for a sovereigntist, anti-globalist conservatism. Post-Brexit, in a deglobalizing world, that would entail the pursuit of an independent foreign policy, and a relentless focus on domestic British interests, transforming our cumbersome state into an agile, interventionist market-shaper, rebuilding industry and state capacity towards creating a more cohesive, resilient and national economy. An appetite for foreign adventurism would give way to the hard-headed realism necessitated by our status as a middle power with limited resources. The desperate maintenance of an illusory “special relationship” would give way to genuine self-reliance, and a fluid engagement with a changing world in our own interests. High welfare and high migration would be eschewed for high investment and renewed national infrastructure.

It appeared, for a moment, that this kind of Anglo-Gaullism might be the future of Reform, with its nods towards industrial policy and a renaissance of manufacturing capital. But, instead, the kneejerk Americanization of Right politics continues apace, sticking to a capricious White House like a limpet. Today, it is the Right that wishes to govern a country that doesn’t exist. And, in this context, it will be for flawed but ascendant Milibandism to reassert some shaky version of national sovereignty.

Despite Labour’s propagandizing that the result was on a knife-edge, and the polls suggesting a three way split between the Greens, Labour and Reform, it wasn’t even close: Spencer won 60% more votes than the hapless Labourite Angeliki Stogia. Reform was a distant second to Labour’s disastrous third. (The Tories didn’t even keep their deposit.) Yet this was never Farage-friendly territory: too young, too inner-urban, too diverse. It was not Matt Goodwin’s to lose. But the ruling party has been cannibalized from two directions in a safe seat, its coalition riven in a way that defies repair.

Divorces are rarely amicable. This one least of all. Labour’s fractured base is represented perfectly across this Mancunian constituency. In Denton, to the east, the old, now very much post-industrial white working-class; and to the west, in Gorton, the Muslim and ethnic minority vote, living cheek-by-jowl with the declassé elements of Britain’s urban liberals. Here was the tripartite alliance of the contemporary Left in all its glory, fused together awkwardly just like the constituency itself, with a motorway in the middle. Labour has not lost an election here since 1931. Yet today, each of its tribes has found its own reasons to despise Starmer’s Labour: a project that was never comfortable in its own skin.

Perhaps it needn’t have been this way. When candidate selection for the by-election took place in the distant days of Morgan McSweeney, the party saw fit to block Andy Burnham — a man pollsters have consistently shown to be the most popular Labour politician in the country. Someone who might have united the disparate factions. But despite the Mayor of Greater Manchester’s epic support in the area, he was blocked from running to “end the leadership psychodrama”. The humiliated party may regret that move as Starmer, in the coming days, shifts from “dead-man-walking”, staggering on until May, to simply “dead man”.

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Labour has presented voters with a heaving table of grievances from which they’ve filled their plates: Palestine, small boats, winter fuel, Shabana Mahmood’s punitive asylum proposals, proposed disability cuts, the cost of living, Labour’s repeated tendency to excuse proximity to paedophilia on the part of their factional allies. Each of these might have been carefully designed to alienate a completely different member of the famous “the Labour family”. And so the party is being consumed like the spaghetti in Lady and the Tramp.

There will, of course, be no kiss between Reform and the Greens when they reach the middle: the space between Faragism and Polanskism is a cultural chasm. Once the Labour family was united under a social-democratic banner. Now, two sides face each other with a mix of bemusement and horror. The Greens have proved they can hegemonize the Left vote, and Reform the Right, each offering a brand of unapologetic, insurgent, abrasive politics that eschews the old model of median-voter triangulation in favor of brash authenticity.

And what can tired old Labour do, an Edwardian party saddled with a late-20th-century politics, facing the archetypal entrepreneurs of our peculiar age: the unfiltered, un-focus-grouped model of political communications delivered in short-form vertical videos by men-with-an-iPhone without the mediating influence of the “MSM”. Farage mastered the medium, Polanski has merely tweaked the message — ditch and switch the easy panaceas; mass deportations become a wealth tax; net zero goes from national self-harm to national salvation. In Gorton, if not Denton, this noisy brand of “eco-populism” has been brilliantly effective.

Yesterday, on the ground, Green activists seemed ubiquitous. Levenshulme was a sea of Vote Green posters. A swarm of young enthusiasts asked for cars to honk in support outside the Lidl. Next door, an Afghan flag flapped outside a newsagent. Residents walked down a high street as diverse as any London borough, while a Labour van blared a warning that the Green Party would “teach our children to use drugs including crack and heroin and let our daughters be used for prostitution”. Dirty tricks, perhaps, or simply an exaggerated reflection of the ecologists’ foray into an extreme form of Left libertarianism at odds with the socially conservative instincts of Gorton’s Muslims?

The Green bloc marries ultra-liberal young gentrifiers to often deeply conservative British South Asians. But these quirks — even amid claims of “family voting” breaches in polling stations — don’t matter right now. What matters is vibes, signals and the loose cadences of political affiliation. As the cause of labor has wilted, the bobos and the brothers can get behind the cause of Gaza. The Greens have now staked their claim to the mantle of Britain’s foremost progressive party, with their first seat in the North, in a safe red citadel, trouncing Labour’s always-dubious claim that “only Labour can beat Reform”. Labour is no longer the “stop Reform” tactical option in our fragmenting system. They weren’t in Caerphilly last year, and they weren’t in Gorton and Denton last night. For the Greens now find themselves the acceptable home for the virtuous, the over-educated, the bien pensant opinion-havers. They’re the nice party, for nice people, not the génocidaires or crypto-fascists (notwithstanding the internal tensions over the trans question). “I think everyone should have a nice life, and clearly other people do as well”, Spencer said during her victory speech. That may as well be used as the next manifesto’s epigraph.

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Just before the polls closed yesterday, I found a disgruntled Labour member from outside the constituency. They were despondent. Who would they have voted for if they lived in the area? “Green, obviously. I’m not a monster”, they say with a self-deprecating laugh. It’s a reaction instructive of many people’s complicated relationship with their own party: they stay only out of habit, pining after a Reformation of Labour’s “broad church” that may now never come.

When the historian George Dangerfield wrote his interwar classic, The Strange Death of Liberal England, he blamed the decline of the once-great Liberal Party on “three wild strands”: “hysterical” proto-feminists, demanding women’s suffrage; “unreasonable” organized labor, demanding a greater share of the national income; and the Irish, demanding Home Rule. Today, with Labour seemingly in its death throes, the party established to represent the labor interest faces its own three strands of rebellion: problems far more structural than the Suffragettes or John Redmond.

The working class no longer has the manufacturing industries or trade unions that bound it so tightly to Labour politics, even as they balk at the repeated importation of low-wage workers from abroad. The educated middle classes find their children locked out of the housing market with stagnant wages, and are wedded to the mores of very online contemporary cultural progressivism. And, finally, the biraderi culture that once guaranteed wins for Labour, with its tight ethnic and clan-based voter-blocs, has broken down. The tripartite Left alliance is over.

Perhaps social democracy was merely a 20th-century phenomenon, a force for the era of mass production lines, trade unions and the Cold War. Starmer certainly can’t save what’s left of it, and Gorton and Denton makes it uncertain that even a politician with skills, charisma, and determined force of will can either. No contenders on the Labour benches have the communicative abilities or political dexterity to put a broken cross-class alliance together. Hannah Spencer might cheer that “we do things differently” in Manchester — but this city’s future could soon be the country’s too, with the death of Labour England writ large.

