During the Cold War of my youth, there was always potential for accidental conflict. But America and the Soviet Union were both run by people who were working hard to prevent that from happening. Even in the tensest of crises, diplomacy prevailed.

Things are totally different now. On both sides of the Atlantic, in Russia and across Western Europe, I see a rhetorical readiness for armed conflict on a never before seen scale. “Russia has brought war back to Europe,” said Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general recently, adding that “ we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great-grandparents endured.” Meanwhile, the UK’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton said the situation was more dangerous than at any time during his career: “Sons and daughters. Colleagues. Veterans… will all have a role to play, to build, to serve, and if necessary, to fight,” he said. For his part, the head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Agency has warned that Russia could attack Europe before the end of the decade.

If this war with Russia were to happen, it won’t only be because Trump has motivated Putin, it will also be because we have allowed the situation in Ukraine to spiral out of control. Our support has been a catalog of misjudgments. When everybody draped themselves in the Ukrainian flag in 2022, so-called experts were spectacularly gung-ho about Kyiv’s eventual victory. Retired generals competed with predictions of how fast Ukraine would get the job done — two weeks, speculated one. Well, we are now nearly four years into the conflict and as members of the so-called “coalition of the willing”, we Europeans encouraged Ukraine to fight to the bitter end — without a chance of victory.

Suggested reading

Europe needs a Metternich

By Wolfgang Munchau

It is perfectly plausible now that Russia will end up occupying more than the four oblasts it seeks, and that Ukraine loses its independence. Encouraged by victory, Russia might eventually seek more. Exacerbating matters on the other side, some Europeans now seek regime change in Russia. To quote Kaja Kallas, the EU’s High Representative for foreign and security policy: “it is not a bad thing if the big power is actually made much smaller.”

We’ve been here before. Ahead of the First World War, young Germans and Austrians were also hungry for battle, as many Europeans seem today. The Germans envied their grandparents who fought the glorious battles of the Franco-Prussian War 44 years earlier. Then, as now, the political and military establishment underestimated how difficult war would be.

Yet there is one big difference. Back in 1914, Europe’s armies were in a position to fight. A victory by the Germans and Austrians was at the very least a plausible outcome. Today, it is no longer possible that Ukraine can win the war, nor that Western Europe, without US help, could defeat Russia.

This broader European conflict won’t necessarily be a classic land war. I don’t think Putin has plans to invade Western Europe, as security officials claim. My main fear, rather, is hybrid warfare: airplanes blowing up over Heathrow airport, say; an explosion in a busy German railway station; or perhaps even an underwater nuclear explosion that sparks a tsunami. Brussels, as the home of Nato and the EU, would be particularly vulnerable. And any counter to such a provocation would swiftly escalate.

This is the type of warfare for which we Europeans are least prepared. Western security experts see hybrid warfare as a lower genre for lesser people, like Russians. But it is lethal, and we Europeans are ideal victims. We live in tight spaces. We are dependent on critical infrastructure and technology. And, from the Russian perspective, such attacks would helpfully not trigger Nato’s mutual defense clause. Why invade Estonia if you can create utter chaos in European capitals, all while maintaining plausible deniability?

The UK isn’t unaware of this. In November, the Defence Select Committee warned that the UK Government was moving “at glacial pace” to adopt the “Home Defence Programme”, a new national resilience and security strategy to secure the country against serious risks: including unconventional attacks. But the programme has been delayed for over a year, even as Britain’s leaders are desperate to ramp up the war rhetoric.

It is clearer than ever, though, that our political systems are far from ready for a fight. The UK, Germany and France are all unwilling to pay for the support of Ukraine from their own budget, or indeed raise taxes. This is why they were so keen to use the Russian assets that lie frozen in European banks. Now that Belgium, the country where most of the assets are held, has blocked the heist, European politicians will have to put their money where their mouth is.

The trouble is, their electorates won’t let them. European voters won’t give up their welfare payments to fund a war and polls consistently show a marked lack of support for further financial aid for Ukraine. And please don’t ask them to put on their boots and actually fight for their country.

