I don’t believe that story, no matter how often it’s repeated. Starmer pulled off a number of remarkable coups over his short political career. Between 2016 and 2019, he changed Labour’s position from reluctantly backing Brexit to supporting a second referendum. Then he ruthlessly cleared Labour of his political opponents. That helped him win a landslide victory with only 34% of the vote. There are reasons why Starmer failed — but lack of political instinct isn’t one of them.

Bond markets, too, have stories. And not all of them are true or consistent either. After all, “bond vigilantes”, as bond market speculators are sometimes called, haven’t attacked France, a country with an even bigger public debt problem than the UK. France’s annual deficit, and its total stock of debt, are higher than Britain’s too, even as successive French governments have failed to stabilize public spending. So if France is safe, might it not be reasonable to think that the UK has a bit of headroom left too?

Unfortunately not. An attack on France would carry incalculable risks for the vigilantes. France is backed by the European Central Bank: an immensely powerful institution, with the ability to bail out countries of any size. I would hope this never happens. But I can’t rule it out, and the bond vigilantes can’t either. If you bet on a rise in French bond prices, and the ECB intervenes to lower them, a speculator could potentially face massive losses.

The UK obviously doesn’t have the protections that come with membership of a large monetary union. That’s precisely why the country needs a solid fiscal framework, as well as a rules-based central bank. And, here, Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules have proved decent enough. They are certainly conservative, but importantly distinguish between current spending and long-term investment.

If, in other words, Andy Burnham and his next chancellor were to scrap Britain’s fiscal framework, the bond market vigilantes would have every incentive to attack. Jim O’Neill, a former Goldman Sachs chief economist and now an adviser to Burnham, has reportedly come out in favor of a German-style multi-annual public investment fund.  To make his idea palatable to the bond markets, O’Neill has suggested that the UK get rid of the pensions triple lock. I don’t think this will impress the vigilantes unless and until Burnham actually started freezing pensions — and that’s before you factor in the political challenges.

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Under the triple lock, pensions must increase by whichever’s highest: inflation, earnings growth, or 2.5%. This year, earnings came out top, informing the 4.8% jump in pensions. If Burnham were to cap pension increases at 2.5%, that may make an impression on the bond markets, but he’d also lose the support of many pensioners.

In other words, policy choices are difficult, and far beyond the triple lock too. Taxing property sounds fine, for instance, until you discover how many of your own voters would be paying the tax. Many Labour voters in the South of England own high-value properties. Reeves has already imposed a mansion tax on homes worth £2 million or more. If you slashed that to £1 million, you would invariably hit a lot of Labour voters in places like London, particularly when not everybody who is asset-rich is also income-rich.

To put it another way, there are no low-hanging fruits left to pick. Reeves and her Conservative predecessors have already stripped the orchard clean.

If you don’t want to cut military or welfare spending, and have no scope to raise borrowing, the only alternative left would be to raise taxes. But that doesn’t work either. A good example of how difficult it is to raise tax on high-income earners is the story of the UK’s now-abolished scheme for non-domiciled employees — the infamous “non-dom” regime. Classic non-domers used to be American investment bankers, seconded to the City of London for five or 10 years.

Successive Tory governments already scaled it down, and when Reeves came to office, she abolished the little that remained. But then she discovered that she lost out on tax revenues. Some foreign workers went home. Others went to Italy, which has successfully set up its own non-dom regime. Today, Milan is booming for that very reason.

This is what happens when your tax policies meet the complex reality of a world in which high-income earners are exceptionally mobile. Alas, Burnham and his team don’t live in this world. He may have been prepared for his power grab, but he hasn’t thought about the gritty details of economic policy.

Contrary to the stereotypes, Starmer and Reeves were prepared for power, economically speaking anyway. What they failed to do was translate a fiscal strategy into a political one. Traditionally, the Labour Party was the party of work. Rather than accepting the welfare state in its current unsustainable size, Starmer and Reeves could have framed their economic policy as a welfare-to-work program, with a strong emphasis on productive public-sector jobs. To that extent, their failure had nothing to do with day-to-day political nous — what they lacked was an overarching political agenda.

To be fair, Burnham has an agenda: just not a very inspiring one. Let’s go through some possible scenarios. He may do what I just suggested Starmer should have done: he might conclude that boosting Britain’s low productivity is key to winning the next election. Productivity is the money we earn per-hour-worked. It is a better metric than the more common statistic of gross domestic product, which conflates a lot of other stuff. GDP might go up because we work longer hours — or because of higher immigration.

But this does not make us feel better. Productivity is the better metric for politicians, too, because it explains how the median voter actually feels about the economy. The reason people are struggling to make ends meet, let alone afford to buy property, is closely related to the fall in productivity growth.

The one forecast I will make is that without a rebound in productivity growth, no prime minister can succeed. Even if he doesn’t have his own productivity agenda, Burnham may still be lucky. There are some tentative signs that productivity is rising again. For instance, payroll data shows an increase in output-per-hour to levels not seen since the financial crisis. But if that were to happen, Starmer, too, would have been lucky.

I am, however, struggling to see any scenario in which Burnham succeeds on the basis of what he is offering. Productivity doesn’t increase because railways are in public ownership, while higher taxes would actually impede productivity growth. There may be reasons to support more public-sector investment — but productivity is not one of them. If Burnham were to deliver his promises, indeed, the impact on productivity growth would be negative.

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A smarter strategy would be old-school, Left-wing radicalism. I myself would hate it — but don’t let that get in the way of our discussion. A socialist with a brain might just do the following. You’d start by taking back control of the Bank of England and imposing a governor who supports your policies. The bond market vigilantes would get ready to attack immediately. But then you’d fight back, warning them you’re ready to default on all of Britain’s debt.

This is the “Kim Jong Un scenario”: a mad dictator with a few nuclear bombs is more powerful than a centrist people-pleaser with thousands. If the UK were to default on its debt, it would bring down the global financial system. The UK is not Argentina. It is too big to fail. So if you hold the nerve, and your MPs don’t panic and replace you in the meantime, you can dictate any deal you like. In practice, that might mean restructuring your debt, giving you breathing space on interest payments.

Back on Earth, though, we can all rest assured that none of this is going to happen because, as is increasingly clear from Burnham’s putative plan, the Leftists of our generation are mostly uninterested in economics, unlike their 20th-century predecessors.

In the Seventies, the Labour Party, and European social democratic parties, were focused on Keynesian economics. Gordon Brown, shortly after he became chancellor, famously talked about endogenous growth theory. Reeves and O’Neill may be trained economists, yet I’d struggle to identify any economic thinkers in the Labour Party today. Together with Germany’s SPD, and the French Socialists, the modern Left is focused primarily on income redistribution.

This leaves us with a scenario where Burnham might succeed because of luck, or where he fails. As so often in life, though, there are more ways to fail than succeed. My expectation is that in a year from now, Labour MPs will look in the mirror and ask: “what did we do?” And political journalists will have a neat narrative to explain why Burnham was always bound to fail.

The law in question is the “Conversion Practices Draft Bill”, published this week and which ostensibly outlaws attempts to force an individual to change his or her sexual orientation or “gender identity”. The trouble with this framing is that it conflates two entirely antagonistic concepts. As ever with culture war discourse, regressive measures are being smuggled through under the guise of progressive language. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, a ban on “trans conversion therapy” amounts to state-sanctioned gay conversion therapy.

To understand why, it’s worth outlining the difference between what the bill claims to propose and its actual ramifications. Gay rights in this country were secured because of a growing recognition that a minority of any given population are inherently attracted toward their own sex. Gender identity ideology posits that biological sex is irrelevant to sexual orientation, and that a sexed essence — or “soul”, as gender activist Helen Webberley puts it — should be the determining factor.

The key problem here is that there is no evidence for this pseudoscientific belief and, thanks to the current genderist orthodoxy, same-sex orientation has routinely been misinterpreted as a mismatch between soul and body. In other words, “gender-affirming care” is often a fig leaf for an attempt to “fix” gay and bisexual people who fail to align with heterosexual frameworks and traditional sex stereotypes. Under the new law, anyone who does not automatically affirm someone’s belief that they are “born in the wrong body”, or who questions the notion of “transgender identity”, could be accused of “conversion practice” and sentenced to up to five years in jail.

The statistical evidence of the risk to gay people is clear. Data published by the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) — the NHS pediatric clinic that was shut down in March 2024 after it was determined by the Cass Review to be providing treatment that was unsafe and unevidenced — showed that an overwhelming majority of its adolescent patients were either gay or bisexual. In 2012, this amounted to around 90% of females and more than 80% of males. By 2015, the proportions had declined but remained a majority, with 70% of females and 60% of males falling within this category.

Homosexuality is not the only factor that can lead to confusion over “gender”. In her book Time to Think, journalist Hannah Barnes outlined in meticulous detail how the vast majority of children referred to GIDS for gender-related distress also presented with a range of other difficulties, including depression, self-harm, anxiety, histories of abuse and dysfunctional families. Roughly a third of patients were suffering from Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as compared to only 2% of the country as a whole.

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Yet it is impossible to ignore the disproportionate impact on same-sex attracted individuals. For years now, gay rights groups have been explaining the problem, but have been routinely shut out by ministers. The most recent statement by LGB Alliance puts it plainly: “The old conversion therapy told gay people to change their sexuality. The new version tells them to change their bodies.” The Government’s bill “risks making it harder for those young people to receive the time, conversations and exploratory support that have helped generations of same-sex attracted people understand and accept themselves”.

Labour ministers such as Olivia Bailey are claiming that the bill would only apply to “abusive” conduct, but the draft itself says something very different. It defines “conversion practice” as “conduct carried out by a person towards an individual” with the intention of “causing the individual (i) to have to not to have, (ii) to believe that they have or do not have, a transgender identity or a particular transgender identity”. The language is so broadly drafted as to incorporate those who simply deny the existence of a gendered soul at all.

Moreover, the criterion could be as simple as causing “serious alarm or distress”. As criminal barrister Dennis Kavanagh has pointed out, this “begs the question of where this act leaves writers, commentators, political charities and standard companies. Given the offense can be ‘any conduct’ could that be a book? A passionately written article? Could it be a speech? I think so”.

Though the bill contains an explicit exemption for healthcare professionals, it does not protect parents who wish to reassure their children that they have not been “born in the wrong body” — and, whether they be an effeminate boy or a masculine girl, should learn to be happy as they are. Studies have repeatedly shown that gender nonconformity in youth is one of the most reliable predictors of homosexuality in later life. But if a child claims to be neither male nor female, for a parent to deny this could land them in prison.

Indeed, the very notion of a “nonbinary identity” is seemingly protected by the new bill, even though it does not exist as a category in UK law. It states that the “circumstances in which an individual has a transgender identity” include gender reassignment, transsexuality and if “the individual identifies as neither male nor female or as not solely male or female”. Yet in spite of the common misunderstandings around intersex conditions (congenital differences of sex development that occur in males or females) there is no such thing as a third sex or an absence of sex in human beings. For a parent to point this out to a child who identifies as “nonbinary” but is probably just gay — a reality check that might well cause “alarm or distress” — could now result in a criminal prosecution.

The nebulous nature of the bill means it can also be weaponized against feminists and gender-critical campaigners. As lawyer Sarah Philimore has noted, it is likely that “those claiming a trans identity will assert that even mild mannered online posts which do not 100% ‘affirm’ the reality of a trans identity, will be claimed to cause immediate and very significant harm”. The new law is not only smuggling self-identification onto the statute books, it provides a legal cudgel to beat anyone who rejects the premise.

The bill relies on the rhetorical and incendiary ramifications of the term “conversion therapy”. Most members of the public will assume it refers to the “corrective rape” of lesbians, or else the gay men who were subjected to torture, electric-shock treatment and even castration in an effort to “cure” them of their homosexuality. This is why the bill conflates orientation with identity. It means that sensible forms of therapy for those struggling with their sexuality are elided with the inarguable evil of the gay-conversion practices of the past.

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But these practices are already illegal under existing law. The bill offers no new protections for gay people, but rather puts them at risk of medicalization for their orientation under the guise of “gender-affirming care”. Whereas not a single person was ever prosecuted under Section 28, Labour’s new law might not only see concerned parents in prison, but would also create the conditions by which gay people are subjected to irreversible medical interventions to see them “heterosexualized”. The Iranian government has been promoting “sex changes” as a remedy for homosexuality for years. By insisting that transgender identity ought to be automatically affirmed — an approach that has led to the prescription of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and even surgery for gay people — the UK government is now following suit.

Given that activists have so successfully muddied the waters through the redefinition of language, it is tempting to give Labour the benefit of the doubt. Surely, we might ask, its ministers do not wish to harm gay people and are simply ignorant of the policy they are supporting? Yet the Government’s dogged refusal to listen to campaigners on this issue suggests at the very least a flippancy about the erosion of gay rights if it means that its ideology can be upheld.

Consider the evasive behavior of MP Tris Osborne when challenged by journalist Jo Bartosch. Faced with the accusation that his party’s bill is homophobic, Osborne simply deferred to the judgment of ideologically captured organizations: “The UK’s leading health, counseling and psychotherapy bodies (including the Royal College of GPs, British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists, Royal College of Psychiatrists) have, since 2015, agreed to a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) making it clear that conversion therapy in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation is unethical, potentially harmful and is not supported by evidence.”

At no point does Osborne address the fact that not one of these organizations has satisfactorily defined “gender identity”. It could hardly be otherwise, since the concept cannot be defined without resorting to circular appeals to “gender”. What all of these groups have in common is an assumption that “gender identity” exists without explaining what it is or providing evidence for its ontological basis. The Government is now legislating on the basis of what is essentially a faith-based position.

Nor does Osborne address the key point that the legislation he supports is fundamentally anti-gay. Whether its architects are motivated by hatred or disgust for same-sex attracted people is beside the point; the ideology it promotes is in direct opposition to gay rights, irrespective of their intentions. One suspects that ministers are dodging this point because they must know by now that they are putting gay people in jeopardy without any moral or scientific justification. Bev Jackson of LGB Alliance, who has rightly branded this “Labour’s Section 28”, directly asked Osborne the pertinent question: “Can you really not see how profoundly homophobic this is?” Answer came there none.

This refusal to listen to critics seems to be the party line. As MP Olivia Bailey said in a recent interview: “We are going to see through on this ban. We’re going to work at pace through our pre-legislative scrutiny process. It’s really important to get a diversity of views into that legislation, and then we’re going to crack on with legislating for this”. The implication, that scrutiny of the bill is a mere formality, is hardly surprising. The Government is now openly positioning itself as an enemy of its gay citizens, and it is unlikely to be deterred.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There follows a period of political chaos, shaken by repeated General Elections and coalitions, during which the new party goes from strength to strength, exerting pressure on the mainstream. Eventually it gains power, and make changes that define the social contract for the next 80 years.

Prophecy? No: history. The name of that party, adopted 120 years ago, was Labour. But even if history doesn’t repeat itself, it does seem to be rhyming. Except, this time, Labour are the incumbents, and the insurgents are snapping at their heels: this week a shock poll revealed that among trade union members, as many now support Reform as Labour. 

Trade union members. Labour was literally founded by trade unionists. The whole point of Labour, then the insurgents, was to give a voice to working people excluded from the political process. So what happened? Why does “labour” no longer vote Labour? The story is complicated, but perhaps the central underlying change is that the kind of “labour” that drove the emergence of Labour simply isn’t the political force in Britain that it was in 1906. 

The industries have gone. So, too, is the empire that supplied raw materials for those industries, and a ready market for the finished products. And in the aftermath of this disintegration, the industrial working class that once organized, mobilized, and founded a political party has fractured into multiple interests. In turn, some of these are as under-represented now as the industrial working poor was in 1906 — but for radically different reasons. 

When the “Labour Representation Committee” met for the first time in 1900, they really were giving a voice to the voiceless. At the time only around 60% of adult men could vote, and the poorest workers had no direct political representation. Meanwhile, living and working conditions for this class were so grim as to prompt national concern about public health.

The Labour Party was founded to be that voice. Their organizing principles, leadership, and initial funding were drawn from already well-established trade unions, and set out to provide representation for Britain’s working class. The party succeeded, and its arc transformed the country: devising, institutionalizing, and finally outliving an entire template for national solidarity.

Its grand, historic triumph was the welfare state. Social housing, unemployment benefit, and — centrally — the National Health Service all came together first as campaigning causes and then, after two world wars, as a comprehensive vision. All was facilitated by the increase in administrative capacity occasioned by total war, and energized by the cooperative effort and sense of common, national purpose engendered by the struggle. 

But the same wars that created that capacity and reservoir of goodwill also ended the British Empire, which was the larger economic unit on which our national industrial model was based. The replacement of “imperial preference” by the US-led GATT began to chip away at industrial profit margins. Over the same period, the postwar Labour government nationalized key industries in the hope of preserving them for the public good rather than the benefit of a few plutocrats. That in turn empowered the unions, who agitated for better pay even as Britain’s entry into the EU began to bleed factories away to cheaper European countries.  

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Why Brexit is back

By Mary Harrington

Matters came to a head in the late Seventies, in the Winter of Discontent: a high-point of industrial action, and a low-point for functioning government. Public patience with nationalized industry and over-mighty unions ran out. Margaret Thatcher was elected; and by dint of privatizing swathes of industry, and closing the mines, she broke the unions and opened a new national chapter.  

Her interventions were socially costly, miring some parts of the country in deindustrialization, poverty, and despair even as they aided other parts of the economy to get moving again. And yet through all this the overall postwar social contract established by Labour more or less held, and has continued to hold. Everyone pays taxes according to their ability; anyone who needs help can receive it. Political debate is mostly about the fine detail. 

But a central effect of the transformation Thatcher wrought was to tilt Britain — including its working class — ever further from the industrial economy for which the welfare state was founded. In the process, the funding, administration, and scope of welfare have grown ever more politically problematic. 

Who is the “us” for which this solidarity is available? On what basis? This question has grown harder to answer among the people whose interests were, historically, given coherence and voice by Labour, as that class has evolved since the end of Britain’s industrial era. Now, a once cohesive, unionized, industrial proletariat comprises a multitude of sometimes contradictory economic and political subgroups. Many work in the public sector or for the “Blob” that, despite Maggie’s complaints, has mushroomed since her day and is now the strongest bastion of trade unionism, and directly or indirectly state-funded. Others bought their social houses, became prosperous, and joined the aspirational classes; these, along with those self-employed as tradesmen, have often been transformed by years of filing their own tax returns into fiscal conservatives. 

Others again, especially in the de-industrialized Midlands and North, languish on welfare, or struggle in the gig economy. There are countless other pathways too. But identifying a common political interest among them has grown increasingly difficult. Accordingly, Labour has sought to triangulate a new political coalition: now Labour’s “people” are (among others) bourgeois progressives, public-sector workers, students, ethnic minorities, welfare recipients, plus a tribally Labour rump of the old industrial working class. Where internal contradictions appeared, these were papered over by people, especially the latter group, having no other viable political vehicle. 

