Whatever Happend to Electoral Reform?

The Labour Party won the 2024 general election on only 34% of the popular vote. This translated into 411 seats, a majority of 86, or 63% of the total in the House of Commons. This is as good an example of the perversity of first-past-the-post (FPTP) as you'll ever see. The Conservative Party got 24% of the popular vote, Reform 14% and the Liberal Democrats 12%. The reason for Labour's disproportionate number of seats is no mystery. In those constituencies that traditionally lean towards the political right, the vote was split by the presence of Reform and, to a lesser extent, by the Liberal Democrats. The consequence has been a significant increase in marginality, which promises even greater volatility next time round. A small shift in the popular vote share could result in a dramatic change in the allocation of seats. This is particularly acute in the case of the seats Labour won with a narrow margin, which means that a substantial number of MPs, many of them elected for the first time, are facing almost certain ejection at the next general election.

In the circumstances - a wildly disproportionate result and the near-certainty of future volatility - you might have expected the perennial issue of electoral reform to have become more prominent. MPs, including Labour backbenchers and not just the usual Liberal Democrat suspects, are certainly sensitive to it, but it's also clear that none of the parties intend to make it a primary issue, not even the Liberal Democrats themselves. Wh byy is this? One explanation is that the Liberal Democrats are currently more focused on winning Tory seats by leveraging FPTP. In other words, they are relying on Reform to continue splitting the right-wing vote and for Labour to suffer a drop in popularity due to its record in government. This is a perfectly reasonable strategy, but the party isn't likely to improve its vote share much beyond 15%. The heady days of 23% in 2010 depended not only on a tired Labour government but on the fact that some rightwing voters preferred the Liberal Democrats to the Tories, and much of that promiscuous voting bloc has now been attracted by Reform.

The opinion polls currently suggest a three-way split between Labour, the Conservatives and Reform, at 20-25% of the vote each, with the Liberal Democrats nearing 15% and the Greens nearing 10%. It still makes sense for the Liberal Democrats to push for proportional representation, even though ironically their share of seats was pretty proportional in 2024: 11% versus a 12% vote. What they should really be drawing attention to is that Reform could be the beneficiaries of disproportion next time round, picking up a majority in the Commons on 30% of the vote should Labour and the Conservatives fall to around 25%. Even if they don't win an outright majority, and assuming they don't collapse due to incompetence and infighting in the manner of UKIP, they are likely to win a large number of seats, probably sufficient to ensure a hung parliament and perhaps even enough to become the official opposition. What this means in practical terms is Nigel Farage becoming the king-maker of British politics. We will never get him off our TV screens.

The UK electoral system has long been geared to the maintenance of a party duopoly, with the minor parties exercising influence only when neither of the big two has been able to command a majority. But that political dynamic was contained at Westminster, e.g. the theatrical votes by the SNP in 1979, the speed dating by the Liberal Democrats in the formation of a coalition government in 2010, and Theresa May's negotiations with the DUP in 2017. Though presented as exercises in representative democracy, these were simply the workings of the cartel being exposed to public view. Should we end up with a fragmented party system, and the volatility that FPTP almost guarantees in that situation, then British politics may descend to being little more than public horse-trading against a background of weak administrations. We will finally have become Italy. You might imagine that this would prompt electoral reform and the adoption of PR, but of course that would simply cement the new reality, not avoid it. It would also open the door to smaller parties, maybe even a socialist alternative to Labour, and for that reason the cartel would undoubtedly close ranks against it. The more likely outcome is the emergence of centre-right and right-wing electoral pacts: Labour and the Liberal Democrats vs the Tories and Reform. In other words, restricting the choice of voters.

Fascism, in the sense of a latent predisposition to anti-democratic authoritarianism, commands a hardcore of around 5% of the population, but this can be boosted to a third of the vote with the support of conservative voters (attracted by the authoritarianism) and the populist mobilisation of a fraction of the unthinking centre (attracted by the bypassing of democracy). Fascism does not require an overtly Fascist party, with a uniformed vanguard and an explicit Führerprinzip. Its success depends on acceptance and absorption by the conservative establishment. What matters is the dynamic once in power: whether Fascism breaks loose and goes on the rampage, as happened in Germany after 1933, whether conservatives abandon it when it fails, as happened in Italy in 1943, or whether the establishment manages to muzzle it, as can been seen in varying degrees from Hungary to India today. Contrary to the liberal myths that obscure its imbrication with establishment politics, Fascism normally reveals itself in power, not by an outright assault on the political order. It isn't an outsider.

