The Zone of Uninterest

Corey Robin recently published a post about how opinions on Israel are rapidly changing among Jews. It is heavily ironised, and stands at the intersection of the literary traditions of awakening conscience and the Jewish-American experience (his own style owes not a little to Philip Roth), but the essential point I'd like to focus on is his recognition of that rapidity: the sense that there has been a sea-change in opinion and understanding. He quotes a number of statements by prominent Jews, introducing them as follows: "I’m posting these statements here just to give you a sense of how quickly opinion is changing. And it’s not Israel-haters and antisemites or self-hating Jews who are voicing the alarm. Most of these individuals below continue to identify as Zionists, as liberal Zionists, and of those who no longer identify as Zionist, they come by their positions honestly, as I hope you will see."

What changed in recent weeks was the incontrovertible evidence that the Israeli government is engaged in a deliberate policy of starvation, with some members of the cabinet openly advocating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, an intent reinforced by Benjamin Netanyahu's current proposal for the IDF to occupy the entire territory for an indeterminate period of time. What changed was the IDF murdering Palestinians queuing for food in what can only be described as a killing field. The decision of a number of Western countries to signal their intent to recognise a Palestinian state next month, along with the long-overdue and still tentative steps towards an arms embargo by the likes of Germany, have been symptomatic of this wider sea-change, rather than contributory factors. They are evidence of the realisation of governments that have willingly supported Israel that they are way out of line with their own electorates, and are increasingly out of line with liberal Jewish opinion globally.

Many of the people cited by Robin discuss the issue in terms of crossing a line: that Israel has gone too far, and risks losing its soul in the process. Perhaps the most interesting citation is of Avrum Burg, a former interim President of Israel and Leader of the Knesset who is prepared, at least rhetorically, to address the more existential issue - essentially the entire history of the state since 1948 - but who frames this in terms of Israeli/Jewish loss: "Could it be that the current State of Israel, that its body stronger than ever and its spirit deader than ever, no longer deserves to exist? Not because of what happened on October 7, but because of everything that came before, and everything that has erupted since….The destruction of Gaza is a damning indictment of Israel’s moral bankruptcy. And we must face the truth: Israel without an ethical foundation has no justification to exist."

There is a well-worn trope in the literary treatment of Nazism and the Holocaust of the cultured German officer listening to Schubert after a hard day's work overseeing the gas ovens. Beyond the inherent class bias in this image, which assumes the ordinary German soldier was an unthinking brute in comparison, there is this idea of loss: how could a culture that produced Schubert lead to the Final Solution? Where did Germany's soul go? The problem with the "crossing a line" framing is that it suggests a step back could be taken across that same line, like the German officer coming to his senses as he listens to Erlkönig, feeling pity for his victims and understanding that he is the evil-doer. But that is obviously absurd. While some Germans bravely resisted the Nazis, most did not, and those officers in the camps were selected precisely because they were true-believers who would feel neither shame nor guilt. 

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt (another writer Robin has long engaged with) famously wrote of "the banality of evil". The book caused a furore (and continues to divide historians) both because it described Eichman primarily as a careerist rather than a fervid antisemite, and because it highlighted the complicity of some Jews in the facilitation of the Holocaust. The first charge is problematic because it suggests Eichmann's behaviour was the result of incentives, rather than any commitment on his part over-and-above career advancement. At the close of Jonathan Glazer's 2023 film The Zone of Interest we see the Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss retching as he descends the stairs of a deserted palace into the darkness. Is this his conscience rebelling? In reality Höss claimed to have realised the enormity of his crimes only days before his execution. Prior to that, his attitude when challenged was described as "apathetic" and having "a lack of empathy". I can't be the only one who saw a parallel between the film's scenes of mundane looting and videos of IDF soldiers cavorting with children's toys and women's underwear in the ruins of Gaza.