But this coalition doesn’t look as though it’ll hold much longer. For one thing, parts of the coalition now do have other places to go. But for another, the political measures now required to sustain Labour’s flagship political achievements are on their way to destroying the solidarity on which those achievements were predicated. Labour was founded, with justice, to give political representation to a class whose conditions were miserable and voice non-existent. Its greatest victory was the postwar welfare state, which continued — even after the demise of the industries that gave rise to it — to set the template for how a civilized modern country should take care of its own. 

But now the strain is showing. Falling birth rates have shrunk the working-age tax base, meaning taxes have to rise just to keep services at the existing level. This has begun to prompt increasingly sharp questions about value for money, not to mention intergenerational justice. To mitigate this, successive governments have sought to replenish the tax base and boost nominal GDP via inward migration. And even if this had, for a while, something like the desired economic effect, it also depressed native wages, especially at the lower end of the scale.

Meanwhile, policymakers who pursued this strategy didn’t take into account the attenuating effect that rapid demographic change would have on the sense of collective solidarity upon which the whole postwar welfare state was premised. The sociologist Robert Putnam showed that the greater the “diversity” within a community, the less civically engaged it was: less volunteering, fewer voters, less charity donation and fewer community projects. His findings have been disputed, but the point is an intuitive one: if a welfare state is about taking care of “our own”, you need to be able to define “our own”. 

But the modern Labour Party, perhaps as a byproduct of the post-industrial coalition it embraced, can no longer answer the question: who is the “us”, for whom social solidarity should be defined and sustained? Who is “our own”? In these formless conditions, then, the contract that Labour created for the country is showing signs of implosion. Meanwhile, those with the most to lose from the end of a cohesive “imagined community”, the lumpenpetitbourgeoisie that evolved from the Old Labour working class, are among the angriest about its perceived dissolution, into GP waiting lists, petty crime, high street money-laundering, two-tier everything, and all the mutinous rest of it. 

Anecdotally, if I had a pound for every mutter I’ve heard from people who would once have voted Labour, about how our taxes mostly seem to fund seaside holidays for Afghans, I’d be able to fund my own week away in Cromer. In the end it probably doesn’t matter how often the idealists repeat that asylum is a trivial cost, relative to adult social care, or that it’s not that many sexual assaults. Perception matters for public consent to taxation. And the public perception is, increasingly, that the “us” is paying the taxes, but the solidarity is directed elsewhere.

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Of course, none of this is to blame law-abiding migrants, all of whom surely just want to get on in life. But it adds up to a situation in which public enthusiasm for the postwar social contract is up against a shrinking tax base, in a population on its way to being so multicultural that national solidarity as such is now unimaginable save to those who depend economically on the state, are rich enough not to feel the pinch, or else wildly idealistic about a community of all humanity. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, those still supporting Labour typically fit this description: public sector workers and welfare dependents, well-off lefties, and a rump of true believers. But even this latter group is increasingly defecting to the open-borders Green Party. Meanwhile, now, the other lot — the Old Labour voters Labour so long took for granted — also have somewhere else to go. Among those now thoroughly disillusioned by Labour’s refusal to define “us” with any clarity or purpose, many — even, it appears, among those still active trade union members — are going. 

That “somewhere” is an unknown quantity, led by a man considerably longer on charisma than attention to detail. It’s a caucus that’s faced accusations of dodgy funding, and which is accused from one side of being a Roman salute away from full-fat Hitlerism, and from the other of being the “Uniparty” in a teal-colored tie. But it’s also, as plainly as was the Labour Party in 1900, giving a voice of sorts to a currently voiceless political constituency. 

History doesn’t repeat. But, sometimes, it does rhyme. If either side of Reform’s critics turn out to be right, the lumpenpetitbourgeoisie are in for a bitter disappointment. Even if the critics are wrong, I doubt this group will exactly get their small-c conservative wish, of an “us” that’s once again solidaristic and cohesive, just like after the two wars. But either way, I think eventually a version of this political caucus will do again what the Labour Party did before, for better or worse: rewrite the social contract. 

But this time, we are to believe, is the real reset. The resetters’ reset. Perhaps, dare we say it, the Great Reset? Nope. For all his huffing and puffing about how the status quo needs to change, to deliver something called “strength through fairness” (er, what?) the effect was a very small reset: a profoundly conservative defense, in fact, of the status quo.

But that status quo ended in 2008. This is partly thanks to the tribalizing effect of the internet, which swiftly displaced “IRL” after the iPhone, and which has since fractured the managerial dream of universal culture into a million warring echo chambers. But more fundamentally still, it’s because Britain’s permacrisis began, as Starmer’s own speech acknowledged, with the 2008 financial crash. And the main takeaway from the Prime Minister’s latest Small Reset is how profoundly in denial he plainly still is, about how obsolete his project is in the ensuing politics of scarcity.

Having been trailed all over the press as offering a bold vision, departing radically from the incremental change Labour have attempted so far, Starmer’s Small Reset in fact began with whatever the opposite is of a big, positive pitch. Please stick with me, he pleaded; at least I’m not Reform or the Greens. He didn’t put it quite like this; rather, he warned about “very dangerous opponents” taking Britain down “a very dark path”.

By contrast, in the Starmerite path of light he set out against this ominous backdrop, we can discern Starmer’s positive vision, such as it is. His ideal Britain, the one he begs us to help him salvage from Reform and the Greens, is a “diverse” country characterized by “decency and respect”. It’s a nation broadly in continuity with the historic one, but with some friendly additional ethnic variety that makes our communities more colorful and our food more tasty, while the country as a whole stays cohesive and integrated.

The vision is familiar. It dominated in the latter half of the 20th century, and I think of it as “Floella Benjamin Britain”, in honour of the Trinidiadian-British actress and singer, and (now) Baroness Benjamin. She served as an early, upbeat role model of multiculturalism, ubiquitous on the children’s TV of my childhood, and as a defining exemplar of this postwar, post-imperial national vision. Starmer’s supposedly bold remedies for our ailing state, and the visceral hatred he now commands on every doorstep, reveal his core conviction that nothing divides the good people of Floella Benjamin Britain which can’t be solved by better administration, more funding, or more economic opportunity.

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Rules are for suckers in two-tier Britain

By Mary Harrington

More “fairness”, more youth schemes, more EU, and more handouts to local governments. It’s all in keeping with a vision of the country that, today, survives principally in leafy suburbs and CBBC casting: one in which there are no truly irreconcilable differences, no wicked problems, no painful tradeoffs. Instead, we blend social democracy with progressive identity politics, to produce maximum fairness and opportunity across the board.

With minor aesthetic adjustments, variants of FBB also appear in Tory and Lib Dem circles too. I would love to live in the Britain to which it would be well-suited. Starmer has put great effort into realizing this country, a project I would appreciate more if I didn’t think it delusional under current conditions.

Before 2008, FBB was just about expansive enough a vision to offer space for multiple, sometimes contradictory, factions within the overall Left. These included the swivel-eyed far-Left, which got behind the identity politics; it also included what was left of the trade unions, now largely repurposed from representing the “old Left” industrial working class to advocating for public sector workers and generous welfare. But the crash ended that coalition.

The industrial working class were already mostly deindustrialized, and the far-Left was already at war with New Labour. Then, New Labour first encouraged the 2000s financial boom, and — when the crash came — bailed out the banks, at the taxpayer’s expense. The decision wrecked the public finances. It also rendered obsolete the social contract for which Tony Blair had only just finished re-engineering the constitution.

The Blairite pact between government and electorates was: let us open Britain up, and in exchange everyone will get richer. With the bankers’ bailout, that died. This single act by Gordon Brown may have, as some claimed, “saved the world”, but the sheer injustice of it, and the lack of accountability, has never fully been forgiven. In the aftermath of this outrage, the electorate has punished every politician who has dared try and govern.

This is partly unspent rage. It’s also partly because keeping even a semblance of that former settlement in place is, increasingly obviously, no longer about a rising tide that lifts all boats. Now, it’s a matter of choosing which groups should suffer in order for others to stay insulated. Who is paying, and who’s still drawing down? That, as they say, is politics: the allocation of resources according to a calculus of friend and enemy.

Starmer might call this framing “division”, just a bad emotion whose remedy is better procedure (or perhaps more censorship). But when people perceive that money is taken from their pay packets and handed to those who don’t work, or who just arrived on a dinghy, scolding them for responding with anger is not going to assuage them. Nor is the promise of a new youth training scheme.

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National populism has outgrown America

By Mary Harrington

Nor is trying to fix things within the terms of the existing system, as successive governments have sought to. That is, attempting to delay the inevitable via monetary and human quantitative easing, which is to say: simulating growth by printing money and inflating the population through immigration. But these are the only paths open at present. For the current constitution and economy have jammed the country open, in perpetuity, presumably in the belief that doing so would be to our benefit. It’s a bit like not bothering to fit a door on your house, because you think you’ve abolished seasons and no one will ever try and rob you.

Now, after 18 drafty years living in a house with no door, most have palpably experienced QE making them poorer. Meanwhile, the influx of human QE has chipped away at the sense of “imagined community” upon which the welfare contract was predicated in the first place. And far from behaving like inert economic units in a spreadsheet, the people flowing in via human QE programs have turned out, themselves, to be human. Surprise! People have preferences, loves, families, and political interests.

The result hasn’t, at least not uniformly, been everyone blending into a nice CBBC world that’s still the same Britain just with more takeout. The volume of new arrivals is now so great that in some areas there’s no established culture to integrate into at all: just infrastructure, and a transient, polyglot population. As time has gone on, this has begun self-sorting into enclaves, networks, and — increasingly — ethnocentric political groupings. Again, no surprise: when resources grow scarcer, politics gets more tribal. You can’t afford prizes for everyone any more, and want to focus on your nearest and dearest.

That was the driver of Brexit; that was ignored, and now it’s the driver of everything, including an alarming uptick in sectarianism, often internet-enabled. In turn, combining increased resource competition with rising ethnic Balkanization has severely undermined public faith in the imagined national polity that Starmer’s vision of “fairness” presupposes. How can you ask someone to accept their taxes being spent elsewhere in the country if TikTok videos have convinced them that others are getting more than they deserve? Or even that people in that area belong to a fundamentally different tribe, perhaps even one that is hostile to yours?

In response to this fraying solidarity, so far Starmer’s instinct has been to uphold the vision, and just clamp down on the videos. It’s not working. By contrast, Reform and the Greens both lean into the political fracturing Starmer is desperately trying to forestall. No wonder he views them, correctly, as “dangerous”: these parties aren’t just poaching Labour voters, they’re rewriting the rules of the game.

Where Starmer still dreams of a national, perhaps a universalist vision capable of encompassing everyone, and optimized managerially, both Reform and the Greens are far more frankly and unabashedly political: that is, advocating for their political tribes. The Greens’ tribe is that emulsion of students, Islamists, Third Worldists, and the far Left purged from Labour by Starmer himself. For Reform, it’s the long-ignored British working and lower-middle class, functionally abandoned by Labour circa Blair. Both these groups have assessed, correctly, that there’s no longer any point trying to coexist within a big-tent Labour Party: in the new post-crash politics of scarcity, the Omnicause Leftist and ethnic-majority working class tribes have mutually antagonistic political interests.

Is there a resolution? Almost surely, yes, but not within the Labour Party. The purported speech of Starmer’s life included nothing about asylum rules, or the welfare bill, or crime, or crumbling high streets, or tax, or anything really. It couldn’t, because that would mean implicitly picking a side, and thus admitting that what he calls “division” is actually a set of intractable contests whose resolution will produce winners and losers. In other words: politics.

In due course a political actor of some kind will resolve these seemingly intractable issues, and they’ll do so by making changes at the structural level. That is: we’ll eventually reconfigure the country’s political, legal, and economic constraints to align better with Britain as it is, rather than as CBBC wishes it was. But I doubt the person to achieve this will be the lawyerly, procedural, pathologically hands-off Starmer.

His best idea for saving his own skin seems to be restoring the pre-2016 status quo with more Europe. And, madder and more conservative still, appointing as his finance adviser Gordon Brown, the man who stared at the end of the world, in 2008 — then flinched, and gifted Britain the unreal interregnum we’ve inhabited ever since.

Will Farage be the one? Who knows. But eventually it will be somebody. Since the permacrisis began, a whole generation has reached adulthood with the door on Britain’s figurative house jammed open. These young adults have no memory of things ever having been good, and many are willing to take drastic steps in the hope of something better. 

These young people also came of age during Covid, and have taken on board what lockdowns taught them about the real scope for authoritarian action. What will they do to Britain’s constitution? Perhaps they’ll fit a door. Perhaps they’ll knock down all the walls. Either way, whether Starmer lasts till next week or till Christmas, the real, eventual reset will likely entail the end of everything he sought to preserve.

One forecast suggests Labour could lose almost 2,000 councilors this week, almost three-quarters of the local seats the party is defending. Translated to national politics, the vast majority of Labour MPs would lose their seats at the next general election. By the weekend, indeed, the Prime Minister may be so humiliated by a slew of town-hall debacles that he feels he has to resign — before his cabinet colleagues revolt.

The truth, of course, is far less dramatic. If Starmer is finally ejected from office, the locals will merely have been the straw that broke the Labour’s back. Even so, this intense springtime focus on councilors and wards really does matter, if not in the way Westminster thinks. By diverting resources away from the national crucible of government in London, as they frantically try to ensure a good performance in council polls, parties severely undermine the status and work of local government — harming everyone, whatever their politics.

That was clear enough last week, on the day the Commons voted on whether Starmer should be referred to the Privileges Committee. To guarantee victory, Labour whips summoned MPs back to Westminster from councils all over the kingdom — before dispatching them back to the campaign trail after marching through the Commons lobbies. To put it differently, then, many MPs, who are paid roughly £2,000 a week to be national figures, had been given permission by the Commons whips to skive off their normal Westminster work: to become foot-soldiers in council campaigns, and all at the state’s expense.

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If the Westminster system is partly to blame here, the media is too. Indeed, I confess I was often guilty of emphasizing the national dimension of local politics during my long years as a TV reporter. Even so, it does feel as if things are getting worse. To give one example, the Green leader Zack Polanski was recently interviewed for almost 20 minutes on ITV’s breakfast show.  Presenters Ed Balls and Susanna Reid asked Polanski at length about a whole string of national matters — drugs, speed limits, borders and immigration, fuel duty, and several other issues which have nothing to do with local councils. The Today program spent most of its local election interview with Nigel Farage asking him about his policies on welfare, again the opposite of a local authority matter.

In a sense, this nationalization of municipal elections is an inevitable consequence of how politics has changed. As councils face more and more regulations from Whitehall — over a dozen national bodies expect town halls to enforce hundreds of laws —  it’s unsurprising that national debates on education or social care muscle into local elections. That’s especially true when Treasury constraints give councilors ever-less room for maneuver, with social care alone taking up 65% of their budgets.

Equally important is the depressing decline of local media. Even 30 years ago, many communities boasted several newspapers, with the local press feeling it was their duty to report matters in town hall and its council chamber. But now, there is no local media to speak of across 37 local authority districts, and the gap isn’t adequately filled by social media, let alone council websites. It’s therefore now quite hard for voters to know how a local council is performing — beyond their own personal experience — or to discover what plans it has for the future.

Taken together, anyway, this national obsession is grossly unfair to the principles of local government — to say nothing of those hundreds of thousands of people who work in town halls.  British local government was developed over the centuries to promote accountability between governors and governed. Through regular votes at the ballot box, citizens would decide who should run their local services, with the power to eject them if they performed badly.

Increasingly, though, that process of accountability has broken down — and if national trends are largely responsible, voters hardly help themselves. After all, almost everyone now casts their ballots for national reasons, severing the vital link between the performance of local politicians and whether they deserve to stay in power.

There are exceptions, of course. The year-long bin strike in Birmingham, England’s largest local authority, may lose the ruling Labour group many votes, or anyway more than elsewhere. In general, though, Labour council leaders will be thrown out of office on Thursday not because they’ve run their plot badly, but because their electors are horrified by the performance of Keir Starmer and his colleagues in London. The same could apply to some Conservative council leaders, given the Tories’ equally low popularity under Kemi Badenoch.

And if this is bad for democracy in theory, it also discourages effective local governance in practice. Council leaders have little incentive to perform well, knowing their fate at the next local election will almost certainly depend on the ebbs and flows of their party’s national support. In some areas, meanwhile, voters will oust their councilors next week — even though they actually think the council’s doing a pretty good job. For them, giving Starmer or Badenoch a good kicking will take precedence.

What a sense of injustice that must create for councilors who have devoted years to public service. No wonder parties from Labour to Reform have so much trouble finding talented people to stand for council contests, even as the quality of those who do get elected invariably declines.

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What, then, of the future? One solution is surely to exclude political parties from local government, as effectively happens with most parish councils where candidates generally try to secure election on their own personal merits. And, to be fair, there are still some remote corners of Britain where independent councilors remain a powerful force. In Pembrokeshire, for example, independents have run the council for decades, with a similar situation in the Western Isles of Scotland.

Paradoxically, national politicians are always telling us how much they’re committed to devolution, to letting local people decide at the lowest level. In that case, party leaders should stop getting involved in any local elections other than those in their own constituencies. More than that, Westminster MPs should be much tougher in not taking on local casework from constituents when the problem is often the responsibility of the local council. Their centralizing instincts aside, that might actually help MPs, shielding them from the public’s wrath when the pothole down the street isn’t filled in. Nor would this be anything new. Well into the postwar period, parliamentarians saw the Commons, not the town hall, as their place, understanding that their role was to represent their constituency — and not be distracted by every local challenge.

That, of course, would require a shift among voters. For while electors seem happy to see the locals as a great national opinion poll, they increasingly also seem to want their Westminster MPs to be local. Many electors equally insist their national representatives should be born and bred in the constituency, and preferably live there too. Until that changes, expect this country’s politics to struggle, wherever its representatives are based.

And Starmer isn’t the only Labour figure to have a recent swing. In January, the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, Darren Jones, declared he would “rewire” the civil service — in front of a neon sign reading “move fast, fix things” — with no “sideways shimmy to another team or department if you fail to perform”.

The archetypal mandarin, then, is lazy, obsessed with process over outcome, and something of a stranger to their office desk. (Plus, the PM seems to be implying, secretive and conniving.) For a clever graduate, in this telling, the civil service offers an easy life: a well-pensioned, squishy middle ground between the corporate grind and the high-status penury of the arts. The last jobs-for-life left in 21st-century Britain. 

Is that account accurate? Pilfer an unattended lanyard and slip into SW1’s stately buildings. What you see will, in fact, have more in common with the artsy end of the employment spectrum than with the corporate world. Job cuts, low pay and scant promotion prospects have turned working for a nuclear-armed state, one that oversees the world’s sixth-largest economy, into something approaching a hobby career.

