A little over a year ago, a deal was struck to underwrite Britain’s biggest data center. Nscale, a British company that builds and operates data centers on behalf of software companies, had made Microsoft its anchor tenant at a site in Loughton, Essex. Comprising 23,000 Nvidia chips at an initial capacity of 50 megawatts, the £2 billion data center would be large by European standards, but middling in American terms. Nonetheless, it was an agreement significant enough to be bundled into the package announced by the British and American governments during Donald Trump’s most recent state visit. “What a day,” said Keir Starmer, sitting alongside the President at a press conference. The suite of deals, said the then Prime Minister, was “the biggest investment package of its kind in British history”.

Last week, however, Microsoft pulled out of the data center agreement, depriving Nscale of its lead tenant. The project’s failure augurs poorly for Britain. AI is not solely a force of wolfish destruction; it is also an economic tool of immense promise. The frontier models, of course, are owned and operated by American and Chinese companies, but there are plenty of benefits, economic and otherwise, to hosting some of the associated infrastructure. British data centers don’t generate many jobs in themselves, but they allow us to store sensitive data on these shores rather than elsewhere; to support industries, such as banking, whose success depends on being closely connected to servers; to maintain something of a bargaining chip, even if only a small one, in the hyper-competitive new AI economy; and to create more capacity, at least in theory, for the training of British frontier models.

Whatever its faults, Starmer’s government acknowledged this reality, not only in that press conference with Trump, but also in the ambitious AI strategy, authored by the entrepreneur Matt Clifford, that it published in January 2025. Among other measures, the plan called for a twentyfold increase in public compute capacity, partly through the creation of deregulated AI growth zones. The Loughton data center was not situated in one of those zones, but it had government support all the same: ministers are reported to have lobbied local councillors to push through Nscale’s planning application.

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The lobbying worked. Early last year, Nscale said the data center was to be opened toward the end of 2026. In February this year, though, visiting Guardian journalists found that the site was still a working scaffolding yard. In July, it was reported that the data center would be delayed; in mid-September, it emerged that delay might last until the mid-2030s. That Microsoft lost patience should be unsurprising. If a week is a long time in politics, a decade is an aeon in artificial intelligence.

So what went wrong? The answer, it seems, is that Nscale has been unable to secure a timely connection to the national grid. Data centers aren’t plug-and-play; instead, they need a small town’s worth of electricity, with the infrastructure to match. The power arrives at a high voltage that must then be brought to a lower voltage by bulky equipment including transformers. This process takes place in a substation, and substations cannot be rammed into a grid, or a neighborhood, overnight. It might take years for a project to obtain planning permission, and that’s hardly the finishing line: the blueprints must then be implemented by electrical engineers who, given the fast approach of 2030 and its target of 90% clean energy, are thinly stretched.

To make matters worse, a nominally completed substation must not be plugged straight into the grid. Instead, it must be plugged into a temporarily isolated portion of the grid when power demand is low. Those slots are booked years in advance, meaning that one delay can cascade into further delays. In these dangerous times, UK Power Networks (UKPN), which handles such work in the South-East, tends not to share with inquisitive journalists the finer details of its physical infrastructure, but we can safely assume that Loughton is short of a gleaming new substation.

The Government, then, is now discovering that announcing plans for an exciting new data center is very different from actually cutting the ribbon. Loughton, alas, is not a one-off: earlier this year, for instance, OpenAI paused a comparable project in the North-East. One of the problems was the speed, or otherwise, of connecting to the grid, but another — one whose effects every Briton encounters daily — was the country’s industrial energy prices, which are the highest in the developed world. Under Starmer, AI was a high priority; but Net Zero, which has hoovered up the electrical engineers while continuing to discourage the use of gas, is so deeply plumbed into our laws and regulations as to make data centers all but unbuildable. Ed Miliband, it has been alleged, continues to block investment in data centers, even as foreign secretary — though he denies it.

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We can expect that civil servants, under duress from ministers more sympathetic to AI, will find enterprising ways to make the grid-connection process marginally less ineffective. Perhaps some legislative jiggery-pokery will enable sites like Loughton to jump the queue for UKPN’s attention. And maybe data-center developers in growth zones, which already have queue-jump privileges, could be empowered to build their own connection under Ofgem supervision.

But most of these measures would amount to a rearranging of finite resources rather than the introduction of new ones. Elsewhere, though, others are more muscular in their approach. China, whose data center capacity far outstrips ours, upgrades its power grids in anticipation of increased demand rather than in response to it. It purchases transformers in advance and in bulk. And though it encourages its data-center providers to use renewable energy, China permits them to use baseload power, which is largely dependent on coal, if they must.

The US, meanwhile, being composed of varying regulatory polities, has no single answer to the question of how to rapidly build data centers. Because the internet’s earliest users included the American government, the state of Virginia, being close to Washington, has historically had America’s largest data center capacity. But Texas, whose deregulated power grid stands alone from the other, much larger, multi-state grids, is forecast to overtake Virginia by 2030. Texas, in short, offers cheap land, cheap gas and solar, and a nimble regulatory regime — all of which are highly attractive to data center builders.

The lesson here is not simply that gas is a vital stopgap in the quest to harness AI. Paradoxically, an explosion of data centers ought, in the round, to be helpful for decarbonization. American hyperscalers, far too impatient to wait for grid upgrades, are now some of the most generous investors in clean power. Google has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in geothermal, a bet that might ultimately make this hitherto unreliable method of power generation readier for commercialization. Microsoft is helping to underwrite the revival of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, and Amazon is investing in small modular reactors. Technocapital has never before been so ravenous for energy, irrespective of where it comes from.

Even on environmentalist terms, then, the hunger for reliably-powered data centers ought to be harnessed rather than fought. It is also possible that the current construction boom might contribute to breakthroughs in nuclear fusion, in which AI is a promising fit for what is partly a fluid dynamics problem, or in materials science, where AI might help us discover crystal structures of use in batteries or solar cells. Intelligence, after all, is a resource that we can apply to any field of endeavor we choose. Thinking in those terms, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has envisaged that a single data center will one day be the equivalent of “a country of geniuses”.

One need not agree with Amodei’s forecast in order to bemoan Britain’s inability to get things built, be they data centers or otherwise. We have neither the wide regulatory menu of the US nor the world-historic ambition of the Chinese state. Instead, as our governance deteriorates, we are veering from prime minister to prime minister, each with their own pet projects, with the main constant being the continued shirking of overdue reform. Factories and refineries are shutting down, while airports, railway lines, motorways and power stations remain unbuilt.

The transformative technology of the day has not escaped the chaos. Starmer, in addition to commissioning the AI strategy, set up a council whose job it was to prepare Britain’s grid “for the AI revolution”. Andy Burnham, more interested in trivialities such as private parking fines than in leading that revolution, appears to have let the council slip into abeyance — though he has promoted Kanishka Narayan, the well-regarded AI minister, to his Cabinet. Meanwhile, the engineers who run Britain’s power systems complain that the rush to Net Zero is compromising their ability to keep the lights on.

We can still hope for better. A more aggressive planning philosophy, resembling those that work best abroad, could both accelerate grid connection and enable easier in-house power generation. In the short term, data centers would use gas, but in time, renewables would take over. We can imagine Cornish geothermal energy powering the data centers of the South-West; legions of batteries, made cheaper by deep-sea mining, balancing the vicissitudes of wind and solar. Hyperscalers’ nuclear projects, too, could provide reliable baseload power to both data centers and the grid at large.

The data centers might even be beautiful. In this richer, wiser Britain, anything is possible — even, by the mid-2030s, the opening of the data center in Loughton.

Andy Burnham has, thus far, been an avowedly domestic prime minister, with his focus on devolution, housing and social care allowing Miliband more control over foreign affairs. And until now, the role has in some ways suited Miliband well. On the eve of this week’s Labour Party conference, murmurs abounded of Cabinet splits over the economy and immigration. A shift in foreign policy, however, has been more warmly received within the party. Earlier this month, Miliband announced a series of sanctions on illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. He has integrated elements of his old brief at the Energy Department to push for “climate diplomacy”, and has been more explicit in his advocacy for European reintegration than either of the previous two office holders. This all provides easy ammunition for rival parties and for the British press, but it’s catnip for party members.

During his Conference speech in Liverpool on Monday morning, Miliband hit all these notes and provided a clearer view of what his foreign policy will look like. “The world order needs rebuilding anew,” he said, arguing that his approach would be one of “resilient idealism”. He had made the same points at a corporate reception the previous evening, where business leaders uninterestedly chatted and chewed. In front of Labour delegates on Monday, however, he was more at home. The crowd thunderously cheered his labeling of Israeli settlers as “terrorists”, and his declaration that “our future lies in a stronger, deeper partnership with the European Union”.

Left-wing dissent towards Miliband’s agenda has, therefore, come not from within the walls of the conference but right outside. On Sunday evening, more than 50 protesters were arrested for demonstrating in support of the proscribed group Palestine Action. When I walked past the scene, there appeared to be more police than agitators. White-haired radicals sat cross-legged on the grass — standing for an extended period would have put pressure on those joints — and held up homemade signs pledging fealty to the organization, surrounded all the while by a bored-looking ring of officers. The same evening, a smaller group of activists had confronted Miliband in Pizza Express, telling him his Israel position was insufficient and demanding he abandon his doughballs to address the protesters.

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This encapsulates one of the chief problems faced by Labour foreign secretaries at a time of war in the Middle East. While the Right-leaning press decries Miliband as an extremist enemy of the people, there will invariably be a coterie of progressive objectionists who will settle for nothing less than the nuking of Tel Aviv. At the same time, Miliband, a British Jew whose mother escaped a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, has had to put up with allegations of antisemitism for his action on West Bank settlements, just as security officials brief the press that his approach to the US-Israeli offensive against Iran was “petulant, pacifist, legalistic and very political”.

That Miliband is political is obvious: he is arguably the most ideological member of Burnham’s Cabinet, deeply interested in ideas in a way that the more interpersonally minded PM is not. “He’s more demanding [than Cooper or Lammy],” one FCDO official tells me. “But he knows what he wants. As soon as he came in, there was a plan for how he wanted things done.” Shortly after he became energy secretary under the leadership of Keir Starmer, Miliband spoke in an interview of the need to “move fast and build things”. Initially tipped to be Burnham’s chancellor, he has put paid to the idea that a move to the Foreign brief — which for some ministers feels more like an ambassadorial role — would neuter his political influence.

As part of this new shift towards a more ideological foreign policy, Britain will have to accept its own mediocrity. Much of Miliband’s messaging so far has reinforced the image of the country as a secondary power, rather than one that should be competing with the big boys in DC and Beijing. The West Bank announcement was made in conjunction with similar action from Canada and France, other middle powers with which Britain is forging closer ties to compensate for White House capriciousness. The UK has found some success as a driver of European action on Ukraine, leading the “coalition of the willing” at a time when Kyiv has been uncertain of US backing. Miliband insisted in his Liverpool speech that “our alliance with the United States remains essential”, yet he made no effort to hide this government’s diplomatic realignment. Britons are “proud Europeans”, he said, adding: “This is our continent.” In other words: these are our true friends, not America.

While Miliband has sought to portray his plans as a radical break from the Starmer years, some of his prescriptions bear a resemblance to what came before. His talk of “resilient idealism” is immediately reminiscent of Lammy’s promotion of “progressive realism” abroad. According to that doctrine, governments “do not have to choose between values and interests”, and Left-wing ideals can still shape practical responses to global conflict. Where Miliband differs from the more Atlanticist Lammy is in the course that he is charting away from Washington and more determinedly into the embrace of Europe. Indeed, it is hard to picture him (illicitly) fishing with JD Vance.

The Foreign Secretary, then, clearly sees an opening for Britain to become, rather than a leading power, a moral brake on the worst impulses of its betters. On Monday, he vowed to “put climate at the heart of national security”. When the UK takes on the rotating G20 presidency next year, it will “lead the efforts to manage AI so we keep our country and our world safe, and I say no tech titan should stand in our way”. Earlier this month, in relation to Gaza, he said that “Britain is not silent in the face of injustice and nor is it powerless”.

Yet Miliband risks making the same mistake as Lammy, attempting to navigate a multipolar world armed with the outmoded weaponry of the old liberal order. The UK has in recent weeks launched another round of “tough new sanctions” in Russia, with little evidence that they will have a greater impact than those which came before, while continued invocations of international law hardly deter Xi and Putin. Miliband’s assumption of a like-minded federation of European allies will be put to the test, too, by the possibility of continental powers such as France and Germany electing Right-populist, anti-Brussels parties into government in the coming decade. “Europe is not just our geography, but so much more,” he said as he called for a deeper partnership with the bloc on Monday. But how might he deal with a prospective AfD chancellor who wants out of the union altogether?

Miliband may be looking towards Europe, but these pledges are always made with one eye on Labour’s domestic popularity. The party faces a crucial by-election in Holborn and St Pancras next week, where Green leader Zack Polanski is seeking election in a constituency which in more than 40 years of existence has chosen only Labour MPs. There is a case to be made that Polanski’s initial success was the result of progressive frustration with Starmer, and that the Burnham conquest has brought the Left back onside. Miliband’s rhetoric against the Israeli government may have some moral grounding, but it also functions as an attempt to match Green radicalism on the issue.

His enemies won’t be surprised by this: he’s “Red Ed”, after all. Having been party leader for the first half of Labour’s decade of humiliation, Miliband has become a more polished, wily politician in the years since. But he’s still an idealist. “They say that as you age you become more cynical,” he declared during his Liverpool speech. “Why? Not me.” Talk of “resilient idealism” might sound appealing to the Labour base, but that resilience is only tested in times of crisis. As for realpolitik, nobody is mistaking Miliband for Henry Kissinger, but there are plenty within the party who would like him to take inspiration from one of Labour’s more hard-headed foreign secretaries — Ernest Bevin, who served in the Clement Attlee government from 1945-51.

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Bevin, a former union boss, had impeccable Left-wing credentials when appointed by Attlee, but quickly marked himself out as a realist on foreign policy. Recognizing that Britain was a fading superpower, he pushed for the creation of Nato, and its principle of collective defense, so that the country could call on a network of Western European partners ready to support its aims. He championed the development of a nuclear deterrent, and a decade earlier had admonished Labour’s pacifist then-leader, George Lansbury, for “hawking his conscience around”. Bevin also opposed the establishment of Israel, believing it would become a “racial state”, and maintained that the Balfour Declaration of 1917 had been a grave error of foreign policy.

Of course, Bevin failed in his attempt to block the foundation of Israel, his power only extending so far. Miliband, who has used his extensive Whitehall experience to circumvent obstacles that had thwarted his predecessors, is well-positioned to reshape the international order so that British objectives better match his own idealistic, Europhile politics.

And yet, the public may ask how far this serves the national interest. They would be entitled, too, to argue that Miliband’s Net Zero zealotry in the Energy brief constrained national industry, at a cost to the country’s hard-power capabilities. Britain has an opportunity to make something of what Miliband correctly perceives to be its secondary status, leading a set of fellow middle powers. But Miliband’s progressive ideals would be better served by pragmatism than by sanctions and stern words alone. “It’s hard to change the world,” he acknowledged in his Liverpool speech. Sometimes, it’s better to recognize the world as it is, and leave the idealism to the activists sitting cross-legged outside the conference gate.

Miliband’s father was a distinguished Marxist intellectual at a time when being of the Left didn’t mean you had to deny Israel’s right to exist. And though Ed called himself a bridge between Corbyn and New Labour, the bridge was not a particularly sturdy one. Still and all, he seemed to be at the center of a powerful personal storm when he stood shaking at the dispatch box last week and helped put clear blue water between Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer in the matter of Israel. If Burnham looked even more uncomfortable than Miliband, that was because he had more to be uncomfortable about. It was he who kicked off his premiership with the promise to turn the clock back on Starmer’s caution in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre, when the then prime minister refused to bow to the Politburo anti-Zionism of his backbenchers and held fire condemning Netanyahu.

Yes, bugger Netanyahu. But it was a moral imperative, initially at least, to go after Hamas who had made it public that they couldn’t wait to rape and massacre again. Not an imperative, though, to Burnham, who I don’t recall mentioning his misgivings at the time but who now must win back the traditional Labour haters of Israel, who deserted to Zack Polanski, or just deserted full stop. Well, politics is a filthy business, and it might have been that very thought that troubled Miliband, causing his eyes to dilate blackly and the dark antagonistic clouds of Marxist principle and Jewish agony to pass across his face, as though presaging thunder.

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“I am a proud Jew,” he said. Part confession. Part warning. Was it also part apology for what was to come? I don’t mind admitting that I shuddered. I am a proud Jew, but….