In these circumstances, you might expect the danger of an avowedly populist rightwing party, many of whose supporters clearly fit the bill of either the Fascist hardcore or their willing conservative accomplices, to lead to some caution by UK liberals. Its absence suggests two possibilities. One is that Reform is considered so unthreatening by that it will eventually be welcomed into the political cartel as just another species of national conservatism. This is the "de-demonisation" strategy pursued by Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National in France, though that has hit the buffers with her debarring from standing for office for five years, an example of the conservative establishment muzzling the far-right. That Nigel Farage has previous for defrauding the European Parliament is not considered relevant on this side of Le Manche. The other is that liberalism has been so corrupted by its obsessive misinterpretation of populism as a lack of virtue, as much as by its perennial hatred of the left, that it can no longer see the danger.

There is a third, more cynical possibility, and that is the belief that Reform can actually be used rather than tamed: that it can be compromised with, that it may even provide useful cover for a further shift of policy to the right. While the "Republican Front" remains in place in France, that is simply a product of the Presidential electoral system, which typically requires a second round run-off, rather than a determination to isolate the RN. The traditional cordon sanitaire against the far-right is fraying, and that is happening across Europe. There is no structural incentive to isolate Reform in the UK, and arguably an incentive under FPTP to cut electoral pacts, if only informally. In recent weeks the Conservative Party has taken the initiative to suggest a closer working relationship with Reform. While Nigel Farage will not unreasonably keep his distance from the Tories to maintain strategic flexibility, this simply raises the possibility that the party most likely to see advantage in cutting a deal behind the scenes, to the disadvantage of the Tories, will be Labour, whose MPs in marginal seats now consider Reform to be the main threat to their fledgling political careers.

The Trump Shock

The Nixon Shock of 1971 marked the de facto end of the Bretton Woods system of postwar exchange rate coordination. The end had been coming for a long time due to the over-valuation of the dollar, a result of its guaranteed convertibility to gold at a time of monetary expansion, combined with a steadily worsening balance of payments as other economies grew quickly in the 1950s and 60s. While the unilateral end of gold convertibility was the key change, it's worth noting that Nixon's measures also included a temporary 10% surcharge on imports between August and December of that year. In other words, an increase in tariffs. The Washington consensus, and what we might refer to as high globalisation, has been ailing since at least 2008, and arguably since the failure of the World Trade Organisation's Doha Round in 2001. Trump's tariff shock can be considered the practical change that marks its end, more so than the imposition of selective tariffs on Chinese imports during his first term. The uncertainty - "Does he know what he's doing?", "Is this just a negotiating ploy?" - is not unlike the reaction in 1971. It wasn't until 1973 that the new floating exchange rate system was fully operational, just in time for the first Oil Shock. 

The shape of the world "post-globalisation" has been a topic of intense debate for some time now, with many anticipating an era of regional blocs with tightened perimeter controls and free trade maintained within them. This has already suffered an obvious blow with Trump's aggression towards Canada and Mexico, though this can be read as the US demanding subservience rather than equality within the North American bloc. In Europe, the EU has already constructed tariff walls against China and will presumably do so now against the US as well. The other leading theory is that we are seeing a return to mercantilism, though this perhaps places too much emphasis on Trump's rhetorical taste for zero-sum relations (ironically described as "reciprocity") and certainly ignores that the military muscle required to enforce it is available to very few nations today (in the original mercantilist era, countries as modestly endowed as Portugal and the Netherlands could establish global empires, while even little Denmark could have colonies in the Caribbean and, topically, Greenland). Russia has shown the limits of a military-led mercantilism in the twenty first century, while even the US has struggled to enforce its will by arms in recent decades.

One useful way to think about the current moment is as an evolution of neoliberalism rather than its supersession, particularly because neoliberalism remains hegemonic domestically, not only in the US but across Europe and much of Asia. The mix of austerity, privatisation and income inequality remains dominant in all advanced economies even as globalisation is being reined in. As Branko Milanovic notes, China's rise has come about through a willingness to manage the two spheres differently: strong state control of the economy at home and the promotion of free-trade abroad. The US is now shifting towards a similar approach of managing the domestic and international spheres independently. Under Biden, there was a brief (and ultimately hamstrung) attempt to use the state to reinvigorate industry while maintaining global free trade. Under Trump, policy has flipped to the dismantling of the state's ability to intervene in the economy and the replacement of free trade with protectionism. The result is, according to Milanovic, "increased mercantilism internationally with increased neoliberalism at home — in other words, the very opposite combination of China’s policies." 

