Minutes from an early exit, Starmer was magnanimous about his opponent’s hard tackles, saying “it has to be robust — that is the way politics is done”. Some colleagues apparently differ with him on this, implying that the Leader of the Opposition’s swingeing takedowns expose Labour MPs to extra public risk. When she recently spoke of “400 knives stuck in [Starmer’s] back”, there were vague suggestions it might be an incitement to violence, a point about as convincing as saying it was actually a covert plug for the Sheffield steel industry. Meanwhile Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson — branded a “spiteful class warrior” by Badenoch during the same session — has been making more capital out of her big moment than a diving Argentinian mid-fielder tapped lightly on the shoulder. She has even just posed with the phrase emblazoned on a t-shirt.

There is a general air of unreality to all of this; a feeling of opportunistically seizing on small issues in order to distract from bigger ones. One elephant in the room is the way many Labour MPs themselves behaved until about five minutes ago, surfing a collapse in online civility norms during the 2010s to lay into political enemies in the most brutal terms. This week we were vividly reminded of that fact, as old tweets from politicians emerged about Ann Widdecombe: David Lammy writing in 2019 that she was “absolutely poisonous” and a “bigot”; and Jess Phillips incongruously urging readers to vote the “little fascist beast” off Strictly in 2010. Though their tone is jarring now, only a few years ago practically everyone on the Left seemed to be at it, rattling off six casual accusations of profound moral degeneracy before breakfast. As Lammy paid solemn homage to Widdecombe after last week’s horrific events, his words rang pretty hollow. I wonder, though, whether he ever really meant any of it at all.

In ordinary life, insults are rarely launched with a cool head. The red mist has descended and you have officially retreated from constructive communication, which is how you find yourself suddenly ranting and raving at someone, or posting something stupid online; all a bit embarrassing once you calm down. In politics, by contrast, insults are strategically useful — indeed, a US university has recently identified a category of “conflict entrepreneurs” in politics, leveraging verbal toxicity for personal gain. Insults can get you media attention, bond voters together against a perceived outgroup, or silence a whole flank by way of intimidation. So useful are they, in fact, that there is no need for the presence of any feelings of anger or grievance to motivate them at all. You can tweet out a judiciously chosen insult, then tick it off your to-do list. Maybe your SpAd could even write it for you.

To be on the other end of this icy process, as I occasionally have been, feels weirdly impersonal. Although dressed up in the language of individualized guilt, you sense it is not really about you at all. You are merely a useful object, whose previous statements and actions have provided the raw material for the construction of a helpful folk devil: take one small extract of interview, add a pinch of a speech, and finish with a sprinkling of social media quotes. Voilà! You now have a credible enemy of right-thinking people everywhere. What is happening to the person underneath the socially constructed fright mask is of negligible interest; and so, of course, is the issue of whether the mask was ever a decent fit. The only important question is whether it works.

Equally, in the politically motivated case — PMQs aside — there is rarely a need to address your target directly. It is so much more effective to call someone disgusting and evil in the third person, and whether they find out or not is incidental. Lammy and Phillips wrote vicious things about Widdecombe for others to read — she wasn’t ever on Twitter. I suspect that this passive-aggressive tradition is partly why Badenoch’s directness and commitment to combat seems particularly shocking to some opponents. It feels like a violation of the modern rules of the game.

If Reform candidates aren’t very good at this disassociated stuff, it is only because most are relatively new to politics, still preferring to launch traditionally chaotic, angry broadsides — a fact which makes their social media histories so interesting to the press. Most professional politicians would not be so gauche. Granted, it is sometimes useful to have one or two disinhibited voices around to harness voter fury, a role Angela Rayner once played for Starmer with her comments about the Johnson government (namely: “a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute vile banana republic, vile, nasty, Etonian piece of scum” — for which she later apologized). But most of the time, the benefits of a particular line of character assassination should be carefully weighed in advance.

This is not to say it can’t still go wrong. The Left’s studied habit of calling certain groups of people racist, homophobic, transphobic, and so on, has turned into a terrible problem for them retrospectively. The most obvious issue was that the categories were so expansive: once racists were defined as “anyone with doubts about immigration”, and transphobes as “anyone who believes in human biology”, the reviled out-group suddenly contained large numbers of Labour and swing voters. This was unfortunately self-defeating, to say the least.

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But equally, the contrast classes didn’t sound anywhere near seductive enough. Useful political insults should positively flatter an in-group by way of a pleasing, easily graspable distinction between you and the maligned ones on the outside. When you call someone a workshy scrounger, you implicitly butter up diligent taxpayers; in mocking snowflakes, you pay tribute to the psychologically resilient majority. Yet the opposite of a racist/homophobe/transphobe (etc.) was defined only as an “ally”, a badge most immediately appealing to Second World War enthusiasts. Even at their most effective, the Left’s chosen insults worked by instilling fear of dissent rather than disseminating good vibes.

Back to the present, and just as it once seemed politically astute for some on the Left to call people awful names and launch group attacks, now it appears astute for them to condemn other politicians’ verbal behavior as highly likely to cause violence. Equally, just as it was fashionable for the Right to defend free speech for a while, now there is renewed energy around trying to curtail it in the name of safeguarding, with some now demanding that social media companies be held accountable for abuse of MPs. Leaving aside the question of whether the claims about inciting violence are true — which I’ll get to in a moment — either way, to say so is unquestionably yet another move in the political game. When you are in politics, everything is a move in the game. My fears about threat are genuine, but yours are cynically confected. You are a pathetic snowflake, but I am a genuine target. My free speech is important, but yours puts me in danger. The idea that only one side is making capital out of all this is yet another useful fiction to sell to your own side.

Obviously, the claim about certain words causing violence is extremely difficult to verify. It concerns a counterfactual; would such-and-such a despicable act still have happened had a particular MP or his point of view not been all over the papers or on the BBC? Since we are each subject to hundreds of daily influences, and fewer and fewer people engage with mainstream media sources anyway, it is hard to say. But if we are looking for possible motives for political violence, we can at least say that over the past decade or so, members of one party in particular were regularly telling young and impressionable people that a large section of society was positively hateful and dangerous; a threat to the British way of life, rightly conceived, as well as to the planet as a whole. And if we are looking at means, many of these kids belonged to families who watched Question Time and read the Guardian. And no, I’m not talking about Reform. If the new Prime Minister wants to convince the public that his party is not playing yet more games, he should publicly acknowledge the lingering atmosphere of division and fear that Labour members did so much to create.

Such is the unstated implication of the Conversion Practices draft bill, published last week. Two supposedly core, immutable elements of the human person are identified, for which corrective drugs, bribes, or shaming are all presumed diabolical — though these are completely fine to use for more flexible attitudes elsewhere. To try to alter the pattern of someone’s sexual desires, by exerting psychological or emotional pressure or worse, risks becoming a “conversion practice”. The same goes for trying to dissuade someone from a heartfelt profession of gender identity. Past a certain threshold, the police and courts must get involved.

This bill is already receiving much hostile comment, both for its performative aspect — violent and abusive acts are already punishable — and its absurd overreach into understandably heated family discussions about life-changing hormones and surgery. Accompanying notes to the draft try to make a virtue of the chillingly authoritarian focus upon “verbal or non-violent physical acts”. Offenses include practices causing “serious alarm and distress” and “serious harm to mental health”, both of which are too vaguely specified to protect loving parents from police investigation for speaking their mind. The wording is also unlikely to induce religious clergy to express honest and well-meant thoughts about the wisdom of homosexuality or medical transition. Thankfully, at least, there is a carveout for healthcare professionals, but it remains unclear why conversations perfectly acceptable in the doctor’s surgery or therapy space must be harmful at home or in church.

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But not much has been said about one unexpected implication of the bill: that conversion practices involving straight people are just as harmful as those involving gay or trans ones. The intention to cause a heterosexual or “cis” person to become homosexual or trans is to be treated in just as draconian a manner as the inverse case. In theory at least, progressive parents who preach the gospel of gender affirmation a little too enthusiastically risk criminal investigation later, when their children have second thoughts — a possibility which, you have to admit, is darkly funny. The idea that there might also be criminal liability for the hundreds of lanyard-wearing youth workers out there, still working very hard to cement the idea of medical and social transition into deeply unworldly heads, is even more delicious.

But these enticing visions also point to an ambiguity at the heart of the draft legislation; namely, how are third parties supposed to know for sure that a professed sexual orientation or gender identity is permanent, as opposed to a temporary form of experimentation? It would be ironic if the first parent prosecuted for trying to “convert” her child from X to Y turned out later to have been right about the merely transitory presence of the X-ness all along. Unless authorities can answer this question, the law will be unworkable; and I suggest that they can’t.

Since we cannot look into minds directly to find some bedrock, a proxy method must be found. The original epistemic formula, implicit in early gay-rights activism though rarely spelled out, was that you knew a person must be same-sex-attracted if he said he was, because there was no good reason for him to be confused about this, or to pretend. Back in the day, the social context was so hostile and punishing for gay people, it would be irrational for someone to say they were gay when they were not. This meant you could usually take the act of coming out as accurately revealing the state of profound and permanent inner feelings.

Academics chimed in with essays on “heteronormativity” and “compulsive heterosexuality” in society, implying that if a same-sex attraction ever did emerge against such oppressive odds, it could only be a sign of true inner authenticity: a rare delicate flower, improbably growing on stony ground. But conversely, the surrounding atmosphere of homophobia and the heavy expectation of normality made professions of a straight sexual orientation unreliable. In this case, unlike the other, there was good reason to lie to others about who you really were, or even lie to yourself. Despite your protestations, onlookers couldn’t be sure; and nor, for that matter, could you.

When transactivists came along in the Nineties, effectively they adopted the same strategy: you can tell someone is “really” trans if she says she is, because it would be crazily self-defeating to lie. For decades, LGBT activists have kept up this narrative of intense cultural persecution, even as the UK became one of most accepting countries for sexual minorities in the world. Indeed, the Conversion Practices bill itself is the fruit of furious myth-making, with lobby groups suggesting to politicians that Britain is riddled with dastardly ECT-wielding doctors and stern-faced religious exorcists, blithely ignoring the rainbow flags draped all over the Royal Colleges and the Church of England.

As gay and trans identities have become extremely popular in young people, the preferred strategy has not adjusted. According to rainbow dogma, such people can only be expressing authentic realness when they announce their identities, whereas those who say they are straight or “cis” may just be blindly going along with the normie flow. Professed heterosexuality is always suspicious and can legitimately be challenged, in case there is a less conventional, more socially oppressed orientation trembling shyly underneath, waiting to be coaxed into the sunlight.

But by including legal protection for straight people, the Conversion Practices bill produces a reductio ad absurdum of this whole approach. The logic of infallible authenticity, as applied to heterosexual identities, patently collapses; for almost every gay person started off by sincerely self-interpreting as straight. Things are even worse with asexual identities which — ludicrously — are also protected by the bill, according to the accompanying notes. As a concerned mother worried about your lonely son, it seems you will not be permitted to try to robustly argue him into trying to find a girlfriend, if he is telling you at the time that he is asexual. Otherwise, though, it is fine. But since, with the right sort of encouragement, today’s depressed asexual might easily become tomorrow’s happy lothario, why on earth should the law protect awkward teenagers from what they don’t want to hear?

Ultimately, the point extends to gay and trans identities too. These days, we don’t so much have compulsory heterosexuality in  youth culture as compulsory queerness, and it no longer makes sense to say that the only plausible reason a young person would tell herself she was gay or trans, is if she “really” was. There are several alternative explanations available, including that a non-binary teaching assistant suggested she might be; or that she thinks it sounds cooler and more likely to win her friends than the boring straight alternative. This associated glamour can make self-interpretation confusing, and lead to false positives; not something that could have been said of the typical gay experience in the Sixties.

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The insuperable problem here is that nobody can tell now whether a current identity will stick; not even its owner, and especially not when she is young and naive. And of course — a bit like television channels — though there used only to be two or three, there are now so many more to choose from. Ironically, gender studies academics used to stress this impermanence before it became inopportune to do so, always banging on about the endless flexibility of constructions of the self. What seems lifelong today may turn out to be temporary, and vice versa; in which case it cannot be remotely helpful to criminalize the verbal attempts of others to persuade you to take a different path. Critical discussion might feel rude, upsetting, or intrusive, but none of that means it is the business of the law to rule it out. And in fact, with the presumption of your own infallibility about yourself removed, attempts to “convert” you may turn out to be perceptive recognition of what there is, or what still could fruitfully be.

The fantasy of an immutable orientation or identity, offering a key to your true nature, sits awkwardly with human powers of self-interpretation and self-creation. For as long as you are alive, your current understanding of yourself might change, because of social influence or personal reinterpretation or something else entirely. No amount of felt certainty that this won’t happen can rule the possibility out. Life is full of surprises. And sometimes conversion from one set of outworn ideas or feelings to another can be a form of personal salvation.

This is a grave error, and Burnham’s Manchesterism speech on Monday — his first major intervention as Prime Minister presumptive — acknowledged as much. Alongside his eyecatching plan for a Northern wing of Number 10, he lambasted the UK’s public sector for “chasing cut-price deals around the world” as opposed to helping our own “British-based suppliers”, and promised to make taxpayers’ money work “harder for them”. This was a theme Burnham aired repeatedly during the byelection campaign in Makerfield. He cited Britain’s “wasted decades” of neoliberalism and the need to end “forty years of failed economic policy”, raising the prospect of a Britain in which wealth will be rooted in actual production, far more evenly distributed across its regions, and democratically controlled.

The significance of his argument is that it points towards a different economic future from the Blair-era comforts that Starmer and Rachel Reeves have been selling us: essentially, spend more, tax fairly, regulate better. This assumes that Britain’s problem is essentially one of distribution and inefficiency, and could be corrected by a more competent management of the existing settlement.

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This was always inadequate, and it is encouraging to see Burnham embrace the concept of Manchesterism, as laid out in The Productive State, by Mathew Lawrence and Alex Williams, one of the most serious economic frameworks to emerge from the Labour center-Left in many years. Nevertheless, Manchesterism, even in its most developed form, does not go far enough. It remains primarily a program for rebuilding the foundations of the economy through better public provision. But Britain’s crisis runs deeper, and Burnham needs to go much further if he is to arrest Britain’s decline and build an economy that rewards rather than punishes its citizens.

What Manchesterism gets right — and where it stops

Manchesterism starts from the observation that the neoliberal model for public services has failed on its own terms. The classic approach of the Tony Blair era was to invite private companies to bid for contracts to run public services, on the theory that competition would drive down costs, via the “cut-price” deals Burnham cited. What it produced instead was a helpless state, stripped of the capacity to do things itself, at the mercy of private companies far more skilled at exploiting contract law than any harassed local authority. The fundamentals of British life — care, energy, housing, transport, health — have become commodified, run by companies more interested in extracting wealth from the public realm than actually helping people lead productive and dignified lives. The tendency is visible all over the economy: in private equity firms making billions from dysfunctional care homes; in train operating companies extracting profits from lucrative franchises while services deteriorated; in “health services” companies milking NHS hospitals as infection rates rise.

The Manchesterism alternative is public corporations borrowing against their own revenue streams at the UK government’s borrowing rate, investing in infrastructure, and running services in the public interest. The Bee Network — Greater Manchester’s integrated bus system, which Burnham brought back under public control — works. Thames Water, by contrast, is a monument to scandalous dysfunction that follows when essential infrastructure is placed under financialized private ownership.

But while bringing the foundations of daily life under public control is welcome, it will only go so far. The only way to rebuild the engines of wealth creation and ensure that productivity gains translate into broadly-shared prosperity is to restore working-class power through secure, well-paid, productive jobs. GB Energy, if properly capitalized, could begin to change the terms on which Britain generates power. But it can only do so if Britain has the domestic manufacturing base to build the turbines, cables, and grid infrastructure required. There’s no point in trading a reliance on imported gas for a reliance on imported “clean” technology.

Instead, we must recognize that Britain’s political dysfunction is really a reflection of our failure to answer two fundamental questions: namely, who owns and operates the foundations of the economy? And in whose interests? Today, the economy serves shareholders, management consultants, financiers and property owners. The real challenge is to create an economy that instead serves workers, and rewards the creation of real wealth. In other words, Britain’s crisis goes deeper than Manchesterism — and the debate must be conducted at the level of rigor and ambition appropriate to the moment.

The productive crisis

Britain’s fundamental economic problem is structural and specific. Labor productivity has been essentially flat since the financial crisis of 2007-9. British workers produce less output per hour worked than their counterparts in Germany, France, or the United States — and the gap has been widening. Net national savings have been in negative territory for nearly two decades, and we have meanwhile been consuming our accumulated capital stock — letting factories rust, railways decay, and infrastructure crumble — rather than investing to expand it. Our trade deficit in goods has also been persistent since the mid-1980s. We have become a nation of consumers, and we are consuming on credit.

The scale of the destruction that created this situation is still not adequately appreciated. In 1979, manufacturing accounted for close to 30% of British GDP. Today, that figure is 8-9%, with employment in the sector falling from 6.8 million to 2.6 million workers. The well-paid, unionized factory jobs that sustained communities across the North, the Midlands, Wales and Scotland have meanwhile been replaced by insecure, non-unionized work in call centers and distribution warehouses. These are the communities that have voted for change at successive elections — including Brexit —and have been repeatedly disappointed. In the regions that bore the brunt of the destruction, economic inactivity among working-age people now runs at between 24 and 28%.

The financial sector that subsequently grew did not magically compensate for this destruction. Rather, it profited from it. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s new government implemented one of its signature policies in removing controls on the international flows of capital. This enabled the City of London to speculate with the wealth that had been generated by British production in international financial markets. When steelworks in Sheffield or shipyards on the Clyde or car plants in the West Midlands closed, the banks and asset managers were not passive bystanders. They recycled the capital — putting it into property speculation, consumer credit, and financial engineering.

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One notorious instance occurred in 1991. Hanson Trust quietly acquired a stake in ICI, then Britain’s largest manufacturing company, in what was widely seen as the opening move in a hostile takeover. Hanson had no interest in building Britain’s chemical industry. Instead it hoped to unlock shareholder value through the break-up of one of Britain’s great industrial companies. Although the takeover never materialized, the episode accelerated a profound shift in ICI’s strategy. Within two years it had demerged its pharmaceuticals business as Zeneca and embarked on a prolonged restructuring driven increasingly by shareholder value rather than long-term industrial development. Hanson exited after making a substantial profit, having contributed precisely nothing to Britain’s productive capacity. This, in microcosm, has been Britain’s industrial policy over the past 40 years.

But this hasn’t just been bad for British industry. Financialized capitalism has also had consequences for equality. The richest 10% of the population now receives 35% of Britain’s income in yearly bonuses, dividends, capital gains, and rents. The richest 1% holds more than 20% of the total wealth, while the poorer half of the country holds around 5%. Real wages in 2023 were barely higher than they were in 2007. A third of children now live in poverty — more than half of them from working households.

This escalating inequality is not only the result of an unfair distribution of the proceeds of growth. An economy built on Serco contracts, Deliveroo riders and Cavendish Square hedge funds does not present us primarily with a distribution problem — which is why the old Blairite formula of spending more, taxing fairly and regulating better isn’t going to do much to improve it. This is, instead, an economy that has stopped growing in ways that reach most people. Stressed workers scrabble for gig work between insecure care-home shifts while those who own the businesses extract ever more wealth. This is because the productive base that once made broadly shared growth possible was deliberately dismantled.

So Britain cannot create prosperity, reduce inequality, or regain genuine sovereignty without rebuilding its productive base. Manufacturing is where labor productivity rises most systematically through mechanization, automation, technical change, and information technology. It is where workers’ power has historically been strongest, allowing productivity gains to translate into wage increases rather than shareholder returns. And it creates deeper growth around it too, since manufacturing doesn’t just create jobs in factories — it also supports jobs in the businesses that supply materials, transport goods, and sell finished products.

Moreover, services, including finance, which have become the mainstay of the British economy, will never correct the persistent trade deficit in goods. The alternative to reindustrializing Britain is not the economy of highly-paid knowledge workers that we were once promised. It is a low-tech, low-paid service economy in which finance continues to dominate and inequality persists. In other words, the Britain we live in now.

The skills catastrophe

Integral to Britain’s productive failure is an acute crisis of labor skills. The destruction of manufacturing did not simply eliminate jobs but extinguished the knowledge that lives within workforces, apprenticeship networks, and technical colleges — as well as the relationships between firms and the people who build and maintain things. The steel towns of South Yorkshire, the shipbuilding communities of the Tyne and Clyde, the sheet-metal and toolmaking traditions of the Black Country had distinct identities built on skill, pride in craft, and knowledge passed down over generations.

Once this knowledge is gone, it does not return automatically when investment arrives. British manufacturers regularly report the absence of welders and metal fabricators, toolmakers, electrical and instrumentation technicians, mechatronics and robotics engineers, and CNC programmers. These are the foundational competencies of any modern industrial economy — and without them, reindustrialization is far harder even when the will and the finance exist. The technical education system that might address this gap is fragmented and poorly funded. England is particularly weak on post-16 higher technical training — the kind of provision that Germany delivers through dual vocational apprenticeships and the Berufsschulen system. Worse, mainstream commentators have consistently failed to grasp the depth of the problem because they treat skills as a training policy question rather than a structural consequence of forty years of productive decline.

The coming wave of artificial intelligence displacement makes the urgency greater still. Without a deliberate and funded redeployment and retraining of workers, tied to real posts in expanding industrial sectors, Britain will face a hollowing out of its services workforce. We need a national labor plan, offering long-term training programs, mid-career conversions, and apprenticeships of a kind Britain has not had for decades.

The bond market as political test

One argument commonly ranged against public corporations is the idea that they will spook the bond markets. The specter of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget of September 2022 is never far from such discussions. But the bond market panic Truss unleashed was a response to unfunded sovereign borrowing without specified supply-side returns. This was effectively a subsidy for the wealthy, not targeted public investment in productive assets.

By contrast, public corporation financing is usually acceptable to bond markets — as long as it is credibly structured and borrows against its own revenue streams. The Netherlands finances public corporation liabilities equivalent to nearly 80% of GDP without sovereign disruption, though, to be sure, the institutional framework is different from Britain’s.

Burnham has taken a position on this issue, even stating that “Britain is in hock to the bond markets” — though he has also sometimes tied himself in knots trying to reassure financial markets that an ambitious program would not alarm them. The Dutch example shows it need not be the dire problem it is often made out to be.

But a Labour government that begins to implement a truly ambitious industrial policy can expect a different order of response from the City of London — which will inevitably generate pressure on gilt yields, pressure on sterling, and pressure on the political class to abandon ambition. That pressure will not be a market verdict, however — but, rather, a political intervention by concentrated financial interests whose position would be threatened by the program.

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In other words, the barriers to taming the bond markets are political, not technical. A government that issues debt in its own currency and is prepared to use its central bank cannot be forced into default by bond market pressure. Central bank independence is a shibboleth of the neoliberal era — a constraint entrenched by Gordon Brown’s decision in 1997 to grant the Bank of England operational independence. However, its time has now passed. The Bank of England is a public institution, and part of its mission must be to deploy its control over the nation’s credit to rebuild the nation’s productive base. Since the crisis of 2007-9, the Bank has created vast amounts of money to bail out failing banks and manage stagnation. There has always been money for that. The Bank should be at least as forthright in rebuilding Britain’s productive capacity.

An ambitious Labour government should be able to rely on the Bank to continue holding its gilt stock rather than unloading it at loss-making prices, as it is currently doing at vast cost to public finances. The Bank ought to reinvest maturities and keep interest rates low and stable while Britain rebuilds its productive capacity. A break from the Bank’s current posture is a break from New Labour’s foundational economic settlement and should be named as such.

But even a cooperative Bank of England would be insufficient without a wave of public investment in key infrastructure capable of “crowding in” private investment. It would further require a well-capitalized Public Investment Bank with preferential access to the Bank of England. It would thus raise immediately the issue of some degree of capital controls, in order to ensure that money generated in Britain stays in Britain rather than being spirited away to accounts in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands the moment a government pursues policies that threaten the returns of mobile capital.

Capital controls are neither exotic nor radical. This was standard policy in Britain from 1945 to 1979, the period of the country’s strongest growth performance in recent decades. They are currently used by China, India, and many other successful industrializers. Even the IMF has acknowledged their legitimacy under conditions of financial instability. Their purpose is not to cut Britain off from the world but to change the incentives for fast-moving speculative capital, preventing it from disrupting the productive sector and limiting the power of finance over elected governments.

A Labour leadership candidate who cannot articulate a credible strategy to prevent capital flight, including the readiness to use targeted capital controls as and when they are necessary, has not yet answered the fundamental question about surviving contact with the City of London.

The policy space Brexit created

Beyond finance, a serious industrial strategy will also take advantage of the policy space that Brexit created and that no government since 2016 has exploited in the ten years since the vote. This failure makes Labour’s continuing internal paralysis over the question of rejoining the single market all the more damaging. Britain is now free to align trade policy with domestic investment and employment in ways that EU single market membership foreclosed.

An industrial strategy that hopes to deliver results will need time for productive capacity to take root. In the meantime, the risk is that new capacity will be killed through cheaper imports from countries with lower wages, laxer standards, state-sponsored overcapacity and so on. This is how capitalism works, and there is no point pretending otherwise.

Nevertheless, there are several tools available: WTO anti-dumping measures and safeguards; a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism that could equalize the carbon price of imports in steel, aluminum, cement and other foundational sectors from 2027; procurement rules requiring domestic content and supply chain traceability. If necessary, tariff-rate quotas, national security designations, and domestic content conditions can be attached to public subsidies and grid connections. Donald Trump has made managed trade a normalized reality in the world market — and there is no going back to the free-trade consensus of the previous, now defunct, era. Britain should use the space available to it and stop wasting time.

Organized labour as key mechanism

There is one further dimension of this debate which has been less visible so far, but is crucial to whether Britain can come up with a genuine alternative to an extractive economy— trade unions. Organized labour is not simply a constituency to be won over but a key mechanism for restoring Britain’s wealth-creating capacity. Union representation on the boards of public corporations is the lever through which public ownership serves the interests of workers and the public. Union power in Britain is how regional rebalancing becomes real rather than rhetorical. The skills crisis cannot be addressed without organized labour either — for workers tend to understand the needs of their own industries better than those outside them.  The reconstruction of apprenticeship frameworks, the rebuilding of technical education, the link between training investment and union density that coordinated market economies have consistently demonstrated — all of this requires workers’ collective power, organizational capacity and crucially, their practical knowledge.

The tests of seriousness

Andy Burnham could run on Manchesterism and offer a better-managed version of the current settlement. That would be an improvement — but it would not be the breakthrough that Britain truly needs. The country desperately needs policies that address its deep productive crisis. If a radical Labour government is to go down that path, four specific commitments will be the test of its seriousness, as we show in detail in our forthcoming book.

First, a target to raise manufacturing’s share of GDP to an achievable and sustainable level that could act as a base for further increases. This should be backed by a costed investment program that includes public equity stakes, a properly capitalized Public Investment Bank, and union board representation as a condition of public finance.

Second, graduated and targeted capital controls to protect democratic economic decisions from speculative financial attack.

Third, trade regulation that uses the policy space Brexit created and no government since 2016 has seriously exploited.

Fourth, a national labor plan for rebuilding skills and training, with long training programs, mid-career conversions, and apprenticeships with high completion rates, as the vital human foundation without which an expanding industrial base cannot exist.

Britain has had nearly five decades of neoliberal failure, punctuated by the periodic realization that its decline is worse than previously acknowledged. The debate that Manchesterism has opened is the right one, and the left should deepen it. The central challenge remains Britain’s crisis of production, from which its crisis of provision ultimately flows. The four commitments we have outlined are the minimum conditions for a genuine break. Anything less is a better-managed version of what we already have — and we know that it does not work.

Costas Lapavitsas, Larry Elliott, and Doug Nicholls are the authors of Reindustrialise Britain: A Strategy for Wealth Creation (Polity Press), forthcoming, September 2026.

Is there a political equivalent? This could perhaps explain why Labour has decided, amid an omnicrisis of state capacity, public finance, social cohesion, cost of living, and basic legitimacy, to launch plans that include uncapped new routes for migration, legalizing tent cities, and making normal parenting illegal. Why now? Are they insane? Have they become infected by the political equivalent of Cordyceps unilateralis?

But it only looks to bewildered normies as though our government is plowing ahead, for unknown (perhaps fungal) reasons, with policies guaranteed to make everything infinitely worse including its own approval rating. It’s really the climax of a long-standing shift in the way states conceive of themselves, one that began decades ago. It’s just that the Left saw the trend earlier, and is better-poised to exploit it — especially where, as in Britain today, decisive leadership is otherwise lacking.

