The Lineaments of Desire

The honeymoon period of the Labour government has been less revealing of Starmer's true nature or his administration's priorities, all of which were made abundantly clear before the general election, than it has of the hopes and fears of the commentariat. Inevitably, none has been busier in articulating their desires than Polly Toynbee at the Guardian. On The Monday after the vote, when it was clear how shallow support for the incoming government was but before the King's Speech confirmed its intentions, she was demanding that Starmer addressed the cynicism of the electorate through the trifecta of Lords Reform, a cap on political donations and the introduction of proportional representation. Obviously, none of this made the cut and you can safely assume we'll be in much the same situation in 2029 as we are today, even if they do get around to retiring a few hereditary peers. After the King's Speech she was reduced to insisting that the government would surely abolish the 2-child benefit cap, despite other commentator's noting that there was no way the government would take any action that could be seen as ceding to pressure from the left.

In between times, our fearless politics-understander went on safari to observe the Tories in defeat and was delighted to discover that Nigel Farage is alive and well. With the newly-installed government giving every sign that it will disappoint her liberal hopes, she was happy to displace her energies onto the defeated enemy. It was long thought that Farage got disproportionate coverage on the BBC and elsewhere because of the influence of the Tory press, but we're about to witness the determination of the liberal press to keep him front and centre, both to encourage the continuing division of the political right and to fill the void where progressive reform should be. Picking up the weekend baton, Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer has decided that we can finally discern the lineaments of Starmerism: "This is turning out to be a very political government led by a very political prime minister accompanied by a very political cabinet." That might sound banal, but what Rawnsley actually means is that this is a government with a clear agenda. He puts it bluntly: "This isn’t socialism. It is using the power of the state to try to galvanise a more productive capitalism." And then even more bluntly: "One thing is already clear. The Starmer government is not at all libertarian."

Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times took, as is his wont, a more Olympian view on what he described as the doom loop of modern politics: "Hatred of politicians deters good people from the job, which makes government worse, which makes voters hate politicians still more". This thought was stimulated by the failed attempted assassination of Donald Trump, which Ganesh immediately linked to people in the UK telling parliamentary candidates to fuck off: "The harassment of candidates in Britain’s election has been met with a sinister breeziness. To be clear, then: the anti-politician culture is wrong in and of itself. But more than that, it is self-reinforcing." Far from a sinister breeziness (what even is that?), the travails of various Labour candidates beaten by pro-Gaza independents or Greens has resulted in the new Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, promising taskforces and crackdowns, not to mention TV allowing the likes of Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debbonaire to air their grievances and suggest that voting them out of office was somehow unfair. What is sinister here is the conflation of legitimate anger with illegitimate violence, something we've also seen in the judicial treatment of Just Stop Oil protestors this last week.

Ganesh makes the connection explicit as part of his claim that we're not recruiting the best people to Parliament: "Actual violence is worse than intimidation, which is worse than verbal abuse, which is worse than invasive attention, which is worse than the reflexive, almost rote-learned cynicism that is now the routine lot of the politician in front of a public audience (“Why should I believe a word you say?” etc). But all have the same effect. All deter able individuals." This is mere sophistry. They clearly aren't comparable, unless you think that a life sentence in prison and missing the bus are equivalent as reasons for why I missed a football match. The purpose is to equate a lack of respect for the political class with violence - i.e. incivility as the gateway drug to assassination. The key thing we know about the two political murders in Britain in recent years, the killing of MPs Jo Cox and David Amess, is that they were committed by respectively a neo-Nazi and a Jihadi, both clearly unbalanced. To read from this that the problem is a wider societal disrespect for politicians is absurd.

Ganesh goes further to suggest that there is something tragic in the very nature of political life. The example he offers is frankly comical: "Robert McNamara was a jewel of his American generation — Harvard Business School star, Ford Motor Company whizz — and a tragically fumbling Pentagon chief during the Vietnam war." The assumption that academic or commercial credentials make you a natural for politics is naive technocracy, while the implicit appeal to meritocracy is pernicious (note how much that misunderstood concept has featured in the propaganda around the new UK government's social plans, such as Bridget Phillipson's belief that her life story can inspire a nation). Not only do people succeed at one firm and fail at another, highlighting the importance of institutions and tacit knowledge, but politics is inevitably constrained by circumstance and ideology. The Ford Edsel was an unforced error; the Vietnam quagmire was the consequence of the analytical errors of anticommunism that had become settled, bipartisan policy.

