Over the past decade, three Conservative prime ministers have been forced from office by their own colleagues. In contrast, in the post-war period, no Labour leader has been ejected. Tony Blair did step down in 2007, but by that time he had been leader for 13 years and prime minister for 10 of them. He himself admitted people “get tired of the same face” after a decade. “It’s long enough,” he conceded.

Certainly, no one was talking about getting rid of Tony Blair after just one year in office. On the first anniversary of his premiership, in 1998, Blair’s approval rating was an astonishing 72%. And his party had a 29-point lead over the Tories. The mood in the parliamentary party was understandably euphoric. Reading West MP Martin Slater said, “Tony Blair has told us we must not gloat, but we can’t let [the anniversary of the election] go uncelebrated”.

There was little gloating going on last week in Westminster — at least not among Labour MPs — as Keir Starmer marked his one-year anniversary with an approval rating of 23%. For a prime minister who kicked off at 60%, this is cataclysmic. It’s unlikely his leadership will end in quietly dignified retirement.

One year in, seven-in-10 voters think the Labour government is at least as chaotic as its Conservative predecessor. The welfare debacle didn’t disabuse them of this notion, as Starmer’s complete lack of authority was exposed. And we’ve never watched a Chancellor weeping beside their PM at PMQs before.

The Prime Minister dismissed the welfare rebels as “noises off”, but these noises are now turning into talk of a leadership challenge. As ever, the usual suspects have put their head above the parapet. John McDonnell, whom Keir Starmer kicked out of the party last year for opposing the two-child benefit cap, immediately popped up to call outright for the Labour movement to “take back control” of the party. But, behind the scenes, speculation over Starmer’s future is mounting. Last week, he was asked by Kemi Badenoch whether Rachel Reeves would be Chancellor by the next election. But perhaps the more pertinent question is: will he be Prime Minister?

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What Starmer could learn from Blair

By Richard Johnson

It’s not as easy as it used to be to topple a Labour leader. Until 1981, the leader was elected annually by the Parliamentary Labour Party. It would take just two MPs — a proposer and a seconder — to force a leadership election. In spite of the technical ease in forcing a leadership challenge, they almost never happened. In the post-war period, just one leader — Hugh Gaitskell — was challenged, and he saw off his opponents with ease.

The stability of the party leadership was partly due to Labour leaders understanding the fragility of their own position, and the fractious nature of their party. They had come up through the Labour movement, and they knew that the party was really a coalition of diverse interests and perspectives. They had to work hard to ensure that they could sustain wide support. Cabinets and Shadow Cabinets included members from across the wide spectrum of the political Left. As Harold Wilson remarked, he came from the Left of the party, but he recognised that it also needed a Right-wing to fly.

Even after the rules were changed in the Eighties to transfer part of the decision to party conference and then again in the Nineties to ordinary members, leaders recognised that they were holding together a coalition. They needed to show love — or at least respect — to the different elements of the party. Otherwise, resentment would grow into something potentially explosive. That is why even Tony Blair made a point of meeting with members of the Left-wing socialist Campaign Group when he was party leader.

Keir Starmer, though, has a different approach. He has adopted perhaps the most presidential style of any Labour leader. All authority flows down from the leader, not up from the party. Labour has never quite had a leader like him, one so aloof from the party’s internal apparatus, contemptuous of its pluralism, and singularly unpopular with the public.

After first using the votes of the Left and soft Left to elect him leader in 2020, Starmer then turned his back on them and handed control of the party to the Right, the old Blairite wing now itching for revenge after what they regarded as the ignominy of the five-year Corbyn leadership.

With Starmer’s blessing, the Right took control of the National Executive Committee, and were exceptionally successful in controlling parliamentary selections, with a disregard for internal party democracy unseen even in the heyday of New Labour. Potential candidates deemed to be Corbyn-curious were sifted out, even if it cost Labour seats, as it clearly did in Islington North and Chingford. Left-wing incumbents were deselected. Some Right-leaning NEC members then parachuted themselves into safe seats ahead of the election. Then, after the election, Starmer expelled remaining Left-wing MPs within weeks of taking office.

This “presidential” governing style isn’t without risks. As Juan Linz laid out in his seminal essay, “Perils of Presidentialism”, such systems tended to be less stable than a parliamentary one because they entail a “winner takes all” politics, or, to put it more bluntly, a “loser gets nothing” dynamic — something which ultimately encourages revolution.

Starmer, more than any other Labour leader, has taken this “winner takes all” approach to his leadership. He set out to bury all the remnants of the ancien régime both in policy and personality, abandoning the old manifesto’s promises and expelling his predecessor from the party. Worse, Starmer had no mandate to conduct this purge. He wasn’t elected leader to hammer the Left: on the contrary, he had promised continuity with the policies of the Corbyn years, but then spent his time as leader repudiating them.

Initially, this didn’t seem to matter. Once the Conservatives ditched Boris Johnson in a staggering act of political self-harm, Labour’s poll lead was unassailable. Starmer’s leadership, insipid and uninspiring as it was, became self-justified merely by dint of the fact that Labour was winning. But now Labour is in the mid-20s in the polls, Reform is in first place and Nigel Farage is on the verge of measuring up the curtains in No. 10. Most Labour MPs could be wiped out. The debacle of the 2019 result, so trumpeted by the Right of the party as evidence of the Left’s electoral toxicity, could seem like a happy memory.

Now, the carrot of strong poll numbers and the stick of fierce discipline have rotted away. Backbench MPs no longer see Starmer as a vote winner. And after U-turns on winter fuel, grooming gangs, and disability benefits, he clearly doesn’t frighten them either.

But Starmer has made it harder for them to get rid of him. As leader of the opposition, he quietly made a couple of modifications to the rules of succession. There is no vote of confidence, like there is with the Tories. Instead, an MP merely needs to put up a challenge. Starmer, though, raised the threshold for nominations from 10% to 20% of the Parliamentary Labour Party. He has also limited the franchise to party members and members in affiliated trade unions. Non-members who were given a vote under Ed Miliband, on condition of paying a nominal fee, have been taken out of the process. Additionally, the Labour rule book now specifies that challenges are permissible only “prior to the annual session of Party conference”.

These rule changes may be beneficial to Starmer, but they are by no means bulletproof. It seems likely to me that if Starmer is forced to defend his leadership before ordinary party members, he is toast. As someone who speaks to many fellow party members from across Labour, it’s hard to find cheerleaders for the PM.