We rely on the developmentalist economies of the Far East for our manufactured goods, on the Norwegians for our oil and gas-powered energy, on Europe for our food, Wall Street for our payments systems, Silicon Valley for our digital worlds, and on a diverse caste of cheap, subaltern labor to staff our care homes, serve us coffee, clean our offices, and deliver our meals. In light of the recent outbursts from a mercurial White House, British bank bosses have begun to plan for an alternative to the US’s Visa and Mastercard systems. And not a moment too soon: when the President threatened a Nato ally with annexation last month, all we could offer was bland platitudes, a humiliating prostration before hard power.

Even those few sectors in which we do excel — the consultancies, and the legal and financial services that we still export to the world — seem designed for a softer-edged era. Like Tony Blair himself, the “knowledge economy” was the future once, or so we were told. The real value was created through the immaterial labor practiced in the metropoles. Globalization was non-negotiable; “you might as well debate over whether autumn should follow summer”, in the words of its leading evangelist, and Britain would ride the wave, prospering at the cutting edge of international bullshit artistry. Once the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution has surrendered its economic autonomy to the whims of global finance capital, there’s nothing left to do but turn the art of corporate jargon and consultant-sophistry into its unique specialism — right before the glossy reports and PowerPoints are automated by AI.

But now the tide hasn’t so much gone out as receded past the horizon. Not only is automation coming for the white-collar service class, but the transatlantic alliance is more frayed than in its whole history. The “normal” of liberal-technocratic triumphalism looks like a one-time-only blip, a bubble punctured by the collapse of Lehman, its final illusions extinguished by Covid-19. A world of Great Power rivalry has returned — the Americans proving Lord Palmerston’s old maxim that there are “no eternal allies or perpetual enemies, only eternal interests”, and judging that it is not in Washington’s eternal interests to simultaneously confront the rising giant of Beijing while being locked into conflict with Russia on a declining continent that cannot defend its own peripheries.

And so, a political consensus is forming: we must reindustrialize. We must rebuild our national productive capacities. Without a solid manufacturing base, we are dangerously exposed in a hostile world of geopolitical contestation. In his first speech as the putative “shadow chancellor” this week, Robert Jenrick told us that Reform would “restore our proud industrial heritage and create good jobs for British workers once again”. “We do believe in industrial strategy”, he assured any listeners confused by his about-turn away from the party of the sovereign individual and free and open markets.

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In this, Jenrick is only echoing his leader Nigel Farage, a man who Maurice Glasman once described as “a saloon-bar Thatcherite”, but who has now taken to floating the idea of public ownership and equity stakes in British engineering firms, lamenting the loss of “shipbuilding, cement making, chemicals, steel”. “It’s all gone off to India and China”, he says, articulating all the cultural-political sovereigntist themes of post-industrial Britain — lost identity, lost purpose, lost control. Yet all those on-the-ground resentments are ultimately the result of conscious macroeconomic decisions on the part of the monetarists: a strong sterling is a boon for the City but blows a hole in the UK’s balance of trade that can only be filled by constant rounds of inward foreign investment; the unedifying and unending ritual of flogging the family silver, until every old family firm and former national champion is in the portfolio of a Gulf state.

Gone are those days, Farage and Jenrick promise. Instead, Reform will pursue something called the “politics of national preference”, at least according to one of the party’s ideological gurus, James Orr, the national-conservative theologian and disciple of the patrician, communitarian Toryism of Roger Scruton.

And if all of this sounds familiar, that might be because it echoes the lines of our current party of government. Chancellor Rachel Reeves promised to “make, sell and buy more in Britain”. Her economic philosophy would be rooted in “securonomics”: the doctrine of maximized efficiency would give way to the new watchword of resilience, and the local, national provenance of goods would be prioritized over their price. If Thatcher’s heirs have seen the writing on the wall, the second-generation of Blairism have too: a country that makes things, that has a trade surplus in goods, will fare better in an age of chaotic, global fragmentation.

Yet if we’re heavy on the diagnostics, we’re light on the prescription. Jenrick might position his vision as a “new political economy”, but nothing that’s so far been proposed will go any further towards “reindustrialization” than Reeves’ defunct “securonomics”. The latter was, more-or-less, dead on arrival, always to be sacrificed on the altar of the Labour leadership’s innate caution and overdue respect for established procedures. It is not in the nature of the apolitical, robotic meeting-chair-in-chief to challenge any of the orthodoxies repeated from the mouths of a recalcitrant, Treasury-brained senior civil servant, let alone the Confederation of British Industry.

To be fair, Jenrick’s “new political economy” differs from Labour’s take on industrial renaissance in one crucial respect. For Reform, the net-zero project is the primary blockage to the resuscitation of heavy manufacturing, particularly in high-carbon, energy-intensive sectors being crushed under the weight of subsidized renewables and grid costs. For Labour, the green transition is the exact opposite: the catalyst for the transformation of the British economy. In place of the dark Satanic mills of Victorian industry, and the monotowns of Fordist mass production, the new industrial revolution will restore England’s reputation as a green and pleasant land, a global leader in wind power with a sideline in batteries, solar cells and nuclear energy.

Both parties are peddling a fantasy. The seeds of deindustrialization were sown long before decarbonization became a uniparty dogma. The loss of much of Britain’s heavy industry took place even as we were net energy exporters. Besides, the Chinese economic miracle was built on more than cheap coal. The aggressive industrial policy contained in the Communist Party’s Made in China 2025  has transformed the country from the world’s sweatshop into a high-tech center of advanced manufacturing, with massive, state-directed investment into highly competitive, strategic and innovative sectors, complementing a long-term policy of strict capital controls, high tariff walls, and a central bank that militantly supports investment-led growth. That’s reflected in Chinese exports: no more the crowded production lines of cliche, with the PRC instead becoming a global leader in high-tech sectors, robotics and AI.

In response, the US first mobilized debt-financed subsidies to “reshore” jobs to the American Rust Belt. “Bidenomics”, as it was called, attempted to lure back manufacturers in high-tech sectors by handing them taxpayer bungs. The results were mixed. Hundreds of billions were spent, but restive voters rewarded the Democrats by electing Donald Trump. The irony, of course, is that Trump has continued with the same “decoupling” strategy pursued by his predecessor, along the way hiding American industry behind a new and belligerent protectionism. That has now been hampered by the strength of the US constitution’s separation of powers, and a Supreme Court ruling that the President’s Liberation Day and subsequent tariffs are unconstitutional. Nevertheless, the idea that the UK, in this international context, could start a new industrial revolution simply by abandoning net zero targets is risible. Another latter-day Reformer Suella Bravermen might want us to believe she has undergone a Damascene conversion to Reform’s apparent “socialism” with a Faragist face, but Jenrick’s desire to demonstrate subservience to the strictures of the OBR and its originator George Osborne precludes any radical rupture with decades of economic failure.

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Meanwhile, Labour’s positioning of net zero as a catalyst for industrial growth is equally a chimera — our expensive adoption of renewables is destroying the margins of what remains of heavy industry while propping up Scandinavian social democracy and Chinese developmentalism via the rapid import of Danish wind turbines and Chinese solar cells and electric vehicles. All of this while our reliance on Norwegian and US shale gas continues unabated. As with many of the thin promises of Starmerism, “securonomics” has never been translated from rhetoric to reality.

And so Britain remains buffeted by forces beyond its control, unwilling or unable to reassert itself. A genuine plan for national sovereignty would combine the dynamism of markets with the strategic direction that can only be provided by an agile, active state, one willing to do away with shibboleths that were built for a bygone world. In practice, yes, that means driving down energy costs as a matter of priority, but also supporting capital spending with unified fiscal and monetary policy. Primary budget surpluses would maintain market confidence while extra borrowing for long-term, pro-growth capital projects could be facilitated by a reformed Bank of England. The deep pools of capital in the nation’s pension pots could be re-domesticated and mobilized towards infrastructure and industrial investment.