The last time we saw such blatant opportunism was in another leadership vacuum, as eerie as our current nightmare interregnum: the Biden administration. Even as Democrat staffers hailed the increasingly clearly faltering 80-year-old Biden as leader, and signed “his” proclamations using an autopen, the power-vacuum created by his age-related decline facilitated a program with that unmistakable zombie-fungus feeling: as though the polity everyone thought they still lived in had been covertly hacked and re-programmed.

We might call the agenda doing the re-programming Cordyceps politicus. Wherever it infects a body politic, it sets out to replace clear boundaries and accountable force with horizontal networks, mercurial and overlapping sets of rules, and an authority that recedes from accountability. The classic culture-war battles it produces are usually boundary-related: opening borders, expanding citizenship to everyone, dissolving sex categories, muddling child and adult, defunding police, emptying prisons. But C. politicus is not libertarian. It calls certain acts crimes — it’s just that the crimes are different. Shoplifting is tolerated, but you could be de-banked for the wrong opinions (as Farage was), or have your kids taken off you for knowing sex is immutable.

Though here I’m giving this sensibility a baroque, fungal name, it’s not new. Its most prescient theorists, in fact identified it more than three decades ago: the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari. In an essay written all the way back in 1990, Gilles Deleuze drew on the work of his close collaborator Felix Guattari to argue that methods of control exerted in the information age radically invert those of the previous era. This older model, he suggests, was exhaustively documented by Michel Foucault as disciplinary societies, developed through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Disciplinary societies are characterized by “spaces of enclosure”, each governed by its own laws, such as the family, the school, the hospital, and the barracks. All these are in turn enclosed by the nation-state, whose laws govern all.

Deleuze argued that the disciplinary model has been obsolete since World War II, superseded by forces including, centrally, digital computing in order better to serve the mercurial needs of capitalism. Deleuze, being French and a theorist, doesn’t have a very detailed material account of this, though Marshall McLuhan might ground it in “electric simultaneity” or, more recently, Jacob Siegel in “the information state”. But however you account for it, the shift dissolves previously clear boundaries, replacing them with something more porous and flexible: less a boundary than a mesh or network.

In the wake of this shift, all those spaces formerly defined by clear rules separating inside from outside now only maintain the appearance of this form. In truth, though, they’re just shambling along, evacuated zombies, “until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door”. In Deleuze’s account, then, the ant was a zombie long before the fungus infected it.

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As for the “new forces” themselves, he describes these as societies not of discipline, but control: a new form of social organization, where formerly well-defined institutions become porous, nebulous, and immaterial. A society of control defines who (or what) is or isn’t included, not via gates and fences but access codes. And instead of agglomerating “individuals” into boundaried “masses”, the idea of “individuals” itself is dissolved into overlapping datasets. Institutions become de-materialized, porous, and edge-less: the corporation replaces the factory, continuous education replaces school, and ankle tags replace prison.

What does that look like in policy terms? Perhaps most controversially, a radical softening of national borders. Under Biden, that meant a torrent of people flowing into the USA from everywhere on earth, in many cases simply recorded by border guards who caught, documented, and then paroled them against future immigration hearings. Similarly, much as C. politicus simply didn’t recognize the principle of maintaining a hard border in Texas, nor does it do so now, at England’s coastline. Here, we find that for every boundary erected, another access point opens: Labour makes noises about tackling Channel migration by “smashing the gangs”, perhaps even including those of its members alleged by one smuggler to operate inside the UK government; all while quietly dropping the ban on small boat migrants obtaining citizenship.

In almost the same breath, the Home Office announces another set of boundaries grown porous, another set of clear hierarchies replaced by networked, situational, and unaccountable power. Universities, businesses, and “community groups”, we hear, will now be able to sponsor and house an uncapped number of “refugees” at taxpayer expense. Members of the public, meanwhile, will be drafted to hear asylum appeals.

Should these new arrivals exit their taxpayer-funded lodgings, too, they can pitch a tent wherever they like. Another new initiative will de-criminalize rough sleeping, following the model first pioneered in Democrat states during the Biden years. The Government will repeal the 1824 Vagrancy Act, which allows police to move on rough sleepers. In its place, a slew of initiatives will provide housing, tackle organized begging, and funnel resources to homelessness charities.

The track record of “housing first” initiatives in the USA might invite some to wonder at the wisdom of this proposal. And just as cynics are already wondering whose vested interests will be furthered by this seeming devolution, or how much these “community groups” will overlap with longstanding Labour sectarian lobbies, we might also wonder how much funding this programme will funnel to yet more Labour client NGOs. Regardless, here again the governing theme is the dissolution of discipline into mercurial, networked control.

At the border, the issue is not how to manage arrivals, but whether the border should even exist as such, and to what end. This is, fundamentally, a contest between the disciplinary and control models. The disciplinary model treated as self-evident the idea that illegal migrants should be expelled, and where they were expelled to didn’t really matter. The control model, though, doesn’t have an inside or outside: from this vantage-point, the idea of someone being “illegal” makes no sense. Instead, problems arise when people are “undocumented”, meaning the system cannot properly manage access, resources, and flows.

We see the same all-transforming shift in new legislation that directly challenges the final, most central “disciplinary” institution of all, on Deleuze’s list: the family. A draft bill announced over the weekend proposes to criminalize “conversion practices”, which is to say therapies that aim to alter someone’s felt sense of sexual identity — in terms that will, if passed, criminalize parents for refusing to assent to their child’s assertion of cross-sex identification. The only carve-outs are for doctors, meaning this Bill places parents legally on a less authoritative footing than medical practitioners as regards their children’s lives and wellbeing — despite having birthed, raised, and loved them from the start.

This is a regime that simply doesn’t view the family as a meaningful institution. The same was already clear in recently-announced plans to restrict social media for children — with enforcement responsibility placed entirely on tech firms, via face-scanning and digital verification. Parents simply don’t figure. The clear implication is that, as in “conversion practices”, parents are simply not viewed as having a special or trustworthy authority, in relation to their kids.

But perhaps this makes sense — for this model also muddles the boundary between “child” and “adult”, to a degree that renders adult authority suspect by extension. Now, kids are competent to consent to puberty blockers at 11, but not to scroll TikTok until 16, whereupon they can vote, but not vape. And parents aren’t trusted to enforce any of this. The meme circulates about brains not maturing till 25. Nothing makes sense, at least if you’re expecting the disciplinary model of individual responsibility at a clearly-defined age. But it does make sense within the control model, which sees none of us as an “individual”. Instead, we’re an aggregate of overlapping datasets and access codes; there simply isn’t a general concept of “old enough”, just a series of case-by-case assessments.

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Lest you were hoping that a future government might come along and reverse all these policies, the final icing proposed for Andy Burnham’s cake is the return of Sue Gray, and an aggressive devolution program. If delivered, it will end the Parliamentary sovereignty that still clings to British government, a hangover from our heyday as a disciplinary nation-state and still on the constitutional books even if under-used. The proposed alternative is a permanent regional committee-ism that locks the Blairite settlement in forever: a perfect recipe for the special pleading, clientelism, and infinite regress of accountable power that characterizes C. politicus.

Can anything save us? Yes, but also no. If Deleuze is right, this has been coming for decades. Everything he predicted in 1990 is happening now. And even in America, where a legislative fightback has been underway since 2024 against the Left-wing version of C. politicus, that hasn’t exactly brought back the old, industrial nation-state. The same fights about citizenship and migration are ongoing; the data centers are still being built; the power still, now, rests with Big Data and assorted more or less fully realized forms of network state.

If the real, underlying shift is the one away from an industrial society to one of information, no amount of railing against the Left will bring the old world back. But though it might be grounds for gloom, it needn’t cause us to despair. Ultimately, if Deleuze is right, the disciplinary, nation-state Britain is already long gone, and attempts to revive it a waste of time. But even if there’s no escaping the society of control, it doesn’t follow from this that everything must be ceded to oikophobes and genderists.

There’s plenty of work to be done by thoughtful Right-wingers in elaborating what it might mean to map Deleuze’s post-border model to the good, the true, and the beautiful. It need not necessarily follow from permeable borders, for example, that humans everywhere are precisely interchangeable. Less abstractly, we might just be less weird about pointing technologies of control at (for example) tackling criminal gangs.

Most centrally of all, the reason we shouldn’t despair is that there was already an England, long before the disciplinary nation-state “Great Britain” was ever composed. I see no insuperable reason why there won’t also be an England, after its demise. As long as we remember we’re not datasets, but human souls, no zombie fungus can fully consume us.

In theory, of course, we’ve been here before, with Starmer also trying to connect English devolution with a post-Brexit politics. In 2023, while still in opposition and riding high in the polls, Burnham’s soon-to-be predecessor said his plans for devolution would transform “‘take back control”’ from a slogan into a solution. Alas, things turned out rather differently. Indeed, if a single issue encapsulates the pathologies of the Starmer regime, it is local government reorganization (LGR) — the outgoing PM’s plan to streamline councils — as well as the introduction of more metro mayors. In the two years since 2024, when a flagship white paper was published to address both, quiet constitutional radicalism has met with ever more farcical incompetence. This is Starmerism: triple-distilled.

Because so much else has happened, it’s easy to forget just how ludicrous parts of that agenda are. From 2028, for instance, the largest city-region in Europe will be the combined “metro area” of Norfolk and Suffolk. Feted to have a single mayor overseeing a fiefdom of some 9,200 square kilometers, that mayoral authority will be around the same size as Cyprus — and six times larger than Greater London. The idea of Norwich being the administrative capital of a city-state, eclipsing Madrid or Paris in scope, sounds like something from an Alan Partridge fever dream. For Keir Starmer, it was simply part of re-forging the British state.

Almost as bad is the proposal for a single mayor to cover the whole of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Given the uproar when Emirates sponsored the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth, and planned to paint the iconic building in the same colors as Southampton football club, it’ll be interesting to see how the two places integrate. In Portsmouth, the nickname for the denizens of Southampton, some 17 miles away, is “scum”. Those who live in the home of the Royal Navy, meanwhile, enjoy the nickname “skates” (you’ll have to Google why). There is no history of collaboration between the two cities — both of which enjoy almost 1,000 years of continuous history. It’s a similar story with Cumbria, soon to be a metro area as well as a county, with the authority forecast to be over twice as large as France’s largest municipality. That’s despite the fact that Carlisle, Cumbria’s largest city, has a population of just 100,000, and the region is best known for the empty Lake District.

Would Burnham repeat such bizarre absurdities? There are grounds for cautious optimism. In February 2023, Burnham spoke to the journalist Steve Richards. There’s little reason to be cynical about his remarks at the time, not least because his chances of a national comeback seemed negligible, with Starmer riding high in the polls. And yet, for more than half an hour, the then-mayor for Greater Manchester spoke convincingly of a “place first” approach to devolution. “In a post-Brexit, post-pandemic world,” Burnham intoned, isn’t it clear “that Whitehall can’t cope with this? It’s struggling, and it’s because the wiring of the county isn’t right.”

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Throughout that conversation two things stood out. The first is how, for Burnham, any localist agenda must fit the needs of communities which already exist. “Legitimacy comes from the people and the place,” as he puts it. Which makes you wonder whether plans for an East Anglia super-region, let alone a South Coast version of Neom, will truly come to pass in his premiership. The second is how devolution isn’t merely a means to rewire Britain’s economy, but to determine which issues matter in the first place. Whitehall’s inability to craft solutions partially stems from the fact it has little idea what the problems are. Policy-making, in the argot of the former Manchester mayor, is thus divorced from place.

Three years on and it’s clear that, in other ways too, Starmer has continued with the very approach Burnham was skeptical of. For all Starmer’s talk of dispersing power away from London, and the public really taking back control, his faction essentially selected the Labour candidate for the west of England mayor (the now disgraced Dan Norris), while blocking Jamie Driscoll from standing in the North East. Then there were the times the leadership’s retinue made Richard Leonard resign as the party’s Scottish leader, and steered the controversial Vaughan Gething to the role of first minister in Cardiff. Starmer, and much of the Labour Right, were comfortable with devolution, and “giving power away”, so long as those who received it agreed with them.

That hints at another divide with Burnham, who, whatever his other faults, seems to have shed any factionalist baggage. He was certainly a Blairite upon entering Parliament in 2001. Yet in his speech on Monday, he took aim at the whipping system and its tendency to foreclose political debate. Looking further ahead, of course, it’s hard to see how a “place first” approach won’t clash with the political management of the Labour establishment: including its propensity to parachute in preferred candidates for “safe seats”.

Still, it’s a start, especially when you consider that Starmer’s approach to local politics — arrogant, entitled and defined from the center — was so inept that it actively undermined confidence in the need for reform. Starmer’s LGR was meant to be the biggest shake-up of local politics in England since the Sixties. If more mayors, furnished with greater powers, is about enhancing democracy, then LGR was about delivering a more standardized bureaucracy across England. Fair enough: my home county of Hampshire presently boasts 15 different authorities, including “two-tier” district and county councils. LGR means that number will fall to five unitary authorities, all enjoying the same range of competences.

While the changes make sense in theory, as has often been the case with Starmer the execution has been disastrous. Why? Because reforming ambition was encumbered by hubris, which in turn fed incompetence, something extending far beyond ambitions of conjoining old rivals like Southampton and Portsmouth. Starmer’s government, with its enormous majority, sought to remake key parts of national life at breakneck speed. As a result, many councils regarded the timetable as unrealistic, with authorities expected to develop new unitary structures, governance arrangements and financial models within months. It often felt like No. 10 was applying the principles of DIY SOS to the biggest overhaul of local government in over half a century.

Alongside the rush, far-reaching questions remain unanswered. For instance, will newly integrated authorities have to pool historic debts? Would a council broadly in the black (such as Portsmouth) have to absorb liabilities from another in the red (like Hampshire County Council)? And if an authority that runs surpluses integrates with another that runs crippling deficits, what help is on offer from the Treasury? These are, understandably, huge points of contention for council leaders across the country. Yet they have been met with little more than hand-waving and vague promises of things being alright in the end. Speak to almost any council leader, and you’ll likely hear shock at how blasé and reckless London has been throughout.

Which brings us to another major difference between our prime ministers, present and future. While Starmer viewed local government re-organisation, and more metro mayors, as a means of achieving growth within the existing model, Burnham regards empowering city-regions as a way of bypassing No. 11 and the most dysfunctional parts of Whitehall. That is, after all, the subtext of him opening an office in Manchester. While the primary aim is to take power out of Westminster and, as Burnham put it this week, create a political “circuit-breaker”, a secondary aspect would be to strengthen the role of the prime minister himself.

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Whatever you think of it, at least that’s a vision. Compare it to the LGR, whose preference for a “unitary layer” for local government emerged from a single paper published by PWC. The ultimate argument for those vast mayoral authorities from Hampshire to East Anglia, meanwhile, can be found in a report compiled by McKinsey. Why the need for such scale? Because, in order for regional governments to compete for investment, that’s what’s required — with two million inhabitants apparently the starting point to create sufficient capacity, generate adequate brand recognition, and access the right tier of investors.

In other words, those new mayors up for election two years from now are less about empowering local people, or reviving England’s smaller cities, than ensuring creditworthiness. This is why somewhere like Cumbria is suddenly expected to become a city-region. And while this again may sound coherent in principle, you have to question whether such contrived and synthetic entities will garner sufficient democratic legitimacy in the long-term. History and tradition — Portsmouth’s star-and-crescent flag goes back to the Third Crusade — is apparently irrelevant to a Treasury that regards city-regions as little more than economic zones. In a way, it’s strangely reminiscent of arguments for greater European integration made by liberals in recent decades. Reducing transaction costs matters more than anything else. For Burnham, though, if cities are certainly a locus for policy experimentation, they are also places with heritage, history and a continuous culture. His passion for Manchester makes that clear enough.

Ultimately, the two men view devolution as a path to different things — which makes you wonder whether Burnham as prime minister will move to re-assess LGR, let alone oddities like a city-region for Norfolk and Suffolk. And, while we’re at it, why not give the Southampton and Portsmouth city-regions a mayor each? That’s what would happen in any vaguely sane polity.

Which leads us to yet another major fissure between the current prime minister and his successor, with Burnham repeatedly criticizing much of the devolution agenda since 1997. He expressed as much in Monday’s speech, when he promised to offer “new opportunities to extend devolution” in the Celtic fringe by taking power “deeper down”. In words intended for the SNP and Welsh Labour, as much as the inhabitants of such places, Burnham remarked how the “people of Dundee and Bangor feel just as distant from Holyrood and the Senedd as they do from Westminster”.

Now, you might point out, Holyrood and the Senedd are consequences of Blairite reforms. Does Burnham, a former New Labour minister, think they were a mistake? The answer appears to be yes, with Burnham admitting as much while speaking on that podcast with Richards. The original sin of Scottish and Welsh devolution, according to our next prime minister, was the “same Westminster approach… where it’s all national and there isn’t that routing of power at the local level”. Rather than truly empower voters in Wales and Scotland, the Blair government created dysfunctional mini-mes in Edinburgh and Cardiff: places whose political cultures are every bit as complacent as London.

Starmer, by virtue of his connection to Morgan McSweeney and the Labour Right, could never voice such a critique. In theory, the same should be true of Burnham, given his past or present ties to Blair, David Miliband and James Purnell. Yet he’s broken ranks with his old comrades in stating that the city-based approach of the English North — whose champion is none other than George Osborne — has proven more successful.

Perhaps that’s exactly the kind of mold-breaking that’s needed. After all, the historic party of social democracy is betting the house on something which hasn’t worked for a century: pushing power to towns and cities far beyond the M25. Given Westminster’s tendency to hoard power, that’s a huge ask. Burnham’s localism agenda may ultimately end up giving him more influence — not least if he becomes ally-in-chief to existing mayors and council leaders, especially if he spikes the worst aspects of LGR — all while he undermines both the Civil Service and Parliament. As the incoming PM ominously added in Monday’s speech, the political direction he will set “will not be up for negotiation”. Still, even a President Burnham would probably be better than what we have now: spreadsheet devolution with voters a mere afterthought.

Next month, Americans mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence from the British Empire. Although the present US Constitution was written in 1787, ratified in 1788, and first implemented in 1789, during the anniversary celebrations this summer we can expect to hear widespread encomia to the genius of the Constitution as well as of the eloquence of Thomas Jefferson’s preamble to the declaration.

Don’t believe it. While it was a milestone for its era, the US Constitution is deeply flawed. The most successful contemporary democracies have learned from America’s mistakes in designing their own, more recent national constitutions. Pious American patriots sometimes say that “the Founders built better than they knew.” In reality, the Founders botched the job.

Consider two current controversies, over President Trump’s demolition of the East Wing of the White House to build an official ballroom; and the Supreme Court’s involvement in partisan congressional redistricting in Virginia. In a country with a well-written constitution, neither would be a subject of controversy, because lines of authority would be well-delineated and unambiguous.

Can a president of the United States, a temporary occupant of the executive mansion, command upon a whim that much of it be demolished and rebuilt, on the basis of a design he alone has approved, with private, rather than public, funding? Surely, this is the kind of technical question that a well-written constitution would clarify. Congress authorized and funded the last extensive renovation of the White House under President Harry Truman, and under laws passed by Congress, major renovations are supposed to be reviewed and authorized in advance by the National Capital Planning Commission, or NCPC, and other agencies.

But Trump ordered the demolition of much of the White House before he sought approval from the NCPC, which he obtained only later, after a federal judge intervened to block construction and after he had stacked the commission with loyal appointees. The attempt of Trump’s Republican allies in Congress to belatedly fund the ongoing destruction has run afoul of parliamentary rules that govern what can be included in a funding bill under the procedure of budget reconciliation.

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Either the Constitution allows a current president to unilaterally reshape the buildings and landscape of Washington, DC, on his own authority — or it doesn’t. If Trump does have the constitutional authority to destroy a third of the White House on his own initiative, can a future President Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris demolish the Washington Monument and replace it?

Progressive Democrats as well as Right-wing Republicans make extreme claims about the location of authority under the Constitution — when it suits them. After Virginian voters, in a referendum on April 21, approved a plan by Virginia Democrats to gerrymander or rig congressional districts to lock in a Democratic majority in the state’s delegation to the US House of Representatives, the state’s high court struck down the measure as illegal because it didn’t follow proper procedures to amend the state constitution. The federal Supreme Court unanimously refused to review and possibly overturn the Virginia state supreme court’s decision.

Each of these cases illustrates a major design defect of the American federal constitution: the separation of powers, in the case of the White House ballroom; and America’s unique system of federalism, in the case of the Virginia gerrymandering case.

The Founders, bless their hearts, believed in the quaint 18th-century theory that safeguarding democracy and civil liberty required that executive, legislative, and judicial powers be allocated to different, independent, co-equal government branches. The theory was mistaken. We know it was mistaken because Britain and the other major English-speaking countries — Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — all have parliamentary systems, in which executive powers are wielded by the prime minister, a member of the legislature, with the British monarch serving as a ceremonial figurehead.

If the Founders had been right about the separation of powers, then Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand should be undemocratic, illiberal regimes dominated by an all-powerful legislative dictatorship. Indeed, in defiance of the theory of the American founding, most other democracies in the world today have parliamentary or hybrid systems, rather than American-style presidential systems based on the separation of powers. The Founders, though undoubtedly great practical statesmen, were wrong on this fundamental point.

To make matters worse, as the political scientist Juan Linz argued, liberty and democracy tend to be in greater danger in presidential systems, rather than in parliamentary systems. The reason is that the separately elected president can claim equal authority with the legislature, and in a constitutional deadlock, he or she is more likely to command the loyalty of the armed forces and internal security services. Conversely, the only way that a legislature in a presidential system can remove an independently elected president is impeachment.

In a parliamentary system, prime ministers can fall from power when their parliamentary party or coalition loses the majority. And between elections, they can be dumped by their fellow legislators, with a vote of no confidence or similar measure, whereupon they once again become mere ordinary members of parliament, if they do not resign from politics. Just ask Keir Starmer. This model renders impeachments of prime ministers unnecessary.

The separation of powers in presidential systems, then, is more likely to cause breakdowns of democracy than to prevent them. On Jan. 6, 2021, after Trump falsely claimed that the election had been stolen by Joe Biden, MAGA supporters seeking to thwart the ratification of the Electoral College results ransacked the US Capitol and forced members of Congress to flee to safety. On Jan. 8, 2023, after another Right-wing populist, Jair Bolsonaro, lost the presidency of Brazil to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, supporters of Bolsonaro broke into and damaged the Brazilian presidential palace, the legislative chambers, and the high court, in the part of the capital of Brasilia known as — what else? — the Plaza of the Three Powers.

In contrast, when the party of another right-wing Populist, Viktor Orbán, was reduced to a minority in the Hungarian parliament on April 10 of this year, Orban graciously resigned as prime minister. In Hungary’s parliamentary system, he had no alternative. He could not claim to be the sole tribune of the Hungarian people, as he had never been directly elected, only chosen by his party when it held a legislative majority.

To be sure, there have been prime ministers who have become dictators in effect, like India’s Indira Gandhi, who ruled by authoritarian methods during the 21-month emergency of 1975-1977. But in 1977, Gandhi lost her own seat in parliament in an electoral backlash only to be re-elected and serve as prime minister again from 1980 to 1984.

In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister from 2003 to 2014, was able to deepen his authoritarian rule only after he became president under a new Turkish constitution that converted Turkey’s parliamentary system to a presidential system.  Thanks, American Founders!

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American-style presidentialism, then, in other countries as well as the United States, encourages power grabs by chief executives, checked only by impeachments by the legislature and judicial rulings that a president might ignore (“John Marshall has made his decision,” as Andrew Jackson famously said when the high court displeased him, “now let him enforce it!”).

While the separation of powers is a constitutional crisis waiting to happen, the federal system inherited from America’s wise and enlightened Founders is simply a mess. Under the constitution of 1787, the authority of the states and their citizens is supposed to be protected from the federal government by two methods — a clear division of authority between state and federal governments, and the representation of the states as distinct corporate bodies, each with two Senators who initially were chosen by state legislatures. Since the founding, both of these parts of the American constitution have broken down.

Instead of a clear-cut allocation of different responsibilities to state and federal governments in a two-layer cake, we have something like a Streusel swirl, in which federal, state, and local authorities in particular areas are blended and intertwined. Much of the blending is the result of federal funding of state and local programs, including hybrid federal-state programs like Medicaid. The federal Department of Transportation, for example, pays in part for local bike trails and pedestrian walkways, in addition to federal interstate highways.

The reason is simple. When advocates for a policy can’t win at the level of the city council or state legislature, they often find allies in Congress to fund or mandate their favored program, federalism be damned. Interest groups on the Right as well the Left are willing to shop among levels of government until they find one that will do what they want. In the name of states’ rights, anti-abortion conservatives demanded that the Supreme Court return abortion policy to the states, and succeeded when  the Court repealed Roe v. Wade in 2022. Meanwhile, pressured by deep-pocketed tech investors, the Trump administration has sought a federal ban on state regulation of AI. When it comes to federalism in the United States, the working theory of both parties and all factions is that whatever level of government they and their allies control has the authority to carry out the policy they want.

The second protection for the states built into the US Constitution — the election of two senators from every state — lost its purpose long ago. Originally, US senators were elected by state legislatures, on the theory that they represented states as political entities. But the 17th Amendment in 1913 wrecked the structure by requiring that US senators, like representatives, be elected directly by citizens.

But while congressional districts that send representatives to the House are revised after every census, reflecting population growth and sometimes partisan gerrymandering, the rule that each state has two senators, regardless of its population, is part of America’s defective constitution and can’t be altered. The result is that the Senate is the most grotesquely malapportioned legislative chamber in any country in the world. A voter in Wyoming, which has around 590,000 residents, has 66 times the political influence in the Senate as California, with its 39 million residents. The genius of the American constitution!

Would foreign leaders drafting a democratic constitution today in any country think, “Let’s copy the US Constitution and create a bicameral system in which the population ratios in one branch of the legislature can be as uneven as 66 to one”? Would a constitutional convention in a newly democratic Iran or China choose a presidential system in which an independently elected president, unchecked by the legislature, could plunge the country into a foreign war or tear down or build national monuments in the national capital with private money and without legislative authorization? No, they wouldn’t. Rational founders in the 21st century would conclude that democratic stability and continuity are likely to be more secure under a parliamentary regime than in an American-style presidential system.

Madison, Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, and the other members of the Constitutional convention of 1787 were patriotic, brave, well-informed, thoughtful, and public-spirited. These were unquestionably great men. Unfortunately, in looking for models for self-government on a national scale, they only had the examples of ancient, medieval, and modern city-states, leagues, and the proto-parliamentary British monarchy. With the few precedents at their disposal, and given the need to compromise to hold the shaky union together, the drafters of the US Constitution did the best they could at the time. But they screwed up. It’s time that Americans admit it.

But the word “North” still rolls from the tongues of political journalists with barely concealed contempt, as if it were some minor impoverished province of an ancient empire. You’d think Burnham was coming with a pre-formed cabinet that included the Gallagher brothers, or was leading an army of zombies dressed in JD Sports gear. It feels as though Westminster journalists and politicians have suddenly discovered something they spent years ignoring: place.

And that is what is really going on here. The fascination is not with Burnham being Northern, but with how he wins. Three mayoral victories, a return to Parliament and an ability to outperform Labour nationally and limit the advance of Reform have left Westminster asking what he has that other Labour politicians don’t. They are trying to work out whether the North is acting as a laboratory for a new kind of center-left politics, or whether Burnham is simply benefiting from the wider collapse of confidence in Westminster.

And in trying to explain that, commentators have found themselves talking about things they have long ignored: belonging, identity, roots, civic pride, accents — and the North. These are not trivial things. The future of Labour may depend on them.

In 2024, I attended my first ever political event: the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. I went to plead with MPs from what would become the Starmer government that food, farming and the environment were vital issues that needed enlightened support. It turned out to be a complete waste of time — Rachel Reeves trashed the whole lot — but it showed me a little of how British politics works. 

I got to the reception desk and collected my speaker badge. The young man that met me had a broad Scouse accent, and seemed tired of handing out passes to besuited men and women. I’d passed a couple of hundred of them on the way in, and had wondered who they were. Lobbyists? Consultants? Think-tankers? Aspiring politicians? Academics?

They all looked the same. And they all sounded the same too: modern city professionals, anything but working class. And that, frankly, is just the reality of politics. Universities and private schools are the hothouses from which a disproportionate number of MPs come from, and the industries around politics are no different. 

None of these things is a crime, of course, but it was very noticeable to someone new to this world that they weren’t living working-class lives. People laugh out loud when Starmer insists his father was a “toolmaker”: he is clearly so far from any kind of working-class experience himself, and it’s painfully embarrassing seeing him try to connect to it. When he spoke to the nation it was like someone who was used to being billed out by the hour. 

Starmer made me, and perhaps everyone else, nostalgic for the older kind of Labour, for politicians who had once been miners, or factory workers, or shop stewards. MPs who had strong regional accents, and who, even if you didn’t share their politics, seemed an authentic and genuine representation of their communities. 

