Farage later conceded that restoring the furnaces may not be possible, though perhaps new ones could be built. Either way, the episode neatly captured the surreal state of contemporary British politics. After all, there are still four years to go until the next election, and Labour has over 400 MPs, while Reform has just five. As Farage’s promises regarding the steel industry demonstrate, his party’s economic platform consists almost entirely of unworkable gimmicks. And yet, he is quite right to say of Keir Starmer’s government that “Reform are now leading much of their agenda”.

If there was an underlying purpose in Rachel Reeves’ spending review this week, it was to confront the rise of Farage and his party. Since the local elections six weeks ago, Starmer has tried to stake out tougher positions on immigration and integration, while attacking Reform’s economic absurdities. The prime minister has given speeches devoted solely to countering Farage, and has told MPs that they have “a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins”. Reeves’ spending review served as the financial complement to Starmer’s political crusade.

For Reeves, who addressed Farage a number of times in her own speech, the decision to reverse course on the winter fuel allowance was obviously driven by Reform’s local election success. She also coughed up $15 billion for transport investments, targeted at regions where Reform is a threat, and provided Labour with some rhetorical ammunition on immigration with extra cash for Border Security Command and a pledge to end the use of asylum seeker hotels by 2029. Higher defense spending will be funded with a 40% cut to foreign aid.

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The housing crisis tearing Leicester apart

By Wessie du Toit

One can argue that the Government is foolish to build up the Reform threat so much when the next election is still so distant, but it would be wrong to think that this is some sort of knee-jerk reaction. Contra accusations that Starmer lacks a clear direction, there have long been signs that, behind his tepid personality, he has embraced a historic mission of sorts. His purpose is to defend the remnants of Britain’s Blairite settlement from the ongoing revolt against elites, and in favor of national sovereignty. Starmer has filled his government with New Labour figures, and is himself wedded to the technocratic liberalism of the New Labour era which nurtured his political career. He wants to conform to supranational legal structures, empower Britain’s institutions to enforce doctrines of equality and rights, and generally maintain the rule of progressive lawyers and officials. In order to protect these ideals, he has to see off the forces hostile to them.

In the immediate aftermath of last year’s election, a report in the Times suggested that this mission was already taking shape. It noted that, in the northeast of England, you can drive for an hour through seats where Reform came second to Labour. Spurred by campaign manager Morgan McSweeney, who would soon be promoted to Starmer’s chief of staff, the Government’s response would essentially have three strands. Populist rhetoric would make disaffected voters feel represented by Labour; crime, health and immigration — “areas where [voters] see or viscerally feel the price of government inaction” — would be soundly managed; and economic improvement would be made manifest in people’s lives, a strategy Reeves calls the “everyday economy”. This, by-and-large, is the agenda which has come back into focus since the locals. The spending review was a reiteration of the third prong, promising, as Reeves put it on Wednesday, that “renewal” will be “felt in people’s everyday lives, in their jobs, and on their high streets”.

As a theory of how to tackle populism, the formula appears to be a fairly standard center-left one: some “flag shagging” may be necessary to address the tribal needs of voters, but fundamentally, higher living standards and a stronger state will make them good social democrats. Yet to continue giving Starmer the benefit of the doubt, he may have a deeper sense of how material and immaterial factors, matters of welfare and emotion, interact. For he has surely realized that British politics is increasingly becoming oriented around the fundamental question of citizenship. Not citizenship in the narrow sense of who gets to have a passport, but in the broader sense of what it means to be a member of British society; the rights and responsibilities it entails, and the relations, between individual, state and civil society, that it ultimately comprises.

Much of Reform’s popularity stems from the simple assertion, made salient by globalization and particularly immigration, that citizenship requires boundaries to be meaningful. If the state expects citizens to pay its taxes and follow its laws, it cannot make its resources and rights available to anyone in the world. Its first responsibility must be towards the security and welfare of British people, and it must show a preference for the culture and norms of the country as the majority of its citizens understand them. This is not enough to constitute a proper model of citizenship, but if there is a perception that the state is not maintaining the boundaries needed for citizenship even to exist, it can be politically successful. Starmer realizes this, which explains many of the positions he has taken in recent months: criticizing uncontrolled immigration, talking about the need for rules in society, and tightening requirements in areas such as English language proficiency.

But Starmer has also inherited from New Labour a more substantial model of citizenship, one that is much misunderstood. You will often hear, especially on the Right, that Blair primed the country for multiculturalism by reducing British identity to a collection of nondescript “values” like tolerance and fair play. In fact, Blair’s revolution was grounded in a much more sophisticated and comprehensive redrawing of the social contract. It was, indeed, intended to crack open older and more bounded understandings of British society, not just by redefining identity but by marinating public life in a range of progressive narratives and principles, a project assisted by sympathetic NGOs and by cadres of new graduates in the professional classes.