This would be shadowed by other changes. For one thing, chancellors would set budgets that move us away from short-term cash transfers and, again, towards long-term investments. Welfare and pensions bills would be brought under control, moving from means-tested to contributory systems, while the tax revenue burden would shift away from work and patient, productive capital, and towards rent-seeking, unproductive assets, land, and real estate.

Core to this project would be an empowered executive, with a restoration of ministerial authority unencumbered by unaccountable bureaucracies, or an activist judiciary, and unafraid of disciplining and managing footloose capital to direct it towards strategic goals. The era of free movement of capital, labor, goods and services is giving way to one in which nations prosper with enforced capital controls, tariffs and an industrial policy that maintains a strictly national economy. Here, the success of the national payments system will be instructive. But resilience on other spheres should follow. The government last year intervened to rescue domestic steel-making capacity in Scunthorpe, and has since made noises about defense-industrial rejuvenation as a fulcrum for manufacturing revival. But signs that they can turn words and sentiment into concrete action are few; the future will belong to those states that act, that “just do things”, not those paralyzed by their own ideological quietism.

Nations, like Buffet’s investors, are truly tested when the tide goes out. It’s only now, in an age of tumult, that we discover that our embrace of hyper-globalization depended on geopolitical conditions that no longer exist. We bred over-dependency, and are now learning that true strategic autonomy is far harder to rebuild than it was to sell off to the highest bidder.

But Morgan McSweeney was meant to be different. His driving motivation was to pursue a relentless courtship with the median voter. It was a strategy, though, that won him plenty of enemies, not least within the Parliamentary Labour Party. Labour MPs, in the main, did not get into politics to cut welfare, or to legislate punitive measures against migrants. If the old-fashioned class struggle has long ago ebbed, it has been replaced within Labour by a stalwart commitment to redistribution via post-hoc benefit payments, combined with a liberal-progressive social outlook. McSweeney’s project cut directly against this, and they hated him for it. This is, after all, an organization crowded with heady idealists who see any modicum of compromise as betrayal. And after enduring 18 months of uncertainty, U-turns and attempts at appeasement, they got what they wanted. The Mandelson Affair was their coup de grâce.

The Prime Minister remains, for now. But without the architect of his political ascent by his side, Starmer finds himself hamstrung at a moment of great political danger. The Intelligence and Security Committee is set to release yet more correspondence; who knows who will be compromised. The Gorton and Denton by-election is around the corner; it risks being catastrophic. And then there will inevitably be a Labour wipeout in the May locals. The PLP is restive and mutinous; rivals are gathering. Angela Rayner is coiffed and poised, waiting for closure on her tax affairs from HMRC; Andy Burnham is watching from the sidelines, nursing his grievance and ambition. Starmer, a process man by instinct, might even fall on his sword in mortification. However, it wouldn’t take much to see him off: just some well-timed ministerial resignations, or a solemn, plaintive visit from cabinet colleagues: “Thank you, Keir, but it’s time to go.”

In any case, with his personal polling in as dire a state as Liz Truss’s, a leadership battle sooner or later is near-inevitable. The question is when, not if. Starmer’s dwindling band of allies may be furiously briefing that the ever-orthodox and fiscally moderate Prime Minister is the only thing preventing financial cataclysm — a Labourite update of “après moi, le déluge”. But make no mistake, they will soon be the ancien régime.

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For now, though, he clings on, an uncharismatic, unpopular Prime Minister tethered to a thin and uncertain policy agenda. And when a government cannot articulate a clear purpose, it relinquishes political momentum, battered by storms and scandal, without the respite of a driving agenda to return to in times of calm. As a result, a two-pronged populist insurgency is drawing in voters from the Left to Zack Polanski’s Greens, and from the Right to the Faragists. So much for Starmerism, which was meant to restore common sense to the forefront of politics. It was meant to “tread a little lighter on people’s lives”, eschewing ideology for pragmatism. The Sensibles were back in charge, and McSweeney would maintain his voter coalition by breaking all the party’s taboos on the issues of the day — appealing steadfastly to voters rather than to the concerns of the progressive activist class. But instead, it fatally ignored the complications and deeper tensions within Labour’s electoral coalition.

McSweeney, then, spent his time in Downing Street dragging Labour away from its comfort zones: here was an iconoclast, determined to smash all the right-on pieties and shibboleths come-what-may. The intended audience wasn’t Westminster’s bleeding hearts, the Polly Toynbees, or Europhile citizens of anywhere. McSweeney focused on the “hero voters” of the UK’s marginals — those who had backed Boris and Leave, perhaps, but who had swung behind a changed Labour Party in 2024. Or so the theory went. Keir Starmer owed him his election victory, and if he had allowed McSweeney to set the electoral strategy, then why not allow him to define the governing strategy, too?

It has been a disaster. Once in power, Labour immediately started to shed support. The policy mix has been scattered, the rhetorical framing fitful. Cumulatively, titbits of ad-hoc, piecemeal reforms, many of them abandoned after public or parliamentary backlash, appear less as well-planned, median-voter catnip, more like policy calibrated to alienate every disparate section of the electorate. The harsher, anti-migrant rhetoric repulses the activistocracy, while doing nothing to attract Reform voters who can watch footage of small boat arrivals and asylum hotel protests every lunchtime on TikTok; the Net Zero project pushes away the populist Right without keeping on board the younger, green-tinged demographic, many of whom believe the Labour leadership is now complicit in the Gaza genocide; an asylum and migration crackdown horrifies the migrant communities and Labour-voting cosmopolitan professionals, but reassures few if any of McSweeney’s hallowed “hero voters”, who will never be convinced by the superficial patriotism of a leadership so viscerally associated with metropolitan liberalism.

To govern is to choose — and lacking a guiding philosophy, Starmer has instead established policy inquiries, committees, reviews and taskforces, to avoid decision-making. He recoils at political conversation and regards ideological chatter with disdain. He thought he could leave the politics to his chief of staff, but it was only a certain type of politics that the Irishman excelled in: McSweeney is the consummate party machine man, an expert bureaucratic fixer and internal faction fighter who knows how to read polls and interpret. The ruthless efficiency with which Labour translated its relatively meager vote share into Commons seats in 2024 is testament to that.

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The end of Starmerism

By Jonny Ball

While his knack for internal machinations and for the nitty-gritty of political praxis is certain, McSweeney lacked the ability to define his project (and it was his project, more than Starmer’s) when he entered Downing Street. He had a plan to win control of the Labour Party, and even the country, without ever having a clear sense of what he would do with power. His tenuous Blue Labour association was based on little more than his obvious appreciation for that tendency’s potential as an electoral tactic — attracting the Reform-curious — rather than being a considered, moral driving force which could underpin a coherent policy agenda.

Starmerism’s attempts to appeal to this nostalgic, romantic idea of “Labour’s people” — the traditional working-class voters of the post-industrial towns and smaller cities — increasingly resemble a jilted lover begging for reconciliation. The electorate has moved on and found a new partner. His name is Nigel.

The disciplined “Ming vase” courtship that secured victory in 2024, has, in government, produced an administration defined less by caution than paralysis. In power, McSweeney seems to have masterminded a project with little motivating it beyond survival. It is becoming “no things to no men”. And with an eye on the polls, its final defenders are beginning to morph into their former nemeses: those hard Left militants and unreconstructed Corbynites who agitated against any compromise with the electorate, whose politics spoke not to the country but to their own narrow clique.