I know they weren’t all like that, but some of the great ones were — Nye Bevan, Barbara Castle, Dennis Skinner, or Alan Johnson. Hell, even their nemesis, Maggie Thatcher, was a penny-pinching grocer’s daughter from Grantham. Until recently, people belonged to a class and a profession rooted in a place. People would identify as, say, a “Shipbuilder from Tyneside”. But as working-class industrial jobs have ceased to employ hundreds of thousands of people, the occupation part of such identities has faded away, replaced with the much blander and vaguer, “Northern”.  

Labour politicians were formed by their occupation, class and sense of belonging. The British people have always been quite forgiving of politicians being of a different class or status to them, as long as you don’t hide it — Jacob Rees Mogg and Boris Johnson are accepted as posh boys, because they wear it openly. But politicians being fake about their background is almost unforgivable. 

In Liverpool, the young man passed me a badge with “Labour Party Conference” written on it, and I made a joke about Labour being the party of the “working man”. He laughed. “Seen many?” I asked. He grinned and shook his head. 

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I think that was the moment I realized how disconnected from place (and perhaps social class) a lot of politics now is. And the irony with Andy Burnham is that, at least if you read his CV, he is very much a career politician. 

He is currently overplaying this image of someone Northern, rooted, local and authentic: an antidote to Westminster. Yet his biography is a textbook Westminster success story. First he went to a Catholic grammar school. Then Cambridge to read English. Then he swerved the real world and instead worked as a parliamentary researcher. From there? A special advisor, then an MP in New Labour from 2001. Then he was cabinet minister for Blair and Brown. Amid all this, he even found time to run two failed campaigns for leadership of his party. 

In short, if we are looking for fresh talents, untainted by Westminster, Burnham would be an odd choice. He isn’t a miner, a farmer, a factory worker or even an entrepreneur. He is, to his core, a politician. 

Why, then, isn’t he perceived as just another career politician? The answer probably tells us more about the state of British politics than it does about Burnham himself. Westminster is so insulated from place, and so dominated by a narrow professional class, that almost any politician who even appears rooted in a community now leaps out. 

Burnham’s talent over the past decade, then, has not been to escape the political class — but to escape being defined by it. While Westminster was chewing through reputations, he was safely up in Manchester. From Brexit to the bond markets, Burnham sat most of it out. He could have been in the Trafford Centre drinking cans of lager for all anyone cared. And those 10 years away from London gave him something increasingly rare in British politics: a national political profile without the stain of abject national failure.

I live two hours further North than “Andy” (a massive Northern flex). And I’ve spent time with regular working people all week: farmers, plumbers, cleaners, wagon drivers, caterers, carers, and teachers. And Burnham has come up in conversation a lot. That’s not exactly polling, or a focus group, but it perhaps reveals a little of the mood. He clearly has some political capital up here. It helps, for one thing, that they know who he is (I often ask people to name five MPs, and they struggle to name more than two or three). They also like the way he talks. He sounds genuinely down-to-earth Northern in a way that disarms many people — perhaps because sounding Northern is still associated with being working class. London increasingly feels like it is another economic universe — with wages, house prices, and a general level of affluence that is bewildering to the average person in Carlisle or Hartlepool. When we sense a politician is lost in the London bubble, we tune out. What do they know about our lives? 

People in the North like that Burnham was supportive of the Hillsborough families, and behaved honorably after the Manchester Arena attack. He showed character speaking for Manchester when she was hurting. They suspect he’s been quite a good mayor, though no one is exactly certain what he got done, as that’s too local and specific to make the news. The general consensus is that Andy is sensible and decent, and hopefully humble enough to carry Northern common sense with him as he returns to the national stage. 

The trouble is, everyone up here knows the country is broke. They don’t need an economist to tell them. And up here, particularly in rural areas, Labour politicians aren’t universally popular. Thanks to their hapless efforts, the Starmer-Reeves government has set back the Party’s electoral prospects by about 30 years. Their 25-year Farming Roadmap was published this week to widespread derision — asking farmers to produce more food, with less help, while also restoring nature and heading off climate change, with less support and investment than ever before. Absolute bullshit (a farming term, you understand).  

Andy Burnham hasn’t been costing you or me much money over the past 10 years. But that’s about to change. It’s easy to be soccer-dad Andy, playing the Smiths on a guitar, and talking about what politics should be when you are “King of the North”. It’s altogether different when you are the prime minister. 

His big idea of a “land tax” sounds scarily like it might include farmers — if it does, he will be continuing the politically disastrous culture war started by his predecessors. Will he reset the relationship with rural businesses, or make things worse for them? A lot of people up here are waiting nervously to find out.

But the media misses something else. The North is real — but it is not one thing. The “North” that Burnham represents is fundamentally metropolitan: a product of big industrial cities and their hinterlands. This is clear enough in his language, in his talk of “growth”, “infrastructure”, “investment”, “transport”, “productivity”. Close your eyes and we could be back in 2001; he is, in fact, the last survivor of New Labour. 

Yet that reflects only one version of Northern identity. It is worth remembering there is as much of England north of Manchester as there is between Manchester and London. And many of us living up here are no more convinced that Manchester speaks for us than London does. Up here the economy is on its knees — people need manufacturing, energy, farming, tourism, forestry and the food and drinks sector to thrive, and right now, things are dire. For years, our political class has preferred to talk in abstractions: growth, productivity, migration, public services. But voters experience those things somewhere. They experience them in places. 

That is one reason Reform has been so successful. The populist Right instinctively takes the side of people who feel attached to place against the forces they believe are changing it. They understand that identity is local before it becomes ideological. The center often delegitimizes these grievances, as it did by labeling negative experiences of immigration as “racism”. This is good for shaping a Westminster/BBC narrative about ignorant Northern communities, yet fails utterly to address the long-term issues, let alone retain the political loyalty of the accused.

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Right now, Westminster appears incapable of solving the problems of our age — creating a strange moment of weakness and opportunity. Burnham is trying to seize it. He represents an idea of how that status quo might be challenged. But a Northern accent, a dark blue t-shirt, and fluttering your eyelashes will only get you so far in Westminster. 

The fantasy of the North is an imagined one, but it has a moral power. It’s an old story, one with roots far older than Barbara Castle. The North, or really the hinterland, possesses virtues that have been lost or squandered in the corrupted and decadent capital — honor, loyalty, duty and plain speaking. And Burnham is riding in to Westminster brandishing them all. How long he can retain them remains to be seen. For the South is powerful; it rarely rolls over for a northerner. And in the days since the King of the North pulled into Euston on his Avanti West Coast, you can sense it arming itself again — almost irritated that someone had the audacity to pull off this Labour coup.

Perhaps the robotic tone was because he’s not actually all that proud of his record. Starmer’s denunciation of the previous regime as “morally bankrupt” is difficult to dispute, but can a man widely referred to as “two-tier Kier”, for his palpably asymmetric approach to public order, really boast of “decency”? Can a man whose legacy will be full-term abortion, censorship, digital surveillance, and the abolition of trial by jury really claim to have rescued Britain from the moral abyss? Can a man who gave us soaring youth unemployment, who shrugged at farm suicides, who thinks nothing of bankrupting schools for disabled children and religious minorities, really boast of returning to Britain a sense of pride?

Who cares? Not the Westminster court press, which reports on it all excitedly, as though this now wearily familiar Downing Street bloodshed is nothing more than a soap opera. And perhaps they’re right to ignore the substantive issues, and treat it as spectacle. This is, after all, arguably, a sober assessment of the relationship between any given prime minister and the machinery of governance.

Exactly 10 years ago, the country went to the polls to vote on whether or not we should remain in the EU. I voted Leave, as (narrowly) did the country. Overall, the desire was twofold: in the words of Vote Leave, to “Take Back Control”: that is, to restore democratically accountable national government, from its dissolution into the opaque Brussels machinery. And, relatedly, to end an inflow of immigration that, thanks to Brussels, we were powerless to control.

The deeper issue at the time, to my eye, was not just transnational treaties but state capacity. We couldn’t long maintain a reserve of competent civil servants, politicos, and mandarins, while also outsourcing to Brussels much of the policy you’d expect such experts to devise and implement. Just as muscles atrophy when you don’t use them, my fear was that eventually we’d lose our capacity to do joined-up policy, as an independent state. Civil servants would relax into the inertia of EU autopilot, and assume the totality of their job was implementing procedures and strictures devised elsewhere.

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But the hour was already late. The regime’s inflexibility began causing real frustration with the global financial crash. A post-political regime that hummed along (it seemed) nicely in the boom years began to show its downside in the bust, in a now-manifest indifference to national populations, an insatiable appetite for human quantitative easing, and all with minimal accountability. Even so, after the crash, public faith in the settlement didn’t falter straight away. A hung Parliament in 2010 attested, even then, to the deep divide over how Britain’s future ought to unfold, but Cameron, as coalition leader, served a full term and was re-elected. Back then, more people than not at least somewhat trusted the British government.

So did I, by and large. In 2016, I thought matters might still be salvaged: that state capacity might be retrieved, and that it was worth trying. Over the past decade, though, I’ve come to wonder if I was wrong. This time a decade ago, the British people voted for change, and to take back control. But 52/48 is almost a hung Parliament, and the Remainer resistance was immense and well-connected. The ensuing trench warfare took years, claimed two prime ministers, and gravely damaged what trust the public still held in the idea that British governments answered to the British people. So did it work? Well, the monkey’s paw curled, and we have since enjoyed incessant change — of prime ministers. But we don’t seem to have taken back control of anything that actually matters.

This sense, that the democratic steering mechanisms on the machinery of state are purely decorative, was ultimately what prompted the Brexit vote. But even Brexit doesn’t seem to have produced the desired increase in responsiveness. All it has done, in fact, is increase the speed at which frustrated electorates cycle through prime ministers, hoping each time that this will be the one whose efforts connect with the machine, and who can show an ability to drive it.

Again and again, since Cameron, we’ve elected a new leader, who then governs for an eyeblink, and sees their approval rating plummet. Again and again, they come up against the same problem, that the Leave vote was supposed to remedy: the machinery of government won’t be steered. And no matter how many times we yank out the steering wheel and replace it with a different one, the machine just keeps trundling along.

This is surely why Starmer’s list of vaunted achievements is so paltry he had to read it out, at the resignation podium, in his bad-faith robot voice. The contrast was all the starker because so swiftly followed an emotional expression of gratitude to his family, that — unlike his rubbish “achievements” — he obviously did feel able to deliver with his whole chest. But for all the time I’ve spent ragging on Keith-GPT, he was ultimately a victim of the same problem as all the others.

By December 2024, barely six months and a single rioting season into his premiership, he was rubbing civil servants up the wrong way by complaining that nothing he wanted to do seemed achievable, because so much of the bureaucracy seemed comfortable in the “tepid bath of managed decline”. The mandarins were miffed. But Starmer wasn’t saying anything Dominic Cummings hadn’t already said during the Coalition years — and which hadn’t, in fact, long animated Cummings’s rationale for bringing Britain out of the EU. Cummings is still saying it, arguing recently that we’re stuck with stagnant growth, lagging technology, and dysfunctional public services, because the governing class is hell-bent on preventing change. Instead, their priority is preserving the interests of their own caste.

So if, after scant months in office, a proceduralists’ proceduralist like Starmer was sounding off about the Blob in terms scarcely distinguishable from Dominic Cummings, the reasonable conclusion is that there’s probably something to the critique. But Starmer didn’t grip any of these structural issues. Instead, under his premiership we have enjoyed two years of interconnected and ramifying screwups, as assorted forms of entrenched dysfunction interact in ever more complex and unhappy ways. This background of fractal ineptitude, vividly set off both by the regime’s perceived bias against white Britons, at best ambivalent resolve on tackling mass migration, then provided a backdrop to assorted Labour factions who, sensing Starmer’s core ideological emptiness, have seized the opportunity to advance crank hobby-horses such as legalizing suicide.

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I see no evidence anywhere else in Labour (except from the Dark Lord himself, Tony Blair) of concrete thought on these structural issues. Starmer has evidently decided not to make it easy, and has announced a leadership contest. But it’ll be Burnham in the end, and my unhappy suspicion is that that come September, he will rock up at No. 10 with his boxes of Jamie Oliver cookbooks and suitcase of Professional Northerner regalia only to find that he, too, can’t get the machinery of government to respond.

Will he be steely enough to get under the hood and change how the engine works? I don’t know. But a recent profile by a Manchester journalist, who has covered his mayoralty for years, depicted Burnham as a gifted unifier and genuinely popular, but weaker on joined-up governance. For example, a flagship homelessness scheme he launched in Manchester ended up, in practice, operating at cross purposes with other housing services. Meanwhile, the rest of the Labour bench are overwhelmingly more aligned with the architectures of business as usual — with the quangos, the mandarins, the judges, the human rights, the entitlements, and all the suffocating rest of it — to have any interest in letting him tinker. And Labour’s ungainly post-industrial coalition pulls in so many contradictory directions that the party remains, for now, woefully paralyzed.

So unless Burnham is keeping his cards very close to his chest, once we’re through the latest round of court soap opera the almost inevitable prospect is more of the same. Another round of flashy, headline-grabbing schemes; another round of the permanent bureaucracy limply going through the motions, then resuming whatever it was doing before. More mass immigration, more Net Zero, more decline. More unrest. And, in due course, more Downing Street blood-letting.

But who knows, perhaps this is the least worst outcome. Last time we had a Labour government with a substantive plan for revolution, we ended up with Tony Blair’s constitutional vandalism. We are still living in his world today. That’s why voters are so frustrated, why the system won’t do anything else, and why every prime minister ends up hated. Ending the bloodshed requires not revolution, but counter-revolution.

This of course raises the grimmer and deeper question of whether Britain even retains the state capacity to make a success of such a counter-revolution, or could muster enough aligned operatives to replace those who would inevitably try and obstruct it. But evidently I haven’t learned anything from Brexit, after all, because I think it’s worth trying. If nothing else, just because it would make such a pleasant change to get through a full Parliamentary term, without having to hose another prime minister off the pavement.

The relation between British voters and the people elected to govern us feels a little like being stuck in that taxi. I know many decent people who voted for this Labour government, in exasperation at 14 footling years of the Tories, and who simply hoped that Starmer would deliver what he seemed to be promising: sensible center-left policies plus a bit less psychodrama.

Instead, all those votes seem to have granted a thumping majority to a man who has U-turned on everything sensible and center-left he ever promised, while showing a steely determination to ram through, either personally or via proxies, a whole shadow program of policies which weren’t in the manifesto. 

Of these, none is more egregious than the Assisted Dying Bill. This was never Labour policy. It was brought as a Private Members’ Bill, with the transparent connivance of government, and given the airiest of rides by a committee packed with supporters. Except then it ran out of time in the House of Lords, under the weight of 1,200 amendments brought against its shortcomings on behalf of the great many charities, experts, nurses, carers, GPs, psychiatrists, abuse campaigners, priests, and others who raised concerns about its lack of safeguards. But apparently that wasn’t enough to scotch it: tomorrow, another Labour MP, Lauren Edwards, will re-introduce the very same bill again, after coming second in the Private Members’ Bill ballot. Under existing Parliamentary procedure, if the Bill passes again in the House of Commons, it cannot be blocked in the Lords.

It’s like some sort of fever dream, in which you vote again and again for sensible taxation and functioning borders and public services, but every time you go outside there’s just the same Labour MP chasing you with a syringe. And what makes this so wearisome is that this will be the third attempt in five years to legalize suicide. Baroness Meacher’s 2021 bill in the House of Lords didn’t get much traction; Kim Leadbeater’s 2025 effort was stymied by the Lords. Now the gerontocide enthusiasts have donned the mantle of Our Democracy, insisting that the Lords doing what it’s supposed to do — scrutinize legislation — is somehow not constitutionally licit. Edwards called the bill’s failure in the House of Lords “the decision of a minority” blocking “long-overdue change”. It should be, she asserted, a “fundamental democratic principle” that the Lords shouldn’t be able to veto legislation in this way.

Now, perhaps you can correct me, but I don’t remember any such high-minded objections when the Lords threatened to block the invocation of Article 50 following the Brexit vote. Lord Falconer, for one, cheered on the Upper Chamber’s obstruction of Brexit, only to condemn it recently for affording assisted suicide the same level of scrutiny. It’s remarkable how swiftly constitutional safeguards can morph into anti-democratic obstruction when it’s your pet policy being scrutinized.

But surely, you might say, this is just politics? Well, it’s true that living in a democracy implies sometimes having to put up with political outcomes you don’t like, because some other lot voted for them. But the way people vote is supposed to be based on the publication of election manifestos. Of course hardly anyone actually reads them, but in theory the party publishes a list of pledges, the people assess them and vote to elect the party whose policies they like, then the winning party tries to get them passed in Parliament. Even the Brexit referendum was a Cameron election promise. 

Most governments deviate in practice from the manifesto. But in most cases there’s at least an attempt at resemblance. Starmer appears to have begun in that spirit: barely two years ago, in his first speech as prime minister, he pledged to tread more lightly on our lives — which sounded like a welcome relief, and perhaps even what people voted for. Wrong. What we got, instead, was a party that had promised to spare a thought for ordinary people and not be a total hot mess, but which has instead dedicated a startling amount of energy to resigning, U-turning, and pursuing a weirdly post-humanist agenda, whose policies were never in any manifesto.

Digital ID wasn’t in the manifesto. But it’s now front and center in Starmer’s program (for as long as that lasts, at least). Nor was there anything in the manifesto about social media censorship, or changing the law on abortion. There definitely wasn’t anything about legalizing doctor-assisted suicide. On Brexit, meanwhile, Starmer’s manifesto explicitly promised not to re-open free movement.

And yet: abortion has been decriminalized all the way up to birth; new “youth safety” measures will in practice affect everyone including adults; and even Brexit refuses to stay done. Having promised not to reverse any of the headline Brexit changes, Starmer has since agreed to a “youth mobility” scheme that smells a lot like a fun-sized version of free movement, all while tying Britain back into “dynamic alignment” in some areas of EU regulation. This might all stay within the letter of manifesto promises, but it’s not the spirit. Labour fellow-travelers such as Sadiq Khan, meanwhile, think he should go further, urging Labour to fight the next election on rejoining the bloc.

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Nor are we even being spared the psychodrama. Just this week we’ll all enjoy yet another by-election, which isn’t even the drama itself, but a sort of amuse-bouche for the real event, when Andy Burnham (should he win) will challenge Starmer for the top seat. (We might add that the good people of Makerfield voted for Josh Simons, and not any of the current ridiculous circus.) And most flagrantly of all, in the midst of financial meltdown, international unrest, simmering tensions over unwanted migration, and an ever-escalating cost-of-living crisis, the euthanasia ghouls still can’t accept defeat. No, they are going to suck all the oxygen out of Parliament for a second time, instead of focusing on issues that would actually make a positive difference to the lives of normal people.

Perhaps it’s unfair to blame all of this on Starmer personally. Who knows, perhaps none of it is strategic, just the organic result of a man who neither likes nor understands his country desperately mashing at the controls, in the hope that any resulting changes will be better or at least no worse than what was there before. But you don’t have to be a conspiracist to feel there’s a whiff of calculation about the document leaked to the Guardian last winter, which revealed Labour already strategizing in opposition over how to smuggle assisted dying in — not via the manifesto and a proper mandate, but a Private Members’ Bill. The de-criminalization of self-administered abortion to full term, too, was tucked into a much larger Crime and Policing bill, whose headline measures were on tackling shoplifting. A cynic might be forgiven for seeing the same preference for cajoling electorates into compliance with a pre-existing program there, too.

The same also goes for the insistence that “Digital ID” will be voluntary (yeah, sure, to begin with) or Labour’s gradual assembly of a digital censorship engine. The legislative foundations for this were smuggled into a bill on children’s welfare, earlier this year, followed by a “public consultation” (aka policy laundering exercise) to grant legitimacy to the new restrictions, announced yesterday. You can be sure that what privacy advocates have long warned are the real implications of age-restrictions — that everyone will be forced to link their social media to an official ID — will only become apparent further down the line, once it’s too late to object.

Britain is genuinely divided on assisted suicide. You can find plenty of keen Rejoiners, pro-choice advocates, and even supporters of digital ID. I dare say people of good faith can make a case for all these policies singly. But no one did, in Labour’s manifesto. And so no one voted for any of these efforts to realize these policies. Indeed, the sidling manner in which they have been pursued strongly suggests that those doing so know perfectly well they aren’t vote-winners, especially not when combined with eye-watering taxes, crumbling services, inflation, riots, mass youth unemployment, and all the miserable rest of it. Taken all together, and in lieu of all the things people actually did hope Labour would deliver, it feels worse than inept: it feels actively malignant. If Joseph de Maistre was right, and every people really does get the government they deserve, we must have done something truly abominable.

In Moscow, trapped in that taxi, my friend saved his own skin by phoning his client, who yelled over speakerphone in Russian at the driver. The tone was clear: the driver executed a handbrake turn and drove my friend, shaken but unharmed, at speed to his original destination. By contrast, the many good people I know who voted Labour and who just wanted a slightly less venal and dysfunctional rabble in charge, are now being driven at speed through concrete tower blocks, by mad ideologues deaf to every objection. Our destination appears to be a regime of state-sponsored killing, censorship, and surveillance, that would set screaming alarm bells off on the Left, were they not the ones bringing it about. Who can we call, to turn the car around?

To this end, we are told, Starmer has announced that digital platforms have a three-month period in which to implement measures preventing under-16s from taking or sending or receiving nude photos. As things stand, Apple and Google have some age-verification features but these don’t work across everything on the platform. The Government has threatened to legislate if these measures are not made more robust. 

In response, much of the reaction so far has focused on how this actually isn’t enough censorship, and won’t someone think of the children? The safetyists may yet get their wish: further restrictions are expected next week, purportedly also addressed at protecting kids. The new rules will clamp down on infinite scroll, “harmful” websites and perhaps also the design of digital content algorithms. Conservative MP Laura Trott immediately declared that this wouldn’t be enough censorship either.

As the mother of a tween girl, you’d think I would be cheering this all on. Yes, I do worry about keeping my daughter safe as the shark-filled digital waters lap at her ankles. But I also think these proposals stink, are being rolled out in bad faith by a Poundland tyranny whose leaders are deeply afraid of their own citizens, and should be fought tooth-and-nail precisely on the grounds of thinking of our children. 

As regards thinking of my own child, so far I’ve just embraced the fact that being a parent means saying “no” sometimes, and resigned myself to being the villain on this issue. But in the macro-debate now occurring over kids and social media, what’s striking is that parental authority of this elementary kind doesn’t seem to figure at all. The actors in question are the Government and tech companies. Inasmuch as kids feature, it’s as a groom-able, corruptible, harm-able but otherwise passive blob, to be proactively Kept Safe by Big Government.  

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I guess a government that doesn’t think its citizens capable of remembering to give their own kids breakfast, before sending them to school, is not going to treat those same parents as capable of managing their kids’ YouTube habits. And I’ll grant that there’s a grim pragmatism at work here. Based on observation of my daughter’s peer group, only a minority of parents seem to enforce more than minimal restrictions on screen use, or to spend much time investigating the platforms and content their children are exposed to.  

But if, as seems obviously the case well beyond this particular policy area, the government operates from a basic assumption that parents can’t be trusted to play any substantive role in raising their own kids, it follows that the only body with the power to intervene in their social media consumption must be (you guessed it) the government. And so we get to the crux of the matter: how is this to be achieved?

In the case of the ban on sending nudes, it appears this would mean forcing every device to include software that preemptively scans all images, and stops any being sent that the AI image scanner has identified as a bit nude-ish. To deactivate this, the device user would have to verify his or her age. So, again: how is age verification to be achieved? At the very least it would require a mandatory ID check when setting up a device or computer, perhaps by scanning a passport or driving license. Starmer has also announced he’s rolling out “optional” digital ID, so presumably he intends this to be used for verification too. 

In other words, preventing kids from sending nudes would in practice mean everyone must accept the ubiquitous presence of software that automatically scans every image on every device, and censors according to its own algorithms. Which you don’t control. Then, too, anyone sharing images deemed “sensitive” by this software must prove they are over 18. And this means showing an official ID — perhaps, in time, a digital one — which in turn means forfeiting anonymity. 

Some might perhaps argue: so what? Of course the software is only going to be employed in the narrow context of kids being groomed to share nudes. And this kind of sexual exploitation is indisputably very bad. Am I on the side of perverts and pedophiles? This was the line taken by Technology Secretary Peter Kyle, when Nigel Farage raised concerns over the Online Safety Act, on free speech grounds. 

More fundamentally, though: why do we need these government mandates at all when parents can already enable this feature for their kids via the Screen Time settings in existing devices? Why, indeed, would Britain be going full-steam ahead with further restrictions, when the reporting so far from Australia is that the ban there isn’t even protecting kids at all?

The answer, I’m afraid, is that Starmer instinctively wants more control over the internet because he’s afraid of the people he is supposed to govern, plus they use the internet to laugh at him. And I can see how that would make sense from his point of view. Britain in 2026 really is a sullen, fractious tinderbox, with a population growing more visibly tribalized by the week, in a process that really is being accelerated by social media. 

This angry national mood derailed his premiership almost immediately, after the Southport atrocity, and erupted again last week over the role played by police “anti-racism” in the death of Henry Nowak. The perception of institutional animus against white Britons has propagated well beyond professional race-baiters, to the point where my husband was quizzed on a business trip to Europe last week by normally apolitical business colleagues. What on earth is going on in Britain, they wanted to know? 

Given all this, I don’t exactly blame Starmer for seeking to tighten his grip on the only aspects of the country he understands: the dimension of words, and that of rules. Perhaps he genuinely believes that stopping people talking about their political discontents is the same thing as making the discontents themselves go away. And certainly if you wanted greater powers to control what people say, Protecting Kids would be a good way to get people to grant you those powers. 

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In the case of the Online Safety Act, for example, never mind how Peter Kyle insulted Farage: Farage was right about the Act’s effect on free speech. Critics argue that it’s not even doing a good job of keeping kids safe; meanwhile, it’s proving effective at stifling speech inconvenient to the regime. From satirical posts about Keir Starmer to actual speeches delivered in Parliament, the resulting perverse (or, if you prefer, just oppressive) speech restrictions have generated a rolling scandal since the bill became law in 2025. Given how swiftly its promise of protecting kids from porn mutated into a catch-all device for protecting the Government from mockery and criticism, a tool that scans every image you send would surely be similarly repurposed.

As for anyone who still blithely insists that showing ID is a small price to pay for saying what you like: let’s not forget that British police forces made almost 10,000 arrests in 2025 for social media posts. How much would they relish a tool that gave them the real name and address of everyone who’s ever “stirred up division” with a photo or video?

So won’t somebody think of the children? I don’t think anyone here is really thinking of the children. I don’t even buy that Jess Phillips, who recently resigned in protest at digital censorship not being implemented, is thinking of the children. This is, after all, the same Jess Phillips who was accused of trying to water down a national inquiry into the sexual abuse of girls, including in her own constituency, by majority-Pakistani rape gangs, by expanding its scope to meaninglessness. In other words: someone more than capable of turning a blind eye to the safety of vulnerable children, when doing otherwise might endanger her wafer-thin majority.

Nor do I think that the Americans already weighing in to oppose Starmer’s digital censorship are exactly thinking of the children either. The US interest in this issue is surely partly cultural, but it’s also about maintaining control of the West’s digital infrastructure, relative to Russia and China’s competing digital spheres of influence, and latterly also against noises from the EU about forging its own brand of “tech sovereignty”. Given all this, should Starmer’s three-month deadline for voluntary compliance expire and Labour follow through on the threat of legislating on censorship, we can expect robust pushback from the USA — to ends perhaps only somewhat aligned with the interests of the British people. 

But even those who don’t care about the geopolitics should look at these proposals, and actually think of our children. Laws that empower parents; sure. Perhaps even rules restricting under-16s to “dumb phones”. But a mandatory image-scanning backdoor for the Government, on every phone, which you can only unlock by giving up anonymity? Perhaps you’ve been shamed by Peter Kyle, or terrified by Laura Trott, into thinking we should assent to this so our children can enjoy freedom from sexting. But the freedom we should actually be thinking about, for children, is the freedom to speak, to think — and perhaps in time to organize, and liberate the nation from our useless, odious technocratic tyrants. 

How much ink has been spilled, in recent months, on the matter of “Anglo-Gaullism”? Here he is, at last, le Général — and he was under our noses all along! The actual policies of de Gaulle, his “certain idea of France”, all this was only secondary. The real lesson of Gaullism is this: when the state is on the edge of crisis, when it is crying out for a radical reimagining, it is best to entrust power to one who has already proved his mettle.

Tony Blair has proved his mettle. We want economic growth, political stability, and a state that can do things; he brought us all these things before, and he can do so again. Iraq might have been a catastrophe, but other countries know the benign power of his touch. Perhaps soon our cityscapes will contain his statues; perhaps our own playgrounds will teem with “Toniblers”.