The irony here is that, whatever their problems, Europe’s leaders see war as a way of distracting from even deeper crises. If peace broke out, for instance, the EU would have to reform its absurd Common Agricultural Policy, redirecting funds away from French farmers towards Ukraine. Continued profligacy would become tougher to defend in other ways. The EU ditched its fiscal rules to make room for more defense spending. Without a war, deficit spending is hard to justify. War is the ultimate excuse for failing policies, keeping dysfunctional governments in power and delaying the moment of reckoning.

Like so many of my generation, I always thought that Europeans had learned from the mistakes of the past — including the oldest mistake of all. As Sun Tzu, the legendary Chinese strategist of war, warned some 2,500 years ago: if you “know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Unfortunately, we keep on overestimating ourselves and underestimating our enemies. Putin initially underestimated his enemy with an amateurish attack on Kyiv. But he recovered and the Russians are now fighting a well-organized, fully-funded, focused war. And perhaps his strategists would conclude that now is the right time to launch an extended hybrid war against Europe. What has Putin to lose?

Suggested reading

Why economists get Trumpism wrong

By Wolfgang Munchau

Meanwhile, our misjudgments continue. Just as Napoleon and Hitler underestimated the sheer scale of Russia and its freezing winter temperatures, contemporary European politicians continue to discount the economic resilience of modern Russia. The first mistake happened right at the beginning of the war, when we thought we could exhaust Russia economically through sanctions. We fooled ourselves with deeply misleading statistics, according to which Russia’s GDP was approximately the size of Spain’s. But what matters in a war is purchasing power — literally bang for buck. On that metric, Moscow spends more than twice as much as Germany on defense, and far more efficiently. While experts insist that the Russian economy is on the verge of collapsing. there’s no sign of that happening. Similarly, certain international lawyers continue to claim that the sequestration of Russian assets is risk-free. There is a pattern here — one that could yet prove catastrophic in both treasure and blood.

In contrast, the geopolitical realists of earlier generations, such as Henry Kissinger or George Kennan, the legendary US diplomat of the post-war era, had a much deeper understanding of superpower politics. Nobody would have accused Kissinger of being soft on the Soviet Union. But nor was he a trigger-happy war monger.

Back then, the Americans maintained diplomatic channels with Russia. And they didn’t indulge in ritualized virtue-signaling about the rule of law. Their job was risk-management — and they performed it admirably. What is becoming increasingly clear is that the Trump Administration is not in the business of managing risk, but of pursuing short-term commercial advantage.

Greenland may well be next. Its vast, largely unexplored deposits of rare earth elements, combined with its strategic position make it an obvious target. Indeed, Trump has already laid the groundwork both with the National Security Strategy and with the appointment of an envoy tasked with its acquisition. Ownership would dramatically strengthen the US position in the Arctic Sea, a region of growing strategic importance that Europe has largely ignored.

Nor is Canada immune: Trump has already identified it as a security threat. It also happens to sit on 163 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, ranking 4th globally according to the US Energy Information Administration, after Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. As the US becomes more dependent on oil for its energy needs, the acquisition of Venezuela and Canada would certainly follow a commercial logic, if not strategic reason.

It’s completely mad, I know. But it reflects a geopolitical reality in which risk is no longer managed and diplomacy discounted. The Cold War world was a safer one, not because the situation was safe, but because adults were in charge.

As a dyed-in-the-wool Leftie, I think I have the right to say this: if Trump is in the White House, it is our fault. If too many Britons blame migrants for a secular stagnation that has nothing to do with them, it is the Left’s fault. If Europe is fragmenting and warmongering, yes, you guessed it, that too is on us. If green investments are despised on an overheating planet, it is because the Left failed to wrestle the green transition from the clutches of Wall Street types who profit from phony pollution markets.

