A Touch on the Tiller

Apparently, some people are asking "What is the point of Labour?" Of course, this is a question that has been asked pretty much constantly for the last 100 years. Even during the halcyon days of the postwar Attlee government the party was roiled by existential doubt, triggered by mundane but symbolic issues such as prescription charges. A constant refrain has been that other anxious question "Is this what a Labour government should be doing?", which implies a catechism of correct policy as much as the more nebulous "Labour values" that are regularly invoked nowadays. Martin Kettle is the latest to wonder what is the point of the party, but he undermines his own analysis at the start by describing Rachel Reeves as "a traditionally social democratic, centre-left Labour chancellor". This highlights that the problem in defining the point of a Labour government is that there is no agreement on what constitutes social democracy any longer, let alone the "centre-left". Reeves' own view was expressed in 2015: "We are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, the party to represent those who are out of work. Labour are a party of working people, formed for and by working people."

Kettle's diagnosis is that "Labour is now an alliance of positions, interests and instincts rather than a party with a unifying direction or a leader who clearly articulates an overarching plan for government. As a result, Labour has become several small parties in one." But 'twas ever thus. Labour has always been a coalition of interests and factions, and its leaders have necessarily been skilled at managing the resulting tensions. Even during the New Labour years, when policy went with the grain of wider developments (neoliberalism, neoconservatism, weak communitarianism), there were substantive disagreements on social, economic and foreign policy. Kettle's real point is that the party never fully embraced the secular shift of the electorate: "The essential fact is that Britain is significantly more middle class, better educated, more outward-looking and more liberal. Yet Labour still struggles to adapt to, never mind to lead, this intricate, nuanced and continuing change." In other words, the failure of the SDP to supplant Labour in the 1980s, and the willingness of the party to return to its Labourist comfort zone after 2010, which is what Reeves' words really indicated, has left it facing in too many directions.

The chief problem with this analysis is the assumption that Labour's blue-collar electorate is fundamentally illiberal and backward-looking, which is why they have been attracted to Reform. This suggests that Kettle himself has failed to evolve his thinking since the 1980s. Even a brief glance at the opinion polls indicates that Reform have prospered primarily at the expense of the Conservatives, while Labour is losing support mainly to the Liberal Democrats and Greens, with the latter now acting as a proxy for "the left". The latter drift has been characterised as mainly among under-30s, which is probably accurate, and by what Kettle describes as Labour's "more ideologically driven supporters", code for self-indulgent, middle-class lefties, and which is likely wide of the mark. If it is true that Labour is losing progressive voters while Reform is obviously attracting Tories, this leaves you wondering where the working class has gone to. For Kettle, it simply disappeared with deindustrialiation. The sociological reality is that today's working class is increasingly made up of young, insecure renters in precarious employment. In criticising Labour, Kettle does so through a mental model - the blue to white-collar shift - that has been out of date for decades.

In this, liberal commentators of a certain age find common cause with Blue Labour nostalgists such as Julian Coman who believe that things started to go wrong for Labour when "From the 1980s onwards, the cutting edge of progressive thought became overwhelmingly preoccupied with the rights and freedoms of the individual." This is a gross misrepresentation of the history. The rise of the feminist, anti-racist and LGBTQ+ movements were collective endeavours, not the triumph of the neoliberal monad. Coman's prescription is "a collectivist politics that preserves the ethical insights of universalism, but that also foregrounds the values of social cohesion, collective obligation and communal wellbeing – and is willing to negotiate tensions that might result". Predictably, he espies this turn in both Shabana Mahmood's desire for "order and control" over immigration and in Andy Burnham's wish to overcome "the subjection of democracies to the arrogance of rootless international capital" (Burnham actually spoke of the need to "stop being in hock to the bond markets", which isn't quite the same thing and certainly lacks the whiff of xenophobia.)

A better way of understanding what is the point of Labour is to ignore the vibes-based commentariat and look at the government's fiscal policy, which inevitably tells us whose interests they think they are working for. Chris Dillow makes the important point that what matters in the coming budget is not how much money is raised, or how that is done, but whether it will reallocate the real resources necessary to improve public services and to boost the long-term trends for investment and productivity. Labour's historic reputation, in the sense of justifying its existence rather than just staying in office, has been based on two periods of goverment: 1945 to 1951, and 1997 to 2010. The former was notable for a period of austerity, when consumption was deliberately depressed in order to invest in industrial rebuilding and the securing of foreign markets for exports. This was made harsher than it needed to be by the heavy investment in defence, but it obviously succeeded in improving the fabric of the public realm. The New Labour years saw a significant uptick in public investment, funded by a benign economy, albeit one built on the insecure foundations of financialisation.

In that first period, Labour clearly advanced the interests of the industrial working class through high levels of employment and comprehensive (if not particularly generous) welfare. Social reform took a back-seat until the 1960s and foreign policy preserved too many illusions for too long. In the second period, Labour had a more national and less class-based appeal and focused largely on public services management, leaving economic policy to the markets and an "independent" Bank of England. Its reliance on outsouring and private finance has proved to be a strategic mistake, on a par with its failure to control the finance sector. If in the first period the party clearly represented the interests of labour, in the second period it conceded the government's role in the allocation of real resources to the interests of capital generally and the City in particular. That's a pretty profound change and truly remarkable in the context of the party's history. The pushback after 2008, both the return to a Labourist comfort zone under Ed Miliband and the evocation of a revivalist social democracy under Jeremy Corbyn, attempted to redress this in favour of labour. 

To date, the Starmer government has indicated a marginal preference for capital but has also tried to support labour. So in last year's budget there was a modest increase to the national minimum wage and also a rise in capital gains tax rates (though not to parity with income tax). The true significance of the rise in employer NICs, along with the higher NMW, is that it should act as a stimulus for capital-labour substitution, particularly among low-wage jobs, and thus a rise in productivity. But as with the rest of the budget, it was a half-hearted measure rather than part of a core strategy to shift real resources from consumption to investment. All the signs are that next week's budget will be more of the same: tinkering at the edges with fiscal drag providing the chief means to fund increased public spending. This suggests that the current Labour administration remains trapped in the same worldview that hobbled the Blair and Brown governments: a belief that left to its own devices capital will deliver growth and higher wages, and this in turn will generate higher tax receipts for public spending.

The pointlessness of this Labour government then is not down to Keir Starmer's lack of vision or his inscrutability ("His innermost beliefs are a mystery even to the cabinet", according to Rafael Behr), any more than it is to the inadequacies as Chancellor of the woman dismissed by her patronising critics as "Rachel from Accounts". The lack of point is the point. This is a government that was engineered by the politico-media caste to thwart the left, eject the hapless Tories before they did any more damage, and otherwise just sit tight until something turned up to give the economy a boost. Possibly AI, possibly better trade deals with the US and EU. This is a government that refuses to publicly choose between the interests of capital and labour and believes it can steer a course between the two. But each touch on the tiller simply enrages more people, now on one side, now on the other. The result is a general collapse in support. Perhaps we will all be surprised on Wednesday and the pre-budget leaks and briefings will turn out to have been a cunning diversion, but I suspect that what will see is another timid exercise that will satisfy few.

The End of the BBC

A pivotal figure in the assault on the BBC was Marmaduke Hussey. He was a pillar of the Establishment but also a Tory newspaperman: a former Chief Executive and Managing Director at Times Newspapers. As such, the ultimate call to kill the Corporation - and we shouldn't be in any doubt that what we are withessing is the latest stage in a long drawn out assassination - was made by Margaret Thatcher. She was driven by her belief that the BBC's editorial leadership was not made up of people who could be considered "one of us", like Hussey, and this made them tantamount to traitors in her eyes. Though the then Director General, Alasdair Milne, was also a pillar of the establishment, within months of taking up the role of Chairman Hussey had forced him out. Since then, the Director General has always had a target on his back (there have been no women) and appointments to the role have been deeply politicised. They have also alternated between TV "lifers" and those drawn from the newspaper industry.