Western governments have gone out of their way not merely to support Israel's military actions but to provide it with every possible excuse to step back over the line: to be applauded for restoring a status quo ante bellum in which Gaza was already a concentration camp, blockaded and rationed to punish the Palestinians as a people. Keir Starmer's pompous conditionality is simply a route that Netanyahu can take, with minimal inconvenience, to ensure that the recognition of Palestinian statehood is once more deferred and Israel reaffirmed in the community of the Western powers. In reality, the momentum of events and the wider anger in Europe may see the UK isolated in September, perhaps only lining up alongside Germany, a country whose Staatsräson requires that it expiate its guilt over the Holocaust by giving Israel carte blanche (the embargo on arms that "could be used in Gaza" is obviously little more than a gesture).

But is it possible to step back over that line? It clearly wasn't in the case of Eichmann and Höss. You can't simply say "Sorry, we went too far" after committing a deliberate genocide. Robin quotes the academic Lihi Ben Shitrit: "As psychologists note, shame and guilt are similar and often appear together, but there are crucial differences. Feeling shame is associated with embarrassment over the actions of members of our group that we think negatively reflect on our group’s identity. Guilt occurs when we feel collective responsibility for the negative actions of our group members. Shame leads to avoidance — hiding, denying or looking away from such actions. Guilt, on the other hand, motivates reparative or restorative responses. Liberal Jews like myself need to overcome our shame, which pushes some of us to avoid or even deny the reality of Gaza. Instead, we must grapple with guilt; guilt not in the sense of personal culpability, but rather in our collective responsibility."

Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian provides an object example of that liberal avoidance, even going so far as to claim a "moral case for escapism", and thus superior virtue: "For it’s when we feel ourselves plunged into the abyss, when our despair at our fellow human beings pulls strongest, that we most need to look upward – and glimpse the stars." What Freedland is implicitly saying is that his shame will never become guilt, in Ben Shitrit's terms. In other words he will neither question the existence of the State of Israel, like Avrum Burg, nor concede that collective responsibility means that Western governments, complacement liberal media and Israeli society generally must be deemed as guilty as Netanyahu, Smotrich and Gvir. As with the reaction to Eichmann in Jerusalem, it is that second charge, of collective responsibility, that sticks in his craw.

Conditionality

The two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict remains a polite fiction, urged mostly by European governments that have no intention of taking active steps to implement it. The US long ago gave up on even the fiction, preferring to make clear its support for a maximalist policy by Israel. The decision to bomb Iran in June was an endorsement of its client state's insistence that its area of authority is all of the Middle East, with only Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states (currently) off-limits. So long as Israel remains America's regional proxy, which it will do regardless of who is in the White House, there is no possibility of its territorial integrity being called into question by a land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians. That the fiction of the two-state solution is once more in the news does not indicate some tectonic shift in the geopolitical plates, despite the breathless coverage in the media. The proposed recognition of a Palestinian state in September by France, the UK and others is merely the latest attempt to preserve the fiction with the minimum of effort and consequence.

The conditions outlined by Keir Starmer are obviously intended to give himself sufficient room for manoeuvre to once more renege on a promise, even if Isarel truculently refuses to oblige by agreeing to even a temporary ceasefire. But they are also intended to revive the value of the "card" of formal recognition, and thus of the two-state solution itself, after years in which it has dwindled to almost nothing. To switch metaphors, by solemnly reviving the carrot as the centrepiece of his strategy he hopes to avoid questions over why the UK government has not thought fit to deploy the sticks of sanctions and arms embargoes in the face of what even centrist commentators are now admitting amounts to genocide. I have no idea whether Starmer will find himself obliged to recognise a Palestinian state in September, or whether he will find a way of wriggling out of it (the absurd conditions laid on Hamas - disband, have no future role etc - might well do the trick), but I do know that his decision will amount to little either way so long as the material and political support that the UK offers to Israel continues.

Patrick Wintour in the Guardian referred to the emerging division "between the moderate and extremist visions for the future of Gaza and the West Bank once the war finally ends." But he immediately emphasised that the former is premised on the Palestinians submitting to foreign interference - "a radically reformed Palestinian Authority governing without Hamas" - which makes clear that what will be recognised is closer to the pre-1948 British mandate than an independent people. Critics who insisted that the right of statehood cannot be qualified were forgetting that such qualifications were central to the operation of British imperialism during the twentieth century and it appears that muscle memory has kicked in, even though the UK simply doesn't have the power to impose its will in the way it did 100 years ago. This is why Starmer's conditions have a slightly ridiculous air of pomposity about them: I found myself hearing the voice of Neville Chamberlain talking about having sent the German Chancellor a "final note" as the current Prime Minister stood at the lectern. 