Writing in what is by defnition the inner sanctum of the liberal elite, Ganesh has no reservations about pointing the finger at the real villain: "It is natural to attribute the anti-politician mood to governmental failures: the botched wars, the misregulation of banks, the British state’s formidable achievement of rising taxes and deteriorating outcomes. There isn’t anything like the same curiosity about the source of those failures. What if the causal link runs the other way? What if an inept state is the ultimate fruit of anti-politics?" In other words, what if it is the fault of the people? Ganesh wants this to be true, as I'm sure many of his readers do, and to that end he will happily deny the evidence of his own eyes and insist that the failure of Northern Rock was the fault of its depositors, not its reckless management, and that the increasingly poor performance of the NHS is down to the sick rather than the failure of politicians to adequately fund it. This is frankly no different to a tabloid berating benefit claimants or insisting that the NHS is struggling due to uncontrolled immigration.

Though they operate in very different registers, what is common to Toynbee, Rawnsley and Ganesh is the hope that under a Starmer government we will see a change in the political culture. For Toynbee,  this is a matter of virtue: "cleaning up our fetid politics". For Rawnsley, the emphasis is on the efficient, even brutal exercise of power: using "legislative hammers" and being "tough and dirigiste in the pursuit of its most critical goals". For Ganesh, the desire is for an end to populism, which is to say for democracy to take a back seat and for the electorate to be less demanding of the political class. Government should get on and govern, and the electorate should know its place. How much Starmer will satisfy their desires is moot, depending as it does on contingency and the level of public resistance, but you can already expect Toynbee to be the most disappointed. This will not be a notably liberal government, except in the narrow economic sense, and in the sphere of planning its "dirigiste" intentions will inevitably give way to the interests of capital, so Rawnsley will be making excuses at some point in the future. The one who appears most likely to get his wish is Ganesh, simply because all he wants is the restraint of democracy, which remains the abiding desire of the Parliamentary Labour Party as well.

The AI Hype Cycle

Gartner, the American technology research consultancy, launched its Hype Cycle in 1995 at a time when there was a lot of new hardware and software being punted towards its corporate clients. The original value of the cycle was that it allowed Gartner to visually represent the relative maturity of various technologies within the wider cycle of business adoption, not unlike a wine vintage chart (too early, drinkable now, past its best). As the somewhat cartoonish graphic indicates, this was pitched at non-technically-literate executives. The origin story told by Jackie Finn makes clear that the purpose was to advise on the timing of adoption, hence the research note in which the image was first published was entitled "When to Leap on the Hype Cycle". The absence of "whether" simply reflected that Gartner's business model was to sell consultancy to firms that were in adoption mode. This in turn reflected the times: not simply a point at which the World Wide Web was taking off but the latter stages of the great IT fit-out of the corporate world that commenced with the arrival of PCs and mini-computers (what would become known as "servers") in the 1980s.

The Hype Cycle quickly became a fixture not only for Gartner but in the culture of business and even wider society. But as it spread, an idea developed that this was actually the common life-cycle of emergent technologies: there would always be a period of hype followed by disillusion followed by the payoff of improved productivity. You can see the problem with this by considering some of the examples on that first graphic. Wireless communications never really had a peak of inflated expectations because the underlying technology (radio) was mature and the benefits already proven. Bluetooth was frankly a bit Ronseal. Handwriting recognition turned out to be a solution in search of a problem, hence it never made it to the plateau of productivity. Object-oriented programming (OOP) turned out just to be a style of programming. Insofar as there was hype, it resided in the promise of code re-use, modularity, inheritance etc, which were all crudely understood by executives to mean a shift from the artisan approach to the production line and thus fewer, lower-paid programmers. The explosion of the Internet and the consequent demand for programming killed that idea off.

It's difficult to say on which side of the peak of inflated expectations we are today in respect of AI - i.e. artifical intelligence but more specifically large language models (LLMs). If I can be forgiven for introducing another term, we may well have reached the capability plateau of AI some months ago, possibly even a couple of years ago. This is because we are running out of data with which to populate the models. All the good stuff has been captured already (Google and others have been on the case for decades now) and the quality of newer data, essentially our collective digital exhaust, is so poor that it is making generative AI applications dumber. The current vogue for throwing even more computing resources at the technology, which has boosted chip suppliers like Nvidia and led to worries that the draw on power will destroy all hope of meeting climate targets, reflects the belief that we can achieve some sort of exponential breakthrough - who knows, perhaps even the singularity - if we just work the data harder. 

