Take the proposal to equalize capital gains tax with income tax. Burnham had repeatedly stressed that Britain undertaxes wealth; and not so long ago, senior figures within the party were touting the equalization idea as a “wealth tax that works”. On Tuesday, though, a Treasury source dismissed the notion as “batshit crazy”. Healey is now reported to have rejected the equalization idea.

It’s not the only proposal that Healey has rebuffed. Some of his Labour colleagues wanted to lower the threshold for Labour’s planned mansion tax from £2 million to £1.5 million — a move that would have brought an estimated 137,000 additional properties into the tax. Again, Healey is reported to have said no.

He has defended businesses as well as home-owners. Burnham had previously suggested increasing rates on warehouses and out-of-town retail developments would be a way to help revive the nation’s high streets. But the John Lewis chairman Jason Tarry and the M&S chief executive Stuart Machin warned that additional rates would penalize retailers already struggling with higher employment costs, expensive energy and property taxes. Healey subsequently ruled out additional taxation of large retail warehouses.

That makes three proposed tax increases — all rejected within days of each other. Are we seeing the early signs of a divergence between Burnham and Healey? We have a Prime Minister promising to revive Labour’s post-war tradition of Government intervention and redistribution, but the Chancellor seems to recognize — possibly reluctantly — that Britain’s problem is not a shortage of taxation, but a chronic failure to generate economic growth. With the tax burden already at a post-war high, public spending continuing to rise and precious little fiscal headroom, there is little room for maneuver. The likely outcome? A surprisingly Right-wing Budget.

The argument about Labour’s economic direction is, of course, nothing new. For a brief moment, the leadership contest that brought Burnham to Downing Street threatened to become a genuine battle of ideas about Britain’s economic future. But the contest was over almost before that debate had begun, leaving Labour’s fundamental disagreements over economic policy unresolved.

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One of the two factions was the Labour Growth Group, formed by 60 or so MPs — among them Wes Streeting — in the wake of Keir Starmer’s election victory in 2024. As its name suggests, the group was formed out of the frustration that Labour had spent far too much time arguing about how to divide up Britain’s wealth and nowhere near enough about how to create more of it.

In May 2026, its director Mark McVitie, with chairman Chris Curtis MP, published An Honest Day, a manifesto calling for more homes to be built, energy costs to be brought down, lower taxes on employment and to make Britain more attractive for businesses to invest. The manifesto correctly identified the high cost of housing, energy and other essentials as major obstacles to economic growth. Its authors also backed greater government intervention to address where markets were failing, alongside higher capital gains taxes to help finance a cut of up to 2p in employee National Insurance. It was an attempt to combine supply-side reform with Labour’s instinct for redistribution.

As Burnham’s star rose, the Labour Growth Group’s fell, with Curtis standing down as chair in June. Its arguments nonetheless reflected a recognition among some Labour MPs that the existing economic settlement was failing to encourage productive investment or reward work.

A different prognosis, meanwhile, has emerged from the Tribune Group, which represents a more Burnhamite vision of the economy, rooted in greater state intervention. The caucus was originally formed in 1964 and was revived in November 2025 by Labour figures including Louise Haigh, concerned at the rising threats of both Reform and the Greens. By January, the group reportedly had more than 100 Labour MPs among its members. Their diagnosis of Britain’s ills center more on questions of inequality and insufficient state intervention, with proposals including wealth taxes, greater public investment, progressive taxation, changes to fiscal rules and a stronger role for government in directing economic activity. Haigh is now First Secretary of State in Burnham’s government and has been pursuing precisely that agenda.

Both groups recognize Britain’s problems with weak productivity, expensive housing and disappointing living standards. The disagreement is about whether prosperity is best restored by removing barriers to private enterprise; or by giving the government greater control over how resources are distributed. One side sees the state as part of Britain’s economic problem, the other sees it as the solution. That is a considerable ideological divide for a governing party, particularly when its Prime Minister and Chancellor appear increasingly drawn to opposite sides of the argument.

Meanwhile, in opposition, the Conservatives are attempting to correct the economic errors of their own recent governments. In the years following Brexit, the party abandoned much of Thatcher’s free-market program and accepted higher public expenditure, greater intervention and an increasingly burdensome tax system.

The result is an economy that remains torpid: hence Kemi Badenoch’s attempt to restore some center-Right economic philosophy. On 4 October, she published The Right Way, a pamphlet that deliberately echoes the Thatcher-era The Right Approach. Badenoch’s document emphasizes private enterprise, competition, lower taxation and limiting government intervention.

Her new Shadow Chancellor, Andrew Griffith, has reinforced that message with proposals for substantial deregulation, arguing that Britain needs to reduce the barriers to investment and development. So the Conservatives are returning to the principles of sound money and economic liberalism that they spent years neglecting, even as Labour’s Chancellor appears to be moving towards much the same economic ground. One can discern echoes of the New Labour era, when both main parties broadly accepted the case for markets, fiscal discipline and private enterprise, even if they disagreed over the details.

The IMF, at least, appeared this week to think Healey was heading in the right direction. On Tuesday, the Fund published its October 2026 World Economic Outlook. British growth this year has been revised upwards from 1.0% to 1.3%, but the Fund expects the economy to expand by just 1.2% in 2027, down from its previous forecast of 1.3%. Higher energy prices and long-term interest rates are expected to weigh on consumption and investment, while inflation is forecast to average 2.8% next year.

The Government has welcomed the upgrade for 2026, but next year’s outlook is considerably less encouraging. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has identified substantial pressures on departmental spending: higher defense costs, rising health spending  and plausible increases in both public-sector pay and the cost of delivering services, even as the Government tries to avoid making cuts elsewhere. As a result, the Chancellor could require an extra £35 billion a year by 2030–31.

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It is with these constraints in mind that the IMF has urged Healey to maintain fiscal consolidation despite the pressures on public spending. Its chief economist, Silvana Tenreyro, told a press conference in Bangkok that “the message for the UK is simply stay the course and continue on that trajectory”.The IMF’s warning followed similar comments from the governor of the Bank of England. Andrew Bailey cautioned that the Government’s fiscal plans must retain the confidence of financial markets or risk another gilt market crisis, recalling the turmoil following Liz Truss’s disastrous 2022 mini-Budget.

That leaves the Government in a tricky situation. On one hand, it faces demands for more money for defense, hospitals and other public services. On the other hand, it needs to convince investors that it can afford to pay for those services. Perhaps Burnham and Healey will attempt to plug the yawning gap in the public finances via higher taxes on businesses and investors. But, paradoxically, this will make those same businesses and investors less inclined or able to create jobs, innovation and, ultimately, growth. The unfortunate reality is that previous governments have already squeezed the productive parts of the economy for as much as they could. Businesses are struggling with higher employment costs, expensive energy and weak domestic demand. Investment remains disappointing, productivity growth is anemic and the incentives to work, save and invest have been steadily eroded.

Healey consequently faces weak growth, expensive borrowing and a Prime Minister committed to expanding the state’s responsibilities. Rejecting additional tax increases may protect investment incentives, but it does nothing to reduce the expenditure commitments those taxes might otherwise have financed. The Chancellor may therefore find himself increasingly drawn towards the economic arguments being advanced by the Conservatives: spending restraint, welfare reform, deregulation and stronger incentives for private investment. This month’s Budget may offer the first indication of that shift, although the real test will come when Healey has to decide whether protecting the welfare state means confronting its increasingly unsustainable costs. Successive governments have spent years putting off difficult reforms, which is precisely why Britain finds itself in this position.

It’s not hard to see how this will become a problem for Burnham, who has built his entire political persona on Manchesterism; greater public provision and government intervention. Promising more services at little or no direct cost to the public is politically attractive. Paying for them is rather less straightforward. The autumn Budget, then, will provide an important indication of how Healey intends to reconcile Labour’s ambitions for a larger state, and Burnham’s ambitions in particular, with the financial constraints imposed by increasingly nervous gilt investors.

The party has an opportunity to put Britain’s dire public finances on a sustainable footing for a generation, potentially depriving the Conservatives and others of their strongest economic argument. An uncomfortably Right-wing budget would be the first of many difficult steps.

But if Healey starts squeezing departmental budgets, cutting welfare spending and reducing the size of the state, Burnham could find himself presiding over the very economic program he came to power to oppose. The economic recovery job will be a long one — but can Healey survive the next Budget, or the one after that? Is Labour prepared to tear itself apart to deliver the reforms Britain needs?

If Healey retreats every time Labour supporters object, though, we will simply repeat the mistakes that got us here in the first place. And we know where that ends: a gilt market crisis, spending cuts Britain refused to make voluntarily forced upon it, and at far greater cost. The longer politicians refuse to make the necessary decisions, the fewer choices they will eventually have. That is what decades of political cowardice have brought us to.

The question is whether Burnham would sacrifice his political convictions to keep his Chancellor, or sacrifice his Chancellor to save his premiership.

Is reigniting the Brexit wars really a clever idea? I personally favored Remain in 2016 but became disenchanted by the campaign’s excessive focus on dubious economic claims. I argued at the time that Remain should offer a positive vision of Europe, rather than doom-mongering. But if Burnham asked for my advice today, I would tell him: don’t look at the polls. Don’t worry about “Bregret” or Labour Party politics. Look instead at the state of the EU, which has changed dramatically since 2016. 

Right now, the EU is not a club you’d want to join. In fact, the sensible Icelanders recently voted against pursuing EU membership. Despite barely surviving the Eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis, the EU never bothered to fix the underlying problems that triggered it, such as a fragmented banking system and the lack of a common capital market. Now another sovereign debt crisis could soon be on the horizon, with French interest rates going through the roof. And if the polls are right about France’s presidential election next year, the political center might shrink or even disappear as a political force, leaving France and the Eurozone under the influence of the far-Right. Does Britain really want to be in the same club as President Marine Le Pen or Chancellor Alice Weidel?

If Britain were to foolishly seek to rejoin, it would doubtless get a raw deal. For one thing, the EU will not be able, or willing, to offer the UK any rebates or opt-outs. In the past, such concessions have been achieved through diplomatic master strokes. Margaret Thatcher negotiated the rebate after driving everybody crazy about the issue. John Major landed the opt-outs, including from the euro, because he would otherwise have vetoed the Maastricht Treaty in 1991. But the age of miracles has passed. Since then, the EU’s finances have deteriorated. Germany is no longer prepared to bankroll the EU as generously as it once did: the fractious coalition in Berlin needs all the money it can get just to survive. Meanwhile, Le Pen has pledged to reduce France’s EU budget contributions. If she succeeds, other European nations will have to pay more; if she does not, she will almost certainly block anyone else from getting a rebate. I cannot conceive of any political constellation that would allow for Britain to rejoin on the cheap. 

In fact, according to my calculations, Britain’s annual contributions to the EU budget would be around £30 billion in today’s money if it were to rejoin. That’s about half of the UK’s entire defense budget. How would Chancellor John Healey pay for this: by cutting defense or welfare spending, or else by raising VAT? Pray tell! 

You might now accuse me of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. So let’s talk about value for money. For the most part, Britain’s EU contributions would not go toward investments, such as cross-border railways, hyperscalers, or nuclear fusion. Instead they would be redistributed to other member states. Where is the value in that? 

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There’s another, even bigger obstacle to Britain rejoining the EU: Artificial Intelligence. What almost nobody engaged in the Rejoin debate is thinking about is the sheer extent of the EU’s anti-tech crusade. Since Brexit, the Luddites in Brussels have passed a large number of laws seeking to control the spread of digital technologies and impose their will on the global tech industry. Of these, the 2024 AI Act would be particularly damaging to the UK’s prospects. The European attitude to AI is best exemplified by the German media, which only ever publishes news stories that emphasize the dangers of AI. It views AI as a means through which evil American entrepreneurs could destroy European culture. 

Of all the policy mistakes the EU has made over the years, its tech legislation must be both the most stupid and the most significant. The EU believed in the story that it kept telling itself: if America was an innovation hub and China a manufacturing powerhouse, then Europe was the global regulator. For sure, it used to be. But that was only because world-leading European manufacturing companies, such as the German car makers, set standards for the rest of the industry. Today, by contrast, only four of the world’s 50 largest tech companies are European. The EU has lost the AI race and as a result it has no leverage in the global debate over how AI should be regulated. That debate is limited to Anthropic, OpenAI, the US government, and to some extent China.

Unlike the EU, the UK is a player in AI — albeit a small one. Brexit was not an economic success story overall: in fact, I’d call it a macroeconomic non-event. But AI was a silver lining. Last year, AI investment in the UK took off. This year, the UK poured more capital investment into AI than the whole EU; in a few years’ time, it will probably have invested even more.

Yet if the UK were to rejoin the EU, it would have to sign up to all of Europe’s tech regulations, including the onerous AI Act. If that happened, all current and future investments into UK-based AI firms would be at risk. There is no way the EU would allow the UK to maintain its liberal regulatory regime and become Europe’s only technology hub. And I struggle to imagine a UK government voluntarily strangling what could eventually become the country’s most successful industry.

Given the way the EU is run right now, the UK cannot conceivably return. But Burnham has reduced the question of rejoining to shallow identity politics. The EU is an abstract placeholder for progressive multilateralism. Many of the loudest advocates of EU membership think of business in terms of clichés: they insist, for instance, that business always benefits from the single market — but for many industries including AI, that is just not true. I don’t imagine that many Rejoiners are considering how EU membership would affect the fledgling London-Oxford-Cambridge tech triangle. To do so would upset their lazy narratives. 

In the end, I felt the same way about Leave and Remain as Henry Kissinger felt about Iraq and Iran. He wanted them both to lose. Now, I feel just as pessimistic about Rejoin.

Andy Burnham has, thus far, been an avowedly domestic prime minister, with his focus on devolution, housing and social care allowing Miliband more control over foreign affairs. And until now, the role has in some ways suited Miliband well. On the eve of this week’s Labour Party conference, murmurs abounded of Cabinet splits over the economy and immigration. A shift in foreign policy, however, has been more warmly received within the party. Earlier this month, Miliband announced a series of sanctions on illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. He has integrated elements of his old brief at the Energy Department to push for “climate diplomacy”, and has been more explicit in his advocacy for European reintegration than either of the previous two office holders. This all provides easy ammunition for rival parties and for the British press, but it’s catnip for party members.

During his Conference speech in Liverpool on Monday morning, Miliband hit all these notes and provided a clearer view of what his foreign policy will look like. “The world order needs rebuilding anew,” he said, arguing that his approach would be one of “resilient idealism”. He had made the same points at a corporate reception the previous evening, where business leaders uninterestedly chatted and chewed. In front of Labour delegates on Monday, however, he was more at home. The crowd thunderously cheered his labeling of Israeli settlers as “terrorists”, and his declaration that “our future lies in a stronger, deeper partnership with the European Union”.

Left-wing dissent towards Miliband’s agenda has, therefore, come not from within the walls of the conference but right outside. On Sunday evening, more than 50 protesters were arrested for demonstrating in support of the proscribed group Palestine Action. When I walked past the scene, there appeared to be more police than agitators. White-haired radicals sat cross-legged on the grass — standing for an extended period would have put pressure on those joints — and held up homemade signs pledging fealty to the organization, surrounded all the while by a bored-looking ring of officers. The same evening, a smaller group of activists had confronted Miliband in Pizza Express, telling him his Israel position was insufficient and demanding he abandon his doughballs to address the protesters.

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This encapsulates one of the chief problems faced by Labour foreign secretaries at a time of war in the Middle East. While the Right-leaning press decries Miliband as an extremist enemy of the people, there will invariably be a coterie of progressive objectionists who will settle for nothing less than the nuking of Tel Aviv. At the same time, Miliband, a British Jew whose mother escaped a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, has had to put up with allegations of antisemitism for his action on West Bank settlements, just as security officials brief the press that his approach to the US-Israeli offensive against Iran was “petulant, pacifist, legalistic and very political”.

That Miliband is political is obvious: he is arguably the most ideological member of Burnham’s Cabinet, deeply interested in ideas in a way that the more interpersonally minded PM is not. “He’s more demanding [than Cooper or Lammy],” one FCDO official tells me. “But he knows what he wants. As soon as he came in, there was a plan for how he wanted things done.” Shortly after he became energy secretary under the leadership of Keir Starmer, Miliband spoke in an interview of the need to “move fast and build things”. Initially tipped to be Burnham’s chancellor, he has put paid to the idea that a move to the Foreign brief — which for some ministers feels more like an ambassadorial role — would neuter his political influence.

As part of this new shift towards a more ideological foreign policy, Britain will have to accept its own mediocrity. Much of Miliband’s messaging so far has reinforced the image of the country as a secondary power, rather than one that should be competing with the big boys in DC and Beijing. The West Bank announcement was made in conjunction with similar action from Canada and France, other middle powers with which Britain is forging closer ties to compensate for White House capriciousness. The UK has found some success as a driver of European action on Ukraine, leading the “coalition of the willing” at a time when Kyiv has been uncertain of US backing. Miliband insisted in his Liverpool speech that “our alliance with the United States remains essential”, yet he made no effort to hide this government’s diplomatic realignment. Britons are “proud Europeans”, he said, adding: “This is our continent.” In other words: these are our true friends, not America.

While Miliband has sought to portray his plans as a radical break from the Starmer years, some of his prescriptions bear a resemblance to what came before. His talk of “resilient idealism” is immediately reminiscent of Lammy’s promotion of “progressive realism” abroad. According to that doctrine, governments “do not have to choose between values and interests”, and Left-wing ideals can still shape practical responses to global conflict. Where Miliband differs from the more Atlanticist Lammy is in the course that he is charting away from Washington and more determinedly into the embrace of Europe. Indeed, it is hard to picture him (illicitly) fishing with JD Vance.

The Foreign Secretary, then, clearly sees an opening for Britain to become, rather than a leading power, a moral brake on the worst impulses of its betters. On Monday, he vowed to “put climate at the heart of national security”. When the UK takes on the rotating G20 presidency next year, it will “lead the efforts to manage AI so we keep our country and our world safe, and I say no tech titan should stand in our way”. Earlier this month, in relation to Gaza, he said that “Britain is not silent in the face of injustice and nor is it powerless”.

Yet Miliband risks making the same mistake as Lammy, attempting to navigate a multipolar world armed with the outmoded weaponry of the old liberal order. The UK has in recent weeks launched another round of “tough new sanctions” in Russia, with little evidence that they will have a greater impact than those which came before, while continued invocations of international law hardly deter Xi and Putin. Miliband’s assumption of a like-minded federation of European allies will be put to the test, too, by the possibility of continental powers such as France and Germany electing Right-populist, anti-Brussels parties into government in the coming decade. “Europe is not just our geography, but so much more,” he said as he called for a deeper partnership with the bloc on Monday. But how might he deal with a prospective AfD chancellor who wants out of the union altogether?

Miliband may be looking towards Europe, but these pledges are always made with one eye on Labour’s domestic popularity. The party faces a crucial by-election in Holborn and St Pancras next week, where Green leader Zack Polanski is seeking election in a constituency which in more than 40 years of existence has chosen only Labour MPs. There is a case to be made that Polanski’s initial success was the result of progressive frustration with Starmer, and that the Burnham conquest has brought the Left back onside. Miliband’s rhetoric against the Israeli government may have some moral grounding, but it also functions as an attempt to match Green radicalism on the issue.

His enemies won’t be surprised by this: he’s “Red Ed”, after all. Having been party leader for the first half of Labour’s decade of humiliation, Miliband has become a more polished, wily politician in the years since. But he’s still an idealist. “They say that as you age you become more cynical,” he declared during his Liverpool speech. “Why? Not me.” Talk of “resilient idealism” might sound appealing to the Labour base, but that resilience is only tested in times of crisis. As for realpolitik, nobody is mistaking Miliband for Henry Kissinger, but there are plenty within the party who would like him to take inspiration from one of Labour’s more hard-headed foreign secretaries — Ernest Bevin, who served in the Clement Attlee government from 1945-51.

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Bevin, a former union boss, had impeccable Left-wing credentials when appointed by Attlee, but quickly marked himself out as a realist on foreign policy. Recognizing that Britain was a fading superpower, he pushed for the creation of Nato, and its principle of collective defense, so that the country could call on a network of Western European partners ready to support its aims. He championed the development of a nuclear deterrent, and a decade earlier had admonished Labour’s pacifist then-leader, George Lansbury, for “hawking his conscience around”. Bevin also opposed the establishment of Israel, believing it would become a “racial state”, and maintained that the Balfour Declaration of 1917 had been a grave error of foreign policy.

Of course, Bevin failed in his attempt to block the foundation of Israel, his power only extending so far. Miliband, who has used his extensive Whitehall experience to circumvent obstacles that had thwarted his predecessors, is well-positioned to reshape the international order so that British objectives better match his own idealistic, Europhile politics.

And yet, the public may ask how far this serves the national interest. They would be entitled, too, to argue that Miliband’s Net Zero zealotry in the Energy brief constrained national industry, at a cost to the country’s hard-power capabilities. Britain has an opportunity to make something of what Miliband correctly perceives to be its secondary status, leading a set of fellow middle powers. But Miliband’s progressive ideals would be better served by pragmatism than by sanctions and stern words alone. “It’s hard to change the world,” he acknowledged in his Liverpool speech. Sometimes, it’s better to recognize the world as it is, and leave the idealism to the activists sitting cross-legged outside the conference gate.