As a result, the Left of the party hates him, and the soft Left — where the bulk of the membership is — feel deeply disappointed. Those on the Right of the party have regarded Starmer as a useful vehicle for their path to power, but they have never seen him as one of their own. There are, simply put, no Starmerites in Labour.

All it might take to remove Starmer, then, is one Labour MP to gather nominations from 20% of their colleagues. And every wing of the party has a reason to want him gone.

From the Right, the motives are a mix of ambition (Starmer was useful for them; they have no core loyalty to him; he is now dispensable) and self-preservation (he’s dragging the party down and threatening its electoral prospects). From the soft Left, the reasons are a combination of ambition, self-preservation, and policy disappointment. From the Left (such as it is), it is hatred for his betrayal. The question is, who would dare make the first move?

Moving too early isn’t without risk. If a Cabinet minister tried and failed to unseat Starmer, there would be repercussions: banishment, surely, to the backbenches.

Yet for some ambitious MPs, there are good reasons to move early. Wes Streeting is one of the Cabinet’s most effective communicators. He is the darling of the party “Blairites” and is clearly very ambitious. Moreover, he holds his Ilford North seat with a tiny majority and might lose it at the next election. It could be now or never. He equally hamstrung, though, by this association with the “Blairites”, which puts him ideologically out-of-step with the membership. They have rejected Right-leaning candidates in every leadership election for the past decade.

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But, if Streeting managed to force a challenge, the element of surprise might enhance his chances in a members’ ballot. Fortune favors the brave. And such is the level of despair currently that even Left-wing members have told me they’d vote for Streeting if it meant getting rid of Starmer.

Then there’s the quietly ambitious Angela Rayner, sitting demurely on the other side of the PM as his Chancellor wept. She is in a unique position as Deputy Leader, because if she tried and failed to remove Starmer, he still could not strip her of her position. He would probably sack her from the Cabinet in the case of a botched coup, but freed from the constraints of collective responsibility, Rayner on the backbenches could be a very dangerous thing for the Starmer premiership. She could be the voice of authentic Labour for which the membership is so clearly hungry.

Historically, there have been candidates in similar cases who were willing to sacrifice themselves as the “stalking horse”: candidates with no chance of winning, but announce their candidacy simply to kick off proceedings. The idea is that this MP would bounce other, more plausible candidates, into challenging Starmer. Are things so bad someone would be willing to fire the gun? Might an éminence grise like Ed Miliband, for example, or a vocal backbencher, be tempted? The risk of this approach, of course, is that it could produce the opposite effect, whereby the frontbench rallies behind their Prime Minister in his hour of need.

But how brave is this Labour cohort? How much more are they willing to take? British history is littered with the names of individuals who probably could have taken on their leaders but missed their chance. Michael Portillo regrets not standing against John Major in his 1995 “back me or sack me” challenge. David Miliband could probably have become prime minister in 2009, had he announced he was challenging Gordon Brown for the leadership. The lesson is don’t wait for the perfect moment, as it might never come. The first test of leadership is showing you have the guts to seek it in the first place.

Labour MPs recognized this when they voted him as successor to Harold Wilson in 1976, topping the best slate of leadership candidates ever offered to a British party, seeing off Tony Benn, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot, Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins. He’s still the only person to have held all four of the great offices of state: PM, chancellor, foreign secretary and home secretary. And if that’s all a bit lofty, as transport minister in Clement Attlee’s government, he gave us zebra crossings and cat’s eyes, literally changing the look of the country.

But what he’s chiefly remembered for is the wave of public-sector strikes that paralyzed the country in the early weeks of 1979. There were more days lost to industrial action that year than any since 1926 and the General Strike, and for the next two decades, the Winter of Discontent — as it became known — was the go-to line of attack for Labour’s opponents. It was the “I’m afraid there is no money” of its day. Indeed, it’s not dead yet. In January this year, Richard Littlejohn warned Daily Mail readers that the current government “would take us back to the Seventies” and the accompanying photo was captioned: “Rubbish piles up on the streets of London during the Winter of Discontent.”

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Britain's golden age of sleaze

By Alwyn Turner

This is a bit unfair as well. Callaghan’s stewardship of the economy had thus far been successful by most measures. Labour came to power in 1974 in the midst of a recession and with massive inflationary pressures left over from Conservative Chancellor Anthony Barber, who had done economic damage far beyond that attributed to Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. Under Wilson and then Callaghan — with Healey as Chancellor throughout — Labour steadied the ship. In 1976-78, GDP grew by an annual average of 3.2% while inflation was brought down from 24.2% to 8.3%. There was even, relatively speaking, industrial peace; more days were lost to strikes in 1972 under Edward Heath than in the first three years of Callaghan.

The key factor in all this was the partnership between government and trade unions. From 1975, a national pay policy was agreed, fixing the maximum wage increase that would be permitted, and for the most part the line was held. A decline in the standard of living was accepted, with some reluctance, by the unions as the price of restoring economic stability.

But by late 1978, the reluctance proved too great. Callaghan failed to secure an agreement with the unions, and instead the government unilaterally announced a pay policy of 5%. The Winter of Discontent ensued, Labour was driven out of office, and 18 years of opposition followed.

In his last days as PM, Callaghan predicted the dawning of a new era. “There are times, perhaps every 30 years, when there is a sea change in politics,” he told adviser Bernard Donoughue. “It then does not matter what you say or what you do.” Though he was right that this was a critical moment, there’s an unmistakable note of self-justification, because there was nothing inevitable about the country taking the direction that it did. Had he not launched that doomed pay policy, and done what everyone expected by calling a general election in the autumn of 1978, when the economic conditions were favorable, he would almost certainly have won.

But maybe the sea change had already come, back at the 1976 Labour conference, when Callaghan himself announced the death of Keynesianism. “We used to think that you could spend your way out of recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending,” he declared. “I tell you in all candor that that option no longer exists.” For 30 years, governments of both parties had pursued the target of full employment, but now the emphasis was to be on conquering inflation. We’d been living in a cozy world, avoiding “fundamental choices and fundamental changes” for too long. “That cozy world is gone.” As Margaret Thatcher, his successor in Downing Street, was later to say, “There is no alternative.”

And there was the problem for Labour. Callaghan’s move away from Keynes took him into Tory territory. The Thatcherite wing of the Conservatives had already concluded that inflation was the real enemy, and that state spending needed to be cut. Following her election victory in 1979, Thatcher pursued Callaghan’s argument to its logical extremes. He complained that his speech to conference had been taken out of context — “misused by Conservative spokesmen to justify their malefactions in refusing to increase public expenditure at a time of recession” — but the truth was that he had prepared the way for Thatcherism and was then horrified by what transpired.

