The Moral Economy of the Labour Right

Martha Gill in the Observer asks: if politicians are corrupt and self-serving, why shouldn't the rest of us shoplift, cheat on benefits and evade tax? The context for this is the observation by the Department of Work and Pensions that benefit fraud, like wider fraud in society, is on the increase. Of course, it should be borne in mind that the DWP has a vested interest in pinning the blame for an increase in benefit overpayments on what they describe as "a growing propensity to commit fraud", rather than the incompetence of an increasingly complex claims system that is still characterised by larger sums unclaimed than lost. According to the government's own figures, £8.3 billion was overpaid in 2023 due to fraud and error, while £3.3 billion was underpaid. Independent assessments of benefits unclaimed are north of £20 billion. For Gill's purpose, the DWP's selective interpretation and somewhat opaque figures are irrelevant. What matters is the introduction of a moral dimension. In a manner similar to Janan Ganesh's recent ruminations on the link between public morality and politics, she asks "Could the long trend of rising corruption in politics, too, be linked to this growing feeling that it is “only a bit wrong” to break some rules yourself? Could it be that the conduct of ordinary Brits has something to do with the behaviour and decisions of their leaders?"

But whereas Ganesh flipped the polarities to blame the swinish multitude for the poor quality of our politicians, Gill's purpose is to squarely blame those politicians. To this end she references E.P. Thompson's essay, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century". In her words, "The crowd was expressing moral outrage. Industrialisation had changed the rules on them – protective laws had vanished, and previously illegal activities were everywhere. The upper classes were defying commonly held values and the rioters wanted to reassert them." This is a subtle misreading, though one that many of Thompson's contemporary critics also succumbed to, largely because of confusion over the use of the word "moral". For Thompson, this was about mores, not ethics, and specific to time and place: "beliefs, usages, and forms associated with the marketing of food". And crucially, this moral economy did not lead to a generalised hostility to the "upper classes". The food riots of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were typically a protest against profiteering, directed at specific merchants. Likewise, the Luddite riots were directed at specific mill owners, not the Prince Regent.

Gill's misreading allows her to draw a line to the present: "This explanation also turns up in accounts of the 2011 London riots. The looting was decried as “senseless” by much of the rightwing press, but those who interviewed looters were instead treated to angry rants about the MPs’ expenses scandal, the bank bailouts, police corruption and the abuse of stop-and-search powers. The riots were, in part, a response to double standards." Clearly there is a world of difference between opportunistically looting Foot Locker and rioting against a grain merchant who is hoarding his stock in a time of dearth with a view to raising the price. But by suggesting the 2011 riots were motivated, at least in part, by a wider sense of fairness, Gill can create a causal relationship between virtue in government and social morality: "All this tends to suggest that the DWP is wrong when it says there is nothing to be done about this loss of integrity: the solution lies in leading by example. Corruption and unfairness at a high level leaks into the population at large. In battling this, the government seems to have made a start: Rachel Reeves has appointed a corruption tsar to claw back money lost to fraudsters during the pandemic."

Gill's final comment is to wonder whether retaining the two-child benefit cap might encourage more benefit fraud because it is perceived as "unfair". This reads like a plea for the cap to be abolished on moral rather than utilitarian grounds, but it is also a view that imagines the people as a single body with a common mind: inclined to see certain things as unfair (despite polling evidence that many people agree with the cap), and inclined to give way to their base nature if thwarted (despite the fact that the increase in benefit fraud is marginal).  Like Janan Ganesh's suggestion that the cynicism of the people corrodes politics, it is firmly rooted in the elitist world of Plato's Republic. The idea that there is a causal relationship between ministerial virtue and public morality is pure Plato, but it is also an idea that flies in the face of history and political economy. Some of the greatest crimes against humanity, notably man-made famines, were carried out by politicians who considered themselves to be virtuous, while nobody since the caesura between Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations would claim that material interests are irrelevant to public morality.

Having helpfully introduced the most acute issue in politics over the last week or so, we can leave Gill behind and turn to the latest dispatch from the bowels of the Labour right: Andrew Rawnsley's Sunday column. Most of it is a defence of Rachel Reeves's claim to be shocked, shocked by the state of the public treasury, which Rawnsley sees as clever politics ahead of an inevitable increase in taxes on the well-off. But he also takes time to explain the rationale for the suspension of the whip from the seven Labour rebels who voted to lift the cap: "Defenders of the punishment meted out to the rebels say it was “a matter of principle” to sanction Labour MPs who voted with the opposition against a Labour King’s Speech which was based on a Labour manifesto put to the electorate less than a month ago. There’s also a nip—in-the-bud argument. This goes: if you let seven rebels go unpunished this time, you’ll have 30 Labour MPs voting with the opposition when the next difficult issue comes up, 60 the time after that and your majority will have unravelled before you know it."

This is typical of the commentary on the Prime Minister's "ruthless" move in that it can't seem to settle on a single explanation. We are variously told that this is about setting a precedent in a parliament where the size of the government's majority will make future rebellions cost-free; that it is yet another performative act intended to show that Labour has changed since the days of Corbyn (approaching 5 years ago); and even that it is bad form to vote against the King's Speech (ye olde tradition of making up the consitituion as you go). What's received less attention is the duration of the suspension. Why 6 months? There have been few suspensions in recent years and then typically around 3 months. Leaving aside Keir Starmer's history of sentencing inflation in the aftermath of the 2011 riots, the length of the suspension isn't meant to be a condign punishment or a deterrent pour encourager les autres. My own suspicion is that he is trying to give the seven enough rope with which to hang themselves. As currently independent MPs they will have opportunity to vote against the government, but that will probably just result in further extensions or even permanent withdrawal of the whip. 

As we saw with the long delays in handling the disciplinary "cases" of Corbyn, Abbott and Shaheen, and in the successful burying of the Forde Report, the preferred tactic of the Labour right is to manoeuvre the left into limbo and then wait for time to take effect. Appeals to fairness fall on deaf ears because for the Labour right unfairness is the whole point: the left are illegitimate and undeserving of due process or justice. This is exacerbated when the left tries to appeal either to the better natures of the right or to the sympathy of the media, e.g. John McDonnell claiming that the seven voted to "put country before party", or when they deride the act as a "macho virility test" (music to the right's ears). In its contempt for any popular sentiment that doesn't match its own prejudices, in its self-pity when confounded (e.g. denied the parliamentary seats it thinks it owns), and in its exultation at the exercise of power, this is a moral economy that would be only too familiar to Edward Thompson, but it is that of the merchants and the mill owners, not of the crowd.

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.