Behind the edifices of creamy Portland stone which run along the 640 meters of Whitehall are the offices from which much of the world was run for much of the past two centuries. Their present condition could be a metaphor for the nation. “You’ll have some nice parts where you can host dignitaries,” says James*, a youngish diplomat at the Foreign, Common and Development Office, of his department’s headquarters at King Charles Street. “But where you work, there’ll be damp; the toilets will be blocked; the wi-fi [will be] pretty crap.” It’s very Slow Horses, James says, in both office décor and the corresponding gallows humor.

These offices are staffed by much the same people as any halfway-prestigious private company: graduates, usually with humanities degrees from decent universities, in smart-casual dress, or a suit (but no tie) for big meetings. They write reports, send emails, and do generic admin. In this case, not in service of selling vacuum cleaners or bonds, but serving the political wishes of the government of the day by helping them formulate policy, then carrying it out. Everything from drawing up a new geopolitical strategy, to making sure a Commonwealth reception is stocked with enough sandwiches, can fall under a civil servant’s brief.

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Rachel* joined the civil service — the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, to be precise — from a different industry, and worked there for a couple of years in her mid-twenties before going back to the private sector. The money was one motivation for leaving: her salary when she quit was around £45,000, a lot less than what followed. Another was that familiar beast of Whitehall: bureaucracy, especially after Labour returned to power in 2024. “We would say all the time, ‘We never thought we’d miss the old Tory SpAds,’” she says. “[But] they were just so much easier to work with than the [Labour] ones.” Her team went from being able to liaise directly with government special advisers — political appointees working for Tory ministers — to being instructed to instead contact a minister’s private office of civil servants.

It was an “added layer of communication”, Rachel says, “which slowed everything down so much”, negated the actual hard work her team was doing, and contributed to a frustration which had her eyeing up the exit. The main reason she left, though, was the department’s promotional system, or lack thereof. “Essentially, someone has to leave the job for a promotion to become available.” 

Rachel’s is not the kind of story you want to hear if you care about Britain’s state capacity: someone talented and hard-working, who’s left money on the table to enter public service, being spat out. For what it’s worth, Max*, a twenty-something at the Treasury, thinks the idea that maddening layers of process drive civil servants out of the business — if you can call it that — is “slightly overdone”. James similarly believes that “the machine can move fast with the right incentives, or responding to the right demand signal”. True as this might be, a reputation for bureaucracy, even undeserved, will have its own damaging deterrent effect on those considering entering Whitehall.

What is agreed upon is the money problem. Max says that the lowest rungs of the Treasury are poorly paid even by general civil-service standards, with starting salaries well under £30,000. (Their US equivalents in Washington start on between the equivalent of £42,000 and £52,000, depending on their education level.) “I know of people who were actually cutting into the savings they had made from previous jobs in order to afford to be in London to work at the Treasury.” As much as people might want to work there, plain financial reality might quickly force them out. The result? “A big blob of the Treasury is actually south-west London private school types,” Max explains, “who can afford to grit their teeth and power through.” Pay-to-play is bad enough in arts and media. Do we really want it corroding the government’s economic engine?

James works abroad, in what’s called a “hardship area”: essentially, a poor, chaotic country which an urbane diplomat needs extra inducement to move to. It means a rather cushy setup: his accommodation is paid for, he gets around 40 days of annual leave, and he also receives a “flight package” to cover trips to the UK and elsewhere. And if you’re a diplomat with kids being educated where you’re stationed, the government has an obligation to maintain that same level of schooling. If they were at a fancy international school abroad, that often means the British taxpayer continuing to cover a private education when the family moves back home. But the Foreign Office has “taken a real hit” budget-wise, says James. “You are starting to hear stories of seniors being told the office won’t cover their kids that are upper-sixth at private school because it’s costing too much.”

With Foreign Office restructuring plans entailing a headcount reduction of up to 25% in the next few years, there’s a de facto “promotion freeze”, says James, with a lot of voluntary exit packages waved around threateningly. Similarly, says Max, the Treasury’s self-image as one of the “big-dog departments” means that people prefer not to move anywhere else in government. As a result, promotion within it is “very, very difficult” — creating additional pressure on those who can’t afford to wait things out. The City, with its big salaries, is ready to embrace those who bail.

The cost-cutting is affecting the quality of the civil service’s staff. Whitehall has traditionally leaned on high-caliber individuals who don’t have the stomach for 100-hour workweeks in the City, but the ever-increasing financial tradeoff is slimming down their number. Max says his senior bosses in their forties would generally affirm that “the top, top, top people from the various unis they went to would all try and get into the civil service”. He doesn’t see many quite as “high-grade” people closer to his own age. James makes a similar point: the FCDO has a class of “very competent” managers from their mid-forties to early sixties. “Would those people necessarily be doing the job now if they started with me? I think, increasingly, the civil service will become less attractive to that cohort.”

What does keep people involved? Something that money can’t buy, obviously. The same thing that makes people stomach shit pay and shit hours in capital-P Politics: proximity to power. Particularly if you’re at the FCDO, Treasury or Cabinet Office — the latter acts as a hub for much of the running of government — you can plausibly claim to have your ear next to the heartbeat of the state. You are the person, says Max, chatting to the person “who’s chatting to the Chancellor about [something] at 1pm”. It means that “at dinner parties, people will often want to hear about your job”, says James, in a way they don’t if you tell them you’re just another corporate lawyer. 

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Of course, being close to power is not the same as having it, and confusing the two can be farcical. The department’s middle management, Max says, has plenty of “existential, balding, early-thirties men who aren’t quite clear where their life is headed. A lot of them do tend to enjoy having a Treasury email address. I think an exact thing a manager of mine said at one point was, ‘I have a Treasury email address, and they need to respect that.’” Above them, among the department’s senior staff, is a tinge of fatalism. “If you have chats,” says Max, “they’ll be like, ‘Yeah, things are shit.’ But even how they speak about it, you can kind of tell they enjoy knowing the ins and outs of why things are the way they are, and aren’t quite exactly like public discourse suggests.”

Alongside that is what Max calls a “weird scoffing” about the private sector; of seeing it populated by “bullshitters to the nth degree”. This antipathy, he suggests, “energizes a lot of people in different ways”. Are they so wrong to feel that way? The big-picture story of the past decade has been that states — their borders; their armies — actually matter again. Britain’s own state has again reached the size to which it swelled in the Seventies, with public spending around 45% of GDP, though much of that now goes on hospitals and care-home beds rather than typical appendages of Leviathan’s might.

What we are now learning is that size doesn’t always translate into efficacy. Advocates of a muscular, activist state must prevent that muscle from running to flab. The public sector’s inability to recruit the best people, largely because of the economic (some might call it parasitical) dominance of the City and adjacent industries, has a tangible impact on state capacity — on sovereignty, even. A weeks-long delay on sending a British warship to the drone-hit military base in Cyprus; the Office for National Statistics declining to the point where UK employment figures are almost guesswork — these and other examples of the Government’s eroding ability to exert control at home and abroad are partly a resource problem, but they are also crises in competence.

Maybe this only increases the importance of being closer to what’s left of our sovereignty. “There’s a widespread recognition,” says Max, “that this government, that government, all these governments are shite, and we break our backs trying to make them look decent. So do you want to be as close to the levers of power as possible? Or do you want to be in the backwaters feeling the frustration the country’s feeling?” The most basic, most essential kind of power there is — “the power of the government over the freedom of its subjects”, as Tom Wolfe put it in The Bonfire of the Vanities — will always retain some faint flash of glamour.

*Names have been changed

The disruptive ambitions of “aggressive, hostile powers” were a clear concern of Sir Olly Robbins, the former permanent under-secretary to the Foreign Office, in his appearance before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee yesterday. But he is now dismissed from his post, along with the weight of institutional expertise he carried. Sir Keir Starmer explicitly blamed Robbins for the fact that he was not until recently told of the damning UKSV assessment which deemed Mandelson high risk before his departure for Washington. A career civil servant, long steeped in the nuances of internal process, Robbins offered explanations with the eloquent but slightly stunned air of a man roughly pushed out of a space capsule, suddenly breathing different air. Yet as his quizzing by MPs shed light on the battle between the Government and civil service, it was the civil service that came out bruised but on top.

At the heart of this row are two different understandings on process, both flawed in different ways. The Government is simply careless of process, unless its pious invocation serves to advance a policy goal — which is why, for instance, a particular interpretation of “international law” was so loudly and persistently invoked over the doomed Chagos deal. With the Mandelson fiasco, though, Starmer’s inner circle has been exposed as unusually contemptuous of the civil service, along with its operations and safeguards. It is a dispiriting development from a Prime Minister elected in large part because of his professed adherence to ethics.

In response to pressure from No. 10, the civil service didn’t jettison process. But it did burrow deeper into it, finding procedural levers which technically permitted it to give the government what it so badly wanted. By Sir Olly’s account, an uneasy Foreign Office tried at times to stand its ground, and at others worked diligently at the flexible outer limits of permitted procedure to fulfill the Government’s requests. Ironically, it was for pursuing the latter path that Robbins has now found himself shoved into a pothole. Yet neither strategy exactly inspires full confidence in how the British state works.

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By Aaron Bastani

Before the question of the Peter Mandelson appointment ever reached Sir Olly’s desk, barely a week into his new job in January 2025, it had flouted normal process in almost every way possible. As a candidate for ambassador to the US, the UK’s most sensitive diplomatic posting, Mandelson was already a dubious choice. From his earlier resignations to his infamous “Prince of Darkness” nickname, it didn’t take tremendous insight to guess that Mandelson might run into some difficulty with higher-level vetting.

Aside from his now notorious friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, Mandelson had business links to China and Russia through his Global Counsel consulting firm. This was flagged early during due diligence, of which Starmer was made aware. Even the most naïve inhabitant of 10 Downing Street would surely have taken a cursory look at the Mandelson CV and thought “one to watch” — and Starmer was no greenhorn but a former director of public prosecutions. Quite apart from this, Simon Case, the cabinet secretary in November 2024, had openly warned the Prime Minister that if he intended to make a political appointment to the post of Washington ambassador, then the Foreign Office would develop a vetting plan to reveal any issues “of which you should be aware before confirming your choice.”

Case’s advice was ignored, for reasons which Starmer still hasn’t explained. The fact is, No 10 wanted their man in post quickly. Mandelson, a long-standing mentor to the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, was seen as a potentially invaluable, politically sinuous Trump-whisperer: the whiff of sulfur was a key element in his appeal. Downing Street publicly trumpeted the appointment in December, long before Mandelson’s full vetting was completed. Robbins said that some in the Cabinet Office queried whether Mandelson needed vetting at all, something Number 10 denies. Either way, Mandelson’s transition to Washington was clearly treated as a done deal, including giving him advanced access to high-level briefings. By late January, when responsibility for high-level vetting arrived in Robbins’s in-tray, the political stakes were very high indeed. There were frequent phone calls and “constant pressure” from the Prime Minister’s office, Robbins said, asking when the vetting was going through.

Even as No. 10 apparently sought first to ignore, then rush, then pressure the process around the appointment, it completely lost sight of the essential principle such a procedure is meant to uphold: that individuals deemed dangerous to national security must not be placed in positions of high trust and influence.

Robbins, in contrast, was clearly concerned with national security. Even during his grilling from MPs, he expressed anxiety that the spotlight on the details of developed vetting might be of undue interest to malevolent foreign states. When the negative UKSV evaluation trickled in, it must have proved an awkward moment. But the Foreign Office had the final say, and Robbins said that its own security team had expressed full confidence that they could “manage the risks” from Mandelson, which is why he signed the appointment off.

The most obvious flaw in the process arises from how the UKSV assessment was passed on to Robbins. He learned of it, he said, in terms of an oral briefing from a Foreign Office security official who described the UKSV judgment on Mandelson’s status as “a borderline case” but “leaning toward” recommending clearance be denied. By this reading, the final call might still be up for grabs, with mitigations. But that is far more tentative than the actual UKSV document now being circulated, in which the “overall concern” about the candidate was marked “high” and the outcome was “clearance denied or withdrawn”. It appeared Robbins was discouraged from seeing the physical UKSV document, according to department protocol. Yet while he rightly defends the high confidentiality of developed vetting, there seems no reason why a hard copy of the outcome alone should not have been made visible to him.

Was the secrecy of the process such that Robbins himself was misled? Either way, the debacle suggests that for all the British state’s theoretical commitment to correct procedure, its fulfillment is highly dependent on the government’s respect for it. And the more that is known about the Mandelson affair, and No. 10’s behavior around it, the more apparent it becomes that the impatient or deliberate casting aside of proper protocol and safeguards is not a bug of Starmer’s government — but a feature.

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In his testimony, Robbins said that Downing Street made inquiries as to whether a “head of mission” diplomatic role might be found for Matthew Doyle, then serving as the PM’s head of communications. Robbins had explained that this would be hard to defend at a time when he was in danger of making very senior and experienced diplomats redundant. There was also a suggestion from No. 10, Robbins said, that Mandelson might make Doyle part of the US embassy team. In the end, Doyle was elevated to the House of Lords, where he was subsequently denied the Labour whip after campaigning for a candidate accused of paedophilia. But Robbins saw the Doyle discussion as part of a wider push to put political appointments in roles previously occupied by civil servants, which had generated discomfort in the Foreign Office.

Beyond Starmer and McSweeney, meanwhile, there are other signs that members of the Prime Minister’s inner circle are resistant to external examination. Consider Jonathan Powell, the National Security Adviser (NSA). He has often been quoted as observing that Mandelson’s appointment process was “weirdly rushed”. But his own has not been without controversy. His appointment as NSA is the first time that the role, created in 2010, has been given to a special adviser and political appointee; normally it’s occupied by a career civil servant.

Unlike his predecessors, and despite repeated requests, Powell as NSA hasn’t once publicly appeared before the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS) — though he has agreed to attend in private. Having appointed a special adviser to the job, the Government has since argued that it is not “appropriate” for serving special advisers such as Powell to give evidence before select committees. It seems comfortable with an unusual degree of opacity surrounding his international operations.

In late March, a JCNSS report expressed concern over the national security threat from China, and the balance which the Government is striking between security and trade in its dealings with Beijing. It was published days after Powell met the Chinese foreign minister in Beijing, a trip not publicly disclosed in advance. The “lack of clarity” over who was responsible for national security, the report said, “hampers the possibility for external scrutiny and challenge.”

In opposition, trust and transparency were Labour watchwords. Yet the disabling of Starmer’s ethical antennae will surely go down as one of the tragedies and mysteries of modern British history. A lawyer by profession – and by all accounts a conscientious one – did he allow himself somehow to be persuaded that this is how clever people do politics? If so, his team of young bucks and old Blairites has not served him or the country well. During the Prime Minister’s painful, tight-lipped performance in the House of Commons on Monday, he was asked if there could be other instances in which people had failed UKSV vetting with national security implications. He flatly indicated that this, and more, would form part of the coming review. The questions summoned by the erstwhile Prince of Darkness still have a very long way to run.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For all the genuine and awe-inspiring might of America’s war machine, geography has given Iran an advantage in the Strait of Hormuz to which there is no obvious military solution. It is difficult to imagine what the Marine Expeditionary Unit, currently steaming toward the Gulf from the Pacific where it had been deployed to deter China, can do to unblock the Strait. Even if the 2,500 deployable Marines seize Qeshm island, on the Iranian side of the strait, they and the shipping they are being sent to guard will still be within range of weapons systems located within the mainland city of Bandar Abbas — and among its half-million population — and in the craggy and desolate mountain ranges behind. Senator Lindsay Graham’s proposal of seizing Kharg island, more than 300 miles away at the other end of the Persian Gulf, would still require the taskforce to sail through the very same strait from which, fearful of losses, the US Navy chooses to steer well clear.

It is all very well for Trump to demand that European, or even Chinese, warships escort oil tankers through the narrow waterway, but there is a reason that the US Navy has refused the same task. What America cannot do without bearing politically unsustainable risk, and very little prospect of success, Britain certainly cannot, and it is petulant and ultimately risible of Trump to demand we try. As Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius rightly observed this week, “What does Donald Trump expect from a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to achieve there in the Strait of Hormuz, which the powerful American Navy cannot manage alone?”

In these inauspicious circumstances, the idea that Britain should be doing more to help does not seem compelling, whatever confused and rambling outbursts emanate from the imperial center. The single drone that hit the American hangar in RAF Akrotiri may have been an embarrassment for Whitehall, but it was hardly a catastrophe. The seeming absence of a ground-based air defense system may be a mysterious oversight, but as Israel and the Gulf kingdoms show, even the most modern and extensive GBAD installation does not provide total defense. The carrier that many Fleet Street hawks demanded should immediately sail for Cyprus is already busy in the High North. Indeed, its current deployment, announced last month, came after Trump’s own declarations that Europeans were paying such insufficient attention to Arctic security that America has the right to seize Greenland, and perhaps Canada too. It is not Britain’s responsibility to chase after every military whim, reasonable or otherwise, of our imperial patron. In any case, the whole purpose of Britain’s Sovereign Base Areas is to act as our unsinkable carrier in the Levant: in Cyprus, and in the skies over Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf states, the RAF is already active shooting down missile threats to regional allies, and there is no obvious logic in seeking to do more.

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By Aris Roussinos

Macron’s European flotilla, led by France, and assembling in the Eastern Mediterranean, displays more than a touch of overkill: for the level of threat it faces, Cyprus must now be the best-defended country in the world. It is certainly an impressive sight, and a galling one for British observers of our own naval decline — yet competing with France is not in itself a vital national interest. Rather than being driven by strict military necessity, this is an act of political theater in which European leaders can signal both their capacity to act decisively in concert when one of their number is threatened, and their willingness to maintain a certain distance from the United States in doing so. Dismissively quashing Trumpian suggestions that it might sail eastwards to the arena of America’s muddled war, Macron’s government clearly sees the deployment, coming so soon after the announcement that France will expand the defensive umbrella of its independent nuclear deterrent across vast swathes of Europe, as tangible proof of the latent power that a French-led Europe, independent of Nato, can muster in defense of its own interests. We are less weak than we tell ourselves, the flotilla says, and our erratic overlord less strong.

Politically, the implications of all this for Britain are unclear. Starmer’s government has, correctly, chosen not to commit itself to this war, which is unfortunately not quite the same thing as remaining entirely detached from it. There is not, after all, much difference between Britain’s Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus, unwillingly hosted by Cypriots for use in wars of no interest to them, and the notional RAF bases here in Britain from which American long-range bombers set off to and return from their missions over Iran. For the Greens and Scottish Nationalists to condemn the use of these bases is entirely expected. Yet when we see the keen populist bellwether of liberal centrist opinion Ed Davey demand a fully independent British nuclear deterrent, something has surely changed. It is hard, now, not to palpably feel the tide of empire retreating, though this time round with us as the natives observing, with mixed feelings, the crumbling power of their imperial master. Living through a time of historic changes is a more disorienting and ambiguous experience than the confident hindsight of historians later pretends: we can expect our politicians to struggle with the new realities struggling to be born.