Who, then, is the real van Heel? We all know that she’s Dutch and also lived in Belgium when young. She met her future husband after coming to study at Cambridge and apparently becoming the coolest girl in college. The football-loving lad was punching above his weight, it is said, though the couple has now been married for 25 years with three grown-up kids and a dog. Much of her professional career has been spent in marketing.

We also know that she once went on Blind Date, despite already dating Andy, as she thought it would boost her marketing career. Choosing “Will from Surrey”, she ended up throwing a cushion at him while he called her “a cold fish”. (What’s hilarious is that “Will from Surrey” might only have been on the Cilla Black show to boost his career, too — as he later became the Conservative Party’s marketing director.) Since then, van Heel has worked at BSkyB, has run her own agency, MVH Marketing, and has progressed to chief strategy officer at a London-based agency called Heavenly, where she worked on campaigns for England Rugby, the BBC, and HSBC.

She has already experienced press interest: when the tabloids disliked an outfit she wore in 2009 at the unveiling of a sculpture of the Queen Mother, and, on a more serious level, when involved in a dispute over her husband’s parliamentary expenses claims for refurbishments of a south London flat they’d bought. The Telegraph noted this week that it was van Heel who “took up the baton, faxing detailed notes ‘on behalf of Andy Burnham MP’ to parliamentary officials, asking them to approve expenses they had previously rejected”. Burnham had already told the Parliamentary Fees office, when expensing the refurb of a previous flat, that his wife would divorce him if he wasn’t reimbursed. On a personal level, she lost her sister to breast cancer, a disease which also affected her mother and other sister, and carrying the BRCA1 gene mutation she opted for a pre-emptive double mastectomy herself.

So yes, there are details — but the bigger problem is that, ever since Cherie Blair unwittingly opened the door to the press in her nightie, the wives and husbands of our leaders have insisted on keeping a scrupulously low profile. So low that we barely know who they actually are any more. Cherie’s achievements as a barrister, QC and political activist were soon overshadowed by lifestyle dramas — such as when the press got very excited about her best friend Carole Caplin, who, according to Alastair Campbell, styled herself as “the Blairs’ guru” and rapidly progressed from fitness and fashion advisor to telling Cherie to ward off No. 10’s enemies using crystals. Caplin would often massage Tony because it helped him relax. I mean, the stories were golden — but imagine Victoria Starmer explaining to the public why she let her best friend massage Sir Keir.

As for the Blairs’ children, three of whom went through their teenage years at Downing Street, the papers also had a field day. At least, until 1999 when Blair appealed to the Press Complaints Commission and his complaint, on whether the way they obtained his daughter Kathryn’s school place was really in the public interest, was upheld. Yet in 2002 the Blairs had reason to complain again when their son Euan’s Oxford application became known as the “acid test” for press intrusion on the children of public figures. Would this be news if it were about an ordinary person? No. Subsequent prime ministerial children have benefited from reinforced press protections ever since.

Cherie surely also suffered from the Lady Macbeth trope, a little like Carrie Johnson later on; an intelligent woman who’s politically involved must be exerting a malign influence on her husband. Yet her successor, Sarah Brown, could not have been more different. Her diligence and dutifulness, as well as charitable work, fit well with her husband’s dour attitude to the job. (Perhaps her own background in PR, having co-founded the firm Hobsbawm Macaulay, instructed her well in how to play it.) Yet his premiership lasted less than three years, and her insistence on humility in the face of public attention has perhaps only truly been matched by Victoria Starmer, whose husband’s time in the top seat lasted a similarly short time. Could it be possible that the more hidden or humble the partner, the less successful the PM? In trying to remember Liz Truss’s husband my mind has just come up with a businessman called Peter, but I’ve just checked and in fact he was an accountant called Hugh.

It’s hard to blame any prime ministerial spouse for avoiding the press, but it does seem that, without hearing any kind of voice from the person themself, or knowing what they want from life, people are left making idle comments about their clothes. Perhaps that’s a price worth paying. Victoria Starmer’s insistence on wanting no part in the whole shebang, to playing the media-friendly wife, seemed chic in itself. And yet — if Keir’s problem with the public was a lack of human touch, then it would have surely helped to see inside his marriage. When his time was finally running out, he began to make frequent references to his wife, something he understandably tried to play down while running the country. Yet how you run a family together surely has a bearing on how you run a country. If his potential supporters really couldn’t fathom who he was, being able to see his family could well have helped. It is certainly not a woman’s duty to prop up her husband’s career by playing the role of the smiling wife. And yet, at the same time, the public isn’t strange or prurient for wanting to know who they’re voting for.

Samantha Cameron let the cameras in and talked about family life. She had been a music and Ibiza-loving raver and went on to set up a fashion brand. She also told her husband David that he was to serve no more than two terms as prime minister — she couldn’t bear any longer — but her media-friendliness certainly boosted his brand. The strength of their marriage, particularly through the death of their beloved son Ivan, shone through to even those who hated their politics. She was the weapon he needed, and when Carrie Johnson later replaced Samantha’s minimalist kitchen with a lavish refurb, people judged Carrie for it.

Then there are the spouses who are equally politically motivated themselves. Hillary Clinton went from being First Lady (under her husband) to secretary of state (under Obama) to presidential nominee herself. Whereas Michelle Obama, regularly and indeed almost relentlessly asked if she’d consider being president herself, has only ever given the idea an exceedingly firm no. With rumors still abounding that she might, her husband had to take up the theme. “There are three things that are certain in life,” he claimed: “death, taxes and ‘Michelle is not running for president.’”

It is a thankless task to raise kids in a family under such scrutiny where you can’t afford to make one single mistake in public — or to leave one of your children behind at the pub, as the Camerons did. Marriage, when it works, creates a unique support system that the highest job in the land clearly benefits from. And yet given we’re on our seventh prime minister in a decade, all of them married, clearly marriage wasn’t enough. As an unmarried person I’d be fascinated to see a singleton take on the job of PM. I wasn’t around for our last one, Ted Heath in the early Seventies, and I can only imagine that answering endless questions about your sex life would be as exhausting as trying to have one. Then again, that didn’t stop Boris Johnson.

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But given how many of my middle-aged friends are now divorced, if they were ever even married, or are busily muttering to their partners about “opening things up”, surely the whole nuclear family thing will cease to be such a requisite of our politicians? If our parliamentary spouses feel too much of the spotlight is on them, perhaps they could share the load by entering a throuple?

This isn’t an easily squareable discourse, and telling women what to do isn’t my usual thing. We all feel conflicted by our nosiness — but nosy we remain. It’s precisely because of how damaging intrusion can be that it’s best to get ahead of the competition and intrude on yourself first. Accept that your husband has already made a play at being Mr Normal, and let the cameras in. Given how little we know about Nigel Farage’s partner, or Kemi Badenoch’s husband, it could provide the competitive edge that our new prime minister needs.

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.

The hard reality is that Britain is in hock to the bond market. Its options are limited, and all the democratic will in the world can’t change that — at least, not in the short term. Galling as it is that fund managers have come to assume a weight similar to, if not greater than, that of democratically-elected governments, that is the consequence of choices made by those same governments over decades — choices that deferred the costs of those decisions to a future that is now, suddenly, upon us.

James Carville, the Democrat strategist, famously said that he’d like to be reincarnated as the bond market because then he could “intimidate everybody”. But it wasn’t always so. There was a time when gilts were the only show in town. Fund managers who needed a stable income from a credit-worthy source had no option but to buy government bonds, and little reason to search for alternatives.

However, three developments have since converged to create the situation in which we find ourselves today. First, financial globalization opened the world to investors. This helped keep interest low in western countries as investors from emerging markets looked to park their money in “safe havens”. But it also opened the door to investors in those safe havens being able to look elsewhere if that status ever changed.

Second, defined-benefit pensions were increasingly replaced with defined-contribution pensions. In the short term this was another win for governments. With the population aging and retirements getting longer, defined-benefit schemes were going to demand ever bigger contributions if they were to remain sustainable. Switching the model saved employers money in the short term, boosting profits and thereby asset values, which was always a political winner. But it also meant the guaranteed supply of credit from pension managers needing long-term, stable returns diminished.

Third, slowing economic growth in rich countries drove debt higher, as governments postponed the tax rises or expenditure cuts which would bring budgets back into alignment. At the same time, rising economic growth and improving fiscal management in developing countries helped improve their credit-worthiness, creating new competition for creditors.

Today, as a result, hedge funds — increasingly foreign-owned ones — have replaced pension-funds as the main buyer of UK gilts. Footloose and fickle, they chase returns and dump bonds the moment they doubt a government’s fiscal prudence, as Britain discovered during Liz Truss’s premiership. And with plenty of options in a changing world, from higher-yielding but increasingly safe emerging-market debt to corporate bonds, investors can play hard to get.

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Voters like poetry — grand visions and promises of pleasure without pain — but fund managers don’t. They want the driest prose: that the bonds they buy will hold their value, that their money will be returned at the promised date, that they can sell the bonds easily if they need cash, and that the interest rate at which they bought them will be honored.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves failed to bridge that gap. While the Chancellor often talked of hard choices, she seldom made them. On the expenditure side, Labour promised to restore public services but offered few compensating trade-offs. Instead, the Government maintained the triple-lock on pensions, reversed modest welfare reforms and froze most taxes, saying they would raise the growth rate of the economy to pay for it all.

Yet they offered no compelling narrative for how they would do this. The bold changes that might have had an impact, like deep planning reform, a major infrastructure program or re-integrating with Europe, were all ruled out since various constituencies opposed them. Starmer seemed to think that simply by acting like an adult, unlike some of his recent Tory predecessors, investors would return to Britain and the economy would take off.

It didn’t, and there was little reason to believe it would do so in the foreseeable future. And the fatal consequence of relying upon growth as a get-out-of-jail card, but failing to deliver it, was that Reeves could only keep bond investors on board by constantly sweetening the terms of their loans. Although her fiscal management prevented a Liz Truss moment, it merely spread the pain out over time. Since Starmer and Reeves took control of Britain’s economic direction, UK gilt yields have risen by 0.7%, making it the most expensive government debt in the G7. Investors didn’t panic and rush for the exits, as happened in 2022. Instead, they demanded ever more inducements from their hosts if they were to stay at the party.

In short, Starmer and Reeves began their term of office facing a daunting challenge — deteriorating public services, burdensome debt, a housing crisis, stagnant productivity and a restive electorate demanding action on all fronts — but having chosen first to bind their hands. It was inevitable they would spend their term bobbing, weaving and ducking, desperately holding out for the bell but destined not to end the round. Despite his claim that he bequeaths an economy that “is stronger, growing faster than our peers”, in truth GDP growth is slowing and real wages are stagnating.

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Burnham needs to digest that lesson fast, because there will be no time for him to learn on the job. Should he become prime minister, he would take office with the financial conditions facing the government even worse than they were when Starmer took office. As revealed starkly on the morning Burnham’s return to parliament was announced, the interest the government must pay on its debt now consumes nearly 10% of total expenditure, which is considerably more than it spends on defense (itself an area that Britain must spend more on, lest it alienate its many alliance partners). And with bond yields rising across developed markets, that is likely only to worsen.

Yet while the prose demanded by gilt buyers has become even colder and more austere, voters still want poetry. Burnham has offered plenty: re-nationalizing utilities, increasing defense spending, cutting student loans, business tax cuts. If he doesn’t rapidly pivot to a prose which the bond markets like reading, he’ll enter the same doom-loop that saddled the Starmer-Reeves duopoly.

Some observers have concluded that this is inevitable, that Britain has become ungovernable and no prime minister can succeed, the proof being that the electorate now cycles through them with stunning rapidity — six so far in the last decade, soon to be seven. This line of thought holds that Britain, like many western countries, is gripped in a sort of Cleopatra complex: voters beat any messenger who delivers news of hard choices, leading politicians to make impossible pledges only to be kicked out the door when they fail to deliver. For all that he spoke of the change he brought to the UK in his short term of office, Starmer shied away from anything major, and it hasn’t escaped notice that even some of the “change delivered” for which he claimed credit in his resignation speech were measures that didn’t originate in Downing Street but were forced upon him by his MPs who resisted change.

Perhaps what Britain needs is better voters. But it seems just as likely that what it really needs is better leaders. The country’s beloved wartime narrative is that in 1940 the country had the option of an easy way out by appeasing Nazi Germany but chose instead to follow Winston Churchill into battle. Is it really impossible for leaders today to muster a will to fight? If Britain wants to end its servitude to the bond markets, it can. All it needs to do is reduce its need for them – by making itself an attractive creditor that can turn down offers that are insufficiently appealing. That will require both a bold plan to boost growth and a credible one to keep current expenditure under control. Labour nostalgists who hark back to the Seventies, when Tony Benn called for a Fortress Britain that would put bond investors back in their place, overlook that Britain is an entirely different place today: our bond-buyers aren’t all Britons who can be corralled behind a national project and our debt is rising and not falling as a share of GDP, giving those buyers ever more leverage.

Perhaps devolution will produce positive outcomes, and perhaps Burnham can tweak Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules a bit — though only if he’s to produce more convincing ones — but so far he’s produced little of an economic vision. He’d better do so fast, because he doesn’t have the luxury of time. Attention has thus turned to who he selects as his Chancellor as an indication of his economic vision: will it be the left-leaning Ed Miliband ushering in change, the right-leaning Wes Streeting heralding Blairite continuity, or possibly someone else all together?

But that’s looking for clues in the wrong place. Whoever Burnham selects will have their hands bound by the bond market into which Britain has delivered itself. If they have bold ambitions, they’ll need to match it with serious intent to preserve the country’s solvency, lest the markets discipline them. Doing as Starmer did and farming economic strategy out to his Chancellor would be a dereliction of duty. Burnham’s first job is to produce an economic vision for the nation — and if need be, to seek a mandate for it. If there’s one glimmer of hope, it’s that he has begun assembling an economics team, which suggests both a willingness to listen and a seriousness of purpose. One example is Jim O’Neill, a former chief economist for Goldman Sachs, who wants to increase infrastructure spending while keeping to the fiscal rules; another is Mark McVitie, the former director of the Labour Growth Group who has called for a watering-down of clean energy policy and a rise in capital gains tax to fund a 2p cut in national insurance.

On Sunday, the former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak offered him sage advice: “he’ll never have more power than on his first day in the job. It is vital he has a clear and achievable plan for what he wants to do in those opening hours.” One acid test will be what he has to say on triple-lock on pensions, a policy which dooms every government to an eternally worsening fiscal position and will deepen the country’s debt bondage.

If Burnham vows to keep it, his rivals should begin their leadership campaigns now, because his tenure will be as ill-fated as Starmer’s. Burnham will have to govern in a prose we might not enjoy, but there can still be lessons for him in poetry. As he makes the journey from Manchester to London, Burnham might therefore do well to reflect on a similar train journey from northern England chronicled by his favourite poet, Philip Larkin, who observed a car of young newlyweds at the peak of their joy rolling into their destination “ready to be loosed with all the power / That being changed can give”. Much like them, Burnham’s ride will be joyous — but will end in London, as Larkin’s poem ominously does, in a downpour.

Time was when the Labour Left did ambition. Whatever one thinks of Tony Benn, and opinions divide sharply, nobody could accuse him of thinking small. His 1975 Alternative Economic Strategy, a patriotic blueprint for autarky, envisaged public ownership on a colossal scale, capital controls, industrial planning, tariffs to protect domestic manufacturing, and a self-respecting state capable of directing investment towards national priorities. At one point, he floated the nationalization of Britain’s 25 largest companies. The aim was not merely to regulate capitalism but to grab it by the lapels and reorder it through state action. To Benn, the struggle against capitalism and the struggle for national sovereignty were inseparable. His socialism amounted to a species of Anglo-Gaullism. The objective was to ensure that Parliament, rather than plutocrats or Eurocrats, ruled Britain.

That patriotism informed Benn’s hostility to the European Economic Community — Euroskepticism was then still an honorable, even intellectually formidable, tradition on the Labour Left. Benn regarded the EEC not as a post-national panacea but as a constitutional straitjacket designed to frustrate democratic control over the economy. If Westminster could not direct investment, subsidize industry, regulate capital flows or protect strategic sectors without running afoul of Brussels, then the entire project of socialist transformation became an elaborate exercise in make-believe. Compared with today’s notionally Left-wing Europhilia — which often amounts to little more than a Pavlovian urge to applaud whatever annoys the Tories and, latterly, Reform — Bennite Euroskepticism at least rested on a clutch of thoughtful and well-articulated premises.

Benn, moreover, was not some lonely crank muttering socialist incantations and shouting from the backbenches. By the late Seventies and early Eighties, much of the Labour Left shared his conviction that Britain’s economic malaise demanded structural remedies rather than desultory managerial tinkering. Michael Foot, now remembered chiefly as a disheveled romantic in a donkey jacket, led a party committed to an astonishing program of economic intervention. The 1983 manifesto promised new public enterprises in electronics, pharmaceuticals, and high tech; proposed renationalizing key assets; advocated extensive industrial planning; and sought to extend democratic control over economic life. To modern ears, accustomed to politicians boasting about breakfast clubs and advising men to whisper “maaaate” at misogynists, the sheer scale of the ambition feels almost foreign.

Yet there was a minor snag. Bennism never came remotely close to persuading the proletariat. The 1983 manifesto may today read like the last serious attempt by the British Left to think systematically about power, but it also delivered Labour’s worst post-war result. For an electorate still haunted by inflation and strikes, nationalization and withdrawal from the EEC looked less like a program for renewal than a recipe for further turmoil. Nor was the electorate the only obstacle. The Labour Left spent almost as much time arguing with itself as it did with its opponents. Benn and Foot did not exactly belong to a single political tendency. Foot’s subsequent reputation as a wild-eyed Bennite firebrand was always somewhat exaggerated. An old-fashioned parliamentary socialist, he romanticized the Commons in a way Benn never did. He also regarded some of Benn’s more ambitious proposals with skepticism, describing the idea of nationalizing Britain’s 25 largest companies as “crazy”. Where Benn sought to remake Labour, Foot often sought to hold it together, preserving a heteroclite coalition that still stretched from Tribune socialists to elements on the Labour Right.

For all their differences, both men possessed something now largely absent from Labour politics: a theory of power. They believed that Britain’s problems stemmed from the structure of ownership: a state in hock to a rentier class that preferred inflating house prices to financing factories; a financial system that found speculation and offshoring more profitable than domestic production, and democratic institutions hollowed out by budget cuts and Brussels. The central question, as Benn saw it, was not simply how wealth was distributed but who possessed power, and whether democratic institutions retained the capacity to challenge it. Reflecting on his years in government, he wrote in one of his voluminous diaries: “As a minister, I experienced the power of industrialists and bankers to get their way by use of the crudest form of economic pressure, even blackmail, against a Labour government.”

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Burnham’s politics, by contrast, start from the tacit assumption that the argument has already been settled and lost. Finance will remain dominant. Capital will remain mobile. The ownership of the economy is no longer a political question but a fact of nature, somewhere between gravity and the weather. As one former colleague put it, Burnham’s beliefs are “not ideological” but rooted in “people’s daily experiences”. Benn began with a theory and worked downwards to policy; Burnham begins with a conversation in Morrisons and works upwards towards a philosophy. The commanding heights have disappeared into the mist; the task now is to ensure that the buses arrive roughly on schedule. Benn wanted to socialize the economy. Burnham is content with contactless ticketing.

The retreat began long before Burnham. Neil Kinnock’s achievement as party leader from 1983 onwards was not to construct a new theory of power, but to dismantle the old one in the shadow of Thatcherism. After the electoral catastrophes of the early Eighties, Labour’s idée fixe became electability rather than transformation. It accordingly spent 40 years sanding down its ambitions in pursuit of intermittent office, trapped in a vicious circle whereby each electoral victory was achieved by abandoning the very ideas that might have justified it. Public ownership was quietly downgraded, trade-union power curbed, Euroscepticism abandoned, and socialism itself pushed into the loft conversion alongside conference samizdat. Yet Kinnock never quite replaced what he had discarded. Labour shed policy after policy without offering much in the way of a positive alternative. By the time he left office in 1992, the party had become more respectable but intellectually thinner, more adept at winning the confidence of ordinary Brits before elections than improving their lives afterwards. The ambition to stem decline had given way to the more modest goal of reassuring Middle England that Labour’s bark was worse than its bite.

John Smith represented a further step down the mountain. An insufferably moralizing chap, he looked less like a tribune of the working class than a Scottish bank manager who had wandered into the wrong conference. Smith grasped that Labour needed constitutional reform, decentralization and a more liberal conception of politics, but he lacked both the temperament and the time for anything more audacious, preoccupied as he was with the battle over One Member One Vote. Where Labour once dreamed of reindustrialization and redistribution, it now devoted its energies to redesigning the method by which delegates selected the shadow cabinet.

With Blair and Brown, the comedown became complete. New Labour in power accepted not merely the institutions of Thatcherism but many of its underlying assumptions. The task was no longer to challenge the dominance of finance but to manage it more effectively; not to reverse globalization but to adapt to it; not to democratize economic power but to skim enough tax revenue from the City to finance a few public services. By the end of the Blair-Brown years, finance accounted for a larger share of the economy than ever, manufacturing had shrunk further, and vast swathes of public expenditure were being funneled through private contractors. The party had moved from promising to assume the commanding heights to Cool Britannia. 