Crucially, though, there was another component in this scheme, essential for winning over the public, and that was public services. Improving public services was central to New Labour’s electoral pitch in 1997, and from that date until 2010 spending rose sharply, increasing by an average of 4.4% each year with a focus on health, education and transport. As for the quality and quantity of public services — more difficult to measure, of course — the Office for National Statistics estimated an increase of about one-third between 1997-2007. But this was not simply about improving material living standards or voter satisfaction; public services were a vehicle through which a new image of Britain could be sold to citizens.

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Blackouts are coming for Britain

By Wessie du Toit

Immigration is a case in point. In the Blairite vision, people would embrace new arrivals if they were able to walk into shiny hospitals, schools, and community centers and be greeted by smiling teams of multiethnic staff, before receiving high-quality support. This is still the image of Britain emblazoned on every public-facing brochure and webpage, and the notion that immigration serves the purpose of staffing public services remains the most commonly heard case for it.

Similarly, via education, bureaucracy and broadcasting, public services provided opportunities to promote cultural change, whether by encouraging certain attitudes to language or presenting Britain as an amalgam of distinct communities. Meanwhile, the authoritarian side of Blairism — the growth of surveillance, anti-terror programs and new criminal offenses — approached the same task from the opposite angle, advancing the role of the state as a protective if menacing force capable of maintaining order in a changing society.

There are parts of Britain, increasingly likely to vote Liberal Democrat, where this vision has been really quite successful: good schools, hospitals and infrastructure underpin a way of life that is socially liberal and cosmopolitan. Here we see modern Britain “at ease with itself”, as the cliché would have it, a world that peacefully minds its own business. But these areas are generally quite wealthy. Throughout much of the country, by contrast, the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent years of austerity eroded the foundations on which the New Jerusalem was supposed to be built. To make matters considerably worse for Starmer and Reeves, more recent Conservative governments botched Brexit and lost control of the country’s borders. What remains of the Blairite model of citizenship, conceived as a system of managed change, are incoherent and disconnected pieces, with none of the security or prosperity needed to anchor them: social justice campaigns that seem to spring up from nowhere; a police force both unreliable and strangely aggressive; incomprehensible concessions to international law.

If there is a discernable purpose in the Starmer project, it is to shepherd these fragments and painstakingly restore them to a more coherent whole. The urgency with which his government has awarded public sector pay deals, while insisting on the need for growth, shows an elemental desire to rebuild the progressive state by getting public services functioning and funded. The problem illustrated by this week’s spending review, however, is that the government simply lacks the resources to do anything more than plug some of the gaps left by the state’s steady decay. The golden geese of New Labour’s financialized economy are not coming back, and since investors demand high interest rates from the government, the Treasury now spends more than £100 billion each year just on debt interest. For comparison, Reeves’ winter fuel payment cut was predicted to save £1.5 billion annually.

But if Labour lacks a vision for citizenship without healthy public services and a generous state, then so does Reform. Farage’s purely opportunistic economic policies, comprised of lavish, largely unfunded tax cuts and giveaways, show a failure to grasp the seriousness of the moment. He may think that the problem of citizenship is just one of reasserting boundaries, but he will soon find that, for much of the public, it is also defined by material benefits which he cannot provide.

He also killed a lot of people, or at least his policies did. Of course, all presidents kill people, by commission or omission, but to some the sins of George W. Bush are egregious, unforgivable. I told some jolly stories about him at a conference once and a young woman came up to me afterwards to object, “how could you say such things of a war criminal?”

I assume she will not be buying Mr Bush’s new book, Out of Many, One. Or she’ll at least give the autographed deluxe edition, retailing for $250, a miss. (It will be clothbound, we are told, and contained within a slipcover.) She will miss, then, pictures of dozens of oil paintings Mr Bush has fashioned. His subjects are immigrants to the United States, sensitively and lovingly portrayed, celebrated and humanised.

“Bush’s painting style is inelegant,” as one review in Art in America elegantly put it. “His subjects’ eyes are often misaligned … and even though he attempts to create depth and shadow, the facial features ultimately fail to convey anything resembling human warmth.” But of course it’s not really about the art. It’s about the politics, which are met with approval. “The book, providing an honorific framing, bestows a dignity upon his subjects that his presidential policies did not.”

