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Stuart Mitchell/Reform UK/PA
Morgan McSweeney, Dominic Cummings and Tony Blair. They represent wildly different political traditions and instincts, but to spend any time with them is to be immediately struck by how closely their analyses can overlap. And right now, their Venn diagram has taken on a particular relevance as British politics contemplates the future of Nigel Farage and Reform UK.
It might sound absurd to the casual observer. These men hold wildly varying beliefs and, in many ways, define themselves in direct opposition to each other. McSweeney’s entire project is predicated on the idea that Blair’s “radical centrism” is not only out of date but politically objectionable for not taking seriously the working classes Labour exists to represent. Blair, in turn, remains eyerollingly dismissive of McSweeney’s “blue” Labourism and his attempt to win back the disaffected old voters lost in the years of high Labour liberalism. Both men, in their different ways, reject out of hand what they would see as Cummings’s brand of anarcho-conservative populism. Cummings, meanwhile, believes that McSweeney and Blair are both achingly anachronistic in their understanding of the modern world and what is necessary to make the British state function.
And yet, there is much that binds these three figures together. Within weeks of entering No. 10, McSweeney had come to the same conclusion as both Cummings and Blair: the British state, in its current form, is not fit for purpose and needs what Keir Starmer has since called “a complete rewiring”. Of all the influential figures in British politics, Blair and Cummings today are among the most convinced of the seismic nature of the coming technological revolution, not just for jobs and wages, but for politics itself. All three are also convinced that without fundamental reform, the duopoly which has ruled Westminster since Labour broke past the Liberals in the Twenties may not have long for this world.
With the election of Donald Trump in November, and the rise of Elon Musk as a figure of epochal power, Westminster has entered into a tailspin of speculation about the prospect of Nigel Farage being the figure who might finally put this teetering political system out of its misery. Despite having only five MPs to Labour’s 402, there is now open speculation that Farage may not simply expand his party’s presence in parliament at the next election, but win the next election, becoming prime minister himself.
Farage himself plays up such speculation for obvious reasons. “We are about to witness a political revolution the likes of which we have not seen since Labour after the first world war,” he told The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards. “Politics is about to change in the most astonishing way. Newcomers will win the next election.”
It is worth stressing at this point that the barriers to a Reform victory remain enormous. To win outright, Farage would need to double the party’s vote share and see both Labour and Tory support collapse. Reform now lies in second place in 98 constituencies, 89 of which have a Labour MP. The Tories, meanwhile, are in second place in 292 seats, 218 of which have a Labour MP. The fundamentals of British politics, in other words, make it far harder for Reform to win the next election than the Tories.
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Subscribe‘All potential vulnerabilities were identified and, where possible, closed down: Green pledges abandoned, spending plans watered down, and language around immigration and Brexit tightened up to leave no doubt in voters’ minds.’ But they’ve shot their bolt: it was all lies. They won’t get away with that again. No-one will believe a word they say.
Very nice article, and to celebrate it, here’s a song which feels just right for the occasion.
https://youtu.be/5VLXT4Cj6ts?si=o_Y2aGF4TkeOSyCE
With Trump’s portrait you could have gone with I don’t like cricket
🙂
Parental Warning: Baby Boomer music!
What is the use? There will be no elections (I think?) until 4 and 1/2 years have passed ….
Perhaps things will come into focus long before then. We were pretty certain from 2022 that Labour would win a majority in 2024 because they were dominating the polls. It is quite possible – even likely – that Reform will be leading the polls next year.
If they do, I would expect Conservative voters to move en masse to Reform (I know I will, without hesitation, if they look like the best bet on the Right). If the Tory voting intention share collapses, MPs will also begin to move and the Reform parliamentary party will grow rapidly.
If Musk senses that the move is on, he may very well turn on the taps and Reform could have paid staff running operations in a hundred or so target seats.
The Tories would likely have to sue for peace and take a junior role in any pact. They would focus on the South of England leaving Reform the rest of the country.
So by, say, 2026 it might be clear which way the wind is blowing. It certainly seems unlikely that 2TK will turn around Labour’s fortunes.
Game on!
That sounds a pretty accurate analysis. The Conservatives have allowed the centre ground to drift progressively leftwards since 1997. They may well pay a heavy price for that, sooner than they realise, as Reform drags it back in the opposite direction
Indeed. I see the distinct possibility of a pact developing between the Conservative and Reform parties, potentially leading to a combined ‘RefCon’ alliance. If they won enough local and Parliamentary by-elections over the next 4 years, Labour would be plunged into total chaos. It would also give the Tories the scope to ditch the old party and Constituency drag-anchors, and develop a forward-looking policy agenda fit for the future, rather than hankering back to the past.
Hopefully …. 🙂
The objective is to save the legacy political parties?
The portrait of Trump above and behind these three apostles looks like those 19th century lithographs of the Saviour. All serene, with the clouds parting above his head to reveal the heavenly light resembling an aureole, and sunbeams bursting through the clouds as the darkness clears away.
