It’s the summer of 2026. Most of Murphy’s fellow Democrats have long given up on the sort of national soul-searching that followed President Trump’s first election in 2016. You remember: that brief window in which Left-of-center pundits and electeds crisscrossed the de-industrialized heartland for clues to why they had lost their working-class base. Soon, though, soul-searching gave way to lawfare aimed at reversing the election’s outcome: Russiagate, the Ukraine phone call, this, that — all futile.

Not Murphy. For several years, the senator has been on something like a spiritual quest: not to find God or himself, but what ails America at a much deeper level than most of the center Left has either allowed or even bothered with. Murphy’s new book, titled Crisis of the Common Good, is the thoughtful, surprisingly well-written, densely researched product of that quest. This, even as Murphy carries a separate persona as a fierce #Resistance liberal on social media and the network formerly called MSNBC. 

Whether these two dimensions can work together, and perhaps elevate him to higher office, is the central question of his career.

Crisis of the Common Good is remarkable for many reasons. For one thing, its pages and notes section are littered with positive references to conservative intellectuals, mostly from the post-liberal-ish corner of the Right. These include the Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, the American Affairs editor and re-industrialization advocate Julius Krein, the political economist Oren Cass, and, ahem, yours truly.

“I’ve certainly been enamored of the intellectual Right,” he tells me, “and I think there’s a lot of overlap.” In a way, that understates things. Murphy’s deepest project involves translating to American terms and conditions the political tradition known as blue Labour in Britain and Left conservatism in continental Europe. 

Proponents accept the necessity and blessings of market activity. But they’re also acutely aware of the dangers posed by unrestrained capitalism to family, religion, belonging, and community — the goods historically cherished by conservatism. 

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To mitigate the dangers, they turn to social-democratic means, or what Murphy in his book describes as the “social-contract” model of American political economy: business regulation, labor unions, wage floors, industrial policy, jealous guardianship of public goods that private actors can’t preserve even if they want to. The “conservative” or “blue” half of the equation identifies what must be preserved; the “Labour” or “Left” half sets out the means. 

Or as FDR, quoting Macaulay in a 1936 speech, put it, “Reform, if you would preserve,” adding in his own words: “I am that kind of conservative because I am that kind of liberal.” Reform the market if you care to protect society.

The words and speaker are significant. America came closest to adopting a blue-Labour or Left-conservative politics during the New Deal order, roughly from the 1930s through the mid-1970s. To cite one example: the New Dealers’ massive rural-development programs — emergency farm credits, foreclosure moratoria, rural electrification — kept hundreds of thousands of landowning families on farms they would otherwise have lost.

Under Eisenhower and Nixon, the Republican Party upheld these reforms in many areas, and even expanded their logic in others. Then came the neoliberal counterpunch under Reagan and the Bushes. Yet as Murphy is the first to admit in his book, neoliberal Democrats also did their part in tearing down the socially managed capitalism of the midcentury. 

The senator devotes the bulk of his book to chronicling the consequences with anecdotes and data. He organizes his chapters under several “cults” that enthrall Americans: the cults of profit, “everywhere,” technology, consumption, credentialism, and corruption. (The religious undertone here isn’t accidental; surprising for a progressive, Murphy seems to premise his thinking on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally religious animals; all culture is cultus, and some cult or other always commands our obeisance.)

He opens the chapter on the profit cult, for example, by noting how he and his fellow parents are barred from filming their own kids playing hockey by the for-profit entities that now control much of youth sports. Why? Because the firms insist you pay a monthly fee to access footage from their proprietary cameras. 

The example is well-chosen. The small businesses and wealthy donors who once underwrote youth sports in his part of Connecticut did so not expecting to turn a profit, as Murphy notes. They did it because they valued the camaraderie and public-spiritedness cultivated — cultus again — by youth sports. But now, profit-maximizing enterprises have invaded this corner of American life; the days aren’t far when you can place Polymarket bets on high-school sports.

The examples pile up grimly: a lonely teenager who killed himself after an AI chatbot convinced him that he could join her in the afterlife; the class-based stratification of literally every corner of public life ($20 gets you someone who will stand in line for you at a congressional hearing; $100 a night gets you special amenities in the California prison system); the obscene commodification of higher education; and much else of the kind.

In the book — if not always in his cable-news commentary — Murphy frames Donald Trump not as the cause of these transformations and the social alienation to which they’ve given rise. Rather, Murphy treats Trump as a symptom. “Literally the first time I mention his name in the book,” the senator tells me, “it’s in the context of drawing him as a symptom, not the cause, of our spiritual rot.”

The distinction matters, because many conventional Democrats would prefer to frame Trump as a demonic aberration — the easier to avoid the systemic rot the 45th and 47th president has revealed. Says Murphy: “It’s so easy to blame all of our problems on him. He is the main character, and he is, perhaps, an existential threat to democracy, so he’s an important character, and he can’t be avoided. But I just worry that it’s not enough to beat him in an election.” The underlying political, economic, and cultural crises would still churn beneath the surface.

More than that, Murphy is surprisingly willing to acknowledge Trump’s preternatural ability to register and address America’s subterranean ailments, even as the senator vehemently disagrees with Trumpian solutions (such as they are). And while the post-liberal intellectuals of the American Right, he believes, offered useful diagnoses and prescriptions, “my impression is that Donald Trump has effectively obliterated that small but previously growing movement within the party” that sought to re-orient the Right toward worker power and social solidarity. I think that’s overstated but, alas, directionally correct.

So does the Left have anyone who comes close to Trump’s capacity to “get” American discontent? And wouldn’t Democrats have to change course on immigration, especially, if they want to get within striking distance?

In his book, Murphy identifies a sense of place and belonging as one of the goods ravaged by corporate-led globalization and neoliberal capitalism. He rails against the commercial ideology of “everywhere” that runs roughshod over local community — “a belief that efficiency and scale should trump rootedness and place, that it really doesn’t matter where you live so long as you can order the same products, watch the same streaming shows, and follow the same influencers online,” as he writes. 

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But isn’t American discomfiture with mass, low-wage migration — a defining cause for the Trump campaign in 2024 — part of the same rejection of the cult of “everywhere”? 

Murphy seems to bristle a bit at this question. “I hope I’ve put my actions where my mouth is. I spent five months in a locked basement room trying to drag my party to the center on immigration.” He was a major proponent of a bill that would’ve given the president the authority to close the border if average daily crossings crossed 5,000 in a given week. Restrictionists objected — rightly, I believe — that the president already has the statutory authority to shutter the border, while the bill championed by Murphy would have legitimized a huge number of illegal crossings annually as long as figures stayed south of the threshold.

He goes on: “I think you have to have an answer to the existing, often unrestrained migration patterns this country has dealt with over the last decade. It is hard to live in a country where people are different from each other, in which there are so many new entrants. And one of the ways you keep a multicultural, multilinguistic country together is to have clear rules about who can enter — how you become a member of our club, how you become a citizen, how you become a worker. The Democratic Party has been far too casual about answering that question. And I do believe there’s a way for the Democratic Party to be stronger on the question of border security, stronger on the question of a true immigration rule of law.”

Fair enough, but doesn’t the right to call somewhere home also entail the expectation of some stability in who else gets to live there? More to the point, the #Resistance Murphy has joined many further to his Left in calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. What gives?

“Well, you have to have an internal immigration enforcement mechanism,” Murphy says. “You have to have a means to control the border. But he has literally built a personal political police force. There’s no way to just make a few personnel changes and have an actual internal immigration enforcement office that is obeying the law. So, yeah — I’m someone who believes we have to have a way to enforce our immigration laws internally. But I also believe we’re going to have to rebuild it in a different way when he’s gone.”

Perhaps this line — yes to what ICE does, no to ICE itself — is just enough to position Murphy in the sweet spot between a national electorate and where the Democratic Party’s insurgent socialist wing is taking it. Speaking of which, is Murphy planning a presidential run in 2028?

“I mean, I don’t know,” he replies, sounding earnest. “I really don’t. A reporter said to me earlier today, this would not be the book you’d write if you were running for president — because it’s not a book about me. It’s a book about a deeper set of questions about the country. And I’ve had a couple of my friends — who I absolutely know are running for president in 2028 — text me and say, ‘Hey, listen, I think you’ve found a way to frame some things that people have been having trouble talking about, this spiritual rot in the country.’ And, you know, hopefully, if this gives a vocabulary to people to use in 2028.”

“Blue”, we are variously told, refers to the small-c conservatism of the movement, as well as to “blue-collar” voters themselves. Suffusing Blue Labour discourse is an understandable nostalgia for old-fashioned ethical socialists, influenced by such mainstream texts as Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum of 1891. And so “blue” also connotes the group’s inherent melancholia: how could it not, when their successors operate in a party overflowing with all the technocratic dreariness and cultural coding of contemporary liberal progressivism?

But forget the melancholia and the suffering and penance for the moment. There’s a glimmer of hope on the horizon. And not just because the bone-dry managerial style of a Remain-campaigning Surrey lawyer has been replaced with the more palatable normie populism of the Manchester everyman. Whether the Westminster chatterati believe the affectations of Andy Burnham’s persona or not, the incoming PM can at least earn Labour the chance of a second hearing with its former supporters in working-class Britain.

Hope begins in Burnham’s Makerfield constituency. Just 25 miles separate the Stubshaw Cross Labour Club on the outskirts of Ashton, and the high street in Gorton, a diverse, multicultural area south of Manchester city center. But the political distance between the two could have huge ramifications for the future of Britain. Stubshaw Cross — a flat-roofed working-men’s club with England flags, cheap lager and sun-faded banners of Bobby Moore lifting the 1966 World Cup — was the center of the Labour firmament for several weeks during Burnham’s recent by-election campaign. Gorton, of course, was the scene of the Greens’ first ever by-election triumph earlier this year.

The former Mayor of Greater Manchester, according to all the polling evidence, would have trounced the Greens’ plumber-turned-parliamentarian Hannah Spencer in Gorton, just as he eventually trounced Reform’s plumber-turned-candidate Robert Kenyon in Makerfield. But he would likely have done so having been dragged Leftwards by the Green insurgency, into the social and cultural space of the young, ultra-liberal Left, and their incongruous Muslim allies.

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Makerfield is different. The Green insurgency is nowhere to be found, and until our PM-in-waiting was elected, the seat was near the top of Reform’s target list. There was an image of the constituency as a post-industrial wasteland — a quintessential Northern outpost, “left behind” and populated by the angry and white working class. Never mind that it’s far wealthier than Gorton, its rougher estates leavened by villages scattered among green fields, new cars in driveways, and neat front gardens overlooked by well-kept pebbledashed semis. For a certain breed of Labourite, seats like Makerfield remain ideological catnip: the collieries have long closed, but the area still represents something romantically assumed must always be fundamentally Labour. It’s the Britain of the non-graduate workers, the blue-collar salaried staff, the tradesmen.

Gorton and Denton, of course, was prime Labour territory too, until the Green victory anyway. But there’s always been a slight embarrassment in some of the more nostalgic party circles about Labour’s relationship with metropolitan Britain. For one, there’s an electoral logic to it: there’s no route to Downing Street through the inner cities alone. But there’s also an ideological aversion, a feeling that Labour can’t simply be the party of what Michael Lind calls “the hubs”, full of rootless “anywheres”. While the cities house the demographic fusion that makes up the party’s newer base — graduates, public-sector employees, the youthful urban precariat and ethnic minorities — Labour support among older, less mobile, and whiter workers in the smaller towns has long been in abeyance. Their struggles in seats like Makerfield, at least without Burnham on the ballot, is a sore reminder of what the party has become: the vehicle of choice for the buzzy urban citadels, while old proletarian Britain abandons them in droves.

That’s what makes the victory in Makerfield remarkable, and what makes some Blue Labour figures hopeful. A week after the by-election, on the hottest June day on record and in the upstairs of a Manchester pub aptly named The Briton’s Protection, I chaired a meeting of two Blue Labour MPs, 30 of its local supporters, and a gaggle of the politically curious gathering to discuss the tendency’s future. The room was full of an unusual positivity, as a strange unity broke out between warring intra-party tribes.

Burnham’s candidacy in Makerfield had seen him renounce his previous positions on rejoining the EU and gender self-identification. Last week, he posted about the release of a Rochdale grooming gang leader from prison, telling followers that “like everyone, I want this vile criminal out of the country”. Burnham is combining this no-nonsense, Rightward tilt on culture with a robust critique of what he calls “40 years” of market-liberal economic logic.

The unofficial radical pole of Burnhamism’s prescription has already been set out in “The Productive State”. The brainchild of Mathew Lawrence and Alex Williams, a pair of Left-leaning thinkers, it’s a detailed document that advocates for a whole new growth model based not on ever-increasing, welfarist distribution of tax revenues — but on a reassertion of public control over core sectors and natural monopolies, including the privatized utilities, transport and social care.

This will, the authors say, facilitate a new social infrastructure: one based on national investment rather than rentierism and dividend extraction by endless outsourced corners of the public-private para-state. From there, out-of-control departmental budgets will soon be brought to heel, as layers of procurement parasitism are removed in favor of in-house delivery. The growing benefits and post-hoc subsidy regime will be reined in too, once the state has made the transition from distributism and entitlements to production and investment.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these proposals have caught the eye of Blue Labour, with whom there’s significant ideological overlap. In the sweltering upstairs function room of The Briton’s Protection, Jonathan Hinder made the case for a more robust, workerist socialism based on public investment, trade-union power and a developmentalist state that just builds things. “We’re a socialist tradition,” he tells the comrades, “against an economic consensus we’ve had since 1979” — an echo of Burnham’s own pronouncements. “Some people call us socially conservative,” Hinder adds, in a nod to what we might call the incoming PM’s Radio 6 aesthetics. “I’d just say we’re ‘normal’.”

There’s every likelihood, of course, that this vision will be eclipsed by a less radical interpretation of Burnham’s fledgling “Manchesterism”. That could constitute something like a mild increase in capital spending in the regions — made possible within the fiscal rules by allowing arms-length bodies such as the National Wealth Fund to issue their own bonds — alongside extra devolution and symbolic moves like No 10 North. Certainly, the Blairite Right of the Parliamentary Labour Party would love to strangle Hinder’s ideas at birth, as would a media establishment hostile to transformative economic policy. Those dreaded bond vigilantes wouldn’t mind a go at the garrote either. All the while, some on the Left have called for more radical measures still: fiscal-monetary coordination, financial repression, price controls, and nationalization.

The substance of Burnham’s agenda, then, is yet to be fully formed. Just weeks away from Downing Street, as advisers still jockey for influence, the direction of the project is still very much in flux. Indeed, that question of personnel could prove decisive. There never was a consensus among its backers whether Morgan McSweeney’s flirtation with Blue Labour’s broad messaging was based on a genuine ideological position or hard-nosed politics — the public, British Social Attitudes surveys regularly show, lean Left on economics and Right on culture.

McSweeney’s recent interview with Nick Robinson suggests the latter, with Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff expressing open hostility to any politics based on ideas, and showing himself to be little more than an adept campaign organizer, possessing no political economy, no theory of state, and little interest in policy. With the disappointments of Starmerism finally interred, the new Blue Labour lodestar within the incoming camp is Josh Simons, the former MP who gave up his seat to force the Makerfield by-election, and who is tipped as head of a No 10 policy unit. Several Blue Labour sources describe him as “aligned”, adding that he “gets it”. One says “Simons is broadly a good thing, but I don’t know him well”.

Burnham’s future cabinet sparks greater uncertainty. One Blue Labour-adjacent figure tells me that “loads of Northern MPs” are “very concerned” about the potential appointment of Ed Miliband as Chancellor. “It’s not just his policy,” they explain, “but his actual personal unpopularity with a large chunk of the electorate.” Miliband is, in their estimation, “a real bogeyman”, confirming the worst suspicions of those “who already worry that Labour are full of luvvies”. To be fair, some Blue Labourites tell me the Energy Secretary’s monomaniacal Net Zero obsessions are fueled by a genuine belief that climate policy can be used as the fulcrum of social-democratic industrial policy, a catalyst for building a new, green, big state capitalism. Again, though, not everyone’s convinced: one insider simply calls Miliband “a crank”.

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There are broader questions too. The progressive wing of the PLP will make welfare reform a difficult sell. Burnham is said to support Alan Milburn’s much-vaunted review, but any tweaking of benefits rules will have to be accompanied by genuine pathways to work, to avoid rebellion on Labour benches anyway. Similarly, there’s a disconnect between the public’s desire for harsher immigration and asylum policy and the soft-Left’s queasiness on Shabana Mahmood’s Home Office reforms. A staffer from her camp tells me she’ll “probably” stay in the role. Time will tell.

The truth is that whatever the success of an emergent Blue Burnhamism, it won’t be because the faction — if we can start calling it that — revives flat caps, smokestacks and Catholic social teaching. The industrial proletariat of old has gone, and the old Labour Party with it. The new working class of Britain are as likely to live in Gorton and Denton as they are in Makerfield. They don’t work in factories or down pits, but in call centers and shops, construction sites and care homes, warehouses and soulless offices.

Burnham the endlessly protean politician understands the performative nature of politics, and the necessity of broad-based appeal. As a Home Office minister in the Blair era, his stances on crime were so tough that he earned the nickname “flog ‘em and Burnham” from civil servants. He then went on to tease the Corbynites by attending Universal Basic Income fringes at conference, and positioning himself as a born-again Leftist. Where Blue Labour has had a tendency to over-correct, to lean into outmoded political archetypes, Blue Burnhamism can shapeshift on culture. The New Left sage Perry Anderson has written that political movements must be “capable of synthesizing heteroclite demands that [have] no necessary connection with each other… into a national-popular unity”.

That is the task of leadership. Burnham must succeed where Starmer failed and simultaneously appeal to the old and new working classes by articulating a positive national renewal project, a normie populism combining civic, progressive patriotism, matter-of-fact socio-cultural positioning and comfortable regional identity with a new economic direction for the country. But if Makerfield has given his leadership some early ideological shape, the challenge will be in translating Burnham’s cosmetic difference into a real-world, concrete politics. Fail, and Blue Burnhamism will be remembered as little more than a Northern campaign dialect.

The first was to Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. This initiated me into a lifetime of grief that utterly refuted the utilitarian assumption that our nature is to seek pleasure and avoid pain. They say it’s the hope that kills you, but I never got that far. Spurs offer me an unmediated Proustian route back to my nine-year-old self. Staring stupefied at the telly, Arsenal scoring, watching their fans celebrating, hearing the commentator say “that was against the run of play”, followed by a sensation of mouth-drying bereft sickness that flows from the heart, and then makes its way like mercury through my veins and culminates in a paralyzed nausea that is my intimation of eternity. Come on you Spurs!

The second object of unquestioned fealty was to the Jewish God and people. Christmas is not really the time to describe what this has been like. All I can say is that it is the very opposite of the American Constitution; the “pursuit of happiness” does not describe the experience at all.

And then there is Labour.

It is important to note that the party used to be a source of happiness to me. I was 13 in 1974, when it felt like we won the Double, winning two elections in a year. I was a supporter. “There’s only one Harold Wilson”, and “Barbara Castle, Barbara Castle, we’ll support you ever more”, was about my level. As with Spurs and Jews, I thought that we were good and the others were bad and that was all there was to it.

And then Margaret Thatcher won the election of 1979, and it felt like the end of the world. There is a Jewish fast called Tisha Bov, where we read the Book of Lamentations and remember the destruction of the First and Second Temples, the expulsion from Spain, Kristallnacht. They all happened on the same day — and that is what the 3 May 1979 felt like to me. And it seemed to go on forever. It was like watching Arsenal win the Double for 18 consecutive seasons. And I couldn’t avoid watching it on the telly, on repeat, all the time. All our industries were transferred to the care of the Chinese Communist Party, the French controlled our nuclear power plants, and my beloved working class were sent to work as Ronald McDonald or consigned to call centers. “Everything holy is profaned and all that is solid melts into air”. That’s the only sentence from Marx I can really get behind. And that’s how it felt to me. The Ayatollah Khomeini said, also in 1979, that “everywhere was Karbala and every day was Ashura.” Well, at least we had that in common.

And then New Labour came along to intensify the work of Thatcher. “Things can only get better.” No. There was nothing true about that statement. At any level, as we now know.

I studied history at university, and the history of the labor movement became my Mastermind area of expertise. I made it my calling to understand what had gone so badly wrong. The deeper I went into the archives, the more clear it became to me that the labor movement and party, uniquely in Europe, were not a social-democratic secular party but a genuine broad church of previously estranged Christian traditions. It is often said that Labour was more Methodist than Marxist, but it cannot be stressed enough that it was also more Catholic than Communist.

The fundamental basis of the original Labour credo was that the free market did not create the world. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” is the first sentence of the Holy Scripture. Without following Aquinas too closely, we can define Creation as “human beings” and “nature”. The definition of capitalism is the commodification of both. It is the exploitation of human beings and nature in order to turn them into commodities of fluctuating price in competitive markets in order to generate quick and maximum profit. That is the definition of capitalism. Pope Leo XIII called this a system of “modern slavery” and Saint John Paul II wrote of a “structure of sin”. It desecrates the human status of the person and most particularly the worker. The highest return at the greatest speed is its objective. The status of a worker as more than a commodity blocks that return. Capitalism is like diarrhea: it liquidates solidarity.

