The England of 2026 is impossibly different from that of the Paris Garden, and so is our attitude to bears. Instead of torturing them, we’ve turned them into the cuddly moral arbiters of the modern British state. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of Paddington, who has become a metonym for the country’s “official” values. “Your actions were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for,” a magistrate said in 2024, as he sentenced two men for drunkenly vandalizing a sculpture of the Peruvian bear. “He represents kindness, tolerance, and promotes integration and acceptance in our society.”

Britain’s arctomania started a century ago, with a different bear: Winnie the Pooh. The first collection of A.A. Milne’s stories, about a “bear of little brain” who potters around the Hundred Acre Wood eating honey, hunting woozles, and playing pooh-sticks with his chums, was published in October 1926. It was an instant success, selling some 150,000 copies before the year was out. Children’s books had always been didactic — as far back as 1475, The Babees Book instructed infants not to pick their noses, bite their nails, or suck their thumbs. But Milne left this behind. Instead, he pioneered a “bossy” turn in children’s letters: his tone was one of adult condescension, an example of which appears on the book’s first page:

“He’s Winnie-ther-Pooh. Don’t you know what ‘ther’ means?”
“Ah, yes, now I do,” I said quickly; and I hope you do too, because it’s all the explanation you are going to get.

And yet, like Paddington’s, Pooh’s moral code is a distinctly adult one. Milne’s stories, as the critic John Bayley wrote, “always seemed to belong more to one’s parents than oneself.” It feels as if he’s constantly reprimanding an idiot child for not quite being child enough. The facetious, italicized tete-a-tetes between the narrator and Christopher Robin evidence that. The sentences are filled with irregular capitalizations (“Silly Old Bear”, “Shortness of Breath”, “Hostile Intent”), which is an attempt to show the childish imagination: how each new thing, encountered fresh, appears singular and so must be rendered as a proper noun. This fails: children’s imaginations are wicked and Gothically capacious, but in the Hundred Acre Wood there is nothing of the sort. Children allow darkness; it’s only adults that must pretend it doesn’t exist.

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And these stories were an exercise in adult interference from the very start. Milne pillaged his son Christopher Robin’s imagination and his stock of cuddly toys, only to impose an entirely new meaning onto them — an official and inflexibly grown-up interpretation of what childhood is really about. In Pooh’s world, things can always be explained, and actions have rational consequences: “The only reason for being a bee that I know of,” Pooh says, “is making honey… And the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it.” It is a far-cry from the illogical transformations of Lewis Carroll or the Grimm Brothers.

This accounts, in part, for Milne’s success. This was how adults wanted childhood to be, how they misremembered it: comfortable and stable, with no horrors lurking out there in the dark. Pooh lulled his adult readers “bump, bump, bump, on the back of the head” into the silly innocence of the Edwardian summer. The Hundred Acre Wood, after all, is a place where the trees haven’t been blasted bare by artillery fire, and the word “Somme” could only be countenanced as a plausibly Poohvian misspelling (“I want Somme hunny”).

Milne retired Pooh in 1928, and turned his hand to “serious” literature. But if his children’s books appealed to adults, his mature works didn’t. The most notable of these was Peace with Honor: a 1934 treatise that implored Hitler and Mussolini to conduct themselves less obstreperously, and the British and French not to rise to their bait. There was no need to fight wars, if we could be kind to one another instead. “It evidently came from the depth of the author’s heart,” wrote a New York Times reviewer. Even when he wrote about geopolitics, he seemed to do so from his study in the House at Pooh Corner.

Following Milne’s death in 1956, Pooh became a global icon — and swapped the King’s English for a gee-wiz Californian in a series of successful Disney films, the first of which, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, appeared in 1977. He became, like shortbread cookies and the Queen, a symbol of Britain’s soft power in an age of hard decline. In 2006, his 80th birthday was celebrated by the great and the good of Blairite Britain with a bill in Parliament. It applauded Milne for his influence on “the early development of fine values, honest principles, and decent morals amongst many generations of children worldwide”. John Bercow, Nick Clegg, and even George Galloway signed it. Once upon a time, Britain had exported slaughter and civilization throughout the world; now it offered a lazy, talking teddy-bear that encouraged children to be kind. In seeking to banish the fusty remnants of an older, imperial Britain, the Blairites had to find a new set of ahistorical values that they could call “British”. And those could be found in the Hundred Acre Wood. Yet cruelty belied the Blairite kitsch: the year of the Pooh bill, 34,000 civilians died in Iraq and the South Yorkshire police ignored Angie Heal’s third report into Rotherham’s grooming gangs.

Twenty years on, even Blairism’s legacy journal, The New World, concedes that the “mordantly twee energy” of Milne’s books has had a disabling effect on British society. Unsurprisingly, injunctions to “be kind” prevent serious political discussion. This is clear from Pooh’s inheritor: Paddington. The Peruvian stowaway had been quietly present in popular culture since Michael Bond published A Bear Called Paddington in 1956, but he assumed his current symbolic role after the release of the 2014 film adaptation. “Kindness”, “tolerance”, “integration”, and “acceptance” all functioned as stifling buzzwords in an era of political turmoil. In the period defined by the Brexit vote, Covid lockdowns, the death of Queen Elizabeth, and mass migration, all the sacred continuities of British society were undone. It fell on Paddington to cheerlead the social cohesion that shared symbols and institutions had once guaranteed.

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In his essay “On Toys”, the French philosopher Roland Barthes argued that toys are a means of indoctrinating children into bourgeois life: kids play with postmen and soldiers and police-officers, so that they can assume these roles as adults. Toys are homogeneous, factory-made, chemical and plastic, much as their handlers’ adult lives will be. So what would Barthes make of modern Britain’s teddy-bears, with their soft coats and state-approved values: kindness, tolerance and courteousness? Of course, the Elizabethans were wrong to chain bears up and bait them; but at least they knew they were scary beasts that eat people. By turning them into cuddly toys and fictional characters, the British have attempted to remove death’s sting — to cover up the nation’s discontent in kindness and synthetic fur.

Christopher Robin suffered because of his father’s interference in his own enchanted world, and came to resent the Pooh books and even his father. Once he arrived at boarding school, the saccharine lines of the poem “Vespers” (“Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares! / Christopher Robin is saying his prayers!) turned into regular jibes, spat out of bullies’ mouths. It took most of his life before he could recover from what his father had done to him, and this only when writing his own memoir. “It seemed to me,” he wrote, “almost that my father had got to where he was by climbing on my infant shoulders and had left me with the empty fame of being his son.” Milne also left Britain with the emptiness of his creation, which will always be playing “in that enchanted place on top of the forest”.  

When Bill Clinton got elected in 1992, a newspaper dispatched me to Washington, where I followed his first two years in office. He had a lucky break during the election campaign, but did not owe his victory and political success to that. This was the new era of post-communist financial globalization. Many of the smart people at the time were on the center-left of politics, and Clinton was their man. He was a reactionary on law and justice, but his welfare-to-work policies were inspiring. The center-left of Clinton’s generation saw welfare as an insurance policy, but also as a poverty trap. As a result, they pushed for people to get back into work. Clinton committed his own share of policy errors, like the deregulation of the financial industry. But he started off with an intelligent agenda.

Clinton was also a politician with a keen interest in macroeconomics. He was not an economist, but shortly after he got elected, he assembled a group of experts to help him draft his program for his time in the White House. His strategic goal was to reform welfare and the health system while at the same time eliminating the fiscal deficit.

Today, 34 years later, Andy Burnham will become Britain’s latest prime minister. What do we know about him? It is true that he did not have a lot of time to prepare his agenda. The time between a US presidential election to the inauguration is a little over two months — with a Christmas and New Year’s break in between. This is a little, but not much more, than the time between Burnham’s victory in the Makerfield by-election and his arrival at No. 10. Certainly, it does not take years to formulate an economic strategy.

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It is the implementation that takes longer. Clinton did not have it all worked out, but he set goals and intermediate targets, and developed a clear idea of the political and real-world obstacles that would stand in the way. Burnham has expressed a lot of ideas about British society. He has policies — but I’d struggle to identify an overarching strategic objective beyond the usual platitudes of social justice.

Burnham inherits a problem that his predecessors failed to address. Productivity growth in the UK collapsed directly after the global financial crisis in 2008 and never recovered. Until then, the City of London was the gift that kept on giving. In Germany, it was the car industry. One European country after another lost its business model. What happened in all of these countries, including the UK, is that more and more people become dependent on welfare. It became normal. Germany renamed its welfare program a “citizen’s income”, as though it were a basic human right. But the shift from welfare as an insurance policy to a welfare as a personal choice has trapped European societies in a vicious circle. The greater their welfare dependency became, the more they fell behind in investment and innovation.

Burnham has not given us any plan to fix this problem, let alone one I could disagree with. There are socialist ways of raising productivity growth, and libertarian ways. But let’s not get hung up on ideology. The fall in productivity growth is not about who gets what. It’s about investment, and most investment comes from the private sector. Companies invest to become more productive and innovative.

What does Burnham think about private-sector investment? I haven’t the foggiest, and nor does anyone else. I don’t get a sense that this is a question that keeps him up at night.

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He has, however, thought a lot about public-sector investment. But the two are not the same. About 80% of all investment in the UK is from the private sector. So if Burnham pushes ahead with his public investment plans by raising taxes, what I’d expect to see is a fall in private investment that exceeds the rise in public investment. It’s basic math.

Granted, we’d all like to have better trains. But fixing the trains has nothing to do with productivity. The US is a country with a terrible railway network, and with high private-sector productivity. France has Europe’s best railway system, but the trains have not stopped the French economy from becoming increasingly dysfunctional. Everybody needs to get to work, but the comfort and speed of the journey is at most marginally related to our productivity.

The productivity problem can only be solved through strategic action — just like Clinton addressed structural fiscal deficits and welfare dependence. Emmanuel Macron, too, was a welfare reformer, but he had no fiscal strategy. This is what has rendered his presidency a failure. A recent estimate from the French High Commission for Strategy and Planning found that France’s debt could rise from a current level of 118% of economic output to between 186% and 245% by 2050.

The center-left used to be good at strategy. Clinton was. So were Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. To be clear, I am not endorsing anyone here. This is not about whether we agree or disagree with their policies. My point is that these people had some strategy. But since Burnham has not told us what his strategy is, we can safely assume that he does not have one. Macron had one, but as I say it failed the fiscal test. This is a bit like going to war and being shocked that the enemy fights back, which is what happened when the US and Israel attacked Iran.

As for Starmer, he clearly was not a reformer, but at least Rachel Reeves imposed fiscal rules that kept the show on the road. But, again, have no clear idea where Burnham really stands on those rules. He said he would follow them, but this is easier said than done unless you have a clear idea of what to do when the numbers no longer add up.

So rather than leaking the names of Cabinet ministers, maybe Burnham should have told us about how he intends to fix the productivity problem while keeping the country solvent. At this point, we don’t need details. We need direction.

Burnham has lots of policies, for example on devolution. I am not against this. It is possible that local governments spend money more wisely than central government. The other way around is also possible. Either way, there is no link between the degree of decentralization and innovation. Silicon Valley is not where it is because of Californian politics. It is there because of Stanford University, and because some of its most brilliant entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs, grew up there.

Burnham knows local politics better than most politicians do: and maybe it is easier to fix some problems locally. But it borders on delusional to think that you can draw lessons from the governance of Manchester for the UK as a whole. Cities don’t have bond markets, nor currencies that can devalue. And the mayor of Manchester does not have to put up with Donald Trump. The idea of a Northern No. 10 is a nice publicity stunt; but it is about appearances, not substance. I therefore make one specific and confident prediction: Burnham will not solve the UK’s underlying economic issues.

That said, he may still succeed politically. Elections, after all, are zero-sum games. Someone has to win. Starmer got his whopping majority not because he had a brilliant plan, but because people preferred his lack of a plan to the Tories’ version of a lack of plan.

Electoral success and problem-solving are not the same thing, of course. Margaret Thatcher would probably have lost the 1983 elections had it not been for the Falklands War. Angela Merkel managed to win four elections in a row and yet failed to address her country’s economic problems.

But the importance of problem-solving (or lack thereof) does not mean that you should keep ignoring the economy. The persistent failure of the previous generation to address the problems of a permanent decline in productivity has made European countries harder to govern. And the longer people are trapped in the welfare system, the harder it will be to get them out again. If you fail to solve a problem for long enough, eventually it catches up with you.

The odds of a successful Burnham premiership are shortening precisely because previous prime ministers have prioritized short-term expediency over long-term strategic action — and because it looks like he will do exactly the same. But we are already living in the long-term. The fact that politicians like Cameron or Johnson succeeded politically without solving the country’s deep-seated problems does not mean that the current generation of politicians will enjoy the same luxury.

In politics, as in football, outsiders can win, and favorites can lose. But we should not fool ourselves about Burnham. He does not have a strategy to fix the British economy. Those who are hoping he will do it by chance will be disappointed.

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

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

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

What Manchesterism gets right — and where it stops

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

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

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

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

The productive crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The skills catastrophe

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

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

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

The bond market as political test

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The policy space Brexit created

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

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

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

Organized labour as key mechanism

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

The tests of seriousness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

It was none other than Karl Marx himself who made the sharpest observation of how history repeats itself. In his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, he writes: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Marx was comparing the French emperor who had been dethroned after his defeat at Waterloo with his nephew, Napoleon III, a calamitous figure, who was King of France from 1852 until 1870.

Blair’s attempt at a comeback has a Napoleonic quality. Most commentary on his long essay focused on the man — his record in office and, especially, Iraq — and not on the arguments of the essay. A lot of people, especially on the Left, really hate him. But I think there is a bigger story here that is not about Blair himself, but about radical centrism itself.

He is right to say that “there are two epochal changes happening in the world today — one geopolitical, the other technological — and Britain is not prepared for either.” But he does not reflect on why this happened, and on his own role in that story.

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Blair was the most successful Labour prime minister in history, if you measure success in terms of the number of times he managed to get elected. But his big idea failed. He bequeathed a legacy of economic decline that his successors were not able to address with the classic tools of radical centrist policies — inward investment, trade agreements, privatization, deregulation and financialization.

The election of Emmanuel Macron in 2017 should serve as a more recent cautionary tale of what happens when countries naively try to revive radical centrism. In 2016, Macron suddenly appeared on the French political scene with his own version of radical centrism. He was elected president in 2017, and his new party gained a majority in the French parliament shortly afterwards. His government passed big reforms — the liberalization of labor markets; cuts in capital gains and corporation taxes; reforms in social security contribution systems; apprenticeship and vocational-training reform; railway reform, and so many others. It was one of the busiest legislative agendas that Europe’s ever seen, similar to what happened in the UK during Margaret Thatcher’s first term.

But then it stopped. Macron was re-elected in 2022, yet his party failed to win a majority in the following parliamentary elections. In 2024, he made a bad call to dissolve the parliament, as a result of which his party was almost eliminated.

There is a pattern here. In both France and the UK, radical centrism initially seemed to work and then at some point turned into a car crash. Radical centrism fails not because it’s wrong in theory, but because it’s wrong in practice. It simply cannot be delivered in a small European country, because it requires a diversified economy. That’s why the US could deliver it better than others. Radical centrism means that, if you live in an industrial town and your employer goes out of business, you can move to another part of the country and find another job. Or, if you train as an electrician, you may end up running an electricity company. Or, if Elon Musk fires you from your cosy government job, you can get yourself a food truck and retrain as a chef. Social and regional mobility plays a big part in this. This stuff does not happen in the UK or elsewhere in Europe, at least not on the scale that would be needed for radical centrism to work.

What killed radical centrism in the UK was financial globalization. The UK never recovered from the global financial crisis, because its economy remained dependent on the City of London. Because radical centrism requires a diversified economy, it is not a feasible political ideology for a mid-sized European country.

One could have imagined the EU developing in such a way to make radical centrism feasible. There was a time, in the early Nineties, when people thought of the EU and its single market as the future. I was among them. But reality intruded. My family and I moved around four European countries. So did many families — but most of them stayed where they were.

The barriers were not cultural, as euroskeptics lazily claim, but legal and institutional. Europeans have a long history of migration. The very rich and the very poor have always moved around. But what stopped middle-class employees moving around the EU were practical issues like incompatible pension systems. If you took up a new job abroad, you could lose insurance claims that you’d built up over many years. Another problem, one that affected families with children, was that of incompatible school curriculums. Europe’s private schools are ultra-compatible; if you are rich, Europe is a dream. But if you’re middle-class ,and you try to put your 10-year-old through a French or Belgian state school, you will have second thoughts. Language will be the least of your child’s problems.

The idea of the EU as a framework of radical centrism failed because it would have required a degree of political integration that EU leaders were simply not ready for. One of them was Blair himself. Blair is pro-European in terms of his stated preferences. He was anti-Brexit, even in favor of a second referendum. But his revealed preferences tell a different story. Memories are still fresh in the EU of how Blair divided the bloc over Iraq. He nurtured a narrative about a clash between the old Europe and the new Europe, of which he was the natural leader.

But for me, the decisive moment came much earlier. The most consequential stated preference by Blair was his decision during his premiership not to enter the euro. Initially, he had wanted to join it. I remember the moment when Blair briefly toyed with it but decided to fall into line with the position of Gordon Brown and Ed Balls, who strongly opposed euro membership on macroeconomic grounds. The macroeconomic arguments were indeed weighty. But to reduce the question to macroeconomics alone was to confuse the short-term and the long-term. This was a strategic mistake for Blair. Had he joined the Eurozone, then he might have been able to deliver radical centrism back in the UK.

The reason the euro decision was so important is that it killed the idea of an integrated European capital market. The EU still does not have one today. The lack of a big capital market is the reason why Europe does not have a large tech industry, whereas the US and China do. European banks are not big enough to fund companies the size of Google, Apple, Meta or Nvidia.

Back in the late Nineties, the UK was in a unique position to change that. It had the know-how. It had the financial center. It could have driven the financialization of the EU. But to build a capital market of the scale and importance of the US would have required a single currency and a single government bond market.

History took a different turn — and it won’t turn back. Today the EU has eight currencies, one of which is the euro. On top of this, we have the British pound, the Swiss Franc, and the Norwegian krone. Every country has its own sovereign bond markets, its own banks, and its own capital markets.

All the big European countries today suffer from similar problems to the UK — a fall in productivity growth from which they never recovered. All of them failed to connect with 21st-century technologies. They have bloated welfare states. They have not spent enough money on their security. Their most talented people emigrate. As Marx correctly predicted in his Eighteenth Brumaire, the political leaders in Europe are squarely in the category of what he called “grotesque mediocrity”.

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Blair himself is of a different caliber. What I found refreshing about his essay is that at least somebody in the UK is talking about political ideas. The debate inside the Labour Party is reduced to personalities and popularity. Neither Keir Starmer, nor his presumptive challengers, have the slightest idea of what they want. At least Blair has a plan.

Sadly, it is just not a good plan. I concluded a long time ago that Britain’s problems are not solvable at a national level. I clung on to the hope — the delusion, you might call it — that the EU could develop into a political union capable of addressing this problem. That did not happen and now it will never happen. There are no obvious solutions to the problem.

It is difficult to imagine whether Marx, had he lived today, would still be a Marxist. It is not nearly so hard to imagine what he would have made of Blair and the radical centrists of our generation — tragic figures who turned into farcical ones in their own lifetimes.

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.

Joe comes here most weeks, not to buy anything, only to talk. I follow him through the paddock, into the auction room, where a pair of young farmworkers doom-scroll in the corner. A door opens, and a Red Bull can skates across the floor. A police siren rises over the bleating sheep. The auctioneer enters: some 5,500 lambs will be sold today. I am at the furthest reaches of England, the Cumbrian-Scottish border, formerly known as “the Middleland”: the lawless marches which neither country could control for long.

Joe’s paranoia is rooted in history. On 15 February 2001, right here at Longtown Mart, under another Tupperware sky, he came to buy sheep at one of the busiest auctions of the year. Some 14,000 “yows” were sold that day, and he bought 12 of them. A few days later, at Cheale Meats abattoir in Essex, an animal bought at Longtown tested positive for PanAsia Type-O, a new strain of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) more viral and afflictive than most, killing some animals and laming many more. They say it first started over at Heddon-on-the-Wall, just outside of Newcastle, where old Bobby Waugh fed his pigs on illicit swill, made from a Chinese restaurant’s waste. But it jumped species at Longtown, meaning that, as the British countryside was harrowed into a hell of restricted movement and rotting corpses and burning pyres, it was north Cumbria that suffered most.

Around 70% of farms in north Cumbria had their livestock culled. Joe’s was one of them. Some farmers sold up, and some restarted; others just went mad. Nationally, there were only some 2,000 cases of the disease, and yet 0ver six million animals are estimated to have been culled (a Private Eye investigation suggested it’s much higher), costing the British economy some £8 billion. There was a human toll too. Over 60 farmers and three vets killed themselves in 2001 alone, and by the following year the suicide rate among rose to more than one a week, a figure that had been steadily increasing since mad cow disease struck in the Nineties.

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Benidorm is England’s id

By Cosmo Adair

Altogether, it would arguably become the worst FMD epidemic in world history. But it should have been expected: foot-and-mouth has been around for hundreds of years, and is endemic across much of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The last time it plagued Britain was in living memory, in 1967, which saw 2,364 outbreaks with some 430,000 animals slaughtered and burned. It was only a matter of time before it returned: limited customs checks made sure of that. “The single market meant we scrapped 500 years of port controls,” said Tim Land, a professor of food policy, in an interview at the time. Some would later claim that the wind blew it over the Channel.

It would always come; it should have been expected. Yet when it did, that dreary February, the trauma was made so much worse by the conduct of the Government. Its handling of the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic would prove the first in a long rollcall of 21st-century state failures that severed the connections between Westminster and its subjects, between the city and the countryside. “There was a big cultural disconnect between what people understood to be going on, who of course weren’t going to rural areas,” says Professor Maggie Mort, an academic at Lancaster University who studied Cumbria’s post-FMD recovery. “A lot of the trauma and isolation was to do with that feeling of not being understood.”

* * *

It was over a month before anyone came to check Joe’s sheep, by which time they were so lame they could hardly feed. A vet arrived, and then an execution squad was summoned. They would have used captive-bolt pistols, common in abattoirs but not for mass slaughter. They jam and overheat and lose power when used repeatedly, which means the killings can take hours, often more. Some animals were shot many times before dying. Over the course of a day, a farmer’s life could be reduced to a pile of corpses, either burned on a pyre or else left to rot in the farmyard before being crane-lifted into a còrtege of red “Snowie” trucks, which then proceeded to the mass burial site near Great Orton — all while making their owner, the eponymous Malcolm Snowie, the first “foot-and-mouth millionaire”.

As cruel as the killing was the time of year. “The hardest thing,” one farmer tells me, “was the sheep were lambin’ and they shot them as soon as they were born.” Peter Frost-Pennington, a vet, tells me that he remembers “standing at a farm, looking at all these dead sheep lined up and their lambs, and looking around at the countryside, completely devoid of animals, and I stood there, and just wept”.

Joe’s own sheep were burned on a pyre on the Roman wall. It would be days before the bonfire stopped, during which a thick, gray cloud spread uninterrupted across the landscape. The worst thing was the smell: the nidorous honk of bone and skin and fur and rancid fat, which permeated everything. All through Cumbria, the windows were shut, the washing lines brought in.

Back in Westminster, there wasn’t a plan. Each outbreak was a red pin stabbed into an outdated map; each farm and village a problem to be resolved more than a living place. Government-in-crisis always seeks solutions rather than understanding, and in postwar Britain that increasingly means delegating responsibility to “experts”. And so Nick Brown, the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food (Maff), made the precocious decision — later emulated by Matt Hancock — of outsourcing government to scientific advisors and computer models.

The latter, cooked up at Imperial College by Professors Neil Ferguson and Roy Anderson, miscalculated the disease’s spread. Fed on unreliable figures from Maff, it also didn’t account for the fact that FMD affects different animals differently. In practice, that meant Maff unnecessarily ramped up the “contiguous cull”, whereby all livestock on premises that neighbored an infected farm would be pre-emptively slaughtered — even though many at Pirbright, the national Animal Health Institute, considered this both cruel and incorrect.

The then-Prince Charles privately condemned it as “mindless” slaughter. And, far beyond the modeling, it was: there were stories of sheep being “accidentally” culled, such as Punderland Farm, Little Clifton, where an official’s misreading of a map led to the slaughter of a farm some 100 miles away from the target. In a sense, one can hardly blame them: some of Maff’s maps were so old that they didn’t even have the A66 marked on them. Even the disposal trucks got lost: one man at The Wellington pub in Great Orton remembered how they’d often stop outside the village school to ask for directions, uncovered carcasses in the back of the truck. Meanwhile, one small-talking executioner asked the farmer if the particular bull he was about to shoot was male or female. Elsewhere, in Monmouthshire, a gunman was filmed chasing sheep around a field and shooting at them. Naturally, the local council said that he wouldn’t be prosecuted; the farmer would instead — after all, he’d lost control of his animals.

Terrible as it was for culled farmers, at least they were compensated. Yet as those suicides of vets imply, FMD’s impact went far beyond the farmyard. Andy, 51, a tree surgeon, says business was so bad that year that “everything was just hemorrhaging money”. By 23 December, 2001, he had only £62 left in his bank account. To make matters worse, his brand-new Land Rover was stuck on a quarantined farm, irretrievable for the best part of a year. In hindsight, perhaps that was just as well: so neurotically was everything disinfected that, by the end of the year, most Land Rovers in Cumbria had been corroded by citric acid. 2001, at least, was one of the best years in living memory for rural car salesmen.

Back in London, Tony Blair kept insisting it was under control. Once he visited Cumbria on the 22 March, and saw the scale of the devastation, he called in the Army, and turned the airfield at RAF Great Orton into a “killing field” and mass grave: within only a week, some 20 trenches, four meters deep and 150 meters long, were hewn into the landscape. The General Election was delayed by a month, the first time since the Second World War, shortly after which Nick Brown’s Maff was replaced by Margaret Beckett’s Defra (“Destroy Every Fucking Rural Activity,” as one farmer quipped). Things were better organized now, but it was all too late: such ineptitude combined with bureaucratic slaughter had made a lasting impression. “You don’t give a shit about the North,” one protester shouted at Blair, as the prime minister slipped out of his Jag in Carlisle town center.

That was how most people felt back then; it still is. And no wonder. Joe’s flock hadn’t just been his livelihood, but his father’s too. Flocks are built up over generations; a living heritage destroyed in a day. The day the farm was culled, his mother slipped and broke her hip. She never recovered. Neither did he. Not long after, the next-door farmer was found hanging from a ceiling beam. “It was a bad year, a bad time,” Joe says. “Farm’s a hell of a mess.” Has been ever since. But he found salvation of a sort in his belief that the hill under which his cattle were burned was something special that the Council wanted to take away from him. He wrote three letters to the Queen, and one to Barack Obama. Neither replied. “I’d rather get in touch with them than the police,” he tells me.

And if Joe became especially paranoid, it was more a matter of degree. Such was the extent of the cockup that it fed conspiratorial thinking. Some blamed the EU, long-suspected of wanting to destock the countryside; others Blair’s attempt to neuter the Countryside Alliance by refurbishing rural England as a holiday destination. Someone even told The Sunday Times that FMD was a covert operation by Saddam Hussein. Even now, the farmers I speak to at Longtown tend at first to respond to my questions with an attribution of blame: three mention the “EU” and “destocking” but most blame either Blair’s indifference or his active resentment of the countryside.

To that extent, then, something like inheritance tax is just the latest humiliation in a long, long line. One man I speak to at the livestock mart curtly informs me that he won’t tell me anything, except that FMD was linked to 9/11, but then he keeps on speaking: about the migrant hotels in Carlisle, Peter Mandelson and “the Epstein stuff”, and the “tarts” and “dogs” and “crooks” in London. He visited London once, and was repulsed: as he recounts it, his handlebar mustache, half-concealed by distended cheeks, quivers in disgust.

Amid all this swirling resentment at urban Britain, even Nigel Farage is tainted. For all his pint-swilling Barbourism, Reform’s is a taut coalition of Kentish colonels and the Left Behind, of Middle England and the post-industrial white working classes, in which there’s little space for an organic political expression of rural Britain. Just 50 miles away, on the coast, is the home of 2019’s median voter: the Workington Man, who the political system has been scrambling to appease for much of the last decade. He’s not appeased yet, but Westminster continues, in its hamfisted way, to try to understand him — they need his vote. Given that only 1% of Britain’s workforce is in agriculture, no one needs to court the farmers. So if the last YouGov seat-by-seat polling has Reform winning every seat but one in Cumbria at the next General Election, it’s equally clear that many here crave something more attuned to their distinct and fragile culture.

One predictably popular option is Jeremy Clarkson, but really he feels more like a vessel for an inchoate kind of rural radicalism. “What we need is a new Cromwell, to walk into Parliament, and lop their heads off and fling them outside,” says Howard, a 68-year-old sprawled at the bar of the String of Horses at Brampton. Dressed in an undone, white-quarter-zip jumper, he’s on his fourth Snakebite and chaser of the night. Then he stands, his barstool scraping the stone floor. “Let it be me,” he cries, and mimics the executioner’s blow. Soon, Howard starts crying about his dead Labrador, and the bartender brings him a plate of chips.

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If there is room for such a Cromwellian figure in modern British politics, it’s likely Rupert Lowe. In his Restore Britain campaign video, released last weekend, he addresses his audience “from the farm… because places like this represent what proper Britain is about”. Though in Gloucestershire, his countryside is far from the dappled leafiness of the political countryside. With its skies drab and weather half-cold, and its common-sense inhabitants weaned on an elemental conservatism, Lowe’s England is epically different from the Cotswolds cliché.

Of course, how these credentials will hold up under the advice of metropolitan ideologues remains murky. That feels fitting. “Long after the last pyre has stopped burning,” wrote Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland at the height of the slaughter, “foot and mouth will stand as an indictment of British public life — and of the way we govern ourselves.” Yet who remembers FMD now? Outside of the Middleland, and the far-off places like it, almost no one. The only real memorial to the catastrophe is at RAF Great Orton, the former killing field transformed into a nature reserve. Of sorts: with its copse of wind turbines and plains of wild tarmac, set on the severe flatness of the Solway Plain, this is an absurdly natureless place. Beneath the grass, some 500,000 animals lie buried, entombed in sealed chambers of lime and excavated mud. Locals tell me that, every so often, they still have to extract fluid from the chambers, lest they overflow.

Once FMD was nearly over, Lord Haskins, then Blair’s “Rural Tsar”, said that “the idea of turning the clock back is not the way of dealing with the problems in Cumbria today”. Instead, he argued, “the future is looking at the future, not building up fantasies of the past, like some people might think.” But his future, unseen in 2001, has stuttered and stalled — not because we built up fantasies of the past, but because we ignored it altogether.

Had such a disaster been inflicted upon, say, the sub-postmasters, or the miners of Orgreave, it would have been absorbed into our national, postwar story — the story of victimhood and decline. There would be new laws to assuage their grief, and BBC dramas to re-enact it, and lordly think pieces to cite it in their etiology of the “Great Populist Revolt”. That revolt is long from finished here, barely even started, and yet the Government lumbers from crisis-to-crisis, condemned to a sort-of amnesia: repetitiously forgetting all the lessons it’s learned, only to be forced to learn them again.