As the BBC had always loyally reflected the interests of the state, as mediated by the government of the day, what this antagonism between Hussey and Milne reflected was not some leftwing drift at Broadcasting House but the growing gap between the Conservative Party and Establishment sentiment in the early to mid-1980s (the views of those disparagingly referred to at the time as "wets"). That gap closed over the years, not least because of the "commercial" turn of the Corporation during the regimes of Michael Checkland and John Birt, and because of New Labour's appointment of sympathisers, such as Greg Dyke, who it expected to stay "on side", most notoriously over the David Kelly affair. Since then, the BBC has been beset by repeated "scandals" centring on editorial judgement and the accusation of cover-ups, while the licence fee remains a perennial issue for rightwing newspapers, a fact that has less to do with concerns over the Corporation's funding and more to do with its very existence as a public service broadcaster.

There is an irony in the fact that as the Tory party has fallen apart as a political force since 2015 so its grip on the BBC has tightened, notably with the appointment of Robbie Gibb to the BBC board under Boris Johnson. Farage and his various understrappers have always been happy with the Corporation, though they'd never publicly admit it. They get disproportionate, indulgent coverage and little in the way of probing scrutiny. It's the Tories who remain the BBC's implacable foe, as they have been since the launch of commercial television in the 1950s. You could say that this reflects the reality that the Conservative Party has only ever been a front for the rightwing press and associated commercial interests, but then we have to acknowledge that those powers are waning too under the impact of the Internet, social media and streaming, so why is their grip tightening now? Is this merely the ebbing tide of the politicised appointments of the 2010-24 era?

One plausible answer is that any sign the BBC is becoming popular, particularly with the young, must produce a reaction to force it into becoming more conservative and narrow in its appeal. In other words, this is a defensive manoeuvre in the face of growing calls for the BBC to be genuinely impartial, not just over issues such as Gaza but in its coverage of emerging voices on the left, such as Zack Polanski. The bias that the BBC is encouraged to show, from sneering at trans people to kow-towing to Donald Trump, is less about enforcing a conservative worldview and more about minimising its potential audience. The history of the many calls for impartiality levelled at the Corporation makes it clear that what is really being demanded is silence and thus irrelevance. Just as the BBC should leave sport and entertainment to ITV, so it should recuse itself from any political analysis and leave the exposés of the malignant antisemitism and traitorous indulgence of Islam by the far-left to GB News and others.

According to Polly Toynbee, "Its enemies hate the BBC with the same venom they detest the NHS, as publicly owned and popular social endeavours." But the parallel between the two isn't particularly helpful, and not just because nobody on the right is seriously suggesting the NHS can be converted to an ad-driven model. The Tory ideal is for the BBC to withdraw from popular entertainment and focus on higher culture (albeit of a very conservative stripe, e.g. the Last Night of the Proms) and uncontentious public service broadcasting (essentially middle class programmes like Countryfile and Gardeners' World), leaving the bulk of the linear TV field to commercial broadcasters. In the case of the NHS, the ideal is to reduce it to a basic safety net for the poor. Viewed as positional goods, these are at opposite ends of the wealth/status spectrum: a high culture backwater and the return of pauper wards. Inasmuch as the BBC and the NHS have a similarity, it is in the lack of true democractic accountability, something that doesn't seem to bother Toynbee overly much.

A better way of understadning the animus against the BBC is to consider the role of youth. Political engagement among the young, unless channelled via respectable routes in the traditional parties, is habitually derided as naive or the product of brainwashing. Likewise, and despite her venerable age, Auntie is routinely accused of following fashionable nonsense and of being obsessed with "reaching a younger audience". This isn't without foundation - a steadily ageing audience will inevitably lead to the end of the licence fee model - but it is exaggerated as part of the persistent campaign to undermine the Corporation's claims to represent the entire nation. This is why there is such an emphasis on the idea that the BBC is indulging the radical young over issues such as trans rights and Palestine, and also explains why if any leftwing voices are to be allowed on the channel they must ideally be young and excitable, all the better to be dismissed as young and excitable. Owen Jones and Ash Sarkar probably only have a few more years in the limelight before they are considered worringly "grown-up". 

The elevation of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership presented a major challenge to the BBC precisely because of his age. He couldn't simply be patronised as a young fool. The initial response, beyond dismissing him as a old fool, was to use his supporters as a proxy, focusing on his success in attracting and energising younger voters, hence the prominence given to Momentum. But this ran into the brick wall of the general election in 2017, which proved that Corbyn's attraction went well beyond the young and clearly included many of the older Labour voters that Westminster opinion was convinced had been lost to the anti-EU right. This led to a switch in focus, first to the old standby of traitorous disloyalty (e.g. the attempt by Newsnight to link him to Moscow after the Salisbury poisoning in 2018), and then to the claims of institutional antisemitism (culminating in the infamous John Ware Panorama report in 2019). 

Just as the liberal press routinely occludes 2017, so the BBC will ignore its role in undermining the Labour Party and indulging the Conservative government under Boris Johnson in 2019, and will insist that it is and always has been politically neutral, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary from the 1926 General Strike through the Battle of Orgreave to today. In comparison, its questionable editing  of Donald Trump's 2021 Capitol Hill speech is a triviality. The real significance of the moment is that the UK's national broadcaster is being threatened by the head of a foreign government, and one with a track record of bullying media companies into agreeing sales to his own backers. The fear from the 1980s onwards was that the BBC would be broken up and replaced by components of the Murdoch empire, or at least placed ever more firmly under the thumb of newspapermen, but it's now more likely that it will be arm-twisted into a subservient relationship with the new media conglomerates centring on Silicon Valley. As in so much of her policy, Margaret Thatcher paved the way for the americanisation of British life.

Reforming the Tax System

The framing of the budget due on the 26th of November has largely focused on two aspects. First, the government's fiscal "black hole", i.e. the assumption that taxes must rise and/or public spending must be cut to minimise borrowing and thus satisfy the bond market; and second, the need to stimulate growth so that future revenues may provide the means to reverse those tax rises and/or spending cuts. The metaphor is meant to be terrifying, a forbidding gravity well that will drag us to our doom, but it actually works best in the sense that no information can escape from this conceptual void, most notably the actual size of the hole itself. This currently lies, depending on who you believe, somewhere between £20 and £50 billion.There has also been a change in the term used to describe the government's operating contingency, from "fiscal space" to "headroom". What the language indicates is that the technical analysis of the state's finances has adopted a more emotional register, even if planetary extinction and bumping your head are not on the same level. The consensus is that as the public's tolerance for spending cuts has reached its limit, tax rises are now inevitable.

While there may be profit to be made speculating on the Chancellor of the Exchequer's plans in the financial markets, there is little point wondering about the budget's political economy. Rachel Reeves' speech will, I confidently predict, not mark a radical departure from the neoliberal consensus of the last 50 years. Both tax and welfare will be presented as necessary evils. There will be more parsimonious benefits and tighter sanctions. More funding will be announced for the NHS, with the quid pro quo of more "reform". Growth will be invoked in the abstract, but the concrete measures will be pitiful when not delusional. No doubt there will be more funding to make the UK a "leader in  AI". If the rumours are to be believed, there may be a penny on income tax and the same off NICs, green levies cut to lower energy bills, and the abolition of stamp duty. Or maybe these are all distractions intended to leave us relieved that she hasn't changed much at all.

It is in this context that a number of UK think-tanks have come together to present a series of proposals to reform the tax system. These reforms can, they say, be revenue-neutral. Rather than increasing receipts, the idea is to make the tax system more efficient and remove anomalies and disincentives, which should encourage growth. You don't have to go to the extremes of a flat tax or the Laffer Curve to understand the ideological link between tax "simplicity" and rightwing economics, but that is not to say that complexity is necessarily good. The question as ever is cui bono?, and you can get a pretty good sense of that by considering the think-tanks involved. The group is presented as spanning the "political spectrum", from the Adam Smith Institute to the New Economics Foundation, but the centre-right bias is pretty obvious, down to including Labour Together, which is more known for factional plotting in its namesake party than developing economic policy. 