Am I being too harsh on us Leftists? Not really. Big Finance and Big Business did not, of course, need us on their boards to devastate people’s lives in 2008. They did it all by themselves. But we on the Left had the tools to see the crash coming and to push sensible policies afterwards to tend to the wounded majority. Instead, we fell in love with our own voices as we delivered fiery speeches at otherwise splendid gatherings: Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, and Aganaktismenoi. While we wasted our energy debating irrelevant issues, the likes of Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Europe’s social democrats were concocting — often in our name — schemes to transfer the bankers’ losses onto the shoulders of society’s weakest. In short, we had the opportunity to shield the many from the greed of the few. And we failed, resulting in the surge of nativist proto-fascism that masquerades as unbowed patriotism and realist geopolitics.

But here is the greatest paradox of our era. Though never before has the Left been so weakened and discredited, never before has it been so necessary. The reason is that only the Marxist Left is even interested in rethinking the one thing that can re-align our technological capacities with our need for freedom and prosperity: property rights over machines, algorithms and scarce natural resources.

Where are we at today? Capitalism was defeated in 2008 almost as decisively as Soviet communism was in 1991. Since then, austerity for the masses and state “socialism” for Big Business and Finance inadvertently funded the explosion of Big Tech’s cloud capital: machines that produce no commodities but generate enormous power directly to modify our behavior.

The resulting permanent stagnation reflects the post-2008 Twin Peaks problem: a massive pile of monies (the first peak) that won’t flow into productive investment, and an equally vast pile of public and private debt (the second peak) that such investment could have canceled. Rising discontent and the return of the ultra-Right were inevitable — it’s what happened the last time Wall Street collapsed, in 1929.

A new technofeudal ruling class, using its cloud capital and power to shape our behavior, seized control of markets and siphoned off profits as rents, deepening systemic stagnation. Competitive markets are now infeasible, except in communist China. Across the Western world, capitalist markets are shrinking while cloud capital threatens the very idea of the liberal individual and the neoliberal fantasy that growth could come from shrinking the state. Social democracy is also dead in the water, a sad reflection of how welfare states can never be funded by taxing mercurial tech lords and unhinged private equity outfits who own both our states and the means directly to modify our state of mind.

More from this author

The delusions of the centrist Chancellor

By Yanis Varoufakis

As cloud capital develops its AI powers further, it is overriding what remains of our property rights over our thoughts, intellectual output, even our audio-visual image. By privatizing the dollar through stablecoins and the military-industrial complex through the combination of drones and AI, our tech lords have begun to develop a new transhuman ideology — techlordism — which will replace neoliberalism.

Regulation, anti-trust laws, and wealth laws cannot rein in these exorbitant, feudal-like powers. In a world where technofeudalism advances by masquerading as dynamic capitalism, all other ideologies — liberalism, neoliberalism and social democracy — are now as extinct as the feudal ideals of chivalry or the divine right of kings.

The old ideological clash between free-market ideologues and social democrats no longer describes our reality. True political power comes from control over property rights — the only way to make our brilliant new technologies serve humanity is to democratize control over them, particularly in the workplaces where they are deployed. Who else but a revitalized Left can make that case?

But first the Left must regain the trust of a deeply skeptical society. It can only do so by distancing itself from five cardinal sins.

The Left fell into the trap of welfarism once it abandoned its ambition to drive social progress by intervening in the workplace. Having forgotten what makes production tick, social democratic parties ended up as the parties of pensioners. Redistribution is essential in any civilized society, but a society stuck in a welfarist mindset won’t stay civilized for long.

Suggested reading

David Graeber: the Left’s lost hero

By Thomas Peermohamed Lambert

Then there’s laborism. As William Morris so eloquently warned, the celebration of mind-numbing work as virtuous is stultifying and misguided. Industrial robots and cloud capital, once wrested from the tech lords, must be the Left’s tools for liberating labor from laborism and for steering the masses toward creative, artisanal work that not only satisfies the soul but also produces high-quality stuff.