The appearance of financial analyst reports suggesting that AI isn't worth the investment strongly suggests that the trough of disllusionment may be upon us, but for the optimistic this simply means we are closer to the slope of enlightenment. The classic real-world template for this was the dotcom stock boom in the late 90s, which was followed first by the bust in 2000 and then the steady, incremental improvement that culminated in the mid-00s with the iPhone and Android, Facebook and Twitter, and the first examples of cloud computing with Google Docs and Amazon Web Services. For those with a Schumpeterian worldview, the bust was simply the necessary stage to weed out the pointless and over-valued. The Internet eventually became pervasive, generating highly valuable businesses in the realms of hardware, software and services, because it met the consumer demand for killer apps: first email, word-processing and spreadsheets, and then social media, video and streaming. But what is the killer app for LLMs? An augmented search function, like ChatGPT or Microsoft's Copilot, is small potatoes, while the ability to create wacky images with DALL-E 3 is on a par with meme-generators in terms of value.

The wider promise of AI has been that it will replace the need for certain workers, notably "backoffice" staff whose knowledge is highly formalised and whose data manipulation can be handled by "intelligent agents" (to use the terminology, if not the meaning, of that original Gartner graphic). You may remember this idea from the history of OOP. Indeed, you may remember it from pretty much every technology ever applied to industry, starting with the power looms used to depress wages that the Luddites railed against. The standard story is that new technologies do destroy jobs but they create other, even better jobs in turn by freeing up labour for more cognitively demanding (and rewarding) tasks. Of course, from the perspective of an individual business this isn't the case. The promise of greater productivity is predicated on either reducing labour or increasing output. The new jobs will be created elsewhere and are thus someone else's problem. This is a good example of the difference between microeconomics (the rational choice of a single firm to replace staff with technology) and macroeconomics (the impact on aggregate levels of employment and effective demand in the economy as a whole). The story of job substitution is true, as far as it goes, but it is also obviously a consolation: there is no guarantee that the new jobs will actually be better.

The dirty secret of AI is that it requires an ever-growing army of human "editors" (to dignify them with a title that does not reflect their paltry pay and poor working conditions) to maintain the data used in the LLMs. These are mostly "labellers" or "taggers", and mostly employed in the global south. The fact that the jobs are done at all tells you that they must be sufficiently attractive in local terms. In other words, spending all day tagging pictures of cars is probably better paid than tending goats. This means that the anticipated benefits of AI may simply be a futher round of the offshoring familiar from manufacturing in the 1980s and 90s, but this time with AI acting as a veil that makes the human reality even more obscure than sweatshops in Dhaka or Shenzen. Indeed, the veil may be the point for many AI boosters in the technology industry: a way of preserving their idealised vision of a tech-augmented humanity that isn't shared by many beyond their own limited social milieu and geography. Inevitably the boosters also include many who have zero understanding of any technology, like Tony Blair, but who are very keen on the idea of a dehumanised workforce and a disciplined polity.

AI serves as a massive distraction for technocratic neoliberalism. It offers a form of salvation for all the disappointments of the last few decades: secular stagnation is averted, productivity growth picks up, truculent labour is made docile. After all the waffle over the last three decades about the knowledge economy - the need to raise our skills to take advantage of globalisation - it is notable that the promise of better jobs has been downgraded. In a recent "report" by the IPPR think-tank, we are told that "Deployment of AI could also free up labour to fill gaps related to unaddressed social needs. For instance, workers could be re-allocated to social care and mental health services which are currently under-resourced." From spreadsheets to bed-pans. The lack of resource for health and social care is simply a matter of money, i.e political choice. There is no suggestion that AI-powered businesses will be paying a higher rate of tax, rather the implication is that AI will fuel growth that will increase revenue in aggregate (again, macroeconomics provides the consolation for microeconomics). 

One of the key dynamics of postwar social democracy was the idea that public services depended on a well-paid workforce paying tax. The value created in the economy was funneled via pay packets and PAYE into the NHS and elsewhere. Neoliberalism broke this model by offshoring and casualising labour. Workers (i.e. average earners) funnel less value to the state, which leads both to greater government efforts to raise revenues elsewhere and to pressure to cut public spending ("cut your coat according to your cloth"). An AI revolution that reduces the number of average paying jobs (those "backoffice" roles) and substitutes more lower paid "caring" roles will simply further increase the pressure on the public sector. I suspect that the deployment of AI will not be marked by a slope of enlightenment, let alone a plateau of productivity, but by the determination of the private sector to reduce labour costs and by the determination of the state to trim the public sector as tax revenues decline. It is often comically bad, but in combination with offshored digital peons, AI technology is probably already "good enough" to meet those ends. In terms of the hype cycle, we are probably a lot further along than we imagine.