Soon, the initiative will pass to the soft Left, who will attempt to chart a different course, perhaps wooing back prodigal sons and daughters from the Liberals and the Greens, ostensibly to unite the Left-wing vote against a divided Right. Yet the danger is that Labour retreats once more to its instinctual comfort zones; it may not be enough to forge that progressive alliance from a fragmented electoral map, but the soft Left MPs can at least assuage their consciences, mouthing that old refrain: “No one likes us, we don’t care.”

In Westminster pubs and corridors, a febrile atmosphere has taken hold. Everyone is full of righteous indignation: the New Labour cliques are sulking, feigning ignorance of Peter Mandelson’s mendacity and his well-documented friendship with a convicted paedophile; meanwhile, members of Labour’s Left flank are excitedly discussing how they might leverage the scandal, which is surely larger in magnitude than the Profumo Affair, to their own political advantage.

But it is a scandal that bodes ill for the entire party establishment. The provisions of the “humble address”, the parliamentary procedure by which the Conservatives forced Number 10 into transparency, will reveal thousands of messages between Mandelson, ministers, and Downing Street advisers. The process of releasing communications will go on for months, with Labour’s reputation already in tatters. The next election could be an extinction-level event. The paranoiac dreams feverishly of seedy cabals, elite depravity and unimaginable, casual venality. But at what point does subscription to these apparent irrationalities become, in fact, rational? Make no mistake: for a polity that already suffers from a deficit of trust in its politicians, this is fuel to the most deranged of fires, and the Labour Party faces incineration. As British politics fragments, Labour has lost its hegemonic hold over the Left. The Greens are fighting hard in a crucial by-election in Gorton and Denton. “This is grievous,” one of Labour’s parliamentarians tells me via text.

And so, sensing the mood, and surrounded by the unmistakable stench of decay, MPs mull a post-Starmer future, asking what comes next.

Wes Streeting, the heir apparent, is tainted by his long-running association with the Prince of Darkness, his mentor of many years. Angela Rayner, spearheading Commons compromises and permanently flanked around the Parliamentary Estate by a praetorian guard of supporters, is increasingly spoken of as the new leader-in-waiting. One MP tells me the way could now be “clear for Ange”. Known as “Angie” to the comrades, Rayner would recenter the Labour Party firmly within its soft-Left comfort zone. But there’s little or no plan beyond vague assertions that her “fresh” approach would do much beyond stopping the party “trying to out-Reform Reform”, signaling higher taxes, higher spending, laxity on welfare, and a friendlier welcome for migrants.

Then there’s Al Carns, a barely recognized defense minister and military man. Carns only entered Parliament in 2024, but is also being seriously floated as an option. This in itself speaks of the widespread desperation on the Labour benches, and reveals a kind of military fetishism, a fantasy that a heroic man in uniform can deliver the party from certain collapse where mere civilians have failed.

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The dark shadow of the Blairites

By Aaron Bastani

Keir Starmer’s leadership is “hanging by a thread”, one backbencher texts me. As it is, Starmer owes his survival so far to the generally bovine nature of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Almost everyone in the PLP agrees that “it’s over”, that the authority of the Prime Minister is irrecoverable. But in the absence of a standout alternative, the MPs lumber on, zombie-like. Many are unsure of how or when to trigger the inevitable, too scared to take the initiative, afraid for their own careers as well as for the unknown trajectories of a leadership contest that would be fraught with dangers and would plunge the country into a deep uncertainty.

How would a restive public respond if the party of government, which promised respite from endless Tory infighting, entered into a fratricidal contest at a time of deep national malaise? That contest would take the form of introspective debates in which candidates would fall over themselves to cater to the tastes of the party selectorate: 200,000 overwhelmingly middle-class urban progressives whose views little resemble those of the wider public. Fundamentally, the PLP hesitates only because it is paralyzed by the paucity of better options. But the herd will move eventually. A critical mass will form.

It will be a fitting epitaph for the reign of both Starmer and McSweeney that they were brought low by the ghosts of New Labour. These are nostalgic emissaries from a faded, halcyon age of “Nice” growth (no inflation, consistent expansion), when Tony Blair played politics on easy mode with a buoyant global economy and a unipolar geopolitical moment. He still managed to badly damage the body politic with the blunders that were the Iraq war, PFI, and the accelerated hollowing-out of the country’s manufacturing base. But rather than exorcising those specters, the current administration brought the Blairite old guard — not only Mandelson, but Jonathan Powell, Tim Allen, and their second-generation sycophants — back in. In lieu of a real vision, Starmer and McSweeney had promised quiet competence and a steady hand. Their alliance with the old guard delivered neither.

These were “serious appointments”, we were told, aimed at bringing depth of experience and a focus on delivery. Still, Downing Street has floundered, and will go on floundering, whipped around like a plastic bag in a storm, until it ejects a Prime Minister who is palpably unsuited to the job, and who has become a national hate figure with polling as dismal as Liz Truss’s at her nadir. He is the sad captain of a rudderless ship endlessly buffeted by events beyond its control. Even if the ship is blown to calmer waters, its crew would have little sense of which shores they are trying to reach.

New Labour had its fair share of scandal, but it also had a vision of modernity, of what the country should be, and its place in the world: mass higher education for a new, shining “knowledge economy”; openness to globalization; “Cool Britannia”; the “People’s Princess”; humanitarian interventionism; football, lager and guitar bands; the “special relationship”. To paraphrase John Goodman’s line in The Big Lebowski: say what you want about the tenets of New Labour, Dude, but at least it was an ethos. Mandelson could wax lyrical about the vagaries of Thatcherism in Marxism Today because he had a consistent worldview, combined with a philosophy of power, depraved and abhorrent though that philosophy was. Starmerism is, in contrast, a gray blur, a void. It’s no wonder he and McSweeney began to try and resurrect New Labour throwbacks early on. But the decision is now haunting them.

McSweeney himself is a close confidant, a protégé even, of Mandelson. Both carefully cultivated a reputation for “the dark arts” of political subterfuge; both were consiglieres of powerful superiors. Early in his career, the Irishman made his name as an enthusiastic young spreadsheet-filler, gladly updating the “Excalibur” database through which Mandelson kept tabs on Blair-skeptics in the 2000s. As McSweeney punched newspaper filings into his computer, “Petey” was partying with a sex trafficker.

We were told that the Cork man was of pure “Blue Labour” stock. But while there have been sporadic echoes of this positioning in Starmer’s premiership, they have been limp, reluctant and unconvincing. How could it be otherwise when those stilted speeches have come from the pursed lips of a dull, Remain-campaigning, North London-dwelling human rights barrister?

But the issue surely speaks to a problem with McSweeney himself: the PM’s chief aide is a successful electoral tactician and factional fighter, and a master of the party machine, but he is a man with no hinterland, no intellectual or ideological scaffold. He is a political cipher, a fixer for competing Right-wing factions coming together under the nonentity of “Starmerism”. Internecine war against the Left has been his and their raison d’être. Dirty tricks and spin have been his modus operandi, the ends always justifying the means. But that is not a plan for government. It’s not a plan for the country. McSweeney is likely to resign over his pro-Mandelson maneuverings, perhaps buying the Prime Minister a little more time in office. But Starmer will flail uncontrollably without the architect of his ascendancy. McSweeney offered little other than an empty electoral victory, but without him the Prime Minister will be revealed as even more hollow and insubstantial than his aide. The writing is on the wall; the only question is what lies beyond the wall.