So how bad was it? Well, the roof hasn’t fallen in on us. We haven’t been thrown out of the country as we were in 1290. And the target was shrewdly selected. The settlers. Who loves the settlers? There is some argument as to how much of what we see on the forever discredited BBC News tells the whole picture, how many of the settlers on the West Bank are running riot, how much of what they do is encouraged by the government. But that they are there at all is hard to take. A number of the early Zionists had wanted to see the back of religious zealotry. Had I been an early Zionist I’d have agreed with them.

I visited the West Bank 30 years ago or more, while writing and subsequently filming Roots Shmoots, a journey into Jewishness and, I suppose, myself. I didn’t find any of myself on the West Bank. And while I don’t, as a rule, make the mistake of being ashamed of what Jews who are not like me do anywhere, the words, action and deportment of the West Bank Jews I met turned my stomach. A seemingly intelligent American woman talked to me at the door to the settlement she managed. After 10 minutes of rational conversation, she threw wide her arms and said God gave her all I saw before me. I told her we had a problem in that case as He’d also given it to me. I further witnessed a fringed, orthodox Jewish teenager mocking an elderly Palestinian woman and that was enough. I saw plenty more that was ugly. But sometimes one small act can tell you more than a thousand big ones. Get the hell out of here, I thought. Not me, him.

So all right, maybe sanctioning them is a good idea. But then again, maybe it isn’t. Too many fanatics — for the deranged can be found on both sides of any argument — had been calling for sanctions. You are a proud Jew, remember, Mr Miliband. Do you want to number yourself among the ignorant and the bigoted who chant outside Marks and Spencer and hiss at people who buy the wrong figs? Do you want to give them even a sniff of hope that they have not chanted in vain?

You don’t need me to tell you, Mr Miliband, son of a Marxist intellectual, that revolutions and other movements of great change don’t grow out of despair. The spark is hope. Cast your mind back to that October 7 Massacre, which your boss won’t allow himself to be too voluble about in case it cedes another robotic voter to Zack, and recall the way it stirred the settler-colonialist professors on the campuses of Oxford and Harvard to rise up and call for more of the same, more blood, more hostages, more rape, more death. Hamas are pleased with you. “So far so good,” they say. “Good start.” Did you answer them, Mr Miliband? Did you ring Corbyn to get advice on how to talk to terrorists? Did you say thank you, comrades, while reminding them you’re a proud Jew and that’s all they’re getting. Or is there more in the pipeline? Is Burnham, too, hoping you won’t stop there? As I write, a Labour MP is recommending military action against Israel, which could be stretching our armed forces if we’re also having to go protect the Falklands again. But that’s what hope does. It makes men greedy and unrealistic. Even the Bishop of York is calling for a few more targeted sanctions while you’re on the job, at the same time as warning, as you would expect of a senior Churchman of York — where long ago there was another famous massacre of Jews — against the perils of antisemitism.

Antisemitism! Tut, tut, none of us want that. But will telling it we don’t want it be enough to put it back in its box. You dropped a few of the catchwords favored by the river-to-the-sea marchers in your troubled address. Demo-speak. “The occupation”, without explanation. “Ethnic cleansing” which, though there are some in Netanyahu’s ultra-Right coalition who admit they think along those lines, suggests a more systematic program of removal and destruction than we can be sure exists. You are on the foothills of the biggest of all the lies currently doing the rounds, Foreign Secretary and, if you’re not careful, you’ll soon be putting the definite article before “genocide”. THE genocide. I think I see the phrase beginning to form on Andy Burnham’s lips, though he pointedly resisted it when he was merely Mayor of Manchester and had only tram-drivers to answer to.

There is no point, Mr Miliband, offering to be confident that people with a Jew-grudge will listen sympathetically to the nice distinctions you are making between the West Bank and Israel and Israel and the Jews and the Jews and Israel, if you are not yourself fastidious in the language you employ. You rose and addressed a tinder box of a nation. Maybe you knew it. Maybe that was why your eyes turned black as though swimming in pitch. I am a proud Jew. But what might I just have put a match to?

Here, with nothing but good will, Mr Foreign Secretary, is a suggestion for you. Worldly wisdom is as important a virtue in a politician as a good heart. So is knowledge of the hearts of others. It’s a fine thing to be a proud Jew. But what we need even more than that right now is an intelligent Jew.

Howard Jacobson’s latest novel is Howl (Jonathan Cape)

Miliband, of course, occupies a uniquely hated position in the imagination of the British Right, akin to that held by Nigel Farage for the Left. But that is in large part because Miliband has been the most radical and effective minister in Keir Starmer’s otherwise pallid regime. And chances are, if Burnham’s government stands any chance of being as transformative as he has promised, Miliband will be the driving force behind it.

Over the past two years, Miliband has been unmatched in terms of political will and competence at working the levers of power. On two occasions, he fended off efforts by Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s powerful chief of staff, to have him reshuffled to another department. Miliband not only persuaded the PM to soak up the criticism of his policies, but extracted large sums from a cautious Treasury to implement his energy revolution. He has overseen hundreds of thousands of solar energy installations, and commissioned hundreds of new wind turbines; he has loaded households and businesses with the costs of rapidly upgrading the electricity grid, and held open the door for Chinese EVs to flood the British market; he has subsidized new nuclear power and sunk money into developing carbon capture technology. It seems the notoriously difficult machinery of Whitehall poses few problems for Miliband.

Now he is reportedly helping Burnham’s team prepare for power. Though Burnham yesterday tried to dampen speculation about his pick for chancellor, his speech illustrated why Miliband is regarded as the favorite. Burnham’s stated goals of a massive social housing buildout, bringing down the costs of essential utilities, bringing those utilities under greater state management, and striving for “equivalent living conditions in all parts of Britain” are all consonant with Miliband’s politics. As for welfare reform, Miliband is likely the only candidate with the legitimacy among Labour MPs and the broader Left to see it through.

Above all, though, there is a yawning gap between Burnham’s pledge of “the biggest change in our lifetimes in the way the country is run” and the very broad, thin brushstrokes of his own political vision. The erstwhile Manchester mayor has so far relied in an almost Trumpian fashion on his supporters to project intellectual coherence onto his own intuitive style of politics. Only Miliband, it would appear, has the temperament, competence and ideas to actually deliver such an epochal shift to the Left.

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Regarding a Miliband chancellorship, a treasury official has warned Burnham that “you might as well be handing your premiership to him”. That may sound emasculating, but it is far from clear that it would be politically damaging. For if Miliband is feared by conservatives, he is also very much admired by progressives. That he struggles to connect with Middle England was made clear by his electoral failure as Labour leader in 2015; but that is where Burnham comes in. Between them, they stand a good chance of making Labour the first choice for voters who are primarily motivated by keeping out Reform UK, something Burnham has already managed in Makerfield. Given the country’s chaotic new electoral landscape, this could be Labour’s surest path to keeping power.

Whatever one thinks of Miliband’s politics — and as Badenoch’s recent comments suggest, his enemies have never quite been able to grasp him, portraying him as both sinister and ridiculous — he evidently has virtues as a politician. They include conviction and tenacity, the traits our current prime minister so conspicuously lacks, as well as a capacity for hard work and attention to detail. He first entered the Treasury in 1997, aged just 27, as an advisor to then-chancellor Gordon Brown. In 2008, when Miliband took charge of the newly formed Department of Energy and Climate Change, he set an eye-wateringly ambitious carbon target after just 13 days in the post, announcing that by midcentury Britain would reduce its emissions by 80% of their 1990 levels. (His elder brother David, the heir-apparent to New Labour who he would infamously deprive of the party leadership in 2010, had previously set a slightly more modest target of 60%.)

In 2009, when prime minister Brown decided to back a third runway at Heathrow, Miliband resisted fiercely, prompting Permanent Secretary Jeremy Heywood to ask, “why is this new minister holding up the wheels of government like this?” As the baffled Heywood later remarked, when Miliband managed to extract various climate-related concessions from Brown, “this just isn’t supposed to happen”. During his first stint as energy secretary, Miliband created the framework in which policy has developed ever since, including under the Tories. It was Theresa May, after all, who would set the still more ambitious goal of Net Zero emissions by 2050. Add to this the authority of experience which Miliband can claim today, and it’s small wonder that Starmer so often appeared to be in his thrall.

Then there is that most revered of political qualities — ruthlessness. In the grueling 2010 leadership contest, Miliband outmaneuvered not only his brother, the candidate of the party establishment, but also the domineering Ed Balls. (In fourth place out of five was a certain MP for Leigh, Andy Burnham.) For someone who learned his trade in proximity to Gordon Brown’s bitter, years-long struggle to wrestle the leadership from Tony Blair, the unseating of Starmer must have been a tea party.

Needless to say, Miliband also has flaws. Chief among them is a weakness for the feel-good politics of progressive activists and NGOs, which he has been immersed in since he first served as Climate Change secretary and, before that, as minister for the Third Sector. This is a comfort zone of blue-sky thinking and moral crusades, where idealistic academics imagine that the right combination of clever policies and exciting comms will induce the public to hold hands and strive for social justice. This dimension of Miliband’s thinking led to perhaps the most undignified moment of his career: the decision to prostrate himself before Russell Brand on the eve of the 2015 election, hoping that an endorsement from the comedian, then absurdly considered some kind of thought leader, would unlock a mythical youth vote.

Clearly though, Miliband’s ideas are not all vacuous, since much of his 2015 manifesto was subsequently implemented by the Tories, including an energy price cap, a higher minimum wage, stricter regulation of junk food and mandatory gender pay-gap reporting. The fact is that, beneath the Left-wing clichés and wonkish talk of “predistribution”, Miliband has a core insight which has proved basically correct: since the 2008 financial crisis, people have wanted a more active state to shield them from the effects of a globalized market economy. He is just unequipped to sell this message beyond a core of voters on the Left, something which Burnham might prove better at.

If Miliband does indeed become chancellor next month, his vision will probably include a strong element of “mutualism”, giving “ordinary” people a greater role in the running of companies, public services and local government. This has been a longstanding Miliband theme, present in his contributions to the 2010 manifesto through to his 2021 book Go Big, which championed policies like company wage boards and citizens’ assemblies. It is also where Miliband’s thought intersects with Burnham’s flagship idea of devolution. Mutualism has another proponent in Miatta Fahnbulleh, the MP for Peckham who worked with Miliband in the energy department, and who has allegedly become influential in Burnham circles.

But Miliband does, of course, come with big risks. Britain already has a high-regulation, low-growth economy — partly thanks to the kinds of policies that Miliband prefers — with much less financial breathing space than it had a decade ago. Like Rachel Reeves, Miliband would make a big show of committing to fiscal rules and stimulating growth through productive investment. But this may not be enough to placate the debt markets on which the state’s finances depend, and which are already suspicious of Miliband. Growth from capital investment in infrastructure and housing will take time to arrive, especially with Net Zero continuing to bear down on business through high energy costs, and with the further tax increases that will almost certainly be necessary. Financial constraints may end up trapping Miliband in an electoral no-man’s land, unable to deliver the radical policies that voters on the Left crave, while angering everyone else with regulation, taxes and unemployment.

Miliband will also face a dilemma in terms of Britain’s international orientation. The strongest case for his aggressive Net Zero drive is not an environmental one — as critics never cease to point out, Britain accounts for less than 1% of global carbon emissions — but a security one. Renewable energy, along with the electrification of the economy, will hopefully make Britain less vulnerable to the fossil-fuel price shocks that countries such as Russia and Iran have inflicted in recent years. It will reduce the tendency of energy prices to be set by the most expensive producers of natural gas, while ensuring that Britain has a stake in the technologies of the future. The Telegraph’s economics commentator Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, hardly a raging Jacobin, is among those arguing that renewables will see Britain becoming an electricity exporter in a matter of years. But Milibandism has major vulnerabilities of its own.

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The most obvious is defense. Where, among all the spending commitments that would accompany his chancellorship, should Britain find the money to prevent its Armed Forces from sliding further into ruin? Britain’s energy security would be purely notional if its allies no longer considered it worth cooperating with, and if its infrastructure open to attack by hostile states. No less important, Miliband’s economic vision is highly dependent on China, whose cheap exports to Britain, including both Net Zero technologies and other products, are preventing prices from rising as much as they otherwise would. Yet China’s goal is to use its exports to prevent Europe from rebuilding its own industrial base; that is why the EU is increasingly building tariff walls.

This is perhaps the biggest source of potential tension between Miliband and Burnham. The latter has insisted that reindustrializing Britain is crucial for providing good jobs and broad-based growth, and has strongly hinted that protectionism will be necessary to achieve it. That would require Miliband to fundamentally change his strategy, or Burnham to choose a different chancellor.

Who else could it be, though? The fact remains that, if Burnham wants to deliver on his rhetoric of national transformation, his best option is to gamble on Miliband’s experience and determination. For better or worse, a Miliband chancellorship could produce an economic and social shift on a scale comparable to the Thatcherite revolution — and especially if it manages to consolidate the nascent anti-Reform bloc of voters, thereby securing a further five years of power. But the stakes are high, and the implications far-reaching. Labour can only hope that, beneath his platitudinous exterior, Burnham has grasped these realities.

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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By Jonny Ball

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.

Two decades of consensus on green policy, shared by Britain’s governing classes and to some extent its public, is currently unraveling. A recent YouGov survey found flagging support for Net Zero, the government’s commitment to decarbonize the British economy by 2050 or sooner, with a quarter of voters now saying that the dangers of climate change have been overstated. It may be, as Labour’s zealous energy secretary Ed Miliband argues, that Britain’s climate debate is being polarized along American lines; but it clearly matters that material sacrifices demanded by green measures, which were long a question of principle, are now starting to be felt in people’s lives. At any rate, the Reform Party, who will potentially form the next government, are determined to scrap what its deputy leader Richard Tice calls “net stupid zero”, and the Conservatives are now following suit, with Kemi Badenoch this week pledging to repeal the Climate Change Act.

Even Labour is wavering. Miliband’s green policies are beginning to look like a political liability. The party faces pressure from its trade union supporters over job losses at closed oil and gas facilities, while energy costs for both homes and businesses remain painfully high. All the while, anger continues to mount at the difficulty of building anything under exacting environmental regulations.

The rest of the world has shown scant regard for Britain’s delusional bid at “climate leadership”. America and China continue to burn fossil fuels on a scale that dwarfs anything in our own industrial past. Donald Trump is dismantling the Biden climate agenda and railing against Europe’s green policies. In August, a proposed treaty to limit global plastic production failed to materialize, and now a draft report by the International Energy Agency suggests that, far from reaching “peak oil” this decade as previously hoped, the current trajectory will see global oil and gas demand still rising in 2050. The apparent futility of Britain’s climate mission must also be sapping the public’s support.

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Labour’s technocratic tyranny

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These developments have barely registered in Polanski’s publicity drive since becoming leader. Instead, the former Lib Dem council candidate has established himself as a darling of the Corbynite Left. One of his first moves was to support the police for sending five armed officers to arrest Irish comedian Graham Linehan for his comments about “trans-identified males”. In interviews and on his own podcast, “climate emergency” is merely one ill-defined theme in a familiar repertoire of wealth taxes, colonialism, and the looming threat of fascism. Among the issues occupying the Greens in the lead up to their conference are legal action and protest by former members who say they were purged their gender-critical views.

The Green Party, in other words, has ceased to be an organization dedicated to environmental campaigning and policy, at precisely the time when such an organization is needed most. In fact, just 16% of those who would consider voting Green see the environment as the top issue facing the country.

How did we get here? The root of the problem is that, during this century, environmental politics has split into two parts: an establishment strand, and a protest strand. The establishment strand is comprised of the methods by which governments and large firms have tried to mitigate environmental damage. It is a bureaucratic affair, focusing on carbon budgets, regulations, and the allocation of capital to green technologies and energy sources. The protest strand, by contrast, is just what it sounds like: direct action demanding that governments go harder and faster to save the planet, whether in the form of climate marches or guerrilla campaigns by groups such as Just Stop Oil.

The result of this division is that, while environmentalism has maintained a high public profile, its political base has eroded. Neither strand has really bothered to involve a broader public in debating the goals and means of green policies. Nor have they properly considered the resentment those policies invite, whether through growing energy bills or the constant creep of restrictive rules.  Environmental politics ought to help us keep sight of one of the most profound questions a modern society faces: how can we prevent our way of life from ruining the world we are handing on to future generations — its landscapes, waterways, and fast-diminishing wealth of natural life? Instead, it has become a byword for stifling bureaucracy on the one hand, and for a facile politics of gesture on the other.