The General Elation

The centrist celebrations of Labour's landslide general election victory have quickly given way to crabby complaints that the strategic genius of Morgan McSweeney and Keir Starmer isn't being appreciated. This is because of "resentful Corbynistas" and battered Tories pointing out that Labour got half a million fewer votes than in 2019 and barely improved its vote share. One word that has been used a lot is "efficient" as Labour managed to convert its 34% share into 64% of MPs. There are obviously other terms you could use to decribe that outcome, such as disproportionate, but the choice of word tells us a lot about what commentators anticipate from the new government. There has been much talk of Labour being "under new management" and Keir Starmer personally promising competence and probity in public office; the one an obvious ideological rebuke to the left, the other a condemnation of the Tories' chaotic misrule. But no one seriously expects that a working majority of 181 will encourage Keir Starmer to release his inner socialist and drive radical reform. Thus we have the sight of a party celebrating that it no longer piles up "wasted votes" in urban seats giving every sign that it will waste the opportunity of a big Commons majority, just as Blair did in 1997 when the door to lasting constitutional reform was wide open. 

The Labour right's "power for a purpose" mantra exists solely to chastise the left. In office the party is invariably timid, particularly in respect of the constitution and foreign policy. 1945 wasn't even an exception to this rule: Attlee had no more interest in reforming the House of Lords than he did in pushing decolonisation. The urging of "boldness" ahead of the manifesto publication was largely a plea that Labour adopt something vaguely progressive that could be sold on the doorstep. It was about the vibe rather than the substance. Likewise, the early talk of priorities and the first hundred days has focused on fire-fighting rather than reform: stop Thames Water going bust, end the NHS strikes, stop more local councils going bust. The impression given is of a new management team parachuted in to save a failing business. There will be progressive gestures. The Rwanda scheme abandoned, the de facto ban on onshore wind farms rescinded, and various taskforces assembled to address planning regulations and the parlous state of the universities, but there's will be no questioning of the role of capital while the meta-narrative will be about the restoration of the state's authority.

For Starmer's enthusiastic backers in the media, such as Andrew Rawnsley, the election victory is a continuation of the Labour leader's efforts to "rebuild" the party after Corbyn and "its most abject defeat since 1935". The idea that Britain is a broken ruin is hyperbole but it does chime with voters' experience of crumbling public services and infrastructural neglect. The idea that the Labour Party was a ruin, given the huge increase in membership under Corbyn and the positivity of the 2017 election, is ridiculous, but the needs of the narrative demand that Starmer be framed as a fixer and restorer. The problem is that his "remarkable feat" in making Labour electable is mostly smoke and mirrors. Not only did it depend on the Conservative vote being torn in multiple directions by an electorate united in nothing beyond the conviction that the Tories should be booted out, it also required the connivance of the press as Starmer systematically misled the Labour membership, purged the left and lined the party up with the most conservative elements in society. The late endorsement by The Sun was confirmation of a deal sealed years ago.

The myth of 2019 will never die because it serves the narrative of how Starmer "rescued" Labour, but it will also enjoy a new lease of life as the challenges mount up for the government. As more and more people are disappointed, the Prime Minister will be able to say that it took 5 years to fix the party and it will take at least that to make inroads into the UK's myriad problems. That Labour secured over half a million more votes in 2019, and a percentage share only slightly worse than last week's, are not details that will change this narrative, and no centrist will thank you for noting how poorly 2024's performance compares to 2017's in terms of attracting voters. What matters is the win, even if we all know that the result was simply an extreme example of the old adage that it is governments that lose elections not oppositions that win them. The claim of efficiency does come with some caveats: that Labour has alienated the young and ethnic minorities, which it may come to regret, and that its vote in many of the consitituencies won from the Conservatives is fragile. With so many seats now classed as marginals, a Tory revival is not out of the question.