New Labour’s days are over, their epoch long since passed. The smooth, polite advocates of Blair’s Davos-friendly progressivism cut lonely figures in today’s harsher, meaner world of hard power, nation-state revival, big government interventions and Great Power realpolitik. To that extent, Streeting is hindered not just by his personal and professional links to Mandelson, but by his ideological associations with a project that is hopelessly out of step with an age of deglobalization, statism, and ubiquitous, cross-party calls for “reindustrialization”.

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Starmer has written Labour’s suicide note

By Jonny Ball

The New Labour philosophy will be the downfall not just of Mandelson, but of this government. Its apparatchiks were enchanted by wealth. Proximity to the ultra-rich — not so much the captains of industry, but the money-men of high finance — was central to their ideological project and became embedded in their lifestyles. The post-2010 trajectories of Mandelson and Blair are the most extreme symptoms of a whole philosophy and guiding culture based on a union between the erstwhile social-democratic Left, global elites, and high finance. They were “intensely relaxed” about the filthy rich, not for strategic or electoral reasons, but because they “really do believe in it”.

They made a Faustian pact with the City and an accommodation with market liberalism, while in their private lives they were cavorting with two-bit oligarchs, despots and other malcontents. It wasn’t merely a pragmatic approach to modern statecraft — they were intoxicated by it all. They convinced themselves that they were the indispensable missing link between the dusty town halls, the old-fashioned parliamentary committee rooms, the dry social-democratic conferences, and the new, dynamic, globalized cash nexus with ultra-high-net-worths sitting atop of it all, apparently owning the future. We’re now witnessing their comeuppance on the national stage.

One parliamentary staffer speaks longingly of their desire for a unifying program that suits a dirigiste era: a civic patriotism and a firm-but-fair migration system coupled with investment-led regional growth, industrial strategy, and bold interventions around which Labour’s disparate strands could finally coalesce. In this wistful reading, the soft Left, Blue Labour, elements of the old trade-union Right and even the more strategically minded Corbynistas could get behind a project of national renewal, with only the thoroughly discredited and out-of-step Blairites outside of the tent. But this program is nowhere to be seen. The most plausible candidate that could have articulated such an offer was blocked from standing for Parliament in Manchester last week.

Mandelson used to tell the cynics who never quite accepted his vision — those who worried about the party’s historic base in the post-industrial towns and cities of Britain — that Labour didn’t need to worry about courting the working class, since they had “nowhere else to go”. Meanwhile, Blairism’s éminence grise had many places to go: Epstein’s island, his New York mansions, his private jet. Now, Labour’s people have plenty of options, too: Reform, the Greens, furious abstentionism and a heady mix of zany political entrepreneurs and hyper-online conspiratorialism. “The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing,” Wilson said. That was forgotten long ago. Mandy may have forgotten Labour voters, but they certainly won’t be forgetting him.

And so the starting gun on a Labour civil war, and perhaps the end of Starmerism, has been fired via an arcane administrative decision rather than all-out rebellion over policy. It would be a fitting conclusion. Nothing will define Starmer’s premiership better than his near-total lack of a defining project and his singular devotion to proceduralism in lieu of a political vision.

We must not, of course, rule out a 14th policy U-turn on the part of this government. These have tended to occur when Number 10 has attempted to enact technocratic reforms that seem lab-designed both to alienate the electorate and disturb the progressive moralism of Labour MPs: think of the winter fuel debacle, ID cards, disability benefit cuts, the farm tax, and much else besides.

In each case, the strategic Machiavels of Downing Street apparently chose pure masochism. A policy announcement would be made out of nowhere, immediately burning bridges and political capital; the resulting furor would become memetic, with the policy held as indicative of the Government’s detachment from ordinary voters; thanks to widespread public opposition, it would be dropped, but only once all the damage had been done, obviating the potential benefits of full implementation while doing nothing to repair the Government’s popularity.

It’s not impossible that the Burnham snub will, in this grand tradition, be overturned following internal party outcry. A reverse ferret would require a new emergency meeting of the NEC to wave the Mancunian candidate through. Burnham, more likely than not, and more than any other possible Labour candidate, would saunter to victory in the Gorton and Denton contest. And yet this latest example of willfully ham-fisted internal NEC bureaucracy in the service of a flailing, decrepit administration will represent a different challenge entirely for Number 10.

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Britain’s bargain-basement social care

By Jonny Ball

Everyone knows why Burnham has been blocked, but our Prime Minister cannot admit it. If he were truly honest, he would have drafted a statement along the lines of: “after less than two years in office, defined by serial failure to connect with voters or my own party, I’m scared of welcoming back a potential challenger. Burnham has a vocal register that goes beyond my preferred tone of pained, nasal miserablism, and as such could destroy my Prime Ministerial career.” Burnham would threaten not just Starmer, but Nigel Farage: the country’s top pollster has concluded that he would be the most difficult Labour opponent for the Reform leader. Yet the party line is that if Labour moves Burnham away from his mayoral role, thus triggering a mayoral by-election, it risks losing two elections in one.

In other words, even the face-saving explanation for blocking Burnham is deeply ignominious. The fact that initiating a Greater Manchester Mayoral by-election is being briefed as “politically dangerous” for the Labour Party should ring alarm bells: this is the Labour Party, worried about losing a Mayoral by-election in Greater Manchester. For those new to British politics, the edge-of-the-Pennines land of Oasis, the Happy Mondays and torrential rain is perhaps the safest of red citadels in the entire country. But rather than the movement of a solid Labour metropole into the status of a marginal battleground provoking the thought that there may be some need for a change of direction at the top, the Labour Right has instead concluded it’s best to simply dig in.

Make no mistake: this is the beginning of the end. Starmer and a coterie of sycophants have now openly shown their hand: they are directionless, fearful, weak, panicked. But the Prime Minister should be commended for achieving something rare, even unheard of, in British politics: uniting diametrically opposed Labour factions against him and his advisers. Corbynites, Blue Labour and the “soft Left” are apoplectic, while Wes Streeting, an ambitious Blairite, is being as vocal as he can be within the confines of his cabinet position. Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband, Lucy Powell (big beasts, in contemporary Labour terms) — all have come out batting for Andy. A party insider tells me that Blue Labour’s small band of parliamentarians — a supposedly powerful element of the Starmerite coalition — “are furious”. A backbencher tells me that the NEC’s decision is “mad, weak, and will end badly”.

“If you asked me to put money on an outcome,” one Corbynite says, “I don’t think I could.” “A whole series of dominoes could fall in totally bizarre ways.” For what it’s worth, here’s my prediction: members, activists, trade union leaders and MPs will make noise over Burnham’s exclusion, noise which will die down in the coming days and weeks. The decision won’t be reversed, meaning that the most popular possible candidate will be excluded from the ballot. A less convincing candidate will take his place: a second-rate lobbyist, third-sector email-sender or corporate communications professional. They will hand the seat of Gorton and Denton to a populist insurgent in a Reform teal tie. The principal beneficiaries in the Commons will be one of Angela Rayner or Streeting, either of whom could use the row as a springboard to challenge Starmer. In that event, they are unlikely to have trouble finding the 80 MPs needed to trigger a leadership election. Starmer’s decision to block Burnham, then, may have prevented his most plausible leadership rival from returning to national politics.