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The second truth is that the state did not create the world either. The preservation of the sacred status of human beings and nature is the primary role of politics. Subsidiarity is the best way to temper the Pharaonic tendency of centralized state power. Sovereignty is necessary to resist the domination of capital, subsidiarity is required to resist the tyranny of the state, and all this is predicated on democratic solidarity as the fundamental ethic of society. Cain made a very big mistake. He was his brother’s keeper; we all are. This is the political position of Blue Labour in British politics, and it is based entirely on Laborem Exercens and Centesimus Annus.

The fundamental teaching of Catholic social thought is that tyranny is a real threat in the economy and the state, and that only a democracy founded upon solidarity, the sharing of the burdens of this hard and merciless life, can generate a virtuous politics. It does so through domesticating the demonic energy of the market and the state. Solidarity, status, subsidiarity and stewardship are the four legs of this table of wisdom.

It is far too rarely acknowledged that, alone in Europe, Labour succeeded in generating a workers’ movement that was not divided between Catholic and Protestant, or between secularists and believers. Instead, the movement itself provided the common life within which these potentially antagonistic forces could combine in pursuit of a common good. In cities like Glasgow and Liverpool, as well as London and Birmingham, this was an extraordinary feat.

“Common good” politics served the movement, and the country, very well. This is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Labour tradition, as opposed to social democracy in Europe, which was far more explicitly secularist in form. The non-established churches, for reasons of historical self-interest, were committed to freedom of association and expression.

The churches that nurtured the labour movement were associational forms of religious solidarity, severed from state power and concerned with preserving a status for the person that was not defined by money or power alone. Aristotelianism flowed predominantly through the Catholic Church, the rights of freeborn Englishmen through the Protestant congregations of the South and the Midlands. The currents came together in the labour movement. They also provided a national connection, that has proved durable, until now, within the labour movements in Scotland and Wales.

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The London dock strike of 1889 is a classic expression of the labour movement in action. The docks were a crucial part of the functioning of the British Empire, and they were staffed by 100,000 poorly-paid and often hungry dockers. Many of the dockers were Irish and many of them local, but an alliance was brokered by the Catholic and dissenting churches. The dockers coordinated themselves through labour representation committees, new institutions within which leaders were elected, strategy discussed and actions planned.

On 14 August that year, the strikes began. The courage of the strikers was remarkable. To disrupt trade was viewed as unpatriotic and seditious, for the British Empire was a maritime emporium with London at its hub. As such, the Government threatened the strikers with not only the police, but the force of the navy and army. The laws of the maritime economy, freely contractual, were held to apply to the port, which was excluded from territorial legislation. But it was difficult for the dockers’ employers to depict the strikers, who were dignified and disciplined, as an undisciplined rabble. It helped that Cardinal Manning, accompanied by the Salvation Army band, led them on their march. The dockers, in the end, were victorious. They had built a successful political coalition on the basis of stable employment and wages: a great founding achievement of labour politics.

But chaos was still to come: the sheer ferocity of the market storm within which the Labour Party was born in 1900; the scale of the dispossession, of property, status and assets, generated by the creation of the first-ever free market in labor and land; the simultaneous enclosure of the common lands; the scrapping of apprenticeship; and the eviction and proletarianization of the peasantry. All this meant that the only port in the storm was the security that people found in each other.

In the burials given by co-operative societies, we find another example of the importance of the labour movement: dignity in death underwritten by solidarity in life. The pauper’s grave was one of the most fearful fates of dispossession. But co-operative societies provided a solution that enabled the deceased, poor though they were, to be buried respectably. The solution was subscription-paying membership, co-operation with chapels and churches, and the practices of mutuality and reciprocity. Altogether, these co-operative burials showed reverence for life as well as dignity in death. They were drawn not from a secular or modernist ethic, but from traditional assumptions and practices. Labour as a radical tradition was crafted by both workers’ and Christian institutions as they confronted the hostility of both an exclusivist state and an avaricious market. Workers called their ideology socialism and their party Labour.

Jesus said that many are called, but few are chosen. With those words in mind, it is sometimes quipped that many are cold, but few are frozen. But such a state of affairs cannot be Labour’s ultimate goal. The desiccated utilitarian administration of gradated levels of pain was always the enemy. In contrast, the original credo was that Christ is King. Incarnated mercy and grace, kindness and truth. It is better to give than to receive. Fellowship is life. Love thy neighbor. Labour was once a biblical party, and must become one once more if it is to avoid a progressive death. I am my brother’s keeper. We all are.

In order to be truly radical, Labour must recognize its debt to Jesus Christ. In this bleak midwinter, we must give him our heart.

Later that year, Mahmood stood on a podium at the Labour Party conference and excoriated “pale, male and stale” politicians. As an opposition MP, she was often seen holding “Free Palestine” placards. But now, as Home Secretary, Mahmood is the politician who must grasp the nettle of Britain’s asylum reforms. She is the minister Keir Starmer has chosen to implement the “Denmark-style” reforms he hopes will restore public faith in the collapsing system: making it harder for refugees to settle, and foregrounding the expectation that receiving asylum is a temporary measure.

At first, this seems an odd mix of task and person. Mahmood’s detractors, especially those on the Left, might call her a hypocrite. Her cheerleaders, especially those on the Right, have hailed her as a realist and a strident moral decision-maker.

But it is clear that Labour sees her as the only politician capable of delivering these changes and averting a post-budget electoral collapse next May. In this respect, she is really the consummate “Blue Labour” politician — a perfect example of the strange, shadowy and seemingly contradictory impulses on her wing of the party: namely the “Politics of Paradox”.

The paradox here is that to save the overall moral legitimacy of the asylum system, the Government must implement a series of changes that make it seem less compassionate. Changes that are by turns symbolic, well-intentioned, unrealistic or inhumane will hopefully restore trust in the system with the public: and allow things to carry on more or less as they were. This is what the Danish center-left have achieved, so why wouldn’t it work in Britain?

The “Politics of Paradox” was coined back in 2011, when Blue Labour founders Maurice Glasman and Jonathan Rutherford collected together a series of seminars under the title The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox. It was part of a spirited attempt to give the party an intellectual framework that could help it understand Gordon Brown’s defeat in 2010 — an attempt to return Labour to the history of class politics from which it had come unmoored.

Even then, years before Brexit, Labour was becoming a political party run by and for globalization’s winners — progressive activists and the aspirational social elite. This was the paradox: Labour presented itself as the party of affluent urbanites and the information economy, when it was really a party of ex-mineworkers with broken lungs.

The Labour leadership of the time were alive to these apparent contradictions. The foreword to The Labour Tradition, written by then-leader Ed Miliband, emphasized the “need to rediscover the tradition of Labour as a grassroots community movement”. The essays demonstrated that close social ties and bonds, family, and a concept of place were central to working-class identity and key parts of the Labour tradition. The authors evoked proud traditions of ground-up politics that could stretch back through the artist and socialist William Morris, through the 19th-century founders of the Labour Representation Committee, to the democratic activists murdered at the Peterloo Massacre and beyond — all the way to the proto-socialist Levellers and Diggers from the English Civil War. These traditions disdained elitism, metropolitanism and hierarchy. Instead, they celebrated ordinary family life. That was what Labour should pin to its mast. That, so the theory went, was its real identity.

But here was another paradox. To proclaim this turn against elite metropolitanism, lifelong professional politician Ed invited his brother and fellow Oxford University graduate David Miliband to donate an essay. Editors Marc Stears (Oxford University) and Stuart White (Oxford University) invited extra contributors, adding to content taken from the seminars held at Oxford University. These included the privately educated think-tank director Philip Collins (Cambridge), and the now former minister James Purnell (who had at this point returned to the think-tank career he had held between his spell at Oxford and his period as a Labour minister). These were the people — all members of the intellectual elite — who became the scions of Labour’s working-class voice and identity, warning against the gentrification of the party. But remember, this wasn’t hypocrisy. It was paradox.

It didn’t immediately change the party. The General Election of 2015 found Ed Miliband’s Labour embracing the paradoxical politics of radical timidity and slumping to defeat. Under Momentum’s influence, Labour offered a radically outstretched middle finger to the working class and lost twice, in 2017 and 2019. But the pendulum has now swung back again. The paradox-handling technicians are back behind the steering wheel.

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For this, they have Morgan McSweeney to thank — the Labour fixer who cut his political teeth battling the BNP in Barking and Dagenham, and said to be a long-term Blue Labour acolyte. McSweeney reached the top of Labour democracy through the think-tank-cum-organizing-project, Labour Together. The initiative was set up to try and tie Labour’s dysfunctional factions together through the difficult Jeremy Corbyn era and its aftermath.

But what started as a grassroots project later became a sink for big donor funds. The organization jettisoned any staff who bought into its original mission of unity — and instead became oriented around breaking up the Labour family rather than keeping it together.

Paradoxically, however, this was the only realistic way to get a class politics that didn’t completely neglect non-metropolitan England back into the Labour Party. Polling showed Labour members far from the general public on almost every issue. Any Labour member on the ground understood that the party had become utterly dominated by graduates in large cities, particularly London. These were people whose politics were representative of their insular social milieu. People from places that applaud themselves for processing asylum seekers, before shipping them off to post-industrial England’s poverty hotspots.

So a platform of pledges was developed to present the Starmer leadership as “Corbyn in a suit” — and therefore amenable to the arty member selectorate. It included a pledge for “Full voting rights for EU nationals”, as well as promises to “Defend free movement” and to “End indefinite detention and call for the closure of centers such as Yarl’s Wood”.

The platform was then quietly discarded in its entirety. Keir Starmer took over Labour and nobody got what they voted for. Selections for Labour’s parliamentary candidates in 2024 produced a party more packed with professional politicians, lobbyists, Spads and elite professionals than any Labour government in history. You might think this cohort would have the decency to be the quiet foot soldiers they were selected to be, chosen over binmen and bus drivers and nurses with more “challenging” affiliations to trade unions — but they aren’t playing ball. They seem angry. They were never told this was going to happen.

What would the Chartists referenced in The Labour Tradition think of this strategy? Maybe they’d shrug: “It’s a paradox”.

As for McSweeney, he no doubt understands, in light of these asylum reforms, that the Danish Social Democrats are the only Left-affiliated party in Europe to have won back working-class voters from the populist Right. However, it’s not clear if he has read the details of Mette Fredericksen’s party’s success. Fredericksen led the change from the front, and did so for years. Her changes were not carried out behind closed doors — but were done with conviction and consent.

After the working class abandoned the Danish Left, the Social Democrats rigorously re-assessed its attitudes and biases. They produced a pamphlet called “Just And Realistic” (Retfærdig og Realistisk) that was distributed to members. Frederiksen led a debate that scrutinized her party’s losses: heavily and transparently. This produced a new strategic, moral message: “You are not a bad person because you do not want to see your country fundamentally changed. And you are not naive because you want to help other people live a better life.” And she made sure to deliver on the second part of that message.

In government, the Danish Social Democrats practiced some of the most aggressive tax-and-spend policy in the world. Their returning working-class voters at the next election prioritized welfare, the economy and the environment. Immigration and asylum issues became a much less salient electoral issue for every party voter, save the now irrelevant populist Right. With these issues off the table, the focus landed on the economic policy that is the neglected pillar of Blue Labour thought — indeed, which is so far almost completely absent from Labour’s governance.

Instead, we have an approach that’s more “Blue Labour on immigration, Tony Blair Institute Labour on economics”. It has produced an industrial strategy that ignores Britain’s neglected towns and struggling heavy industry, ignores the mutual ownership models that are a socialist tradition, and instead favors cash bungs to American AI industries located in major cities. Having carried its “Ming vase” over the electoral finish line, pledging almost nothing, Starmer’s Government has found itself with no mandate to raise tax — and unable to raise money from the ever-fewer winners that characterize the most regionally unequal, unmeritocratic economy in the developed world.

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In Denmark, Frederiksen’s party had one of the most egalitarian, socially mobile, secure and radical societies in the world to fight for after the debate on asylum. What will Labour have, besides the prospect of calmed markets?

The victory of soft Left candidate Lucy Powell in Labour’s deputy leadership election shows that the party’s infrastructure isn’t really able to manage the kind of paradox it is being asked to tolerate. The current administration is on notice. The lack of effort to convince its internal structures has come back to haunt Starmer. The local elections in 2026 will be a day of reckoning.

The Labour leader’s only real attempt to develop a rhetoric vaguely similar in tone to the Danish Social Democrats in his “Island Of Strangers” speech was excoriated by the party’s members and voters, and later rescinded. He has never understood, let alone made, an authentic Left-wing argument against an asylum system that drains a foreign aid budget intended to save children from malaria. This is money that instead now lines the pockets of corporate behemoths like Serco. Starmer is now the least-popular prime minister, among pollsters, since records began. Most of Labour’s members want him to leave.

Mahmood may represent Labour’s last attempt to magic back those voters they claim to represent: the angry, disempowered and downwardly mobile, living in areas that have been neglected for a generation. People who should be on Labour’s team but are on Reform’s. Certainly, in this world of paradox, where class politics is imposed by Oxford PPE graduates, those voters haven’t been given their own voice in the party machinery. Since Angela Rayner’s departure, there is no prominent Labour politician that has had a “real” job.

If this last conjuring trick fails, it might well be that Labour’s only option is to concede that its working class traditions are dead. To beat Reform now may mean trying to ditch First Past The Post, to run another Brexit referendum alliance of educated urban graduates and middle-class professionals, absorbing Lib Dem and Green votes.

The middle class graduates that Labour came to depend on know the Labour they want — and they are annoyed. As it is, Labour has begun to resemble a scene in Armando Ianucci’s In The Loop, where James Gandolfini’s military general remarks that if you fight a war and have no soldiers left “it looks like you’ve lost”. If you claim a politics based around class relations, and working class people aren’t part of it — but a lot of the elite are — well, you know the rest. The next Labour leader will need to figure out what in this project, a battle against the odds for the party’s soul, is worth saving.

“The Government is shifting,” Blue Labour founder Maurice Glasman agrees. With the Labour brand “very toxic” — particularly among the staunchly proletarian and provincial petty-bourgeois voters attracted to the populist iconoclasm of the New Right — not changing course would consign Labour to a future as one half of a despised duopoly. Yet, Glasman adds, things can change fast. Mahmood is trying her best to make sure of that. But in doing so she is engaging in a dangerous game, less “ming vase” and more bull in a China shop — decisively alienating one half of Labour’s base while desperately chasing the other.

Labour’s base has, of course, evolved over time, alongside the contours of Britain’s shifting class dynamics. In the interwar period, George Orwell identified a strand of middle-class, radical intellectualism resolutely detached from the culture of the broader labor movement, one that displayed a proud antipathy towards the quotidian culture of the nation at large. “England is perhaps the only great country,” he said, “whose intellectuals
 are ashamed of their own nationality.” The bourgeois radicals, Orwell added, “always 
felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse-racing to suet puddings”.

In a similar vein, the pre-war dockers’ leader Ben Tillett drew a distinction between “matter-of-fact, fighting trades unionism of England” on the one hand — and “the hare-brained chatterers and magpies” on the other. Such divides die hard. In his novel The Night-Soil Men, the recent fictionalized tale of Labour’s foundation, Bill Broady has the salt-of-the-earth Bradfordian and early Labour minister Fred Jowett lament the presence of a “raffish metropolitan crowd” in his fledgling proletarian party. The intellectuals, for their part, could dish it out too. In the Sixties, Tom Nairn, a thinker of the Marxist New Left, happily bemoaned the conservatism of an organization that brought together two late-Victorian traditions: Fabian bourgeois liberalism and stolid trade unionism, the latter influenced by religious non-conformity and primarily concerned not with world revolution but the protection of its crafts.

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This friction, then, between an effete elite and the mass membership of the broad labor movement, has always existed. And indeed it’s a dynamic that has arguably made Labour a more malleable, pragmatic socialist party than its Marxist continental cousins. After all, Labour’s postwar governments combined economic radicalism, nationalization, and trade union power with a respect for The Crown and the House of Lords. As Clement Attlee observed, it was in the constitutional monarchies of Britain and Scandinavia that the greatest advances towards democratic socialism had been achieved, not least because of the continuities of symbolic power and national representation that remained amid class struggle. Yet as the influence of trade unionism and the old, grassroots cultures of the organized working-class has declined precipitously, so Labour has morphed into a thoroughly liberal-progressive party, with an often toxic brand, redolent of all the hectoring, right-on, detached habits of modern managerial officialdom.

In Mahmood and Blue Labour’s reading, a primary source of this toxicity is down to what the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has called a trahison des clercs — a treason of the Left-wing intellectuals, especially regarding the fraught politics of migration. Labour, in this telling, has abandoned the labor interest, leaving aside the working class as its primary political agents. Instead, it has embraced what Marxism Today used to call “a rainbow coalition” of different interest groups: students, public-sector workers and identitarian socio-cultural tribes. Since declaring “the forward march of labor halted” in the late Seventies, during a period of steep deindustrialization, the Left’s leading theorists claimed there was no alternative but to seek new electoral alliances by “hegemonizing” ethnic minorities, the feminist movement, LGBT activists and the counter-cultural youth, all under the benevolent leadership of bourgeois-bohemians.

Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council was the living embodiment of this shift. It signaled, he said, the arrival of “the post-1968 generation” into a dominant position in Left politics. His first tenure in the capital saw County Hall “swarmed with young punks, skinheads, Rastafarians and a host of other Londoners”, according to one of his thoroughly New Left contemporaries. While these developments enraged a Labour leadership focused on persuading working-class Thatcherites back into the Labour family, they also found critics among the far Left. The “Mersey Militants” who controlled the Liverpool Labour Party at the time accused the London crowd of being “loony” “middle-class intellectuals”, in the words of their most prominent spokesperson, Derek Hatton.

The contemporary Labour Party, as part of these transformations, has adopted what Streeck calls a “cosmoliberalism” not shared by large swathes of the public. “Modernization” turned it from a part of the demos to a party of Davos. Most of its MPs have followed the same familiar path: university; a think tank, corporate consultancy, law, or public affairs; and onwards to Westminster. That’s why they all sound like they work for Deloitte — because many of them really did. And, for Streeck, it’s the Davos-style “cosmoliberal” mindset that sees working-class skepticism of free movement of labor and capital as a kind of betrayal of “international solidarity”. Indeed, the progressive activists who dominate the institutions of the modern Left are the only social segment who appear unconcerned with the recent historically unprecedented waves of mass migration, or with the “woke turn” of the last decade. Brexit, in their reading, is a racist project. Restrictionism on migration is always more-or-less Powellite. Opposition to unfettered globalization, or support for a return to a more national economy, is horribly passé, or maybe even Trumpian.

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Mahmood is trying to put paid to all that. Last week, I described her speaking style as “tepid”. The Birmingham MP is barely known outside the party, and as one of the mooted contenders in the unofficial race to succeed Keir Starmer, I found her previous media performances unconvincing. But, on Monday, setting out plans to emulate key aspects of the Danish Social Democrats’ hardline approach on migration, she was anything but. This was a cabinet minister in command of the House, more authoritative at the despatch box than any politician so far this Parliament. The Home Secretary is on a self-proclaimed “moral mission” to restore faith in a broken system: and, from her rhetoric at least, it’s hard to doubt her.

But she will struggle, and faces three major impediments. The first are the legal challenges her plans will likely provoke, not least at the European Court of Human Rights. That is a body which has rigorously applied its expansive interpretations of what it calls a “living document” to prevent convicted paedophiles from being deported lest it disrupt their “right to a family life”. Our own domestic legislation, the Human Rights Act, buttresses this lopsided liberal legalism. And that brings us on to the second impediment — the Prime Minister. After all, it was a fastidious application of exactly that kind of legalism that gave Keir Starmer a high-flying career at the bar. For all his lack of a grand meta-narrative, he remains at heart a vaguely progressive North London lawyer. More than that, he lacks focus. One can never be certain which particular Starmerism we’ll be offered on any given day. Possessing no vision of his own, his politics seemingly depends on whoever he’s just spoken to.

And yet Mahmood’s third impediment is perhaps the strongest: the Labour Party itself. Many of its parliamentarians, its activists, and its supporters will be bitterly opposed. This isn’t surprising, for Mahmood has merely fired the starting gun on Labour’s latest round of internecine civil war, an endless conflict centered on divergent conceptions of the very soul of the party, about who Labour is ultimately for.

Today’s polling shows the party way behind among almost every demographic except one — the privately educated. Labour’s safest seats are now, in reality, not in the so-called “heartlands”, or “left behind” Britain, but in the dynamic metropoles. Here, the rainbow coalition lives on. But the cities operate on what Glasman calls “the Deliveroo economy”. A salaried “creative class” are all-too-comfortable with unskilled mass migration, for the abundance of cheap workers it provides to drop off their takeout, or staff their care homes — a permanent, affordable service class, whose presence can be celebrated as a marker of superior virtue and liberal tolerance.

For Labour’s romantics, the fact that the party has been captured by that particular urban milieu is a source of profound shame. To quote Clause Four, after all, Labour was founded “to secure for the workers, by hand and by brain, the full fruits of their industry”. But we have passed from an industrial past, through to a grimly post-industrial present. When Labour was founded, Britain made around a third of the world’s steel. Now we make around 0.3%. Instead, we send emails, sell coffees, pump our housing market. Service work dominates. Almost half of school-leavers go on to university. The economists refer to this model as “cognitive-cultural capitalism”, and a smug generation of Third-Way politicians promoted it as something they called “the knowledge economy”.

