What few visitors ever discover, though, is that under the church’s foundation stone, laid in 1904 by King Edward VII, a trade unionist stonemason left a time capsule message in a tin. Along with a copy of two socialist papers, The Clarion and The Labour Leader, was a note: “We, the wage slaves employed on the erection of this Cathedral,” it reads, “dedicated to the worship of the unemployed Jewish carpenter, hail ye! Within a stone’s throw from here human beings are housed in slums not fit for swine…”

There, a stone’s throw from the conference, those wards remain neglected. Race riots plagued Liverpool Walton last year, with some of the most violent scenes witnessed in a nationwide summer of thuggish discontent in the aftermath of the Southport murders. This is the poorest constituency in the country, and also one of the safest Labour seats. Dockside jobs have long been replaced by low-paid service work, or long-term unemployment. With cheap, dilapidated housing stock, it’s a primary location for “migrant dispersal”. Labour is losing its grip to a Faragist insurgency here and across its former bastions, where the modern equivalents of the “wage slaves” of the cathedral time capsule reside. Polling shows Reform creeping up on even the safest stalwarts in Merseyside’s red fortresses.

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By Jonny Ball

One wonders, then, how secure Keir Starmer feels here. Not in the sterile atmosphere of conference, but outside, in the city’s bars and pubs, where conference delegates have detected an unusual hostility to the Labour invasion. One “traitor”, a disgruntled Labour delegate, was told to “fuck off” back to London. So while the consensus is now that the putative “King of the North”, Andy Burnham, overplayed a weak hand, the Reform threat is hardening.

The Prime Minister’s speech was uncharacteristically defiant, as he announced a “fork in the road” moment for the country. He painted the choice facing Britain as one between the declinism of the insurgent new Right and the rosy uplands of Labour. In his telling, Britain isn’t broken, and he reeled off a list of committee-approved examples to stir patriotic feeling: all the familiar notes on our NHS, Lionesses, community volunteers, and, cringingly, “the swagger of Oasis”.

Yet on those subjects where Britain does feel broken — on migration, on growth, on infrastructure, and on industrial revival — the Prime Minister is clearly detached from reality. In conference land, the Government is going all-out on growth. But out here, in the real world, we’re looking at a stagnating economy, wondering where the boom is coming from. In conference land, globalization is over, and we are focused on national production, not cheap imports. But outside, the Government is presiding over a decimation of heavy industry. Stopping the boats will prove difficult while the Government remains confined by the judiciary’s expansive interpretations of ECHR rules. Emptying the hotels, in practice, means transferring residents to scarce social housing, or those cheap HMOs in areas like Liverpool Walton.

But this speech was designed for the Labour faithful — reassurance for attendees at the center-Left Disneyland without the thrills. Though they might have momentarily drowned it out amid a sea of warm white wine in the conference corridors, discontent is rising. A note was circulated among the backbenchers shortly after the summer recess. “Keir Starmer has no vision and the Government has no purpose,” it read. “He will never have one. The cabinet is incapable of leadership.” When I read this excerpt to Maurice Glasman at our UnHerd event, he agreed with the sentiment. But he was also quick to caveat that this is not the time for a leadership contest — if only because there’s no obvious replacement waiting in the wings.

Leadership talk is cheap. And with Burnham slinking out of the conference, moments before Starmer’s keynote speech, that leaves a telegenic Health Secretary, the Blairite Wes Streeting, in contention. But Streeting is defending a minuscule majority of 528 votes in his constituency of Ilford North, holding his seat — just — against a pro-Gaza candidate at the last election. Even the slightest of swings against a miserably unpopular Labour Party would see him leave the Commons. The Blue Labour favorite, Shabana Mahmood, according to Glasman, is a bona fide representative of a “Left-conservative” current that is fiercely patriotic. He assured me that she would combine bold economic radicalism with harder-edged policy on crime and migration. But Mahmood is a relative unknown outside the party. And both she and Streeting hold views that the Labour selectorate — an achingly middle-class and liberal-progressive bunch, on the whole — would find difficult to stomach.

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Glasman bemoans this effete “lanyard class” of graduate professionals — metropolitan urbanites who live separate lives and speak a different language from his party’s traditional, working-class base. But in the receptions and the bars around Liverpool’s ACC, there is little of the old proletarian culture in evidence. Instead, the conference is thronging with people who know what “IPPR” stands for. That is a deeply weird thing. At the fringes, all manner of legislative tweaks are plied as the answer to our woes. Net zero will be a catalyst for climate jobs. Planning reform will keep the wolves from the door. One activist, skeptical, tells me “we’re fucked”. Is it any wonder that lower-income, non-graduate workers are abandoning them in droves for Nigel Farage, someone even a sober, Left-leaning former Bank of England economist, Andy Haldane, has described as the closest thing the UK has to “a tribune of the working class”?

In private, some MPs express despair. Others think it can be turned around. More than one reminds me that Thatcher, in 1981, was desperately unpopular, and yet two years later she won a landslide. But there are two variables which they have conveniently forgotten. One is that Javier Milei is hardly about to invade the Falklands — which means no British warships dispatched to drive a patriotic national fervor to rescue our PM.

The other is the growing economy of which Thatcher was the beneficiary: back then, Britain was leaving the recession of the early Eighties, buoyed by North Sea oil tax receipts. Today, growth remains elusive. We’re living in a different world. Rather than being boosted by the beginnings of China’s pro-market economic reforms and Reaganite deficit spending, the developed world’s whole economic model has been upended by Donald Trump’s tariffs and the decoupling of Washington-Beijing’s “Chimerican” growth engine. Labour faces a hostile global economic environment, a bear market for the sovereign debt of advanced economies. The Budget will raise taxes and be perceived negatively. It will not give us a Big Bang.

And so it’s no wonder that at conference drinks receptions, at private dinners, in quiet corners of the strange, clinical corridors, people are speaking of regicide. The Prime Minister’s authority hangs by a thread. With his personal polling worse than Liz Truss, the mood in Liverpool is dour and, among some, resigned to what will constitute a disaster of historic proportions — a nail in the coffin of social democracy at the next general election. The paucity of an obvious alternative is all that saves Starmer from open, desperate insurrection.

That may come soon. But not yet, they say. Perhaps after the forthcoming difficult budget, or a disastrous round of local elections next May. Maybe cabinet colleagues will one-by-one visit the Prime Minister in Downing Street, to tell him, with regret, that he no longer retains their confidence. But not yet. The Labour-loyalists of the SW1 army live in an alternative reality. They inhabit a political space in which hundreds of thousands of people aren’t marching the streets in support of Tommy Robinson. In which they’re not 10 points behind a party promising mass deportations.

But outside, communities don’t feel on-the-up, or united in Starmer’s fever dream of camaraderie; they are plagued by the visible fraying of the public realm, disinvestment, and a breakdown in cohesion. Outside, the cost-of-living crisis never ended. The Labour response, echoing emptily in Liverpool, seemed almost a denial, a tired boosterism delivered by a PM whose rhetorical capacity is fundamentally suited only to a register of dull miserablism.

Hermetically sealed in a self-soothing conference, progressive, graduate officialdom will try to convince itself that a weary public will cling on to each word of Starmer’s speech on BBC News, assuming piecemeal reforms are quite enough to turn things around. But it couldn’t be more detached from the people Labour was founded to represent.

The stonemason wrote his socialist paean two years before the Labour Representation Committee, created to provide the working-classes with an alternative to the bourgeois Liberals, became the modern Labour Party. Today, Starmer’s lanyard class has reclaimed it for the bourgeois liberals. The wage slaves will be seeking a new home.

It’s probably apocryphal. Lewis writes that he “heard many versions of this vignette”, which was “all over Cambridge in a week, Oxford in two”. But it has a deeper kind of truth: one society’s elite, wearing a grin that might be a grimace, bowing to another’s. Because when the City of London was deregulated in the Eighties, culminating in the “Big Bang” of 27 October 1986, when a whole load of trading restrictions were wiped away at once, Britain’s brightest (or at least, most prestigiously educated) graduates put their noses in the air, and sniffed.