Is the President dressed as a cricketer to impress the English?
I hope to God that portrait was an unsolicited gift, because otherwise it means he commissioned it himself.
Thanks anyway for pointing it out. I had a good chuckle.
Obviously the greatest cricketer that ever played the game. You don’t remember his 200 before lunch at Miami batting against Holding, Garner, Lillee and Warne ?
He is a good sportsman. After all, he beat Tiger Woods at golf.
It’s rubbish isn’t it. Whatever anyone says, it should never be classed as “art”.
In the US, this type of look in a portrait is more closely associated with tennis and a “preppy” look. Cricket, no.
In one sense, it is possible to see Blair and Cummings as the yin to the other’s yang. Cummings sees history as a dark, chaotic process of disorder and renewal, while Blair cannot escape his faith in progress.
I think they both look at the same sort of dynamics and choose to interpret them in different ways: Cummings pessimistically, Blair optimistically.
Looking at where the McSweeney-Blair-Cummings venn diagram overlaps, we can draw one central conclusion: revolutionary change is coming. The question is: who will thrive in the chaos it unleashes?
Cummings, because his dark mind is geared towards expecting it and planning scenarios out in his mind that might help to cope with it.
Cummings clearly had/has a ‘brilliance’ in certain areas. But the good Lord never gives everyone all the talents and also tends to couple talent with the odd major deficiency. A self defeating damaging ego being a regular chuckle from Him upstairs.
During his Italian campaign, one of Hannibal’s generals said to him “Hannibal, it’s true what is said, that the Gods don’t bestow all their gifts on one person. You know how to win a victory but not how to use it!”.
(That was after Hannibal had thrashed the Romans at Cannae, and marched to the gates of Rome, which he could easily have taken, before scratching his head and marching away again.)
I re-scanned article thinking Author must have mentioned the SDP and what eventually happened to them. At one point they were ahead in the Polls in 81. But silent. Bit of an omission I think.
Now doesn’t everyone think the time they are in is the most eschatological? It can sell books for sure, but isn’t the truth things in past, the West at least, evolved and a crunching revolution wasn’t quite what happened. Author refers to how AI may transform critical sectors of the UK economy and there is something in this, but bringing it back to Reform, they certainly don’t have any ideas or insights for this coming change. Quite the contrary – they want to freeze time and go back at least a couple of decades.
More broadly Reform’s problem is when they start to get pressed for real policy propositions across all areas well beyond the rage amplification about immigration. They will run into v real internal differences. Come 2029 it is unlikely the electorate going to be keen on a cuts in public services, esp if AI making more insecure, too. So what’s Farage et al going to propose? Anti-immigration will only get them so far. They will also need to acquire depth in candidate quality, or quickly one nut-job after another will undermine the project as they gain more time in the spotlight.
Nonetheless it’s certainly a warning to both main parties.
I think your complacency is going to be shattered quite soon. What’s happening now is not an incremental change.
Quite soon being 4 and a half yrs?
By then Labour will have no presence in local government at all. The party itself will disappear altogether at the election while the Tories will be reduced to begging for scraps. The era of your misrule is coming to an end.
Clearly most if not all of your downvotes are by people wanting to shoot the messenger, because your message is spot on. So what else could they object to? That you haven’t split your post into more paragraphs?
Maybe Farage should get together with Dominic Cummings who could help plot a path forward. Unfortunately, as the MSM have managed to unfairly demonise Cummings, his involvement wouldn’t be a Good Look. But he has put a lot of thought into his proposed Startup Party.
Cummings is a start up kind of bloke. He is not a long haul man at all and admits it himself.
Don’t underestimate Reform’s chances. Labour are widely loathed and their high water mark was 33+%. Down much from that and they are toast. The Tories are little better, and will be remembered for their deceits.
Reform have some nutters, but so do Labour and the Tories, and they have had millions of pounds and years to root them out and haven’t done it.
Money is pouring into Reform. Some serious people are helping out and more will join. More of both will come. They are not going away
I don’t think they are going away. But big difference once they have to develop a fuller Policy portfolio and then, much like we are seeing already with Trump’s coalition of support, the fractures will open. And as regards money pouring in, inevitable some of that turns out to be from malign actors and helps undo them.
Well they did propose an adult energy policy. They did propose an adult approach to trade with the US. They did propose leaving the ECHR, membership of which is now incompatible with being a sovereign country. They did propose some interesting changes to the tax system. They did propose a serious reform of the public sector,where vast waste abounds.
Had you seen any of that?
How much waste? We have been fed tripe about the wasteful public sector for decades and governments have devoted themselves to eliminating this for the same amount of time, so I doubt that it exists at all. The problem seems to be the reverse as programmes can’t be properly implemented as there are insufficient bureaucratic skills to make it happen. King Charles waving the Royal Sceptre might look good on TV but its not a magic wand. Bureaucrats are important and necessary.