It is reassuring then, at a moment in which Britain’s Right-wing parties have not covered themselves in glory, that Reform’s initial gung-ho enthusiasm for America and Israel’s war was so swiftly backtracked by Robert Jenrick, a long-standing skeptic of foreign entanglements. If his colleague Andrea Jenkyns remains keen to commit British boots on the ground, this is at least beyond the power of the Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire to effect. Yet the spectacle of Reform’s headlong advance to war, and the party’s hurried retreat when faced with polling data, has perhaps obscured the Conservative Party’s own, and perhaps worse, stance on Iran, a position seemingly derived equally from recklessness and a shaky grasp of detail.

Badenoch’s insistence, perhaps extrapolating from her experience of World of Warcraft, that Britain should  “stop the archer” by joining in strikes on Iranian underground missile bases, rather than merely “catching the arrows”, would seem an odd and escalatory response to a UAV launched from Lebanon. Bombing an entirely different weapon system in an entirely different country would not prevent any recurrence of such attacks, presumably undertaken by Hezbollah, unless Badenoch also intends to bomb Lebanon. Yet doing so would require deconflicting and therefore coordinating with the Israelis in a bombing campaign that even the United States is steering clear of, against UAVs launched from mobile and most likely civilian vehicles, in the wooded and heavily-populated landscape of southern Lebanon. The moral, legal, and political risks of accidentally killing civilians, in an aerial campaign that has already killed hundreds, would be unacceptably high for little obvious gain, the product of a soundbite in search of a strategy.

In its latest and even more confusing iteration, published in the Daily Mail, Badenoch’s stance on the American-Israeli campaign is that she is “clear that Britain shouldn’t have joined in – I remain concerned that there isn’t a clear plan behind the strikes – but Britain should also not be neutral” and should “strike the missile and drone sites at source”. The Conservative Party’s apparent position on this urgent question of national security is that Britain should conduct its own entirely independent retaliatory bombing campaign, in the same airspace as American and Israeli jets and against much the same targets. Given the American aircraft losses already to friendly fire, we must presume that Badenoch intends the RAF to coordinate and deconflict with its American and Israeli counterparts, as well as, given Britain’s military shortcomings, leaning upon their support for surveillance and targeting data. How this is considered “not joining in” is hard to discern: the advantage for the nation, even harder.

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It seems unnervingly clear that, rather than starting “from first principles,” according to her characteristically high estimation of her own intellectual rigor,  Badenoch had settled on a political strategy of marketing herself as stronger on defense than Starmer, in which the outbreak of war initially seemed a useful backdrop. That the war she initially chose to back proved both chaotically mismanaged and domestically unpopular has now led her to defend, alone, this tenuous and isolated political outpost. On a matter of the utmost gravity, the only principles apparent seem to be feeding the needs of the Westminster media grid, and a desire to cosplay the Iron Lady for her dwindling audience.

If we are to truly start from first principles, they must be that Britain has its own interests, distinct from those of our allies in Europe and the United States, and it is only to those interests British leaders should attend. If the Iran War is an American party to which we have been invited but do not wish to attend, so is it the case that the European effort is something Starmer may wish to join, but to which we have not been invited. Greece did not send its jets and frigates to Cyprus to defend Britain’s SBAs, as British commentators affected to believe, but to reassure and protect its ethnic kin, maximizing the country’s political influence. In the same way, the broader, European effort has its own French political rationale, of advancing a Macronian vision of strategic autonomy, in which Britain serves little if any role. Rather than joining the war at arm’s length, as Badenoch may wish, our current refusal to take part is itself carried out with a certain insular detachment.

Yet the European consensus on this war’s regretful pointlessness, now uniting even the most Trumpian of continental governments, like those of Italy and Hungary, with the liberal center, provides Starmer with the political cover to stay out. At the beginning of this conflict, it was a contrarian position in the British press to unequivocally state that joining the fight is not in our interests: now it is, correctly, the mainstream political opinion in Westminster as across Europe as a whole. What a few weeks ago appeared an unusually bold stance from Starmer now seems boringly, obviously sensible: Trump’s increasingly erratic jibes to the contrary now inspire pity rather than deference. There may well be a case, when the shooting stops, for taking part in convoy escort and minesweeping duties in the Strait of Hormuz, but we and other Europeans should demand a reasonable price from this most transactional of American administrations. Above all, surely, we should require that Trump firmly and publicly commit himself to the territorial integrity and self-determination of both Greenland and Canada, the New World extensions of our European civilization: he may be a boomer, but Trump has no right to consume our rightful patrimony.

At this moment of historic American weakness, so swiftly following Trump’s intimidation of our home continent, we Europeans must be a little more ambitious in renegotiating the terms of our relationship. Yet instead, the Conservative and Reform politicians who would have blindly leapt into war now tie themselves in knots justifying arcane and incoherent positions, isolating themselves from both domestic opinion and the broader European Right. That they find themselves in this position seems almost more pathetic than lamentable, so devoid is it of any political or strategic sense. Like parents, all empires age, wither and then eventually die. Filial loyalty does not generally extend to jumping into the grave alongside them.

Yet success or failure will be a harder judgment to make for historians of Trump’s own latest Middle East adventure, which is already starting to look like a reverse Suez: its exposure of the limitations of pure military power; the domestic and international hostility; the fragility of alliance systems lazily assumed to be solid; and the wider overtones of an empire wildly overreaching in an attempt to stave off terminal decline. The difficulty in ascertaining, when this ends, whether or not Trump has achieved his war aims rests simply in the fact that the aims so far put forward have differed wildly, and are often mutually contradictory. The Suez Operation possessed a clearly defined military goal which succeeded, and a wider political one, which failed. As it stands, the Trump administration appears in possession of neither.

The broader arguments against the current conflict were most memorably made by Trump himself, campaigning as an anti-war candidate who would keep the United States out of costly and unmanageable Middle Eastern entanglements. His Vice-President, JD Vance, once articulately made the case against this very war. Having successfully demolished his own policy platform, it is difficult to determine what would now count as victory for Trump. The desired outcomes given, at the time of writing, have ranged from the maximalist deliverance of “freedom” to the Iranian people through full regime change in Tehran, through to inspiring an ideal “Venezuela solution” in which more amenable military figures launch an internal coup, then perhaps installing a Shah, ruling Iran remotely from the more stable comfort of Maryland. Or else simply destroying Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity (which Trump claimed to have “obliterated” in June last year). This scrambling for post facto rationales appears to derive from the fact that Iran did not immediately fold, as Trump apparently assumed it would, with the assassination of its leadership: unlike today’s America, it is not a personalist regime.

Yet if America’s war aims are nebulous from a lack of preparation, Israel’s appear haphazard by design. Summing up Netanyahu’s goals, the Israeli strategic analyst Danny Citrinowicz observes that “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future [or] the stability of Iran.” Whatever Netanyahu’s aspirations, a heavily armed but leaderless Iran, engulfed in chaos, represents a strategic threat rather than a victory for the wider West. In this, it appears that America has launched a war alongside, and at the behest of, a notionally junior partner with wildly divergent goals, and which Washington has already admitted it is unable to rein in. For British politicians, all the warning lights should now be blinking red: even the Iraq War, a historic disaster, was vastly better conceived, planned and resourced than this.

And if America’s war aims are vague and contradictory, their proposed means of achieving these desired outcomes are too — including Iranian submission through aerial bombing alone — a result which has never yet been obtained in the century-long history of air power — through launching a peripheral revolt in which Kurdish and perhaps Baluchi separatists act as America and Israel’s boots on the ground. The best that can currently be said for Trump’s gamble is that the desired end-state is so nebulous in its imagining, and the approach so scattergun, that almost any off-ramp can be spun as a victory by his imperial court and its attendant sycophants. With no single, coherent outcome proposed, Trump can claim, as he already has, that the war has already succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of planners. This is even as he is warning his base that victory may yet take some weeks, and cautioning Congress that “it is not possible at this time to know the full scope and duration of military operations that may be necessary”.

The war was, it seems, resourced for a few days of intensive bombing, with little anticipation of Iran striking back against Gulf states, and American early-warning facilities, with its arsenal of low-cost drones. Policy is now being made on the hoof, with senior administration officials “at each other’s throats” on the need for ground troops. CENTCOM, overseeing the war, has requested an increase in military intelligence analysts “to support operations against Iran for at least 100 days but likely through September”. The spectacle of a days-long special military operation, entered into with an over-confident faith in hard power achieving a swift political solution, then dragging on interminably, is all too familiar. For Vladimir Putin, certainly, America’s unforced error of embroiling itself in a quagmire US presidents have spent a half-century studiously avoiding is a godsend, depleting Western munitions stocks, replenishing the Kremlin’s coffers through rising oil and gas prices, and weakening Europe’s negotiating power.

Judged on strict military terms, though, the operation has chalked up notable successes. Iranian ballistic missile launches have slowed, and no doubt the aerial onslaught is depleting Iran’s arsenal of both munitions and launchers. The looming switch from stand-off munitions to less sophisticated bombs implies that air superiority has already been achieved, as Israel declared last weekend, or will soon be achieved, as the White House more cautiously claims. Whether or not Israel, the US and the Gulf states will run out of interceptor munitions before Iran runs out of missiles is a matter of speculation for even the best-informed analysts. Even as Pentagon sources brief concern over their dwindling arsenal, the Trump administration, for what it is worth, claims that it possesses “unlimited” stocks of munitions for a war that could last “forever” — while simultaneously blaming Ukraine for running down its weapons stockpile.

The most recent American attempt to exert its will in the region through air power alone, against Yemen’s Houthis, who are vastly weaker than Iran, entirely failed. The Houthis have not yet joined the war, as Hezbollah now has in response to Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon: the prospects for escalation grow wider by the day. As for boots on the ground, the much-briefed claims that Iran’s Kurds are willing to join in the war against Tehran remains debatable. The Kurdish Regional Government of Northern Iraq, which hosts exiled Iranian Kurdish militias, has been warned by Iran that their entry into the war will invite an Iranian response, and has stressed its neutrality as a result. It has not even been a month since Washington abandoned its last Kurdish partners: they must now judge whether this time round America will prove a more dependable ally.

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Britain can't escape its imperial master

By Aris Roussinos

For all the military risks involved, it is very possible, though far from certain, that US and Israeli bombing can bring about the collapse of the Iranian state, though what happens next is anyone’s guess. The US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine, reportedly cautioned before the strikes began “about the potential downsides of launching a major military operation targeting Iran”, citing “the scale, complexity and potential for US casualties of such a mission”, and asserting he was “​​unable to predict what the result of a regime change operation would be”. Both the Iranians and the Americans have already claimed to have received, and rejected, the other’s request for a ceasefire, with Israel reportedly seeking assurances Washington is not already seeking private talks. In any case, the Iranians have good cause to be wary of negotiating with Trump, given that their previous rounds of negotiations ended in American and Israeli bombing. Indeed, the current war began with Israel’s aerial assassination of the country’s political leadership in the middle of negotiations which, the Trump administration later boasted, were merely a ruse. Some of America’s intended new rulers of Iran, Trump has claimed, have already been killed by Israel. Having launched a war of choice, at a time convenient to him, Trump may now find ending it a far less simple affair.

As it stands, it is in Iran’s interest to drag out the war for as long as possible, expanding it across the wider region, increasing the economic disruption to American allies, and capitalizing on the widespread hostility to the war. As both Trump’s anti-interventionist base and the Democrat opposition rightly proclaim, this war has been entered into without any coherent plan, seemingly through Israel’s chain-ganging of the United States into military action it would not otherwise have chosen, an observation claimed as antisemitic by Israel’s advocates in the United States yet which has nevertheless also — bafflingly — been offered as proof of the war’s necessity by America’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Intelligence Committee chair Tom Cotton, and most recently by Trump himself.

As for Netanyahu, he exultantly claims that bringing America into the war is something he has “yearned to do for 40 years”. The Democrats, repeatedly briefing the attack line that Trump was “the first president stupid enough” to be cajoled by Netanyahu into war with Iran, have now been gifted a path to success in midterm elections which may yet overlap with the conflict itself. When as cynical a politician as Gavin Newsom feels safe questioning future military support to the “apartheid state” Israel, demanding from the podium “Why did we help Israel kill little girls?”, we see the cracks in America’s only true special relationship widening into a gulf. This war was, most probably, Netanyahu’s last chance to enlist the fading superpower against his decades-long foe. Whether it improves Israel’s long-term strategic position is doubtful in the extreme  — but none of this is Britain’s problem.

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The dangerous martyrdom of Khamenei

By Arta Moeini

It goes against instinct to praise the Prime Minister for his lawyerly prevarication. Yet given all the risks and uncertainties inherent to this war the arguments against joining America and Israel’s wild gamble are as strong as can be imagined. Just weeks ago, the same Trump administration which now chides us for our caution was threatening to annex European territory, and mocking our participation in its previous disastrous wars. Even if we exclude, as the Prime Minister does not, the moral factors, Starmer is entirely correct to say that this is a war with “no viable plan”. It appears that the Prime Minister, through his twin flaws of excessive deference to both European opinion and international law, may yet be dragged, unwillingly, towards the national interest. We already have our own war to worry about, in which the desire or ability of the United States to negotiate a satisfactory conclusion looks as doubtful from London as Washington’s reliability as a negotiating partner must look from Moscow. American realists may be correct in stating that the Ukraine war, in which Britain is already dangerously over-exposed, is not a core Washington interest — but neither is Netanyahu’s latest war of choice a British or European interest. Simply put, there is no advantage for Britain in joining this distant conflict, and the national interest, as in the Gaza War of which this is a vast escalation, remains in staying out of the affair as far as possible.

It is absurd, then, to watch Reform politicians, so recently bemoaning Britain’s political enmeshment with distant Middle Eastern conflicts and diaspora grievances, caper onstage with Israeli and Iranian monarchist flags, demanding our involvement in this mess. Farage’s hiring as foreign policy adviser of the neoconservative lobbyist Alan Mendoza, who has never yet seen a disastrous war he did not wish to join, was a rare deviation from his sharp political instincts, and a warning of the major strategic risks inherent in a Reform government, however much their domestic agenda may appeal. The Greens will rightly benefit from this misstep, as will, on Reform’s Right, Restore, edging towards a Powellite indifference to distant wars. If he holds his course, so will Starmer too.

The dilemma now for the Prime Minister is whether or not to join the emergent European policy of defensive neutrality, protecting national and continental interests while refusing involvement in the wider campaign. Yet the almost wholesale capture of the British security establishment by an Atlanticist ethos indistinguishable from vassalage, along with the looming American usage of British bases for offensive purposes, will complicate this. Starmer initially refused to permit offensive raids to launch from British territory, a policy which, in Spain’s case, has seen Trump threaten to use its bases anyway. Such threats would appear less stark, no doubt, if Britain had not already placed the sovereignty of Diego Garcia under question, but we cannot all boast the strategic wisdom of David Lammy’s former brain. If allowing British bases to be used cannot be prevented, Starmer can either explain why, or — politically more likely — spin a plausible rationale for active involvement, attempting to make a virtue out of compulsion.

Yet there is another path, the one shown by Emmanuel Macron, now expanding across the continent the French-led defense axis initially trialed with Greece. At the same time, Macron is drawing a sharp dividing line between the interests of Europe and her many nation states, and of the erratic empire which alternately threatens and cajoles us. Seventy years ago, a misadventure in the Middle East saw Britain and France adopt opposing positions on American domination, which led us to this impasse. Through an accident of British politics, it falls to as unlikely a figure as Starmer to make just such another historic choice.

Having finished a poor third in the Gorton and Denton by-election, the Prime Minister is again blaming voters — this time for falling for the Greens’ divisive sectarianism. Even as oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz collapses after the bombing of Iran, jeopardizing vital imports, it is impossible for light from the outside world to penetrate the passivity of his consciousness.

But the realities that have crushed the British political class render the outcome of last week’s by-election a bigger event than the cataclysmic mismatch of Starmer’s ambition and his utter unsuitability for political office. The four political forces that destroyed Labour in Gorton and Denton originally materialized during Tony Blair’s second term, and neither Labour nor the Conservatives has ever really recovered.

The first of these, and the overriding one, is the deterioration in Britain’s economic performance. In her victory speech on Friday morning, the new Green MP for Gorton and Denton, Hannah Spencer, said that she did not think “it’s extreme or radical to think working hard should get you a nice life”. Once “working hard … g[o]t you something … a house, a nice life, holidays. But now, working hard, what does that get you?”

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The coming rare earths war

By Helen Thompson

It was apt language. As the former Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, foresaw two decades ago, the years of “NICE” – Non-Inflationary Continuous Economic Growth – are long over.

Rising Asian oil consumption driven by China’s economic transformation ended the relatively benign world economic conditions that prevailed between the mid-Eighties and the early 2000s. As oil and gas production in the North Sea declined, Britain was particularly vulnerable in the emerging energy world.

From 2004, Britain became a net energy importer. To manage a structural energy-shaped trade deficit without dependence on volatile international capital flows, a state needs a strong export base. But Britain had a de-industrialized economy and was already running a sizable trade deficit. The past five years of high gas prices have accentuated this weakness. Without coal or hydropower, and with a declining nuclear sector, Britain is highly dependent for electricity on importing natural gas. Amplified by policy and network charges, our industrial electricity prices are the highest of any G7 economy. This burden has decimated the chemical sector, and contributed to Britain registering a record trade deficit in goods in 2025. A report by the CBI and Energy UK, published this month, reported that 40% of manufacturing firms have cut back investment because of high energy costs. Without some relief, NICE retreats ever further into the past.

The second force at work against Labour in Gorton and Denton was the penetration of British politics by the Middle East. Across the coalition mobilized by the Greens, Gaza hurt Labour, just as the Iraq War helped lose Labour 11 seats to the Liberal Democrats at the 2005 general election — including Manchester Withington, one part of which is now in the Gorton and Denton constituency. A year later, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon was the inciting incident for Tony Blair’s early departure from office.

As strong support for Israel was part of the New Labour project, that internal party coup was a symbolic moment. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Starmer’s attempt to replicate Blair’s playbook in opposition, by staging a confrontation with the Left of the party, centered on suspending Jeremy Corbyn over antisemitism. But as progressive politics since Iraq has been bound to objecting to Israeli and US policy in the Middle East, Israel’s response to Hamas’ October 7 attacks casts a very long shadow. A Labour government cannot sit in the position New Labour did when there was genuine hope of a two-state peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians without shedding votes to its Left. Nor can it chase those votes without the risk of embroiling Labour again in the antisemitism crisis of the Corbyn years.

The third long-standing force punishing Labour in Gorton and Denton is the graduate debt borne by the millennial and early Generation Z urban precariat. Labour has had problems with university tuition fees since 2004, when, having ruled out any change to university funding in its 2001 manifesto, Blair’s government legislated for English universities to charge up to £3,000 a year: from 2006-7, students would pay by loans, rather than the previous means-tested upfront charges. Labour’s majority on the bill was five, with Scottish Labour MPs delivering the necessary votes, even though the fee regime would only apply in England. While it was the Liberal Democrats who took the political blame for the next hike in tuition fees, in 2012, it is the young graduate voters wishing to identify with Labour who bear the brunt of this fee regime — and which has, with higher inflation, resulted in higher interest loans.