But it will prove a Pyrrhic victory. Rayner and Streeting will be emboldened. Rayner, politically speaking, would offer a similar political prospectus to Burnham, but she is burdened by her recent tax scandal. Streeting, meanwhile, while pivoting Leftwards in a bid to woo members, is pure Davos Labour: Tony Blair Institute policy papers, public sector marketization, AI utopianism, and accommodation with fiscal and monetary orthodoxy. Of the three, Burnham had the more obvious diagnosis for the country’s ills: his “four horsemen” of privatization, deindustrialization, austerity and Brexit would be remedied by some old-fashioned soft Leftism. That means tax-and-spend, public ownership, European rapprochement. Much of this would come unstuck after collision with the realities of contemporary statecraft. But the chances of the vision being realized under the easy charm of British politics’s foremost BBC 6 Music dad, is now dramatically reduced.

I don’t mean to present a paean to the lost future of an Andy Burnham ascendancy. There’s much of his carefully crafted public persona that’s easy to poke holes in. His “King-of-the-North”, everyman, football-lad schtick grates among SW1 insiders who recall a fresh-faced Cambridge graduate joining the team as a budding Blairite spad in the halcyon days of New Labour. They remember a health minister who voted for the Iraq War and for the happily enforced marketization within “Our NHS”. They remember him running unsuccessfully, to be Labour leader on a platform of fiscal rectitude. Since then, he’s flirted with Corbynism and positioned himself as a tribune of left-behind regions against an effete Westminster elite. His inchoate offer of “Manchesterism” trumpets the benefits of public ownership in local and perhaps national governance. But Manchesterism is based on little except his successful record in enacting a piece of obscure Tory legislation that allowed a re-regulation of Manchester’s buses under an authority resembling Transport for London. This isn’t bad policy in itself, but one can’t create a comprehensive and convincing ideological “-ism” around your implementation of Theresa May’s 2017 Bus Services Act.

All this is true. But in politics, truth is secondary to perception. And the truth is that Andy Burnham is perceived as a vastly more likable, relatable and convincing politician than Keir Starmer. He passes the pint test. He’ll be licking his wounds this week, plotting a way forward, no doubt. The hope that the NEC decision will quieten leadership speculation is delusional: all the party’s ruling body has done is hasten the inevitable, handing several rounds of ammunition to their opponents. The barrage will be too much to withstand as they come under fire in Gorton. But with Burnham outside of parliament, for now, it’ll be up to others to put the final nail in Starmerism’s coffin.

Only weeks ago, it was received wisdom that neither Badenoch nor Keir Starmer would fight the next election. They were dead leaders walking: chronically out of their depth, surrounded by plotters with a battery of not-so-subtle leadership pitches being fired regularly from their own benches — not least those relentless vertical video releases from a baby-faced liberal Cameroon turned gaunt, camera-stalking national-populist. PMQs had become a reliably stultifying exercise in futility, as our inept, dull Prime Minister batted away tame questions from the limp Leader of the Opposition. While Starmer’s conference was hijacked by Andy Burnham’s premature declaration of frustrated ambition, Badenoch’s was funereal, with stories emerging of the party leader forlornly doomscrolling and writing sad self-help notes. These two hapless captains were going to go down with their ships.

And yet, suddenly, we’re supposedly witnessing what is being optimistically termed the “Kemi bounce” — or, let’s be blunt, a slight nudge upwards for her personal polling numbers. Before yesterday’s surprise suspension of Jenrick, there had already been signs of life in Badenoch. She had given some assured performances in the Commons, even confidently delivering impressions of the flailing Labour Chancellor who had blamed critiques of her dismal reign on latent misogyny. Here, Badenoch was on strong ground: downplaying the platitudes of identity politics is her bread and butter.

But then, astonishingly, came her sacking of Jenrick, long a thorn in her side. It is a political truism that the opposition is in front, but your enemies behind. Now Jenrick is safely out in the open.

Badenoch’s revelations of treachery bumped her restive justice man into a precipitous embrace of Nigel Farage, who, let’s not forget, had recently suggested that Reform would soon be viewed as moderate compared with Jenrick’s increasingly hard lines on race and migration. At the hastily arranged press conference to announce the latest recruit to the turquoise barmy army, Farage was left to enjoyably improvise as Jenrick arrived late for his first stage call. After some painfully awkward jokes, the turncoat turned up only to deliver a wooden speech, characteristic of the machine politician Westminster belches out so uniformly and regularly. Here on the stage was the difference between the Tories and Reform represented in human form.

Observers could only ask: why would Jenrick, who has spent the past 18 months positioning himself as a Conservative leader-in-waiting, suddenly decide to defect to the disruptors? We have watched him transform from what Michael Gove identified as a Tory-boy archetype that the public are all too familiar with, into an aggressive and nakedly ambitious attack dog. He’d been on Ozempic, he’d finally got a haircut that didn’t scream “Secretary of the Nottinghamshire Young Conservatives 2014”, and he was suddenly at one with the harsher, meaner, populist zeitgeist, plugged into the Very Online matrix of the New Right’s anonymous shitposters, echoing their grievances. Fueled by Elon Musk’s Twitter, the discourse had moved on from Badenoch’s anti-woke talking points, calcifying into a politics that flirts, at one remove, with old-fashioned, blood-and-soil ethno-nationalism. Against Jenrick’s dynamic, X-friendly communications, Badenoch was yesterday’s woman.

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Chavismo’s useful idiots

By Jonny Ball

But Jenrick’s path to Tory leader was never assured, despite him being the bookmakers’ favorite. The 2024 election wipeout left the party a rump organization dominated by the kind of Whiggish, true-blue, free-market social liberals disgusted by what they regard as a dangerously radical populist turn that Jenrick was embracing. Their constituents may force more Conservative Party creep towards Reform-lite positions, as the mood of the whole country sours against small boats, large taxes and visible decline. But deep down, these shire Tories long for the days of their post-financial crisis hegemony, of Dave and George and pasty taxes, for a return to the status quo, before the Leavers and the MAGA-adjacent got their way. They are, though, hopelessly out of step.

And yet Jenrick was one of them not long ago. He was a Remain campaigner, who in 2017 called for a more liberal immigration policy, and who signed a letter denouncing Farage’s “intolerance” and the Brexit “dystopia”. As recently as 2022 he condemned Suella Braverman’s description of small boat arrivals as an “invasion” and warned against using language that “demonizes people”. His Damascene conversion to all the ascendent neuroses of the New Right tribe, with ubiquitous anti-migrant posturing at the forefront, will leave voters wondering whether he really believes anything at all.

Jenrick isn’t the first politician to display a knack for protean transformation in the service of his own career. His political versatility mirrors the intellectual and spiritual shifts occurring on the British Right as old institutions and old ideas collapse under the weight of the past two decades of failure. He managed to keep a straight face as he reeled off the reasons behind his political transfiguration: real wages stagnant since 2007; courts and prisons in disarray; the collapsing state of everyday services; regional inequalities that leave the real England, outside of London and the south east, as a closer equivalent of Bulgaria than competitor nations like France or Germany; and a low-waged, low-productivity economy addicted to consistent and sustained influxes of cheap migrant workers.

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Who comes after Starmer?

By Jonny Ball

And yet, Jenrick was a member of the government that presided over the deepening of British decline. As a Reform MP, it will be galling for his Conservative former colleagues to watch him campaign so flagrantly against their own shared record. As an immigration minister, he spoke of “ramping up” the procurement of “even more” hotels to accommodate Channel migrants. His handling of migrant housing led one Conservative MP to complain that the part Jenrick played was “so bad and chaotic” that he “should consider his position”.