Unmoored from the lives of its citizens, the environmentalism of Britain’s establishment has drifted into a realm of fantasy targets and unworkable edicts. Nothing shows this better than the adoption of Net Zero goals in 2019. As Professor Helen Thompson has noted, the legislation passed through parliament with “little contest in the dying days of Theresa May’s government, when the country was still politically consumed with the question of whether the UK would actually leave the EU”. Our political system was paralyzed, our politicians unable to agree about anything, yet they still committed to “reinventing modern civilization… within less than three decades”. There was neither the technology existent to realize these ambitions, nor a plausible route to the green industrial boom promised by May, by Boris Johnson, and now by Miliband.

Instead, Net Zero policy has contributed to the on-going deindustrialization of the country through exceptionally high electricity prices. Moreover, a rush to install wind and solar before the grid has been updated means that we have problems not just with inconsistent supply, but with oversupply, so that we will pay an estimated £1 billion this year to prevent windfarms from generating too much electricity. This strategy, or lack thereof, risks discrediting the entire project of decarbonization, as does the failure to explain why Britain must shoulder these costs when other countries do not. It is becoming apparent that an additive approach — building up renewable sources as well as some domestic oil and gas — will be more politically sustainable, and may be more effective as well. Energy is so important to a modern economy that, with more of it, we could develop our own cleaner industries, rather than relying on dirty ones overseas, and could ultimately invest more in green tech and infrastructure.

The unpalatable nature of such compromises has helped to push the environmental movement, and the Green Party specifically, onto the more comfortable terrain of protest. As one Green member recently tried to remind his leadership, the party has grown over the years through patient advocacy and attention to local issues. Yet the “hyperpolitics” of the past decade, with its online activism and public demonstrations, has taken its toll. Greta Thunberg’s graduation from climate heroine to Palestine campaigner is emblematic of how green politics has been submerged in a wider protest agenda. Now an exodus of progressives from the post-Corbyn Labour party, combined with the longing for a charismatic populism on the Left to match Nigel Farage, is creating a party that is green only as an afterthought. But if the cause is too diffuse, its appeal is too narrow. Research into the Green membership has found that it is concentrated in London and the southeast of England, that 88% are Remainers, and that almost all identify as Left-wing.

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Obviously an environmental movement can be based in a critique of society, and even a spirit of revolt — love of the natural world usually involves some degree of disillusionment with modernity — but in the past, this has taken diverse and colorful forms. During the Twenties and Thirties, the so-called “muck and mystery” movement, led by reactionary and fascist-sympathizing British landowners, combined organic agriculture with Morris dancing and festivals celebrating an imagined ancient English culture. In the Seventies and Eighties, meanwhile, New Age hippies dabbled in Tipi communes, Native American cultural practices, and pagan ceremonies at Stonehenge — culminating in a brutal clash with police at the 1985 “Battle of Beanfield”.

Such mysticism, while it inevitably veers into the ridiculous, represents something that would serve today’s green movement better than an emotive attachment to politics: a sense of wonder at, and direct connection with, the natural world. Focusing on nature not just in an abstract global sense, but in a concrete, local one, can paradoxically appeal to a much broader base of people, of different temperaments and outlooks.

This may sit uneasily with the practical purview of environmental politics, which demands a careful understanding of economic webs spanning the world, as well as the mundane technical systems which make our societies function. But that is precisely what makes this problem so difficult. An effective environmental movement must be at once romantic and rational, global and local, radical and conservative, and above all, capable of incorporating many types of people. With that in mind, and looking again at the Greens today, we might conclude that political parties are probably the wrong mechanism for this challenge altogether.

“I have absolute faith,” energy secretary Ed Miliband has said, that Net Zero will “do great things for our country and our world.” Inconveniently, an investigation by one of Britain’s leading energy experts provides evidence that our growing reliance on Milliband’s beloved renewable forms of energy, not the “rollercoaster” fossil fuels market, is more likely to have a devastating economic effect.

For the past two months, Professor Gordon Hughes, a senior fellow at Washington’s National Center for Energy Analytics and Edinburgh University’s former head of economics, has been working with UnHerd to develop a sophisticated computer model of the UK’s electricity system which provides a robust picture of power generation and why the economic pain is only set to continue.

Miliband, according to Hughes, is starting from a false premise. He is “unambiguously wrong” to claim that the principal cause of rising bills to date has been the price of natural gas. In fact, the wholesale price of electricity, which is where changes in fossil fuel prices are most clearly seen, has generally been constant for the past 20 years. And yet in that same period, electricity bills paid by businesses have almost quadrupled, while those of domestic households have more or less tripled.

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It’s true that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 saw the European natural gas price surge briefly by up to 500%, while there was a smaller, short-lived spike in 2008, caused by an imbalance between supply and demand. But to blame, as Miliband does, “petrostates and dictators” for the fluctuations is, according to Hughes, just a “convenient scapegoat”. In fact, it’s the ever-growing thicket of taxes, levies and subsidies, stemming from the switch to renewables, which has caused the price increase for these added extras now comprise more than three-quarters of the cost of electricity on household bills. According to Hughes, “the steady increase in inflation-adjusted electricity prices over the last two decades is largely a matter of self-inflicted harm”.

And his model reveals that under the Government’s 2030 clean power plan, much worse is yet to come.

For true believers like Miliband, this would be a price worth paying if Britain really could become a net-zero paradise. But unfortunately, given the basic inefficiency of renewables, and the fact they often don’t generate power for hours or days at a time, fossil fuels are destined to remain part of our energy mix for many years. This means that if we want to keep the lights on, we are going to have to spend billions of pounds well before 2030 to build new, back-up gas-fired power plants that Miliband claims will only be used 5% of the time, simply because so many in our existing fleet are worn out.

The single biggest element in the coming increase projected by the model is the cost of the planned expansion in renewables. Official estimates of its cost, says Hughes, are too low, and judging by recent market data, the price for constructing new wind and solar farms is likely to be around £150 billion over the next five years — all of which will be added to bills.

Another factor is Britain’s increasing dependence on electricity supplied via undersea cables from abroad. According to the Hughes model, the more electricity we import, the more we pay. But without it, there will be blackouts. In 2024, after all, Britain was a net electricity importer 91% of the time. Yet foreign energy cannot be relied on. Norway has already passed a law allowing its government to block the sale of electricity when its own supply is scarce. Other countries may well follow suit.

You might argue that high prices from European supplies are, in turn, caused by spikes in the natural gas market. But that, Hughes’s model shows, would once again be false: gas accounts for less than 15% of Germany’s energy mix, and less than 5% of France’s. And while Miliband claims his Net Zero plans are needed because gas prices are always bound to rise, that’s also untrue. In Europe, the long-term trend has been stable for 25 years, while in America, the fracking boom has seen costs fall. In other words, to insure against another 2022 — an unusually bad year — Miliband wants to transform British energy in ways that Hughes’s model shows will incur much long-term hardship. That, he notes, “seems like rather a bad bargain”.

Worse is to come, especially once Labour’s green revolution really kicks in. It’s certainly true that wind and solar farms can generate energy from nature, saving operators on fuel costs. But the “full system costs” of renewables wipe out these gains. If, for example, the wind doesn’t blow, turbines will need backup generators. And though Miliband says he wants an eightfold increase in large-scale batteries to store electricity when the weather doesn’t cooperate, the technology only functions for around two hours. This winter, we’ve had days on end without wind, and Hughes’s model suggests batteries would make up just 10-15% of the shortfall.

How, then, would Britain secure the rest of the energy it needs? With natural gas! While Miliband claims gas-powered plants will only need to operate 5% of the time by 2030, Hughes suggests the real figure will be at least three times as high — bearing in mind that the Government says growth in electric vehicles, heat pumps and immigration will increase demand for electricity by 11%. To create a reserve big enough to cope when renewables aren’t functioning and parts of the system “trip off” because of a fault, Hughes says that by 2030, Britain will need some 50 gigawatts (GW) of gas or diesel generating capacity, up from 30 GW now, partly because nuclear stations are due to shut, and we cannot rely on electricity always being available from abroad.

Of course, existing gas plants could remain operational, but only run when needed. But this would ignore another problem. The “open cycle” variety of gas-powered turbines that can be fired up quickly, making them suitable for occasional use, have a lifespan of around 30 years — and almost all in Britain have already reached this limit. By 2030, two-thirds of the less adaptable “closed cycle” type will be similarly aged. Even if we make generous assumptions about how many old facilities might still be available, this means building a whole new fleet over just five years, even though these plants would often lie idle.

All this will obviously cost billions. Current turbine prices come in at some £60 million per GW, so building new back-up plants with a total capacity of 30 GW would cost £18 billion, and 50 GW £30 billion. This implies a further question. With the economy in the doldrums, and the Treasury under pressure to fund budget increases in health and defense, how exactly would Miliband pay for his net-zero dreams? Here, again, the answer is levies on bills, the fees that have already raided pockets so dramatically. Contracts for backup power plants are issued by the Government through what it calls the “capacity market”. This is already skyrocketing, from £120 million in 2017 to £1.1 billion in 2024. With renewables continuing to crowd out reliable alternatives, the capacity market is increasingly needed. And Hughes’s model says these levies are likely to reach an eyewatering £7.4 billion by 2030 — a conservative estimate.

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The model identifies still further costs. One is the permits operators must buy to burn gas and other fossil fuels, and whose prices are constantly rising. Then there’s the so-called “balancing mechanism” — whereby operators are paid to generate energy in an emergency, or else cut off production entirely in the case of grid bottlenecks. Taking in all these factors, Hughes’s model suggests the cost of electricity production could reach almost £60 billion by 2030, between 70 and 80% higher than it would be if the UK stuck with its current, non-Net Zero system.

Nor is this even the whole story. All told, electricity generation only accounts for about half your bill. The rest is formed of “network charges” — paid to the National Grid and energy firms for ensuring the power gets from producers to end users. The exact numbers are more difficult to calculate. But the National Electricity System Operator (NESO), the Government-owned company that runs the grid, has said that to create a Net Zero system, it will need to vastly expand its network to link up new wind and solar farms. The upshot? A potential outlay of £65 billion by 2030, with network charges rising from between 80 and 117%.

The economic impact of all this, it hardly needs stating, would be disastrous. “It is a tax on all of us,” is how Hughes puts it. “Electricity-intensive industries which compete in world markets can only meet it by reducing wages or profits. Since workers are unwilling to accept reductions in their incomes, the result has been that they have closed their activities in the UK and moved elsewhere.” The evidence is already in, with the recent demise of the Bridgend steelworks, the pending closure of the Grangemouth refinery and the likely end of car manufacturing at the BMW factory in Oxford. Vauxhall, Hotpoint, JCB and niche manufacturers of items such as mattresses are also cutting jobs and have warned they may soon leave Britain too.

Not that Ed Miliband seems to mind. Only last week, he reiterated his commitment to Labour’s net-zero targets, stating that “the single most important thing we can do is stick to our clean power mission”. It seems that to a man seeking to build a world-leading utopia, something as transient as Britain’s future prosperity doesn’t mean very much.

***

Technical details of Hughes’s model can be found on his website, Cloud Wisdom. He is also willing to share the model’s code with those who want to know still more.    

If we were being charitable, we could put Reeves’s early Brownite fandom down to a precocious awareness of the limits of state power in a modern, globalized market economy. While most young Leftists take years to realize that there aren’t levers labelled “socialism” and “equity” hidden in the corridors of power, and that the problem isn’t simply that nefarious politicians are refusing to pull them, Reeves realized early on that politics required compromise. Brown was a master of trade-offs; his chancellorship was defined more by continuity than by rupture. He combined a glum acceptance of narrow political possibilities with smug detachment, wonkish obsessions, and an intensely awkward media persona. Reeves has built on his example.

More importantly, though, Reeves’s teen-worship reveals the limits of her ambition. Hers is less a politics of utopias or grand narratives, but rather one of managerialism, and deep, lifelong integration with the strange social club of professionalized Labour politics. Like Brown, she has no intention of altering the relationship between state and market, or between labor and capital, in any substantive way. Instead, her Platonic ideal is a return to the easy politics of Britain in the post-Cold War years, buoyed by a booming global economy. That was before the 2008 crash and all the morbid symptoms of secular stagnation that developed after — including the populisms of the Left and Right, and the intensifying culture wars. In Reeves’s analysis, what Britain needs is not so much a new growth model, but simply a return to growth per se. This would be enough to protect the sensible, center-left old guard from oblivion.

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But in thinking this way, Reeves and Keir Starmer are beginning to resemble an anachronistic ancien régime, hopelessly out of step with the times. The year is 2025, not 1997. Donald Trump has just won re-election with an enormous personal mandate for mass deportations, tariffs, and “drill, baby, drill!”. And all the energy is with the populist Right. The mushy center cannot hold — and Labour’s policies, its aura, and its diction all seem strikingly discordant with the zeitgeist. Farage, Trump, Musk et al. seem imbued with a Hegelian “World-Spirit”, whereas everything Labour does appears as old-fashioned, robotic, and labored. Over the weekend, Reeves admitted Britain could learn from Trump’s “positivity” — but perhaps it needs to do more than just that.

The problem isn’t limited to Labour. The whole of Europe has become a seedbed of national populism; an incubator for the politics of Giorgia Meloni, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen and the AfD. It is no longer a continent of expansionary, liberal optimism, but instead resembles a declining, dysfunctional terrain that is falling far behind the true, bifurcated hegemons facing off in Washington and Beijing. In such a world, caught in the middle of a new Cold War, how can Labour possibly survive?

Like a blindfolded child struggling to hit a piñata, Reeves scrambles for a solution to Britain’s flatlining jobs market, spiking bond yields, and “fiscal headroom”, which is squeezed between her own fiscal rules and the whims of gilt traders. Bill Clinton’s strategist once said that if he was reincarnated he’d like to come back as a bond trader, so great was the power they wielded over the world’s governments. Reeves might sympathize with such a fancy. Even when she sticks to her own mildly social-democratic, tax-and-spend Budget, the faceless entities of international sovereign debt markets throw a spectacular hissy fit, casting doubt on her growth forecasts, edging up the price of borrowing, and forcing her to keep Britain stuck in a low-investment, low-productivity doom loop.

There have been whispers that Labour-aligned groups are seeking the advice of Dominic Cummings and his esoteric, very online pro-growth networks. Yet if this is true, the maverick’s influence is yet to be felt. When it comes to the issue of planning regulation, the Government has displayed an almost incomprehensible timidity. It may have green-lighted a handful of projects, but a comprehensive reform of planning — especially one that confronts the vetocracy — still looks highly unlikely. The final legislation will probably fall victim to the Government’s penchant for eternal reviews, consultations and inquiries. The future expansion of Heathrow is a welcome development, but after Reeves’s begging-bowl trip to China, and her half-hearted trip to a Davos snoozefest, during which her event was apparently streamed online by fewer than 40 people, it smacks of desperation.

In the meantime, the Left has been condemned to near-total irrelevance. Gaza has become an all-consuming passion for those on the Left of Labour, dominating their organizing efforts. Where there might have been an effective fifth column against Reeves’ more conservative instincts, there is the pro-Palestine movement. Popular discontent with the removal of the winter fuel allowance has been a boon to Reform, which has increasingly begun to triangulate towards the more statist instincts of the electorate by promising a restoration of the pensioners’ benefit, the removal of the two-child benefit cap, and the renationalization of the steel industry and Thames Water. What’s more, the Left has continued down the pathway of sub-cultural estrangement from the national mean, ritually purifying their ranks of anyone who strays from their militant line on gender, race relations, policing, geopolitics and migration. When they do venture into debates about the political economy, it’s only to fight yesterday’s war. They criticize Labour’s supposed return to “austerity” even after a Budget that raised taxes by £40 billion and oversaw the largest increases in borrowing and spending for decades.

Much of that money will be spent on the green transition, which is now in full swing. Reeves awarded Ed Miliband’s Energy Department the biggest increase in spending of any Whitehall body. There will be no new oil and gas licenses; Grangemouth refinery will close; and the steel and chemicals industries will be decimated. And yet the hundreds of thousands of Net Zero jobs this will create will not be in Britain. Instead, Britain will import turbines, cables and solar technologies, primarily from Denmark and China, which never embraced the ideology of monetarist deindustrialization.

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This isn’t the “Green Industrial Revolution” the Left once heralded as a catalyst for growth and a jobs renaissance. How could it be when the most efficient way to cut our emissions is to export them elsewhere? To do otherwise would require an unimaginable level of investment in Britain — and already, the markets have deemed the UK to be pushing against the limits of fiscal probity. A choice has to be made between a robust domestic supply chain for the green revolution, or the catch-up maintenance of crumbling roads, schools and hospitals.