If New Labour represented the abandonment of Labour’s old ambitions, Ed Miliband represented their uncertain rediscovery. The timing ought to have been propitious. The Conservatives were imposing the most severe fiscal retrenchment in a generation. Real wages were stagnant, public services under pressure, and the financial crash had discredited the hubris of many a Hayekian. Yet Miliband proved strangely unable to convert this conjuncture into a compelling alternative. Though he flirted with a critique of “predatory capitalism” and occasionally hinted that his marxisant father Ralph might have been right all along, he never developed these instincts into a coherent political project. The whole unhappy experiment culminated, appropriately enough, in the EdStone. Unveiled in a Hastings car park during the 2015 election campaign, the two-tonne limestone monolith bore a handful of pledges so anodyne — “a strong economic foundation”, “higher living standards”, “an NHS with the time to care” — as to be quite meaningless. The stone was intended for Downing Street’s rose garden; instead, it became a monument to Labour’s inability to explain why it deserved power. Faced with a choice between austerity and tax-and-spend, the British electorate displayed a touching preference for someone else’s suffering. Miliband’s defeat duly followed.

In the aftermath, Labour briefly returned to something resembling Bennism in the form of Corbynism. The program amounted to moderately higher public spending — raising the state’s share of GDP from roughly 40 to 45%, bringing Britain closer to its continental peers — alongside the renationalization of selected utilities and a modest industrial revival: hardly the storming of the Winter Palace. A surprising number of voters appeared to recognize as much in the snap election of 2017. Yet his leadership was undone two years later by fifth columnists and a cackhanded commitment to two referendums — Brexit and, potentially, Scotland — at precisely the moment when the public wanted none. The Labour Left thus contrived to squander what may have been its last once-in-a-generation opportunity.

Now, with Starmer’s purges having culminated in the discovery that even the purger can one day become the purgee, we are witnessing the extraordinary recrudescence of the Labour Left. Starmer survived the paid-for clothes and Mandelson’s penchant for removing his own but not Burnham’s by-election victory. The irony is that the Labour Left’s great returning hope arrives not bearing a new economic settlement but a municipal case study, albeit a successful one.

Yet the more remarkable fact is that Burnham may now inherit the Labour leadership, and with it the premiership, without ever being forced to explain what, precisely, he believes. His supporters treat his coronation as a foregone conclusion. That is curious. For a party supposedly rediscovering its radical tradition, there has been remarkably little appetite to subject its newest savior to public scrutiny. The Conservatives spent much of the past decade airdropping prime ministers into Downing Street and presenting the electorate with a fait accompli. Unlike them, though, our future prime minister is an empty signifier. 

Burnham’s backers speak reverently of “Manchesterism”, but it is not entirely clear what the term means beyond competent local government. The flagship achievement of his mayoralty has been fixing Greater Manchester’s bus network. The policy has been successful enough: usage in the first franchised areas rose by around 8%, punctuality improved, and the city’s now-iconic yellow buses have become a visible symbol of municipal renewal. Yet there is an undeniable mismatch between the scale of the achievement and the scale of the claims made for it. Britain’s productivity growth has averaged barely 0.5% annually since the financial crisis. Business investment remains among the lowest in the G7. Housing construction consistently falls short of demand. The country’s capital stock is aging, its infrastructure creaks, and regional inequalities remain among the highest in the developed world. Against this backdrop, Burnham’s prime ministerial pitch appears to amount largely to better buses.

What is missing is the very thing that animated Benn, Foot, and even, in his own coy fashion, Corbyn: an explanation of how the economy works. Burnham can tell you who broke Britain — “the four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deregulation, privatization, austerity, and Brexit” — but he has remarkably little to say about what should replace the existing model. His cri de coeur is “business-friendly socialism”, whatever that focus-grouped inanity might mean. Perhaps this accounts for his popularity. A Labourist Zelig elevated by the party machine, he has built a career on being all things to all people. Whether this party trick will work in power as it has in party intrigue remains to be seen. 

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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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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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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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

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

And then there is Labour.

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

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

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

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

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

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Britain’s wage slaves are revolting

By Jonny Ball

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

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

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

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

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

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Blue Labour has come too late

By David Littlefair

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

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

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

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

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

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

But how convincing a patriarch is he, really? This week, he made headlines not for inciting misogyny, but for losing a fight. He was an MMA fighter long before he was an influencer or porn producer, and has always traded on his physical prowess. But this week, after a five-year break from the ring, Tate went up against the boxer Chase DeMoor in Dubai — and was brutally outmatched.

Taller, stronger, and 10 years younger, DeMoor taught Tate a lesson so conspicuously absent from Tate’s own brand of “patriarchy” as to disqualify it from being properly patriarchal. Namely: it doesn’t matter how aggressive you are, as a young man. Eventually you will get older and lose physical dominance, and you need a plan for holding onto power when younger and hungrier rivals come snapping at your heels.

In patriarchy properly understood, the core of this is “succession planning”, which is to say training a loyal heir. The 21st-century’s foremost storyteller, Taylor Swift, captured this dynamic in the recent song “Father Figure”, sung from the perspective of a mafioso-like patriarch:

I showed you all the tricks of the trade
All I ask for is your loyalty
My dear protégé

A patriarch may be an adoptive “father figure”, as in Swift’s telling, or else a literal father — as, for example, in historic royal families, or more recently the Murdoch, or Kennedy, or Trump families. Whether the family trade is running an organized crime network, a real estate business, a media empire, or a country, a patriarch of this kind will ensure his kids are taught to manage the empire. If he doesn’t have kids, successors will be identified, groomed, and in time granted power and responsibility.

In this spirit, Rupert Murdoch’s children have largely taken over from the aging tycoon. George Soros has handed over his global social-engineering activities to his son Alex. Trump’s offspring are often seen in his entourage, and play important roles in his commercial and political activities. These are all patriarchs in the old pattern. But where is Tate’s dynasty?

Reports vary on whether he has kids, or how many. But there are no reports of any family visits during his incarceration in Romania. The inference is that however many kids he has, they don’t live with him. This would make sense: it would, in fact, replicate Tate’s own upbringing.

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When Tate mentions his father, the American chess player Emory Tate, it’s usually in admiring terms — for all that the anecdotes often describe what sounds like a cruel, violent narcissist. This determination to deify his father’s memory has always seemed piteous to me, for Emory abandoned Andrew and his siblings in 1997, just as Andrew approached adolescence. In their father’s absence, Tate and his siblings grew up in a single-parent home amid Luton’s grim, crime-ridden council estates.

Tate’s escape shows genuine grit and ability. It also sheds a light on how Tate’s own potential was crippled by his own father’s failings. But to grasp this, we need to bracket the assumption, axiomatic among the world’s Jess Phillipses, that “patriarchy” is bad by definition in all its manifestations. For while there are forms of patriarchy I would not wish to embrace, such as the kind that legitimizes child marriage or “honor killings”, some traits may have been decried as “patriarchy”, or even just “toxic masculinity”, that are better understood simply as average sex differences — and which come in positive, prosocial forms as well.

It is, for example, not an effect of “patriarchy” that on average boys are more willful, aggressive, and high-energy than girls. I’m not going to waste paragraphs citing statistics; naturally there are outliers, but on average this is simply true and obvious. It also has implications for the socialization of boys; implications that were well understood until about 10 minutes ago. Boys benefit from clear boundaries; plenty of exercise; and, especially as they get bigger and bolshier, authoritative older men to keep them in check. Among the kind of common-sense people who don’t generally get to write newspaper columns, this folk wisdom is amply conveyed by the phrase “Boys are like dogs”.

To be clear, I don’t mean this rudely: I like dogs, and I like boys and men too. But on average they’re not interchangeable with girls. In the case of both boys, and dogs, the liveliest ones need clear boundaries. Sometimes enforcing these requires someone big, strong, and authoritative enough to make those boundaries clear. And when we set about smashing “patriarchy”, one of the things that got smashed with it was a healthy appreciation of the contribution made by older men to this aspect of young male socialization.

Fathers are not all perfect, obviously, even when they stick around. But there’s plenty of evidence that their absence is a significant risk factor in young, energetic, willful men going off the rails. Prison Reform Trust data show that among young offenders, 76% report growing up with an absent father: a vastly more significant proportion even than those growing up in a deprived home (51%). There’s also, unsurprisingly, a strong link between fatherlessness and urban gang membership, as much in the USA as the UK, where one report showed that two-thirds of gang-involved young people came from lone-parent households.

Is this what happened (or rather didn’t happen) to Andrew Tate? A great many lone parents do their best in difficult circumstances, and this really isn’t to criticize. But I sometimes wonder how effective a harried, exhausted, full-time-working single mom can be at disciplining an adolescent son who is now a foot taller than she is and more interested in the approval of his new gang friends than her curfew.

In What Do Men Want?, the philosopher Nina Power argues that much of what the contemporary world decries as “toxic masculinity” is better understood not as patriarchy but its absence: a “regime of the brother” characterized less by orderly power structures than comparatively flat, sibling-like rivalries. We should understand the Tate phenomenon in this context: a kind of online Lord of the Flies fratriarchy, in which lost boys desperate for affectionate guidance from authoritative older men struggle to prove their manliness against one another.

And while Labour is obsessed with Tate as a vector for “misogyny”, really he’s more an accelerant than the cause. For in a “regime of the brother”, without well-defined male hierarchy, what’s the most low-risk way to perform dominance? You don’t attack your bros; you bond with them, by tormenting a group you can be reasonably sure won’t fight back: women. Tate is currently the subject of multiple court cases in relation to such cruelties, but the Tateosphere is hardly the only fratriarchy whose main social glue seems to be hurting women for fun and profit. From the Pakistani rape gangs to the Epstein network, such squalid brotherhoods use violence and sexual cruelty as a form of bonding.

To my knowledge there’s no research on the prevalence of fatherlessness among the boys and men who make up Tate’s fanbase. But I’d bet any money that boys from broken homes are over-represented. His fratriarchal message is perfectly calibrated for this group: emotional numbness and a kind of brutal, venal self-fathering, overlaid with contempt for and performative cruelty toward the women who care for but can’t control them.

But I doubt Labour’s strategy on “misogyny” will ever go there. Notoriously, where the rape gangs are concerned, Jess Phillips has as little as possible to say about male bonding through sexual violence, where this might offend her electoral base. But it goes deeper. The party is enthusiastic about tackling “root causes”, particularly where this can be parlayed into new funding for their favored NGOs. But addressing fatherlessness as an accelerant of adolescent male misogyny would require definitive, heretical admission that some family structures are better than others. Safer to stick to internet censorship, and tinkering with the curriculum.

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Ironically, then, Phillips really is doing her bit to destroy “patriarchy” — even if the fratriarchy now replacing it is even less to her taste. I suspect no one really likes it — not even the bros themselves, whose critical weakness Tate just demonstrated in a boxing ring in Dubai.

For where there’s no father figure, all you can ever be is chief bro. Tate is evidently not a family man but a chief bro. And the trouble with being chief bro is that eventually a younger, hungrier rival will come along. Then what? In Swift’s song, the mafioso father-figure sees off the challenge from his rivalrous protégé, because he’s long since parlayed physical dominance into subtler forms of power:

Whose portrait’s on the mantle?
Who covered up your scandals?
Mistake my kindness for weakness and find your card canceled

Tate, though, is not a boss on this model. He had no father, not even an adoptive father figure, to show him how to ascend from chief bro to patriarch. So when a younger rival beat him bloody this week, the reaction was the kind of scornful glee you’d direct at a sibling rival. It’s the brittle machismo of the fatherless: both a driver of misogyny, and also evidence of patriarchy’s absence.

Are you building the kind of empire that will outlast you? Or did you stake your reputation on staying top dog forever, and forget that everyone gets old? Tate’s tragedy lies not, or not only, in his noxious online output. It lies also in how his father’s failures blighted his considerable natural potential. He was bright, aggressive, able, and ambitious, but like so many other lost boys had no one to form him. No one to show him what to do, or who to be, so as to become genuinely admired and loved — or even to retain his position, once past his physical peak.

Now, he’s a bloodied loser. But there’s no portrait on the mantel, and no loyal protégé in the wings. His children will grow up as fatherless as Tate himself. There will be no “Top G” dynasty. Save a trace or two in historic UK PHSE curricula, and some Romanian court papers, “Bottom G” will leave no legacy.

All the quagmires of government failure are distilled into this sector. An aging population puts the Treasury under ever more strain, but successive governments are too afraid of upsetting the asset-rich gray vote. Staffing crises are assuaged by importing cheap foreign workers, and local authorities are bankrupted by ballooning costs. All the while, council tax payers wonder where on earth their money goes.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting wrote in The Guardian at the beginning of the year to tell us how seriously he was taking the crisis. Despite our aging population, the number of people receiving state-funded social care has fallen by 10% in a decade, adding huge demand pressures on hospitals and GPs. Around one in seven hospital beds are taken up by fit patients with no discharge plan in place. What’s more, social care costs are expected to double by 2038. But there’s no idea about what to do. As the ratio of workers to pensioners becomes more and more lopsided, fewer taxpayers will have to foot the bill for larger numbers of dependents. One of the larger items on the bill will be a rapidly expanding workforce in an already enormous sector; while over 1.5 million people work in social care today, even amid chronic shortages, by 2040 that number is expected to rise by 470,000 to over two million.

Meanwhile, ultra-liberals wrap their gratitude for bargain-basement social care workers in paeans to diversity and cosmopolitan tolerance. I’m thinking, of course, of Zack Polanski. “One in five care workers are foreign nationals,” he reminded a Question Time audience earlier this month. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want to wipe someone’s bum, and I’m very grateful for the people who do.” It seems the progressive mindset is now so flexible that it can accommodate an attitude to labor relations that would be familiar in an autocratic Gulf petrostate: grossly underpaid foreign workers are invited and maintained as a vast, low-waged service army, while the middle classes engage in more dignified work, like making podcasts about “eco-populism”.

There’s a more essential challenge here, too, as services including residential care homes are hollowed out by parasitic ownership models, hedge funds and private equity — a model which has been adopted across the public sector, not just in social care. Councils often award contracts to large providers based on “value for money”, handing over service provision to private firms that can supposedly deliver with economies of scale. But studies have shown that the outsourcing of provision almost never has a positive impact on quality of care — it simply increases costs for service users. Currently, anyone with assets over £23,250 contributes to their own costs of care, while local authorities shoulder much of the increasingly heavy burden. To make matters worse, research released last month found that, over the course of just three years and in only three English regions, £250 million in profit was extracted from social care provision, often by companies registered in tax havens.

This is the end result of a particular kind of political economy. It was in the 19th century that Joseph Chamberlain, then the Liberal mayor of Birmingham and later a prominent pro-imperialist Tory, pioneered what was called “gas and water socialism”: municipal authorities would provide basic public utilities directly. Yet somehow we’ve regressed over the last century and a half, with anyone now proposing a model like Chamberlain’s liable to be dismissed as a socialist fantasist. Instead, for almost 50 years we’ve advocated a model that sells England by the pound: the government structures that once promised cradle-to-grave care are now emaciated and powerless in the face of foreign investors. Everything is put out to tender and outsourced, with the local and national state as the customer. Around a third of government spending now goes on procurement from the private sector. And ultra-dry Thatcherites, the Blairite modernizers, and their Cameroonian heirs have all played their part, extending the practice and allowing the core capabilities of the state itself wither. The taxpayer pays, but it’s often an opaque world of para-state private behemoths delivering everything at the coalface, disguised behind a government logo.

The results are mixed, at best, and the only sure winners are the investment groups themselves, and perhaps the expensive lawyers that oversee the Byzantine tendering process. As for the state’s own capacity, institutional memory, expertise and personnel — all these are now woefully inadequate.

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In social care, it wasn’t until the Eighties that local authority-run homes began to be sold off. The NHS and Community Care Act of 1990 took away councils’ responsibility to provide care directly, replacing it with a requirement simply to buy care from private providers. Where 89% of care provision used to be delivered by public providers or charities, today the proportion of private provision stands at 83%. Service users are left vulnerable, as care homes are taken over by the sovereign wealth funds of more entrepreneurial, agile states — ones that patiently invest in long-term assets rather than rushing to sell them off to the highest bidder.

Taken together, the sector encapsulates our embrace of the twin liberalisms that have defined the last decades. The economic liberals first insisted we break up the state monoliths, and introduce internal markets, the spirit of entrepreneurialism and healthy competition into public service delivery. Soon after, the social liberals demanded that we welcome historically unprecedented numbers of arrivals into the country. The British labor market at the lower ends of the wage scale has paid the price.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, successive governments have avoided tackling this crisis head-on. Fine words aside, Streeting is no exception, ordering yet another lengthy review, not due to report until 2028. Andrew Dilnot, the respected author of the last review, was openly disparaging of Labour’s delays. He has already offered his own solutions: one involves a national criterion of eligibility for care. Beyond replacing the current postcode lottery hodgepodge, this would, in effect, create a National Care Service of sorts, paid for with capped contributions from individuals with social care needs, and levied upon estates over a certain threshold. The Holy Grail for local authorities would be a truly integrated national service, taken out of the purview of cash-strapped municipalities. They would be then free to focus on the services used by the majority of people who do not use social care, but who nevertheless pay up to two thirds of their council tax bills toward its failing institutions.

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At its best, care work could be transformed into a secure, decently paid profession, on a similar footing as nursing or teaching, ending the doom-loop of high turnover, chronic shortages and low skills. That would have a fiscal cost, of course, and may require controversial incursions into the enormous real-estate portfolios of human history’s most fortunate generation: the Baby Boomers. But the point is that Streeting already knows what needs to be done, and yet he is unwilling to expend the political capital to do so. Memories of Theresa May’s ill-fated “dementia tax” are raw.

Such timidity is grimly to be expected. For if it’s impossible to escape the feeling that nothing now works, it’s equally hard to avoid the fact that our politicians seem totally adrift, powerless amid the global forces swirling around them. What’s worse is the growing realization that this impotence has been self-inflicted. It’s the result of conscious decisions to wind down and outsource the direct functions of state, to diminish the powers of the executive, to degrade and then offload assets, in effect to sell the family silver. We’ve got ourselves in chronic indebtedness and at the mercy of international lenders and speculators — only to then turn around and cry “not me, guv” when things fall apart.

One might expect a Labour government that talks of “resilience” to grasp the nettle and finally start rebuilding the capabilities of the British state, taking on private interests and rebuilding the public realm in public hands. But why wreck a career on social care, as so many senior ministers have before, especially for a man as clearly ambitious as Streeting? The dysfunction is such, after all, that any attempt at reform may open a Pandora’s Box, leaving even the best of our secretaries of state without a future. And so, when it comes to social care, nothing is to be done, and nothing sums up our very British dysfunction quite like it — the truest icon of our national decline.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How Labour lost the Welsh Valleys

By Brad Evans

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starmer wasn’t the only member of Labour’s front bench to cheer on a declining membership. In an interview six months earlier, Rachel Reeves actively welcomed the loss of certain supporters. “Membership in my constituency is falling and that’s a good thing,” the Leeds MP told the Financial Times. Those who were leaving the party, said Reeves, “never shared our values”.

Today, less than 18 months after Labour’s general election triumph, those statements already feel like relics of a bygone era. Labour is failing to balance its books this year, and is battling to properly resource next May’s local council elections. On Tuesday, UnHerd asked the party whether Reform now has a larger membership. The party’s press office referred to the figure of 333,235 that was published at the end of 2024. That figure was reported in February to have dropped to 309,000. By now, it is highly likely that Reform’s surging membership, at a self-reported 265,000 or so, has either overtaken Labour’s or will do so imminently.

As Labour’s membership and funding contract, so is its wider support — to a more severe extent than senior politicians are publicly acknowledging. Last week’s Senedd election in Caerphilly, a constituency which has voted for a Labour MP every time since 1918, was won by Plaid Cymru. The Labour candidate, thumped by Reform, didn’t even come second. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, compared that defeat to the Hartlepool by-election in 2021, where the Tories snatched what had for generations been a Labour stronghold, declaring it “rock bottom”. But such a comparison is wholly inadequate. After all, in 2019 Labour retained Hartlepool only because the Leave vote was split between the Brexit Party and the Tories. The south of Wales is a whole other matter.

What is more, coming back from what just happened in the Valleys is immeasurably harder. In that Hartlepool defeat, Labour finished second. Last week, by contrast, they gained just 11% of the vote. There’s much to suggest that the fate of Welsh Labour at the next general election could resemble that of its Scottish sister party in 2015. Wipeout.

It is always easy for political journalists to become breathless about events such as these. The attention economy constantly demands new twists and turns in public life: a perpetual churn of new figureheads and takes. But to underscore quite how bizarre British politics has become, consider this. Not only might Reform have more members than Labour, and not only are Welsh nationalists winning in places Labour have held since universal male suffrage, but there are now national polls putting the Green Party on a higher share of the vote than a Labour government — one that commands a larger majority than Margaret Thatcher ever enjoyed.