Out of Many, One doesn’t tip-toe around the subject of immigration or suggest there are good people on both sides of the argument. It comes out, instead, 100% in favour; it tells anyone who opens its pages that immigration made America, and will continue to make it, and anyone who doesn’t believe that is wrong. Brown and black faces stare out, proudly: safe in the knowledge that the author, the 43rd president of the United States, wants them to belong.

George W. Bush is taking on the nativists in his party, the cruel wing of Republicans. Taking on Donald Trump. Calling them all out. Introducing his book in the Wall Street Journal last month, he wrote: “We should never forget that the desire to live in the United States — a worldwide and as powerful an aspiration as ever — is an affirmation of our country and what we stand for. Over the years, our instincts have always tended toward fairness and generosity. The reward has been generations of grateful, hard-working, self-reliant, patriotic Americans who came here by choice.”

“My hope,” says Bush, “is that this book will help focus our collective attention on the positive impacts that immigrants are making on our country.”

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Why would the US want George W Bush back?

By Christopher Rhodes

Which is good. And because (I am relieved to say, given my previously lonely affection for him) it is no longer eccentric to take a generous view of George W. Bush, the book will contribute to the debate about immigration in America from a humane perspective. It will bring people together and that, in the modern United States, is no mean achievement.

But it misses the point. And the risk is that it encourages others to miss the point too. These bromides about the decency of immigrants may well be important correctives to the un-American hostility of the Trump era but they fail totally to address the perfectly reasonable question that Trump raised. A question that hangs over the Biden administration as it tries to work out its immigration policy, but more important a question that hangs over the whole United States.

Midway through his term of office, not in a tweet or a campaign rally but in the calm of an almost conventional speech, Donald Trump said: “America is a cutting-edge economy but our immigration system is stuck in the past.” Many Americans, including some who cannot stand Trump, would agree with that. The immigration question of the next decade is not, “should America be welcoming to immigrants?” Or even “what do we do about the southern border becoming overwhelmed by desperate people?” No, the question is whether America welcomes the wrong type of immigration and needs to change. “Is it time to favour computer programmers over gardeners?” That’s the question. Same numbers — a million a year, legally — but different people.

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We'd be lost without borders

By Paul SCHEFFER

But the question is not posed. Not because Americans fear people speaking other languages or cooking with strange ingredients or praying to other gods. The problem is not them, many Americans say: the problem is us. Our society, our community, has become — with the best intentions — a more dangerous place. The anti-Trump campaigner and former Bush aide David Frum made the point in a piece in The Atlantic magazine a couple of years ago: “More and more of the people who live among Americans are not on equal legal footing with Americans. They cannot vote. They cannot qualify as jurors. If they commit a crime they are subject not only to prison but to deportation. And because these noncitizens are keenly aware of those things, they adjust their behavior. They keep a low profile. They do not complain to the authorities if, say, their boss cheats them out of some of their pay, or if they are abused by a parent or partner at home.”

This is the result of the array of an immigration policy that broadly allows family ties — and ingenuity in hopping across the southern border — to trump skills. A policy that brings in adult siblings of already poor, semi-legal residents. As a result not everyone in America gets the full right to stay: some will be legal temporary residents, some students who should not be working, some came illegally but can stay (like the Dreamers whose parents brought them to America illegally as children) on some kind of sufferance.

Of course, there are plenty of wealthy Americans to whom this doesn’t matter much. They lead lives insulated from the masses. They have cheap gardeners on tap: cheap labour — desperate labour — which enables the low-wage America that keeps so many people so poor. Bernie Sanders used to point out that open immigration policies were very much the plaything of the rich — of faceless, placeless corporate America. There are sociologists who point out, too, that a nation desperate for labour, having to pay more for it, might not have incarcerated so many black men so readily in recent decades.

What is unquestionably the case is that America a few decades ago was almost entirely filled by citizens with equal rights. It has morphed in recent years into a place with graded citizenship; in some big states, like California, fully 10% of residents are not full citizens. As Frum put it, “No intentional policy has led the US to accept more low-wage low-skill labourers and fewer cancer researchers. Yet that is what the United States is doing.”

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The death of American dignity

By Justin Webb

Here we get back to George W Bush. Because although he avoids it in his picture book, he knows all of this. He knew it back in 2007 when he tried to get Congress to agree to act and do so in exactly the direction Donald Trump wanted. He brought together the liberal lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, and the Republican John McCain. In exchange for the decent treatment of people already in America they proposed that future immigration be limited by skills not family ties.

The effort failed. Among those who scoffed was the then presidential hopeful Barack Obama. “How many of our forefathers would have measured up to this points system? How many would have been turned back at Ellis Island?”