If this cohort were not already resentful enough, the Chancellor’s last budget froze the threshold for repayment for three years to patch up the fiscal gap caused by the welfare debacle in the summer. Starmer and Rachel Reeves’s presumption that these voters have nowhere else to go has been blown apart by Zack Polanski’s leadership of the Greens. Indeed, with graduate urban millennials having constituted the social base for Corbyn’s movement-based Labour party, the Greens are now the very version of Corbyn’s Labour that Starmer thought he had slain — this time with the right generational leader for the cause.

The final force at work is the one that delivered Reform 28.7% of the vote in inner-city Manchester. Quite simply, Labour can no longer be the party of the working class. For two decades the party has tried to face both ways or, more precisely, danced one way and then, shortly after, the other, on those issues that have alienated much of the working class from both main parties. Blair’s second government was sufficiently complacent about these voters to eschew transition arrangements for the right to work in Britain of EU citizens from eastern Europe, even as it was sufficiently worried about rising Euroscepticism to offer a referendum on the constitutional treaty. Since Shabana Mahmood became Home Secretary, Starmer’s government has moved quite decisively on migration and asylum, but she cannot win the argument in Labour that she is right to have done so.

Come May, whoever will be leader of the Labour Party has two forms of nostalgia on offer: try to restage the Brexit referendum, as is Starmer’s obvious aim; or take up Polanski’s tacit offer of a “progressive” alliance as a backdoor return to the domestic and foreign-policy Corbynism. Each is an attempt to escape from the realities that face Britain: a deindustrialized economy highly dependent on inward international capital flows that cannot offer high earnings, or home ownership, to those many millennial or Generation Z graduates, and the decline of Europe in a world of great power competition between the United States, China, and Russia.

Britain cannot reset relations with Europe by dint of one faction in the political divide using the issue as identity politics. Treating the EU as a means to bash the Conservatives, while simultaneously opting out of anything in EU membership that was too demanding, was one of the ways by which New Labour opened a path to Brexit. Either British politicians accept what is required to integrate with the EU and find a way of persuading a broad coalition of the electorate of its merits, or they have to work out a serious alternative European strategy that engages with US, Chinese, and Russian power.

However deeply a set of British voters cares about what happens in the Middle East, Britain cannot influence US or Israeli policy. Starmer’s unwillingness to let the US use the Diego Garcia airbase or RAF Fairford for the initial attack on Iran made no difference at all to the outcome. Grandstanding with Washington, and then equivocating afterwards about the Iranian regime’s fate, is no strategy for deciding what approach to take to the US-China-Russia competition in a world in which the Trump administration is laying assault to China’s energy vulnerabilities and bidding to reopen Russia for US oil companies.

Under Polanski, the Greens have an answer to the geopolitical question Starmer evades: break with Washington and leave Nato. But the corollary of that for any European state has to be accommodation with Russia over Ukraine, closer ties with China in the tech and resource war, taking more responsibility in the Red Sea, and ending energy dependency on the US. The first two are not appealing to at least parts of the progressive coalition, the third to any section of it, and the last would presently be impossible without a reset with Russia.

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The end of Starmerism

By Jonny Ball

Where energy is concerned, there is a Green vacuum. In the 2019 general election, a Green New Deal to achieve an alternative energy system that realized net zero carbon emissions during the 2030s was the centerpiece of Corbyn’s Labour. Polanski calls himself an “eco populist”, but any such ambition was near entirely missing from the Greens’ campaign in Gorton and Denton.

Whatever the attempted distractions, energy is where the underlying material reality of the British political crisis can no longer be avoided. If the next election is heading for an identity and generational contest between Left and Right coalitions, in which the Greens and Reform define the stakes, Net Zero as an energy strategy will be a consequential substantive divide. As much as it was driven by climate change, Net Zero 2050 was a bid to solve Britain’s problem of foreign energy dependency and the burden that creates for a deindustrialized economy. But as a legal commitment, Net Zero constrains policy-making in the energy world as it is, and insulates decisions from voters’ worries about the cost of living. Britain cannot substitute wind and solar for gas on an hour-by-hour basis without grid-level storage, and it cannot electrify much of present hydro-carbon consumption without subsidies for electric vehicles and a housing stock better suited to heat pumps.

The fantasy that the British economy can grow faster without a realistic energy policy is causing another round of deindustrialization. Britain can prioritize Net Zero for climate reasons or it can have an energy strategy. It has been another of the deceits of Starmer’s administration that there is no choice to be made. Already, former Labour ministers and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change are calling for drilling in the North Sea to be kept going for as long as possible. Now, as the fallout from Iran spreads through oil markets, those demands will intensify. There is no escape from choosing. Accelerated by events that no British government can meaningfully influence, the next act of our political crisis will likely force the long-coming energy reckoning. If, come the summer, the Labour leader, guided by Gorton and Denton, follows the Greens, the party will push what remains of New Labour, however unpalatably, to the same side as Reform in a battle over Net Zero.

There will be no putting Labour back together again, any more than there has been a remaking of the Conservatives after their humiliation in 2024. There never was a way back to the old version of NICE, any more than there was a way to reinvent the entire energy base of Britain within three decades. What is still required is a path forward informed by the real world within and beyond.

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

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

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

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Starmer has written Labour’s suicide note

By Jonny Ball

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

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

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

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

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

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Morgan McSweeney’s empty legacy

By Jonny Ball

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even though the poem was never actually written down, it ended very badly for its author. One or more informants in Mandelstam’s trusted circle memorized the lines and passed them on to the secret police. The poet was arrested and sentenced to internal exile, and later — after being rearrested and consigned to forced labor — died of illness in a transit camp. One might ask why, in circumstances of such extreme danger, Mandelstam had decided to speak his criticism at all? It was because the unceasing performance of lies had become so exhausting and diminishing. To feel that he truly existed, as a poet and a human being — or even that reality itself existed — he needed to proclaim the truth in the hearing of at least a few others. His wife Nadezhda Yakovlevna later said that he “did not want to die without stating in unambiguous terms what he thought about the things around us”.

In the last year, an unfamiliar way of talking has fully established itself in UK Labour government circles, chiefly evident in its utterances on the actions of US president Donald Trump and his entourage. It goes well beyond the usual diplomatic courtesies practiced among democratic nations. Instead it involves the rigorous self-vetting of public speech of the kind once practiced by the citizenry of the former Soviet Union as they moved through daily life, acutely conscious that the wrong word could trigger catastrophic results. Few people in the UK can now be unaware of the syndrome: from the outset of Trump’s second presidency, our leaders have sought to skate over any of their previous public criticism of the US president and have stubbornly withheld fresh criticism even when it is obviously due. The result is now an unusually extreme gulf between what we all know they believe and what they feel able or willing to say.

The rest of Britain has watched this political performance with varying emotions, but mainly the weary tolerance born of the consciousness of impotence. Those who follow politics may well know, for example, that the justice secretary David Lammy, formerly foreign secretary, previously called Trump a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathizing sociopath” and a “profound threat to the international order”. They may also recall that after the events of January 6, 2021, when a crowd of Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol, Sir Keir Starmer told reporters that “President Trump has to take responsibility. What happened was appalling. It wasn’t protest — it was an attack on democracy. And responsibility lies with President Trump. No doubt about that. This is the culmination of years of the politics of hate and division, and this is where it leads.”

These were not controversial views at the time, nor were they confined to the left of politics in the UK or elsewhere. John F Kelly, the former Marine general who was Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff during his first term, unambiguously warned the world prior to Trump’s re-election in 2024 that his former boss met his definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if permitted, and had no concept of the Constitution. The thing that most worried him was Trump’s declared readiness to use the military against the “enemy within”, namely his fellow Americans. Even to say such a thing for political purposes, Kelly argued, was a “very, very bad thing, let alone actually doing it”. More than a dozen former Trump staffers, all self-described “lifelong Republicans”, came out in support of his remarks.

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With Starmer’s entry to Downing Street and Trump’s subsequent return to the White House, however, the Labour leadership’s observations were consigned to the memory-hole. A decision was clearly taken to manage a uniquely tricky diplomatic situation not only by refraining from denouncing Trump, but by overtly flattering a man widely thought to be unusually susceptible to praise. Last February, Starmer flew into Washington for his first meeting as British prime minister with President Trump. Shifting a gear beyond civility and into effusiveness, he brandished a letter from “His Majesty the King” inviting Trump for a second state visit. “This is really special,” he said, as if himself astonished by the King’s depth of admiration. “This has never happened before. This is unprecedented.” The next day there followed a memorably depressing scene in which Trump and his vice-president JD Vance, primed by a sycophantic reporter, made a strikingly crass verbal attack in the Oval Office on the visiting Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

The British press and public have watched this process, and even at times applauded its guile, without ever believing in it. They know that Starmer has been doing it in an effort to protect both the interests of the UK and democracy in Europe, on two pressing areas in particular: the British economy, in his quest for a lasting US trade deal, and the defense of Ukraine against Russian aggression, in which US military and intelligence assistance is essential. Beyond that sits the necessity of American support for maintenance of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, and the unique closeness of US-UK intelligence sharing. Onlookers therefore initially understood that the prime minister’s flattery of Trump was wholly tactical, like someone trying to placate a madman on the top deck of a crowded bus by complimenting him on his hat. Yet it was also impossible to watch without a frisson of national humiliation. When there is an explicit gulf between someone who is free to speak their mind, no matter how unfiltered its contents, and someone who must habitually mute, conceal and flatter, it is a raw demonstration of power, and all onlookers know it.

The intensity of the UK’s “Trump-whispering” strategy thus far has been underpinned by two assumptions. The first is that the US president has a strong and sentimental attachment to the UK and that — if only Britain remains sufficiently “on side” — it will predispose him to offer us significantly favorable treatment. The second is the Foreign Office’s belief that it is cleverer than the incumbent of the White House, and can effectively steer and “manage” his wilder tendencies internationally. Nearly a year into Trump’s second term, both are looking hollow. Even given the erratic nature of the US president’s pronouncements on Ukraine, the bulk of his approach has served to appease and embolden Vladimir Putin while weakening Nato. A recent shift to underpin a European “coalition of the willing” security force with US guarantees has yet to be nailed down. Meanwhile, Trump’s increasingly frequent outbursts on the necessity for the US to seize and “own” Greenland — currently a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark — whether by purchase or military force, have sent shock waves through Denmark and the rest of Nato. Back home, the president’s declared intention to use American cities as “training grounds” for the military is proceeding apace. Last September, he advocated just that as part of tackling an alleged “war from within”, the very process about which an alarmed Kelly warned in 2024.

Few would argue that Starmer is a natural politician, but he does show signs of a conscience. Within this increasingly uncomfortable diplomatic straitjacket, he has done his level best to shore up support for Ukraine and Denmark. But the domestic political price of “Trump-whispering” is growing steadily higher. As time goes on, and the US administration’s moves become more extreme, its muting and confusing effect on the Labour front bench is becoming ever more noticeable. Last week, David Lammy proudly posted pictures of his White House meeting with JD Vance on X, even as Vance himself was on X vigorously defending the masked ICE officer in Minneapolis who shot dead Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three and US citizen. Vance described the dead woman as a “deranged leftist”, deciding her culpability well in advance of any formal investigation. In the pages of the Spectator, the former Labour party éminence grise Peter Mandelson — recently recalled as Britain’s ambassador to the US over his links to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — energetically praised Trump’s “decisive approach” to foreign policy while scolding Europe for its “histrionics about Greenland”. Whatever moral nuances the UK government’s Trump game originally contained, they are increasingly abandoned or irrelevant as the US presidential court exercises its dark magnetism: you’re either in or you’re out. And if one justification for sycophancy was to buy time to pivot away from Britain’s overdependence on the US — time which should rightly be spent on a heavy and accelerated investment in the UK’s military and industrial base — then the Treasury is notably failing to enact it.

A paradox lies at the heart of a looming electoral problem for Labour. In surveys, between 60 and 70% of the British public hold an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Yet Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party — the most Trumpian on offer, with explicit links to the MAGA movement — is currently leading by some distance in the polls. Voters appear to yearn above all for direction and definition: they often say things like “I might not like everything Farage says, but I know what he stands for” while signaling the opposite about Starmer. The difficulty for Labour is that the accusations it seeks to direct at Reform — dog-whistle racism, social divisiveness, ambivalence on Russia, unrealistic economics — are partly nullified by its tactical, smiling silences over similar, or far worse, manifestations in MAGA.

Compelled into a “special relationship” cage and trapped in a kind of moral paralysis, a muted Starmer steadily appears blurrier, grayer and more inauthentic as Trump explodes in lurid technicolor. And despite Trump’s occasional magnanimous word for Starmer in the Oval Office, he will shed no tears for his British counterpart’s political difficulties: it is one of the most time-honored tricks of the imperial tyrant to manipulate an ideological opponent into gradually erasing himself. Yet Starmer’s current strategy of transatlantic ambiguity cannot hold indefinitely. He, his fractious party, and the wider country may soon have to choose openly between the path of cynical realpolitik and that of dangerous conviction, between Mandelson and Mandelstam.

While Putin has not yet achieved the fast-moving operational breakthrough that has eluded him since the war’s first hours, the acceleration of Ukraine’s territorial losses on the eastern and southern sectors of its frontline paint a grim picture of the coming months. Now the situation is such that, as America’s army secretary Dan Driscoll reportedly told his Ukrainian counterparts last week, Kyiv’s military position can only worsen, and Moscow’s can only improve. America’s skepticism of Ukraine’s chances is itself a self-fulfilling prophecy: in these circumstances, it is hard to argue against Driscoll’s reported warning to Kyiv that “you are losing… and you need to accept the deal”.

The war’s outcome will now be decided by Russia and the United States, over the heads of both Ukraine and Europe. If this is a defeat for the European Atlanticists who are most determinedly hawkish against Moscow, it is also the end result of the worldview they embody. So enmeshed are European nations within America’s defense structures, that it is impossible for Europe to sustain a major war without US support: and which only a fool could now believe is guaranteed. The Ukraine war was an opportunity for Europe’s leaders to radically transform our continent’s security framework towards a vision of strategic autonomy — in which, by taking responsibility for our own defense, we Europeans could assert our own interests and shape our own futures. Yet as the Russia analyst Jade McGlynn, a Ukraine hawk, observes: Europe “has chosen paralysis while others determine the fate of our continent” — a fate which is “the product of decisions not taken, responsibilities avoided, and illusions clung to for too long”, not least the “bizarre teleological liberalism that sees liberal democracy as somehow feted to win out according to the laws of history”.

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Putin is facing his Waterloo

By Aris Roussinos

As the war’s early days revealed, Putin is no strategic genius. But with Europe’s current leadership, he does not need to be. If it is Emmanuel Macron’s tragedy to be a great man of history, trapped in the role of a 21st-century European leader, it is our far greater misfortune to be ruled by his peers. Europe failed at the historic task with which it was presented, settling back into its comfort zone of demanding a satisfactory outcome to the war it is not in a position to impose. Veering between a hawkishness that it cannot sustain — see Kaja Kallas this week demanding Russia’s demilitarization — and humiliating tributary missions to our Washington overlord which reflect our true situation, Europe’s bellicose rhetoric on the Ukraine war has become increasingly detached from reality.

The simple facts of the matter are that the United States, on whom Europe’s defense depends, is keener to end the war than Russia, which scents total military victory. Ukraine’s overriding interest, in preserving the Kyiv government’s independence from Moscow, increasingly diverges from Europe’s, which is for the Ukrainian armed forces to distract and degrade Russia’s military power long enough for Europe to effectively re-arm, or for some, so far unknown, deus ex machina appear to resolve the situation in a satisfactory manner. From its earlier heady expectations of total victory, and resultant disastrous overreach, Kyiv must now find a path to negotiating the least painful defeat the circumstances offer: Europe’s political discourse is yet to catch up with this harsh reality.

Yet even still, for Britain, losing a proxy war is a better outcome than losing a war in which we are ourselves engaged. Due to the Army’s prolonged mismanagement, Britain cannot field artillery or air defense to speak of. Nor can it cobble together the armored brigade that is its Nato responsibility, nor sustain the munitions expenditure of a high-intensity war for more than a few days. The next prime minister will find themself at the helm of a country that has simultaneously enmeshed itself to an alarming degree in a losing war while bulldozing, through sheer incompetence, its own ability to field an army. Having entirely failed to rebuild its deterrent power in the nearly four years since the beginning of the greatest land war in Europe since 1945, it would take great optimism in Whitehall’s wisdom and ability to assume that matters would suddenly improve if Britain were itself forced to fight. This is not a reassuring position to be in, and Washington enforcing a peace settlement that extracts us from this worrying bind should be accepted, even if its terms are no cause for celebration.

Yet dragging Britain’s political class to hard reality is not an easy task. Though no doubt well-meaning, the pundit hawkishness that undermined previous attempts at peace negotiations has not served Ukraine well. It would have been better for Ukraine, and Europe, to have negotiated peace from a position of relative advantage, as the country possessed in 2022 or 2023. Yet those chances were squandered, with those urging negotiations condemned as Putinist appeasers by a commentariat which apparently believed that Ukraine was destined to liberate Crimea, topple Putin, and carve Russia into a constellation of weak ethnic statelets. Discounting the possibility of Zack Polanski hypnotizing Putin into shrinking his munitions stockpiles, we are perhaps fortunate that the likeliest next prime minister will be either Nigel Farage, leading a Reform government with a mandate for total change, or an intervening Labour reformer. Shabana Mahmood has already set out her stall as a purveyor of uncomfortable truths and hard-nosed realism, while another likely contender for a Labour coup, the defence secretary John Healey, possesses the credibility to recalibrate Britain’s rhetoric to its diminished capability.

Britain’s next leader will be forced by events to construct a new and cautious vision for British security managing four separate poles: the United States, whose will and ability to defend Europe is clearly waning; Europe itself, which has proved itself disunited and incapable of sustained and concerted action; Russia, whose assertive foreign policy will have been bloodily vindicated by the war’s conclusion; and the greatest industrial power in world history, China.

In our current circumstances of military and economic weakness, and near-revolutionary domestic political discontent, a continuation of Britain’s hawkish stance on world affairs is simply not viable. Even if an interventionist foreign policy were wise — which it is not — or electorally popular — which it is not — it is simply now beyond our ability. It is unfortunate, then, that in his choice of the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society’s Alan Mendoza as foreign policy adviser, Farage has settled on an advocate of total, ideological war against rivals great and small at which even Washington balks. It is, indeed, worryingly plausible that the domestic demands of neutering claims that he is a Russian asset, a Brexit-era liberal fantasy entirely downstream of the Clinton campaign’s Russiagate conspiracy theory, will force Farage into reckless hawkishness to win the approval of the commentariat which will never come.

