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.