The proposals are none-the-less interesting because of what they tell us about the presumed limits of the possible. Some will have been watered down for palatability, and to avoid any one proposal crowding out the rest. For example, a land-value tax (LVT) would be supported by a genuinely wide spectrum of economists (as would a UBI), but that is replaced here by the abolition of stamp duty (SDLT) and a revaluation of Council Tax bands. That the reform of property taxes is the first item on the agenda is indicative both of the dysfunction of this area but also of the propertarian assumptions of the think-tanks. There is no suggestion that the amount of capital wrapped up in domestic property is a problem for the economy and a reason why domestic investment in production is low. The second proposal is to extend VAT to more goods and services but lower the headline rate. It's typical of the report, which is only 8 pages long and has little in the way of evidence or justification, that it doesn't explain why VAT only applying to half of all spending is a problem. There's also a whiff of naivety in suggesting that we add VAT to food and kids clothes in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis.

The proposal on income tax is about smoothing the cliff-edges that occur with marginal rates and the withdrawal of subsidies, such as for childcare. This is certainly a real problem, though the idea that it disincentivises people from taking pay rises or coming off benefits is questionable. There's certainly evidence for the latter, but that simply highlights the poor design of the benefits and the reliance on means-testing. At no point do the report's authors suggest that benefits could be made universal in a revenue (and expenditure) neutral way, which would certainly simplify the system and do away with most of the sanctions regime. The fourth proposal is to "Tax all income from work equally", which translates into merging NICs with income tax. Few would object to this, but the report's shallowness (apart from a reference to the 2010 Mirrlees Review) obscures the significance of that "from work" qualifier. The major issue in not that NICs become regressive for salaries over £50k but that there is a lower tax rate on dividends and capital gains, which leads to disguised employment.

The fifth proposal returns to property with the suggestion that landlords should be able to fully expense mortgage costs, which they can only do today by setting up a company, and to levy NICs on rental income. In other words, this is directed at petty landlords, in particular the buy-to-let variety who are mortgaged to the hilt. The separate packages are meant to be standalone, but clearly if both #4 and #5 were implemented, the net result would be a tax cut (through 100% mortgage relief) for petty landlords. How that is meant to help GDP growth is not at all clear. Perhaps the most amusing part of this is the revenue neutrality rider: "This would be through adjusting headline Income Tax rates in whichever direction is appropriate." There's an obvious conflict here with package 4 ("Adjust Income Tax rates to achieve revenue neutrality"), inasmuch as the same adjustment is unlikely to to achieve neutrality for both income from work and income from rent. A choice would have to be made between the interests of landlords and those of the working population. Less than 5% of the population are landlords, while 13% of MPs are. 

The sixth proposal continues the property theme, but here in the form of equities and other financial assets. The package includes a capital gains allowance to offset fluctuations in interest when borrowing to invest; an end of "rebasing" on death for CGT calculations to disincentivise people holding onto assets rather than passing them to others who may make better use of them; and (the highlight in the press) the application of an exit tax (aka "settling-up") that would require CGT to be paid on domestic assets when leaving the country for good. The revenue neutrality rider for this package is: "Headline CGT rates should be adjusted in whichever direction is appropriate for revenue neutrality", which is worth noting because it emphasises that this group of think-tanks presumably do not agree that capital gains (along with inheritances) should be treated as income and taxed as such. The differential between income tax and CGT rates (and Dividend Tax rates too) will remain.

The final package concerns Corporation Tax. The proposals are to allow full expensing of all up-front business spending (not just capital expenditure on fixed assets) and to remove the limits on loss deductions, "with appropriate safeguards against abuse". This would certainly simplify matters, but as that last clause hints, it would require a new raft of regulations and checks to ensure that businesses won't simply defraud the Exchequer, or criminals pose as business owners. The experience of the Covid-19 pandemic does not inspire confidence. There are good arguments that capital expenditure should get tax relief to encourage investment in productive capacity, but the idea that we should have no qualification rules for the sake of simplicity seems naive. Offsetting the cost of new technology on the shopfloor may help improve productivity, but it's less obvious that fully-expensing company cars will do so given that their usage won't change.

What this report suggests is that the think-tankers who routinely applaud themselves for thinking radical thoughts aren't expecting much in 3 weeks time, but they will be ready to go on TV and explain why if only the Chancellor had been brave enough to adopt their suggestions long-term growth would be assured. The subtext is that Reeves needs to be more generous to business and to investors, for they alone are the wealth-creators. For all the emphasis on revenue-neutrality, the packages taken together would probably be implemented in a way that shifted more of the tax burden onto consumers and less on savers and (domestic) investors, despite secular trends requiring the opposite (fewer working-age adults, more well-off pensioners, greater wealth inequality). And they are probably justified in thinking that both Reeves and Starmer will be sympathetic to that tilt, just as they have shown themselves to be sympathetic to watering down employment rights and green levies under similar pressure from business.

Caste Away

The British politico-media caste has taken leave of its collective senses. The uproar over the banning of Maccabi Tel Aviv away fans at Villa Park is notable not for the ridiculous arguments or patently false claims being made by those who want the ban over-turned, but by their shared assumption that they can get away with shitehawking the British public on a truly epic scale. It is a display of power that acts as a litmus test to identify those who identify with power. This free-for-all was triggered not by the ban itself but by the reaction of various rent-a-gob MPs, such as the Tory Nigel Huddleston who immediately interpreted the ban as a refusal to "guarantee the safety of Jewish people on our streets and in our sports grounds". This competitive anti-anti-semitism quickly escalated all the way to the Prime Minister, who as a football fan should really have known better. Keir Starmer's response - "We will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets" - effectively gave permission to the entirety of the caste to junk any attempt at factual analysis in favour of hyperventilating about the state of modern Britian with a blatant subtext that we've bowed to Muslims for too long, hence the demonisation of Ayoub Khan as terrorism-adjacent and demands for Zarah Zultana to be deported.

It seems otiose to point out that the inflaming of community tensions here is the direct result of the caste's behaviour, not the decision of the local council's Safety Advisory Group or the preferences of the West Midlands Police. The irony is that the reasonable fear of away fans running riot has transmogrified into a belief that Jews aren't safe on our streets precisely because the politico-media caste have been allowed to run riot. While there have been some sensible responses among sports journalists - pointing out that away fan bans are neither unusual nor unprecedented in the case of Maccabi Tel Aviv - it was notable that those whose career seems to have been a long drawn-out bleat about how much they despise the game of football were at the forefront of opposition to the ban, possibly because it allowed them to ride their other hobby horses about the pernicious left. Consider Barney Ronay's take in the Guardian, which was essentially a sneering dismissal of Ayoub Khan and Zack Polanksi (incidental reference to hypnosis and tits all present and correct) for what he saw as their hypocrisy in claiming that Birmingham is not a "no-go area".

In today's Observer, Philip Collins - standing in for Andrew Rawnsley as resident Blairite opinion-monger - takes a predictably more lofty view of the whole matter, seeing it in terms of Keir Starmer's continuing struggle to convince the country that he is the best person to be Prime Minister. Collins tries to position Starmer as the "quiet and reasonable" point of calm at the centre of the storm, hence he throws brickbats at both critics on the left and on the right. Like Ronay, Collins believes "there is every chance of a fight", noting Tommy Robinson parading around in a Maccabi shirt and asking who's up for it, but believes this simply requires robust policing. At no point does he stop to wonder whether the Prime Minister finding himself on the same side as a convicted football hooligan over the question of the ban might be cause for concern. Instead he claims "this drama is a parable of the conundrum facing Keir Starmer as a political figure. Caught between two factions who do not want to talk to one another, let alone be reconciled, he does not naturally assume the tone of assertive certainty that is the demand of the moment." His nostalgia for Blair's muscular centrism is palpable.