It's worth emphasising at this point that while the Chinese government has been highly dirigiste in the economy it has also embraced one particular neoliberal practice domestically, which is the attraction of foreign direct investment (FDI). A lot of American (and European) capital is dependent on the success of Chinese and other Asian businesses. This has helped not only to rapidly grow Chinese industry but to transfer technology and know-how, thereby helping Chinese firms to move up the value chain (consider the symbolic rise of DeepSeek). There has been some talk about the capital dimension of Trump's tariffs, but mostly in the sense that encouraging firms to reshore in the US (particularly from Canada and Mexico) will help reduce the country's trade deficit. Less attention, as ever, has been given to the flows of capital earnings. The US net income from abroad has been in decline for some years now and mainly because the growth of FDI in the US, particularly from Europe, has increased the outflow of earnings. The issue for the US then is not the location of factories but who takes the profits from them.

It is correct that focusing on the deficit in manufactured goods ignores the larger, compensatory surplus in services and IP, but it's also true that American foreign earnings are far more susceptible to taxation than goods are, and that's because they've largely been under-taxed ever since the WTO Uruguay round was finalised in 1993. The UK's Digital Services Tax, which was introduced in 2020, is both puny and scary. Puny because it's only levied at 2% on online revenues, scary because it could easily be a lot more. And it could also be extended to other services. That this was the concession the UK government immediately suggested to ward off Trump's evil eye was illustrative of their understanding of its significance, which will have been repeatedly brought home to them in meetings with the likes of Amazon and Meta. That those companies, long seen as close to the Democratic Party, lined up to support Trump's second term is entirely down to their economic self-interest. With the US a mature market, their future earnings growth depends on expansion abroad, and that risks being undermined by taxation. A little stock market turbulence today is a price worth paying to secure those foreign earnings long-term.

It's important to remember that different fractions of capital can be in competition with each other, even to the point of apparently undermining the general interest, and this has historically been most acute in the relations of domestic capital and foreign investment (industry and the City, in British parlance). Trump has long been explicit in seeing foreign economies as ripe for extortion. "Other major economies are the “greatest profit machines ever created”, he argued way back when. “‘Tax’ these wealthy nations, not America.”" He has never made his money by manufacturing goods, as both his laughable attempts to sell steaks and suits and his naive eulogisation of American "heartland" industries make clear. He has made his money by buying cheap, often distressed, assets and then aggressively using the law and government leverage to secure super profits (Trump's plans for the real estate redevelopment of the Gaza Strip are entirely consistent with this). His use of the term "tax" as a synonym for tariff is significant. Trump isn't really trying to shield US businesses from international competition. He's seeking to run an international protection racket in which he can personally "wet his beak".

The media focus on tariffs and the Punch and Judy of reciprocity misses that what we are witnessing is a display of asymmetric power whose objective is to extract a rent from other economies: to impose a tax on the world so that taxes can be cut in the US. Tariffs on goods will ultimately hit US consumers, a fact that the stock markets are currently pricing-in, but the chief goal of the exercise is to increase returns on American capital abroad (which will happen automatically if the dollar weakens) at a time when it is relatively weak at home, and weak precisely because of the country's slavish adherence to neoliberal policy since 1980. The Biden administration recognised the problem but could not bring itself to reject neoliberalism, trying instead to finagle a government stimulus through the vector of national security. The capitalists who now dominate the Republican Party are not interested in reversing neoliberalism, for all their stated abhorrence of "globalism", largely because they have done so well out of it domestically. The dominant voices are no longer those of traditional heavy industry and manufacturing but of the extractive sector, notably oil and gas, and financial engineering. They are seasoned exploiters and rentiers. 

That the British establishment has settled on a policy of "wait and see", a consensus built of equal parts cluelessness and a horror at offending Washington, shouldn't distract from the government's clear-eyed understanding of Trump's demands. While the EU, China and others respond in kind, the UK knows it is powerless. Consider this opening sentence in the Guardian: "Donald Trump’s tariffs signal a new global economic era, Downing Street has said, as economists warned that the British government would probably have to raise taxes in response." Though the connection is explained as the result of a genralised recession hitting growth, this is still an admission that domestic tax policy, like policy on pretty much anything else that catches Republican politicians' fancy, from free-speech to food standards, is now going to be subject to approval by Washington. "The broad outlines of a deal have been drawn up and include concessions across a range of areas, including a lower digital services tax on US tech companies and reduced tariffs on some agricultural products. The government has not denied reports that the deal includes a commitment to review enforcement of the UK’s online safety and digital competition regulations."