They followed the smell of money to the City, which was soaking up both the investment and the working culture of American firms. In-person trading and a clubby, old-school-tie vibe were replaced with walls of computer screens and punishing office hours. Britain’s elite sloughed off its ambivalence to moneymaking and paternalistic sense of public service, and joined a carnival of pinstripes, braces, champagne and mobile phones as big as bricks.

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Neither of those qualities have grown back. Banks, consultancies and corporate law firms still take a heavy tithe of Oxbridge graduates, even the airy-fairy humanities ones. But we’re not in the Eighties and Nineties anymore, when finance’s power to shape the world eclipsed that of democratic politics. Rather than being high-rolling, cork-popping masters of the universe, the modern banker is a sober, industrious creature. Money is not their liberator; it is something they need in abundance just to keep their head above water in London’s property market. The glamour has died but the drudgery of the day-to-day work remains. As once-solid upper-middle-class professions (teachers, doctors, etc) are being pushed into precarity, finance is in turn becoming a solid, even stolid, upper-middle-class profession. Banking is boring now.

When Donald Trump returned to the White House this year, much was made of a “vibe shift” in American finance back to old-school, red-blooded capitalism and its attendant cultural values. A bull market bellowed, and fig leaves of progressivism were blithely abandoned. JP Morgan swapped DEI (“diversity, equity and inclusion”) for DOI (“diversity, opportunity and inclusion”). Deloitte told staff working on US government contracts to remove their pronouns from their email bios. “I feel liberated,” one “top banker” told the FT. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.”

To be a fly on the wall of that banker’s office during Trump’s tariff shenanigans. Was the freedom to shout slurs across the trading floor worth the biggest stock market fall since Covid? Though the bond market might have disciplined the President into putting a 90-day freeze on most of his tariffs, he still freestyles market-upending proposals in public: a 25% duty on iPhones and 50% on all EU goods, at time of writing, but there’ll be a new batch by the time of your reading. The business world is locked in a perpetual frenzy of second-guessing. These days, “finance is obviously subordinate to politics”, says James*, a finance worker around 30, who I meet in a west London pub one listless Sunday afternoon to get a sense of the modern reality of things.

Our cultural conception of finance is a bit out of date, partly thanks to Industry, the TV series that follows a bunch of young finance guys and gals as they drink, snort, fuck and occasionally trade their way through London. The series’ creators, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, both worked in finance in the early 2010s and have always maintained that the on-screen hedonism they cook up is generally accurate. But James says that in four years in banking, he has “never, ever heard [of] or seen anyone doing drugs in the office”. Even putting aside the fact you’d get “absolutely fucked up” by HR if you were caught, “no amount of coke can make you feel better” if you’re working 100 hours a week, as young finance foot soldiers typically are.

Which is probably just as well: he says that colleagues around 50, who very much lived by the “work hard, play hard” principle in the first decades of their careers, have noticeably more chronic health conditions (diabetes, high blood pressure, etc) than other professionals their age. Instead, finance’s ultra-competitive ethos has made it the ideal host for infection by the wellness craze. People run half-marathons at the weekend, and wear smart watches that track their health data rather than Rolexes.

This is a world almost entirely alien to the one that Jacob Phillips entered in 2000, aged 21. He hadn’t gone to university, and fell into one of the City’s “parasitic” ancillary industries, media monitoring for financial PR firms. It had a “rough-edged, Thatcherite kind of mindset”, he says. There were no meaningful HR processes. It was difficult to fit in without drinking at lunchtime. On Fridays, “it’d be pretty normal for people to be passing a wrap around and popping into the toilet towards the end of the day”. His bosses “were completely open about the fact that they only wanted to employ young people, because you can push them around”.

Finance is still powered by young people pouring their evenings and nights into numbing, repetitive work, but they are not quite as docile about the arrangement as before. In 2021, junior Goldman Sachs employees launched a high-profile campaign to carve out a sliver of guaranteed free time away from the lair of the vampire squid. James, similarly, says that Gen Z staff are “a lot more open to complain to seniors than we ever were”, which helps keep upper management in check even if it does mean his direct underlings are “very whiny” at times. Sarah*, another banker a few years into her career, sees a distinct culture shift with new Gen Z recruits. “They are very good at their jobs,” she says, “but don’t sign up to the narrative that you need to get in before the boss does and leave after.” This, she thinks, is down to there being “less scope to make lots of money over the next 20 years”. If you can get less out, you’ll put less in — it’s not an equation you need a quant for.

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This is the latest chapter in what’s been a deeply generational story. Along with wider cultural shifts, there’s an underappreciated and very specific factor driving finance’s death of largesse: banks, private equity houses and the rest becoming publicly listed companies. Goldman and BlackRock in 1999; Lazard in 2005; Evercore in 2006; Blackstone in 2007; KKR in 2010; Carlyle in 2012; TPG in 2022; CVC in 2024. These listings made a small group of senior partners fantastically wealthy, but invited in far more scrutiny from shareholders and the wider public. Salaries and bonuses have to be justified to outsiders; tightening expense accounts bounce employees from business-class flights to economy.

Essentially, boomers who had their fun in the buoyant Eighties, Nineties and early 2000s decided to cash out at the expense of their juniors. Where have we heard that one before? It’s a mirror of the generational distribution of wealth in society at large — in fact, the dynamics are even more distorted, thanks to the 2008 financial crisis. Those who started work by about 2000, and so achieved a degree of seniority before the 2008 crash, are rich rich. Anyone younger is merely very wealthy. The guys in their 50s and 60s “come from a very different world”, says James, and the best anecdotes, like buying more than one Ferrari in a single year, are usually theirs. So why wouldn’t their Zoomer juniors quiet quit? The sadomasochistic contract written down the spine of the industry — work like a dog for me, and one day you’ll be as rich as me — is provably false.

Let’s get this in proportion: no one here is on less than six figures, and if you do well, your salary will probably start with a 2 or 3 by the time you’re 30. But the cost of London property, plus the sky-high cost of everything else, leave psychological scars that embed an “upper middle-class mindset where you are very rational with the money”, says James. “I know people who take home over a million pounds a year and absolutely stress over the temperature at which their flat is set up. If I earned a million this year, my lifestyle wouldn’t change at all.” People, in general, aren’t flashy — what’s the finance bro obsession with outdoorsy brands like Patagonia and Arc’teryx if not a performative disavowal of finery and frippery? And there’s always the axe hanging overhead. “Banking workforces are constantly getting squeezed,” says Sarah, “so there’s concern the money train won’t last forever, which holds people back from spending.”

When Phillips was in the City, he says there was a pervading, “subtle sense that markets rule everything”. He left after five years, in 2006, and has since become a writer and academic. But when he first read the accelerationist writer Nick Land, his mind was taken back to his old career. “It really rang true with this sense there that the market was this strange, complicated, sinister, untameable beast which could ravage anything in its way. You either rode the tiger or you’d be destroyed by the tiger.”

Now, “governments matter”, says James. “What we had in the Nineties and 2000s was an anomaly.” In a funny way, we’ve gone full circle. Before the Thatcherite revolution, finance was a stable, comfortable career. In Liar’s Poker, his book about his years at Salomon Brothers, Lewis meets a minor City grandee who tells him he disapproves of workdays longer than eight hours, because “you then arrive at the office in the morning with the same thoughts you left with late the night before”.

Work patterns are now very different, but finance is, once again, an industry where the overriding attraction is stability rather than possibility. You’ve heard the stats, or a variation on them, before: in 2002, the house price to median earnings ratio in London was 6.9; in 2023 it was 11.9. For day pupils, average private school fees as a percentage of the median national salary have increased from 30.6% in 1999 to 48.2% in 2024. If you want an upper-middle-class life, can you afford not to go into banking, or similar industries like corporate law and consulting? This leads to a vicious cycle — prices go up as London becomes more and more globalized and financialized — and a brain drain, as all the pin-sharp Oxbridge STEM graduates are tempted away from the laboratory. If the government can make a meaningful dent in the housing crisis, and build the Oxford-Cambridge Arc to let loose Britain’s life-science capabilities, maybe there’s hope of all this human capital flowing elsewhere. But as many politicians have found, breaking the tight, wrinkly grip of boomer “stakeholders” is no light task.

