Lifetime Learning

There are a number of irritating features in Gaby Hinsliff's Guardian article on student debt. The first is the framing of a "generational injustice", which plays to the idea that the young are getting a raw deal. This ignores that many young people don't have any student debt, because they never went to college, and nor did many older people. In other words, the issue relates to the difference in treatment of the 38% who currently go on to tertiary education and the 15% of the older cohorts that did so by the early 1990s. The second irritation is the claim that what we now have is a "stealth tax", which is correct only in the limited sense that the Chancellor has frozen the income threshold for repayments (i.e. a form of fiscal drag). It also ignores that graduates may eventually have their debt wiped out, which is not a privilege HMRC extends to other taxes, stealthy or otherwise. The reason why the issue is causing so much angst among the press is precisely because it is seen as an added tax on the non-wealthy middle-classes. Rachel Reeves' comment that it's "not right that people who don’t go to university are having to bear all the cost for others to do so" makes this clear from a (traditional) working class perspective.

As a good centrist, Hinsliff cannot resist the temptation to berate the irresponsible left in passing. Thus she notes that "Last week, the Green party leader, Zack Polanski, called for “a conversation about student debt forgiveness”, echoing a rallying cry among young Democrat voters at the last US election for loans to be written off faster (though he didn’t explain where he would find the billions that would cost)". I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Polanski didn't bother to explicitly state where the billions would come from because they can only come from taxation. Hinsliff could probably work this out for herself. The "magic money tree" of borrowing against futrure prosperity is not relevant here, despite the routine trope of further education as an investment and the youth of today as tomorrow's fiscal infrastructure. Like state pensions, state education is paid for by current workers (the Chancellor's point). The student loan scheme is anomalous not because it seeks repayment from the beneficiaries, rather than funding the cost out of general taxation, but because it expects future workers to pay for historic costs. Beneath the wails about injustice, you can spot the traditional conservative argument about not "saddling" future generations with debt. 

Hinsliff notes that graduates may face a marginal tax rate of 49% when even the highest rate of income tax is currently only 45%. As she puts it, "why are young people being squeezed proportionately harder in some cases than their bosses?" But it's no secret that the poorer you are the higher the total tax burden, when you include VAT, Council Tax and other indirect taxes. And it's also no secret that the rich can avoid paying the headline rates of income tax by converting income to dividends or capital gains. The Guardian, like other newspapers, has had to tread a fine line here: emphasising the "injustice" without admitting that it is one among many that currently characterise the UK tax system and arguably nowhere near the worst. Hinsliff suggests that "The fairest option is probably to cap how much any student should have to pay over their lifetime, so that loans bear some resemblance to what was borrowed rather than just morphing into a kind of stealth graduate tax." But she immediately dismisses this on grounds of expense, i.e. lower tax revenues, indicating that fiscal rigour still matters more to centrists than social justice. The discussion should really be about how we shift the tax burden onto those who currently pay proportionately less.

So who would those others be? Back in 2012, I noted that the proposed changes to increase the qualifying age for the state pension would be regressive because of variations in longevity (and thus years enjoying a state pension) across socio-economic groups. On average, the richer you are, the more state pension you will get in cumulative terms, regardless of lifetime contributions. A few months later, I suggested that the worries about a lack of skilled employees could be alleviated by applying differential state pension ages based on further education. In simple terms, if you left school at 16, you'd retire at 65; if you left at 18, you'd retire at 67; and if you went on to do a 3-year degree course, you'd retire at 70. This would skew the composition of the working population towards the skilled, which is helpful if you consider the adverse trend in the dependency ratio (the number working who must support those not working). As there would be nothing to stop anyone saving into a private pension, the rich might still retire at 65 or even earlier, but in aggregate across the economy we should see a staggering of retirement dates in line with education.

The moral (or "justice") case for differential state pension ages based on educational attainment is that people who started work at 16 are likely to die an average 5 years earlier than people who started work at 21. This is both a reflection of a person's socio-economic class origins and the greater likelihood that an earlier start in the workplace will have led to a liftetime of manual or routine labour and consequently greater health issues (the result of physically demanding labour, unhealthy workplaces and the long-running effects of income inequality). The fiscal case is that while manual labour is difficult to maintain into your 60s, cognitive or other skilled work is much easier. In terms of productivity, there is no significant falling off and this is reflected in a lower likelihood of a rapid downturn in earnings in the final decade of work, and thus taxes paid. As cognitive and skilled work broadly correlates with educational attainment, it makes sense to defer state pensions for that healthier, more productive and higher-earning cohort. 