How the Tories might accomplish that is moot. The tale of the last 50 years is not just the general shift to the right on the political spectrum but the compression of the options. Reform are plain old reactionary conservatives, most of whom consider themselves to be Thatcherites. The Liberal Democrats are dominated by the neoliberal economic orthodoxies of the Orange Bookers, while their social liberalism is insipid. They will no doubt seek to challenge Labour's authoritarianism in office, but cooperation on areas such as health, education and welfare is likely. With Labour adopting the mantle of fiscal responsibility, there's no obvious space for the Tories to occupy. Once Brexit "got done", for good or ill, and once the pandemic brought home the folly of austerity, the party found itself without a clear proposition, hence it has spent the last few years thrashing about over emotive but marginal issues such as the Rwanda scheme, London's ULEZ and the fatuous "war on woke". In a political landscape dominated by conservative orthodoxy, Starmer correctly recognised that competence could be his USP, not least because the Tories had displayed serial incompetence in office since 2015. 

There was clearly little movement by voters between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, the latter's vote share barely changing, any more than there was movement from the latter to Labour. Ed Davey and his merry band were simply more efficient (that word again) in their targeting. In contrast, Reform came third in the popular vote, ahead of the Liberal Democrats, but their diffuse support meant that they won only 5 seats compared to the traditional third party's 72. The recovery of the Conservative Party electorally will require it to eat deeply into one or the other's voter base, so it faces a crucial choice. At this point we should remember that the party's secret weapon is not the loyalty often claimed for it but collective opportunism. In 2009 they managed to transform a banking crisis into a charge of fiscal irresponsibility against the last Labour government, paving the way for austerity and indirectly Brexit. Ten years later they exploited the Labour right's sabotage of its own party and the lingering leave-remain split to secure a further five years in power. Opportunism suggests either the absorption of Reform by adopting a fully reactionary programme, or coalition with the Liberal Democrats on a platform of rejoining the EU.

If the UK had a proportional electoral system then a split in the Conservative Party would be likely. But under first-past-the-post (FPTP) it must stick together and so it must choose one political direction or the other. Unlikely though it may seem, the greater opportunity lies towards the Liberal Democrats. Keir Starmer is sincere (for once) in saying that he cannot see the UK rejoining the EU in his lifetime. Though popular sentiment has steadily shifted to rejoining the Single Market it remains negative on the idea of adopting the euro (which would be a condition) and that's unlikely to change any time soon. Were Labour to back reaccession, it would probably lose a lot of seats in those areas that originally voted heavily for leave. As part of the project to establish Labour as the national party, Starmer appreciates that it must also remain the Brexit party, at least until death and demography change the electorate. Though the Liberal Democrats have managed to produce an efficient result at this election - 11% of seats on 12% of the vote - they also know that this will prove a historical curio unless they can significantly boost their vote share (half of what they got in 2010) next time. A merger with pro-EU Tories would consign Reform to the traditional disproportionate lot of the third party.

2024 may well go down in British political history as the oddest election of them all, and we can expect to hear a lot about the need for electoral reform over the coming weeks as a result. But its very oddity means that Labour will be unwilling to consider reform. This is not solely self-interest but an appreciation that the more fragmented landscape of a proportional system would not be in the interests of a faction, the party right, that has deliberately alienated swathes of the membership and made enemies of much of its own voter base. Starmer's "Stability is change" mantra should be clue enough that the project of restoring the state's authority after the disruptions of Brexit and Corbyn will not be sidetracked by constitutional reform, any more than UK foreign policy will suddenly discover an independence from Washington or a moral dimension. The size and fragility of Labour's Commons majority means that the next five years will see growing backbench anxiety as the government's popularity inevitably falls in the face of weak growth and painfully slow improvements in public services. With so many lobbyists elected, there are likely to be lobbying scandals. 

A couple of days before the vote, Polly Toynbee insisted that "If the result is grossly disproportionate, Labour would have a moral obligation to voters to bring in a fairer system: it couldn’t be called gerrymandering when Labour had benefited so much from first past the post." In other words, she thinks Starmer should be magnanimous in victory. Toynbee has always been stunningly naive about British politics since her days helping to found the SDP in the 1980s, but even she must appreciate that magnanimity isn't a word that appears in the lexicon of the Labour right. She continues, "Weak but long held-up reasons for opposing reform were burnt away in the turmoil of recent years. Who can defend first past the post as providing “stability” after the tragicomedy of five PMs in eight years, and scores of ministers whizzing through revolving doors?" Again, she misunderstands what Starmer means by stability: it isn't the "grown-ups" back in charge, it is rather an authoritarian government that will brook no dissent. And if Starmer ever countenanced a change to the electoral system, you can be pretty sure that the party right would dispose of him pronto. The rumour that they intend to change the party rulebook so that only MPs can elect the leader when in government isn't simply about denying the membership a say. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas and the PLP isn't about to vote for PR.