If Ukraine manages to retain its functional independence from Russia, obtain meaningful security guarantees from the United States, and join the European Union, then the cession of territory it currently does not hold and will not soon recapture is hardly the worst outcome. Certainly, it is a better than the looming loss of territory currently in its possession, and an even worse peace deal in the future. The Trump administration, proposing lucrative joint economic projects with Moscow, openly covets a stable future diplomatic relationship with Russia. Whether this is feasible may be doubtful, but so is Europe’s current stance of simultaneous subordination to the former and hostility just short of open war with the latter.

Like Ukraine, Europe and Britain are forced by military and political disadvantage to take their orders from their imperial patron: America has decided that the war must end, and is now persuading Russia to agree. If this damages European pride, then it should: the continent will now pay the price for the weakness our leaders chose for us. Absorbing a bruised and shell-shocked postwar Ukraine, whose economy has been wrecked, a quarter of whose population has already fled to the EU into European political structures will be a generational challenge in itself. So, too, will be stemming the illicit westward flow of weapons, once the shooting stops.

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Trump forces Europe to face facts

By Edward Luttwak

Trump’s Thanksgiving deadline for a peace deal has already passed. If the war is over by Christmas, it will be a miracle. Yet its likely unsatisfactory conclusion, and the narrow escape it may grant us from a far worse outcome, require a measure of sober reflection alien to Westminster’s political culture. The Ukrainians, rightly, now place little faith in Europe’s empty assurances. As Zelensky this week warned his nation, “Ukraine may now face a very difficult choice, either losing its dignity or the risk of losing a key partner, either the difficult 28 points, or a very difficult winter.” If only our own leaders were so frank with us. Britain’s rivals are growing in power, and our allies are demonstrably unreliable: yet as the Commons Defense Select Committee warned this week, Britain’s ability to defend even the homeland itself is doubtful in the extreme. Farage is perhaps fortunate that the burden of defeat will fall on a Labour prime minister, and that Reform’s foreign policy is so far little more than an empty page on a website: with his current foreign policy adviser, it is better that this is remains so. Losing a war is, historically, one of the greatest spurs to serious projects of national reform. In preparing for government, Farage must make use of what may only be a lull in hostilities to chart a swift and viable path towards guaranteeing the nation’s basic security, and ensuring that Britain is never again left so dangerously exposed between its commitments and its capabilities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The twilight of the millennial socialists

By Jonny Ball

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

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

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

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

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

Now, though, detectives now face the political and procedural struggles of a high-profile criminal investigation. Hints of this came early, as Defence Secretary John Healey patrolled the Sunday morning news shows, offering lawyerly answers to questions around crime and extremism. Behind the scenes, however, the Government will be wary. The public mood is febrile, and all this before a strategy on “the way forward” is even announced. Leading the inquiry are the 5,000-strong BTP, responsible for investigating all offenses committed on Britain’s mainland railway network.

They are sometimes criticized for slow response times — other forces joke that “BTP” stands for “Be There Presently” — and this is the likeliest reason that the arresting officers came from Cambridgeshire Police. Yet BTP is genuinely stretched, a truly national force responsible for the railways from John o’Groat’s to Land’s End. Furthermore, many of its specialist resources are focused on major termini, leaving smaller stations relatively unpoliced. Even so, BTP has strengths. Its officers, for instance, are specially trained in evidence-gathering on the railways. Railway infrastructure is a surprisingly complex and occasionally dangerous environment for investigators. Evidence, for example, might end up on live railway tracks. It goes without saying, here, that closing a line to facilitate police work is far from simple, especially a major East Coast route like this one.

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The police can’t control Britain’s streets

By Dominic Adler

BTP has concluded there is currently no evidence of terrorism. How and why? The answer lies in both the circumstances of the offense and a fast-time intelligence response, in this case aided by police Counter Terrorism Units. Presumably the suspect didn’t featured on any Security Service or criminal-intelligence databases. The suspect’s home, once identified, will have been searched, and his electronic devices checked. Officers will also have investigated his associates, vehicles, financial records and any criminal history. They will further have sought an urgent interview with the suspect himself, possibly even before the arrival of his legal representatives. We can only speculate what information police gleaned beyond “no comment”.

Does this, then, establish irrefutable evidence there was no terrorist angle to the stabbings? Not completely. All the same, I would suggest the BTP’s assessment was made in good faith. After all, someone very senior put their name to such a conclusion. And given trust in the police and government is already frayed, a bad judgment on such a serious matter would be disastrous. Given the number of scandals around governmental candor, and the Prime Minister’s dire personal polling, this investigation will only get bigger — or “grow arms and legs” as officers say.

This still leaves the thorny question of motive. Social media provides, as ever, a vortex of misinformation, speculation: and outright fantasy. Investigators, on the other hand, will focus on the facts. Once terrorism and extremism are discounted, few alternatives remain. Was this a mental health incident? Now that we know there’s only one suspect — a second man was arrested before being released without charge — that’s the most likely explanation: especially as the alleged assailant apparently ranted about the devil, and asked to be killed as the police approached. Whatever the truth, and as with all such crimes, the details offer hearty meat and drink to conspiracy theorists. To counter them, police will need to tread a fine line between offering fact-based public assurances while protecting the integrity of court proceedings.

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Surrey cokeheads are lining up chaos

By Dominic Adler

In all this, senior officers are crucial. Lucy D’Orsi, the BTP’s chief constable, was extremely ambitious while working at the Met. She may still covet the Commissioner’s job and will certainly understand the pressure to be seen to “do something”. This highlights another important cog in Britain’s steam-driven policing. The BTP is a “Ministry Force”: meaning it falls under the remit of the Department of Transport rather than the Home Office. What Whitehall battles will be fought as civil servants mark their turf and cover their behinds? For the general public, disasters are to be endured. For senior police officers and civil servants, disasters might be awful too, but they also provide opportunities for politicking.

Beyond the specifics of the Huntingdon case, officers and civil servants will also be conscious of the broader implications for public order. The autumn months are among the most challenging of the policing calendar, partly a function of darker evenings, but also because of public events like Bonfire Night and Remembrance Sunday. Then comes the run-up to the festive season, with its Christmas markets, concerts and parties.

All weigh heavily on the rail network, with BTP almost certainly bidding for significant support for “public reassurance” operations. Expect to see temporary knife-arches at high-profile transport hubs and known crime hotspots. Expect facial recognition teams too, as well as the now-ubiquitous armed police patrols. BTP have already trialed joint patrols with the Royal Military Police, with “Redcaps” occasionally seen patrolling Waterloo Station. We may not see troops patrolling the streets this Christmas, but in his interviews yesterday Healey was strikingly reluctant to rule out extra checks.

Whatever the efficacy of these measures, and whatever the attack’s ultimate cause, they won’t address the broader issues. Anyone can buy a ticket and hop on a train, and as Robert Jenrick famously pointed out, it’s also easy to avoid paying. Nor will tougher security fix the broader public mood. The public discourse around such incidents grows ever more bitter. Exhortations not to “look back in anger”, or publicity posters urging unity, are increasingly dismissed as something approaching Soviet propaganda. Cynicism is now commonplace; the Government’s armory of vigils and nudge units is fast running out of ammunition. Online, certainly, the message is increasingly one of: “Yes, let’s look back in anger.” Such frustration feeds resentment and disorder, creating a societal doom-loop.

In a sense, the police themselves are trapped here. Because of Huntingdon and similar outrages, officers are compelled to engage in expensive, kneejerk responses — rather than preventing crime to start with. Meanwhile, the disgruntled and disillusioned will project their grievances onto this whole awful affair, the facts secondary to fevered narratives. All this means the police will continue doing more with less, with varying degrees of success. Yes, emergency responses can be impressive, but in many ways policing is becoming like the NHS. It’s perfectly capable of getting a patient to A&E in extremis — but after triage? Like treating a chronic health condition with an endless waiting list, the morass of legislative and financial constraints on forces risks being ignored, though whether this changes during this month’s Budget will be interesting to observe.

We properly expect the police to respond promptly to violence. Yet “reassurance patrols” also divert resources from core duties and, crucially, from deterring crime in the first place. Officers become jaded and exhausted by the continued distractions from duty, and the canceled rest days. The public, for its part, has realized what’s happening too — short-termism and “sticking plaster” policing rather than meaningful strategies to tackle the root causes of violence. All the while, politicians will stick their fingers in their ears and hum, or back initiatives to sell blunt-ended kitchen knives. And so, like a stone dropped into a pool, the ramifications of the Huntingdon stabbings will make waves long after the headlines fade and the trains begin running once more.

In and of itself, this is extraordinary. For decades, the recognition of formal Palestinian statehood was held out as a reward for a final treaty between the two sides. Now, though, the message to Israel (and indeed the United States) is unmistakable: the old orthodoxy has failed, and recognition is now not the prize for peace, but a tool to obtain it.

Complicating it all — as always in the most mediated and fraught conflict since 1945 — is emotion: on both sides. On the one hand, everyone from Hamas to the Green Party is delighted. On the other, the Israeli government, Jewish diaspora communities, and those rightly fearful of Islamist terror, are enraged, arguing that the move rewards Hamas for its barbarism on October 7.

For his part, Keir Starmer was at fastidious pains to deny this was the case. “Hamas is a brutal terror organization,” he said. “This solution is not a reward for Hamas… Because it means Hamas can have no future. No role in government. No role in security.” Either way, his move was inevitable. The cumulative toll of Israel’s campaign — tens of thousands of dead, alongside the absence of any realistic plan to end the war and indeed Benjamin Netanyahu’s explicit opposition to Palestinian statehood — has had its effect.

In this sense, it’s clear that recognition is a rebuke of Israel more than an expression of unqualified support for Palestine. Though other Western countries from Sweden (in 2014) to Ireland (in 2024) had already gone down this path, London, Ottawa and Canberra all held out. This was partly due to strong relations with Jerusalem, especially on security coordination, as well as a desire not to upset the United States.

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Gaza is the endpoint of liberal democracy

By Aris Roussinos

But with the US still against recognition, and Israel intransigent, the three middle powers decided this was the time to move. Sources tell me that the Government feels that recognition may be the only leverage they have left to try and change Israeli behavior on the ground.

Then, of course, is the question of domestic politics. For Labour voters, Palestine is not just a cause célèbre: it is a hugely effective mobilizing tool. They want action. And with sectarian issues now front and center for parts of the Muslim vote, and indeed costing Labour parliamentary seats, it’s no surprise that the party has moved to shore up its Left flank.

That said, it’s important to understand what recognition does and doesn’t — do. In the end, there is no escaping the fact that the state of Palestine is simply not a reality on the ground. Gaza is a war zone; the West Bank is ruthlessly contested. For now, recognition is solely a legal and political act. It won’t create mutually agreed borders, kick out settlers, and rid both the Israelis and the Palestinians of Hamas. Nor does it end the war or solve Israel’s legitimate security concerns.

Recognition does, however, do three concrete things. First, it formalizes Palestine’s diplomatic relationships with the rest of the world. Embassies replace missions; ambassadors present credentials. That matters for everyday statecraft: aid, trade, consular issues, and the slow, tedious work of institution-building.

Second, it reframes the conflict politically. By declaring Palestine a state, these three governments must now judge Israeli actions not merely through the lens of counterterrorism and occupation, but also inter-state norms. More robust pressure around the recognition of borders based on 1967 lines will follow — as will intensified scrutiny of settlement expansion, and more explicit linkage between Israeli policy and Western support.

Third, recognition pressures the Palestinians. Officials from London and Canberra alike know that recognition without reform will go nowhere. But by recognizing Palestine now, there is a political (and moral) imperative on its officials to ensure that it begins to function like one.

This will require two changes above all else. First, a decisive break with the tactics of October 7. Many Palestinians — and millions of their supporters globally — are desperate to relativize a massacre that was undoubtedly a crime against humanity. A leadership that cannot take an unequivocal stance against such violence must forfeit the support of the very states now recognizing it.

Second, Palestine needs serious governance reform: both in the West Bank and Gaza. The antisemitic school curricula; the Palestinian Authority’s “pay to slay” policy of making payments to the families of those killed or wounded during terror attacks; not to mention the widespread Islamist and jihadist presence across both territories — all this must go. A technocratic interim leadership, with a mandate to unify the security services and hold proper elections, is the minimum diplomats must demand in exchange for recognition.

That is currently impossible, what with a murderous Hamas and a corrupt and sclerotic Palestinian Authority. Britain, Australia and Canada will therefore now need to pour cash and various other forms of support, designed to both build and increase institutional capacity into the nascent state.

Israel’s response to all this has been predictably furious. Netanyahu and those around him feel that Hamas is being rewarded for October 7. According to a Netanyahu spokesperson, the Israeli prime minister’s message to nations recognizing Palestine is that “the people of Israel aren’t going to commit suicide because of the political needs of European politics.”

While Netanyahu lashes out, Israeli opposition figures blame him for what has happened. In a tweet, Yair Golan, leader of The Democrats Party, said that recognition was a “direct result of Netanyahu’s political abandonment: refusal to end the war and the dangerous choice of occupation and annexation.”

But Israel’s problems run deeper than internal dissension. I have seen, first hand from on the ground, how the country’s choices since October 7 have been driven by trauma. From the very beginning, the operational logic to destroy Hamas collided with humanitarian catastrophe, the absence of a plan and a nation’s collective anguish.

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Starmer’s posturing is a gift to Hamas

By Giles Fraser

The longer Israel fights without a credible political solution, the more it loses the goodwill of those it needs most: the Arab states who signed normalization to better contain Iran; the Europeans who defended its right to self-defense; and even parts of the Pentagon security establishment that have stuck with it for so long.

UK government sources have repeatedly made one thing clear to me in recent weeks. Recognition, they explain, is a warning from friends: security without politics produces only perpetual war and international isolation.

Israel also has another problem. Recognition happened despite US objections. Traditionally, the Anglosphere follows Washington on Israel-Palestine. But yesterday, it didn’t, a divergence that says two things. First: the Gaza war has disordered not just Middle Eastern but Western politics. Western leaders are recalibrating their positions in light of domestic opinion and international law. Second: the US monopoly over the Israel-Palestine “peace process” is gone. If Washington cannot or will not propose a credible pathway, others will try to improvise one, and publicly too.

Critics question why, if the UK, Australia and Canada were really so determined to put recognition on the table, they couldn’t at least dangle it as a prize for releasing the hostages. They also argue that recognition rewards intransigence: that it will embolden maximalists on both sides. Some of this will prove true. Israeli far-Right ministers are already spouting annexationist rhetoric; hardline Palestinian factions will claim the world has moved their way without the need for genuine concessions. And, of course, a Donald Trump who feels snubbed may offer yet more support to Netanyahu out of pure spite.

But those who support recognition will feel justified in arguing that the status quo led only in one direction: further West Bank annexation, more Gaza bloodshed, and decades more conflict. In the end, then, recognition is not a peace plan: but a stratagem to force one. The gamble, and it is a big one, is that it’ll finally force the Palestinians to accept serious, political and ideological reform — and Israelis to accept that perpetual war and endless occupation are not strategies worth pursuing. Whether or not it is realistic, this is now the policy. And, for the sake of both sides, we must hope it works.

When the UK had its financial crisis in 1976, Denis Healey, the former Labour chancellor, did what he needed and imposed austerity. “One never likes one’s bank manager”, he quipped as he went cap in hand to the IMF. But he swallowed the humiliation, and he took the money. The UK got a $3.9 billion emergency loan from the IMF. But Healey himself had to do the heavy lifting with tax rises and spending cuts.

Back then, the UK had a balance-of-payments crisis: it was running out of foreign currency reserves to pay for its imports. This is not the case today. The problem the UK has today, which it did not have in 1976, is a structurally weak economy with low productivity growth. The UK’s economic model, that of a late-capitalist rentier society, is no longer working. Yet, unlike in the Seventies, the UK lacks a political majority sufficient to arrest the toxic dynamic between rising debt and low economic growth.

Brexit did not cause the problem; but nor did it solve it. The Brexiteers fell into the same trap the Remainers had fallen into before. The UK had needed to reform its economic model for membership of the EU to be successful. The EU’s single market became dysfunctional over the years and no longer generated the growth it once did.

The Leavers also got this wrong. If they really wanted “to take back control” as they famously claimed, they similarly needed to reform the economic model: towards one that rewards entrepreneurship and innovation. It would have required a systematic reboot of the public sector. That did not happen. This is not something the IMF can help you with. It is not the unelected “ministry of finance for every country in the world” as Julius Nyerere, a former Tanzanian president once claimed. And it is certainly not the IMF’s job to bail out clueless governments.

If things in Britain are bad, though, they’re worse in France. France had its financial crisis in 1982, a year after François Mitterrand became the first Socialist French president. After a year of classic Socialist economic policy, the country was on the brink of a financial crisis, similar to the UK’s position six years previously. At this point, Mitterrand performed a policy turn that left his supporters in shock. He appointed Jacques Delors as his new finance minister, who, like Healey in the UK, delivered austerity — “an operation without an anaesthetic”, as Delors described it at the time. Delors, who later became president of the European Commission, aligned the French economy with that of Germany, and in doing so laid the ground for a long period of stable economic growth. Contrary to popular narrative, the UK, too, experienced an economic boom in the period from 1976-9. Margaret Thatcher did not come to power because of low growth, but because of a failing public sector.

Either way, and unlike in the Seventies and Eighties, neither François Bayrou nor Keir Starmer has the majority needed to deliver the policies which would fix the problem. In France, the situation is about to come to a head: Bayrou has called for a confidence vote to support his austerity policies and the consensus is that he will struggle to find a majority. He is still fighting. He went on TV the other day with an impressive rant in which he said the young French are being expected to pay off the debt “all for the comfort of certain political parties and for the comfort of the boomers, who believe that everything is just fine”. But the debt France has been accumulating is not for investments for absurd early retirement policies, and a bloated public sector. France has failed to present a balanced budget since 1974.

Unlike Bayrou, Starmer has a large majority — though not one large enough to pass the welfare reforms needed to meet his fiscal targets. Sure, he can raise taxes, and that will almost surely happen in this autumn’s budget. But this will only make the doom loop worse. As taxes go up, fewer companies invest, and people consume less.

And good people leave. When Brexit happened, some European expats left London. But for most, it still made sense to live and work in post-Brexit Britain. It remained a business-friendly place. But with Labour’s tax policies, which target expats and soon property, their incentive to stay is massively reduced.

The parallels between the UK and France are not coincidences. Something similar is happening throughout Europe. The underlying problem is productivity growth — growth per hour worked. The more widely used measure of gross domestic product, or GDP, is misleading because it conflates productivity and employment growth. An extreme example is Spain, where GDP growth is very strong. But this is due only to mass immigration. Spain, Italy, France, UK, even Germany now, all suffer from low productivity growth. This is why people feel so miserable. Their countries are getting richer on paper. But they are not.