There is some waste, but not anyway near as much as the mythology and it doesn’t add up to anything like the sums Reform suggested – 5% of public sector dept budgets is c£30b. After 14 years of austerity where’s that coming from? If they want to be clear about reductions in health care, then fine, but they won’t be will they. And the lack of detail would spook the markets immediately if they reduced taxes on assumption they can find it. Hence public expenditure would increase in debt repayment.
Let me give you just one example.
I was at a meeting, about 12 years ago regarding some engineering work being done at a hospital. I was press ganged into attending, and three more after it. They took three hours each. No one, other than myself had any knowledge of the work being undertaken. There were between eight and twelve at these meetings. It was all guff. No added value. A complete waste of my time. No knowledge to impart. No actual interest at all. Just presentism, all on the state, as they were all paid from the NHS budget.
By any metric the civil service is soporific. They still have staffing levels to do work that required people pens and paper thirty and forty years ago.
It is this way because successive governments avoid the issue or make it worse by forming another Quango to ” look into it”.
Were all the attendees NHS or public sector employees CM? Or were they contractors and PFI employees milking the NHS? There is alot of that.
Most were direct, some were barnacles. All we’re paid out of the NHS budget. None contributed anything.
Yes read their Manifesto. Full of superficial slogans. Like chucking chum into the sea to attract the fish.
The solution to public sector funding – everyone gets a 5% cost reduction target. Thus an abrogation of any policy decision making on what that then requires to deliver it. Govt doesn’t work like that. It was, as I say, ‘chum’.
‘Green pledges abandoned’.
Did anyone remember to tell Miliband?
True, but then not much of what they’re doing was promised in their Manifesto.
Just reading a book – The Coming Wave – by the founder of DeepMind. If he’s right, the World is going to be utterly different in about 20 years’ time. I mean science fiction different.
Couple of satellites bash into each other and it’ll be the reverse quite quickly. See Kessler syndrome followed by Locked in syndrome. And if it doesn’t happen by accident some agent will ensure.
Don’t cancel your landline
I cancelled my landline in about 2000 (and I hadn’t used it for years before that).
Surely you have some friends MM?
Sure. I just hate talking on the phone. Even now, I don’t have message-bank, and safe to say never answer a phone call. Civilized people text or email.
Book about surfing?
Surely Musk has to be banned from making donations to British political parties. He is a South African. He has no business meddling in British politics.
I’m sure he’ll have companies in the UK. One of them can legitimately make a donation.
Ban every company in which he (or anyone associated with him) has one share. Jail the office holders of any political party who accepts such a donation. It can’t be that hard, can it?
Ask yourself this if you can.
Would you propose such wild, dictatorial lunacy if he was of the left,(which of course he once was until, ” the left left me”).
Of course I would! I hate the Left!
The West has regularly told other countries how they should govern themselves, so how does this differ?
“The West” is a group of like minded nations. “Elon Musk” is a puffy-faced Japie.
Oh you really are the intellect. You would like to disenfranchise someone on how you judge their looks?
I disenfranchise Musk because he isn’t British (I see no issue with him participating in the political process in South Africa, or any other nation he may be a citizen of). I dislike him because he is arrogant, obnoxious, creepy and weird. The slight on his appearance is simply a shorthand way for me to telegraph my dislike for him.
I think there is a difference between telling other countries how they should run their affairs and interfering monetarily in elections.There is no law against either Uganda, Sweden, Russia or Tonga screaming at the top of their lungs how they should run U.K. should be run.
You agreed with fifty Labour activists going to campaign for Harris then? Organised from Labour headquarters, and with the knowledge of McSweeney.
I don’t know.
If only those well-meaning Britons who support ‘taking back control’ and asserting British Sovereignty and Autonomy could see how servile the image of Mr Farage ‘going to Canossa’ at Mar-a-Lago and seeking President Trump’s Ultramontane blessing and commission alongside Mr Musk’s financing is – when viewed from any other angle than that of blind enthusiasm.
Would Farage make of this Kingdom a Trumpal Vassal? Receiving the crown back at the hands of a foreigner?
Any sane British politician would be doing what Farage is doing. For the foreseeable future the US is going to be the driver of global growth as Europe sinks further and further behind due to the gob-smacking stupidity of its rulers who are systematically destroying the continent’s industrial base. Every day the news from Germany gets worse; let’s not even talk about France.
Not sure what your point is. Britain was never anything like France and Germany, and it isn’t now.
Not sure what your point is.
It’s not complicated. We need to focus on the transatlantic relationship and not that with the collapsing economies of the EU.
I was (and remain) an ardent Brexiter, so on that level at least, I agree with you.
Well, no-one who is now complaining about this seemed at all bothered when Soros spent £50 million trying to reverse Brexit.