That cohort's extra years in work will typically be at above-average levels of pay. The current difference in median salaries for graduates and non-graduates is about £12k per annum: £42k versus £30k. If we conservatively assume that difference generates £2.4k in additional tax from the typical graduate (i.e. at 20%, though many will actually be higher-rate taxpayers), then the 5 years of further education required for a typical degree should recoup a further £12k in revenue if the individual works till 70. At this point you might note that this is significantly less that the £53k cost of tuition fees and maintenance loans for a three-year degree. So how would we bridge the gap of £41k to match costs with income? The answer, once more, is through income tax. The follow-up question is: whose tax? Do we simply raise rates across the board? The answer to that question is no, we raise taxes on that part of the salary distribution where graduates are mostly to be found, which is above £40k.

A graduate tax is cumbersome to administer because it is geared to the persistent person rather than their variable income. The graduate who through career choice or ill-health doesn't earn enough to make repayments means that such a tax would be punitive unless waived below an earnings threshold or written off at the end of a fixed term, which is why the current loan replayement scheme has those features. A far simpler solution is to make income tax more progressive so that those on higher incomes, who will disproprotionately be graduates, pay more. You could do this by lowering the higher rate threshold to a point where it recoups an extra £15.6k over 40 years (that's the difference of £41k but at a 38% rate to match the graduate share of the working population). This would be £47,700 in today's money, which, you'll note, is significantly higher than the median graduate income. One way of implementing that would be to continue with fiscal drag. At 3% inflation, it would take only 2 years for the curent higher rate threhold of £50,270 to depreciate to £47,700.

You could argue that this would penalise successful non-graduates who earn high salaries but who never benefited from higher education, but this is to forget that they will have the option to retire at 65 on a full state pension (worth £60k, i.e. 5 years at £12k per annum in today's money). Also, bear in mind that we're not increasing the burden on basic rate taxpayers, which should please the Chancellor. The difference in tax for a graduate on the median income of £42k would be nil, because they're below the £47.7k threshold. A graduate earning £50,270, i.e. at the current higher rate threshold, would pay an extra £1,028 in income tax a year. Across 40 years, that graduate earning 50k (assuming they stay at the same relative level of income) will pay roughly an extra £41k (in today's money) in income tax. If you add in the extra £12k they can be expected to pay by working till 70, that recoups the £53k spent on their college education. In summary, differential qualifying ages for the state pension, plus an income tax higher rate threshold geared to (but higher than) the median graduate earnings, would allow us to revert to fully-funded tertiary education.

As well as encouraging more students to go to college, and thereby help boost the long-term productivity of the country, putting the burden of student debt onto higher-paid and older graduates (and to an extent on higher-paid non-graduates) has the advantage of going with the demographic flow as the population ages. We are approaching a wave of graduates in their 60s, most of whom incurred no student debts, reflecting the expansion of higher education starting in the 1990s. More broadly, this approach helps redress the bias of the last 40 years that favoured the (now) well-off elderly - who benefited from lower housing costs and better private pensions as well as free education - relative to today's youth. And it does so without penalising poorer older people, who will disproportionately have left school at 16 or 18 and are dependent on the state pension. 

The sketch I've outlined here is simplified and not meant to be definitive, but it does prove, I think, that a fairer and more efficient method of funding higher education is available if we get away from the cursed idea of student loans and view it in terms of working lifetimes and the returns to income arising from higher edcuation. At heart this means reverting to the time-tested principle that today's dependents are paid for by today's workers, whether they be pensioners or schoolkids (no one is proposing student loans for A-levels, after all). The impediments to this are not economic but political, and at their root is both the persistent anti-intellectualism of a public discourse that assumes many degrees are "worthless" and a government culture that prefers universities to operate as commercial enterprises rather than as sites of dissent and crtitique.