The answers were a surprise. On the points system, “almost all of them.” And on Ellis Island: “virtually none.” The reason is that the whole “bring me your huddled masses” schtick is a bit of a con. Nearly 30 years ago, a taskforce led by then congresswoman Barbara Jordan, a hugely respected African American Democrat, blew it apart with a detailed study of the people who actually came to Ellis Island. Jordan pointed out that they were in fact more skilled than the average American at the time. They were seamstresses and stonemasons, tailors and bricklayers. They had, in other words, the skills the nation needed. They were the cancer researchers of their time. This was not charity; it was nation building.

Now, the argument goes, American immigration is the opposite of nation building. The immigration system actively pulls at the threads of community. It overburdens services and it underserves the wider causes of the nation. It’s lovely that George Bush’s book contains such an array of faces but they may be — to be brutal — quite often the wrong faces.

Bush knows this, and Biden does too. The current President is fast becoming a president of consequence. Above all a president who understands community and place. If Biden moves on immigration — goes for big reform — at least one former president will have his back. Even if he can’t paint.

1. Promote integration

Nobody wants to live in a society in which we fear fellow citizens simply because we do not know them. In polarised times, we risk a retreat from community if we separate ourselves into our different identity bubbles.

Yet we have never had proper national integration strategies. We have seen nothing like the level of political will, resources or civic engagement that Germany has mobilised in response to polarisation. Government should lead, setting the vision and foundations – but closing the contact gap needs to be everybody’s business.

Nobody should go to school in Britain where there is no meaningful contact across class, ethnic and faith lines. Every school governing body should be required to consider twinning and linking arrangements with other schools to ensure we are educating children to be citizens of a shared Britain.

Employers, sporting and cultural institutions should make practical contributions too.

2. Use the race disparity audit to form policy

Theresa May created the race disparity audit to deal with ‘burning injustices’ of inequality. This pioneering initiative has rendered every policy area transparent. It shows where we are making progress, where the gaps are, and who risks being left behind. It is unmatched anywhere else in the world. It would actually be illegal in France, where collecting data about racial inequalities is prohibited.

We must not waste the opportunity it gives us. This audit must now underpin a practical policy agenda that advances fair chances and no unfair barriers – regardless of one’s class, race, gender and hometown. Theresa May’s potential successors – and the opposition parties – should commit to acting on it, by offering competing ideas to narrow these opportunity gaps to unlock the potential and talent of Britain today.

3. Listen to the public on immigration

After Brexit, Britain will need to rethink its immigration policy. The public has lost confidence in governments who failed to anticipate or respond to the rise in immigration – and which then corroded trust further by making promises that couldn’t be kept. To reassert this, the public need a voice in shaping the choices we make.

The Chancellor has the Budget: a day on which his or her work is scrutinised by parliament and the public alike. So, the Home Secretary should have an annual Immigration Day, on which the Commons agrees policies and targets. This event should be preceded by extensive local and regional public engagement on the pressures and gains of immigration.

Attitudes towards immigration have softened since 2016, but the Government remains nervous about engaging the public in any decision making. The failed net migration target was a one-size-fits all approach. We could better reflect how the public think about migration by taking different policy approaches for different types of migrants: international students; low, semi and high-skilled workers; families and refugees.

4. Make it easier to become a British citizen

It is good for our society when the people who join it want to become British. We should encourage the take-up of citizenship. Three million European nationals are being invited to become permanent residents under the ‘settled status’ scheme; the next Prime Minister should directly invite those who want to take up citizenship to do so, at cost price.

The Government is planning to review the content of the citizenship test; it should also conduct a broader review of the purpose of citizenship policy – and review the current policy, process and cost barriers to becoming British.

We should also celebrate our new citizens – by breathing new life into citizenship ceremonies, holding them in iconic locations, and using them as a practical opportunity to promote full engagement, from voter registration to opportunities for volunteering and contact.

5. Initiate a shared history project

Comprehensively understanding our history is an important step on the road to a more united Britain. Our traditions of Remembrance have become increasingly inclusive, with a growing awareness of the enormous contribution of Commonwealth soldiers in the two world wars; there has been greater recognition across all faith and ethnic backgrounds that Remembrance can, does and should belong to us all.

The 75th anniversary of D-Day this year will see our country reflect on the contribution of the tens of thousands of Second World War veterans now in their eighties and nineties. Across the 2020s, direct experience of this conflict should be captured before it passes from living memory into the history books. That’s why the next Prime Minister should announce the biggest ever oral history project in this country.

Teenagers and young people would meet those who served and record their personal stories. Doing so would create more contact across the growing generational divide than ever before – and help us all to understand how shared history underpins our national identity today.