For now it is just one pollster, FindOutNow, that has Zack Polanski’s party in third. But that reflects a wider shift in the party’s performance in the seven weeks since he was elected leader. On Monday, a poll by Lord Ashcroft had the Greens on 17%, a solitary point behind both Labour and the Tories. YouGov, often viewed as the gold standard in British polling, now has the party on 16%, with Labour’s 17% its worst on record. According to that same poll, the Greens now lead Labour, and Reform, among those under 50. Among the young, specifically those aged 18 to 24, the Greens now have almost twice Labour’s vote share. Votes at 16 may ultimately harm Starmer’s re-election efforts more than it helps them.

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The twilight of the millennial socialists

By Jonny Ball

These are not figures that befit a party in government. But Keir Starmer’s view of power has long been that only one of two parties matter in British politics. As long as the Tories were neutralized, the thinking went, he would remain in Number 10. But in less than two years, that logic has shattered. Labour are threatened not only to their right by Reform, particularly on issues like immigration and law and order, but to their left as well. Since Polanski won the leadership, the Green Party’s membership has doubled: it now stands at more than 150,000, and has even surpassed the Tories. There is a non-trivial chance that, before next May’s local elections, Britain’s two largest parties will be Reform and the Greens. For all the naysaying of pundits in London, who often argue for an inverse correlation between electoral success and membership size, the membership surges matter. More members doesn’t just mean more activists, but more direct debits too. Money is critical if you want to seriously contest Westminster politics.

Besides members, and money, Reform and the Greens are also led by two of the most effective politicians in England. Both Farage and Polanski excel in the modern media environment, where chat shows matter as much as political interviews, and vertical social video draws more eyeballs than any appearance on Newsnight. One of Polanski’s videos, with the title “Let’s Make Hope Normal Again”, has been viewed almost 12 million times on X.

The two men might agree on little regarding policy, but in one key respect they are similar. Both, according to the thinking of political scientist Paolo Gerbaudo, are “hyperleaders” — more similar to President Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than Kemi Badenoch or Keir Starmer. Hyperleaders enjoy strong personal recognition, which arguably supersedes that of their parties. They leverage unmediated digital relationships, speaking directly to their audience: Farage has GB News, Polanski a podcast. Both present themselves as authentic outsiders to the political class. And despite the superficiality of digital media, both have real substance on matters of policy. You know what Farage thinks about immigration, or Polanski on taxing the super-rich. But what are Badenoch’s or Starmer’s views? As much as anything else, the hyper-leadership of both Farage and Polanski serves to make the leaders of the Big Two appear almost insincere. Both Labour and the Conservatives increasingly look like Diet Coke versions of everything they claim to be. The real problem for Starmer is that Polanski is saying many of the things he himself asserted while in opposition, whether it’s on the virtues of industrial action or the case for public ownership. It’s just that Polanski seems to mean it.

For all the talk of a grim Budget in November, next May will be the deciding moment for Starmer’s premiership. Besides a likely drubbing in both Wales and Scotland, all of London’s 32 boroughs will choose councilors. It’s increasingly plausible that Polanski’s party won’t just pick up wards in the capital, something which is now close to certain, but become the largest party in one or more councils. It will be in those authorities where the Greens perform best — most likely Hackney, Lambeth and Southwark — that they will subsequently select as leading targets for the next general election.

But even if May is an unprecedented nadir for Starmer, it could be just the beginning of the party’s woes as growing success for electoral rivals, Left and Right, leads to a wave of defections at a local level. Ideological alignment is part of that, certainly, but in many cases they will simply stand a better chance of re-election if they jump ship. Others could face the choice of defecting to the Greens, or being blocked from re-selection if they are too critical of the Starmer leadership. (This happens every year, under a range of pretexts.) That cascades upwards too: would Clive Lewis, Olivia Blake or John McDonnell rather join the Greens or be blocked from standing again? For a post-ideological politician like Starmer, what keeps the show on the road is the adhesive of power. Take that away, and the wheels come off.

Confronted with electoral doom-mongering, Labour supporters are now arguing that the wipeout in Caerphilly was a result of tactical voting designed to keep out Reform. To an extent that is true: Green and Liberal Democrat voters flocked to Plaid Cymru’s Lindsay Whittle last week, with both parties losing their deposit. What is more, that is precisely what happened in elections to the French legislature last year. Despite coming first in the popular vote in the first round, the National Rally ultimately finished third. Senior people in Reform are savvy enough to know something similar might await them. Even Tom Watson, Labour’s former deputy leader, recently declared that the country is heading for a “Stop Farage” election. Stop Corbyn, stop Brexit — and now stop Reform. It begs a question: what is the Labour Right, of which Watson is a standard-bearer, actually for?

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How Blair broke Britain

By Aaron Bastani

More importantly for the party, though, is that leaning into a progressive alliance, and hoisting a banner proclaiming “stop Farage”, may actually accelerate Labour’s demise. That narrative might work if you are the leading progressive force. And yet for Labour in Wales, and Scotland, that appears to no longer be the case. London, and other parts of England, might not be far behind — especially after next May. It’s a dangerous game for Starmer’s party, played on fine margins. Get it right and you remain in power. Get it wrong, and you kill the idea that Labour is the default choice for progressive voters. Labour’s willingness to jettison members might soon look like naïveté.

It may be a platitude among Labour circles, but it is nevertheless true: Labour only wins as a broad coalition. That was the case with Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair — a man who even came to an accommodation with Ken Livingstone as the Mayor of London. Starmer, who, uniquely as leader, wanted a smaller party, appears incapable of such sagacity. In Britain, general trends at a global level, of center-left parties fragmenting and failing to adapt, have now converged with the particular: a small-minded man incapable of building alliances.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has made his view on the matter clear: central banks are asked to do too much. But others have argued the opposite. Earlier this month, economic historian Adam Tooze wrote in the Financial Times that the monetary policymaking arrangement in the UK isn’t working well, and should be revisited. In essence, the Bank of England is not helping, and perhaps even hindering, the government’s efforts to grow the economy. Suffering from a severe period of economic malaise, the UK needs all the help it can get, from every part of the state, independent or not.

Without delving too deeply into the quagmire of central bank independence, Tooze called for a “new concordat” between the Bank and the Government. Others on the progressive end of politics have, along similar lines, advocated for more fiscal and monetary coordination. Personally, I don’t like the term “coordination”, because it hides the real question: who should be in charge, the Bank or the Government? The answer to that question, in the context of a modern democracy, would seemingly have to be the Government.

So, whether you think that we should junk central bank independence altogether (a point I’ll return to) or merely that the nature of the relationship between the Bank and Parliament, which was set down in 1997, needs revisiting, it’s worth considering what such a new concordat might address. In other words, what should the Government consider changing about how the Bank of England operates?

The concordat should address four things. First, the Bank’s mandate which is currently to secure price stability and then to support government policy. On this basis, one could argue that the central bank is already failing. Currently, it is engaged in a process known as Quantitative Tightening (QT), which is effectively the unwinding of the better-known Quantitative Easing, which was first used after the financial crisis. During QE, the Bank purchased bonds in order to inject money into the economy. QT involves selling off those bonds, or simply letting them mature without reinvesting. In so doing, the Bank of England is shrinking its balance sheet and affecting the gilt market. QT is not necessary for price stability, and — far from supporting government policy — it is, by some accounts, making things fiscally tighter for the government. This might lead one to ask: is the Bank’s decision to engage in QT, particularly right now, in line with its mandate?

That is not even to mention all the things that the Bank is choosing not to do, which could support the Government’s aims and are unlikely to prejudice price stability. Consider, for instance, changes in bank regulation to encourage investment —particularly domestic growth driving investment, even green investment, or investment in particular regions of the country. Other central banks have deployed programs designed to support credit creation in particular regions and sectors — India, Japan, and the Eurozone, for instance. The Bank itself, prior to the recent bout of inflation, had committed to tilting its own bond purchases, meaning skewing them toward “green” rather than “dirty” bonds. It later abandoned this program.

A concordat could change the way we understand price stability. Instead of instructing the Bank to aim for 2% inflation precisely, a target that is widely accepted as itself arbitrary, the Government could instruct the Bank to seek price stability understood as the absence of highly volatile price levels or hyperinflation. We might imagine this as keeping inflation roughly below 10%, as much empirical evidence suggests inflation doesn’t do lasting harm to the real economy until it gets into double digits.

Some would undoubtedly object: we’ve just had a bout of inflation below this level and it was very painful. This is, of course, true, but even with a precise target, the central bank was unable to prevent the pain and its solution was far from painless, as many at the time pointed out. In fact, it was government action, not central bank policy, that was required to ease the inflationary hurt, something we’d be more likely to get if there was no pretense that solving the issue was the central bank’s sole responsibility in the first place.

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The second area I’d suggest considering in a potential new concordat would be the Treasury indemnity of central bank losses. The UK is unusual among central banks for two reasons: first, the Bank of England considers itself capable of making a loss, and second, the Treasury has committed to an indemnity covering any central bank losses. That is: the Treasury, if need be, will bail out the Bank.

Not all central banks consider themselves capable of making a loss. The most obvious counter-example is the US Federal Reserve System, which does not register central bank losses in its official records. Instead, it has adopted a practice of deferred asset accounting. This means that anything which might be otherwise logged as a loss for the Fed is balanced off against the assumption of future gains — this assumption is not unrealistic, given the history of regular gains in the past that are remitted to the Treasury. In short, it is a choice for the Bank of England to account for “losses” in the way it does, and it is a choice for the Treasury to indemnify them. The alternative would be for the central bank to simply cover the losses itself, as in the US, based on future gains, or by virtue of its power to print money.

MPs involved in this new concordat should consider changing the Bank’s accounting practices and/or eliminating the indemnity. Or at the very least, they could force the publication of the legal terms of the indemnity. At the moment the conditions for the Treasury covering central bank losses are unknown to those outside the Treasury. Many have called for the release of the details; among them is the House of Lords committee on Economic Affairs, twice. Without knowledge of how the current indemnity works, it’s hard to understand why it should exist at all.

The third area ripe for reconsideration is the way the Bank of England conducts monetary policy. Since 2009, the Bank has conducted interest rate policy by paying bank rate — that is, the interest rate paid by banks rather than consumers — on the reserves that private banks hold at the central bank. In 2024 it paid out approximately £40 billion to private banks, and such payments are projected to continue through 2033. As well as being large, these payments tend to be politically counter-cyclical. The central bank pays more to private banks when it is trying to raise the interest rate. This is usually a moment of economic pain for the average citizen. It’s hard to understand why the state should be giving huge sums of money, in such a tough moment, to private banks, and not using it to support public institutions. Some will claim that the answer is that we need to induce banks to hold reserves, and that paying them to keep their reserves at the central bank is the best way to do it. I’m not so sure. We don’t pay car companies to install seat belts, we just require it.

By paying interest on reserves to private banks since 2009, the Bank has effectively separated balance-sheet policy from interest rate policy, enabling the central bank to hold a large balance sheet without distorting interest rates. In practice, this has given the Bank a new and incredibly powerful policy tool — the balance sheet. But it’s not obvious what the Bank should be using this tool to achieve, given it is not technically necessary to secure price stability. One might suppose, based on the mandate, that it should be used to support government policy, but the Bank has not adopted such a view.

One way in which a new concordat could alter the contemporary payment on reserves mechanism would be for the Bank could adopt a tiered system of reserves — as many of various political stripes have suggested and other central banks (like the European Central Bank) have implemented. This involves paying banks different rates depending on the amount of reserves they hold at the central bank. It could mean paying banks only for a certain level of reserves — and not for excess or even placing a negative rate on excess. Or it could mean not paying banks at all for the required level of reserves and perhaps implementing a negative rate for those above that level. Notably, for this to work, the bank would likely need to embrace, or re-embrace, reserve requirements — reserve requirements are rules that set out the minimum amount of liquid assets that a commercial bank must hold.

Questioned by Richard Tice about whether the Bank should introduce reserve requirements, Andrew Bailey dismissed the idea. There is, in fact, no reason to dismiss the possibility of reserve requirements: they have been deployed historically by nearly every monetary jurisdiction and are still used (and encouraged) in many jurisdictions today.

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Finally, the last specific area ripe for reconsideration as part of a new concordat is balance sheet policy itself. QE, as we all know by now, had a major impact on the economy, but also on our political and social life. This is not particularly surprising as it involved the government creating buckets of money and using it to buy particular assets and not others. What the Bank buys, and how much, matters. There is good reason to consider a means of political input into any such deployment of the balance sheet. In 2024, the House of Lords Committee on Economic Affairs issued a report which called for a memo of understanding between the Treasury and the Bank on such policy, suggesting that two were not in full accord on the matter. Each institution responded to the report effectively saying there was no need for such a memo because I know what I’m doing. Clearly that’s not sufficient, given the mess we’re in right now where the Treasury is desperate to initiate economic growth and the Bank is chuntering on with QT as if it can’t hear the Chancellor at all.

We should reflect for a moment on what all this adds up to. This is a list of pretty major aspects of the contemporary monetary policymaking system. All of them are in need of a re-think if we are to assemble a unified macroeconomic policy in the UK that is fit for the moment. But that might make you wonder: is this a one-off? Should we be engaging in an ad-hoc reconsideration of the system, and then go back to our respective corners (the Government and the central bank)? Or is it more sensible to consider a mechanism through which the Government and the central bank can more regularly “coordinate” policy?

The UK, unlike many other jurisdictions, already has a means for establishing more institutionalized, regular exchange between the Government and the central bank. Every year the Chancellor writes a letter to the Bank offering guidance. In recent decades, as a result of deference to central bank independence, this letter has largely been pro forma and not imbued with much coercive power. But that need not be the case. We could reinvigorate this mechanism, should the Chancellor decide to use this letter to inform the Bank of changes the Government wishes to see both in the structure and operation of the central bank, starting with the four I’ve discussed here.

Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that Rachel Reeves will announce anything like a new concordat at the budget in November, or anytime really. Labour seems committed to hewing as closely as possible to what they understand to be conventional economic and financial wisdom on the subject. I don’t understand why exactly, but right now, the party in government seems unable or unwilling to try anything the contemporary central bank hasn’t already embraced. Consequently, it’s easy to see who is in charge here. One agent hoards the conventional wisdom and the other bows to it. It’s a shame twice over. Doing things as they have been done since the late Nineties is not a recipe for economic success in the 2020s and a system of government in which the central bank is calling the shots is not a democracy.

The abandoned criminal case, involving Westminster researchers accused of passing material to Beijing, reveals the ghost in the machine: the British establishment’s rank hypocrisy over what constitutes national security. To put it simply, espionage isn’t espionage when politically it’s inconvenient. For the police and security services, this poses an obvious dilemma. Why bother chasing spies in the first place? Such hypocrisy was ever thus, from the kid-glove treatment of the Cambridge Five, to MI6’s decision to hide Michael Foot’s suspected status as a Soviet “agent of influence” before the 1983 election.

For decades, then, our political culture has been seeped in opacity and hypocrisy, something I’ve encountered myself. As a special branch detective, I remember a routine financial vetting review. This was invasive — yet entirely necessary. Any counterintelligence officer knows employees with money troubles constitute a potential point of compromise. I, a lowly detective, spent hours accounting for every penny I’d spent over the past year.

I saw other incongruities, especially where the Official Secrets Acts was concerned. When MI5 officer David Shayler removed a hoard of secret files from the records section at Thames House, we found them in a newspaper editor’s safe. This constituted several offenses, including under the 1911 Official Secrets Act, which features prominently in the Chinese scandal. Created to combat German naval espionage, it is a stuffy Edwardian sofa of a law, its definition of what constituted “damage” to the state better suited to the age of the telegram.

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Faced with these challenges in the Shayler case, our financial investigator suggested an elegant solution: simply charge the newspaper editor with the bog-standard offense of Handling Stolen Goods. This, we at Scotland Yard agreed, was a good idea; the CPS, and no doubt the Attorney General, disagreed. This was during the early days of New Labour, when news management trumped all. I later heard rumors that a senior Labour figure confessed there was no appetite for “going to war with The Mail on Sunday.”

This culture of “rules for thee but not for me” runs rampant across all political parties and Whitehall elites. That’s especially frustrating when public bodies spend precious time and resources fostering a “security culture” — one where operational security (OPSEC) is paramount. Intrusive vetting is one common tactic here, with probing questions about a candidate’s political views and private life (sex life included). So-called “clear desk” policies are obsessively policed too: leaving a document on a desk while you pop to the loo can lead to a reprimand. All the while, restrictions are habitually placed on private conduct, from being a member of a controversial political party to having contact with foreign nationals.

Then there are the so-called “STRAP” rules, a codeword to designate a ban on the use of digital devices in areas where sensitive intelligence is handled. Yet as so often, senior police officers, or civil servants, seem strangely exempt here. I remember attending a mandatory GCHQ OPSEC briefing, where a technical officer from GCHQ demonstrated how easily everyday devices can be hacked. When he asked what might shield a phone from hostile compromise, a wag put up his hand. “The rank of chief superintendent and above,” he suggested, “protects mobiles from all foreign intelligence services.”

Like much else in Britain, then, attitudes to secrecy appear two-tier. Over my own career, I often got the impression that senior officials conflate their own importance — and political hobbyhorses — with those of the wider United Kingdom. And as Jonathan Powell may yet learn, backroom deals are all very well until you piss on the wrong people. Either way, realpolitik becomes more difficult in an era of instant rebuttal, quicksilver-fast social media and febrile, impermanent governments.

You grow pretty cynical after a career in the police — but even I’m shocked by the unsightly infighting between the Government and CPS, not least because of the Prime Minister’s previous (and much-referenced) incarnation as director of public prosecutions. The current DPP, Stephen Parkinson, is a Westminster lifer, not known for rocking boats. Significantly, Parkinson is also the first DPP who served as a solicitor rather than a barrister. Could he, finally, be giving the KC old boy’s network the finger, standing his ground against the elite consensus? Such details are the cogs upon which mighty wheels turn. Then there are the Cabinet Office veterans Simon Case and Mark Sedwill, both veritable Jacques Cousteaus of the Deep State, and both immersed in national security matters.

How, then, does this Whitehall’s dead, invisible hand impact actual investigations? The China case is perhaps instructive. Unlike TV spooks, real intelligence officers don’t mysteriously appear at crime scenes and tell the cops what to do. The dark deeds are performed in the Cabinet Office, or in Whitehall pubs. Then there are the courts, where sensitive evidence is subjected to endless voire dire, or meta-trials, as lawyers join silky verbal battle to establish the admissibility of evidence. These arguments happen in camera or in a judge’s chambers, or else involve issuing “Public Interest Immunity” certificates, which render testimony secret. The whole process is typically English: nominally open, but in fact very, very closed. To be fair, opacity is sometimes needed. The state is entitled to keep secrets, but that’s exactly why the privilege shouldn’t be casually abused. Certainly, I suspect the police case was solid — the CPS don’t charge this stuff lightly.

Then there’s the issue of the Government’s attitude to counterintelligence, which occasionally acts as a brake on diplomacy. It’s difficult to drink champagne at the ambassador’s reception if the bloke who planted microphones in the Ferrero Rochers is on trial at the Old Bailey. Capacity is another factor. When I worked on the Alexander Livinenko investigation, almost 20 years ago, MI5’s Russia desk had atrophied. After 9/11, tracking foreign spies was of limited interest to a government focused on counterterrorism and, this being New Labour, “community cohesion”. Besides, City bankers were happily stuffing their Church’s brogues with pilfered Russian cash, earning Britain the nickname “The Laundry”. Given Litvinenko’s murder was a naked act of radiological terrorism, I’m amazed it never escalated further. Which brings us back to money: pre-2008, New Labour bet the bank on financial services, and lost. It’s a gamble we’ve been paying for ever since, as the Chinese know.

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This brings us to the nub of the problem, one which Keir Starmer seems to have missed: the Government’s blatant gaslighting over China. In the end, whether or not the People’s Republic constitutes an “enemy” feels insultingly nebulous; as far as I know, such considerations have never been much of an issue before. Besides, even Jonathan Hall, the government’s own advisor on national security law, agrees China is an obvious threat. And Hall, the most fair-minded and experienced barrister in his field, isn’t known for partisanship. This speaks to the depths of high-level disagreement over this issue, with China presenting a unique problem for British policymakers. The communist state views close governmental involvement in private enterprise — including intelligence — as a given. Virtually all Chinese technology, business and diplomacy serves the Communist Party’s insatiable appetite for sensitive information.

And so politicians wilfully ignore the obvious: what we see as spying, the Chinese consider due diligence, simply part of Beijing’s game of hegemonic chess with the United States. In this reckoning, the UK is basically irrelevant, whatever hawks like Tom Tugendhat might imply. We’re surely in no position to retaliate with an intelligence campaign of our own, particularly given the parlous state of our economy. And so, despite our allegedly Rolls Royce civil service, diplomatic corps and spooks, Powell seems to have decided that acquiescence is the only game in town. Counterespionage, old boy? Over-egged. Needs to be seen in context. And, perhaps, those Chinese businessmen will rescue our steel industry in return? Just, whatever you do, don’t tell the plebs.