The Trouble With Harry

One plausible explanation for why Rishi Sunak called a general election for the middle of a major international football tournament is that he wanted the country distracted by a more meaningful debate than whether the next government commited to fiscal discipline should wear a blue or a red rosette. Unfortunately, his own ability to create news stories out of nothing, from his cheerful enquiry at a Welsh brewery whether the workers were watching the football to his ill-advised decision to skip some of the D-Day commemorations in Normandy, has kept the political contest front and centre. However, after three underwhelming performances in the group stage, the England team has managed to muscle its way back into the nation's consciousness with the great debate over who should be dropped to ensure progress in the knockout rounds. This has not only given the Prime Minister something of a breather but has also cut short the inquest into Scotland's miserable exit, though that would always have received relatively cursory attention in the London-centric media anyway. 

There has been no shortage of criticism of individual players and equally no shortage of fanciful claims that a relatively untried Cole Palmer or Anthony Gordon could be this nation's saving grace if Gareth Southgate could just "unleash the potential". The manager has likewise had to put up with a tidal wave of chuntering suggesting his time is up and that he remains too loyal to certain players. What is striking is how many people have broken cover and baldly stated that he needs to drop the player to whom he has been most loyal, Harry Kane, who has arguably been England's worst performer to date, despite having scored a goal. This is not an opinion shared by all commentators, resulting in a clear schism developing in a manner all too familiar from previous tournaments. The case for the prosecution was nicely summed up by Goal.com stating that "it's just not happened for Kane in Germany", which is funny when you consider how he won the Bundesliga top scorer award while he led Bayern Munich to a trophyless season for the first time in aeons.

In the case for the defence, Jacob Steinberg in the Guardian considers variously dropping Jude Bellingham, Bukayo Saka, Phil Foden and even Kieran Trippier, for good measure, but steadfastly refuses to consider that Kane might be a worthier occupant of the bench despite admitting that his performance up front was "slow". Given that this lack of pace was noticeable throughout the rest of a team made up of younger, nippier players, you'd think he might wonder if Kane was slowing the collective down, not least because of his tendency to drop into midfield and get in the way of whoever the nominal 10 is meant to be. Bellingham wears the shirt but many commentators think Foden would do better centrally than on the left wing, and they could be right. But by the same token, the guy who often plays as a false 9 for Real Madrid might actually do better as the spearhead of the attack, but nobody is suggesting that. Unlike other squads, England actually have an impressive bench of forwards offering a variety of styles in Ollie Watkins, Ivan Toney and Jarrod Bowen, but the captain remains an automatic starter and nothing in Gareth Southgate's history suggests a willingness to take a chance deep into a tournament. This is a manager who is reluctant to make substitutions in-game.

As is normal when England aren't crushing the opposition, there has been a revival of the structural explanation for the team's under-performance among the more chin-stroking members of the commentariat, ever keen to turn the base metal of a football team into socio-political gold. This used to focus on a combination of infrastructural inadequacies and the poor quality of coach development, until the FA got serious about both, investing in St. George's Park and the new Wembley stadium and formalising its developmental "pathway". Now the lament concerns the lack of a national identity, which for many is the result of the money-bags Premier League with its tactical heterogeneity and reliance on foreign imports. Paradoxically, this idea manages to co-exist with a belief that England have too much of an ingrained identity, made up in equal parts of misplaced passion, disdain for technique and a bovine aversion to systematic thinking. The reality is that the England squad has many talented players, some of whom have played abroad and all of whom have worked under tactically astute managers (which includes even David Moyes).

The broader reality is that this is not a strikers' tournament, or at least not one that will be defined by someone filling their boots. The current leading goalscorer is Georgia's Georges Mikautadze on 3, which says more about that team's general performance than it does about the prowess of a player plying his trade at Metz, recently relegated to Ligue 2. Like Austria, the other impressive performer in the group stages, Georgia has shown that organisation allied with aggressive pressing and pace will succeed. The lesson for England should be that more aggressive pressing and pace, which the squad is perfectly capable of, will smooth over many of the organisational deficiencies evident in the first three matches. But as the salutary introduction of Conor Gallagher against Slovenia showed, this is only going to work if the personnel are geared to pace all over the pitch, and that means Kane remains the weak link. It also seems unlikely that Gareth Southgate, a former defender himself and thus someone whose instinct is to slow the game down, will suddenly go against type and "unleash the dogs of war", as some tabloid hack would no doubt put it.