But Labour, say the romantics again, shouldn’t exist for graduate professionals, but for genuine workers. The mass production and assembly lines may have receded into memory, or at least been offshored to the Far East. Yet the armies of non-graduate workers remain, only now in warehouses, retail, call centers — all in aggregate as estranged from the modern party as ever. To that extent, then, Mahmood’s immigration plans represent a real, decisive shift aimed at recapturing Labour’s putative real people. Glasman tells me that, in addition to her plans on immigration, Mahmood “is strong on the Left flank”. She’s “an economic nationalist, basically”, he says. “She wants to see the primacy of the national economy, and serious reindustrialization.” This is about a fundamental restoration of secure, unionized work in domestic industries located outside the unaffordable, service-dominated urban centers.

Unfortunately, such a politics has not yet been much in evidence from either Labour in general, or from Mahmood in particular — though it is sorely needed. There has been no per capita or real wage growth in almost a generation. It’s clear, today, that the knowledge economy and John Prescott’s refrain that “we’re all middle class now” was a chimera, built on credit and unsustainable financialization. University no longer offers a pathway to bourgeois respectability. The downwardly mobile graduates are themselves revolting, hurtling towards the alluring purities of “eco-populism”. As for the desperate post-industrial proletariat, it’s increasingly flirting with the populist Right. Is it any wonder, given all this, that Labour is in a near-constant state of identity crisis? The awkward reality is that its original class base, with which it has formed a nostalgic attachment, in fact no longer exists, or at least not in the way it once did. Rather than appealing to a cultural imaginary gleaned from an LS Lowry print, or a Ken Loach film, Labour must therefore relearn how to speak to the average man and woman in non-metropolitan, new-build Britain.

Could it look overseas for help? The Danish Left’s clampdown on asylum and migration has been credited with seeing off the threat from the Right. Its message to working-class Danes was conciliatory. “You didn’t leave us, we left you,” said the slogan. But it hasn’t been plain-sailing. The Social Democrats have just lost control of Copenhagen for the first time in over a century, ceding power to an eco-socialist outfit — and portending, perhaps, the fate of Labour’s equivalent cosmopolitan tribe abandoning it for radical-liberal pastures. If Denmark is what success looks like, then, there’s a serious trade-off. Mahmood’s gamble is based on the hope that she can reconnect her party with its working-class roots, wooing them back into the fold. If that means sacrificing the trendy, gentrified parts of the big cities, then so be it. A calculation has been made that most urban Labour constituencies are still classed as “safe”, whereas Reform-leaning seats tend to be more marginal. Glasman tells me that “the key feature of this era that we’re in now” — a period of deglobalization, economic upheaval and populist revolts — “is that the working-class vote is decisive”.

Not everyone is convinced. Even a sympathetic MP tells me that “our electoral coalition is so upside-down that maybe a Blue Labour pivot is impossible”. But Mahmood’s wager is brutally simple: that Labour can no longer claim to be the party of workers while treating the politics of borders with liberal disdain, all while viewing the nation-state as an anachronism. She is betting that the people Labour was built to serve still want a government that protects them — not a globalized free market that dissolves them. If she is right, she may yet drag her party back into congruence with one side of its base. But that comes at the price: the hemorrhaging of votes in the citadels. The stakes of the game are existential, as the soul of the party is up for grabs yet again. And this time, it may be the last chance anyone gets to claim it.

Perhaps the most plausible current replacement for Starmer is Streeting — and his stock has clearly risen. On a personal level, he’s surely a more dynamic, believable and telegenic politician than the PM. Where Starmer has no tonal register that doesn’t land as a pained, pre-rehearsed vacuity, the Health Secretary can at least appear sincere, fluent and relatively spontaneous. Nor would Streeting be lumped with Morgan McSweeney and a Downing Street operation that has, according to one exasperated Labour figure I spoke to, “descended into pure paranoid insanity”.

That, of course, still leaves the question of policy. Starmer’s own pitch was always one of quiet professionalism — “a politics that treads lighter on our lives”, as the man himself once put it. After years of Tory psychodrama, an understated seriousness appealed to many, even if it came in lieu of an intellectual hinterland. Such was the implicit bargain after 10,000-word Fabian Society pamphlets and soporific “This is what I believe” essays failed to reveal much about anything. “There’s no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be,” the Prime Minister told colleagues for good measure before taking office. “I will make decisions one after the other.”

And so he has. His leadership has been characterized by a sporadic series of disjointed, scattergun choices, made seemingly ad hoc and without any overarching context. Most policies are announced and then forgotten, lost in the news cycle, or else abandoned after a backlash. Remember winter fuel and disability benefit reform? How about our “island of strangers”, or troops on the ground in Ukraine? Let’s see how digital ID goes.

If Starmer’s myriad failures are ultimately tied to his lack of ideological ballast — his lack of “Starmerism” — then what could we expect from “Streetingism”? As a talisman of the Blairite Right, Streeting would likely pursue a more robust implementation of Tony Blair Institute-style policy points: AI adoption; a streamlined, lean state; welfare reform; an Atlanticist foreign policy; and a full-throttle embrace of Big Tech. But while this agenda may be pursued more consistently and vigorously under the Health Secretary, it doesn’t veer radically from our current path, and is unlikely to deliver us from our secular malaise. Just as New Labour’s Faustian pact with the City left us brutally exposed during the 2008 crisis, TBI Britain would leave us as a European outpost of American interests, over-reliant on the tech asset bubble. What’s more, we’d risk becoming an appendage of Silicon Valley, still beholden to trade and capital flows in a rapidly deglobalizing world, with an emaciated state apparatus and growth concentrated in sectors with few employment prospects and low economic multipliers.

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There are alternatives. The favored replacement candidate of the Blue Labour tendency is Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who has wooed some with her hardline stance on migration and crime. This week, she called for the emulation of Danish policies on refugees and asylum. Yet this same social conservatism risks repelling Labour members, as well as many MPs. Her speaking style is tepid and overwrought. Whether she can make the transition to a leader for a populist age, one that demands a challenging mix of emollience and pugnacity, along with an easy, authentic patter, is unknown. And for all the emphasis on her “Blue Labour” credentials, that second word in the duo risks becoming obscured. While she is comfortable talking tough on crime, it remains to be seen whether she makes the grand arguments needed for a restoration of national industry, of domestic production, of a strong, protective state.

It’s telling, perhaps, that it’s been left to a non-parliamentarian, Andy Burnham, to spell out the most obvious departure from Starmerite political economy. The Mayor’s putative, alternative vision of “Manchesterism” — centered around publicly owned utilities and mass social housebuilding — will attract the Labour rank and file. But Burnham has no Commons seat, and is therefore ineligible for the leadership. A re-energized Ed Miliband has been touted as an alternative talisman for the mushy soft-Left, and he would likely run in this vein too. His Net Zero and progressive credentials would allow him to run as an unashamed anti-Reform leader, looking to unite Labour, Liberal Democrat, centrist Tories and Green voters in a “Stop Farage” alliance.

Meanwhile, given that the Labour brand among voters attracted to the anti-systemic iconoclasm of the populist Right may be irrevocably damaged no matter who is leader, uniting the Left and center in a broad coalition probably makes sense in electoral terms. Even reviving the complacent, liberal-metropolitan spirit of London 2012 would represent an improvement on Starmerism’s cautious and self-defeating desire to appear as all things to all men, alienating more or less everyone in the process. And with Starmer’s personal ratings lower than any prime minister in history, any alternative would likely lead to a significant, if temporary, polling bounce. That’s hardly surprising: the small circle of Labourites currently running the shop have confused what was once an effective electoral plan — “nuking” the Left and hoping for the best — with an actual governing project.

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Yet if progressive liberalism with a human face might be the best way to weave the necessary strands into a coherent electoral bloc, the fact is that Labour’s problems run far deeper than mere personnel. To that extent, Starmer is merely the symptom of a far broader failure of imagination: never in the postwar era has Britain been led by a political clique so devoid of a vision or transformative purpose. Notice, here, that I avoided saying faction: that would imply some semblance of a worldview, or a consistently pursued framework for governing, beyond the attainment of power for power’s sake. It would also require the identification of winners and losers, according to a broad scaffold of political morality, and an idea of how the country ought to be.

All the Labour hierarchy’s problems stem from a fundamental misdiagnosis: that the panacea for a two-decade slump in living standards would merely entail a changing of the guard. The truth, of course, is that Britain’s seemingly intractable structural decline could never just be remedied with the adoption of some new, more arid professional management jargon, after years of Cameroon insouciance or Johnsonian bombast, to say nothing of the Truss calamity. And as Labour has realized that administrative competence — which worked so well at the Crown Prosecution Service, or indeed in Parliament circa 1999 — isn’t enough for genuine political leadership, panic has set in.

What is needed in the current climate — a willingness to decisively break with the old — has clearly eluded Starmer and looks set to elude his successor. Mere adults-in-the-room competence has been blown apart by experience. Rather than smooth efficiency, and slow-and-steady reform, we have desperate scrambling, a grim spectacle of ministers in office but not in power, reaching its apogee as the Prime Minister’s team resorted to invoking the bond markets to save his skin, briefing that a leadership election now would spook investors.

This aspect of the abortive Streeting leadership debacle speaks volumes about the state we’re in. Over the last half century, politicians have voluntarily ceded their powers to anonymous, exogenous forces, making themselves supplicants to international courts, to permanent bureaucracies, to arms-length technocratic bodies and, crucially, to international capital, to the bond markets. The fact that Starmer’s allies plead with colleagues that gilt-traders must, above all, be sated, shows us who really runs Britain: and that nobody is willing or able to “Take Back Control”.

Streeting, Mahmood, Miliband, Burnham — each of them would need to pursue a genuinely radical rupture if they wished to overcome the current Prime Minister’s defects. But such ambition, if anathema to Starmer, is quite possibly beyond them too, and indeed beyond anyone currently in the Labour Party. After all, economic and political sovereignty would require us to eliminate our day-to-day deficit dependency, taking on special interest groups still in receipt of permanent, structural — and enormous — cash transfers. But it also requires a massive shift from revenue spending to capital investment and infrastructure, and a desire to reshore, domesticate and discipline highly mobile capital with the kind of statist interventions that we haven’t seen in 50 years of progressive integration into the liberal-globalist empire.

So instead, and especially given the myopic, moribund culture Labour now seems stuck with, we’ll likely see a continuation of managed decline, with the haphazard focus on policy tidbits maintained as a hallmark. Morgan McSweeney’s sacrifice on the altar of Starmer’s failings might buy time before the PM’s own demise. But whoever takes over will be faced with the same symptoms of broken Britain: fiscal crises and a restive electorate, coupled with a political economy that has generated near-zero per capita growth in a generation. And if, after all that, a Prime Minister Streeting does somehow manage to inject some verve into Labour, the odds are that his Ilford North seat — majority: 528 — will fall to a “Gaza Independent” at the next election. What a fitting postscript that would be, for a government that’s helped bring us so low.

That is owing to Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. Once, McSweeney was called a “Blairite”: it was he, after all, who had steered Liz Kendall’s ill-fated 2015 attempt at a New Labour restoration. He remains aligned with Kendall; both have spent the last week under extreme pressure from backbenchers over the welfare reform bill. He has however found that the Blue Labour outfit, at least as far as the rhetoric is concerned, fits him better than the Blairite one: Alasdair MacIntyre beats Alastair Campbell. Maurice Glasman has described him as “one of ours”.

The outfit does have the tactical advantage of being amorphous, of revelling in “the politics of paradox”. It is rhetoric as much as ideology. Sometimes it presents itself merely as a strategy for winning back the “Red Wall”; other times it is a fully-fledged philosophy, which promises to defend the dignity of man against commodification and atomization, those wretched hallmarks of modernity. Blue Labour is, broadly speaking, anti-woke, anti-euthanasia, anti-austerity; it is pro-union, pro-nationalization, pro-“Levelling Up”. Its adherents can usually be spotted by their watchwords: “work”, “community”, “tradition”, “faith”, “flag”, “family”. If these sound ubiquitous and banal, that’s partly the point.

It is best understood as the peculiarly British variant of “postliberalism”. American postliberalism tends to carry a reactionary flavor. Many of its adherents are Roman Catholics, more often by conversion than birth, aiming more or less openly at Catholic integralism. There is a Right-wing postliberalism in Britain, too, represented in Parliament by the Conservative MPs Nick Timothy and Danny Kruger. But in Britain’s postliberal scene the Left has the upper hand. The academic Adrian Pabst, who co-edited one of the “Blue Labour” books, wrote the book on postliberalism in 2021; and John Gray can usually be found banging the drum in the Left-wing New Statesman. Britain exported its finest postliberal, Alasdair MacIntyre, to the United States; but although he swam the Tiber, as American postliberals are wont to do, his thought remained much infused by his earlier dabblings in Marxism.

When the British postliberals cast around for an illustrious, indigenous pedigree, they find one on the Left, inhaling the fumes of an old, patriotic socialism. Unlike in America, Catholics do not hold a monopoly on postliberalism in Britain: there is a strong Dissenting element here. The British postliberals can take their cues from R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), the most widely read history book in interwar Britain. They can conscript to their squadrons the “guild socialism” of G.D.H. Cole, the Romanticism of William Morris, even the half-crazed rantings of Thomas Carlyle. They can tap into the Englishman’s radical historical memory: Blue Labour is surely the only political force in modern Britain which trades seriously in the language of the “ancient constitution” and the “Norman Yoke”. In its mixture of high-minded intellectualism and the robust common sense of the working man, Blue Labour calls forth the proud tradition of working-class autodidacticism, now largely lost.

Related to all this is the Blue Labour version of Labour Party history, which rejects any notion that the Labour Party was the inheritor of 19th-century Liberalism. This is a heresy which Glasman ascribes to Anthony Crosland — a pernicious turn in Labour’s sense of itself, laying down the foundations for its Blairite hijacking and subversion. No matter that Keir Hardie (for example) started life as a Gladstonian Liberal: Blue Labour is true Labour, promising salvation after prolonged apostasy.

As Blue Labour and postliberalism have risen in recent years, so too has a standard line of attack. Its locus classicus is a brilliant 2023 article by one J. Sorel. It argues, in effect, that the postliberals have already won: that Britain, at least since 1997, has been dominated by the “community” at the expense of the “individual”. Sorel’s is a fair objection. After all, lockdown was sold to a compliant public precisely by making reference to “social bonds”, “responsibilities”, and “community”. Markets were shut down for “the common good”: behold the postliberals’ ultimate victory.

Already in 2022 Glasman was writing about the lockdown with a certain nostalgia. Furlough gave a “substantive role” to the state “in support of the workers”, as he had always dreamed of. The pandemic reminded us all of the quiet dignity of labour: “Pakistani nurses, Nigerian cleaners, Portuguese carers and Bolton lorry drivers all risk their lives to keep things going.” The pandemic focused “the importance of place, of neighbours, of mutual aid and community”.

The Blue Labour sense of being stalked by the phantom of “individualism”, contrary to so much recent experience, quite clearly bears the imprint of the Eighties. For postliberalism is every bit as much an ideology of the Eighties as, say, Thatcherism. It owes much to the critique of Thatcher by the Tory Wets, and to a widespread disgust at the excesses of capitalism as represented by crude caricatures of “neoliberalism”, such as “Loadsamoney” and Gordon Gekko. Britain’s Left-wing postliberalism then formed part of a wider reaction against the liberalism that emerged triumphant out of the Cold War: Fukuyama’s “The End of History?”, so often made to stand for this moment’s hubris, appears as the punching-bag in every book in the postliberal canon.

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While the wildest dreams of the liberals were being realized, the British postliberals had all their hopes betrayed. Glasman’s doctoral thesis, co-supervised by John Gray, praised the West German social market, and asked why other countries had not implemented its model. Poland might have; the labor movement Solidarnosc had inclined in that direction under communism. But once communism fell, once Solidarnosc had attained power, it succumbed immediately, on Glasman’s telling, to the forces of Western capital. The intervention of Western “free-market fanatics” was to blame; and those same fanatics were responsible for much “unnecessary suffering” in Britain, too.

The doyen of the Polish economists, Tadeusz Kowalik, wrote a rejoinder in the New Left Review, criticizing Glasman for overplaying the extent of “individualism” in Nineties Poland. Glasman’s portrayal of Poland’s “libertarian atomisation” bore no resemblance to reality. Rent and heating were still subsidized; “there is no basis to Glasman’s later statement that there has been ‘a virtual abolition of welfare’”.

These shortcomings could be described as an early instance of the “Blue Labour fallacy”: the assumption that all social ills owe their existence to the excesses of “liberal individualism”. A good example of it can be found when, while dipping his toe into Blue Labour in 2015, David Lammy described the 2011 riots as “the product of a ‘me-first’, ‘take-what-you-can’ culture” — individualism run amok. Gangs are communities of a sort, so their part in the lawlessness had to be brushed aside.

There is, as Sorel observed, also a distinctive postliberal style, characterized by new terms for the various dichotomies and cleavages of modern society. Take David Goodhart’s “Somewheres and Anywheres”, or Danny Kruger’s lesser-known “The Order and the Idea”. Glasman’s 2022 book has “Mercurians” and “Apollonians”, which map more or less onto the Goodhart formula. Mercury is the Anywhere god, the god of commerce and capital and all those who do not till the land. Apollo is the Somewhere god, the god of (to use a postliberal cliché) that sense of place. When Glasman reached for this terminology, as his footnotes make plain, he was — quite strikingly — referring to Yuri Slezkine’s ingenious and controversial book, The Jewish Century (2004).

In that book, Slezkine argued that, in medieval and early-modern Europe, the Jews were “Mercurians” par excellence, “service nomads” who filled a social and economic niche. But Mercury fast became the presiding god of all modernity: “Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate… modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.” Zionism was one response to this. Whereas America, the destination of many European Jews, stood for “unabashed Mercurianism, nontribal statehood, and the supreme sovereignty of capitalism”, the Zionist project stood for “unrelenting Apollonianism”. It promised to return “the world’s most proficient service nomads” to the land; to transform Mercurians into Apollonians, or “rootless cosmopolitans” into hardened sabras.

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Israel is now the world’s finest exemplar of the “Apollonian” postliberal state: it places enormous obligations on the shoulders of its citizens (such as military service); it sanctifies community and family life; it is robustly “civic-nationalist”; and it reaps the rewards, as postliberals would have it, in its high fertility rate and few deaths of despair. It can draw on a proud socialist, communitarian heritage, too, with the kibbutz standing in for the British cooperative. When Glasman decided to take his signal inspiration from Slezkine — rather than falling back on Goodhart’s terminology, as he might have done — he was setting out what might be described as a kind of Anglo-Zionism. Labour, in his telling, has too often exalted the Mercurian way of life over the Apollonian; Britain today, thanks to the depredations of liberalism and capitalism, is too Mercurian. To restore Labour to the Apollonians, to Make Britain Apollonian Again, is the central mission of the Blue Labour project. It is, much as Zionism was for the Jewish diaspora in the 20th century, a matter of restoring to an emasculated nation its manhood.

This last metaphor ought to be taken seriously. In an earlier outing of Blue Labour ideas, in the aftermath of New Labour’s downfall in 2010, Glasman made essentially the same point, though with a more familiar dichotomy than “Apollonian vs Mercurian”. Labour then, in Glasman’s analogy, was a strained marriage between a university-educated, progressive Mum and a salt-of-the-earth, traditionalist Dad. The story of the Labour Party was the story of Mum taking over; under Blair and Brown, “the Dad might as well have left home”. One Labour MP, Helen Goodman, was not pleased with the gender politics at play: “it looks more like something suitable for the psychotherapist’s couch than a political tract.” Perhaps this is why Glasman chose to abandon it for “Mercurian” and “Apollonian”.

Blue Labour prides itself on its sense for British history, but here it is selective and superficial. It privileges the rural over the urban, the agrarian over the commercial, the “Apollonian” over the “Mercurian”. Its national feeling tends towards the twee parochialism of Morris dancers and Maypoles. It abhors aspects of our history for which many feel some affection: the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the tradition of enterprise and free trade. “Commerce” means at least as much in Britain as “community”. In excoriating the vice of “individualism”, Blue Labour dispenses with one of the most precious parts of Britain’s cultural inheritance. Blue Labour dislikes “modernity”, but Britain fared rather well in modernity; modernity is in a sense our creation. A certain “rootlessness”, a devotion to Mercury, is an inevitable characteristic among a people with a diaspora as large as ours. One might go so far as to say that Britain — more like America than Israel — is a Mercurian nation.

But do the British people yearn for more social obligations? After the lockdown they might have had their fill. Do they want higher taxes, as the ideal Blue Labour programme would likely entail? It’s unlikely; the tax burden is already the highest it’s been since the Second World War. Do they want more power in the hands of “local communities”? Perhaps — though they are hardly impressed by devolution in its current form, and might prefer a centralized state which can actually do things. Are they much roused by talk of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Rerum novarum? Even the heartiest Blue Labourite will surely admit that they are not. Blue Labour, in short, is based on a series of misapprehensions about the country it wishes to govern and reform. Britannia is not whispering about “the common good” and “that sense of place”; instead she shouts four rather familiar words, “lower taxation, lower immigration”. The future now belongs to whoever listens.

What’s it like living here? I ask two men skulking off to the pub through the graveyard, past a pair of Lithuanian builders drinking cans. “It used to be a lovely English village,” says one. “Now it’s a fucking shithole and I can’t wait to get out.”

That night, the local branch of Reform UK met to plot their revolt against this New England. In the seedy light of the local working men’s club, the rebellious bourgeoisie of Essex shook hands with their exiled London counterparts: retired City bankers, tradesmen, medical students, laborers, and a softly spoken NHS worker from India. On stage was a map depicting the theatre of war: Barking and Rainham and Havering, the gap between London and shires, and the new fault line of British politics.