The old trickle-down economic model worked well in the days of unbridled, global financial capitalism, a period that for the UK started in the mid-Eighties and ended in 2008, when its productivity collapsed. Italy’s wave of low productivity growth was kicked off around the time when it joined the euro. Germany’s began to stagnate in the second part of the last decade. France performed better than Germany and the UK until the pandemic but has since joined the low-productivity club.

For the time being, America has managed to buck this trend. It has high debt and high growth. But this could change under Donald Trump because his “Big Beautiful Bill” is even more reckless than anything we have seen in Europe. It would indeed be ironic if the most Europhobic president in American history ended up delivering a European-style low-productivity economy.

Yet, again, if that were to happen, it would be only part of a wider trend. You cannot pin this down to any one politician or political party. This is not about the Left versus the Right. The UK’s economy fell off the cliff during the global financial crisis when Gordon Brown was prime minister. Seven prime ministers from both the main parties presided over the aftermath. France is run by a rainbow coalition of the Left, the center, and the moderate Right, and not one of these parties even has a plan to reverse it.

The problem, rather, is the way in which debt and productivity interact. You have to look at the two numbers together, as well as the debt-servicing costs, which are determined by the interest rates and the repayment schedule. The debt ratio in the UK is 95.6%. In France, it is 113%. The US’s debt ratio is even higher, at 124%. But low productivity growth is making things worse in the UK and in France.

Germany has lower debt than other large European countries. But their debt burden is rising too. The German welfare state is out of control and piling up enormous future liabilities. All these European countries have distinct versions of the problem. But the underlying force is the same — a secular stagnation in productivity growth.

There are only three ways out of a debt problem: austerity, growth, and default. Some would add inflation to this list, but I don’t. Investors would demand higher interest rates to compensate for this, leaving the government in exactly the same tight spot as before.

The most authoritative work ever written about sovereign debt was “Growth in a Time of Debt”, written in 2010 by the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. They studied 44 countries over 200 years and found that countries with debt-to-GDP ratios of over 90% performed worse than those with lower rates. The result was widely discredited at the time because their calculations contained errors, which received wide publicity. Unfortunately, these errors detracted from the main result — that there is a toxic interaction between high debt and low productivity growth. The paper’s findings have become even more relevant in the 15 years since publication.

So, beware of Reinhart-Rogoff. A debt spiral is like a slow-moving deadly disease. It is hard to forecast its progression. But one thing is certain: we are not going to wake up one day and discover that we’ve been miraculously healed.

With the next election still years away, after all, parties have a remarkable opportunity to forge the political identity of today’s 12- and 13-year-olds: and tomorrow’s new voters. As genuine digital natives, it’s impossible to overstate the power of social media here, especially when ads can be hyper-personalized, and when there’s so much in modern Britain to feel angry about. That promises a tsunami of digital campaigning, as children are flooded with seemingly innocuous content that can nonetheless reinforce partisan political messages. A trending meme or viral video that children encounter now has the potential to mold their political outlook, influencing how they vote when they finally turn 16.

For Britain’s political parties, this really matters. In large part, that’s because young voters are also enthusiastic voters, especially for a novel event like in 2029. This has already been shown in Scotland, which lowered the voting age for the 2014 independence referendum, and which saw turnout among 16- and 17-year-olds reach a remarkable 75%. No less striking, research suggests that by instilling a high level of participation in voters at 16, individuals are more likely to vote into their 20s and beyond. This means effective campaigning in the short term can influence politics for years or even decades to come.

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More to the point, tomorrow’s future voters are essentially up for grabs. The traditional view — that a younger electorate is a de facto electoral boon to centre-left parties — is a dangerous oversimplification, one that fails to appreciate the underlying political polarization within the group itself. This generation is not a monolith, but in fact highly fractured, with notable drift towards both the far-Left and far-Right. A recent poll from the Onward think tank echoes this divide, revealing that among young Britons, close to a third hold a positive view of communism, even as 38% would back a “military strongman” taking charge. That, in turn, is driven by a profound rejection of the mainstream political establishment, from housing to climate change, presenting vast opportunities for radicals to attract youngsters to their cause.

For its part, social media is the perfect vehicle to engage with these concerns. For one thing, there’s its sheer proliferation, with perhaps ​​2.7 million Britons under the age of 13 using TikTok in 2020. Then there’s the broader rise of digital activism and social media campaigning, which has allowed young people to be part of political protest movements from the comfort of their iPhones. Taken together, this dynamic allows politicians to target young people with highly specialized messages.

What might this look like in practice? The Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election offer something of a blueprint, with both employing psychological profiling to target voters online. The Trump campaign used Facebook to deploy tens of thousands of daily ad variants, before determining which resonated best. There are even more relevant examples here too. Back in 2010, for instance, the parent company of the now-infamous Cambridge Analytica was hired by Trinidad and Tobago’s opposition United National Congress party. The techies determined that, to win the election, the UNC needed to discourage young voters from casting their ballots. To that end, they crafted a campaign centred around youth apathy, reframing abstention as an act of empowerment. This strategy led to a significant drop in youth voter turnout come election day, duly gifting the UNC their victory.

Over the last 15 years, of course, digital technology has improved dramatically. Combined with increasingly malleable social media platforms — feeds are driven exclusively by user preferences, making it easier to steer them down a particular path — this guarantees the electoral techniques used in the run-up to 2029 will be far more sophisticated. This is apparent, too, in the widespread adoption of generative AI tools, making it possible to produce thousands of highly differentiated pieces of campaign material, each personalized to specific subsets of young voters. If, for instance, an individual was deemed to be afraid for the future, they might be shown anti-government messaging dovetailed with inflammatory images of uncontrolled mass migration.

No less pertinent, this material can be refined and tweaked in real time. To return to our hypothetical example, our user’s anti-government messaging could instead be combined with patriotic images of historic Britain, firing a sense of national pride. Taken together, anyway, this surely marks the death knell for traditional polling. Rather than releasing their ads and hoping for the best, campaigns can now use synthetic voter models to run simulations, before deploying ever-evolving material that instantly responds to shifts in voter behavior. Most importantly, this will also ensure that campaigns can keep up with social media trends, mimicking its bewildering variety of apolitical memes.

And if generative AI will surely play a role here, the vast amount of data now available on social media users will also allow parties to target voters far more subtly. Increasingly, material will be integrated into the algorithmically curated feeds of future voters, undetectable from other content but designed to convey a certain political message. Individuals, who on the surface may appear identical in age, sex or race, may nonetheless see vastly different messages appearing on their feeds. As a result, political material will be crafted to resonate with their “true” online selves, something that can only be determined after hundreds if not thousands of hours of scrolling. Insecurities and weaknesses, revealed through what content someone consumes, can hence be exploited. This is certainly clear in the co-opting of “pro-masculinity” content by nationalists, with the latter promoting the defense of one’s homeland as a key tenet of being a man.

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For political strategists, this is a dream come true, allowing them to seamlessly disguise political messages as naturally viral content, shifting the ground on core issues from immigration to healthcare without anyone (least of all voters themselves) consciously noticing.

What could all this mean for Britain? Parties have already tried to burrow into Gen Z feeds, with Reform dominating youth social media: in large part thanks to Nigel Farage’s endless stream of “memeable” content, directed at his 1.3 million TikTok followers. In the run-up to the 2029 election, anyway, what we might call “TikTok politics” will intensify competition in key constituencies — as parties, especially those on the political fringes, target marginals where most new voters live. Think, here, of university towns like Canterbury, or else high-birthrate areas like Bradford. That’s reflected more generally too. Before the 2019 election, psychologists determined that the number of newly eligible 18-year-old voters was greater than the incumbent MP’s majority across 56 seats. Highly targeted regional campaigns, favorably altering voting behavior in young people, could therefore have an outsized impact, especially when our FPTP electoral system acts as a vote multiplier.

While a single-party majority remains unlikely, then, capturing swathes of a highly polarized youth vote could be decisive. Not that any of this will happen via anything as shallow as policy or debate. Rather, it seems likely that algorithms will shape the actions of many first-time voters, whose choices in the polling booth were engineered months or even years before.

A year into Keir Starmer’s government, however, and Corbynism’s corpse is rising. On Thursday evening, Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana announced that she was resigning from Labour in order to set up a new party with the old leader, alongside various other independent MPs, campaigners and activists. Citing the welfare reforms, which were torturously voted through last week following an internal rebellion, she wrote that “the Government wants to make disabled people suffer; they just can’t decide how much”. She also accused Starmer’s ministry of being “an active participant in genocide” in Gaza.

Whether this new force on the Left will hold together is another matter. Corbyn was reportedly “furious and bewildered” that the fledgling party was launched before he agreed to join. “Zarah jumped the gun a bit with that,” a source close to the project admits. Corbyn has since declared that “discussions are ongoing” and “the democratic foundations of a new kind of political party will soon take shape” — hardly as emphatic a launch as Sultana’s the previous night.

Still, the conditions are ripe for a Left-wing insurgency. The Prime Minister may have passed his welfare bill, but even the staunchest Starmerite would be hard-pressed to claim this as a success. Reforms which were set to save £5 billion will now cost the Treasury up to £6 billion, and No. 10’s authority is in tatters.

While the 49 MPs who rebelled against the welfare bill — not to mention the 126 who backed an amendment several days earlier — reach across the Labour spectrum, the group set to gain most from these humiliating concessions is the much-maligned Left of the party. Shortly after the vote, Labour MP Richard Burgon accused the Government of trying “to balance the books on the backs of disabled people”; his colleague Diane Abbott, meanwhile, said she opposed the bill “on moral, legal and political grounds”.

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This perceived shift to the Right, not just on welfare cuts but also on issues such as winter fuel payments and war in the Middle East, has fuelled a jumbled but nonetheless potent coalition of old-school socialists, environmentalists, and Palestine advocates. For all Starmer’s fears of a Faragist insurgency, the threat from his Left could be just as damaging.

Corbyn first signalled that there might be life left in his old dog last September, when he established a parliamentary alliance — alongside four other independent, pro-Gaza MPs — to challenge Labour, mirroring the politics of disaffection so cannily grasped by Farage. Where Reform has targeted Labour over “two-tier” justice proposals and Net Zero policy, the Gaza independents latched onto other issues that have public cut-through, such as welfare reform and alleviating the cost-of-living crisis. A prospective Left-wing party could harness these Labour weaknesses to great effect. Particularly if it yokes in other members of the difficult crew, including the Socialist Campaign Group which counts 26 members including Sultana and fellow suspended MPs John McDonnell and Apsana Begum. McDonnell, in particular, has proved a particular irritant for Labour, this week claiming that Starmer has “a sheer lack of understanding of what the Labour party exists for”, and suggesting that MPs are already competing to succeed the Prime Minister. Back in May, he was urging fellow radicals to “take back control of our party — before it’s too late”.

Meanwhile, the Corbyn coalition spies weakness and knows their strength. Starmer was, after all, elected Labour leader in 2020 on an essentially Corbynite platform. Starmer himself cited the party’s 2017 manifesto as the “foundational document” for his campaign, pledging to abolish tuition fees and increase income tax for the top 5% of earners — both of which have since been left by the wayside.

By running as Continuity Corbyn, minus the antisemitism scandals and Punch-and-Judy factionalism, Starmer recognised that the 2019 election was a defeat not of socialism, but instead of a particular leader’s political intransigence. Corbyn’s policies on tax, public ownership and public services were popular back then, and are even more so today. So as Starmer rows back on everything he said he stood for, could this new Corbynite coalition capitalise on the continued popularity of its key ideas? Certainly, some of the Labour rebels were reflecting wider views: after all, a plurality of British voters disagreed with the proposed cuts before Starmer’s U-turn.

But as Starmer falters, there’s another awkward squad on the move. The Greens’ deputy leader, Zack Polanski, has launched a bid for the top job, defining his platform as one of “eco-populism”, challenging Labour on Net Zero and what he sees as Starmer’s surrender to big business. He is out to prove that the Green message isn’t monoglot, and reckons his party can win over Reform voters. “We need to grow faster,” Polanski says of this nascent Left-populist movement. “The Right didn’t mess around with creating little different parties or independent groups; the Right just got on with it.”

While much of Polanski’s language mimics the cadences of Corbynism, he is not a straightforward disciple. In 2018, he suggested that his own Jewish faith was a reason why he couldn’t vote for Labour, and that Corbyn’s “complicity” in antisemitism within the party was an “existential threat” to British Jews. Two years earlier, he heckled Corbyn over Labour’s muddled position on European Union membership.

Polanski has since retreated from his stance on Corbyn’s alleged antisemitism. This disavowal may well be genuine, but it’s also true that, with the war in Gaza, the growing anti-Labour Left has found both a unifying cause and an easy stick with which to beat Starmer. In the weeks following Hamas’s attacks on October 7, the then-leader of the opposition pointedly opposed a ceasefire and proceeded to sack several frontbenchers who called for an immediate end to the fighting. Following a series of incremental shifts, he then adopted the same view which got those shadow ministers fired, albeit without acknowledging that they might have been correct after all.

One Labour source told me that the Prime Minister’s “total lack of accountability” for his previous support of Israeli military action was “shameless”. Yet that the party has now moved closer to the core plank of Corbyn’s planned party is, if not a vindication of Sultana and the Gaza independents, at least a signal that their politics should not be dismissed. Problematically, though, some of Corbyn’s fellow independents campaigned on platforms which weren’t just pro-Gaza but explicitly catered towards the significant British Muslim populations in their constituencies. Their politics are sectarian, not socialist, and might therefore be unpalatable to a wider audience.

So can any of the dissidents form a cohesive platform? The economist James Meadway has called for a “Red-Green alliance, modeled on France’s New Popular Front”. That’s the Polanski model: a Left-wing message couched in Right-populist methods. And one that he would use, should he become leader, to target between 30 and 50 seats at the next election. This would factor in defections from other parties, including, ambitiously, an attempt to entice Corbyn to go Green. I’m told, too, that Sultana was involved in discussions to join, before deciding to press ahead with the prospective Corbyn-led party.

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Yet Corbyn was always unlikely to join a Polanski-led Green Party. He thrives on protest and grassroots energy, not the everyday jostling that comes with being a member of a parliamentary party. Even after surviving the Owen Smith putsch of 2016, his greatest threat as Labour leader always came from his own MPs, among whom he never commanded broad support. As Andrew Fisher, Corbyn’s former director of policy, wrote several months after Starmer ascended to the leadership, “the Corbyn project was an attempt to build the car while driving it and learning to drive at the same time, while fighting over the steering wheel.”

Perhaps this irony pertains to the radical Left as a whole. Labour’s Pasokification may have enabled the rise of the Corbynites, but Starmer’s triumph last year killed the idea that they were the Left’s best shot at winning power post-Blairism. This new movement is at once profoundly different from the giddy optimism which defined the early days of the Corbyn project, and a fruitless effort to recapture the magic of 2017.

For while sectarians, socialists and environmentalists share some goals which are born from political convenience, their aims are ultimately distinct; even the Socialist Campaign Group is too divided to make the most of its enduring influence. Yet these factions will damage Starmer by splitting the Left-wing vote. More in Common polling last month showed that a Corbyn-led party would capture 10% of the vote, trimming Labour’s total by three points — and the Greens’ by four. Starmer would be left thrashing in Farage’s slipstream, level with the Tories.

For Corbyn, though, that could be enough: to play spoiler, rather than claim the spoils. Even his supporters acknowledge that, initially at least, he had no intention of winning the 2015 Labour leadership contest. His goal, then and now, was to change the parameters of mainstream Leftist debate, to end the party’s subjugation to New Labour, and take it back towards its socialist roots. His statement on Friday pledged to “create something that is desperately missing from our political system: hope”. And that may well be his best weapon against a Labour Party which increasingly appears directionless, thoughtless and, indeed, hopeless.

Revolutionaries were never meant to master the Rube Goldberg machine of Britain’s governing apparatus. But with the British Left having dealt another blow to Starmer’s authority, they could still be the force that finishes off this government. Corbyn, belatedly, may have his revenge.

It is obvious that there was no such equilibrium on 23 February 2022, when Russian columns started rolling towards Kyiv, and Russian President Vladimir Putin had just described Ukraine not merely as Russian, but as the homeland of the very first Russian state: Kievan Rus’.

That warning of an imminent invasion was quickly confirmed by satellite photographs of long columns of Russian armored vehicles preparing to advance. It was then that the US President, the French President and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, together with every other active European ally, had an opportunity to arrange an emergency meeting and issue a categorical warning to Russia, dovetailed with a convincing promise of maximum support to Ukraine.

There had been plenty of time to prepare for that moment — in fact eight years, given thinly disguised Russian soldiers had first infiltrated and then invaded the two Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in April 2014, when Crimea was also seized.

But when the moment came, and Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, there was no cohesive and determined power ready to respond quickly and effectively. NATO had done just that several times during the Cold War, by promptly reinforcing threatened allies with thousands of air-lifted troops from the so-called “Allied Command Europe Mobile Force”.

That, however, was the old, pre-enlargement NATO, which was still a veritable military alliance of countries capable of defending themselves, and help weaker allies in trouble, and whose chronically weak Mediterranean member states, with the most resplendent uniforms and least combat strength, had no Russian troops on their borders.

But once very deserving yet utterly indefensible countries such as Estonia were included in NATO — along with Poland, which mustered just 42,000 combat soldiers out of its population of 33 million a mere three months before Putin’s full-scale invasion began — it stopped being an effective military alliance.

Instead, it became a kind of social club. The NATO calendar is full of meetings at the “Supreme Allied Headquarters” in Mons in Belgium, where all manner of military and related issues are addressed often very professionally and quite freely — except that nobody is allowed to mention, however politely, even the most glaring military shortcomings of fellow allies, which undermine important war plans.

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The highpoint of the NATO calendar is the splendid summits with all flags flying, in which the arrival of new countries is greatly celebrated, regardless of their ability to actually defend themselves. Both heads of state and heads of government are invited to those gatherings on the premise that there is strength in numbers, with no concerns about the inherent difficulty of reaching any agreements in such a vast crowd.

In the last summit, held in Washington DC in July 2024, Biden’s confusion of President Zelensky with Putin added a touch of humor to otherwise gloomy proceedings: nobody in attendance offered any suggestions on how to end the war in Ukraine.

What proves that NATO is no longer a genuine military alliance was that nothing was done in the last pre-war days before Putin’s invasion finally began. The satellite intelligence that revealed Russian forces on the move also showed that they were already in assault formations. But even then, five days remained to fly fighter-bomber squadrons to forward bases.

Yet even inaction would have been better than what actually happened. Instead of ordering the rapid deployment of tactical airpower to bases in Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, the Biden administration instead evacuated US diplomats from Kyiv, starting a panic that induced the evacuation of some 20 other diplomatic missions.

For its part, the German government made clear that the Nordstream II pipeline project, further increasing Berlin’s dependence on Russian gas, would not be stopped even if Ukraine were invaded.

Only the courageous determination of Zelensky, together with his Defense Minister Resnikov and Kyiv’s stalwart mayor, prevented a collapse — starting the resistance that continues until today.