In 2020, that very same crack team from Imperial, presided over by Professor Neil Ferguson, reassembled to battle yet another public health crisis, offered the country yet another “totally unreliable” model that sent us into an ill-advised lockdown. And what did we learn? Only to move harder, faster in delegating control to unelected academics, statistics, models. And all the while, FMD is sure to come again. Only last year, Dover Council warned that it’s a matter of “when, not if” it returns through the port, even as a lab leak in 2007 almost led to a repeat of 2001. There is, of course, a plan for when it appears, but chances are it won’t be followed. Once again, the Stygian fumes will suffocate the land, and the roadsides will be lined with corpses, and another generation will have their almost-instinct proven true: that down there in London, they just don’t care about us.

* * * 

Over the five past decades, I have asked a series of ambitious political leaders the same question: “Do you have any doubts about your ability to fill the role of Prime Minister?”

All but one of them admitted to having qualms: David Cameron. It was exactly two decades ago, and the 39-year old had just been elected Tory Leader. “If I had any doubts,” said Cameron, “I wouldn’t have put myself forward to lead our party in the first place. You have to be absolutely ready to take the difficult and big decisions – including sending troops to war. And I decided I was ready for that.” 

Described by his wife, Samantha, as “the most glass-half-full person in the world”, Cameron will go down in history as the man who took Britain out of the EU. But there is much more to him than his role as the accidental Brexiteer. 

Like nearly half of Britain’s Prime Ministers, Cameron was educated at Eton — where he did not distinguish himself and might well have been expelled for smoking cannabis. But he slipped the noose. At Oxford he was elected to join the notorious Bullingdon Club. “When I look at the photograph of our group of appallingly over self-confident sons of privilege,” said Cameron later. “I cringe. It’s cripplingly embarrassing. The Bullingdon has haunted me for most of my political life.” 

Despite the hijinks, Cameron managed to get a First in PPE, much to the chagrin of his Eton and Oxford contemporary, Boris Johnson, who only achieved a 2:1 in classics. The two men were to have a prolonged love-hate relationship for years to come. As schoolboys, both had declared they wanted to become Prime Minister, although Johnson upped the ante by saying he also sought to be World King. 

When Cameron came down from Oxford, he joined the political finishing school of Conservative Central Office. He was snapped up to become a Spad, working to polish the image of top Tory Cabinet ministers, then left to take a job at the media company Carlton TV, where he became head of communications from 1994-2001.

After failing to win a Tory seat in the Blair landslide of 1997, Cameron watched with growing admiration the presentational skills of the New Labour troika of Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson. When he did finally become a Tory MP in 2001, he privately proclaimed he was “the Heir to Blair”. When elected Conservative leader four years later, Cameron sought to detoxify the Tory “Nasty Party” brand. He wanted to create a party in his own image. The New Conservatives would be modern, diverse, caring and environmentally aware. On his debut at PMQs as the new Leader of Opposition, he said to the Prime Minister Tony Blair: “I want to talk about the future, after all he was the future once.” A year later, he drove a sleigh in the Arctic pulled by snow-white huskies. His new slogan was: “Vote Blue, Get Green” — swiftly lampooned as “Hug a Husky”. 

When Cameron fought his first general election as Tory leader in 2010, he feared the result would be a hung parliament. He privately asked the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was accustomed to coalitions, how they worked. She summed it up succinctly: “Well, David, the way it works is that if things go well, then the big party gets the credit — and if they go badly, the small party gets the blame.” “Sounds a good idea to me,” responded Cameron. 

As PM, Cameron invited Merkel to Chequers. One summer evening they were watching the sun go down over the Chiltern Hills, an area of outstanding natural beauty, and Cameron joked: “Just think Angela, if things had turned out differently in the Forties all this could have been yours.” Merkel laughed out loud; the Germans do have a sense of humour. 

At that time, after years of trying, I had been given access to make a fly-on-the wall series, Inside the Commons, filming in areas where TV cameras were normally strictly verboten. In his grand wood-panelled Westminster office, I asked the PM how he rated the Commons as an institution. “You do feel a real sense of history in this place,” he said. “It’s half like a museum, half like a church and half like a school.” Clearly an unusual school where three halves make a whole. When I asked Cameron what he thought of Prime Minister’s Questions, he replied: “There isn’t a Wednesday where you don’t feel total fear and trepidation about what is going to happen. I am normally sitting here preparing for PMQs and about five minutes beforehand you think: ‘Oh no, have I got to do this again?’” 

He admitted that each week, one of his staff would email Tory backbenchers a list of questions that the PM would like to be asked. When I suggested that this made a mockery of PMQs, Cameron said: “If you’re saying it’s appalling, I would say that politics is about the team putting across team messages. So people shouldn’t be too worried about that happening in PMQs.” He saw himself, he said, as “a political decathlete, switching from one discipline to the next trying to give every single one of them my best”. 

But the subject the PM found the most problematic was Britain’s relationship with the EU. He had promised when he became leader that the Tories would: “Stop banging on about Europe.” But he was up against his own party becoming increasingly pro-Brexit — and he was also up against Nigel Farage, whose UKIP party was making dramatic gains at the ballot box. Seeking to pooh-pooh the pretenders, Cameron said: “UKIP is sort of a bunch of fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists.” But Farage seized on Cameron’s words as proof that the political elite despised ordinary Britons who were concerned about the EU and immigration. In speeches, interviews and rallies, Farage sardonically used the PM’s description of Ukippers as a badge of honour. 

Cameron told me he saw himself as “a practical Eurosceptic” who wanted to stay in a reformed EU. He decided to hold an in-out Referendum which he was confident of winning. The two people he most wanted campaigning for the Remain side were his very close friend Michael Gove and his fellow Bullingdon man, Boris Johnson. But Gove was playing a slippery game and refusing to commit himself. Cameron sent Gove a text saying: “You must realise I divide the world into team players and wankers. You’ve always been a team player, please don’t become a wanker.” Gove admitted he was moving towards Leave, but he promised Cameron: “If I do decide to opt for Brexit, I will make one speech. That will be it. I will play no further part in the campaign.” 

This was the opposite of what Gove actually did when he became full-time leader of the Leavers. Failing to land Gove made Cameron all the more determined to bag Boris. The PM had long envied Johnson’s charisma and campaigning skills. But Johnson was keeping his powder dry. On 17 February 2016, as Cameron prepared to announce the date and details of the Referendum, Johnson went to see Cameron in his study at No. 10. The PM told Johnson that if he agreed to campaign for Remain: “You can have a senior role to play after the referendum. I am offering you any post you want in the government – except the top one.” Johnson said he would think about it and they should stay in touch. 

Ten days later, Johnson pinged Cameron a text saying: “I have been a tortured soul, but I have to go with my heart and support Leave.” But, then, barely two hours later, a fresh text from Johnson appeared on Cameron’s device saying “depression is setting in” — that he was “dithering” and might change his mind and back Remain after all. The following day, Johnson messaged the PM yet again, saying that he could not look at himself in the mirror if he campaigned to Remain. Cameron said publicly he was “disappointed” by Johnson’s decision. That was putting it mildly. The word I got from No. 10 was: “The fury here is uncontrollable.” 

The Referendum campaign coincided with a record number of illegal immigrants trekking across Europe and crossing the Channel in small boats to come to Britain. Film of their arrival on BBC, ITV and Sky inadvertently resembled a daily party political broadcast for the Leavers. It chimed with the simple message from Johnson and Gove: “Take Back Control”. 

Cameron accused the Leavers of “resorting to total untruths to con people into taking a leap in the dark”. He authorised a poster showing Johnson rolling the dice, Gove drinking whiskey and Nigel Farage smoking cigars in a casino together with the slogan: “Don’t let them gamble on your future.” Cameron later said: “The campaign turned into this terrible Tory psychodrama and I couldn’t seem to get through to people. It was like one of those dreams where you’re trying to shout but no sound is coming out.” And he continued: “Johnson and Gove have behaved appallingly — attacking their own government and the pair seemed to be different people by the end of the Referendum. Gove, the liberal-minded, carefully-considered Conservative intellectual, had become a foam-flecked Faragist warning that the entire Turkish population was about to come to Britain.” 

In the early morning of 24 June, the PM threw in the towel. The Leavers had won by 52 to 48%. On the steps of No. 10, a shell-shocked Cameron announced his resignation as Prime Minister saying: “The will of the British people is an instruction that must be delivered.” But he was not the man to do it. 

Johnson left it for a few hours after the resignation and then texted Cameron: “Dave, I am so sorry to have been out of touch but I couldn’t think of what to say and now I am absolutely miserable about your decision. You have been a superb PM and leader and your country owes you eternally.” Boris’s 18-year-old nephew, Oliver, felt different. He told his mother Rachel: “Uncle Boris has just stolen our future.” 

For many months after the Referendum result, Cameron would say: “not a day goes past without me feeling haunted by the demons of Brexit that were unleashed”. So does the ex-PM now wish he hadn’t called a Referendum? “If you are asking me do I have regrets — yes. Am I sorry about the state the country has got into — yes. Do I feel some responsibility for that — yes.” In another interview, he said: “It was my Referendum, my campaign, my decision to try and renegotiate with the EU. I accept all of those things and people will have to decide how much blame to put on me.”

Privately, however, Cameron was less self-culpatory. “Boris ruined my bloody career,” he told the former Europe Minister, Sir Alan Duncan, at a private breakfast. I watched Cameron at his final PMQs, in front of a packed House. He produced a bravura last hurrah: self-assured, witty and sometimes poignant. “I have done a bit of research, Mr Speaker,” said the PM. “I have addressed five thousand five hundred questions from this Despatch Box. I’ll leave it to others to work out how many I have actually answered.”

Riding the mixed cheers and jeers, the departing Prime Minister said: “I will miss the roar of the crowds — I will miss the barbs of the Opposition. And the last thing I’d say is that you can achieve a lot of things in politics, you can get a lot of things done. Nothing is really impossible, if you put your mind to it. After all, as I once said: ‘I was the future once.’” Twenty years on, Cameron and Britain are still deciding how much blame he deserves for the future he delivered.

Pounding the footpaths, watching the hedgerows change with the seasons, was my one permitted outlet from an otherwise claustrophobic daily routine. Nor was it just me. The run tracking app Strava, which combines fitness monitoring with social-networking, has grown so rapidly in popularity since the pandemic that it’s planning to launch an initial public offering.

I didn’t use Strava to log my runs, but I did track them with a smartwatch. Looking back over the data, I realized I’d clocked up more than a thousand miles during that first pandemic year. I wasn’t the only one: since Covid, endurance sports have only grown in popularity. The Financial Times reports that over a million people applied to run this year’s London Marathon, and across the world other “fitness races” and formats are booming.

But perhaps this is to be expected. For the preferred sporting and leisure activities of the middle class have long served as a kind of gamified echo of everyday life. In 19th-century Britain, for example, the emergence of team sports mirrored the gradual domestication of our national culture. The nation’s roaring, piratical 18th-century love of blood-sports and bare-knuckle boxing gave way to the symbolic “combat” of team competitions, reflecting both Britain’s increasingly formal and orderly public morality, and also a crystallizing sense of “team” unity in public life at scale. The assertion, popularly attributed to the Duke Wellington, that “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton”, is probably apocryphal. But it echoes an intuitive sense that there’s a link between our sporting preferences, and the broader conduct of national life — up to and including in war.

What does it say about us, then, that amateur rugby, football, and cricket appear to be in decline, even as endurance sports boom in popularity? For those who value the idea of national “teams”, the answer is an unnerving one: we appear to be re-imagining both sports, and also politics, as a relationship less among a defined community than between an individual and a centralized, de-materialized digital mediator.

At elite level, even team sports have shifted focus. Premier League and international football, for example, are more popular than ever — but here, the real “game” often seems to take place not between competitors in a match, but rather via the many secondary ways in which the resulting data are used, mined, and gambled against. Athletes themselves are tracked and algorithmically optimized in every imaginable way, from wearables for sleep tracking to machine-learning tools to improve in-game tactics. Software systems and performance-tracking hardware devices leave elite sports players as fully “under the algorithm” as an Amazon worker (albeit considerably better paid). For fans, meanwhile, there’s an ocean of in-game and player data, covering every imaginable facet of every elite sport. This, in turn, has fueled eye-wateringly lucrative secondary sports-data subcultures, from online Fantasy Football leagues to the multi-billion-pound international sports betting industry, estimated to be worth around £625 billion a year.

In a sense, then, the real “product” of elite sport is now its digital footprint. At amateur level, though, this doesn’t work nearly as well. How do you persuade every Sunday league player to wear the same tracker, like Premier League athletes? By contrast, an individual runner can easily join Strava and gamify his or her own “performance” on an opt-in basis. So perhaps this is at least part of the appeal of individual endurance sports: unlike weekend football, it enables amateurs to enjoy the experience of data-driven sports self-optimization, just like an elite athlete.

How, then, did we get to a point where the amateur feels “real” in proportion to their ability to generate an analyzable, optimizable data trail? Arguably most of us signed the digital Faustian bargain a long time ago. I recall weighing up the benefits of a searchable email inbox against letting Google’s bots crawl my correspondence, two decades ago, and deciding to accept the deal. And, since then, the social media revolution has redefined the public square. Now it’s a non-physical space, of seemingly infinite possibility, in which participation is nominally free — but the price is accepting that your every move is tracked. In the process, those of us who grew up in a relatively un-surveilled offline world have become accustomed to the nagging half-awareness that our data are being tracked and agglomerated all the time. It creeps me out, but not enough to stop me from using Gmail.

Over those two decades, the surrounding culture has also shifted. I know one mother of a university-age daughter who still keeps an active tracker on her adult child’s phone. She told me her daughter could switch it off, but doesn’t; it feels less like surveillance than watchful care. In any case, her daughter’s friends all monitor one another using the same technology.

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The generation that read about Harry Potter’s Marauder’s Map has grown up expecting to be able to locate their friends on a map in real time. And when everyone is accustomed both to this kind of hypervisibility, perhaps sport simply doesn’t feel like it has happened unless it’s also visible and analyzable on-screen.

So what does the digitization, gamification, and individuation of sport tell us about public life today? The 19th century scaled the “team” model of sport up into a nationalistic model for geopolitics: the doctrine of “balance of power” pitted a Premier League of European powers against one another, in an ever-shifting contest for supremacy. Today, by contrast, we appear to be sliding in our sporting preferences toward more individualistic endurance pursuits, enhanced by smart wearables and data analysis.

And the Strava model, applied to governance, in turn also looks considerably more borderless, more individualistic, and more data-driven. We already see wonks hailing the reconstruction efforts in former warzones as exciting test-beds for this sort of networked governance. Tory grandee Sir Ed Vaizey, for example, recently addressed an international digital cooperation summit on the benefits of digital ID in rebuilding war-torn polities such as Syria and Ukraine. The Centre for International Governance Innovation also hailed Ukraine’s innovations in digital governance. It’s hard to avoid the sense that for some, at least, warzones figure less as human catastrophes than exciting technological frontiers, spurring developments from drone tech to surveillance and digital services.

Should Tony Blair secure the role Donald Trump has allocated him, as chief colonial administrator in the Gaza demilitarized zone, will he join the push for such innovative measures to be rolled out as part of its reconstruction? A longstanding supporter of digital ID, Blair’s own Institute recently extolled the benefits of these tools for Britain, especially combined with AI and facial recognition. It would be surprising if he didn’t view the reconstruction of Gaza as an opportunity to push the envelope in digital-first governance.

What might this mean in practice? Perhaps, again, the popular shift from team sports to gamified solo endurance activities offers a clue. Vaizey invites us to imagine the benefits digital innovation brings to post-war reconstruction, such as “a refugee mother who can prove her identity on a basic phone, redeem a payment nearby and book a clinic appointment without queuing all day”, or “a mine clearance team guided by artificial intelligence maps that help families return to their fields”.

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This all sounds nice and humanitarian. What it also implies, more tacitly, is a distinctly post-national sensibility. Once equipped with a unique digital identifier, Vaizey’s “refugee mother” theoretically becomes analogous to the long-distance runner: a single unit in a data flow, with a unique digital trail. This is a very different model from the “sports team” one, which views the basic unit of governance as the national “team”, comprising citizens defined as such by a mix of esprit de corps, geographical proximity, and other common traits.

The digitally-enabled Strava model, on the other hand, views governance as a porous, opt-in constituency of highly mobile individuals, originating potentially anywhere, defined by a digital identity and associated data trail. How, in that context, do you create any sense of togetherness? If anything, this approach militates against esprit de corps, as it’s cross-border by design. As Vaizey points out, the more transnational digital governance is, the more efficient and effective it can be.

Whether you think this good or bad surely depends where you’re standing, and how much you trust your leadership class. At scale, digital governance shades potentially into alarming levels of power: it’s one thing to be kicked off Strava for going running in North Korea, another altogether to be frozen out of your bank account for protesting a government policy. In theory, for example, the Palestinian inhabitants of a hypothetical, reconstructed, shiny digital Blairtopia would be free to go anywhere. In practice, the more transnationally monitored they were, the more easily terrorist suspects could be contained — or anyone else, for that matter.

Again, whether or not you consider this a good thing depends on how much you trust Blair. Going by the recent travails of his former spin doctor Alastair Campbell, who recently lost an undisclosed sum investing in an allegedly fraudulent sports betting syndicate founded by his son Rory, New Labour’s judgment on matters of data (and sport) may not always be reliable.Closer to home, the fact that more Britons supported digital ID before Keir Starmer announced it attests how little the electorate here believe his government could wield such power benevolently. But more broadly, these developments imply the crystallization of a consensus among those in charge, on how the polity overall should be defined. Is Britain a sports team, or a Strava leaderboard? It is perhaps the most irreducible divide in contemporary politics. It ought at least to be up for discussion. But the Blairs of this world assume the latter, and seek simply to present this as a fait accompli.

But the more relevant question is surely: do we have a choice? I don’t use a smart watch to track my runs any more. But that’s more about the gloomy spectacle of my advancing age and worsening pace per mile, than any privacy concern. I worry that we made our decision when we got Gmail and Fitbits, and taught our kids to love their phone trackers and ourselves to post our Strava routes. If I’m right, it might already be too late to walk (let alone run) it back.

Now that the era has passed into the kitsch bricolage of nostalgia, with Zoomers dressed like Kevin the Teenager flocking to see Oasis’ stadium tours alongside nebbish politicians in bucket hats declaring that they’re “mad for it”, it is hard to see the mid-Nineties as anything other than a golden age. Paunchy aging dads — my own demographic, sad to say — fondly remember gelling down the fringes of their Caesar haircuts, donning their knock-off Ben Sherman shirts and drenching themselves in CK One before hitting the town with a tenner in their pocket. Yet it is a measure of Britain’s extended national decline that the mid-Nineties, today remembered as a halcyon era, was at the time experienced rather differently. 

In a 1996 speech, the aspiring prime minister Tony Blair warned that “I see two futures open to this country. In one, Britain’s communities follow the process that has occurred in some places in the US, where the affluent have retreated into fortresses with private security guards, leaving the rest to live in ghettos of low opportunity, crime and insecurity. But the cycle of decay and economic underperformance continues. This is the Blade Runner scenario.” The other scenario, naturally, was for the country to vote New Labour into office. The influential 1997 Demos paper, “Britain”, observed that abroad, “the general perception [is] that the UK, and London in particular, is not a safe place, with people living under the shadow of IRA bombs, homeless on the streets and racial tensions”, while “even the Union Jack has become an ambivalent symbol — at times a racist icon for skinheads and fascists”. Its solution, which we live with today, was to rebrand, and remold, Britain into a young and multicultural country, “the least pure of European countries, more mongrel and better prepared for a world that is continually generating new hybrid forms”. 

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Why Starmer is doomed

By Aris Roussinos

Yet if the flags currently flying on lampposts across England, transforming suburban York and Birmingham into a simulacrum of the Lower Shankill, represent the reaction to this experiment, it is instructive to remember that the era, punctuated by racist murders and the rise of the BNP, witnessed its own contested politics of the flag, and conflicted attitudes to Britishness and Englishness. When, in 1992, the mournful Manchester-Irish troubadour Morrissey draped himself in the Union Jack, in front of a vast image of two skinheads, to perform “The National Front Disco” and caution his fictional “Bengali in Platforms” to “Shelve your Western plans/‘Cause life is hard enough when you belong here”, the response from the music press was not acclamatory. “Flying the flag or flirting with disaster?”, asked a rhetorical NME headline. Yet five years later, when the girl band bawd Geri Halliwell could strut on stage in a sequined Union Jack minidress, the national flag was not only not controversial, it had become ubiquitous in popular culture. What had happened in between was, simply, Britpop.

Was Britpop’s cultural nationalism ironic or sincere? As the brains behind Vanity Fair’s famous “Cool Britannia” cover, Toby Young — now firmly ensconced within the British Right — observed, a new generation had emerged that “had grown up loathing and despising American mass culture” and “felt a kind of nationalistic resentment”. Blur returned from a dismal 1992 tour of small-town America filled with loathing for the imperial hegemon and a conflicted love for England and home. “What is it about home we’re missing?” the group’s drummer Dave Rowntree pondered, “What is it we like and that we don’t like?” They set about working on their second album, Modern Life is Rubbish — its working title was Britain Versus America — which, with its inward-looking cultural references, both mocked and celebrated small-town English life, and defined the Britpop aesthetic. Choosing, as Blur’s guitarist Graham Coxon notes, “a Ladybird Books-style painting of the classic Mallard locomotive” for its cover because “nothing could be further from what most people expected of an alternative rock LP”, the album had strangely conservative vibes which belied the group’s profession of Left-wing values. Drawn from the provincial lower-middle-class of Southeast England, the children of teachers, Army bandsmen and a South Coast BnB-owner-turned-rubbish-compactor, the group was shaped by the values of their upbringing. “My family, like most army families, was pretty conservative and patriotic,” Coxon remembers. “It was generally assumed that you supported England in everything it did.” Coxon’s autobiography is infused with the memories of a postwar English childhood, of grubbing for “smutty magazines” inside abandoned pillboxes at a time when “‘Tommies versus Jerries’ were popular pastimes in the school playground”.

Like his cultural distaste for America, Blur’s singer Damon Albarn’s self-professed political radicalism is likewise shot through with a very English conservatism, condemning his Essex peers for their crass Thatcherite materialism and lamenting that “The color and vibrancy of the countryside was destroyed… literally fields I was playing in one year were housing estates the next”. As John Harris observes in his excellent book on the Britpop era, Albarn’s Essex childhood home was in a rural hamlet where “the local accent has an archetypally East Anglian burr; when Albarn enrolled at the local comprehensive school, he rubbed shoulders with the children of agricultural workers”. Coxon remarks of the “Grantchester Meadows” quality of their childhood, “hanging out by the river at the back of [Albarn’s] house in the wilds of Essex”, that “our outlook was a little more bucolic and melancholic… A lot of that English local color flavored the music, right from the start.”

Oasis grew up in quite another England, if the Manchester-Irish milieu can be termed England at all: far from lazy summer afternoons, the group’s first incarnation was simply called “The Rain”. There is a particular recurring strand of Irish literature that focuses on unhappy households, dominated by a superficially charming but overbearing father, in which the devoted mother bears her lot unhappily and the sons plot their escape as revenge. The semi-official biography of Oasis by Paolo Hewitt slots right into the genre. The drunk, abusive Tommy Gallagher, from rural Meath, ruled his Manchester household through fear: divorcing him, against the priest’s advice, the family moved to a council house in suburban Burnage, “where each house has a garden”, and which “lies within walking distance of two golf courses”, as Harris notes with a Daily Mail-style eye for class minutiae wasted on The Guardian. 

The Gallagher brothers were raised in the Irish diaspora milieu of Gaelic football, church social clubs and Irish dancing — and long summer holidays at their mother Peggy Sweeney’s family farm in rural Mayo where Noel Gallagher reminisces about picking blackberries, bringing in the cows for milking and drawing water from the well. Appearing on Gay Byrne’s Late, Late Show — then a staple of both home and diaspora Irish life — the young Noel Gallagher presented himself as a good sensible boy to the avuncular presenter (not least in the knowledge that his mother would be watching) claiming sentimentally that tears would well in his eyes at the scent of burning turf. “If you look at Gaelic bands,” Noel would tell Hewitt, “they always had these rousing, fist-in-the-air choruses. And I suppose it’s also because we have this rootsy, folk feel on some of the other songs which you get subconsciously from your childhood.” Or as Gallagher would correct a reporter at the height of 1995’s Battle of Britpop, “We’re not Britpop, because we’re Irish, for a start.”

Yet when the founder of Creation Records, Alan McGee, first met the group in Manchester, it was with the Union Jack behind them, which the band had painted on the wall of their rehearsal room. “Noel had even written a song called ‘The Red, White and Blue’,” notes Hewitt. “Their fascination with the British flag caused a little consternation among some onlookers… and there were various mutterings about the band’s politics.” The Union Jack, in distorted form, soon made it onto the band’s demo cassette. As Harris notes, “when a passing Creation staff member inquired about the design on the cover of the Oasis demo — the colors of the Union Jack arranged in a vortex, as if being sucked down the plughole — Liam dispensed a snarling reply… ‘It’s the greatest flag in the world and it’s going down the shitter,’ he said. ‘We’re here to do something about it’.” And so they did: like the RAF roundel, the Union Flag, whether on Noel’s guitar or the PR ephemera of the era, would become ubiquitous, just as the laddish fusion of football culture and Sixties revivalist pop would revive the St George’s Cross in common usage for Euro ‘96. “17 years of hurt never stopped us dreaming,” Blair would declare, “Labour’s coming home.” The world of the Blairite “Britpopper” had been born. It is one which Fabian thinktankers have never left.

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Labour needs to kill Britishcore

By Poppy Sowerby

For all its Blairite connotations, the first recorded use of “Cool Britannia” in British Politics was, improbably, by Virginia Bottomley’s Department of Media and Culture. But if the fragile mood of optimism inspired by a buoyant economy, recovering from the recession of the early Nineties, was the product of the Major government, the Conservative Party was in no position to capitalize on it. The attempted Rightward shift of Britain’s political culture, encapsulated in Major’s lyrical evocation of old maids cycling to church through the mist, had been wrecked, in a now familiar pattern, by the corruption, incompetence and sexual deviance of the party’s MPs: rather than being too conservative for the country’s voters, as contemporary accounts assume, the Tories were too libertine. In their wake would come Blair’s revolution, which co-opted Britpop, to gain a sheen of youthful credibility and optimism, with the eager collaboration of the music industry, in which, as Sleeper’s Louise Weber noted, “you could not criticize New Labour, you could not criticize Blair, it was verboten, not allowed”.

The many subsequent hagiographies of Britpop place great emphasis on the Sussex band Suede as the forerunners of the movement, also wrapped in the flag, against their will, by the music industry. It accompanied them on the 1993 Select magazine cover featuring Suede’s singer, Brett Anderson, beneath the title “Yanks Go Home”. Yet even Suede’s then-risqué androgyny and odes to amyl nitrate now seem curiously innocent, more Charles Hawtrey than Rimbaud. Indeed, all the frantic cosmopolitanism of the Nineties today seems quaintly parochial: Albarn’s increasingly cruel “social satires” of the small-town middle classes exude the status anxieties of the provincial FBPE activist, his various accents, careening all over the English class system, a Harry Enfield performance. Blur’s 1993 mockney stomper “Sunday, Sunday” plays with imagery of provincial ennui, Sunday roasts and war veterans, that while mocking, now reads almost as nostalgia for a world that then still existed. Even the Select piece that launched the movement, with its Dad’s Army graphics and declaration of a “Battle of Britain”, are products of that same insular postwar world, in which Noel Gallagher could reminisce about making Airfix models of Hurricanes and Lancasters, and the aging Graham Coxon spends his free time at Tunbridge Wells’ War and Peace Show re-enactments, buying military surplus. The Britpop movement, ultimately, drew from the same cultural wellsprings Reform does today: from Blur’s PR jaunts to what is now Farage’s Clacton seat, to Oasis’s suburban childhood, flanked by golf clubs on the edges of Stockport, the provincial England then invoked half-ironically has now swung sharply to the Right.

For whatever else Britpop was, it was a celebration, if a patronizing one, of England’s white working class, which would be far beyond the cultural pale today. As Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker would later note, “working-class culture was often sneered at as being crude and stuff like that but then people maybe cottoned on to the fact that it was a bit more alive than the supposedly highbrow culture”. Adopting an increasingly parodic cockney accent, in his war against the lower-middle classes that birthed him, Damon Albarn assumed that if there was hope, it lay with the proles. His then-girlfriend, the privately educated Justine Frischmann, likewise mars Elastica’s otherwise standout track Waking Up with the mockney suggestion to “make a cup of tea”, delivered in the tones of someone nervously appeasing a builder. Yet it was only under the Blairite consensus Britpop helped usher in that this very same culture became demonized: the cockney double-glazing salesman persona Albarn assumes in the Parklife video would very soon become Emily Thornberry’s St George’s Cross-hanging, white-van-driving nemesis.

Indeed, for all that nostalgic hagiographers of the era like Jon Savage can claim, ludicrously, that Oasis’s Some Might Say “captures the mood of the moment” of the Conservative defeat in England’s 1995 local elections, the band themselves were always ultimately an expression of Thatcherite social mobility, of conspicuous consumption and the polished Rolls-Royce in the driveway. The very cover of Oasis’s Definitely Maybe, with its stripped floorboards, glass of red wine and paper lampshades, expresses a working-class aspiration towards middle-class aesthetics — the renovated Victorian townhouses of BBC’s This Life — that the band would soon swiftly transcend. Where Blur, 30 years ago, mocked the urge of the newly wealthy to move to “a very big house in the country”, Noel Gallagher rapidly transitioned from playing at a Home Counties country house to buying one, from where he now delivers his recollections of the era on a throne-like wing chair. Blur’s Graham Coxon has retreated to true-blue rural Kent to explore “English indigenous folk traditions” from a barn conversion; Alex James to life as a country landowner and cheesemaker: the lures of Deep England, and of romantic conservatism, always win in the end.

What was Britpop then? Perhaps, in the end, just a confection of the spin doctor era. Like New Labour’s political mood music, it was always empty at its heart: Blur’s lyrics were always less clever than claimed, and Oasis’ less profound. Britpop died in 1997, shortly after Blair came to power: it was as if the movement had outlived its purpose. And just as the original bands of the era brought about a flurry of uninspired imitations, it has been our fate since then to be ruled by a dismal succession of Blair tribute acts.

Blair’s social revolution, his New Britain, buried the cozy postwar England that had birthed the movement, and gave Britain a new aristocracy of judges and NGO activists yet to be dethroned. In reward for its services, the new Blairite order installed a new cultural establishment, the commentators from the Britpop-era music industry who write Guardian thinkpieces, judge books and arts prizes, present BBC radio shows, and feed the stultifying incuriosity of the Radio 6 dad. Instead of evading his threatened Blade Runner future, Blair accelerated it: Oasis’s Don’t Look Back In Anger would soon become the anthem of the British state’s “organized spontaneity” to dissuade Manchester’s white working class from reacting to jihadist mass murder with anything other than the empty, swaying sentimentality of a stadium sing-along. Yet as Noel Gallagher himself observed, “These people have the right to be radicalized. They have rights… That guy who set that bomb off sees the streets of Britain as a battlefield — our leaders don’t see it as a battlefield.”