James, as we reach the dregs of our Morettis, is candid. “If I was born in our parent’s generation, I would have probably not worked in finance. I enjoy being quite comfortable, having a fat savings buffer, but back then, if a London Zone One flat was £300,000, £200,000, I would’ve happily worked in a general corporate job — maybe even marketing [or] journalism. But because we are where we are today, and how uncertain the next 10, 20 years look like, I want to absolutely max out on income.” It’s hard to blame him, or all the other bright young things in their down-padded gilets streaming through the grey dawn into central London every morning.

*Names have been changed

Obviously, after I wrote about her for the Guardian, the locals in our trendy Crouch End park soon got wind of it. They would stop us to ask if Maisie was the “Princess Diana dog” and we would joke about her being harassed by the paparazzi. One humourless reader didn’t really get the joke. He wrote to the newspaper: “Bindel has gone too far this time. That dog looks nothing like Princess Diana!”

But like Diana, Maisie was heartbreakingly beautiful, a Spaniel-Collie cross with a long coat and soulful eyes. Her legs were slightly too short for her body, which made her all the more lovable. But before she came to us, someone had abandoned her. According to her profile on a rescue charity’s website, it said she would be put to sleep the following day unless she was claimed. We did. And we were besotted.

Her reputation — and her bark — soon preceded her. Our local park has a tennis court attached, and Maisie would gallop in and grab a ball, mid-serve. The Crouch End tennis gang were rarely amused. She even made a name for herself in media circles: if ever my partner Harriet or I were doing interviews, Maisie would inevitably bark her head off. Producers would have to decide whether to rerecord the segment or broadcast her voice on Radio 4 or Sky News.

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Maisie brought us joy in private as well as in public. With us, she was sweet, cuddly and affectionate, though she barked at everyone else. And she was insecure. If Harriet and I were sitting together on the sofa, she would try to separate us with her paws. She had never got over whatever had happened to her in her former life. We supported her with her trauma, and she helped us when we needed comfort after a bad day. Harriet, a lawyer, and I both do work that takes us to very dark places, dealing with the detail of the worst excesses of men’s violence. It’s not uncommon for us to be talking about murder, prostitution and child sexual abuse before 8am. But having a creature who would greet us joyfully, blissfully unaware of the terrible things humans are capable of, was always incredibly therapeutic.

And we repaid that joy with love and attention and vast vast vets bills. I’ve never felt more middle-class than when I had to tell an editor that I couldn’t knock out a piece in the next hour because I had to take the dog to hydrotherapy. She had fortnightly appointments ever since she developed arthritis. She also had monthly vaccinations to keep the condition at bay, and check-ups for her kidney disease and pancreatitis. People without pets will howl at the expense, but I had always felt lucky we could afford this sort of care.

Never more so than when we decided we had to euthanise her. She could no longer bound on to the tennis courts to irritate the Wimbledon wannabes; she could no longer negotiate the four steps into the kitchen or out into the garden without help. She had gone off her food. Her kidney failure had progressed and the vet suggested a new course of treatment. “No,” I said. “It’s time for her to go”. My partner and I knew we would rather let her go a day too soon than a day too late. She was 16-and-a-half and it was just before Christmas.

I know people will call me a hypocrite for promoting the value of having a pet, particularly during a cost-of-living crisis. When people are using food banks to feed their children, isn’t it bad taste to be talking about pet food banks? I hear the criticism. And I have made similar arguments myself — railing against donkey sanctuaries getting more funding than domestic violence charities. And, yes, I do think we should prioritise humans. I spend a significant amount of my unpaid time and energy campaigning to keep women and children safe from male violence. But I also donate a fair bit every month to animal charities. I want women to live without male violence; I don’t want donkeys to suffer; I want people to be able to feed their pets. These things aren’t mutually exclusive.

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A couple of years ago, I wrote about about people who had to give up their pets because they couldn’t afford basic vet treatment or decent food. I wept with owners who recounted the pain of rehoming their beloved companions, feeling angry that there was little help for them. Things have only got worse since then. Figures released last week by the Dog’s Trust reveal that a record number of people are being forced to give up their pets: the charity received more than 45,000 requests from owners about giving up their animals in 2023.

If I could have kept Maisie alive, fit and healthy forever I would have. But when the time came, the vet came to the house so that Maisie could die in her own bed, with us close by. She was given a sedative, fell into a deep sleep, and then a final injection stopped her heart. She was wrapped up in her favourite blanket and carried out in a wicker basket, while we sat inconsolable, looking at her bowls, her toys, her collar.

I cry about her every day and I have barely slept since she died. Christmas was especially hard: even the cat looked bereft. I would go out for walks on my own, feeling completely weird without a dog by my side. It was so odd to not hear her incessant barking when the doorbell rang. The house has lost its soul. While researching that piece two years ago, I also spoke to experts in bereavement counselling for pet owners. Some might think going to a therapist to get through the loss of a pet is a ridiculous self-indulgence when there’s so much human suffering in the world. But I know now that such loss can bring with it terrible grief, particularly when they have been so therapeutic, as Maisie was for me

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Maybe it was the quietness of the holiday season, but I ended up looking at dogs on rescue centre websites — thinking that, in the future, we would probably get another. Yes, I felt guilt, but I figured there was no harm in looking. And then, of course, the inevitable happened. She was a cross between a springer spaniel and a French bulldog, nothing like Maisie. It was only a couple of days before I surreptitiously emailed the owner, asking for more details. It was a familiar story: family dog gets pregnant, six puppies are born, they all need rehoming.

We brought Ruby home on Sunday, a month after Maisie died. She is four-months-old, and full of energy. I can’t wait for her to start barking, demanding a walk first thing in the morning. I still feel Maisie’s loss like a hole in my heart. But I didn’t want to wait just for the sake of it. I’m a fairly anxious person, an insomniac, and the nature of my work leaves me with invasive thoughts. Being able to spend time with a furry bundle of happiness reduces my anxiety and makes me forget, albeit temporarily, the painful stories stored in my head. Maisie helped me keep doing the work that I do. Now, Ruby will take up the baton — and the tennis ball.

Some of the suggested “home hacks” in this book have attracted particular mirth, seeming as they do to involve great effort and even high personal risk for exceptionally low reward. For instance, should you be desperate to get your hands on an egg ring — that is, a metal ring that helps you form perfectly round fried eggs — but unable to afford the £2.10 that would obtain you one from Amazon, Monroe suggests removing the lid and the bottom from a tuna tin, sanding the rough edges away, and washing afterwards to remove “any tiny dusty bits of metal”.

Should you be poor enough to lack a tin opener, meanwhile — currently on sale in Tesco for 60p — she suggests using a “small sharp knife that you are not particularly attached to, a hammer or mallet, a bit of vigour, some patience and a VERY steady hand”. As the internet has pointed out, combining both of these suggestions to produce an egg ring seems to make it likely that by the end of the process, you won’t be particularly attached to your fingers either.

It is hard to know to whom these tips are really addressed. It seems improbable that the average cash-strapped and harassed parent is going to need — or indeed have time for — any of them. The most obvious candidate for lacking a tin opener is someone homeless or in temporary accommodation, but having perfectly circular fried eggs is surely an unlikely priority here. Other tips in the book involve making firelighters by stuffing cardboard toilet rolls with tumble dryer fluff; filling worn-out socks with lavender for a microwaveable “hot pocket”; making a rolling-pin out of a glass bottle filled with ice; and gluing ring-pulls into your handbag to keep your sunglasses secure. Perhaps, then, the envisioned reader is a pastry chef living in the woods, but still with access to a lot of home appliances.

If you are familiar with Monroe, you’ll know that fearlessly confecting the imaginary habits of poor people is something of a habit of hers. If you aren’t: she’s a queer, tatted, highly articulate and Very Online single mum who mostly writes about low-cost food. Ten years ago, she stumbled into fame at the height of the government’s austerity programme by writing a blog post about not being able to feed her son or heat her home in Southend-on-Sea. Since then, she has authored several cookbooks and continued her blog, heavily mining her own lived experience to evangelise about how to eat cheaply and well when you’re hard up. Nigella Lawson is a big fan and offers a fulsome tribute in the new book.