“The people gathered here are terrified for their children’s future,” explained Philip Hyde, a veteran of Havering politics, before taking to the stage with his mic. “You won’t believe the things I’ve been researching,” he teased his sullen audience. A litany of misery poured forth: cuts to police; IMF reports on public sector austerity; bankrupt councils; young families being raised in collapsing flats. A new mosque planned in Romford. A cavernous pause was left to allow the audience to groan. “We’re the bloody minority around here now,” someone heckled from the back.

Just 40 minutes away on the tube, Westminster is facing the prospect of a seismic revolt. Should Reform hold its polling momentum through 2029, a thick seam of light blue will reorder the old electoral map, spreading from the suburbs of East London, across the safe Tory seats of Essex, and out towards Nigel Farage’s holdout in Clacton. Barking and Dagenham — a Labour stronghold — is set to fall too. Here, amid the inter-war housing estates, the proportion of the white British population has fallen by 51% in two decades. The last election saw a 17.6% swing to Reform, and a slight Labour drop.

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The defeat of the BNP in 2010, then the 2012 London Olympics, were supposed to remake the area into a confident multicultural district. Now, though, Reform’s revolt is set to be levied by two forces well beyond the comprehension of that long-lost decade. Demographic anxiety in the face of historic mass immigration has unearthed the folk memory of an exiled cockney diaspora, forced even further into the Essex shires. Old notions of class are increasingly redundant in these shifting hinterlands. Mass migration and downward social mobility have created a quasi-ethnic voting bloc, one that regards the British state as defunct, broken and entirely alien to its interests.

At the Rainham working men’s club, Hyde’s romp through national decline had driven the audience into an embittered fugue. Midway through an excoriation of the council, the master of ceremonies was interrupted by an angry mother. During a protest in Whitehall after the Southport stabbings, she claims her son was jailed for 13 months simply for standing there. “Where was Nigel Farage when they were sending innocent boys down for nothing?”

“Bring back Rupert Lowe,” someone heckles in the ensuing fracas. The tension’s been brewing all night: between a party in search of professionalization and a lagered-up, pissed-off crowd. The bickering is only broken by a young man, taking to the stage and seizing the mic. “There’s no point squabbling,” says Kai Cunningham. “Reform is our only chance. The country is broken. Barking and Dagenham is broken, and all the lefties need to hear us say it’s broken, and realize we’re still here advocating for our country.” The loudest cheer of the night bellowed out.

Cunningham is representative of the new Reform. Twenty-one years old, confident, brisk, cheeky: fluent in both the fall of modern Britain and hope of its renewal. He has seen something like it with his own eyes. Jordan Kukabu, a friend from school, was stabbed in the heart with a machete outside Dagenham Heathway Station. “If I had gone down that route,” he says, as we walk past the day after the meeting, “I could have ended up like him.” A boxing club turned him around. Then came a political awakening while undergoing basic training in the army. At night, in the barracks, Cunningham would watch “atrocities taking place across the country” on his phone.

A plan was hatched. A degree in law would get Cunningham credibility. It would force those in Westminster to take him seriously. “We need more white working class men going into education, because let’s be honest, no one is going to listen to some bricklayer from Dagenham.”

Should Reform win — either in upcoming council elections or in 2029 — the party will inherit an area on the brink of even greater change. On the council website, a video of drone shots shows the up-and-coming district in the shadow of the London skyline: neo-Georgian municipal buildings, built in the days of Fifties full employment, overshadowed by a burgeoning vista of tacky high-rises, their garish plastic facades glowing in the estuary sun. Thousands of jobs are promised for a population set to jump by a half in the next decade.

But walk the streets below and a parallel city emerges. Britain’s fastest changing district, it’s ground zero for the historic wave of migration now set to define Britain’s 21st century. Every year, 18,000 people come here, and another 18,000 leave. “I have no idea who lives there,” says Cunningham, pointing to one of the newly built high-rises. At street level, arrivals from India, Nigeria and Afghanistan shun the worn-out shopping parades and high-street shops, opting instead for thriving open-air markets: an unnerving hum of a fringe non-place in a new global city. Transient, eerie and mysterious are how other locals describe it. It all speaks of a demographic upheaval so vast, says one social worker from nearby Ilford, that the state can barely conceive of the pace of change.

Glimmers of the past remain. The Becontree Estate — once the world’s largest social housing project — still offers a stubbornly suburban image of privet hedges and satellite dishes. Here are the cues for Cunningham’s vision of renewal: he speaks of his father and granddad’s generations, stretching back to the Ford Factory that opened back in 1932. They enjoyed simple things: a job, a home, a place to raise a family. Can Reform restore this? Cunningham mentions the party’s policy on apprenticeships, but there’s some deeper grievance, one beyond the exhausted sparring you see on Question Time. “It upsets me when people say they’re leaving, that they’ve got no one around anymore,” he says, recalling the family and friends that have packed their bags. “But there’s a younger generation that wants to stay and put up a fight.”

The loss of young people like Cunningham irks both the local party and its grandees. “Really, that’s the sort of young man we should be attracting back to the Labour Party,” says Jon Cruddas when I tell him about our tour. The former local MP is currently writing a social and political history of Britain through the lens of Dagenham, exploring how the “dynamics of modern capitalism” ran through the area. Here, he explains, was the Fordist utopia that inspired Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, then the steady unraveling of social democracy across the 20th century. The prospect of having to conclude his book with a Reform victory would be grimly ironic, especially for a man who’s helped keep the area Labour against the odds. The seat was supposed to fall with the Red Wall in 2019, but a hyper-local political machine kept the bricks here intact.

Cruddas became the area’s MP in 2001, at a time when 40,000 local manufacturing jobs were in the process of disappearing. The next two decades formed an almost moral crusade to stop the area from being forgotten completely. He once tried to get Ed Miliband to watch Fish Tank, a film set on an estate in Dagenham that might, as Cruddas puts it, explain crumbling class constituencies, worklessness and the importance of human flourishing. “He told me it was too depressing to watch.”

Cruddas sees Dagenham in almost novelistic terms: a place at the vanguard of change, seeming doomed to exist beyond the comprehension of Westminster — until all it can offer is hubris and warning. For him, it all started with the 2001 census, which failed to pick up on demographic change ahead of the BNP’s short-lived local triumph.

Now another reckoning is coming. “What’s at stake in the area is not just the future of the government, but the future of the Labour Party,” says Cruddas. In some sense, No. 10 understands this. Blue Labour, forged in the area, has been courted by Starmer, hoping to cobble together a coalition of Britons who want security, community and common sense. At the helm is Dagenham veteran Morgan McSweeney, rolling out set pieces once reserved for Nick Griffin. That involves the basics — repairing potholes, civic pride, neatly tailored patriotism (this time with an eye on the Donbas) — all glossed up with deportation spectacles and lively graphics on social media.

But Dagenham is not just a political lesson in staving off Right-wing populism. Just like Huxley’s interest in the area, a quieter, more tangible dystopia is being formed in this hinterland of London. Here is a vision of a radically different 21st-century Britain, an upheaval slowly emerging round its towns and cities: precarious work, ersatz apartments, a churn of neighbors, all gazing out over a solemn, unknowable sprawl, offering barely an echo of the lively, globalized, multicultural Britain promised to the country in the Blairite pomp.

Down by the river, you can find this new Dagenham being built on the ruins of the old Ford factory. Cranes tower over the estuary horizon, tending to a highrise village of 3,500 flats, part of the 50,000 planned for the area. Here, the place seems trapped by the weeping Thames sky, the dismal orbit of the A13. The end not just of London, but of the world itself. “Dagenham is home to a proud and diverse community that reflects the industrious and pioneering spirit of its heritage” boasts the construction site billboard. “This place is driving accelerated support for Reform,” Cunningham says. “On the doorstep we have a simple message that works well: improve the lifestyle of the people here rather than just adding more.”

In 2025, faced with a disastrous start, Labour seems finally to have heard Cruddas’s concern for human flourishing in Dagenham. Last year, a Demos essay by Chris Naylor, the former chief executive of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, portrayed it as the platonic form of the New England coming into being. This, he wrote, is a place where “vast changes in expectations, the erosion of trust” in politics meet the decline of “old world power paradigms” and collide with “new technologies” and ”rapidly changing demographics”.

But if Naylor’s essay is an accurate reading of Dagenham as it is, and Britain as it may yet be, its purported solutions also offer a warning for Starmer. Here the administrative state’s buzzwords around hubs, community engagement and multicultural success run up against reality, one that may yet spill over to rout not just Labour, but the entire Westminster establishment.

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One issue is money. The local council is in worse financial straits than bankrupt Birmingham. The relocation of Smithfield and Billingsgate market to Dagenham Dock, and the arrival of 2,700 jobs, was recently scrapped due to rising costs. Amid that epic demographic upheaval, meanwhile, locals are increasingly resentful of how many foreign-born households are given social housing — especially when the wait for a four-bedroom home here is 67 years.

Outside an abandoned pub, Chloe, in her early thirties and pregnant, walks carefully with her two year old near the indifferent hum of the A13. She spent six years on a council waiting list for a house, while living in a “rat-infested flat” where the rent rose to nearly $2,000 a month. “I was basically the wrong color,” she says wryly. “It’s not just English people, but second- and third- generation Asian and black families that are fed up and want to leave. I don’t want to sound awful, but it’s just not England around here anymore.”

Walking back to Rainham, certainly, there is a sense of exodus. Gated bungalows, guarded by stone lions and Union Jacks, dream of Deep Essex. In Orchard Village, the regenerated estate where Fish Tank was filmed, Mia*, a data and systems manager, points out the flats of people who’ve left: for Chelmsford, for Billericay, for Basildon. “You’d like to see Nigel Farage’s party around here to be quite honest,” she says. Hailed as a regenerative success after being rebuilt in 2009, the estate has drifted back to the despair Ed Miliband once ignored. “I feel sorry for the young people around here now,” says Rob, semi-retired, wearing his knackered Tesco outfit, rolling a cigarette in a stone patio full of gnomes. “I just can’t see a way to get on, have a life.” He’s never voted, but next time might well pick Farage.

The train takes you away from Dagenham and towards Rainham once more. Silent rows of new houses line the tracks, stretching out into the expanse of the silent Thames marshes until they become part of the forgotten landscape itself. Back on the high street, not far from Rainham Hall, I meet Greg*. A small business owner, he was a reluctant Reform voter at the last election. “The change I see in the area frightens me,” he says. “When people don’t know what the future will look like, they can do strange things.” As we talk, in the dusk of the spring evening, there is birdsong and daffodils, traces of the village that was.

*Some names have been changed.

Obviously this is a fantasy, like most British political commentary. It is Britain’s political comment class alone who are so destructively enamoured of the political theatre of a distant foreign country that American news crowds out our own in the battle for attention. Yet this colonised mindset is only true of a specific shade of American politics: an identitarian left-liberal strand tailor-made for our mid-Atlantic Twitter class.

Londoners rioted in protest against policing in Minnesota, and our increasingly deranged discourse is directly cut-and-pasted from US models. But the twists and tangles of American conservative politics are more or less unknown territory in our own semi-digested imperial province.

A clear example of this dynamic can be found in the rise of what some term America’s New Right, well-documented in a critical but fair and accurate portrayal by the Left-wing New Republic’s Sam Adler-Bell. An uneasy alliance of state-capitalist National Conservatives, post-liberals and Catholic Integralists, the New Right “wants to see Republicans abandon their fealty to free-market dogmas, embrace traditional Christianity, and use the levers of state power to wage the culture war for keeps”.

Like younger conservatives in Britain, a young New Right writer quoted by Adler-Bell observes that “we have to think of ourselves as counter-revolutionaries or restorationists who are overthrowing the regime”, as the conservatism of their elders has simply failed in its essential task: “there’s not a lot left to conserve in the contemporary state of things. There are things that need to be destroyed and rebuilt.”

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The parallels with Britain are clear. In America, the conservative establishment has “ossified into a decadent, self-dealing oligarchy” that has adopted “the moral heresies of so-called wokeness and [clings] to the rotted corpse of the Reaganite consensus”. The conservative old guard “‘just want to run the greatest hits of 1984 over and over again”.

Surveying our own Conservative scene, we see the same dismal picture: the potential challengers to Boris’s rapidly waning authority include Rishi Sunak, a free marketeer crippled under the weight of his Treasury Brain, and Liz Truss, gleefully capering around in one of the Army’s remaining tanks in homage to Thatcher, keeping alive a Tory cargo cult that should have died decades ago. The Tories possess the single electoral benefit of not being the Labour Party: but they have no coherent vision of the good, and offer little to any forward-thinking conservative.

Why is this the case, given the total Americanisation of British politics? Why do the intellectual currents revolutionising the American Right here remain a mere object of curiosity to an idiosyncratic minority of conservative thinkers?

It is hard not to think that Thatcherism has played a major role in the intellectual debilitation of the British Right: the ideas that most animate the party faithful are the same ones put into practice, overwhelmingly disastrously, forty years ago. The free-market think tanks which cluster around CCHQ are still trying to realise the fever-dreams of fin-de-siècle Vienna intellectuals. The Tory party remains trapped in the long 20th century, weighed down by corporate boomers and their lobbyist hirelings. Indeed, the paucity of Conservative Party thought today is such that there is more value in adapting Marxist analysis to Tory ends than in reading anything excreted from the party ecosystem.

As a result, Conservative MPs whine about ‘wokeness’ on Twitter instead of using their parliamentary majority to repeal the raft of New Labour legislation that foisted a Blairite shadow government on the country; the dense web of state-funded quangos, NGOs and bureaucrats that sets the tone of British political discourse and frustrates Tory policy at every turn. No wonder Tories win elections and yet are amazed they can’t change Britain’s political culture: they waste their energy fighting the symptoms while subsidising the causes.

In Britain, the obvious target of an equivalent conservative counter-revolution would be against the destructive innovations of New Labour, whose zombie ideology, rejected by voters a decade ago, still commands the cultural heights. This is what the purported “culture war” means, at heart, which explains the horror expressed by every ageing broadsheet commentator who claims that revoking legislation brought in ten years ago is an assault on the venerable British Constitution comparable only to fascism.

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A swift path to victory is possible, not least by halting the overproduction of downwardly mobile elites New Labour embedded into British society like a retreating army laying delayed-action bombs. Even Blair himself, rising flowing of mane and leathery of skin from his political tomb once again, recognises the problem of his own deranged political children, without accepting any of the blame.

But the Tories ultimately don’t want to win the culture war. Instead, they’ll keep it grinding on until the last boomer dies in the last nursing home, as long as it keeps the shires blue for another decade. A ruthlessly efficient machine for winning and holding power, the Conservative Party simply has no idea what to do with power once it has it, and thrusts it at its enemies like a hot brick.

The fundamental problem facing the Conservatives is this: largely as a result of its own policies it will soon run out of voters. Younger voters, millennials and zoomers, are not aliens with strange and inexplicable desires: they want their own homes, secure jobs, good pay and the ability to form families.

The Labour Party, at its best, offers much of this. But it also offers much else that is terrible, including an unhinged identity politics repellent to ordinary voters even in the America of its birth, let alone in the very different cultural and demographic context of an Early Modern kingdom in northwestern Europe. Given the choice between boring, effective socialism and American-imported identity politics, it will always choose the latter. There is simply no way forward with the Labour Party that currently exists; its front bench is effectively a mindless golem swayed by the Twitter fads of the moment.

Much of the energy of the young New Right, like that of the millennial socialist Left, derives from online debate on social media, which has radicalised politics away from an ailing and effectively dead centre. For both factions, it is an intra-elite competition, aiming to seize control of sclerotic party structures to win the support of the masses for their respective revolutionary projects. Like millennial socialism, the New Right represents the political battlegrounds of the near future: both share revolutionary dissatisfaction with the status quo, and both share the desire to win the coming ideological battle. The Nineties Third Way is dead, and whatever replaces it will shape the coming decades.

Whatever the angst about it from ageing commentators, in Britain, as in America, all younger conservatives are shaped and influenced by the discourse of the online Right, just as younger Leftists are shaped by the internecine squabbles and identity fundamentalism of the online Left. In Britain, however, our ruling Conservatives seek to quash the only intellectually interesting expression of youthful conservative thought through their campaign against online anonymity: they may be incapable of preventing Islamists stabbing MPs to death, but they’ll pull out all the stops to stop you complaining about it online.

As in Britain, in America the proponents of the new conservatism of the common good are largely Catholic, though they less often display the convert’s zeal that characterises their more pugnacious American equivalents. In Britain, this tendency largely adheres to Blue Labour rather than the Conservative party — a situation I have previously argued is not tenable. Theoretically, the division between the American New Right’s China-inflected state capitalism and Blue Labour’s socialist heritage is a point in favour of the British variant: we have, after all, a viable and only-recently destroyed tradition of nationalised industry and utilities, still popular with voters, that Americans do not. But alas, our post-liberals lack the killer instinct, meekly submitting their tweed-encircled necks to the culture war knife, merrily quoting Chesterton all the way to the scaffold block.

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But the ultimate downfall of any Tory counter-revolution is the absence of any infrastructure for nurturing a new wave of conservative thought. In the US, as Adler-Bell notes, a lavishly-funded constellation of goodies are offered to young conservatives, from think tanks that ‘“identify, educate, and credential” a new generation of staffers and bureaucrats to the fellowships that “have long played a role in shaping the next generation of right-wing elites.” In effect, as he jokes, “all this conservative foundation money slushing around functions as a ‘welfare state’ for lacklustre writers and scholars”.

In Britain, this conservative infrastructure to bring in new blood and new ideas simply does not exist; they’d send our equivalents to Prevent. Indeed, the only money sloshed around by the Conservative apparatus is for huckster resellers of PCR tests and for a cultural and NGO blob which hates conservatism in all its forms.

The Tories profess to believe in the magic wisdom of the free market while subsidising their political enemies, and affecting perplexity at the results: their vision of the glorious past extends no further than the early 1980s. The British political Right still views the state with fear and loathing, with Tory MPs happier snuffling around for crumbs from boardroom tables than exerting the executive power granted to them by the public. The American New Right, by contrast, aims to use the power of the state, the most powerful tool available to any politician, to effect a conservative counter-revolution.

Ultimately, the Conservative party shrinks from the vast power the British constitution affords the executive, which can radically reshape Britain for the better and cement Tory rule for another generation. For all its many faults, the Labour Party does not. And when it eventually returns to government it will surely use the state’s power to bury Toryism for good, just as Blair and Brown managed to allow Tories to keep winning elections yet to keep failing at delivering the basic governance demanded by their voters.

The American New Right may well warrant some scepticism: whatever its populist leanings, its electoral manifestations are largely a project of Silicon Valley donors, after all, and the disbelief of the American Left that the country’s Right can ever be swayed from corporate capitalism may well be accurate. Yet it is surely correct about one thing: the party that learns to use the state effectively will be able to reshape the nation in its image. Perhaps we should be paying attention to America after all.

What was a few short years ago the preserve of marginal discontents is now the hegemonic discourse: it is the liberals who are on the back foot, dreaming up ever-more elaborate conspiracy theories to explain the collapse of their ideology.  

Yet Britain’s most prominent post-liberal theorists are not claiming victory, and are instead mourning their defeat. In a plaintive recent essay, Blue Labour’s Jonathan Rutherford has claimed that “we imagined Blue Labour was about renewal, but, in hindsight, it was already too late. One thinks of the Owl of Minerva taking flight ‘only with the falling of dusk.’” For Rutherford, “Labour no longer possesses the intellectual and philosophical resources for a political renaissance and it does not look beyond itself to acquire them”.

Instead of seizing this historic moment, the Labour Party has lost itself in the abstruse theological disputes of a liberalism increasingly unmoored from reality, and become ever more feverish in policing its ideological purity as its voter base vanishes into history.

To understand the sense of gloom pervading British post-liberalism, we must return to its diagnosis of the West’s political crisis. The argument is this: liberalism contains within its essential nature the seeds of its own destruction. By dividing communities, social and economic classes and nations into a constellation of individuals warring among each other in search of self-advantage, liberalism negates any possibility of collective action or solidarity. Essentially a northwest European secular heresy derived from the Protestant Reformation, liberalism seeks to remake the world in its own image, projecting its own ideal form onto utterly different societies in a mission as doomed to failure as America’s wars in the Islamic world. 

In its purest economic form, liberalism, the ideological nursemaid of capitalism, destroys its social and fiscal base in pursuit of an idealist model, with disastrous results. It is increasingly rejected by voters across most of the Western world. And yet it hangs on to tenuous political power through its capture of the economic elites. Aware of their slipping grasp on power, encircled by enemies, liberals have retreated into fundamentalist fervour, fighting a rearguard battle against democracy while enforcing purity within their own ranks. This is why we are mired in the culture wars; this is why we are trapped in an increasingly heated political interregnum; and this is why political crisis has become endemic across the West. The rulers have lost the consent of the ruled; even when the insurgents win elections, they have no control over the actually-existing levers of power.

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It is in this context that the Blue Labour theorist Adrian Pabst has published Postliberal Politics: The Coming Era of Renewal, which functions as an excellent introductory guide to post-liberal thought for wavering liberals, and a warning to current post-liberals to shun the temptations of authoritarianism. 

For Pabst too, the Covid era transpired to be a “false dawn” for post-liberalism, as “the winners of the shutdown were tech oligarchs such as Amazon, Google or China’s Alibaba while family-owned businesses folded and inner-city shops were boarded up.” Instead of ushering in the post-liberal moment, then, “the ‘new normal’ is largely an intensification of the forces that dominated the old status quo: capitalism, nationalism and technocracy. Instead of resolving the interregnum, politics seems caught in an impasse.”