The Chancellor pines for a return to a lost, Brownite norm, but she still cannot answer Lenin’s “who, whom” injunction — Who is your politics for? This is the trouble when you have no grounding in ideology: you never establish whose side you are on — a discovery that remains with you even as your politics grows more nuanced. Reeves never developed a deep political hinterland. She has no politics. And that distances her from the spirit of the age. While today’s populist insurgents combine a robust cultural supremacism and an economic nationalism that suits the post-Covid, deglobalizing, decoupling era, the centrist incumbents cling to the safety of convention, sensibilism, and a long-gone, post-political era of liberal consensus. The vibe shifted against them long ago.

There is still potential for a syncretic politics of the Left that combines the energies of the new leviathans of the age — a protective, interventionist, and redistributive state — with an embrace of tech-accelerationism, productivism, and a pro-growth policy agenda. This could loosely resemble a kind of East Asian developmentalism, adapted for an advanced, post-industrial economy plagued by intense regional inequalities. But the Left isn’t there yet. They’re still arguing with brick walls. The progressives have lost hope in the future; they’ve become nostalgic regressives, far too wedded to the old ways.

To take the interventionists at face value, you would think the fall of Assad in 2024 is somehow proof of their own wisdom in supporting airstrikes on his regime 11 years earlier in response to his use of chemical weapons. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, said last week that “if the West had acted faster, Assad would have been gone”. By not intervening when it had the chance, the West “created a vacuum that Russia moved into and kept Assad in power for much longer”, Streeting argued. It’s a neat story with a pleasingly simple moral at its core: take action or somebody else will.

Streeting’s account of recent history — notably far from his health brief — is the conventional view in London, Paris and Washington; the view of what Barack Obama once described as “the blob”. It is no surprise, then, that it was echoed by George Osborne on his podcast, Political Currency, last week. Osborne described David Cameron’s failure to win parliamentary authorisation for military action in 2013 – inadvertently setting off a train of events culminating in Barack Obama’s decision not to impose his red line against chemical weapons — as one of his greatest regrets from government. “Forget about the suffering the Syrian people have endured for the past 10 years as a result [of non intervention], look at the massive migration flows into Germany, the pressures that put on European governments, the collapse of more moderate centrist administrations, ultimately the small boats that come across the English Channel,” Osborne explained. All could be traced back to the West’s failure to take control back in 2013 when it had the chance.

To support Osborne’s case, he played a clip of the British diplomat Hugh Powell reflecting on the lost parliamentary vote a decade in.

Powell was Cameron’s deputy national security adviser in 2013, and scion of Britain’s greatest diplomatic family. He is the son of Margaret Thatcher’s former foreign affairs adviser, Charles Powell, and nephew of Keir Starmer’s national security adviser, Jonathan. In Hugh’s view, the 2013 vote against intervention was “a massive mistake”. The key point, he said, was that the Assad regime was always fragile and could have been knocked out of power with more forceful Western intervention. “2013 was an opportunity to help crack it well before Hezbollah and Russia came to its rescue,” Powell told Osborne and his podcast partner, Ed Balls. “And with Assad gone we had a good chance of installing a power-sharing government in Damascus that might well have prevented the hidden expansion of ISIS.” It’s a neat story.

The thing is, though, Powell’s explanation is exactly the opposite of what David Cameron insisted was the case at the time. In 2013, Cameron told MPs that he was seeking parliamentary approval for military action for one reason alone: to deter the use of chemical weapons. “The question before the House today is how to respond to one of the most abhorrent uses of chemical weapons in a century,” Cameron began in his statement pleading for their support. “It is not about taking sides in the Syrian conflict, it is not about invading, it is not about regime change, and it is not even about working more closely with the opposition; it is about the large-scale use of chemical weapons and our response to a war crime — nothing else.”

So, which is it? Was it a missed opportunity for regime change, as we are now led to believe. Or was it a failure to punish the use of chemical weapons that had nothing to do with regime change, as Cameron insisted then?

Powell’s apparent admission that there was a wider ambition was picked up by Ed Miliband to defend his decision to vote against military action. Responding to Wes Streeting’s comments, Miliband correctly stated that the 2013 vote was — at least ostensibly — to authorise a “one-off bombing of Syria”. However, Miliband then claimed the reason he did not support this one-off bombing mission was because “there was no plan for what this British involvement would mean, where it would lead and what the consequences would be”.

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Miliband’s account is just as lamentably dishonest as Cameron’s. If Western intervention would have made no difference to Assad’s grip on power because it was a “one-off”, then his argument for not punishing Assad in 2013 is logically bogus. But if it were not, then he cannot at the same time claim with certainty that the air strikes would not have undermined Assad’s grip on power. They were either one-off strikes or they were not. Miliband, like Cameron and Osborne, is trying to have it all ways.

Just as it now seems obvious that Cameron was hiding the real motivation of his policy 2013, so too does it seem obvious that Miliband was too. Cameron couldn’t be honest about his intention because it would’ve sparked even more opposition. Miliband couldn’t be honest, because his calculation was fundamentally not about the policy but his own self-interest. Labour opposed intervention in Syria in 2013 because they believed it was necessary to win the general election in 2015.

The dishonesty of the two sides trying to recast their roles in recent history captures the essence of our governing class’s failure in recent years. For so many of our leading politicians and diplomats, it seems, their views are essentially unfalsifiable acts of faith. Casting my mind back across the great titans of 21st-century British policies it is hard to think of a single big beast who appears capable of genuine reflection on the inadequacies of their way of understanding the world. The world of podcasts is teeming today with former ministers or political leaders explaining why what they have always said remains entirely true.

It is for this reason that I find myself reflexively jumping to Miliband’s defence despite his reprehensible behaviour in 2013. For Osborne, nothing seems capable of shaking his faith in the benign power of the West and its ability to make the world better for all.

Osborne’s attempt to claim the Syrian non-intervention led to the small-boats crisis is particularly lamentable. Of those trying to make it to Britain illegally today, most come from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Albania — none of whom are wanting for lack of Western intervention. What is more, the ability of the EU to deal with illegal migration flows across the Mediterranean have grown immeasurably worse because of the Cameron-Sarkozy decision to intervene in Libya in 2011, toppling the Gadaffi regime and creating an anarchic vacuum of power which continues to this day. Where is the real reflection from Osborne et al about this failure, let alone the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan?

There is a fundamental complacency to our outgoing political class today, which seems happy to wallow in what Keir Starmer might call the “tepid bath” of its simplistic analysis, unable, it seems, to wrestle with the complexities of foreign and economic policy today and to level with people about the trade-offs. It is striking that David Lammy’s “progressive realism” places ever greater emphasis on the realism of its creed rather than the progressivism, emphasising, for example, the recent push to develop ties with the Gulf. The days of Tony Blair’s Chicago speech setting out his interventionist “doctrine of the international community” seem as ancient as those of Kissinger.

In Hugh Powell’s account of 2013, for example. Western intervention would have led to the fall of Assad and the emergence of a unity government of some kind. In Osborne’s telling, this would have prevented the various crises which swept over Europe thereafter. Both are essentially declarations of faith.

Today, Powell says the only outside power able to impose order on Syria is Turkey and that President Erdogan will need to send a Turkish Richard Holbrooke figure with the skill and determination to pull Syria’s various ethnic and religious factions together in a Lebanon-style power-sharing arrangement. The references to Holbrooke and Lebanon are inadvertently telling.

Lebanon is a failed state with a record of catastrophic mismanagement and corruption that has destroyed a once thriving country. Living in Lebanon might have been better than living in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan in recent years, but it was worse than almost everywhere else outside sub-Saharan Africa. Is this really the best solution?

Richard Holbrooke, meanwhile, might be a hero to the interventionists today, but his record carries lessons that are more uncomfortable than they imagine. A biography written by Holbrooke’s friend and admirer, George Packer, is a reminder that he rose to prominence in the Sixties as a far-sighted diplomatic realist who saw that America’s war in Vietnam was going catastrophically wrong in a way that the country’s foreign policy establishment seemed incapable of understanding.

In the late summer of 1966, after returning from Saigon, Holbrooke found himself at the White House with President Lyndon Johnson. “The belief that America could do whatever it wanted remained strong as iron,” Packer writes. But Holbrooke dared to question. “Mr President, I’ve just come back from Vietnam and, you know, I’m a little worried about this… there are some limitations to what the Americans can do in the civilian field in Vietnam.” Johnson then stared at Holbrooke and replied: “Well, son, your job is to get rid of those limitations.”

The wise men of the American establishment were wrong in 1966 and Holbrooke was right. But it was the wise men who would be summoned to the White House, as Packer writes, “to assure Johnson, on the basis of nothing except heavily slanted briefings, an unexamined attachment to the domino theory, and their own code of resoluteness, that this distant country they didn’t understand was a necessary battlefield of the Cold War, before returning to their stately offices and sterling reputations”.

It is an irony — though perhaps a revealing one — that Holbrooke ended his career as such a wise man convinced of his and America’s ability to overcome their limitations in another faraway country, Afghanistan. Today, in his place, we have new wise men, clinging to their unexamined theories and codes of resoluteness convinced of their own fantastical tales of recent history. The truth is that both Ed Miliband and David Cameron are losing their battle for history — and deservedly so. The vote in 2013 and the fall of Assad 11 years later are just two crises in an epoch of Western failure that has given us the world of Donald Trump and Abu Mohammed al-Julani in which we live today. If Britain and its new Foreign Secretary really wants to learn from its recent past, they will need more young Holbrookes and fewer wise men clinging to their unexamined faiths which have long since lost credibility.

How times change.

Speaking to Labour Conference last week, Ed Miliband — now the Secretary of State at the Department for Net Zero and Energy Security — pledged to construct an “armoury of clean power” for the United Kingdom, in order to make its electricity system “net zero” by 2030. What he didn’t mention, however, was that his brother is being paid by a venture capital outfit whose profits are likely to increase in the process.

***

When David Miliband stepped down from Parliament, his MP’s salary was a modest £66,000. But that was only a small portion of his income. In his final entry in the Commons interests register, he declared he was also being paid £100,000 a year as chairman of Sunderland Football Club, and £92,840 as an adviser to a green investment fund. To top up his account, he also accepted almost £65,000 for appearing at a London forum hosted by the foreign ministry of the United Arab Emirates.

Just over a decade later, David has refashioned himself as a man of virtue: he lives in New York, where he runs International Rescue Committee, a US-based charity that supports people in humanitarian crises. For his services, however, he receives a princely sum. In 2022, he took home a salary of $1,253,728, as well as a bonus of $150,000.

For such a level of remuneration, and with such a workload, one might expect David to be busy with the day job. Yet, for more than four years he has had an additional job: in September 2020, five months after his brother became shadow energy secretary in Sir Keir Starmer’s new shadow cabinet, it was revealed that David had become a paid advisor to Giant Ventures, a London-based venture capital firm that has a particular focus on green technology and energy. Following a series of earlier investments, it recently launched a new “climate focused growth fund” and claims it wants to invest a further $1 billion in “sustainable technologies” by the end of the decade.

All of which may seem perfectly in fitting with David’s form when it comes to juggling multiple jobs. Except for one thing: at least two of the companies Giant Ventures has invested in are likely to prosper as a direct result of decisions made by the new government. In other words, David now works for a company that stands to profit from climate policies introduced by his brother Ed.

Before and since the election, Ed Miliband has spoken of the need to create a vast energy storage network connected to the national grid — to ensure that, in a renewable energy system, the lights don’t go out when the sun is not shining and there is no wind. Part of this, he has said, will be supplied by arrays of giant batteries. He mentioned them again in his conference speech last week, when he called for the “armoury of clean power”.

Enter Field, a battery power storage firm set up in 2021 by Amit Gudka, one of the co-founders of collapsed energy firm Bulb. Field, with five sites already finished or being built, claims to be ready to meet Miliband’s challenge. And Giant Ventures seems to agree: according to data gathered by finance research experts PitchBook, it invested in Field at its outset in 2021.

Now, it is possible that Ed Miliband was unaware that Field was partly financed by Giant Ventures, although this had already been reported. It is also possible that didn’t know his brother was a member of the Giant Ventures advisory board, though that information was also public.

But that would be puzzling. According to Whitehall’s Ministerial Code, newly appointed ministers must formally declare “all interests that might be thought to give rise to a conflict” with their government post: not only their own, but those of their spouse and “close family members”. They must not only avoid any conflict, but also the “perception” that one might arise. It should have been obvious to Ed Miliband that he had a duty to check his brother’s interests.

This year’s declaration is yet to be published, but both Labour and Conservative former ministers told me that declarations of ministerial interests are usually made immediately after taking office, so that civil servants are aware from the start where conflicts might arise. I asked both the energy department and the Cabinet Office, which is responsible for the list, whether Ed had declared David’s role at Giant Ventures, but both refused to comment. Asked when the next list would be published, all they would say is that this would happen “in due course”.

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Similarly reticent, Giant Ventures refuses to disclose how much it pays David Miliband, but it seems certain he does receive a stipend: one of his fellow advisory board members, Lord John Browne, the former chairman of BP, states in the Lords register of interests that the position constitutes “remunerated employment”. For Miliband in particular, this “employment” takes a number of forms: not only does he attend board meetings — he also appears at events and in the firm’s videos and podcasts.

As for the insight he provides to the fund, a spokesperson told me that, “like all venture capital firms that are not listed on public markets, we do not publish our investor reports to the general public”. However, PitchBook has identified two firms that look likely to profit from Ed Miliband’s “clean energy superpower” revolution. As well as Field, for instance, there is Beams, which helps homeowners make their properties more energy efficient — a service that should prosper following Miliband’s pledge to impose tough, green standards on both private and public rental homes.

Miliband has also made a specific ministerial decision that will benefit Field. Less than three weeks after the election, Field became the beneficiary of a technical change to the rules governing Britain’s electricity supply system that Miliband personally signed.

The document in question, the Capacity Market (Amendment) Rules 2024, is not an easy read. It relates to the curious way that the grid pays for energy storage: under the “capacity mechanism”, the Government concludes expensive contracts with companies such as Field, who in return guarantee that they will supply a stipulated amount of electricity at a moment’s notice for a given period of time. (In the case of batteries, the limitations of battery technology mean this will be no more than a few hours.) Under this system, the companies get paid whether or not they actually supply any energy.

The cost, which has been rising steadily, is met by adding a levy to customers’ electricity bills. Energy supply expert Gordon Hughes, emeritus professor of political economy at Edinburgh University, told me that by the beginning 2026, the annual cost is likely to be more than £2 billion, the equivalent of £70 per household, and by 2030, up to £5 billion.

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Until Ed Miliband changed the rules, the problem for companies like Field was that when batteries are used and recharged repeatedly, their capacity deteriorates. This meant that battery firms had to pay to install more capacity than their contracts said they needed when their batteries were new, so that they would not be running the risk of breaching their contracts when their capacity declined. This was because the old rules said they were not allowed to add more capacity if and when it was required. “This change is clearly advantageous to them,” says Hughes, “because it allows them to reduce their upfront costs. It is also likely to increase their profits.”

This was not the only decision Miliband made on 18 July that may come to benefit Field. On the same day, he signed a letter to the national grid setting out details of the capacity mechanism’s future, which will create lucrative opportunities for firms like Field to build more batteries, enhancing their profits and the value of investments made by venture capital firms.

After the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero told me it could not comment as to whether Ed Miliband had declared his brother’s interest in Giant Ventures, I sent an email setting out details of how a conflict, or at least the appearance of one, might occur. But Its spokesperson refused to address this, saying only: “There is an established process in place for the declaration and management of interests held by ministers. This ensures that steps are taken to avoid or mitigate any potential or perceived conflicts of interest. The List of Ministers’ Interests will be published as part of this in due course.”

Giant Ventures said it did not wish to comment, while David Miliband failed to respond at all.

This is unsurprising. Since leaving Parliament, David Miliband has been reluctant to speak publicly about his relationship with Ed. But on one of the few occasions that he has, in 2015, he told The Guardian: “I’ve always said you remain brothers for life.”

After the pipers comes a succession of American cop cars. One is from Los Angeles; another is playing KRS-One’s “Sound of Da Police”. Next are the floats, soliciting charitable donations, and then the local worthies. The scouts, a youth farming group, naval cadets, and a topless child manning a machine gun mounted on a truck are all present.

This is Nuneaton Carnival, an annual fair launched in 1930 to raise money for the local hospital that has been a fixture ever since. Today, following a four-year Covid-enforced break, the market town is out to party. It is Middle England as conjured by the fever dreams of Paul Dacre, a provincial part of Warwickshire where one might once have spotted old maids cycling to communion through the morning mist.

If Nuneaton lives at all in the public imagination today, it is as the place where George Eliot was born and Ed Miliband died. In 2015, it was viewed as the ultimate bellwether constituency: had Miliband won Nuneaton he would have been prime minister. But it wasn’t to be. David Cameron would later crow it was at 1.53am, when the town declared, that he knew he had won the general election outright.