More absurdly, Collins sees Starmer as a victim of intolerance: "On one side stand the outraged on the left wing facing the outraged on the right wing. And there stands the prime minister in the middle, forced to play a game he would rather referee, no doubt shaking his head at the stupidity of it all." This image is hard to reconcile with Starmer's own words where he equated an operational decision by the West Midlands Police with tolerance for "antisemitism on our streets", thereby inflaming the situation and giving carte blanche to the rest of the politico-media caste to lose their shit. In reality, Collins, like the the rest of the Blairite hardcore, has little regard for Starmer, hence he introduces his column with faint praise: "A dispute involving football and the application of the law sounds as if it were designed to bring the best out of the prime minister. These are his private and his public passions. But the question of whether or not the supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv should be permitted to travel to Birmingham to watch their club’s game against Aston Villa on 6 November also shows that the prime minister, struggling to stay calm and reasonable, might never escape the verdict that he is a man out of time."

One explanation for the general turn to hysteria by the caste is the recognition that the impending budget may prove a decisive moment for this administration: the last chance to set a coherent course for the next few years and crystallise in the electorate's hive-mind what this government is for. The major consequence of a bad reception may not be a setback to the personal ambitions of the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, but a whispering campaign against Starmer. His over-reaction to the Maccabi ban suggests a man who knows he is on borrowed time and is flailing around to reassert his authority (that snub by Trump in Sharm El-Sheikh obviously hurt). It might appear an odd hill to die on, but Starmer reached high office through his reputation as a public philosemite as much as a europhile, and with the latter an embarrassment now, a "dispute involving football and the application of the law" may, as Collins surmised, have looked like an open goal. It may also have looked like an opportunity to eclipse the Home Secretary, who should really be leading on this matter.

The problem that instinctive authoritarians face is that the moment you fail to impose your authority you can quickly find it dribbling away. Donald Trump may always chicken out (TACO), but he gets away with it, first because he is shameless in rewriting failure as success, and second because he enjoys continuing support among the right-leaning media for his policies (though that may not last). Starmer, in contrast, has already lost the public and is clearly on the cusp of losing the media. His refusal to define "Starmerism" means there is no natural constituency for him in the PLP; the 2024 landslide intake and the current state of the polls means there are many MPs who believe he is leading them to unemployment; and the doubts about the competence and nous of the Number 10 operation continue despite repeated reshuffles and reboots. All this raises the stakes and means that Starmer cannot now climb down over the Maccabi ban. The hysteria of the caste is a clear message that the Prime Minister must dance to their tune or face humiliation.

Save the Tories

The Guardian has decided that it must save the Conservative Party from decline, as if it were an endagered species. In order to do this, it must first ignore the party's recent history, and then construct a mythos about the nature of conservative politics that reaches back more than a century to Weimar Germany, of all places. To get the ball rolling, Polly Toynbee first argues that we need a healthy Conservative Party. But what she is effectively asking for is the preservation of Thatcherism, which remains the essence of contemporary Toryism: privatisation, deregulation and a disdain for welfare. She herself admits that the Conservative Party "has presided, especially since the 1980s, over capital supremacy at the expense of labour, sky-high inequality, public service degradation and me-first individualism." There is no route from the present moment that offers a return to the One Nation conservatism of Michael Heseltine, let alone Harold Macmillan. Invoking either is futile nostalgia. Invoking both, as she does, looks like delusion. What Toynbee really wants is the restoration of the post-Thatcher cartel - i.e. an ideological spectrum running from Blair to Cameron - hence she talks up the likes of David Gauke. 

Her current fears arise less from her desire for a "better brand of conservatism" than from her recognition of Starmer's failure to establish a popular "grownup" politics over the last 15 months. What she cannot acknowledge is that Kemi Badenoch is a symptom of the cartel's steady rightward shift since the 1990s, rather than some aberration peculiar to the Tories, and that this is linked to Starmer's failure to hegemonise her preferred centrism. Ironically, the one thing that would have buttressed the Tories would have been a Labour victory under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, as that would have encouraged them to shift towards the centre-right space and present themselves as a safe alternative for both traditional conservative and liberal voters frightened by the Red Terror, even as they insisted that the people's will must be observed over Brexit. They cannot do that now because Labour under Starmer has occupied that space, and adopted the same stance on Brexit, thereby pushing Tory voters further right, hence the escalation in the rhetoric over migrants and the European Convention on Human Rights.

In another wisftul paean to the "moderate right", Zoe Williams, citing Daniel Ziblatt's research on the National People's Party of Weimar Germany, claims that "When the mainstream right loses its confidence, when it starts to chase the buzzwords and symbolic politics of the far right, it hands them the steering wheel." This is a misreading of the DNVP's history and the dynamics of the Weimar Republic. The Deutschnationale Volkspartei was formed by the merger of multiple nationalistic, monarchistic and reactionary parties in 1918 and was virulently antisemitic from the start. Socially, it was the party of landowners, industrialists and the Lutheran middle-classes. It was strongest in rural areas, particularly in Prussia and Pomerania. Politically, it took an ambivalent stance towards the Kapp putsch of 1920 and regularly called for the assassination of government ministers as "traitors". In other words, the DNVP was both consistently hostile to the Weimar Republic and had already adopted the central plank of what would become the Nazi programme before the NSDAP's foundation. It wasn't chasing the Nazis. If anything, it provided a readymade social and political environment in which the Nazis could thrive.

The NSDAP came to national prominence largely due to the platform offered it by the DNVP's push for a referendum on the Young (reparations) Plan in 1929. If there is a parallel between the DNVP and the UK Conservative Party it was in the way the former's push for a referendum divided the nation and consolidated the right around a more radical locus. But the parallel breaks down when you realise that even after the merger of 1918 the political right in Germany was still fragmented. As well as being antisemitic, the DNVP was anti-Catholic, with the result that conservative Catholics gravitated to the Centre Party in the Rhineland and the BVP in Bavaria. These two parties were also more supportive of the Weimar Republic, participating in numerous coalition governments. In summary, the "mainstream right" did not lose its confidence until 1933, and even then Franz von Papen (on the right of the Centre Party) imagined he was manipulating Hitler, not the other way round. The DNVP were Nazis avant la lettre in their extreme antisemitism, hostility to the Republic, and violent hatred of the SPD and KPD. The DNVP's voters switched decisively to the NSDAP in 1930.

Williams' German history is bad, but her British history isn't much better. "What happened to the old-school Conservatives, who treasure stability, conservation, the constitution, the pride of Britain on the world stage? What happened to the modernisers, who described the nation in terms of powerhouses, not powder kegs? Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t wild about any of them either, but it’s absolutely striking how those worldviews – the one nation Tory, the Cameroonian Conservative – have been erased, in favour of relentless demonisation: of migrants, Muslims, benefit claimants and protesters." Like Toynbee, Williams seeks to invent a Tory who never existed. But whereas the former at least tries to locate this species in the distant past, the latter attempts to set up an opposition between the Cameronian party of 2015-19 and the Conservative Party of today, which requires a lot of forgetfulness. Would an old-school Conservative who treasured stability have risked the EU referendum? Was George Osborne a moderniser, his austerity wilfully misunderstood? Did Theresa May ever tell migrants to "go home"? Did Boris Johnson ever say anything disobliging about Muslims?

You might be wondering why the Guardian thinks the Conservatives should be saved, given that the Liberal Democrats are perfectly capable of offering a centre-right alternative that the paper would find congenial. Why not celebrate the eclipse of the Tories and go all-in on Ed Davey? The answer, I suspect, is that they recognise the risk that the Liberal Democrats could outflank Labour on the left, particularly over civil rights and a more humane attitude towards immigration. This would make it too obvious that Labour has become the actual conservative party of British politics: unwilling to gainsay the financial markets, instinctively authoritarian, and mawkishly patriotic. They need the Tories in play as well if they are to present themselves as the party of the nation. The analogy of society with a family hasn't really enjoyed a vogue since the days of George Orwell ("the wrong members in control"), possibly because Thatcher made the terms mutually exclusive, but it is useful here. If the left and the Greens are dismissed as foolish youth, and Labour and (to a lesser extent) the Lib Dems are the grownups, then Reform is your racist, raffish uncle and the Tories your racist, wealthy aunt. Starmer's backers in the press still want him to be the centrist dad of the nation, despite his utter unsuitability for the role, and will happily reinvent the Conservative Party if it helps to achieve that goal.