Of course, we know it cannot be. Blair is unpopular, we are told, hated by the Left for Iraq, by the Right for the constitutional mess he left behind, and by both for the globalism he let rip. He continues to make fortunes from dodgy regimes and multinational companies who pay him for his advice. He was the future once, people say; he is now best left in the past. And yet the sound of him on the radio, deftly batting away Nick Robinson’s questions and presenting a considered plan for government, cannot help but make the heart flutter. The way he speaks about Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting, those misguided little pipsqueaks, calls to mind that irritating centrist cliché of the “adults in the room”. He has aged graciously, and his years of rest have served him well — one gets the sense (thanks perhaps to his Big Tech, jet-setter lifestyle) that he is really plugged into the world, that he knows what it’s all about. Surely it is time to state the obvious without shame: the argument for his return has become impossible to ignore.

The Labour Party is searching for a Prime Minister who can do the job and win elections. Blair can do the job, is more popular nationally than Starmer, and would demolish any rival in a debate. He is not a sitting MP, but Andy Burnham shows us that this needn’t be an obstacle. Where there’s a will, there’s a way; surely we can find him a safe by-election.

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The invention of David Attenborough

By Samuel Rubinstein

It’s one of those events which, were it to occur, would somehow command that powerful feeling of inevitability. Ten years in power never was enough; “the Master” was always meant to be one of those political titans who bestrides generations. It was only the pettiness of Gordon Brown (and the bellicosity of George W. Bush) that cut his time short; it was only the pettiness of two subsequent Labour leaders that kept him out of the political discussion. The old cadre of Blairites, in their wilderness years, spoke of him as though he was the Mahdi in occultation. His spirit was present in Chuka Umunna and “Change UK”; Lord Adonis was a one-man “Bring Back Blair” brigade. In 2021 it was reported, to the excitement of SW1, that Blair was “on the verge of a comeback”. Here, at last, it is.

That comeback, a 5,700-word essay, may not appeal to the soggy center. It is not a hodgepodge of clichés about “moderation” and the “sensible center ground”. It says nothing about “polarization”, “extremism”, or some abstract, demonic force named “hate”. Blair’s “Radical Centrism” is not fence-sitting Lib Demmery — at one point he takes an easy shot at the Lib Dems. It is not the centrism of The Rest Is Politics, which makes a fetish out of umm-ing and ahh-ing before concluding that we should all be nice.

Blair’s centrism is a promiscuous sort: he picks up ideas wherever he finds them and takes them back home. He was never afraid to break the Left-wing shibboleths of his own party; he is not afraid to break “centrist” shibboleths, either. He confesses an admiration for Donald Trump; he wants to abandon Net Zero; when he says that the small boats must be dealt with “whatever it takes”, he hints that Britain should leave the ECHR. He does not speak histrionically about Reform meaning the End of Britain. He struck the right note on the trans question well before For Women Scotland, while much of the “sensible center” was busy defending the indefensible. He is clear-minded about the world. When he wrote an essay on antisemitism for The Free Press, he did not duck away from something that many of his political tribe would fear to address head-on. Antisemitism in the British Muslim community, he straightforwardly declared, is “frankly unacceptable”. Whatever charges Dominic Cummings might lay at Blair’s feet, he cannot call him an “NPC”.

Although Blair remains true as ever to the Atlanticism that wreaked disaster in Iraq, his essay may reveal some ambivalence about the constitutional reforms which his governments engineered. Given his emphasis on state capacity, he must regret some of the ways he diluted Westminster’s power and outsourced decisions and responsibilities to quangos, judges, and devolved administrations. Before the Blairite restoration, there ought perhaps to be some public statement of contrition. But if we could forgive Churchill for Gallipoli, we can surely forgive Blair this.

Perhaps we are prone to romanticizing the politicians of the past, but that tendency needn’t be wrong. Blair might not hold a candle to Churchill, who might not hold a candle to Disraeli. But nobody today — not Starmer, not Burnham, not Wes Streeting — can hold a candle to Blair.

If certain journalists are doing their Blair love-in, it’s safe to say that their feelings aren’t reciprocated. Their coverage of politics is a key part of Blair’s complaint. The media has helped to force politicians into a “24-hour pressure cooker”, which prevents them from seeing and studying the world. Blair is frustrated that “politics” seems now to mean Chris Mason and Beth Rigby, having got a taste of blood in Partygate, hunting after more Prime Ministerial scalps. What will people in the future make of the fact that, on the eve of one of the great world-historic revolutions, the arrival of AI, Britain’s chattering classes were obsessing over Peter Mandelson, Olly Robbins, and Lord Alli’s suits?

Blair offers a strong analysis for the collapse of the present government. A classic insult hurled at Sir Keir is that he was a “technocrat”. It sounds right. He looks the part, and has the CV to match. Perhaps this image helped him win the 2024 election. But really, as Blair says, the problem with Starmer is that he is given to the Labour Party’s fits of passion and delusion. Arriving in Downing Street without any clear vision of his own, he made himself the tool of deeper forces. The few times he has tried to break out of the Labour Party’s rigid cast of mind — winter fuel allowance, benefits reform — he has been beaten into submission by angry backbenchers. A good Labour leader would have put them in their place, but Starmer never had much authority to do so. Most Labour MPs in 1997 were acutely aware that they owed their victory to Blair. His strategies and gambles paid off. They were not “Labour MPs”, elected to do vague Labourish things. They were New Labour MPs, and they were elected to do Blair’s bidding.

Sir Keir has never established his authority in this way. He purged Corbyn, and he was to be rewarded by the electorate for doing so. Labour badly needed a rebrand after 2019, and Sir Keir gave it one. But it was only superficial; it never ascended to the realm of ideas. New Labour figures were summoned from the past — some, such as Peter Mandelson, fatefully. But New Labour was never emphatically asserted as the correct path, intellectually as well as electorally.

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Inside Tony Blair Inc.

By Tom McTague

There is a revealing part of Blair’s essay where he describes meeting with Labour people before 2024. He asked them whether they were Old Labour or New Labour. The most common answer was that they rejected those categories; they were “Just Labour”. For the last two years we have had a “Just Labour” government. Starmer has implemented a Left-wing manifesto. That is true both tangibly — abolishing the two-child benefit cap, beefing up renters’ rights — and on the no less significant plane of symbolism: recognizing the state of Palestine, finishing Blair’s job in the House of Lords. And, as a token of thanks, the soft Left is scheming against him, all in favor of someone who did not even compete in the 2024 election, and can claim no part in Labour’s landslide victory. The Prime Minister, as his predecessor suggests, “totters in the breeze”. The backbenchers see this and know how to exploit it. Starmer had a mandate, but he never articulated what he had a mandate to do. Blair would have been less cautious, more forthcoming. He would have purged Corbyn, and he would have repudiated Corbynism. He would have told the party, and then the country, that they had bitter pills to swallow. They would, in the fullness of time, have to do some un-Labourish things; they would have to scrap the triple lock and Net Zero, water down the welfare state, make an accommodation with Trump, and turn the bulk of their attention to AI. Perhaps Blair, if given such a chance, would have won fewer seats at the election — but a massive majority has hardly been of much good to Starmer.

Britain faces a crisis of seriousness. We are becoming an unserious country. Blair is right to say that only an unserious country would cycle through seven Prime Ministers in ten years; only an unserious country would, as Blair says we are projected to do, spend more on disability benefits than defense. In happier times the priorities of government could be “education, education, education”. Such priorities presuppose that a government is capable of forming a clear vision, and then using its means to realize it. We cannot take these things for granted anymore. Blair is right that the priority today can only be efficacy, efficacy, efficacy.

The German historian Heinrich von Treitschke once remarked that the Prussian King Frederick William III, who was crushed by Napoleon, “seemed as if made to lead a well-ordered middling state honorably through quiet times”. These are not quiet times. It is a stroke of bad historical fortune that Starmer couldn’t have been Prime Minister between 1997 and 2007, and Blair Prime Minister today; each would have suited that moment better than the one they got. Starmer could have had that Love, Actually moment with an American president, refusing to send British troops to Iraq: he was a young and dashing human rights lawyer back then, as though plucked from a Richard Curtis romcom. Blair ripped apart a working constitution without due care; there is plenty of cause today to take a Jacobin chainsaw to the state. Blair developed a vision of social democracy that was committed to business, growth, and the extraordinary potential of technology; such a vision now is more needed than ever.

It’s not too late. Blair is a sprightly 73, a year younger than Lord Palmerston was when he began his second term as Prime Minister, over a decade younger than Gladstone during his final stint in Downing Street and five years younger than the American president was when elected for a second time. He is our Général de Gaulle; he is our Grand Old Man. We need him more than the Gazans do. Bring him back.

For the British Left in the “peak-woke” era, America was less a concrete place than an imaginary polity: not a constitutional republic with an admirable history of overcoming its shortcomings, but a hellhole of racist, capitalist tyranny that delighted in killing men who looked like Michael Brown and George Floyd. 

Nowadays, the mirror image is taking shape on the American Right and spreading through the influence of Elon Musk: an imagined Britain lorded over by Comrade Starmer and his totalitarian minions, bent on enabling migrant and minority criminality and silencing patriots who dare to resist. 

For Musk & co., the case of Henry Nowak — the Essex student allegedly stabbed to death by a Sikh man, Vickrum Digwa, late last year — epitomizes this state of affairs. Digwa claims he acted in self-defense after Nowak racially abused him; Musk’s crowd are insisting that, for this reason, the police withheld medical aid to Nowak as he bled to death on the pavement. In other words, they are constructing a reverse mythos around Nowak well before the complexities are fully understood, and with the same ideological frenzy that characterized the British Left’s understanding of American conditions in an earlier era. 

With “post-woke” hindsight, it’s easy to mock the British Left’s imaginary America, where cops beholden to “systemic racism” snuffed out black lives for the kicks. But to the Britons who took up BLM, their Manichaean picture of the United States was no joke — it lent an epochal importance to their local causes.

As one observer noted at the time, the Metropolitan Police officers assigned to escorting the London protesters “seemed in no mood to hassle anyone”. They kept a polite distance and ensured that everyone could exercise their freedom of speech and assembly. Indeed, most of the London police wouldn’t have been carrying guns — a fact that lent a ludic aspect to the importation of the BLM slogan. 

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Britain is embarrassing itself

By Sohrab Ahmari

Even so, the London progressives seemed to identify, at an intense emotional level, with the racial oppression suffered by black folks in the American Midwest. “The London Metropolitan Police move around this city like an occupying force,” one white trade unionist complained to Vice. Just like in America, with its “system that is predicated on the oppression of black people — institutionalized racism”.

The London protesters couldn’t have known that less than a year later, the Obama Department of Justice would exonerate the police officer who killed Brown after “the most definitive account yet of the shooting”, as The New York Times reported. The testimony of some 40 witnesses belied the claim that Brown had innocently raised his arms; and the DOJ, like a Missouri grand jury earlier, couldn’t contradict the officer’s assertion that he was put in reasonable fear after Brown “leaned into his patrol car, punched him, reached for his gun, and then, after running away, turned and charged at him”, as the Times put it.

When, half a decade later, another racially charged police killing took place — George Floyd’s in Minneapolis — the entire UK establishment recalled that America is a terribly, terribly racist place. They took the knee, published columns, tabled a Black Lives Matter resolution in the House of Commons, and so on. With his bureaucratic piety, Keir Starmer intoned that Floyd’s death had “shone a light on racism and hatred experienced by many in the US and beyond”.

The upshot was more “Hands up, don’t shoot!” protests in front of police officers without guns, and vandalism targeting the Cenotaph and Churchill’s statue at Westminster. Americans moved on; the cult of Floyd didn’t survive subsequent scrutiny of his life; and the Democratic Party quietly concluded that police officers are good and necessary, actually, and that defunding their departments is a dangerous — not to mention unpopular — thing to do.

Yet the tendency of America and Britain to fantasize and jump to conclusions about each other didn’t go away. It merely shifted in direction, geographically and politically. Over the past year or so — ever since Musk decided that no one had heard of the grooming-gangs scandal until he publicized it — American Right-wingers have come to develop a picture of Britain that is no less distorted than the one that the UK Left entertained of the United States. 

In the US Right’s imaginary Britain, all-too-real crises are similarly magnified to monstrous scale. This Britain isn’t a constitutional democracy, blessed with an ancient and robust tradition of rule of law, in which individual and institutional actors sometimes make mistakes and sometimes act badly, even as society as a whole attempts to uphold freedom and justice. No, this Britain is a conspiracy writ large — against its white citizens, by Leftist authorities in cahoots with malevolent foreigners.

Musk’s treatment of the Nowak case is telling. As I write on Thursday, the Tesla and SpaceX boss has published no fewer than four X posts or reposts on the case in a matter of two hours: several asking why the likes of Starmer and Angela Rayner, who took the knee for Black Lives Matter, have failed to do the same for Nowak, or even to mention his name. Another post asserts that the killing of “this innocent English boy” was “aided by police”.

Musk also pledged to fund a wrongful death suit against “these disgusting excuses for law enforcement” — that is, the police officers who initially responded to the scene. Musk’s framing of the case, hourly amplified to his quarter of a billion followers, seems to rest upon accounts offered by those such as Tommy Robinson, who insists that the police “left [Nowak] to die because they heard the word ‘racism’”. Replied Musk: “Unconscionable.”

Yet this simplistic telling — oi, you were racist, mate? Then I guess we’ll let you bleed! — is being cast into doubt as the alleged killer’s trial unfolds at Southampton Crown Court. 

Nicholas Lobbenberg, the prosecutor, noted that the police did initially handcuff Nowak “and started giving him first aid when he then collapsed”, as the BBC summarized his statement. “Shortly afterwards,” the prosecutor told the court, “Henry became unconscious, then police began to set to work to give him first aid and summon an ambulance, a doctor flew in by helicopter but there was nothing that could be done to save Henry and he was declared dead.”

The prosecution’s account still leaves many questions unanswered, not least why the police handcuffed Nowak. But what we know so far — first-aid application, a physician flown in — makes it hard to believe that police “left [Nowak] to die” because they thought he was a racist. 

The far more plausible interpretation is that the police initially misunderstood what was happening as they were trying to make split-second decisions amid a chaotic scene. Is it possible that progressive police training played some role in their decision-making? Maybe. The responding officers should face questioning about all of this, and no doubt will. And if ideology was a factor in their conduct, they should face consequences, and reforms must be instituted.

But that’s just the thing: very little of this has been carefully examined and analyzed, while already, Musk and his local allies like Robinson are jumping to a stark conclusion: white lives don’t matter in modern Britain. Much as, a decade or so ago, British progressive activists and too many in the liberal establishment permitted a similarly ideologized lens to distort their perception of justice, race, and policing in America.

Will the reductive passion plays and martyr cults of the racial Right prove any less destructive — of institutions and truth procedures — than did those of the Left? Either way, Musk won’t be the one paying the price.

Labour and the Conservatives have always taken very different approaches to the business of changes of leadership. Tories care mainly about electability. Margaret Thatcher’s ideological legacy was adored by many Tories — and indeed still is. When they knifed her in 1990, her Cabinet were more concerned that the electorate had fallen out of love with her. Tellingly, John Major’s turn at the helm didn’t herald a decisive shift in ideology; he was simply a more acceptable face of Thatcherism for the Nineties.

When Labour looks for a new leader, though, it inevitably becomes an internal referendum on the political direction of the party. That helps explain the violent swing, say, from the Bennite Jeremy Corbyn to the centrist Keir Starmer that left the Labour faithful gasping for breath. But despite the bloodshed, modern political parties are not versions of Terry Pratchett’s Assassins’ Guild, where advancement comes through the elimination of rivals. Michael Heseltine’s proclamation that “he who wields the knife never wears the crown” has proven to be remarkably reliable. Either way, Starmer’s position is not new — but you don’t get the impression he’s relying much on the lessons of history.

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Starmer's weaponised incompetence

By Jonny Ball

Two years on from its famous landslide victory of 1945, Clement Attlee’s Labour government was already in bad shape. Chancellor Hugh Dalton was reportedly taking Benzedrine to keep going. Herbert Morrison, leader of the House of Commons, was recovering from a serious illness. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin was drifting between office and hospital. Churchill had described Attlee as “a modest man with much to be modest about” — but he was clearly easy to underestimate. When Attlee’s internal enemies decided to oust him in 1947, their leader Stafford Cripps left his fateful meeting with the PM having accepted a new position as the Minister for Economic Affairs — a position created especially for him. In keeping his enemy close, Attlee took a somewhat different approach to Starmer, who first refused to meet with Wes Streeting, only to frostily dispatch him after 17 minutes of conversation the next day.

Hugh Gaitskell succeeded Attlee as Labour leader in 1955 but never became prime minister, dying suddenly in 1963. Harold Wilson took over and won the general election the following year, but before long the rumblings in his party about his leadership became too loud to ignore. By the late-Sixties, the Home Secretary Roy Jenkins seemed the most obvious choice to replace him.

Starmer claims his political hero is Wilson; Streeting has declared himself a Labour revisionist in the ideological mode of Jenkins and Anthony Crosland, who argued for reducing inequality, improving opportunities and dispensing with socialist dogma. Jenkins was admired by almost everyone who mattered in late-Sixties Britain, intelligent journalists, broadcasters, civil servants, captains of industry, and had a coterie of well-heeled and glamorous mistresses. He looked and sounded like the future. Wilson looked like the present, stretching out to infinity.

All Jenkins had to do was pick his moment — and the aftermath of the disastrous local elections of 1968 would have been ideal. He was egged on by his enthusiastic supporters, the Friends of Roy, whom Gerald Kaufman compared to a group of schoolchildren with a crush on the hockey mistress. But to his eternal regret, Jenkins failed to act. He later admitted that successful prime ministers generally possess “a seam of utter ruthlessness”, and wondered if perhaps he lacked it. Elsewhere, he observed that if you fired a shot at your enemy, you had better make sure they ended up dead. This is a conundrum that Streeting must have grappled with himself in recent days. As for Wilson, still the greatest Houdini figure in modern British politics, he governed on and off until 1976, by which time he had moved from a modernist belief in the “white heat of technology” to being more of a national headmaster figure, permanently disappointed with everyone.

Still, worse than failing to act is sending your foot-soldiers over the top and then failing to follow them yourself, creating only bitterness and resentment. A prime example was James Purnell resigning from the Cabinet to trigger a coup against Gordon Brown, only to find that his ally David Miliband had bottled it and failed to follow through with his own resignation. Purnell left British politics soon after: the Labour Party is not kind to failed assassins.

And there is another danger that Jenkins, who was at Bletchley Park during the war, would have appreciated more than most. This is the concept of political game theory — specifically, the tragedy of the first mover whose act will always benefit the second mover. The first mover bears all the costs while exposing themselves to a counter-strike, neatly explaining Heseltine’s famous quip, which he learned the hard way in his own doomed attempt to replace Magaret Thatcher. So while Jenkins could have mortally wounded Wilson with a challenge, in doing so, he may have allowed one of his rivals — whether Denis Healey, Jim Callaghan or Michael Foot — to take the prize and unite the party behind them. This was something the wily Wilson also knew, which was why he surrounded himself with a collection of powerful lieutenants, each the commandant of a different Labour faction. If one faction thought the other faction might triumph, that persuaded them to back the status quo instead. Another reason why David Miliband didn’t challenge Brown was because he thought the party might turn to Alan Johnson if Brown went, and not him.

A successful challenger must perform three functions at once. They must reassure markets and elites; they must excite activists and MPs; and they must appear plausible to ordinary voters. That combination is exceptionally rare. Tony Blair certainly managed it. Jenkins only managed two out of three (he was probably too patrician to appeal to regular voters, especially as the Sixties started swinging). And Streeting perhaps manages two or even three as well. He is one of the few figures in the current Cabinet whom Labour MPs can plausibly imagine facing Nigel Farage across a television studio without visibly shrinking. He is fluent, a self-declared revisionist, emotionally direct in the modern political style with a powerful backstory. But Labour history is not especially kind to obvious heirs, even when they look much more likely to be successful. The party distrusts naked ambition on almost theological grounds because surely true Left-wingers would want to put the common good first.

So, a politician seeking the leadership must appear ready without appearing too eager. The advice that Brown always tried to give himself was to do a good job, and not look like he was actively plotting against Blair, simply being available when a vacancy arose. A wise dictum — albeit one that fell apart as his desire to enter No. 10 rose to almost pathological levels. In 2006, his ally Tom Watson launched the so-called “curry house” plot against Blair. However, in what became a running joke in Westminster, the conspirators’ attempts to keep the meeting secret spectacularly failed after they signed the restaurant’s visitors’ book, which was then leaked to the BBC.

Brown finally inherited the premiership in June 2007, after years of subterranean warfare — though not before Labour briefly descended into the sort of factional farce that only Labour can produce. Michael Meacher and John McDonnell maneuvered against Brown simultaneously, prompting one weary figure to remark that “the left hand doesn’t know what the far-left hand is doing”. But even that was not as peculiar as Barry Gardiner flying home from Dubai to run for leader, only to throw in the towel upon landing.

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How to topple a Labour leader

By Richard Johnson

Coups fail when ministers hesitate, factions freelance, allies leak against one another, and everybody assumes someone else has counted the numbers properly. Most failed Labour coups begin in perfect agreement that the party leader is intolerable — only to end with catastrophic disagreement about who should replace him. Starmer’s saving grace is that those calling for his replacement have yet to choose their champion. In the coming days Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham might all join the contest — assuming Burnham can find a seat in time. If Starmer chooses to stay and fight, he may ultimately survive a bruising leadership challenge simply because his enemies can’t shape their forces into a single fatal implement.

As the clouds of dissatisfaction swirl about him, Starmer seemingly faces a choice. He could adopt a wait-and-see approach; or he could use Attlee’s method of coopting rivals into allies. Yet, instead, his experience as a former prosecutor seems to be governing his actions. He blocked Burnham from standing in Gorton and Denton (even turning up to vote against in person); suspended the whip from MPs who sided with the SNP over the two-child benefit cap; and insisted that Rayner resign over her tax problems. Now that those seem to be resolved in any case, wouldn’t it have been better to have kept her inside the tent? Lawyer first, politician second, this purge-and-eliminate approach looks more like something out of the Neil Kinnock playbook than anything else.

Through the Eighties, Kinnock played an enormously important part in preparing Labour for a return to power. That meant he had to be ruthless in purging the hard-Left — as in his landmark 1985 conference speech, where he railed against the hard-Left militant faction in Liverpool. The rest of the party knew that the radicals were harming their electoral chances, and so were prepared to back Kinnock all the way.

Starmer has followed the Kinnock approach, albeit without the conditions to make it work. Notably, he lacks an external threat that the grassroots feel they need protecting from. The Conservatives have collapsed, and though the Greens and Reform are both a source of deep anxiety, they’ve yet to prove themselves as potent parliamentary forces. Besides, whoever ends up leading the party three months from now, the next election is still years away. The purge-and-eliminate strategy hardly seems wise in the circumstances. Maybe Heseltine’s dictum will need to be rewritten for Starmer. The leader who wields the knife loses the crown.

Boris Johnson was the first major politician to successfully harness the chaos. Back in 2019, as the Conservatives faced electoral collapse and the rise of insurgent populism, he posed as a maverick outsider and — despite leading a party that had been in power for almost a decade — turned government into a vehicle for revolt. He went on to win the largest Tory majority since 1987 and Got Brexit Done.

Labour is now facing a moment of similar peril. It has lost Wales and vast swathes of urban Britain, as well as towns and suburbs to Nigel Farage’s Reform. Much like the Tories before Johnson, Labour seems done for; remote and detached from the people it claims to represent.

So, as chaos consumes Westminster, the party is frantically searching for a political redeemer. Wes Streeting, resigning as Health Secretary yesterday, offered a diagnosis: “where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift.” But besides his impressive alliteration, the now former Health Secretary didn’t offer much by way of solutions. Indeed, at the time of writing, no senior MP has mounted a leadership challenge to Starmer. In fact, the party would seem paralyzed but for one man: Andy Burnham. And late yesterday, Josh Simons forsook his Makerfield constituency to allow the Manchester Mayor to contest the seat in a by-election which, should he win, will mean he can stand for the leadership.

Burnham probably doesn’t think he has much to learn from the tousle-haired Tory. But if he does win the seat, and later replaces Starmer, he will have to learn what Johnson instinctively understood: to build a coalition strong enough to stop Farage’s populist cavalcade, he must rescue Labour from elements killing it from within.

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The battle for Makerfield

By Felix Pope

Starmer has turned Labour into a party of cautious, insipid managers — adding credence to the caricature of centrist politics. Even on Monday, when he had to give the speech of a lifetime, the Prime Minister pledged to nationalize British Steel, but only “pending review”. Those two words sum up everything that has gone wrong during his premiership.

So Labour needs an insurgent — against the status quo yet, like Johnson, from inside the corridors of power. But does Burnham have it in him? To an extent, his uncontentious manner reflects the broader culture of much of Labour. There is a longstanding instinct, particularly on the “soft Left”, to reconcile factions and bring people together.  Gordon Brown, as his premiership took a turn for the worse, memorably welcomed Peter Mandelson back as Business Secretary. A few years later, after upsetting the odds, Ed Miliband offered an olive branch to the Blairites by making Alan Johnson — who later admitted to buying a copy of Economics for Dummies — his shadow Chancellor. Even Blair had Robin Cook, John Prescott and Clare Short.

Recent history suggests there’s not much evidence that such emollience, by itself, is a strategy. Mandelson’s prodigal return didn’t make the slightest difference for Labour in the general election that followed. Picking Alan Johnson, and later Ed Balls, as his shadow chancellors stopped Miliband from crafting a distinctive political brand. And right now, with Labour already in power, Burnham can’t afford to prioritize uniting several hundred MPs over uniting the country. The former, after all, might soon depend on him to save their jobs.

Instead, Burnham must concede that his own party is just as dysfunctional as the Conservatives were, and accept Labour’s shared culpability for decades of bad decisions: from PFI and privatizing utilities to the Iraq War; an economic model built on cheap migrant labor and, latterly, trying to thwart Brexit. That, after all, is at the core of Nigel Farage’s message: decades of failure are the result of a rotten consensus, overseen by the uniparty as it squatted in the “center ground”. This smug dogmatism insulated politicians from the needs and opinions of the public. It’s precisely why the potential Hail Mary presently being pitched by some Starmer supporters, re-joining the EU, will appall so many. And yet, Labour still doesn’t get it.

Burnham, then, must accept the accuracy of Reform’s diagnosis — before outlining his own alternative — a policy platform increasingly known as Manchesterism. At the heart of this agenda is a vision based on sovereignty, common ownership and a productive national economy: themes that aren’t offputting to the majority of Reform voters. It has the feel of a Left-wing, British version of MAGA, a prospectus that could attract a large bloc of voters.

Manchesterism, as detailed in a report this week, identifies the root of Britain’s permanent slide in living standards as the extractive nature of rentierism, be it buy-to-let landlords, private equity or foreign sovereign-wealth funds. Yet besides this critique, which unsurprisingly calls for public ownership of things such as water and energy, is a pro-enterprise agenda embedded in a state that protects. If you have £80,000 of student debt you are less likely to start a business, or begin a family — a self-evident truth somehow lost on the policy wonks of SW1.

In other words, Burnham should attack the prime movers of precarious Britain — from the architects of tuition fees to those who pushed outsourcing into every corner of local government. Successfully selling this platform must therefore be accompanied by upbraiding the likes of the Tony Blair Institute, ditching ID cards and asking questions about the wisdom of various constitutional reforms since 1997. I’m yet to hear a socialist argument for the Supreme Court, or Osborne’s even more idiotic OBR. And while I don’t favor a hereditary system, it’s hard to argue that the “reformed” House of Lords, built on cronyism and party patronage, is any better. For decades, Burnham should say, the Party lost its way. A vital connection with the toiling classes was lost. Implicating a government within which he served — that of Tony Blair — would only serve to underscore the extent of his critique, while blunting attacks from Reform.

Among all the figures currently being discussed as successors to Starmer, Burnham stands apart because he alone appears capable of building a coalition to stop Reform. Wes Streeting is simply the continuity candidate for the uniparty, associated with all those figures the voters distrust. Ed Miliband was rejected by the electorate once before, and would struggle to present himself as a figure of renewal. While Angela Rayner remains the preferred candidate of several trade unions, doubts about her authority within the party persist — and she has seemed increasingly lightweight since Labour entered office. Others floated — such as Al Cairns and Shabana Mahmood — have no hope with the Labour membership. Cairns has only been an MP for two years, and has no policy agenda or base within the party. Meanwhile Mahmood’s tenure as Home Secretary has arguably angered Labour members more than anyone.

Burnham, though, has that rare advantage. He alone among these purported rivals can command support from both his party’s parliamentarians and its members — as well as the general public. Such a convergence matters deeply as the party enters what looks like to be an existential crisis.