He was the last prime minister of the old cross-party consensus, a time when — in the language of the day — union leaders had “beer and sandwiches” at No. 10, and deals were done in “smoke-filled rooms”. Displaying the conventional complacency of an ancien régime, he underestimated his rival, failing to take seriously her talk of being an outsider, “a plain straightforward provincial”, her rejection of “metropolitan liberal views”, her call for “a return to common sense”. In retrospect, Thatcher looks more and more like the harbinger of the era of populism, and Callaghan her facilitator. That 1976 speech is what he should be remembered for, the start of the sea change that he spoke about.

All of which seems increasingly relevant at a time when we are in the early stages of an even bigger sea change, with a Labour prime minister again trying to navigate the death of a cross-party consensus.

The features are very different, of course. And so are the two men. Keir Starmer didn’t exactly beat the cream of the crop when he defeated Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy to become leader. He had no experience of political office at all — let alone the great offices of state — before the general election last year. On the other hand, he has a massive parliamentary majority to fall back on — the 1974-79 government started with a majority of three and rapidly declined into a minority.

Despite the differences, there is the same sense of a new political mood and, as in the late Seventies, the ideological fervor is with a populist Right. Recently this has been with the rise in the polls of Reform, but a reinvented Conservative Party that can harness public discontent remains the real threat.

That looks a distant possibility right now, but the return of Donald Trump has accelerated the pace of events. Starmer’s premiership has certainly changed in response to Trump. The biggest challenge is clearly the development of a new version of NATO, but there are domestic implications as well. The noisiness of Trump and his outriders is changing the political agenda here. In particular, immigration — the key dividing line between mainstream parties and populists — looms larger.

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Why Starmer will be dragged to the Left

By Steve Richards

Earlier this month, Health Secretary Wes Streeting had some fun at the expense of the Tories. “It must be so painful for them to watch a Labour government doing the things that they only ever talked about,” he teased: “reducing bloated state bureaucracy; investing in defense; reforming our public services; bringing down the welfare bill.” He was exaggerating for the sake of comedy, but there was an underlying truth to his boast. With that comes the danger that, as Callaghan found, the attempt to try to occupy the opponents’ ground can end up merely by legitimizing the Right’s arguments. There’s been nothing in the advance briefing about Rachel Reeves’s spring statement today that looks particularly Labour.

Callaghan tried to hold the incoming tide halfway, offering a compromise that accepted spending cuts and a (hopefully short-term) rise in unemployment while retaining the structure of the old system, most notably cooperation with unions. That proved economically effective in the short term but it wasn’t enough to save Labour. By the time the party returned to power in 1997, it had accepted Thatcherism in full. As Callaghan said: “The cozy world is gone.”

Having inherited a party that has hemorrhaged voters to the Liberal Democrats on the Left, and Reform on the Right, and collapsed among the under-25s, Badenoch’s core challenge is to win them back. Ingeniously, despite facing an utterly unrepresentative electorate of die-hard Tories, she has won the leadership contest without committing herself to a specific program that would further alienate these three groups. She now needs to craft a strategy that attracts them back.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have made this far easier than it ought to be. Their series of missteps continues, not only with Starmer’s active support for the Harris campaign making relations with our crucial ally more difficult than necessary. Closer to home, Labour has presented its opponents with more voter-sensitive gift-horses as the economy nose-dives into stagflation. Advancing the EV-only policy to 2030 from the EU-aligned 2035, and the prospective Trump date of Never, ranks the priorities of young metropolitans over the job losses that will be inflicted on the Northern working class — not to mention or the 1,300 workers just gone from Vauxhall vans. It’s no wonder that an astonishing 31% of Labour voters already rate Starmer “unfavorably”. Having won a huge parliamentary majority on only 32% of the vote, many of his new MPs are sitting on tiny majorities destined for defeat in 2029. But whether the beneficiaries are the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, Reform, the SNP, or the Tories, depends heavily on Kemi Badenoch. As Leader of the Opposition, she is in pole position both to grab media attention, and to set out a credible alternative to the managed decline embodied by Labour.

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Kemi Badenoch's New Toryism

By Tom McTague

As an immigrant from Nigeria at its most dysfunctional, Badenoch sees Britain as a haven of order. She has already offered her immigrant’s perspective on the virtues and flaws of British society to good effect. In interviews, when asked about her moral values, she describes herself as “an agnostic who is culturally Christian”. Would any current Labour politician dare to make such a remark? To understand its full significance, I found myself re-reading Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual, a landmark book in political philosophy. It traces the early Christian origins of the ideas and institutions on which our distinctive notion of rights and duties in European and North American societies still rests.

The Nigeria that the young Badenoch left in 1996 lacked common national values, being riven by bitter divisions. Its north was largely an Islamic culture recognizing a duty of submission to authority; its south was predominantly Christian fundamentalist; and around the country there were pockets of deference to pre-colonial kingship. Enabled by this lack of common moral foundations, a corrupt military dictator thrived, rewarding loyalty with commercial privileges.

Badenoch recognized that the Britain of 1996 was far more functional than the society she had left behind and was astonished to find her fellow students here denigrating it. They were taking for granted an inheritance that she realized must have been built by centuries of struggle and could easily be eroded. While such ideas have become deeply unfashionable within the liberal establishment on both sides of the Atlantic, the liberals are in the minority — as Kamala Harris disastrously discovered. Badenoch may have the same skin color as Harris, but her political philosophy and backstory edge closer to that of the Vice-President-Elect J.D. Vance. As a black immigrant, she can craft a credible and ethical Britain First agenda without taints of racism or imperialism.

Badenoch needs to start, though, by getting rid of the greedy stench of the Liz Truss package that still cloaks the party: the tax-cutting for the rich and public-service cutting for everyone else. This was widely recognised as morally repellent, alienating the many Conservative voters who fled to the Liberal Democrats. The worst news for Badenoch, according to YouGov, is that 59% of Liberal Democrat voters view her unfavourably, compared to only 13% favourably. She needs to use some of that hard-won flexibility to apologise for that greed-agenda and decisively renounce it. She must renounce, too, the financier vision of Singapore-on-Thames: such a programme would gift high-earners in the City and Canary Wharf rates of taxation comparable to the low level of Singapore. It’s an image that alienated many Tories. It dismissed the Britains beyond the Thames bubble — and sure enough, it was beyond the Thames that most Tory seats were lost. Many of those lost to the Liberal Democrats live in towns in the southwest; those lost in the Red Wall are on the east and west coasts. Here, there is further bad news for Badenoch: she is seen as Metropolitan — 23% of Londoners are favourable to her compared to only 18% of Northerners. It’s early days, but I have not detected any signs of this yet in her messaging.