The insular, homely English culture Britpop both mocked and celebrated was ravaged by the political order it soundtracked. Only in retrospect does John Major’s Britain, then imbued with themes of decline, seem like a vanished golden age, the political horizon, before it all went wrong, of the radicalized Right-wing Zoomer. The era’s nostalgia for the Sixties has been replaced by today’s nostalgia for the country the Boomers destroyed. Once again, the nation is asking “What is it about home we’re missing? What is it we like and that we don’t like?” The Union Flag is omnipresent in England once again, for quite different reasons: the white working class Britpop championed, like the provincial lower-middle class it mocked, is in open revolt against the political and cultural establishment it helped enthrone, and it is the bourgeois Right-wing dancing to their raucous tune.

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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Reform won’t save Britain

By Dan Evans

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.

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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.

Over the past decade, three Conservative prime ministers have been forced from office by their own colleagues. In contrast, in the post-war period, no Labour leader has been ejected. Tony Blair did step down in 2007, but by that time he had been leader for 13 years and prime minister for 10 of them. He himself admitted people “get tired of the same face” after a decade. “It’s long enough,” he conceded.

Certainly, no one was talking about getting rid of Tony Blair after just one year in office. On the first anniversary of his premiership, in 1998, Blair’s approval rating was an astonishing 72%. And his party had a 29-point lead over the Tories. The mood in the parliamentary party was understandably euphoric. Reading West MP Martin Slater said, “Tony Blair has told us we must not gloat, but we can’t let [the anniversary of the election] go uncelebrated”.

There was little gloating going on last week in Westminster — at least not among Labour MPs — as Keir Starmer marked his one-year anniversary with an approval rating of 23%. For a prime minister who kicked off at 60%, this is cataclysmic. It’s unlikely his leadership will end in quietly dignified retirement.

One year in, seven-in-10 voters think the Labour government is at least as chaotic as its Conservative predecessor. The welfare debacle didn’t disabuse them of this notion, as Starmer’s complete lack of authority was exposed. And we’ve never watched a Chancellor weeping beside their PM at PMQs before.

The Prime Minister dismissed the welfare rebels as “noises off”, but these noises are now turning into talk of a leadership challenge. As ever, the usual suspects have put their head above the parapet. John McDonnell, whom Keir Starmer kicked out of the party last year for opposing the two-child benefit cap, immediately popped up to call outright for the Labour movement to “take back control” of the party. But, behind the scenes, speculation over Starmer’s future is mounting. Last week, he was asked by Kemi Badenoch whether Rachel Reeves would be Chancellor by the next election. But perhaps the more pertinent question is: will he be Prime Minister?

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What Starmer could learn from Blair

By Richard Johnson

It’s not as easy as it used to be to topple a Labour leader. Until 1981, the leader was elected annually by the Parliamentary Labour Party. It would take just two MPs — a proposer and a seconder — to force a leadership election. In spite of the technical ease in forcing a leadership challenge, they almost never happened. In the post-war period, just one leader — Hugh Gaitskell — was challenged, and he saw off his opponents with ease.

The stability of the party leadership was partly due to Labour leaders understanding the fragility of their own position, and the fractious nature of their party. They had come up through the Labour movement, and they knew that the party was really a coalition of diverse interests and perspectives. They had to work hard to ensure that they could sustain wide support. Cabinets and Shadow Cabinets included members from across the wide spectrum of the political Left. As Harold Wilson remarked, he came from the Left of the party, but he recognised that it also needed a Right-wing to fly.

Even after the rules were changed in the Eighties to transfer part of the decision to party conference and then again in the Nineties to ordinary members, leaders recognised that they were holding together a coalition. They needed to show love — or at least respect — to the different elements of the party. Otherwise, resentment would grow into something potentially explosive. That is why even Tony Blair made a point of meeting with members of the Left-wing socialist Campaign Group when he was party leader.

Keir Starmer, though, has a different approach. He has adopted perhaps the most presidential style of any Labour leader. All authority flows down from the leader, not up from the party. Labour has never quite had a leader like him, one so aloof from the party’s internal apparatus, contemptuous of its pluralism, and singularly unpopular with the public.

After first using the votes of the Left and soft Left to elect him leader in 2020, Starmer then turned his back on them and handed control of the party to the Right, the old Blairite wing now itching for revenge after what they regarded as the ignominy of the five-year Corbyn leadership.

With Starmer’s blessing, the Right took control of the National Executive Committee, and were exceptionally successful in controlling parliamentary selections, with a disregard for internal party democracy unseen even in the heyday of New Labour. Potential candidates deemed to be Corbyn-curious were sifted out, even if it cost Labour seats, as it clearly did in Islington North and Chingford. Left-wing incumbents were deselected. Some Right-leaning NEC members then parachuted themselves into safe seats ahead of the election. Then, after the election, Starmer expelled remaining Left-wing MPs within weeks of taking office.

This “presidential” governing style isn’t without risks. As Juan Linz laid out in his seminal essay, “Perils of Presidentialism”, such systems tended to be less stable than a parliamentary one because they entail a “winner takes all” politics, or, to put it more bluntly, a “loser gets nothing” dynamic — something which ultimately encourages revolution.

Starmer, more than any other Labour leader, has taken this “winner takes all” approach to his leadership. He set out to bury all the remnants of the ancien régime both in policy and personality, abandoning the old manifesto’s promises and expelling his predecessor from the party. Worse, Starmer had no mandate to conduct this purge. He wasn’t elected leader to hammer the Left: on the contrary, he had promised continuity with the policies of the Corbyn years, but then spent his time as leader repudiating them.

Initially, this didn’t seem to matter. Once the Conservatives ditched Boris Johnson in a staggering act of political self-harm, Labour’s poll lead was unassailable. Starmer’s leadership, insipid and uninspiring as it was, became self-justified merely by dint of the fact that Labour was winning. But now Labour is in the mid-20s in the polls, Reform is in first place and Nigel Farage is on the verge of measuring up the curtains in No. 10. Most Labour MPs could be wiped out. The debacle of the 2019 result, so trumpeted by the Right of the party as evidence of the Left’s electoral toxicity, could seem like a happy memory.

Now, the carrot of strong poll numbers and the stick of fierce discipline have rotted away. Backbench MPs no longer see Starmer as a vote winner. And after U-turns on winter fuel, grooming gangs, and disability benefits, he clearly doesn’t frighten them either.

But Starmer has made it harder for them to get rid of him. As leader of the opposition, he quietly made a couple of modifications to the rules of succession. There is no vote of confidence, like there is with the Tories. Instead, an MP merely needs to put up a challenge. Starmer, though, raised the threshold for nominations from 10% to 20% of the Parliamentary Labour Party. He has also limited the franchise to party members and members in affiliated trade unions. Non-members who were given a vote under Ed Miliband, on condition of paying a nominal fee, have been taken out of the process. Additionally, the Labour rule book now specifies that challenges are permissible only “prior to the annual session of Party conference”.

These rule changes may be beneficial to Starmer, but they are by no means bulletproof. It seems likely to me that if Starmer is forced to defend his leadership before ordinary party members, he is toast. As someone who speaks to many fellow party members from across Labour, it’s hard to find cheerleaders for the PM.

As a result, the Left of the party hates him, and the soft Left — where the bulk of the membership is — feel deeply disappointed. Those on the Right of the party have regarded Starmer as a useful vehicle for their path to power, but they have never seen him as one of their own. There are, simply put, no Starmerites in Labour.

All it might take to remove Starmer, then, is one Labour MP to gather nominations from 20% of their colleagues. And every wing of the party has a reason to want him gone.

From the Right, the motives are a mix of ambition (Starmer was useful for them; they have no core loyalty to him; he is now dispensable) and self-preservation (he’s dragging the party down and threatening its electoral prospects). From the soft Left, the reasons are a combination of ambition, self-preservation, and policy disappointment. From the Left (such as it is), it is hatred for his betrayal. The question is, who would dare make the first move?

Moving too early isn’t without risk. If a Cabinet minister tried and failed to unseat Starmer, there would be repercussions: banishment, surely, to the backbenches.

Yet for some ambitious MPs, there are good reasons to move early. Wes Streeting is one of the Cabinet’s most effective communicators. He is the darling of the party “Blairites” and is clearly very ambitious. Moreover, he holds his Ilford North seat with a tiny majority and might lose it at the next election. It could be now or never. He equally hamstrung, though, by this association with the “Blairites”, which puts him ideologically out-of-step with the membership. They have rejected Right-leaning candidates in every leadership election for the past decade.

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But, if Streeting managed to force a challenge, the element of surprise might enhance his chances in a members’ ballot. Fortune favors the brave. And such is the level of despair currently that even Left-wing members have told me they’d vote for Streeting if it meant getting rid of Starmer.

Then there’s the quietly ambitious Angela Rayner, sitting demurely on the other side of the PM as his Chancellor wept. She is in a unique position as Deputy Leader, because if she tried and failed to remove Starmer, he still could not strip her of her position. He would probably sack her from the Cabinet in the case of a botched coup, but freed from the constraints of collective responsibility, Rayner on the backbenches could be a very dangerous thing for the Starmer premiership. She could be the voice of authentic Labour for which the membership is so clearly hungry.

Historically, there have been candidates in similar cases who were willing to sacrifice themselves as the “stalking horse”: candidates with no chance of winning, but announce their candidacy simply to kick off proceedings. The idea is that this MP would bounce other, more plausible candidates, into challenging Starmer. Are things so bad someone would be willing to fire the gun? Might an éminence grise like Ed Miliband, for example, or a vocal backbencher, be tempted? The risk of this approach, of course, is that it could produce the opposite effect, whereby the frontbench rallies behind their Prime Minister in his hour of need.

But how brave is this Labour cohort? How much more are they willing to take? British history is littered with the names of individuals who probably could have taken on their leaders but missed their chance. Michael Portillo regrets not standing against John Major in his 1995 “back me or sack me” challenge. David Miliband could probably have become prime minister in 2009, had he announced he was challenging Gordon Brown for the leadership. The lesson is don’t wait for the perfect moment, as it might never come. The first test of leadership is showing you have the guts to seek it in the first place.

This down-at-heel cosmopolitan community, home to immigrants, artists and students, had always been poor but peaceful. Yet on that afternoon 20 years ago, something had changed. The atmosphere was tense: the familiar sounds of Asian music, reverberating from youthful sound systems, had been replaced by a chorus of police sirens, and the colorful aura of the storefronts was lit up by flashing blue lights.

It was 12 July, and earlier that morning residents had been forced to evacuate their homes following the discovery of a bomb factory in a nearby flat at Alexandra Grove. The unkept hovel in question could have been any student digs. But instead of alcohol and pizza boxes, the rooms contained enough explosive material to devastate this entire neighborhood. The rudimentary devices which had brutally torn through the lives of 52 victims in London the week before had been made here.

The strong police presence was met with mixed emotions. You could sense the hostility as both Makkah Masjid and the local Leeds Grand Mosque were ransacked by investigators seeking to understand the teachings and instruction which had radicalized four men from this city. This, in turn, was met by the fear of reprisals against local Muslims.

Like many of my generation, I had watched the televised violence of 9/11 in horror. Yet while that act of terrorism marked all our lives, it was still a tragedy that had played out over there. What was taking place in Leeds on that summer morning for years later, was the “War on Terror” coming home. As Zygmunt Bauman put it, that which was global, was truly local — especially the new forms of violence it was creating.

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Acts of terror have always been about communication. The images of destruction carry a powerful message, and the acts rely heavily on symbolism. If the abiding image of 9/11 was that of the planes striking the Twin Towers, in London, it was the pictures of the ripped-apart bus which left an indelible scar on Britain’s collective consciousness.

Terrorism, as 7/7 showed us, wasn’t just about a fear of the unknown. It was about weaponizing the familiar and intimate — turning the everyday into the source of nightmares.

Even though this played out all those years ago, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it could all happen again. Similar forces and dynamics are still at work amid our communities, and are arguably more dangerous still. The processes required to prevent such violence are being lost within our divisive political landscape. The Prevent Strategy, for example, launched by Labour in response to the 9/11 attacks, has been met with criticism from all sides for failing to stop radicalization, instead alienating minority communities. And governments, from Tony Blair onward, have struggled to get to grips with community alienation and failure to integrate.

Blair, who was PM on 7/7, left office tainted by his entanglements in the Middle East. Today, the United Kingdom risks being ineluctably drawn into an even more fraught conflict with Iran, even as events in the region remain our most divisive political concern. We only have to look at the continuing protests in London to see how explosive the issue has become, with Keir Starmer struggling to deal in a constructive way the debate on Palestine.

Things were quite different at the turn of the 21st century. We were only just realizing we had entered into an age marked by the catastrophic actions of individuals, to say nothing of the worrying limits of liberal multiculturalism. It no longer took an army of millions to bring about a global security crisis, just a handful of radicalized individuals. Their ability to disrupt was amplified by the power of the media and the attention it permitted.

In some ways, we have learned how to address these acts of violence, seen again at Manchester Arena in 2017, and not treat it as a threat to our entire way of life, as Tony Blair did. In an article for Foreign Affairs, the then PM explicitly linked the “War on Terror” to a battle for global values. Today, we more readily see these as the acts of deranged individuals.

But is the focus on lone wolves naive? The radicalization of potentially dangerous individuals is arguably a deeper problem than ever before across the political spectrum. Back in 2006, don’t forget, mobile phones were still primitive, and Facebook had only just carried out its first pilot roll-out. Twitter was yet to be launched. Yet if the early years of the War on Terror fostered a “with-us-or-against-us” mentality, part of the official doctrine, the tribalism of our social media-enabled politics today is far more divisive, dogmatic and assured.

The subsequent penetration of smartphones and social media into our every day has enabled a politics of immediacy that exacerbates divisions and amplifies calls for violence, even as it further hampers social solidarity. The first decade of the War on Terror placed too much importance on simplistic “Clash of Civilizations” narratives — which ended up in the widespread demonization of Islam. But the calamitous corrective to this has been to insist there is no correlation between Islamic teachings and violence and oppression.

We have only to look at the disastrous response to the Southport attacks, and the catastrophic mishandling of the investigation into grooming gangs, to see how the politics of correctness fuels the rise of counter-parasitical movements feeding off similar feelings of anger and resentment. If it is ridiculous to claim, for instance, that all followers of any belief system fully advocate violence, it is equally absurd to claim it has no relation whatsoever to acts of slaughter and the quashing of basic rights. No political or religious project or identity should be immune from criticism: they can all become violent and oppressive.

The problem here is that when it comes to Islam, the Labour Party still doesn’t know how to deal with it, happily promoting social liberalism while also making criticism of the more violent strands of Islam still harder. All the while, cities such as Bradford and Leeds are becoming increasingly segregated, in terms of lives, religion and politics. All across Britain, meanwhile, identity politics is more divisive than ever. Battlelines have been drawn and are fought over by those who insist they are on the right side of history.

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Twenty years on, then, we have far less confidence in our leaders and a feeling of despair surrounds the idea of multiculturalism — a feeling that politicians on both sides of the political divide will be inclined to weaponize. Indeed, while the War on Terror simply withered away, we are none the wiser as to why youngsters are radicalized. This was spelled out in the Government’s official report into the attack. It stated: “What we know of previous extremists in the UK shows that there is not a consistent profile to help identify who may be vulnerable to radicalization”. This, too, has been borne out in Prevent’s continued failure to target and defuse potential suspects.

Today, then, political positions are hardening. We have a far more organized far-Right movement, and on the Left, we see the new divisions forming, as with the rise of the Independent Alliance, which will once again place identity and the question of foreign policy front and center. Meanwhile, the possibility of further terrorist attacks can’t be ruled out. It is amid such moments of political febrility that the idea of civil war doesn’t seem so fantastic. We should remember that, as we remember those who perished 20 years ago.

A few days ago, I found myself on Tavistock Square in London. There is no sense that such a horrific event took place on these sun baked streets. Nor, as I traveled through Edgware Road Station, did I suspect that others on the train would be remembering those images from within the blown out carriage, as the smoke billowed from a smoldering blackness. It is all too easy to forget such appalling horrors: the victims, their families, the rescue workers who had to confront the unimaginable.

If we are to do justice to the memory of 7/7, then, it is not only to follow a ritual of remembrance. It is to remember that the forces that led to the detonation of those bombs 20 years ago aren’t extinguished. And that Britain today is contending with rising disenchantment. We need political leaders who will defuse this dangerous moment, not light the touchpaper. We don’t want to become the unwitting authors of another catastrophe.

It took only 12 months, the life-span of a shrew, for a Labour landslide to transmute itself into a struggling government barely able to contain social cataclysm. If a country’s stability can be measured in the longevity of its leaders, then Britain remains in a period of near-revolutionary ferment. Who can say with confidence that Starmer, Britain’s sixth Prime Minister in a decade, will see out his full term, or even that his party will?

At the time of writing, with the Chancellor weeping on the front bench, and Starmer’s authority within his own party having followed his welfare reforms down the drain, the Labour government reeks of approaching death. Already almost as unpopular as the Conservative Party at its terminal nadir in government, Labour is in office without power, in helpless possession of a historic majority it cannot use and is unlikely ever to repeat.

Yet for all that Starmer is simply a dud, the Government’s root problem is structural rather than personal: any Labour replacement would suffer the same fate. All the recent character portraits released to mark his dismal anniversary, peering behind the hollow mask, are thus an exercise in futility. The reason Britain is cycling through prime ministers at an ever-increasing rate is due to a crisis of state legitimacy. Like later 19th-century Ireland, the effective governance of the country has now become impossible. The state’s legitimacy and reach are contested, neither oppression nor mollification are practicable, an amorphous nationalist revolt is brewing, and strategic shocks are appreciable on the horizon.

In an attempt to borrow the legitimacy of existential threat, the state warns darkly of an approaching war it is not equipped to fight, in defence of a political order no one would willingly fight for. The country is simply in no state to fight a war. According to Westminster’s own newly announced commission on social cohesion, the UK is now a “tinderbox” of “creeping balkanisation and extremism” in which “the basis of our democracy is at risk”. Yet as the commission itself laments, “We do not have a national era-shaping presidential figure such as Lee Kuan Yew or Charles de Gaulle” to remake the faltering state. What we have, for now, is Keir Starmer.

One highly probable outcome of the current crisis, according to the New Statesman’s Tom McTague, is that Starmer “will be remembered as the last leader of the old normal, the final defender of the shaky post-2008 world before it was dragged into a new state by the figures now jockeying for mastery of the populist right”. Yet whatever the contours of the new state, the Westminster state, in its current ailing form, is also a very recent one: the proof of this is that even a return to the Britain of John Major would be experienced as a political revolution, condemned as fascism by clients of the Blairite state. Blair’s New Labour effectively erected a new UK polity on Britain’s territory, a “New Britain” in his own words, to entirely reshape what had by the Nineties become a normal European nation state for a new globalised world order. Yet now that global order has collapsed, and the British state reshaped in its image lives on borrowed time.

The unintentional effect of Blair’s demographic and constitutional tinkering was to set in train a second, later counterrevolution on the Right, understood by its opponents as a Right-wing populism of base urges, rather than a logical and entirely predictable political reaction. The current political trends on the Right are most closely analogous to the classical nationalisms of the 19th and 20th centuries, one of the essential stages of political modernity which Britain, through its possession of an early unified state and global empire, had previously sidestepped. Once you accept the analogy with classical nationalism, you see its hallmarks everywhere. The increasing co-option of the Conservative Party and its allied media and thinktanks by the New Right follows precisely the same process of “blocked mobility”, producing a revolutionary counter-elite among disaffected graduates that the scholar John Hutchinson traced in his works on cultural nationalism. In this regard, we may note that the current UK state’s proscription of “cultural nationalism” as a threat to its survival is entirely rational. Late 19th-century Ireland is one useful parallel, but others are available, as the relationship follows a well-worn historical path. In his 1994 book Modern Nationalism, Hutchinson summarised the process by which the ethnic Russians of the Soviet Union lost faith in their state, and by withdrawing its legitimacy, allowed it to collapse.

Like his contemporary Blair, Gorbachev aimed to reshape his ailing state for the brave new world of the Nineties. Instead, he accelerated its collapse. Following his failed reforms, ethnic Russians “came to believe themselves victims of a failed system… declining in world prestige and economically incompetent” in which the heterogenous state built around their ethnic core instead appeared to be the engine of their demographic decline. Relative birth rates, of ethnic Russians and minorities, assumed new political importance as “concerns were expressed about demographic trends which were transforming them into a minority in the Union”, while a new flowering of overt anti-Russian sentiment among minorities heightened their alienation from the Soviet state. The growing centrality of demographic and cultural anxieties in an atmosphere of economic decline and paralysed political leadership accelerated a Russian “ambivalence that made them prepared in the end to desert the USSR in order to build a better future in their homelands. Divisions paralysed the state, paving the way for full collapse.” In 1986, Hutchinson reminds us, the Soviet leadership had declared the “national question” to be finally resolved: five years later, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.

How relevant is this scenario to the UK? Each day’s headlines now throw up correspondences, yet what is remarkable, and tragic, is how new these dynamics are. Writing in 1994, Hutchinson observed that there are a few “other multinational states where the core nationality exercises power through a civic rather than an ethnic identification”, with Britain being the prime example. Yet the Britain of the Nineties differed from the Soviet Union in that “the core nationality is much more dominant than were the Russians in the USSR (who had declined to barely 50 per cent of the total population) and there are many fewer minority nationalities to control”. The takeaway lesson, for Hutchinson, is that “even universalistic ideologies such as communism, possessing all the machinery of a modern technological state to achieve its aims, have ultimately to operate through ethnic core populations.” Indeed, “for a state to achieve stability… these cores must be demographically dominant and strongly identified with the state and its territories.” This social-scientific truism is increasingly the pivot of British politics.

Just as Gorbachev’s failed reforms accelerated processes which “encouraged many Russians to redefine the Soviet territory as alien and to identify the Russian territory as their homeland,” we see a similar process on the rapidly evolving British Right in distinguishing between the Britain of recent memory and its UK replacement. When even Tory grandees such as Lord Frost borrow the disparaging term “Yookay” from the internet Right to disparage what he defines as Blair’s “new country, an actual successor state to the old Great Britain [but] distinct from it”, we see a similar, explicit distinction being made as that between Russia and the USSR. The counterpoint to Blair’s UK, or YooKay — the two are, now, more or less interchangeable — is, as Frost observes, simply Britain.

Whether you welcome this development or fear it, British politics in its current tumultuous form, with all its increasingly radicalised and existential debates on immigration and demographics, on its history, social housing and the welfare state, and on the nature and boundaries of Britishness or Englishness, is inexplicable without accepting that the country has now entered this phase of political development. Almost every daily headline or “culture war” controversy strengthens this thesis, which requires a wilful blindness to ignore: indeed, it is now more vigorously heard in ordinary life, or seen in the comments of local news stories than it in the Westminster press. In rushing towards visions of civil war, social democrats such as Marr, just like his increasingly mainstream apocalyptic analogues on the Right, have skipped the more common and plausible political outcome of political pressures leading towards a reinvigorated, more tightly-defined nation state, as historically distinct in its own way as Eastern Europe’s transition from communism.

McTague’s portrait of Starmer as “the last leader of the old normal” may be better applied to Farage, a flawed politician seemingly destined to take on a daunting and unenviable historical role. When Farage can declare that “Those who try to demonise me could be in for a terrible shock once I’m gone. That’s why we say we believe that we are the last chance to restore confidence in the democratic system, to change things”, he is probably correct. Whether he is up to the challenge is doubtful. As its name suggests, the Reform Party can be understood as one of the last attempts of the old system — the UK state in its post-Blair form — to save itself. If the analogies with classical nationalism are valid, then the political horizon of interest is what comes after Reform’s likely failure in government, as some on the political Right increasingly make explicit. Rupert Lowe’s new cross-party venture, Restore Britain, is a more perfect summation of nationalist thinking.

As the most intellectually interesting politician on the Right, Robert Jenrick, declares, “The old order is collapsing — and its architects like Tony Blair are yesterday’s men and women… We live in a political interregnum” in which “we have no choice but to go advance, and embrace the new order that is coming.” Cynically or not, consciously or not, Jenrick is tapping into the ferment of nationalist ideas on the younger Right, as is a growing cohort of the Conservative Party under Badenoch’s hands-off leadership. We have entered a well-established and predictable historical process which is likely to reshape the British state entirely before it is done. Indeed, it is notable that one eyewitness observer of the transition from the Soviet Union to Russia, Dominic Cummings, has already himself transitioned from reformer to accelerationist. Others will surely follow: adapting the old Irish nationalist maxim, we can say that the UK’s crisis is Britain’s opportunity.

Yet despite the weakness of lobby journalists for vapid gossip, the individual personalities of Westminster politicians thrown up by the moment are in a sense irrelevant, making Starmer, the empty cipher, the perfect figure of our time. Like Starmer, buffeted by winds he cannot control, their positions are structural, created by the logic of events. Like us mere voters, the politicians of today and of the near future have been dragged into the slipstream of history, in a process they may not fully perceive and cannot fully control. To accurately outline the contours of the current crisis is one thing: but where it all leads, no-one can yet say.

In Blair’s case, the issue was the Lone Parent Premium, an additional payment to single parents that had been introduced under the Callaghan government in 1977. In his budget, the Conservative chancellor Ken Clarke had announced that it would be abolished by 1998.

In opposition, Labour had decried the cut. Single parents, mostly mothers, would be £6 worse off per week. Shadow Social Security Secretary Harriet Harman denounced the policy in the Commons: “The way to get lone mothers out of poverty and cut spending on benefits for them is not by cutting the amount on which they have to live year by year and plunging them further into poverty.” Yet, after the 1997 election, Harman became the social security minister tasked with implementing the very cuts she had passionately opposed only one year earlier. Blair had vowed during the election campaign to commit to Conservative spending plans for two years — and that meant seeing through Clarke’s cut. The credibility of New Labour’s economic programme was at stake.

Blair anticipated that welfare reform would be one of the biggest fights of his premiership. Behind the scenes, bitter rows erupted among senior ministers, with the foreign secretary, Robin Cook, arguing that the policy went against Labour’s core values. The international development secretary, Clare Short, warned it might destroy trust in the government.

Labour MPs worried that their constituents had not voted Labour to cut benefits for single mums. Spin doctor Alastair Campbell wrote in his diary: “The trouble we were having was explaining it as something that fitted the kind of issues on which people elected us.” Blair disagreed. He didn’t simply want to frame the issue as a fiscal necessity; instead, he believed the cuts could be justified as an anti-poverty strategy. Women who stayed on benefits would never become more prosperous. They would eke out a meagre living, at the mercy of government beneficence from budget to budget. In work, women could earn more, develop new skills, and progress in their careers, ultimately raising the standard of living for their children.

Blair persuaded Clive Soley, chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, to defend the cuts on feminist and socialist grounds. Soley audaciously claimed they were “a genuine attempt to rebuild a new welfare state fit for an economy that recognises the importance of women. That has always been part of the socialist vision.”

In spite of a petition from 120 Labour MPs pleading him to abandon the policy, Blair would not back down. He told Campbell: “All we can get out of this is strength.” He said he wanted to send the signal that “the bloke is not for turning.”

The government was heading towards a showdown. Blair, backed by his chancellor Gordon Brown, would not make any concessions. He was convinced he didn’t need to. The education secretary, David Blunkett, recorded in his own diary: “Aggravation is rising; although, in the end people will no doubt capitulate.”

The Conservatives had offered their support to the policy, so there was no risk of a defeat for the Government. At stake was Blair’s leadership over his party. In this respect, William Hague hoped that the prospect of an inevitable victory would encourage more Labour MPs to rebel. He predicted that welfare reform would be “New Labour’s Vietnam.”

Yet Blair did not demand loyalty for loyalty’s sake. He defended the policy in terms of principle. He met with rebels, spoke to the media, and later even toured the country to defend the cuts. He wrote in The Sun: “We warned you that New Labour would be different… I said we would not flinch… These were not fancy phrases to please the crowds.” His lines were delivered with such vigour that it was plausible that he really believed what he was saying.

The same cannot be said for Harman. It was obvious that she didn’t believe what she was saying. She later admitted in her memoirs: “There was no argument in favor of it.” She blamed Brown for pressuring her to support the policy on pain of contributing to a run on the pound. “I didn’t feel able to second-guess him on what the money markets would do,” she wrote.

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In one speech defending the cut, Harman’s performance was so unconvincing that a handful of Labour MPs who were planning to abstain, but were open to being persuaded to support the cuts, instead decided to vote against them. Backbench MP Chris Mullin called Harman “shameless”.

Yet many felt pressure to fall in line. While collecting signatures for a letter of protest to Blair, backbencher Jean Corston overheard another Labour MP describing the cut as wicked. When Corsten asked her colleague if she would put her name to the letter, her fellow MP made excuses and scarpered.

On 10 December 1997, the vast majority of Labour MPs marched through the “Aye” lobby to abolish the Lone Parent Payment. Some female MPs were reported to have been in tears. Even MPs on the party’s Right felt uncomfortable about their vote. Labour Right-winger Giles Radice wondered: “What have things come to when I find myself more in agreement with [left-winger] Audrey Wise and Ken Livingstone than I do with the government?”

In the end, Blair’s resolve paid off. He made no concessions to the rebels, yet only 47 voted against the proposals. A further 13 Labour MPs abstained. The whips decided not to take formal action against most of the rebels, though each one was sent a waspish ticking-off letter. Four, including Livingstone, were singled out for further punishment as they had made particularly critical comments. If they rebelled again, they were told, they would lose the whip.

This past fortnight, Starmer has demonstrated no such authority over his Party. The Prime Minister hopes that by reviving the New Labour model, he can reprise Blair’s electoral miracle. Last year, it seemed as if he had pulled it off. Starmer won 411 seats, just seven MPs shy of Blair’s record in 1997.

Yet his victory was superficial. The limits of this New Labour tribute act can be glimpsed in Blair’s and Starmer’s contrasting approaches to welfare reform. On the surface, Blair’s attempt to cut the Lone Parent Premium in 1997 bears a strong resemblance to Starmer’s attempt to cut the Personal Independence Payment (PIP). The policies are both deeply unpopular with the Labour Party’s rank and file; though they have more support in the wider electorate. They are both examples of fiscal prudence, often not considered a Labour attribute, achieved by attacking Labour-inclined groups. Politically, they show a government that is willing to make “hard choices” in the supposed “national interest”, against the wishes of idealistic Labour members.

Yet Blair and Starmer couldn’t have taken more different approaches. Blair faced down his MPs, made no concessions to them, and survived the rebellion unscathed. After the vote, Labour polled 55%, a 29-point lead over the Conservatives. In comparison, Starmer tried to face down his MPs, made some concessions to them, failed to placate many, and now faces genuine questions about the future of his leadership. Labour is currently polling at about 25%, about five points behind Reform. Although Tuesday’s vote won’t bring down his leadership, Starmer’s authority has perhaps been irrevocably shaken. Labour MPs now have a greater permission structure to challenge the leader going forward.

It goes to show that Blair was a far more astute politician: he was a fighter, but also a capable intellectual advocate of his policies. He invited the debate, and encouraged MPs to make their cases to him, only for him to come out on top.

By contrast, Starmer has failed to make a strong argument for his policies — perhaps because he lacks any real political vision. He is a manager, obsessed with rules and procedures. His political life has been a dizzying metamorphosis from soft-Left to Corbynite to Blairite. As a result, we don’t really know who he is.