Or when Labour sent 50 groupies to join Kamala ‘Word Salad’ Harris’s campaign.
Well, they should have been.
Agree and one can see the rules being tightened.
However worth being aware he’ll likely have switched sides in US come 2029. The fall out with Trump inevitable.
It wouldn’t matter who he does or doesn’t support. He’s still awful. He could give me $100 million and I’d still hate him.
SA-born Gary “Autoglass” Lubner is a big donor to Labour. I presume you complained about him as well?
Never heard of the guy. Is he a British citizen? If not, then yes, I would complain.
Neither do the EU have such business, yet they interfere.. Neither do other Supranational organisations , yet they do to.
Etc….
Well, they shouldn’t.
“Better a wise fool than a foolish wit.”
I must be the only fool who thinks the British Constitution is functioning very well and showing remarkable flexibility and robustness.
I am always wary of individuals who reach for mechanistic metaphors for the life of the state. The correct interpretative model for our living Constitution is that of an organic entity, not a machine for governance. The Body Politic. That is our most priceless and ancient inheritance in this Kingdom.
Much of the angst and tension in our political moment, it strikes me, is because the whole political nation does “groaneth and travaileth in pain together”.
Impatient of the upshot we mistake the pangs of healthy labour with a malfunctioning machine.
We would all like to “trammle up the consquence and leap the world to come… that one blow might be the be-all and end-all” but in our Constitution the process, both formal and informal, is part of the national purgation.
As with the Commons during Brexit, which I thought was a model for Parliaments the world over – that so hot a disagreement could be contained within the stretched bounds of peaceful disagreement – the Constitution is operating at white hot efficiency to accomodate the new political realities without breaking.
We will have to see if France, Germany or the United States, with their dead paper Constitutions can accomodate the change that is coming without a political dissolution. I have my doubts.
Makes you proud, or grateful, to be British.
The loudest voices for constitutional change are from tyrants and losers.
What an interesting comment
I suspect that there is a lot more truth in it than I care to acknowledge
Looking back, there have been plenty of such moments in British history, and our Constitution has come about through that lengthy process, able to accommodate the tensions thrown up by each era.
The Brexit outcome was indeed a very recent testing of its mettle and in the end (whatever else anyone thinks of Boris Johnson) he was able to utilise it to overcome even the most recent reform – the introduction of the Supreme Court by Tony Blair – to prevail upon the democratically-expressed will of the people.
A living Constitution is no constitution at all. It bends with the wind. Have you no solid, unchanging principles in the UK?
We have only one: what the King-in-Parliament enacts is law. That is, no government can bind its successor; parliament can always change the law if there is a majority to do so. That is why treaty agreements that bind parliament’s actions – like EU or ECHR membership are anathema to our constitution and are eventually jettisoned.
EDIT: It is interesting to compare the US and the UK on the subject of citizenship for people born in the country. In the UK a government with a majority could just say, there is no such citizenship right whereas in the US, Trump would need to change the constitution with all that entails – which is near to impossible.
Trees that are able to “bend with the wind” don’t fall, whereas those that try to oppose the wind will break.
We’re mighty oaks, TM.
You inadvertantly call to mid Kipling’s great poem about the British Constitution- The Reeds of Runnymede.
At Runnymede, at Runnymede
What say the reeds at Runnymede?
The lissom reeds that give and take,
That bend so far, but never break,
They keep the sleepy Thames awake
With tales of John at Runnymede.
You mean like the right to bear arms?
Whereas the US constitution means whatever you want it to mean at any point in time
My paper Constitution guarantees I can’t be put in jail for obnoxious tweets, and can’t be charged with non-crime hate incidents. Plus we can own firearms for our self-defense.
I’d call that check and mate vs. whatever small liberties the British elites still allow you.
If only it were so.
The increasingly fraught and existential struggle for vacant seats on the bench of the United States Supreme Court gives the lie to the purported inviolability of the Constitutional ‘guarantees’ you mention.
Fleshly Judges, appointed for life, unaccountable to anyone, and with the power to bind and loose as they see fit, are the true arbiters of “Liberty” in The Great Republic – not reified paper Constitutions.
You’re talking about tyranny. That’s even more likely in your system; you’re experiencing it right now. At least if we in the US are faced with a tyranny we have the Constitution to rally around, and the 2nd Amendment gives us the means to do something to oppose it. In the UK, you’ve already completely rolled over to tyranny.
In this Kingdom our next elections are in 4 years or so at which, if the people are so minded, we can overturn the entire political order legally, legitimately, honestly and without recourse to civil violence.
When rebellion has been translated from a foul crime into a patriotic duty it forecloses all manner of ways and means of forging a living compromise.
Hence the tradition of insurrection and assasination in American politics which has no modern parallel in Britain.
No, our next elections are in 2025, unless the Government decides it would not be in the public interest to hold them.
I beg your pardon, you are quite correct. I had meant Parliamentary Elections.