The entire affair suggests a system in meltdown. Dysfunctional, arrogant and — crucially — impoverished, Britain is caught in a trap of its own design, where we chase Chinese pennies like paupers teased by ancien régime aristocrats. All the while, the national security charade continues. The official secrets, the MI5 briefings and intelligence-gathering. All poured into the colander that is the Cabinet Office, leaked, lost or hacked to whoever wants to steal it. Should the scandal end Starmer’s unhappy tenure as Prime Minister, it would be apt. A lawyer to his bones, he seems convinced he can prove that black is white and night is day, that a secret isn’t a secret and an enemy isn’t an enemy.

But something else was troubling me, which wasn’t unrelated. A few months before, a Nazi flag had been hoisted onto an electrical cable at the very intersection where our generational paths collided, and left to fly in the mountain breeze. Many locals were horrified, and a local man was arrested. A swastika was being flown three minutes away from the home where I lived out my teenage years and my parents still dwell, in what was once one of Britain’s strongest bastions of anti-fascism? What would the miners who held these communities together have thought of such disrespect? How did it come to this?

Debates continue to rage about the meaning of flags, as indicators of identity and belonging. But they have never just been about nationalism. Back in 1831, in the Valleys town of Merthyr Tydfil, the red flag of socialism was raised for the first time in direct response to the working conditions at the Cyfarthfa Ironworks that was lorded over by Crawshay Bailey. That flag would become synonymous with this region, giving rise to the Labour Party, birthing the idea of the NHS and also becoming a key battleground in unionism and the fight for working-class rights.

Earlier this year, I co-hosted a two-part BBC radio series called From Despair to Where?. Named after the song from the Manic Street Preachers, it addressed the problem of the Valleys today. The producers wanted to show a balanced picture of the region and, to their credit, managed to find some inspiring local projects. But what I found only reaffirmed the general malaise, decline and dereliction that has come to define this place. The sense of hopelessness felt by a group of young girls I interviewed has stayed with me. As one of them tearily said to me off camera, “there is no hope for the young in these valleys. Is there any wonder that so many are taking their own lives? I sometimes wonder what the point of it all is. I want to believe in something. But it’s hard.”

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But something has also changed in the atmosphere. When I was growing up in the Valleys in the Eighties, we felt the sense of ruination and abandonment. This was captured by a BBC reporter who, in 2013, described the place as carrying an “unbearable sadness”. Yet in a political reversal of the stages of grief, that sadness turned to despair and that despair has now turned to anger that is barely contained within the valley. And who can deny these people that anger when the outside world continues to crush them?

The BBC series was inspired by a book I wrote about growing up in poverty. It also situated the history of the Valleys within the broad sweep of political and economic history to bring new attention to its struggles, and how people need to have their voices listened to by those in power but find it often denied. My hope was especially to reach out to disillusioned young people and remind them of the Valleys’ proud past of fighting injustice and inequality.

Miners from South Wales made up the largest contingent of volunteers from Britain in the fight against the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. An encounter with striking Rhondda Valley miners in London inspired the American civil rights activist, Paul Robeson, to establish lifelong links with the region, finding common cause between the exploitation of Welsh labor and racist policies in America. That is not to mention the contribution these communities gave deep underground as their coal extractions literally fueled both of Britain’s war efforts, which included untold sacrifices against the Nazis.

Yet I have also come to the sobering realization that such history means absolutely nothing to young people in these towns, who are desperately scrambling to find their place in a world that doesn’t want or need them. The mining communities that once defined the Valleys belong to a different world entirely. It is not theirs. There is nothing remotely comparable, except the poverty and the familiar strips of precariously perched terraced houses, which are home to people who continue to know their lives don’t matter. There is no nostalgia for that past. Everything from that era has been lost or abandoned.

Just as the idea of university has been looked upon with suspicion by many in the Valleys for a number of generations, so the same suspicions apply to politicians, especially those seated in Westminster. Indeed, while there was a moment in history when the peoples of the Valleys did feel some kind of representation, through the voices of politicians such as Aneurin Bevan, the Aberfan disaster of 1966 extinguished whatever faith there may have been in the national political process. Aberfan was also a watershed moment for the Labour Party in South Wales, as the governing party was shown to be removed from the people whom it was meant to represent the most.

What replaced it was apathy. The apathy continued for generations, and the palpable feeling of despondency grew more assured each time the Labour Party came to power. Local people have known the Tories never cared for their plight, but that’s OK. It’s politics and at least you know where you stand. What’s worse is to be continually held down by those who claim to be saving you from drowning.

Keir Starmer’s government has been both a monumental let down and a cataclysmic failure for these people. Cuts to benefits have been acutely felt, especially by pensioners, which has then led to further disbelief as politicians such as Angela Rayner profit from second homes. Her potential replacement as deputy prime minister, Bridget Phillipson, killed off any hopes many poor young children could have of getting into university with her hike in tuition fees. Local people suspect the next Budget, and its inevitable round of cuts, is only going to make things worse.

As I walked back through the village of Ton-Pentre a few days ago, I met an elderly lady who used to work in the local library. That has now been closed down, like most other amenities and public services. An educated woman, she told me of her concerns, and how she marks each passing year by counting more boarded-up shops or the appearance of another vape store, fast-food eatery or tattoo parlor on the high street. Those streets used to be at the heart of local communities, and at least tempered poverty with a sense of belonging. She said she barely leaves her home any more.

We spoke of the flag incident, which she said was outrageous and caused a great deal of harm to the elderly. Then, to my surprise, she told me that as a life-long Labour supporter she would be voting Reform in the next election. It seems she won’t be alone. Polling data continually shows Reform leading in these towns, sometimes with margins greater than the 10-point leads frequently reflected nationally.

While some commentators will be quick to draw immediate connections between the Nazi flag and the rise of Reform, speaking to people here tells a different story. Yes — there is some concern with migration if people are asked. But that concern is really about local economic conditions, and a belief that the more money the Government spends elsewhere, the less there is for any chance of recovery here. And let’s be fair: the Labour government hasn’t presented the argument any other way.

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To understand the rise of Reform, then, it is crucial to understand the failures of Westminster and how people are now finding meaning in their message that claims to be working for the working classes. While I don’t like the politics of Reform and have stated on many occasions my suspicions of Nigel Farage, I do understand why local people in places like the Valleys would exercise their democratic right in that way. That does need to be respected, or else we just become another external voice denying poor people theirs.

Reform may be feeding off the anger poor communities like those in South Wales are feeling today, but they didn’t cause it. The Valleys of South Wales have been in a state of economic depression for nearly a century. And the people there have always belonged to a particular class — the disposable of history.

As we look across the political landscape today, we know it has been increasingly marked by intolerance and a simple inability to sit down with people we fundamentally disagree with and have an open and respectful conversation. Should we therefore be surprised to see a swastika in South Wales? We would hope there would be universal revulsion against Nazi regalia, given the horrors that symbol of fascist power undeniably evokes. Those who fly such flags should be condemned. But that doesn’t mean we should turn away from the anger that lies beneath. History teaches us that’s the most foolish and dangerous of all the paths to take.

Beneath the ground of the Valleys of South Wales, there remain many empty tunnels and discarded mining shafts, which are still full of coal, damp, seeping toxic chemicals and even traces of floating gases. But the people there are also sitting on a social and political bomb, which is just waiting for somebody to come along and light a match to prove it was there. If we are to prevent places like the Valleys from exploding, a serious change in attitudes is necessary, starting with those in Westminster.

A good place to start is to listen to local people, especially their struggles and concerns without condescending them. If not, all the current debates about the St George’s Cross may pale in comparison.

For all its purely domestic malignities, British politics is, like that of the European Union, merely a provincial outpost of those of America’s imperial center. A large part of Europe’s current woes is attributable to our leaders reshaping our societies according to the model both inspired and imposed by American hegemony in the Nineties, before being left in the lurch as our masters change course. Believing that, under the Pax Americana, globalization would dominate the future, our leaders entirely reshaped our economies and societies for the world they saw coming into view. Industry was allowed to wither in the certainty that cheap Chinese goods would sustain our lifestyles; international human rights law, in reality a fig leaf for American military intervention against geopolitical rivals, was elevated above national interests in a way the hegemon never once countenanced for itself; destructive energy policies were written into law in the illusory belief of a shared global mission to ameliorate climate change. Through a misreading of America’s early 20th century experience, mass immigration was actively encouraged, in the genuine belief, still intoned as a mantra by Labour at its conference, that ethnic and cultural diversity, contrary to historical precedent, would soon become an inherent strength.

But now the hegemon has radically changed course, leaving its regional middle managers in Britain and Europe stranded in their Nineties fantasy world, and the political parties which adopted this worldview facing collapse. Globalization was always just a superficial Americanization, from which America itself has now withdrawn. Trump’s UN speech, in which he declared that the “entire globalist concept of asking successful, industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely and totally, and immediately” is a direct attack on the worldview of our leaders. So too his criticism of “uncontrolled mass migration” — which, he says, is an “assault on Western countries”.

It is difficult to think of an arc of client states surviving for long in direct ideological opposition to their imperial patron: rightly, Reform’s new signing Danny Kruger has characterized the insurgent party’s domestic foe as simply “late-stage liberalism”. In Britain, at least, the result is likely to be the diminution of Labour and the Conservatives to minor regional parties centered on London, the last ideological stronghold of the old regime. A year ago Keir Starmer delivered the Conservative Party a historic defeat; today he is the most detested prime minister in modern British history. There is no prospect of Starmer winning the next election, and little prospect of him leading the Labour Party into it.

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Yet Starmer, devoid of an individual personality, ought not take any of this personally: he is simply a stand-in for the collapsing Nineties System, of which he is the robotic final avatar. Everything that Starmer represents, even if presented in human form, would be just as roundly detested. Blair himself has transitioned from the fantasy vision he imposed on British politics to the technocratic, enlightened despotism of his proposed Gaza Mandate, in which a combination of economic growth and digital surveillance will contain the volatile nationalism of the Palestinian people: in his plans for digital ID, it is not hard to see Starmer following suit, albeit without the growth.

Trapped between loyalty to a collapsing imperial ideology, and the upsurge in nationalist sentiment its implementation produced, the Labour front bench, disconsolately waving the various flags of the United Kingdom for the cameras, finds itself forced to spout incoherent slogans. The country is not broken, and to claim that it is is dangerous rhetoric: but the country also requires total renewal, indeed reforging into a “New Britain”. Reform stokes division, and yet the country is also at a “fork in the road”, from which Labour will conjure up unity from diversity. The Boriswave was a terrible mistake, but to undo it would be fascism; nativist sentiment is the preserve of a tiny internet minority, but also of the country’s most popular party; Reform is racist but its voters are not. The Home Secretary declares that “ethnonationalism” is a societal evil to be defeated, while Starmer endorses its basic principle in asserting that Israel and Palestine require two separate nation states to prevent their two peoples from slaughtering each other. If only they could have bonded over slicing half-time Jaffa oranges together, perhaps things would have been different.

The party’s messaging, as it enters full election mode just one year into its term, is entirely incoherent because it must triangulate between the roundly despised, and entirely illusory worldview of its leadership on the one hand, and the newly aggrieved mood of the country on the other. The central axis of British politics is now the basic, essential stuff of national identity, which is not a battleground favorable to Labour. Indeed, there is something late-stage Soviet in Wes Streeting vowing to defeat the combined forces of English, Scottish and Welsh nationalism through a “return to the spirit of 1945”, even as he waits to lose his seat to a “Gaza independent”. But then all British politics in 2025 has become the fantasy pronouncements of those waiting to lose their seats, in what is now merely a series of rearguard delaying actions before a Reform government.

Through having implemented its worldview, and forcing the nation to live with the results, the Labour Party is doomed. But for the Conservative Party, the immediate outlook is just as grim. Having rid his party of conservatives, that self-described “Heir to Blair”, David Cameron, condemned the Tories to share Labour’s fate: the collapse of the two parties, viewed in narrow partisan terms by the Westminster lobby, is more accurately the collapse of the shared ideology they undertook, between them, to impose on Britain.

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Starmer’s assertion that the Conservatives are the less threatening rival is based on the perception that they are, if not technically the same party as Labour, the product of a shared worldview. There is no threat, for Blairism’s last disciple, of them rolling back New Labour’s constitutional and demographic vandalism. Indeed, considering the party’s governing record in deepening and accelerating New Labour’s cultural revolution, Starmer’s backhand compliment to the Tories could just as easily be a withering broadside by Farage. Such is the shifting popular mood, Labour now even feels free to attack the party’s governing record of excessive liberalism. In disparagingly deploying the online-Right term “Boriswave” to critique Tory governance, no doubt to the despair of his remaining supporters on Bluesky, Starmer has at least put paid to any lingering ideas of a Johnson comeback.

Like a nation, a party can survive many setbacks: but enough of them together and the result is fatal. While Kemi Badenoch was evidently the wrong choice for leader — as I warned at the time of her election — it is far from clear that a belated Jenrick coronation can now do much for the party’s near-term fortunes. A counterintuitive case, though not a strong one, could perhaps be made that Badenoch’s laissez-faire attitude to management has at least allowed the Jenrick wing to experiment with forging a harder-edged, more Right-wing faction within the party. The modernizing, developmentalist, even self-proclaimed Anglofuturist faction around him, now calling themselves the “New Centre Right”, present a compelling vision for 2020s Conservativism. Their greatest appeal is that they can present the same offer of radical reform as Reform itself, but with more competent implementation: but it is a difficult task to campaign on renouncing your own party’s record, and in any case Reform can now convincingly argue that a vote for the Conservatives will be a vote for continued Labour rule. Besides, whatever its strengths, on current polling trends many of the New Centre Right’s brightest stars cannot expect to keep their seats.

The options available to the party last year are no longer on the menu, and those that remain are unappetizing. A gamble could be made that Reform will rest British politics onto a plane more amenable to future Right-wing governance, and that the losses of the next election may in time be recouped by the rump party that survives. One plausible future, at least for Jenrick’s wing, by far the most energetic and convincing Conservative faction, is playing a similar role in relation to Farage to the one Farage himself once performed against the Tories: as a purist pressure group, punishing any deviation from Rightist principles from the luxury of the sidelines. Another is as a more successful SDP, a predominantly internet-based party, with more support from commentators than voters, producing high-quality policy documents to be plagiarized by their electorally successful rivals. Yet if it wishes to remain in Parliament, the New Centre Right faction also presents, for Reform, the only attractive set of potential Tory defectors, in a path already smoothed by their erstwhile ally Danny Kruger. Extinction or co-option? Neither prospect is attractive, yet both now seem more probable than renewal. Outpaced by history, the politics of the ancien régime has another four years to further discredit itself, with every grim daily headline passing verdict on its failure. Gathering in a city that, this week, bloodily displays the UK’s very worst dysfunctions, the Conservative Party’s only chance is that our current path of extreme political volatility may still, against all the odds, extract the party from the grave it so eagerly dug itself. The old UK regime is dead in office: the time is running out to shape the Britain that will replace it, in anything other than Farage’s image.

All the announcements only revealed Labour’s curious blind spot about how most people have to live their lives. Chancellor Rachel Reeves continues to make this clear. Her own checklist of achievements indicate just how distant Starmer’s strange, technocratic government is from New Labour. Where Blair and Gordon Brown sang the praises of unfettered globalization, Reeves puffs up her interventions against the market, from British Steel to loans for Jaguar Land Rover. And though Reeves and others will praise New Labour, with creatures like Peter Mandelson and Blair circling the Government, Starmer’s party is far more prepared to intervene on the economy than its most recent predecessor.

But intervene for whom? Big numbers, big companies, big talk of economic growth: this is the tone Labour wants to set when doing economics, to the point of absurdity. A claimed £110 billion investment by mostly US “financial firms”, the centerpiece of last week’s Trump bootlicking, was to produce just 1,800 jobs — perhaps every lucky new employee will simply be given £61 million each? And so it goes for data centers, the shiny new toy for all parts of the party, including new Business Secretary Peter Kyle and even the leader-in-waiting Andy Burnham, with seemingly little thought as to what tangible economic benefits these resource-guzzling monsters actually produce. It’s all radically disconnected from the daily experience of life in Britain, which remains much as it did pre-Labour: a sense of everything being too expensive, and nothing really working properly.

It’s not too hard to guess where the real impetus for data center enthusiasm has come from. Keir Starmer has been happy to pose with Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, a man otherwise given to pontificating about “the superiority of the West” and “scaring our enemies”. Perhaps Starmer was hoping some of Karp’s mildly unhinged confidence would rub off on him; sadly, the PM’s own enemies do not appear to be the remotest bit scared. Nigel Farage certainly isn’t.

Starmer’s government is shaped by one, overwhelming factor, something Burnham had the temerity to point at in an extensive pre-conference interview: “fear” of the bond markets. He wasn’t wrong: the Government has an increasingly fraught relationship to financial markets, as repeated mini-crises and the steady creep upwards of government borrowing costs suggest. The result has been a kind of economic paralysis in which the Treasury tiptoes as close as possible to the spending limits allowed by its own fiscal rules, in the hope of not frightening the bond markets, but never does enough to break out of the doom-loop. Attacks from the Left are starting to have some bite. Starmer has been unable to persuade his own backbenchers of further austerity, with messy reversals to at least some planned cuts (and rising interest rate charges) adding another £10 billion to expected borrowing, but his government is also tied, painfully, to pre-election promises to keep the main taxes untouched.

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Add to that weak economic growth and rising demands from health and social care and you have a hole in the government’s plans that is likely to be somewhere between £30 to £50 billion. Reeves will find out the exact number at the end of this week, when the Office for Budget Responsibility presents its latest forecasts; leaks beforehand suggest a further reduction in Britain’s productivity growth is on the cards. We are rapidly approaching two lost decades for the British economy. And there doesn’t seem to be a way to square the circle of low growth and politically impossible tax rises and spending cuts that is generating this economic instability. There is no particular reason for anyone trading government debt to believe that this messy government will be able to either magic up chunky tax rises (which Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones hinted at over conference) or persuade its increasingly restless backbenchers of the need for more cuts.

This fundamental lack of confidence is causing a steady increase of borrowing costs. In a world already beset by multiple shocks, from the big and obvious like the Trump tariffs to the more subtle like the impact of extreme weather on harvests, Britain is particularly badly exposed. Not only because government debt hovers at around 100% of GDP, but because the economy is fundamentally, materially weak: importing about half the natural gas it burns for electricity and heating, and about half the food it eats. It’s an economy that now has no remaining fertilizer factories, relying solely on imports from an increasingly turbulent world. The obvious, immediate things to do — a wealth tax, and an end to the absurd Quantitative Easing-related payments to the Bank of England — have been proposed only by the Government’s opponents to its Left and Right respectively.

Starmer can and should call Reform’s plans to mass deport Indefinite Leave to Remain holders “racist”. Relative to the complete spinelessness Labour has previously displayed towards Farage, this is a step forward. It is useful when confronting a political enemy to be able to actually attack them for something. But it will prove no more successful a strategy, by itself, than the same trick did for Joe Biden. For sure, he could be rude about the unique threat Trump presented to US democracy — and his points, broadly, would be correct. Biden and his supporters could talk up the huge investments made through the Inflation Reduction Act, or the CHIPS Act. They were real cash and major interventions, far bigger than anything Labour has contemplated, that would, over time, deliver some manufacturing jobs. But if all Trump had to do was ask, repeatedly, at every rally, whether ordinary Americans felt better off now than they did four years before, it amounted to nothing. Worse, when the hapless Kamala Harris attempted to float a few mild proposals to restrain grocery prices, the hue and cry from the liberal economics establishment about the evils of “price controls” meant her campaign never touched the core issue of overpriced essentials, and corporate profiteering, again. Lacking any real ideological scruples on economic issues, Trump’s administration has proceeded to rip up much of the free-market rule book — imposing dramatic, politically motivated tariffs, and taking part of chip manufacturer Intel into public ownership, for example. Reform in the UK has shown a similar flexibility — Nigel Farage has pledged to nationalize British steel while Richard Tice has taken on the Governor of the Bank of England over the costs of Quantitative Easing.

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Biden, Harris and the Democrats could go round and round the core economic issues. They could point to all their marvelous interventions. They could highlight the real dangers of their opponents’ plans. But if they did not address the central economic issue for millions — the cost-of-living crisis — it would all amount to nothing. And so they lost.

This should be taken as a warning for Labour. UK inflation remains above the Bank of England’s 2% target and, crucially, it is food prices that are helping to keep it there. Britain imports so much food that disruptions in the rest of the world (crucially now including extreme weather disrupting harvests) turn quickly into higher prices in the supermarkets here. Living standards have barely moved since 2019, creating fertile ground for the kind of resentments against migrants that Reform, and those further to the Right, to flourish.

Labour has dragooned more establishment economists into advising them, now including former Bank of England deputy governor, and former Columbia University President, Minouche Shafik. But their attachment to establishment economics is part of their problem: it means they will run scared of intervening on prices in the name of free-market economics, and it means they will duck out of taxing wealth — instead leaning still harder with Budget tax rises on the “working people” they once pledge to protect. Charges of “racism” against Reform will count for little if all Farage has to do at the next election is ask, like his mentor Trump, if people feel any better off.