Blair would never have claimed, as Starmer has recently done, that he doesn’t read all of his speeches before delivering them; or that he says things he doesn’t mean because his speechwriters tell him to do so.

It holds true that in politics, as in life, you are more likely to respect someone, even when you disagree with them, if you believe them to be motivated by genuine conviction. Blair had conviction and, even if his policy prescription was deeply flawed, his success was partly due to his ability to defend his political vision. It was clear what he thought Britain’s problems were, and how he meant to fix them.

That can hardly be said for our current Prime Minister. Starmer once said: “There is no Starmerism and there never will be.” That has turned out to be a problem, not a point of pride.

The speech, delivered “on the frontier of the new Millennium”, is one of the purest expressions of the Blairite creed you could hope to find. Politics was no longer about class struggle, Blair explained — the exploiters vs the exploited. It was a battle between the forces of progress and the forces of reaction — a question of orientation. Are you for the future or the past? As for the substance of this future, Blair is weirdly uninterested. He’s just all for it. And so, like the Communist Manifesto — with its eerie talk of spells and spectres and sorcerers — the speech has its own touch of mysticism. “These forces of change driving the future don’t stop at national boundaries,” he continued. “[They] don’t respect tradition. They wait for no one and no nation. They are universal.”

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By Richard Godwin

Blair’s delight in our silicon future might be dismissed as ancient history, were it not for his renewed influence on British governance thanks to the Tony Blair Global Institute for Change (TBI), the multinational thinktank fronted by Blair and underwritten by the Oracle billionaire, Larry Ellison to the tune of over $200 million. The TBI’s position on tech is basically that it’s amazing. “Accelerating AI adoption is… not only a matter of boosting economic growth but also of improving social outcomes,” reads one report about how we need to “reboot copyright” and to ensure that the fruits of Britain’s creative sector can be fed into Silicon Valley’s shiny new machines.

Keir Starmer has reportedly outsourced much of his policy detail to the TBI’s gleaming legions of researchers and has delivered numerous iterations of Blair’s old speech: “There is no route to growth without embracing the transformative potential of AI,” he was promising back in January. We’ll doubtless hear more of the same during the Government’s forthcoming “London Tech Week” — perhaps even a little more detail on the $330 million that Peter Thiel has signed in order to gain access to seven year’s worth of NHS data. Remember: according to Blair’s oracular vision, the likes of Thiel and Ellison are emissaries of the future, so we just have to do what these guys say, right?

So when we learn that the TBI-stamped technology minister Peter Kyle has met lobbyists from Apple, Google, Amazon and Meta, on 28 separate occasions; or that the Government is minded not to ban smartphones in schools due to a “lack of evidence”; or that campaigners are “dismayed by the lack of ambition” in the new Online Safety Act; I think we are supposed to put away any cynical thoughts. The Government is on the side of progress after all.

The trouble is, the Blairites only seem to be able to see progress in terms of whatever the tech firms tell them is progress. This might have been a mildly credible position in 1999. It’s nothing short of idiotic in the enshittified techscape of 2025. Replace “universal” with “totalizing” in Blair’s little paean and you have a fairly accurate picture of where digital technology under the current oligopoly has actually led us. A handful of firms, none of them British, actively harming children in pursuit of profit.

We can argue whether successive British Governments’ failure to regulate tech in any meaningful way has benefited the nation in the grand scheme of things — but the evidence of its dire effects on children in particular is hard to ignore. According to ONS data, between 2010 and 2014, suicide rates among British 10 to 14-year-old girls and boys increased by 167% and 92% respectively. Self-harm rates among girls rose by 78%. Anxiety diagnoses for 18 to 25-year-olds jumped by 92%. Similar patterns have emerged in just about every developed country since around 2010. Rates of adolescent depression and anxiety nearly doubled in the US between 2010 and 2019. Emergency room visits for self-harm among 10-14-year-old girls rose by 188%. This was before Covid struck and added accelerant.

Correlation is not causation, but as Jonathan Haidt demonstrated in his book, The Anxious Generation, there is no other social change as sudden, universal, or as intimately connected to the lives of teenagers as the introduction of smartphones. In 2010 smartphones barely existed; by 2024, 96% of British teenagers had one according to Ofcom. The teenage mental health crisis exploded around 2010.

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It wasn’t Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok or Reddit that invented self-harm, revenge porn, anorexia, gender dysmorphia, misogyny, extremism, incel culture, or any of the myriad ways that teen misery can mutate online. But teenage life still largely takes place amid a hostile online ecosystem in which social media companies mine their attention for profit. Whatever you’re worried about in the depths of your teenager’s soul, whatever particular sadness they harbor, it’s fairly likely the algorithm has spotted it first and tried to exploit it.

It certainly spotted Molly Russell. In 2023, Senior Coroner Andrew Walker determined that the 14-year-old British school girl had died from an act of self-harm after Instagram’s algorithms pushed her image after image inducing her to kill herself. It was the first court case that directly named one of the tech firms as a cause of harm. Her father, Ian Russell, has been clear: “It’s time to protect innocent young people, instead of allowing platforms to monetize their misery.”

Meta responded with platitudes (including some from Nick Clegg, no less), meaningless verifications and assurances that the content was indeed “safe” (in fact, Instagram continued to push inducements to self-harm even after her death). But it wasn’t a design flaw; it was the business model. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg came close to admitting as much in the recent Meta antitrust trial in the US. He testified that only about 20% of content consumed on Facebook and 10% on Instagram actually comes from a user’s friends and family. “The vast majority of the experience is more around exploring your interests, entertainment…” Whatever keeps you glued to the screen, in other words, which just happens to be the most inane, harmful, enraging, depressing, divisive content. Content which, as a recent British Standards Institution survey found, resulted in 72% of 16-21 year olds feeling worse after spending time online. Fully 46% of them wish the internet had never been invented.

The backlash against smartphones — essentially a backlash against the totalizing tech monopolies — is finally strong enough that Labour cannot afford to ignore it. There are Smartphone Free Childhood chapters in just about every community. Parents talk of little else. Even Tony Blair has now been heard saying that tech is “messing with kids minds” — though he’s not sure what to do about it.

The Government’s own position is similarly confused. Starmer would like it to be known that he has watched Adolescence with his teenage son. Gillian Keegan has limply promised to “crack down” on smartphone use in schools. Political will seems absent. As one charity worker, whose work centers on vulnerable boys online, put it to me recently: “I keep telling the Home Office, ‘Why are we not doing more to tackle these big tech companies?’ And they basically said: ‘There’s no political appetite. Big Tech is too powerful to take on’.” As politicians are lobbied here, Zuckerberg has already managed to torpedo protections for young people in America — and we can only speculate what cases his representatives made to Kyle across nine separate meetings. I wonder if Molly Russell’s name came up.

Actual policy is limp. The new Online Safety Bill continues to welcome measures such as age verification (we’ll see how the kids get round that one) and potential fines on social media companies (with no risk of prosecution), but it has clearly been watered down, with no onus to remove “harmful but legal” content. There is nothing remotely as ambitious as Australia’s ban on smartphones for under-16s.

It is an exercise in Blairite governance: if you can’t beat them, invite them to write your policy. Hence the current position regarding a total ban on smartphones in schools comes down to “more research”. Tobacco firms once wanted more research. Betting firms want more research. The fast food lobby hungers for more research. We have the research. The research shows us that smartphones in schools have been a disaster.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Republicans have joined the battle. The broligarcy are openly attacking nations like Canada, Australia and the EU for their attempts to rein in their tech monopolies. JD Vance has reserved particular fury for the UK with the implication that we should fall into line with our Imperial masters on issues such as “free speech” or risk losing favor. The cost of Silicon Valley’s favor is clear: access to data, to infrastructure and to the inner lives of British teenagers.

We have started into this moral vortex before, the strange combination of naivety, cynicism and evangelical uplift that characterized much of the Blair project. Perhaps it is the fate of apparently liberal, progressive governments to be easy on capital and vicious to the vulnerable — an inverted version of the Nixon Paradox. Yet to argue for more leniency for these companies is not to argue for change, but a still more enshittified version of the present. And this is what makes Starmer’s subservience to the exploiters so depressing. As the public begins to get the measure of these companies, the Government and its Blairite allies are opening the door wider.

The messaging is haywire. A recent newspaper headline announced with stentorian gravity the hottest May Day since records began; that same headline loomed over a photograph of swimmers frolicking in the surf. And my sheep-farmer neighbor in Cumbria — this year of all years, when the lambs were born onto bone-dry hillsides — leaned on the handlebars of his quad bike and said to me: “The thing is, Chris, when it comes to climate change, I don’t know what to believe.”

Well we do know that the world is getting hotter. Forget restricting the rise in temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, as envisaged by the 2015 Paris Agreement; depending on the time period you base your monitoring on, we’ve either already breached that limit or are about to do so. In March, the French government announced measures to prepare the country for a rise of 4°C. Even 3°C would, in the words of Lord Stern, a respected British climate economist, be “way outside the experience of Homo sapiens” and “life-changingly, civilization-changingly, awful”.

Let nobody say we weren’t warned. In 2006, Stern wrote a report about the economics of climate change for Blair’s government that was widely read — and, as it turned out, widely disregarded — both in Britain and abroad. While Stern argued that “the benefits of strong and early action far outweigh the economic costs of not acting”, the most powerful government at the time, that of President George W Bush, believed more in regime change than climate change.

Extrapolating from Stern’s figures, the $4-6 trillion that Bush and his successors spent invading and immiserating Afghanistan and Iraq would have paid for 10 years of the relatively inexpensive transition to a low-carbon global economy that was then on offer. Now, after two more decades of intensive fossil fuel consumption, ever-higher concentrations of greenhouse gases, and many political false starts, this transition has become both more costly and less assured of success. In 2024, the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance costed the necessary climate measures at around $6.5 trillion a year by 2030, rising to as much as $8 trillion by 2035.

On 29 April, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) published a paper entitled “The Climate Paradox: Why we need to reset action on Climate Change”. In the paper’s foreword, Blair wrote that voters are fed up with being asked to make “financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle” that have “minimal” effect on global emissions, and that the UN’s annual COP talking shops “will not deliver change at the speed required”.

Coming from a former prime minister who prided himself on his reading of public opinion and his prioritizing of “delivery” over dogma, these points were well made. Blair’s conclusion, however, was doctrinaire and unwise: “Any strategy based on either ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.” Environmentalists erupted.

The paper itself was authored by Lindy Fursman, a former climate adviser to the New Zealand government. Besides advocating for more investment in adaptation and technological fixes such as carbon capture and removal — both eminently sensible, though regarded by hardline environmentalists as tantamount to “giving up” on efforts to cut emissions — Fursman divided humanity’s attitude to the crisis into three historical phases. First came an age of activism in the Nineties, which was followed by a decade or so of optimism; now, we’ve entered a far more ominous age of apathy.

The age of optimism peaked in Britain in June 2019, when the nation became the first G7 economy to commit to Net Zero by 2050. The amendment to the 2008 Climate Change Act was so uncontroversial that MPs waved it through without a vote. It was a rare moment of bipartisanship in the premiership of Theresa May. It was also a year of activism. Extinction Rebellion occupied public spaces, Greta Thunberg scolded the UK parliament, and in September, in cities around the world, at least four million youngsters, many of them truants grinning in their school uniforms, took to the streets to demand radical action. So rattled was the aviation industry by flight shame that a nervy KLM ad asked customers, “Could you take the train instead? Next time, think about flying responsibly.”

Then Covid arrived, followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which laid bare, in Fursman’s words, “a fundamental reality: when faced with financial hardship, domestic economic stability and living costs take precedence over climate action”.

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In the furore that followed the TBI’s intervention, Stern described Fursman’s paper as “muddled and misleading”. “If the UK wobbles on its route to Net Zero,” he went on, “other countries may become less committed.” Yet regardless of whether the UK government “wobbles”, the future of the world will not be determined by climate action here.

Britain’s share of global emissions is 1% and falling. Its self-image as a decarbonization success story owes less to Net Zero policies than it does to the fact that Britain is a post-industrial economy offshoring emissions to Asian countries that make the processed food, clothes, and electronics we like to buy. By and large, we and much of the rest of Europe have done our emitting, while China surpassed America as the world’s biggest emitter more than 20 years ago.

Instead, it’s the increasingly populous emitters of the developing world — China, India, Southeast Asia, and Africa — that will decide what happens next. These markets should now be receiving an unprecedented inflow of affordable climate finance to enable them to feed, house and provide energy to their people without frying the world. And yet, for reasons of indebtedness, poor credit worthiness and superior returns on Wall Street, this isn’t happening except in the case of China. According to the International Energy Agency, 90% of new clean energy investment has gone to the rich world, plus China, since 2021. Just 2% has gone to Southeast Asia. And in 2024, investments in green energy in Africa, whose population is expected to double by 2070, totalled a nugatory $22 billion. This is the most significant factor in our current predicament. But it is not the only one, and, again, politics is to blame.

Far from being the subject of an international consensus, Net Zero has become as divisive a notion as Bush and Blair’s “war on terror” in the early 2000s, and without good reason, for while the war on terror was a mendacious enterprise dressed up as an elevating mission, Net Zero was once a more or less attainable goal undone by politics. As prime minister, Blair compared the fight against climate change to the battle against fascism in the Second World War, and it was his government that published the first draft of the climate change bill that went on to become law. But he also refused to end the tax-free status of aviation fuel because it would have imperilled the great British summer holiday.

Few politicians have the integrity and wherewithal to handle an issue that would test the capacities of the greatest visionary. Nor do we ask them to. But the proposition so cogently laid out by Stern in 2006 — essentially, pay not very much now in order to avoid a world of pain later on — was ignored by our leaders, and many electorates. Planning for the long term, it seems, is anathema to our instantaneous approach to capital allocation, communication and electoral success. Indeed, it may be that electoral democracy in its current state of degeneration is fundamentally unsuited to the kind of systemic change that the crisis demands. That China continues to bring coal-fired power stations online shouldn’t obscure the fact that the People’s Republic has developed by far the most plausible plan for the transition to renewable energy of any major economy.

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Given that the Chinese model cannot easily be adapted in the West, and that meaningful change here will only come from popular pressure on political and economic elites, what is lacking most obviously from the current debate is the loud and ungovernable clamour of those who have the most to lose.

For while climate anxiety may course through our tracked and cosseted young people, there is no sign of further mass protests. Extinction Rebellion activists are referred to Prevent. Greta agitates for Gaza. Parents advise their offspring to concentrate on their exams. As I was told by a theology teacher at a large London secondary school, the exuberance shown by pupils during the protest of September 2019, and the school’s support for their cause, has given way to “hopelessness”.

An infantilized and emasculated youth is no driver of revolutionary change. And yet there are two reasons for young people to act. On the negative side, and to descend into the vernacular, while the planet is to some extent demonstrably and unavoidably shafted, if no action is taken it will become worse than shafted. It will become increasingly uninhabitable.

The second reason isn’t negative at all. It’s an inspiring message of emancipation that can be summed up in the words of Jeremy Oppenheim, whose company, Systemiq, funnels investment and expertise into climate measures around the world. “Sustainability,” he writes, “is a promise of freedom: freedom from polluted air, from unaffordable energy, from food systems that harm our health and ecosystems, and from plastics and chemicals that trash our environment… It’s not about restrictions or fear — it’s about the possibility of a better life.” This “better life” is one of abundance in which the weather is our friend, our food actually tastes of something, and we thrive in intelligent partnership with the forces of nature. What could be more thrilling than that?

It’s telling that the most significant intervention on the climate in recent times has come from a septuagenarian former prime minister with a trust problem. It’s time for young people to start owning this crisis; time for them to throw off the noise-canceling headphones and try for a better life.

What we have seen since the Southport attack is the precise opposite response: uncontrolled spontaneity, which government policy is expressly designed to prevent. When Keir Starmer attended the scene to lay flowers, he was heckled by locals demanding “change” and accusing him of failure to keep the British people safe. Self-evidently, Starmer, who in August had been in power for less than a month, bears no personal responsibility for the attack: instead, he was derided as a representative of Britain’s political class, and of a British state that cannot maintain a basic level of security for its subjects.

In the same way, rioters in Southport — fuelled by false claims the killer was a Muslim refugee — cheered when they injured police during the violent disorder that followed the initial vigil, which included attempts to burn down the town mosque in what can only be termed a pogrom. Like the riot that followed in Hartlepool, violence against emissaries of the state — the police — was coupled with objectively racist and Islamophobic actual and attempted violence against migrants.

There are strong parallels with the ongoing disorder in Ireland, which is an explicit reaction to mass migration: last year’s Dublin riots, sparked by the attempted murder of schoolchildren by an Algerian migrant, were in some ways a foreshadowing for the current mass disturbances in Britain. In Southport, the spark for the rioting — the attack itself — was swiftly absorbed into a wider sense of hostility towards mass migration: protestors carried signs demanding the state “Deport them” and “Stop the Boats” to “Protect our kids at any cost”. As in Ireland, presumably local women were prominent, hectoring police and silencing wavering voices with appeals to group solidarity. While this is a very different dynamic to previous football casuals-dominated street mobilisation organised around Tommy Robinson — as represented by Wednesday’s desultory clashes in Whitehall — liberal commentators in Britain, as in Ireland, have nevertheless chosen to portray the violence as orchestrated by Robinson, rather than him piggybacking on it, as is also the case in Ireland.

Shocked by the jolt to their worldview, British liberals, for whom the depoliticisation of the political choice of mass migration is a central moral cause, have also blamed Nigel Farage, the media, the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and Vladimir Putin for the rioting, rather than the explicitly articulated motivations of the rioters themselves. But there is a matter-of-fact social-scientific term for the ongoing disorder: ethnic conflict, a usage studiously avoided by the British state for fear of its political implications. As the academic Elaine Thomas observed in in her 1998 essay “Muting Interethnic Conflict in Post-Imperial Britain”, the British state is unusual in Europe for being “exceptionally liberal in granting political rights to new arrivals” while dampening interethnic conflict by simply refusing to talk about the issue at all, and placing social sanctions on those who do. When it works, it works: “Interethnic conflict has never been as severe, prolonged, or violent in Britain as it has been in many other countries” — for which we should be thankful.

But as Thomas notes, sometimes it doesn’t work, as in Enoch Powell’s famous intervention, supported by 74% of British respondents polled at the time, when, “once the silence was broken and public debate was opened, the liberals found themselves in a weak position. Having focused on silencing the issue, they had not developed a discourse to address it,” and found themselves discomfited by demonstrations in support of Powell. The Labour government of the day dealt with the rising tensions surrounding immigration by rushing through emergency legislation that imposed an effective moratorium on extra-European immigration via the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, with the aim of assimilating migrants already here and dampening nascent violence by preventing others arriving.

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Under New Labour, however, this mostly successful policy was torn up, with the conscious intention of transforming Britain into a specifically multi-ethnic — rather than multiracial — society, largely derived from the era’s brief enthusiasm for globalisation. Downstream of then-fashionable social-scientific theories on the simultaneous inevitability and desirability of such a transformation, policy papers like the Runnymede Trust’s influential report “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” pushed to reshape Britain as “a community of communities”, a genuinely multicultural state that rejected the “narrow English-dominated, backward-looking definition of the nation”. Ethnic identities — of which the British one was framed as one among many — were to be embraced, within the parameters of the newly multicultural state, and immigration restrictions lifted to achieve this goal.

Yet Labour’s shift towards an explicitly ethnic understanding of community relations would not last long. Following the 2001 ethnic riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley, the Labour government performed a dramatic about-turn. As the Tunisian academic Hassen Zriba observed: “All of a sudden, multiculturalism became the disease that needed urgent solution.” Blair’s government commissioned five separate reports, all of which declared “that excessive cultural diversity is a hindrance to inter-racial harmony, and that community cohesion is the best solution”.

This emphasis on community cohesion was heightened by the mass casualty jihadist attacks of the 2000s and 2010s, leading inexorably — along with the Prevent programme, widened state powers of coercion and surveillance, and the accelerated construction of a civic conception of Britishness — to the “controlled spontaneity” project, the terminus of which we witnessed in Southport. While the other northwest European states which adopted a multicultural ethos, notably Sweden and the Netherlands, have since abandoned it, rhetorically the British state is still committed to multiculturalism.

In practice, however, the British state has quietly adopted a revived version of assimilationism. Over the past two decades, a capacious version of Britishness has been constructed around little more than superficial national symbolism and the desire to avoid ethnic conflict, euphemised as “British values”. Interestingly, Blair himself, who now rejects multiculturalism, has recently become an advocate of Lee Kuan Yew, in whose political philosophy Singapore’s ethnic diversity is, rather than a strength, an undesirable hindrance derived from well-meaning British colonial intentions.

But latent authoritarianism aside, Starmer is no Lee Kuan Yew. His faltering attempt to steer the discourse following the Southport attack towards tackling “knife crime” — itself a British state euphemism — highlights the state’s ideological inability to address ethnic tensions frankly, and so manage them effectively. If it were happening in another country, British journalists and politicians would discuss such dynamics matter-of-factly. This is, after all, simply the nature of human societies. Indeed, it is one of the primary reasons refugees flee their countries for Britain in the first place.

Yet when they occur in our own country, such dynamics are too dangerous to even name. Instead, ethnic groups are euphemistically termed “communities”, and the state-managed avoidance of ethnic conflict is termed “community relations”. When Balkan Roma rioted in Leeds recently, it was as an ethnic group responding to what it saw as the British state’s interference in its lives: the British state, in return, addressed its response to the nebulous “Harehills community”. When Hindus and Muslims engaged in violent intercommunal clashes in Leicester two years ago, it was as rival ethnoreligious groups, and was again responded to by the British state as an issue to be dealt with by “community leaders” — the state euphemism for its chosen intermediaries, in a form of indirect rule carried over from colonial governance.

But when the rioting is carried out by ethnic British participants, as is now the case, the limitations of this strategy reveal itself: the perception of an ethnic, rather than civic British or English, identity is actively guarded against as state policy, just as is the emergence of ethnic British “community leaders”. As such, political advocates of a British ethnic identity are isolated from mainstream discourse, as has been state policy since the Powell affair: any expression of such feeling is what Starmer means by “the far-Right”, rather than any traditionally defined desire to conduct genocides or conquer neighbouring countries. This mainland state of affairs, incidentally, is in strong contrast to Northern Ireland, where the existence of rival Irish and British ethnic groups is the basis of the political system, reified by the British state through the ethnic power-sharing apparatus of the Stormont parliament. In Northern Ireland, Britishness is an ethnic identity: across the Irish Sea, it is a firmly civic one: that these constructions differ is a function of political expediency rather than logical consistency.

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This ambivalence over referring to Britain’s various ethnic groups is contrasted by the British state’s deep engagement with identity groups based on race, a cultural quirk that academics have long highlighted, and which distinguishes Britain from its European neighbours. Even today, political discourse in Britain evades ethnicity for a focus on race in a way unusual outside America, where it stems from an almost uniquely stratified slave economy, overlaid on a settler colonial society deriving from genocide. Yet British liberals squeamish at ethnic identities — especially their own — instead obsess over the politics of race. Ethnic conflict is taboo to even discuss in the abstract: but minority racial rioting, even over imported grievances, is viewed sympathetically.

Perhaps well-intentioned, the assimilationist aim of this dynamic was counteracted by the British state’s parallel promotion of the new “BAME” identity, assembling various geographically unconnected ethnic groups together in one political whole solely by virtue of their non-European origin. Instead of reflecting our lived reality of a country now composed of multiple ethnicities, among which are the majority native British, an entirely artificial racialised binary was constructed for ideological purposes, in which the ethnic British, along with other Europeans, were merely white, while non-white Britons were encouraged to self-identify as a counterbalancing force. I am legally, but not ethnically British — like most descendants of migrants, I am perfectly happy with my own inherited ethnic identity — but in pursuit of its own convoluted logic, the British state instead chooses to define me as white, an identity of no interest to me. The long-term contribution to social harmony of this explicitly racialised innovation was, as both the ethnic conflict literature and common sense suggest, doubtful in the extreme, and the government dropped the BAME label in 2022: its mooted replacement, “global majority” is, if anything, more problematic.

The British state’s differing strategies to ethnic-minority rioting, on the one hand, and British ethnic-majority rioting on the other, are, as conservative commentators observe, markedly disproportionate. This may not be “fair”, but it is not intended to be. The function of British policing such tensions is increasingly not to prevent crime — as anyone living in Britain can see — but simply to dampen interethnic violence, in which the shrinking ethnic majority population is, as the literature is clear, analytically the most obvious and potentially volatile actor. In the words of the sociologist John Rex, whose advocacy for a new multicultural Britain was highly influential during the Nineties, the fundamental task of multi-ethnic governance is the twofold desire to “ensure that those who will come are peacefully integrated and that their coming does not lead to the collapse of the post-1945 political order”.

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That is, after all, the logic of “controlled spontaneity”: to prevent a backlash to sudden atrocities or a generalised sense of insecurity that would detach the ethnic majority from Britain’s post-Blair settlement and potentially lead to the formation of ethnic parties. Indeed, the formation of explicitly ethnic parties is the deciding factor in what academics term the shift from a pluralist society — in which ethnic conflict is managed within the existing political order, as in mainland Britain — to a plural one, where the political system revolves around ethnic rivalries, as in Northern Ireland. We are not there yet, though the formation of notionally Muslim (but de facto Pakistani and Bangladeshi) political groupings is a step in that direction, as is Reform’s entry to Parliament, understood by Farage’s voters and opponents alike as a tacit ethnic British party, though one with a strong post-war assimilationist rather than ethnic exclusionist bent.

The government’s alarm aside, the potential for serious ethnic violence seems limited, as few of the precipitating factors listed by academic specialists exist: the British state retains vast coercive power, sympathetic elites aspiring to lead majority ethnic mobilisation do not exist, and, in any case, the most heated divisions on the validity of the British ethnic group remain within the British ethnic group itself.

Instead, like the daily drumbeat of violent disorder so new to British life, but now accepted as the norm, occasional outbursts of ethnic violence, whether currently by the British or by other ethnic groups acting in their perceived communal interests, will become commonplace, as in other diverse societies. To manage such conflicts, the state will become more coercive, as Starmer now promises his supporters. But modern Britain isn’t hell: for the most part it works, better than most places in the world, even if it is far less orderly or safe than the country we grew up in. There will be no violent rupture, no radical new dispensation: things will continue as they are, only more so. This is the nature of most post-colonial societies, and now it is the nature of our own.

***

This article was first published on 3 August. It was updated on 5 August to clarify the chronology of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act.

The old system was far from ideal, of course. Successive Prime Ministers came to depend on Heywood’s personal authority in a way that now seems unhealthy. He may have been a skilled courtier, but a perception has grown since his death that Heywood had built a machine that only he could manipulate.

As a result, Keir Starmer has inherited a system that is broken; the state can no longer corral the government machine into action. Everyone in Whitehall says the same thing: the authority of the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, is shot, and with it his department. And this matters. Without an organising authority, the state stands inert, propelled only by its own momentum.

In its place, No. 10 has become even more important — the last institution able to impose its authority on the patchwork of governmental principalities that make up the British state. And yet, No 10 itself is not fit for purpose either — a creaking Georgian terrace without institutional knowledge or technological wherewithal. As such, the Treasury dominates Britain’s remaining source of institutional power and strength.

Starmer’s first two months as Prime Minister are testament to this depressing reality. Devoid of any organising narrative, it has allowed itself to be defined instead by the ongoing winter fuel fiasco. And to peer behind the front door of No 10 is to glimpse a situation that is even worse than it might seem.

Since winning power, it has been striking how quickly a sense of factionalism and distrust seems to have taken hold of a team that, before the election, was defined by its sense of collective mission. Back then, everyone was pulling in the same direction. Today, briefings find their way into the press with an alarming regularity: tales of unhappiness, fall outs, power grabs and hierarchical squabbling. Far from being the experienced steady hand who would be able to grip the Whitehall machine with immediate effect, Starmer today looks more like an early Tony Blair who had never worked in government before becoming Prime Minister.

One reason for the briefing wars, according to those involved, is that there were simply not enough jobs in government to go around. As a result, noses have been put out of joint. This, though, is the most benign explanation. Those I spoke to said the briefings were not just from embittered former aides, but reflected a genuinely uneasy atmosphere in No. 10, with a clique forming around Sue Gray on the soft-Left wing of the party and another around “the boys” who have tended to push a more “blue Labour” agenda, focused on the priorities of the working class. Rumours of a division between Gray and Morgan McSweeney, however, are overdone, according to those I spoke with. At the heart of the briefings, therefore, lies a battle to shape the nature of the government — a battle which should have been settled long before the assumption of power.

In Jonathan Powell’s memoir of his time as Blair’s chief of staff, The New Machiavelli, he quotes the observation that new leaders must learn quickly on the job to “defend what Fortune has placed in their lap”. He warns that in modern democratic societies there is no choice but to move quickly and boldly in the first 100 days, for this will define much of the rest of their time in office. “A new leader,” he writes, “has to have prepared in Opposition for that sprint in government.”

As Leader of the Opposition, Starmer seemed to know what he was doing. He had hired Gray directly from the Cabinet Office so that he could hit the ground running. Gray knew Whitehall intimately, warts and all, and surely would have formulated a plan to deal with the gaping hole of authority now sitting at the centre of the British state. So why, two months in, has nothing changed? Long-talked-about plans to create a beefed-up “Department of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet” have — so far — failed to materialise.

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Part of the reason for this is the hangover from the Truss catastrophe. Having seen what happened following her sudden removal of officials such as the Treasury’s Tom Scholar, Starmer and his team are determined to avoid any such mistakes. However, the danger is now one of overcorrection. Decisions must be made, the centre gripped and the government’s central purpose explained.

There was a widespread expectation across Whitehall that the current Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, would be summarily dispatched by Starmer. Boris Johnson had plucked Case from obscurity in the hope that he would become “his Jeremy Heywood” back when he anticipated serving a decade as Prime Minister. Yet Case remains: an eerie reminder of a disgraced former regime, shorn of the authority or respect necessary to do the job.

A new National Security Adviser was also expected to be appointed, the unlucky Tim Barrow having been ill-served by Rishi Sunak’s attempts to make him ambassador to the US just months before the election, to Labour’s fury who wanted to make the decision themselves. The Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, Elizabeth Perelman, is also expected to move on, having moved over to No. 10 from the Treasury with Rishi Sunak.

Taken together, then, Starmer has not only inherited a dysfunctional system in desperate need of reform, but a set of lame duck individuals charged with managing that system. And it is these figures who Starmer is now relying upon to steer him through these crucial opening stages of his premiership. Over the next few weeks, Starmer must oversee his first address to the Labour party conference, and then his Government’s first budget on October 30 — two moments of high political drama that will shape the remainder of the Parliament.

While most of the great reforming governments, such as Blair’s and Thatcher’s, took years before they found their stride, they had a clear strategy right from the beginning. For Thatcher it was to make Britain great again by ending the post war economic consensus; for Blair it was to drag the country into modernity through constitutional reforms and European levels of public sector investment. Starmer’s government has no equivalent purpose. Any of his five “missions” could be adopted by the Conservative Party without any controversy: “Kickstarting economic growth,” “Making Britain a clean energy superpower; “Halving serious violent crime; “Breaking down barriers to opportunity”; and “building an NHS fit for the future.” Is anyone opposed to these ambitions? Are they even political?