Being 37th on Labour’s list of targets, the Warwickshire market town ought to have flipped that night. Other than at Thatcher’s pomp, in 1983 and 1987, the constituency had been red from 1930 to 2010. Brexity, deprived, struggling with the cost-of-living crisis and convinced that immigration is too high, it is the exact type of seat that Sir Keir Starmer is straining to win at next year’s general election. Since 2010, it has been held by Marcus Jones, a stolid Midlands solicitor who has lived in Nuneaton all his life, and whose lead over his Labour rival yawned to a 30-point gap at the last election.

Arriving at the town by train, the first sight is of Hell. On platform 1, a mural — about eight feet high and 20ft across — seems to depict the town alight: long tongues of flame wrap themselves around buildings, bridges and trees, consuming all. This Guernica of the West Midlands — On the Right Tracks by Joanne Bannister — was commissioned by Nuneaton & Bedworth In Bloom. I try to find someone to ask about it, but the ticket office is shut, and no staff can be found.

Across town in Gala Field, rows of gazebos mark the spot where the carnival procession is to begin and end. Amid the food trucks and tombola stalls, I meet Martin Parrack, who has pitched up to run a PR drive on behalf of the Warwickshire Freemasons.

“I’m here to dispel the myth that we’re in the Illuminati,” he tells me in a flat Brummie accent. “The principles of the Masons are to be good to your neighbours and your family.” Between the secret handshakes and cloak-and-dagger ceremonies, I suggest, you must talk to a lot of different people. How do you think the town is doing right now?

“The membership of the Masonic temple in Nuneaton is growing,” he says. “Young people who can’t afford to buy houses in Coventry or Birmingham are moving to the town. They’re moving to areas that wouldn’t have been so… desirable in the past.”

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But the region, he adds, is not in a good place. “Tamworth is struggling, Nuneaton is the same. I recently walked from Birmingham to Nuneaton, then from Nuneaton to Atherstone, to raise money for charity. If you walk through Nuneaton town centre, you can see a marked decline in footfall. Today is a Sunday, but that was midweek. It’s not vibrant.”

A few stalls down, two local women soliciting donations for a disability charity share much the same story. “We’re still at the tail end of Covid, feeling its after-effects,” the younger woman, who is in charge, tells me. “Society has changed. People are less sociable. The community spirit has petered out a bit.”

Her older colleague chimes in. “Covid was the final nail in the coffin,” she says. “The high street is declining. People are counting their pennies.”

Nuneaton has been on a slow decline for some time. Once an epicentre of the Industrial Revolution, the flat land around here was pockmarked with coal mines sunk deep into the earth. Just a decade ago, the Daw Mill colliery — just a 20-minute drive away — was one of the largest in Europe still operating.

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Then, in February 2013, a fire broke out 740 metres below ground. Sparked seemingly from nothing, it spread quickly to a ventilation unit and 100 miners had to be evacuated. Fourteen stayed behind to contain the blaze, but to no avail. A few years earlier, employees had been making £70,000 a year, with dozens chasing every vacancy. Now, out of nowhere, the mine was forced to close; 650 men lost their jobs.

Today, at Nuneaton Museum, a small exhibition featuring a spread of historical curios are all that remains of the industry. A woman working behind the desk tells me the closure of the pits was a blow to the town.

“We ran an event where we invited people in to discuss their memories of mining,” she says. “There is definitely a big sense of sadness at the loss of the industry. There was a fondness for coal. It was a real part of the town. It was in the bones of Nuneaton.” Can the area be revived? “There are a lot of plans in place to regenerate the town and to bring it out of what’s perceived as a slump,” she insists.

As for who they’ll vote for, she says locals are “sick” of the Tories. “The choice to vote for the Conservatives was made in desperation,” she explains. “Labour used to be popular, but there was a loss of faith in the party.”

Lianne Parry, a volunteer busy talking to the few guests who wander in, agrees that Starmer could win the seat. “The faith in Labour could come back,” she claims. Nuneatonians voted for Brexit, but they didn’t understand what it was or what it would do. “After it happened, they wondered why things were so difficult, but they voted for it without asking questions.”

I walk from the museum up into town, towards the high street. When the 18th-century non-conformist historian William Hutton visited Nuneaton, he described it as being “in the domain of sleep”. Some 250 years later, little has changed. Nuneaton Beds and Sofas is having a closing-down sale; the Myton Hospice a clearance sale; Debenhams is boarded up; a sign in the window of Gattsbys solid oak furniture specialists declares: “Sorry — closed.” The high street is largely deserted. The first man I try to talk to rides away at speed on his mobility scooter, insisting he does not live in Nuneaton.

I stop in at Lord Hop, a microbrewery set up in a shop that was once a former beauty salon. Its landlord, who was born in Nuneaton but now lives outside, says the footfall is so low, he often closes at 7pm during the week. Despite that, he insists, “the town is coming back”, with a new cinema and restaurant set to open. “It’s natural to be optimistic,” he tells me. “We never fully recovered from Covid. Covid chucked everything out of sync.”

In response, the Government “chucked money at the town”, he adds — but the £4 million from the levelling-up fund was not enough. It failed to tackle the real causes of decline — inchoate talk of council “corruption” and big business getting away with something, as well as a broader sense that the area hasn’t taken advantage of Brexit. Online, equally vague rumours about municipal corruption have been raised, with little substance behind them. “Where is all the money going?” ask Nuneaton and Bedworth Community Association on a website that also features a video suggesting the World Economic Forum “runs the world”.

The first crack in Labour’s local base of power came in 2008, when the Conservatives took control of the borough council for the first time since it was established in 1974. The “last fortress of socialism in Warwickshire” had fallen, the Coventry Telegraph reported. On a flying visit to the town, David Cameron congratulated then councillor Marcus Jones, the future agent of Miliband’s doom.

Could Jeremy Corbyn do any better? It was at a Labour leadership hustings in Nuneaton, after all, that the oddball backbencher drew such great applause that both Owen Jones and Toby Young foresaw his eventual victory. Held just a month after Miliband failed to win over the town, the occasion was designed to excise the spirits of defeat, but — as if the party’s new leadership had been built upon a burial ground — it would only come back to haunt them. In 2019, the Tory margin of victory stretched to 13,000.

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“They’re all the same, all the politicians are the same,” says Nick, a regular nursing a pint of porter. “Corbyn was very Left-wing. He wasn’t interested in improving the town, he was interested in his own agenda. He believed in God knows what.” Nor was Corbyn strong enough, says the landlord — not strong enough to take on the capitalists, not strong enough to reverse decline, not strong enough to represent them.

Starmer, meanwhile, is too posh and too remote. Bill Olner, the Labour MP who represented Nuneaton from 1992 until 2010, was different, they say. Nick adds: “He mixed with the locals. He was a working man all his life until he was elected to parliament.” After his defeat, Olner, a former electrician and union shop steward, joined the local council and served until he contracted Covid and died in the local hospital.

Yet if it was Nuneaton where Labour’s crack-up began, and Nuneaton where their entry into the wilderness was confirmed, it may yet be the origin of their revival. A recently watered-down green energy plan from the party would mean investment for a new electric battery factory in the region. Locals remain confident things can change, while sceptical of the ability of politicians to help. Or, as Harry Ghale, one of the town’s many retired gurkhas told me as he helped set up a community barbecue: “Nuneaton is okay. I’m not bothered about who wins the next election.”

51 years later McCluskey, now the leading trade unionist of the last decade, shows no regret as he reveals this scam in his memoir, Always Red (published to coincide with the annual conference of the Labour Party he helped to ruin). Indeed, he seems almost proud of getting away with it — his account mentions no comeuppance for the con. That’s fitting for a man whose career in politics and public life has been defined by two things: indifference to the consequences of his own actions, and the power of money.

Other people’s money, that is. Until recently, McCluskey headed Unite, and his liberal use of the union’s funds is a motif of this book. Even if you’re familiar with the grubby business of political party funding, there’s something startling about McCluskey’s lordly accounts of committing vast sums of his member’s money to whatever politician or campaign he’d chosen to favour. When Tom Watson spends the £50k Len handed him for a campaign, Len casually tosses him another £20k. When Alan Johnson calls about a donation to the Remain campaign, Len agrees £250k — the legal maximum — in one phone call.

The impression of McCluskey as a feudal lord, treating Unite as his fiefdom, grows with his account of using its resources to look after his own affairs. He criticises various adversaries for using expensive lawyers to fight their cause: when a challenger to the Unite throne seeks legal advice “from a top QC” it’s a sign of his “bottomless pockets” and “establishment” backing. Yet McCluskey recalls making repeated use of Unite’s in-house lawyers to threaten journalists who sought to report — accurately — his relationship with Karie Murphy, a close aide to Corbyn. If that relationship was a wholly private matter, why did the union spend members’ money concealing it?

All this is chickenfeed, of course, compared to the millions McCluskey spent propping up the man who would lead Labour to its worst defeat since 1935.

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For a book over-heavy on meetings, deals and chatter among and about politicians, there’s no clear explanation of why McCluskey thought Jeremy Corbyn was right — or just right for Unite. He backs Corbyn because he’s not a “Blairite” or from the “Labour Right”, a group that seemingly includes Ed Miliband — whose leadership campaign he backed — and any other Labour figure who doesn’t agree with Len. Indeed, McCluskey’s primary aim here appears to be to insist that he was right about, well, everything, despite the dreadful consequences of his choices.

Tony Blair gave Labour 13 years in power in part by breaking the unions’ grip on the party — a political success for which many in the Labour movement will never forgive him. McCluskey, interested in power as well as money, appears to see the primary job of a union leader today as reversing those changes. His aim, he writes, was to give Unite more “influence” over Labour. That influence is an end in itself — how it might be used, in the interests of Unite’s fee-paying members, is never explained. All that matters is that Len has senior Labour people at his beck and call. At least Corbyn was consistent in his principles; McCluskey offers far less ideological clarity. His politics are those of the back-scratching backroom deal.

Inevitably, then, McCluskey’s memoir reveals some stark inconsistencies. He expresses interest in Blue Labour, and its regard for traditional “family and flag” values. But without pause, he showers praise and cash on Corbyn, whose internationalism, pacifism and sympathy for identity politics is diametrically opposed to those values. He privately supports Scottish independence in 2014 while funding the No campaign. He thinks EU membership is bad for British workers, but campaigns to Remain.

His post-2016 position — to my mind convincing — was that Labour should commit to accepting Brexit, dismissing a second referendum or other schemes to overturn the result. If his arguments had won out, Labour might not have lost quite so much ground with its traditional voters. Yet even Unite’s money can’t buy him enough influence to make that the party’s policy. He blames John McDonnell and Diane Abbott: “Corbyn now had his two closest friends in politics, one in each ear, telling him to move on the issue — and that’s what he did, committing to a second referendum in all circumstances.”

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Not all Labour MPs backed Corbyn’s position, and McCluskey reports meeting members of the group who wanted to support Theresa May’s deal and “get Brexit done” long before the slogan was coined. They ask for Unite’s backing to go against party policy and deliver the Brexit McCluskey says he wants. But he refuses. Then he blames them for obeying the leadership. “They talked a good game but, whenever it came to the crunch, almost all of them fell into line with the whip,” he writes, failing to note that he funds and supports that very whip.

As a major player in the Corbyn project, McCluskey needs an excuse for its shattering failure in 2019 — and Brexit, rather than the infighting he’s implicated in, is it. In his account, Corbyn’s muddled position on leaving the EU was the sole reason for Labour’s collapse, especially in its working-class heartlands. To support this argument, McCluskey offers some second-hand anecdotes about Unite members’ dismay over Brexit, including some quotes that to my weary ear sound about as convincing as his testimony about his youthful broken arm. “At a meeting of the stewards I was told: ‘Jeremy is regarded as a traitor over Brexit’,” McCluskey recalls, conveniently.

He concludes with the bizarre claim that he and Unite were “vindicated” by the electoral catastrophe that he funded and “influenced”. Far from accepting any responsibility, he repeats a favoured Corbynite talking point about his man “winning the argument”, as if that makes up for reducing Labour to barely 200 Commons seats.

He also overlooks or cynically downplays the other major factors in that 2019 humiliation — most grievously anti-Semitism. “No evidence that antisemitism was more widespread in the Labour Party than in wider society has ever been produced. All the evidence that exists suggests the opposite,” he writes, dismissing the views of several Jewish Labour MPs, peers and members, and the Board of Jewish Deputies, and the Community Safety Trust, and the Jewish Chronicle. What, after all, do they know about anti-Semitism?

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Also dismissed is the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, which found that Labour, under Corbyn, had been “responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination”. Far more important to McCluskey is that accusations of institutional bigotry “demoralised” Corbyn and — worse — “devastated” poor Len himself. Will no-one think of the real victims here?

Besides, even if Labour was a little bigoted, voters didn’t care, in McCluskey’s telling. “I don’t believe antisemitism,” he writes, “was much of an issue on the doorsteps of Darlington or Doncaster in the 2019 general election.” Perhaps McCluskey, devoid of principles in politics, finds it hard to believe others might have them. Or perhaps this is just part of his wider habit of claiming the support of whoever he likes for whatever position he likes.

McCluskey has a habit of grandiosely speaking for the “ordinary workers” of Britain, the idealised grafters he allegedly represents. Despite a six-figure salary and a life spent in London offices and upmarket restaurants (as an aside in the book, he says he’s partial to Black and Blue in Borough Market, where a ribeye steak is £31), McCluskey insists that he retains a gut understanding of the workers, who, naturally, agree with him in all things.

But, strangely for a book by a union leader, Always Red pays little attention to trade unions and their members, at least in contemporary Britain. There’s lots of rose-tinted memories of earlier decades, and too many dull stories about the backroom politicking that saw McCluskey reach the top of the movement. But precious little about where unions stand now, and what their future might be.

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McCluskey led Unite for a decade, until this year. He proudly reports that under his leadership, its funds grew tenfold to almost £500 million, “more than all the other British unions combined”.  For him, financial clout is all — and apparently more important than the number of people who actually support him and his union. He fails to mention some other numbers. In 2007, when Unite was formed by merging Amicus and the TGWU, it had 2 million members. Its most recent official filing shows it now has just 1.1 million members paying into its general fund.

That’s in keeping with overall union membership, which remains in long-term decline. Today barely 13% of private sector workers are union members. Perhaps the most stunning figure on the unions’ decline is that members are now more likely to be university graduates (28%) than to have no qualifications (17%). Education is the dividing line of our age, and trade unions speak for those at the top, not the bottom.

Why have those workers least able to bargain for higher wages turned away from the Labour movement?  Could that trend be stopped or reversed? Union sympathisers like to explain the decline by pointing to legislation and the growing power of big employers, which makes “exploitation” easier. But if that’s the case, why haven’t supposedly exploited workers become more inclined to seek the unions’ protection? McCluskey offers a few cursory paragraphs about automation and technology, and a lot of blaming Thatcher and the Right-wing media — but makes no real attempt to answer such questions. He’s more interested in himself.

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And money, of course. He’s not the only one. Could it be that the unions, in search of members with solid and reliable wages to pay membership dues, have been more interested in representing public sector workers? Almost 52% are now union members. And the public sector now has twice as many high-skilled roles than the private sector, since many jobs — teachers, nurses, the police — now require a degree.

No doubt those workers need representation, in the workplace and Parliament. But a labour movement that focuses on relatively secure and affluent state employees, while neglecting those in more precarious positions, is a movement that has lost its way. The “Blairites” share some blame for that, but it’s been more than a decade since Ed Miliband disowned Blair’s “naive” faith in markets — and 14 years since the man himself left office. 2019 was the nadir of the modern Labour movement, and that’s the responsibility of those who led it at the time.

It was Corbynism that turned Labour into the party of the middle class. But he was aided and abetted by the man who was being paid to speak for British workers — who instead spent millions of pounds of their money trying to buy himself influence over a political project that repelled them. And McCluskey is about as sorry for it as for lying about that broken arm.

When Our Lord Jeremy extended his messianic balm over the fields of Glastonbury that June, the crowd was higher than ever — not just on the usuals — but on pure, uncut, top-shelf New Jerusalem. The torpor and apathy and cruelty of the 2010s were over at last. Salvation was at hand: Brexit would be reversed, affordable housing would be built, borders would be abolished. Every child would receive their own mega fast broadband router, and sex workers would be free to roam the land, maligned no more.

All over the country, roses shed their thorns; at Longleat, lions lay with lambs. No more either/or distinctions, from now on the British would embrace both/and. We were going to have it all, and so would the Palestinians. “That politics that got out of the box,” he roared from the Pyramid Stage, “is not going back in any box.”