And that’s your problem. Your House of Commons is a dictatorship. It can do anything it wants. You have no constitutionally enshrined rights. You have no upper house or executive who can veto their insanity. Why can’t they amend the electoral law so they never have to run again? Cromwell’s long Parliament did just that.
You also have enough executed and deposed Kings not to be able to be all high and mighty about rebellion. Your Navy let the Dutch King invade England in order to depose the legitimate King, in an act of mass high treason..
I’m afraid you simply don’t understand how our parliament works.
As for those examples you cite, they’ve proven to be formative towards our Constitution, i.e. resulting from long historical experience. Kings were deposed/executed for the very reason that they sought to exercise powers beyond those which the “Commons” (hence the name) would put up with. That can no longer happen, though it mightn’t stop some party or other from trying.
I’ve no doubt that our parliament will continue to evolve, which it’s free to do unencumbered by a (supposedly) inviolable written Constitution.
Any ‘written’ constitution is open to interpretation, which is how the USA have embraced every new era. On the whole some of those verities have served the people well. I wish we had an enshrined right to express an opinion without the possibility of being jailed.
The idea that we live under tyranny in the UK is just silly. We have an unpopular government with a large parliamentary majority. But they will be dealt with by the normal democratic means when the time comes. We have some policy areas where the ruling class doesn’t agree with the majority of the public but that will also get sorted out in time – in favour of the people. We have some unevenness in the application of law (usually because of undue sensitivity to the feelings of ethic minority communities).We also have some overreach by some politicised institutions. But we are a long way from tyranny. There is absolutely no need for an armed uprising or anything that the 2nd Amendment might enable. Just patience and planning.
People have been arrested for nasty tweets. That’s tyranny.
The police will cite you for non-crimes. That’s tyranny.
Tell those people who are serving a prison sentence for saying words the government don’t like that they are being ‘silly’
This is what I mean by overreach by politicised institutions. And it is very sad for those that get on the wrong side of them. But the laws that enable such behaviour by officials will be rescinded by the next government which will put a stop to it. It isn’t a tyranny as long as we have democratic elections, political parties that are not in cahoots against the public and we are not bound by the rule-of-judges. I am pretty confident that the next government will among other things take us out of the ECHR, scrap the Equalities Act and the Human Rights Act and the recording of non-crime hate incidents.
You call it “political overreach; Arthur calls it tyranny. I’m inclined to believe that the overreach of our government that curtails and infringes upon our civil liberties (especially free speech) is perilously close to, if not actually, tyranny.
And so much for a new government over-turning policies it does not like if it wins the next general election. That democratic dynamic counts for nothing if the Woking Class elite merely changes its party name, but not its fundamental disdain for the general population. The only truly democratic vote in the UK in recent decades was the 2016 Brexit referendum – and just contemplate the massive reaction against that by the political elite who did everything in their power (and continue to do so) to overturn and undermine the will of the majority. Plus ça change, as they say! At least in the USA the population does have solid protection in the form of a written constitution, however flawed it may be, and however susceptible it may be to manipulation by clever lawyers in both houses.
The two-tier justice now prevailing in the UK is an affront to the principles of the so-called democratic process and a manifestation of tyranny, whatever name it’s given.
It doesn’t seem particularly healthy that (foreign) oligarchs are meddling so much. Whether you agree with the oligarch or not.
Indeed. It just shows Farage never really been interested in sovereignty. The contradiction completely lost on him.
If there is intentional, documented meddling, that is one thing. If it is mere imitation by the populace, that is something else entirely, and not necessarily a bad thing.
Musk is not the first oligarch or foreign government to be meddling but he seems to excite a response as if he is the first.
He might not be the first, but he is certainly the least pleasant.
I agree, but many Americans may see this as payback time for Starmer’s troops helping with Harris’s campaign.
What’s fascinating is that none of these panjandrums have drawn the glaringly obvious conclusion from the technological revolution that we are experiencing: that it ultimately renders the centralised state – as well as the elites that it fosters – completely redundant.
What is the most robust system that humans have ever created? The Internet.
Who is in charge of the Internet? No-one is.
The Internet is a protocol-driven system. Protocol-based systems are flexible, adaptable and responsive in ways that the monolithic command-driven hierarchies of the state can never be.
Shrewd politicians, if such things existed, would be developing new forms of mutualism and localism to exploit the benefits of instantaneous communication, not continuing to drag everything into the orbit of a sclerotic centralised bureaucracy that has shown itself to be at best incapable of effective management of, and at worst destructive of, the security and wealth of the entire society.
Um, no. You might have noticed that the internet is dominated by a few Silicon Valley oligarchs who can – and did – meddle in US politics with some success. The internet allows such domination to be overcome more quickly than in the past, but it still takes time.
Oh, and China.
There’s nothing to prevent you from building a platform just as those guys have done if you have a good enough idea. With AI you don’t even need much in the way of technical skills – or money.