The conference in New York this week, hosted jointly by France and Saudi Arabia, employed similar language, insisting that "a transitional administrative committee must be immediately established to operate in Gaza under the umbrella of the Palestinian Authority". Given the corruption of the PA, this simply looks like a change of jailers for the people of Gaza and the West Bank. What is singularly lacking is any reference to the 1967 borders, which can be the only viable basis for a territorial settlement. According to Wintour, "The reality is that Israel in the wake of 7 October has moved further and further away from notions of a two-state solution." In fact, Israel had been steadily moving away from the idea since before the collapse of the Oslo Accords and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Illegal settlements have been created with state support since 1967. Indeed, you could argue that the Accords lasting influence was to confirm that Israel had no interest in an equitable peace, seeing Palestine as "less than a state", in Rabin's words, and the Palestinian Authority as mere collaborators.

For Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian's chief apologist for Israel, the problem remains Netanyahu ("Steadily, the Israeli public is coming to see the price of the pariah status that Netanyahu has all but cultivated.") If world opinion has (reluctantly) concluded that Israel has crossed a line, there is no recognition by Freedland that the actions of the government are a faithful reflection of the society that elected it. But while he ignores the reality of Israel he is happy to recyle Number 10's crude interpretation of Hamas: "That group is not interested, they say, in a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, living alongside Israel. Hamas is not in the two-state business, but rather seeks to rule over a single, jihadist state across the entire land, from the river to the sea." Freedland's understanding of the region, which accurately reflects British centrist opinion, is premised on the myth that most Israelis are liberal and secular, and that most Palestinians are religious fundamentalists who wish to wipe Israel off the map. It is this idea that informs the "moderate vision" that Wintour speaks of. 

Implicit in this vision are a number of assumptions: that the Palestinians must be actively policed to guarantee Israel's security (and not vice versa); that the Palestinian Authority must be answerable to Israel and the international community, rather than just the Palestinian people; and that Palestine must be "less than a state", lacking such accoutrements as an army or an independent foreign policy. It is a mindset that reflects the persistence of colonial thinking among Western governments in which certain peoples are deemed unfit for self-rule. Genocide never occurs out of the blue. It arises against a background narrative in which an entire "other" people is seen as a threat that must be expunged to guarantee the security of the nation. And in the context of Israel-Palestine, it is the "moderate" vision as much as the extremist that is responsible for that narrative. This was a genocide long-foretold because it is a narrative we have long been conditioned to.

The Rage of the Centrist

The evidence that Israel is deliberately starving the Gazan population if not to death then to a state of extreme malnutrition that will scar it for generations is now irrefutable. This has led to some predictable hand-wringing by centrist commentators, such as Gaby Hinsliff demanding a more virtuous response from a UK government that has not only been complicit in Israel's genocidal war but has actively criminalised principled opposition to it. We are told that pressure is mounting on Starmer to recognise a Palestinian state, even though this would do nothing to alleviate the suffering. If Emmanuel Macron thinks it's a good idea, you can be confident it's an empty gesture. In reality, the UK government is never going to recognise a free Palestine, something that the cabinet ministers briefing the press about their support for it know perfectly well. They are trying to protect their career prospects, or at least avoid being sacked by the electors, by crying crocodile tears for starving children.

What is notable is not just the abject cowardice of the response by centrists like Hinsliff but their refusal to accept that the time has come for the UK government to take meaningful steps, such as an arms embargo or sanctions against Israel. This is not just a transparent attempt to obscure their failure to advocate a stronger line months ago, when the direction of travel was obvious. It also highlights their own commitment to what we really should start calling the final solution of the Palestinian problem. Just as the government will never recognise an independent Palestine, so the commentariat will never admit that the goal all along has been the erasure of the Palestinians as a people with a land. You might as well ask them to admit that the Labour Party wasn't riddled with antisemitism between 2016 and 2019, and wholly free of that bacillus before and after.