These days, Monroe seems professionally wedded to a narrative of personal struggle and sudden dramatic changes of fortune, for better or worse. She has a huge Twitter following, regularly detailing physical and mental health challenges, struggles with alcohol, a rollercoaster love-life, and anecdotes that heavily imply that the wolf is never far from the door. She’s helped by a fluent writing style that cycles rapidly through a variety of clickable moods: cheerful resilience in the face of adversity, living-my-best-life showboating, sassy clapbacking, ruefully relatable parenting moments, and so on. In short, she’s the acceptable face of modern poverty in the eyes of many middle-class progressives — and they adore her for it.

Equally though, the very characteristics that make her so pleasing to some make her absolutely infuriating to others. And just imagine — some of these infuriated people are actually poor and/or working-class. It’s no doubt a hard job to stand in for an entire demographic in the public imagination but still, Monroe’s apparently inability to keep a story straight about whether she’s really a downtrodden victim of a cruel system or rather #winningatlife tends to get on the nerves of readers feeling permanently crushed by rising interest rates, rents, energy bills, and food prices. In the last year or so, an army of determined internet sleuths has arisen to challenge the official back story of poverty, obsessively documenting internal discrepancies within Monroe’s voluminous Twitter output, cross-referenced with her many heartfelt Guardian op-eds, interviews, and blog posts. Understandably wounded, the writer is now apparently psychologically locked into an escalating and ultimately unwinnable confrontation with a multi-headed hydra of critics on Twitter.

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Personally, although I find Monroe’s online persona more grating than — as she might have it — a metal sheet into which you’ve just punched several large holes with a sharp knife, I don’t think she’s a deliberate scammer. She strikes me as more of a disorganised, constitutionally inconsistent type who can’t remember what she last said from one moment to the next. Either way, I’m not too bothered. I’m just grateful for the lolz provided by some of the recipes — and specifically, the juxtaposition of Monroe’s middle-class culinary sensibilities with her cheap, ultra-processed ingredient list.

Think Nigella-does-Asda. Descriptions of unctuous smatterings and glossy meldings are one thing when enthusing about béarnaise or Sachertorte, but they take on another register altogether when the subject matter is Sainsbury’s Baked Beans or Instant Mash. A much-derided blogpost of Monroe’s from last year suggests buying a tin of spaghetti hoops, washing the tomato sauce from the hoops, then grating some cheese on top to produce “Anellini Con Cacio e Pepe”. (Readers are also told that the washed-off tomato sauce can be reduced down “in a vigorous boil to concentrate it” to make something approximating tomato purée.) In the latest book, Monroe waxes lyrical about such culinary temptations as “moonshine mash” (Instant Mash mixed with pureed tinned sweetcorn), chicken cooked in Fanta, and cornflake ice-cream.

Once you have unscrewed your face, consider that the real attraction of Monroe’s writing for readers cannot possibly be that it gives impoverished people genuinely delicious things to eat, still less that it saves them lots of money. After all, no amount of repurposing stale cornflakes or fiddling about with ring pulls is going to make even the smallest dent in household bills these days. Rather, the main appeal of Monroe’s writing is surely that it taps into an old and perennially satisfying literary tradition, which for want of a better term I’ll call Thrift Lit.

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By Kathleen Stock

In this genre, fearless housewives — often abetted by a calm and steadfast husband with carpentry skills — marshal all their domestic forces against a hostile local environment. They build shelters, repurpose natural objects into domestic ones, find ingenious uses for old things, and waste nothing. They pickle, salt, ferment, and store up for winter; mend, patch, darn, and husband; plant crops then tend and harvest them; look after animals. Slowly, over time, they produce gleaming, quiet, well-ordered homes in which to bring up docile children, safe little shelters from the chaotic storm of life outside, lit warmly from within. Classics of the Thrift Lit genre include The Swiss Family Robinson, the Little House On The Prairie series, and The Country Child.

Viewed in this light, despite all the contemporary trappings (non-binary, tattooed, neurodiverse), Monroe becomes a surprisingly traditional figure, grounded in Puritan values of self-restraint and respectability: a castaway, pioneer, or farmer’s wife, ingeniously building a succession of bright, glowing homes for herself and her child out of nothing, in the midst of a punishing economic wilderness. The virtues to which she exhorts us by her own alleged example are thrift and frugality, not as means to any further ends but as wholly satisfying moral and aesthetic ends in themselves.

Of course — because we are limp and useless spoilt softies who can’t do anything right — we get the heroes we deserve. Our own modern-day Ma Ingalls is a pale shadow of her stoic forebears in terms of stiff upper lip at least. Still, the appeal of her message is timeless, and a good one for a cold and pitiless January. You too can use your own resources to make order out of chaos. It may be a fantasy, but it’s a consoling one. And if that doesn’t help, there’s always the circular eggs with a light smattering of metal dust to look forward to.

“It’s crisis upon crisis,” says Dr Shonagh Dillon, CEO of Aurora New Dawn, a charity that provides services for victims of domestic and sexual abuse in Hampshire and the Thames Valley. Organisations like hers have not yet fully recovered from having to deal with the increased demand caused by Covid, and now they are braced for a flood of new calls for help. Back in March 2020, government ministers were warned by MPs, charities and campaigners against domestic violence about the deadly impact lockdown was likely to have on vulnerable women and children. “Stay home” was a bitter message for women who suddenly found themselves shut up, 24 hours a day, with abusive partners. And lo and behold, calls to the national domestic violence helpline rose by 60%, some of them made by concerned neighbours who heard alarming noises from next door.

Dillon recalls the early days of lockdown, when staff trying to deal with a deluge of calls from desperate women had to wait weeks for the government even to designate them as key workers. I tell her about sitting in on remote meetings organised by City Hall in the spring of 2020, as charities and local authorities struggled to respond to the crisis: attempts to set up emergency accommodation to save women from injury and worse were being frustrated by government departments, each of whom — Home Office, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government — claimed it was someone else’s responsibility. Perpetrators fully exploited the situation, telling police officers summoned by a 999 call that they couldn’t enter the family home because someone inside had Covid. They put trackers on phones and cars in case a woman managed to escape on the rare occasions she was allowed to leave the house, to go shopping or take the kids to the park. Social workers moving women to emergency accommodation had to learn how to check for such devices to prevent the victim being followed.

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By Joan Smith

Today it is not lockdown that is being exploited, but the high cost of living. Anxiety about making ends meet is creating ideal conditions for coercive control, a form of abuse that is not as widely understood as physical violence. Of course, the two often co-exist, with a history of financial abuse being revealed only when a victim is being treated for physical injuries. Money problems do not cause abuse but they make it worse, providing extra “leverage” for men who are already threatening and isolating their partners. “My abuser would check accounts when I had the debit card,” one survivor of financial abuse told Women’s Aid. “If I was food shopping, he would ask how much I’ve spent to see if I was truthful as he had already checked online. He would not top up the gas and electric meters so I had to spend all day with no gas or electric.”

Dillon is all too familiar with how coercive control operates. Survivors have told her about men who say: “You’re not feeding your kids. They’ve got holes in their shoes. I’m going to tell social services you’re a bad mother.” That is a terrifying threat to make to a woman who, through no fault of her own, is struggling to put food on the table or having to rely on charity shops to clothe their children. They already feel intense shame about their supposed shortcoming as mothers, something perpetrators understand very well and are eager to exploit. Women fear losing their children above all else — and abusive men can sound very plausible. How can a woman prove she’s not to blame — that money is being kept from her deliberately — when her partner sounds so reasonable to outsiders?

Shortage of money increases the pressures within relationships in other ways, as men who can’t afford to go to the pub or a football match spend more time at home. Researchers used to wonder why intimate partner abuse rises during big sporting occasions, such as the football World Cup, speculating that perpetrators were punishing women when their team lost. The answer turned out to be much simpler: domestic abuse increases whenever men spend more time at home, which is why the big rise during the Covid lockdowns came as no surprise to anyone. There were a spate of domestic homicides — 16 in three weeks — in the first month of lockdown.