Our People

The Labour Party's history is one of a dialogue between rights and entitlements: what everyone should expect versus what organised labour should be entitled to. This reflects the party's origins both in the radical wing of the Liberal Party, with its desire to universalise liberties, and in the particularist approach of the trade union movement, which sought to further the interests of its members. Though the unions grudgingly adopted some of the universalist tactics and language of syndicalism, notably the general strike, its focus remained limited to the bread-and-butter of self-interest rather than social transformation. Thus the aim in 1926 was to restore miners' pay and hours, not to seize the means of production. As the labour movement was absorbed into capitalist society through parliamentarianism and what became known as "industrial relations" (i.e. collective bargaining), the two traditions were initially complementary, achieving a secular apotheosis in the institutions of the welfare state, notably the NHS. This was the synthesis of universalism and particularism captured in the resonant phrase "national insurance": available to all as a right but subject to conditionality and the contributory principle. 

Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century these two traditions increasingly came to be seen as being in conflict in the popular discourse. The rights of the individual were arrayed against the privileges of trade unions in the form of the closed shop and the inconvenience of strikes. The language of the original liberal revolution was revived as union leaders were cast as "barons" and the destruction of established norms was cast as "modernisation". This was all part of the neoliberal revolution, but it also reflected the growing tensions within the labour movement itself between younger workers demanding that the movement take industrial democracy seriously and a bureaucratic apparatus that increasingly accepted the hegemonic idea that British industry needed reform to free itself of "sclerosis". The triumph of Thatcherism settled this argument decisively in favour of the apparatus even as it undermined the labour movement through recession, repression and punitive legislation.

With questions of industrial policy and property rights sidelined, the consequence was the Labour Party's greater emphasis on that liberal tradition of universalism. This translated not only into the extension of rights to previously disadvantaged communities - what would come to be known as "diversity" - but into full-throated support for European integration and a more robust promotion of human rights globally. But the particularist tradition was still part of Labour's DNA, only now reframed as the just desserts of the neoliberal monad: Worcester woman enjoying her ability to shop at Marks & Spencer's on a Sunday. The result, when Labour finally returned to government in 1997, was the peculiar mish-mash of "rights and responsibilities" that marked the party's rhetoric, together with the blithe trust in market forces and messianic approach to foreign relations embodied by Tony Blair. I don't need to enumerate the many disasters this gave rise to. The key point is that the once fruitful dialogue between rights and entitlements had by now curdled into a fractious contention between established rights and fluid responsibilities, often at the whim of the media.

The current Labour government lacks a theory of the economy, by which I mean it doesn't really know what or who the economy is for, beyond the unthinking credo of growth and its presumed material benefits for voters in the form of a profusion of goods. Consequently it has no idea how to stimulate or restrain economic activity, hence the uncertainty over green investment and missteps like the employer NIC hike, while its fiscal planning seems reactive only to market sentiment ("in office but not in power" pretty much sums up Rachel Reeves as Chancellor). Likewise, it has no theory of culture, hence its absurd attempts to monopolise patriotism, its MOR tastes in the arts, and its fogeyish attitude towards the young. But what it does have is a theory of governance and central to that is the belief that rights are conditional on right behaviour. Historically, even during the New Labour years, this was largely just rhetorical scolding, but it has started to take on a concrete form now. This is evident not only in the administration's preservation of the benefit sanctions regime introduced by the Conservative-Liberal coalition, and in its echoing of the press in treating asylum as a "golden ticket", but in its appetite for extending the state's coercive powers over protest.

The liberal tradition holds as a self-evident truth that only conservatives and reactionaries impede progress. The implication is that anything slightly to the left of them will help the arc of history bend towards justice. This is obviously not true, but it means that liberals can easily delude themselves into thinking that they are the defenders of rights even as they undermine them. The tradition emanating from the labour movement holds as a self-evident truth that the Labour Party exists to further the interests of "our people". The implication is that it is always worth voting for Labour, no matter how disappointing they may prove in office. This, rather than Peter Mandelson's claim that Labour supporters "have nowhere else to go", is the guiding light of the party's electoral strategists: get Labour into power and hope for the best. In combination, these two beliefs allow Labour politicians to convince themselves that, to coin a phrase, all voters are equal but some are more equal than others. But because of the party's factionalism, "our people" often means a very narrow segment of the population, which is how fictions like the "hero voters" of Morgan McSweeney's imagination can come to dominate political analysis. 

This also explains why Labour always appears happy to alienate its actual core vote, which it has been doing at a spectacular rate over the past year. There can be little doubt that the majority of people protesting over Gaza and the subsequent proscription of Palestine Action will have voted Labour in 2024, and also little doubt that the party's poor showing at less than 34% was not the product of "efficiency" as claimed but the result of disillusion since the purge of the left after 2019 and the steady jettisoning of Keir Starmer's pledges made during the leadership election. When you add in the reluctance to lift the two child benefit cap or introduce any sort of wealth tax since taking office, it almost seems like we're witnessing a perverse experiment in finding out how easily a political party's base can be discouraged from voting. In this light, the mood music about "reforming" the European Convention on Human Rights sounds like another attempt to woo a reactionary who isn't going to vote for the party anyway, but it also points to something fundamental in this government's worldview: that all rights are contingent because they are conditional to the needs of the moment, from avoiding inconvenient court challenges to reassuring the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

The contrast with the Labour Party's embrace of universalism in the 1990s is stark, and only made more ironic by this turn occuring under the leadership of a "human rights lawyer". Despite his many flaws, Blair never doubted that Labour had to apperal to the mass of voters rather than just "our people". And while he was guilty of ventriloquising their preferences over issues such as the Iraq War, he didn't present the British people in narrow and exclusionary terms but as part of a more dynamic global population seizing the neoliberal moment at "the end of history". But it's important to emphasise that the particularist turn does not mark the revived influence of organised labour in the party, or even a commitment to the bread-and-butter concerns of the already forgotten "everyday economy" or "securonomics" that Rachel Reeves once eulogised. Rather it reflects the steady absorption of the Labour Party by the security state and the adoption of its instinctive authoritarianism. "Our people" has come to mean the apparatus itself, not the rank and file.

Society of the Lanyard

The latest round of the national ID debate had hardly got underway before pundits and commentators were hurling insults. Particularly amusing was the sight of Lewis Goodall being community-noted on X for insulting X users' poor grasp of the subject while being married to an employee of the Tony Blair Institute. Leaving aside his consdescending tone and alledgedly offensive wife, Goodall did make one useful point, though without perhaps fully understanding it, when he accused the debate of being "insular", pointing out that other countries have had ID cards for years with little issue. This is correct, but it misses that the government, and lobbyists like the TBI, are also reluctant to actually examine the use of such schemes in other countries. One obvious reason is that they do not provide evidence for many of the beneficial claims that are habitually made. For example, we know that national IDs will not deter asylum-seekers because those camped out around Calais have already passed through multiple countries with ID regimes which didn't deter them either. Likewise, none of the countries that insist on IDs for employment have managed to do away with the shadow economy.

Deterrence is a common theme across arguments in favour of national IDs: it will deter illegal immigration, it will deter illegal employment, it will deter benefit fraud. But this is no more convincing than the deterrent argument used to justify any criminal law. Making something a crime does not stop it happening, it just clarifies the consequences. The more positive argument for a national ID, that it will improve citizens' access to public services, is nowadays more likely come with citations about how easy it is to report a collision to your car insurer in Poland using the national ID app. I'm pretty sure Poland doesn't have nationalised car insurance, more's the pity, so this is stretching the definition of public services. In other words, the boundary between a digital citizen and a digital consumer has already been erased. Across the EU, national ID schemes have been captured by commercial interests over the last twenty years, which is why they have moved online. Being able to access your bank account securely with your national ID is a greater benefit for the bank than it is for you. 