With such negative ratings among Liberal Democrat voters, she should start by courting them. Historically, the NHS has been key to this cohort: David Cameron won the Tory leadership in 2007 by boldly stating that he was in politics to support the NHS — even during the ensuing austerity, the NHS’s budget was fully protected. Although Reeves has announced a huge increase in spending for the NHS, this will be a shocking waste of billions if it doesn’t come with reform. Gwyn Bevan’s How did Britain Come to This? sets out the coruscating evidence of how, over decades, the Treasury has repeatedly and grossly mismanaged the health sector. Powers and budgets should be torn from its incompetent maws and localized. But while she can gleefully use Bevan’s evidence to embarrass Starmer, the recent Tory record on health is so bad that I cannot see her outcompeting Ed Davey.

So what else could she do which would appeal to good-hearted Liberal Democrats, but also to the alienated voters of the Red Wall? She can prioritise healing the rift inherent in the two-tier country and the resulting “huge and persistent inequalities” which are such a block on growth. There was a flashpoint in Red Wall areas over the summer which perfectly illustrated the attitude of the Government to our divided country and pinpointed an opportunity for Badenoch: the riots.

What triggered this sudden outpouring of furious dissatisfaction? We can trace it back to Boris Johnson’s bragging incompetence that with Brexit we could “have our cake and eat it”; this ensured that the European Commission would not cooperate with continuing the Dublin Principle, which enabled us to return asylum seekers coming from mainland Europe. This casual disregard for the consequences of increasing immigration was compounded by a Whitehall decision to house these incomers in four-star hotels. Hell bent on value for money, the Treasury minimised the cost by choosing hotels in the poorest provincial towns. This penny-pinching reduced the cost per asylum seeker to the still staggering figure of £41,000.

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By Paul Collier

These towns, though, were at the heart of the empty Tory promise to “Level Up”. The Treasury hated the programme and had released only £400 million for it — that’s a measly £8 per person in provincial Britain, barely enough to give the High Street a lick of paint. The contrast between this insulting parsimony and largesse to the asylum-seekers housed in the same towns was explosive. Inevitably, the powder-keg of resentment did attract racists, mostly from outside the town. But overall, the Government’s reaction — relying on the criminal justice system to quell the immediate effect of violence, rather than considering a longer-term approach to the root causes of alienation — fuelled the impression that the working class, and those who lived outside London, were considered second-class citizens. Contrast Labour’s reaction with Margaret Thatcher’s after the Toxteth riots of 1981, when she immediately dispatched Michael Heseltine to lead a programme of urban regeneration. Reeves, meanwhile, has dismissed not just the phraseology of Levelling Up, but even the notion that the divergence between London and provincial England matters: “there are poor people in London.” YouGov finds that Starmer is seen as being as metropolitan as Badenoch, but her big advantage is that whereas only 10% of voters have yet to make up their minds about him, 39% remain uncertain about her..

And so, Labour has left a wide-open goal. If Kemi Badenoch does nothing, many of the Red Wall voters who supported Labour in the last election will abstain or defect to Reform. But she already has the advantage, leading the more powerful opposition; Nigel Farage has little chance of ever being in government. She must therefore directly appeal to the disenfranchised and hold out the promise that she will help those left-behind towns and cities to renew themselves.

The Levelling Up program, which as an unpaid advisor I saw from the inside, failed not just for lack of money. It failed, as the NHS is failing, through a lack of innovative vision. So here’s a thought for Badenoch. What provincial Britain needs, and wants, are jobs for those trained with vocational skills. By 2029, working class (CDE) under-25s will be approaching 30. Those in the North and Midlands will be worried about their lack of opportunities. Local governments will be bankrupt. Decent jobs can only come by helping the most innovative provincial SMEs to grow more rapidly. Such firms exist in their hundreds despite the hostile policy environment. But to grow fast, they need venture capital. Britain abounds in this, but two-thirds of it goes to London and its Oxbridge satellites. The other three-quarters of Britain’s population is a venture-capital desert. No wonder there’s no growth: the greater part of our island is a stagnation nation. The migration nation follows Kemi to London.

Back in the early days of those “wasted 14 years” dismissed by Labour, we created two valuable public investment agencies. The British Business Bank (2014) and the National Infrastructure Fund (2015) have the expertise to finance the public infrastructure and private-sector venture capital which will ultimately be the essential driver of growth. Rishi Sunak had no interest in them, and nor has Reeves, but they are a Tory solution to a national problem waiting to be harnessed. Kemi Badenoch could announce that their mandates would be to equalize economic opportunities around the country and commit to devolving decision-taking to them. Thereby, she would have in her holster a credible strategy that the rival opposition parties cannot offer, and that Reeves has opted to ignore. As she and the Prime Minister announced to the Board of BlackRock, her preferred solution to past short-termism is to set up a new unit within the Treasury. One of its tasks will be to craft an “industrial policy”. Yet the Treasury and the rest of Whitehall are so bereft of the necessary skills to formulate one that it can only lead to further embarrassments. To dig itself out of the comedy that HS2 ends at Royal Oak, the Treasury has just committed £6 billion to extend it to Euston: an “industrial policy” only for London.

Badenoch has the gumption to deride the pretensions of Whitehall and the wit to make it amusing. Keir Starmer is, it’s sad to say, the perfect foil for such barbs. By using her expertise in finance for a unifying public purpose, Badenoch would kill three birds with one stone. She would combine an inspiring backstory with an appealingly optimistic agenda to Britain’s youth: Cool Britannia Redux. She would test the moral mettle of those former Tories who switched to the Liberal Democrats repelled by the greed agenda. Equalizing economic opportunities around the nation is something that Ed Davey can neither deride nor deliver. And she can win the provincial working class — the Red Wall voters adrift, already disillusioned by Labour, tempted by Farage, but knowing in their hearts that regardless of his rhetoric, he will never have the power to improve their lives. In the process, she can reset the image of her party vis-à-vis its biggest problem. In 2007, it was that the Tories could not be trusted with the NHS. David Cameron courageously and successfully took that bull by the horns. In 2024, it is that the Tories cater to a finance industry dominated by greedy asset-strippers. Let BlackRock carouse with Labour. By repurposing Britain’s financial renown to heal the divide in our society, Badenoch can turn vice into virtue. Forget stagnation nation and migration nation: we could become innovation nation..