The biggest issue we have in the UK generally is the dead hand of the huge governmental beurocracy. Name a single government department that actually delivers what it is supposed to!
Defence? Health? Home Office? None of them are fit for purpose, and with the lunatic pushing a Net Zero (or you’ll die trying)…….
You’ve got me interested. Could you enlarge on what a ‘protocol-based system’ is?
I had the pleasure of staying in Clacton the night Nigel Farage (and four of his colleagues) became an MP. There is nothing less than a historical inevitably about Nigel Farage becoming the next PM in 2029 (if not before) at the head of a Reform UK government. I am but one of many millions of British voters awaiting that day with relish.
Have a nice day.
Mike Buchanan
JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS http://j4mb.org.uk
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I actually think that Nigel Farage (and four of his colleagues) became five MPs.
Labour will approach the next election in the Conservative position; exposed as totally untrustworthy. I certainly wouldn’t care to predict the outcome.
I guarantee that should Farage become PM then that’s the end of the Union
Support for Scottish Independence shall without doubt climb to 60% +
And in a sustained manner
And such invokes the Universal law
That you cannot govern without consent No matter what barriers Westminster erects to Prevent
You can “guarantee” no such thing. I give the Scots more credit than to cut their noses off to spite their faces due to an incumbent PM in Westminster.
Westminster is economically , morally and military bankrupt
And Scotland ceding from the Union will cure that?
The good news just keeps coming, eh?
Philosophically, McSweeney is hopeless. He has told the Labour leadership to trumpet the message that their government will improve their lives financially. Yet their Treasury is concerned only with public sector investment and restoring the real earnings of unionised workers they are in.
Labour is a walking and talking anachronism. The Conservatives have more chance of achieving internal change because they have been transformed overnight into a blank slate. Hopefully, Ms Badenoch will be the last useless volley of Tory liberalism.
Farage might be a brilliant political campaigner with a unique gift for understanding and reflecting the concerns of an important section of the electorate but he give no indication he is capable of guiding a modern economy through the transformation needed or running the State.
Quite right! Only Starmer can do that!
When I read “both Blair and Cummings see the world entering a period of climactic change which may result in something entirely new coming into being” I thought for a moment they must have had an epiphany on Net Zero.
A danger of over intellectualizing the much simpler issue: the simplicity of the average Britvoter, and their enslavery to ‘ meeja’: thus politicians have massively underestimated and misundertood, not least by pure arrogance, of the core issue of freedom of speech.
It affects britvoters obsession with expressing their ” views” on ” soshul meeja” now the pub bar replacement.
There are three areas of political doctrine in which politicians views of importance and interest and the reverse of britvoters actual views.. racism, LGBT and global warming- only Farage and Reform have, amazingly, picked up on this blindingly obvious fact!
Absolutely! Coming from a working class background, I voted Reform in a heartbeat when they pledged to end the ‘Net Zero’ madness. The poorest in our society will end up paying for the misplaced social consciences of the middle class. ‘Out of touch with the voter’ doesn’t scratch the surface of Labour’s problems. They are bereft of society- changing ideas and represent no-one except the middle class political elitists which the party has become.
The modern voting system has become a spectacle—dominated by technocrats, massive donations, and technology—losing its connection to real-world outcomes. Instead of empowering people, voting feels like a theatrical show, with billionaires and their out-of-touch tweets shaping narratives more than actual policies. Billions are spent, yet the average person sees little benefit.
Democratic ideals are colliding with technology, and the cracks are showing. Voting, once a tool for change, is now overshadowed by the instant impact of a click or a tweet. Meanwhile, our competitors focus on tangible results, bypassing these performative distractions. If we don’t rethink how democracy works in a tech-driven world, we risk falling behind.
As Shirley Jackson’s *The Lottery* warns, blindly following outdated systems is dangerous. It’s time to question whether our voting system still works or if it’s just an illusion of progress in an increasingly disconnected world.
Billions are spent, yet the average person sees little benefit.
And THAT, friends and neighbors, is how people like Trump, Melei, and some others get elected – by noticing the forgotten people and that govt is supposed to work for them, not the other way around.
“Could Elon Musk make Farage king?” So that headline was complete clickbait, correct?
Probably most of us correctly guessed that “king” was meant figuratively.
It’s interesting to note that the Tories’ destruction, probably permanent, has been caused almost entirely by their obstinate refusal to curb immigration, legal and illegal, having repeatedly lied that they would, and now Labour are making exactly the same mistake.
What’s more, Starmer and co will be completely unable to remedy it, even if they wanted to. With his lawyerly outlook and undying loyalty to the EU, he will be less likely to make the necessary first steps, namely to repeal Blair’s Human Rights act and leave the EHCR, than I would be to fly to the Moon on the back of a swan!