After Starmer

Ever since the immediate aftermath of the 2024 general election, when Keir Starmer's favourability rating briefly flirted with positive territory before tanking, liberal commentators have been baffled as to why the Prime Minister is so widely hated. Given the ample evidence of his duplicity, incompetence and craven appeasement on the world stage this must be read as performative ignorance. They know perfectly well why public opinion is so negative but have too much invested in the project - the grown-ups back in charge - to admit that his election as Labour leader was a con-trick on the party membership, that the landslide general election win on a paltry 34% of the vote was a fluke, and that the government remains committed to preserving the status quo rather than delivering the change promised. The liberal press were central to that original sin, so there is a degree of pyschological transference at work here. Unless you're willing to admit that it was a con and that you played your part in it, it makes sense to assume that the hatred is directed at the one man rather than at the wider politico-media class.

Complaining about the irrationality of the mob has been common since the days of Plato, while the nature of political reporting has not changed much since the Early Modern period, with its emphasis on court gossip and the insider/outsider dichotomy. A good example of this was Peter Walker in the Guardian unironically using the phrase "herd mentality" and quoting the ubiquitous Luke Tryl, of the pollsters More in Common, to the effect that the shallow electorate prefers jolly cards like Boris Johnson to sober technocrats like Starmer: "One of my grand macro-theories of politics is that people relate better to politicians who look like they enjoy the job, and they react quite badly to politicians that look pained by it." Tryl is a consumate insider: a former Special Adviser to Nicky Morgan at the Department for Education and a long-time think-tank wallah. His insights into the electorate are carefully curated to meet the expectations of his clientele, which predominantly means the media.

But the era of bafflement may be coming to a close in the wake of the Mandelson scandal as more revelations about Starmer's path to the top and his performance in Number 10 have to be publicly acknowledged. As a result, we can expect to see more pieces, like the latest from Tim Shipman in the Spectator, that make abundantly clear that Starmer is not only hated by the public but is despised by many within the politico-media class as well. Shipman is also performing, but his sub-text is not that the public are ignorant and gullible but that the true king-makers are the press and the currency of king-making is unattributable briefings: "Every single quote in this article is from a Labour source: a minister, MP or party official, and most importantly eight serving and former Starmer aides." The meta-narrative of Shipman's tale is that Starmer is apolitical. He doesn't have strong beliefs, with the result that he is indecisive and inconsistent, he shows no interest in either political theory or practice ("incurious"), and he has no taste for gossip. This is a character study of an outsider made by an insider. 

While the Tory press long ago wrote off Starmer as a fraud, and while the more bovine centrists of the Guardian continue to praise the man as "decent", despite the many indecencies of his comments over Gaza and immigration, more thoughtful liberals, like Tom McTague at the New Statesman, see the fall of McSweeney as evidence that the marriage of convenience between Labour's Old Right and the Blairites is falling apart. The corollary of this is the supposed opportunity espied by the Soft Left to make Starmer its cats paw. At this point it is worth emphasising that the Labour Party no longer has discernible ideological factions. The Old Right long ago mutated from conservative trade unionists and Atlanticists to amoral bureaucrats who saw the fight against the left as simply a route to power and thus access to freebies and perks. The left itself has been largely extirpated, leaving only the rump of the Socialist Campaign Group. The Blairite true-believers have always been a small minority, and Blue Labour exists largely in the minds of the press. The Soft Left is simply the bulk of the party: careerists with shallow beliefs. The claim that it is an organic faction is belied by the absence of an actual political programme. The aim of the revived Tribune Group to create one will probably just lead them to reissue the 2024 party manifesto. 

What this points to, and which McTague at least seems to get, is that the Labour Party has run out of road. It no longer has a purpose, neither as the political wing of organised labour nor as the electoral vehicle of social democracy. The shibboleths about equality and opportunity run up against the harsh realities of the Thatcher dispensation: embedded inequality, a fear of offending the rich, a hollowed-out economy dependent on the kindness of strangers. The social and cultural ambitions of the party, from decent housing and reliable welfare to non-utilitarian education and collective arts, have long since shrivelled to practically nothing. The interrogation and reform of the state has given way to the punitive inspection of the populace. The monarchy and the House of Lords stumble on while we are told we can no longer afford benefits for the sick and elderly. The NHS is bleeding to death and once it has gone Labour will have lost the last vestige of its commitment to the welfare state. A revived commitment to the warfare state, as promoted by the likes of Paul Mason, will not fill the void. The Labour Party has entered the terminal stage.