This refusal to face the reality of their choices creates a psychic burden that needs some form of release. To no one's great surprise, as the evidence of genocide and the strategic use of starvation has mounted, so the centrist hatred of the left has reached an even more hysterical pitch. While Paul Mason insists that the new party mooted by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana would be the re-embodiment of the German Communist Party, paving the way for Hitler/Farage, Nick Tyrone, a self-styled centrist dad and think-tank wallah, opined that "literally anyone" would be better in government than the two former Labour MPs. You might think this was mere hyperbole, rather than literally meant, but the point is that he really would prefer Nigel Farage, or (for that matter) Boris Johnson or Liz Truss. These people have never been shy about admitting their hierarchy of acceptable politics.

Mason at least professes to abhor Farage, but that's really just to maintain his anti-Fascist credentials among credulous liberals and his self-deluding image as a latterday SPD street-fighter that the Labour Party would be foolish not to select as a prospective parliamentary candidate for a seat in the North. Tyrone is honest enough to admit that the political centre in this country is occupied by people who would much rather see Farage in Number 10 than anyone happy to self-describe as a socialist, which funnily enough is a more accurate historical echo of Germany in 1933, when the centre-right paved the way for Hitler, than Mason's crass analogy. Another example of centrist fantasy, built to obscure the reality of right-leaning preferences, comes from the journalist Ian Dunt. 

The "soft left" in Labour barely exists outside of the media's imagination and is certainly not organisationally robust enough to fight anyone. The mystery of the missing "soft-right" is easily explained: they're all in the Labour Party furiously fighting the left. In simple terms, the political establishment, which is coterminus with the widest definition of "the centre", has decided that it will not fight the far-right because the electorate is made up of incorrigible racists. The protestors outside asylum hostels must be placated with guff about "legitimate concerns", until they overstep the mark at which point they become suitable fodder for a crackdown. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage must be indulged not only by the rightwing press and a complacent BBC but by the political establishment as a whole. Instead, attention must be focused on the threat from the left, who must be stamped on hard along with anyone deemed a proxy, such as trans men and women or protestors against genocide.

Centrist commentators who loudly gave Israel the benefit of the doubt for years, and who now regretfully inform us that they may have been wrong to do so, are demanding that they be applauded for changing their minds. There is no humility or contrition, merely a testy anger that they have been bested in analysis by ageing hippies and pink-haired kids. Some have even taken to aggressively denouncing the left, who have been proved right, for not welcoming them into the big tent of bien pensant opinion, insisting that in the face of starving children what matters is civility and tone. What these sociopaths are ultimately defending is their authority within the politico-media complex. To that end, it is necessary that they continue to construct a leftwing bogey that can act as the scapegoat for the projected charges of naivety and delusion. For many of them, the launch of a new party by Corbyn and Sultana is a blessing.

What Determines Rent?

The popular discussion of economics divides into macro and micro, with those familiar with the former tending to adopt a slightly patronising attitude towards the latter (the legacy of Keynes' de haut en bas style), which in turn sees them map onto a left-right spectrum. This is misleading, not only because macroeconomics has historically been an attempt to reconcile classical liberalism with the reality of the state as an economic actor, thereby excluding the need for a socialist or Marxist analysis, but because it tends to omit large swathes of the real economy. A famous example was the lack of attention paid to finance and banking as a systemic vulnerability prior to 2008. But an even more prevalent omission in the popular macroeconomic discourse, which was once central to economics in the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, is the role of rent.

Smith laid out the basic proposition: "The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give." Ricardo formulated this as a general law, to wit that the rent of a piece of land will equal the additional monetary gain of its productive use relative to the production of a rent-free piece of land. In other words, tenant farmers will desert high-rent land if the rent exceeds the marginal loss they would incur by farming a rent-free piece of land. 