When govt fails those who it is supposed to serve, people eventually notice. THAT is how Trump happened. DC has been dysfunctional for some time and discontent has brewed for a while. But until Trump, the would-be “solutions” were people who were part of an already broken system. When the status quo is not working, people will take a gamble on a Trump, a Melei, or some other so-called outsider. Because the insiders, the alleged professionals and experts, are not working out.
If Labour wanted or needed Lib Dem support it would have to reverse VAT on private school fees, restore winter fuel allowances and reduce employers nat. ins contributions, and several other unwise and vindictive policies.
The Tories are proven failures and the Labour Government has demonstrated its clueless incompetence in record time. Liberal Democrats are vacuous and SNP another well proven failure. The electorate across all of the U.K. has nowhere else to turn but towards Reform. One just has to hope they play their cards right and can find a full slate of trustworthy candidates for local and national elections. It’s a big ask, but with the help of the likes of Elon Musk, Reform might make it and effect the revolution away from the creeping Socialism of the Uniparty – which we so badly need to happen if we are to avoid national implosion and economic disaster.
A multitude of scenarios can be imagined. Much will depend on a relatively small number of factors, which can be partially controlled, or at least influenced, by Starmer, First, his relationship with the Trump administration, and ability (or not) to land an FTA that is perceived as ‘good’ for the UK. Second, his negotiations with the weakened EU to ‘reset’ the relationship; if there is a perception of making broad concessions, which prepare the ground for a reentry of the UK to the EU, this will be once again polarise UK politics, and be exploited by Reform. Other factors are obvious – Ukraine, Syria, immigration, the UK standard of living, etc.
One cannot discount the UK entering another period of unstable politics, and an early general election being precipitated because of a loss of confidence in the Labour administration, which could, of course, be fuelled by social media and people interested in UK politics taking a different direction than under Starmer. It would be astonishing to see a large parliamentary majority come under pressure from such influences, but entirely possible.
Why isn’t Cummings in jail?
And why is Cummings even mentioned? What relevance does he have today?
Don’t tell me Unherd is bringing Cummings in from the cold?
There is an incestuous link here. Owner – Gove – Cummings
And when is Unherd (stupid name) going to review Downfall?
Perhaps Cummings could review it?
If you get Gove to review Downfall I would take out a five year subscription….
Reform has been built on the Brexit vote and a desire that British politicians should represent the interests of the British people. The Party might do with some cash. However, many Reform voters and probably even more potential Reform voters will be repelled by the Party being financed by a foreign oligarch.
He writes about the Labour plan to win the election then fails to mention the effective reversal of the policies he listed once in office. Many must feel thoroughly betrayed by that,
Everything Cummings is reported to have said here conforms to him being a Marxist.
“Cummings, similarly, believes the conditions are coming together for a period of far deeper and darker upheaval; the failure and corruption of the old order will become so systematic that it breaks down at rapid speed.”
“… will only accelerate the implosion, Cummings suspects, releasing forces as unpredictable as they are unmanageable.”
This explains a lot. Didn’t he spend a lot of years in Russia?
I think he saw it in an atlas once. FFS I hope he did, Russia has a leadership that is actually sane and tries to deliver for it’s people. The West is still trying to relaunch the colonialism of the 19th century and hasn’t a clue now the plan has hit a few speed humps, Britain being the worst offender. Still imagines it runs the world through its American proxy.
In periods of stability, politics becomes a contest between competing solutions to the problems of the present and competing visions of the future. There are stable factions within parties and extremes on both sides but most voters fall near the center on most issues or no more than one standard deviation to the right or left. My personal theory is that politics can be considered a multidimensional probabilistic distribution where each core issue represents an axis or dimension. These axis’s can appear and disappear over time as political issues fade in and out of relevancy. Technology makes some old issues irrelevant but raises new ones. It would look something like a cloud that is densest in the middle and gets thinner further away from the center.
What this means is that the outcomes are fairly predictable and the window of political possibilities is small. Political parties and factions must calculate how far they can push in any direction along any axis without alienating too many voters to gain and retain political power. If a policy produces bad outcomes or becomes too extreme, the party responsible suffers and the center may move slightly in the opposite direction. The cloud shifts and changes but ultimately doesn’t move very much, especially when all dimensions/issues are considered. This dynamic even exists in non-democratic nations. If a king or other autocrat goes too far in one direction and angers enough of the noble class or the people in general, he risks being assassinated by powerful interests, deposed in a coup, or ousted in a popular revolution. Even autocratic nations can be said to have a so-called Overton window of political possibilities. This model is stable enough that one or a few changes, even significant changes, on one or a few dimensions doesn’t greatly change the overall picture. The system remains stable.