Eventually, the government noticed. Covid “acted as an escalator and intensifier of existing abuse”, a joint report from the Home Office, National Police Chiefs’ Council and College of Policing belatedly admits. “It seems to have been weaponised by some abusers as both a new tool of control over victims and… as an excuse for domestic abuse and even homicide.” Two men, Anthony Williams and Hussein Egal, blamed stress caused by Covid when they were charged with killing their wives. Egal inflicted 70 injuries on his wife, Maryan Ismail, after (he claims) she had threatened to throw him out for having the virus. Williams strangled his wife to death, and then pleaded guilty to manslaughter, having told the police that lockdown restrictions had had a negative impact on his mental health. He received a reduced sentence of five years. It remains to be seen whether, in a few months times, men accused of murder will claim they were driven to it by anxiety about not being able to pay the mortgage.

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By Julie Bindel

Homicides were not the only deaths linked to domestic abuse: there were also 38 suspected suicides of victims in the first year of the pandemic, a phenomenon so under-researched that we do not have previous years’ figures to compare it with. It attests to the desperate circumstances some women found themselves in, locked in with their abusers, as well as important questions about whether the women’s actions were voluntary.

Surely, surely, ministers would never make the same mistake again? But that appears to be exactly what is happening. “The suicide rate will definitely increase,” Dillon predicts. “It will happen if women can’t flee safely.” She asks herself every day how she can help victims, knowing that her organisation is struggling with its own costs, including soaring heating bills. Some of her employees are single mothers and survivors of abuse, and the cost of living is already hitting them hard. “I’m worried about my staff,” she says. Most earn between £24,000 and £26,000 a year, when they could get more than £30,000 in less stressful occupations. “We are going to lose staff hand over fist. We’re constantly fire-fighting,” Dillon says wearily.

Women’s Aid has addressed the looming crisis in an August report, offering a stark warning: “The cost of living is preventing women from fleeing domestic abuse.” Two-thirds of survivors told the organisation that abusers were using the cost of living increase as a tool for coercive control, “including to justify further restricting their access to money”. Almost three-quarters said that shortage of cash had prevented them from leaving. With private rents beyond the means of most victims, and mortgages prohibitively expensive, women feel trapped. “I feel like my only option to keep my kids is to go back to the marital home where he nearly killed me,” one survivor told the organisation.

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By Dr Emma Jones

Two months ago, a group of charities said they were “disappointed” by the lack of government action on tackling the cost of living crisis. Women’s Aid is calling for mortgage payment holidays for victims, an emergency domestic abuse fund, and discounts on energy bills for organisations that provide services for women and children. Refuge has asked for the £20 universal credit uplift to be restored. The government says it is working across departments to ensure that victims, survivors and their families are fully supported, citing a £230m investment in its Tackling Domestic Abuse Plan.

What the government did not say, however, is just as important. The plan was announced in March, under a different administration, and some of the money is earmarked for long-term projects such as training to recognise abuse. The vast scale of the economic crisis has since become clear, yet one of Liz Truss’s first actions as prime minister was to abolish the role of women’s minister. The decision has been criticised by some Conservative MPs, including the chair of the women and equalities select committee, Caroline Nokes. Having a dedicated women’s minister gives us a voice — and also acts as a brake, forcing government departments to think twice about the impact of policies on women and girls.

If the government is planning a substantive response to a situation many women regard as an emergency, it is keeping very quiet about it. This time round, with so much evidence of the disastrous consequences of its predecessor’s tardy action in lockdown, it has no excuse. Another crisis is playing into abusers’ hands — and there is very little time left to save their victims.

Nothing in this respect has changed since the Victorian era, when the middle classes were equally panicked by stirrings from below. Nobody objects to the right to withdraw one’s labour; it’s just strikes that some people can’t stomach. The last thing one should do with this particular right is actually exercise it. If you do, you can be sure that the state will shackle you with even more repressive legislation. Strikes are a nuisance for the general public. Choosing between freezing and starving is also a nuisance for the general public, though not, presumably, for Newman and Wark.

There is talk again of hand-outs, which the Victorians doled out graciously to the deserving poor. Perhaps we should dispense with a new prime minister and ask Bill Gates to take over running the country. Some things, however, have changed since Victoria’s day. Back then, the poor were largely invisible. (I apologise for the quaintly archaic term “poor”; I mean of course those with limited disposable incomes). A lot of them lived in slums, where few of their social superiors dared to tread. They were a ghettoised species to be researched into or moralised about, an alien underworld visited largely by philanthropists and sociologists.

Middle-class people ventured into their midst from time to time to note their physiognomic peculiarities or beg them to be washed in the blood of the Lamb. They were also largely illiterate, which shut them out of the public sphere even more decisively. Nowadays, the poor may live next door, or even closer than that, while a good many of the ghettos are for the rich. The low-paid have also acquired a voice of their own, rather than having conscience-stricken novelists speak out on their behalf. It’s a long way from Charles Dickens to Mick Lynch. The deprived used to be a problem — a distinctive group like the disabled, in need of special measures. But what if the problem is society itself?

Some Victorians saw poverty as a transient state. A poor person was someone en route to becoming a rich person, rather as an ape was en route to becoming a human being. For the state to intervene in the laws of the marketplace would only derail this desirable evolution. Some of these apologists for progress and civilisation would have been aghast at the idea that there would still be widespread hunger almost 200 years on. Much the same view was taken of Empire. Colonial peoples were stuck at an evolutionary point which we ourselves had left behind some centuries ago, and the more enlightened of our forebears felt the need to bring these savages up to date by invading their territories, hi-jacking their labour-power and plundering their resources. They did not pause to reflect that a major reason why the colonies were in a dire state was because they themselves existed, rather as a major reason for the existence of the poor is the activity of the rich.

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Boris Johnson was too Dickensian

By Terry Eagleton

Others in Victorian Britain saw poverty as a natural condition, and thus as unchangeable. This, however, doesn’t follow: not all natural conditions are unchangeable, as the planet knows to its cost. It’s a lot easier to move a mountain than to demolish patriarchy. There are, however, certain natural phenomena which never vary, like the need for nourishment or the nastiness of the US Republican party, and destitution could easily be added to the list. Besides, an authority as unimpeachable as the Son of God had declared that the poor are always with us. If Jesus was a Tory, who were we to say otherwise?

After a while, however, poverty became a scandal. It showed no signs of disappearing, but ideologically speaking it grew less acceptable. This was partly because of the growth of humanitarianism, and partly because too stark a division between rich and poor was politically destabilising. The case that having an empty stomach is as natural as having typhoid thus crumbled away. Fewer people believed that capitalism, too, is just human nature, though this view still has a number of subscribers. It was growing harder to maintain that Neolithic Man could find his fulfilment only by running a corner shop, or that tribal peoples like the Nuer and the Dinka are secretly hankering to be stockbrokers. Aristotle thought that trade simply for the sake of accumulating wealth was unnatural. For some feudal ideologues, capitalism flouted traditional values and would never catch on. Shakespeare was well aware of the New Men, as the Elizabethans called them, and feared the devastation they were wreaking.

So hardship had to be accounted for in non-natural terms, and it was thus that the evolutionary theory became the trickle-down theory. In the end, the wealthy would come to the rescue of the needy. It is remarkable how resistant to reality this pious faith has proved. Karl Marx was derided for claiming that the rift between the well-off and the hard-up would widen as capitalism developed, but he has proved prophetic. It is the rich who are getting richer, not the poor. If it is true that capitalism can lift some people out of deprivation, it is also true that it can plunge others into it, sometimes at the same time.

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Even so, the myth persists that granting tax breaks to billionaires is the quickest route to all-round affluence. How many times must this theory fail in practice before it is finally discredited? Imagine someone who believes that the killing of African Americans by police officers is simply a series of tragic accidents. It says nothing significant about the structure of American society. The more African Americans are murdered, the more stubbornly this individual sticks to his view.