You see, Mahmood isn’t just Home Secretary: as she was so keen to remind conference-goers, she’s a Labour home secretary. Twice during her speech she put special emphasis on her party’s name, lest anyone close their eyes and think they were listening to Theresa May or Suella Braverman. And, by the standards of a senior Labour politician, this was a surprising speech. 

The main focus was the Government’s changes to “indefinite leave to remain” (ILR) rules for migrants, the qualifying period for which will now be increased from five years to 10. Earlier this month, Reform UK pledged, if elected, to scrap ILR entirely, forcing migrants to re-apply for visas every five years. The radicalism of this proposal allowed Keir Starmer — himself compared to Enoch Powell by portions of the British Left — to cast Farage as “racist” and “immoral”. During a separate fringe event last night, Mahmood referred to the policy as “much worse than racism”. Indeed, Reform’s announcement was in some ways a gift to the Home Secretary, who could outline a Labour policy which is certainly robust, but which nonetheless takes a more humane approach to questions of migration.

“Open, tolerant, generous”: that was the Home Secretary’s pitch for what the UK has to offer newcomers, and that is only possible if stronger policies are introduced for protecting the country’s borders. Thanks to Conservative policies, she said, “the scale and the speed of change as well as the nature of [immigration] has frayed trust and eroded public confidence”. She added: “We need a system that is fair to people who are already here. That means cracking down on illegal working that undercuts British workers.”

But this outwardly nationalist rhetoric had its limits. If she fails in her task to stop the boats and bring down net migration, Mahmood’s Liverpool address may come to be remembered as the “Little England” speech. Surveying the crowd, she expressed her “belief in a greater Britain, not a littler England”, a line which received the heartiest round of applause of the whole speech. That response from the audience — which also cheered Mahmood’s references to her second-generation immigrant background, as well her drive-by attacks on the open-borders maniacs of the last Tory ministry — showed an enthusiasm for immigration hawkishness only if it was tempered by liberal caveats. The crowd held its collective breath when she began to criticize migrant hotels, then exhaled when she described them as “that totem of the Tory legacy”. Clearly, Labour’s conference-goers may not be ready for full-fat Mahmood. 

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Labour insiders had tipped Mahmood for the Home Office for several months before her elevation was hastened by Angela Rayner’s resignation from the Deputy Leadership. That reshuffle, early in September, gave Starmer an opportunity to bring in a tough minister to bring down both legal and illegal immigration — a task which successive governments have made seem impossible. Mahmood doesn’t deal in half measures. Last summer, in the wake of rioting across Britain, the then-Justice Secretary warned that “thugs and hooligans” would “feel the full force of the law”. A fortnight ago, she made the very same threat to Unite the Kingdom protestors who used violence against police officers. Speaking yesterday, she vowed to go after shoplifters in a vaguely Bolshevik-sounding “winter of action”.  And after she oversaw, as justice secretary, the early release of thousands of prisoners, which might have led to the resignation of a less capable minister, she turned it into an opportunity to abolish shorter sentences.

In doing so, she aimed to strengthen Labour’s appeal to the voters who are deserting the party. British electoral politics, across the spectrum, typically functions as a quest to win over swing voters who are in parts economically Left-wing, socially conservative, patriotic, and tough on crime. In its pithiest form, this worldview is summarized as: “Hang the paedos, fund the NHS.” Many of the Britons occupying this sweet spot would once have voted for Labour, but are now drawn to a Reform UK message which is tailored towards the disaffected working class. Mahmood, who settled for merely chemically castrating sex offenders during her time in the Justice Department, is viewed by prominent figures within Labour as the party’s best answer to this conundrum. Maurice Glasman, the founder of Blue Labour and an influence on Government strategists including Morgan McSweeney, has labeled Mahmood as “clearly the leader of our part of the party”.

Conscious of her role in the fight against Reform, Mahmood argued in her Liverpool speech that “working people will turn away from us — the party that for over a hundred years has been their party — and seek solace in the false promises of Farage”. The Right-wingers in teal aren’t even the most serious threat to national stability, in her eyes: at the beginning of her address she highlighted that when 150,000 people marched through London earlier this month, “they did so under the banner of a convicted criminal and a former BNP member”. In other words, this wasn’t an attempt to “unite the Kingdom” but the desperate howl of the Little Englander. 

There was once a time, as recently as the mid-20th century, when to be a “Little Englander” was not a sign of xenophobic small-mindedness but instead of progressive opposition to the British Empire. That it is now a universal term of derision is reflective of how thoroughly more middle-class, metropolitan sections of the center-left have come to dominate the Labour Party. In her speech, Mahmood stated that hers is “a patriotism that speaks but does not feel the need to shout”. That may well be true of many Britons of all political stripes, but the fact remains that Labour is now well behind in the polls to an insurgent movement which is only too happy to shout its patriotism from the rafters. 

Rather than drawing distinctions between its national plan and the pitfalls of being a Little Englander, Starmer’s party should do more to appeal to this group, which is still resolutely insular. Mahmood said in Liverpool that “where a nation is fearful, it turns inwards. When we feel safe, we can look outwards” — yet her speech was still given with one eye firmly on the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), whose range of views on immigration tends to be narrower than that of voters. In response, a Reform press release stated that “her speechwriters may have toughened her rhetoric, but the Home Secretary’s speech won’t wash with the public”.

There are other issues where the position of Labour MPs and members is out of kilter with the public as a whole. Though a small majority of Britons support remaining in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), there are more who think that the treaty should be reformed (35%) than left as it is (28%). Yet while the Home Secretary has made positive noises about reforming the ECHR, Attorney General Richard Hermer has suggested that any such move would amount to a “political trick”. Wanting to leave it altogether is a positively fringe position among MPs, and this summer’s welfare bill debacle demonstrates how hard it can be to get legislation past intransigent members of the PLP. Be that as it may, drastic legal changes may be the only way to actually remove failed asylum seekers in considerable numbers, as the steady stream of disrupted deportations implies. 

For all her strong rhetoric, then, Mahmood still needs to convince a party which, since the time of Tony Blair, has wedded itself to the cult of human rights, not to mention a Prime Minister who has become an emblem of this legalistic mindset. And the Prime Minister is likely to remain in situ. Andy Burnham Autumn has now run its course after barely a week, with the Greater Manchester Mayor telling a fringe event in Liverpool on Monday that he would not be challenging Starmer for the leadership. With the internal threat defused, the Prime Minister can focus his efforts on the Faragist menace, while Mahmood can worry less about trying to win over the Left of the party.

Despite the best efforts of Rachel Reeves, Labour is still trusted more than Reform when it comes to managing the economy. Its immigration policy, however, is a tougher sell, not least if the Chancellor pushes through a migration deal for young EU workers to boost public finances. And though Mahmood used her speech to praise the “one in, one out” deal negotiated with France by her predecessor Yvette Cooper, doubts remain about whether this ratio will hold firm in practice — and whether, more fundamentally, Starmer and his parliamentary colleagues have any desire to undertake the legal reforms that would enable Mahmood to do her job effectively. 

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“The story of who we are is contested,” Mahmood claimed in Liverpool yesterday. She was talking about Britain, and about the new class of ethnonationalists who have seized the previously unifying language of patriotism and twisted it into something darker. Yet she could just as easily have been describing her own party. As Labour’s conference moves towards its conclusion, Starmer’s assertions that he has planted his flag and made clear what he stands for are hardly convincing. Mahmood has put forward a more persuasive assertion of her personal beliefs. But she won’t win over any Reform voters by accusing their leader of racism, while Left-wingers, many of whom are presently beguiled by Jeremy Corbyn or the Greens, may be put off by her self-presentation as “a patriot, proudly so”. This Gordian Knot applies to pretty much everything Starmer does on domestic policy, and his home secretary should prepare to have her hands tied just as often. 

This hints at an even broader problem for Labour. Whatever the glamour of the conference, the fact remains that neither Starmer nor his Cabinet is currently guiding British public opinion. The Overton window is moving markedly to the Right, evidenced by the very real prospect of a governing party at the end of this decade with a plan for mass deportations. Given all this, even relative radicals like Mahmood risk being stranded as the liberal consensus folds and a political revolution rages around them. But at least she’s trying. Jonathan Rutherford, a political adviser who is another influential Blue Labour figure, has — somewhat grandiosely — hailed Mahmood as “perhaps the most astute and able politician of her generation”. She isn’t, but she may still be Labour’s best hope of stopping the more likely holder of that title from capturing Number 10 in 2029. If, that is, her party can hold its nose.

The questions for the British Defense Secretary, on a visit during Labour Party conference which began yesterday just across the Mersey, ranged from “What will this mean for local jobs?” to “Is Russia about to attack?” This just about sums up the dilemma facing UK defense policy: are we in a period of incrementally raised threat, demanding incrementally higher defense spending; or should the severity of the global situation demand the urgent expansion of investment into Britain’s historic military hardware production sites, to the necessary detriment of spending on everything else?

Amid its polling slump, Labour is desperate to demonstrate delivery on its domestic agenda, and is conscious that no matter how statesman-like Keir Starmer and Healey look on global stage, there are — as yet — few votes in national security and defense. But the prospect of conflict with Russia, given the recent doubling of Russian incursions into Nato airspace, rightly haunts the British government. If the worst happened, according to one senior military officer I spoke to, here’s what it would look like. In Phase One, all the expensive kit is destroyed, the stockpiles of complex weapons are expended; the long-practiced maneuvers end in stalemate; and trench warfare begins.

In Phase Two, both sides are lobbing drones and missiles at each other’s industrial base. Their armed forces consist mainly of raw recruits, and their cities look like London during the Blitz. In Phase Three, one side’s scientific and technological base begins to innovate faster, using AI, robotics, space and lasers to make itself unbeatable, and their opponent loses the will and the means to fight.

Any of these phases can be circumvented either by a strategic nuclear attack or a devastating act of economic warfare. And the preparatory phase looks much like the present: unexplained cyberattacks on major infrastructure, “protest” movements driven by disinformation and — as is currently happening in Moldova — outright interference against elected governments.

Nobody in their right mind would want to begin such a conflict. But the fragmented state of the Western alliance, and the irrationalism of the man in the Kremlin, mean that our surest way of avoiding it is deterrence — nuclear, conventional and economic — and by strengthening our alliances. If you want to understand how pivotal those alliances are, look at this map, produced by my colleagues at the Council on Geostrategy. It shows that, though Nato’s frontline with Russia is on land, stretching from the Black Sea to the Arctic, the alliance itself is essentially maritime. Its flanks are seas; its supply lines are oceans; its communication networks rest on seabeds.

Though few British citizens are prepared to accept it, and few politicians are prepared to lay it on the line in these terms, that is the stark background to Britain’s rearmament program. Since February this year, when US Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth told his counterparts that the USA was handing the conventional defense of Europe to European states themselves, the British government has scheduled a hike in defense spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, promised 3% in the next Parliament and signed up to the new Nato target of 5% in 10 years’ time.

In UK defense circles, the concept of “fight tonight” has evolved from an edgy thought experiment to a concrete criterion for readiness. Britain has committed, in short order and without any debate in Parliament, to fielding a “sub-strategic” — tactical — nuclear weapon, to be carried on F-35A combat aircraft and deployed under Nato command.

In the new National Security Strategy, the UK has also pledged to embrace higher risks when it takes action and accepted that, in pursuit of enhanced security, its “interests” may have to override its “values”. And, in the upcoming Defense Investment Plan, the Ministry of Defense will decide how to match its weapons systems, forces and deployments to the threat, given the size of its budget.

The outstanding problems are: how to pay for rearmament; how to secure consent for it, from a civil society that is atomized and fractured by disputes over identity; and how to ready political and military leaderships for the possibility of having to manage Russian escalation.

The money problem is acute. In the Thirties, once it accepted the possibility of war within a decade, the Treasury understood it would have to be financed by borrowing. Though it rationed the spending increase, and forced hard choices on the military — prioritizing the RAF over both other services — between 1932 and 1939 the Treasury raised defense spending from 2.3% to 9% of GDP.

That would be hard to repeat today. First, because the UK’s public debt is 96% of GDP. Though that is lower than it was at the start of rearmament, today the government borrows from investors free to move their money across borders, not from a middle class whose savings are constrained by capital controls as in the Thirties. Second, because of the welfare state. On the eve of rearmament, when defense spending stood at 2.5% of GDP, the rest of the public sector accounted for just 17%. During wartime, when defense spending ballooned to 50% of GDP, state spending on civilian services shrank below 7%. Today the non-military public spending accounts for around 42% of GDP, much of which is unshrinkable.

“Total war”, of the kind we fought twice in the 20th century, is unthinkable for states with public health, welfare and pension commitments. As a result, the fiscal debates and the rearmament debate in British politics are misaligned: the 5% Nato commitment remains aspirational, while the Treasury and the OBR have yet to agree a methodology that could measure the upsides of this investment in terms of growth.

The British government is engaged in discussions over a proposal to put cash into a multilateral fund, with allies who have better credit ratings, and to borrow against it on the capital markets. That could delay the cost of some defense spending, effectively moving it off balance sheet for the medium term. But the UK has distanced itself from a City-led project to finance such borrowing, known as the Defense Security and Resilience Bank, and is making slow progress in its own negotiations.

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In the meantime, selling rearmament to the electorate has barely begun. Keir Starmer was warmly received when he told the London Defense Conference that security and defense were no longer “one priority amongst many others” but “the central organizing principle of government; the first thought in the morning — the last at night.” But that is not yet a priority shared by the electorate, nor even most MPs. When the first thought in the morning for millions of people is how are they going to meet their food and energy bills, rearmament is a hard sell.

Labour got a taste of just how hard last month when, by a narrow margin, the TUC Congress voted to stop supporting increased defense spending. Despite pleas from the two big Labour-affiliated manufacturing unions — GMB and Unite — white-collar workers from the teachers, lecturers and health unions voted for “welfare not warfare”.

So those of us who want to make the case for defense spending need to do so in a much more convincing way. “Welfare not warfare” is a compelling slogan only if you believe warfare can be avoided through disarmament and multilateralism. Ukraine found out the hard way that, when dealing with an insane ethnonationalism, these don’t work.

One of our strongest arguments is the economic multiplier effect of defense investment. The economy of Barrow-in-Furness, whose submarine order books are guaranteed for decades, is now booming to the point of overheating. With the government committed to building similar clusters, in Plymouth, Clydeside and Belfast for example, new defense manufacturing jobs should become available, each paying 40% above the average factory wage.

But at some point, the national conversation has to move from the opportunity to the threat. My father’s generation of Labour-voting miners didn’t switch from pacifism to rearmament simply because they thought it would raise wages; they did so because they didn’t want to live in the Third Reich.

Today, many young people are rightly appalled by the wars going on — in Gaza and in Ukraine — but their attention seems fixed on the injustices only of the former. It does not seem to occur to the British public that, when Russian-paid saboteurs torch warehouses in London, or take down airports and hospitals in cyber attacks, that might be in preparation for something worse.

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Yet those who study the Russian state media know that the UK is constantly portrayed as the main enemy, and the fantasy peddled is that Putin will one day drown Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast with a giant nuclear-detonated tidal wave, followed by our abject surrender.

The key to change lies beyond the confines of electoral politics. There is, in Britain, a military-industrial-academic “complex” that has become used to conducting its business in conditions of quiet and opacity. The armed forces don’t look or sound like the country they are defending. Our defense giants tiptoe around the issue of their presence on campuses.

Banks hike lending costs to defense SMEs over “reputational risks”. Our two major Christian churches refuse to let their trustees invest in defense. Students pursuing careers in defense related science and technology face peer pressure to opt for something softer — and, for the most talented, that is often a more lucrative job in finance.

Yet China has seven of its elite universities signed up to top-secret military research, and leads the USA in 57 out of 64 defense-related categories of science, while the whole of Russian society is geared for war. So before the population moves, it is this ill-defined but critical community of bankers, vice-chancellors, civil servants, religious leaders and opinion formers who will have to move first.

Their assumptions accumulated since 1991 — towards reliance on international law and institutions, towards improvisation in a crisis, and towards incremental change — will need to be abandoned. So will the tradition of conducting all discussions about threat, strategy and deterrence out of earshot of the public. So will pension funds’ reluctance to invest in defense, and universities’ reluctance to shout about the defense-related research they do.

In the Thrties, the air of unreality lasted from Hitler’s march to power right through to the Battle of Jarama in February 1937, when — mobilized by the Communist Party — the first British and Irish troops went into action against a fascist army in Spain. After that, something snapped in the British psyche. Labour, which had voted against every defense budget since 1919, became the most ardent supporter of rearmament.

Today, though politicians like Starmer and Healey are already there, the wider electorate — both Left and Right — has yet to make the leap. When they look at the half-finished ships in places like Birkenhead, and its sister yards in Govan and Rosyth, the public sees, if anything, jobs and apprenticeships. When military planners look at these same chunks of metal, they see vital deterrent weapons systems whose deployment cannot come soon enough.

Though rarely expressed so honestly, these are sentiments that leaders around the world could sympathize with. Most governments claim to be answerable to their people, yet if they rely on debt to fund their activities, they will find their sovereignty constrained by analysts sitting in distant financial districts. James Carville, the outspoken former adviser to Bill Clinton, famously quipped that he would like to be reincarnated as the bond market, since “you can intimidate everybody”.

When Labour entered power last year, Chancellor Rachel Reeves faced the same problem that bedeviled Erdoğan and Carville: how to reassure the bond markets that they could keep lending at reasonable rates. Her answer was to commit to a set of “fiscal rules”, pledging that government debt will be falling by the end of the parliament. This was not an original strategy: Reeves was merely adapting what has become a convention for British chancellors since George Osborne created the framework for austerity in 2010. But during Reeves’ hapless tenure, it has become clear that the mantra of fiscal responsibility conceals another tendency: government by metrics.

Bereft of imagination in a rapidly changing world, our political class clings ever more tightly to numerical targets and indicators, hoping to convey an impression of competence and stability. Instead, they have only reinforced the sense that we are ruled by management consultants rather than leaders. Nor have metrics provided the bulwark against chaos that they promised; for the numbers, it turns out, do not always show what people think they show.

An over-reliance on statistical models and measurements comes with two great dangers. The first is that the seemingly objective quality of numbers can seduce us into believing that they present an infallible picture of reality. In fact, data are gathered and modeled by institutions with all the shortcomings and flaws that one would expect of a human undertaking. The second problem is that our behavior is increasingly determined by what we can measure — or think we can measure — rather than what is actually important or desirable.

Both problems are abundantly illustrated by British politics today. When it comes to her fiscal rules, Reeves is essentially relying on economic forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility, an independent body, to tell her how much money she has to spend. The government ties its own hands, inviting the OBR’s economists to rate its finances before the markets get a chance to. The problem is that these forecasts are imprecise, and regularly revised as the various metrics change. Consequently, Reeves’ chancellorship has been an endless drama of budgetary “black holes” and vanishing “fiscal headroom”, as she scrambles to tailor her policies to the shifting estimates. Measuring has displaced thinking, to the point where the government’s decisions are being dictated by a numerical target rather than an actual plan for how to match the public finances to the nation’s needs.

In July, for instance, Reeves tried to tackle the problem of runaway welfare spending. Instead of setting out a strategy for reforming a fiendishly complex and thoroughly broken system of benefits — a problem whose roots go deep into British society ­— she set about salami-slicing various budgets to satisfy the fiscal rules. This so outraged Labour backbenchers that Reeves and Keir Starmer had to abandon their cuts in any case.

That same month, as if to emphasize the futility of the government’s approach, the OBR suggested it would be reconsidering some of its forecasts, which were too optimistic. The adjustment will likely force Reeves to raise billions of pounds in tax at her upcoming Budget. As the blogger M.F. Robbins has aptly put it, “you cannot micromanage policy based on statistical noise. The more you try to do this, the more you’ll find that, in fact, the noise is managing you.” The Chancellor is now trapped between a bond market waiting to see if she will keep her promises, and a party that wants her to abandon them. Last week, former transport secretary Louise Haigh published a frontal assault on the Chancellor’s strategy, demanding a less prominent role for the OBR in government. A group of 40-odd Labour MPs in Red Wall seats has previously expressed similar frustrations.

Labour’s love of metrics does not end with fiscal rules. Hoping to show a firm, technocratic grip on the nation’s problems, Starmer’s government has issued a blizzard of “missions” and “milestones” based on quantifiable targets. It wants 75% of five-year-olds to reach “a good level of development”. It aims to recruit 13,000 neighborhood police officers and 6,500 new teachers; to build 1.5 million homes and to achieve 95% clean electricity. The list goes on. At one point, the government even proposed a “digital dashboard”, so that the public could track its progress towards these goals on their smartphones.

All of this assumes that we want to treat politics like a stock market, assessing the fundamentals of a government before choosing to invest. We measure and rate everything else, so why not our politicians? One reason is that voters have an intuitive understanding of “Campbell’s Law”, which observes that a measure which becomes a target will likely come under “corruption pressures” — that is, it will be fudged or misrepresented to appear more impressive. More importantly, politics, like human experience, is fundamentally qualitative. The number of new houses does not tell us whether they are decent homes in neighborhoods where people actually want to live, just as the number of new police officers and teachers does not tell us whether the criminal justice and education systems are working as we would like. These are ratings we make with our eyes and ears.