There are times however when this model simply breaks. When there is too much change too quickly along too many different dimensions, too many new dimensions emerge or disappear at once, the people who represent the dots become highly fragmented and far apart on the individual dimensions, and/or some combination of the above, the cloud becomes unstable. The dense center becomes less dense. Instead of one cloud, there may be two or more some distance apart or there may simply be a relatively uniform but broader and thinner cloud. Existing political parties and factions are unable to cope with the sudden explosion of wildly different views. Conflicts erupt within parties. Old parties decline or divide and new parties emerge based on the changed issues. People themselves factionalize along lines of race, geography, ideology, etc. and reject the old political factions and philosophies. They demand new answers to new challenges and if the old parties cannot adapt, they seek new political advocates. We can see all these dynamics playing out in the present. At such times, the window of what is politically possible gets much larger because people are uncertain and their views are more widely spread. Novel political conflicts demand novel solutions. These are times of experimentation with new ideas and new philosophies. Over time, as some policies fail and others succeed, the new issues will become stable. Ineffective extremes will be abandoned and the cloud will condense into a new center, a new normal. Internal conflict will subside and the system will stabilize again. This dynamic of disruption, change, and a return to equilibrium is found just about everywhere in nature.
At present, the window of possibilities is quite large. There’s very little that isn’t on the table. To my mind, the likeliest possibility is that Farage becomes the major leader of the opposition to Labour. I have no idea whether that means Reform UK replaces the Tories entirely or he somehow takes over and redefines the Tories, retaining the name and traditions. On the other hand, Starmer strikes me as first and foremost a political pragmatist, and such leaders can be highly effective in times of change, cutting through ideology and hitting on real solutions. He might redefine the Labour party into something with populist appeal as well.
The thing to keep in mind is that we were already in a time of great political change before AI entered the picture. What it means for politics we’re only beginning to guess. At minimum, it will eliminate many jobs and lead to a boom in productivity without directly producing any new jobs, thus further depressing wages and exacerbating existing inequalities. At maximum, it could produce the most massive economic shifts since the invention of the steam engine, a reorganization of social roles and economic activity as complete as the industrial revolution. Since the industrial revolution, production has been driven mostly by the availability of labor and the productivity of labor. Computers, assembly lines, mechanization, etc. have increased productivity per labor unit and eliminated some jobs, but not been enough to change the fundamental equation. AI might finally tip the scales to the point that energy rather than labor is the decisive input, vastly changing calculations of geopolitical power. Lack of labor might not be such a barrier to relatively high levels of production. Countries that are geographically large or even small countries with large and reliable energy sources could become powerhouses. As ridiculous as this is going to sound, Iceland could become a major power. America and Russia would likely remain significant powers having significant land resources. China has vast size but lacks energy resources. Their alliance with Russia is likely to deepen significantly regardless of any action taken by the US. I suspect the changes brought about in the AI boom will probably overcome the present populist vs. establishment dynamics, delivering the final coup de grace to globalism and driving a new era of geopolitical competition. Let the energy wars begin.
Very well put!
Interesting viewpoints with sound bases. Once again, a long read post of yours that didn’t take too long to read and absorb. Didn’t a few of us say before that you should petition to write for Unherd, Steve? I don’t care if you don’t hold three degrees, work for a think tank or have a Substack or whatever criteria Unherd uses to evaluate potential talent.
They do not allow writers who give new angle of thinking. All these writings are narrative like someone else is writing about the same take. With Steve Jolly, his writing is to make us think not react! And that is not allowed.
Of course the British state doesn’t work. I can say with certainty that there are umpteen thousand people employed in it whose jobs are unnecessary. Whole departments are staffed at levels which were required thirty or more years ago. There are hundreds of departments and Quangos which should not exist at all
The number of people in the public sector goes up, what comes out of it goes down. Only if a huge cull takes place, a la Milei, can it start to improve. The state is an enormous drain on the economy, doing little right and a massive amount wrong. It provides money and the illusion of a job to hundreds of thousands of people, who get a free ride on the back of the private economy
I wonder if Blair , and McSweeney, and the author would have the stomach for the work required to put that right?
Yes Musk could and Farage would let him, then we’d be the 51st in fact. Starsimer is petrified and already looking to change rules on party funding. One way or the other U.K. politics will be revolutionised. BTW the Southport killer denied murder……..see it on the BBC? No nor did I
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yx234gx15o.amp
It didn’t get much prominence and wasn’t there for long, but it did come with a free freaky picture.
I hope commentators don’t use AI as an alibi for the fact that the British State is failing. The signs of decline are everywhere and have nothing to do with AI.
How does McSweeney view the possible outcome of Labour doing Reform’s work for them? Every day seems to bring a new scandal, a new stone deaf policy, a new affront to the electorate whilst their popularity is dropping to new lows.
Politics is downstream of culture and economics. By any measure both of those national foundations are crumbling. The old way of doing politics must too!
Are Cummins and Farage really the best we can come up with?
Whilst I believe it’s highly unlikely that Reform would gain enough seats at the next GE, I would suggest that there is a definite possibility of a Conservative government with a significant majority and Reform in 2nd place so official opposition party.