This moment of recognition has been coming ever since the general election. All the chuntering about the government's lack of a clear purpose obscures that the Starmer Project, to borrow the title of Oliver Eagleton's enlightening 2022 book, was pretty much complete before the polling stations opened. Eagleton summarised the project as: "1) a 'values-led', non-antagonistic electoral strategy; 2) an unsparing crackdown on the Labour Left, seen as more dangerous than the Conservatives; 3) an Atlanticist-authoritarian disposition, combining intervention abroad with repression at home; and 4) a return to neoliberal economic precepts, overseen by Blairite leftovers". My own view is that the last 2 are essentially just business-as-usual, while the first is characteristic of a politics "disenchanted by economics", in Will Davies' phrase, and thus a by-product of neoliberal governance. What is distinctive about the Starmer project is number two, and insofar as the liberal press continue to salute Starmer, it is in recognition of his success in sealing the left's tomb (a phrase coined by Peter Mandelson). The problem is that without the left, the Labour Party is an empty shell.

The key to Keir Starmer is not that he is apolitical but that he has always been a state apparatchik. As I've noted on a number of occasions (and expanded on in the comments to my previous post), his brief was to restore the authority and gravitas of the state after the twin insults of Brexit and Corbyn, both of which saw democracy temporarily slip the control of the establishment. In practical terms, this meant firstly securing the Labour Party against the left, and then moving foreign and trade policy back into the domain of technocratic expertise (this is far more important than formal reaccession to the EU). What scared the establishment about Corbyn was not the possibility of a move towards social democracy in domestic policy but of the UK moving towards an unaligned position on foreign policy. With Brexit, the fear was that trade policy would be politicised and thereby made subservient to domestic policy. For that reason, a hard Brexit would always be preferred to a soft Brexit (let alone a Lexit), as the former could be more easily managed outside of parliamentary scrutiny while the latter would have demanded greater scrutiny in the Commons.

The Labour Party has been secured and the government is safely in the hands of the apparatus, even if its day-to-day operation seems chaotic and incoherent. The establishment is comfortable with this, hence who succeeds Starmer isn't really a pressing concern, despite the best efforts of Janan Ganesh to convince us that the government is already too leftwing and that Rayner or Miliband in Number 10 would announce a socialist republic. As Eagleton presciently said in 2022, "Those in line to succeed Starmer - Burnham, Rayner, Nandy, Streeting - have all indicated that they will adopt the same approach, albeit with more passion and less self-apology". That no one has a clear idea of the policy differences between any of the leading candidates tells you that there will be no ideological contest come the next leadership election. That is Starmer's legacy. What we'll get will be vibes because everyone agrees the problem with the current leader is poor presentation not bad politics. If the candidates cannot explain what they are for, they will struggle to convince voters what Labour is for.

Starmer's appointment of Mandelson as the UK ambassador in Washington was emblematic of his rejection of democratic accountability in favour of technocratic expertise, even if Mandelson's "expertise" was little more than plotting, schmoozing and maintaining an extensive contacts book. The apologies over his appointment are insincere. To the politico-media class that indulged him for so long, the public reaction to the revelations of his relations with Jeffrey Epstein is simply populist hysteria: a fit of moralising that has no place in the world of the "grown-ups". Their hope is that the madness will shortly pass and business as usual will resume. They may be disappointed in this simply because the press have the smell of blood in their nostrils. While many journalists will urge caution for fear of highlighting their own complicity in the shenanigans that first elevated Starmer, others will be unable to resist the pleasures of the scandal. Like the scorpion that stings the frog, it is in their nature. 

This Charming Man

Last week, a long time ago in politics, the Sky News presenter Sophy Ridge tweeted that "Peter Mandelson is obviously a very charming man". This struck me as odd because Mandelson has always seemed to me to be a particularly charmless individual - vain, cruel and pompous - and I can't imagine I am the only one who thinks this way. The emphasis of "obviously" was perhaps an attempt by Ridge to excuse her own gullibility, but it also serves to remind us that she is talking of his reputation within a rarefied social network. To be fair to her, the remainder of her anecdote belied her first sentence, noting that in her personal experience he was initially dismissive because she, as a trainee reporter many years ago, had neither status nor power. She then correctly notes that his "charm" was simply the currency of a "closed group of elites" expressed through gossip and condescension: "There are too many people in Westminster who look over the shoulder of the person they're talking to see if there's someone more important in the room". In other words, "charming" does not have its ordinary meaning here. It is simply a performance intended to confirm your membership of the "inner circle".