If he isn’t entirely dim-witted, one can only account for this by appealing to ideology. There must be some reason why this man can’t afford to acknowledge the existence of systematic racism. To do so might seriously jeopardise his own interests. He might be forced to look at the world in a way that makes it hard to carry on living as he does. The same goes for the Kentucky ex-coalminer standing up to his waist in flood water who, when asked whether climate change may have played a part in destroying his home, hesitated for several seconds before grudgingly replying: “It’s possible.”

It isn’t in the interests of the current economic system to acknowledge that it breeds inequality in the same way that sugar is sweet. This is why some look forward to the time when the low-paid will catch up with Elon Musk, or at least with Gary Lineker. This will certainly come about, but only in the kingdom of heaven, and people surviving on sandwiches because they daren’t turn on the cooker are reluctant to wait that long.

The beauty of the American Dream is that it accepts the reality of poverty, but in an upbeat kind of way. The badly off won’t get to live in Martha’s Vineyard, but individuals here and there will bootstrap themselves to success. There is a ladder leading to the top, but like all ladders it is wide enough to hold only one at a time. Society is one enormous lottery, and what keeps you from chaining yourself to the nearest police officer is the prospect that your number might always come up. Meanwhile, as you visit your local food bank, it is consoling to think that others are paying a fortune for tickets to the moon. The hearts of the unemployed swell with patriotic pride at the thought of the urchin from the Bronx or Detroit who grew up to be a millionaire and throw them out of their jobs.

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Was Jesus a revolutionary?

By Terry Eagleton

Every civilisation has its blind spots — the unsayable or inconceivable, the invisible framework which marks the limits of permissible thought. In Britain today, this is the property system. This situation, too, hasn’t changed since Victorian times. In the 1840s, a famine broke out at the heart of the British Empire, the greatest social catastrophe of 19th-century Europe. One million Irish people died, while millions of others emigrated. One reason they did so was because the British government wouldn’t permit any tampering with the laws of the capitalist economy. Few people today believe that this set-up is divinely ordained, but a lot of them behave as though it is. Watch Kirsty Wark’s blank, uncomprehending visage when someone on the show is rash enough to mention socialism.

Before we squabble about restoring a tax cut here or help for the most vulnerable there, we should step back and contemplate for a moment the sheer surreal lunacy of the situation. In a world in which computers are so advanced that they may be feeling lonesome, and for all we know are secretly dating each another, people are going to die because they are deprived of goods to which they have an absolute right. Perhaps it will soothe the grief and fury of their families to point out that there is no alternative — that, in the midst of the greatest affluence and technological wizardry history has ever witnessed, the wit of humanity is unable to conceive of a different way of doing things. I wouldn’t like to be the politician who tries to tell them.

Why were their crystal balls so inaccurate? Was today’s inflation simply unforeseeable? The straightforward answer is: no. The initial inflation was caused by the disruptions brought on by the lockdowns and was perfectly foreseeable using basic macroeconomic models taught in undergraduate classes. Yet most economists seem to have missed this — largely because, starting in March 2020, they stopped focusing on economic problems and became armchair epidemiologists, offering opinions on how the virus spread and what might stop it.

There was no meaningful economic discussion during the pandemic; normal repairs and maintenance appear to have been neglected, leading to serious problems with supply chains. In 2021, for example, there were 1,946 factory fires — the most ever recorded in a single year and an increase of 129% over the previous year. And these problems have been supercharged by recent geopolitical developments, the most obvious being the war in Ukraine.

As with the lockdowns, economists and policymakers repeatedly misjudged the effect of imposing sanctions on Russia. Most commentators thought they would lead to a collapse in the rouble and the disintegration of the Russian economy. The sanctions would “reduce the rouble to rubble”, predicted Joe Biden. This has not happened. The rouble is currently 30% higher than it was pre-war and while Russia is facing down a recession, the Bank of Russia is slashing interest rates rapidly, signalling that the worst is over.

While the sanctions have not impacted Russia as many assumed they would, they have crippled the Western economies. Before the war, it was fashionable to say that Russia only had an economy the size of Italy’s. This was always misleading. When properly adjusted for relative prices, Russia has an economy substantially larger than the United Kingdom. And it is not simply the size of the Russian economy that was underestimated, but also its importance in the markets for core goods.

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Don't blame Brexit for shortages

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For example, Russia produces large amounts of the world’s fertiliser. It accounts for 19%, 15% and 14% of the world’s potassium, nitrogen, and phosphorus exports respectively. Fertiliser is obviously key to growing foods, so disruptions to these markets tend to increase food inflation. Russia produces large amounts of basic foodstuffs too, and is the largest wheat exporter in the world. Put simply, the Russians punch above their weight in the production of the necessities for life. While they may not, say, have a world-leading social media industry, they produce a great deal of the goods that we simply cannot do without.

But Russia’s real economic trump card is energy exports, particularly energy exports to Europe. Prior to the war, 40% of gas and around 25% of oil consumed in Europe came from Russia. And as European countries have ramped up weapons shipments to Ukraine, Russia has started to close the taps, driving up prices and further exacerbating the inflation.

These are the most powerful short-term drivers of inflation, but if we look further down the track there are long-term trends that look even more ominous. It is, for instance, becoming increasingly clear that the war in Ukraine has driven Russia and China much closer together, with the two countries opening up important new trade links. This appears to be part of a broader shift in which the BRICs countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), as well as Argentina, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, attempt to decouple from the Western-led global economic system. Recently, the BRICs announced that they would attempt to establish a new reserve currency to challenge the US dollar.

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By Martin Gurri

Until now, the West has benefited from the cheap labour and raw materials provided by the developing world. But at a certain point it was inevitable that the developing world would decide it is done playing second fiddle to the West. That day appears to be here, with Russia and China ushering in this new age. Without easy access to cheap labour and raw materials, prices in the West will have to rise — and living standards will have to fall accordingly.

Amid all this, there is every chance the BoE will find it cannot control inflation. Normal or “cyclical” inflation occurs when the economy runs too hot, labour markets tighten up and workers demand higher wages, which are then passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. Central banks then raise interest rates to slow the economy and the inflation is rung out of the system.

Yet while wages are certainly rising now, it is not clear that this is a core driver of inflation. More likely, the inflation is being driven by the after-effects of lockdowns and by the enormous and chaotic geopolitical shifts that we are witnessing. And if this is true then interest rate hikes by the BoE could make the situation even worse. It wouldn’t just cause a recession, but an inflationary recession — the worst of all possible outcomes, as it means rising unemployment and rising prices.

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The BoE does appear to be aware of this prospect. In their Monetary Policy Report in May, they stated that they “can’t do anything about the global supply problems or the energy prices that are currently pushing up inflation”. So why are they proceeding with the interest rate hikes? The most likely answer is that they realise that they need to try something. If inflation gets completely out of control, it will crush living standards and irreparably damage the economy. The BoE likely figures that they need to give tightening monetary policy a shot and see if it works. If it does, then they will have done their job; if it doesn’t, at least they know that they tried their best.

Either way, the stakes are enormously high. If the BoE fails to squeeze inflation out of the system and it turns out that price rises are reflective of a new global economic order, living standards in Western countries will decline at a rate never seen before in history. Since the Second World War, and especially in the last 40 or so years, we in the West have based our entire way of life around commerce and rising living standards. If it turns out that this era is now over, how will we choose to live? Will we be able to accept a lower standard of living? Or will modern society fragment? If the interest rate hikes by the BoE fail to tame inflation, we could soon be about to find out.

However, on the rare occasions Labor did win federally, it was when it offered a meaningful alternative to the Coalition. In the 1972, 1983, and 2007 elections, the ALP presented big ideas to an electorate ready for change — and won. By contrast, when the ALP tried to pass itself off as Coalition-lite, voters opted for the full-strength option.

The next federal elections, scheduled for 21 May, could break the mould. Despite some early hiccups, and an apparent lack of enthusiasm among voters for its leader, Anthony Albanese, Labor’s strong poll position has so far held. Labor comfortably leads the Coalition on a two-party-preferred basis 54% to 46%.