In setting out his stall, Pabst outlines the failings of a zombie liberalism still holding onto power, in which a dominant class “prefers a world of individual atomized exchange underwritten by an ideology of globalism”, and where  democracy and citizenship are “debased and become merely functional arrangements to advance the interests of a new cosmopolitan class”. 

Yet the most striking aspect of Pabst’s book is not his rejection of liberalism but rather his rejection of existing Rightist strands of post-liberalism, most notably their American incarnation. The dominant theme of Pabst’s book is one of preserving post-liberalism’s position as a strand of Left-wing thought which upholds the genuine achievements of liberalism, a socially conservative branch of socialism rather than an economically interventionist faction of conservatism. 

For Pabst, it is the Rightist “self-styled post-liberals” who are the enemy within: “behind their version of ‘Left on the economy’ and ‘Right on culture,”’ he argues, “lurk forms of statism and moralism that will do nothing to secure shared prosperity or plural societies.” Pabst warns that post-liberalism is too often “associated with a politics that is anti-liberal and anti-modern, animated by a reactionary desire to roll back the new rights of minorities and to return to social and political exclusion along the axes of race, sex or class”.

Taking aim at the idealised Mitteleuropa of prominent American conservative intellectuals, Pabst argues that while Hungary and Poland are superficially attractive for managing to “combine a protectionist state with pro-family welfare and education policies”, in reality they are largely reliant on fiscal dumping and deregulation to attract foreign capital while sliding into authoritarian nationalism that undermines constitutional freedoms.” 

“What may look post-liberal turns out to be mostly anti-liberal,” warns Pabst, arguing that “behind the simplistic slogan ‘left on the economy and right on culture’ lurks an admiration for a politics of state control and the rule of strongmen,” an “authoritarianism sliding into novel forms of fascism” in which “authoritarian systems extend state surveillance into all spheres of societal and personal life, co-opting any independent movement and persecuting non-conformist groups.” 

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Yet the obvious retort is, of course, that this system of surveillance and enforced conformity is a perfect description of actually-existing liberalism, at least in its deranged 21st-century incarnation. For the unfortunate reality for a viable Left-wing post-liberalism is that, as Rutherford laments, it is an entirely marginal force on the political Left. Even Blue Labour’s relatively anodyne platform of worker-led cooperatives, state support for family formation, reshoring vital industries and enforcing currently-existing immigration laws sees them consistently called fascists or even Nazis by their own party’s activist base. 

A wild and paranoid recent review of Pabst’s book illustrates the problem. “The truth is,” writes the reviewer, “that he has hitched his wagon to the post-liberal narrative of the national-populist right assiduously promoted by the UnHerd website,” whose “editors and contributors formed the core participants at the Windsor Castle symposium acknowledged in Pabst’s preface as the inspiration for his book.” 

I should probably add here that I attended this conference, and while membership of some secretive reactionary cabal under royal patronage would be a gratifying experience, it is as divorced from reality as the rest of the review, which is a classic example of the conspiratorial hysteria with which ageing liberals console themselves for the collapse of their ideological dreamworld.

Despite Pabst taking great pains to demarcate a Left-wing post-liberal space from that of the national populist right, the reviewer goes on — and on, and on — to claim that he “can’t resist the temptation to promote national-populist — and alt-right — conspiracy theories about ‘the fusion of woke capitalism with extreme identity politics’” that “Post-liberalism is a right-wing, nationalist project seeking to incorporate and hegemonise sections of the left by splitting it from its social liberal base.” 

If this is the Left among which Blue Labour aims to carve out a post-liberal movement, then the project surely has little chance of success. With Labour so internally divided, and further from power than they have been in decades, the chances of guiding the party towards a humane post-liberal ethos and then leading it to electoral victory seem impossibly remote. So why waste time on a failing political party whose activists hate you and everything you stand for? 

This is the essential conundrum of Blue Labour, and the reason for its perpetual marginalisation. Post-liberals should leave political tribalism to Americans: politics is simply the means to reshape the state in your image, and parties are merely useful vessels to do so. Logically, the conclusion is that the only current means of shaping British politics is as a faction within the ruling Conservative party, whose dominance of British politics is unchallenged; it is already making post-liberal noises to anchor its new hold on the post-industrial north, without any serious intellectual direction or engagement. 

Whether we like it or not, post-liberalism’s greatest opportunity to sway the course of politics is on the centre-right — and the road to doing so is through ideological capture of the state’s institutions, just as the neoliberals did forty years ago. 

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The key to victory is surely to utilise the power of the state through democratic means to break the anti-democratic liberal hold on the political system and advance post-liberalism from a matter of debate among a tiny handful of academics and writers to a functioning political programme. Yet Pabst, with a watchful eye on the authoritarian statism of China and Russia, and on the illiberal democracy of Hungary and Poland, views the untapped power of Leviathan with alarm. “Unmediated state sovereignty on the model of Machiavelli’s Prince or Hobbes’ Leviathan risks authoritarian control at home and anarchy abroad,” he warns,  so “the challenge before us is to turn the existing platforms into public utilities owned by the people, not the state, and to run them as mutuals – with private providers competing on the provision of services.” 

These are noble goals and a vast improvement on the alternatives, yet there is an avoidance of the practical path towards implementing them. How do you break the power of global corporations and the tech oligarchs? How do you unprise the grasp of what Pabst terms the “sham clerisy who dominate much of the media, education and the civil service” on the national institutions they have commandeered for themselves? 

Little platoons, however right and just their cause, can function only within a broader army structure to nurture and guide them. The only viable means to victory, then, is surely by employing the power of the state just as the neoliberals did, and the most realistic means of doing so is through the nascent statist centre-right. The managerial-technocratic Labour Party, which has junked the economic radicalism of the Corbyn manifesto while doubling down on liberal identity politics, certainly doesn’t intend to. 

If post-liberals do not do this, authoritarians will, as we see in China’s crackdown on oligarchs like Ali Baba’s Jack Ma and on tech platforms. Paradoxical though it may seem, the path to a radical localism surely lies through a resurgent state which must then give away the power it has reluctantly assumed to bring about necessary reform. It is as if post-liberals have adopted the teleological assumptions of liberals, that the arc of history will drop power into their laps, without also adopting their hunger for power, and their willingness to use the state to achieve it.

Pabst is correct to state that both the Conservative party and the Republicans remain beholden to capital, and superficially adopt post-liberal language to win popular support while continuing disastrous liberal policies. Yet there are reasons for hope. As the Marxist Italian sociologist Paolo Gerbado observes in his new book The Great Recoil, the new statism is a distinct phenomenon from the crude populisms of the decade’s first half and is still a malleable force, waiting to be shaped. 

The task of doing so can be taken up by either Right or Left, or by a post-liberal synthesis of the two. Younger conservatives in America, as defined in Park McDougald’s incisive survey of the New Millennial Right as the conservative analogue of “millennial socialism”, are “frustrated with the politics of their elders”, and want “a more solidaristic conservatism that is less libertarian, both culturally and economically, and in some ways less liberal”. In time, they will capture the institutions of conservatism, just as in time the millennial socialists will capture those of the Democrats. 

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In Britain too, much of the energy on the younger Right is towards forging a confident, developmentalist conservative state that corrects the most harmful errors of liberalism, and spreads economic growth and social solidarity across every corner of the nation. Time may be on the post-liberals’ side, in the long term, but only if they do not waste today’s narrow window of opportunity on either preaching to the unconvertible or shrinking from their most viable path to power.

Throughout his book, Pabst diagnoses the problems with unerring accuracy yet avoids the obvious conclusion. There is a missing element, the how, by which post-liberalism triumphs. A war only ends when one side wins decisively: post-liberals are unwilling to deliver the final blow, instead mourning their ostracisation from a rump political left which despises them as existential enemies. 

Without a Constantine to convert, without the power of a Rome behind them, post-liberals will find themselves trapped in the political catacombs forever, meekly hiding from a savaging in the amphitheatre. They cannot convert the liberal clerisy from within: they will be forced to defeat them from without, before authoritarians do. The gap between conservative and socialist post-liberals has always been largely cosmetic: perhaps the future of Blue Labour now lies in shaping a dirigiste, paternalist and communitarian Red Toryism.

At the time, precarious work felt playful and varied, like something you could always reverse later. I skipped between temp and short-term employments, lived hand-to-mouth and spent my energy on hipster art projects, experimental writing and fiddling about on the then still-nascent internet. It was fun and interesting. I wrote unreadable novels and was permanently skint. And, over time, I watched my resources and lifestyle diverge ever more sharply from those enjoyed by my university friends.

Much has been written in the last week about how the civil war within the modern Labour Party is a fight between working-class and bourgeois factions. Labour has been stolen, in this view, by a gaggle of North London poshos for whom Left-wing views are as obligatory as a Daunt Books cotton tote and something “ethnic” decorating the living-room wall.

Writing in UnHerd, veteran Labour campaigner and unionist Paul Embery recently blamed this on the party’s turn against the cultural values and priorities of the “traditional working-class base”: values that, in his view, include “communitarian impulse, traditional values, desire for belonging and sense of national pride”.

But while the tension between the woke Left and the “traditional” one is real, well-documented and hitting Labour hard, the conflict between Islington and Darlington is not the whole picture. For if there’s one thing my lucky escape from flatshares and gig-work taught me, it’s that a key line of battle in the 21st-century class wars is not guacamole versus mushy peas. Rather, it’s how liquid someone’s life and working conditions are.

These days, my life is the old-fashioned illiquid bourgeois package: a marriage, a family, a home. But my lucky escape from temporary housing, temporary jobs and so on only came about because I married someone who’d managed a long enough stint in the corporate salt-mines to buy a home. Others have not been so fortunate: ONS data in 2017 showed that people aged 35 to 44, my cohort, are three times more likely to be renting than 20 years ago.

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In the years since I was pioneering millennial precarity, the balloon of home-ownership has gone on rising; the average house deposit is now 72% of an individual’s gross salary, or 137% in London. That blessed state now eludes not just feckless bohos like me but many who are striving as hard as they can to catch it — and still falling back. Previously, I’ve called this group an “Everywhere precariat”: the also-rans emerging from a higher education machine that now processes 50% of young people, before disgorging them into a shrinking job market with £30,000-£60,000 of debt, elite values and expectations of a middle-class lifestyle.

Those in this precariat who don’t score an inheritance, win the cryptocurrency lottery or otherwise roll a lucky six in the resources casino are left clutching their tickets for a middle-class party bus that seems to have departed without them. The US blogger Venkatesh Rao describes this lifestyle as “premium mediocre”: a kind of performance of bourgeois tastes and lifestyle, just about funded by hand-to-mouth spending.

For Rao, an increasingly critical class distinction here is whether or not you work “above the API” — a reference to the “application programming interface”, a software intermediary that allows two programmes to talk to one another. In other words, whether you issue commands to the digital networks that shape our lives, or whether they issue commands to you.

To illustrate, think about the difference between a freelance graphic designer and an Amazon warehouse worker. One operates Photoshop for a living: that is, “above the API” in Rao’s terms, telling a computer what to do. In contrast, the warehouse worker is monitored throughout the day, has their pick rate tracked and is “operated” by AI-powered performance optimisation algorithms — in other words: below the API.

But in terms of income, security, and prospects, there may be very little to distinguish them. As James Bloodworth detailed in Hired, warehouse operatives often compete through gangmaster-style agencies for insecure, unpredictable work with low-skilled migrants from all over the world. And they do so in a legislative environment that offers very few employment protections. Similarly, graphic designers compete through websites such as PeoplePerHour, against other designers from all over the world, in an environment that offers very few employment protections.

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And such precarious work is increasingly normal, especially for young people. These jobs are also the first to go in a pinch: the ONS reported in April this year that 53% of the employees who have vanished from PAYE over the last year were under 25. Both the warehouse worker and graphic designer have low-paid and sporadic income, funding at best low-cost and insecure rental housing; forming a family and having kids for many such people will feel nigh-on impossible.

Of course, there are plenty of occupations that don’t meet Rao’s description. But it disproportionately describes working life for the young, where a perfect storm of insecurity, rising costs and shrinking opportunities is driving them sharply Left: 56% of 18-24-year-olds who voted Labour in 2019, compared to 35% in my cohort (40s) and 14% in my mum’s (70s).

This group is increasingly militant. It’s a viewpoint epitomised by commentator Grace Blakeley, who is critical of Amazon while treating issues of culture and community as secondary to those of economic insecurity. What’s driving the civil war on the Left is that a life defined by instability tends to produce a worldview radically at odds with the core values that gave birth to “traditional working-class” politics.

The “traditional” Left – let’s call it the Proletariat Left – was born out of the industrial revolution: a transformation in working people’s lives that both displaced workers from agriculture and homogenised lives en masse. Think of the start and end bells marking factory shifts, the neat rows of workers’ cottages built in terrace style, the routinised movements of an assembly line or the sheer level of coordination needed to keep shift work running smoothly.

As well as being able to work en masse, this cohesion made it easier to organise en masse. Over time, what emerged was the potent blend of intellectuals, the quietly patriotic and the fiercely revolutionary that characterised twentieth-century Leftism. That Leftism humanised the rapacity of 19th-century industry, and softened raw capitalism with social-democratic infrastructure such as the NHS.

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In contrast, the Precariat Left was born into the post-industrial era, and many of its members have no personal experience of any other. They are defined by, suffer under, and also celebrate the absence of the very stability, cohesion and homogeneity that formed the bedrock of the Proletariat Left.

Stable jobs are dwindling — as is the cohesion that made it possible to unionise for better conditions. Above the API, how is a freelance graphic designer meant to negotiate for a better piece rate, when he or she is competing against workers all over the world? And below it, you don’t need to be a xenophobe to see how much more difficult it is to form a trade union if your co-workers are on zero-hours contracts, come from all over the world, and mostly talk to their fellow-countrymen during breaks. But at the same time, the Precariat Left welcomes diversity — because that’s the world they grew up in.

From the vantage point of the Proletariat Left, obviously what’s needed is more solidarity. For example, Blue Labour — perhaps the last remaining sub-group within the party that voices Proletarian Left concerns — sometimes discusses trade-offs between cultural cohesion and immigration. But from a Precariat Left point of view, talking about cultural cohesion simply doesn’t make much sense — and routinely traduces Blue Labour as racist.

Instead of Proletarian Left-style stability and solidarity, the world of the Precariat Left is shifting, provisional and temporary — whether in terms of identity, lifestyle, or domestic arrangement. It’s international; it doesn’t look askance at people with minority sexual identities or gender expressions; it’s suspicious of anything too conventional-looking — perhaps because those things now feel profoundly off-limits.

Coalition-building among the Precariat Left is not just between Hampstead and Hartlepool but across barriers of language, culture and values, as well as above and below the API and between graduates and non-graduates. At its best, “woke” identity politics is trying to do just that: build solidarity in a world fissured by difference.

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Yet it runs into difficulty on two fronts. Firstly, the Precariat Left preference for identities and alliances rather than values and solidarity is understandable on its own terms, but has also morphed into an aesthetic for many who are in fact comfortably “above the API” and always likely to remain so. In the process it risks turning against its own: consider how protests against police brutality in impoverished communities rapidly morphed into arguments about abolishing the police — in truth not a popular policy among the actual precariat, though still appealing to elite anti-authoritarians from safe neighbourhoods.

Secondly, as we’ve seen recently in Britain, hearing their entire worldview traduced as obsolete bigotry understandably incenses the Proletariat Left. And this group, despite the tectonic demographic shifts away from its worldview, is still numerous, and electorally essential for a Left-wing party.

This may change, though. Most of the giants of the 20th-century labour movement are old, or already gone. Most attendees at the Durham Miners’ Gala have no first-hand pit experience. The last industrial jobs in the West are falling to robots, and both the mass culture and the labour movement it created are a distant memory for most.

But it’s not as though working people no longer need advocacy. Amazon recently apologised for falsely denying that its drivers are sometimes compelled by tight delivery schedules to urinate in bottles. In response, the new post-industrial Left seeks to challenge Amazon and its ilk today, not via the old union style but forms of solidarity that celebrate instability, diversity and inclusion.

Will they be successful? This version of the Left has shown a poor record so far of evading those gilded entryists who love to play with instability but will never live amid the consequences of their games. And it remains to be seen whether the new Left is capable of organising at the scale needed to take on our new corporate overlords. But for the sake of the new precariats, let’s hope they are.

1. The Red Wall hasn’t finished falling down

At the last election the Conservatives won fifty seats from Labour across Wales, the Midlands and the North of England. These make up the famous “Red Wall” — or at least that section of it that turned blue.

For what’s less appreciated is just how much of it is still standing. We’re not talking the odd fragment here and there — but a significant proportion of Labour’s remaining MPs.

Up until last week, Hartlepool was number 44 on a list of likely Tory targets for the next general election (i.e. those requiring the smallest swings to turn blue). So, in theory, 43 seats are more winnable than Hartlepool was. Of those, 36 are held by Labour, 28 of them in the North and Midlands.

For what it’s worth, number 43 on the list is Rotherham. In last week’s local elections, the Tories went from zero seats on Rotherham Borough Council to twenty in a single bound. If that’s anything to go by, the fall of the Red Wall is only half-way through.

2. Millennials might not ride to the rescue

Labour’s first priority shouldn’t be to win back the Red Wall, but to save what’s left of it. And yet unbelievably they’re being distracted from this most basic of tasks by the prospect of gains along the “Blue Wall”: Conservative-held seats in the South where younger, university-educated voters are trending Left.

As Ed West wrote on UnHerd this week, long-term generational shifts should certainly worry the Tories. But Labour ought to worry too. The party’s extreme dependence on younger voters is not a strength, but a vulnerability. Not only do young people have a habit of growing up and changing their minds, there’s a lot the Conservatives could do to win them over.

3. The Green Party 

Even if the Tories persist in abandoning the young to the Left, there’s no guarantee that the Left means Labour.

Last week, the Green Party demonstrated that it is capable of taking seats off all the main parties. Its biggest breakthrough though came in Bristol, where the Greens took an astonishing thirteen seats from Labour. Sheffield produced another astonishing result, in which the Greens gained five seats and Labour lost its majority.

In a general election, this could mean the Greens breaking out of their Brighton bastion to give Caroline Lucas some company in Parliament. A more dangerous scenario is one in which English Greens follow the lead of their German counterparts to become the middle-class Left-wing party”. This would deny Labour the new “Blue Wall” voters they need to offset their losses elsewhere. A Green surge could prove fatal.

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4. Non-white voters can’t be taken for granted

Labour still dominates the ethnic minority vote. It’s a key reason why the party keeps on piling up massive majorities in the most urban constituencies — especially in London.

But no one likes to be taken for granted; Starmer can’t assume that this will continue.

It is, for instance, going to be increasingly hard to sustain the image of the Tories as an exclusively white party. The Cabinet already includes Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel, Alok Sharma and Kwasi Kwarteng. By the next election they could be joined by Sajid Javid, James Cleverly and Kemi Badenoch (who would be the first black female MP to achieve Cabinet rank).

An ethnically-diverse Cabinet is not in itself a reason why non-white voters should vote Conservative. But it does explode an “argument” for why they should not — i.e. the insinuation that the Tories are irredeemably racist.

5. The boundary review

After years of delay, the much-delayed review of constituency boundaries should be finished by July 2023 — after which, in the subsequent general election, the Conservatives will almost certainly gain seats, while Labour and the other opposition parties lose them.

It’s hard to tell how many until we get the new map — but it’s not unreasonable to suppose a Tory gain of ten seats and an opposition loss of about the same number.

That, of course, would increase the government’s notional majority from eighty to a hundred. Good luck overturning that in one go.

6. A post-Covid boost

Getting the boundary review done by summer 2023 would allow an autumn election in the same year.

And it is highly likely the Government will want to go to the country during a Goldilocks period for the British economy: early enough for the post-Covid boom still to be felt, but late enough to get strategic investments in Red Wall constituencies underway. The Tories, in effect, will only look stronger. Boris Johnson would love to spend the campaign posing in a hard hat, new infrastructure rising up behind him.

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7. A Labour Party civil war

And yet Labour’s real problem might be in the foreground.

The first shots in Labour’s impending civil war were fired over the weekend, as the Shadow Cabinet reshuffle descended into chaos.

But worse could be to come. Compared to Jeremy Corbyn’s first year as leader — in which most of the shadow Cabinet resigned and there was a second leadership contest — Starmer has had an easy ride.

Now, do you suppose that’s because the Corbynites have meekly accepted their fate — or because they’ve been waiting for their moment?

I suspect Starmer is about to find out.

8. A Labour stalemate

There is an alternative to civil war, but it’s worse.

The Corbynites never makes their move; the Starmerites never hit back. So nothing is resolved, nothing decided. Nothing of interest happens at all — or is even said for fear of provoking the other side.

There was talk of appointing Yvette Cooper and Hillary Benn to the shadow cabinet — not unbearably exciting, I’ll grant you — but Starmer couldn’t even make that happen. If nothing else, an Opposition should capture the imagination, but this lot just gather dust.

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9. The threat of Scottish independence

Another nightmare scenario for the Labour Party lurks north of the border: a second referendum on Scottish independence.

The 2014 referendum was a catastrophe for Labour — wiping out its most reliable stronghold. A second referendum would cause further damage. It’s not that there are many Scottish Labour MPs left to lose (it has just one). Rather the danger this time is of an English backlash, which is overwhelmingly likely to benefit the Conservatives. And there’s always the possibility that the Nats will win. Without Scotland’s MPs, the Tories could strengthen their grip on Westminster.