Green Keynesianism is theoretically splendid but severely circumscribed in practice. As Michal Kalecki predicted decades ago, even if the ruling classes permit the state to boost their aggregate profits through public investments in socially necessary projects like green energy, their dominant strategy is to take advantage of public monies but end Keynesian policies well before the majority benefit from them.

Accelerationism can also be useful in the right context but is a disaster when applied unthinkingly. The idea that, if things get much worse, the majority will come to their senses and rise up to protect their interests, is as deluded as the tech lords’ conviction that we shall all become happy and glorious if their AI-driven cloud capital takes over the planet tomorrow. Preventing the deterioration of society’s circumstances through redistribution and Keynesian policies in the short run is essential as long as the Left does not fall into the trap of seeing welfarism and Keynesianism as permanent solutions.

But perhaps our worst sin has been that which we rose up to defeat but ended up embracing with grim gusto: authoritarianism. Those of us who spent our youth in Leftist circles can recount the horror stories. But the rot began earlier when our precursors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels among others, failed to foresee that our powerful prescriptive texts attract disciples and believers. Before long, Leftists abused comrades, built their personal power base, deplatformed rather than out-argued opponents, sought positions of influence within the system they were supposedly fighting against, bedded impressionable students, took control of the Politburo and threw anyone who resisted into some gulag, actual or metaphorical.

Assuming that we are capable of putting these sins behind us, the task ahead is clear: to demonstrate that the radical democratization of workplaces and core economic infrastructures is not merely a radical ideal, but a practical requirement for authentically freer, richer, and happier lives.

Any theory of change must begin with a vision of a future worth fighting for. But it can’t end there. To be useful, the Left must outline the tangible steps it would take to get there — not just tomorrow, or in six months’ time, but in one year or five years from now.

Beginning with the long-term vision, the Left needs to inspire confidence that technology can become a liberator, rather than the handmaiden of exploitation and oppression: that it will forever be as long as machines are owned by the 0.001%. It must, then, illustrate what this means for how corporations function, how money is created and how land and other natural resources are used. To explain fully how these three realms — production, money and land — are to be managed by an empowered demos, would take many pages. Indeed, I had to author a political science fiction novel to outline them.

Nevertheless, the foundations of any long-term Left vision can be summarized in a single word: democratization. First, that means democratizing corporations by means of new corporate laws that incorporate the principle of one-employee-one-share, and one-person-one-vote, alongside citizens’ juries (as opposed to bureaucratic overlords) that would oversee newly democratized corporations. Second, that means democratizing money, by deploying digital payments systems to establish a monetary commons which harnesses our collective capacity to create money. This would be a decisive step toward providing a non-inflationary trust fund for all. Finally, any serious Left must democratize land, and other scarce natural resources, via a new system of land use that divides socialized land into commercial and social zones, using proceeds from the former to invest in the latter.

With production, money and land democratized (but not nationalized), there is no limit to imagining a realignment between humanity’s technological capacities, our collective interest and our personal freedom. Indeed, the only limit is the hard question: OK, even if we agree that this is where we want to go, how do we get there? The answer must include tangible, verifiable goals every step of the way, from tomorrow morning to the next decade or two.

Suggested reading

Why Marx is back in fashion

By Ben Burgis

These steps must include practical solutions to the aforementioned Twin Peaks problem (the transformation of idle cash into productive, non-damaging investments); the termination of fake electricity markets; the revival of our depleted (health, educational, environmental) commons; the task of restraining Big Finance and the technofeudal ruling class; the liberation of swathes of people from the shackles that hold them back; and the misunderstandings that cloud their thinking.

At the level of ideology and prose, meanwhile, the Left must correct the great mistake that, in the first two decades of the 20th century, caused it to veer off into a mire of authoritarianism and, inevitably, failure. Though the Left has its roots in the emancipatory movements of the 19th century — from women’s liberation to the trades unions — sometime around the Great War both the communist and the social democratic traditions ditched liberty in favor of something nebulous and ill-defined that Karl Marx rightly rejected: equality. In this way, the Left gifted freedom to the liberals (who only cared about their freedom, not that of the majority) and itself drifted into authoritarianism and, eventually, ill-repute.