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To succeed, though, will take more than calling for a new comms strategy, “re-framing” the national debate or nebulous calls for unity. Labour’s most popular national figure will need to convince voters he understands why they have lost trust in the system — and that he has a plan for two decades of decline. This doesn’t mean he should overcook his radical credentials, and spook the bond markets. Rather he must start by conveying a sense of urgency and action, while re-connecting with the constituencies Starmer alienated in recent years — from those who support the cause of a Palestinian state to small business and the Labour Left. At the same time, he could do worse than purge, or at the very least alienate, a few Bluesky liberals. From the start, he’ll need to demonstrate what he’s against.

After all, that’s what Johnson did in 2019, when he dispensed with the pro-European awkward squad — a prologue to turning around the electoral fortunes of a Tory party in meltdown. Like Johnson, Burnham needs to show he’s on the side of the people against the Brahmin elite. What’s more, establishing political consent in the 2020s means governing as an insurgent, a fact that the spin doctors and ideologues of the long Nineties — who generally populate the opinion columns of this country’s broadsheets — are bewildered by. Listen to such voices for much longer, and Labour might well vanish for good.

Of course, there remain some ubiquitous animal behaviors whose fitness-enhancing value remains a true mystery. Why, for instance, do creatures ever panic? That is, why do they fail to respond in a well-controlled way to environmental threats; why do they muddle important considerations and unimportant ones; why do they sometimes “act-out” or fail to act at all when the stakes are at their very highest?

One has only to look at the two mesmerizing examples of political panic put before us by the Labour Party this week to see how vividly dysfunctional a reaction it is. Politicians rarely face such a clear-cut test of their survival instincts as Keir Starmer did on Tuesday — a reckoning, moreover, largely of his own orchestration. No. 10 strategists apparently toiled long through the weekend to ensure his latest reset speech — his 10th? his 20th? — would see off his challengers.

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Surely, faced with the political equivalent of a fight-or-flight threat to his life, Starmer’s reaction would not be the familiar rehearsal, adenoidal in sound and spirit, of a few pre-announced policies and coma-inducing oratorical leitmotifs (“I’ve learned a lot in the first two years in the job. In terms of the policy challenges our country faces…”)? As it happened, like a creature paralyzed by the overwhelming odds against it, Starmer didn’t even attempt to deviate from his tried-and-tested soporific style, whose only appeal at this stage must be its sheer familiarity: a flat, dull, self-derivative piece of oratory. In a truly courageous piece of spin, a listening Labour party apparatchik ventured that he had never heard Starmer speak so “personally” about his background. Ah, yes, Keir Starmer: famously unwilling to use his working-class background as a rhetorical crutch and positively cagey about his father’s mystery profession.

Alongside panic manifesting as overthought underreaction, we have witnessed panic as mindless overreaction. By her own admission, the backbench MP Catherine West hadn’t even looked up her own party’s internal rules before initiating her assault on the Starmer premiership. Still 100 or so of her colleagues signed onto her aimless plan — apparently insensitive to the consideration that whoever replaces Starmer is highly likely to be worse, not least in some of the very same respects that he is already bad. To panic is often to regard action — any action at all, even those that make things worse — as better than failing to act at all.

Philosophers have recently become interested in the idea that groups, as well as individuals, might have mental states — and, therefore, that actions and behaviors might be attributed to them too. In Westminster’s strange ecosystem, one such creature is the lobby: the political media itself. Its unusual, apparently counter-adaptive trait is to thrive on panic. The combination of rolling news coverage, diabolically amplified by the restless Sauron’s eye of X, may as well have been designed to initiate the equivalent of speculative runs on politicians’ political capital. Always on the alert for the first tremors of chaos or collapse, its standing inclination is to direct its disordered attention to every fresh twist of the news cycle. To the chronically online, there is a special sense attached to a “good day” on X: it is one in which, by a kind of dispersed psychological alchemy, the site seems to act as a single collective intelligence — achieving a kind of flow state in which a steady stream of breaking news and claxon emojis melds seamlessly with parody, self-reference, and a commentary providing an instantaneously memeified parallel reality. Has two-tier Keir become two-year Kier? Is No. 10’s sexy lectern man getting a good night’s sleep before his next big outing? Has the prime minister appointed Myra Hindley as children and safe-guarding minister as part of is latest ingenious reset? Wouldn’t it be oh-so-funny if Samantha Niblett, champion of Labour’s ill-conceived “summer of sex” campaign, becomes the “69th” MP to disown her prime minister? The chains of mutual-reference and random association are akin to the thoughts of a disordered mind: the significant and insignificant competing for shared space. When the Johnson government was brought to its brink, ministers were resigning faster than they could be feasibly replaced: the speed and publicity of social-media announcements creating a sense of uncontained, perhaps uncontainable, chaos.

Johnson was correct when, delivering his resignation speech from outside No. 10, he bitterly noted that “at Westminster, the herd instinct is powerful and when the herd moves, it moves”. What he didn’t mention is that such speculative runs would be near impossible to achieve without the coordination mechanism now provided by modern media. Under previous regimes, politicians found room for maneuver amid the comparatively slow speed of information. Just consider the astonishingly quaint recollection Ken Clarke gives of Black Wednesday, when Britain crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. Having “pottered around” at the Home Office a bit, Clarke joined Michael Heseltine and Douglas Hurd who were “cooped up” in Admiralty House, “drinking tea [and] hoping against hope that a second-interest rate rise would work” to avert a sterling crisis. Only some hours into the afternoon did it occur to any of them that, in their splendid isolation from the flow of information, they “were probably less well informed than perhaps anybody else in the United Kingdom about exactly what was going on”. “We began to search for a transistor radio.”

However counterintuitive, in political crises too much information can be as destabilizing as too little. The reasons Britain has recently surpassed Italian levels of prime-ministerial replacement are probably overdetermined. But one important accelerant to the many underlying problems is the dysfunctional epistemic environment, one which offers a surfeit of opportunities to overreact to new information. Recently, Daniel Kodsi and I have argued that there is a distinctive kind of intellectual pathology associated with the temptation towards “presentism”, and more generally the temptation to attach outsize significance to incoming data simply because it is novel or striking. Of course, “presentism” might as well be the in-house motto of rolling news: with its stunted attention span and breathless inability to differentiate between what is significant and what is merely novel.

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Of course, the harried reporters of rolling news and locked-in situation-monitors of social media might with some justification claim that their business is a short-term market in novel information. But it is telling that when the hive mind of the modern press is thrown into overdrive, even the criterion of novelty is relaxed: the more basic objective being a manic exercise in pattern recognition for whatever will stoke controversy, and keep the perpetual motion-machine of the news cycle humming at full speed. For that purpose, old news repurposed as revelation will do just as well — aided and abetted by the kind of collective amnesia that comes naturally to a mind that lives in a permanent present. The news that Peter Mandelson had “failed to pass” security vetting in the run up to being posted to Washington as ambassador had been prominently reported in the Independent months before being resurrected as chaos-inducing scoop when its political valence changed. Likewise, clearly not recognizing the moralistic potential of what they had unearthed, the Mail on Sunday reported in gossipy style on early events in the scandal that would become “Partygate” a year before the press adopted the cause with monomaniacal fervor. As was so clear with Partygate, the media’s characteristic priority — to prosecute every fresh detail of a rolling saga under the crudest moral lens to hand — can often actively inhibit the effort to collectively confront harder questions, about, say, the justification and efficacy of lockdowns themselves.

Now it is Starmer’s turn to be the subject of the modern media environment’s special ability to speculate a crisis into being. Pathologically dull and terminally unimaginative, Starmer hasn’t changed a bit since being elected. That the local elections would result in catastrophic Labour losses was not only eminently predictable, but widely predicted, not least by journalists who lusted for months over the political instability that might result. The deeper, underlying difficulty — that Labour’s existing policy program is unequal to alleviating any of the country’s long-term structural or cultural ills — should not come as a surprise to anyone so close to Starmer as to actually be one of his sitting MPs. Why panic now, then, when the evidence of political malaise has been so clear for so long? In an environment dominated by noise, perhaps they can no longer pick out a long-run signal.

More to the point, why think for even a moment that any successor to Starmer would be able to resist the modern media’s predation? The hankering after instability and hunger for panic that moves the news cycle is constitutive to its operation, and not so much — as commentators used to speculate about successive Conservative leaders — something that results from an individual leader’s ability to project “vision” or competence. Britain, as many of the media’s commentators like to observe, seems to have become “ungovernable”: a verdict that should be delivered as much in a spirit of self-congratulation as impartial observation.

Every 30 seconds or so, a minor Minister would emerge blinking through the familiar Downing Street doorway, only to be heckled by the chaotic bunch of hacks who sounded more like creditors demanding their money in small-claims court than esteemed veterans of Britain’s press. Most of the representatives of His Majesty’s Government managed to ignore the questions being shouted at them and scuttled off. But a few stopped to impart their wisdom. They did that British-politician thing, repeating the same line, over and over, no matter the query: “Our job is to carry on, as the public expects . . . to carry on . . . as the public expects.” Is there a God? Can historicism survive itself? Should young men take up balls-maxxing? “Our job is to carry on, as the public expects.”

Astonishingly, these scenes were playing out in real time on Sky News on Tuesday afternoon. For over in London, the British political and media class are staging a parody of themselves as the Labour Government totters and the Prime Minister is urged to commit Harikiri over a bad set of local election results.

Viewed from the other side of the Atlantic, Britain’s almost comedic political chaos can prompt smug self-satisfaction — based on our stronger American presidency and more stable party duopoly of Democrats and Republicans. But, really, it should inspire dismay in Washington — and not a little internal anxiety.

Britain is supposed to be a serious power. Its nuclear submarines prowl distant waters, carrying the threat of global mega-death. It’s the world’s fifth or sixth largest economy (depending on which measure you use). It is home to a world financial capital and a banking system whose stability has been the envy of the world going back to the 19th century. A seafaring island people with a preternatural knack for harmonizing hierarchy and liberty.

The special relationship is enduringly important for Americans for these reasons and more. But these, in turn, have rested upon the stability, state capacity, and political moderation that characterized Britain at its imperial zenith in the 19th century and survived the collapse of the Empire in the immediate postwar years.

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To take one example, in confronting the challenges of industrial modernity — the squalor and poverty of the working class, the chaos of market life — Britain succumbed to neither French-style radicalism nor German or southern European authoritarianism. Instead, social compromises were struck within the give-and-take politicking of Parliament; and one of the world’s most rigid class systems invited the full participation of a labour movement and its associated party; trade unionists could be, and would be, made lords (miraculous, if you think about it).

Yet in the early decades of the 21st century, stability, state capacity, and creative moderation are scarcely in evidence. No British prime minister, it seems, can be permitted to finish a full term: not if “the bond markets” disapprove or local elections go badly. The British public and political classes, it seems, have exempted themselves from H.L. Mencken’s democratic maxim: the people have voted, and now they should it get it good and hard. (Yes, yes, it’s parliamentary parties that win mandates; but something’s gone terribly when Italian premiers last longer in office, on average, than their British counterparts.)

The collapse in British state capacity is less cartoonishly visible, but no less serious. The upshot is a state bureaucracy that is at once bloated and increasingly incapable of coordinating economic activity and delivering on core functions. My colleague Tom Ough has described modern Britain as starved of the “agentic” initiative: both at the level of the state and of individual actors (compare this with the Foreign Office of old and its individual spies and diplomats who’d create new Mideast states by day and compose Arabic poetry by night). The upshot for America: a Britain that would struggle to field a single carrier — even if motivated to do so in a less foolish operation than President Trump’s Iran war.

As for moderation: taking a cue from Orwell, the American intelligentsia has long viewed Britons as somehow naturally immune to spittle-flecked political fanaticism of every stripe. British liberty rejected the yoke of every Nosey Parker, as Orwell observed (while getting bombed by the Luftwaffe), and arch British humor mocks every would-be Lord Haw-Haw.

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But I’m not sure I share this confidence anymore. More and more, one encounters in British political culture, Left and Right, some of that same unblinking earnestness which renders Americans all too susceptible to barmy visionaries. American culture is, after all, partly the work of Puritans who found Caroline England insufficiently miserable and sought a new land in which they could make each other even more miserable.

Now, owing to US material and cultural domination, the tendency has traveled in the reverse direction. Even as the racial and gender craze of 2020 came and went in America — we’re visionaries but also have short attention spans — the same seem to have greater staying power in Britain. The English Right, meanwhile, increasingly views its own country through the distorted lens of America’s online Right: “This is what they took from you” runs the caption to AI slop videos showing Victorian and Edwardian England with the industrial misery neatly cropped out. This trend, too, has grave foreign-policy implications for Washington. To wit, a Britain racked by severe cultural incohesion — if not “Balkanization” — is likely to be internally distracted, struggling to project power even in its own near abroad.

Which brings us to American internal anxiety prompted by the current Starmerpocalypse. The US-UK special relationship isn’t just about British troops joining Americans in the trenches (a comradeship the Trump administration has too often callously denigrated). It’s also about those “mystic chords of memory” that perhaps throb more sentimentally in too-earnest American hearts than in British ones. Even the Trump administration, after all, concedes that “our legal system, our culture, and values is very much an offshoot of what was going on the British Isles for hundreds of years”, as JD Vance told me in an interview last year.

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America has been exporting its recent anxieties and mad enthusiasms to its much older cultural predecessor. At the same time, we tell ourselves that the United States, for all its trigger-happy daily violence, has done a better job of overcoming the problems that wrack Britain and other European states in the wake of globalization and mass migration. But is that really true? Don’t some of America’s deeper crises of identity — those that go beyond the recent culture wars — resemble British crises?

Britain, as Enoch Powell observed in an encounter with William F. Buckley, never quite resolved what it meant to go from a globe-spanning empire to an ordinary country: what claims did the former subjects of the Empire have upon the home islands after decolonization? There’s a case to be made that America’s post-1965 immigration — the Asian, African, and Latin wave that made me an American by choice — was an equally momentous transformation, giving rise to a similar tangle of problems having to do with representation, cohesion, and belonging.

These are discomfiting questions. Get it together, Brits, so we can take comfort once more in our Churchill mugs and “Keep Calm” T-shirts.

Much of the subsequent “post-match analysis” has not understood the magnitude of this shift, so we’ve decided to debunk some of the local elections myths you are going to hear on repeat over the coming week.

Myth #1: Labour should be relieved it wasn’t worse

The loss of 1,200+ seats is, amazingly, being recast as a surprisingly good result for Labour. Our internal estimates of how England would have voted if the whole country were up for election puts Reform on 28% of the vote, followed by the Conservatives on 20%, with Labour on 18%, the Greens on 17%, and the Liberal Democrats on 15%. Compared with the 2024 general election, there is no local authority in England where Labour did not lose ground.

There is, then, a very real possibility that in an England-wide election, Labour would finish behind both Reform and the Conservatives (and possibly the Greens), while being wiped out in Wales and pushed into third place in Scotland. In no reasonable world could a governing party failing to finish in the top two of any of Britain’s constituent countries be seen as anything other than catastrophic.

Myth #2: The Liberal Democrats should be thrilled

While the Liberal Democrats gained some seats in this election, our modeling shows its vote share has barely changed since the 2024 general election. Once the country’s natural third party, it has failed to capitalize on electoral fragmentation to anything like the extent of Reform or the Greens. It may have seemed like the party best-placed to capture Labour voters deserting the government — no longer.

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey is one of the clear victims of this new era of conviction politics. Polling consistently shows that the public’s feelings towards Davey are more muted compared with feelings towards either Nigel Farage or Zack Polanski — so while Davey is less polarizing, he is also less galvanizing. This week, a poll from Deltapoll put the Lib Dems on just 9% of the vote, down 3 points on the 2024 general election.

At a time when voters are fed up with the two main parties, this is a bad result.

Myth #3: Reform has peaked

The idea that Reform support has dropped since the 2025 locals, popular in some circles on social media, is not supported by the data. Our projected national vote share sees Reform more or less equal with its 2025 level. It may be true to say it has plateaued, but if so it is still several points above its rivals. Under first-past-the-post, that is enough to deliver a landslide of seats.

It is notable that the one area where Reform did lose ground is in Norfolk, where it faced 11 candidates from Rupert Lowe’s Great Yarmouth First, though Lowe’s local popularity means this challenge is unlikely to materialize nationwide.

Myth #4: Reform and Green gains were driven by turnout and tactical voting

In England’s first experiment with five-party politics on Thursday, tactical voting was barely a factor. Since the polls closed on Thursday, we’ve spoken to 2,000 voters in parts of England where elections were held. When we asked voters to describe in their own words why they voted the way they did, fewer than 1-in-10 raised tactical voting as a consideration.

Reform’s resilience cannot be attributed to differential turnout. One of the most telling findings from our poll is the general election vote intention among people who did not vote on Thursday, in which Reform is ahead on 24% of the vote.

Myth #5: The rise of populist parties is down to a protest vote

There is no consolation to be found for the Labour government in the notion that this is a midterm “protest vote”. Our analysis finds that both Reform and the Greens have the highest levels of voter retention between the local election vote and voters’ stated general election vote intention. Of those who voted Reform on Thursday, 85% said they would do so again at a general election, closely followed by the Greens on 83%. There is simply no evidence to suggest that the electorate voting in Reform councilors would be uncomfortable with the prospect of Nigel Farage in No. 10.

The data are clear: the continued success of Reform and the Greens cannot be attributed to tactical voting, differential turnout, or mid-term crankiness on behalf of the electorate. Instead, we are witnessing a systematic consolidation of support for these insurgent parties among their respective bases. We ran regression analysis on the wards which have already reported results while writing this piece, and found that the largest demographic drivers of constituency swing for the Greens and Reform were the exact same demographics which predicted their previous strength. In other words, Reform and the Greens are locking in ever-increasing shares of their potential support bases, rather than making inroads into unfamiliar territory.

Myth #6: The scale of Labour’s losses is down to small margins

Now that five-party politics has truly arrived, one consequence is that margins of victory in elections are narrowing. Most contests are now won by candidates with less than half of the votes. Unfortunately for Labour, there is no solace to be taken in this trend either: it is their victories which were the narrowest of all in Thursday’s elections. In contrast, where Reform won, they won comfortably.

These are not protest votes. They are not tactical votes. They are not merely a reflection of turnout differentials, or the vagaries of local elections taking place in unrepresentative areas of the country. What we are seeing across the country is a genuine increase and consolidation in support for the two insurgent populist wings in British politics. Around 45% of voters would have backed Reform or the Greens if these elections were replicated England-wide, rivaling the total of the three establishment parties.

This, then, was the first proper test of how Britain’s quixotic, first-past-the-post electoral system would hold up under the weight of five parties. It is clearly already beginning to feel the strain. Our modeling suggests that if these results were replicated at a general election, Reform would comfortably win the most seats, but still fall just short of a majority.

Given the increasingly chaotic and distorted nature of our elections, this five-party system may not last for long. But those hoping for a return to two-party politics should be careful what they wish for. If Britain enters a new era of dominance by two parties, there is no guarantee that those parties will be Labour or the Conservatives.

It is amid this wreckage that Andy Burnham plots his next move. Long touted as a potential challenger for the Labour leadership, and after years biding his time in Manchester, Burnham and his followers sense that this is his moment to strike, and indeed perhaps his last chance to return to Westminster. 

The prospect of a Burnham coup has taken on new potency in recent months, discussed as a serious proposition not just by the usual suspects of the soft-Left, but also by his erstwhile factional foes. The party is loathed across the country — after the first 10 declared councils, Labour has lost around 83% the council seats it was defending, including in former Red Wall areas such as Hartlepool. This ratio is unlikely to be carried throughout the day, yet it speaks to a deep loss and anger in areas which were once deemed the party’s heartlands. In this context, Burnham remains one of the few national political figures with positive cut-through among the public. Survation polling suggested that had Burnham stood in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election, Labour would have taken 47% of the vote, with the Greens on 25% and Reform on 21%. 

The key to Burnham’s success has been his experience as Mayor of Greater Manchester. From buses and policing to homelessness and housing, this estranged child of Blairism has forged a new political identity, distinguishing him from the toxic trappings of Labour party loyalty. Burnham’s talents don’t lie so much in the technical detail of policy, as in his apparently effortless knack for strategic narrative, and his uncanny grasp of public mood. From nixing Ultra Low Emission Zones to backing investigations into grooming gangs, Burnham has resisted, at every stage, attempts to be pigeonholed as a daft Lefties caricature, one unconcerned with the issues which matter to Reform and its voters. 

The relentless logic of “Burnham or bust” has even begun to acquire force among the Mayor’s factional opponents. Yet his route to No. 10 will not be easy. To begin with, of course, Burnham needs to find a way to re-enter Parliament. While his team has briefed that several serving MPs are willing to step aside for the good of the party, that’s easier said than done with the added prospect of challenging a Labour NEC famed for making factional decisions against him. Then there’s the volatile electoral environment, which makes any by-election a roll of the dice — even for the King of the North. Take today’s results in Burnham’s own patch: in Tameside, a Greater Manchester borough, Labour has lost 16 seats, as Reform gained 18. Elsewhere in Greater Manchester, the news is grim too; though the party clings to power in Wigan, every Labour councilor up for election is now out of a job — and near clean sweeps for Reform in Salford too.

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There are other problems. Assuming that he does manage to both re-enter Parliament and outfox his rivals, today’s results hint that even as prime minister he could struggle at the next general election. Labour’s task now is split between recouping votes from Reform to their right, but also from the Greens to their left, illustrating the very different voting tribes Labour now caters to. In the Northern post-industrial towns of Wigan, Salford, and Hartlepool losses have primarily accrued to Reform. In Oxford, Exeter and Ealing, the Greens have made gains. The loss of the Senedd and Scottish Parliamentary presence also bakes in Labour’s decline in two former powerhouses: confirming the eradication of these former vote-farms for the party. Labour, in short, seems politically snookered, with an English voter-base so riven between Reform and Green, and with nationalists triumphant in Cardiff and Edinburgh, that the former party of the people seems to have no natural constituency left. 

No less important, this fractured political landscape shows the difficulties any potential leader will face on the policy front. For the first time in decades, Labour’s lost voters have alternatives, yet these alternatives disagree on everything except dismantling the hated status quo. The Greens have turned Labour’s moral wounds on Gaza, housing, and metropolitan neglect into a new political home, with a membership surpassing 200,000. Reform, meanwhile, has seized much of the narrative around nationhood, pride and belonging in many of Britain’s deprived post-industrial regions. 

If anyone can perform this balancing act, it’s Burnham. But unlike in Greater Manchester, Burnham in Parliament will be dependent on a large body of disparate MPs to carry through his vision. Years in the wilderness have weakened his connections and friendships, leaving him with little in the way of a truly loyal following among the PLP. The road to Parliament will also require him to make deals with many on the Labour Right, the same machine politicians responsible for the tone-deaf posturing and self-destructive factionalizing which has landed the party in such a mess. 

Not that it’s all bad news for Burnham. For one thing, both Reform and the Greens have serious weaknesses. Zack Polanski’s rapid rise has brought organizational strain, factional tension and intense scrutiny over allegations of antisemitism. No less important, mass activist membership is not simply new to the Greens, it also marks a departure philosophically from a party which has always traditionally seen itself as an electoral vehicle more than a social movement. 

Reform, too, has compromised its radical credentials. Defected Tory frontbenchers proffering fiscal conservatism obviously dilute Farage’s potent narrative of change. Revelations of huge undeclared donations from foreign entities and crypto-billionaires are scandalous, while the party’s previous electoral successes have ended badly too. From Kent to Stafford to Lancashire, Reform councils have been mired in fratricidal squabbling and operational chaos; they have failed to deliver on key promises such as cutting waste, lowering council tax and managing local services more effectively. 

As Reform picks up many more councils over the next 24 hours, not least after its triumph in erstwhile Labour strongholds like Newcastle-under-Lyme, expect more awkward questions over the months and years ahead. There is also a risk for Reform of too much success, too quickly. This organization with no real experience or history managing the complex organs of local government could easily flounder. In a sense, Farage finds himself caught in his own momentum, relying on the wave to carry on crashing through without breaking and receding.

As for Burnham, he may have other reasons for hope too. While it’s true that both Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are already in Parliament, and both purportedly sitting on the 81 MP nominations needed to trigger a leadership contest, the results today show that neither of them have the security to reinforce a leadership bid, facing the prospect of losing their thin majorities at the next general election. Think again to Tameside: not only has Labour been punished in the council, it’s also Rayner’s own seat. As for Streeting, he defends a slim majority in Ilford North. 

Yet if Burnham’s rivals may now be thinking of their own futures, whether in No. 10 or indeed Parliament generally, Burnham’s route to Westminster requires a delicate dance: one in which Starmer is defenestrated but not so quickly as to preclude his ability to participate in a future contest. Streeting, in particular, is all too aware of this. Facing certain annihilation in a run-off with Burnham, the Health Secretary’s allies are already briefing that they could precipitate the contest early, denying Burnham his chance. 

In this, the events of the next 24 hours may prove crucial. The pro-Burnham camp’s strategy to head off a pre-emptive challenge from Streeting is to pressure Starmer into a timetable for managed departure, providing breathing space to find a seat and allowing a dignified retreat for the beleaguered PM. Yet Starmer seems unlikely to enter such an agreement willingly, without tremendous pressure. Burnham’s best chance lies in the goldilocks zone between complete wipeout — increasing pressure for Starmer’s immediate departure — set against devastating, but not cataclysmic results which allow for a more measured and timely departure. Success, then, requires skillful and coordinated interventions from both parliamentary colleagues and timely presentations from Burnham himself.

For the moment, anyway, Labour’s sensible money seems to have little choice but to accept the Burnham wager. The time is nigh for the organization to decide if it values its survival more than it hates its most popular figurehead. The party will likely find answering that question harder than it should — regardless of how grim today proves.

The No. 10 aide had fallen on his sword, sacrificing himself on the altar of Keir Starmer’s continued reign of error. The press, the public, and even the Parliamentary Labour Party, with one eye on its dismal polling, demanded someone’s head on a plate — and it certainly wouldn’t be the man who was ultimately responsible for the decision to appoint the thrice-disgraced friend of a convicted paedophile as US ambassador. Advisors advise and ministers decide, yes. But who in their right mind would want to see an otherwise successful PM, delivering essential reforms, resign over such a trifling matter?

The feeling was by no means universal. One aide told me that they wanted to reply with “[waving emoji] Off ya fuck”. That aide will be pleased that McSweeney is being hauled over the coals for his alleged role in pressurizing Foreign Office officials to expedite Peter Mandelson’s appointment, with or without due process. To the McSweeney skeptic, yesterday’s pitiful Foreign Affairs Select Committee performance would have been no surprise. Here sat a man whose image, as a Malcolm Tucker-esque fixer, had for years been carefully cultivated, not least by his allies’ incessant briefing to journalists. By this telling, “Morgan” was the real power behind the throne, a latter-day Thomas Cromwell steering the government while Sir Keir was plonked obliviously at “the front of the DLR”.

But who among us isn’t tempted to believe in an enigmatic Rasputin, the political éminence grise to which we have recently become so accustomed? Bumbling Boris lacked political consistency, but Dominic Cummings would provide operational rigor, as well as an overarching vision: a lean state, shorn of the constraints of European law and recalcitrant bureaucracy, using science and technology to facilitate post-Brexit growth.

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McSweeney was supposed to be cut from similar cloth — the consummate political fixer and wily operator on whom the PM relied for his organizational, political and ideological moorings. But in the cold light of Emily Thornberry’s camp, incredulous questioning, he wilted. Here was a diminutive, shy Cork man whose answers to the committee were anodyne deflections and polite, sometimes flustered, denials. He began with a profuse apology for recommending Mandelson as ambassador. At one point in the proceedings he had to correct himself after initially seeming to claim that he had always doubted the Prince of Darkness’s answers to questions posed in his vetting. “In September I realized I didn’t get the truth back”, said McSweeney. “At the time I thought I got the truth back. I might have mumbled my words. I got the answers back to him. I thought he was telling the truth. I thought he answered truthfully”. Clear as day.

On display was none of the panache, the charm or even the quiet menace that we might have associated with an ultra-effective operator, Labour’s backroom svengali. That isn’t to say that the dark arts of political skulduggery and intense factionalism haven’t taken place on McSweeney’s watch and at his behest. They have. The Irishman’s rise to the top is a story of furtive dinners, calculated untruths, strategic sleights of hand and discreet inner-party campaigns whose funding broke electoral law. But it’s all been done in a way that mirrors the political project that he and Starmer personify. The essence of that project is inner-party, internecine factional warfare carried out by people without any idea of their ultimate political purpose, without any conception of their ideal Britain.

With Cummings, there was an ethos behind the mythos. Whatever one thought of the Vote Leave guru, he had a theory of change, and a set of coherent, radical proposals that he had concluded would work in the national interest. His was a move-fast-and-break-things approach, to be delivered by small, accountable teams full of “weirdos and misfits” and Leninist fervor, committed to a Whitehall package reversing the influential reforms of Northcote-Trevelyan report. In contrast, McSweeney’s philosophy seems to have lacked substantive weight. What were his efforts in service of? Five ditched missions that nobody vaguely normal can recite? Or was it the six milestones, or three foundations?