England's issue is not unique, even if Kane is a high-profile example of the problem. Many teams have struggled with their lead attacker. Italy don't appear to have located one, to judge from the anonymous performances of Mateo Retegui, Federico Chiesa and Gianluca Scamacca. France's Kylian Mbappé is a support striker, not a number 9, and needs the movement of a selfless partner to create the necessary corrdidors for a slaloming approach to goal, which is why the goal-shy Marcus Thuram and the veteran Olivier Giroud get match minutes. The goalless (if unlucky) Romelu Lukaku is beginning to look like a museum exhibit, younger centre-backs pressing their noses up against his glass case, and is surely appearing at his final major tournament. Alavaro Morata is still Alvaro Morata. Even the hosts remain ambivalent, with German fans enagaged in a debate about whether goal machine Niclas Füllkrug (2 so far) would be a better starter up top than the more flexible and subtle Kai Havertz (1 to date). 

Portugal's Ronaldo hasn't managed to score yet and despite the slavish efforts of his team-mates doesn't look likely to, unless he gets lucky with a long-range free-kick. I suspect that young kid invading the pitch to get a selfie with him will remain the abiding memory of his contribution. As he has aged, Ronaldo has moved in from the wing to become an old school centre forward: looking to hold up play, good in the air and possessed of a thunderous shot. As with the German clamour for Füllkrug, there is an obvious nostalgia to this - the big number 9 as the focal point - but it isn't going to provide a winning formula at a tournament where the best performances to date have been by defenders and goalkeepers. Once you shut out the main man, Portugal look as bereft of ideas as England do. If innate caution means that Southgate will limit himself to one change in his preferred lineup, then he'd do better to swap Watkins for Kane rather than tinker with the wide players or pair Kobi Mainoo with Declan Rice. But if there is one thing that can be said of the England manager, it is that he is predictable, so a recall for Luke Shaw looks the more likely.

Small Change

It's an unpleasant duty that I've been putting off for a while, but I can't do so any longer. I'm going to have to comment on the Labour Party manifesto. But before I do, it's worth looking at the context in which it has been launched. Labour has enjoyed 20-point leads in the opinion polls since the days of the Old Queen and current polling suggests a landslide win in the general election in two weeks time is well within its grasp. The irony, of course, is that this may come with a vote share, and even a vote quantum, little better than 2017. The rhetorical emphasis on the idea that Labour has changed, i.e. been purged of the left, is exemplified in the manifesto's timidity but also in its front-page focus on a stern-looking Keir Starmer. His persona as a ruthless operator (no one bothers any longer to deny that he lied through his teeth to become Labour leader) is the link between the party's internal change and the proposed change of government: the replacement of the incompetent Conservatives with a management team resolutely committed to financial stability and national security. 

This makes the manifesto an essentially negative document - it tells us much about what Labour won't do - which has predictably caused media liberals to simper about the positive vibes, regretting the lack of substance despite their utter commitment to not changing much and to not encouraging a hope that might escalate beyond their comfort zone. For all the attempts to introduce a sense of jeopardy into the election, with the tedious promotion of Nigel Farage and Reform by the BBC and the ever-hopeful attempts by the Guardian to revive the Liberal Democrats, the truth is that a Labour win has been nailed on since the end of 2022 because the Tories are toast. Sunak's failure to change the trajectory after Liz Truss is not simply a reflection of his own limitations as a statesman but an indication that we have passed the point of no return on a generation of Tory politics, now wholly exhausted, that sprang to life in the austerity mania of 2009. This has removed the need for Labour's offer to be anything beyond "change", which obviously suits the ideological preferences of the PLP. 

Just as predictable as the gyrations of media liberals, the demands of a two-horse race in a first-past-the-post electoral system have led economists who lean left to cross their fingers and praise Labour's offer as a positive step in the right direction, even as the Institute for Fiscal Studies correctly describes its promised public spending increases as "tiny, going on trivial" and the associated tax rises as "even more trivial". A more insightful commentary (here by Keir Milburn) is that what Labour are really offering is simply a different flavour of clientelism. Rather than dodgy deals for useless PPE or side-bets on the election date, we will see a return to the public-private partnerships of the New Labour years. A higher toned corruption. In theory, the state will underwrite risk while the private sector will generate profits that will in turn boost tax revenues and thereby raise all our public spending boats. In reality, this remains the same economic model we've had in place since the 1980s, so those economists are in danger of dislocating their knuckles if they imagine we'll see a different outcome, with growth boosted and the benefits trickling down to the needy.