The Left must now ditch airy-fairy notions that it cannot define, like fairness and equality, and instead proclaim as its highest calling the universal freedom from others’ extractive powers — powers that, in modern society, stem from highly skewed property rights. Put slightly differently, property rights must be the main plank of the Left’s program, along with the defense of freedom from concentrated (corporate or state) power and intolerance (including the intolerance of the intolerant).

In this technofeudal world, where capital has triumphed by mutating into a variant that controls our minds directly, we do not even own ourselves. As the 21st century’s dystopia unfolds, a libertarian Marxist mindset is the Left’s last chance to be relevant and useful to a species struggling not merely to reform a problematic system — but, ultimately, to survive as a species capable of both freedom and prosperity.

Just as unrealistic were Samuel Johnson’s 1769 hopes of rising by eight in the morning, a self-command plaintively repeated many times over 50  years of diary entries, without much success. Woody Guthrie’s  “New Year’s Rulins”, written down in 1943, were a mixed bag: “change bed clothes often” and “listen to radio a lot” sound eminently SMART, but “help win war — beat fascism” less so. Meghan Markle’s resolution a decade ago to “let the magic know that there is an open door policy with me in 2016 and that it is always welcome to join the party”: time-bound, certainly, but neither specific nor measurable. But then again, she did land a prince that year, so what do the psychologists know?

What the SMARTies miss is that turning an essentially optimistic ritual into a piece of efficient project management is a depressingly cowed way to kick off the year. If we are forced to view them in psychological terms, New Years’ resolutions are better framed as a socially sanctioned form of Borderline Personality Disorder. For a few weeks in the depths of winter, there is collective permission to dream of personal reinvention in the most exuberant and improbable of ways. Or as G.K. Chesterton observed, equally unheeding of the SMART imperative: “The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes.”

Never mind your unspoken conviction that you are bound to fail in your self-improvements sooner or later. Right now, you are in a generous imaginative realm where anything is possible. You are listening for bells, and letting the old year out through the back door. You are first-footing the homes of your friends while carrying propitious gifts. During this mysterious interlude, full of icy dark and ghosts, why not dare to dream of miraculous transformations too?

All this technocratic talk about New Year’s resolutions misses the point because it doesn’t fully grasp what they are. In making one, you are not offering a sober prediction about the conduct of your future self, based on available evidence. If questioned, many fervent annual resolvers would predict that they are bound to default eventually, but still place stern notes to selves on the fridge in the meantime.

Unlike with prediction, your will is involved. You are forming an intention, and it can only come from you. For this same reason, Zoe Williams’s half-serious suggestion in The Guardian last year, that we start choosing resolutions for our friends instead of ourselves, is a non-starter. An intention has to relate to your own perceptions of what is valuable in life, not theirs.

Intentions are weird mental entities, and philosophers struggle to pin them down. They are different from mere beliefs, because of that presence of the will. But they also seem different from desires, because you can long for something you have no intention of trying to get. In order to properly count as having an intention, some philosophers think you must display commitment, having already started to make preliminary steps towards your goal. Others disagree: it can be the kind of “pure” mental state you can have while sitting around doing nothing whatsoever. New Year’s resolutions look like they fit the latter model better than the former, and not just because of all that turkey. Had you embarked upon realizing your goals already, they wouldn’t have the requisite dramatic promise of a fresh start.

Suggested reading

On Bonnie Blue and Roger Scruton

By Kathleen Stock

Accordingly, you should ignore any so-called experts ludicrously exhorting you to “soft launch” New Year’s resolutions in September, on the grounds that this will be more effective. Such pedestrian minds are apparently blind to the awe-filled sensation of standing between two huge temporal edifices in the dark. You are shedding the old self with the old year, and plunging headlong into the new on both counts. In September, telling yourself you are going to start running five miles every day is mundane. On 1 January, it becomes a magical incantation.