Remarkably, this is despite the fact that Labor’s election pitch can be boiled down to being nicer and more competent than the incumbents. Gone are its serious plans to reform the tax system, which increasingly favours high income earners and the asset-wealthy. Although Labor promises to increase the share of renewable energy, coal exports will not be touched. On foreign policy and national security, the major parties’ platforms are almost identical. So why is Labor still looking poised to win?

For one thing, the public has clearly tired of the government and its responsibility-shirking leader. Historically, though, this hasn’t been enough. Enthusiasm for the Coalition hit rock-bottom ahead of the 2019 elections, after successive internal coups removed two election-winning prime ministers in three years. Yet the Coalition still won. This time, however, circumstances may have conspired against another Morrison miracle.

The most difficult thing about governing, according to the British PM Harold Macmillan, was “events, dear boy, events”. And “events” may finally be on Labor’s side. All Albanese has to do is grab the popcorn and watch.

As a rule, Australian voters tend to see the ALP as stronger on health, education, and social services. The Coalition tends to poll better on national security and economic management. Unfortunately for Labor, while the former strengths win state elections, the latter issues appear more decisive in winning federal elections.

Coming into this election, the Coalition has again campaigned heavily on its national security and economic management record. It has sought to paint itself as the David that stood up to the Chinese Goliath — by, for example, introducing tough anti-interference laws, calling for an international inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus, signing up to the AUKUS alliance, and committing to substantial increases to defence spending. It also claims to have delivered strong economic results, such as historically low levels of unemployment, despite the ravages of the pandemic.

The Coalition’s election attack ads, under the slogan “It won’t be easy under Albanese”, routinely denigrate Labor’s national security and economic credentials. They claim that Albanese would be “soft on China”, extending earlier smears that sought to present Labor as “Beijing’s pick” in the election. Morrison even called ALP deputy leader, Richard Marles, a “Manchurian candidate” in February. The Coalition’s ads also highlight Albanese’s earlier support for unpopular tax reforms and his lack of economic experience in government.

How fortuitous for Labor, then, that two unrelated events, both occurring in the middle of the election campaign, have severely undermined the government’s national security and economic management narrative. The first is the 19 April security agreement between China and Solomon Islands, an archipelagic country of around 650,000 people located approximately 2,000km to Australia’s northeast. Although the agreement is secret and its final wording unknown, a draft version was leaked by local opponents and published on Twitter in March. It caused a political storm across the entire region, especially in Australia.

Under the draft agreement, Solomon Islands could request policing and military assistance from China. If the Solomon Islands government consents, China could also “make ship visits to, carry out logistical replenishment in, and have stopover and transition in Solomon Islands, and relevant forces of China can be used to protect the safety of Chinese personnel and major projects in Solomon Islands”. Although permanent bases are not mentioned, many analysts have suggested that the agreement opens the door to China establishing an operations base for its navy, allowing it to potentially block shipping routes between Australia and the US, and across the wider South Pacific.

While other observers, more familiar with the Solomon Islands context, strongly disputed the likelihood of a Chinese military base in the country, Australia’s election campaign was set alight. In a country already anxious about China’s growing power, the agreement seemed to confirm the most alarmist security predictions for a region politicians like to call Australia’s “patch” or “backyard”. Shadow Foreign Minister Penny Wong pounced, calling it “the worst failure of Australian foreign policy in the Pacific since the end of World War Two”. Albanese also called it a “massive foreign policy failure”. Both blamed the agreement on the Coalition’s mismanagement of the relationship with Solomon Islands and other Pacific countries. Wong pinpointed Australia’s declining aid disbursements to the country since the Coalition took over in 2013.

Wong’s claims are obviously hyperbolic. Experts argued that Australia’s influence in the region should not be exaggerated, and that the agreement was also motivated by domestic political considerations in Solomon Islands. Additionally, Wong’s claim that aid declined under the Coalition was also judged inaccurate.

Nonetheless, Labor’s punches had the government rattled, with Morrison struggling to defend his record in the Pacific. He was not helped by a fair bit of exaggeration from his own side, including Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce’s statement that the Solomon Islands could become Australia’s “little Cuba”, and Defence Minister Peter Dutton claiming he now expected “the Chinese to do all they can”. Worse, from the Coalition’s perspective, a survey has found that 72% of voters were “concerned” or “very concerned” about the agreement. The Coalition’s lead over Labor on national security narrowed dramatically from almost 30% in August 2021 to 14% in April 2022.

To make matters even worse for the Coalition, in early May, Australia’s independent central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia, raised interest rates for the first time in 11 years to combat the growing problem of inflation. The RBA’s decision exposed the deep holes in the government’s economic management success story. Sure, unemployment is low, but underemployment has been worsening for decades, reflecting the fact that many of the jobs created in Australia are casual or part-time. Wage growth has also been stagnating for almost a decade, such that rapidly rising living costs have become a major political issue. Inflation has reared its head in Australia, as in many other countries, but the cause is not a wage-push, as in the Seventies; it is disruption to supply.

Rate rises are, therefore, only going to compound the cost-of-living crisis for many Australian families by making their mortgage and credit card repayments more expensive without an offsetting increase in pay. The problem for the Coalition is that many of the worst-affected are likely to live in the exact same outer-suburban seats it needs to hold in order to stay in government. Tellingly, the rate hike and rising inflation have sparked the first substantive fight between the major parties in this campaign, over how much wages should rise.

None of this is to say that Labor has a clear plan for addressing the cost-of-living crisis — but it’s clear that neither does the government. If Labor wins on 21 May, it should thank its good fortune, not its campaign managers.

This is in large part due to his Spring Statement, which was a fiasco — a failure not just of empathy, but also of basic political judgement. However, he and Boris Johnson do have one last chance to turn this around — and that’s the forthcoming energy independence strategy. It’s due out on Thursday, but after weeks of wrangling between Downing Street and the Treasury, there’s no guarantee.

The Prime Minister — as always looking for the big, bold, willy-waving policy — wants to go nuclear. But he’s forgotten that the story of British nuclear is not a happy one.

It all began with such high hopes. In 1956, a young Queen Elizabeth II opened the world’s first nuclear power station, Calder Hall in Cumbria. As she said back then, “this new power, which has proved itself to be such a terrifying weapon of destruction is harnessed for the first time for the common good of our community”.

However, that wasn’t the whole truth. As well as generating electricity, the first generation of Magnox reactors were also designed to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. The dual purpose meant they were never optimised for civilian use. Calder Hall was also next door to Windscale Pile No. 1 — which, in 1957, was the site of Britain’s worst nuclear accident.

In the Sixties, the next generation of Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGR) was planned as a fresh start. But these too were a big disappointment. The first one opened 13 years late and the fleet as a whole has been plagued by technical problems. In the Eighties, Margaret Thatcher decided to give nuclear a third chance. The plan was to build ten new plants, based on the Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) design. But due to escalating costs only one of these was ever built — Sizewell B.

In the 2000s, it was Tony Blair’s turn to bang his head against a brick wall. This time, the design of choice was the French-owned European Pressurised Reactor (EPR). Eight sites were planned; but to date, work has started on just one of them — Hinkley Point C. Predictably, it too has been hit by multiple delays and cost over-runs. It’s due open in 2026 — 70 years after Calder Hall — but the results of yet another cost review could mean that more bad news is on the way.

After seven decades and four failed attempts to make nuclear power work for Britain, Boris has decided that we should make a fifth attempt. He wants 25% of the Britain’s electricity to come from nuclear power. At the moment the figure is about 16% — most of which is from stations that are due to close by the end of this decade.

But over the past 40 years, we’ve only managed to build them at a rate of one per generation. What makes Boris think he can do ten times better? Moreover, this is a technology notorious for blowing through budgets. If it all goes wrong again, then with multiple projects we’ll pay a heavy price. Why then is there so little opposition to this high-risk strategy?

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By Joel Kotkin

Possibly it’s because the public is so desperate for affordable energy. Supposedly unpopular forms of generation like onshore wind farms are anything but. These projects enjoy overwhelming support, even if they’re built close to where people live. According to the Sunday Times, Tory internal polling shows that support for renewables goes “off the charts” if local residents get discounted electricity. Nuclear is not as popular as wind or solar, but the same principle could apply: deal with the nimbies by stuffing their mouths with freebies.