10. Don’t bank on a two-party system

Britain’s two-party system has been in place for so long, we’ve come to see it as a feature of our constitution. But it isn’t.

Just because we’re accustomed to alternating spells of centre-left and centre-right government it doesn’t mean that things have to be that way. In other democracies, one party can hold power, barely interrupted, for decades upon end. Consider Sweden, for instance, or Japan. Britain too could end with a permanent party of government — and it won’t be Labour.

The idea that “the world doesn’t owe you a living” is a Right-wing sentiment that the Left has always resisted. But that doesn’t stop it from being true.

I railed against it, as I looked up at his wife and two children, saying when we parted that we would meet again in the new year. He contacted me in early January inviting me to visit him in hospital, that he had “something important” he wanted to talk about, but I will never know what it was. He died before I could visit, a year ago today.

Over the past year, as the pandemic took hold and politics fell apart, my thoughts have returned again and again to Roger, imagining what he would have made of lockdown, of the rise of China, of the Brexit deal and the squalid disintegration of the Trump Presidency. He was a gentle and curious man and I would have enjoyed his observations.

He was interested in many things, but he was also a curiosity in our intellectual culture; a conservative. He was viewed by the Left, as at best a nostalgic irrelevance, at worst a nasty reactionary. There was no place for the conservative philosopher in our universities, and yet I viewed him as an ally. I was always struck by his generosity and his appreciation of the conservative tradition within Labour. He truly understood the importance of loss and grief; the loss of a home and a community is vital to any comprehension of our present politics, but it is hard to grasp if you think that things can only get better.

Further reading

Jeremy Corbyn's Labour would crush civil society

By Roger Scruton

Roger gave expression to the new era that is now emerging in which the nation state, democracy, a sense of place and the working class are not doomed remnants of a previous epoch, but the primary materials through which the effects of globalisation are mediated politically. He was a modernist in literature and style, but it was a modernity tempered by tradition and this was expressed in his view of people as longing for meaning, for attachment, for love and for beauty, who flourish in a society characterised by healthy relationships, a sense of being part of a “we”.

His conservatism, in which association, friendship, institutions and ultimately politics would encourage a shared responsibility for each other in a shared home, “an island of me in a sea of we”, is central to his thought. That theme of home, or oikophilia, was one of his great contributions to modern philosophy. It required a sense of solidarity, of sharing a fate with others.

Roger’s politics was local, conservationist and loosely sociable; he was far too much of a loner, though, to subscribe to a communitarian or collectivist anthropology. He thought that the Ancient Constitution, based upon the balance of interests rather than the separation of the powers was the system best suited to our country. He was enamoured of the Common Law as the defender of our liberties, and our environment. His book, Green Philosophy is a very significant contribution to this. His love of Kant and appreciation of secularism set him apart from reactionary thinkers.

His understanding of Christianity, meanwhile, and its relationship to the nation was understood in terms of civility and temper and not as the foundation of political authority. He thought that in England, following the civil war, there was an appreciation of pluralism and a suspicion of religious enthusiasm. The origins of authority remained political and revisable. It was the lack of that understanding that concerned him about Islam.

His final book, Where We Are, is a profound reflection on the basic assumption of national sovereignty. He evokes a “we” that provides the democratic authority of the nation state, which far from evaporating in the swirl of globalisation, retains the legitimacy to preserve meaning and attachment in people’s lives. He articulated the possibilities that leaving the European Union opened for renewing our civic and democratic institutions.

Further reading

How identity politics drove the world mad

By Roger Scruton

When I pointed out to him that the most significant consequence of slipping the constraints of the Lisbon Treaty would be for the Left to be able to actively challenge the destructive power of capitalism to commodify human beings and nature, he replied that Labour seemed more interested in hating Tories than in appealing to a broad range of people who might agree with that, and support it.

I enjoyed many evenings in his garret in Albany going through the papers, discussing our politics: the Left, community land trusts, American misunderstanding of conservatism. Those discussions echo still, and I see three areas where Scruton’s work can continue to be a source of vitality.

The first is his work on aesthetics and beauty, in which human scale and form take a central place within a tradition characterised by the sacred and the sensual, which he considered the basis of love. For him, sex was sacred. During this lockdown period, when we have inhabited a parallel world of no physical presence, in which the laughter of strangers has become a distant memory and when there is so little intimacy, Roger’s emphasis on sociability, conviviality and relationships has taken on a more intense prescience. His interest in what we have lost gives me strength.

The second concerns the meaning of a home. For Roger the primary story of humanity was that of exile and return, this was as true for the Odyssey as for the prodigal son. The sociable nature of the person required a form of settled community, a home to return to. In this, self-governing civic institutions play a central role, expressing the particular nature of particular people in particular places. He viewed the Left as increasingly embracing the renunciation and denunciation of any notion of a home, of attachment, preferring instead an emphasis on false consciousness and domination. His book, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, is worth reading right now. It was Roger who pointed out to me that the meaning of nostalgia is a longing for home and that is not to be despised.

Further reading

How I overcame my class stigma

By Roger Scruton

The third area relates to housing and architecture. He railed against a dehumanised modernity, in which the greed of the market worked with the instrumentalism of the state and professional indifference to build homogenised and degraded houses in disconnected spaces that sapped culture of its form and meaning. His heart was grieved by what had happened to Birmingham and Manchester. The city centre of his local town, Swindon, was a source of sorrow beyond words. He loved the terraced housing which was demolished as slum clearance and replaced by something inhumane, rather than restored. For him this was where the coalition between the rich and the educated generated the greatest damage. It bears reflection still.

A very belated recognition came to him when he was chosen to chair the Government commission on “Building better, building beautiful”. It was an attempt to defy the developers and the professional architects so that people could participate in building and designing the new homes relying on local labour and materials.

His chairmanship came to a terrible end, in a storm of Twitter hate, generated by a false account of an interview with the New Statesman. The words I read at that time, full of demonisation, bore no relation to my gently stubborn friend, who argued that what matters is love, truth, beauty, friendship and meaning. Those are the concepts and categories through which we should judge our lives and our politics.

His life was characterised by courage, civility and curiosity. He had the courage to be a conservative when the intellectual world was moving against conservatism, and to be true to his tradition in the face of distortion and demonisation. I think it killed him in the end, but he lived it and engaged with civility when confronted with the hate.

He told me that his politics “if I have any, are probably Blue Labour”, and I asked him to keep quiet about that. That was cowardly of me, and a year following his death, there is a deathly silence in our national conversation where his voice once was.

What do they all want? At the more wonkish end of the debate, the argument is broadly that the political push throughout the twentieth century for ever greater social and economic freedom has brought many benefits, but that these have been unevenly distributed and are now reaching the point of diminishing returns.

The pursuit of ever greater freedom and individualism, this strand of thought argues, has delivered rising wealth while hollowing out working-class communities; liberated some women while forcing others to work a double shift and abandon the young and old in substandard care, and provided an infinitude of consumer choice but at the cost of mounting ecological damage. Under the sign of radical individualism, the new communitarians argue, we are all becoming more solitary and self-absorbed. Even charitable giving seems to be in unstoppable decline.

But what, in practice, are the new social conservatives seeking to conserve? Calls for a revival of cultural conservatism, many in the name of Christian values, seem often on closer examination oddly insubstantial. In 2017, UKIP’s leader-for-that-week Stephen Crowther said that the UK is a Christian country, “and we intend to stay that way”.

Yet for Crowther, being a Christian country does not seem to impose any obligation to actually be Christian, but he says, simply “reflects the Judeo-Christian classical and enlightenment origins on which our laws, our social systems and our cultural norms have been built over two millennia.”

Elsewhere in Europe, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbàn describes his brand of authoritarian, identity-oriented politics as “Christian democracy”. Only a minority of Hungarians go to church every week – only 12% attends church regularly, although around three in four identity as Catholic or Protestant — but the identifier “Christian” has nonetheless become central to Orbàn’s politics.

Much as Crowther did, the Orbàn-supporting Bishop of Szeged, László Kiss-Rigó, bridges this gap with a vague, cultural definition of what actually constitutes a Christian: “In Europe, even an atheist is a Christian”, he said. It turns out that being “Christian” is less about prayer or doctrine than values, for as he puts it: “We are very happy that there are a few politicians like Orbán and Trump who really represent those values which we Christians believe to be important.”

What exactly are these values, then? Attendees at anti-Islam Pegida rallies in Germany carry crosses and sing carols. Italian Right-winger Matteo Salvini punctuates anti-immigration rhetoric by brandishing a rosary, drawing criticism from the very Catholic faith whose symbols he invokes. Try to pin down any actual values this form of Christianity might require of its adherents, and matters are much less clear.

Even those whose stated desire is to defend the place of faith in public and political life seem keen that the faith itself stop short of imposing actual obligations. To take a more moderate example of the new cultural conservatism, the Social Democratic Party took a broadly post-liberal, culturally conservative stance in its 2018 relaunch. The New Declaration made an energetic defence of our right to hold even illiberal religious views openly in public life, stating that “Citizens holding a traditional, patriotic or religious outlook are often bullied and marginalised, stifling the open debate upon which a free and democratic society depends.”

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Then, about a year later, the SDP lost its only donor over a bitter intra-party dispute about whether or not it should be party policy to ban religious non-stun slaughter — a position markedly at odds with the party’s previous defence of religious pluralism. And when the Church of England recently reiterated its long-held position on sex and marriage, prominent SDP member Patrick O’Flynn took to the pages of the Daily Express to mock “the otherworldliness of these Men of God”. Instead of insisting on “out of touch” doctrine, O’Flynn suggested, in order to attract more young people to weekly worship the Church should adjust its doctrines on sex and marriage to reflect their values.

In this view of faith, theological positions do not reflect any kind of truth-claim but should be emergent properties of the aggregate ethical positions held by the members of that church. Less “Christian democracy” than “democratic Christianity”: whatever the congregants believe becomes the doctrine of the Church.

From a religious perspective this makes no sense. To the believer, doctrine is handed down from God Himself. The thought of God’s word being subject to plebiscite is absurd, if not outright blasphemous.

This debate reveals the missing piece in today’s would-be conservative revival. Where do our values come from? What is the proper source of political authority? Progressives gesture at natural rights or an imagined future utopia, but for anyone who remains unconvinced that we are all on a journey somewhere wonderful, some other authority is required.

Edmund Burke suggested the answer lay in a blend of deference to tradition and God’s grand design, tempered by carefully constrained democratic institutions; his Savoyard contemporary, Joseph de Maistre, argued that the only proper form of authority lay in God’s will, delivered via the Pope and an absolute monarch.

The history of modernity has unfolded in the tensions between these competing understandings of political authority. “The will of God”, the will of “the People” and the grand designs of utopias have variously been used to justify all manner of enterprises, with outcomes from the magnificent to the horrific. But our present political difficulties may be in part down to a growing popular discomfort with accepting the legitimacy of any of the above.

Suggested reading

The danger, and hope, of the European Right

By Douglas Murray

Since the election of Donald Trump and the vote to leave the EU, there has been a low but persistent rumble from our moral betters that democracy should maybe have its wings clipped a little, to stop stupid proles making bad decisions. A degree of wing-clipping has in fact long since taken place: John Gray has discussed recently in these pages the way the language and legal mechanism of ‘rights’ is used to shift entire areas of public life from democratic debate to the dry realm of unelected lawyers and judges. But if authority does not reside in the will of the people, nor does it reside with God: it is difficult to imagine a mainstream British politician claiming moral authority on the basis of divine will without being roundly pilloried.

Progress and human rights, then? Every young person who passes through a modern university is taught in no uncertain terms that totalising metanarratives are suspect. At best, they are power moves. Whenever you find one you should ask cui bono? In the case of universal human rights, the answer is probably: lawyers.

This leaves would-be conservatives in a bind. If (with a few honourable exceptions still holding out for direct Vatican rule) political authority rests not in tradition (too restrictive on personal liberty) or democracy (probably rigged) or even God (don’t tell ME what to do!) or even in the lawyers, then what is left? Politics professor Matt McManus argues that the result is a postmodernism of the right as well as of the left: a series of nested calls for a return to authority, tradition and culture that all, on closer inspection, turn out to be largely delivery mechanisms for adversarial but hollow identity politics.

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Where in Britain does 'do God'?

By Giles Fraser

Having come unmoored from its roots either in the past, the divine, or the popular will, McManus suggests that this postmodern conservatism has warped a Burkean belief in tradition into a kind of moral cosplay whose main purpose is less seeking the good life than making a noisy defence of whichever identities its sworn enemies attack. As the postmodern liberal-left demonises heterosexual white males, so postmodern conservatism sets out to defend them; and so on.

Seen in this light, the problem with Orbàn and other borrowers of Christian clothing is not that they do not believe their own words. Inasmuch as they can mean anything, they genuinely identify as Christians. It is more that when all sources of authority are suspect, the only legitimate recourse is to the self: to identity, and identification.

And the problem with identification is that it remains separate from whatever it identifies as. Just like the modern dating marketplace, where commitment is radically undermined by the ease of swiping right, modern cultural conservatism is radically undermined by the fear that without a reliable foundation of authority, and with more identity-choice options only a click away, we are never fully the thing we claim as our identity.

Without a sense of confidence in the roots of its political legitimacy, conservative values dissolve from concrete obligations to consumer accessories. This in turn is why Orbànist “Christian democracy” and many of its populist cousins find their most compelling realisation not in religious doctrine or observance, but in defining themselves against their outgroup. If “even an atheist is a Christian” then either no one is a Christian, or everyone is. The only way of defining what a Christian is, is in terms of what it is not: foreigners.

But if this is so, then in a postmodern environment, shorn of recourse to authority, cultural conservatism is a waste of energy. It cannot define what it wants. All is insubstantial; there is no exit from the Matrix, nothing left to conserve.

Does it follow from this that those who long for place, limits, love, family, faith and meaning should just sit in the rubble and watch it all burn? I do not think so. But when there is nothing solid to go back to, anyone attracted to what is left of the ideology that used to be called “conservative” needs to find a new name for their yearning. “Constructionists”, perhaps. There is a lot of building to do.

Although the Conservatives led across every social class, their lead in the skilled and unskilled working class was particularly emphatic. Boris has no equal in cabinet. There is no coherent opposition, his majority is impregnable and all his MPs have signed up to his agenda. Hail Caesar. Meet the new King of Merry England. Good King Boris.

His goal is to make his domination hegemonic through two measures. The first is to identify the Tories with the working class and the country towns and distance them from London and finance. Putney went Labour and Bolsover went Tory. Look up the difference in house prices between the two. It is a class polarisation against the ruling financial and cultural elite.

Ministers have been banned from going to Davos. The Conservative vote went down across the home counties, and especially those areas nearest London. That was the logic behind proroguing Parliament and the expulsion of the remain rebels from the Party. The Conservatives were happy for them to vote Lib-Dem and Labour. Instead the party concentrated entirely on the towns and villages of the North and the South, the country shires and the post-industrial working class, the basis of the Brexit coalition. “Fuck business.” The Conservatives will be more northern and proletarian and Boris will drink beer with his new MPs in the many bars in Parliament. The Cavaliers will lord it over the Puritans.

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How cavalier is Boris?

By Giles Fraser

The second step was to break from fiscal orthodoxy and embrace the activist state. Expect to see a thousand Boris busses bombing around the country lanes of England in partnership with local government. Expect a house building boom. The PM will violate EU rules on state aid and competition law with relish, while Labour will cleave to the constraints of the single market and the rulings of the ECJ.

During the election campaign, the Conservatives pledged state aid to small regional businesses while not pointing out that half of Labour’s manifesto would have been illegal under EU Law. They quietly renounced Thatcherism. Boris will be the heir to Keynes while Labour will uphold the rectitude of Hayek forever enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty and its sovereignty over the single market and customs union. While Boris will point out the distinction between free trade and free movement, Labour won’t know the difference between the two. The interregnum has been broken, and as in 1979 its broken to the right.

Pope Francis said recently that we are not living through an era of change but a change of era. This Conservative victory is an important part of defining what the features of the new era are. The previous consensus was defined by four shared assumptions; that the nation state, democracy, the working class and conservatism would matter less. The dominant forces were the educated middle-class, globalisation, written constitutions and liberalism. Blair and Cameron expressed this perfectly.

Brexit is a sign of the times, a glimpse of the future but the progressive mind can only see it as reactionary, nostalgic and backward looking. The decisive role of the working class in asserting national sovereignty through its democratic vote in order to renew the ancient institutions of Parliament and the common law is incomprehensible to the left. The new era is a foreign country for those who thought the arc of history was with them.

Suggested reading

Will Boris save social democracy?

By David Goodhart

The scale of Labour’s defeat last Thursday is hard for the progressive mind to comprehend. Like the death of a loved one, who has survived terrible illness before, it is both shocking and predictable. The responses of blame, avoidance, denial, anger, displacement and depression from the Labour family are also shocking and predictable. Labour is like a family from hell. Full of hate and blame and unable to understand how it got here. Labour is no longer a tribe and has lost its homeland. It’s gonna be lonely this Christmas.

This is because Labour is out of relationship with its history, traditions and the communities that created and cherished it. So out of touch that it couldn’t see the rejection coming. It now shares the entropic fate of the French, Italian, German, Belgian and Dutch Labour Parties, who have shrunk progressively into irrelevance, replaced by nationalist and Green Parties on the whole. Drained of their national purpose by the constraints of the European Union, social democracy has no conception of the social, or of democracy. Labour now shares their fate which means irrelevance and endless meetings that go nowhere. Just a slow and inexorable decline. It marks the end of British exceptionalism on the Left, just as we leave the EU.

It could have been so different. In 2017, when Labour said it respected the result of the referendum, it surged through the final two weeks of the campaign. The Conservatives, running on the policy of ‘lose your mind, lose your home’, turned a Brexit election into a discussion of the financial consequences of dementia.

There were indications of disaffection as Mansfield and North Derby turned blue; but the heartlands believed that Corbyn was a faithful son of Tony Benn and he had spent a lifetime denouncing the EU as a capitalist club where no-one was accountable. Against the current of continental Europe, Labour alone was a vital and renewed social-democratic party committed to nationalisation and the redistribution of wealth. Brexit was a source of socialist renewal and democracy was re-affirmed as the means of resisting the domination of the rich and their decades of relentless plundering. But, then, Corbyn’s Labour renounced Brexit.

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How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

One of the reasons why the election result seemed so shocking was that the working class were supposed to be on the wrong side of history, to not really matter anymore. Despite the result of the Brexit referendum, it was assumed that the task for Labour was to build a coalition of ‘progressive’ voters around a second referendum which they called a ‘people’s vote’. The difference between 2017 and 2019 was that the working class noted that Labour was blocking Brexit and denying the legitimacy of their vote. Corbyn’s Labour sided with global capitalism. It is a minor irony in all this that Andrew Murray and Seamus Milne, who prided themselves on their Marxist analysis with a central role for class ran a campaign based on ‘values’ and were trounced by the Conservatives who placed a relentless stress on the working class and transferring their loyalties. Labour Marxists turned out to be Whigs. What a lot of luggage for such a short journey.

The deep complicity between New Labour and the Corbyn Project was shown here. The progressive certainty that history was going in one direction, towards the free movement of people and things, that technology would dissolve place and borders in an undifferentiated swirl in which only the individual and Treaty law mattered.

That the future was based on globalisation was unquestioned between them, as was the idea that the nation state and democracy no longer really mattered. This Whig theory of history is as untrue now as it ever was. The working class, the Nation-State and democracy are key features of the new era. Far from being losers, the post-industrial working class has decided the two most significant votes of our time.

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Does class still count?

By James Bloodworth

And the Left was the loser. The progressive illness has dissolved the ties that bind because it has no concept of society, of the social, of belonging and inheritance. Trapped in an endless now, it lost the future. The coalition of Peter Mandelson and John McDonnell that tied Labour to a second referendum is the key to understanding the catastrophic defeat because it finally ruptured the connection between the working class and Labour. It said, you didn’t know what you were doing. It said that democracy does not decide issues in our society. It said that it had no faith in our country to decide its future through democratic politics but that it had to be contracted out to an unaccountable system of directives and laws.

By embracing a second referendum, Labour crossed a line. It no longer supported workers who trusted democracy more than the European Court of Justice when it came to their rights. Labour thought that the consequences would be catastrophic and displayed no confidence that our country could flourish outside frictionless capitalism. The Left suddenly became experts in just-in-time supply chains as if capitalism, the most adaptable economic system ever devised, would not be able to cope. They were not faithful to the marriage and it is now over. There is no evidence that there will be a reconciliation.

At the last election, Labour lost Mansfield by a thousand votes. Now the majority is more than 16,000. The Scottish working-class have not returned to Labour, but moved to a nationalist party and show no sign of remorse. Once rejected, they move on and don’t look back. In Michael Lind’s recent book, the New Class War, he makes the connection between class and geography, between hubs and heartlands. Labour is the party of the hubs, but the Conservatives now lay claim to the heartlands.

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Ditch the City, enrich the nation

By Maurice Glasman

And beyond the immediate devastation of defeat, is the existential horror of what it means. The severing of the long-term marriage with the working class that created the Labour Party in the first place. It opens the space for the emergence of a genuinely nasty right-wing populist Party as an alternative to Labour and the Conservatives. The Brexit Party is merely a mild taster of what the future portends. The Conservative vote only rose a few percent overall, many former Labour voters went for the Brexit Party. What was clear is that the Labour vote collapsed in the heartlands and the Brexit Party saved more Labour seats than it lost.