Starmer has created “mission boards” which will bring together leading experts from outside government with the relevant ministers from across Whitehall in order to bring a collective focus to the task. The idea is a reasonable one, though real reform will require a functioning government machine that is able to put each board’s decisions into action.

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“My experience is that there is no reform of the system that is going to deliver you big change,” Tony Blair has warned. What was needed, he concluded, was something more simple: grip. “Unless you’re driving from the top it won’t happen,” Blair warned. “It won’t happen because the system won’t have a clear enough direction if it doesn’t get it from the very top…. in the end, the authority, the leader, is the thing that makes things happen.”

So who is driving at the top? So far, Starmer has suffered the fate of almost all prime ministers, so buffeted by events that the banal acts of government must be left to someone else. First, there was the crisis in the prisons, then in the budget, and then on the streets themselves with the riots that broke out over the summer. That is before we consider the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, which have already taken up much of Starmer’s time — including yesterday’s meeting with Joe Biden in the US.

With Starmer distracted by the realities of power, the most important man in the government that few have heard of outside Westminster is the man he has tasked with coordinating the central missions of his government: the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden. Freshly installed as a member of the “quad”, through which all decisions must go — along with the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Chancellor — it is McFadden’s job to reinvigorate the Cabinet Office; the man with armed with the authority of the Prime Minister to get things done. Without a Jeremy Heywood to corral the state, much of the burden will fall on McFadden. Yet, McFadden can only do so much.

Blair — the man McFadden once worked for — is clear what the overriding task of any prime minister must be: “Make the centre STRONG.” And yet, it was not strong when Blair left office — and it is in an even worse place today. As Powell himself put it in 2010 “the little secret of the British constitution is that the centre of government is not too powerful but too weak”. Britain is today an over centralised country with a weak centre.

The British state today is in desperate need of reform. The country is taxed more than ever, but receives less in return. The economy is stagnant, living standards only just emerging from their worst squeeze in living memory and the NHS no longer seemingly able to cope with the demands placed upon it. To succeed, however, Starmer must channel his inner Ferdinand Foch: “My centre is yielding. My right is retreating. Situation excellent. J’attaque!”

This lesson from history is not one currently being heeded by Keir Starmer. He needs to get his people in place, get a grip  and get on the front foot — quickly. The system is broken, but it will be Starmer who is to blame if he cannot fix it.

What we have seen since the Southport attack is the precise opposite response: uncontrolled spontaneity, which government policy is expressly designed to prevent. When Keir Starmer attended the scene to lay flowers, he was heckled by locals demanding “change” and accusing him of failure to keep the British people safe. Self-evidently, Starmer, who has been in power for less than a month, bears no personal responsibility for the attack: instead, he was derided as a representative of Britain’s political class, and of a British state that cannot maintain a basic level of security for its subjects.

In the same way, rioters in Southport — fuelled by false claims the killer was a Muslim refugee — cheered when they injured police during the violent disorder that followed the initial vigil, which included attempts to burn down the town mosque in what can only be termed a pogrom. Like the riot that followed in Hartlepool, violence against emissaries of the state — the police — was coupled with objectively racist and Islamophobic actual and attempted violence against migrants.

There are strong parallels with the ongoing disorder in Ireland, which is an explicit reaction to mass migration: last year’s Dublin riots, sparked by the attempted murder of schoolchildren by an Algerian migrant, were in some ways a foreshadowing for the current mass disturbances in Britain. In Southport, the spark for the rioting — the attack itself — was swiftly absorbed into a wider sense of hostility towards mass migration: protestors carried signs demanding the state “Deport them” and “Stop the Boats” to “Protect our kids at any cost”. As in Ireland, presumably local women were prominent, hectoring police and silencing wavering voices with appeals to group solidarity. While this is a very different dynamic to previous football casuals-dominated street mobilisation organised around Tommy Robinson — as represented by Wednesday’s desultory clashes in Whitehall — liberal commentators in Britain, as in Ireland, have nevertheless chosen to portray the violence as orchestrated by Robinson, rather than him piggybacking on it, as is also the case in Ireland.

Shocked by the jolt to their worldview, British liberals, for whom the depoliticisation of the political choice of mass migration is a central moral cause, have also blamed Nigel Farage, the media, the Conservative Party, the Labour Party and Vladimir Putin for the rioting, rather than the explicitly articulated motivations of the rioters themselves. But there is a matter-of-fact social-scientific term for the ongoing disorder: ethnic conflict, a usage studiously avoided by the British state for fear of its political implications. As the academic Elaine Thomas observed in in her 1998 essay “Muting Interethnic Conflict in Post-Imperial Britain”, the British state is unusual in Europe for being “exceptionally liberal in granting political rights to new arrivals” while dampening interethnic conflict by simply refusing to talk about the issue at all, and placing social sanctions on those who do. When it works, it works: “Interethnic conflict has never been as severe, prolonged, or violent in Britain as it has been in many other countries” — for which we should be thankful.

But as Thomas notes, sometimes it doesn’t work, as in Enoch Powell’s famous intervention, supported by 74% of British respondents polled at the time, when, “once the silence was broken and public debate was opened, the liberals found themselves in a weak position. Having focused on silencing the issue, they had not developed a discourse to address it,” and found themselves discomfited by demonstrations in support of Powell. The Labour government of the day dealt with with the rising tensions surrounding immigration by rushing through emergency legislation that imposed an effective moratorium on extra-European immigration via the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, with the aim of assimilating migrants already here and dampening nascent violence by preventing others arriving.

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Under New Labour, however, this mostly successful policy was torn up, with the conscious intention of transforming Britain into a specifically multi-ethnic — rather than multiracial — society, largely derived from the era’s brief enthusiasm for globalisation. Downstream of then-fashionable social-scientific theories on the simultaneous inevitability and desirability of such a transformation, policy papers like the Runnymede Trust’s influential report “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” pushed to reshape Britain as “a community of communities”, a genuinely multicultural state that rejected the “narrow English-dominated, backward-looking definition of the nation”. Ethnic identities — of which the British one was framed as one among many — were to be embraced, within the parameters of the newly multicultural state, and immigration restrictions lifted to achieve this goal.

Yet Labour’s shift towards an explicitly ethnic understanding of community relations would not last long. Following the 2001 ethnic riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley, the Labour government performed a dramatic about-turn. As the Tunisian academic Hassen Zriba observed: “All of a sudden, multiculturalism became the disease that needed urgent solution.” Blair’s government commissioned five separate reports, all of which declared “that excessive cultural diversity is a hindrance to inter-racial harmony, and that community cohesion is the best solution.”

This emphasis on community cohesion was heightened by the mass casualty jihadist attacks of the 2000s and 2010s, leading inexorably — along with the Prevent programme, widened state powers of coercion and surveillance, and the accelerated construction of a civic conception of Britishness — to the “controlled spontaneity” project, the terminus of which we witnessed in Southport. While the other northwest European states which adopted a multicultural ethos, notably Sweden and the Netherlands, have since abandoned it, rhetorically the British state is still committed to multiculturalism.

In practice, however, the British state has quietly adopted a revived version of assimilationism. Over the past two decades, a capacious version of Britishness has been constructed around little more than superficial national symbolism and the desire to avoid ethnic conflict, euphemised as “British values”. Interestingly, Blair himself, who now rejects multiculturalism, has recently become an advocate of Lee Kuan Yew, in whose political philosophy Singapore’s ethnic diversity is, rather than a strength, an undesirable hindrance derived from well-meaning British colonial intentions.

But latent authoritarianism aside, Starmer is no Lee Kuan Yew. His faltering attempt to steer the discourse following the Southport attack towards tackling “knife crime” — itself a British state euphemism — highlights the state’s ideological inability to address ethnic tensions frankly, and so manage them effectively. If it were happening in another country, British journalists and politicians would discuss such dynamics matter-of-factly. This is, after all, simply the nature of human societies. Indeed, it is one of the primary reasons refugees flee their countries for Britain in the first place.

Yet when they occur in our own country, such dynamics are too dangerous to even name. Instead, ethnic groups are euphemistically termed “communities”, and the state-managed avoidance of ethnic conflict is termed “community relations”. When Balkan Roma rioted in Leeds recently, it was as an ethnic group responding to what it saw as the British state’s interference in its lives: the British state, in return, addressed its response to the nebulous “Harehills community”. When Hindus and Muslims engaged in violent intercommunal clashes in Leicester two years ago, it was as rival ethnoreligious groups, and was again responded to by the British state as an issue to be dealt with by “community leaders” — the state euphemism for its chosen intermediaries, in a form of indirect rule carried over from colonial governance.

But when the rioting is carried out by ethnic British participants, as is now the case, the limitations of this strategy reveal itself: the perception of an ethnic, rather than civic British or English, identity is actively guarded against as state policy, just as is the emergence of ethnic British “community leaders”. As such, political advocates of a British ethnic identity are isolated from mainstream discourse, as has been state policy since the Powell affair: any expression of such feeling is what Starmer means by “the far-Right”, rather than any traditionally defined desire to conduct genocides or conquer neighbouring countries. This mainland state of affairs, incidentally, is in strong contrast to Northern Ireland, where the existence of rival Irish and British ethnic groups is the basis of the political system, reified by the British state through the ethnic power-sharing apparatus of the Stormont parliament. In Northern Ireland, Britishness is an ethnic identity: across the Irish Sea, it is a firmly civic one: that these constructions differ is a function of political expediency rather than logical consistency.

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This ambivalence over referring to Britain’s various ethnic groups is contrasted by the British state’s deep engagement with identity groups based on race, a cultural quirk that academics have long highlighted, and which distinguishes Britain from its European neighbours. Even today, political discourse in Britain evades ethnicity for a focus on race in a way unusual outside America, where it stems from an almost uniquely stratified slave economy, overlaid on a settler colonial society deriving from genocide. Yet British liberals squeamish at ethnic identities — especially their own — instead obsess over the politics of race. Ethnic conflict is taboo to even discuss in the abstract: but minority racial rioting, even over imported grievances, is viewed sympathetically.

Perhaps well-intentioned, the assimilationist aim of this dynamic was counteracted by the British state’s parallel promotion of the new “BAME” identity, assembling various geographically unconnected ethnic groups together in one political whole solely by virtue of their non-European origin. Instead of reflecting our lived reality of a country now composed of multiple ethnicities, among which are the majority native British, an entirely artificial racialised binary was constructed for ideological purposes, in which the ethnic British, along with other Europeans, were merely white, while non-white Britons were encouraged to self-identify as a counterbalancing force. I am legally, but not ethnically British — like most descendants of migrants, I am perfectly happy with my own inherited ethnic identity — but in pursuit of its own convoluted logic, the British state instead chooses to define me as white, an identity of no interest to me. The long-term contribution to social harmony of this explicitly racialised innovation was, as both the ethnic conflict literature and common sense suggest, doubtful in the extreme, and the government dropped the BAME label in 2022: its mooted replacement, “global majority” is, if anything, more problematic.

The British state’s differing strategies to ethnic-minority rioting, on the one hand, and British ethnic-majority rioting on the other, are, as conservative commentators observe, markedly disproportionate. This may not be “fair”, but it is not intended to be. The function of British policing such tensions is increasingly not to prevent crime — as anyone living in Britain can see — but simply to dampen interethnic violence, in which the shrinking ethnic majority population is, as the literature is clear, analytically the most obvious and potentially volatile actor. In the words of the sociologist John Rex, whose advocacy for a new multicultural Britain was highly influential during the Nineties, the fundamental task of multi-ethnic governance is the twofold desire to “ensure that those who will come are peacefully integrated and that their coming does not lead to the collapse of the post-1945 political order”.

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That is, after all, the logic of “controlled spontaneity”: to prevent a backlash to sudden atrocities or a generalised sense of insecurity that would detach the ethnic majority from Britain’s post-Blair settlement and potentially lead to the formation of ethnic parties. Indeed, the formation of explicitly ethnic parties is the deciding factor in what academics term the shift from a pluralist society — in which ethnic conflict is managed within the existing political order, as in mainland Britain — to a plural one, where the political system revolves around ethnic rivalries, as in Northern Ireland. We are not there yet, though the formation of notionally Muslim (but de facto Pakistani and Bangladeshi) political groupings is a step in that direction, as is Reform’s entry to Parliament, understood by Farage’s voters and opponents alike as a tacit ethnic British party, though one with a strong post-war assimilationist rather than ethnic exclusionist bent.

The government’s alarm aside, the potential for serious ethnic violence seems limited, as few of the precipitating factors listed by academic specialists exist: the British state retains vast coercive power, sympathetic elites aspiring to lead majority ethnic mobilisation do not exist, and, in any case, the most heated divisions on the validity of the British ethnic group remain within the British ethnic group itself.

Instead, like the daily drumbeat of violent disorder so new to British life, but now accepted as the norm, occasional outbursts of ethnic violence, whether currently by the British or by other ethnic groups acting in their perceived communal interests, will become commonplace, as in other diverse societies. To manage such conflicts, the state will become more coercive, as Starmer now promises his supporters. But modern Britain isn’t hell: for the most part it works, better than most places in the world, even if it is far less orderly or safe than the country we grew up in. There will be no violent rupture, no radical new dispensation: things will continue as they are, only more so. This is the nature of most post-colonial societies, and now it is the nature of our own.

***

This article was updated on 5 August to clarify the chronology of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act.

And yet, the removal vans had scarcely pulled away from No. 10 before news crept out that Britain’s prisons are full, and the Lord High Chancellor, Shabana Mahmood, may be obliged to release some 40,000 criminals less than halfway through their sentences, to ease overcrowding. The domestic violence charity Refuge has already warned that this means domestic abusers may walk free having served barely 40% of their supposed sentence.

To Starmer’s haters, the report is evidence of a broader far-Left utopianism: the ideology that wants police defunded, borders opened, and drug addicts “treated” with free drugs. His defenders, meanwhile, retort that the Tories created this problem. And it’s true that Britain’s prisons were at capacity before Starmer took office; last year, judges were being told not to hand down custodial sentences because there was no room to incarcerate the prisoners. Then, back in May, Sky reported that Sunak’s government had quietly introduced further early-release measures to ease pressure on prisons, even including inmates deemed “high-risk”.

Then, ahead of the election, Sunak reportedly turned his own inaction into a trap for the new administration. In May, he blocked a request to release up to 500 more offenders early, leaving the problem for Starmer to deal with instead. Taken all together, the headlines read more like a Tory landmine than incontrovertible evidence of Starmer being soft on crime.

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But even if he isn’t, his problems go deeper than just prison capacity. A glance at law and order in Britain since the last Labour administration reveals that the Tories did little to improve on Blair’s approach, and much to make things worse. And also that the New Labour policy on law and order had its own roots in a long-term trend of declining social trust and growing values pluralism. While the Tories’ record as inheritors to this approach leaves much to be desired, Starmer will find it tricky to do better: he has a far harder hand to play than Blair.

As the last Labour leader to secure a landslide, Blair threaded the needle between aspirational, liberal-leaning, middle-class voters and his more authoritarian Old Labour base by strategically emphasising law and order in measures such as the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act — even as he liberalised many other aspects of the country. This Act took aim especially at “antisocial” behaviour, and introduced new forms of non-custodial surveillance and control such as Asbos. As well as legislation, Blair also turbocharged funding for criminal justice, including a 21% real-terms spending boost for the police. This was all designed to operate alongside increased spending on welfare and social services. The rationale was alleviating the poverty that contributes to crime, while punishing wrongdoers: “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.”

Did the package work? It depends who you ask, and how you count. As one study reports, in 2005, the Blair government bragged about presiding over a 30% fall in crime; in opposition, meanwhile, Michael Howard accused Labour the same year of enabling a 16% rise. Both were right — just drawing, respectively, on the British Crime Survey and recorded police statistics.

Meanwhile, even as competing statisticians bickered over the data, Britain under New Labour continued to grow more intentionally multicultural and socially liberal — a pluralism in turn contained by Blair’s proliferating infrastructures of surveillance, social regulation, and para-judicial control. No one could tell you what to do, the “modern” British norm declared; but if you were too expressive in your individualism, you might end up with an Asbo, or an electronic tag, or a bevy of social workers to “support” you insistently until you did as you were asked.

These new architectures of social control served as a replacement for the shared moral codes that were already thinning under the hot winds of “there’s no such thing as society” Thatcherism, when New Labour were first elected. And arguably they worked well enough, enabling the continued pursuit of pluralism — at least until the money ran out. Then, after the global financial crash, we got Tory austerity plus some mumbling about “the big society”: in other words, much the same society-wide liberal individualism as during the Blair years, only now accompanied by cuts to the public services that had held things together in the previous decade. Blair-esque bureaucratisation of public space advanced, for example in the 2014 introduction of Public Spaces Protection Orders — but now such developments came without the blank cheque. Indeed, both the police and the Labour Party accused the Conservatives of real-terms cuts, by as much as 33%. Certainly, officer numbers fell by around 20,000 between 2009 and 2016, undoing the New Labour police workforce expansion.

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In other words, Blair’s legacy of suffocating social regulation has mushroomed, but enforcement has grown increasingly patchy. The corrosive cumulative impression has become that burglars can rob your home with impunity, and shoplifters can help themselves, but mean tweets will get you arrested.

But will matters improve under Starmer? It’s hard to say. So far, Starmer’s law and order approach sounds reassuringly Blairish: he is, for example, a longstanding critic of Tory prison policy, has promised 20,000 new prison places, and also pledged to prioritise antisocial behaviour and recruit 13,000 neighbourhood police officers. But Starmer’s choice of Minister for Prisons hints at some of the pitfalls he may face. James Timpson is CEO of the Timpson shoe repair chain, which makes a point of employing ex-prisoners, who comprise some 10% of Timpson’s workforce. Timpson is also former chair of the Prison Reform Trust, in which role he previously declared that “only a third” of prisoners should definitely be there.

Timpson’s advocacy of rehabilitation over jail time was echoed by Starmer following his election, when he vowed to cut the numbers reoffending and roll out a “tough love” programme focusing on “youth futures”. This proposal, dubbed “Sure Start for teenagers”, promises to bring together law enforcement, mental health specialists, and youth workers, in order to tackle knife crime. Elsewhere, Starmer has pledged to create “community and victim payback boards” involving “local communities” in dispensing justice for low-level offences.

All this suggests that Starmer — or perhaps the party behind him — places great trust in the power of non-carceral measures to address misbehaviour. And this, in turn, implies considerable trust in his government to be able to roll out enough of the social infrastructure this requires, to make such measures work. We will have to hope, then, that Labour can scratch together enough loose change to pay for it all. With post-1997 boomtime funding, “Sure Start for teenagers” might have been both compassionate and hard-hitting. Amid a fiscal crisis, shrinking tax base and stagnant economy, though, it runs a grave risk of winding up as a toothless half-measure: just the “more youth clubs” meme so often parodied on the Right.

Then there’s the pluralism. The mass immigration inaugurated by New Labour, in part “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity”, has now delivered a society so very diverse it’s becoming openly sectarian in some places, with white identity politics on the rise in retaliation. Indeed, His Toniness has already descended from plutocratic Olympus to advise Starmer to rein in immigration, in order not to fan the flames of “populism” any further.

In blithe disregard of these developments, Starmer’s proposed “community payback boards” will, we are told, bring together “community leaders” with other officials to determine community service sentencing locally. It sounds cuddly and decentralised; but is Britain still cohesive enough to devolve power in this way? Perhaps not; just recently, Labour MP Jess Phillips had her election speech booed by local pro-Gaza Muslims, in a context of such ferocious harassment and intimidation she didn’t even dare acknowledge its drivers directly, instead pretending to blame it on misogyny. In the context of such ethnic and religious fragmentation, anything that further empowers “community leaders” risks being an open door for tribal institutional capture, and even more accelerated fracturing of the polity.

Let’s hope none of that happens. Who knows? Perhaps Starmer will dredge up enough money to fund the police properly, build enough prisons to keep dangerous offenders off the streets, give “Sure Start for teenagers” the resources it needs, and roll out effective local institutions able to impose and enforce appropriate community service. Perhaps none of this will get politicised, or captured by sectarian “communities”. Perhaps all the muggers and loiterers and shoplifters will either be taken off the streets, or cured of their waywardness, and our streets really will get safer.

I hope they do. But I suspect that policing a radically pluralistic polity requires either hard authoritarianism, or a lot of money for the soft, Blairite kind. Starmer has an ebullient, freshly elected party of Left-wingers behind him, making the former politically difficult. And he has very little fiscal headroom for the latter. In that context, we risk ending up with the worst of all worlds: the same fissiparous polity and squeezed funding as under the Tories, just this time with a rueful grin and a side order of progressive humbug.

If that’s so, no amount of noble rhetoric about rehabilitation will disguise the truth for long. And it won’t really matter whether the label on the bottle says vintage social justice, or just sparkling anarcho-tyranny; the sour taste will be the same.

Only four years ago, when running for Labour leader, Starmer promised party members that he would be different. “The selections for Labour candidates need to be more democratic and we should end NEC impositions of candidates,” he tweeted in February 2020. “Local Party members should select their candidates for every election.” There were no caveats; his promise couldn’t have been clearer.

More than a year later, when we briefly chatted at a book launch in London, Starmer was still singing the same tune. He once again insisted that Labour would embrace greater transparency when it came to parliamentary selections. There would, he assured me, be no parachuting in of candidates “like the Milibands” — a reference to brothers David and Ed, both social advisers who were found seats before the 2001 and 2005 elections respectively. We even discussed the dangers of finding seats for some of his closest advisers — people who might make excellent cabinet ministers but could struggle to win over a local Labour Party.

Back then, I could not have predicted how ruthless and clinical those same advisers would be. On Monday and Tuesday, no fewer than seven Labour MPs announced they were standing down at the election. This sudden rush of departures was remarkable, but no coincidence.

While the number of Conservative resignations has steadily grown over the past three years, Labour’s tally has been strikingly low. In the 16 months between September 2022 and January 2024, for example, just two Labour MPs announced they were stepping aside. And yet, it was obvious to many that significantly more had made the decision to retire, but were deliberately holding back to help the party leadership. For as we saw this week, by delaying their announcement until very close to the election, they would allow the NEC to claim it’s far too late to involve party members in the selection decision. They would, as a result, have to “parachute” someone in.

Within hours of this week’s retirements, sources within Labour HQ told me who their lucky replacements would be. In each seat, the NEC went through the process of interviewing a shortlist of names — but everyone knew who they were going to pick.

So, in Makerfield, near Wigan in Lancashire, the NEC panel imposed Josh Simons, the director of the Starmerite think tank Labour Together. For Leyton and Wanstead, where John Cryer, chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, stood down on Monday, they chose Calvin Bailey, a former RAF squadron leader who Starmer’s team see as a future Defence Secretary. In both constituencies, the first Labour members heard of the decisions was following leaks on social media.

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Such manoeuvrings, of course, have long been part of Labour’s DNA. Among friends, Tony Blair has admitted his deep regret after chaperoning duff MPs into the Lords so he could snatch their empty seats. It effectively amounted to bribery, though you wouldn’t be able to convince a court of law it happened.

Even so, in 1997, the 69-year-old Labour MP Sir Ray Powell blew the gaff on the whole process when he publicly claimed he’d been offered a peerage by a senior Labour figure to give up his seat in South Wales. At around the same time, the same deal was offered to John Gilbert, the MP for Dudley North who’d been minister in Callaghan’s government during the Seventies. But Gilbert was a tough negotiator. He insisted a peerage wasn’t enough — he wanted to be Ambassador to Washington. That was, however, a demand too far for Blair’s people, so they instead promised that Gilbert would get both a peerage and a ministerial job for two years in the new government. And just like that he became minister of state at the MoD.

What was Blair’s game-plan here? At the time, he was worried — believe it or not — that there would be too few lawyers on the Labour benches, and not enough to fill the law officer posts. So to remedy this, his old flat-mate Charlie Falconer was summoned for Dudley North. However, when he went before the NEC committee, Falconer was asked where he sent his sons to school; and when he admitted they attended distinguished private schools, Westminster and St Paul’s, his ambitions were snuffed out.

Almost three decades later, I accept of course — as I suggested to Starmer himself — that he can’t act in a wholly democratic manner. Party leaders should have some scope to get top talent into the Commons, because it’s vital that governments are formed from the best and the brightest. And it’s an unfortunate fact that some extremely able people do not get through selection processes, or have the right local connections to secure a seat in a Labour area. If that’s the case, on rare occasions the suspension of local party democracy can be justified. But you should still be open and honest about what you’re doing.

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This time around, by contrast, it’s bogus to argue that Labour had no option but to impose candidates from head office on the grounds that there isn’t time for a proper form of selection. The Conservatives, after all, are still involving party members in their last-minute selections, many of which will take place this weekend. Even if the Tories’ final three-name shortlists have been influenced by CCHQ, at least they get some sort of choice.

Moreover, it’s not even as if this week’s NEC parachute operations have yielded a raft of future political geniuses. Indeed, no fewer than five of the leaked names are themselves members of the National Executive, including James Asser, chair of the NEC, who was yesterday handed West Ham and Beckton. Perhaps most revealing of all is the man chosen to stand in North Durham: Luke Akehurst, the ruthless leader of the NEC’s Right-leaning faction who has long argued that there is no room for dissent in the Parliamentary Labour Party.

What’s also interesting is how most of the parachuted candidates owe their sudden success to the NEC and Starmer’s close advisers, rather than Starmer himself. The Labour leader seems to have had little involvement apart from pushing for two Labour figures from his own Camden council. One of them, council leader Georgia Gould, is the daughter of the late Blair adviser Philip Gould and is already being tipped as a likely future cabinet minister. The other, Abdul Hai, was expected to be gifted Stratford and Bow — but amazingly, yesterday morning, McSweeney challenged Starmer by pushing instead for Uma Kumaran, a former adviser to the leader. Seen in this light, one begins to wonder how much Starmer really controls his own party — or, for that matter, how much power his advisers wield behind the scenes. Judging by the past few days, it doesn’t augur well.

Nor does this week’s operation offer an encouraging prequel to how a future Starmer government might behave. Having suddenly got the power to impose their favoured candidates, his senior advisers are handing out seats to their factional friends and NEC cronies. Indeed, they seem to be behaving like a bunch of schoolboys who have broken into the school tuck-shop and are now gorging themselves sick. And as they do, one suspects they have missed a delicious twist, 27 years on, to the aforementioned Dudley North story.

In 2022, the Labour Party in Lincoln chose as their candidate one Hamish Falconer, whose public-school education had barred his father from becoming a Labour MP. Despite this Achilles’s heel, Hamish, whose record at the Foreign Office suggests he’s brimming with talent, spent six months courting party members in the constituency. The result? He bucked the trend in selection by defeating his local rival by a margin of five-to-one. Proof, if we needed it, that often a parachute isn’t required.

And yet the first thing to catch your eye as you walk into this chic, open-plan room that will be the nerve centre of Labour’s general election campaign, are the desks right in the middle of the room: those of Morgan McSweeney and Pat McFadden, the party’s campaign director and coordinator respectively. Labour’s election generalissimos.

Both are slight-but-steely men of distinctly Irish extraction: McSweeney born and brought up outside Cork; McFadden the Glaswegian son of parents who emigrated from Donegal. Add Sue Gray, the daughter of Belfast parents who moved to London in the Fifties, and Starmer’s top team is strikingly Irish. Softly spoken but hard at the same time, each of them is expected to play a significant role in the coming Labour government.

Of these three, though, it is McSweeney who has the aura of power. He is the architect and owner of the Starmer operation. “This is his project,” as one senior Labour figure put it. “He designed it; he did the research; he drew the conclusions; and he delivered Starmer.” As such, McSweeney remains the untouchable adviser at the heart of today’s Labour party, the well-source of Starmerism.

McSweeney’s influence has become a source of much speculation in Westminster — and, of course, bitterness on the Left, much of which sees him as a kind of ruthless Machiavel who has delivered the party into the hands of the Labour Right through force of cunning and deception. And, it should be said, there is some truth to this analysis. In the immediate aftermath of the 2017 general election campaign, McSweeney took over as director of “Labour Together”, an organisation whose original intention was to shore up the Labour coalition, only to turn it into a tool to defeat the Corbynite Left as a first step on the route back to power. Even in the days after the Grenfell tower disaster, when it looked as though the Conservative government might fall, McSweeney did not waver in his commitment to remove Corbyn as leader.

In the two years that followed, McSweeney canvassed party members to identify what they needed from a Corbyn replacement, revealing a party membership that was not lost to a militant army of infiltrators, as some believed, but one that could be persuaded to back a figure from outside the Corbynite Left as long as they were not advocating a return to the failures of the past. It was from this research that McSweeney alighted on Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary who had returned  to Corbyn’s shadow cabinet after his reelection as Labour leader in 2016 and remained with him until the defeat in 2020. With McSweeney’s guidance, Starmer offered Labour members a carefully constructed set of promises: to increase taxes on the rich, abolish universal credit, scrap tuition fees, defend free movement of people and initiate a green energy revolution.

Starmer has ditched many of them since becoming leader. Taxes will not rise, freedom of movement will not return, and green investment will have to wait until there is the money to pay for it. In the meantime, Jeremy Corbyn has been kicked out of the party, the Left has lost almost all its influence and the old Right has prospered. So, is New Labour on its way back? Pat McFadden’s elevation certainly suggests the Blairites are back at the heart of today’s Labour party. McFadden was Tony Blair’s Political Secretary in No. 10. and remains a committed devotee of the old master. His wife Marianna, meanwhile, is now McSweeney’s deputy, having moved over from the Tony Blair Institute, which Starmer has praised as “the very best of public policy innovation”. Is this, then, a Blairite reconquista?

No — and to see the McSweeney-Starmer project as a return to Blairism is to miss the point entirely. Over the past few months I have spoken to many leading figures in the party who have worked with and know McSweeney, Starmer and Blair well. Not only does McSweeney reject Tony Blair’s central analysis of politics and what Labour should do as a result, but for much of his time trying to retake the Labour Party, McSweeney was not just battling the Corbynite Left, who were determined to maintain control of the party, but the Blairite Right, many of whom had concluded it was already dead and were determined to create something new in its place.

The core of the McSweeney project, in other words, is not a restoration of Blairism, but a rejection of it.

***

In 2017, the year Morgan McSweeney became director of Labour Together, Tony Blair created his Institute for Global Change. The TBI, as it became known, merged the various charities, businesses and other assorted organisations that the former prime minister had built since leaving office into one giant not-for-profit. Central to this venture was a new policy unit whose stated purpose was to “renew the centre”.

Blair recruited a group of smart, young politicos to come up with the ideas he believed were necessary to save the liberal order. He headed up his team with the German-American academic and writer, Yascha Mounk, who had written a series of polemical warnings about the state of Western democracy and how to save it.

The central idea of the new unit was to promote Blair’s brand of “radical centrism”: the view that the real divide in British politics is no longer between Left and Right, but between those who are open to the modern world (the centrists) and those who are closed to its reality and only want to exploit people’s grievances about it (the populists). In this world, George Osborne and David Cameron are potential fellow centrists, while Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn are populists.

Blair, I’m told, believes that the Labour Party is essentially a product of the industrial revolution and must dramatically reform itself to survive the technological upheaval now taking place. Radical centrism, then, is not just a tactic for winning, but an idea built on a belief in irresistible technological and social change in an era of globalisation that is eroding the very idea of a working class which Labour was created to represent.