It’s clear, then, that the system needs reform. But what kind of reform? Wes Streeting seems sure he knows the answer. Last week, as my patient was wallowing on the ward, Streeting announced grand plans to introduce a “league table” for hospitals. Due to be rolled out next April, the Health Secretary is already promising to “name and shame” struggling trusts, with doctors and managers in the firing line too. Yet while Streeting is abrasively promising to “drive the health system to improve” — the truth is that his scheme is fundamentally flawed.

By obsessing over performance indicators, he’s ignoring the deep-seated issues that are actually failing people like my patient. Not scorecards: but funding. Not league tables: but inadequate staffing, and archaic IT systems, and waves of retirement that smash the health service’s institutional memory. Clearly, these problems predate the new Labour government. But in his eagerness to turn life and death into the Premier League, and at the risk of sounding like a member of the bureaucratic blob, Streeting will only boot genuine change aside.

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Perhaps Streeting’s most obvious problem is his tone. Unveiling his reforms to the NHS’s 1.5 million workers, he (presumably inadvertently) employed the style of an angry football coach. Yet if his bedside manner is notable only by his absence — his soundbites about “failing trusts” will only alienate the very clinicians tasked with delivering care — the real problem is what hospital league tables imply. Under Streeting’s provisions, any failure to deliver improved outcomes won’t be the fault of the immense structural problems facing the health service. Rather, it’ll be my fault, and the fault of other hard-working doctors and nurses, whose only mistake was treating challenging cases without the resources to cope.

Nor will the Government’s plan simply create tension between hospitals and the public they serve. Rather, Streeting’s confrontational approach will also exacerbate the “us and them” dynamic that already exists between clinicians and managers. The moment a poor-performing hospital slides down the league table, after all, incompetent bosses and careerist trust executives will do what they always do when under the cosh themselves: bully clinicians.

It goes without saying, of course, that quite aside from the toxic environment this inevitably creates, such an approach won’t actually improve care. Rather than focusing on treating their charges thoughtfully and professionally, doctors will instead be pushed to simply hit targets: all for the sake of the sainted league table. That, in turn, means the quality of patient care will decline. Let me give you a few examples. Surgical waiting times may drop, for instance, but only because crucial procedures are delayed or denied. At the same time, patients with severe mental health issues may be shunted through A&E, their care ignored in the scramble to meet discharge targets.

All it takes is one misstep and a hospital’s reputation will be ruined — league table or no league table. Nor is patient care the only concern here. Between understaffing and burnout, healthcare professionals are operating under immense strain. The prospect of having their workplace “named and shamed” as a “failing” hospital will only compound these pressures, inevitably leading to an exodus of talent from the health service. There are other second-order dangers here too. Consider, for instance, what will happen to the desirability of places with “high-performing” hospitals, a gap that’ll inevitably widen preexisting societal divisions yet further. Think I’m being paranoid? Just look at how school league tables are now hooked to property prices.

Just as important, Streeting’s initiative risks creating opportunities for private healthcare vultures. The precedent of the private prison industry, where for-profit companies have seized on the shortcomings of the public jails, is a cautionary tale here. Should the Government’s league table policy create the perception of a “two-tier” NHS, with “successful” hospitals thriving and “failing” ones crumbling, it could provide the perfect justification for an expansion of private healthcare. It goes without saying that such a move would undermine the very foundations the NHS is built on, and condemn millions to the permanent gruel of underfunding. Then there’s the question of how you’d even build a league table worth the name. As the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) has rightly noted, simplistic comparisons are particularly challenging given hospitals are now merged into multi-site trusts.

To be clear, I’m not claiming that league tables are never appropriate — either in healthcare or elsewhere. Universities, after all, have long been ranked. But the point is that these decisions are based on a limited range of factors. Hospitals and healthcare trusts, to say nothing of the communities they’re located in, are clearly far more complex. Just look at the numbers: 45,500 people a day visit major hospital A&E departments in England. And while Alan Milburn did see success in reducing the NHS waiting lists during his tenure as Health Secretary during the New Labour years, the current waiting list hovers at around 7.7 million.

This immense scale speaks to the fundamental issue with Streeting’s proposals. Ultimately, the problems facing the health service can’t be solved by superficial performance management tools. Significant, sustainable improvements will instead require a comprehensive, evidence-based approach, one that empowers frontline staff; invests in infrastructure and training; and addresses the social determinants of health. Rather than this misguided initiative, the Government should focus its efforts on policies that put staff first. Any reforms that fail to recognise their expertise, and empower their leadership, are doomed to fail.

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Beyond that broad principle, what could the Health Secretary do specifically? Improving social care is a start. But to do this, Streeting needs to understand what NHS trusts have in the way of social care provision — then dovetail that with strategies for getting patients out of oversubscribed wards, notably around boosting preventative measures around obesity and other social ills. The point, at any rate, is to understand hospitals as the local organisations they undoubtedly are: a hospital in Surrey clearly can’t be compared to one in Rochdale.

Streeting also needs to do away with the primary care rush for 8am GP slots, a phenomenon ultimately driven by sluggish telephone and online appointment systems. We equally need creative thinking around how to prod people away from A&E in all but the most critical cases. Why don’t trusts and local authorities think about health as a genuine priority, particularly in poorer areas where hospitals are dealing with a wellbeing crisis that goes far beyond emergencies? Do all this, it goes without saying, and the Department of Health may finally stop staff from leaving, along the way bolstering both care and the morale of workers.

In the short-term, though, the best the NHS can probably manage is merely to keep its head above water. Of course, that’s not the kind of vote-winning transformation Streeting is hoping for. But the challenges facing the health service are just too entrenched to be fixed through quick political fixes — let alone arbitrary league tables. As my wretched mental health patient so vividly proves, the system is just too far gone for that.

The five-year experiment is part of a £279 million deal struck with Lilly, the world’s biggest drug company, and aims to determine whether giving weight-loss injections to the obese will boost the economy. It will have two prongs. On one side, the NHS will identify potential participants for its trial on the basis of obesity, plus some combination of “hypertension, sleep apnea, cardiovascular disorders and unhealthy levels of … cholesterol”. It will then dose them with Mounjaro, Lilly’s competitor to Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy (better known as Ozempic). Meanwhile academics at the University of Manchester will be collecting data about the effects of the drug on “health-related quality of life and changes in participants’ employment status and sick days from work”.