The glory of Labour was its ability to express the Labour interest within the framework of the inherited Parliamentary and legal institutions asserting democratic politics as an alternative to violence. While the rest of Europe did polarise and went Fascist or Communist, Labour retained the affections of the working-class and engaged in the politics of war and peace. Defeating the Nazis in the War Coalition and then creating the National Health Service, nationalising steel, coal and the railways, creating the National Trust and the Green Belt.

The virtues of civility, generosity, and kindness in the public square are easily dismissed and hard to retain. Labour was the source of that politics and with its departure from the working-class communities it used to represent, a sullen resentful politics looms. Something closer to the Front National or the Afd in Germany.

The new Government needs to offer something more than electoral success and some infrastructure projects; it needs to build on the politics of earning and belonging, of contribution and civic renewal. Over the past 40 years, the counties and towns of our country have been denuded of its assets and inheritance. None of the building societies that were demutualised in the last 40 years exist any longer as local institutions. The endowment of regional banks so that there is access to capital once more is an essential part of that. The recognition of vocation is also essential and the establishment of vocational colleges for building, maintenance, social care and taxi driving with apprenticeship laws that regulate labour market entry would address the skills required for building homes, caring for the elderly and the 85% of the economy that functions outside globalisation.

The dignity of labour is the foundation of this. It should be the basis of Labour’s alternative. The central question for the next ten years is whether the Conservatives can recognise that their future now lies with labour.

All hail Good King Boris

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Blue Labour’s Jonathan Rutherford argued recently that national solidarity is a cornerstone of public support for a welfare state, and the nation-state a critical defence for ordinary people against the forces of globalisation. It appears the public agrees: Dominic Lawson argues that it was Corbyn’s rejection of common basic gestures of patriotic feeling that caused the British working class to reject him.

But Blue Labour’s call to respond with a return to “patriotic, communitarian, one-nation” Labour politics was countered with accusations that patriotism is just racism in disguise.

Part of what makes this unfair caricature funny is the nagging worry that it might contain a grain of truth. What if patriotism is a bit racist? After all, it is possible to conflate membership of an ethnic group with belonging to a nation-state. And history is not short of examples of national or ethnic antipathies being used to justify violence and hate.

But what if many of our fellow-countrymen have decided they don’t care? That retaining a democratic nation-state and a sense of national pride is worth being accused by members of the identity Left of stupidity or racism? If this is the case, our high-minded betters have two choices.

The first is to try even harder to “educate” the stubborn proles out of their love of Queen and country in favour of (one presumes) intersectional identity politics and socialist internationalism. To which I say: good luck with that.

The second is to make a positive case for patriotism. Racial prejudice is still, sadly, a feature of British life, but there are many more non-racist Britons than there are racist ones. A look at the 2019 General Election results for actual racist parties such as the BNP (total votes: 510) supports the contention that racism does not have mass electoral appeal.

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Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates

By Mary Harrington

What would an inclusive patriotism look like, though? The last serious effort anyone made at articulating such a thing was Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia back in the 1990s. (It is perhaps not a coincidence that he was the last Labour leader to be, however fleetingly, popular with the working class.)

But Cool Britannia was fatally wounded by Blair’s decision to drag the country into a disastrous war in order to shore up our post-imperial “standing” on the “world stage”. And if Cool Britannia’s geopolitical fantasies were punctured by the Iraq debacle, its cultural and economic vision imploded with the Great Crash of 2008.

We seem to have run out of iterations of Great Britain. Colonial empires are frowned upon and the EU’s opt-in reprise of imperialism has been resoundingly rejected by the British public. “Soft power” is an elite preoccupation and ours is waning anyway. Financialisation has hollowed out our economy. So what remains for us to be patriotic about? It is perhaps understandable that many decent people on the centre-Right and centre-Left fear that the answer is “just racism, sorry”.

I think they are wrong. If Great Britannia has run out of road, I would like to wave a (suitably small) Union Jack to celebrate a new, bijou British patriotic vision: Small Britannia.

For starters, our island home is small but nonetheless beautiful and precious. Small Britannia should make stewardship of this small home a patriotic duty — our ancient landscapes are struggling, as they are relentlessly strip-mined of natural health and resources by super-sized agribusiness. Subsidised by that one-size-fits-all policy of anti-smallness, the Common Agricultural Policy, this kind of industrial agriculture rips up hedgerows and decimates wild plant, animal and insect species (especially the smallest) with crop spraying, habitat destruction and topsoil erosion.

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Post-Brexit, freed of the strictures and perverse incentives of the CAP, a patriotic vision of Small Britannia might help us also resist pressure to import US-style agribusiness methods. Instead we could go large (or small) on environmental protections and seek to promote a rural economy that celebrates everything small, from small multi-crop farms to small fields with rich hedgerows to fertile topsoil teeming with the small organisms that keep the land healthy. 

Small Britannia could continue, in the same spirit, with policies oriented toward supporting smallness in businesses. Thickets of regulation automatically benefit big business, as they have the resources to meet them, while smaller organisations flounder or are simply put off starting because of regulatory obstacles. As suggested in this 2014 report on EU over-regulation, Small Britannia could encourage a flourishing raft of small businesses by exempting them from a thicket of rules (written risk assessments, GDPR etc) they neither need nor have time to obey.

While we’re at it, let’s celebrate smallness in architecture and urban development. Let Small Britannia encourage human-scale building, self-build projects, small-scale development, and architecture in keeping with local settings. A patriotism of smallness would embrace not enormous bland housing estates, gigantic modernist skyscrapers or even the grand imperial-era architecture of cornices, porticoes and Great Men but small architecture: vernacular styles using local materials and adapted over centuries to work harmoniously with local climates.

Boris Johnson is already embracing Small Britannia in turning his development focus toward towns and smaller places. We must demand more of this, and ensure a post-Brexit Johnson government responds to the despair of “left behind” parts of the country not with handouts or pressure to turn everywhere into an underwhelming simulacrum of London, but a vision of smallness flourishing on its own terms.

Let Small Britannia oversee a wave of investment in towns, in rural transport, in encouraging new, small businesses in small places. And let us have policies that help the young to stay on in small communities or come back there to raise their own families, rather than draining youth and talent away to enormous urban hubs. 

Smallness also supports integration. Letting go of empire and the grandiose visions of the past means embracing the country we are today, not just an imagined “original” (white) population. Here, again, Small Britannia could do worse than start with a celebration of small communities. It is far harder to segregate by religion or ethnicity if you live in a village where everyone knows everyone else by name. (I live in a small town and this is one of the best things about it: though our population is multi-ethnic, civic life is far more tolerant and inclusive than anything I ever saw living in London.)

Stable, friendly small communities need not mean suspicious and exclusionary ones if we all share a love of Small Britannia. Far more than balkanisation by the resentful categories of the identity left, a patriotism of human-scale communities and buildings and landscapes has the potential to offer a genuinely inclusive sense of belonging.

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And as Small Britannia oversees a flourishing of smaller, more stable and more inclusive communities, let us also celebrate a new geopolitical smallness. Small Britannia does not have to either possess or join an empire. Let power-bloc politics grind on; small nations have survived unscathed in other great-power eras. And within Small Britannia, let us see a real devolution of power; as Tom Clougherty argued in CapX earlier this year, fiscal devolution to the regions could hold the key to economic rebalancing away from London.

Small Britannia can close the book on all the dreams of ‘reach’ and ‘influence’ that are really codes for one empire or another. Let us turn our backs on the grandiose vision of the hyper-liberals, with their dreams of technocratic global government. Let us be free of Cool Britannia and its Hyacinth Bucket-like fretting about how Britain appears “on the world stage”. Let us above all spurn the ethno-nationalist frothing of those few racists who believe, mistakenly and perniciously, that Britain’s worth was ever tied to its ethnic makeup.

Let Small Britannia instead be a beacon to a world still in thrall to a narrative that says globalisation is inexorable, that small cannot survive,  that nation-states are doomed and governance must inescapably globalise in order to keep a lid on capital. Let us prove that the hollowing-out of small communities can be reversed and national democracies can return accountability to electorates.

Let us not abandon patriotism to actual racists but reclaim it for the decent majority. Small Britannia can set aside cold, homogenising utopias and empires, and embrace the local, the particular, the emergent and the organic. Let us turn away both from nostalgia but also from abstract victim identities and embrace all the citizens we have, with their multiplicity of origin stories. Out of this we can forge a new national synthesis in which everyone in our great small country can feel proud to wave a (small) Union Jack.

By contrast, positive freedom is the sort of liberty that various forms of un-freedom make possible: the freedom expressed by your fingers dancing up a keyboard is made possible by years of disciplined practice; the freedom of running a marathon is made possible by years of not smoking or drinking or lazing about on the sofa. As the lonely commitment-phobic bachelor may someday come to realise, you can pay a very heavy price for choosing the wrong sort of freedom.

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Why won't Remainers talk about family?

By Giles Fraser

Liberalism is the politics of negative liberty. And it cuts Left and Right — broadly speaking, going Left on culture and Right on economics. On culture, it seeks to dismantle the cultural impediments to minority flourishing and emphasises the importance of individual choice. It is pro-gay and pro-choice. Many are comfortable with all this, but become distinctly less comfortable when words such as “family” and “motherhood” are considered to be a part of the whole apparatus of oppression and in need of deconstruction.

On economics, liberalism seeks to dismantle the barriers to free trade. With free-market capitalism, the human subject has broken free of the restrictive chains of tradition and religion, those of place and community, those of the family, even of one’s own biology. And with the inevitable forward march of globalisation; the collapse of restrictions on capital flows and financial deregulation; the disintegration of nation state borders, soon the values of the unencumbered self would stand victorious over the whole earth.

A few years after the collapse of the Berlin wall, Francis Fukuyama was so confident that Western liberal democracy had become the only show in town that he declared history to be over — and at its zenith stood the liberal subject triumphant.

Suggested reading

How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

He spoke too soon. Whether history will record its crisis as the financial crash of 2008 or the Trump/Brexit revolts of 2016, liberalism is no longer as cocky as it used to be. Despite its many undoubted gains, liberalism is now recognised as coming with a heavy price tag. In the name of negative freedom, it hollowed out many of the conditions of human flourishing: the solidarity of community, the importance of place and roots, spirituality and religion, the family, the nation state.

Post-liberalism is the attempt to resurrect many of these ideas, not because it is hostile to freedom, but because it seeks to articulate a deeper sense of freedom: positive freedom.

Suggested reading

Call yourself post-liberal?

By Peter Franklin

The peculiar thing about post-liberalism is that even though it aligns with many (perhaps even the majority of) people in the West — Right-wing on culture, Left-wing on economics — few, if any, mainstream political parties have moved in to occupy this space. Gramsci could so easily have been talking about the present moment when he said that a political crisis “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born”.

The following is an attempt to stake out something of an intellectual tradition for post-liberal thought, as it has expressed itself over the last 50 years or so. These are, for me, the top 10 texts that could help us consider the present moment in post-liberal terms.

1. After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre

Top spot must go to Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981). A former Marxist turned Thomist, MacIntyre argued that the moral inheritance of the Enlightenment — the crucible of liberal values — was to strip human life of a sense of purpose or teleology. When morality is rendered merely a question of individual choice, the moral life becomes grounded in nothing other than subjective opinion. And on this flimsy basis, it has struggled to survive.

The choice we have before us, MacIntyre claimed, was Nietzsche or Aristotle (or St Benedict). He prophetically expresses the Gramscian moment as us waiting not for Godot but for a new “doubtless very different, St Benedict”. By which he means, the “construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness”.

Another book worth reading alongside After Virtue would be John Gray’s Enlightenment’s Wake. Having been a J. S. Mill scholar for much of his academic life, Gray knows the enemy better than many of its proponents (Mill is a poster boy of classical liberalism). Given the preponderance of religiously minded people in the post-liberal quadrant, it is worth noting that atheists like Gray can equally flourish in this space.

2. Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Deneen

Second spot is shared by two very contrasting approaches, one from the Right and one from the Left. Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018) is a bracing attack on the borderlessness of the liberal self. It argues that what was designed to promote freedom instead undermined the very conditions — social, educational, religious — that made genuine freedom possible.

Deneen defends the importance of social institutions, from unions to churches to the family, that sustained human flourishing. And he points out that as human beings come to see themselves as fundamentally separate from each other, only the increasing power of the state can impose order on anarchy. Ironically, then, in the name of (negative) freedom, liberalism stimulates the state into greater acts of control.

Suggested reading

Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

By contrast, Nancy Fraser’s essay in American Affairs ‘From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond’ (2017)  carefully articulates how progressive liberalism came to form an alliance with neo-liberal economics, to create what she calls the progressive neo-liberalism of the Clintons and Blair.

Not only does she show how the populism that catapulted Trump into the White House was built upon a dissatisfaction with this alliance, but also, more philosophically, how Left and Right liberalism are brothers-in-arms — a fact that is currently most obviously expressed in the woke capitalism of Silicon Valley and Big Tech.

3. The Road to Somewhere, by David Goodhart

The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart (2017) is credited with the introduction of the important terms ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’ to distinguish between those who are bounded and rooted in place, and those who are mobile and rootless. Many smarted at this distinction, with its implication that those who have benefited from social mobility — or, at least, geographical mobility – have expressed some fundamental lack of loyalty to their community.

Suggested reading

It's a bad time for an illegal immigration amnesty

By David Goodhart

Theresa May’s well known comment: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world you are a citizen of nowhere” presses further on this sensitive spot. But there is little doubt Goodhart’s terminology illuminates a central aspect of the populist complaint against liberal politics. This book can be usefully paired with Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots, first published in English in 1952.

4. Hillbilly Elegy, by J. D. Vance

The defence of these ‘somewheres’, often derided as small-town, small-minded ‘deplorables’ is vividly captured by J. D. Vance’s brilliant Hillbilly Ellegy (2016), a sympathetic portrait of his upbringing in the Ohio rustbelt.

Likewise, Christophe Guilluy, in his The Twilight of the Elites (2019), describes how France has been fundamentally divided between the economically successful metropolitan centres and the un-chic periphery — a distinction he uses to explain the whole gilets jaunes phenomenon.

Suggested reading

Why the future is Henry the hoover

By J. D. Vance

5. Red Tory, by Phillip Blond

In the UK, the post-liberal moment was anticipated by Phillip Blond in his Red Tory (2010) and later by the Blue Labour movement. In the old terms of Left and Right, both were seen as political cross-dressers. Both regard capitalism and socialism as equally flawed, preferring instead something more like an economics of distributivism, where economic activity is subordinate to human interest — see Hilaire Belloc’s The Servile State (1912). For a quick guide to Blue Labour you could do worse than listen to Maurice Glasman’s Confessions or read Adrian Pabst’s The Demons of Liberal Democracy (2019).

A post-liberal reading list

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6. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, by Michael Sandel

Earlier philosophical attempts to expose the limits of liberal politics included the development of communitarianism, associated with thinkers like Charles Taylor and (his student) Michael Sandel. Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) is a more difficult book than one might expect from Radio 4’s user-friendly ‘public philosopher’, but it is an important milestone in the tradition — not least in the way that Sandel takes on John Rawls, in many ways the master thinker of 20^th century liberalism.

And, qua Rawls, a special mention here must go to Katrina Forrester’s recently published In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (2019). But for my money the two great books of this tradition are Taylor’s magisterial Sources of the Self (1989) and his brilliant little polemic The Ethics of Authenticity (1992).

7. Theology and Social Theory by John Millbank

There is no doubt that post-liberalism — in contrast with many other 20^th and  21^st century ‘isms’ — has an influential and functioning theological wing. John Millbank’s Theology and Social Theory (1990) is a formidable statement of the argument. It is noteworthy that Phillip Blond began as a theology academic, Red Tory being in many ways an extension of the whole Radical Orthodoxy school that included people like Millbank and Rowan Williams.

Suggested reading

How beauty shapes our fates

By Phillip Blond

Within the church itself, it is Catholic social teaching, growing out of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) and latterly expressed by Benedict XVI, that has proved to be especially influential. From Dorothy Day to Rod Dreher, it is not possible to capture the influence of Catholic social teaching in simple Left/Right terms. These are all Christian references, but pretty much all systems of religious belief carry both pre- and post-liberal convictions.

8. Why Love Matters, by Sue Gerhardt

Family life is often the entry point of former liberals into a more post-liberal sensibility. Having children often necessitates a certain rootedness, but also the lack of choice involved in who your children are or who your parents are exposes the limits of the liberal idea that we are all contractually related.

Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain (2004) by Sue Gerhardt is an important take on the science of early mother/child relationships. Pretty much anything by Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby on attachment would fit well under this category.

Suggested reading

Why liberal feminists don't care

By Mary Harrington

9. The World Beyond Your Head, by Matthew Crawford

The tradition which follows up on John Ruskin’s emphasis on beauty also feeds into post-liberalism. Roger Scruton on architecture, Jane Jacobs on the importance of neighbourhoods, and increasingly those who try and capture something of the dignity and spirituality of work.

Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head (2015) is a brilliant diagnosis of the way in which the liberal Kantian self finds it hard to concentrate in a world of perpetual distraction.

Suggested reading

The rise of the hippie conservatives

By Freddie Sayers

10. Prosperity without Growth, by Tim Jackson

Finally, the environment. Here, above all, the liberal idea of continuous and perpetual growth runs up against the distinctly post-liberal idea of the existence of limits. Tim Jackson’s Prosperity without Growth (2011) is of particular interest here. But the person I would read first is the Kentucky poet/farmer Wendell Berry. The World-Ending Fire (2019) is an astonishing collection of essays; The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977) is a work of genius.

This list is very much my own. Others will point to how much has been missed out. But if I were to design a kind of post-liberal curriculum, this is where I would start. In the UK, probably the most successful attempt to translate these ideas into some sort of political programme is that of the SDP’s New Declaration.

But despite the fact that many people exist within the quadrant it describes (Left on economics, Right on culture) it is still struggling to break through. It’s perhaps because it’s easier for the Right to break Left on economics than for the Left to break Right on culture — which is why the Conservative and Republican parties may be more amenable to this sort of thinking than their opponents. But even this is not a natural fit. Which brings us back to Gramsci. The old is dead. The new is yet to be born.

One of the best, and most carefully listened to speeches, was the one delivered by Paul Embery, on behalf of Trade Unionists Against the EU. In it, he reiterated his position on the Brexit debate – that democracy must be defended.

I have known Paul for a number of years: he is a firefighter and member of the National Executive of the Fire Brigade’s Union and I chaired the FBU’s Parliamentary group. I also know him as a long-standing Labour Party member; he has spoken at Labour Party conference fringe meetings for many years. He also writes compellingly for this website.

He is a socialist with deeply felt principles and an active supporter of Blue Labour — a grouping that wants to return the Party to its original roots and values of work, family and community. He is also passionately and vocally pro-Leave. At the rally when he was introduced, no mention was made of his elected office or even his membership of the FBU. He spoke in his own time and not on behalf of the FBU.

Suggested reading

How to fix Britain after Brexit

By Paul Embery

Nonetheless, shortly after the rally, Matt Wrack, the General Secretary of the FBU, issued a statement which said that it was outrageous that so-called Trade Union officials and Labour MPs attended joint rallies with Nigel Farage and others on the nationalist Right. In no uncertain terms, he stated: “They are a disgrace to the traditions of the Labour movement.”

His statement so angered me, that I immediately resigned from chairing the FBU Parliamentary group. In my resignation statement I pointed out that to imply that people such as Claire Fox and Brendan O’Neill, both of whom were at the rally and had spoken, were nationalist Right was an outrage.

Matt Wrack, undeterred, went on to make a formal complaint against Paul. This was duly investigated by the Vice-President of the FBU, Andy Noble, and Paul was suspended from the executive council. A few weeks later, at an internal disciplinary hearing, Paul was removed from his position and banned from holding office for two years. The executive council ruled that in criticising anti-Brexit Labour movement leaders during his speech, he had undermined the union’s own stance on the issue and thus acted in a way “prejudicial to the interests of the union”.

Last week, he lost his appeal by a narrow margin of just six votes out of 112.

Matt Wrack has personally led the charge against Paul. It’s odd, given that he has spent his career publicly championing freedom of speech, that he should take such a stance.

Suggested reading

Why does the Left sneer at the traditional working class?

By Paul Embery

This is the same Matt Wrack who in the past has said:

“To address the huge challenges our movement faces today, we need to build a culture of debate and democracy which accepts that there will be different views and sharp difference of opinion. Democracy must include the right to express those differences.”

It is disappointing, too, given that Wrack has always argued that genuine political disagreements should never be resolved by resorting to the rule book. So why would he take against Paul in this fashion?

There has certainly been much support for Paul and his writings and tweets over the past year, who was seen as one of the only credible challengers for the position of General Secretary when it is up for re-election next year.

But Wrack’s vendetta against such a stalwart campaigner for the rights of the worker has done huge damage to the reputation of the FBU. There has been an outpouring of anger against the leadership from outraged grassroots members. One member Tweeted: “I would say it’s the union’s loss, but it’s the members that ultimately suffer when decisions like this are taken, because they no longer have people to represent them fully.”

In an unprecedented intervention, the Deputy Commissioner and Director of Operations at the London Fire Brigade, Tom George, said: “I never interfere with union affairs but occasionally it doesn’t hurt to share one’s opinion. I feel the way Paul Embery has been treated recently by his own Union is appalling and dare I say it scandalous.”