Jenrick, though, isn’t alone. His former colleague, Nadhim Zahawi, also fled to Reform this week, leaving the insurgents open to the charge of simply being a lifeboat for desperate Tory deserters. The contamination effect of the defections will make it difficult for Farage’s party to continue to identify as a radical disruptor while it welcomes any comers. Nor will it be able to deliver such an effective kick against Westminster’s detested establishment with all the old-guard in tow. Perhaps sensing this, Farage has now set a cut-off date for politicians hoping to cross the floor: May 7, the day of the local elections. For now, Jenrick is “in sackcloth and ashes”, Reform’s leader told reporters, given his serial failures in government, and his involvement in years of slow-motion social collapse. Whether voters will be so forgiving remains to be seen.

For them, after all, the end of Chavismo isn’t just an act of imperialist aggression, ending once and for all the liberal-humanitarian pretenses of The West Wing generations, holding that American power represents something more than the brutal assertion of geostrategic interests at the point of an M4 Carbine. Yet if Trump has little concern for dressing interventions up in any idealistic garb, Maduro’s arrest also represents the symbolic end of a utopian project for Britain’s Left. Venezuela, for them, was once a paragon of political virtue, a model pupil for a world transformed. Of course, its failure was evident long ago, as the promise of Bolivarianism, or Venezuelan socialism, soured into a nightmare of economic collapse and mass emigration. Not that any of this really stopped some of Britain’s progressive dreamers, desperate for answers as far from home as possible.

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My Corbynista shame

By Poppy Sowerby

For Britain’s Left-wing radicals, the domestic working class has always been a source of profound disappointment. Rather than fulfilling their proper historical role as agents of revolution, “The People” have been successfully bought off via moderate trade unionism, incremental reforms, and gradual embourgeoisement. As a result, many of our socialist intellectuals have internalized Marx’s 19th-century lament that English workers are “thick-headed John Bulls”, or else bemoaned our apparent culture of parochial conservatism. (Certainly, this is a convenient excuse for why much of the Left’s recent history has been marked by serial failure, even as evidence suggests consistent majority support for populist-tinged, social-democratic governance.)

And so the Left, wallowing in perennial domestic miseries, has tended to look abroad for their political beacons. During the Cold War, there was no shortage of high-minded “useful idiots” to excuse the follies of the Soviet Union, or else display their “radical chic” affiliations with an assortment of violent paramilitary and guerilla armies. Even Maoism briefly became the fashionable option for a niche sub-set of Western Europe’s youthful post-1968 generation, with the murderous iconoclasm of the Cultural Revolution presenting a more dynamic and rebellious — and therefore more palatable — alternative to the Kremlin’s gerontocracy.

More recently, Palestine has become the cause célèbre for younger generations politicized via short-form vertical video, convinced that events in the Occupied Territories represent a world-historic crux. Yet in the 2000s and 2010s, it was Venezuela that provided an example of a shining city upon a hill, of “Resistance”, of something called “socialism for the 21st century”, embodied in the charismatic persona of Hugo Chavez. Just as New Labour was basking in the warm embrace of the City of London and cosying up to the neo-cons, Caracas provided an outlet for the British Left’s affections.

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The twilight of the millennial socialists

By Jonny Ball

Chavismo was at the forefront of Latin America’s “Pink Tide”, a wave of Leftist administrations that came to power promising a break with liberal economics and American regional hegemony. Of all the governments that emerged, it was Chavez’s brand of populism that represented its most radical wedge. Governing in the Latin American tradition of the charismatic caudillo, “El Commandante” had a simple model: amid the commodities boom of the millennium’s first decade — built on ballooning Chinese demand, Middle Eastern chaos and widespread concerns around “peak oil” — Chavismo would distribute surging crude export revenues to the urban and rural poor in the form of direct cash transfers, social welfare programs and subsidized everyday goods. Poverty was dramatically reduced while the ordinary citizen shared in several prosperous years of rapidly expanding gross national product.

It was these laudable efforts that earned Chavez, a former military man and a fervent nationalist, the praises of the extra-parliamentary and Labour Left. Thirty-two MPs signed a 2005 early-day motion brought by the Corbynite shadow chancellor John McDonnell praising Venezuela’s advances in “education, healthcare and land reform”. By 2007, Ken Livingstone signed a deal that saw Transport for London accept discounted petroleum in exchange for London officials advising Caracas on town planning and public-transport systems. In 2013, when El Comandante died of cancer, Jeremy Corbyn even penned an obituary titled “Thank You Hugo Chavez”.

Chavez described his project as “Christ’s work”. An apt phrase: for many a young Western ideologue, an organized political visit to Venezuela was practically a pilgrimage, even as Chavez himself was a deeply committed Catholic. Even so, Bolivarianism was also consciously draped in all the red regalia and classic jargon of the global Left: “anti-imperialism” was the default geopolitical stance; Yankee-led capitalism would be superseded by a new mode of social organization; an aging Fidel Castro was set up as a saintly figure; and commercial and military ties with the Cuban, Russian and Iranian governments were deepened.

All well and good. But Maduro’s ascension, following Chavez’s death, was nothing short of a national calamity. The seeds of decline had been sown even at the height of Chavismo, which saw average per-capita incomes surge. That hydrocarbon bonanza may have slashed poverty, but the whole model was reliant on high export prices. This was a new distributional arrangement rather than one based on a new model of production; the country remained dependent on resource extraction and exports just as it had under the old Caracas elites.

As oil prices fell to less than a third of their 2008 $147 peak, then, “Bolivarian socialism” became a short-lived chimera, its foundations too shaky to withstand US sanctions. Certainly, Venezuela’s heady extension of oil-fueled welfarism pales compared to the breakneck industrialization of the USSR, or indeed the growth-oriented, high-investment path set out by China. With oil revenues diverted to cash transfers and day-to-day spending, little was reinvested in Venezuela’s decaying infrastructure, nor indeed in the plant and machinery of the capital-intensive extraction sector. Industry atrophied, and the opportunity to diversify and increase the productive capacity of the wider economy was missed. Private-sector activity and investment was dampened by a combination of price controls and scattergun expropriations. And when commodity prices finally fell through the floor, Maduro responded disastrously, meeting his budget shortfalls by printing cash and pushing inflation up to a staggering 1,000,000%.

Nobody comes off well in Venezuela’s long unraveling, now reaching a strange denouement. The early promises of Chavismo were dampened by fatal missteps, and while Chavez himself was repeatedly elected by large margins, Maduro entrenched a level of cronyism that rode roughshod over separations of powers and subjected every part of the state apparatus to loyalist capture. His subsequent victories at the ballot box are broadly seen to have been fraudulent, and the idea that anyone could command majority support in a country in which the economy has contracted by over two thirds stretches credulity.

Yet there’s a wider tragedy here, too, one that lies far beyond Caracas. That begins with our own government: our impotence in the face of such boisterous breaches of international law exposes yet again our unhappy reliance on American imperial favor. For Britain’s Left, though, the lesson from the failure of Chavismo is in some ways even more profound. This, after all, was never just some abstract experiment — it was a real substitute for domestic failure, where socialism could be built at arms-length in exotic settings, without having to persuade the skeptical swing voters of Nuneaton.

What’s more, the underlying failure of Chavismo mirrors a failure of imagination from the Left here in Britain: without a new model that breaks fundamentally with our broken economic paradigm, Left politics becomes a struggle over the post-facto distribution of national income from the same spluttering growth engine. Hence we see some of the loudest Left outcries and mobilizations against freezes in welfare payments, or against reducing palliative cash transfers, none of which do anything to alter underlying, structural failures of neoliberal capital. The Left is still grasping in vain for an alternative that goes beyond the distributional and towards a new growth model. In just the same way, Chavismo, despite the nationalizations and lofty rhetoric, did little to build a new productive template, or new foundations for inclusive growth for generations into the future, instead relying on the foolish permanence of volatile oil revenues.