Perhaps the paucity of ideas reflects McSweeney’s familial politics in the mother country. The McSweeneys are a Macroom clan of Fine Gael supporters. His aunt was Fine Gael councillor, and his cousin has been an advisor to two recent Fine Gael Taoiseachs. This kind of grounding in the anti-revolutionary, pro-Treaty traditions of one of Ireland’s conservative parties lends itself not to grand narrative or transformative agendas, but to quiet pragmatism in the service of established institutions. From rural Ireland to London, McSweeney is the college dropout who found purpose in Labour’s backroom. There, around the turn of the millennium, he punched information on New Labour’s political enemies into a primitive database, “Excalibur”, for use in Mandelson’s own Blair-era machinations. It was then that McSweeney learned the tricks of the trade, under the tutelage of the epoch’s factional enforcers.

But his emphasis on discipline outmatched anything that came before him. McSweeney oversaw a Stalinist approach to party management. He purged political rivals and suspected malcontents; he was all too willing to remove the party whip from recalcitrant MPs. But this is Stalinism without the five-year plans. It’s authoritarianism for authority’s sake. Dirty tricks must be employed, power must be exercised and maintained, simply to stop the Corbynites, to “rescue the party” from all the parasitic tendencies of the loony Left. But there was no vision for the country. Pure means, with no ends, beyond sinecures for your allies, what Thornberry called “jobs for the boys”.

In Starmer’s image, a new Parliamentary Labour Party has been created. Out of the 403, not a single one of them represents a plausible alternative Prime Minister. This is the only thing that keeps Starmer in place, in spite of his unprecedented unpopularity, itself about to collide with a coming recession and inflationary spiral. McSweeneyism, in pursuit of political professionalization, has produced a Labour-dominated House of Commons packed with legislators whose chief achievements center not around representing workers, rising through the ranks of trade unions in a variety of sectors, and sit still less upon building organizations or creating successful institutions with national impact. Instead, it is a hollowed-out parliament of junior managers armed with humanities degrees, specializing in internal slideshows for corporate public affairs departments or the third sector. Gone are the organizers, the rabble-rousers, the barnstorming autodidacts, and in are the dull young things, delivering speeches in the manner of weekly updates on Microsoft Teams. Once it was a party of labour; today it is a party of LinkedIn.

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And now, languishing in the polls, mired in scandal, hit by economic crises, and about to lose Wales and much of London to insurgent parties, even the LinkedIn PLP is restive. The putative footsoldiers of Starmerism are unmoved by claims that they owe their jobs to the Irishman. A No. 10 insider texts to say that “everyone says he’s a genius” but that McSweeney was “just a kinda sensible pair of hands… no real narrative, just data-driven.” The insider concludes: “That’s fine for winning but not for leading the country”. McSweeney’s construction of a historic majority rests on the thinnest of margins of support. This was the shallowest of victories — winning by appearing as a default option, as simply “not Tories” after the years of Partygate, Trussonomics and stagnant living standards. For all the clever vote-to-seat efficiency, it’s likely that any leader of the Labour party, a team of monkeys in red rosettes, would have fought a hard campaign against a hapless Rishi Sunak. McSweeney and Starmer’s efforts in 2024 garnered fewer votes than a Hamas and IRA-adjacent old hippy-dippy Leftist could muster in Labour’s 2019 wipeout, and significantly less than the same bearded radical won in 2017.

Without McSweeney, Starmer is less anchored. He has burned through all his goodwill and political capital. There will be no recovery. A timetable for his exit, imposed on the Prime Minister by his own Cabinet, is not out of the question. In January, Starmer blocked Andy Burnham from contesting a Denton and Gorton by-election; this time, the Prime Minister will be too weak to repeat the trick. If Starmer is given an exit timetable, Burnham will have time to gain a seat and to launch a challenge in time for party conferences in September. Among many MPs who previously gave Starmer the benefit of the doubt, the general feeling that the PM is a good man doing a bad job has given way to near-universal contempt for him on a personal level. He has shifted blame and thrown colleagues under the bus rather than take responsibility. Operation Save Keir could yet claim more scalps.

For all the fawning goodbyes crediting McSweeney’s “genius” with saving Labour “from the brink of destruction”, it may all be too late in any case. If trends continue, his legacy won’t be saving Labour, but overseeing its slow self-destruction. He may have proved adept at conquering a party machine, but far less capable of maintaining the political coalition that the machine was meant to serve — an electoral bloc currently being torn apart by competing populisms of Left and Right. McSweeneyism treated power as the destination rather than the instrument, and a party and a Prime Minister that forgets the difference rarely survives for long.

Sir Olly Robbins, the official who allegedly ignored the independent vetting of Mandelson, has said that it was a done deal — already announced to the public and the wider world. Crucially, he claims No. 10 was dismissive towards any vetting in the first place, and that his job, as a civil servant, was simply to accede to the wishes of the Prime Minister. Downing Street, for its part, is claiming that it did not lie; it was just unaware of the vetting outcome. It didn’t ask, didn’t inquire, and therefore didn’t know.

The truth is that the Prime Minister’s excuse for this Mandelson scandal is neither an aberration, nor evidence that the machinery of government requires a small tweak. It is the entirely predictable product of a broken political class, which has spent decades diffusing accountability, and blaming anyone but themselves.

The Conservatives, for they were no different, won four consecutive general elections, held office for 14 years, and cycled through five different prime ministers, yet spent far too much of that time explaining to the British public why they were unable to deliver the commitments on which they were elected. “The system” was blocking them, they said; it was the fault of “the Blob”. They were right, in part, but the blame is misplaced. And if this lesson is not learned, we will continue to spiral into decline.

“The Blob” is a metaphor for the inner workings of the British state. It is deployed by ministers to describe the feeling when they repeatedly pull a lever in government — only to find that nothing happens. This sometimes manifests itself as simple inaction on ministerial priorities by unelected officials; at other times as direct, insidious opposition from within the ranks of officialdom.

“The Blob” was once considered something of a conspiracy theory — the failing Tory government was blaming the Rolls-Royce civil service for its own failings. This view was so strongly held in some quarters that when it came into power, the Labour government of 2024 essentially prostrated itself before Whitehall. There would be no more “gaslighting” of the civil service. Now, finally, “the adults were back in the room”, and officials would be free to work their magic.

Starmer appointed Sue Gray as Chief of Staff to reset relationships between ministers and officials, and create a “positive” culture of “collaboration”. Indeed, her initial words in No. 10 to the elite ranks of the Civil Service were: “Thank you so much for welcoming us into your house… [w]e are really mindful that we are guests here, and this is where you work.” Elected officials and their government, according to Gray, were guests in the house of the Civil Service.

Within months, it fell apart. Gray was forced out in October 2024 by which time it had become clear that Labour had no plan for government beyond letting the civil service choose what it should do. By early December the same year, Labour had begun briefing that Dominic Cummings’ criticisms of the system were correct. A timeline many wouldn’t have expected.

Later, as relations between the Blob and No. 10 hit new lows, Starmer claimed too many in Whitehall were comfortable in the “tepid bath of managed decline”. The response from the civil service was extraordinary. The following day, Robert Peston reported that one official had told him there was “a mood that we [the civil service] should pull the plug on him” — a remarkable threat to make to the Prime Minister, and leader of the party with the largest electoral majority this century.

But rather than pointing out the extraordinary nature of such a claim, with unelected bureaucrats openly threatening an elected government, Peston summarized the news as “another unforced error” by Downing Street. This same pattern holds today. We now read that the civil service has “turned against” Starmer, and that there is a serious crisis in “ministerial-civil service relations”. The Government’s route out, it is argued, should be to work “to rebuild some of the trust lost by the events of the past week”, by treating officials more positively, and leaving the foundations well alone.

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Given all this, it should be obvious that the Blob exists. We hear the same stories over and over again from ex-ministers. The Blob can delay ministerial priorities until the point they’re shuffled out; it can direct policy by briefing in particular directions; and it can slow or kill off priorities it wants to. What’s worse is that some senior officials are extremely happy for this to happen (such as those who leak to journalists their praise or condemnation of a particular government).

In the end, though, blame for its existence lies firmly with our politicians. They choose the re-shuffles, they choose to shy away from fundamental changes to the system, they form governments without any plan or direction, they build quango after quango, and appoint unelected officials to positions of power.

But the Blob allows ministers to deny accountability for outcomes, prevent parliamentary debates about trade-offs, and claim that their hands are tied should a decision prove unpopular. The Blob has stepped into the vacuum — making choices, or simply avoiding actions, delaying what they dislike or taking decisions that should have been reserved for our elected representatives. In short, it has provided politicians with the ability to shirk responsibility, to come in without plans, to re-shuffle ministers regularly, and to avoid the hard work of deep state reform.

The Mandelson scandal is a clear example of this: the Prime Minister is able to play on the murky role of the civil service to avoid the fact that he was ultimately responsible for appointing Mandelson. No one denies that No. 10 wanted him as Ambassador. No one denies that they had announced it publicly. The problem isn’t in process, and it isn’t in Downing Street having a preference for a candidate. The problem, in the end, is that the Prime Minister appointed a terrible candidate, and is now reaping the whirlwind of that bad decision.

Today’s system — a labyrinth of bodies, independent panels and commissions, officials, and politicians — ensures that no single individual is ever clearly responsible for a decision, let alone an outcome. In many cases, nobody truly knows who is responsible, if anyone actually is. Every hard choice is outsourced to a wider web; every politically controversial decision is delayed and shifted away from ministers; and every major failure is subject to an inquiry that takes years, whose recommendations are accepted in full, and then forgotten entirely.

Westminster is now moving to insulate itself from any real change. There will be reviews, new safeguards, and rehashed protocols for appointments. Each will be presented as a necessary correction, yet each will fail to solve the fundamental problem. It is no exaggeration to say that finally ending this system is one of the most important pieces of work to be done right now. The future of our nation hangs upon it.

We know, after all, that this system does not work. Low wages, a broken healthcare system, broken borders, a dwindling number of taxpayers, a continuous cost of living crisis, economic stagnation, and declining living standards. The system has lurched us from crisis to crisis and never presented a vision to build a positive outcome for our nation. The best it has achieved is managed decline.

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But contrary to popular Westminster opinion, the web can be disentangled. Institutions can be reformed, replaced, or entirely abolished; responsibility for decisions can be given back to our elected representatives. Politicians can take charge by leading and making decisions, rather than accepting the current system.

We must not forget — as our political class has done for decades — that our Parliament is awe-inspiringly powerful. There is no court that presides over it, there is no law that limits it; Parliament is sovereign and supreme. All Acts can be re-written, all laws remade. There is nothing, but the incapacity of our politicians, to prevent dramatic and wholesale change. Leadership, in the end, is simple. You make choices, you take decisions, and you carry the consequences.

Politicians can choose to lead once more. They can reassert where power lies, and to accept the risks that come with it. They can ensure single-person owners of projects. If a minister takes a decision, they must own it in full. If it succeeds, the credit is theirs; if it fails, the blame is theirs. This is the way of the world outside Westminster. Only useless kings get to blame their endless advisers; elected leaders have no one but themselves to blame. No new process can substitute for this principle.

This is not radical, nor is it novel. Ministers should be responsible for their departments. The system should do what a democracy is supposed to — connect decisions to consequences. Only a political system grounded in this principle can reverse our decline and invent a new future. But such an aspiration would require our politicians to take accountability and to act boldly.

I fear, though, that Starmer and Westminster will draw the wrong lessons from this crisis. I fear Starmer will think “if only procedures had been properly followed, or if only we had better procedures, this never would have happened”. He should instead ask himself: “Why did I appoint this man? Why didn’t I just apologise for a bad decision? Why is leadership so difficult?”

I suspect that line of questioning, because it puts responsibility where it should actually lie, is not one he would like to take — nor would other politicians. For ultimately it leads to the most fundamental question of all: “Am I good enough to do this job?” And many, I suspect, will not much like the answer.

But if he’s a hero abroad, Sánchez is more often cast as a villain at home — an opportunist who has clung to power at the expense of Spain’s national interest. Sánchez has been the Secretary-General of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) since July 2014 and in office since June 2018. In that time, he’s survived Covid, the economic shock that followed, and the rise of the hard Right. Britain in the same period has churned through five prime ministers — including one who lasted just 49 days — and the economy has stagnated alongside its sewage-filled rivers.

What makes this period of stability even more surprising is that for the majority of Sánchez’s time as PM, he has governed in coalition. Since his re-election in 2023, he has presided over what sections of the Spanish press term a “Frankenstein government”. Whether it’s truly monstrous depends on your political affiliation — and perhaps your appetite for the gothic — but stitched together it certainly is.  To pass laws, PSOE has been forced into a coalition with a Left-wing alliance of smaller parties called Sumar, a verb which means “to add up”, though “make up the numbers” might be more apt. But even with their support, Sánchez falls short of a majority. So he must also go cap in hand for votes from separatist parties in the Basque Country and Catalonia that want independence from Madrid. It’s the alliance with these groups that’s proved particularly controversial. Unpopular concessions to the separatists have followed, including, most bitterly of all, an amnesty for the organizers of the illegal 2017 referendum on Catalan independence. Outside Catalonia and the Basque Country, support for independence is tiny and the subject provokes anger, even from liberals. Try saying “let them decide” in a Madrid bar and watch how the mood changes.

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So, many predicted this hodgepodge government couldn’t last. Yet it has, and Sánchez is winning admirers for the striking clarity of his values. So how on earth has he done it? 

For one thing, the Spanish system makes it hard to remove prime ministers. A government can only be toppled through a “constructive vote of no confidence”. That means opponents must agree on a replacement before they can bring the leader down.

Sánchez is also being helped by the fear of the hard Right, according to Pablo Simón, a political scientist at Carlos III University of Madrid. “Many parties back Sánchez not because they want his policies, but because they want to prevent the alternative,” says Simón. He’s referring to the emergence of the hard-Right party Vox, which has reshaped Spanish politics and coarsened the discourse, especially around immigration. In recent election campaigns, you occasionally hear the line Si te gusta el jamón, vota Vox — if you like ham, vote Vox — a charming refrain that left many wondering whether they really liked ham after all. The prospect of a coalition between Vox and the center-Right Partido Popular (PP) also helps explain Sánchez’s staying power.

But part of the answer lies in something that is almost alien to British politics, with its entrenched two-party structure, but which seems increasingly likely to define Britain’s next election: the politics of the bloc. Until recently, Spain looked very much like the UK — dominated for decades by just two political forces, PSOE on the Left and PP on the Right. That system cracked open after the 2008 financial crisis and fractured further with the rise of Vox. Sánchez has proved remarkably adept at navigating this new, uneven terrain. He cannily framed the 2023 election as a simple choice: vote for him, or get Vox. And for all the anger over his Faustian pact with the Catalan separatists, he has avoided giving them what they really want: a legal independence referendum.

The question for Britain is whether something similar may be happening at home. The recent Gorton and Denton by-election offered one of the clearest signs yet of the fragmentation of the two-party system. Together, Labour and the Greens took more than two-thirds of the vote, suggesting that in parts of the country a progressive bloc already outweighs the conservative one — music to the ears of those hoping a progressive alliance may finally be taking shape.  

A recent More in Common survey asked which parties voters would tactically block, and found that 38% of Britons would vote against Reform. Green voters were the most likely to say they would vote tactically against Reform, a view also shared by Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters. Britain’s electoral system may make formal coalitions less likely than in Spain, but informal dealmaking may already be beginning to take shape to prevent the alternative. Although progressive voters appear warm to the idea of cooperation between Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, the party machines are, for now, dead against it. Starmer’s sharp criticism of the Greens’ “sectarian” campaigning in Gorton and Denton hardly suggests he’s looking to them as a future bedfellow. And given the amount of energy he’s spent stamping out any whiff of association with the Corbyn-era Left, an alliance with the Greens of Zack Polanski would, surely, feel like the end of days.

Nevertheless, the comparison runs deeper than just voting patterns. Spain, like Britain, is a union state where the tensions pulling it apart feel familiar to anyone versed in Scottish or Welsh politics. A couple of years ago I invited my delightful Basque neighbors over for a drink. When I asked about their politics, they said they’d rather not say. It just “divides people”. As the penny dropped, I wondered briefly if this amiable couple were really cut out to be separatists. We changed the subject — Gibraltar, if I remember correctly — and got on with the rest of a pleasant evening. But in a very real way, it’s this ability to accommodate such differences that makes Sánchez’s coalition so striking: it forces the separatists to engage with the practicalities of governing, rather than just heckling from the sidelines.

“Sánchez has a remarkable political instinct,” says Simón. “His leadership style is extremely flexible and adapts quickly to changing circumstances.” Sánchez once ruled out an alliance with the separatists — until it became politically necessary. That flexibility can make him seem like a cynical operator, disguised as the handsome new doctor in a telenovela. But while the bloc holds, it also allows him to assert its values with apparent conviction. Sánchez excels at giving his base the signals it wants to hear. Time and again, he uses his power to claim the political banners that define his bloc: feminist legislation, defense of migrants, and forthright criticism of Israel’s military action in Gaza. 

And now his four-word rebuttal to Donald Trump. No a la guerra is not only a masterclass in clear communication, but a calculated callback to the Spanish Left’s opposition to the Iraq War. That conflict left a deep scar in Spain and brought down José María Aznar’s Right-wing PP government. Days before an election, ministers blamed the Basque separatists ETA for deadly train bombings, rather than the actual culprits, Al-Qaeda. 

Sánchez understands that in a multi-party system you can’t afford to be Diet Coke — you have to appear to be the real thing. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer is so preoccupied trying to prevent the drift of Labour voters to Reform that he struggles to communicate his values at all. On Iran, he seemed to plant the exact flag that progressives, still wounded by Britain’s own bitter experience in Iraq, so desperately wanted to see. But then he hoiked it from the ground like a caddy at Mar-a-Lago, leaving everyone to wonder if a flag had been planted at all. Still, he says, “we will not be drawn into the wider war.”

To be fair, Sánchez is on safer ground with his anti-war stance. A recent poll showed more than two thirds of Spaniards are against the war in Iran. In the UK, opinion is foggier — a YouGov poll found 49% opposed and 28% in favor, with the rest unsure. But Sánchez made his call at the outset of the war, before any polling had been published. Why? Because he doesn’t need to hedge his bets. He knows exactly what his bloc wants to hear.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Sánchez is more adept at dealing with the reality of multi-party politics. Spain’s two-party system started to fracture long before Britain’s. During the protests that hit the country following the 2008 crash, pork products again entered the political arena as the public branded politicians chorizos, todos, or “a bunch of crooks”. From the anger emerged the new parties, Podemos and Ciudadanos, that shattered the old duopoly of PSOE and PP. 

The Right derided Podemos’s unconventional pony-tailed leader Pablo Iglesias as a “perroflauta” —  a brilliantly compressed insult for the Spanish breed of crusty found on town square benches with a dog (perro) and a recorder (flauta), and a repertoire consisting mainly of Manu Chao. But among Spanish progressives, excitement was through the roof. Many — including a friend of mine with three houses — joined the cause. A new energy swept through the Left, anticipating the early days of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK or Bernie Sanders in the US. Long-dismissed socialist ideas suddenly felt fresh, especially to a younger generation that had never heard them from the mouths of mainstream politicians. Within a few years of its creation, Podemos had won millions of votes and dozens of seats. 

Like Ciudadanos, Podemos has now faded. However, the blocs these parties helped create remain, and it’s between these sides that the political battle is now being fought. On the one side, you have Sánchez’s socialists and their regional allies; on the other, the conservative parties of PP and Vox. 

Of course, the comparison of Spain and the UK has its limits, not least the different electoral systems. And bloc politics is far from ideal. As Simón points out, it has some big drawbacks: increased polarization and making national agreements far harder to reach.

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But both Spain and Great Britain are dealing with fragmented politics and Sánchez is the master of the bloc. Far from being unstable, his coalition has proved more durable than Britain’s recent majority governments and forces him to take clear positions that resonate with his base. Across Europe, politics is now reorganizing around competing visions of migration, identity and the state. For a country where a night out rarely begins until midnight, Spain has arrived uncharacteristically early to the bloc party. British politicians may soon discover that survival depends less on commanding a majority than on mastering Sánchez’s delicate art of holding the bloc together. 

For Starmer in particular, if he can’t find a way to appeal to his own base, he risks looking less like Hugh Grant’s PM and more like a lonely teenager on a big stage clutching a sign that reads “Vote for Pedro”. 

And yet, according to reports leaked from Labour’s National Security Council (NSC) this week, Miliband was crucial in preventing Keir Starmer from deeper embroilment in Trump’s Iran war. Far from appealing to an idealized, imagined Britain, one full of Ottolenghi-loving Fabian podcasters and policy wonks, that position leaves him closer to the public than most of the British Right. Both Reform and the Tories have either sycophantically embraced MAGA militarism, as an American client faction attached to the body politic, or else indulged in forlorn nostalgia for a prelapsarian imperial age.

Conservative commentators and politicians bemoan our inability to project power and state capacities on the world stage, demanding a reassertion of military prowess even as industry, services and the social fabric continues its inexorable decline at home. They live in a parallel dream world; the idea that there exists any latent jingoistic desire among Britons to sacrifice limited butter for inconsequential guns is as delusional as any ivory tower Left-liberalism.

Apparently Miliband’s cabinet interventions on Iran were “petulant, pacifist, legalistic and very political” — strongly reminiscent of his attitude in 2013, when he urged parliament to block UK military action against then Syrian President, Bashar al Assad. To which the only rational response can be: thank God. The Americans may not be happy (“This is not Winston Churchill we’re dealing with,” an irritated Trump told the White House press corps). But, thanks to the insistence of Red Ed, history may yet absolve the prime minister in what proves to be his finest hour, particularly in the not-unlikely scenarios that the Islamic Republic endures, re-radicalizes, or else descends into anarchy — with all the stagflationary pressures and refugee flows that implies.

To be sure, Starmer’s characteristically stiff reaction to the violence seems perfectly calibrated to alienate all sides. His sclerotic legalism has put off advocates of intervention who decry the Government’s initial hesitance in allowing US use of British bases, while opponents baulk at the subsequent U-turn giving the green light for operations to defend Gulf states from Iranian missiles. But the outcome of the NSC meeting shows where the Labour leader is politically: in his post-McSweeney and post-Gorton era, with the pivot-to-Reform strategy roundly discredited, he is a puppet of the party’s resurgent progressive forces.

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Who comes after Starmer?

By Jonny Ball

There’s little doubt that Miliband is enjoying an extended second wind in his political life. Milibandism 1.0 was an amorphous thing, bound by the residues of New Labour and the orthodoxies of the period. Post-financial crisis populism was still in its infancy, the Overton window was narrower, and any antagonism towards the post-Thatcherite settlement had to be couched in conciliatory language. A Labour figure once remarked that the Corbynite 2017 manifesto was “basically the programme Miliband would have loved to have presented” to the country — with all its paeans to nationalization, regional investment banks and the recreation of postwar social democracy updated for the 21st century.

In the end, though, Miliband was bound by Brownite instincts and the curse of his insiderism, unable to see the appeal of promises of totalizing, systemic change. Perhaps that’s why he was always something proto-Starmerite in his awkward adoption of the rhetoric of faith, family, flag. In the wake of Emily Thornberry’s St George’s Cross furore, the Labour leader told us he felt “respect” when he saw a white van. The problem wasn’t so much the odd phrasing or sentiment, but rather the dissonance between Miliband’s words and his party’s palpable disdain for overt displays of plebeian nationalism in the provinces. The issue typified his and his party’s estrangement from what might have once been their natural base of lower-paid, non-university-educated voters.

Yet Miliband’s stint as leader of the opposition also included heavy flirtations with Blue Labour: it was Miliband who ennobled Maurice Glasman, and appointed another of its thinkers, Jon Cruddas, as policy co-ordinator; it was Ed again who earned the ire of the activistocracy by stamping “controls on immigration” onto a campaign mug.

For all its faults, then, Milibandism 1.0 at least attempted to shore up the marriage between the Hampstead intellectuals and the working class that constituted the unsteady coalition of the post-Blair Labour party. It’s only in its later guise that Milibandism has become so unabashedly associated with Labour’s soft Left — the woolly, liminal space between the ultra-Atlanticist and pro-American Blairite Right, and the niche “anti-imperialist” causes and foreign guerrilla fetishism of the Corbynites. But as the cabinet doyen of that loose band, Miliband may this week have acted as the country’s foremost Left sovereigntist, a “Britain First” Left patriot, as uninterested in dissolving the country’s capabilities into the arsenal of a mercurial Washington hegemon as he was back in 2013.

Of course, it is his departmental role, rather than his non-interventionist foreign policy, that has defined Milibandism 2.0, with a more self-confident, assured performer emerging from his 2015 election loss. His name has become synonymous with the Government’s mission to decarbonize the energy grid by 2030, and as a result Miliband himself has become the whipping boy for a Right which has broken with the once-tight net zero consensus. Preventing new drilling and exploration on British territory, even as we continue to depend on volatile imports from abroad, is pure magical thinking, sacrificing pragmatism in the interests of His Majesty’s Treasury and the British balance of payments for the kind of idealistic virtue signaling so familiar to Milibandism’s core milieu.

But, he would respond, in pushing the transition to renewables so mercilessly, Miliband is in fact attempting to assert “energy independence” with “home grown” clean energy — reducing our reliance on unreliable and expensive imported sources. This isn’t a position shared by many energy economists, and it does little to assuage fears that our green transition is coinciding with the decimation of heavy industry and a rise in industrial energy costs, while new grid technology and infrastructure are sourced largely from China and Denmark. Yet whatever the problems of actually-existing Milibandism, he at least remains one of the cabinet’s few doers: his project may be incongruent with our new age of Great Power resource competition, but it is being pursued consistently, and with more alacrity than any other of the Government’s scattergun agendas.

So even if they disagree with him — whether on Iran or North Sea oil — the Right would do well to take Miliband seriously. After all, there is surely space in British politics for a sovereigntist, anti-globalist conservatism. Post-Brexit, in a deglobalizing world, that would entail the pursuit of an independent foreign policy, and a relentless focus on domestic British interests, transforming our cumbersome state into an agile, interventionist market-shaper, rebuilding industry and state capacity towards creating a more cohesive, resilient and national economy. An appetite for foreign adventurism would give way to the hard-headed realism necessitated by our status as a middle power with limited resources. The desperate maintenance of an illusory “special relationship” would give way to genuine self-reliance, and a fluid engagement with a changing world in our own interests. High welfare and high migration would be eschewed for high investment and renewed national infrastructure.

It appeared, for a moment, that this kind of Anglo-Gaullism might be the future of Reform, with its nods towards industrial policy and a renaissance of manufacturing capital. But, instead, the kneejerk Americanization of Right politics continues apace, sticking to a capricious White House like a limpet. Today, it is the Right that wishes to govern a country that doesn’t exist. And, in this context, it will be for flawed but ascendant Milibandism to reassert some shaky version of national sovereignty.

Half a millennium on from Gutenberg, it is taken for granted that if something is written down, it’s remembered — which means (paradoxically) we can forget about it. So what happens when written records are lost? If no one else can quite remember, does that mean the event didn’t happen? This question has loomed large with recent revelations that the Cabinet Office’s “propriety and ethics” team broke into a safe in 2022, to retrieve a report detailing a historic investigation of allegations made against Dame Antonia Romeo, and then destroyed the dossier.

Romeo had been accused of bullying by Foreign Office staff while working as consul-general in New York in 2017. The investigation was later dropped, prompting some to claim a cover-up. The report was stored in said safe until 2022 when Darren Tierney, then head of the government standards watchdog, retrieved and destroyed the documents.

Was this a career-saving act of deliberate forgetting? If so, it worked: Romeo was appointed Cabinet Secretary last week by Keir Starmer. Tierney, for his part, insists he only obtained the report to help in redacting a memoir by the former diplomat Lord McDonald of Salford. The same Lord McDonald, in fact, who briefed last week against Romeo’s appointment; perhaps it’s a coincidence that a fishy incident of record-deletion should also bubble to the media surface at the same moment. Or perhaps not.

In any case, the impression is of all-out Whitehall war, as competing civil service factions vie for the chance to Yes, Minister Starmer’s ailing government. But beyond the byzantine intrigues of career bureaucrats, the casual destruction of an important report speaks to a deeper sense that Britain is now governed by a universal policy of strategic forgetfulness: an amnesiocracy.

There is surely a strategic amnesia in the ongoing, obdurate official inability to remember or grapple with the cumulative enormity of the rape gang scandals. Despite the horror this ongoing national catastrophe engenders, successive reports seem to generate outrage at intervals, only to be officially forgotten again, every time, without anything significant ever changing. Most recently, having reluctantly promised an inquiry, Labour seems to be trying to kick it into the long grass. Perhaps Starmer hopes the public will forget about all the child rape and torture, and stop asking.

