Starmer can’t keep Britain afloat How do we prosper in a protectionist world?

Not only did the company get away with it, but when P&O’s Dubai-based parent company, “DP World”, appeared to threaten to withhold a £1bn investment in Britain as a result of Haigh’s remarks, ministers began furiously back-pedalling. They offered “clarifications” to the company that the Transport Secretary did not actually speak for the Government. And so, DP World proceeded with its investment, taking a further stake in Britain’s infrastructure.

I happened to travel on P&O Ferries to France this summer, and found it a desperately soul-sapping experience. Gone are the canteens of old, staffed with actual visible people. In their place are giant vending-machine-style cafes, in which you order, collect, scan and pay for your food without ever having to interact with another human being.

The experience, like so much of our daily life today is entirely impersonal and transactional: the ferry turned into a giant service station on the sea, where the middle classes of England can be fed and watered en route to their Eurocamp holidays by a quiet army of foreigner workers largely kept from view. If you’re still struggling to imagine the scene, picture a Pret a Manger ferry.

The year before, in contrast, we travelled with Brittany Ferries to Spain, where all the staff appeared to be middle-aged Frenchmen and women. Brittany Ferries, it turns out, is owned by a series of Breton farming collectives who, you can only imagine, are rather better at ensuring the company’s bosses are unable to “get away with it”.

Like so much about Britain today, the ferry fable adds to the nagging sense that the country is not so much fiscally broke, as spiritually so. It is extraordinary that a country surrounded by the sea is unable to muster a single British ferry company in Dover employing British workers on wages that can sustain a decent family life in Britain. It’s pretty shameful.

The second revealing moment came courtesy of Jenrick attempting to rally supporters to his cause by, once again, celebrating the legacy of Thatcher. This is not to sneer at his stunt. The appeal of Thatcher should not be dismissed as mere nostalgia even if her record is not what many of her supporters assume it to be. Though Karl Marx observed that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”, his point was that when a country faces a crisis, its leaders naturally turn to precedents to make the current situation understandable, “anxiously conjur[ing] up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language”. This is what we are seeing today. Aware of the daunting scale of the challenges we face, the country is anxiously looking back to its recent history for reassurance that they can be overcome.

The fact that the challenges Thatcher faced are entirely different from today’s — and therefore require entirely different solutions — does not undermine the residual sense that, however flawed and incoherent her actual record in government was, at least she had an idea of what she was trying to achieve and why.

What also marks out Thatcher’s premiership is that whatever its practical reality, it was the product of an ideological movement that had been decades in the making, combining Hayekian economics with Cold Warrior idealism. Domestically, Thatcherism was, in effect, Powellism without Enoch Powell — a programme of privatisation, monetarism and spending restraint which he had been championing for much of the Sixties and Seventies, supported by Ralph Harris and Anthony Seldon at the Economic Affairs and the “St Andrew’s Set” at the Adam Smith Institute.

By the late Seventies, the IEA and ASI had been joined by Keith Joseph at the Centre for Policy Studies, as well as those older high-Tory thinkers such as Maurice Cowling, Roger Scruton and John Casey who added a certain academic depth to the Thatcherite counter-revolution, combined with an emerging cadre of radical libertarian students about to enter the political fold. As Casey himself pointed out “the early Thatcher years marked a very odd moment in the history of the Tory party when it decided to lie back and enjoy ideas”.

Perhaps the word “enjoy” here is doing a little too much work. This was a period of ideological ferment and not just between Left and Right, but within the Conservative Party itself, pitting the self-styled libertarian Thatcherites on one side against their “Wet” opponents on the other. Yet to have an ideological dispute, you need clashing ideologies, which in that period were in abundance.

Back then, ideas and intellect certainly seemed to matter. The other day I came across an entry from Thatcher’s engagement diary in October 1982 regarding a dinner organised by her think tank, the CPS.

Among those who attended were V.S. Pritchett, Anthony Quinton, Isaiah Berlin, V.S. Naipaul, Tom Stoppard and Phillip Larkin. A briefing note sent to Thatcher contains descriptions of each of the guests. “Anthon Quinton: President of Trinity Oxford. Conservative philosopher. You liked his ‘Politics of Imperfection’ and quoted it in the Airey Neave lecture”. “VS Naipaul: Very successful, sharp, angular novelist. Trinidad origin. Passionately opposed to the Left and of course ‘Liberation movements’.” “Tom Stoppard: Brilliantly successful and entertaining, rather Shavian, playwright. Czech origin. I expect you will have seen several of his plays e.g. Professional Foul, Night & Day.”

It is hard to imagine today’s political class ever receiving such a briefing with that degree of assumed knowledge — or any of the leading figures taking an evening off to enjoy their equivalent company. And Jenrick’s stunt only served to remind us of that. Starmer, despite declaring that he does not have a favourite book or poem, is not an uneducated man — far from it. In his speech to Labour conference he spoke of the value of the arts and his own love of classical music. Yet, we all know, implicitly, that this is an age not of great ideas, but of Zoom calls, spreadsheets and box sets.

As a result there is a shallowness to today’s politics. Starmerism is clearly not the product of an ideological movement years in the making boasting a cadre of political ground troops ready to go into battle for its principles. This government is, rather, a reaction to two distinct failures: the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn and the Conservative Party under five different prime ministers. Beyond that, its roots are so shallow it risks being blown away at the first storm that comes along.

Which brings us to that final, inescapable, economic reality. Money. While there has been much focus on the French fiscal crisis and the growing spread between its bond yields and those of the Germany, it has been less remarked upon that British borrowing costs are now higher than both countries — and rising as investors begin to price in the likelihood that Rachel Reeves will increase borrowing in her statement on 30 October.

For much of Labour’s first 100 days, it has argued that its first priority is to put the Government’s books in order  following an apparently reckless Tory splurge under Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. “Never again” has been Starmer’s motto, a reference to the crisis which followed the Truss mini-budget of 2022. And yet, without much fanfare, the yield on 10 year gilts is now almost back to where it was in 2022 at over 4% — a whole percentage point higher than in France.

The reality for Britain, then, is that its economic challenges have not gone away because it replaced Truss with Sunak and then Sunak with Starmer. The fundamentals remain difficult and clearly no one in Government has a clue how we might escape this trap. And it is a brutal trap: how can we, as an ageing, indebted and energy-poor country that is dependent on inward investment, possibly find a way to prosper in an increasingly protectionist world dominated by Chinese exports, American technology and a booming Middle East? Right now, no one seems to have a clue.

At Starmer’s investment conference in London, the boss of the US pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, David Ricks, set out the challenge as he sees it. “I think the difference in the UK is, separate from Europe, it’s a relatively small market for most multinationals and certainly for Americans, so something needs to be quite different to make it interesting.” For many Remainers, it was a gotcha moment: had we stayed in the EU, we would not have to be so different, and so would not be chasing businessmen like him. But the reality is that Britain has been desperately searching for inward investment for decades — and has even succeeded at it: last year the UK actually saw its its foreign investment grow, as Europe’s fell. The reason we are dependent on foreign finance is not because we left the EU, but because we run such a large trade deficit. As David Edgerton put it in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, the dream of Thatcherism was to resurrect British capitalism, but what we really did was to open Britain up to the world’s capital.

I’m not sure Britain does need to make itself “interesting” in the way Ricks and his friends describe. But we clearly need to do something different. And in the meantime, we are prostrating ourselves before rogue operators who know how desperate we are.

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Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Betting The House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election.

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