It’s tempting to think that numbers can build trust by helping the public to understand the work of government. But if statistical and subjective reality clash, it has the opposite effect. People do not like being told a graph proves that their perceptions are wrong. In 2024, supporters of then president Joe Biden foolishly tried to convince struggling voters that they were doing great, actually; had they not seen the economic metrics? Something similar is happening with law and order issues in Britain today, as data on falling crime rates fail to assuage anger at low-level lawlessness and police impotence. The Covid pandemic was perhaps the most ambitious attempt in history at doing politics via statistical models, and it was ultimately a disaster for public trust in institutions. People were initially willing to give up their freedoms to “bend the curve” of infections, but as time wore on, the experts who were meant to save the politicians from resentment were themselves contaminated by it.

It is true that our impressions diverge from the numbers in part because we are biased. Political partisanship has long influenced perceptions of the economy in the United States, and now the same appears to be happening in Britain too. Then again, sometimes the official statistics are just spectacularly wrong, as has consistently been the case with immigration. In 2004, Tony Blair’s government estimated that welcoming migrants from Eastern European countries to work in Britain would result in a maximum of 13,000 people arriving annually. Just four years later, the Home Office revealed that 750,000 had come already. Another discrepancy emerged when EU citizens were invited to apply for settled status after Brexit. In 2019, the government thought there were 3.7 million EU nationals in the country, yet closer to 6 million have asked to remain. Similar misjudgments led former prime minister Boris Johnson to relax visa restrictions in 2021, resulting in a surge of new arrivals.

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Such errors stemmed in part from a woefully inadequate method for collecting data. The International Passenger Survey, designed in the Sixties for studying tourism, involves little more than questioning people at random at airports and other border crossings. It uses a tiny sample of migrants, and misses out many patterns of movement altogether. But until other data sources were added in the last few years — and despite immigration becoming a persistent political issue — this was the British state’s sole way of measuring it.

At one point, it could be argued that migration was an outlier in a generally solid field of British statistics. Since the Covid pandemic, though, the country’s chief number-crunching body, the Office for National Statistics, has been mired in crisis. Reports have been delayed, revised, and retracted, and it has admitted that some of its most important metrics are no longer reliable. It is a portrait in miniature of British misgovernance. In 2007, the ONS lost 90% of its London-based staff — a devastating flight of expertise — when a misguided attempt at devolution saw the agency moved to Newport in southern Wales. Governments have subsequently cut its funding, which as a cost-saving exercise is a bit like trying to lose weight by gouging out an eye. But the most pressing problem has been that fewer and fewer people are taking ONS surveys, which seems partly to reflect an unwillingness to cooperate with the state, or for that matter to answer phone calls and open the door to strangers.

This erosion of statistical competence has far-reaching implications, given the range of public and private actors who use ONS data. Their uncertainty has knock-on effects for the affordability of mortgages, the value of British businesses and assets, and the quality of government policy. Political discourse will, meanwhile, become increasingly farcical, as politicians stake their authority on numbers that provide only a tenuous picture of reality, and we will criticize them using the same illusory figures. We are already familiar with the seismic importance given to every tenth of a percentage point of GDP growth, even though such changes are far too small to measure accurately, and would tell us little of value to our lives in any case. So we are unlikely to change tack just because the measurement has been declared unreliable as well.

A grasp of metrics is essential for governing a modern society; we are right to expect that the state will make the numbers add up. The fate of Liz Truss, a prime minister effectively toppled by the bond markets when her plans were found wanting, is a reminder of the ruthless will to measurement at the heart of capitalism today. Donald Trump can bully government agencies to confect more favorable economic data, as he appeared to do last month by firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but he cannot force businesses and investors to believe that data. Still, politics requires an insight that goes beyond our fixation with the quantifiable. The numbers do not lie, but nor do they tell us everything. It was once widely believed that demographic change in the United States would hand the future to the Democrats, and that the size of the EU’s GDP and population meant it could easily propel Ukraine to victory against Russia. Those claims appear less certain now.

Likewise, Britain’s current regime shows that an obsession with metrics is ultimately a profound weakness, mistaking the means of statecraft with its ends. Starmer and Reeves’ project appears to be falling apart before it is even clear what that project was, teaching us that a government led by managerial bean counters can be as fragile and incoherent as one led by clowns. Leaders who confuse meeting targets with governing well will achieve neither.

Today’s deputy leadership contest is being held as Labour faces a similarly extinction-level event — not that either candidate has a chance of resolving that. The party is in a double bind, with the Corbynite Your Party and a revived Greens under the “eco-populist” Zack Polanski snapping at their Left. To their Right, Reform is marching into Labour territory to demand nationalization of the steel industry, a restoration of the winter fuel allowance, and an end to the exorbitant interest payments handed to commercial banks by a cash-strapped Treasury.

The Government has no response, and can only resort to characteristic prevarication and half-measures. The Prime Minister obsesses over process, managerial tweaks, and civil service procedure, while the dissonance between tasks and means grows ever more extreme. We’ve seen countless failed managerial resets: five “missions”; six “milestones”; three “foundations”; and 30 priorities. Starmerite policy ephemera is a feature, not a bug, of a PM with no coherent guiding philosophy.

The inanity of Downing Street’s triumphal announcement of “phase two” was already obvious. But the emptiness of its “delivery, delivery, delivery” sloganeering has now been brutally exposed by the personnel bloodbath and open mutiny by the victims of the chief of staff Morgan McSweeney’s reshuffle axe.

Amid the perma-chaos, the PLP has deigned to present to Labour members two near-identical candidates from the party’s mushy-soft center-left as potential deputies: both, until recently, served happily in Starmer’s cabinet; neither is associated with the Corbynite ancien régime; and it’s difficult to discern what major ideas, policies and strategic approaches, if any, set them apart.

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Lucy Powell, the recently sacked Leader of the House of Commons, is up against the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson. Both are very different politicians compared to their predecessor, Angela Rayner, who acted as the sine qua non of Labour’s claims to working-class authenticity. But the former deputy’s shadow looms: both Powell and Phillipson have made much of what they share with her, their northern roots and their gender, in a kind of glum replay of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch with fewer laughs, each presenting themselves as the deserving heir-to-Ange.

But the drama of this deputy leadership battle, lies not in bold ideological fault lines as it did back in 1981. For there are none. Rather the contest is a low-key proxy war between the Prime Minister and the party’s clear favorite to replace him, Andy Burnham — the King in the North, who gave Powell his early endorsement as “someone from these parts”. Burnham even has his own parliamentary faction, Mainstream, a fledgling outfit bringing together “radical realists”, who range from a benighted former Blarite policy adviser, Corbynite academics and soft-Left parliamentarians. Whether this hodgepodge of characters can actually achieve anything is another matter entirely. Labour has no shortage of internal groupuscules, some more effective than others. Little unites Mainstream’s founders other than a vague distaste for a spluttering Starmerism. But if Powell can mount a solid campaign as the unlikely voice of an aggrieved progressive membership, then it will be to Burnham’s ultimate benefit.

Manchester’s Metro Mayor isn’t the only ghost at Labour’s tragic feast. Jeremy Corbyn is here, too. It might be 10 years since he was elected leader of the Labour Party, spawning a movement of millennial socialism that set him at odds with a “modernized” party, but he is gearing up to prove a major irritation today. Starmer could try to ignore him, but Blair and Mandelson were similarly complacent when they described how they shut the awkward squad of socialists MPs — Corbyn, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott — in “their sealed tomb”. Look how that worked out. The seal was broken a decade ago by the Labour membership’s frustration with the tepid reformism on offer from party moderates. The Corbynites returned from the dead with a response to Britain’s secular decline that was red-blooded, full-throttle, and which promised transformation over tinkering.

Corbyn provided an answer after Blairism and its Brownite mutation had acquiesced to the political economy of Thatcherism — being “intensely relaxed” about people getting filthy rich, at ease with globalization, and striking a Faustian peace deal with the City. Under New Labour, there would be significant private provision of public services, independence for the Bank of England, and a retreat of the state from the economic sphere. Pumping the tax revenues from deregulation, and privatization drives into the welfare, healthcare and education budgets, they thought, would be change enough. The Gremlin in the machine back then was the global financial crisis, when the entire neoliberal growth model collapsed under the weight of the US subprime mortgage market. It has existed ever since on the life support of bank nationalizations, quantitative easing and state-backed asset bubbles.

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Corbynism’s rise in 2015, then, coincided with the beginning of a second term of austerity, in response to the implosion of the City. Despite negative real interest rates, capital spending was squeezed by the Coalition and the Cameroons in all-out efforts to eliminate the deficit. State capacity was diminished, productivity and real incomes squashed, and the country was left with a starkly depleted public realm.

Which is where we find ourselves today, at a political and economic impasse, with an economy that cannot grow and a polity that is becoming ungovernable. This is the origin story of our current economic and social malaise, a harsher, zero-sum politics, the rise of Reform, Brexit, intensifying culture wars and, of course, Corbyn. Osborne’s Notting Hill set had succeeded in unlocking a set of morbid symptoms that cumulatively destroyed their world view. Today, anybody advocating a return to end-of-history economic liberalism has been relegated to the status of hopeless nostalgists on the sidelines of the political stage; Rest is Politics fans tutting into their phones in the local Gail’s.

Corbynism played a crucial role in that shift. But its core base was concentrated among young, downwardly mobile graduates in larger cities, rather than “the many” (not the few) who were at the heart of the movement’s promise. Corbyn was never a working-class hero — more allotment radical — and much of Labour’s traditional vote was profoundly alienated by his foreign policy stances as well as the social milieu he so awkwardly represented. Your Party is a further retreat from that zone of mass politics and the construction of viable electoral coalitions. As well as being riven by the kind of personal and political divisions that have become the hallmark of the non-Labour Left, it is a capitulation — a recognition of permanent exclusion from real proximity to the levers of state. Even its potential as a “UKIP of the Left” is being hindered by early factionalism, as former Corbyn staffers and trade union heavyweights brief relentlessly against his putative “co-leader”, Zarah Sultana. Her vision of a progressive ultra-liberalism clashes with the views still held by the coterie of Leninist ideologues surrounding the former Labour leader. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that she is out-maneuvered and defects to Polanski’s Greens.

True, the minoritarian tribe attempting to fuse disaffected urban progressives with socially conservative Muslim voters may yet act as a successful disruptive force, but it is unlikely to wield direct influence in the corridors of power. Instead, it will assuage the consciences of its members and supporters, safe in the knowledge that no compromises will ever have to be made with anyone outside of their small fractions of the electorate. It was ever thus on the fringes of the Left.

In any case, Starmer has expunged this kind of politics from his Labour Party. It’s unfortunate that he is yet to land on anything with which to replace it. Instead, we have a void. Vague, inchoate nods towards a more interventionist, activist state are hinted at, then forgotten. We hear snippets of critiques of neoliberal growth; Reeves’s “securonomics” model is floated but never realized. Implementation, after all, would require the arrival of the promised “insurgent government”. Instead, the Prime Minister disavows his own speeches and sacks ministers hours after giving them his fulsome support. It’s hard to see how he calms this chaos of his own making.

In the past, Starmer would have turned to the talismanic McSweeney. But today, his svengali is vulnerable. Not just tainted by the Mandelson appointment he approved, the party strategist’s relentless enthusiasm for bashing the Corbynite Left and achieving maximum seat-to-vote efficiency has been matched only by an ability to alienate Labour MPs. No. 10’s authority is shot among a parliamentary party in a funereal but restive mood, with many backbenchers nervously eyeing their wafer-thin majorities as their party languishes in the polling doldrums.

It seems Downing Street has forgotten the dictum from Harold Wilson, that the Labour Party, like a bird, “needs the Left and Right wing to fly”. The progressive activists are exhausted by Starmer’s half-hearted pandering to Reform; and voters, disillusioned by record levels of legal and illegal mass migration see nothing but a stiff North London lawyer flip-floppings on policy, over-promising but under-delivering. It’s no wonder Britain’s working class, the hallowed hero-voters of McSweeney’s imagination, are abandoning the Labour Party in droves. There should surely be howling embarrassment, recriminations and recalibrations at the top table at the idea that Labour has now definitively become the party of the rich.

Instead, the public gets Phillipson v Powell. This vapid struggle to become Starmer’s ceremonial number two is not only a symptom of the quality of our MPs but also a stark illustration of the existential troubles of a listless Labour party, and a broader Left in crisis. And meanwhile, the populist Right advances with the spirit of the age billowing in their sails.

The British-German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, one of the smartest people I have ever met, famously talked about the 20th century as “the Social Democratic century”. The term stands for all the parties of the center-Left: Social Democrats, Democratic Socialists, or Labour. Dahrendorf’s characterization was about the institutions and practices the center-left managed to create: collective bargaining, the welfare state, pensions, universal healthcare, unemployment protection, and free education. The parties of the center-left prided themselves on taming capitalism. They managed to turn the EU’s single market, which started off as a force for market liberalization, into a regulatory behemoth. The Social Democrats in Germany, the French socialists, and Britain’s Labour Party did not win most elections in the 20th century. Until recently, the Conservatives were the natural party of government in the UK, as were the Gaullists in France and the Christian Democrats in Germany. But it is the parties of the center-left that won the battle of ideas. Their main political opponents, the center-right, were simply alternative managers of the system the center-left created.

Today, the Left is in synchronized decline everywhere. Industrial workforces, the backbone of the center-left’s electorate in previous decades, have disappeared. The Left has split into various parties – Greens, hard-Left, center-left. In Germany, the SPD ended up at 16% at the February election, its worst result ever. The French Socialists are nowadays a junior partner in a political group whose only visible figure is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the hard-left. François Hollande was the last French Socialist president. He was very keen to get to the top, but when he arrived there, he forgot what he wanted to do.

Keir Starmer is Britain’s version of Hollande. Like Hollande, he was flushed to the top by a backlash against an unpopular previous incumbent, but has been clueless since he became Prime Minister. With the help of the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system, he managed to get two-thirds of the seats with one-third of the vote. But he does not know what to do with it.

Today Labour is polling in the same ballpark as the German Social Democrats or the French Socialists. The long-run trend is brutal. In the short-run, voting systems matter, but they cannot arrest secular decline.

The decline had already started to kick in during the 1970s and 1980s, but the collapse of the Soviet Union gave the Left a new lease of life, allowing them to reinvent themselves as globalists. The Socialist François Mitterrand was president in France at the time. Bill Clinton was soon to gain power in the US. The age of Tony Blair would follow in the UK. At that point it appeared that we were able to create a new Social Democratic age — the centrist, globalist version. It lasted for thirty years. I always thought of the World Economic Forum as the quintessential quango of that period — where Left-wing intellectuals met with the world of finance and business. From the heights of the mountains in Davos, the globalists did not see what was going on beneath them.

The age of the Left-wing globalist is gone — but vestiges remain. Starmer’s appointment of Minouche Shafik as his chief economic adviser is a throwback to that age. Shafik spent most of her career as a diplomat in international financial institutions, with a mixed record during her stint on the monetary policy committee at the Bank of England.  If you are desperate and in search of a new economic strategy, as Starmer surely must be, this appears to be an odd appointment. He needed an original thinker, but he got himself a salesperson.

The most visible outward sign of socialism’s failure in the 21st century is its alienation from digital technologies. Dahrendorf’s Social Democrats were creatures of the analog age. Modern socialists are digital Luddites. When confronted with data, their instinct is to regulate. Data protection is a big deal in Europe and in the UK. In Brussels, people still celebrate the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — the set of legislation that brought us the irritating cookie popups online. What the bureaucrats don’t know, and don’t care about, is that GDPR has become a nightmare for small companies in particular, and a big cost factor for everyone. It purports to protect consumers against data abuse, but it kills fledging data-based business. With GDPR and the AI directive, which subjects companies offering AI services to regulations on data protection, Europe made sure that it will not participate in the single most important industry of the 21st century. Nor will it reap the spoils of this industry as a user of AI services. AI is a technology that could deliver the much needed improvements in productivity. Unlike the Europeans, Starmer regularly pays lip service to AI and quantum computing — but his policies are the same as those of the Europeans.

His government’s mindless pursuit of the net zero target is wrecking UK energy policy. His big idea is to realign regulation with the EU. This will guarantee that the UK will remain stuck in the worst of both worlds. It does not enjoy the benefits that come with EU membership, yet it is hamstrung by its regulation.

The tech industry is the driver of economic growth in China and the US. The only socialists anywhere in the world who understood this are the Chinese. Despite this, I still get people quoting at me the old quip that the “US innovates, China imitates, and the EU regulates”. The joke is spot-on for the EU. Whether it is true for the US is a more complicated story that deserves a column on its own. But the joke gets modern China completely wrong. China has out-innovated Europe. They are the world leaders in many important pockets of high-tech engineering, leaving Europe with no chance to catch up.

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If you traveled back in time and told this story to intellectuals of the 20th century, this is the part that would probably surprise them the most. The big delusion of the center-left has been that they won the battle against the Communists. In fact, because hard-Left parties are on the rise, the post-social democratic age is looking increasingly like the pre-social democratic one. Once again, the social democrats find themselves outflanked by communists on the left and by nationalists on the right.

The West deluded itself for a long time that China was becoming Westernized. Few predicted the rise of the Right. Donald Trump has now dominated the Republican Party for a decade. Nigel Farage has a real shot at winning the next General Election. So does Marine Le Pen in France. The Alternative for Germany outpolls the venerable CDU. The German SPD’s brilliant new idea is that they want to ban the AfD. They have run out of ideas.

I see the right resurgence everywhere in Europe, including the UK, as a natural backlash to the Social Democratic age and its now dysfunctional institutions. I don’t think that the Left will reverse the trend. But they could do better by following a few simple policy rules. First, allow your economy to participate in the technologies of the 21st century. But don’t try to pick winners. We should let the private sector do it and give it the room it needs through light-touch regulation and moderate levels of taxation.

Second, when productivity growth is low, the only source of available money for redistribution should be structural reforms like changes to welfare and healthcare systems. Another option is the privatization of dysfunctional state-owned entities. Don’t do what Rachel Reeves is about to do: plug your fiscal holes through higher taxes, which ends up depressing productivity growth. In Germany, Lars Klingbeil, finance minister and SPD chief, is about to do the same as Reeves is.

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And finally: change the story on immigration. Make it your priority that businesses can get the labor supply they need. Crack down on crime committed by immigrants. You are not going to beat Farage by doing what he does. Healthy economies not fret about immigration nearly as much as unhealthy ones.

The center-left will absolutely not follow this advice. What was once said about the Bourbons applies to them too. They learnt nothing. And they have forgotten nothing. Starmer has no tech policy, no policies for structural reform, he will raise taxes, and he will follow Farage on immigration.

The Left is still overrepresented in the media, in academia, and in the legal system, but that only amplifies the delusion. Therein lies the real tragedy. The Left blames its misfortunes on Right-wing conspiracies or on social media. In their worldview, there can be no other explanation. They live in a bubble where the like-minded reinforce each others’ views — a cocooned version of Dahrendorf’s 20th century.

That is why I think Labour is finished as a force of politics. Angela Rayner would be gone either way.

It feels good to get this off my chest. Being swept up in the Corbyn frenzy of 2015-17 was borderline compulsory for posh teenagers queasy about their own privilege. It gave me some distinction among friends whose only impression of this strange, shabby Islington MP was that he was determined to take away their holiday homes. This was an embarrassing chapter in my life, during which I never left the house without a velvet choker — the fashion at the time.

That first wave of Corbynism, like my predilection for chokers, was doomed. It insisted on ideological positions untethered from reality, its adherents allergic to the views of those outside the morally pure vanguard. The frenzy of Corbynistas was vibes-based, conviction-lite and fact-free. The faces of that movement were young, vital and countercultural; it was them versus the Tory gammons and the square New Labourites. For a teenager, the choice was obvious. Of course, none of those yelling “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” to the tune of Seven Nation Army at Glastonbury had a handle on the catastrophic economic vision of John McDonnell. Nor would one expect them to; how do you find the time to read a manifesto when you spend all day skulking around the Dalston Oxfam?

Now a chaotic new Corbyn party — a venture with the Coventry MP Zarah Sultana — claims once again to have the answers to Great British inequality and division, this time in an even more vicious political landscape as Reform paws at the door. Proving its proletarian credentials, the provisionally named “Your Party” is offering strangers on the internet the opportunity to suggest its official name. Unfortunately this does not appear to be a straightforward voting system – Party McPartyFace would inevitably result – rather, YouGov has listed some of the top suggestions being mulled over by top brass. Among them are The Collective (which sounds like a high-markup coffee shop in Hackney Wick), Arise (a yuppie pilates studio) and The People’s Party. This latter one, the favorite among those YouGov surveyed, is an interesting choice. How many People’s Parties the world over have ended up being brutal authoritarian juntas? Heed the rule of thumb: parties and states with promising names – “people’s republics” and so on – are often anything but. Just saying.

Once christened, the first hurdle, a rite of passage on the hard-Left, will be surviving infighting. Last week, a squabble straight out the gate showed “Your Party”was still in the mire over antisemitism. Sultana had told the New Left Review that during his time leading the Labour Party, Corbyn had “capitulated to the IHRA definition of antisemitism” (Corbyn adopted the definition in 2018). She went on to describe his leadership as, of all things, “conciliatory”. For those keeping score, it is worth remembering Corbyn’s interview with Piers Morgan days after October 7, 2023. “All attacks are wrong,” was his response. Pushed repeatedly to condemn Hamas, he refused. Some conciliation.