Blair has long thought this. When he came to power in 1997, he called for a new progressive alliance with the Liberal Democrats. This, he believed, would usher in a new century dominated by what he called the “radicals”, much as the 20th century had been dominated by the conservatives. Ironically, this progressive alliance died because Blair was too strong to need it. Yet, the idea was brought back to life in the wake of the 2017 general election when Blairism seemed at its weakest — with Corbyn in control of Labour, the Conservative government struggling to enact Brexit, and only Emmanuel Macron lighting up an alternative path in France.

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In public, Blair insisted that he was not in any way “advocating a new party, organising one, or wanting to vote for one”. However, he had concluded that the Labour Party was finished, according to someone who shared his views, and was involved in discussions about a new party. “He would tell those who thought otherwise that they were being nostalgic,” said the same associate. “He felt that too many in the party could not reconcile themselves to the reality that Labour was simply irrecoverable, passed its sell-by date.”

And there were attempts to set up new parties at this time. In 2018, one alternative centrist party emerged called United For Change, backed by the Labour donor Simon Franks, which briefly held onto the notion that it could find success by capitalising on the anti-politics sentiment of the moment. It reportedly contacted political figures as divergent as Nick Clegg and Dominic Cummings to see if they were interested (they weren’t). One of its founders was Ryan Wain, now an Executive Director at the Tony Blair Institute. At the same time, there was a breakaway faction of MPs from across the political spectrum, many of whom would go on to form Change UK, another short-lived centrist movement trying to slay the old political divide.

McSweeney found himself competing for donations with another group yet trying to raise money for a new “En Marche” style movement. Some Labour donors were even presented with a formal proposal for a new party, written in September 2018, which was leaked to Labour Together and various Labour MPs. Those now close to Starmer believe it came from figures connected to Blair (though not from Blair himself).

I was recently handed a copy of this authorless, 72-page “Political Movement, Planning Document” calling for the creation of a new party that was being shared with Labour donors in 2018. In its “executive summary”, the anonymous author declares: “Britain is stuck. The promise that the next generation will be better off than their parents is broken. Inequality is tearing the country apart. Housing is too expensive, earnings are static, and the quality of work is too poor for too many. The world is changing fast and we’re retreating from it. The old Left-Right binary divide can no longer provide a platform that meets the challenges of today or the future.”

Such failure offered an opportunity for something new, the author argued. “The old parties cannot face the future because they have run out of answers, energy and leadership. Now is the time for Britain to move on and face the future.” A new “movement” to bring forward “a new political class” was needed. This new political class would then “scale the social innovation that is already happening in our communities” while “incubating solutions not ideology”.

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Such solutions are then set out in distinctly New Labour language: early years education to reduce inequality; universal child care to help people back to work; a strong NHS and affordable housing. Planning reform is also mentioned, or what the author calls “rezoning land up, out and in”. Taxes should be on land, not work; the economy remain open; and “meaningless immigration caps” removed. Britain must also reclaim its role “as a global leader” by tackling international challenges such as climate change. “We can move on to this future, but only if we have the courage to face it.” As worthy as these policies may or may not be, they seem unlikely to form the basis of a great new popular uprising.

McSweeney’s view, according to those who know him well, is even harsher, seeing the document as everything that is wrong with progressive politics today, attempting to tap into an anti-political sentiment with a clarion call for a new political class wrapped in language seemingly from another era. At the core of his disagreement, however, is the document’s attitude to class. “Every century in Britain, a new force in politics has emerged as a result of big shifts in society,” the document declares. “These shifts create the new coalitions upon which a new politics can be built.” And the big shift in the 21st century?“The growing dominance of the middle classes and university graduates”. Among these “rising social groups” as the document calls them — “graduates, middle-class professionals, and ethnic minorities” — there is an openness to the world not found among those from “the once-dominant but now fast-declining groups” listed as “older white voters, the working classes, and school leavers”.

The central argument for the proposed new political party, therefore, is that class is no longer the central divide in democratic politics. “A voter’s views on multiculturalism, diversity, immigration and the internet are now a better predictor of political allegiance than economic interests,” the document argues. A majority of “open” voters in every region of the UK believe “multiculturalism, social liberalism, feminism, environmental sustainability, immigration, globalisation and technology” are positive. As such “for the first time in a century, a new national force in British politics could thrive”. To get such a movement off the ground, a charismatic leader was needed and an army of new supporters. Oh, and money — hence the proposal. The document suggested offering free membership to all with a higher £5.99-a-month “founder” tier with the offer: “Found the new politics for the same price as a Netflix subscription.”

For much of late 2018 and 2019, as parliament ground to a halt over Brexit and Tony Blair became ever more outspoken in his call for a second referendum to break the deadlock, McSweeney was fighting to persuade donors to boycott this proposed new party: not just because it posed an existential threat to his own attempt to take control of the Labour Party — but because he thought its political analysis was useless. McSweeney and Starmer fundamentally do not accept the idea that there is an ever greater number of “open” liberal graduates who can or should replace the working classes.

When one donor asked McSweeney why he should not support the proposal as a “lifeboat” in case Labour Together failed, McSweeney responded that, if Labour Together succeeded, the first thing he would do would be to blow the lifeboat out of the water.

***

The formative moment in Morgan McSweeney’s career came long before he took over Labour Together. It was 2008, and he had been tasked by Barking and Dagenham Borough Council with promoting community relations. Under the Race Relations Act of 2000, public authorities had a duty to “promote equality of opportunity and good relations between persons of different racial groups”. In 2008, the Labour-run council concluded that this meant defeating the British National Party, which had gained a foothold in the area.

McSweeney found a place failed both by its Labour council and its Labour government. At the centre of the borough was Becontree, once the biggest council estate in the world, supported by the Ford car plant in nearby Dagenham. By the time Blair became prime minister in 1997, however, deindustrialisation and right-to-buy had undermined its social fabric. Homes had been bought by landlords, divided up and rented out, often to new immigrant families attracted to the cheapest housing in London. As the area became more transient, it became less maintained. As tenants came and went, landlords would simply dump their unwanted belongings in front gardens. When residents complained, the council produced pamphlets disproving this “disinformation”, and emphasising how much they had spent cleaning up the area. Enter the BNP, who simply blamed the foreigners.

For McSweeney the problem was not one of communication, but of reality. The area had got worse. Families who had lived here for generations were embarrassed that the houses next to them were suddenly a mess. They were also angry that absentee landlords from Hackney, Islington, Essex and beyond were able to act with impunity, while they could barely change the colour of their front door without council permission. In response, McSweeney encouraged the removal of the existing council leader and helped deliver one of the most popular policies in local government history: the “eyesore gardens policy”, proposed by the new council leader Liam Smith, whereby the local council sent in workers to remove the rubbish outside people’s homes — and then charged the landlords for the trouble. In 2006, the BNP had stood 13 candidates in the local elections and won 12 seats. In 2010, they lost them all as Labour swept the board winning every single seat in the borough.

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McSweeney’s lesson from Barking was not just that voters should be listened to because that was good politics, but that voters should be listened to because they knew what they were talking about. They were right about Barking and the council had been wrong. Nationally, however, a similar story was playing out, McSweeney believed. In 2010, the Labour Party had gone into the election telling voters the recession wasn’t their fault because it was caused by a global crisis; they were acting like a giant Barking Borough Council. Voters had every right to blame the Labour government for the reality of falling living standards. Something new was needed, but Labour wasn’t offering it.

McSweeney carried this analysis into his job at Labour Together. And so, while he was battling the separatists trying to create a new movement to replace the Labour Party, he was also pushing away the advances of Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, who had set up the “Future Britain Group” to stop wavering Labour MPs from leaving the party. Though Watson’s aims seemed aligned with Labour Together, McSweeney concluded that his group looked too much like an attempt to resuscitate New Labour by uniting the old Blairite and Brownite tribes which had been bickering with each other ever since the party’s defeat in 2010. And New Labour, in McSweeney’s view, was not a solution to Corbynism, but a barrier to its defeat.

If anything, according to those who know him, McSweeney believes Blair has only become more removed from the reality of people’s lives in the years since he has left power. Instead of trying to improve the living standards of the ordinary poor in places like Barking, the radical centrism he proposes now seems to be based on an idea that progressive parties would be better off if they simply assembled a new coalition of voters who were not so poor. Forget the council house tenants who voted Leave; target the landlords who voted Remain.

As director of Labour Together, McSweeney advised Starmer that the only way to win over the party membership and the wider electorate was to reject such an analysis and move beyond New Labour. This was necessary politically, if Labour was to stand a chance of winning again. But it was also a reflection of reality. Even before the financial crisis, ordinary people were not seeing the benefits from the national economic growth in the way they should, McSweeney argued. The BNP was growing in Barking before 2008.

The Labour MP for Dagenham, Jon Cruddas, told me that Barking was the canary in the coal mine of British politics — and it took a man from Cork to find it.

***

The radicalism at the heart of the McSweeney-Starmer project is that it is, in effect, trying to prove Blair wrong — but using many of the tools Blair mastered to do so. When Starmer appeared alongside Blair on stage at the TBI’s Future of Britain conference last year — widely reported as their coming together — Starmer actually delivered a subtle rebuke of his predecessor’s political argument. “The project,” he declared, speaking of his own designs on power “is to return Labour to the service of working people, to become once again the natural vehicle for their hopes and aspirations.”

There were other projects available, he admitted. One alternative was what he called the “rabbit hole of identity politics”. But the other was more pointed. “You could even completely unmoor from the concerns of working people,” Starmer said as Blair watched on. “That sounds ridiculous to me, but some people did seriously suggest it after the Brexit referendum.” Starmer here, is of course conveniently skating over his own support for a second referendum at this time, but there is little doubt where his remarks were pointing. Starmer then went on to add that, while he agreed with Blair that the technological revolution would be game-changing, there was “one place where I do take issue with Tony: the idea that this is somehow beyond Left and Right. No, for me, this is a progressive moment.”

For Starmer,the lessons of recent history are not really Blairite at all. The Left won elections, he said, when it persuaded voters that it would “deliver, no matter how volatile the external world, security for your family, your community and our country.” This, in fact, is exactly what Labour had failed to do in 2008.

Perhaps this is why Blair has never been entirely sold. Peter Mandelson, who remained close and talked to him during this period, believes that Blair was at first not convinced Starmer or indeed McSweeney, the architect of the project, could succeed. For much of Starmer’s first year, Blair thought Starmer could not possibly turn things round. Mandelson, in contrast, saw in McSweeney a version of himself. Those who know McSweeney well say he has a healthy respect for Blair, and sees him as a gifted politician who was at his best in his early years when he had a clear sense of ordinary people’s concerns. Yet, McSweeney also believes Blair has since lost touch.

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In September last year, McSweeney and Starmer flew to Montreal to attend the “Global Progress Action Summit” where the world’s leading centre-left politicians met to discuss “bold new ideas and directions in progressive governance”. The summit attracted some of the biggest names in centrist politics: Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ahern, Mark Carney, David Miliband, Tony Blair.

McSweeney hated it. According to those who spoke to him afterwards, McSweeney felt too many of the arguments on show were disconnected from reality. The world had moved on, but so much of the content appeared to be rehashed versions of Clintonism. During his session, Blair was joined onstage by the Canadian Liberal MP Anna Gainey, who claimed, almost as an aside, that populism was the product of “anxiety” — the opposite of McSweeney’s view.

Blair, in turn, restated his case that the coming technological revolution was the central issue in the world today. “The mission for progressive politics now… is to understand this revolution, master it and harness it,” he said. In essence, then, the mission is technocratic.

The analysis is Blairism applied to the modern world. Today, Blair sees the world from on high: great oceanic swells, tectonic movements, epochal changes and the like. Flying from capital to capital, talking to leaders and plutocratic billionaires, he sees trends way beyond national borders: countries rising and falling, populations changing, policies developing and technology upending everything. “He really does operate in a stratosphere no other British prime minister has ever operated in before,” remarked one of his friends.

It is not hard to see how Blair might have grown frustrated at the parochialism of day-to-day British politics, unconvinced by the importance of “eyesore” policies. And perhaps he has a point. The challenge for Starmer and McSweeney, should they enter Downing Street later this year, will be to tell a convincing story about what they are trying to do that doesn’t begin to feel small the moment they enter No. 10. They will need a project for governing, as well as for winning, taking into account the great global forces of the sort that fixates Blair today. If Starmer is to be a council leader at large, he needs to do so in imperial robes. How he does so will depend in large part on the role he finds for the keeper of “the project’s” flame: Morgan McSweeney.

And yet, the evil of cigarettes has not been fully extinguished. Which is why the Conservative government of Rishi Sunak is proposing that those in their late teens should become the last generation ever to smoke legally in this country. Policy to be announced this week in the King’s Speech will eradicate tobacco from our society as surely and comprehensively as cannabis and cocaine have been.

None of this is particularly new, of course. Official disapproval of smoking goes back as far as James I’s 1604 pamphlet A Counterblaste to Tobacco, though it took another three centuries for the government to get fully involved. The spur then was the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899, which saw a flood of recruits to the colours, young men who were employed as servants, shopworkers, clerks and labourers. But if working-class patriotism was in fine fettle, the same could not be said of working-class health. Around three in 10 who applied to join the ranks were rejected on medical grounds. This worrying state of affairs, said some, was down to the advent of the cheap cigarette.

“The chief cause of unfitness was proved to be smoking,” declared Percy Everett, a magazine editor who later co-wrote Scouting for Boys with Boer War hero Robert Baden-Powell. The habit was responsible for “upwards of 80 diseases, including blindness and cancers of the lower lip and tongue, and is credited with killing 20,000 each year”. In short, it was “an evil which is sapping our boyhood’s strength, and so undermining our national manhood”. Smoking, like masturbation, was linked to blindness and insanity.

In response to such concerns came the Children’s Act of 1908, passed by H. H. Asquith’s Liberal government, which introduced the first restrictions. It became illegal to sell tobacco products to anyone under the age of 16, and policemen and park keepers were authorised to confiscate tobacco, cigarettes and cigarette papers from underage smokers; they could also search boys for such items — though, for reasons of delicacy and decency, not girls.

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Adults, however, continued to smoke freely for six decades, until the evidence of the harm it caused became too great to ignore. The medical profession demanded a government intervention and in 1965 — when 70% of men and 40% of women smoked — television adverts for cigarettes were banned. (Other tobacco products fared better: “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet” ads were still being aired on TV into the Nineties.) The ensuing introduction, in 1971, of warnings on packets — “Smoking can damage your health” — wasn’t entirely successful. A 1975 poll showed that a third of smokers didn’t believe cigarettes could kill. The wording was accordingly ramped up, to include the word “seriously”.

There was also an effort to encourage switching to weaker cigarettes. A league table was published, showing the potency of the various brands. The implication was that if you were on Capstan Full Strength — which offered 38mg of tar per cigarette — you might be better off if you traded down. The Embassy Ultra Mild had just a tenth of those levels.

Advertising restrictions didn’t apply to sponsorship, though. Sport was a particularly attractive partner, since it enabled the brand-names and logos to be displayed on television. Snooker even offered the opportunity to see sportsmen light up while competing. There was also footballer John “Bionic” Osborne, a goalie for West Bromwich Albion, who was famously photographed having a quick smoke during a match in 1972, while the ball was down the other end.

Some, feeling that government action was painfully slow, took matters into their own hands. In 1971, the New Inn in Appletreewick, West Yorkshire declared itself Britain’s first no-smoking pub. It was reported that takings slumped. Later that year, a GP made the news when he refused to accept as patients a 45-year-old woman or her eight children because she had chronic bronchitis and wouldn’t give up smoking. She’d had a 15-a-day habit before the rejection; after, she claimed: “I have become so distraught that I now find I am getting through 30 cigarettes a day.”

Between government initiative and peer pressure, the number of smokers steadily fell, as did the number of places where one could indulge. The restrictions were not always popular, however. In 1982, British Rail banned smoking in the buffet cars of its Southern Region trains, but found itself overwhelmed by complaints and forced to back down. Two years later, smoking was prohibited on Tube trains in London, despite a survey showing only 18% of passengers in favour of a ban and 54% against. By then, only around a third of adults smoked.

It was around this time, though, that public attitudes really changed. Evidence for the negative effects of passive smoking began to accumulate, and there was no coming back from that. In the Nineties, diktats were issued from Brussels that radically reduced the maximum tar yield per cigarette — even as the Common Agricultural Policy was pumping millions into subsidising tobacco production. (An exception was made for Greece, which really liked a strong smoke, and negotiated an opt-out until 2006).

In response to this directive, the other John Osborne — the playwright, not the footballer — wrote a splendidly vitriolic letter to The Times, railing against those who had deprived him of his favourite Turkish cigarettes; “untipped, robust and fragrant”, they were “one of life’s few and reliable pleasures”. The restriction was “craven abasement” to “puny tyrannies”, to countries that had so recently been dictatorships. “As a schoolboy, I narrowly escaped from ‘European’ bombs on my doorstep,” wrote Osborne. “I can forgive this eagerness, but not the compounding of the insult by dashing the tobacco from my lips 40 years on.”

Those who objected to government action on smoking — and they tended, like Osborne, to be awkward individualists — insisted that this was a question of the liberty of the individual. The war against smoking was a “new Puritanism”, said Nicholas Ridley, Margaret Thatcher’s environment secretary: “A crusade to stop others doing what they want or taking risks with their own lives.” (Ridley refused to give up smoking even when diagnosed with lung cancer.) And when David Simpson, formerly of Amnesty International, took over the anti-tobacco lobby group Action on Smoking and Health in 1979, journalist Bernard Levin spotted an irony: “Have all those years of admirable work on behalf of the oppressed and persecuted taught him nothing about the indivisibility of freedom?”

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Like our modern culture wars, the division has not been between Left and Right: over the years, Conservative, Labour and Liberal governments have all been on the same page about tobacco. Rather, it’s been between polite society — those who know they know better — and those who need to be protected from themselves. John Reid, health secretary in Tony Blair’s government, described the war against tobacco as “an obsession of the learned middle class”, and Diane Abbott saw it in similar terms in 2006: “Under New Labour, the party has gone from speaking for the white working class to speaking at them — whether about junk food or the smoking ban.”

There was some truth in this. The four-decade-long campaign had successfully reduced the number of smokers, but its impact was shaped by income and social class. Cigarettes had become unfashionable among the middle classes, but 42% of unskilled workers still smoked, as did 55% of single mothers. According to the Office for National Statistics, the imbalance remains: those with no educational qualifications are four times more likely to smoke than those with a degree.

Education, taxation and location having not been enough, there now comes a new policy to stub out smoking altogether. Sunak’s proposal is to raise the age at which one can purchase tobacco products by a year, every year, so that those now too young to smoke will forever be too young. It’s based on a similar law passed in New Zealand last year, and it will presumably pass through Parliament without much of a hitch — because in government, and in public opinion, the war has been comprehensively won. A taste for tobacco has become the love that dare not speak its name. Smokers are down to fewer than one in eight of the adult population. A YouGov poll last month showed a third of people supporting the proposed age-restriction; when you added in the 29% who wanted a complete ban immediately, it’s clear that Sunak has the public onside.

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Those who fear similar net-zero campaigns elsewhere — against alcohol, the wrong foodstuffs, cars, fireworks, whatever — might note with concern the pattern of public response to every step of the anti-smoking pathway. First, complaints, then ridicule, swiftly followed by compliance and acceptance. It took a while, but there was no rebellion. That studio laughter on Yes, Prime Minister is the sound of a different world.

Admittedly, the suppression of tobacco was greatly aided by an increased understanding of secondary smoking, but once the principle of prohibition is established, it becomes easier to administer. There’s no known secondary harm from vaping, for example, but restrictions have still been imposed by the Conservative government, and there will be more to come. In particular, there are objections to flavoured vapes, since these are assumed to be more attractive to children.

That’s not new, either. The same thinking was seen in the European directive that banned menthol-flavoured cigarettes — though its most notable objector was not a child, but Helmut Schmidt, the venerable ex-chancellor of West Germany. As well as being possibly the last major European statesman to carry a snuff-box, Schmidt was a chain-smoker, and it was reported that he bought up a stash of 38,000 mint-flavoured fags, which proved sufficient to see him through to his last puff. It’s not clear whether he bought enough. He died just shy of his 98th birthday.

In one important sense, he must not panic. As a senior Labour figure put it to me, this is “situation normal” for any Labour leader: events happen, the Left claims the moral high ground, tensions grow, the party must be managed. Almost every one of Starmer’s predecessors has been in the same situation. And, yet, this crisis is acutely challenging precisely because it is not normal for the very reasons he set out in his speech on Tuesday. The slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7 was “terrorism on a scale and brutality that few countries have ever experienced”. And so will be the response from Israel, along with the subsequent fallout. This, after all, was Hamas’s entire strategy, years in the making: to lure Israel into the mistaken belief that they could be managed as a proto-state rather than a terrorist army committed to Israel’s destruction.

The very fact that Starmer felt the need to give a speech at Chatham House explaining his policy on the crisis in Gaza reveals the extent of the trouble. More than 60 Labour MPs have now called for a ceasefire, in direct opposition to Starmer, as well as 250 councillors, the party’s mayors in London and Manchester and its leader in Scotland. More worrying than any of these, though, is the quiet briefing that ultra-loyalists Wes Streeting and Shabana Mahmood are also unhappy with Starmer’s stance. This, in other words, is not a normal rebellion, but a dangerous gap between the leader and his party on a core question of judgement long before the crisis has reached its nadir.

On Tuesday, Starmer attempted to tread a careful line between understanding and discipline, saying that he recognised the strength of feeling while also warning that he would need to enforce collective discipline. Then, yesterday, he released a video to mark Islamophobia Awareness Month which, he said, “comes at a deeply troubling time for Britain’s Muslim communities”. As the war builds, managing to maintain this position will prove ever more difficult.

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One element of Starmer’s problem is external, baked into the nature of the conflict. Unlike every other war in Israel’s history, planned as hard and fast retaliations to deter future attacks, this invasion is building violently but incrementally, as The Economist’s Defence Editor, Shashank Joshi, told me. Some are now talking of an operation lasting five years. This sort of scenario is far more likely to provoke regional escalation and even Islamist terror in the West. This is not situation normal.

The other part of Starmer’s dilemma, though, is internal, at the very heart of his party’s understanding of itself. Labour, as one party grandee put it to me yesterday, sees itself as a movement of “conscience and reform” standing up for the poor and dispossessed. “This party is a moral crusade or it is nothing,” as Harold Wilson put it. Right now, the dominant narrative in progressive circles is that Israel is the baddy and Palestine the goody. All else flows from this childish analysis. Pogroms are bad, but they do “not happen in a vacuum”, according to the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Israel’s response, in contrast, does seem to take place in a vacuum; the fate of its citizens held hostage by Hamas largely ignored (or worse dismissed), as well as the fact that Hamas actively does not support any negotiated settlement with Israel.

For those who insist that this situation is normal, it is true that Labour’s self-perception as the conscientious party of British politics always causes difficulties in foreign policy. Unlike domestic politics, which is all about moral and political judgements to do with the allocation of resources, foreign policy necessarily involves a myriad other considerations where morality offers no easy guide, from security to order, deterrence and even pure national interest. In a sense, the disordered world of international relations lends itself to the tragic mind of the conservative, while the ordered life of the nation state is the natural home of the progressive. At home, you can grow the economy and share out the proceeds; in foreign policy you cannot grow territory without someone losing out.

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This — for what it’s worth — is as true for Blairite progressives as it is for the anti-colonial Left. Both want foreign policies based on notions of an overarching morality. For the former, this means liberal interventionism; for the latter, peaceful non-interventionism. It is no coincidence that both continue to regard the other as reprehensible. I have been struck by the continued vehemence of opinion over Ed Miliband’s decision in 2013, for example, to vote against airstrikes on Syria to deter the further use of chemical weapons. This has become a totemic moment for the Labour Right that Starmer must not in any way echo, much as Tony Blair’s decision to join the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 has become totemic for the Labour Left. To both sides, these two decisions were moral failings more than ones of judgement.

The most instructive illustration of the problems Starmer faces, however, is not from 2003 or 2013, but 2006 and Israel’s war with Hezbollah. This is an event Tony Blair describes in his memoir, A Journey, as being more damaging to him than anything since Iraq, revealing “how far I had swung from the mainstream of conventional Western media wisdom and from my own people”.

As Blair understood, the political problem he faced was baked into the very nature of the conflict, pitting — in progressive eyes — one developed “Western” nation against a disempowered “resistance” movement. Just as today, Hezbollah knew they could provoke Israel and that Israel would have to respond, but could not do so without quickly losing international support. Just like today, Blair was tasked with managing a situation in which initial sympathy for Israel’s right to defend itself quickly disappeared as the images of what that meant began to filter through to the public. “Within days, the international angst transfers from the provocation to the retaliation. [And] suddenly Israel is the aggressor.” This is the cycle we are now in once again, only this time the wheel is turning far more violently, just as Hamas planned.

By 2006, Blair had come to view the situation in the Middle East far more tragically than before. He still believed in a two-state solution, but, as he writes, “I had by now come to see the entire conventional approach on dealing with this problem as itself part of the problem.” He now saw Israel involved in a “wider struggle between the strain of religious extremism in Islam and the rest of us”. In other words, Blair saw the morality of the struggle entirely differently from most in his party and the wider international (Western) Left: not as Israel the oppressor, but Israel forced into the vanguard of the global struggle against totalitarian fanaticism.

Reading the accounts of the horror inflicted by Hamas in the October 7 attacks certainly adds credence to Blair’s understanding: babies burned and kidnapped, women raped so violently their bones were broken, Holocaust survivors brought into their living room and shot — and much of the horror recorded for posterity by its proud perpetrators. “Father, I killed 10 Jews!” one delighted Hamas terrorist is recorded calling home during the attacks. “Check your WhatsApp! I sent you the photos! Father, I killed 10 Jews! I killed 10 Jews with my bare hands. Check your WhatsApp. Father, be proud of me!”

Starmer himself seemed to come close to this moral understanding in his speech seeking to calm tensions in the Labour party yesterday. The attack, he said, was the “biggest slaughter of Jews, and that is why they were killed — do not doubt that — since the Holocaust”. As a result, Starmer argued, calling for a ceasefire only meant freezing the situation in Hamas’s favour, loaded down, as it is, with its sacrificial human booty of more than 200 kidnapped Israelis, including one nine-month old baby. The perpetrators of the worst pogrom since 1945 would be emboldened, Starmer declared.

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The problem for Starmer is that despite the brutality of Hamas’s slaughter, Western opinion has moved in exactly the same way it did in 2006: from initial sympathy to condemnation within days. And yet because of the nature of Hamas’s terror, this crisis is certain to be far worse than the war against Hezbollah in 2006 and so the condemnation will be louder.

In such circumstances, Starmer’s position is particularly difficult. On the one hand, it seems almost inevitable that he will slowly modify his position to manage his party, reflecting its essential understanding of the conflict. There are already hints at this direction of travel. “The siege conditions haven’t lifted, and that is unacceptable,” Starmer declared.

And yet, the genocidal nature of Hamas and its support from Iran is not going away. Israel is already facing rocket attacks from Iranian proxies in Yemen and Lebanon. “We must teach Israel a lesson,” Hamas Official Ghazi Hamad declared on Lebanese television this week. “We will do this again and again. The Al-Asqa is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight. Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it.” When challenged as to why Hamas had managed to build 500km of tunnels for itself but not to protect civilians, Mousa Abu Marzouk, from the organisation’s political bureau, told Russia Today that that was the UN’s job.

In the end, much will rest on public opinion. Will the West take Hamas’s words at face value, or for that matter Iran’s? Or will it filter the conflict through its own eyes, as the simple struggle between oppressor and oppressed?

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Reading Blair’s account of the situation in 2006, you cannot help but feel he had given up. He was too tired and world weary. “At points I had wondered why I didn’t just cave in and condemn Israel and call for them to stop unilaterally,” he writes. “The Israelis would have understood it, and it would have been the proverbial safety valve for the fierce political criticism.” It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that had that war happened in 1996, rather than a decade later, this is exactly what Blair would have done. “I had my determination to comfort me,” he records in his memoir, “and by and large it did (which is, I suppose, what always happens to leaders when the final hubris overwhelms them).”

Starmer, though, is not yet even prime minister. Determination alone will provide little comfort and he will be warned not to let Blairite hubris overwhelm him. In Greek mythology, hubris is the excessive pride of someone who believes they can defy the gods. In the West, of course, our god is public opinion. One insider told me Starmer had little to worry about because, in the end, no one will vote in the 2024 general election based on events in the Middle East in 2023. And Starmer isn’t about to sacrifice his ambitions for a policy that will make almost no difference to anyone other than Labour’s own conscience.

By contrast, only a small number of Grinches with long memories and cynical dispositions point out that Churchill opened his wartime premiership with the promise of nothing but “blood, sweat and tears”. (His government of 1951, by contrast, promised to “set the people free” and ended up being, even in the eyes of his greatest admirers, an embarrassing shambles.) As for Reagan, his success owed at least as much to fear — of the Soviet Union, of national decline, of urban disorder — as it did to hope. Rambo not Rockie is the film to watch if you want to understand American politics in the early Eighties. We Grinches would point out that the most successful politician of recent times, Donald Trump, trades on the feeling that “carnage” is just around the corner.

Of course, the Left has a particular problem. It is, or has been, about selling change. Left-wing candidates have usually sought to persuade their supporters that things can get better, whereas British Conservatives argued that change was likely for the worst.

This brings us to the current state of the Labour Party. A few years ago, it looked as though Starmer would be Neil Kinnock — painfully leading his party back to electability but not quite fast enough to get elected himself. Now everything is going right for him. He is ahead in the opinion polls; his party is disciplined; his opponents — the SNP as much as the Conservatives — are falling apart. Prudent commentators talk of the dramatic swing that would be necessary for Labour to get an absolute majority in parliament, but my own money is on something close to a landslide.

This is not, though, quite the same as saying that Labour should be optimistic. In his conference speech last week, Starmer blamed the Tories for “kicking the hope out”. But this is not a hopeful time. Tony Blair came to power in almost uniquely propitious circumstances. Norman Lamont lost the Tories their reputation for economic competence with the sharp drop in the value of the pound on Black Wednesday of 1992, but Labour inherited the benefits of Ken Clarke’s competent Chancellorship that followed Lamont’s dismissal. Blair also reaped the results of patient negotiation by the Major government in Northern Ireland. This was good news for the province but also for the climate in Westminster: for the first time since the Sixties, senior ministers could walk the streets without a phalanx of nervous-looking bodyguards.

Conditions beyond the reach of the British government’s policy were also good. The fall of the Soviet Union meant that peace and democracy seemed to be on the rise. Almost everywhere except North Korea, spending on armaments dropped in the Nineties. World-weary commentators had spent years saying countries that had lived under Communist rule would take decades to adjust to liberal democracy but, as it turned out, the Czech Republic — one of the more repressive countries in the eastern bloc during the Eighties — was a liberal democracy within a few years. Even China seemed to have moved away from the repression of 1989, which was why the handover of Hong Kong did not, in the short term, produce the exodus that some had expected.

Compare this with what is likely to hit the next Labour government. If Keir Starmer becomes prime minister, he will face the worst circumstances that any new British prime minister has faced since May 1940. The sadistic relish with which Jeremy Hunt references economic figures makes one suspect that, first, he has given up all hope of buying the next election with tax cuts and, second, he does not even want to buy the next election because he knows that the consequences of Brexit and Covid may still be making themselves felt in five years’ time. And that’s not to mention the larger, sometimes existential, problems that the next government is going to face: Putin, Trump, China, climate change.