So: thanks to its symbolic context, a New Year’s resolution isn’t just any old intention. This context also explains why it has a kind of solemn import that the everyday version lacks. The felt gravity is hard to explain otherwise. You might say that it is because you have made a promise to yourself, but self-promises are the easiest kind to break. You might say it is because you have told others about your resolutions, in order to “hold yourself accountable”. But even if you have, it is unclear why others should care either way. Your projects are not theirs, and vice versa.

Perhaps to overcome this difficulty, an article in this week’s Atlantic suggested that New Year’s resolutions be agreed collectively with family or friend groups, the better to avoid future backsliding. Once again, possibilities of thrilling self-transformation are made to sound more like completing a group presentation at work. A better story is surely more Nietzschean. It is a crucial part of the January fantasy that your body and soul will be forged into some new and miraculous shape, simply by the force of your own will.

For delicate souls, this might sound disturbingly oppressive. Indeed, to explain the difference between an everyday intention and a resolution, some philosophers picture the latter as a piece of self-imposed legislation. Alain de Botton has said that “we need resolutions for the same reason as we need laws, to keep ourselves in check”. Meanwhile, Richard Holton pictures resolutions as involving intimidating meta-intentions. When you make a resolution, behind your ordinary pusillanimous intention to do such-and-such in future stands another intention, armed with a metaphorical cattle prod, there to stop you giving into temptation to break the first.

Since some people don’t like being told what to do, even by themselves, it is presumably these kinds of legalistic or military conceptions that give rise to endless variants of the “Why my resolution is to give up on New Year’s resolutions” article from Guardian authors. Others worry that resolutions are bad for mental health, apparently defining “feeling disappointed in yourself” as a form of mental illness. The good news is that you are likely to get over this sort of illness very quickly — and that as long as you are alive, there will be further New Years to try again.

Suggested reading

Does Nick Fuentes have daddy issues?

By Kathleen Stock

For this is surely the best side of the annual ritual of resolutions, properly understood. They are not just an expression of what you want to do, but of who you want to be. They are an intrepid acknowledgment that you are capable of being a better person, couched not in the bitter language of self-recrimination but of hope. Whether they actually lead to a slimmer waistline or more efficient working habits is neither here nor there. The point is that, right now, you can almost believe they will.

And the new year serves a further function: of allowing you to leave certain things behind. As with rituals of confession and forgiveness, you now have a formalized opportunity to mentally cast off the past and start again. Without religion we have precious few occasions dedicated to symbolic renewal, and certainly no collective ones. Our vernacular may be full of punishing talk about public “accountability”, but says little that is useful about meaningful repentance. This means it can be very unclear when repentance may legitimately end, and how exactly one is supposed to move on. Here, perhaps, we really do need something time-bound. In lieu of a priest, a calendar can help.

None of this immense value can be described in the language of “measurable” or “achievable” outcomes. Indeed, it can barely be described in words at all, without flat-footed literalism stamping the life out of it. Those who are keen to dismantle the institution of New Year’s resolutions are taking away more than a bit of February self-recrimination. Who wants time, boringly viewed as an undifferentiated plane? Who wants human life seen as a monotonous toil, with no small deaths along the way nor invigorating rebirths?

As for me: in 2026, I resolve to be more loving to my family, more attentive in my friendships, more fastidious in my habits. My January will be the driest on record. My language and my kitchen will both be impeccably clean. I will go walking in nature every day, laugh in the face of thunderstorms, and leap hills effortlessly. My columns will soar like an eagle, float like a butterfly, and sting like a bee. I will finally finish reading The Brothers Karamazov. In Russian. And if I can help it, I will mostly be staying away from the psychological professions. Their disenchantment can be horribly catching.

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

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

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

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

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

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

More from this author

Where the Labour Right went wrong

By Aaron Bastani

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suggested reading

Britain’s bargain-basement social care

By Jonny Ball

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

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

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

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

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

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

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