Accustomed as we are to seeing the nation’s relatively poor health as a terrible financial burden, effectively Streeting is urging us to flip the script and see it as a possible goldmine. For ministers and managers desperate for cash injections to help get their most troublesome patient back on its feet, the implicit model must look deliciously appealing. At a price, it seems he is allowing one company exclusive access to a patient population: both to their bodies directly, via the use of a particular product, and apparently to some of their data afterwards. If public health does indeed improve as a result, the crippling financial burden on frontline resources, taxpayers, and employers will ease. Yet even if it doesn’t, sick people might continue to be a source of revenue in future, as companies like Lilly pay for access rights in the search for lucrative remedies and good publicity.

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Later on, once voters have got used to thinking of national ill health as an economic resource to offset the drain on public finances, similar initiatives might be rolled out for other expensive UK-wide disorders. Mental health conditions like depression and anxiety appear prime candidates for future government interventions like this one. In Streeting’s imagination, perhaps, biotech companies will start flocking to our shores, lured by the juicy prospect of exclusive access to a centralised pool of patients. Lazarus-like, the NHS will eventually stagger out of the tomb, throwing off its bandages. The economy will boom, replete with newly svelte and mentally balanced workers. Government ministers will dance nimbly in celebration to the sounds of Taylor Swift .

But aside from such grand visions, there are several more mundane questions that might be posed about rolling out Mounjaro as a state-backed strategy. Some of these hinge straightforwardly on what is already suspected about side effects. Vomiting is commonly reported, as are other relatively minor but still unpleasant gastric issues. A bigger issue is that even where nausea is absent, such drugs seem to remove a major source of subjective pleasure in life — namely, delight in eating — for which the satisfaction of once again becoming an efficient source of productivity units may come as scant consolation.

Described as the “King Kong” of weight loss jabs, Mounjara’s key ingredient is terzepatide which, like semaglutide, works partly by causing appetite suppression. According to a former user of the latter “I didn’t even think of (food). … Looking at a bag of Doritos was kind of like looking at a pair of socks”. Another admitted: “Almost immediately I couldn’t eat at all. I couldn’t drink. I couldn’t do anything. Tea and toast in the morning is my go-to and I could not touch it from the very first day.”

To people of ascetic sensibilities, this might seem a negligible price to pay for health; but then again, ascetics are unlikely to need Mounjaro or Wegovy in the first place. In contrast, we constitutionally sybaritic types tend to place enormous importance in life on the sensory joy and comforting reassurance which food can bring, an enthusiasm which evidently crosses cultures, culinary tastes, and pay packets. Unless you are literally starving, food is practically the one daily pleasure in life you can reliably count on, be the fare grand or humble; and if it wasn’t for the prospect of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, some of us wouldn’t bother getting out of bed at all.  Indeed, along with what has become known as an “Ozempic face” and an “Ozempic butt” — both unfortunately drooping — there is now talk of an “Ozempic personality” to match, involving anhedonia, depression, and a loss of libido.

The counterargument says that obese people are often fed up with obsessing about food in one way or another; and that regaining mobility means they will be free to get out and about, and so discover less one-dimensional sources of personal meaning instead. Maybe so. But testimonies suggest that old fondnesses are not so much permanently extinguished by the drug as temporarily quashed.

The woman who used to think Doritos looked like socks reported that, after quitting the drug, “everything came back full force”; “all the crazy cravings that I’ve struggled with for the sweets, the junk food.” Another said: “Suddenly it was like my body woke up and discovered, ‘Hey, I like bread’”.  In some cases, it is thought that people will need to become lifelong Mounjaro users in order to avoid relapsing into enjoying food again — a tragic indictment of late modernity if ever there was one.

Indeed, to me the most interesting issues arise when we consider what kind of society we inadvertently might be creating in future, by introducing such ruthlessly effective weight-loss drugs at scale now. Politicians, it seems, aren’t properly exploring the landscape of nearby possible worlds. If, for instance, without pharmaceuticals such as Wegovy and Mounjaro, just over a quarter of us are likely to become obese at some point — the current figure — then this also suggests that, with access to the drugs, a quarter of us are going to become indifferent to food and perhaps even vaguely nauseated by it, in some cases for life.

What then is going to happen to the nation’s restaurants and pubs? What will happen to regular family meals round the dinner table, nearly a thing of the past anyway as many of us favour mindless mastication in front of the telly? What about luxury food products, presently coveted as obvious temptations and sold to the public as such — and to the companies and industries that produce them? It seems to me you can’t chemically neuter a huge part of the population’s taste buds and not see swingeing social effects elsewhere.

Another interesting question concerns notions of personal responsibility. At the moment, there is still too much emphasis on personal choice for obesity in many people’s minds, with structural features such as addictive hidden sugars and contributory environmental factors being improperly discounted. Equally, it would be an overstatement to say there was nothing an individual could do to change his or her shape.

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But with drugs available, obesity will become statistically much rarer. Fatness will become even less socially acceptable than it is now in the eyes of other people, and notions of personal responsibility yet more salient. Obese people who have ready access to the drugs and yet who fail to take advantage will become conceptualised by fellow taxpayers as wilfully stubborn drains on the public purse. They may even be thought undeserving of benefits, or of other NHS help. We have officially moved out of the “kindler, gentler politics” phase into the “tough choices” era, after all.

At the same time, in cases where the NHS positively withholds free treatment from someone in future — maybe, say, after an allotted period of treatment is up — it seems likely that such an individual will then see herself as having extra reason to blame the system for her physical state. Effectively, the NHS’s adoption of Mounjaro at scale will embolden some to equate the state’s failure to prevent obesity in their own case as equivalent to causing it. Already we have Daily Mail testimonies from hard-up private buyers of semaglutide, complaining it is “disgusting” that the jobless might get the medicine for free, when they themselves have to pay. Grievance culture can take many creative forms; feeling hard done by because the government won’t pay for injections that make Doritos look radically unlike Doritos is quite possibly the next one.

In the meantime, slender fashionistas on fashion show front rows are secretly buying Ozempic to make them yet more ethereal; adolescent girls are seamlessly incorporating the drug into their already vast repertoire of ways to mortify the flesh; plastic surgeons are busy informing those with “Ozempic face” about which fillers and surgeries are best to purchase, in order to disguise the sag. The future of weight loss is already hurtling towards us. Rather than focusing on appetising-looking new financial opportunities, we should probably have a proper think about the hidden additives.

It’s a crusade Farage knows only too well. Despite Conservative Party infighting, the political battle ahead won’t be between competing factions on the Right. As Reform has stated and Trump has clearly understood, the real fight will be between those who feel disillusioned and alienated, and those spared such suffering. Farage’s choice to launch Reform’s manifesto in Merthyr Tydfil in the South Wales Valleys was symbolic: not only is the town synonymous with the birth of revolutionary socialism, but it was also the constituency held by the founder of the Labour Party, Keir Hardie in the early 20th century.