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So, the model for an incoming Starmer government should not be Blair’s victory in 1997 but Thatcher’s in 1979. She was not swept into power by a wave of hope; she floated in on a tide of despair. The Labour Party was exhausted after five years of trying to rule with a tiny minority. One of its most important leaders, Roy Jenkins, had effectively given up on the party. Not that the Tories were bouncing with excitement. At the time, the body thinking most usefully about the future of the Conservative Party was The Authority of Government Group: it met in an atmosphere of Eeyorish gloom. Its members thought that the power of the unions, among other things, might make Britain ungovernable — they were particularly worried by the prospect of future miners’ strikes, which they thought they would be unable to “win”. Some of them privately admired the Callaghan Labour government of 1976 to 1979, and doubted whether they would be able to do any better if they were elected.

Britain today is gripped by the same kind of pessimism that prevailed in the late Seventies — and Starmer needs to recognise this. The Labour Party should act within its constraints rather than acting as their job is to cheer everyone up with a group sing song. Indeed, nothing will undermine the Tories more than their recent, and most un-Tory, displays of optimism. Rishi Sunak’s new slogan seems to be “Long-term decisions for a brighter future”. If I were a Labour strategist, I would plaster the country with photographs of a grinning Boris Johnson having his cake and eating it.

Labour should play down expectations. It is often said that the public have lost faith in politicians. This is the exact opposite of what has happened. They have lost respect for politicians but, in some respects, this is precisely because they have too much faith in them. The public has come to treat politics as 17th-century peasants treated witchcraft — as a source of unlimited, if often malign, power. The fact that the NHS has long waiting lists in the aftermath of Covid is assumed to be the result of incompetence or bad intentions by ministers, rather as crop failure would once have been regarded as the result of some unpopular old woman putting toads in her cauldron.

Thatcher’s great achievement was to persuade people that there are many things that a government cannot do much about. Furthermore, when a government can do something, it invariably means making ruthless decisions about the balance between harm and good; as Nigel Lawson, quoting the French politician Pierre Mendès France, put it in his resignation speech: “To govern is to choose.” For Thatcher, this insight was applied to the economy: subsidies were withdrawn from industries that were bound to fail. The area of brutal choice for Starmer will be the environment.

Currently, the Labour leader is running scared from the result of the Uxbridge by-election, where opposition to Sadiq Khan’s measures against the most polluting cars seemed to account for an unexpected Tory victory. Starmer is also given to spouting nonsense about how everyone will benefit from a “Green industrial revolution”, when the truth is that protecting the future of the planet — or even just protecting the lungs of children who are unfortunate enough to live near the Westway flyover — is not going to come from a cosy, win-win solution. People, particularly vociferous middle-aged men, will be made to stop doing things that they want to do. Similarly, Starmer, who campaigned so energetically against Britain leaving the European Union, can hardly now plausibly claim that there is a “good Brexit” — especially at a time when the public seems to be losing faith that such a thing exists. Starmer should level with voters: his negotiations with Europe will be an exercise in damage control.

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The other lesson of 1979 is that parties should not be sentimental about their voters. Many Tories were heartbroken that Scots abandoned them in that election: it is said that “Rab” Butler told Thatcher that she would have Scotland engraved on her heart as Mary Tudor had Calais, lost to the English crown in 1558, engraved on hers. But it was a small price to pay for winning seats in Essex or the Midlands. Labour should write off part of the Red Wall vote. Losing Birmingham Northfield, a working-class seat that used to revolve around the Longbridge car plant, is a small price to pay for holding every other seat in the city. There has been much talk recently of the “woke elite” holding “luxury beliefs” when it comes to, say, immigration — but “woke elite” in this context really means an educated middle class that is larger than ever before, and politically engaged. In truth, there would be no more self-indulgent luxury for the Labour Party than to hold on to a diminishing group of traditional working-class voters out of nostalgia, as if Left-wing politics is a Hovis ad.

Of course, there are some respects in which the first Thatcher government is a bad model for Starmer. Thatcher was lucky because Britain became a net exporter of oil early in her government and because General Galtieri was stupid enough to give her an opportunity for an easy military victory and, thus, a much higher level of electoral support. This meant that, for her first few years, Thatcher just had to survive, whereas she could afford to be radical — even, sometimes, optimistic — after the 1983 election. It is hard to imagine fortune smiling in this way on any British government in the next few years — and easy to imagine scenarios, such as a Russian attack on Poland, that would make a sizeable dent in Starmer’s good luck.

Unlike Thatcher, Starmer cannot afford to wait. He should take brave and controversial decisions early on — prioritising those, such as making some serious progress on the HS2 rail line, that would be hard for any subsequent government to reverse. Because for all his optimism, he cannot bet on a second term. Perhaps, in short, the best hope for the next Labour government would be to start with as little hope as possible.

Tom McTague: You were born in 1978 in Bootle, Liverpool. I imagine in the hospital just around the corner?

Jamie Carragher: I’m not quite sure which hospital it was. By the time my mum was pregnant with me, she’d already had a couple of miscarriages, and the doctors knew there was something not quite right — but they couldn’t put their finger on it. I think they thought initially I would have spina bifida. My mum was very holy, and she didn’t want to terminate the pregnancy. She thought, if that’s what God wants, then that’s fine. When I was born, I had gastroschisis — and was rushed straight to Alder Hey Children’s Hospital.

TM: And that’s where your stomach is essentially outside your body?

JC: Yeah, it’s not still like that! But I’ve still got the scar. And I still have a great relationship with that hospital. Everyone in the city is so proud of it.

TM: I hadn’t realised that your mum came from Maltese stock. That’s where her Catholicism comes from?

JC: My grandfather was from Malta. I’ve had the call in the past: could I play for Malta before England?

TM: There’s a whole mad history of Malta. They applied to join the UK officially and we were too tight: the Treasury turned them down. It kind of says something about Britain, I think. But I assumed when I started reading your autobiography, Carra (2008), that the name Carragher meant you had an Irish background. Can you tell us about that side of your family?

JC: That’s my dad’s side of the family. My nan grew up just on the border of Bootle and Kirkdale. My grandad, I think, came over from Ireland with his family — that’s where the Carragher name comes from. There were lots of brothers and sisters; families were huge then. And they were a close-knit community. Everyone’s nan and grandad lived a few streets away from their kids and grandkids. So everyone was just always in and out of each other’s house.

TM: Was it sectarian growing up in Liverpool at that time? Was there a divide between the Catholic kids and the Protestant kids? 

JC: The only divide was whether you went to Protestant or Catholic school. You just didn’t know anyone outside your school. And this area is really Catholic. Liverpool as a city is a real stronghold of Catholicism, and maybe that stems from people coming over from Ireland. It always felt like every school was Saint-something.

I remember, in my last year of primary school, one boy said he was going to a Protestant school for seniors called Hillside. The Catholic teachers were aghast — they couldn’t believe he was going from St James’s to Hillside. It was a big part of your life as a youngster: going to church, Holy Communion.

TM: What I find interesting about Liverpool politically is that it hasn’t become like Belfast or Glasgow, where you’ve got this clear sectarian divide. Even though in Liverpool you had all of the same ingredients: you’ve got Irish immigration, you’ve got Irish names and Irish schools and Catholic churches. And there was sectarianism in the past. My grandmother was brought up in the Scotland Road area, which was at the time an Irish slum and had an Irish nationalist MP, the only one ever elected in Britain. There were Orange Order marches and sectarian violence, too.

JC: I remember those marches as a kid.

TM: What did they feel like? 

JC: To be honest, we were only kids and there was a band playing. But I always remember my dad telling me that, when he was a kid, there was a bit of trouble around them. And for his dad — my grandad — it probably would have been a lot worse. But over time, that strong feeling has died out.

TM: Do you think football plays a big part in that? In Belfast and Glasgow, where there are more heightened tensions, you have Protestant and Catholic clubs. My understanding is that in Liverpool, Everton is kind of seen as the Catholic club, but it plays in blue. It’s like football has somehow acted as a kind of detoxifying agent.

JC: You chose the team who your dad supported; more often than not, it was not to do with religion. The one thing I do remember is when I first started watching Everton in the mid-Eighties, people all wore bobble hats. Some of these hats were half-and-half: the Everton one would be half Celtic, and the Liverpool one half Rangers. That’s the only inkling I have that Everton was seen as the Catholic club.

TM: Your autobiography busts a lot of myths. Early on, people were always saying that you grew up in poverty in Liverpool — but you didn’t, you grew up in a nice house in a nice area. You had a great childhood. You also talk about how people romanticise this city where Everton and Liverpool fans get on; where Everton fans went to Liverpool games even if they weren’t playing. You say all this is rubbish. You’re also quite cutting about what seems to be a new sectarianism emerging in Liverpool, with Everton and Liverpool fans getting quite brutal with each other. Is that still the case today?

JC: Yeah, I think it still feels nasty. We’ve always been seen as the friendly derby, but I’m not sure it was ever quite like that. The notion emerged in the Eighties, when the economic situation was really tough — with people struggling as much as they are today — and the one thing both sets of supporters in the city had to shout about was the two football teams. We, Everton and Liverpool, played each other so often in the mid-Eighties in cup finals — basically the whole of Liverpool descended on London. There was this common camaraderie of going down to Wembley on the coaches together. So I think that’s where this idea of friendship between Liverpool and Everton fans came from. There was this togetherness because everyone was in the same economic situation: football was an outlet.

As a child, I remember we went down to London on a coach right outside here. And this woman, Ann Kirby — she lives just over the road, the old woman organising bingo when you walked in — knitted all the kids jumpers with EFC on. This must have been 40 years ago now. We wore them all the time. And the women sent us all off, because no woman would have gone to the cup final. It was all the dads taking the kids. And there was only one Liverpool fan on the coach of 50 or 60. A very, very brave man.

I don’t think you’d see this kind of camaraderie today — and this saddens me, because as a city, we are different in a lot of ways. We feel like we have to fight — whether it’s against the Government, the establishment. And we can do that as a city, but there’s a real split: red and blue. I think this is good: you need a strong rivalry. But sometimes it goes a little too far. Maybe that’s because, with the invention of social media, football is just in your face 24/7. It wasn’t like that when I was a kid.

TM: It’s like football was previously something that could bring the city together in a way that didn’t happen in Belfast or Glasgow — but now, it’s wrenching it apart. 

JC: Well, it’s easy to feel better about your team if they’re doing ok — but Everton haven’t done well for a long time now. The club’s been mismanaged for a very long time and it is tough for the supporters. They deserve a lot more, a lot better. Football stirs the emotions in the city and that will never change — and I don’t think that particularly helps relationships. You’ve got one team doing really well, and another finding it tough.

TM: There’s this sense in the rest of the country that people from Liverpool have some kind of grievance, that they get too upset by everything. Simon Hughes, The Athletic journalist, traces Liverpool’s identity as a united Labour city back to the Eighties — when you were growing up. There’s opposition to Thatcher, militants taking over the city, stadium disasters, and the appalling response from the government. All that comes together to create this Liverpool identity. Could you feel this as a kid?

JC: I’ve always felt that Liverpool people have got something about them — a personality, a character trait. You very rarely see a shy one. People from outside the city say: “Oh, they always complain, they’re never happy with this or that.” But I think we look at it a different way: we stand up for ourselves, we don’t accept what the Government is saying about a certain thing — even now, 30 or so years after Hillsborough. I admire that the city doesn’t allow people to walk all over us, and maybe that gets other people’s backs up around other parts of the country. But I actually love that about this city. It’s got that real backbone and it’ll fight and it’ll take on people. You don’t want to take on people from Liverpool, I can assure you of that.

TM: I’ve noticed recently that people like you, with an Irish name, or Rooney, with a very Irish name: you’re proudly English. You want to play for England, you wear the England jersey with pride. And yet I sense that there’s a certain kind of anti-Englishness starting to bubble up. People are asking: are we English? Are we a bit different? 

JC: I don’t think it’s bubbling: I think it’s been there for a long time. I wouldn’t say that I’m anti-English — and of course, you wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to play for your country — but I would never choose my country over my city. It wouldn’t even be a question. That’s just obvious to me. What people in the Midlands, the North East, or down South would choose, I don’t know. But if I went abroad and someone asked me where I’m from, I wouldn’t say I was from England. I’d say I’m from Liverpool. I’m sure there are other places in the country that feel the same. There’s a real North-South divide in this country, no doubt about that.

TM: Do you think it’s more acute than it was in the Eighties?

JC: Well, I was a kid in the Eighties. It always felt like it was a fight against someone. I remember my parents talking about Thatcher at the house. I think it probably feels bigger now just because social media has a major part in magnifying things. In the past, your parents would be having those political conversations in the back kitchen, but now it’s so much bigger and stronger because everyone can give their view on social media.

TM: You grew up at a time when Liverpool was earning its reputation as a Labour city. This wasn’t always the case: when your grandfather’s family came over from Ireland, Liverpool was a Tory city. The Protestants would vote Tory and the Catholics would vote Labour or Irish nationalist. It wasn’t until the Eighties that the city embraced its anti-Tory identity. What are your earliest memories of politics? 

JC: It was very simple for me when I was growing up: the Tory Party was for the rich, while Labour looked after the working classes. Even today, people around here are just trying to make ends meet, making sure there’s food on the table. I don’t think they’re watching Question Time, and finding out the policies of both parties. They’re thinking, we’re going to get more help from Labour — and that’s what we need.

TM: It would be difficult for you, wouldn’t it, if you were a Tory?

JC: I’m not sure there could be anything worse than being a Tory. I think people around here would rather I played for Man United. I’m serious.

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TM: Do you think that’s the social pressure — or is it something you believe in?

JC: Well, I didn’t grow up in a place where anyone voted Conservative and could explain why they did. Growing up, Margaret Thatcher was a real bone of contention in the city. At that time, there were a lot of celebrities in Liverpool who had done well. They left Liverpool for London, and I think a lot of them backed the Conservative Party and Margaret Thatcher.

TM: I’m thinking of Ken Dodd, Cilla Black, Jimmy Tarbuck.

JC: There was always a lot of resentment towards them from people in Liverpool, and I think rightly so. People in Liverpool love to see their own do well, as anywhere does. But I think you’ve always got to remember where you’re from. I remember they were always called “professional Scousers” — they used it when they wanted, but didn’t fully embody what a Scouser was.

You have to try to help the people you grew up with — even if it means people in my position perhaps paying more tax to a Labour government, which might help a young mother trying to bring up two kids. I think people in my position should never forget where they came from. But there are certainly people who have played for Liverpool in the past — I’m not naming names — who have forgotten this.

TM: Are there secret Tory footballers out there?

JC: I think there’s a few of them!

TM: You say you’re not too involved in politics, but you backed Andy Burnham for the leadership. Obviously, Andy Burnham’s from the North West — he’s an Everton fan who came to Liverpool to talk about Hillsborough. I think that was a pivotal moment for him. Is that how you got to know him?

JC: I’m not sure when the initial connection came — I think it was actually before he gave that famous speech at Anfield on the memorial of Hillsborough, I think in 2009. We went for a meal afterwards — something at the town hall. And yeah, at the time, I’d have liked to see him get the leadership of the Labour Party.

But the reason I say I’m not fully into politics is that I’m a little bit wary of getting too involved in something that’s not my area of expertise.

TM: Gary Neville’s not shy…

JC: Well, he’s working with local MPs. He probably knows a bit more about what’s going on.

I’d like to lend my support on initiatives where you feel you help people. It’s not just about Labour and Tory. Sometimes you might need the Conservative government to get certain things passed, and I can use my voice, because of who I am, in pushing certain things through Parliament. We’ve certainly done that with the help of people on the other team. It’s about getting behind a cause rather than getting fully into bed with a political party. I obviously would never be shy in saying I would always vote Labour and I would love them to be in charge in the next general election. But I am a little bit wary of getting into something that I don’t know everything about.

TM: You don’t need to. The theory goes that the less you know about politics, the more informed your opinion is. You can just see it: you either know that the city is doing well or is doing badly. It seems that you think the city is currently in a worse state than it’s been for a while?

JC: We see how many food banks there are now around this area. How many people are on the streets? It does feel like it’s never been as bad — on the back of the Tory government and Covid. The kids not being in school. That’s not just a Liverpool thing, of course. And I think that’s why people become disenfranchised with the Government — [the Tories] have been in a long time, and we’re still seeing these problems in a lot of working-class cities.

TM: It does feel very different. If you go into Liverpool city centre, it feels wealthy, buzzing, like a proper European city. And then you come out here, and it definitely feels poorer. Do you think the problem with the Labour Party holding a conference in Liverpool is that you get busloads of people coming up — people like me — and they arrive in the city, they get a black cab down to the conference event, and they go, “Liverpool’s doing great!” and actually, it’s a bit of a façade? It’s the same with Manchester. We were out there last week and you get the tram out two or three stops, and it feels very different.

JC: I think you could probably say that about a lot of places. Obviously a lot of the money goes into the city centre. It’s not just for the people from the city; it’s for tourists. There’s so much work being done in Liverpool — and it’s fantastic. But I think there’s always been a feeling in Liverpool that there’s not just the North-South divide in the country, but in the city as well. So when you come north from the city centre, you’ve got Bootle, you’ve got Kirkdale, you’ve got Walton. There’s still obviously places that are finding it tough in the south end of Liverpool, but the areas I’ve just mentioned are always looking for help.

You think of the stadiums — what the football clubs do for those areas, the North end. What Anfield does for the area of Anfield is massive — Liverpool [FC] being there. And Everton does need to move stadium, and it’s going to be absolutely magnificent — almost in the city centre, just on the edge of the docks. But you worry about the impact that’s going to have on Walton. The pubs around there, the cafes before the game, all the supporters. It’s going to have a real impact.

TM: Liverpool has always had a council that’s been opposed to the Government, against the establishment. And now you’ve got the prospect of a Labour government coming in, and Keir Starmer being Prime Minister. But already I get the sense in Liverpool that Keir Starmer is not particularly well-liked. That he’s seen as having promised things — like, not to appear in The Sun — and then he’s gone back on it. He’s seen as too cynical. It sounds like a bit of a warning: don’t take Liverpool for granted, Labour.

JC: Liverpool will always be Labour. It’ll never be Tory; that’ll just never, ever happen. I think Labour probably know that. But I’m pleased the Labour conference is in Liverpool. I think it’s good for the city. I was at a Q&A with Wes Streeting a few nights ago and he was talking about a plan, for the next two or three years, that the Labour Conference comes to Liverpool — and I was pleased about that.

I understand where you’re coming from in terms of Keir Starmer. The situation is not so much to do with his policies as a Labour leader, I think a lot of it is to do with The Sun. And I get both sides of the argument. He should never have said “I won’t speak to The Sun” — and then do it. If you give your word to people in Liverpool and you don’t deliver, you’re always going to have a problem — whether or not it’s speaking to The Sun, which is obviously a big no-no in this city. From his point of view, as Labour leader, I can understand. You need the press on-side.

In terms of his policies, Liverpool is a Labour city and Left-wing. I understand the problem that any Labour leader would have, that being really Left-wing is not going to get you into power. There is that feeling with Keir Starmer, and probably was with Tony Blair as well, that they’re almost a Tory: not Left, centre-left. But then, what would you rather have: a centre-left or a Tory government? Because it’s been proven, certainly with Jeremy Corbyn, that being real Left-wingers there’s very little chance that you’re ever going to get into government. You become known as a protest party, really. And yeah, you can protest, you can fight, and you can be disappointed in Labour — that they’re not doing everything you feel they should be doing, or really Left-wing. But it’s still better than what the alternative is.

TM: Better to win?

JC: Better to win and have the chance to actually implement policies that will help people in these areas rather than being a protest party just fighting against the Tories.

Tom: Jamie Carragher, the Blairite! The centrist dad who says, “Be sensible”!

JC: Yeah, well, that’s the only time I can remember Labour being in! I know what happened with the Iraq War — that’s always going to be a stain against them. But I think he was a great leader, wasn’t he? He just had it, didn’t he? When you saw him in the despatch box. Labour winning three general elections in a row. That just doesn’t happen because, you know, Labour very rarely win. And they’re in a great position to win now. I’d still rather a Labour government be in, even if it’s not Left-wingers, which people in the city would like.

TM: You think the problem, then, with Starmer is not necessarily the policies — it’s the cynicism? To so obviously say one thing and then do the other? Because outside of Liverpool that’s the criticism as well, from the Left: he promised all this and he didn’t deliver it. 

JC: I mean, do you believe things politicians say? I just think it’s a lot of bollocks if I’m being totally honest with you. I take it with a pinch of salt whenever we’re promised something by a politician.

TM: How has Liverpool dealt with the Tory conference the other week — where they reversed on HS2 coming up to the North?

JC: I don’t think it’s something that anyone on the streets is talking about. I think it was always seen as something that was going to Manchester. So I don’t know how much we’ll be affected. But again, it just goes back to that North-South divide. When they’re saying they can’t afford to finish it — I’m just not having that at all. And I’m not daft. I know the costs have spiralled, and they always do on things like that. But they have to find a way.

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TM: There’s talk about the Northern Powerhouse, which is kind of connecting Liverpool, through Manchester, to Leeds and across to Newcastle. But there is this other idea, which is the Osborne idea, which is that you need to create a megacity in the North West, with Manchester at the centre, connected up to Liverpool and Leeds. But I sometimes think: I wonder if people in Liverpool would be okay with being thought of as a kind of suburb of Manchester?

JC: No, Liverpool won’t be playing second fiddle to anyone — certainly not Manchester!

TM: There’s kind of two divides. There’s the divide within the North: Liverpool versus the rest, with Manchester getting all the special favours. And then there’s the North-South divide generally. For your work, you probably have to go down to London all the time — to all these clubs in the South. But when you were growing up, the North would have been dominant in football. And now [in the South] you’ve got all the small teams — not to offend any supporters! — Brentford and Brighton and Bournemouth. Is that a reflection, you think, of the state of the economy generally?

JC: Teams in the Premier League have got money, no matter where you are in the country — even the teams at the bottom are getting £100 million, so they can all afford massive wages. So if you’re going to play for a Brighton or a Bournemouth now, and you’re a foreign player, you can earn massive money — and you’re also not far from London. Whatever I was saying about this North-South divide, I go to London quite a lot, and it’s one of the best cities in the world. I think it could even be number one. So I think that plays a part in players wanting to be closer to the South — maybe it’s easier to get back home, flight-wise.

You think of some of the clubs in the North I grew up going to. Sheffield Wednesday — what a giant football club. Bournemouth and Brighton aren’t bigger football clubs than Sheffield Wednesday in terms of support, the stadium, history. But the way the Premier League is going now, the influx of foreign players, means it’s a lot tougher for teams [in the North] to attract foreign players than the teams you’re mentioning down South that, for me, aren’t as big.

TM: The way you were talking about Liverpool challenging the status quo made me think about Brexit. Is there a sense in Liverpool that that’s a Tory project? Because, going back to the Eighties, Liverpool was a great port for the whole world — and then, with trade diverting to Europe, the main ports became Felixstowe and Dover, down in the South. But I don’t get the sense that there’s anti-European sentiment here?

JC: The way people feel in this city [about Brexit] is the way my mum and dad feel about the Tory government of the Eighties. Brexit is the one thing that really winds me up. It’s a disaster. And this city was probably one of the strongest in voting to stay in Europe because we realise what Europe is doing for the city — not governments, especially not Tory governments.

TM: Because outside of Liverpool, being anti-establishment is voting against the EU. The argument goes: we’re poor, or poorer than we were, and that has coincided with being in the EU. And you could say the same about Liverpool: we used to have a port that went to the rest of the world and then we joined Europe and all that trade went South, because the South is closest, and so the EU hasn’t been good for us. It’s strange that that wasn’t more of a reaction in Liverpool.

JC: No, no. EU money changed the face of Liverpool. The Albert Dock was just rotting away in the Eighties, and look at it now. We’re really proud of it in the city. You think of the cruise ships going into Southampton — we’ve got the cruise terminal here, we’re getting a lot of that business ourselves now, tourists coming in. So no, I’ve never felt what you mentioned. The local press were fully behind staying in. And I think people in Liverpool just got it. It just wasn’t good to leave the EU. No sensible person or politician can ever make an argument for Leave. I just never heard one.

TM: Speaking of punching out at the establishment, do you sense that online conspiracy theories — about Covid, about World Government — are taking root in Liverpool at all? Wasn’t Rickie Lambert running something in Liverpool the other day? 

JC: I don’t believe in conspiracy theories in terms of Covid. I mean, Rickie Lambert went to something, but I don’t think there were that many people there. And I think when there’s actually been people coming here to protest in big numbers about things, against something that we believe in the city, they were pushed back. I don’t think there’s a big thing in Liverpool about conspiracy. I would call it more distrust — about a government or people in the higher echelons. And I think often it’s proved right.

Look at what was going on in Covid in No. 10. The way they were all carrying on. MPs expenses going back, what, 10, 15 years? These are our leaders, these are the ones we’re supposed to look up to, they are shaping the country. And then maybe people in Liverpool are getting criticised because they’ve got no jobs or they’re on benefits, or they’re trying to fudge the system in some way. And you’ve got the people at the very top doing exactly the same. I think there’s something sort of built into us in this city, that you never take things too much at face value in terms of people in the prime position. And to be honest, it’s been proved right.

In 1993, the political consultant Philip Gould wrote a paper for internal Labour Party consumption advocating a “new populism”, based on the time he had just had working on the successful Democratic Party campaign for Bill Clinton. In his later book, The Unfinished Revolution (a bible for New Labourites), Gould said his memo went down “like a lead balloon” with the party machine. However, it proved influential with the young modernisers rising through the ranks, including Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson. Gould went on to work on Blair’s leadership campaign the following year and then served as a pollster and trusted communications adviser in opposition and government. He died of cancer in 2011.

The day after Blair was selected as leader, Gould wrote another of his lengthy memos, its message eerily prescient as Starmer sets out his pitch to the Labour Party faithful today:

“I argued that the real political agenda was a combination of Right and Left. It was Right-wing on crime, welfare, immigration, discipline, tax and individualism, but Left-wing on the NHS, investment, social integration, opposition to privatisation and unemployment. People wanted change, but they didn’t yet want Labour… There is still a lurking fear about unions and the loony Left; there is potential concern about Labour because of its liberal social positions; there is anxiety about tax; there is almost no idea what Labour stands for.”

In 1999, after Blair’s first landslide, Gould wrote once more of this “new populism always seeking to hear the voices of those not often heard”. Crucially for him, this did not mean the unions and minorities, who Labour already paid a lot of attention to, but “working-class achievers and the middle class under pressure”. These were the people he had grown up around; he saw them as natural Labour voters who the party had repeatedly betrayed. “I came from the land that Labour forgot,” he wrote.

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To get to these people, reassure them and to make them vote for you requires a lot of work: part of what Clinton referred to as the “head game” of politics. In his foreword to the revised edition of Gould’s book, Blair himself acknowledged this: “Politics is far more intellectual exercise than people ever think… You will always end up with a strategic definition of your overall political position. The question is therefore: do you impose it on yourself or do your opponents do it for you?”

What this revealed is that, for all its faults, New Labour understood how politics works — how people in the public eye are positioning themselves all the time, whether they realise it or not. And they decided it was better to do this deliberately. In this sense, theirs was not the intellectuality of the distanced, objective observer, who is committed to truth, but that of the participant who is in a fight and trying to win it.

This desire to understand where they stood with the public accorded a central role to Gould’s polling and focus groups, to the intense annoyance of many Labour MPs. Gould himself, perhaps somewhat naively, saw this market research “as an important part of the democratic process — part of a necessary dialogue between politicians and people, part of a new approach to politics”. He saw opinion polls and focus groups as a way for ordinary people to get their voices heard in the Labour Party and in government: a form of democratic idealism that contrasts starkly with New Labour’s reputation for cynicism and technocracy while in government, as well as with the distinctly anti-democratic tendencies of its supporters in more recent times.

In reality, however, this focus on responding to the public’s concerns was easily exploited in power, by giving one impression while doing the opposite: notably on immigration. This was particularly pertinent on immigration, where they made a lot of noise about restrictions while quietly opening up new avenues: something that subsequent Conservative governments have emulated. This feeds into a more general, jarring conflict between being attentive to moderate public opinion and New Labour’s sometimes maniacal focus on change and modernisation, on defeating the “forces of conservatism”, as Blair outlined in his conference speech of 1999. Given the stale Tory governments, stale Labour Party and stale country of the Nineties, the stars were aligned for the embrace of change. In fact, it seemed to fit so well that they effectively made it into a universal ideology: thereby departing in spirit from the natural conservatism that they had recognised in most people.

This tension in New Labour between respect for the electorate and the desire to overturn much of what the electorate holds dear appears in Gould’s book as a conflict between the ideas of the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott, whom he studied under at the London School of Economics, and the German idealist G.W.F. Hegel. Gould notes his debt to Oakeshott, but says that ultimately it was Hegel who prevailed in his mind for being “more satisfying, although more mystifying”.

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Certainly, Hegel has much greater scope and ambition with his theory of dialectical progress and world-historical change. Because of this he has a much greater claim to authority, something we might see embodied in one of Blair’s favourite themes: “the world of change”, of inevitable and ever-increasing social complexity, technology and globalisation. This perspective is now standard in the upper reaches of public life, no doubt partly down to how it implies handing power to an expert class with a superior understanding of social change: a progressive elite. It confers a sheen of novelty and optimism onto the actions of power: of technocracy, quangofication and the ongoing project of using progressive identity politics to organise the state. It also serves as a neat means to exclude non-conformers from high society: for if you do not accept that certain changes are inevitable and cannot be reversed, then you count as someone without the requisite knowledge, as out-of-date and to be treated as a regressive outsider by the organs of power.

Here, the conflict within New Labour — and within Gould’s own mind — resolved itself in a way that would end up shutting out the people he had sought to represent. Hegel’s own promotion of the Prussian state as the apotheosis of the historical process finds itself replicated in the way New Labour followers tend to treat their own consensus as an endpoint: a culmination of social progress. In effect, they therefore reject Hegelianism as a continuing process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Instead, they treat the conflict of ideas as over and the game already won, notably on such things as mass immigration (which is to continue indefinitely). Any counter-currents can therefore be safely quarantined as “populism” and dealt with as threats to be managed rather than interesting challenges.

This transition among Blair and his followers from populism to anti-populism reflects the transition from being outsiders to insiders. Formerly, they saw themselves as an insurgent force. But now they are comfortable and indeed broadly set the tone for public life both in state institutions and the mainstream media.

And Keir Starmer’s Labour Party appears to follow cautiously in their wake. It is, for instance, notably wary of getting on the wrong side of public opinion on subjects such as crime and immigration, just as New Labour was. But it is also solidly committed to the consensus established in the New Labour years, of relying on arms-length, extra-governmental bodies staffed by fellow travellers to help push through policy choices under the guise of independent expertise. Rachel Reeves’s proposal to give the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) legal oversight over any major tax and spending decisions is a classic example. You are only going to do that if you know the body in question shares your instincts. Mark Carney’s very public endorsement for Reeves yesterday shows that the old guard of technocrats are pleased with Labour at the moment.