A typically-breathless report in the Guardian on the subject states that "Estonia claims e-ID saves citizens about five days a year of pre-digital administrative hassle." In other words, it was the digitalisation that reduced the admin overhead, not the national ID. Nobody in the UK is currently spending five days a year routinely negotiating public services online, and obviously the introduction of an ID scheme will not reduce the amount of time you spend sitting in a hospital waiting room or queueing for a bus. One argument you don't hear from the Tony Blair Institute, or anybody else for that matter, is that a national ID scheme will increase the take-up of benefits, by identifying people who are eligible but currently don't claim. It's estimated that UK benefit fraud (some of which is actually just DWP error) amounts to over £6 billion a year while unclaimed benefits are almost four times that at £23 billion. The intersection of national IDs and benefits is always about "efficient allocation", "better targeting" and the prevention of fraud.

The UK's feudal legacy is not to be found in the monarchy or Morris Men - both largely invented traditions of the modern era - but in its parcellised approach to public services, which is reflected in the multiple and not always overlapping identification schemes from NHS numbers to driving licences used to organise it. That may seem strange given that cars are obviously a modern invention and the NHS dates from only 1948, but the point is that the state in its broadest form has always been more fragmentary and blinkered than either its advocates or critics have allowed, and the roots of its disaggregation go a long way back. The welfare state may have offered an embrace from cradle to grave, but it was never the same arms doing the embracing over time, while the dystopian nightmare of an intrusive state ignored the reality of administrative disconnection (the totalitarian fears of Geroge Orwell originated from his experiences in the very exclusive and parcellised environs of Eton and the BBC).

The worry that a national ID scheme would lead to Larry Ellison or Peter Thiel controlling our personal data is a classic case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Partly because of the parcellised nature of personal identification in the UK, they have already scooped up many of our demographic assets with minimal democratic oversight and zero public agreement. For them, the promise of a national ID is the ability to exploit the linkages between the datasets that they already control: the primary key to all the mysteries, if I may be permitted a techno-literate joke. But whether that will lead to greater insight is moot. It's easy enough to sell the state on the vision of making the population ever more legible, but the experience of Big Data has proved underwhelming, particularly in the area of public administration. The fundmental problem is one of triviality: that there isn't much to be learned by extending a particular NHS patient's record to include their driving licence. Even in aggregate, there is unlikely to be a statistically significant correlation between being entitled to ride a motorbike and suffering from shingles.

If the government wanted to implement a national ID card on the cheap it could simply issue everyone who doesn't have one with a driving licence. In these cases the card would simply have blanks on the reverse - i.e. you wouldn't be licensed to drive anything. In many countries, such as the USA, a driving licence is the standard form of (non-compulsory) ID and in the UK plenty of teenagers already use a provisional licence for proof of age in pubs and clubs. But this pragmatic approach, infomed by international practice, isn't what the likes of Lewis Goodall are seeking when they criticise British insularity. Their vision is of a common online identity whose utility to the state is almost incidental to its utility to business. And what particularly attracts journalists who face derision on social media is the prospect of doing away with online anonymity altogether. As they gather at the Labour Party Annual Conference in Liverpool to fret about Starmer's lack of vision, what they see when they look around the conference hall is actually their own vision: a society of the lanyard.

Shifting Sands

Back in the 1980s, David Icke was a spokesman for the Green Party. Though his public statements about alternative medicine and mysticism embarrassed his fellow party members, leading to his resignation in 1991 just prior to his announcement that he was a son of the Godhead, it's fair to say that the reputation for eccentricity in the public mind was not limited to just him. The Greens have always been an amalgam of different traditions, not to mention people pursuing obscure hobby-horses. Conservation has often looked like conservatism, hence the presence of aristocratic scions like Jonathan Porritt in the party's ranks, while the close relationship of envrionmental damage and poverty has encouraged what political scientists like to refer to as "leftwing economics". At the margins you will find both xenophobic nativists and hunt saboteurs. This variety also extends to the practice of politics. For example, the earlier incarnations as PEOPLE (sic) and The Ecology Party highlight the contrasting atttractions of anti-establishment populism and a more academic and scientifically-grounded approach to public persuasion.

Since the 1990s, and the fragmentation between the Scottish Greens, the Green Party Nortthern Ireland and the Green Party of England and Wales, the GPEW specifically has tended to opportunistically reflect the shifts in the party landscape at Westminster. In policy terms it has moved less towards the left, as is popularly supposed, than to the centre, for example in dumping its earlier euroscepticism and becoming pro-EU, which reflected its relative success in elections to the EU Parliament. Its embrace of social justice is largely rhetorical as practical actions, such as housebuilding, risk conflicting with its ethos of growth scepticism. Local councils under Green control have not been noted for their radicalism. When the party has gone out on a limb, as with the proposal for a basic income, it has often come a cropper as these contradictions have emerged. The fundamental problem is that you can only reconcile a more equitable distribution of resources in society with a minimal growth, sustainable economy if you commit to the expropriation of wealth, and that would necessitate a significant expansion of the state's power, which runs against the party's libertarian instincts.

Of the longstanding political parties, the Greens have had the most volatile membership and electoral support since the millennium. There was an influx of former Labour supporters in response to the Iraq War, but then an outflow of more conservative supporters to the Liberal Democrats in 2010. After getting 1% in the 2005 and 2010 general elections, its vote almost quadrupled to 3.8% in 2015. This was partly due to the return of voters disllusioned by the Lib Dems, but also to the influx of left-leaning voters disillusioned with Labour, as was evidenced in 2017 when the Green's vote share more than halved to 1.6% as Labour  under Corbyn energised the left. The subsequent victory of the right of the Labour Party has seen many leftwing members decamp to the Greens and supporters switch allegiance. At the 2019 general election Green support was 2.6%. In 2024 it jumped to 6.4%. Since then, the party has been at around 10% in opinion polls. Clearly the composition of its support has changed along with the quantum over the last two decades and all the pointers suggest this is largely down to attracting people who identify left on both the social and economic dimensions.

The recent leadership contest, which Zac Polanski won with 85% of the vote, suggests the party is going to move towards a distinctive left populism, but perhaps the real significance of the result is that it highlighted the tension between the managerial class of MPs, PPCs and party staffers and a more radically-inclined membership, something that will be familiar to former Labour Party members. With the long-trailed Corbyn-Sultana vehicle now looking like it has lost its wheels before ever taking to the road, and with Polanski's undoubted talents for publicity, there's every chance that the Greens will start to post support levels in the mid-teens, at which point they will be level with the Liberal Democrats and may even be breathing down the necks of Labour and the Conservatives if those two continue to shed support. Though the prospect of the Greens entering government as part of an anti-Reform coalition cannot be ruled out, they are unlikely to find themselves in such a position so long the UK has a first-past-the-post electoral system and so long as their support is geographically diffuse. 

The evidence from other countries with more proportional voting systems is that green parties are quickly co-opted by the cartel of established parties, sacrificing radicalism for respectability. This leads to tension between those advocating pragmatism and those insisting on principle, or "realos" and "fundis" as they are styled in Germany. The GPEW is unlikely to face that problem in an acute form due to the constraints of the electoral system, but there is clearly a difference between the parliamentary elite and the wider membership in terms both of ideology and praxis. With a party leader outside Parliament, it is likely that the Greens will lean more towards activism and protest in the coming years, which will accentuate this difference. It will also reinforce the impression of the Greens as the locus of the extra-parliamentary left, particularly if the Corbyn-Sultana fallout leads to splintering. While Corbyn remains a formidable figure, he is 76. In reality, the Your Party proposal always looked unstable given the evident gulf between not only Sultana and the "boy's club" of Gaza independents but between those wanting a party based on mass membership democracy and those more comfortable with the "organising committee" approach of Labour tradition.

From the perspective of the Labour Party, the old claim that the left have nowhere else to go is already redundant, but this won't persuade the party leadership to shift leftwards to win those voters back. If there is one principle that defines the current regime, and explains the alliance between Blairite modernisers and the old Labourist right, it is a visceral hatred of the left. The idea that if Starmer could be replaced by Andy Burnham there would be a reorientation is simply deluded. The vibes might be better, and the "King of the North" might scrap the two-child benefits cap and various other unpopular policies, but there will be no return to full-throated socialism. In other words, there will continue to be a large space to the left of Labour and electoral gravity will inescapbly drag the Greens there. The strategic question for the GPEW is whether it can broaden its voter base beyond the young and educated and make inroads among working class voters in urban areas, which would mark a significant change of direction after focusing on rural seats. This in turn is bound up with the possible fortunes of Reform UK.