Paul’s supposed crime was to oppose the FBU’s Brexit position – but this is no longer an issue about views on the European Union. The treatment of him is not about Leave or Remain. In fact, it has united Leavers and Remainers who believe in the principles of freedom of expression and the right of everyone to hold to their personal beliefs. Paul himself has stated the conduct of the union’s leadership throughout this episode has been deeply worrying.

I spoke to Paul before I sat down to write this. He was resolute and quietly furious:

“The investigation into me by the union’s vice-president was particularly disgraceful, and worse than anything I have ever seen by any employer. It can only be described as a shameless political witch-hunt,

It deviated wildly from the original complaint about my speech at the rally, and even sought to intrude into personal areas of my life, such as demanding information relating to my private income. It amounted to a blatant dig for dirt in an effort to blacken my name. Without a shred of evidence, the vice-president accused me of misusing union funds – a grave and sinister accusation which, in the end, collapsed when it was found to be utterly baseless. It was an indication of how far some people were prepared to go in an effort to discredit me.”

Matt Wrack’s spiteful actions on behalf of the Union represent an attack on democracy itself, not just one heroic firefighter. Nor will this be the end of the matter. I am certain the majority of the union’s membership will condemn what has happened to Paul and ultimately Wrack will be answerable to them. Paul served the union proudly for 20 years; it should be ashamed of this despicable betrayal.

These are the strange times we live in. It’s hard to look at British politics right now and not see a system in meltdown. Remarkably we have not one but two hard-Brexit parties – the Brexit Party plus UKIP; and not two but three anti-Brexit parties – the Lib Dems, Change UK and the Greens (plus of course the SNP and Plaid Cymru in Scotland and Wales). Then, of course, there’s Labour and the Conservatives straddled painfully across the fence. It’s quite conceivable that all nine of these parties will win seats in the forthcoming Euro-elections (and, with the exception of what’s left of UKIP, in the next general election too).

In fact, we’ve never been closer to a wholesale realignment of the post-war party system. The Conservatives are already in existential crisis territory – and if Labour is finally forced off the Brexit fence, then we could see the existing cracks and splinters in both parties develop into wholesale disintegration. That would mean multi-party politics across the whole of the political spectrum, but under first-past-the-post (FPTP) rules. Expect the next general election to be the most unpredictable in British history.

Further reading

Call yourself post-liberal?

By Peter Franklin

Almost anything could happen except, it would seem, the one thing that needs to happen – which is the emergence of a sane and sensible post-liberal party.

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As I’ve explained before, the polling evidence keeps showing that the most under-served portion of the electorate are culturally conservative voters who lean to the Left on economic matters. As I’ve also explained, post-liberalism shouldn’t be confused with anti-liberalism. Rather, what post-liberals recognise is that while freedom matters, it’s not the only thing that matters – and especially not when it’s hitched to a self-serving ‘open-vs-closed’ agenda designed to benefit those already best-placed to take advantage of globalisation.

Despite the emergence of numerous new parties and movements in Britain and elsewhere, it’s hard to find any that qualify as post-liberal. New centrists such as Change UK or the Macronistes in France offer establishment liberalism in undiluted form. The radical Left, as exemplified by the Corbynised Labour Party, is a toxic cocktail of cranky foreign policy, extreme political correctness and the sort of borrow-and-spend economics that would pawn the country to the money markets. As for ‘national populism’ on the Right, that’s all about exploiting and exacerbating resentments, not offering any positive way forward. Can you think of any populist movement overseas that would provide a model for what we’d want see over here? Trumpism in America? Le Penism in France? Orbanism in Hungary? No. Non. Nem.

Further reading

Five reasons why populism isn't up to the job

By Peter Franklin

These forces wouldn’t have been unleashed if the failures of the political and economic establishment weren’t so obvious – and yet they only provide an outlet for anger, not any kind of solution. What the world needs now is a democratic, inclusive and post-liberal alternative – and Britain has a key role to play in building it.

Whether Brexit goes ahead or is smothered to death, the need for the fresh start that post-liberalism can provide is pressing.

Furthermore, post-liberal thinkers are finding their voice in the UK – both in the Conservative and Labour parties. An honourable mention should also go to the modern-day Social Democratic Party, which has yet to make a significant electoral breakthrough – but which has a post-liberal platform and a growing membership.

But can post-liberals afford to divide their forces? Has the time come for them to join together in a unified political movement? It’s easy to think of reasons why not. Here are three to start with:

Firstly, breaking through as a new party isn’t at all easy – not in a FPTP electoral system and especially not when you can’t rely on the simplicities of single issue politics or the attention-grabbing tactics of an anger-based campaign.

Secondly, post-liberals also believe in loyalty to institutions, thus for those rooted in traditional Toryism or the Labour movement, it goes against the grain to sever oneself from time-honoured connections.

Thirdly, the current disruption of politics might bring about a positive realignment within the existing parties rather than to the party system as a whole. At the very least , there’s the chance for renewal that comes from a change in party leaders. Theresa May’s leadership is already tottering and there’s talk of Jeremy Corbyn wanting to retire. Red Tories and Blue Labourites can therefore dream of better times around the corner – just imagine how much better things would be if, say, Johnny Mercer and Lisa Nandy were leading their respective parties. So, with change of one sort or another on its way, why not stick around for another throw of the dice?

*

Then again, it’s the hope that kills you. Also not good for your health is repeatedly banging your head against a brick wall. Sooner or later, you have to decide when to stop – unless, that is, the wall decides for you.

Political parties, especially long-established political parties, are not stand-alone institutions. They are part of a much wider system encompassing economic and cultural interests deeply opposed to the values of post-liberalism. You might imagine that you’re working for change from within, but, honestly, how’s that working out for you? Has our politics become more responsive to public concerns? Has it become humbler in the face of its manifest inadequacies? Have we seen the political establishment rise to the challenge of Brexit? Have we seen our politicians set aside their factional interests to work for national reconciliation? Have they inspired you lately? Have you been wowed by the effectiveness of government or by the constructive engagement of the opposition?

Further reading

A party for the politically homeless

By Giles Fraser

To put it another way: have you lived through any point in our political history when you’ve been less impressed by the system, less inspired by those chosen to lead?

No, I didn’t think so.

As well as asking yourself what you think about your party, it is also worth pondering what your party thinks of you. Of course, the big parties are broad coalitions, so you can’t expect everyone in the tent to be the same as you. But even if they don’t agree with you, they should at least respect you – but do they? The nastiest things I’ve ever read about Red Tories or Blue Labourites have come from within their respective parties.

But even worse than the contempt is when they try to steal your clothes. There’s been at least two occasions when the Conservative leadership has dressed-up in Red Tory red – David Cameron’s Big Society phase and when Theresa May was persuaded to give Nick Timothy’s ‘Erdington Conservatism’ a go. Meanwhile, Labour leaders don Blue Labour blue everytime they worry about losing their working-class supporters – most notably during Ed Miliband’s One Nation phase. Still, whatever the occasion, it always but always comes to nothing. A sincere engagement with post-liberal ideas is simply too challenging to the core ideologies and embedded vested interests of both parties. Like any other presentational fad, the moment passes and some other gimmick takes its place.

*

Of course, it’s not as if post-liberals all believe the same thing. Some are socialist, others capitalist; there are post-liberal remainers and post-liberal leavers. And despite their stereotyped reputation as ‘faith, flag and family’ stick-in-the-muds, there’s a wide range of perspectives on those issues too.

So a unified post-liberal party would itself be a broad tent. However, I’d argue that someone from Blue Labour has more in common with a Red Tory than with a Corbynite or a Blairite; and that, equally, Red Tories have more in common with Blue Labour than with the liberal, libertarian or reactionary wings of the Conservative Party.

Further reading

Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

I’m not saying that agreeing a joint platform would be easy; I’m saying that post-liberals of all shades share enough in the values that matter most to make cooperation on policy not only feasible, but positively fruitful. After all, its not as if the country’s current situation calls for the same old tired ideas.

Though loathe to let go of long established loyalties, I’m not sure it calls for the same old tired parties either. As I’ve already said, post-liberals have a natural affinity for venerable institutions, but if we’re being realistic, political organisations are the least of these. If no one had ever put country before party we’d still be stuck with Whigs and Tories – if not Roundheads and Cavaliers or even Yorkists and Lancastrians.

In times of trouble you have to decide what to hold on to. If that forces a choice between outward forms and essential truths, I’d rather go with the latter and make a virtue of it.

Few, however, have taken Corbynism seriously as an intellectual movement. Fewer still have done so from a point of view that is, by temperament, broadly sympathetic. Yet this is what two young academics, Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts, have done in a new book which seeks to take “Corbynism seriously and critically as a semi-coherent set of ideas”. In Corbynism: A Critical Approach they have produced the most thorough and alarming overview of the Corbyn worldview to date.

In contrast to some of the headlines which usually accompany stories about a future Corbyn government, Bolton’s and Pitts’ first contention is that Corbynism is not as radical at it seems. Instead the Corbyn movement reflects “wider societal, ideological and political-economic shifts that bring it closely in-step with an increasingly ‘post-liberal’ political environment”, as the authors put it.

They demonstrate that Corbyn’s populist division of the world into oppositional ‘us’ and ‘them’ camps has more in common with the politics of Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán than it does with the traditions of democratic socialism.

Suggested reading

Peterson, Corbyn and the rise of the kidult

By Jenny McCartney

Borrowing heavily from the baleful and half-baked ideas of populist theorist Chantel Mouffe – as well as from the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt – Corbynism’s division of the world into ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ requires regular heresy hunts in order to sustain itself.

Moreover, capitalism itself is viewed not as a material system of production, but rather as an unfolding moral-religious story in which one side – the ‘99%’, the working class, the ‘oppressed’ – is regarded uncritically as innately ‘good’, while blame for society’s ills is placed squarely on the shoulders of ‘them’ – the bankers, the ‘1%’, and in the darker reaches of the Corbyn movement, a sinister cabal of wealthy Jews.

As we have discovered over the past three-and-a-half years, this deeply personalised interpretation of capitalism easily lends itself to conspiracy theories about the malevolence of particular groups and individuals. Once this group of permanent outsiders is required to define an ideology, the search for enemies continues without end. As populist governments around the world have demonstrated, the triumph over one adversary invariably necessitates the creation of another, as well as the never-ending expansion of categories such as ‘fascist’ to include anyone with whom the party or movement disagrees.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this fascinating book is contained in its erudite attack on Corbynomics. Corbynism as an intellectual movement is built on several key planks. As the authors note, it is first and foremost the reheated ‘socialism in one country’ that was a hallmark of Tony Benn’s Alternative Economic Strategy of 1975. It also rests on a personalised understanding of capitalism inspired by the late socialist theoretician Ralph Miliband.

Suggested reading

How Corbynomics is winning over Britain

By Matt Goodwin

In this reading of Labour Party history, the failure on the part of Labour politicians such as Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan and Tony Blair to usher in socialism was seen by Miliband not as a result of the power of global capitalism, but as a consequence of (in Miliband’s words) the personal “failures, derelictions and betrayals” of these politicians. In addition, Corbynism is inspired by the ludicrously determinist post-capitalist fantasies around full automation promoted by a new generation of media-savvy pundits such as Aaron Bastani.

It is the first of these – the equation of economic nationalism with socialism – that is behind Corbyn’s apparent ambivalence towards a hard Brexit. Little attempt is made within the increasingly influential ‘Lexit’ movement to understand the global nature of capitalism. Instead, and in common with Blue Labour, delusions abound as to the power of a single nation state to hold-out against the immense power of global capital. Yet “capital,” as the authors put it, “will win out” – just as surely as night follows day.

Were a Corbyn government to come to power and implement its desired programme – which in practice would resemble the recent ‘Alternative Models of Ownership’ paper more than its watered-down 2017 manifesto – a “recklessly deluded” protectionist agenda could well result in a beggar-thy-neighbour, 1930s-style trade war should other countries choose to pursue a similarly nationalistic economic path.

Suggested reading

Corbyn is natural response to Blair's political and personal failings

By Douglas Murray

As for fantasies of workers’ control of industry favoured by more democratically-minded sections of the far-Left, under this contemporary incarnation of Bennism production would remain within constraints set by the state. As Bolton and Pitts put it: “If workers refuse to adhere to the ‘needs of the nation,’ the state must ensure that they do”.

The trade unions, vocally supportive of Corbyn in opposition, would potentially be neutered and reduced to mere arms of the state under a Corbyn-led government, just as they are in favoured Corbynista despotisms such as Cuba. In other words, workers would gain no more freedom than they currently possess under capitalism. And they are likely to suffer even greater privations if the raft of protectionist measures favoured by the Lexiteers around Corbyn are put into practice.

At a time when it has become fashionable in socialist and communist circles to portray liberalism as little more than the handmaiden of fascism, Bolton and Pitts’ book offers a refreshing defence of liberal democracy from the Left. Too short-sighted to recognise that socialism and social democracy are built on the freedoms set down by liberalism, and too mired in the logic of identity politics to articulate a vision in which what a person thinks and says is more important than the tribe they belong to, competing tendencies within the Labour Party “luxuriate in the flames licking at the sides of liberal society,” the authors write.

These competing tendencies – in particular Corbynism and Blue Labour – hope to ride the ascendant wave of anti-liberalism for electoral gain. In this they are unwittingly aiding and abetting the very nationalist forces that – in a familiar story – will turn their sights on the workers’ movement once the formal niceties and civility of liberal democracy have been dispensed with.

More from this author

Why liberal-Left paternalism led to Brexit

By James Bloodworth

There is something profoundly disturbing taking place in politics across the globe and Corbynism should, in my view, be seen as another morbid symptom of it rather than its putative solution. As orthodox religion fades away in the developed world, it has been replaced by a Manichean style of politics that retains the moral fervour of its progenitor, as well as its teleological faith in progress.

Heretics are regularly uncovered and cast out of what the academic David Hirsh has called the “community of the good”. Instead of fearing each new political crisis, competing sets of true believers try to outdo each other in cheering on our steady descent into the abyss – a process they believe will hasten our arrival at the promised land.

Corbynism: A Critical Approach, is the best book on the phenomenon of Corbynism by some distance because it slots the movement firmly within this camp of moralising and intolerant populism. In doing so it ought to free up space on the broader Left for a more critical approach to the Corbyn project, not least because it is written by two activists who have by their own admission long-yearned for “the Left to take the reins”.

This is probably something of a forlorn hope to be sure. Many prominent Left-wing journalists long-ago abandoned any pretence to truth-telling in their adherence to the Labour Party line. Nevertheless books like this are valuable because they will stand as exemplars of clear thinking and objectivity, long after the career-ideologues have been swept away and child-like adoration of ‘Jezza’ has subsided.

Poverty and wealth exist side by side, with people living radically different lives in parallel to one another. New shops and refurbished pubs cater for the influx of a thirty-something middle class that has utterly changed the tenor of the area.

The transformation of this area is a story about the transformation of England in the last 40 years of globalisation. It is also a story about the gentrification of the Labour Party. For this is the kind of area which is now a Labour heartland. In the last election 40,000 people, almost three quarters of the electorate, voted for their local MP, Jeremy Corbyn. As Labour loses its working class vote it is becoming a more metropolitan liberal party of the professional class.

Further reading

The truth about 'liberal' London

By Paul Embery

Think back two decades, to 1996 – the Clinton democrats were booming, New Labour was about to enter office and Third Way politics was winning over one European social democratic party after the other. Liberal market globalisation was taking off. It was at this point that Christopher Lasch, the social theorist, issued a prescient warning about what we would now call Davos Man. In his essay, ‘The Revolt of the Elites’, he wrote:

“Once it was the ‘revolt of the masses’ that was held to threaten social order and the civilising traditions of Western culture. In our time however the chief threat seems to come from those at the top of the social hierarchy, not the masses.”

In England a generation of journalists, school teachers, university lecturers, public relations experts, opinion formers, lawyers, media communicators, and public-sector professionals formed a new and expanded cultural elite. It became the carrier of liberal cosmopolitan values. These values distinguished it from much of the rest of the country and as it became an influential force within Labour, the party began to lose touch with the more conservative concerns of its traditional constituencies.

In the years up to the 2008 financial crash, politics, then, was dominated by a trans-partisan elite of technocratic Right and cultural Left. Anthony Barnet captures this well when he describes a new sphere of government being “regulation, reinforced by human rights”. Liberalism in its market, utilitarian, and identity forms was the dominant ideology. It tended to subordinate democracy to the economic, technical and legal realms. Political problems were reduced to organisational, technical or economic tasks. Politics became consensual and managerial. The EU altered the balance of power within our constitution toward the judiciary at the expense of Parliament and government. The main political parties squeezed onto a centre ground. There was, we were told, no alternative.

Further reading

The rise of post-truth liberalism

By John Gray

But with every consensus comes an exclusion, and the trans-partisan consensus of liberal market capitalism excluded the labour interest. Capitalism was allowed to treat society as a domain of the economy. A system of regulatory practices enforced market-based reforms in the public sector. The financial system grew in unfettered power. Political class conflict was neutralised by administrative fiat, managerialism and economic-technical thinking. By 2005 wages were stagnating and the share of national income going to labour was falling. As large scale immigration became a national controversy it was hived off from politics and made an issue about rights and economics.

In society, diversity became the progressive ideal of the age: a plurality of identities and cultures could be brought together to live in a harmonious society without conflict. Modernisation would do away with old traditional loyalties. Attachment to local place and a desire to belong obstructed progress and those who clung to them were backward looking and nostalgic. Immigration was a progressive good and those who doubted it were prejudiced against a multi-ethnic society.

If technical regulation ordered economic activity, then rules about language and behaviour could manage social conflict. A liberal system of diversity evolved seeking to administer a consensus in public life by policing the boundaries of what it means to be white, black, Muslim, male, female, gay, straight, old, young. As Ben Cobley argues in his book The Tribe, the system is presided over by the cultural elite which on behalf of others allocates victimhood and blame between different identities. The absence of politics allows diversity to become a competition for cultural distinction amongst the elites. The system of diversity, he explains, employs words “not to explain the world but to maximise itself and deprive its opponents of language”.

Marx in the Communist Manifesto describes this kind of practice as a bourgeois socialism which wishes “for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat”. It creates what Patrick Deneen calls a “liberal anti-culture” which transcends a particular time and place. It leads to “a condition in which we are able to live the same everywhere: a homogenised, standardised, monoculture”.

Its rejection of the particular and the historical in favour of the abstract and universal, has undermined the collective and cultural defences of society against commodification. People have their own culture, language and history which provides them with meaning and forms the basis of their connection to wider humanity. Liberal anti-culture trashes this inheritance. What it then praises as an ‘open society’ is simply a defenceless one, unable to resist either the administrative state and global market forces.

Liberalism in its negation of politics can become a dominant force and a threat to liberty and democracy. It has led to a growing popular distrust of politics, the state and government. In its tendency to use the market, rules and regulations to enforce change it has silenced and disenfranchised those who have borne the brunt of economic change.

Brexit was a political revolt against this anti-culture, against the elites who have benefitted from it, and from the rules and codes enforcing it. The revolt came from the English shires and the ex-industrial working class. A nationalist populism which spoke for the local and the particular turned this anti-culture against liberalism.

The result is a culture war in England. The class that succeeds in consolidating its culture will define the identities and motives of the defeated. It will define what is normal and what is not; what is virtuous and what is not; and what is questioned and what is not. Who wins defines not just the country but social reality.

Further reading

Victimhood culture will tear us apart

By Jenny McCartney

Culture war has ended the liberal depoliticalisation of conflict and brought political conflict back into society. The English need to become a political people again. A political people comes into existence when it articulates itself and produces a representative. As the political philosopher Eric Voegelin argues, for a political party to be representative, it is not enough for it to be representative in the constitutional sense. It must also be representative in the existential sense.[1. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, The University of Chicago Press, 1987]

Labour has lost an existential relationship with England. Nor in the constitutional sense does it recognise an English polity. At each political crossroads it has walked away from being the party of the labour interest. The populist revolt has undermined the existential nature of both the Conservatives’ and Labour’s political representation without creating new forms. The political life of England is polarised and dominated by its extremes. The margins where political division is generated are the new centre.

The fascist jurist Carl Schmitt describes the political as the distinction between friend and enemy.[2. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, University of Chicago Press, 2007] It is within this friend-enemy conflict that political decisions are made and where sovereignty resides. Sovereignty is essential for democratic politics. It is the highest, legally independent, underived power.[3. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, University of Chicago Press, 2005]

It is the source in time and place of the agency that constitutes a political system and underlying this agency is a ‘we’, a community of people. For Schmitt this ‘we’ is homogenous. For us it is not. It must be constructed by democratic politics out of different ethical, political and religious traditions.

Further reading

The centre-left will never defeat European populism if it fails to first understand it

By Henry Olsen

People have lost trust in our democratic process. Liberalism in its current form as an individualistic ideology is not capable of restoring its existential dimension. Nor is it able to defeat illiberal extremism. The biggest risk to social order is a market society of acquisitive individualism. A major risk to minority ethnic groups is an elite-serving system of diversity.

There can be no return to a pre-EU British constitution. We are living through a constitutional upheaval. Is it a result of a series of contingent decisions and mistakes? Or does it mark the beginning of a new historical settlement? We do not know the answer. But we do know that an antagonistic politics as defined by friend and enemy, ‘us’ and ‘them’, has crashed back into society. The democracy of conflict, estranged interests, irreconcilable difference is back in play. What will matter is the strength of our civic institutions and the vitality of our national political community to democratically negotiate the common good. The successful representatives of the future will be those skilled in the art of politics.