This theory was useful in an era when many people were tenant farmers and when colonialism was bringing marginal (i.e. rent-free) land into production, so the idea of farmers upping sticks to find a more economically advantageous plot wasn't as unrealistic as it seems to us today. Obviously the externalities of colonialism were ignored while rent was seen as a product of natural endowment - the gift of heaven -  and the industry of white colonisers (cf Locke). Subsequent attempts, e.g. by Marx, were made to focus on the capital investment of land, its improvement in Smith's terms, and how natural endowment in reality gives rise to rentierism, i.e. monopoly exploitation, notably in the area of patents and technical innovation (as theorised by Joseph Schumpeter).

The one area of rent that has tended to receive far less attention from economists, in terms of explaining what determines its price, is the rent of property, and specifically houses and flats. This might seem odd given how large rent looms in our lives. Even if you have bought a property or are currently paying a mortgage to do so, you are subject to rent insofar as house prices will always reflect the equivalent contract rent - i.e. what you could get if you let it over the same period as a typical mortgage (hence buy-to-let). Many people assume that the dynamic of this relationship works in the opposite direction: high house prices lead to high rents, and that rising house prices are simply the consequence of demand outstripping supply, hence the arguments that we should ease planning restrictions or curtail immigration, but this ignores that there is no shortage of empty or under-occupied houses and flats across the country. So what determines rent?

The law of supply says that more goods will be produced at higher prices. In other words, if demand for a commodity grows, thereby pushing up the price, producers will increase output to take advantage of the larger demand and thus fatter profit margins. The law of demand says that at higher prices demand falls. So once supply of that commodity exceeds demand, following that increase in output, prices will fall back to their notional equilibrium level. This simplistic model obviously ignores a lot of real world frictions and contraints. For example, not all commodities can be rapidly produced at a higher rate, e.g. by adding shifts or converting existing production lines. Likewise, if the market is cartelised there may be a reluctance among producers to increase output excessively. OPEC is the obvious example here.

In the case of housing, there are real constraints such as restrictive planning regulations and limited real resources (builders and building materials), but the biggest determinant is the reluctance of volume builders to over-supply the market and so depress prices. In this context, the state is a volume builder that has taken a self-denying ordinance to maintain house prices, both for owner-occupiers and landlords, which is why the UK government is so reluctant to build council houses despite the pressing need, and why US liberals like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that "abundance" can be achieved by simply rolling back regulations and striking out building codes, which provides an easy excuse to ignore capitalist realities in favour of a technocratic can-doism.

The "law" of demand is also undermined by necessity. In other words, there are certain things we have to buy, at least at a minimal level, such as shelter, food and clothing, lest we risk injury or death (self-sufficiency is not a practical strategy for most people and a return to a subsistence economy would result in mass starvation). We cannot realistically choose not to buy shelter, preferring to spend our money on first editions or champagne, so demand cannot fall to such low levels that prices must drop. Equally, we cannot easily cut back on the amount we spend on shelter, unlike certain other necessities such as food or clothes. We can skip meals or wear socks with holes in them, but we can't decide to move to a cheaper flat for a month and then back again to ease our cashflow.

When we talk of "the housing market" (singular) we are dealing in a fantasy. In reality, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of geographically limited housing markets, which estate and letting agents understand only too well. Goods (i.e. houses and flats) cannot be moved from one market to another, so prices must always reflect local circumstances. We also cannot easily choose to buy from alternative suppliers in cheaper markets. If I work in London but can't afford the rent, there's no point renting a flat in Sunderland. And if I got an equivalent job in Sunderland, it might not pay well enough to allow me to rent there either.

When house prices or rents do fall, that is typically because of a relative over-supply in a limited geographical market. But when this happens it is rarely because the quantum of supply rapidly increases. Instead it is because the quantum of demand rapidly falls. The obvious examples are all around us: areas that saw deindustrialisation in the 1980s with the result that the population shrank. But the fall in house prices and rents in those areas also reflects the lower average income of the remaining population: deindustrialisation typically took away above-average wage jobs, and they were above-average in most cases due to the strength of trade unions in heavy industries like coal, steel and shipbuilding. Outside these geographic exceptions, house prices and rents rarely if ever fall, something that cannot be explained away as price "stickiness" or the lower bound of a zero return on capital.