And yet here we are, barely the length of a parliament later. Corbyn’s politics is not only boxed up — it is entombed, buried deep beneath the political firmament like nuclear waste. His replacement as Labour leader has less charisma than a long video of Iain Duncan Smith doing a jigsaw puzzle.

A few weeks ago, Keir Starmer appeared on television, watched by a trifling audience, and cried. (You would be crying too if you were the leader of the Labour party.) He seemed needy and awkward, like Labour’s losing, patronising, pints n’ flags n’ chip butties strategy in the Hartlepool by-election. Another by-election loss in Batley and Spen is about to follow.

What can save them? Well, when the going gets tough, the Party gets writing books. Labour luminaries are as prolix and as prolific as the most unhinged Victorian essayists. Labour tomes have fallen from the sky all year: John Cruddas’s The Dignity of Labour, will shortly be joined by Jess Philips’s Everything You Really Need to Know about Politics, and Lisa Nandy’s Finding Our Place in A World Falling Apart. And September will be shaken to its very core by Tristram Hunt’s book about Josiah Wedgewood, who he calls — sigh — “the Steve Jobs of the 18th century”. But the most revealing Labour books this year come from Ed Miliband and Gordon Brown, because they barely mention Labour at all.

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Miliband’s is called Go Big: How to Fix Our World. In 2015, unfortunate Ed looked as if he would be the first British politician to go down to posterity notable only for his association with a sandwich since… the actual Earl of Sandwich. Then he reinvented himself as a podcaster. Co-hosting Reasons to be Cheerful with the radio presenter Geoff Lloyd, Ed revealed that beneath the dorky, robotic exterior he possessed a more dorky, less robotic interior. The podcast was rampantly downloaded, and Miliband was profiled as if he were a cross between a sexier member of the pre-Raphaelites and a knight of the Algonquin Round Table. Miliband, the nearly man, had arrived.

Brown’s is called Seven Ways to Change the World, and is clearly the harvest of a long lockdown. Shakespeare wrote King Lear during his own plague-induced quarantine; Brown found not one, but seven whole ways to change the entire world. It reads like he bookmarked the Wikipedia page of the Marshall Plan, and googled “most inspiring quotes by dead African-Americans”. Like King Lear, Seven Ways is a tragedy, albeit for different reasons

Both Go Big and Seven Ways belong to the “everything can be fixed, trust us, we’re experts” genre of political treatise, which can be traced all the way back to Plato’s Republic. (Plato is a bit more honest about what technocratic governance means for liberty, democracy and the average person than Brown and Miliband are.) Both books believe the world is there to be hacked into betterness by enlightened politicians, inventive think-tankers, and dogged activists. Both see international cooperation as preferable to “populist nationalism”.

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Both books are optimistic, in the sense that they are poached in the mental and emotional atmosphere of 1997. Both Miliband and Brown have little useful or new to say about the Labour Party, Brexit, crime, defence, migration, China, or the spectacular failure of international bodies such as the WHO during the pandemic. Both books are exactly what you would expect them to be. Who is this for, other than the authors themselves?

Miliband is, I suppose, quite self-deprecating and almost aware of his ridiculousness. (He comes dangerously close to making a joke on page 9 of Go Big.) It is possible to imagine bantering with a fleece-wearing Ed while he tries to flog you overpriced organic honey at a Sunday morning farmer’s market in the Cotswolds. Brown on the other hand, remains crashingly, breathtakingly grand. Seven Ways is played in the major keys, and Brown is frozen in “We not only saved the world” mode here. Again and again he batters the reader with his motto: global problems require global solutions.

Seven Ways leaves you with the impression that if Brown found his house on fire, he would convene a summit of global thought leaders before he called the local firemen. On a panel with Fareed Zakaria, Yuval Noah Harari, and Tedros Adhanom, Brown would discuss the best ways to put out a housefire. What temperature should the dowsing water be? How long should the firehose be? Do we have the right balance of gender, sexual and racial diversity among the firemen coming to put out the blaze? His house would be a blackened hulk long before the discussion finished. In Gordon’s world there is nothing that can’t be solved by invoking the world. It’s the view from the sky, never the view from the street. This is a social democrat’s brain after 15 years of motorcades.

What Gordon will never do again is hold real power. Powerlessness shadows both texts. There is a reason why these two ex-Labour leaders don’t want to think about Britain. Brexit. So they dredge up their global solutions to global problems, straining for relevance and produce fantasies instead. If Labour stood on a manifesto cribbed from these books, they’d be lucky to get 500 votes outside the university towns.

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When they actually had power, what did they do with it? Miliband loved gimmicks as leader of the opposition, like unconvincing visits to Greggs and wearisome conversations with Russell Brand. (“The Tories should be worried,”wrote Owen Jones in May 2015, after Miliband met Brand on YouTube.) Meanwhile Brown is lauded as one of the last true intellects in British politics. A serious, big-brained, adult. And yet, as chancellor he could barely leave a room with Tony Blair in it without slamming the door so hard it lost its hinges. For a decade Brown stalked, sulked and screamed, all but consumed by tapeworms of envy that squirmed around inside him. Has there ever been a more emotionally delicate politician? “In the aftermath of 9/11, Tony rang Gordon to ask for his advice,” recalls Blair’s old advisor Jonathan Powell. “Instead of responding Gordon used the call to demand to know when Tony was going to resign. Tony slammed the phone down in a rage.”

These are men who could barely read the mood of their colleagues, let alone the country, let alone the global community. How to fix the world? How about you start by trying to fix a pothole lads? The problem for Labour is that its members may actually read these books and take them seriously. They would be much better off reading Edmund Burke, or V.S. Naipaul. Then they might understand Britain — which is currently reverting back to its spiky, crabby, nasty “fund the NHS, hang the nonces” conservative mean at the moment.

There is almost no chance that young Labourites will do that. They don’t want to understand their enemies, so they’ll be doomed to underestimate them. This is a party whose members, or the vocally online ones, spit teeth at the sight of a Union Jack. When they try to come up with a patriotism of the Left, as the talented Dan Jarvis did in a Fabian Society pamphlet this year, they fall back on platitudes. Left patriotism, Jarvis writes, should invoke the “Britain of the Tolpuddle martyrs, the Chartists, and the miners’ strike.” I can imagine this will be really appealing to all those people who actually care who the Tolpuddle martyrs and the Chartists were. The Tories, I suspect, will be happy to keep the flag, the Queen, and the Armed Forces.

Where is Labour now? In the same place they were in 1964, when Perry Anderson wrote of the party trapped in an “isolated, spot-lit enclave, surrounded on every side by hostile territory”. It’s an enclave in a land that speaks a language foreign to the party. None of the maps makes any sense. The only road out is very dark, cold and lonely. And if the party is asking Brown and Miliband for directions, they’ll be walking it for a long while yet.

At least in 1964 Labour were prepared to fight their way out of enemy territory. “If it’s the last thing I do,” said Anthony Crosland, “I’m going to destroy every fucking Grammar School in England. And Wales. And Northern Ireland.” And he actually did it! Nobody in Labour today looks capable of destroying anything, apart from the party itself. They prattle on about their values (without saying what they are) on the morning shows, or cry like X Factor contestants, or are given the run around by George Galloway in by-elections, while the country turns away in embarrassment. No wonder these old leaders don’t write books about the party today. Writing the obituary of something you put in the ground is not for everyone.

But here’s a more colourful choice. Exactly forty years ago, Westminster’s specialists in failure were engulfed in what remains the most poisonous, shambolic, vitriolic and downright entertaining contest in my lifetime: the race for the Labour deputy leadership between Denis Healey and Tony Benn. Or, as the Daily Express called it, “the political showdown of the century”.

You read that right, by the way. This was merely the contest for the deputy leadership — though as Angela Rayner would be the first to point out, the deputy leadership sometimes matters more than you’d think. Yet as political battles go, it was an epic: the Marathon of the British left, the Stalingrad of the sociologists, the Gaugamela of the Guardian readers.

Incredibly, the Battle of Benn-Healey lasted for almost seven months, from April to October 1981. It had it all: “screaming mobs”, an “orgy of intolerance”, behaviour that “would not have been out of place at a Nuremberg rally” and a personality cult that would have Stalin turning “in his grave with envy”. This is all from a single article on the contest, by Labour’s own Roy Hattersley.

Another star of the future, Neil Kinnock, made a more dramatic cameo appearance, having a physical fight with a Benn supporter in the toilets in Blackpool’s Grand Hotel. As the future Labour leader put it: “I beat the shit out of him … there was blood and vomit all over the place.” His party was a kinder, gentler place in those days.

Let’s rewind a bit. Having lost office to Margaret Thatcher in 1979, Labour had sought solace in its traditional hobby of tearing itself apart. Its last Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, the only man to have held all four great offices of state, had vacated the stage with accusations of treachery ringing in his ears. In a desperate attempt to protect themselves from their own activists, his fellow MPs elected the aged pamphleteer Michael Foot as his replacement.

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Even some of Foot’s own supporters conceded that he was a ridiculous person to submit to the voters as a possible Prime Minister. By the spring of 1981, with the party lurching to the Left, some 28 Labour MPs had walked out to found the new Social Democratic Party. And it was then, with his unerring instinct for controversy, that Tony Benn, former Viscount Stansgate, self-appointed tribune of the plebs, polite, articulate and charming, a “cool, calculated, deliberate, with-malice-aforethought liar” (Mirror) with the “mind of a ranter and the eyes of a fanatic” (Express), decided to challenge Denis Healey for the deputy leadership.

A veteran of the Allied landings at Anzio, the magnificently browed Healey had been Callaghan’s Chancellor. Firmly on the Right of the party, he had steered Britain through the disaster of a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. He stood for moderate social democracy, for the Atlantic alliance, for traditional politics and (in his admirers’ minds) for sanity. The voters liked him. Many of the activists utterly loathed him. To Benn, he was a Tory.

Benn’s appeal was very different. Having launched his challenge at the unconventional hour of 3.30 in the morning, he toured the land in an atmosphere of religious fervour. Never before had a candidate for the leadership, let alone the deputy leadership, taken his cause directly to the people. Yet for week after week, Benn addressed three, sometimes four meetings a day.

Thames Television filmed him in Wolverhampton, a preacher surrounded by his worshippers, his voice trembling with passion, his eyes blazing with enthusiasm. “What we are seeing is the rebirth of hope,” he told a rally on the steps of St Peter’s Church. “It is a march for human dignity, and against those forces which still try to persuade us that men and women should be crucified on a cross of gold in the name of monetarism and profit and loss.” Afterwards, as he sang along with the Spinners, a radical folk group, his eyes shone with tears.

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Perhaps never in Labour’s history had there yawned a greater gulf between ideals and reality. In the country, the inner cities were ablaze, unemployment was soaring and industry was in a state of collapse. Yet for Benn and his supporters, including the young Jeremy Corbyn, the Promised Land seemed tantalising close. A manifesto published by his former special advisers laid out his plans. Britain, they explained, had become a “subject nation, unaware of its own subjection” to the forces of global capital. So the Bennites’ first step would be to “impose emergency controls on the City and banking system”, followed by massive nationalisations, the abolition of private schools and private healthcare, unilateral disarmament, withdrawal from the EEC, the abolition of the House of Lords, the “social ownership of concentrations of wealth” and a statutory maximum wage set at £28,000 a year. Heaven on earth!

Neither side made the slightest concession to party unity. Healey kicked off by denouncing his rival’s “sour and intolerant sectarianism”, accusing the Bennites of telling “barefaced lies”, consorting with “Communists and Trotskyists” and pandering to the IRA. Meanwhile, Bennite activists trailed Healey wherever he went, interrupting his speeches with howls of “IMF!” and “Tory!” The former Chancellor was even barracked by a group called the Posadists, who believed that the revolution would be brought to Earth by Communist aliens in flying saucers. And all the time, the Conservative press revelled in the chaos. “Mr Benn – Is He Mad Or A Killer?” wondered the Sun. But the Guardian’s star columnist Jill Tweedie thought Benn was being grossly mistreated. “No one has been so misrepresented,” she insisted, “since Robert Mugabe.”

With Labour’s unerring instinct for suicidal spectacle, the climax came at the autumn’s party conference in Blackpool. As was usual in the early 1980s, the MPs were corralled like defendants at a show trial, surrounded by jeering activists. As the chief teller stepped to the microphone, somebody handed Benn a note telling him he had won. In fact the result could hardly have been closer. “Tony Benn … forty-nine point five seven four!” said the teller. ‘Denis Healey… fifty point four two six!” The camera cut to Benn, scribbling intently, his face caught between a smirk and a grimace. It was, he told the press afterwards, “an enormous victory for us, because we have won the argument”.

Ever since, most neutral observers have agreed that Labour had had a lucky escape. Had Benn won, he would probably have moved to take the leadership from Foot, triggering an even bloodier bout of factional infighting. In that case, there would undoubtedly have been more losses to the SDP, with MPs, councillors, party members and probably some trade unions defecting en masse. And had Benn been leader in time for the 1983 election, then Labour would almost certainly have come third in the popular vote, behind the SDP-Liberal Alliance.

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But perhaps there’s another way of looking at that story. By provoking a much greater and more enduring split, a Benn victory would have ensured a clear, unarguable divide between utopian socialists and pragmatic social democrats, their unhappy marriage brought to a richly deserved end. The SDP would have been left stronger, more plausible, a Centre-Left party of government. Today Sir Keir Starmer would be safe in the embrace of his fellow pragmatists, untroubled by stubborn working-class women from the north of England. Glancing along the SDP front bench, he might share a friendly nod with his party leader, a chaotic, mop-haired fellow who won the Oxford Union presidency as an SDP supporter, and never dreamed of abandoning his youthful faith. You know the man I mean.

By contrast, the Labour holdouts would have been left to luxuriate in the delights of socialist purity. Since they would never have had a hope of wielding power, there would be no risk of betrayal, no danger of dirtying their hands with the compromises of government. While the SDP went from strength to strength, Benn could have stayed as Labour leader for the next twenty years, preaching to an ever smaller and more exclusive flock. When the time came, he could have yielded the pulpit to his chief disciple, a true believer, a man whose faith burned as brightly as his own. And even now, untroubled by traitors, coups and centrist dads, Jeremy Corbyn might still be leading the Labour Party, with Angela Rayner as his loyal deputy…

Oh well. We can but dream.

To get a measure of the mountain Labour must climb in order to get back into government, compare where the party stood at the end of 2019 with where it was following a decade out of office in the 1980s. By the end of Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure, Labour had effectively gone backwards, winning fewer seats than it had held when Gordon Brown left office in May of 2010. In 1989, by contrast, the party had made significant progress. Labour was polling at 46% to the Tories’ 39%. Moreover, the hard Left had been routed in the party machinery. In 1988, when Tony Benn had challenged the incumbent Neil Kinnock for the leadership, he was trounced, winning just 11% of the vote.

Keir Starmer, too, has taken on the hard Left, most notably by suspending the party whip from Corbyn over his response to the EHRC report into anti-Semitism. Starmer also sacked Rebecca Long-Bailey from the shadow cabinet after she refused to apologise for sharing an article which deployed an anti-Semitic trope.

But the confrontation with Labour’s hard Left is far from over, as is perhaps demonstrated by the frequency with which the hashtag #StarmerOut appears on left-wing social media. The Labour Right made gains during the NEC elections of 2020, but overall the results were mixed, with seven of the 15 positions won by candidates backed by left-wing pressure group Momentum. If Labour’s disciplinary process does not expel Corbyn, it will represent something of a humiliation for Starmer. Yet if Corbyn is thrown out, it could set in motion a war within the Left for years to come. Neither outcome augurs particularly well for the fortunes of leader or party.

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Which isn’t to say Starmer hasn’t been successful with the country. Away from internecine struggles, he has made considerable headway among the public with his critical but cautious approach. The first YouGov poll of last year had the Conservatives 20 points ahead of Labour (49% to Labour’s 29%). The final YouGov poll of 2020 had Labour leading the Conservatives by four percentage points (Labour stands on 41% while the Conservatives are on 37%).

In normal times, the two most important polls to look at when it comes to predicting which way a General Election will go are the leader’s personal ratings and the public’s view of the party’s economic competence. Labour went into the 2015 election polling neck and neck with David Cameron’s Conservative party. Yet Miliband’s poor personal ratings – together with a widespread perception that Labour was spendthrift – produced the Conservatives’ first outright majority for 23 years. That Miliband was more unpopular than Cameron even after five years of Tory-led government ought to have sounded the alarm as to what would come next. According to a LSE study from 2015, leaders in government typically have approval ratings that are 17 points lower than opposition leaders.