It is enough, then, to review the sequence of events to understand why Putin was not deterred back in February 2022: there was no watchful Great Power in Europe to do the deterring alongside the United States, thereby replacing the loss of NATO’s operational capacity and deterrent credibility caused by its expansion into indefensible territory.

But a recent and seemingly uneventful meeting between the leaders of Britain, France and Germany clearly suggests where that missing Great Power may be found: in a solid strategic compact, carefully negotiated between the three countries to jointly support the US response to an imminent crisis — or, if necessary, to induce a US response they jointly favor.

Whatever the differences between the three governments, they could certainly act with much greater agility than NATO as a whole ever could. Tripartite agreement is clearly easier than contending with dozens of European NATO members, from Estonia to Norway to Spain.

Except for Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, no NATO member deliberately obstructs alliance decisions. But each has its own objections to joint action against particular countries. For example, the populations of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and North Macedonia are predominantly Christian Orthodox, and their governments are typically unwilling to act against Orthodox Serbia — or indeed against Russia itself.

As Islamic countries, Turkey and Albania are very likely to object to any action against a Muslim antagonist, while the government of the day of any member state may object to any use of force if the ruling coalition at that time happens to include a pacifist party.

Even if none of those specific obstacles to prompt action appear in any given crisis, the civil and military representatives of each member state will still want to be heard when the use of force is imminent, and that alone could fatally delay responding to a sudden threat.

Against all those impediments to quick action, the alternative of a permanent three-country compact — in effect a synthetic Great Power — is very promising.

There are, of course, obvious challenges. For one thing, even a synthetic Great Power must have formidable capabilities, and these days neither the UK, France nor Germany is a veritable Great Power.

That category is defined by the ability to wage war independently, without needing any significant support from allies. To be sure, Britain did exactly that in reconquering the Falklands from Argentina, sending an expeditionary fleet over an unprecedented 8,000 miles in a display of strategic courage, which almost failed because of the bravery of a handful of Argentinian pilots — and which would have been suicidal against a more competent adversary.

If, however, the limitations of the three powers are well known, the magnitude of their combined capabilities should not be underestimated.

When it comes to ground forces, the British Army these days has some 70,000 soldiers all told, while its French counterpart is under 100,000. Yet both contain a high proportion of units that are actually capable of fighting, in contrast to most other NATO armies.

As for the German army, it had shrunk to less than a tenth of its Cold War strength under Angela Merkel, who ridiculed Trump’s call for more spending in 2018 as totally unnecessary in peaceful Europe — even though Russian forces had already infiltrated southeast Ukraine.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine caused as much confusion as alarm in Germany, as in most of Europe, because under various labels pacifist parties constrained both thinking and defense budgets. It is only now, under its newly installed Chancellor Friedrich Merz, that a serious rearmament effort is finally underway. It is set to focus on armored forces — still the German specialty — which would complement British and French light infantry and commando units.

The synthetic Great Power proposed here would be much better off at sea, where the British and French fleets each operate aircraft carriers. Both fleets also have nuclear-powered submarines, much less vulnerable than surface vessels and armed to attack enemy ships and subs alike. The latter also do not need large numbers to control vast ocean areas: if just half of the 10 now operated by the British and French navies were deployed, they could interdict any Russian naval operations in Atlantic and Arctic waters.

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As with the ground forces, the size of the British and French air forces is less important than the fact that they “are for real”. Thus while the Royal Air Force, the Italians and the Spanish all operate Eurofighters with a significant bombload, only the RAF has actually used them to attack the Houthis from its sovereign base in Cyprus (another overlooked British asset): even though they were inflicting a great deal of damage on the Italian and Spanish economies and almost none on the British.

In theory, this gap is just a matter of politics, but there is also a fixed cultural difference: Royal Air Force pilots are ready and even eager for action, a sentiment shared by French pilots who until recently flew many distant missions into Africa.

A simple decision by the British, French and German governments to operate a joint foreign and defense policy coordination office would be quite sufficient to announce the arrival of the Great Power missing from the European scene.

There would be no need to burden this office with any duties except a timely response to active or imminent threats of war, meaning it would only require the designation of very few senior diplomats and military officers of each country, seconded from their ordinary duties to serve as joint “crisis managers”.

The one thing necessary to make it work is that these individuals would each need immediate access to their respective leaders in the event of a crisis, overcoming the inevitable resistance of all others who must be left out.

The mere announcement that Britain, France and Germany had decided to coordinate conflict policies from a single joint office would no doubt trigger outrage, protests and even nervous breakdowns in the left-out European capitals that still pretend to matter — even as they refuse to help with the Houthis let alone Putin. Brussels, too, would be outraged, where for all her charms President Ursula von der Leyen cannot conceal the inability of the European Commission to help assure Europe’s safety from threats large or small.

Having fought with and against each other in two world wars, France, Germany and the United Kingdom now have a new opportunity to combine forces and endow Europe with the Great Power it urgently needs. If they do not act, more wars are likely.

The tectonic plates are shifting in British politics, and the two-party system is edging towards disaster. As Reform’s momentum seems irresistible — until recently anyway — we may well be witnessing the belated emergence in the UK of something akin to the authoritarian national populism snaking across Europe, the final “Pasokification” of Labour and the emergence of a hegemonic Right-populism in Britain akin to Meloni, Le Pen or Orbán. Reform, then, are on course to be their British heirs.

Yet for all the discourse about the Red Wall and Labour losing the working class, Reform is not strictly a working-class revolt. Like all Right populist movements across Europe, Farage’s outfit is in reality a complex class coalition. To be sure, they undoubtedly do have a very strong base in the old skilled or “respectable” working-class (think: skilled tradesmen). But they also draw support from right across the social spectrum, with a lower-middle class core (think: policemen or shopkeepers) as well as sections of the professional classes (think: lawyers, bankers or managers).

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Like Thatcherism, Reform’s ideological centre of gravity, its weltanschauung, is therefore not the working-class — but the frenzied fear of falling from the lower-middle class. This is certainly class politics and class anger, but it is not the collectivism or solidarity of communities during the miners’ strike. A better example is Hans Fallada’s “little man” in interwar Germany: squeezed and pushed around until he snaps, his isolated, uncollectivised rage fizzing everywhere like a firework let off indoors. In other words, then, Reform faces both ways. It’s both anti-elite and anti-underclass, taking aim at those on welfare as well as politicians and the rich. The hard working majority, the people, are being mugged off, by lazy freeloaders, whether migrants or students, bankers or politicians. Reform’s manifesto is a homage to this worldview: back small businesses; help small landlords and farmers; defend the nuclear family; attack state bureaucracy and the nanny state.

There are remarkable parallels today with the mood of the late Seventies, captured by Stuart Hall in his famous Policing the Crisis, written as the UK stood on the precipice of a new political-economic paradigm. Then, he argued, economic crisis fed popular, racialised fears of crime and disorder, which was in turn absorbed and entrenched by Thatcherism. Today’s popular rage, insecurity and fear of crime is coalescing around migration, an issue which has become a proxy for the huge divide between the people and the elite, a catch-all upon which ideas of powerlessness and glaring, jarring decline are projected. Vox pops of protesters on recent anti-migration marches didn’t even mention immigrants that much. What they did say was that the place has gone to shit; there used to be pubs here now it’s full of litter.

As Hall noted in 1978, a generalised culture of hysteria over immigration and crime drowns out key questions regarding deeper, structural causes for societal malaise — where have all the good jobs gone; why we don’t have any social housing; why the NHS is broken and we can’t see a doctor; why pubs are closing down; why councils don’t collect rubbish; why the police can’t respond to crime; the actual relationship between immigration, wages and public services. Yet answering them honestly would, of course, necessarily implicate many of the politicians and media figures currently pushing simple solutions to Britain’s problems, which doesn’t seem likely these days.

There’s a broader point here too. One of the most compelling criticisms of Hall’s work came from so-called “Left-realist” criminologists, who argued that his focus on the “moral panic” around crime obscured the reality that mugging was happening, crime was rising, and it was mainly affecting working-class communities. Today, while people’s fears and anxieties are undoubtedly being stoked by a sensationalist press, their fears and anxiety are real. Crime is high. Streets are dirty. The migration system is broken. The system is rigged against hard-working people. Social cohesion and trust have tanked. Society is fucked. Across the world the middle-class is being squeezed: it has felt the pinch more than all other sections of the population in recent years, with wages falling, debt soaring, and professionals under ever-more pressure to keep up appearances in their rotting Hackney terraces. This fear of falling and sense of unfairness is stoked by an increasingly visible underclass which hoovers up scarce public resources.

Rachel Reeves was right in her “securonomics” speech that we are at an “inflection point”. The UK is desperate for a new political-economic paradigm. It is not just the physical fabric of society that needs to be repaired, but the mental and civil. Ours is a country that has been driven mad by the twin strains of austerity and precarity, punctured by hyper-individualism and isolation. We need political leaders to articulate new ideas of shared citizenship, a new social contract. The welfare state was underpinned by an emotional articulation of values and citizenship rooted in shared suffering, contribution and fairness. While Thatcher attacked this consensus, she nonetheless simultaneously articulated a distinct, positive vision of the good life and the aspirational citizen-capitalist, liberated by property ownership.

Labour’s problem is not merely that they are straitjacketed by their commitment to spending limits and state intervention. It is that their technocratic approach to politics is incapable of articulating a new emotional common sense, so anathema is this idea to the bloodless managerialism in their hearts. Labour’s strategy is, therefore, just more managed decline, to tell us that things will never get better. Even more outrageously, some Labour politicians have claimed with a straight face that the economy is fine, that people must simply be imagining that they’re broke and let down.

Much as the lower-middle classes found their savior in Thatcher’s fusion of penal populism, nationalism and individual economic liberty, today the frustration of the “hard working majority” finds its perfect outlet in Reform. Farage, an enthusiastic Thatcherite, seems to be the only person in British politics to grasp this worldview, the lack of faith in politics, or indeed the desperation for change. As during Brexit, Farage is seemingly the only politician capable of saying that the system is broken in an engaging way, and skilled enough to articulate a new positive vision.

In other words, then, there is a positive element of Faragism: a blokeish, nostalgic utopianism which pledges to break with the consensus and reset the social contract for decent, hard-working people. Because migration has become a proxy for societal decline and unfairness, the simple act of securing the borders and cutting migration contains a promise for rejuvenation and fairness: the high streets back to how they were; cleaner pavements; lower crime and higher wages. Thatcher had the scrounger as the foil for her positive vision. Farage, for his part, has migrants. Starmer, too, is currently attempting his own Thatcher tribute act with his recent attack on the benefit system. Yet Thatcher’s very raison d’être, like that of her class, was anti-statism, a visceral hatred of the nanny state and the bureaucrats who administer it. This stuff doesn’t work when you personify the very nanny state you’re meant to dismantle.

In the end, though, voters exhausted with the two-party consensus may be disappointed in the insurgents. First, there’s Farage himself, who is both Reform’s biggest asset and its biggest liability. Reform is dangerously over-reliant on the Brexit hero, a reluctant parliamentarian who is always on the look-out for the next lucrative opportunity on American television, and with a long history of falling out with former allies. The current public feud between Farage and Rupert Lowe comes as little surprise to anyone who has followed Farage’s career.

This clash of personalities equally speaks to Reform’s internal contradictions. As a committed Thatcherite, Farage (like all of Reform’s top brass) ironically backed the economic paradigm that has caused British decline to start with. Now, with an eye on power, Reform are cobbling together an eclectic economic strategy which, like other European Right populists, borrows aspects of welfare redistribution: their manifesto wants to part-nationalize utilities. Yet though Lowe apparently called for the creation of a Reform policy unit, Farage proved reluctant.

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There are a myriad of possible reasons for this feud. It could be that Lowe was trying, perhaps naively, to professionalize Reform and turn it into a party ready for government, whereas Farage simply has zero interest in the responsibilities of actually taking power. Meanwhile, Farage supporters suggest that Lowe’s enthusiasm for mass deportations and Tommy Robinson risks scaring the horses and becoming an electoral liability, threatening Reform’s appeal to more moderate, respectable conservatives. Either way, beneath the bravado, Reform is fragile.

And even if Farage turned into a policy fiend overnight, he’d be incapable of solving Britain’s basic problems. Unlike Thatcher, current economic circumstances mean that he would be unable to provide any material concessions to his base: beyond cutting migration anyway. There will be no cut-price council houses and no discount stock options. Right populists in power will face similar issues to the current government.

It all speaks to the sheer depth of our crisis. The UK’s economy is painfully imbalanced and focused on the City of London, crippled by parasitic rentierism, by cynical capitalists who prioritize short-term extraction of wealth over stable investment. Low productivity, low investment, low growth, low wages, poor infrastructure — the UK is Canary Wharf with a country attached, overseen by a bloated political elite that never leaves the M25. Successive attempts to rebalance the economy and build a viable industrial strategy have failed. Recent headlines that the UK is now a poor country is news only to those within the bubble. And, all the while, any departure from the status quo is strangled by the vested interests, from the civil service to asset managers, that control the British state. Compared with all that, Reform’s bickering suddenly feels trifling.

Today, it is hard not to be spooked by the sense that once again we are entering one of these eras that will overwhelm our rotting old order. Waves of Chinese industrial might threaten to overwhelm the last of our competitive industry, while the alarming approach of AI and unpredictable rise of Donald Trump risk upending everything else. And as Keir Starmer prepares to set out his long-awaited “Programme for Change” even his close advisors sense the ground shifting beneath their feet. They have the feeling that they are representatives of both the emerging new world as well as place holders in an interregnum before something else entirely.

It is a striking image — of regents rather than monarchs — and surprisingly self-aware from a Government that in many other respects gives every indication of not appearing to understand the scale of the challenge it faces.

A sense of unease has settled over the country, too, barely five months into its new Government. The Prime Minister’s goal is to lift this ennui with the most important speech of his premiership. Yet he will almost certainly fail. Not because what he says will be unreasonable or the targets he sets wrong — they will be neither — but because we are entering one of those periods of change which requires a form of leadership that is beyond him. Perhaps even beyond any of our leading politicians today.

Charles de Gaulle governed France through two great moments of upheaval. Having created the “necessary myth” of a country united in resistance during the war, his second great achievement, according to his biographer Julian Jackson, was to turn France’s defeat in Algeria in 1962 into a sort of victory. He told the French that, “although militarily victorious, [they] had granted Algeria independence in accordance with her historic commitment to human rights”. The story was not true, of course, but after years of turmoil and shame, the French were happy to believe it. De Gaulle later reflected in his War Memoirs that however difficult the reality might have been during his time in power, he had always felt able to master it, “by leading the French there through dreams”.

It is this sort of leadership that is required in moments of great tumult, when a collapsing old order must be refashioned into a moral story of political will. It was, in essence, Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement, killing the failing post-war consensus and ushering in something new with a story of industrial revival that did not come to pass, but which nevertheless provided a sense of purpose.

The problem with Starmer’s attempted reset is that he is moving in the opposite direction; lowering the nation’s sights, leading not through dreams but powerpoints. We know that in his speech, Starmer will attach at least one specific target to each of his five “missions”, along with an extra promise to reduce immigration. This is all part of his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney’s belief that this government needs to kill the “fiction” that politicians can fix everything, because this in itself damages public trust. Instead of trying to do too much, McSweeney argues that Labour governments must remain focused on practical policies which improve people’s lives.

For those around Starmer there is no alternative. “Of course delivery is not enough,” one senior figure told me. “But if we don’t get waiting lists down and don’t get immigration down there is no story we can tell.” The purpose of Starmer’s speech today, then, is to make his “missions” more tangible, creating that sense of progress — if not achievement — that is currently so obviously lacking. Targets, not dreams. It is striking that those advising Rishi Sunak had the same idea. Such was the lack of faith among voters at the time, his advisers argued, that only a set of specific and deliverable objectives had any chance of convincing people he was serious. Yet by the end of his time in power Sunak appeared lost, unable to cope with the scale of the challenge, finding solace merely in the performance of power, completing his paperwork to give him a sense of progress and purpose if nobody else.

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The Sunak and Starmer approach to government is not without merit, of course. The danger of governing through dreams is that dreams are not real. As Gladwyn Jebb remarked of de Gaulle, his legacy was “to cast his country into a role which was beyond her power”. As a result, de Gaulle’s successors are doomed to live up to an impossible myth — just look at Emmanuel Macron.

So the danger of McSweeney’s approach is that as Britain’s challenges grow, the Government’s ambitions fall and public frustration increases. Because the health service is in such a bad state, for example, the new target is simply to get back to the kind of waiting times that we once took for granted. And meanwhile people’s everyday experiences of the NHS deteriorate. We can order Christmas presents to our doors at the click of a button, but to attempt to see a doctor is to do battle against an unresponsive, maddening and seemingly unreformable bureaucracy. It is pretty obtuse not to realize that public anger at this basic failure is bound to grow; the decreasing length of the waiting lists for routine operations will only infuriate those who can’t get through a GP’s door.

Politics, as the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott observed, is ultimately the navigation of “a boundless and bottomless sea” where there is neither a starting place or an appointed destination. Yet it is impossible to steer your course without looking up to the horizon.

Those close to Starmer understand the dangers of appearing to fixate on a set of arbitrary targets as the world transforms around them; the boundless and bottomless sea suddenly raging while the captain merely stares at the map. As one senior aide reflected, the ultimate challenge is not just convincing Starmer of the importance of storytelling, but fashioning a specifically Labour story appropriate to the challenges facing the country. Because from immigration to energy transition and shifting social norms, changes are coming which threaten to overwhelm many of Labour’s most sacred shibboleths.

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“Something new is happening,” one aide told me, “and so many of the old beliefs are falling away.” This is taking place at such speed, he said, that the party has begun doubting itself. Labour today is no longer defending the benefits of immigration but attacking “the one-nation experiment in open borders” inflicted on Britain by the Conservatives. Facing its first motor plant closure, the business secretary Jonathan Reynolds declared he was not prepared to accept deindustrialization. What will happen when the flood of cheap Chinese-made electric vehicles sweeps through the country, and further plants begin to close? What then?

In previous eras of momentous change, new parties or ideologies rose in response: the Labour Party in the Twenties and Thirties, and Powellism followed by Thatcherism in the Sixties and Seventies. It has not gone unnoticed that Nigel Farage’s Reform lies in second place in 98 constituencies today — 89 of which are held by Labour, including 60 in the north of England and 13 in Wales. On each of the great challenges now facing Britain — immigration, net-zero, China and Trump — Farage is now well-placed to take advantage. He has his dream. He is also said to be ruthlessly focused on the “Waitrose moms” he needs to make his next great leap in the polls as part of his now public ambition not simply to win more seats, but to “win” the next election outright.

To succeed in government, then, Starmer must do more than deliver on the targets he sets today. He needs to lead the British there through the dreams they already have, not by fiddling with taxes and targets. It is a cliché that political leaders campaign in poetry but govern in prose, but in times of upheaval only those who retain a poetic imagination can write their own reality. Starmer, though, is no bard..