If the Labour Party is to counter the threat of Reform in Britain’s abandoned and despondent communities, it will need humility. And it must begin by once again respecting working-class Britain. This means taking its concerns seriously, not dismissing its anger or conjuring up fancy theories to explain voter choices away. We can’t present working-class people as uneducated and highly susceptible dupes. They know more than any social scientist about the meaning of impoverishment.

As the recent election made clear, we live in an age of deep political mistrust, where old loyalties and political allegiances based on the class system are breaking apart, where a large percentage of the electorate veers between anger and apathy, and where new forms of media have transformed the political terrain. But there has been another dramatic shift: the Americanisation of our political system, which has brought about a new political and cultural milieu in which identity has replaced class. As we can see from Reform’s success, the performative politics of emotion now reigns supreme.

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Before this visit, watching Farage weighing up whether to run in Britain’s most recent election or help Trump secure a second term was not incidental. It takes us to the heart of the politics in which he thrives. Of course, characters such as Farage are not entirely new to our political scene: just as a wealthy Oswald Mosley presented himself as a man of the people, Enoch Powell, whose family had roots in the mining communities of South Wales, made a career by demonising immigrants and prophesying “rivers of blood”. Farage, however, is a different breed of politician, who speaks of British values and sovereignty, yet who takes his political and strategic ideas from beyond these shores.

Despite his “anti-woke” rhetoric, Farage speaks more about identity politics than anyone else in British politics. In this, he takes after his bloodied friend, whose 2016 election victory inspired many of Reform’s campaigning methods. Identity politics thrives on mobilising negative emotions, from general anxieties of an insecure world to amplifying each and every sense of injustice or verbal wounding to keep politics operating at skin level. That is the appeal, and it is also the reason why our elections have become so volatile. And as the past days have shown, it has bred a new species of violence that can’t be ignored.

We have a new category of floating voters today who, unmoored from traditional ideology and allegiances, no longer neatly sit in what we once thought of as the centre ground. Again, the United States is instructive here. Take the case of McDowell County in West Virginia: a former mining region and one of the poorest areas of post-industrial America, topping many of the league tables for social deprivation. In 2008, 53% of the community voted for Barack Obama and his message of hope and change. Yet in 2020, 79% voted Trump. The warning for Labour should be clear: when disappointment prevails, any change is welcomed, and it is those who feel that their lives are stuck in a deep-seated statis whose choices are the most volatile.

All this would suggest that immigration is only really a problem when an economy is doing badly. And let’s be honest, for many who live in traditional working-class areas in Britain, things have been grim for quite some time. But immigration is also a highly emotive smokescreen: Trump was the first to realise that, by provoking the culture war on social media, he could distract from his actual policies.

The Left should ignore Reform’s distracting rhetoric and instead focus on the substance of their policy agenda. I am at a loss as to why a single journalist didn’t asked Farage during the campaign what he thought of the banking crisis of 2008, which due to fraud, negligence and greed was the catalyst for the following age of austerity that decimated the living standards of the poor. A former city-trader who worked on the commodities exchanges, we can surely guess his loyalties?

Behind all the bluster, there is a clear set of policies Reform stands for. It is clear it wants less taxes for the wealthy, greater powers for multi-national corporations, less worker rights for those in gainful employment, lower social security benefits, and a doing away with all those unfair inherence taxes on two-million-pound properties. No wonder they would rather seek to evoke the negative emotions of the electorate, for these are hardly policies that will liberate the forgotten on Tyneside.

To his credit, Keir Starmer has just appointed what is arguably the most working-class cabinet in history. But the party will need to go much farther to regain the trust of those communities that birthed the Labour Party more than a century ago. That means delivering upon policy promises to help the underprivileged, and most importantly shifting away from the identity politics sewer in which Farage continues to swim. This can be swiftly done by showing an absolute commitment to freedom of speech, thereby leaving concerns about cancel culture to the hyper moralists.

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This would require a willingness to defend the right of others to stand for what they believe in. I engaged in a conversation earlier this week with David Bull on Talk television not because I agree with anything Reform stands for, but because perhaps the most radical thing we can do in today’s climate is to listen to those we fundamentally disagree with and show we can move beyond a divisive and dismissive stance.

Challenging Reform therefore means changing the terms of the debate so that poor, white communities feel they can exercise political agency. One unfortunate recent development has been the imposition of the term “privilege” upon broken communities that clearly have none in any meaningful sense. I was first properly sensitised to the common usage of the word in a university setting during the pandemic. By coincidence, I also happened to be reading a biography of the American singer, actor and black activist Paul Robeson. I couldn’t imagine for a second that he would have used that term as he marched in solidarity with hungry miners from South Wales on London’s wintery streets in 1928, in a spontaneous scene that would become the start of a beautiful friendship.

Of course, campaigns for racial and gender equality have been hugely important and the ongoing fight for justice in the face of racial violence remains necessary. But if the introduction of race and gender were important correctives in recognising the plight of marginalised groups, something has been lost along the way. What concerns me is how conceptual saviours have used race to castigate poor white Brits — often heterosexual men — who vote for Reform. Rather than labelling all Reform voters as intolerant racists, the Labour Party must speak to voters about why the Reform narrative is so appealing.

Beyond this, the Labour Party must have a more honest conversation on the question of racial politics that is open to its complexities. The realisation that among the most vocal supporters of the Rwanda Bill were second- and third-generation immigrant politicians such as Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel should be enough to temper enthusiasm for the uncritical deployment of intersectional analysis. Racial politics has never been straight-forward. And the relegation of class background in the intersectional schematic only supports the idea that identity politics is just a bourgeoise version of victim Top Trumps, where on every occasion the white heterosexual male comes bottom regardless of social status. One strategy to disarm the allure of Reform could therefore be to positively rethink what diversity means so the working classes feel their presence is recognised and their voices are heard.

In his first speech as Prime Minister, Starmer called for “a bigger reset”. Part of that reset should be to take a step back from believing social media in any way represents the views of what we might dare to call “the people”. Social media has become so toxic that it is leading us all into a dangerous abyss. Besides, if recent events in France have taught us anything, it’s that the countryside is bigger than Twitter.

Come 4 July, the Scottish Nationalists are in danger of losing badly, having become bound up with a militant current of minoritarian social liberalism which undermines the collective and civic basis of classical nationalism, as it has historically existed on the Left. Meanwhile, the national project of the Brexiteers, which lives on the Right, fell short of its own lofty expectations: its architects in the Conservative Party (set to fare even worse than the SNP) proved unable to deliver on their promise of a Britain secure from the ravages of economic and cultural globalisation. 