The key to Mandelson's character, I suspect, is that he is a snob: a middle class North London boy who grew up among Labour aristocracy in Hampstead Garden City and who has always sought elevation to the real thing, hence his acquisition of a posh accent and the accoutrements of country living - the purple Aga, the scruffy dog, the Beryl Cook print - straight out of a Jilly Cooper novel. For many journalists, his charm was little more than a readiness to make bitchy remarks about other politicians and a willingness to leak confidential information. Those political commentators expressing shock that he might have revealed commercially sensitive information to Jeffrey Epstein are obviously disingenuous, but no more so than those of a certain age who insisted that Mandelson's influence in the Labour Party during the 1990s was the product of his skills rather than David Sainsbury's money. And those skills were largely journalistic fantasy. The fact that he repeatedly got caught out and had to resign should have been a clue that he was neither as cunning nor calculating as the press routinely claimed. The moment the media failed to indulge him, he came across as an idiot or an importunate nuisance.

The responses to the revelations about Mandelson's abuse of position and his dishonesty over his relationship with Epstein can be broadly divided into two camps: those who see the affair as the tale of a reprehensible, possibly criminal, individual who tainted others by association; and those who see the peer and former minister as a symptom of a corrupt system. The politico-media class has tended towards the first interpretation while the general public has tended towards the second. This isn't surprising. The first response to political scandal by those in the vicinity is to establish its limits, how far the poison has spread, hence the focus on who knew what and when. The assumption is that the body is sound and we simply need to cut out the rotten parts and let the healing begin. The popular view is that the system itself, the entire politico-media nexus, is rotten and incurable. This is obviously dangerous. So dangerous that any number of individuals will be sacrified to preserve the system. Indeed, the renewed speculation over the position of the Prime Minister is proof of that. 

The recent emphasis on Keir Starmer's "decency" might appear odd even if you only had a passing acquaintance with his track record of duplicity and spite, not to mention his readiness to sack others to save his own skin. The explanation is that centrist political commentators know he has to go because, to borrow a phrase of Clement Attlee, he's just "not up to it", but they want him to go with his dignity intact. Not because they care about him as an individual. It's no secret that his unwillingness to cultivate personal relations with the press claque, which has created a full-time job for Tom Baldwin, has not endeared him, but they understand the need to protect the system. In their eyes Starmer's job was to restore the authority and gravitas of the state after the twin insults of Brexit and Corbyn. Though he purged the Labour left and won a massive majority, he has failed in this goal. The UK has looked shrunken and slightly pathetic on the world stage as Starmer has tried to appease Trump, while Starmer and McSweeney's authority is in freefall among ministers and the wider PLP.

Since 2008, "populism" - the centrist shorthand for any threat to the system - has either been diverted if it appears from the right, usually towards anti-immigration and transphobic sentiment, or bluntly extirpated if it appears from the left, usually through claims of antisemitism or the treasonous support of our nation's enemies. The obvious risk is that the further fallout from the Mandelson affair might lead to more embarrassing revelations about the latter manoeuvre, specifically in relation to the Labour Party between 2016 and 2024. The upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election already looks like a straight fight between the Greens and Reform, which means a competition between two anti-system critiques: one focused on the distance between Manchester and Westminster (which has been widened by Starmer's blocking of Andy Burnham as a possible candidate); the other on the proximity of Rochdale and Oldham and their history of grooming gangs (if Matt Goodwin refers to Mandelson, it will probably be in the context of sexual exploitation).

Mandelson is the British political system incarnate. I don't say that to rehearse the usual guff about how well-connected he is, or to praise his acute understanding of party dynamics and personalities. My point is that he is typical: bitchy, anti-intellectual, venal. He is giddily impressed by wealth and status, which is why he was such an easy mark for an arch-manipulator like Epstein. What should surprise us about the cash gifts he received is how modest they were in the world he inhabited: small change for billionaires. Just as the average member of the PLP appears biddable through a couple of concert tickets and a new suit, so Mandelson appeared happy to bend over backwards simply for the passing attention of the rich, an attention that he used as currency in his dealings with the British media where gossipy name-dropping provided the seasoning for his otherwise stodgy vanity.