The liberal panic over the prospect of a government led by Nigel Farage is ill-founded. While you can win a majority in the Commons on the sort of vote share Reform has seen in recent opinion polls, as Labour proved only last year, this requires three things: a solid core of safe seats, which Labour have in the cities; an opposition that is split nationally, allowing you to pick up lots of seats on a third of the vote; and an unpopular government that has alienated many of its supporters leading them to abstain on the big day. Reform lack any real heartlands (seaside towns are literally too marginal to play this role) and their core support is found mostly in traditional Tory constituencies, not in the fabled Red Wall. They are very good at undermining the Conservative vote, because they are mostly Tories, but there is little evidence that they can have a similarly destructive impact on Labour's support. If people are turning away from Labour, it isn't because they've suddenly discovered that they like Farage, it's because of the Labour government's record in office and the unapologetic rightwing tendencies of the faction that controls the party apparatus.

If the Greens continue their upward ascent until the next general election, Labour could find itself suffering from the factors that kyboshed the Tories in 2024: its vote eroded by both desertion on the left and abstention. This won't put Nigel Farage into Number 10 for the simple reason that the vote on the right will still be split. The Conservative Party isn't about to pack up and retire to the country and Farage isn't about to give up his earnings potential by agreeing to a merger. An electoral pact is an existential impossibility for the Conservatives, so the nationwide split must remain. The nightmare scenario for liberal commentators is a fragmented parliament, which is ironically what they have long hoped for with their support for rootless centrist parties like the original SDP and more recently the farce of Change UK. If that does transpire, it will be because the electorate splits not only on the right and in the centrre but also on the left, which means Labour losing out to the Greens. Corbyn and the left independents may well hang onto their seats, but there seems little likelihood of them increasing their number of MPs if the Greens present themselves as the only viable nationwide left offering, which is surely what they have to do.

In some respects the UK now appears to be facing what France experienced in 2022, and which was reinforced by Emmanuel Macron's ill-advised decision to force another Legislative Assembly election in 2024. The real liberal nightmare is not a Reform government but the Greens, or perhaps a left-Green alliance a la NUPES/NFP, winning lots of hitherto safe Labour seats in the cities. Keir Starmer lacks Emmanuel Macron's constitutional power to ignore the Commons in order to prop up the centre, but that just makes me suspect that he might be the most likely leader of a reconfiguration of the cartel. He isn't a career politician and has shown little respect for the traditions of parliamentary government, let alone Labour history. And as the proscription of Palestine Action shows, he remains fundamentally a creature of the security state. Liberals still appalled at Boris Johnson's arsing around over the prorogation of Parliament are, as usual, oblivious to the real danger. What form this reconfiguraion would take is hard to predict, but if the parallels with Macron hold true, don't be surprised if a national government, including Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems, emerges. It's happened before, after all, and the centenary is fast approaching.

Linehan's Law

When Graham Linehan was detained by the police at Heathrow Airport recently it generated some predictable warnings about the chilling effect of hate-speech laws on the exercise of free speech, which was ironic given the amount of media coverage then given to his tweets and his defence of them. The event was also marked by his supporters' hyperbolic claims, such as JK Rowling describing the UK as a "totalitarian state." The fact you can make the claim without consequence suggests the opposite. Now that the dust has settled, it's worth going back to the incident and reviewing Linehan's reaction to the police officers: "You know what this country looks like from America? I am going to sue you into the ground, I am going to sue you into the ground. Fucking bastards, how dare you. I won’t fucking calm down." What stands out here is not just his sense of entitlement (I'm surprised he didn't say "Do you know who I am") but his insistence that what matters is how this looks from the US, where he has now apparently relocated permanently.

The significance of that perspective becomes apparent when we consider the reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the American rightwing provocateur. This led British politicians, including the Prime Minister, to decry political violence and offer condolences, despite Kirk being a nobody on this side of the pond. Insofar as Kirk had a British audience it would be a subset of the far right groups that coalesced on Saturday for the "Unite the Kingdom" march in London organised by Tommy Robinson and graced by a video-call from Elon Musk who called for the overthrow of the government. This predictably led to violence directed at both anti-Fascist counter-protestors and the police. For Robinson's supporters, violence is a form of expression. They believe that they have a God-given right to get bevvied-up and chuck bottles at other people. Again, what we're dealing with here is a monstrous sense of entitlement. The flags that have been such a feature of the summer in England aren't symbols of inclusive patriotism but of exclusive ownership: this is ours; keep out.

Linehan was in the UK to defend himself in court against a charge of harrassment arising from another set of abusive tweets he had sent. In a prepared statement, he described himself as a "journalist", presumably not because he's actually doing journalism in any normally-accepted sense of the word, but because he imagines that journalists have a special dispensation that allows them to circumvent the laws on hate-speech. When you look at British newspapers, you can understand why he might have thought that. Alison Pearson's crusade in the Daily Telegraph to have Lucy Connolly, a self-confessed criminal racist, recognised as a political prisoner is a recent example of how mainstream conservatism in Britain has now imported the American right's instrumental contempt for the law. Two-tier justice is real, but it's an aspiration rather than a criticism, and one still best captured in Wilhoit's Law: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

The undercurrent of a number of recent "political" cases has been the idea that the law should recognise and reinforce particular hierarchies, such as the superiority of biological women and the inferiority of trans women. This has even led to inverting class hierarchies. For example, in the Sandy Peggie case it is the traditionally subordinate nurse who is deemed to have superior rights to the doctor because of her biology, thus justifying her impertinence. This highlights that the right are instrumental in their defence of established hierarchies, just as they are selective in their observance of the law. The division between the far-right in the streets and in electoral politics reflects not simply a sociological gulf - former football hooligans versus former Conservative Party activists - but a strategic division of political labour based on the prioritisation of different hierarchies. On the street, the dominant hierarchy is race, with religion as a proxy. In the media, the dominant hierarchy is class. For all the focus on immigration, Reform's programme is fundamentally Thatcherite, and for all their vocal anti-racism, liberal commentators cannot hide their contempt for the street. 

The problem with this race/class dichotomy is not that it creates a fatal tension between Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage - the far-right has always melded the street and the legislature - but that it is destabilising of mainstream conservatism, for which political violence must remain a monopoly of the state. Just as middle-aged "lads" imagine that being draped in an England flag means that rucking with the police is patriotism, so the traditional hierarchies that conservatives defend can quickly be compromised when other hierarchies come to the fore. The incident of an almost parodically articulate young middle class man being chased by working class louts, forced to seek refuge at a refugee processing centre, is an example of how events can spin out of control. Lucy Connolly saw asylum-seekers as inferior to herself and thus their lives of little value. Alison Pearson's framing of her as a politcial prisoner is an attempt not only to obscure this bigotry but to re-establish the authority of the upper middle class to define our politics for fear that rage against the "liberal elites" might wash over the rest of the establishment. You can punch down but not up.

No British government is going to curtail immigration, or commence deportations, to the extent that would satisfy the far-right. As a result, the cross-party strategy appears to be to indulge and hopefully contain racist protest. This goes beyond legtimising "concerns" to turning a blind eye to low-level violence and intimidation. Starmer's eventual condemnation of Saturday's aggro as a defence of the flag was telling. Holding a sign saying "I support Palestine Action" will get you arrested. Shouting "paedo" at anyone who supports refugees won't. The political issue of the moment is the collapse of the Conservative Party under pressure from both the far-right (which it vainly apes) and a Labour government keen to occupy the Tories' traditional centre-right space. This rightward shift has been enabled by the political cartel's refusal to accept the left as legitimate, which has evolved from the false charge of antisemitism to a more sweeping criticism of leftists as "groomers" and "traitors": language no longer limited to the fringe but regularly deployed by the press and increasingly directed at the most conservative Labour government in history. This is a direct import from the US where the bogies of "antifa" and the "radical left" are routinely conflated with establishment Democrats.