Starmer, though, has been turning things around. During the summer of 2020, he was the most popular opposition leader of the past 40 years — apart from Tony Blair. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson has become steadily more unpopular as the rallying effect of lockdown (incumbents across the globe saw their support increase during the early days of the pandemic) has given way to a hum of discontent at the Government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. A comprehensive recent poll of 22,000 people found Labour to be on course to win back the so-called red wall seats lost to the Conservatives in 2019.

But the next election is still four years away. And if things return to something resembling normality later in the year, as vaccines are rolled out and pandemic recedes, we might expect to see a boost to the Government’s flagging approval ratings. Boris has many flaws; however he is a deft performer when it comes to articulating the patriotism of those who feel pride in their country’s achievements. By the time summer is here, the focus will have shifted from pandemic to economic recovery.

You might think this would benefit Labour. The pandemic has ripped up the economic consensus that dominated British politics for 40 years. It is no longer taboo for the state to subsidise loss-making businesses, nor to pay people’s wages. Moreover, the post-Covid recovery will require the stimulation of the economy. Attempting a re-run of 2010 austerity policies will prove counterproductive, as Peter Franklin (not a natural Keynesian) has argued persuasively for UnHerd.

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Unfortunately for Labour, however, the party performs better during periods of growth than when there is widespread anxiety about the economy. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the 1992 election, when the Tories managed to cling onto power despite presiding over the longest recession for more than 50 years. Paradoxically, Labour subsequently won power in 1997 under Tony Blair, just as the Conservative chancellor Ken Clarke had created an economic climate of steady growth, falling inflation and a buoyant housing market. Yet voters opted for Labour on the basis that Blair’s party would (the public believed) use the proceeds of growth to improve Britain’s crumbling infrastructure and make life better.

Until now, Starmer hasn’t had to talk policies. His tenure has been largely reactive. He has had to hold a government to account as it dealt with an unprecedented global pandemic. He’s also sought to avoid being dragged into culture war issues. Starmer may have knelt for Black Lives Matter during the summer following the murder of George Floyd, but he also spoke out against the forced dispatchment of the Edward Colston statue into Bristol’s harbour, as well as the ‘defund the police’ slogan adopted by activists.

To those on the Left fighting a culture war, Starmer’s action will seem inconsistent. Yet his ‘common sense’ approach — which accepts the need to tackle racism while eschewing the radicalism of progressive activists — has a good chance of resonating with the public. This is because perceptions of a culture war rampaging through British institutions are largely confined to avid social media users, talk radio pundits and newspaper columnists, where political trends from the United States are more freely adopted. The big dividing lines that fracture US politics are simply not there when the British public are brought into the equation. Nor has Johnson nor Starmer shown a particular appetite to stoke a culture war when it comes to the really big issues. Indeed, a striking thing about the government’s response to Covid-19 is how Johnson has (for the most part) been very un-Trumpesque; he has side-lined the political outriders who’ve been rebelling against mask-wearing and calling for fewer restrictions.

Moreover, as Brexit has made the headlines, Starmer has sought to deftly sidestep Tory attempts to portray him as an out-of-touch remainer. Instead of “re-opening old arguments” over remain or leave,  the Labour leader has urged Boris to “get on” with delivering a “good deal”; as such he whipped Labour into voting for the Government’s deal on 30 December.

Now Brexit is done, some believe voters will expect a tougher line from Labour on immigration. But having voted for Boris’s deal, it would look odd if Starmer now panders to the advocates of open borders who dominate the Labour membership. The Labour leader, though, has gambled that immigration is going to become less of an issue going forward. Public attitudes towards immigration have become more positive since the Brexit vote of 2016. People are also less concerned about it in general. This may change if exit from the European Union does not significantly reduce the numbers coming to the UK, but with the pandemic largely halting mass migration for the moment any way this could well prove to be clever politics by Starmer.

Starmer’s bind is that, as Sir John Curtice has phrased it, Labour “is now very heavily dependent on a pro-Remain electorate that so far at least shows relatively little sign of being resigned to Brexit”. He is gambling that this will change over the course of the current parliament, with Brexit slipping down voters’ list of concerns. However the task ahead is a daunting one. To win power in 2024 Labour must make significant gains in Scotland, retake the Red Wall seats it lost at recent elections, but also hold onto some of the metropolitan seats captured in 2017.

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How, then, does he intend to do this? Critics of Starmer often target his caginess and apparent lack of a big idea. This is a familiar criticism from those on the Left who are wedded to the notion that elections are won on policy. Previous Labour leaders have bought into this way of doing politics, with little success. Ed Miliband zig-zagged between various schools of thought in the early years of his leadership, from Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour to themes of a ‘squeezed middle’ and ‘producers’ versus ‘predators’. As George Eaton wrote for the New Statesman back in 2014, Miliband “has announced policies at a rate that Westminster historians agree exceeds that of any recent leader of the opposition”. Much of it was forgotten by the 2015 election.

Similarly, Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto offered voters a blitz of policy. Yet few believed the party could deliver it. Boris’ Conservatives won the 2019 election with a remarkably straightforward message: get Brexit done. Against this backdrop — and even if there may at times be a degree of overcorrection from the leader’s office — Keir Starmer is probably right to be cautious about Labour’s messaging.

The other reason for Starmer’s caution is the transformation Labour must undergo following Corbyn’s disastrous tenure. Just 16% of voters trusted Labour on the economy in 2019 and that was only the half of it. As the Labour MP Liam Byrne wrote following Labour’s defeat, “hundreds of voters I met thought Labour’s leader was a ­communist terrorist sympathiser who wouldn’t push the nuclear button or sing the national anthem”.

Neil Kinnock had to undertake a similar process of detoxification in the 1980s. Ultimately it wasn’t enough to save his leadership. As a study exploring Labour’s failure at the 1992 election concluded, “Labour lost because it was still the party of the winter of discontent; union influence; strikes and inflation; disarmament; Benn and Scargill.” It took Kinnock and his successors 14 years following Michael Foot’s calamitous spell as leader to turn the party’s fortunes around. Labour’s current leader has four years.

If he is to do that, then Starmer will at some point have to set out Labour’s platform for governing the United Kingdom. It must be sufficiently radical to cater to those hungry for change, while also painting Labour as a prudent and safe pair of hands – the post-Covid landscape will require a degree of economic radicalism whomever is in government.

Preceding that, Starmer must comprehensively trounce the Left or he must bring them onside. He must make that decision one way or another. And he must do all of this while holding the Government to account during most significant national crisis since the Second World War. The more successful Starmer is in the polls, the more wriggle room he will have. If he starts talking about nation, community and belonging — while offering a radical economic prospectus — the soft Left will go with him if they believe he can beat Boris. That will leave the ‘never Starmers’ isolated; it’s easy to imagine a rump of his left-wing opponents noisily forming a doomed break-away project resembling Ken Loach’s Left Unity project of the Miliband years.

Suggested reading

Jeremy Corbyn is nothing without Labour

By Giles Fraser

But if Boris bounces back after the pandemic, then Starmer may be in trouble. It’s often said that the Labour Party is not ruthless enough in deposing flagging leaders. However, given that Starmer lacks the cult-like following of his predecessor, and after more than a decade in opposition, this particular sacred cow about Labour Party loyalty could yet be slaughtered.

Part of Starmer’s appeal is the aura of functional – perhaps even boring – competence he emits. In contrast with Jeremy Corbyn, a politician indulgently embraced by activists in relatively stable times, Starmer is the sort of person you’d want in charge during a crisis. Measured, stoical and a details-man who is on top of every brief, he has impressed with his forensic probing of the Government’s response to the pandemic. Historical comparisons are often overblown, but Covid-19 has seen the British state face its biggest crisis since the Second World War. As the rebuilding effort gets underway in the coming years, voters may look to a leader whose penumbra of understated competence is magnified by the reflection of his jaunty opposite number.

Starmer has performed a relatively good job during his first year in office. He’s had Boris on the ropes a few times and he’s thus far avoided any glaring errors or scandals. Moreover, people seem to like him. If I had to score him I would give a seven out of 10: much improved but more expected in the coming year. Perhaps it’s no wonder journalists refer to Leader of the Opposition as the hardest job in politics.

The truth, though, is rather more mundane. Good quality opinion polls are the best — indeed, the only — real datapoint for quantitatively estimating the outcome of an election before it has happened. They’re obviously not perfect, but they’re the best information we have. Whatever you may hear to the contrary, the political betting markets are mainly a measure of the consensus view of politically engaged middle-aged blokes, who in turn calibrate their hunch against… opinion polls.

There are clear incentives for pollsters to get it right — but they aren’t stated often enough. For most of these companies, the political work is a loss-leader, a kind of shop window for how accurate they are so they can make their real money selling brand trackers to McDonalds or whatever. They join in at election time to prove that their method works, that the numbers they give you about your business demonstrably correspond to what the population really thinks. As far as evil masterplans go, pushing an agenda by putting out dodgy election poll numbers is a terrible one — because unlike the pundits, who can couch their analysis in noncommittal theoreticals, you will be found out on election day.

I’ve been closely involved in pollster world for most of the past ten years and have developed a sort of broad brush heuristic for thinking about the polling evidence. First, only pay attention to the good quality pollsters — in most elections, there’s usually a surprising “random pollster that called it right last time” but more often than not they don’t pull off the same trick twice. Second, don’t bet the house on differences of one or two percentage points — presume that even the best pollsters will be a little bit wrong. Third, pay particular attention to the in-house pollster “MRP” models, of which the most robust is from YouGov (where I used to work).

Once you’ve got the big picture of what the data is saying, compare it with the media narrative. This, in betting terms, is where the “value” lies. Given that the polls won’t be exactly right, does the consensus seem overly invested in small poll differences, or insufficiently convinced by large ones? In the turbulent past five years of politics, there have been upsets in both of these directions.

Further reading

What's your vote really worth?

By Tom Chivers

In the UK, the General Election of 2015 was a gruesome event for most pollsters – most had it near-even between Ed Miliband’s Labour and David Cameron’s Tories, but Cameron went on to win an overall majority, thanks to the Labour collapse in Scotland and the Lib Dem collapse in England. It was, at the time, the most-polled election in history, and the media were furious they had given the numbers so much air-time and had missed the real story.

So when the Brexit referendum came around in May 2016, they were determined not to make the same mistake twice. Despite many polls showing a very close race, there was a deeply-held superstition, sustained by the betting markets, financial markets and media, that people would ‘see sense’ at the last moment and vote to Remain (as they had in the Scottish referendum in 2014). In the run up to the Brexit vote I wrote with frustration in The Times, the Guardian and Newsweek about this mysterious overconfidence, and how it wasn’t borne out by the data.

From the same author

Is Donald Trump toast?

By Freddie Sayers

The Trump victory over Hillary Clinton later that year was a strange combination of both effects. The polls were slightly wrong, and some of the state polls very wrong, but overall they showed a close race. Had we purely gone on the data, with the appropriate humility that with such a novel candidate attracting a novel electorate the polls would likely be additionally off, the possibility of a narrow Trump victory across the battleground states should not have seemed remote at all.

Donald Trump is not a novel candidate any more, he’s the President; and there’s certainly nothing novel about Joe Biden. It was a volatile campaign in 2016, with a high number of undecideds and high third party support; 2020 is none of these things. The main technical error in 2016 — higher turnout among demographic groups that don’t normally vote in such number — has now been corrected by most pollsters. The much-quoted ‘shy Trump’ phenomenon remains unproven, and when we spoke to Robert Cahaly, its main advocate, he couldn’t explain convincingly how it could be measured. For it to be a serious effect, you would have expected Trump in 2016 to have overperformed in Democratic areas where it was most shameful to support him, but that is not what happened. Plus, the midterm polls in 2018 were already demonstrably better.

Since the pollsters are collectively terrified of repeating the errors of last presidential cycle, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had over-compensated in their adjustments and we end up finding they have been over-estimating the Trump vote. Nobody wants to be the pollster predicting a massive Biden landslide right now: if there’s any “adjustment of the weights” going on it is more likely to be softening the Biden lead into safer single digits.

Further reading

Of course Trump can win

By Matthew Goodwin

One clear indication of this reverse effect would be if Texas goes blue. Joe Biden doesn’t need to win it, but the polls are tantalisingly close, though moving slightly in Trump’s favour in the final week. In Democrat circles the possibility of winning Texas is mentioned with a whisper, as if to speak it out loud will jinx the possibility. It feels unlikely, like it somehow can’t happen, but the data says it is possible. This would put Biden in historic landslide territory.

More broadly, Biden’s advantage in the polls on election day – a 7-9 point national lead, and apparently ahead in almost all of the battleground states — equates to a much more comfortable margin than Hillary Clinton had. Biden has roughly double the lead in the top battlegrounds, double the national lead and double the favourability advantage of Clinton in 2016. If the same degree of polling error that afflicted 2016 was applied here, Biden would still win comfortably.

All of this is why I believe it is reasonable to expect that Joe Biden will win the election by a comfortable margin, possibly a very big one. Put another way: if Donald Trump does pull off another surprise and wins re-election, fair and square, it would be an astonishing event. It would mean that the mechanism we have relied on for assessing public opinion for decades — a key part of the way governments decide on public policy, most recently on Covid-19 — is fundamentally broken. It would mean we have to rethink the basic epistemic foundation of our public conversation. It would be scintillating — so much so that I wouldn’t give a moment’s thought to those bets I placed on a big Biden victory. There’d be far more important things to worry about.

Ed, the younger brother of leadership favourite David Miliband, was an unlikely choice — somewhat geeky, often awkward, he would become the butt of a mocking media that thought the Labour Party had reached a nadir with its leader.

Ed’s older brother was no Blair, but he may well have beaten David Cameron in 2015, although the strongest candidate was by now a television dancing star, an appropriately bizarre sub-plot to an increasingly strange political decade. Stunned by a defeat which no one on social media foresaw, the Labour Party then voted in the unlikeliest of candidates, a far-Left backbencher who effectively sabotaged the following year’s EU referendum, or performed with such ineptitude it was effectively sabotage. The result was eventual electoral disaster.

By the end of 2019, Boris Johnson might have thought he had it made, winning the Tories’ biggest majority in more than 30 years with the support of two dozen once-solidly Labour seats in the north. In the second-most cursed tweet of the past five years, the PM promised on 2 January that 2020 would be a “fantastic year for Britain”, and it certainly appeared to be for the Tory party, way ahead in the polls.

I had mixed feelings about the election victory — obviously pleased to not enjoy the coming miracle of Corbynomics, I had also written a soon-to-be-published book in which I warned that conservatism was facing defeat. That was unfortunate timing, but to quote Homer Simpson: “We are doomed – in your face!”

So let’s put our pessimism goggles on and look at how much trouble the Conservatives are actually in. The party has enjoyed a decade of ineffectual opposition, a temporary advantage that has evaporated within weeks of a competent Labour leader being in place.

More from this author

The liberal case for empire

By Ed West

The next few years are going to be hard, and the Government has not handled Covid-19 well. On top of that, the narrative of the corona crisis is one that suits Labour — heroic carers and nurses, with the NHS our shield (never mind that our health system performed poorly, the NHS can never fail, it can only be let down by politicians) and large, unjust disparities between poorer people catching the virus while the wealthy work from home.

But the underlying demographic changes are what should cause Tories to worry most: namely that young people are not becoming more conservative as they reach middle age, or at least are doing so very slowly, countering a historic trend which had much to do with social patterns that no longer exist.

Conservatism is heavily contingent on lifestyle. Among Americans, for example, marriage (and motherhood) is the single biggest factor determining how white women vote, the country’s marriage gap being far larger than its gender gap (although Donald Trump, being utterly repulsive to a lot of women, did narrow this).

Liberalism, with its focus on the individual and the individual’s limitless potential, has always been associated with singledom. Most of its founding philosophical fathers were childless men, including Locke, Mill, Spinoza, Bentham, Hume and Adam Smith. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau had five children but abandoned them all to the death sentence of orphanages.)

Liberalism becomes far more impractical when children come along, especially the most fundamental of liberal principles, sexual equality. It is possible for both parents to work with an infant at home, and share the burden equally, but it is not easy, and it is not cheap; there are trade-offs and sacrifices and when those sorts of conversations emerge, that’s when conservatism rears its head.

So one reason that English-speaking culture has become so much more liberal is that we live in a society that is unusually single; the only comparable period was pre-Reformation western Europe, where the childless were overwhelmingly in religious orders. It was hardly noticed, amid the gloom of 2020, but fertility levels in England and Wales continue to plummet, and it seems unlikely that this miserable year will have inspired a baby boom.

Marriage rates are affected by a number of cultural factors, especially religion, but the simple cost of having children is also an obvious problem. Children have become more expensive, and the biggest component is runaway housing costs; in the US there is a clear correlation between high house prices and support for the Democrats.