His 1998 comment, which will surely be his epitaph, that New Labour was "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they paid their taxes" was interpreted in the shadow of the "greed is good" 1980s. But Mandelson wasn't merely flipping the traditional ethic that saw greed as a deadly sin. He was advertising that the British political system was happy with dirty money and indeed keen to cultivate it, whether from Russian oligarchs or Silicon Valley techbros. The consequence is not just a House of Lords bursting at the seams with criminals and pimps of one sort or another but a House of Commons in which many MPs spend more time lobbying for business interests and foreign powers than they do for their own constituents. Mandelson was not a corrupt exception to the honourable rule. Expelling him from the Lords will do little when the problem is the Lords. Expelling him from the Labour Party will do little when the problem is the Labour Party.

Lost Futures

The suggestion that the "rules-based international order" is over, as a result of Donald Trump threatening to annex Greenland, is not the harbinger of a new international settlement, let alone a replacement for NATO, but a plea for a new narrative to explain US hegemony and excuse its attendant hypocrisy. 

It was notable that in his speech at Davos Mark Carney argued that we must move on from the "pleasant fiction" of the old order by quoting Václav Havel's fictional tale of an honest greengrocer "living in truth". The liberal commentariat predictably swooned at this display of muscular liberalism and the invocation of a humanist saint, but what they failed to acknowledge was that the Canadian Prime Minister wasn't arguing for the creation of a counterbalancing pole to American power but simply a more palatable story that could be sold to the electorates of the "middle powers". Inevitably, many spun the speech to suit their priors, notably those arguing for closer cooperation between the UK and the EU, but Canada is never going to seek accession (hilarious as that scenario might be) because its own interests necessitate a bilateral approach to its neighbour across a 5,000 mile indefensible border. Likewise, Keir Starmer knows that the UK is too entangled with the US security state and financial markets to be anything other than a rule-taker.

The idealised "rules-based international order", which obviously never lived up to the dreams of a Kantian perpetual peace, was a busted flush long before Israel invaded Gaza and proceeded to liquidate part of the civilian population, let alone before the US kidnapped Nicolas Maduro. As Larry Elliott notes, the economic and trade base of that order has been problematic for decades and the political superstructure increasingly dysfunctional. If you wanted to isolate a geopolitical moment when the veil was lifted, you could go back to the Iraq War or the wider War on Terror, but 9/11 was simply the moment when the narrower illusion of security that the long-90s depended on was revealed as a pause between the existential fear of the Cold War and our contemporary "polycrisis" anxiety over climate breakdown, novel pandemics, demographic decline, infrastructural decay and the deleterious effects of social media on fragile young minds. Fear has been the norm and it has been exercised systematically by politicians to discipline populations, particularly in the "sophisticated" democracies of those middle powers (that Carney's speech largely ignored the rest of the world, beyond listing Canadian trade deals, wasn't an oversight).

In this historical context, Trump's turn as a mobster who whacks opponents and demands both protection money (tariffs) and the signing over of property titles (Greenland, maybe Iceland) is frankly comical, or would be if it didn't translate to the murder and incarceration of civilians from Minneapolis to East Jerusalem. These deaths and imprisonments are the normal currency of hegemonic power. Long before Trump appeared on the scene, the US was jailing hundreds of thousands of its own citizens on racially-biased charges, and aiding and abetting murders by its proxy agents abroad, from South America to East Asia. ICE is a texbook example of how the methods of empire are inevitably imported to the metropole, but it is also an example of continuing imperial privilege: this abuse of process is not meant to happen to "us", even though it has happened to plenty of US citizens over the years. The problem now, for both the middle powers and liberal opinion in America, is the lack of a plausible narrative to whitewash the grim reality. 

After 1989, anti-communism was no longer effective at a geopolitical level, albeit it continues in weak form as a habitual recourse in domestic politics, now often combined with the charge of antisemitism. Russia may no longer be communist, or even remotely socialist, but it will forever be burdened with the psychic legacy of anticommunism simply because the charge that the Western left is "soft on Putin" remains too useful to dispense with. The 1990s narrative of liberal interventionism that succeeded anticommunism was never stable enough to survive either the raised expectations of those seeking genuine democracy, or the realities of its application on the ground by cynical realists, resulting in the anodyne compromise of the rules-based order. This was simply a rhetorical placeholder for want of anything better, and one that looked increasingly threadbare after the Balkan Wars.