A similar instinct seemed to guide the recent Ministry of Justice order for Courtsdesk, a digital court reporting resource, to delete its archives. After alleging that Courtsdesk had breached its agreement by sharing sensitive data with a third-party AI company, courts minister Sarah Sackman ordered the platform to delete its archive.

This prompted widespread outcry, with journalists warning that losing the archive would amount to covering up further grooming gang trials and drastically reducing the transparency of Britain’s criminal justice system. Then, hours before it was due to shut down, Justice Secretary David Lammy U-turned on the decision.

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Was Labour trying to make criminal justice records less accessible? It’s certainly the case that court reporting supplies a stream of judgments radically out of kilter with the moral instincts of the general public, especially where “human rights” are concerned. Were I an official in the Ministry of Justice, I dare say I’d be delighted to see a large, searchable, years-long open-access database of such criminal cases wiped, in favor of a system that required reporters to make individual (and no doubt usefully onerous) applications to individual courts for specific cases.

How deliberate you assume this habitual drift toward amnesia to be probably depends on how much trust you still have that the British government has your particular interests at heart. But even if we refuse to attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, this still invites the question: why is our ruling caste getting stupider? Or, at least, more forgetful?

For amnesiocracy is hardly unique to Labour. In their noble recent pledge to cut student loan interest rates, for example, the Conservative Party seems unable to recall having designed the system in the first place. The same goldfish-like mentality appears to afflict the Tories elsewhere, while fulminating in Parliament about immigration, even as they appear to have forgotten just how much of this dyspeptic debate is a direct consequence of (really very recent) Tory policy decisions. Yes, they have to put on a show at PMQs; but the performance of not remembering previous policy decisions is so convincing it does look like they simply don’t remember.

When it comes to the habitual weaponized forgetfulness of our permanent bureaucracy, Cameron probably bears at least a share of the blame. For he presided over a primordial act of amnesiocracy: closing Britain’s civil service college, in 2012, to save money. This school served, from 1970 to 2012, as the repository and transmission mechanism for institutional memory within Britain’s permanent bureaucracy. When it was closed, few of its teaching functions were replaced. We can reasonably assume that, 14 years on, many of the older civil servants who trained prior to its closure have retired or left. Counting just the Fast Stream, we can estimate around 12,000-15,000 more have joined the service since Sunningdale closed; many of these have surely been promoted to positions of authority by now, all without any longer-term institutional memory.

Might this have anything to do with the complaint, now audible across both Labour and Tory figures, that ministers routinely pull levers and find that nothing happens? Was it Cameron’s decision to delete Britain’s institutional governance memory — one held in the aggregate memory of training personnel and veterans rather than written down — that began our long national slide toward the current sense of no one knowing how anything works? This isn’t quite the same kind of forgetfulness as the kind that elides “due diligence”, destroys files, or forgets to cut contact with convicted sex traffickers, but on a practical level it probably affects the public’s lives more from day to day.

Nothing is ever monocausal. Is it the phones? Hugh of St Victor would have been unimpressed with MPs who need the prompt of their iPhones to speak in Parliament, or who (allegedly) even use AI to compose their speeches. There’s also evidence that internet overuse affects memory, perhaps making all our governing class dimmer and more hyperfocused on the moment. Some even suggest this is a positive benefit: Big Thinkers have been asserting that “the Google Generation has no need for rote learning” since before David Cameron was elected.

Hugh of St Victor, meanwhile, would have insisted that without a store of memorized material to think with, everyone is more stupid. And regardless of whether you set much store by medieval monks, no one can deny that smartphones’ ubiquity has accelerated the news cycle to such a pace that a bureaucrat eager to bury inconvenient facts often only needs to wait for the next online panic. It takes a curveball event, such as the Epstein file release — by a foreign government with no particular incentive to make Labour’s life any easier — to cut through this strategy of weaponizing the public’s own forgetfulness.

Along with phones, could the comparative paucity of science and technology graduates in the Civil Service also be having an effect? The Telegraph reports that only 23% of top civil service officials have STEM degrees; once you exclude scientific advisers, this drops to a handful. And perhaps this paucity is also itself an effect. Reports point the finger at Civil Service recruiting practices that favor socially adept groupthinkers, and filter out anyone more interested in being right than being liked — a personality type that describes many STEM graduates.

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Intermittent efforts do seem to be made to inject a little more reality-orientation into the civil service. Dominic Cummings’ famous call for “super-talented weirdos and misfits” to refresh civil service thinking was, just as famously, defeated by the woman he called “Princess Nut Nut” – a woman who, despite obviously her ninja office politics chops, could not really be described as a STEM whiz. And though Cummings didn’t get his weirdos, after Covid, targets were put in place to increase STEM graduate recruitment in the Fast Stream. Recently, too, Labour have announced plans to establish a replacement civil service college, to replace the lost Sunningdale.

But what if this simply ends up transmitting the existing government culture to a new generation, amnesias and taboos and all? What if they’re still filtering out anyone detail-oriented but disagreeable? If so, nothing will change. For the amnesiocratic tic ultimately points toward something far more fundamental than training schemes or recruitment quizzes: a basic metaphysical outlook that treats reality as something conjured into being by fiat, through the written word.

Depressingly familiar among progressive arts graduates, and woefully incompatible with planning and executing anything substantial in the world of atoms, this is the mindset that asserts humans are whatever sex they say they are. It’s perhaps also the mindset that treats destroying a report as equivalent to un-happening the events in the report. The same one that writes lengthy programs for change no one has the slightest idea how to implement, and will have forgotten about next week, while private equity buys up GP surgeries and family homes, sinkhole repair lorries fall into sinkholes, and Britain’s high streets are taken over by ethnic mafias.

This conflation of speaking with doing is bad enough when we’re talking HR policy. It’s worse when the task is to complete (say) a high-speed rail link on time and to budget. It’s worse again when it tacitly opts, even in the face of the documented, organized, gang-based, racially aggravated rape and torture of children, to go on ignoring the problem, perhaps in the hope that by doing so it will magically go away.

So it may be that the root cause of amnesiocracy, is simply that we’re governed by ideologically conformist arts graduates who shut out truth-seeking nerds from power, think words are the same as action, and wouldn’t recognize a workable construction schedule if it bit them on what Hugh of St Victor might have called their “nates”. Throw in a loss of institutional memory and a dose of common or garden nates-covering and hey presto. But this is the hopeful reading, as such a situation is not insuperable: in theory, we could course-correct by re-orienting government recruitment back toward the reality-based community.

Let us hope this is the case. For the alternative is far worse: that the rot goes all the way up. That no one is coming to save us, and we are governed at all levels by at best intellectual lightweights, or otherwise outright frauds, who know exactly what’s what but simply respond to awkward facts by deleting them from the record, and hoping the public forgets they ever asked.

But the next setback might be the one that ends Starmer’s leadership. As for his successor, the Westminster gossip mill continues to turn. Who will step up? Given the dissatisfaction with Starmer’s roboticism, there is a sense in the party that what is required is a leader with personality: someone Labour can lean into, liking, rather than begrudgingly supporting. Andy Burnham fits the bill, what with his Fred-Perry-and-an-accent embodiment of the professional Northerner. But Burnham’s hope of running in the Gorton and Denton by-election was thwarted by Labour’s National Executive Committee, a decision that will keep him out of Parliament for the time being. Meanwhile, Wes Streeting is too close to Mandelson, and too disliked in the party, for his obvious ambitions to be realized. Ed Miliband, though popular within the party, has ruled himself out. That leaves just one credible candidate, someone rarely accused of roboticism.

Angela Rayner, the former Deputy Prime Minister, has her own political struggles. She is still under investigation for her tax affairs, for instance. Even before she lost her job over the matter, she was unpopular with much of the public. But we live in an era of bloc politics. The old duopoly is broken. Left and Right are not fighting over voters in the middle; instead, Reform and the Conservatives are competing to be the main party of the Right, while Labour faces competition from Greens, independents and Your Party for the votes of the left. In the chaos, apparently divisive characters can take advantage by uniting their bloc — if not the country.

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Is this the end of Angela Rayner?

By John Oxley

Could Rayner take such a path? So far, she has ably navigated Labour’s modern factionalism, promoted by both Corbyn, of whom she was later critical, and Starmer. She has praised Blair yet earned the plaudits of John McDonnell. As such, she is well placed for a crack at the leadership, and is said to have attracted lots of donor cash. Her polarizing nature would normally be a weakness, but now it might offer the Labour Party something that it currently lacks: a sense of identity. Rayner has a strong accent, a blunt way of speaking, and an eye-catching sense of style. Unafraid to be pictured with a fag and a pint, she can be to Labour stereotypes what Ken Clarke’s cigars and whisky was to the Tories. Rayner once dubbed herself “John Prescott in a skirt” — embracing the idea of herself as a union bruiser and standard-bearer of the old Left. When Starmer eventually falls, she could be the one who fires up the enthusiasm of the Labour base.

It is, after all, hard to think of a character more explicitly Labour than Rayner. She left school as a pregnant 16-year-old, yet would one day reach the top table of British politics. It is a mythos that delights Labour Party members, and one that is entwined with the party’s history. Rayner credits the Tony Blair government with the state help — childcare and training — that got her into work and enabled her to support herself and her children. From there, she moved into the unions, rising through the ranks as she established her political career. In a party where aspiring candidates talk of their grandparents’ factory jobs in their attempts to project authenticity, Angela Rayner is the real thing. That authenticity is both her chief asset and one of her biggest liabilities. Allies see her as forthright; her opponents dismiss her as “chippy” and “uppity”. Rayner herself has dismissed Tories as “scum”, a comment she took a month to apologize for.

It is a jibe that could help Rayner in a leadership contest rather than hinder her. In such a contest, she would be appealing first for the support of MPs, who whittle down the candidates, and then for the votes of members — who tend to be to the left of the Parliamentary Labour Party. It will be in Rayner’s favor that she has generally shied away from ideological and intellectual fights within the Labour Party. Instead, she has portrayed herself as a pragmatist. Internal purity tests come second. As she put it in 2017: “Ideology never put food on my table.”

Still, it has been half a century since Labour held a contested leadership election while in power, and it is difficult to predict how the party will behave. Pragmatism suggests swinging behind the most electable candidate, but there is always a chance that members will pull behind someone who flatters their own prejudices and can’t actually govern. The Tories’ experiment with Liz Truss should serve as a warning to Labour.

If Labour members can bring themselves to think of electability as well as Left-wing appeal, they will have to countenance the possibility that Rayner might turn out to be a hindrance. Under her leadership, Labour are likely to lose moderate voters who perceive her as radical, even as those on the Right turn out in strength against her. In a polity where median voters matter, that is a fatal dynamic.

But for Labour, the dilemma is that we are arguably no longer in that political zone. With the days of the Labour-Conservative duopoly apparently over, winning might now entail a new strategy. First, you have to unite your side behind you, competing with popular parties on your own side, then you have to outnumber the other bloc. That strategy would appear to call for a divisive candidate.

After all, this is the age of divisive politicians. Boris Johnson had many detractors, but the vigor he brought to the Tory party helped them reach voters they had not reached before. Nigel Farage is leading in the polls despite negative favorability ratings, even worse than Rayner’s. Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump is the epitome of decisiveness, inspiring devotion and hatred — with the former enough to win elections. Having a lot of the population dislike you doesn’t preclude political success, provided your side is enthusiastic enough. Rayner might fit the same mold. Tough-talking, unafraid of a scrap and uninterested in cross-party coziness, she could invigorate the base at the cost of the middle.

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The proposal for Rayner’s leadership bid is becoming clearer: she is the high-risk option. While her politics might be pragmatic and hard to discern, her image is not. If Labour were to choose her, it could consolidate the Left-wing bloc by emphasizing her class credentials and presenting a platform that delivers victories for the people she cares about. In that respect, a Rayner premiership could be the antidote to Starmer’s emptiness, offering a more straightforward, principled politics that offends many but seeks to win back the disillusioned left. Voters tell pollsters they see Starmer as a “jellyfish” and a “doormat”. Few would say that about Ange. In power, she would be reviled by the Right, and would relish winding them up.

But the most important question remains whether Rayner can govern. Starmer has been hampered by his lack of personality, but has also struggled to address the multiple crises that Britain currently faces. It is unclear what Rayner would actually do differently, beyond having a bit more spirit. Her time as Housing Secretary was underwhelming, with the government struggling to make inroads on the housing crisis. She has no real record on economic policy — the most pressing challenge for the government — or foreign affairs. Her union background could easily lead to more policies that protect workers, but it could also make it harder and more costly to hire people in the first place. Above all, Rayner has had barely a year’s experience as a minister. There is every chance that, in the top job, she would simply be out of her depth. A highly partisan program could easily implode, especially if it swings towards rapid tax rises on a stuttering economy.

There is also a chance that she could be a Lefty Thatcher: striking, principled, and loved — by her side, at least — for her pugnacity. But the last time a party went looking for a Maggie, they ended up with a Truss. A proudly partisan Rayner could hit the same trajectory: beloved by her base, but badly exposed in the highest office.

Instead, British politics over the last decade has seen the rise of the celebrity adviser — staff who have been visible shapers of the government agenda and essential to the party leader or Prime Minister. When I was in Downing Street working for Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Chief of Staff was the former mandarin Jonathan Powell, a calm, long-serving presence who focused on the critical issues of Northern Ireland and defense and security. Personalities vary, but the elevation of Chief of Staff started with Dominic Cummings, who worked for Boris Johnson as Chief Adviser. As a named and known figure, Cummings had his own reputation as a political player, having successfully led Vote Leave to victory in the Brexit referendum, and maintained his own links with the media when inside No 10. He continued to narrate his own theory of the case to selected journalists even through the national crisis of Covid, culminating in the infamous press conference held in the Downing Street garden.

Cummings established a set of behaviors and assumptions that have continued to define the Chief of Staff role. Blaming the civil service. Attempting to strengthen the center of government. Concentrating flows of information. Briefing journalists. Suspending the whip from MPs. This, sadly, became a model for Keir Starmer’s No 10 operation. 

The obvious flaw in the Cummings model is captured by that former Labour Cabinet minister Clare Short’s description of special advisers as “people who live in the dark”. She meant it as an attack on spin doctors,  but it was also good advice. The iron law of staffing is that you must not become the story. And when you do — whether you are Alastair Campbell, Dominic Cummings, or Morgan McSweeney — you will have to go. Each fell in different ways: Alastair went to war with the media, finally turning up on screen; Dom lost an internal Downing Street power struggle; Morgan took responsibility for his closeness to Peter Mandelson. Yet each had become a household name — the very opposite of lurking in the shadows. 

The less obvious structural problem is that, over the past decade, the job of Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has been held by 14 different people. This, too, is part of the Cummings legacy. The reason is Brexit. That was the ultimate project of change without a plan, and it has set the template for UK politics. A profound rejection of “things as they are” to which politicians repeatedly failed to respond. Theresa May — no plan, just a hard Brexit with a “dementia tax” and restoration of hunting. Boris Johnson — no plan, and he was not saved by his swift response to the global crisis of Covid. Rishi Sunak — no plan but some spreadsheets and some welcome but insufficient incremental changes. Keir Starmer — no plan, not even a plan to make a plan.

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For a decade, voters have demanded change, whether opting for Brexit, surging to Corbyn, or delivering landslides in turn to Johnson and Starmer. What to change from is obvious: the status quo. What to change to is far more opaque, not least because neoliberal governance, or the “Treasury view”, as it is commonly known, is the paradigm within which government politicians live and think. The bond vigilantes have been beseeched to attack Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, to support the government’s Budget, and now to quell backbench Labour unease. Just look at how easily the current Labour leadership turns to the bond markets for support in party management. 

There is a desperate need for Labour to break with the current political frame, which for a decade has ensured virtually no growth in wages and living standards. Yet there is stasis within the Labour party at the moment — apart from the call by Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, who himself admitted he has no rule in changing the UK leader, for Starmer to resign. Sure, there is a structural problem: the possible candidates are waiting for the result of inquiries. Angela Rayner hasn’t had resolution of an HMRC inquiry; others await the full publication of correspondence between Peter Mandelson and ministers. Burnham, the single most popular figure in Labour politics, is marooned outside the House of Commons having been barred from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election in McSweeney’s last backroom move to protect his boss. Burnham’s candidacy in that contest would have given a voice to voters and a potential vehicle for change for the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). So this is currently a Mexican stand-off in which no-one can pull a trigger.

Yet, as the former Labour Cabinet minister Tony Benn used to say, what matters most are not personalities but issues. The real question for anyone who wants to replace Starmer is what policy platform would restore Labour’s popularity to 25% — which would make it competitive with Reform UK. In reality, there are two options: focus on delivery or focus on change. The first of these, currently being pursued by the Starmer government as the “cost-of-living agenda”, is a cul-de-sac. Sadly, it is the path and error of the technocrat. It is more a tactic than a strategy, and it rests on making a series of small, incremental changes in the hope that those will accumulate into a meaningful difference. 

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The problem is that the cost of living never goes down, not least because, since the Thirties, politicians and economists have been conscious of the massive danger of deflation. So, if prices won’t go down, what to do? The Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, has popularized the term “Affordability”. The concept brings increased spending power into the calculation — with more of that then things are more affordable. The record rise in the minimum wage is part of that, as is the reality of rent controls coming in through strengthening renters’ rights in England.

That’s why Labour’s second option — focusing on change, rather than delivery — is the real contest. Just look at the rise of insurgent parties in the UK. On the Left, there are the Greens, and on the Right there is Reform UK — both fueled by voters who distrust big business, believe the system isn’t working, and have lost trust in the traditional parties. 

Given these circumstances, the Labour Party needs a new political economy. Without a theory of how to allocate revenue and capital fairly, who the winners and losers are, and who their enemy is, changing leaders is pointless. That new political economy requires obeying the first law of politics — the voters are never wrong, so act on their worries. Yes, they complain about the cost of living, but the biggest element of that is housing — and housebuilding has fallen catastrophically. The only entity that can build at speed and scale is the government — so it is time for half a million council houses built on government land. The biggest existential fear for workers is the advance of AI, while for parents it’s the impact of Big Teach on their kids’ futures. For Labour, the natural party of intervention, that means swift and tough regulation.

Above all else, the party must apologize. Admit that Labour lost its way. None of its mistakes — the reasons it has lost support — were in the manifesto. Cutting winter fuel payments, attacking social security for people with disabilities, appointing the wrong ambassador — those were all done in government. Return to the manifesto and build a plan to implement big changes that will be visible and will be felt day by day, month by month, over the remaining years of the parliament. That landslide majority could still come in handy, if Labour can find a true social democratic purpose. Then there may be a Chief of Staff in Downing Street whose name we don’t need to know.

But Morgan McSweeney was meant to be different. His driving motivation was to pursue a relentless courtship with the median voter. It was a strategy, though, that won him plenty of enemies, not least within the Parliamentary Labour Party. Labour MPs, in the main, did not get into politics to cut welfare, or to legislate punitive measures against migrants. If the old-fashioned class struggle has long ago ebbed, it has been replaced within Labour by a stalwart commitment to redistribution via post-hoc benefit payments, combined with a liberal-progressive social outlook. McSweeney’s project cut directly against this, and they hated him for it. This is, after all, an organization crowded with heady idealists who see any modicum of compromise as betrayal. And after enduring 18 months of uncertainty, U-turns and attempts at appeasement, they got what they wanted. The Mandelson Affair was their coup de grâce.

The Prime Minister remains, for now. But without the architect of his political ascent by his side, Starmer finds himself hamstrung at a moment of great political danger. The Intelligence and Security Committee is set to release yet more correspondence; who knows who will be compromised. The Gorton and Denton by-election is around the corner; it risks being catastrophic. And then there will inevitably be a Labour wipeout in the May locals. The PLP is restive and mutinous; rivals are gathering. Angela Rayner is coiffed and poised, waiting for closure on her tax affairs from HMRC; Andy Burnham is watching from the sidelines, nursing his grievance and ambition. Starmer, a process man by instinct, might even fall on his sword in mortification. However, it wouldn’t take much to see him off: just some well-timed ministerial resignations, or a solemn, plaintive visit from cabinet colleagues: “Thank you, Keir, but it’s time to go.”

In any case, with his personal polling in as dire a state as Liz Truss’s, a leadership battle sooner or later is near-inevitable. The question is when, not if. Starmer’s dwindling band of allies may be furiously briefing that the ever-orthodox and fiscally moderate Prime Minister is the only thing preventing financial cataclysm — a Labourite update of “après moi, le déluge”. But make no mistake, they will soon be the ancien régime.

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For now, though, he clings on, an uncharismatic, unpopular Prime Minister tethered to a thin and uncertain policy agenda. And when a government cannot articulate a clear purpose, it relinquishes political momentum, battered by storms and scandal, without the respite of a driving agenda to return to in times of calm. As a result, a two-pronged populist insurgency is drawing in voters from the Left to Zack Polanski’s Greens, and from the Right to the Faragists. So much for Starmerism, which was meant to restore common sense to the forefront of politics. It was meant to “tread a little lighter on people’s lives”, eschewing ideology for pragmatism. The Sensibles were back in charge, and McSweeney would maintain his voter coalition by breaking all the party’s taboos on the issues of the day — appealing steadfastly to voters rather than to the concerns of the progressive activist class. But instead, it fatally ignored the complications and deeper tensions within Labour’s electoral coalition.

McSweeney, then, spent his time in Downing Street dragging Labour away from its comfort zones: here was an iconoclast, determined to smash all the right-on pieties and shibboleths come-what-may. The intended audience wasn’t Westminster’s bleeding hearts, the Polly Toynbees, or Europhile citizens of anywhere. McSweeney focused on the “hero voters” of the UK’s marginals — those who had backed Boris and Leave, perhaps, but who had swung behind a changed Labour Party in 2024. Or so the theory went. Keir Starmer owed him his election victory, and if he had allowed McSweeney to set the electoral strategy, then why not allow him to define the governing strategy, too?

It has been a disaster. Once in power, Labour immediately started to shed support. The policy mix has been scattered, the rhetorical framing fitful. Cumulatively, titbits of ad-hoc, piecemeal reforms, many of them abandoned after public or parliamentary backlash, appear less as well-planned, median-voter catnip, more like policy calibrated to alienate every disparate section of the electorate. The harsher, anti-migrant rhetoric repulses the activistocracy, while doing nothing to attract Reform voters who can watch footage of small boat arrivals and asylum hotel protests every lunchtime on TikTok; the Net Zero project pushes away the populist Right without keeping on board the younger, green-tinged demographic, many of whom believe the Labour leadership is now complicit in the Gaza genocide; an asylum and migration crackdown horrifies the migrant communities and Labour-voting cosmopolitan professionals, but reassures few if any of McSweeney’s hallowed “hero voters”, who will never be convinced by the superficial patriotism of a leadership so viscerally associated with metropolitan liberalism.

To govern is to choose — and lacking a guiding philosophy, Starmer has instead established policy inquiries, committees, reviews and taskforces, to avoid decision-making. He recoils at political conversation and regards ideological chatter with disdain. He thought he could leave the politics to his chief of staff, but it was only a certain type of politics that the Irishman excelled in: McSweeney is the consummate party machine man, an expert bureaucratic fixer and internal faction fighter who knows how to read polls and interpret. The ruthless efficiency with which Labour translated its relatively meager vote share into Commons seats in 2024 is testament to that.

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While his knack for internal machinations and for the nitty-gritty of political praxis is certain, McSweeney lacked the ability to define his project (and it was his project, more than Starmer’s) when he entered Downing Street. He had a plan to win control of the Labour Party, and even the country, without ever having a clear sense of what he would do with power. His tenuous Blue Labour association was based on little more than his obvious appreciation for that tendency’s potential as an electoral tactic — attracting the Reform-curious — rather than being a considered, moral driving force which could underpin a coherent policy agenda.

Starmerism’s attempts to appeal to this nostalgic, romantic idea of “Labour’s people” — the traditional working-class voters of the post-industrial towns and smaller cities — increasingly resemble a jilted lover begging for reconciliation. The electorate has moved on and found a new partner. His name is Nigel.

The disciplined “Ming vase” courtship that secured victory in 2024, has, in government, produced an administration defined less by caution than paralysis. In power, McSweeney seems to have masterminded a project with little motivating it beyond survival. It is becoming “no things to no men”. And with an eye on the polls, its final defenders are beginning to morph into their former nemeses: those hard Left militants and unreconstructed Corbynites who agitated against any compromise with the electorate, whose politics spoke not to the country but to their own narrow clique.

Soon, the initiative will pass to the soft Left, who will attempt to chart a different course, perhaps wooing back prodigal sons and daughters from the Liberals and the Greens, ostensibly to unite the Left-wing vote against a divided Right. Yet the danger is that Labour retreats once more to its instinctual comfort zones; it may not be enough to forge that progressive alliance from a fragmented electoral map, but the soft Left MPs can at least assuage their consciences, mouthing that old refrain: “No one likes us, we don’t care.”

How else can you explain three extraordinary scandals in a single day? By Monday morning, it was clear that Peter Mandelson’s behavior, specifically while serving in the Brown government, could warrant a criminal investigation. Here was a man who reputedly received tens of thousands of pounds from Jeffrey Epstein, and who later sent the pedophile financier internal government memos and market-sensitive information. Even more troubling, Mandelson, through Epstein, advised JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon to subtly “threaten” the then-chancellor in an effort to stop a tax on bankers bonuses. This chancellor, of course, was Alistair Darling, Mandelson’s colleague in government. By Wednesday, the Prime Minister said Mandelson had lied to him “repeatedly”, though one wonders why he chose to believe a man who resigned twice from cabinet in disgrace. Accompanying that claim was a promise to publish documents relating to Mandelson’s appointment, by Starmer, as the Ambassador in Washington.

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Meanwhile, with the media scrambling to comprehend the scale of the debacle, two other stories were breaking which, under usual circumstances, would lead headlines. The first concerned Dan Norris, elected as Labour MP to North East Somerset and Hanham in 2024. Norris was arrested last April for a string of offenses including the rape and abduction of a child. This week, he was arrested for a second time. Though previous investigations relating to minors were dropped, it emerged that a second rape investigation had begun, as well as one concerning the potential sexual assault of a third woman. Norris may also stand accused of voyeurism and upskirting.

Then there was Tulip Siddiq, the Government’s anti-corruption minister until last January. In November, she was sentenced to two years in absentia by a Dhaka court for her role in a scandal centering on her aunt, the former prime minister of Bangladesh. On Monday afternoon, as the Mandelson revelations grew increasingly salacious, Siddiq’s sentence was upgraded to six years. The assertion that Labour are less prone to scandal than the Tories suddenly feels as dated as the Metaverse.

None of this is bad luck. Indeed such stories reveal something deeper, specifically about the modus operandi of the Labour Right. Mandelson, a decades-long tribune for that political tendency, was open to briefing an investment banker about developments from within government precisely because, for him and his comrades, the truth is always defined by the contingencies of the moment — whether it was “sexing up”’ the pretext for war in Iraq or exchanging cash for honors. It’s easy to forget now, but the highest law during the New Labour years, particularly for its staunchest advocates, generally revolved around status and personal advantage. This was politics, at its worst, at the end of history.

Philip Gould, New Labour’s polling supremo, wrote that the aspirations of the post-industrial working class had significantly shifted, now revolving around things like buying a new washing machine. Ideals and utopias were a thing of the past, he contended, replaced by consumerism, Pareto optimality and public management speak. But discarded alongside the ideological refuse of the Twentieth Century — by many of Gould’s fellow travelers at least — was any belief in an ethical life. For the faction’s most senior figures that intensified into a veneration of power for its own sake. It’s no accident that Jonathan Powell, formerly Blair’s chief of staff, and now Starmer’s national security adviser, wrote a book titled The New Machiavelli.

Rather than politics being an instrument to achieve a particular good, such as social democracy, national renewal or a flourishing free market, it became an end in itself. That would, in time, give rise to some of the ugliest pathologies in public life: if politics was about technique, and not morality, then how one behaved didn’t matter — and one certainly shouldn’t be concerned about the consequences. Understand this and suddenly the actions of not only Mandelson, but Blair and Alastair Campbell, become easier to comprehend. An obsession with making money, a vice typically ascribed to the Conservatives, is far more intuitive to the common man.

To grasp how insidious this particular mindset goes, consider the case of Andrew Gwynne, whose recent resignation triggered the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election. Gwynne officially stood down for “health reasons”. In reality, though, it was a series of nasty posts — written in a secret WhatsApp group — that ended his political career. They included Gwynne wishing that a 72-year-old constituent would die: simply because she had the audacity to write to a local councilor about bin collections. Elsewhere, his wife, also a councilor, joked about local children playing in sewage. The story’s toxic postscript, with Andy Burnham blocked from standing for Labour’s nomination in the seat thanks to NEC fiat, just adds to the episode’s squalor. An ugly cliqueish culture and a presumption of impunity – combined with an instinctive aversion to popular democracy. In one small story you have distilled the outstanding features of the Labour Right.