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Today’s Labour Party, then, does not present itself as a populist insurgency against a tired Establishment as Blair and Brown did in the Nineties. Rather, it appears almost purely in a defensive role, its task being to reconsecrate the hegemony that New Labour initially established, restoring the equilibrium of the state and of Britain’s relations to the outside world. On the latter, Starmer’s Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy, one of the most vociferous opponents of Brexit, has promised a “Britain Reconnected” — effectively a restoration in foreign relations.

Where does this leave New Labour’s populist spirit? Gould wrote about the importance of “a new long-term radicalism, to ensure that progressive instincts become rooted in the institutions of the nation, just as conservative instincts were in the past”. And in this respect, his new populism clearly succeeded. However, in doing so it turned against its own democratic spirit, bypassing the people it was meant to serve. Rather than seeking to do what people want, centrists of the New Labour stripe generally seek to manage them away, imposing their own preferences and presenting them as the only sensible, reasonable approach.

In 1994, Gould advised Blair that “populism… means Labour becoming once again the instrument through which ordinary people believe they can achieve their aspirations”. It is inconceivable that Keir Starmer would embrace such an equation. Rather, his role is that of a safe pair of hands. Like many Tory leaders of yesteryear, he is trying to convey the impression that Labour will not disturb you under his rule.

But this looks unlikely. For, as Labour leader, Starmer is almost necessarily aligned to a failing, incapable technocratic state which orders itself using the same, broadly unpopular, progressive identity politics that Labour does. This all promises trouble ahead. Starmer himself is certainly not leading a populist uprising — but I think we can expect one to develop against his incoming government in pretty short order.

The Loom of Time is Robert’s Kaplan latest, characteristically magisterial book, and this opening anecdote holds the key to his enduring importance. He goes on to describe how back in the mid-Nineties an editor had described his interest in the Uyghurs as “testing the limits of obscurantism”. But Kaplan knew different — especially since he understood, when he went again in 2015, that the backdrop for this repression was China’s $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative: “a postmodern transportation network of highways, railways, and energy pipelines linking China by land and sea with Europe across the Greater Middle East”.

Kaplan’s thinking is grounded in geography. Whether it is how the state of Iraq is so geographically incoherent that its descent into chaos was almost inevitable or the conservative influence of mountains on society, the truth is always to be found not in textbooks or the corridors of government, but out in the field, traversing the veins and capillaries that comprise our world: the alleyways and the slums and the bogs — the terrain.

His trip to Xinjiang illustrates his process in miniature. One, understand the map; two, get to the places that others won’t go; and three, from there, better understand the human activities (such as the Belt and Road) that act upon it. This is the beginning of political knowledge.

The book is about the Greater Middle East, loosely speaking the Islamic world “stretching from Morocco in the western Mediterranean to East Turkestan, abutting the arable cradle of China”. A region that absolutely cannot be understood without knowledge of its desert and plains and mountains and bazaars, and without its perennial curse: foreign meddling.

Historically, this has taken the form of avowed empires, which in their 19th-century Western form at least, are dead. Kaplan correctly observes that “in a globalised world one culture cannot simply appropriate and subjugate other cultures for its own ends”. Empires are now not only morally wrong but déclassé.

The imperial mindset, though, persists. If the Greater Middle East was once in the sights of the imperial West — whose afterlife continued with “humanitarian interventions” of Afghanistan and Iraq — it is now the fight zone for what Kaplan calls “ghost empires”: China, which seeks to link its budding commercial outposts in Europe with those in East Asia; but also Turkey and Iran, two former empires which also revere their imperial pasts. As Kaplan observes: “Western imperialism may be looked down upon, but not so the record of indigenous empires.”

Where once the British East India Company advanced eastward from Europe across the Middle East to China, China now advances westward, with similar commercial and strategic motives. It has built a large military base in Djibouti at the mouth of the Red Sea, and is contemplating others further north along the Red Sea at Port Sudan and at Jiwani by the Pakistan-Iran border near Gwadar. It is indeed “a great age in history to be a Chinese civil engineer”.

Geography for Kaplan also serves a wider purpose: it both informs and explains a particular view of history — the long view. What Fernand Braudel, the mid-20th-century French geographer and historian of the Mediterranean, calls la longue durée. If geography is, more or less, immutable, its effects on history are most apparent when you consider it not over months or years, as we have a tendency to do, but over centuries and even millennia. Like Braudel, Kaplan is interested in “the slow, imperceptible changes, like the sluggish movements of the ocean at its deepest depths, which invisibly determine the fast-moving, transitory ripples at the surface, upon which the media remain focused”.

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Taking the long view of history frees you from the varying conceptual and ideological preoccupations of differing periods. And being immutable, geography does not yield to ideology. This means you can start to look at monarchy and empire and autocracy and even democracy — which “according to the long arc of time, remains but a bold experiment” in the Greater Middle East — not exclusively in terms of their morality but their efficacy.

It is an unfashionable approach, but unlike the ad hominem polemics of the column or tweet thread, it shows genuine intellectual bravery. Kaplan writes: “Thus, to define the Arab world in particular as a contest between democracy and authoritarianism — as so many people do — is to impose simulated categories upon it, specific to America’s own historical experience, not to the historical experience of the region in question.” This tendency to view the world as an extension of the United States is simple, and simplistic. Go to a region and decide: who are the victims? Who are the oppressors? Who is black, who is white? Often, the categories are not only irrelevant but unhelpful, and even dangerous. And there is a name for this: imperialism, albeit of the cultural kind.

This is also, in the end, a deeply moral approach, because, as we saw in Iraq, what does not work in the Greater Middle East almost always ends in horror. This is a book about the region, but it is also a book about our reaction to it, which has in turn helped to mould it. Kaplan understands how disastrous this reaction has been, not least through the importation of the “fatal idea” of modern nationalism that, among other things, brought genocide to communities of Turks, Greeks and Armenians who had once coexisted under the Ottoman Empire. This is a place where “the assault of the West, from urbanisation to imperialism to modern nationalism to weapons technology, created complex and hybrid cultural orders throughout the developing world, where chaos took on a magnified and deadly quality”.

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This is the binary that has so obsessed Kaplan throughout his career: the dialectic between chaos and order. In February 1994, he wrote a now-famous piece in The Atlantic called “The Coming Anarchy”. While think-tankers and politicians pondered the role democracy would play in the coming years, Kaplan, out in the field, argued that it was tribal and ethnic divides, dwindling resources, and desertification and drought — which is to say climate change — that would shape the future.

He was right. In 2023, it’s not Cold War fears of nuclear Armageddon or industrialised state war that loom but the spectre of anarchy. The conflict in Ukraine wasn’t officially a war when it began, often fought by local “separatists” — Russian proxies — and with mercenaries and organised criminal gangs all seeking a piece of the action. Meanwhile, opposing combatants often share a “nationality” sundered by ethnicity and language, while foreign fighters flow in on both sides. Head south and see conflict washing across the Sahel as Jihadists groups exploit the desperation wrought by dwindling water and exploding populations. We are living in Robert Kaplan’s world, not the value-freighted one that existed only in the imaginations of Tony Blair and Barack Obama.

Towards the end of the book, Kaplan quotes from War and Peace. Count Rostopchin, a general and statesman, “had known for a long time that Moscow would be abandoned, but had known it only with his reason, while with all his soul he had not believed it”. The homily here is a simple one. Rostopchin knew Moscow would fall to Napoleon, but he could not bring himself to believe it so, when it happened, he was helpless to act.

The prerequisite to effective action is to first accept reality as it is — not in the lecture room or government department, but on the ground. This is the leitmotif that runs throughout Kaplan’s work. It is what has kept him at the cutting edge of geopolitical thought for decades, and it is what we must internalise, or else we will continue to act ineffectively, or worse, with great harm.

At the end of every week, Tony Blair receives his “box” to review over the weekend. It is no longer the tatty, old red briefcase of a Prime Minister, but a virtual one accessible from his laptop wherever he is in the world. Yet, the process remains much the same as when he was in Downing Street. Those who work for him must submit their papers before the box is closed for the weekend. Blair will then review the documents and add comments before meeting his team the following week. Only those really close to the former PM can email him papers directly.

Such is the life of Blair in “retirement”. Aged 70, he works with the zeal of a man with something still to prove; something to build; something perhaps to redeem. Constantly travelling, Blair spends as much as 70% of his time abroad: raising funds, attending conferences, giving speeches and networking with world leaders, plutocrats, corporate executives and “thought leaders”. He flies on private jets and is escorted in armed cars with security always close by. This is Blair today: no longer Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, but Prime Minister of Tony Blair Inc.

Formally, he is “executive chairman” of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, known to all as the TBI. The institute was born in 2017 and now employs more than 800 people worldwide, some with salaries as high as $504,000 (though Blair does not take one). He has offices in London, New York, San Francisco, Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Accra, and enough money to stage the slickest political conference in Britain. He has a media team to manage his media “grid”, a policy team to shape national debate, and a delivery team to project-manage his priorities across the world.

Working directly for him, Blair has a chief executive who used to work in No. 10, Catherine Rimmer, a global managing director who once worked for Justin Trudeau, Michael McNair, and an executive vice president who sits on the board of Oracle, one of the world’s biggest tech companies, Awo Ablo. His policy unit, meanwhile, is the only think tank in Britain with American levels of funding and a direct line into both the Government and Opposition, not to mention the Commissioners in Brussels and tech titans in San Francisco.

It is this arm of the TBI which has produced policy papers on everything from Brexit to AI to Covid. Its influence is such that cabinet ministers and even prime ministers — including Boris Johnson and Liz Truss — are regularly in touch. Starmer’s agenda as Labour leader now so closely resembles the policy prescriptions put forward by the TBI, whether on the need for a closer relationship with Europe or a new planning regime, that there is talk throughout Westminster of a Blairite reconquista. He has openly offered his institute to help Starmer if he becomes prime minister.

And yet, it is not the policy unit that is the TBI’s driving force, but its consultancy operation. Today, the “government advisory work” is responsible for almost all of its revenue, bringing in $79.4 million of its $81 million turnover in 2021, according to the latest accounts. In a recent round of internal restructuring, this side of the organisation was prioritised, resulting in a number of policy specialists leaving, including the policy unit’s leading man, Ian Mulheirn. (When we approached the TBI a spokesman insisted policy making had not been “de-prioritised” and remained one of the three pillars of the institute’s work, alongside “strategy and delivery”.)

The consultancy arm, meanwhile, is expanding rapidly, offering advice to governments around the world on the art of “delivery”. Look at the TBI’s recruitment page and there is an extraordinary array of jobs available: four in Abu Dhabi, three in Eastern Europe, two in each of the Philippines, Rwanda, Athens and Côte d’Ivoire, and one each in Israel, Indonesia, Kenya, New York, Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana and Miami. Meanwhile, its offices in London, Singapore and Delhi are all expanding.

The TBI has become, in the words of one figure who knows the institute well, a “McKinsey for world leaders” — a global consultancy business which advises governments on how to govern, while also acting as a middle man between the world’s political and business elites. Astride it all, of course, is Blair himself, the man who decides what the organisation should focus on, who it should help and where it should expand. Like a senior partner in a law firm, Blair brings in the clients, using his connections with the rich and powerful.

It is important to stop for a moment to appreciate just how mould-breaking Blair’s post-premiership life really is for a British politician. When Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister, she joined the House of Lords. When John Major left office, he became chairman of a cricket club. Gordon Brown became a UN special envoy, David Cameron took on various chairmanship roles, Theresa May and Liz Truss remained in parliament and Boris Johnson returned to his old life writing newspaper columns. None of them tried to build anything on the scale of Blair’s globe-spanning TBI, a British “Clinton Foundation” combining philanthropy, business and political influence. Blair has assembled something so big, in fact, that according to one figure close to another former prime minister, he has approached at least one of those who succeeded him in No. 10 to see if they might be interested in working with him.

But the question I keep coming back to is: why?

II

At Blair’s Future of Britain conference in July, I watched as he weaved through a packed drinks reception, glass of water in hand, posing for selfies, imparting his wisdom. I hoped to grab a word. But such was the scrum of acolytes and security, I could not get close.

As Blair worked the room, hugging old friends and granting quick audiences to starstruck Labour MPs, it felt like being back in the early 2000s. For many of my generation, Blair will always be a defining politician. For me this is doubly so; I grew up in Sedgefield, his constituency, and knew him, tangentially, through my parents who were both Labour activists. I knew all those who worked for him and, indeed, spent time in his constituency office myself as a wide-eyed work experience kid. Back then, Blair seemed almost the ur-politician, the archetype others copied to win power. To this day, seeing him still feels a little bit like journeying back in time.

I am not the only one who thinks this. One person who worked at TBI, and has since left, compared life inside the institute to the movie Goodbye Lenin  — in which a woman who fell into a coma before the fall of the Berlin Wall is shielded from the truth by her protective son. Blair’s new life, according to some former colleagues, feels like one long prime ministerial cosplay in which everybody must play their part. There is the media grid, the box, the police protection officers, armoured cars, private jets and constant meetings with world leaders and VIPs. Spend a day in the TBI offices in central London and you might see anyone popping in: a leading Indian politician one day, Bill Clinton greeting his old friend with a bear hug the next.

Yet there are plenty of giveaways that time has not stood still: the grey hair; the suede Chelsea boots which are a shade too informal for frontline politics; the Apple Watch poking out from under his jacket. The truth is that Blair is only just emerging from a period of his life when public animosity meant that he rarely ventured out in London and, indeed, felt more comfortable not just out of the city but out of the country itself. Looking back, it is astonishing how quickly his reputation fell after leaving office.

Blair resigned as prime minister in 2007 with high hopes for his new life. He was given a standing ovation as he left the House of Commons for the last time and was immediately confirmed as the new “Middle East envoy” representing the UN, EU, US and Russia. There was hope he could do for Israel-Palestine what he had done for Northern Ireland. The tides of history, however, were no longer with him. By the time he left the envoy job in 2015, peace in the Middle East was further away than ever.

During this period, the world Blair had tried to build as prime minister seemed to collapse all around him. Soon after the financial crisis, which immediately followed his resignation, Blair lost his bid to become the first permanent president of the European Council, the stain from Iraq just too great. And then his old rival Gordon Brown ordered an independent inquiry into the Iraq War — a trial Blair could neither win nor escape.

This was when he set up the basic structure of his life today, creating a number of charities in the areas of policy he was most interested in: the Tony Blair Sports Foundation in the North East of England; the Tony Blair Faith Foundation which worked across the world; the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative focused on development. He also set up “Tony Blair Associates”, his consultancy business. To begin with, each of these organisations were nominally separate, which meant most of the attention went on the business wing, leaving the impression that he was simply hawking his services among a range of unsavoury governments — from the Kuwaitis to the Kazakhs —  to the highest bidder, his post-premiership life one primarily driven by money-making.

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Fair or not, the fact that Blair was evidently making a lot of money did not sit well with a public who had been thrust into a world of austerity immediately after he left office. He had swiftly taken a well-paid seat on the board of JPMorgan Chase and joined the lucrative speaking circuit. This work brought in enough money to allow him to swap his old constituency home Sedgefield for two multi-million pound properties: one in London and another in the Home Counties. It did not go unnoticed that he seemed to be recreating the life he had in No. 10, only now freed from having to care about public opinion. His Georgian townhouse in London looked just like Downing Street and his country retreat was not only near Chequers, but had the same air of Chilterns grandeur.

Taken together, the money-making nature of his post-Downing Street life almost destroyed Blair’s public image. Even his decision to give away the entire £4.6 million advance for his memoir, A Journey, was dismissed as a publicity stunt.

But then came Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit and Donald Trump — the populist revolt. This was the moment his resurrection really began. Brexit, in particular, replaced Iraq in the public consciousness as the defining political event, with a new set of political villains whom the public could boo and whistle.

This period of political turmoil, according to many I spoke to, shocked Blair into becoming more involved in politics again. Blair took an important step towards rebuilding his public image by merging all his business and charitable interests into one organisation — the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. From this point on, instead of having a consultancy business and several charities, Blair presided over one giant not-for-profit organisation.

In 2017, he set up a unit called “renewing the centre”, recruiting a team of smart, young Anglo-Americans to come up with ideas to save the liberal order, as they saw it. From the beginning, though, there were tensions in the team. Some believed that given Blair’s background as Labour leader, “renewing the centre” meant, in effect, renewing the centre-left, finding new policies that would rebuild the coalition of progressives he had once so successfully amassed. Others, though, saw it differently. For them, “renewing the centre” meant renewing both the centre-left and the centre-right, and even forming an alliance where necessary to defeat their existential enemy: the “populists” who must never be appeased. I was told Blair was firmly in the latter camp.

For some, he was drawing exactly the wrong conclusion, confirming the populist narrative that there was no difference between the traditional parties, and that neither of which would allow any real change to the system. Over the years that followed, some of Blair’s more Left-leaning recruits departed in frustration, believing, as one person put it, that Blair was not really any different from George Osborne when it came to austerity. Others said the tensions in the project ran even deeper.

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“It was really fraught,” said one. “We were trying to save democracy — but from Mayfair.” Could the TBI really learn lessons this way? Another simply said: “It was a failure.” At this time, Blair was devoting much of his energy to campaigning for a second referendum — a fight he would eventually lose in December 2019, when Boris Johnson comfortably defeated Corbyn’s Labour with the promise to “Get Brexit Done”. The centre was collapsing.

And yet, from this point of political impotence, Blair’s reputation and influence has recovered. As the pandemic began to spread across Europe the following year, Blair put his policy unit to work. As cases escalated, the TBI released paper after paper on everything from face masks to mass testing and even international vaccine passports, always seemingly one step ahead of the Government. When the country was desperate to be vaccinated, Blair released a paper calling for a delay between the first and second doses to improve efficiency. The Government quickly announced the same plan.

Finally, Blair seemed to be back in touch with the zeitgeist. The pandemic was an ultimate test in apolitical “delivery” — that what matters is what works. He was back. His institute was flying and donations were beginning to pour in from around the world. But under the surface, all was not well.

III

In his memoir, A Journey, published in 2010, Blair describes how he helps developing countries. First, he hires teams of “highly qualified young people” from “Governments, the World Bank, McKinsey or private banks”. Then, after hiring these bright young things, he sends them out into the world to “build capacity, so that in time the locals can do it”.

Over the past few years, Blair has rapidly expanded his team of consultants. In Africa alone, the TBI is active in Rwanda, Senegal, Nigeria, Mozambique, Togo, Ivory Coast, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Teams of TBI experts sit at the heart of foreign governments, advising on everything from how to improve crop yields to the creation of “presidential delivery units”.

A quick look at the description for its “Country Director Eastern Europe” job gives an indication of the kind of work the institute does. “The Country Director will lead a TBI team embedded in country at the highest level of Government,” the advert reads. One of its key responsibilities is to “build and maintain a relationship of trust with your counterpart (typically President or Prime Minister level)”. In doing so, the candidate must be able to “suggest and convince your counterpart on key development priorities that TBI could be supporting”. What would be the reaction if this was the other way round: if, say, the Clinton Foundation, advertised for a team of people to be embedded in the British government or simply to “suggest and convince” the British prime minister to follow their advice?

Yet the TBI is proud of what its teams have been able to achieve . “In Nigeria, our energy advisor worked on the design and implementation of a mass solar-connection programme called Solar Power Naija that aims to provide electricity access to 25 million Nigerians,” the report states. In another example, the TBI said it “supported the government of Burkina Faso to improve the country’s agriculture and agri-business outcomes”. In doing so, the TBI claims, they helped increase the country’s “fertiliser-blending capacity”.

To the TBI’s critics, this is just the gloss of “deliverology”, the belief that what is really holding a country back is not so much deep structural challenges such as corruption, economic exploitation or colonialism — but bad governance. And this can be fixed. The problem, in other words, is largely technocratic, not political.

Another criticism levelled at Blair is that what he is really doing is advising on how to build a version of the Downing Street he created 20 years ago — right at the very moment the British state has shown itself to be so woefully dysfunctional (something, ironically, Blair also believes).

But it’s not just cynical Brits who are questioning the effectiveness of the TBI. There are also plenty of raised eyebrows in Africa. In June, Nigeria’s Guardian newspaper published an op-ed by an academic which dismissed Blair as a “self-serving lobbyist… projecting dubious altruistic inclinations”. Nigeria, it said, must not “willingly [offer] itself as a cheap financial rehabilitation home for retired British Prime Ministers”.

In Malawi, there is similar public disquiet. The TBI first arrived in the country in 2012 soon after the former president Joyce Banda came to power. However, after Banda’s government was overwhelmed by an extraordinary corruption scandal known as “Cashgate” — in which it emerged that as much as $250 million had been looted from public funds after a junior civil servant was found with $300,000 in cash in the boot of his car — the TBI left.

It returned to the country, though, in 2020, after Lazarus Chakwera, its new president, took over and asked for help to “strengthen its delivery and implementation mechanisms”. Not everyone in Malawi was happy about it. Charles Kajoloweka, executive director of the human rights and governance watchdog Youth and Society, said it was almost impossible to to find out exactly what TBI was doing. William Kambwandira, executive director at the Centre for Social Accountability and Transparency in Malawi, agreed. “Our greatest concern is that government dealings with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change have been kept under wraps.” In a statement, the TBI said the “sole purpose” of its work was “to ensure the government is delivering on its commitments to improve the public services it provides to its people.”

Such criticisms get to the heart of why some are sceptical about the TBI’s modus operandi. The TBI offers technocratic support based on a technocratic assessment of development, but it does so to political leaders often based on personal relationships with Blair himself.

The former Malawian president Banda explained how her relationship with Blair worked. “When I ascended to power, he and his wife Cherie flew over to Malawi within one week of my presidency,” she told UnHerd. “When he came over, during a state banquet hosted in his honour, I had a conversation with him where I personally requested [support] and he offered to send over three of his staffers to help me, due to the fact that I had assumed the presidency abruptly. I remember that is when he told me about his global programme and offered to lend me a hand. I remember what he said: ‘I have several people working in the region and I will shift them around.’” As Banda put it: “There was no formal agreement or big ceremony because he was just helping a friend.”

IV

In April 2022, Blair needed someone to manage the TBI’s vast, global consultancy. He hired Mike McNair from McKinsey, a Canadian who had worked for years as Justin Trudeau’s policy chief in Ottawa. Since arriving, McNair has overseen a rapid expansion of the organisation.

The nature of this expansion, however, raises questions about the TBI’s future and how it is funded. There has been a push from the TBI to access philanthropic donations and to create partnerships with business. One relationship in particular jumps out from the TBI accounts: that with the tech billionaire, Larry Ellison, and his company Oracle.

Ellison, 78, is currently thought to be the world’s fourth richest man, with an estimated fortune of $140 billion. Like many tech billionaires, he has cultivated a reputation as something of an iconoclastic sage, a workaholic visionary who can see the future more clearly than others — and, importantly, deliver it. Like his friend Elon Musk, Ellison is known for his almost impish impatience, his mind moving from one grand projet to the next, often making grand claims about their revolutionary potential only to move on to something else soon after. “I am a sprinter,” Ellison once remarked. “I rest, I sprint, I rest, I sprint again.”

It should not have been a great surprise, then, when in 2020 Ellison announced that he was suddenly disbanding his entire team at the Larry Ellison Foundation in London. The unit was led by Matthew Symonds, the former Economist journalist (and father of Carrie Johnson) who wrote an “intimate” authorised biography of Ellison, published in 2003. When I rang Symonds, he immediately hung up.

Ellison’s decision to close his London operation came at the height of the pandemic, announcing that he wanted to focus all his charitable energies on “medical philanthropy”. In many ways, this made perfect sense. Ellison bankrolls the Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine, focused on trying to find cures for cancer.

At around the same time, Ellison began deepening his relationship with Blair. In partnership with the TBI, Ellison’s Institute for Transformative Medicine created a “Global Health Security Consortium” with scientists at Oxford University to provide “support for leaders around the world to help them prepare for the health-security challenges of tomorrow”. Ellison also began giving more and more money to the TBI. In 2019, the Larry Ellison Foundation gave the TBI $10 million with a further $20 million committed. By 2021, this had risen to $33 million, with plans for future donations of a further $49 million.

At some point, Blair was evidently able to convince Ellison that the TBI’s methods were a more effective way to make the world a better place than his previous efforts. And the partnership between the two does have a certain logic. Blair believes that “the power of technology” must be harnessed by bringing together politicians and “innovators”. This, then, is one of the central purposes of the TBI as Blair sees it: to act as a matchmaker for plutocrats such as Ellison and political figures such as himself. But it is an approach that raises awkward questions about power and transparency.

Alongside the Global Health Security Consortium, the two of them have also created a “Tech for Development” programme. The idea is to help developing countries build “comprehensive digital infrastructure”. Together, Blair and Ellison have rolled this out in Ghana, Rwanda and Senegal for free, with a view to building electronic health records so that governments know who is vaccinated and who isn’t.

Not everyone, however, looks so kindly upon the partnership. Ellison, after all, is a divisive figure. To some, he is an intense visionary in the same mould as Musk, with the same intense desire to conquer all in business. As Symonds writes in his biography, Ellison has an “unquenchable optimism and almost messianic self belief”. And he is not shy about it. During the pandemic, Ellison offered his medical research facilities to President Trump free of charge. He has bought an island in Hawaii which he uses as both an ultra-exclusive resort for the rich and a living agricultural experiment, part of his grand plan to secure global food supplies. Even as he approaches his 80th birthday, he is still dreaming of his next great breakthrough as well as his legacy. Perhaps that’s why, last year, he made one of the biggest gambles of his career.

In June 2022, Ellison bought the electronic health record company Cerner for almost $30 billion. It was the largest buy-out of his life. Almost immediately after the purchase, Ellison announced that it would help him realise his aim of building a single national database for health records. The plan was endorsed by Blair. His hope is that, using Oracle technology, every American will be able to store their medical data online. It is a visionary move, which, if it pays off, would make Oracle the Amazon of health records. To some, the partnership with the TBI makes good philanthropic and commercial sense: if Oracle can show that digital health records work in Africa, why not elsewhere? And by partnering with the TBI, Oracle gains access to parts of the world it might not have been able to reach before.

The problem is that such a scheme to create a single national health record database is not only incredibly complex and hard to deliver, but extremely contentious. In fact, the main objection is not technocratic, but political — even moral. Do we want every health record to be stored on a cloud run by one corporation? Oracle is already facing a lawsuit in the US over claims it has unlawfully collected information on 5 billion people.

Whether you see the partnership between Blair and Ellison charitably or otherwise, it reveals an important reality about today’s world and the way power works in practice. Blair and Ellison operate in a sphere of hyper-connected individuals (one board member, for instance, is Baroness Rona Fairhead, Boris Johnson’s former minister for trade and export promotion). They talk and meet each other regularly, making important decisions that affect the lives of many people, in ways which are far harder to scrutinise than those taken by governments and political leaders.

Others I spoke to said it is not possible to judge Blair’s enthusiasm for this technology without acknowledging the fact that his institute is partially dependent on donations from a tech billionaire. Some of those who have previously worked closely with Blair went further, arguing that the conflicts of interests within Blair’s new life go even deeper, extending into the heart of the organisation itself. One arm of the TBI might be writing papers on how to protect the international liberal order, for instance, while the consulting arm is embedded with illiberal governments who pose a challenge to that very same order.

Rather than hide this, the TBI actively advertises its partnerships with business, arguing that the “partnerships” it has built up, alongside the donations it receives, allow it to do “the great bulk” of its consultancy work at no cost to governments. When it comes to tricky questions such as patient privacy, Blair is adamant that they do not undermine the transformative potential of technology. In Malawi, for example, the TBI boasts of its partnership with Musk’s “Starlink” internet service, which helped hundreds of thousands of people left homeless by a cyclone. Blair’s entire vision today is for governments to become more effective by linking the kind of strategy, delivery and policy units he had in No. 10 with the kind of technology that was not available to him. Just as he wanted to introduce ID cards back then, he now supports digital ID cards today, as well as vaccine passports and vast new health databases to tackle the spread of disease. As Blair sees it, his partnership with Oracle is just pragmatic policymaking.

But like Ellison, Blair is something of a utopian futurist. He believes, almost as a faith, in the power of technology. Blair is a good boss, according to many I spoke to, because he is always so upbeat and energetic, but when it comes to technology he is a little too “naive” about its possibilities. Another former employee suggests he is “fatalist” about technology in the same way he was fatalist about globalisation — not thinking critically enough about its risks and political consequences. The greatest irony, though, is that such wide-eyed belief in technology now feels almost old-fashioned. To a younger generation who grew up in a world dominated by Big Tech and Big Pharma, the dominance of giant corporations run by tech plutocrats feels less utopian than dystopian.

V

When Blair left office, he consoled himself with the thought that his life was not over. As he wrote in A Journey, he’d always had a bigger passion than politics: religion. Religion gave him purpose. “There is so much frailty still to overcome,” he concluded in his memoir. “But in overcoming it lies the meaning of life.”

But what are these frailties Blair must overcome? According to Catholic teaching, “sins of frailty” are minor acts committed through “indecision, weakness, lack of vigilance or courage”. Those who have previously worked closely with him see a bit of all these in Blair. Some believe he too often shies away from conflict, even today. In No. 10, he outsourced being the bad guy to Alastair Campbell and did not confront and demote Gordon Brown soon enough, which undermined his premiership. Some believe Blair is now shying away from confronting Starmer, a man he believes will become prime minister, but, according to a number of people I spoke to, not a sufficiently reforming one. Even as Blair battled to save centrism, he was careful not to burn bridges with the Trump or Johnson governments, or indeed any of the illiberal governments he works with.

Is this is a sign of indecisiveness? It is striking that even those who most like and respect him are unclear what exactly he wants from the TBI. Does he really want it to be the McKinsey for world leaders? Or a think tank? And for what purpose exactly? To Blair, this type of thinking is overly reductive. To have a political impact you must have policies and the ability to implement them. But it is also for this reason that there is what one former employee described as a certain whimsy to the TBI — an organisation less committed to the service of an abstract goal than to the aspirations of Blair himself. If Tony wants something, it happens; if he wants to help someone he helps them.

The more I studied him, the more I wondered whether his biggest frailty of all is simply the desire to remain relevant, the frailty that J.D. Salinger once described as, “not having the courage to be an absolute nobody”. Blair was a somebody once and it is very difficult to give that up. He had power to do things and he still wants to do things — and so he needs power. But to get power you need money and connections and ideas and people. And he now has all those things in droves.

This is the reason he continues to work as hard as he does, taking his box home at weekends, raising money, flying around the world, attending conferences. Maintaining the network becomes an intrinsic goal in itself. This helps explain why Blair takes meetings with world leaders and works for countries many would avoid. He has what one person described as a deep, primal need to be “connected”.

Today, Blair lives the life of a prime minister, but with the freedom to shake off the petty realities of government, working on campaigns to help American governors one moment, flying in to help embattled African leaders the next; all while working on grand plans to change the world with exciting, utopian tech bros in California.

But how much of this is actually real? “Do governments really want his strategic advice,” one person who knows Blair put it to me, “or his phone number?” Do those companies he has partnered with really have only altruistic intentions? And do political leaders really only work with him to make their governments more effective? The truth, I suspect, lies somewhere in the ambiguous soup of human motivation; in the flawed, frail characters of ordinary human beings with conflicting aspirations, trying to do good in the world and for themselves.

​​Blair today is more influential than any other former prime minister: he has built an empire that connects business to power and himself to everyone. In the 15 years since he left office, Blair has created a world in which he might not be prime minister but he remains powerful. And that is the point. The power is the point.

Additional reporting: Jack McBrams