Not that any of this has provoked a reckoning — so much as a move to the next abstract cause, untethered from any new strategy for power, or any new models of growth or governance. The fact is that the modern British Left is still stuck in what Mark Fisher eloquently called “capitalist realism”, in which it’s easier to conceive of the end of the world than it is to imagine a world beyond capitalism. And yet look around Britain today, and there’s clearly so much that could be profitably foregrounded by a real, energized, pragmatic Left politics. National renewal; investment-led growth; a restitution of state capacity; the rescue of the public realm; a renaissance of national production based on well-paid work in domestic supply chains. All this is urgently needed — yet nothing will be achieved by fetishizing failure in foreign climes. Those hoping for a change in Left cultures shouldn’t hold their breath.

All the quagmires of government failure are distilled into this sector. An aging population puts the Treasury under ever more strain, but successive governments are too afraid of upsetting the asset-rich gray vote. Staffing crises are assuaged by importing cheap foreign workers, and local authorities are bankrupted by ballooning costs. All the while, council tax payers wonder where on earth their money goes.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting wrote in The Guardian at the beginning of the year to tell us how seriously he was taking the crisis. Despite our aging population, the number of people receiving state-funded social care has fallen by 10% in a decade, adding huge demand pressures on hospitals and GPs. Around one in seven hospital beds are taken up by fit patients with no discharge plan in place. What’s more, social care costs are expected to double by 2038. But there’s no idea about what to do. As the ratio of workers to pensioners becomes more and more lopsided, fewer taxpayers will have to foot the bill for larger numbers of dependents. One of the larger items on the bill will be a rapidly expanding workforce in an already enormous sector; while over 1.5 million people work in social care today, even amid chronic shortages, by 2040 that number is expected to rise by 470,000 to over two million.

Meanwhile, ultra-liberals wrap their gratitude for bargain-basement social care workers in paeans to diversity and cosmopolitan tolerance. I’m thinking, of course, of Zack Polanski. “One in five care workers are foreign nationals,” he reminded a Question Time audience earlier this month. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want to wipe someone’s bum, and I’m very grateful for the people who do.” It seems the progressive mindset is now so flexible that it can accommodate an attitude to labor relations that would be familiar in an autocratic Gulf petrostate: grossly underpaid foreign workers are invited and maintained as a vast, low-waged service army, while the middle classes engage in more dignified work, like making podcasts about “eco-populism”.

There’s a more essential challenge here, too, as services including residential care homes are hollowed out by parasitic ownership models, hedge funds and private equity — a model which has been adopted across the public sector, not just in social care. Councils often award contracts to large providers based on “value for money”, handing over service provision to private firms that can supposedly deliver with economies of scale. But studies have shown that the outsourcing of provision almost never has a positive impact on quality of care — it simply increases costs for service users. Currently, anyone with assets over £23,250 contributes to their own costs of care, while local authorities shoulder much of the increasingly heavy burden. To make matters worse, research released last month found that, over the course of just three years and in only three English regions, £250 million in profit was extracted from social care provision, often by companies registered in tax havens.

This is the end result of a particular kind of political economy. It was in the 19th century that Joseph Chamberlain, then the Liberal mayor of Birmingham and later a prominent pro-imperialist Tory, pioneered what was called “gas and water socialism”: municipal authorities would provide basic public utilities directly. Yet somehow we’ve regressed over the last century and a half, with anyone now proposing a model like Chamberlain’s liable to be dismissed as a socialist fantasist. Instead, for almost 50 years we’ve advocated a model that sells England by the pound: the government structures that once promised cradle-to-grave care are now emaciated and powerless in the face of foreign investors. Everything is put out to tender and outsourced, with the local and national state as the customer. Around a third of government spending now goes on procurement from the private sector. And ultra-dry Thatcherites, the Blairite modernizers, and their Cameroonian heirs have all played their part, extending the practice and allowing the core capabilities of the state itself wither. The taxpayer pays, but it’s often an opaque world of para-state private behemoths delivering everything at the coalface, disguised behind a government logo.

The results are mixed, at best, and the only sure winners are the investment groups themselves, and perhaps the expensive lawyers that oversee the Byzantine tendering process. As for the state’s own capacity, institutional memory, expertise and personnel — all these are now woefully inadequate.

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In social care, it wasn’t until the Eighties that local authority-run homes began to be sold off. The NHS and Community Care Act of 1990 took away councils’ responsibility to provide care directly, replacing it with a requirement simply to buy care from private providers. Where 89% of care provision used to be delivered by public providers or charities, today the proportion of private provision stands at 83%. Service users are left vulnerable, as care homes are taken over by the sovereign wealth funds of more entrepreneurial, agile states — ones that patiently invest in long-term assets rather than rushing to sell them off to the highest bidder.

Taken together, the sector encapsulates our embrace of the twin liberalisms that have defined the last decades. The economic liberals first insisted we break up the state monoliths, and introduce internal markets, the spirit of entrepreneurialism and healthy competition into public service delivery. Soon after, the social liberals demanded that we welcome historically unprecedented numbers of arrivals into the country. The British labor market at the lower ends of the wage scale has paid the price.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, successive governments have avoided tackling this crisis head-on. Fine words aside, Streeting is no exception, ordering yet another lengthy review, not due to report until 2028. Andrew Dilnot, the respected author of the last review, was openly disparaging of Labour’s delays. He has already offered his own solutions: one involves a national criterion of eligibility for care. Beyond replacing the current postcode lottery hodgepodge, this would, in effect, create a National Care Service of sorts, paid for with capped contributions from individuals with social care needs, and levied upon estates over a certain threshold. The Holy Grail for local authorities would be a truly integrated national service, taken out of the purview of cash-strapped municipalities. They would be then free to focus on the services used by the majority of people who do not use social care, but who nevertheless pay up to two thirds of their council tax bills toward its failing institutions.

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At its best, care work could be transformed into a secure, decently paid profession, on a similar footing as nursing or teaching, ending the doom-loop of high turnover, chronic shortages and low skills. That would have a fiscal cost, of course, and may require controversial incursions into the enormous real-estate portfolios of human history’s most fortunate generation: the Baby Boomers. But the point is that Streeting already knows what needs to be done, and yet he is unwilling to expend the political capital to do so. Memories of Theresa May’s ill-fated “dementia tax” are raw.

Such timidity is grimly to be expected. For if it’s impossible to escape the feeling that nothing now works, it’s equally hard to avoid the fact that our politicians seem totally adrift, powerless amid the global forces swirling around them. What’s worse is the growing realization that this impotence has been self-inflicted. It’s the result of conscious decisions to wind down and outsource the direct functions of state, to diminish the powers of the executive, to degrade and then offload assets, in effect to sell the family silver. We’ve got ourselves in chronic indebtedness and at the mercy of international lenders and speculators — only to then turn around and cry “not me, guv” when things fall apart.

One might expect a Labour government that talks of “resilience” to grasp the nettle and finally start rebuilding the capabilities of the British state, taking on private interests and rebuilding the public realm in public hands. But why wreck a career on social care, as so many senior ministers have before, especially for a man as clearly ambitious as Streeting? The dysfunction is such, after all, that any attempt at reform may open a Pandora’s Box, leaving even the best of our secretaries of state without a future. And so, when it comes to social care, nothing is to be done, and nothing sums up our very British dysfunction quite like it — the truest icon of our national decline.