In short, Britons seem unable to do nationalism with any success or conviction, that is, to put it into practice beyond its merely performative aspects. So, as the election day approaches, where can the British political establishment look to form a coherent nation-based system?

There is, one place that anyone aspiring to a functional nationalism, in Britain or elsewhere, can take notes from: a forgotten corner of its former empire, where the people happen to do a decent job of maintaining themselves both as a nation and a state, even if it isn’t actually a state in the Westphalian sense. I’m talking about Quebec, a Canadian province that is also a nation unto itself, and one with its own fraught history of holding referendums. Today is Quebec’s own Fête nationale: Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day. And what better occasion to survey the trajectory of nationalism there?

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The animating fact of Quebec politics and history is that of survivance, the desire of its people to survive as a distinct society of Francophones in the midst of an overwhelmingly Anglophone continent. Though Quebec’s identity is rooted in the French language and descends from a heritage that stretches back to New France, modern Quebec nationalism was forged in the Fifties and Sixties, in a time of immense social change known as la Révolution Tranquille (The Quiet Revolution). It saw the conservative and pro-clerical regime of Maurice Duplessis replaced by the reforming government of Jean Lesage, which nationalised utilities and took over education and welfare services from the Catholic Church; these measures established the modern contemporary incarnation of l’etat québécois or the Quebec state, looked to by its people as the supreme institutional expression of the Quebecois nation.

In the Seventies, desires arose among both the political-intellectual elite and the broad populace to make that Quebec state sovereign: their leader was journalist-turned-Lesage cabinet minister René Lévesque, who executed the utilities nationalisation scheme. His Parti Québécois (PQ) would lead the push for independence from Canada with the referendum of 1980; though it was rejected by a 60-40 margin, Lévesque’s government nonetheless largely shaped the character of Quebec nationalism for decades to come: Left-wing, pro-union, secularist, feminist, environmentalist, and aligned with global anti-colonial currents. It was under Lévesque as well that Quebec passed legislation to enshrine French as its official language, cementing the Quebec state’s role as defender of the national character. 

La Révolution Tranquille, however, also spawned a divergent and opposing tradition: federalism, which may be understood formally to mean an acceptance of continued membership in the Canadian federation. But in Quebec, it also has deeper philosophical underpinnings: a kind of radical emancipatory individualist liberalism developed in the pages of the Duplessis-era dissident journal Cité Libre. Its great champion was Pierre Trudeau, who as prime minister of Canada prevailed in the 1980 referendum, but whose subsequent actions sowed the seeds of the knife-edge second referendum of 1995, when Quebec nearly seceded, had it not been for a 54,288-vote margin (1.16%) in favour of “Non”. 

For 40 years, Quebec politics was a struggle between the two poles, nationalist-sovereigntist and federalist, with “soft” or semi-nationalist compromises sometimes gaining ground. By the 2010s, however, something different was happening, a depolarisation of the old sovereignty debate and the emergence of a new alternative: firmly nationalist but agnostic or neutral on independence. Such a stance meant that the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) could attract both soft nationalists and sovereigntists, amounting to a majority of the Francophone electorate. Indeed, this was the formula that its founder and leader François Legault used to win power in the elections of 2018 and 2022.

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The CAQ has pledged to leave behind the quest for independence, treating it as a settled affair (Legault was a former PQ minister). But it has never hesitated to brandish its nationalist credentials in other ways, namely its aggressive agendas on language, culture, and migration: these can be discerned in a bevy of new regulations expanding French-language requirements for businesses, immigrants and English universities, in addition to raising the latter’s tuition costs. Legault has also routinely squared off with Justin Trudeau’s federal government, pressuring it to act more decisively in halting the flow of refugees through Quebec’s borders, as well as proposing a referendum — not on independence — but on strengthening immigration powers. 

Though what is significant from a historical point of view is what the CAQ represents: the re-emergence of Right-wing nationalism as a dominant force. Indeed, the intellectual implications of this tendency are only now being fleshed out by a new generation of thinkers, led by the likes of Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard, Legault’s 23-year-old speechwriter, who published a treatise Le Retour des Bleus (“Return of the Blues”) attempting to revive the conservative or bleu strain of Quebec nationalism; this would entail a rehabilitation of figures such as Duplessis, whose legacy remains anathema to the largely progressive sovereigntist movement.

Just as interesting is the recent resurgence of the PQ as the chief opposition to Legault’s CAQ. After having been written off as a dying Boomer-era artefact, the sovereigntist party has risen in the polls under an energetic young leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, who has threatened to hold a third referendum on independence. However, tough support for the PQ has not actually translated into support for the idea of sovereignty, suggesting that this boost in the PQ’s fortunes has more to do with voicing dissatisfaction with Legault than with Quebecers wanting to revisit the issue. 

All of which means that Quebec politics now appears to be a contest between two vigorous but antagonistic nationalisms; a fact highlighted by the decline of the federalist Quebec Liberals. Though the tension is genuine, these two variants of nationalism are nonetheless united both in their recognition of the Quebec nation as a civic-collective entity, as illustrated by their common resistance to the minoritarian social liberalism that’s taken hold in the rest of Canada; and in their shared readiness to deploy the powers of the Quebec state as a means of safeguarding that nation (leaving aside whether that state should be sovereign), as shown by the activist policies of the nationalist parties, Left and Right. As a result, for instance, Quebec’s language regime may seem absurd or even vindictive to outsiders and non-Francophones, but it starts to make a bit more sense when viewed as part of a larger historical project, that of ensuring national survivance. 

These linguistic and cultural differences aside, we can glean the operative principle for those — in Britain, America or Anglo-Canada or elsewhere — who find themselves drawn to the nationalist persuasion after years of hyper-globalisation: the nation-state only makes sense if both its constituent terms are taken seriously. 

For those on the Left, reclaiming the nation requires promoting unifying bonds and symbols of nationhood over and above the subaltern identity politics that’s become fashionable across the West, for the nation is ultimately what legitimates the state. For the Right, meanwhile, a constructive nationalism in the post-Brexit era will have to rest on restoring the state and its capacity to act in defence of the nation, most of all with respect to borders and rebuilding industry. It will involve a rejection of that odious and long descredited combination of free market-ism and flag waving that’s been the standard of the Anglo-Saxon Right for decades.

For as many a Québécois can attest, without a powerful state to act on your behalf in a hostile world, any nation, no matter how historically great, is liable to be reduced to, in David Starkey’s phrase, a “feeble little country.”