The bottom line is that the UK has suffered decades of under-investment, not only in our public infrastructure and social fabric but in private capital formation. The result of this has been poor productivity growth and consequently weak wage growth. We don't have an industrial strategy to speak of, the finance sector remains too dominant (even as London steadily loses its influence to other global financial centres), our investment in energy renewables is paltry relative to the climate crisis and all of the parties claim that what's really hindering us is an excess of planning regulations. Labour's specific plan with regard to the latter is to recruit 300 more planning officers. There is airy talk of 1.5 million new homes over the course of the parliament but no explanation as to how this will actually be brought about beyond a single passing reference to "a new generation of new towns". Likewise, there is no explanation as to how the government will "kickstart economic growth" beyond "tough spending rules" and "a new partnership with business".

The passage of time since Gordon Brown left Downing Street means that Labour can blame the country's ills on 14 years of Tory misrule, but the structural failings clearly long predate that. Too much of the nation's accumulated wealth is trapped in the dead-weight of house prices; too much of the country's manufacturing and services base was sold off to foreign buyers who simply wanted an entry to the EU single market, and who are now disinvesting; and too many of our public utilities have been converted into cash machines for foreign pension funds. This all dates from the 1980s. The implicit claim of the manifesto, that we can return to the happy days of New Labour, is not only delusional in its belief that the clock can be turned back. It also fails to understand that the benign global economic environment of the late-90s was a one-off in historical terms. The Great Moderation was an anomaly, not the new normal. 

Though the manifesto is insubstantial, there are plenty of gestures that give us a flavour of what a Starmer government will be like, such as a "new Border Security Command" and a "crack-down on antisocial behaviour". Restoring the authority and gravitas of the state after the twin insults of Brexit and Corbyn is the mission. Should the expected parliamentary landslide transpire, leaving the government with a majority in excess of 200 seats, there are already signs that Starmer and his goons will blur the distinction between party and state in a manner that ought to be giving liberals the willies. Tories warning of a "super-majority" have been derided by unthinking centrists rejoicing in the prospect of the Conservative Party being "taught a lesson". Long-time opponents of party democracy have been cheered by the rumour that Morgan McSweeney wants "to give MPs the sole power to choose the next Labour leader if the change takes place while the party is in government", perhaps misunderstanding that this doesn't empower MPs so much as empower the para-state that Starmer has built in Labour's HQ.

The secular trend in the West has been towards greater democracy both in terms of candidate and leader elections. This is less due to the success of "activists" than a response to the decline of national democracy in a world of neoliberal hegemony. As the cartel has become the norm, and as electoral systems based on proportional representation have produced ever-more fluid coalitions over which party members have limited influence, so internal democracy has become the de facto arena for popular political engagement. Though liberals deride the US Republican Party for its anti-democratic impulses, the reality is that it is an example of vigorous democracy in action. In the UK, these forces have led to attempts to revive party democracy (in both Labour and the Conservatives) and to a reaction against it. Nigel Farage setting up Reform UK Party Limited as a private business in which he is the majority shareholder is the logical conclusion of that reaction in the register of a free-market Thatcherite. Barring candidates and imposing loyalists are traditional manoeuvres in the Labour Party, but they are also expressions of that anti-democratic reaction in the register of a bureaucratic apparatus.

The next UK government will be birthed amid multiple paradoxes. It will have an inarguable mandate for change, but has already indicated that it will change very little of substance. It will have a majority in the Commons, and an authority vis-a-vis the Lords, that will allow it to act radically, yet it is determined to excise all radicalism from British politics (the word "radical" appears nowhere in Labour's manifesto if you discount its promise "to stop people being radicalised and drawn towards hateful ideologies"). It has promised to "turn the page" after years of Tory lies and corruption, yet Starmer is widely regarded as untrustworthy and the party apparatus is stuffed with vicious factionalists operating a hierarchy of racism and parachuting their mates into safe seats. Perhaps the biggest paradox is that popular levels of expectation are so low that the great hope of progressives is that Starmer is once more lying through his teeth and will announce tax rises to fund public spending on day one. The real worry in all this is that democracy is dying before our eyes and that what we face is a one-party state. Starmer may well be the luckiest politician in British history, but he may also prove to be one of the most unpopular.