Rents then will always reflect "what the market can bear", which is a polite way of saying that landlords will push prices up to their maximum: the point where tenants can just about afford them, assuming they're willing to limit expenditure on other goods, which may be discretionary, such as entertainment, but may also be necessities, such as food and clothing. The "cost of living crisis" due to the recent spike in food and energy costs shouldn't distract from the fact that the prices of these other necessities are, in real terms, a fraction of what they were 50 years ago. That rents have grown over this period is not because people have felt that housing was a better choice for their discretionary expenditure, despite the relentless media propaganda, but because landlords have, in Smith's words, constantly recalibrated what the tenant can afford to give.

Everything Must Change For Everything to Remain the Same

We've reached that stage in the political cycle where commentators are beginning to wonder why the government keeps screwing up. The immediate prompt for this was the passing of the latest welfare bill, which generated a minor backbench revolt and a "dilution" that means it isn't as stunningly mean-spirited as originally intended. Beyond the theatrics of Westminster, the government continues to pursue its programme. Not the one it was elected on, but the one it intended to enact all along, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the received wisdom of twenty years ago, hence ideas such as a national ID card have resurfaced while a rebranded Sure Start has got Polly Toynbee trilling with delight. 

There are obviously tonal differences between Blair and Starmer, and these have even been offered as an explanation for the current government's struggles. For example, Stephen Bush has decided that the Prime Minister has no real interest in policy beyond justice and security, which was a useful insight when made by Oliver Eagleton in The Starmer Project in 2022 but seems otiose now. Starmer's brief was to recover the Labour Party from the left. That he then won the general election was a bonus, but it's churlish to condemn him for being narrow-minded and dull when those were the qualities necessary to fulfill the original brief. There is a hint in Bush's reading of Starmer that the chief cock-ups, notably the Winter Fuel Allowance imbroglio, can be laid at the door of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Simon Wren-Lewis is baffled that the government didn't recognise that tax rises were inevitable immediately on taking office. He doesn't mention Rachel Reeve's crap impression of Captain Renaud, shocked to discover what a mess the Tories had left, which would have reinforced the point, perhaps because he wishes to find an explanation for the Chancellor's behaviour that doesn't highlight her cynicism (if nothing else, those tears mean everyone will try not to be mean to her for a week or two). The best he can come up with is: "that they accepted that George Osborne was correct: the size of the state under New Labour was too large, and he was essentially right to shrink it. This meant Labour in government would be a more competent version of a post-Osborne Conservative government." 

But rather than accept the charge of the left that there is an ideological congruence between this government and that of the 2010-16 period, Wren-Lewis insists that this was simply a political misjudgement. Likewise he attributes the government's attempts to outbid Reform on immigration to error: giving undue salience to the issue and echoing Nigel Farage's lies about the impact on public services. At this point you might wonder if telling "lies" is evidence of misjudgment or maybe something else. Starmer's track record of deceit and dissimulation in his ascent to the party leadership can lead one to assume that he has no fixed beliefs, but you don't accidentally employ the language of Enoch Powell unless there is some base sympathy.

Simon's prescription for the government to turn round its unpopularity is to be more honest about the need for tax rises, to "plausibly argue that while everyone is promising lower immigration, only they are doing so in a way that doesn’t damage the economy", and finally to start admitting that Brexit has been a mistake. The latter should be emphasised not only because it is true, and will become more evident to voters over time, but in order to remind voters that Farage was one of the chief authors of that calamity. For good measure, he also suggests pointing out that the chaos of the Trump administration is a harbinger of what we could expect from a Farage premiership. 

In his final analysis, Wren-Lewis is pessimistic, anticipating that the government will not raise taxes sufficiently, that they will continue to ape Reform on immigration and that they will fail to be open and honest about the costs of Brexit. Given that he set out to explain why Labour have made these mistakes in office, you might feel a little short-changed. Insofar as he points the finger, it is to suggest that Morgan McSweeney may be less clever than his mates in the media suggest and that Starmer hasn't understood "the difference between being in opposition and government". But naivety on the part of Starmer is no more explanatory than the trope of the king's evil advisor.