In Britain, Conservative economic policy was for many years to encourage rising house prices as a nest egg, but each increase in value, aided by our strict planning laws, was decreasing the number of future Tories. Now, highly-expensive London is a sea of red and it’s only a matter of time before that starts to spread into the Home Counties.

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What if Leave and Remain switched sides?

By Ed West

Left-wing parties win where land is expensive, and cities comprise the most expensive real estate of all, and they are everywhere more liberal than rural areas. This has long been the case, for as Russell Kirk put it, “conservatism always has had its most loyal adherents in the country, where man is slow to break with the old ways that link him with his God in the infinity above and with his father in the grave at his feet.” People in cities tend to different lifestyles — more outward-looking, more innovative, sexually promiscuous and prone to mental illness, all behaviour associated with liberalism.

So, as Britain continues to become more densely-populated, it will move even further to the Left — a pattern tied to another core problem for conservatism: immigration. On average immigrants, and ethnic minority voters, tend to vote for centre-Left parties, a pattern found across the western world (although the extent varies). However much commentators tell Right-wing parties to embrace immigration and diversity, it will never be in their electoral interests to do so, something Labour and Democrat strategists are obviously aware of.

As western societies become more diverse, Right-wing parties pick up more support from more culturally conservative whites, as happened in 2016 in the US and last year in Britain. But these voters tend to be older: the Tories won 67% of the over 70s at the last election, but just 21% of 18-24s. The latest polls are similarly gloomy.

This gap is a surprisingly new development; until 2001, there was little generational difference in voting and under Thatcher the Tories did well among the young, but it’s true that people do tend to move to the Right over their lifetimes. Yet among 20 and 30-somethings this is happening at such a slow rate as to be of little help to the Tories as they are swept away by generational change.

Young people are just far more liberal than their elders were at the same age, a shift linked to social changes beyond any party control, in particular the long decline of the cultural memory of Christianity. In the long term, these wider cultural trends will probably change back; for one thing, conservatives consistently have more children than liberals, and a political philosophy based on super-sub-replacement fertility won’t last forever — but that is way in the future.

Even more worrying for Conservatives is the fact that whole professions and high-status institutions are moving to the Left, not just in more obviously liberal sectors like academia or journalism but among doctors, scientists and the civil service, not especially Left-leaning areas until recently. Conservatism has become associated with low social status — see a St George’s avatar on someone’s Twitter bio and you can guess their income and education levels — and historically people follow the belief systems of those higher up the social scale. This has been further aggravated by Brexit, which has radicalised a generation of younger voters who will now forever see the Tories as the party that threw away their future.

Demographic trends are moving away from the Tories, but these will accelerate if Labour win power in 2024, and further entrench their supporters within the institutions we once called civil society (now almost all funded by the state). It will mean further laws, like the 2010 Equality Act, that ingrain progressive politics whoever is charge, and ever stronger progressive institutional control over education, academia and elsewhere.

With the proposed appointments of Paul Dacre to Ofcom and Charles Moore to the BBC (though the latter has now said he wouldn’t accept it) there seems to finally be some understanding among the Tories that there is no point winning elections if the state is run by your opponents. The BLM protests, in which numerous institutions came out in support of an agenda conservatives find extreme and hostile, may have shaken some into acting.

Suggested reading

I don't miss the nastiness of the Left

By Giles Fraser

Yet many Tories still think it’s the 1980s; that if they deliver on the economy and cut the bloated state, voters will fall into their laps. But for small-c conservatives the state is not really the problem anymore; there are some easy wins to be had by pulling the plug on “social justice” orientated courses being taught at universities, often lacking rigour and promoting political intolerance. Likewise with some public bodies that aggressively promote progressive ideology and could be defunded.

But the wider anti-conservative cultural moment goes beyond this, and the most aggressive form of activism is now driven by big business — Woke Capital — which stood solidly behind the summer protests, as it now does with all radical movements (except those few that harm the bottom line). Leftism is not something limply subsidised by the state, it is the culturally dominant power, intimately tied in with the very individualism and consumerism previous Conservative policies have helped to promote. It is the politics of the individual who finds meaning with group identity politics because their prospects of a home and a family are slipping away.

Culture wars may be worth fighting but they can’t be won so long as the Tories cannot offer a better future and an alternative away from this world of dreary conformity. And they are running out of time, and voters.

However Miliband made two fundamental errors. Unlike Mrs Thatcher, he lacked the personal charisma to overturn the status quo, allowing moribund neoliberalism to limp on for a few years under the tutelage of David Cameron and George Osborne. Secondly, he misdiagnosed the nature of the problem, interpreting it along familiar Left-Right lines. To paraphrase the American philosopher James Burnham, neoliberal capitalism was disappearing but socialism was not replacing it. Instead, new divisions were opening up, and although they are in one sense about class, they are better understood as divisions between insiders and outsiders.

This is the case laid out by American academic Michael Lind in his just-published book The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite, which argues that “Demagogic populism is a symptom. Technocratic neoliberalism is the disease”. Lind says that Western society feels as if it is coming apart and this is a delayed consequence of the working class losing the political power it possessed for much of the twentieth century. “The Cold War has been followed by the class war”, writes Lind. This is a war that is being waged against the working class by an ascendant caste of university-credentialed professional elites.

“Social power exists in three realms — government, the economy, and the culture,” writes Lind. “All three realms of Western society today are fronts in the new class war.” We see this class war being waged over everything from Brexit to the election of Donald Trump to the rise of an activist judiciary. And despite the recent populist backlash one side remains firmly on top.

Understanding the class nature of technocratic liberalism is central to Lind’s argument. The ideological war starts with a pretence that class itself no longer exists. The only barriers to ascent that are said to exist in the liberal technocratic mind are racism and misogyny, which are everywhere. What is sought by the bien pensant middle class is ‘representation’ rather than revolution — effectively a corporate boardroom which resembles the middle class. Never mind those who toil away on the factory floor — social mobility, a creed beloved by politicians of all stripes, will ensure that the best and brightest ascend into the bourgeoisie.

More from this author

Why did a rundown mining town become a safe Tory seat?

By James Bloodworth

Representation is of course not the same thing as democracy. In fact, if representation is the goal we might as well abolish democracy altogether and appoint a ruling class along the appropriate demographic lines. I suspect we will hear arguments like this quite soon even if they are not phrased as bluntly. As Lind writes, “In response to populist rebellions from below, the managerial elites of various Western countries may turn to outright repression of the working class by restricting access to political activity and the media by all dissenters, not populists alone.”

This sounds far-fetched until one recognises that the process has already begun. An online echo chamber — middle class, metropolitan, politically correct — already decides what can and cannot be published in the left-wing media. Transgressors of this unwritten code are increasingly ‘de-platformed’, in other words hounded out of public life.

The populist backlash has its roots in the dismantling of the post-war social democratic order, a “revolution from above” enacted to promote the “material interests and intangible values of the college-educated minority of managers and professionals, who have succeeded old-fashioned bourgeois capitalists as the dominant elite”. Industry has been destroyed and isles of working-class democracy such as trade unions are a declining force. Heartlands have been usurped by hubs – big cities which suck in investment and high-end business and professional services.

Margaret Thatcher once reportedly said that her greatest achievement was Tony Blair and New Labour: “We forced our opponents to change their minds.” She also changed the make-up of the Labour Party, which increasingly resembles the American Democratic Party as a grouping of city elites and ambitious minorities. As Lind writes, “What used to be parties of the native white working class and rural voters have become parties of upscale members of the native white managerial elite, allied with racial and ethnic minorities and immigrants.”

Lind is no populist himself and worries about a “future of gated communities and mobs led by demagogues at their gates”. His solution is a return to what he calls “democratic pluralism”, a philosophy he associates with New Deal America and post-war western Europe. He believes in “selective globalisation” and an immigration policy whose chief aim is to “strengthen the bargaining power of national workers with employers”.

More from this author

In 2010, David Cameron first fooled the country

By James Bloodworth

Until recently this would have been an uncontroversial “centrist” position. But today it invariably crashes up against the twin pillars of contemporary liberalism: the unfettered movement of capital and labour. Both are manifestations of theoretically opposed strands of utopian politics, neither of which brooks any compromise.

To have qualms about globalisation marks one out as a Luddite, whereas an unwillingness to support anything other than open borders leaves one open to the charge of Trumpism or neo-fascism. “Neoliberalism is a synthesis of the free market economic liberalism of the libertarian right and the cultural liberalism of the bohemian/academic left,” Lind writes.

The problem with laissez faire liberalism was encapsulated by RH Tawney’s point that “freedom for the pike is death for the minnows”. Freedom breeds discontent. Yet the question is whether the purported cure is worse than the disease, for an authoritarian streak runs through many literary assaults upon neoliberalism. This is especially true when it comes to conversations about culture and a lingering reverence for “traditional values” on display in parts of Lind’s book.

At one point Lind writes wistfully about an era when “The clergy and zealous citizens and civic groups policed the mass media and the educational system to ensure that they did not offend the largely traditional values of the working class majority.” By contrast, he paints today’s working class as “passive recipients” of “sensationalism, obscenity, and violence”.

Yet what were these “traditional values”? Mass censorship? Women chained to controlling husbands and worn out by drudgery? Discrimination against homosexuals?

I do not believe that Lind wants any of these things, yet each was at one time a feature of working-class life — and it was pressure by reforming, paternalistic liberals that brought about change. There was much that was good and decent about the post-war era; there was also a climate of stifling conformity around sexual mores. One cannot forge a new social democratic politics unless one can effectively appeal to millions of people. Romanticising an era in which half the population were chained to their husbands while zealous religious authorities “policed” the morals of people they knew nothing about will provoke storms of indignation, dooming any such project to failure.

That said, in a broader sense Lind is onto something. Lind quotes the American journalist John Chamberlain who believed that democratic pluralism prevails “when you have a state of tension in society that permits no one group to dare bid for the total power”. One might also quote Aneurin Bevan’s simple point about social democracy representing “not an end to struggle but a change in its terms”.

Suggested reading

All the lies about Leavers

By Matthew Goodwin

This stands in pluralistic contrast to utopian ideologies which seek to suck the ambiguity out of life. Fascists want rigid hierarchy whereas communists long for a society which resembles a beehive. Utopian liberals merely delude themselves into ignoring the baggage of history that weighs down those with less privileged lives. Democratic pluralists, in contrast, seek a balance between, as Chamberlain put it, “the plutocratic city and the impoverished country…. metropolitan East and plundered West and South”.

Balance – or a rebalancing in this case – requires compromise. The trouble is that today’s liberals are in no mood for it. Buoyed by thirty-odd years of having everything their own way they have learned, in common with ideologues before them, to assimilate each manifestation of discontent into their prevailing worldview; everything from Brexit to Donald Trump to the electoral decline of the metropolitan Labour Party is interpreted as further evidence that the masses are too stupid to be trusted with democracy.

“Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear,” wrote Orwell. Lind’s book is a reminder that we live in a superstitious age. Today’s liberals flaunt their rationality at every available opportunity — while they dream of a workerless paradise.

Without Brexit, parliament would presumably be dealing with the myriad problems that confront the country – rather than obsessing over something called a ‘backstop’.

Yet no Brexit presupposes no David Cameron as prime minister – at least beyond May 2015.

Cameron called the referendum in order to appease Eurosceptic MPs in the forlorn hope of uniting the Conservative Party. And then he disappeared. Without Brexit, David Cameron would likely have disappeared from the scene a little earlier…

Suggested reading

What if Remain had won?

By James Kirkup

It is 8 May 2015, and Prime Minister Ed Miliband has just emerged from a car outside Downing Street to make his first speech.

Of course, the Left would soon grow frustrated at what it saw as the timidity of a Miliband-led social democratic government which, like all governments, would be forced to make compromises shortly after assuming office.

Throughout his time as leader of the opposition, Miliband was, after all, assailed by the ideological purists of the far-Left for his purported timidity in taking on the Tories. Occasionally this was warranted. But the chorus of discontent was so incessant that it arguably cost Labour votes at the (actual) 2015 election. As James Morris, a former advisor to Miliband, put it in 2014, “We are too worried about Left-leaning commentariat and the party”.

Yet had the centre-Left won power in 2015, it would have been the Right-wing press that Miliband sought to appease. Labour promised, had it won in 2015, to “cut the deficit every year”, something even George Osborne didn’t manage. Brexit or no Brexit, a Miliband government would likely have zig-zagged between appeasing Left-wing activists on the one hand, and trying to assuage hostile media voices on the other.

Suggested reading

Labour should be careful what it wishes for

By Paul Embery

Of course, there are real things the broader Left could have achieved in a Brexit-free administration. One of these is tackling the scandal of low-pay and precarious work.

Over recent decades the life has been sucked out of smaller towns in Britain. Jobs have relocated overseas or to the larger cities, and young and educated folk have followed in their wake. Town dwellers have subsequently been ‘left behind’ – as a thousand comment writers discovered the morning after the Brexit referendum result.

A centre-Left government could have begun to seriously tackle this issue of regeneration. Labour’s 2015 manifesto committed, for example, to establishing a British investment bank and an ‘apprenticeship guarantee’ for school leavers.

In the process, they could even have partially pulled the rug out from under any future campaign to leave the European Union. Though far from a purely economic issue, the absence of opportunity in these forgotten communities clearly contributed to the support for Brexit.

Suggested reading

Why liberal-Left paternalism led to Brexit

By James Bloodworth

It has become something of a cliché to share – to the sound of great mirth – a tweet David Cameron sent a few days prior to the 2015 election, warning of “chaos under Ed Miliband”. The implication being that without Brexit – which would never have happened under a Miliband government – we would have little of the upheaval that has subsequently followed.

Yet realistically, the Left would be facing its own travails – with or without Brexit. To some extent this is a question of the limitations of government. Indeed, a Corbyn-led administration will likely face the same challenges should it ever win power.

The question that hangs over any Left-leaning government these days is this: what can really be achieved in a global capitalist economy where wealth can be moved elsewhere in a heartbeat? State socialism is a dead end; so what is the Left’s function in the twenty-first century?

There is of course the protectionist course, dissected unsparingly by Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts in their critical account of Corbynism. A Britain that ensconces itself behind tariffs and trade barriers is a Britain that becomes significantly poorer as a result.

Suggested reading

Corbyn's intolerant populism

By James Bloodworth

Then there is the moderate course: a slightly more tepid version of New Labour.

It is unlikely that a Miliband-led government would have taken the first course. For one thing, the centre-Left is less driven by the ideological fervour that animates the Corbynistas. Which is not to say there wouldn’t have been headlines in the Daily Mail accusing Miliband of wanting to turn Britain into Venezuela – that’s par for the course for any Labour leader.

What might have brought down the British centre-Left – in the event of a Miliband government and no Brexit – is indecision. Radical governments almost have it easier in this respect, at least when it comes to economics. Ideologues care not whether their citizens become poorer; instead they worry about whether the correct ideological course is being pursued. The mainstream on the other hand must at least pay lip service to what works.

The experience of Francois Hollande in France is telling in this respect. Elected on a Left-leaning prospectus, Hollande pursued a course that vacillated between radical-sounding rhetoric which spooked the markets, followed – as surely as night follows day – by screeching U-turns that satisfied nobody.

Suggested reading

Why is the hard-Left so conservative?

By James Bloodworth

The radical Left has been nipping at the heels of the centre-Left across western democracies in recent years. The British Labour Party has been turned upside down by this phenomenon, and so it is hard to see how the hard Left would not have continued its resurgence even without Brexit.

In this no Brexit scenario Jeremy Corbyn would still be a backbench MP, but I suspect he would nonetheless be an increasingly influential one. He would have been spared the forensic dragging over the coals by the press that has accompanied his rise. Instead, he would be a regular guest on alternative outlets such as Novara media, where he would be presented as a Left-wing national treasure on a par with the late Tony Benn.

We on the other hand may at least have been spared from those cranks who proliferate online and share their hero’s obsessions and proclivities. Without a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party, there would undoubtedly be less antisemitism in public life. The manhole cover which sits atop that sewer would have remained firmly shut – for the time being at least.

Suggested reading

Tories will reap the Brexit whirlwind

By Matthew Goodwin

A 2015 Labour government might have been short-lived – it may even have been propped up precariously by the Scottish Nationalists. Yet it would at least have had a chance to tackle some of the pressing issues of the day. At present, we are barely talking about the things that really matter – rising in-work poverty, a spike in homelessness, the dilapidation of the country’s infrastructure – because we are so consumed by Brexit.

Anything which might have pre-empted that – as well as the rise of comrade Corbyn and all the residual nastiness that he has brought with him – would arguably have been a deliverance.

The Left would almost certainly be in far better shape today were it not for Brexit. By now it might – in government – have some real achievements to its name. That’s a lot more than can be said for the Corbyn movement.