The current attempts to construct a new narrative are struggling because they are being driven by the supporting cast rather than the lead character, and are consequently tentative and circumspect. Carney's frank truths aren't going to stop Trump dismissing him as a lightweight. Commentators who talk about the US President's unusual approach or unconventional style are really highlighting a void: Washington isn't providing hegemonic leadership to its empire, obliging the satrapies (those middle powers) to step forward and attempt to fill the gap. This raises two questions. First, can the "rest of the West" really constitute an independent power, whether as a collective posture in response to American unreliability or as a genuine competitor on the economic, military and geopolitical planes? Second, would their political establishments, so imbricated with American empire, even want to if they could? A third, more parochial, question is how the UK would fit into any new structure or narrative. 

The middle powers aren't going to gang up on the USA, or cut substantive deals with China and Russia. All they really want is a more palatable narrative in which their political classes aren't humiliated in public by the buffoonish head of a New York crime family. There will be much talk of realism and pragmatism, plenty of acceding to American demands dressed as compromise, and permanently clenched teeth behind fixed smiles until the Trump regime is deposed. Though the preferences of the middle powers mean nothing to the average American voter, the Democrats will, like latterday Bourbons, take heart from this international disdain and imagine that the liberal order can be restored. But the truth is that those middle powers are passing judgment on the inadequacy of that order, or at least the narratives that supported it. What the likes of Carney seek is not a Washington Consensus 2.0 but a return to the consoling fictions of the Cold War, hence the emblematic role of the Russian basket-case in current European thinking.

The UK will remain relatively isolated, still supposedly navigating between the imagined Scylla and Charybdis of America and Europe, despite the fact that we went all-in with the former 80 years ago. As Keir Starmer has made clear, the establishment is unwilling to adopt as provocative a rhetorical stance towards the US as the other middle powers and will insist that the special relationship remains sound and will show its value any day now. We will continue to make TV programmes like Downton Abbey and The Crown, for domestic consumption and American export, that highlight our uncertain self-image, somewhere between a thoughtless aristocrat and a pompous butler. We will painfully inch towards the EU to redress the impact of Brexit, while the City of London will become ever more a satellite of New York, and UK public services and government itself will be ever more penetrated by American businesses as we "embrace AI". We will continue to be haunted by the lost futures signed away at Bretton Woods and Nassau, and in June 2016.

What Is the Labour Government For?

Though noticeably obtuse when it comes to actual history, the Guardian's political coverage has a marked tendency to recycle the past, seeking parallels and portents to explain contemporary developments. The shadows of Thatcher and Blair loom large. This can give the impression that British politics is stuck in an endless holding pattern, which isn't entirely wrong. The latest example sees the political editor Pippa Crerar mining a more recent seam, the 2015 general election: "Before the 2015 UK election, the Australian political expert Lynton Crosby devised a strategy for the Tories that became known as “scraping the barnacles off the boat” – shedding unpopular policies that hindered the party’s electoral appeal. Instead, the party focused on core issues it believed would help win over floating voters: the economy, welfare, the strength of David Cameron (and weakness of Ed Miliband) and immigration. Everything else was deprioritised and the Conservatives stuck to their messages rigidly. It worked."

The Tory focus on essentials in 2015 had the advantage that most voters considered it plausible. The Tories can usually be relied on to promote the interests of business, and enough people are convinced by the media that this is the same as promoting a healthy economy. Likewise, there were solid grounds in 2015 for believing that the Tories would be hard on welfare (excepting pensions), not least their track record as part of the outgoing coalition government that had embedded austerity. And it wasn't implausible that they would lower immigration relative to the "influx" of Eastern Europeans seen under New Labour. Of course, the last of these is now a busted flush, following the "Boriswave" that was the predictable consequence of getting Brexit done, which goes some way to explain why the party is down in the polls and Reform is up. Indeed, you could argue that it largely explains why Reform exists and now has 6 MPs (Robert Jenrick having defected from the Conservatives this week).

In contrast, the problem for Labour is that a dwindling number of voters are convinced of the party's core values, or even believe that they have any. As a result, a strategy of "scraping the barnacles off the boat" in order to focus on core issues like the cost of living doesn't convince, both because the commitment seems insincere and because the government seems incapable of dragging its attention away from the barnacles. The recent partial U-turns on ID cards, inheritance tax and business rates all suggest a government that doesn't really know what it is doing, or why it is doing it, given that all were battles it chose to fight and could easily have avoided. The emblematic ID card scheme, like the watering down of the Hillsborough bill and the proposed abolition of jury trials, suggests a government incapable of passing up an opportunity to indulge it authoritarian instincts, while its attempt to exempt the security state from the duty of candour is an example of its unerring ability to misunderstand public opinion. None of this is ever going to be popular with voters.