Predictably, British centrist commentators responding to the Kirk assassination have been quick to insist that political violence is a problem equally on the right and the left, despite the obvious disproportion between the two. Some have even gone so far as to devote the majority of their attention to the perceived incivility of the left, seeing it as the ultimate cause of rightwing violence, which dangerously echoes the position of Donald Trump and others in the US. What this reaction makes clear is that centrists are also motivated above all else by the preservation of traditional hierarchies: civility is not about your manners but about your authority. But just as the hierarchy of class can be undermined by the hierarchy of race, so the hierarchy of liberal virtue can be swept away in the mistaken belief that dumping the European Convention on Human Rights, in favour of an American-style protection of hitherto illegal forms of hate-speech, is an advance for all of us, rather than just a victory for a minority of angry, middle-aged bigots.

Identity Politics

The case for national ID cards is once more being promoted enthusiastically by the Labour Party and this time by the liberal press as well. And once more the arguments are the same: it will help fight crime, it will reduce benefit fraud, it will squeeze the black economy etc. The suggestion that ID cards will help solve the immigration "crisis" isn't exactly novel, but it is now the headline. What remains fascinating whenever the topic comes up is the complete absence of evidence (speculative assessments by the Tony Blair Institute notwithstanding) to support any of its claimed benefits. What makes it doubly fascinating is that the Windrush scandal has barely passed from memory: an occasion on which the discriminatory interpretation of citizenship led to a cavalier abuse of power and the unnecessary suffering of many people. Bizarrely, some supporters are even claiming that the scandal would have been avoided if everyone had had an ID card; an unprovable counterfactual that completely ignores the actual history of events and the political pressures that led to the performative cruelty of the "hostile environment".

The prominence of immigration has caused some rearrangement of the political forces around the debate. Where once Tory newspapers would have rehearsed both sides of the argument - authoritarian versus libertarian - their opposition to the idea is now muted because of the salience of immigration and their own insistence on the existential threat that it poses to the nation. The Observer, which was previously firmly in the libertarian camp (it ran a "Liberty watch" campaign during the New Labour years), looks like it will provide the forum for the latest debate, though its editorial view, as it shifts further right, is now predictably blithe about the risks. Kenan Malik, for the libertarians, recently outlined the danger of dividing sheep from goats: "Mistreating and abusing citizens is not morally more reprehensible than mistreating and abusing those deemed “illegal”. What it reveals, though, is that if we turn a blind eye to such treatment on the grounds that “it’s only illegals being treated this way”, it will not remain “only illegals”. And once such forms of policing become acceptable, they can easily be transposed to dealing with other groups deemed a social menace, such as strikers or protesters." 

In contrast, Will Hutton has nailed his flag firmly to the authoritarian mast: "Immigration above any other issue fuels populism. Part of the fightback is to douse these flames – say, by introducing universal ID cards so we know who is here, building special purpose centres to house illegal migrants, and processing claims and necessary deportations fast and visibly. This should never be presented as a concession to implicit racism. Rather, it is to keep rules and be fair." While Malik is fairly indirect in his approach, leaving it to the reader to note the implicit mission creep of any ID scheme, Hutton is bracingly direct in his solutionism, which tells something about the respective confidence of the two camps but also about the uncertainty that besets liberals who have hitherto warned us of the danger of identity politics. A national ID scheme appears to flatten the population into a single mass, but it is also identity politics writ large: an extreme form of imagined community. The problem is that while the geographical borders of the country are clear, its demographic limits are not.

We know from the Windrush case that there isn't a clear, dividing line between citizen and non-citizen - between "them" and "us" - so all the talk of rules fairly applied is just hot air. What matters is the political direction and the operational practices of the Home Office. But what Hutton's contribution does make clear is that the introduction of ID cards is the necessary precursor for the mass deportation of people who have been in the country for years. His blunt advocacy is wrapped up in the usual panegyric to Enlightenment values, but it's one that does serious injury to history. Consider this: "The BBC, for example, was established as a public body to use the new broadcast media to disseminate impartial information better to inform and educate British citizens." The corporation was established as a commercial company in 1922, under licence by the GPO, by a cartel of radio manufacturers to provide "orderly management" of the radio spectrum and boost the sale of radio sets. It quickly acquired a political colouring when the establishment realised the benefit in terms of controlling public opinion, notably during the General Strike of 1926. In 1927 it was reconsituted as a public corporation and informal government censor. These facts are well known.

You might wonder why Hutton has dragged the BBC into the debate. The intention is to convince us that a British ID card scheme would be as reassuring as "Auntie". It appears he hasn't been watching BBC TV or listening to the radio of late. If the Tory press sets the agenda for the national broadcaster, don't be surprised if it sets the policy of the Home Office. According to Hutton, "The Overton window of what is acceptable has been moved so far to the right by the populist upsurge." But this confuses cause and effect. It is the political centre - supposedly the repository of Enlightenment values - that has pushed politics to the right since 1980, long before any "populist upsurge". Inevitably, he must drag in the newspaper's obligatory criticism of social media: "But just as the Enlightenment was propelled by a quest for truth and fact, today’s anti-Enlightenment populists are fuelled by social media and disinformation. ... Reform could never have climbed so high, so fast, without a credulous public deluded into thinking social media carries truths that mainstream politicians and media conspire to disguise."

The Enlightenment exploited the novel media of the day to advance its ideas: The Marriage of Figaro being a famous example. Even more pertinent to Hutton's claim was the rise of the scabrous anti-establishment pamphlets that did so much to stoke the French Revolution. Though there is a long tradition of liberals decrying 1789 as the wrong turn that would lead to the gulags, there is no doubt about the central role that Enlightenment ideas had in its gestation and development. The area where Hutton finds common cause with Malik is in the criticism of identity politics: "Have liberals made mistakes? Undoubtedly. Tolerance has mutated into advocacy of minority rights so fierce that the majority feel actively menaced. The charge of being “woke” has some legitimacy." At this point Hutton could be writing for the Sunday Times or Sunday Telegraph. What he cannot apparently see, while Malik shifts uneasily in his seat, is that there is no "majority" defined by their exclusion from minority rights. To suggest otherwise is to drift perilously close to the kind of politics that sees road signs in Welsh or Gaelic, or the mere existence of trans men and women, as an affront.

In the liberal lexicon, populism has always been a synonym for democracy, but in offering ID cards as a counter to it Hutton is reducing it to mere bigotry: that "implicit racism". But even the academics who have made a career out of analysing the subject agree that the primary fuel is economic stress, hence the current wave of populism can be traced to 2008 and its reverberations, notably austerity. It is a common observation that anxiety over immigration is simple displacement, hence it fluctuates in response to media prominence and is often highest in areas with the fewest immigrants. Other factors that have stoked populism include the cartelisation of politics and its related ideological convergence and corruption. Immigration may be seized upon as an issue, but it is not a significant explanatory factor. After all, the great wave of postwar immigration did not lead to more than a few isolated and evanescent cases of populist political advance, and many of those, e.g. Poujadism, had very clear economic roots.

Hutton believes that we, that nebulous "majority", should "go on the front foot to argue for Enlightenment principles, from vaccination to the environment. The entire anti-Enlightenment, anti-truth, disinformation biases of social media must be contested. The success of the Online Safety Act in dramatically lowering harmful content should be built on. Take on the tech giants. Insist information on their platforms is mediated, that anonymity is impossible and that standards of fact in the analogue world are reproduced in the digital world. Even consider launching public social media platforms, reproducing the same thinking 100 years later that justified the BBC." As with his potted history of the Corporation, this is misleading. The Online Safety Act has not dramatically lowered harmful content. It has simply led to the increased use of VPNs. Hutton's suggestion that all online content be mediated and that there be no anonymity is obviously absurd, but making such unrealistic demands is simply seasoning for the less palatable dish that he offers, namely a national ID card that would undermine the traditional liberties that were central to the British conception of the Enlightenment.