Just how seriously is the Prime Minister taking his grand plan? Judging from a Johnsonian quip that “we should put a small nuclear reactor in every Labour seat” — the answer is not “not very”. It doesn’t help that the PM has a track record of promoting madcap schemes such as Boris Island or the bridge across the Irish Sea. Fortunately, those notions came to nothing, but on nuclear, who will stop his folie de grandeur?

Our best hope is Rishi Sunak. As a banker, he knows just how reluctant the private sector is to fund the construction of nuclear power stations. The risks are just too big. So it’s unlikely that we’ll get our new nukes unless the British Government shares in the cost of construction. Even a 10% share would mean finding billions in taxpayers’ money. Though the PM might be willing to risk our cash on a dodgy prospect, his penny-pinching Chancellor is reportedly horrified.

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By Will Lloyd

Remember, this is a technological challenge that has defeated the governments of Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair — but, hilariously, we’re supposed to believe that Boris Johnson can succeed where his predecessors failed.

Even if these immensely complicated, decade-long construction projects were to go to plan, that would still leave the opportunity cost. Billions — perhaps, ten of billions — of pounds are at stake. Using this money to prop-up the French nuclear industry means not using it to level-up Britain as Boris promised he would. It means not investing in the energy industries where Britain should be leading the world, like offshore wind power and carbon capture. It means making this country a technology importer, when we desperately need to export our way back to prosperity. We will be a poorer, more indebted nation if we choose the nuclear option.

It also means a huge diversion of government effort away from the immediate energy needs of the British people. Winter is coming and so is the next 50% hike in our gas and electricity bills. We have just months to adequately insulate the homes of the most vulnerable households. It is this goal that should be consuming the Prime Minister’s political attention, not his nuclear fever dream.

Remember that the best case scenario for nuclear is that we’ll have a new generation of power stations coming online some time in the late 2030s. But the cost-of-living crisis demands urgency. Instead of gambling on a technology that has let us down again-and-again, Boris needs to concentrate on the here-and-now.

That means deploying the technologies that can make a difference by next year, not the next decade. Our national security is at stake, our household finances are at stake, and when temperatures begin to fall again, lives are at stake.

I realise that a roll of loft insulation doesn’t make for the most exciting of photo opportunities — especially for a gesture politician like Boris Johnson — but right now it might make all the difference.

Once wars united people, but not in modern America. Here, the vast majority of citizens share remarkably similar opinions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: that it should be condemned outright. Our politicians, however, seem blissfully unaware of this.

In Congress last week, despite strong pro-Kyiv sentiment among the vast majority of Republicans, pro-Trump acolytes constituted the largest faction of those who voted against supplying aid to Ukraine. Yet on this issue, there is little to distinguish them from the Democratic Socialists of America, who have called for America’s exit from the “imperialist” Nato. There are even some on the far-Left who believe the West’s sympathy for Ukrainians reflects our unredeemable racism.

And yet the past fortnight has revealed something more optimistic than the intellectual adolescence of America’s politicians. The key to repelling Putin’s campaign of division in the West has also become apparent: unifying around basic economic interests.

Much attention has been paid in recent years to Russian online interference in our elections. But it is tangible realities — such as oil, food, and the ability to build things — that will determine our ability to resist external autocratic forces. And it is here that energy policy becomes crucial.

Before Biden became President, America was well on its way to energy independence, and emerged as the world’s leading gas exporter. Far more than words or military threats, the US energy revival was a blow to Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. American production was a critical factor in weakening the price of the one commodity that keeps their economies alive.

Yet this weapon is being systematically dismantled. Since taking the White House, Biden has turned the Federal Reserve and other executive departments into enforcers of “net zero” policies. From the very beginning, Biden and his green allies have busily cancelled gas pipelines, ended new leases for offshore oil, and introduced new regulations that make it harder to build new fossil fuel plants. All of this was manna for Moscow.

Biden’s energy policies, so poorly timed amid the prospect of a looming Russian invasion, has also widened a deeper, more long-lasting schism that will reverberate for years to come. Perhaps more than anything else, it seems certain to expand both class and geographic divisions.

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Green hypocrisy hurts the poorest

By Joel Kotkin

The decision by his administration to double down on green policies, while blaming Putin for their hefty cost, has exacerbated the already-wide divide between the coast-hugging financial and tech oligarchs and the oil drillers, truck drivers, factory workers and farmers labouring outside the big cities, particularly in the country’s vast heartland. America’s coastal elites may express moral outrage about the Kremlin’s behaviour, but for those living and working in energy-producing states such as Texas — whose energy boom represents a far greater threat to Putin than elaborate virtue-signalling — this is not a matter of morals, but of livelihoods.

Oddly, American progressives even seem to lack the sense of realism that their German counterparts, once models for the Left, have adopted. Despite all evidence to the contrary, our greens cling to their fantasy that renewables can magically recast the laws of physics, the length of a day or the oscillations in the wind. Meanwhile, Germany’s greens now realise that such a boneheaded energy strategy essentially turned their country into a satrap of Sino-Russian neo-Eurasianism and helped embolden Putin’s aggression.

So far, no sense of this reality informs the Left-wing Congressional squad, whose pronouncements now constitute the leading edge of Democratic thinking. They generally oppose military aid to Ukraine, and their response to the energy shortage is to propose shutting down our entire fossil fuel production. When the mid-terms come around in November, this will likely help the Republicans in the leading gas and oil producing states. Almost all are in the heartlands, Alaska or the Intermountain West; California, the last blue energy giant, has committed itself to wiping out its large local energy industry while importing oil from Saudi Arabia and, at least until recently, Russia.

But it’s not just the government seeking to wipe out the energy sector. Big Business, through its cherished ESG investment standards, is making it increasingly difficult to start or expand energy production. Following Lenin’s supposed dictum about capitalists providing the rope with which they can be hanged, our corporate elite, perhaps unwittingly, also supports China, whose economy is fuelled increasingly by Russian oil and gas, a tie that has recently been consolidated by a plan to build a new gas pipeline between the countries.

But while such divides threaten the ability of America to lead in the current crisis, the news is not all inevitably bad. Americans can be deluded and stupid but are also capable of change. For generations, many in the West have celebrated the notion of inevitable American decline, particularly in Europe. Yet the country has a history of responding to challenges, albeit sometimes taking longer to respond than ideal.

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Is this the end of progressive America?

By Joel Kotkin

One has to remember that during the run-up to the Second World War, America was distinctly divided — but by the time it came to mobilise, even fascist sympathisers such as Henry Ford pitched in massively. Likewise, today, there is growing concern among Democrats that the party’s energy positions are untenable for the working and middle class. It’s not inconceivable that the Democrats, and the coastal enclaves, are forced into action by the reality of soaring food, car and energy prices.

When this happens, the party’s priorities must lie both in pumping more oil and gas, as well as learning how to manufacture goods outside China. Some Democrats, rather than tightening the relentless squeeze on the working and middle classes, might even consider introducing a modest carbon tax, expanding remote work, and restoring our nuclear power industry, as even some greens now support.

This is also good politics. Some 80% of voters, and an equal percentage of Democrats, favour the use of both fossil fuels and renewables, while support for the net zero Green New Deal hovers around 20%. “Climate catastrophism”, notes the liberal strategist Ruy Teixiera, is a political “loser”, particularly among working-class voters of all races.

For the Republicans, meanwhile, the war in Ukraine also poses a challenge due to the still considerable influence of Donald Trump, who views Putin as “a genius”. Although Trump’s views are out of step even with the bulk of his own supporters, Democrats see an opportunity to link the Republicans with Putinism, and make Biden the staunch defender of democracy.

Of course, moving America in one direction is a fraught enterprise in these times of extreme polarisation. But preventing a deepening civil war here is critical if the world is to stop the likes of Putin from returning us to the Middle Ages. Foreigners may find our political divides diverting, but only the US, if it can get its act somewhat together, has the resources, the human assets and military power to fend off the unrelenting assault of the autocratic powers.