Andy Beckett, whose modus operandi is to ask innocent questions, focuses not on the economic logic for tax rises but on the moral case for redistribution. He often overdoes the disingenousness. Thus he is correct to point out that "Creating a more egalitarian society and politics – which by definition means redistribution from the powerful – was Labour’s original purpose", but there are surely few people, even in the party itself, who imagine that egalitarianism continues to be a motivating force rather than a mere shibboleth. The mantra of New Labour, and centrist political parties in most other developed countries from the 1980s onwards, was that growth would deliver improved public goods, and thus ameliorate inquality, but that we must therefore prioritise wealth creation and so coddle the wealth creators. 

It was, in effect, the centre-left version of trickle-down economics, with the state providing a more concrete presence than the invisible hand of the market. The problem, evident to all since 2008, is that underlying growth was anemic, artifically amplified by financial speculation in the preceding decades. The steadily-encroaching climate crisis has called into question whether growth is even viable, and we may find ourselves struggling to stand still as decades of under-investment cause the fabric of public life to start falling apart. If the cake can't be rapidly enlarged, then inevitably politics will turn to the question of how big our relative slices should be. 

The answer to the question "Why is Labour so afraid to admit that we must tax the rich?" is therefore quite simple. It remains committed to the idea that wealth must be coddled. To that end, public goods must be rationed so that the state's share of GDP doesn't rise and ideally falls. What Beckett describes as New Labour's strategy of redistribution by stealth (the minimum wage, family tax credits etc), but which would be better called "trickle down", is no longer viable because economic growth will not produce tax revenues sufficient to address the growing demand for public goods. The reforms suggested to boost productivity, such as deregulating planning, are hopelessly inadequate, while the one available change that would boost the economy quickly - completely reversing Brexit - is politically unpalatable.

The Blairite Philip Collins thinks that we are facing an era of small party politics and thus of coalition government. The fragmentation of support in the opinion polls is real enough, but we shouldn't imagine that this reflects a greater volatility among voters. The British system was built on two mass parties that acted as informal coalitions: the "broad church" in Labour's case. Together with the trope of the swing voter, this gave the impression of structural stability and marginal shifts. Underneath was a wide variety of views across the electorate and often vicious contests within the parties themselves. What has happened since then is that both main parties have become narrower and more intolerant of dissent, largely due to Brexit (the Conservatives) and the war on the left (Labour). The inevitable consequence is that voters look elsewhere.

Collins's future preference is for a grand coalition of Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, though with the implicit rider that the Tories return to the sensible centre, leaving the crazies to Reform and the lefties fragmented and ineffective across the Greens, various independents and whatever vehicle Corbyn and Sultana manage to launch. What this daydream ignores is that so long as MPs are elected on a first-past-the-post basis, Nigel Farage is more likely to be a king-maker than Ed Davey. Indeed, a Labour-Reform coalition is far from being improbable. Collins may be right that Labour supporters are "inveterately hostile to a deal with Reform", but that doesn't apply to the PLP. 

As this point it is worth recalling that Simon Wren-Lewis saw the government echoing George Osborne and apeing Nigel Farage as misjudgements, as evidence of Starmer's political naivety. The troubling reality may be that just as there has been an ideological congruence between Labour and the Tories on the need to privilege wealth since the 90s, so there is now a meeting of minds between both parties and Reform on the need to lower immigration and welfare rolls. And don't expect the Lib Dems or Greens to mount an effective opposition to that emerging consensus.

We're facing a future in which no one party can command anywhere near a majority of the electorate, not because there aren't policies that command public support but because the cartel isn't prepared to put them to the vote - most obviously a meaningful wealth tax, but also nationalisation of utilities - and will happily fragment the party system if it means the same people can stay in power through increasingly squalid coalition deals. In Lampedusa's The Leopard the famous maxim is that everything must change for everything to remain the same. In reality, it was a change in outward forms, the compromise of the fading aristocracy and the emerging bourgeoisie, not a change in the fundamental class relations of capital and labour. To maintain the privileges of wealth, the British party system will be broken apart.