The bulk of the PLP also seems unwilling to let go of the issues that it believes helped it into power, hence antisemitism is once more in the news, with MPs apparently terrorised by teachers and the West Midlands Police accused of a secret agenda in banning the notorious ultras of Tel Aviv Maccabi. This is because the essential issue for many on the party right is the defeat of the left, the one issue that reliably unites the Old Right, the Blairites and Blue Labour. This has mechanically led to the promotion and protection of Israeli interests, which has in turn gradually morphed into a soft Islamophobia. This has presented the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, with a dilemma. She can't dismiss the WMP's poor handling of the affair as a trivial operational matter without being accused of pandering to the Muslim vote, and she can't dismiss the force's critics as hyperventilating opportunists without calling into question the seriousness of the charge of antisemitism. The result is that she has felt obliged to demand the Chief Constable's resignation. 

What these two cases highlight is that the right of the party are having to cast their net ever wider to find opponents now that the left has been expelled from Labour. In Bristol, it isn't the pro-Palestine protestors who face sanction but the school that sought to avoid conflict outside its gates, while in Birmingham Labour find themselves attacking the police because they too sought to avoid conflict on the streets around Villa Park. The Labour right - many of whom had little interest in antisemitism before 2015 - now find that they can no longer control the monster they created over the last decade, but also find that they cannot kick the drug, if I can mix my metaphors. They are now at the mercy of small, unrepresentative activist groups, like Labour Against Antisemitism, but they have also internalised the cause so completely that they are willing to credulously espy antisemitism almost anywhere within the institutions of the British state and the wider establishment, from the BBC to school governors and the police.This has the febrile atmosphere of a "terror", even if people aren't being routinely shot on the flimsiest of pretexts.

You can understand why the likes of John Mann wish to keep antisemitism prominent, over and above a defensive posture in the face of protests over Gaza. Without it, he has no political utility for the British media and thus no public profile. But you would imagine that there are plenty of MPs outside Labour Friends of Israel who can see how self-defeating this has become for the party and how irrelevant it is for most voters. The demand that the government do more about the cost of living crisis is thus a veiled criticism not only of its lack of focus but of its chronic tendency to be distracted by the "barnacles". You could (generously) interpret the recent chunterings by Paul Ovenden about the "stakeholder state" as having a similar rationale. But what all the mutterings about a lack of focus and the ineffective "levers of power" avoid is the admission that the reason this government is failing is because it is run by people whose ambition (and whose expectation until quite late in the day) was limited to recapturing the Labour Party from the hated left.

Now in office, purely as a result of the Tory collapse, and augmented in the Commons by a generation of rightwing novice MPs who have only ever known factional struggle in draughty church halls and social club committee rooms, the Labour Party cannot shake its belief that the UK faces a greater threat from a fragmented and disorganised left than it does from a nativist right led by a genuine antisemite. The revelations about Nigel Farage's schooldays can be read as an attempt by liberals to shift the government's focus from the left to the right, and will succeed up to a point - Starmer will happily decry antisemitism on both flanks - but the effort will ultimately fail so long as the likes of John Mann and Steve Reed have a platform. They will always prefer to attack the left. This is reinforced by their not-so-secret belief that the political right will remain divided as the bitter and acrimonious defection of Tories to Reform continues. The focus of the Labour right's ire will increasingly shift to the Greens, particularly if Your Party continues to spiral towards irrelevance.

The problem is that this still doesn't answer the question: what is this Labour government for? All it does is recapitulate the same arguments made by its media outriders in 2024: that here is a group of sober professionals who can be trusted to manage the country after Tory chaos, and who have proved their ethical credentials by their robust expulsion of the left. It fails to recognise that they won the last general election by default, that their authoritarian managerialism was never popular, and that their track record in office has underwhelmed even the pessimists. A change of leader later this year is unlikely to alter the trajectory, but that in turn will only cause the party to redouble its efforts to remind the electorate that the real threat is the left and only this iteration of Labour can counter it. More enemies will have to be found who can be tarred with the brush of objective antisemitism. The herbivorous teachers and nonplussed police officers are only the start.