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Similar skulduggery is evident in the case of Matthew Doyle, who became a peer after serving as the Downing Street head of communications. Almost a decade ago, however, he campaigned for a councilor to be re-elected, despite the individual in question being one Sean Morton — who had been charged with possession of sexual images of children. Such was the severity of the charge that Morton, who maintained his innocence, stood as an independent after being dropped by Labour (at that time controlled by the Corbyn faction). But that didn’t stop Doyle from joining his friend on the campaign trail, and even at the election count. Morton was later found guilty of possessing indecent images of girls as young as 10.

Why does the Labour Right receive a comparatively easy ride on stories like this? One potential answer is political sympathies. While the country’s press undoubtedly leans towards the Tories, the orientation of most in broadcast media is instinctively New Labour (hence they didn’t mind Cameron). It’s no coincidence that Mandelson himself worked in television before leading on Labour’s comms in the 1987 election. The new worlds of public affairs, political consultancy and satellite TV all emerged at the same time, as the embryo of Blairism began to grow. A snapshot of that can be found on Sky News every Sunday morning: not only did Trevor Philips know Mandelson from their time at Carlton Television, but Mandelson was also the best man at Philips’ first wedding. Adam Boulton, another iconic face on Sky in the decades since its inception in 1989, is married to Anji Hunter — a former Blair spin doctor. Derek Draper, who died in 2024, and who was central in the rise of New Labour’s ‘innovative’ PR strategies, was married to ITV’s Kate Garraway. TV news and New Labour go together like the sun and shadow. Perhaps that helps explain Starmer’s ongoing struggles. In an era of social media, and GB News, the old rules are changing.

While in opposition, Starmer tried to cast Labour as the party of public probity — a foil to a bungling, contemptible government. But glance at the party’s roll call of shame, from Gwynne to Morton, and the claim looks downright absurd. And now, with the revelations of Epstein and Mandelson, which could be the country’s most seismic political scandal since the Profumo Affair, Labour faces a tainted brand for decades to come.

Why are the two major parties like this? Why is the electorate constantly forced to choose between the Tories, whose parliamentarians included a man who took pictures of himself with cocaine, and a Labour party which appears more at ease with child abuse than a Gary Glitter garden soirée? Whatever Britain’s wider problems — its widening infrastructure deficit, the increased tolerance by the state of low-level anti-social behavior, and a lack of economic vitality — nobody would claim such degeneracy reflects the general public.

The blame must certainly include our electoral system. The point of first-past-the-post, indeed some argue its advantage, is that it generally guarantees the stability of a system resting on two major parties: a government and an opposition. If you are unhappy with one side there is always a strong, albeit limited, alternative. Yet beyond its many failings, not least an inability to generate original thinking in areas such as foreign and industrial policy, FPTP means a deliberate, systematic foreclosure of the political marketplace. This inevitably gives rise to venal, self-serving cultures across the spectrum — not least because whatever happens, and no matter how poorly your party does, it will still access the accoutrements of opposition. The public now grasps this, which is why both Labour and the Tories — if polls are to be believed — face an existential challenge.

But even if one or both were replaced, by Reform and the Greens say, the electoral system would, in time, give rise to the same pathologies. FPTP, especially without primaries, as in the United States, encourages an insular culture that is hostile to the wider public, as Andrew Gwynne’s messages — however trivial — reveal. Instead, the political process is captured by individuals who excel at factionalism, undermining opponents and learning how to gerrymander bureaucracy: none of which is particularly useful in administering the state, building houses or having a police force that actually solves crime. In short, our system selects for politicians who can’t meet the challenges that matter to voters, and who prefer to obsess over internal power struggles.

Yes, the American system is plutocratic, indeed more so than our own. But primaries permit an openness — to new ideas, actors and policies — that ours does not. Without primaries there would be no Mamdani, Trump, Obama, Ocasio-Cortez or Marjorie Taylor Greene, and by extension there would be no challenge, or possibility of renewal, for public life. When Labour activists in this country called for something similar during the Corbyn years, and the mandatory re-selection of all party MPs, it led to a ferocious backlash from the political and media class. Why? Because it would take power away from Westminster elites, and re-distribute it — however imperfectly — to ordinary people. These political pressures, and the impossibility of internal regeneration within the Westminster system, are what gave rise to Brexit. Had Conservative associations been able to choose prospective parliamentarians in a manner that registered Republicans can select candidates for Congress, then Brexit might have been a more serene, efficient affair.

Such systemic dysfunction is only compounded by the second chamber. “Need a Lord on the board?” Mandelson cheerily asked Epstein in one email from 2010, a pithy distillation of what the upper house is really about: creating sinecures for has-beens and bag-carriers, who can subsequently leverage their status for personal gain. All the evidence suggests that the reforms to the Lords under Blair have been a disaster. And yet nobody with power seems capable of acknowledging that fact, let alone offering an alternative.

Of course corruption is inherent to political life. We all desire status, and mostly want money. Inevitably some people will pursue such things to the detriment of the public good. Yet our present electoral system incentivizes such appetites, rather than seeking to mitigate them. It is ridiculous to presume that only two parties might have a monopoly on good ideas, or people. The same applies to moral conduct.

It’s worth recalling that this scandal would never have surfaced were it not for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, an unthinkable piece of legislation in this country. That should raise questions about how we do politics in Britain and, I hope, prompt a conversation about an electoral system that only generates more than two plausible parties of government at a time. If we are to retain this status quo then, at the very least, it should require primaries and mandatory reselection. During the Corbyn years the media often described such proposals as Stalinist, despite their being the default across the Atlantic. I would simply say they keep politicians honest. In the context of SW1 that increasingly feels like a revolutionary demand.

There are complications of course. Starmer has framed the visit as a careful balancing act, insisting there are “opportunities” for economic benefit, but that this “does not mean compromising on national security”. The third, unstated element in the equation is that any new arrangements with China must not offend Britain’s primary patron, the thin-skinned and capricious President of the United States. Donald Trump recently threatened Canada with swingeing tariffs after its own prime minister, Mark Carney, declared a “strategic partnership” with China. A similar reaction would be unwelcome for Starmer, who unlike Carney has staked his authority on his ability to appease Trump.

The Chinese leadership will no doubt reward Starmer’s deference with a token pledge of investment, perhaps a greater one than the paltry £600 million which Chancellor Rachel Reeves secured on her trip last year. But China neither wants nor needs British goods and services on any meaningful scale. It has two basic goals in Britain, and they are to ensure a growing market for its enormous surplus of manufactured goods, and to leverage its economic power to disrupt the American-led Western alliance system. It is on its way to achieving both aims without needing to offer any special inducements.

A country like Britain can only negotiate with China if it can plausibly threaten to reduce its dependence on Chinese supply chains and technology. Instead, under successive governments but especially under this one, Britain has shut down its industrial base and pursued policies which have pushed up the cost of living, stoking demand for cheap imports. China cannot prise Britain away from the United States, which is still the guarantor of British security, but it can slowly raise the cost of supporting the US where Chinese interests are at stake, and in a crisis, threaten to cripple the British economy. What is more, Starmer remains idealistically committed to a system of international law which Beijing is slowly bending towards its own ends. Even if Britain is the last nation to abandon America’s old global order, it can become a member of China’s new one long before that. The two are already overlapping.

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None of this means that Starmer is wrong to reboot relations with China. The diplomatic “deep freeze” of recent years was the result of contingent circumstances which the march of history has already left behind. Starting in 2015, David Cameron and George Osborne launched an ill-timed strategy to deepen ties with China, touting the City of London as a putative gateway to the Western financial system. That plan was complicated by Brexit and the realization that Chinese tech posed a threat to critical infrastructure. As American antagonism towards China hardened, Britain’s leaders prioritized fealty to the US. Then came Hong Kong, Covid, and Ukraine. During the Johnson and Sunak years, as the extent of Chinese espionage efforts in Britain became more difficult to ignore, the government’s China policy seemed to be largely dictated by a desire not to appear weak in front of hawkish backbenchers.

The problem is that, despite the British media’s strange habit of equating diplomacy with surrender, the country does not gain anything by keeping these channels closed. None of Britain’s key partners in security and intelligence have cut themselves off from Beijing to the same extent. Not Australia, despite its bitter disputes with China; and not even the US, which, for all the rhetoric of decoupling, remains firmly integrated with the Chinese economy at every level, from major tech companies like Apple and Tesla to the financial managers at the Federal Reserve.

Meanwhile, China continues to assume an increasingly dominant position in the global economy. As Kyle Chan has written, the era when China needed technology transfers from the West is over, and the flow of knowledge is now going into reverse. Western companies are buying access to China’s expertise in everything from electric vehicles and robotics to pharmaceuticals and even artificial intelligence; Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta recently acquired the Chinese AI startup Manus. China maintains a firm grip on the raw materials which underpin advanced technologies, as it demonstrated last year by using its chokehold on critical minerals to repulse Trump’s tariffs. Many British companies manufacture their products in Chinese factories, and the two countries have a strong partnership in scientific research.

Britain’s economic prospects therefore depend on its commercial relations with China as much as with the United States. Indeed, I’ve heard from businesspeople who much prefer working with Chinese counterparts than American ones that the former are more inclined to seek long-term relationships based on mutual benefit, while the latter, much like their property developer President, tend to see business as a zero-sum contest.

The problem, then, is not that Britain is engaging with China, but that it is doing so from a position of weakness and apparent desperation. Bowing to Chinese demands for a strategically located London embassy, and undermining the prosecution of two alleged spies, were the acts of an auditioning vassal rather than a sovereign partner. More importantly, a reliance on Chinese imports is increasingly baked into Britain’s economic model. Whereas most comparable countries are wary of China’s aggressive trade practices, Britain embraces them.

Since 2020, the Chinese leadership has pursued a strategy of dual circulation, meaning that it seeks maximum self-reliance in meeting its domestic needs, while also producing an enormous surplus of goods to export overseas. This is partly an expression of China’s own weaknesses: its society is submerged in debt, its once mighty property sector is bust, and its state does not want to undergo the painful readjustment that is required before its own consumers can grow the economy through spending. So it needs the world to continue buying its products in ever-larger quantities. But this model also serves to enhance China’s political power over other nations. Just as it uses investment and loans to gain influence over poor countries, it uses cheap exports, which are subsidized by the state, to undercut producers in richer ones, leaving them dependent on Chinese manufacturing.

Labour’s agenda has made Britain a willing accomplice in this strategy. A combination of wage increases and taxes on business has kept inflation high, putting upward pressure on both the cost of living and interest rates. This is a politically toxic situation for the government, and Chinese imports are an obvious solution, as a Bank of England official recently stated. Another Labour priority, Ed Miliband’s rush to bring down British carbon emissions, has similar implications. Not only does it rely on Chinese solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and batteries; it is also accelerating the demise of British industry through high energy costs and regulations. Much of that production will relocate to China. Hence Britain’s imports from China grew by 6% last year; the roads are filling with “Temu Range Rovers” — as the Jaecoo 7 SUV is sometimes called — while Britain’s domestic car production has fallen to its lowest level since the Fifties; and David Lammy has celebrated a British company investing £800 million in a new plastics plant in Zhejiang, even as Britain’s own chemicals industry is collapsing.

Britain may be one of China’s more accommodating trade partners, but the EU, for all its clout on paper, faces a similar dilemma. Visiting China in December, French president Emmanuel Macron said of the trade relationship that “these imbalances are becoming unbearable”. The EU has tried to use tariffs to resist a glut of Chinese electric vehicles entering its market, but China has retaliated by targeting European agriculture and luxury goods, and it still has the ability to withhold critical resources from Europe as it did from the US. Germany is now hemorrhaging industrial capacity to China, and cannot intervene because it also needs access to the Chinese market. As in Britain, European governments presiding over febrile societies will not risk an inflationary shock caused by a disruption of trade with China.

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There is an argument that Britain should simply write off the loss of its remaining industrial base and free itself to gorge on Chinese imports, thereby helping to raise its living standards. In fact, to a large extent this is already happening. But the lesson of China’s rise is that, while such tradeoffs can be beneficial in the short term, they will, in time, become dependencies to be exploited. The much vaunted rules-based order that Trump is now dismantling was not only a framework of American hegemony; it was a scaffolding that China ascended by treating every economic relationship as a vehicle for its political objectives. For the most part, Beijing’s coercive trade tactics have been much more subtle than Trump’s tariff blitzes, but not always. Mongolia, Australia and Lithuania have all suffered naked blackmail from China, due to their stances on the Dalai Lama, the origins of Covid, and Taiwan, respectively. The anti-coercion measures that the EU is now threatening to use against Trump were developed in response to China’s treatment of Lithuania.

The same instrumental approach can be seen in Beijing’s new Global Governance Initiative, announced in September, which advances a Chinese-led world order in the guise of a more democratic and equitable “global community” adhering to international law. This continues a longstanding Chinese campaign to expand its influence over international institutions. It is an unfortunate irony for Britain that Starmer, who would in many ways be at home in the Chinese Communist Party, given his preference for technocratic solutions and skill at operating his party’s machinery against his rivals, does not show the same ruthless nous in the international domain. Instead, he cleaves with an almost touching faith to the sanctity of rules and procedures, apparently blind to the agendas they might serve.

There is a possible future in which some of the nations trapped between the US and China finally make good their fantasies of “strategic autonomy”, radically changing their spending priorities and building up a degree of independence in technology, industry and defense. This would probably be a world where Britain cooperates more closely with its European neighbors, as well as other allies such as Australia and Japan. It is far more likely, however, that Europe’s “middle powers” will become a complicated space where American and Chinese influence mingles and collides. Both superpowers will exercise control over Britain’s infrastructure and economy in different ways, and both will impose their own limits on British sovereignty. If that is the case, an important question for the country’s future will be whether the United States and China can coexist peacefully in contested lands like this.

And so the starting gun on a Labour civil war, and perhaps the end of Starmerism, has been fired via an arcane administrative decision rather than all-out rebellion over policy. It would be a fitting conclusion. Nothing will define Starmer’s premiership better than his near-total lack of a defining project and his singular devotion to proceduralism in lieu of a political vision.

We must not, of course, rule out a 14th policy U-turn on the part of this government. These have tended to occur when Number 10 has attempted to enact technocratic reforms that seem lab-designed both to alienate the electorate and disturb the progressive moralism of Labour MPs: think of the winter fuel debacle, ID cards, disability benefit cuts, the farm tax, and much else besides.

In each case, the strategic Machiavels of Downing Street apparently chose pure masochism. A policy announcement would be made out of nowhere, immediately burning bridges and political capital; the resulting furor would become memetic, with the policy held as indicative of the Government’s detachment from ordinary voters; thanks to widespread public opposition, it would be dropped, but only once all the damage had been done, obviating the potential benefits of full implementation while doing nothing to repair the Government’s popularity.

It’s not impossible that the Burnham snub will, in this grand tradition, be overturned following internal party outcry. A reverse ferret would require a new emergency meeting of the NEC to wave the Mancunian candidate through. Burnham, more likely than not, and more than any other possible Labour candidate, would saunter to victory in the Gorton and Denton contest. And yet this latest example of willfully ham-fisted internal NEC bureaucracy in the service of a flailing, decrepit administration will represent a different challenge entirely for Number 10.

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Everyone knows why Burnham has been blocked, but our Prime Minister cannot admit it. If he were truly honest, he would have drafted a statement along the lines of: “after less than two years in office, defined by serial failure to connect with voters or my own party, I’m scared of welcoming back a potential challenger. Burnham has a vocal register that goes beyond my preferred tone of pained, nasal miserablism, and as such could destroy my Prime Ministerial career.” Burnham would threaten not just Starmer, but Nigel Farage: the country’s top pollster has concluded that he would be the most difficult Labour opponent for the Reform leader. Yet the party line is that if Labour moves Burnham away from his mayoral role, thus triggering a mayoral by-election, it risks losing two elections in one.

In other words, even the face-saving explanation for blocking Burnham is deeply ignominious. The fact that initiating a Greater Manchester Mayoral by-election is being briefed as “politically dangerous” for the Labour Party should ring alarm bells: this is the Labour Party, worried about losing a Mayoral by-election in Greater Manchester. For those new to British politics, the edge-of-the-Pennines land of Oasis, the Happy Mondays and torrential rain is perhaps the safest of red citadels in the entire country. But rather than the movement of a solid Labour metropole into the status of a marginal battleground provoking the thought that there may be some need for a change of direction at the top, the Labour Right has instead concluded it’s best to simply dig in.

Make no mistake: this is the beginning of the end. Starmer and a coterie of sycophants have now openly shown their hand: they are directionless, fearful, weak, panicked. But the Prime Minister should be commended for achieving something rare, even unheard of, in British politics: uniting diametrically opposed Labour factions against him and his advisers. Corbynites, Blue Labour and the “soft Left” are apoplectic, while Wes Streeting, an ambitious Blairite, is being as vocal as he can be within the confines of his cabinet position. Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband, Lucy Powell (big beasts, in contemporary Labour terms) — all have come out batting for Andy. A party insider tells me that Blue Labour’s small band of parliamentarians — a supposedly powerful element of the Starmerite coalition — “are furious”. A backbencher tells me that the NEC’s decision is “mad, weak, and will end badly”.

“If you asked me to put money on an outcome,” one Corbynite says, “I don’t think I could.” “A whole series of dominoes could fall in totally bizarre ways.” For what it’s worth, here’s my prediction: members, activists, trade union leaders and MPs will make noise over Burnham’s exclusion, noise which will die down in the coming days and weeks. The decision won’t be reversed, meaning that the most popular possible candidate will be excluded from the ballot. A less convincing candidate will take his place: a second-rate lobbyist, third-sector email-sender or corporate communications professional. They will hand the seat of Gorton and Denton to a populist insurgent in a Reform teal tie. The principal beneficiaries in the Commons will be one of Angela Rayner or Streeting, either of whom could use the row as a springboard to challenge Starmer. In that event, they are unlikely to have trouble finding the 80 MPs needed to trigger a leadership election. Starmer’s decision to block Burnham, then, may have prevented his most plausible leadership rival from returning to national politics.

But it will prove a Pyrrhic victory. Rayner and Streeting will be emboldened. Rayner, politically speaking, would offer a similar political prospectus to Burnham, but she is burdened by her recent tax scandal. Streeting, meanwhile, while pivoting Leftwards in a bid to woo members, is pure Davos Labour: Tony Blair Institute policy papers, public sector marketization, AI utopianism, and accommodation with fiscal and monetary orthodoxy. Of the three, Burnham had the more obvious diagnosis for the country’s ills: his “four horsemen” of privatization, deindustrialization, austerity and Brexit would be remedied by some old-fashioned soft Leftism. That means tax-and-spend, public ownership, European rapprochement. Much of this would come unstuck after collision with the realities of contemporary statecraft. But the chances of the vision being realized under the easy charm of British politics’s foremost BBC 6 Music dad, is now dramatically reduced.

I don’t mean to present a paean to the lost future of an Andy Burnham ascendancy. There’s much of his carefully crafted public persona that’s easy to poke holes in. His “King-of-the-North”, everyman, football-lad schtick grates among SW1 insiders who recall a fresh-faced Cambridge graduate joining the team as a budding Blairite spad in the halcyon days of New Labour. They remember a health minister who voted for the Iraq War and for the happily enforced marketization within “Our NHS”. They remember him running unsuccessfully, to be Labour leader on a platform of fiscal rectitude. Since then, he’s flirted with Corbynism and positioned himself as a tribune of left-behind regions against an effete Westminster elite. His inchoate offer of “Manchesterism” trumpets the benefits of public ownership in local and perhaps national governance. But Manchesterism is based on little except his successful record in enacting a piece of obscure Tory legislation that allowed a re-regulation of Manchester’s buses under an authority resembling Transport for London. This isn’t bad policy in itself, but one can’t create a comprehensive and convincing ideological “-ism” around your implementation of Theresa May’s 2017 Bus Services Act.

All this is true. But in politics, truth is secondary to perception. And the truth is that Andy Burnham is perceived as a vastly more likable, relatable and convincing politician than Keir Starmer. He passes the pint test. He’ll be licking his wounds this week, plotting a way forward, no doubt. The hope that the NEC decision will quieten leadership speculation is delusional: all the party’s ruling body has done is hasten the inevitable, handing several rounds of ammunition to their opponents. The barrage will be too much to withstand as they come under fire in Gorton. But with Burnham outside of parliament, for now, it’ll be up to others to put the final nail in Starmerism’s coffin.

And not just any old bikini deepfakes, even though many AI platforms are capable of creating them. It’s easy to do: you just say to the AI “Put her in a bikini” and the politician, celebrity, or — sometimes — child is suddenly wearing only a bikini. Yes, it’s creepy. But also striking is the way Labour’s ire is laser-focused on Grok, the AI attached to X, formerly Twitter. It’s also striking how, despite pleas from campaigners for years on the platform’s abundance of obscene material, it’s only now that Labour is swinging into outraged action. So grievous is the danger posed by its bikini deepfakes in particular (including of Starmer), that the Government now plans to outlaw them, even as it’s  threatened to ban X from Britain altogether.

This is where the political expediency bit comes in. In Starmer’s shoes I too would be itching for an excuse to ban X. Under Musk’s ownership, the site has made Starmer’s political life a misery, more or less from the moment he entered Downing Street, from stirring the pot during the Southport riots to amplifying the grooming scandal to the point that Labour were forced to respond with the Casey review. And the response to the review, again largely convened on X, forced Starmer to promise the national inquiry his party is now doing its best to avoid delivering.

This is a far cry from pre-Musk Twitter, which was a liberal-dominated hub of respectable media-class opinion, one with a direct line for governments and intelligence services seeking speech-control influence. But since Musk bought the site in 2022, it’s morphed by degrees into something far more pungent and anarchic, where Right-wing voices predominate and many of the former progressive Twitterati have fled to the Bluesky echo-chamber or simply quit posting.

This has not been an improvement in every respect. I don’t miss the sanctimonious tone of old Twitter, but it was more playful. Even so, the rambunctious Right-wing X is politically significant, not least in being the sole large-scale digital exception to the general rule that major institutions are controlled by the Left. As such, the site plays a pivotal role in UK politics. Whether feeding the “posting to policy pipeline”, or drawing attention to ham-fisted efforts at propaganda or speech control, X convenes so large and vocally anti-Starmer a subset of the British Right that we can hardly blame Keith for wishing, like Henry II, that someone (in this case Ofcom) would rid him of this turbulent website.

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So is this just about Starmer’s ailing premiership? Yes and no. He’s at the helm of a regime that is, in its entirety, holed below the waterline by the subversive uncontrollability of digital public life. He can hardly be blamed for lashing out at a website whose denizens, and owner, so obviously loathe him. But the proposed ban is best understood as part of a wider war — as was the killing of Thomas à Becket.

Henry II had his Archbishop murdered in 1170 in the course of a dispute over the competing political and spiritual prerogatives of Crown and Church: a contest that obliged both parties to turn to the Pope in Rome for arbitration. And today Starmer finds himself at the mercy of not exactly a religious but certainly a cultural force, one whose extra-territorial leader also has an agenda that doesn’t always (or even very often) align with Starmer’s own. There is of course nothing very holy about Musk, or the trolls of X. But the contest over bikini deepfakes points toward a larger-scale struggle, with cultural, political, and economic dimensions and between overlapping Old and New World jurisdictions.

The field on which this is generally litigated is “free speech”, typically referred to as if it were an abstract moral value. But while there surely is a moral dimension to free speech, in an information age the power to free or control “speech”, and to determine what counts in that definition, is of immense political and economic consequence.

We are, in other words, once again litigating the extra-territorial reach of something intangible, much like Henry II. But in the intervening period Britain also gained her own territorial empire: and then lost it again, at the hands of our own former colony, in a way that also provides lessons for our situation now. In 1941, the British Empire, struggling against the Axis, was obliged to negotiate for aid from its secessionist progeny America. A key dispute within the negotiations was over “imperial preference”. This was a set of tariff arrangements enacted within the British Empire which gave preferential trading rights to polities that were part of the Empire. This so gravely disadvantaged American trade that its dissolution was a cornerstone of mid-century US foreign policy. Britain gave up on imperial preference and secured American aid.

I mention this not to re-litigate long-dead geopolitical quarrels, but to draw a parallel with the broader context of Starmer’s proposed ban of X. This modern argument doesn’t concern physical trade in goods, but the rules under which the digital kind are permitted to circulate. Many of these “goods” — including everything that happens on X — fall broadly under the heading of “speech”. In such a context, who gets to set the rules on “free speech” is obviously every bit as important as the 1941 battle over who gets to determine tariffs across British imperial territories.

As things stand, the digital “imperial preference” favors the polity in which the internet was first developed: the United States.  The question of geography is notoriously vexed when it comes to trade. Even determining who has tax and regulatory jurisdiction over (say) a pile of grain in a warehouse forms the topic of intense negotiations between trade experts. Intangible goods are still more complex, though: when a website can be served in multiple physical locations simultaneously, who gets to regulate it?

Extensive material and political interests rest on how this question is settled. And this is the real geopolitical backbeat to Starmer’s feud with Elon Musk: a backbeat that, in truth, encompasses not just Britain but also the EU to which Starmer clearly wishes Britain still belonged. It’s a feud currently playing out in a series of bitter skirmishes between the White House and the EU, as well as, in microcosm, between Musk and Starmer.

Recently, for example, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions against foreign individuals or institutions involved in censoring US digital properties: a clear shot across the bows of European politicians who believe they have a right to censor US websites and fine the companies  where these are served on EU territories. In the pandemonium that erupted following Rubio’s announcement, pro-EU supporters pointed out that no such challenges had been issued against Russia or China, despite these polities firewalling large portions of the American internet in its entirety.

But this is precisely the rub. Do the European states want to be as detached from the US as Russia and China, or not? There is no freedom of speech battle between these polities and the US, because neither Russia nor China tries to control what’s published on American platforms (at least, not openly). They just block them, and build their own platforms. By contrast, European states seem happy for America to supply its digital platforms, even as European politicians demand a say in how they are regulated. It’s as though 20th-century Canada was demanding, on the basis of its extensive wood and paper exports to Britain, a veto over everything published in London.

Until relatively recently, this relation of center and periphery was broadly mutually beneficial — not least in that it enabled American politicians to route round inconvenient constitutional clauses at home, in regulating the internet. Under Biden, the State Department encouraged and fostered European online speech controls, as a means of developing censorship tools both unconstitutional in the USA but nonetheless applicable domestically where desired, and aligned with an overall policy of digital speech control. I’m old enough to remember when something being illegal somewhere in Europe could result in its being deleted altogether from X even if the poster was in the USA. In effect, the Biden regime used Europe as a way of offshoring politically sensitive speech controls, somewhat like Guantanamo Bay offshored the torture of suspected jihadists.

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Now, though, priorities have changed — much to the bewilderment of Europe, which now has a well-developed censorship architecture but has discovered its American sponsor suddenly in a different mood. Even so, they have pressed on: two heavy-hitting US websites, X and Cloudflare, have already been threatened with fines under, respectively, the EU’s Digital Services Act and Italy’s “Piracy Shield”. The US-based forum 4chan has also been slapped with fines under Britain’s Digital Services Act. All have responded, essentially, “GFY”. Starmer’s threat to Musk on the deepfake image-making falls in the same category. It is an attempt to exert sovereignty in a space that’s both nominally open, but also in practice wholly dominated by American “imperial preference” — in the context of an American presidency taking a radical new direction.

Seen thus, the actual contest becomes clearer. Is Europe an American imperial subject, or a rival imperium? If it’s part of the empire, then obviously it doesn’t get to regulate its hegemon. If Europe is an imperial rival, it can hardly expect to demand its opponents supply services even as Europe dictates the terms. This is the real subject of the ongoing diplomatic wrestling-match over “free speech”, censorship, and regulatory frameworks such as the EU’s Digital Services Act and Britain’s Online Safety Act. If Britain, or any other European entity, really wants information sovereignty outside the American imperium, the only route there is the one now threatened by Starmer: banning American digital properties entirely from our territories, the way Russia and China do.

Does Starmer really want to go there? Does any EU state? This is perhaps uniquely difficult for Britain to answer. Geographically and economically speaking, Britain is closer to Europe, which accounts for around 41% of UK exports in 2024, compared to 18% for the US. But linguistically and culturally we’re closer to the USA. To take just one of countless examples, the BBC pays scant attention to EU politics, but Trump only has to raise an eyebrow and it’s front-page news.

In this context, can we really imagine an Atlantic firewall? I doubt it. Back in 1170, ridding himself of Thomas à Becket backfired badly on King Henry; I suspect that ridding himself of this turbulent X would prove similarly unpopular with the British media and political class. And yet our cultural, linguistic and digital enmeshment with an increasingly unpredictable US regime has introduced an acute new set of tensions. It is difficult to see how they can be resolved peacefully. But let us hope they can be. Having seen one bikini’d AI Starmer, I have no desire to see any more.