If these early tiffs don’t kill it in the cradle, “Your Party” could be a disruptor. It has already had fairly buzzy beginnings: despite the perceived chaos, at the time of writing, more than 700,000 people had signed up on the website to register their support (though it’s worth remembering that unlike other parties, it does not charge for membership). Ipsos found that 20% of voters would be “very or fairly likely” to back the party — and 33% among those aged 16-34. Corbyn told Tribune magazine that these potential voters were responding to the usual shopping list of gripes: high bills, high rents, sewage in the waterways. He added: “Plenty of good comrades have approached me over the years suggesting that there needs to be a new political voice in this country,” citing his retention of the Islington North seat as an independent. Seen from Upper Street, the future of socialism is bright.

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But the Londoners who cling to Corbyn — he himself admitted they made up an outsized proportion of those who had registered interest in the new party so far — are still the feckless, limp normies voting not for “the many” but against their parents. For them, politics is simply another opportunity for self-expression. Since Corbyn was booted off his perch, these types were left to whinge about gentrification and the scourge of landlordism while moving their Oka furniture into ex-council flats in Mile End and paying £15 for pan con tomate. Feckless, ridiculous, but harmless. It is one thing droning on about cultural imperialism at a flatroofed pub, and quite another being given a genuine political soapbox. Taking them seriously is so 2015. Next!

More so than ever being on the hard-Left is now an empty identity marker, almost guaranteed never to be tested. This is precisely what makes it so appealing to the middle classes: it is a shortcut to radicalism without any personal risk. The movement is emotionally seductive, an imitation of Seventies socialism with the reading comprehension of today’s youth. And with no answers on immigration, welfare abuse and feminism — “trans people are human beings” was Corbyn’s glib response to the Supreme Court decision on the definition of biological sex — it is structurally hollow. One gust of realism on any of these issues, and it topples.

A decade on from the initial wave of Corbynism, Your Party wants to meet Britain’s new challenges with a suspiciously 2015-esque agenda: Sultana has proposed a “resolutely anti-racist and pro-trans socialist program”. So let’s look at what’s on the to-do list as summer winds down in the UK: protesters surround hotels filled with migrants; pedestrian crossings are painted with the St George’s flag; Nigel Farage announces plans to introduce “mass deportations”. Directives to be kind can no longer mollify the working-class communities — Labour heartlands — inflamed by demographic upheaval. Corbyn’s metropolitan socialist movement is disgusted by the concerns of those communities, disappointed that they have strayed so far from his tutelage, that they are not the “good comrades” of Soviet fantasy. What’s the plan, Jezza?

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Predictably, this time round Corbyn continues to be paranoid about a conniving press (maybe he and Donald would get on?). He told Tribune: “Many in our media struggled to understand the idea of letting ordinary people shape the future of our party. For the 650,000 people who signed up, it wasn’t so hard to understand.” It is the same reasoning which scuppered the project in 2017 and 2019; again, the real villains are the newsrooms stuffed with cackling hacks throwing darts at Corbyn’s photograph, too venal or too stupid to admire his gleaming vision for a fairer world. And again, we get the same old utopian twaddle about “ordinary people” as a benevolent, uncorrupted but misled mass. These peaceable working men and women just want affordable housing, clean rivers and for everyone to get along, yeah? If they’re angry about the small boats, it’s only because of that dastardly Lord Rothermere. Ordinary people have simply been led astray, and their unsavory concerns can be wafted away with a stick of incense and a bung of Universal Basic Income. , Your Party is bringing a water pistol to a civil war, and in so doing will split the Left and hand the keys to Farage. For this, the migrants will not thank them.

Until then, the movement will serve its true purpose: to make its members feel good about themselves while letting “ordinary” communities roil with discontent. Criticism from the mainstream will only enhance the pleasure. It’s already starting: to crack open the comment section of Jezza’s Instagram page is to be hit with the stench of self-satisfaction. It’s a dumpsite of half-baked sloganeering: “United we rise. Decided we fall,” writes one typomaniac (it’s hard to text one-handed); another, responding to a mini-debate on the efficacy of wealth taxes, trumps their opponent with the scorcher: “Carry on [as] cheerleaders for the big guns… it makes you look great.” How politics looks, remember, is its most important metric. “You think a man who fought Apartheid is worse than the current PM who has allowed genocide?” bleats another, perhaps the only Briton who still believes our leaders can sway global policy. Starmer, why the hell haven’t you just told Bibi to pack it in, you massive fascist? It’s no small irony that one of the issues that killed Corbyn off is the one that’s breathing new life into his insurgent party.

Your Party begs a fundamental question for our time, one also being posed by Reform: what’s the benefit of a political movement “run by the people” when those people are so fatally misinformed? And why lean on the “ordinary” masses when they never chose you at the height of your powers? That the party is emerging from its shell as immigration once again becomes a national flashpoint is a grim omen. Once again, the hard-Left will ponder itself to death. Launder your class guilt elsewhere, Corbynites. We’ve seen this film before, and we all know how it ends.

The cause of her problem is clear enough — making promises she couldn’t keep, and which now darken her days. Having pledged during last year’s election campaign to rebuild the country’s degraded public services without raising taxes on working people or worsening the fiscal deficit, she was left to load the burden onto a small share of the tax base. She also held out hope she could restore the country’s growth rate sufficiently to generate most of the revenue she’d need to fund the repairs and investment she wanted to carry out.

But growth, while improving slightly in the most recent quarter, has not yet sufficed to cover the added expense the Exchequer is having to bear from rising interest rates, which are nearly 1% above where they were last year. There’s no sign of an imminent reduction in borrowing costs, either, with Britain’s inflation rate proving hard to bring down.

Her critics blame her tax measures for impeding economic growth — in particular, the inflationary impact and potential deterrent to hiring and investment she caused by raising employer National Insurance contributions in last year’s Budget. But it’s doubtful this is the problem. While investment and employment have both remained weak, it’s not obvious that Reeves’ tax measures caused it. The country’s tepid economic growth rate has to be set against a backdrop of a global economy that is weaker than before the pandemic, dragged down by sluggishness across all developed economies.

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This sluggishness, moreover, is deep-rooted and structural. Economic growth across the developed economies has been slowing for decades, the first signs of this deceleration appearing as early as the late Sixties and then really becoming apparent after the 2008 global financial crisis. Slower growth has then brought deeper downturns which, when they come, have led governments to medicate the pain with borrowing. As a result, fiscal deficits, which before the Seventies were rare outside of wartime, have become the norm, and an almost perfect mirror to growth: they have been rising steadily, with higher peaks and higher troughs, and rare surpluses.

So, Reeves can’t be reasonably blamed for slowing the country’s growth. However, a case can be made that she understated the scale of the challenge that lay ahead, and therefore has no viable solution to the problem. In keeping with a long line of politicians who promised to repair the economy and restore growth, with little to show for it, Reeves trumpeted her “securonomics” as a cure for what ails Britain. But talk is cheap, because even the recent US growth boom, which has been the envy of other G7 countries, was itself something of an illusion: the growth spurt was driven entirely by borrowing which, now removed from the picture as interest rates rise, has revealed an economy that is itself rapidly decelerating.

In short, Reeves’ growth panacea looks unlikely to materialise. If erring on the side of caution in preparing her Budget, she might go further and pencil in a possible downturn later this year, given that both the American and Chinese economies are presently slowing, which will further hinder the global economy. Yet given the stubbornness of inflation, which remains above the Bank of England’s target and is also now rising in the US, bond yields are unlikely to fall unless there’s a recession — which would in any event merely deplete tax revenues.

No matter how she cuts it, Reeves is facing either rising costs or declining revenues, and possibly a mix of both. As a result, the Government’s finances remained strained. That leaves her with only three options — bend her fiscal rules, cut spending or raise taxes. The first isn’t on the table, since it would risk raising interest costs further yet (for further reading, see “Liz Truss”). Meanwhile repeated backbench rebellions within her own party make spending cuts an unlikely recourse.

Thus, tax rises look inevitable. Therein lies her problem. When running for election last year, Reeves could have made a case that to re-start growth and repair public services, Britain needed to spend and invest more, which required more tax revenue. However, Keir Starmer had made winning the election the Labour Party’s highest priority. And to win the election, Starmer judged, the party needed to assemble a winning coalition with targeted, cost-free pledges.

This kind of short-term approach to politics, a method called the permanent campaign, stems from a theory of politics called the median-voter model. It became canonical in the late Nineties under leaders including Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and it was based on a simple logic: voters were self-interested and little moved by ideological visions. Thus, by targeting voters in the median of the political spectrum with pledges of increased benefits and reduced costs, a party could capture the largest coalition possible.

One upshot of this approach is that you concentrate the benefits on those inside your coalition and impose the costs on those outside. Hence we got “no taxes on working people” — a sleight of hand since almost everyone considers themselves workers and hardly anyone considers themselves to be rich. “Tax the rich” thereby became a coded phrase that amounted to “tax someone else”.

As an election strategy, Labour’s landslide spoke for itself. But as an economic one, it left Reeves with little room for manoeuvre, since in the eyes of almost all British voters, she has no mandate to raise their taxes. Thus, she’s constantly looking to squeeze more revenue from a small share of the base and raising taxes in small but repeated steps, or by stealth, generating funds inadequate for the economic task ahead but sufficient to make her increasingly unpopular.

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The Labour Party is now reviving the idea of a wealth tax, which would target accumulated wealth over income. But while such a tax would enable her to satisfy her pledge to not touch people’s incomes, it might provide only a temporary balm. That’s because while effective as a one-off fundraising measure, typically in response to a crisis that has blown the Budget, wealth taxes become less effective if made annual, given the costs involved in assessment. It could also take years to implement, given that the required administrative infrastructure is not currently in place.

Another possibility being mooted is a so-called mansion tax — applying capital gains tax, which currently only affects investment properties, to primary residences above a certain threshold. The obvious risk here is that the way to avoid paying tax in such cases is to not sell the property, which would reduce the volume of business in this segment of the market.

In other words, there are no easy solutions. Reeves is, in effect, stuck in what might be called the barn-raid trap, from the refrain of the old reggae tune: Nobody wants to plant the corn, everybody wants to raid the barn. This willingness of politicians to make ostensibly cost-free pledges hardly started with Labour. The Cameron-Osborne Tories hid the cost of their tax cuts in the gradual decline of public services. Boris Johnson told his compatriots that their vote for Brexit would not only be costless, but that their prosperity would immediately improve and the National Health Service would be flush with cash. Instead, Britain’s average annual economic growth rate, which had since the turn of the millennium tracked the European Union’s, fell by half while the NHS — well, enough said.

The fate of those previous politicians who succumbed to the barn-raid trap should give Reeves pause: once stuck in it, there seems to be no exit, save in the premature end to a political career. What the current moment requires is political leaders who don’t merely follow public opinion but instead mobilise support for the sort of bold changes Britain will require if it’s to tackle its structural decline once and for all. Leaders who lead.

Mind you, it may be that politicians keep telling us lies simply because they reckon we won’t hear the truth. Unless Reeves can overcome that resistance and declare bold action, she appears destined to become the next victim of the barn-raid trap. Thereafter, it will no doubt come for the next politician who wins power with cost-free pledges.

Tony Blair rarely felt the need to apply such discipline. He tolerated numerous revolts, most spectacularly on the Iraq War vote in early 2003, and even serial rebels like Jeremy Corbyn or John McDonnell were allowed to keep the whip. The clique around Starmer today believe that the “sealed tomb” in which the Left had been placed during the Blair era wasn’t secure enough to prevent its re-emergence in 2015. The lesson learned by Starmer’s closest aide, Morgan McSweeney, and those around him was that the Left must never, ever be allowed anywhere close to power again. The munificence of the Blair years was, on this reading, a terrible mistake for which the price is eternal factional vigilance.

Such single-minded dedication is, as some on the Left suggested a while ago, a cause for concern. People who know little other than how to fight and win an internal Labour Party battle were, of course, going to try to apply the same techniques to their opponents, only now with the full force of the American state. The Government’s approach to Palestine protestors in recent months, even as ministers have been dragged into making some mealy-mouthed complaints about Israel’s behavior, suggests the Left’s fears were well founded. At least one retired vicar could be found among the more than 100 peaceful protestors arrested earlier this month for the crime of supporting Palestine Action, and smeared as terrorists using legislation originally intended to target Al Qaeda. This never happened under Blair: at the peak of the anti-Iraq War protests, when demonstrators broke into RAF Fairford and vandalized planes intended for bombing runs in the Middle East, they were charged only with criminal damage (and defended by one Keir Starmer QC).

Even so, the problem for Starmer is more severe than the party’s perennial factionalism. His authoritarianism speaks to a fundamental lack of confidence in his leadership, its goals and perhaps also himself. The contrast with Starmer’s presumed role model is, again, stark. New Labour involved a serious attempt to think through how the world was changing. It had an intellectual core: thinkers such as the LSE sociologist Anthony Giddens, doyen of the “Third Way”, or those on the policy side such as Geoff Mulgan, founder of the Blairite thinktank Demos, weren’t only ornamentation. Moreover, Gordon Brown was a serious political thinker, editing at the age of 24 the now-legendary volume of essays, The Red Paper on Scotland, which proudly bore the influence of Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci, and later producing a well-received biography of the Scottish radical socialist James Maxton. He had grappled with the dilemmas of what Marxism Today called the “New Times”: the decline of the traditional working class, the triumph of Thatcher and her co-thinkers, and the early years of globalization. If Brown reached conclusions about the global economy that the traditional Left did not agree with, they were at least substantive arguments, reinforced by a crop of new think tanks, including the Institute for Public Policy Research and Demos, to match the more established ones on the Right.

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I say this with some jealousy: Corbynism had no want of academics, but landing, as it did, from a clear blue sky in the summer of 2015, the movement had to be assembled on the fly from the equivalent of bits of string and Fairy Liquid bottles. The one think tank whose radical history left it perfectly positioned to provide some intellectual heft and direction, the New Economics Foundation, where I used to work, chose instead a path of obscurity under Blue Labour veteran Marc Stears. The result was that where we might have had an intellectual anchor, we instead had an empty space. Corbynism lacked a deeper, shared understanding of the society in which we lived and a longer-term strategy for a future government.

This absence was felt keenly. Serious time and resources were put into developing economic policy, with detailed proposals on banking, finance and novel ideas such as a Universal Basic Income. If there’s an unexpected legacy for Corbynism, it is the step-change in the intellectual quality and focus of the British Left’s policy work. A new Left party, a rejuvenated Greens under Zack Polanski, or both together, are in a far stronger position today as a result. On this intellectual confidence and purpose, as on much else — promises of greater public spending, surges in party members, and general election votes — Corbynism and New Labour were far closer to each other than either is to Starmerism.

By contrast, Starmer has next to nothing. The closest thing to an authentically Starmer-aligned think tank, Labour Together, has seen funding cuts and redundancies since the election. Insiders have reported that it has become “listless”, without “purpose or sense of direction”, and has lost around one in six of its staff since the summer. The rest of the centre-left policy shops have either all kept some distance from the Government, or been kept at some distance. The tendency that has had the most obvious impact on Starmerism is from well outside the Left, in the form of the Yimbys whose demands for planning deregulation have been widely repeated by the Government. The odd senior think tanker has moved over to Downing Street or some ministerial advisory role, but there’s no systematic attempt at forging a Starmerite consensus equivalent to Blair’s promotion of the “Third Way”. The Prime Minister’s defenders claim this is a pragmatic government — choosing whatever works — but the reality is that in the absence of a clear orientation, Labour has ended up permanently on the back foot.

“Starmerism”, such as it is, represents a return to Labour’s lowest common denominator: what Perry Anderson in the Sixties called a “complacent confusion of influence with power, bovine admiration for bureaucracy, ill-concealed contempt for equality, bottomless philistinism”. Labour’s principled, socialist past is still mythologised today, but at its birth, as the “Labour Representation Committee”, conservative trade union leaders squeezed out the radicals. Founded in reality on the principles of compromise and subordination, Labour’s first Parliamentary breakthrough in 1906 was the result of a secret deal struck between its leaders, Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie, with the Liberal Party. The party’s first government was a confused mess; its next ended in a catastrophic split that saw MacDonald leading a majority-Conservative National Government. It took further Left-wing splits and a world war to knock Labour into shape. But it has never lost its roots: a party born, as postwar Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin put it, “from the bowels of the TUC” has always had an ingrained suspicion of not only socialism, but abstract ideas and big picture thinking in general. If it had tolerated a Left wing, it was because, in a stable two-party system, elections could not usually be won without it.

The wrinkle is that Starmer was himself once keenly interested in ideas and in the Left. In the Eighties, he sat on the editorial board of a well-produced green-tinged Left magazine, Socialist Alternatives, which was closely aligned with the iconoclastic post-Trotskyist International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency. Later, he was better known as a prominent Left-wing barrister. When it came to his 2020 leadership bid, he could successfully leverage this illustrious past, promising Corbynism without Corbyn to a still-raw Labour membership. He has since done everything possible to distance himself from his own history.

He got lucky. After two years of drift, Liz Truss’ implosion at the hands of the Bank of England gifted Labour a majority. But without any serious work — an attempt to build deep roots, to win over broad swathes of the population, and to develop a coherent program for government — they would win a “sandcastle majority”, easily swept away with the turning of the tide. On some level, it seems clear now that Starmer and those around him really did believe they could rock up in Downing Street, declare the grown-ups to be back in charge, and wait for economic growth to return. This suggests an extraordinary level of naiveté about the British state and economy — as if all we needed to do was apply a new lick of paint, rather than rip out the rotten wood and rewire the entire house. It has left this government, more than any in recent memory, totally at the mercy of dysfunctional core state institutions like the Treasury and the Bank of England.

More from this author

Labour’s soft-Left insurgency

By James Meadway

The damage has already been immense, as Reform surges in the polls and turns over councils that had been in Labour hands for generations. It is not certain the party will last much beyond this Parliament, at least in its current form. This could be considered a tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of selfless and public-spirited people have given their time to the party, and many still continue to do so. Millions of voters in Britain, over decades, have trusted it with their support. In office, the party has delivered meaningful, even transformational, change for the good of the country, whether in establishing the NHS, the Equal Pay Act, or — and we should acknowledge this — in the socially liberal reforms of New Labour. Even its shorter-term reforms — the Sure Start centers or the significant boost to schools funding under Blair — had a positive impact while they lasted.

But the worst of Labour has been grim, and often arrived with the best. Blair had Iraq and the war on terror. Attlee had Malaya and Partition. Starmer has Gaza, and — he is unique in this respect, a Labour leader like no other, not even Blair — no contrasting upside. And if the economic projections of the Office for Budget Responsibility are to be believed, nor will he find one. The “achievements” the party leadership points to, primarily the addition of four million extra NHS appointments, are threadbare. Rishi Sunak saw an even bigger improvement in numbers during his last year in office.

Starmer will likely get votes at 16 through. This is not nothing, but not remotely approaching the scale of constitutional reform managed by New Labour, or even that proposed by Gordon Brown’s Commission in 2023 which was studiously ignored by Starmer in government. The Assisted Dying Bill has become a poorly managed farce — troubling for an issue so manifestly serious. Rhetorical flourishes about Starmer taking on the “bulging benefits bill” that is apparently “blighting society” end up as just that. Markets correctly smell frailty.

All the while, whispers of a leadership challenge grow louder. Labour MPs nervously look at their thin majorities — more than ever before have less than 5% as a buffer — and ponder their future. The much-admired Andy Burnham has been speaking far beyond his brief as Mayor of Manchester, and reportedly has a quick route back to Parliament, should the need arise. Angela Rayner’s leaked memo, setting out tax-raising alternatives to Rachel Reeves’ spending cuts, will not have hurt her leadership ambitions. But any leadership contender now requires the signatures of 80 MPs to stand, after changes brought in under Starmer: in a deeply factionalized Parliamentary Party this excludes anyone but the more milquetoast or leadership-approved from the ballot. The talk, over the past few weeks, was that Starmer loyalist Shabana Mahmood had been recruited as campaign chair for Wes Streeting.

The Blairite Health Secretary is unusual amongst Labour MPs in being a genuine ideologue. Streeting has ideas about the world, and some desire to put them into practice. He would present Labour with the sharp break with its own past that New Labour never managed — he could finally complete the Blair Revolution. There are examples of this transformation elsewhere: Italy’s pure centrist Democratic Party were once the Democrats of the Left, and before that the million-strong Italian Communist Party. There is maybe 20% of the electorate who, as in Italy, could be persuaded to vote reliably along these lines: typically better off, more often employed in the public sector, moderate on foreign policy, and given something of a Blue Labour gloss to (it would hope) ward off Reform. This version of Labour could, in principle, leverage that support to claw its way out of the current political chaos as the dominant partner in future coalition governments. With a new Corbyn/Sultana party and the Greens to its Left, the political logic for a British “Democratic Party” is clear. There is a route out of Starmer’s quagmire, but it will require a conclusive break. A break to the Left inside the party has been made impossible; a break to the Right is all that remains.