The suggestion that the US should have a say in domestic UK policy isn't a premonition of our absorption as the 51st state but a straightforward continuation of the neoliberal model by which supplicant nations were dictated to by the US's proxies, then the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO. The Trump administration has bypassed that arms-length model and decided to exact tribute and make demands directly. In that sense, the Washington Consensus has certainly ended, but not because Washington is going to be any less directive and demanding. What has gone is the fiction that this was ever a consensus, rather than the expression of American power.

Fish Don't Recognise Water

My last post looked at the consistency of Labour governments over time in terms of innate bias and how this relates to policy, specifically adherence to the Treasury View ("sound money", the horror of deficit-financing, self-imposed fiscal rules etc) and the tendency to give with one hand while taking with the other (the other party to the transaction invariably being the poor). In this post I want to sketch a comparative analysis between Labour governments and those of other stripes since 1997. I've chosen that date not because there weren't clear continuities with the preceding Conservative governments but because it marks a termination point for Thatcherism in the narrow sense of the style of governance introduced in 1979 that lived on, in however debased a form, under John Major. 1997 is the point when we see a synthesis of historical trends in a new formation, the so-called "third way". Every government since then has been judged in terms of that synthesis and in particular where it sits on the axes of economic and social policy, with little attention paid to how much those axes have shortened since the 1980s to the point where you struggle to discern much difference between different administrations today. 

A good example of the liberal press's reluctance to accept this reality is Andy Beckett's intepretation in the Guardian of the current government as "an attempt to create a new political hybrid: part leftwing, part rightwing, intended to appeal to a much more fragmented, politically fickle, less generous country." Beckett is usually an astute observer of the Labour Party, but on this occasion he has bent over backwards to give the government, and specifically Keir Starmer, the benefit of the doubt in a manner that wouldn't have been out of place in a Polly Toynbee column. This means running through the usual litany of nominally leftwing initiatives, such as nationalising the railways and putting VAT on private school fees, that on closer examination turn out to be underwhelming, with the result that he cannot avoid damning the government with faint praise: "Most of these measures are on a smaller scale than their equivalent proposals under Jeremy Corbyn. But they remain more egalitarian, class-conscious and restrictive of capitalism than the policies of Tony Blair or Gordon Brown."

Beckett proceeds to undermine his case by noting that "Reeves and Starmer seem to have accepted the self-serving argument from big business and its many media champions that increasing taxes on the rich is both impractical and undesirable". This leads to the depressing conclusion that this "toughened-up Labour party prioritises “working people” over the poor, the arms industry and the City of London over the wider economy, and traditional patriotism over more nuanced expressions of British identity. Rather than confront rightwing populism, the government tries to co-opt some of its arguments, for example about the danger of “open borders”. More and more of Labour’s current policies seem designed to appeal to actual or potential Reform voters." All pretty leftwing, I think you'll agree. While there is harmless fun to be had pointing out the gulf between theory and practice, this is another example of the tenacious delusion that tomorrow Labour will reveal its true social democratic colours.

In the Financial Times, Stephen Bush sought to diffrentiate between the Starmer and Blair iterations of Labour government by reference to the economic/social axes, but ended up simply reinforcing the point that everyone is clustered around an imaginary centre: "Both governments are in a sense “centrist” but the accommodation Blairism represented was between rightwing economics and leftwing social policy, while this Labour party is reaching for leftwing economics and a traditionally rightwing approach to social policy." This obviously doesn't chime with the history. The national minimum wage and working tax credits were not examples of rightwing economics, or at least not in the narrow sense of the Thatcherite legacy. Likewise, the Blair years were marked by a "tough on crime" approach that ended up delivering the spiteful authoritarianism of ASBOs, and by the ramping up of hostility towards asylum-seekers. The idea that the Starmer government is "reaching for leftwing economics" is absurd given the nature of its self-imposed fiscal rules, while the cosying-up to business has precluded genuinely leftwing economic radicalism such as industrial democracy and nationalisation (the railways really aren't a counter-argument), let alone higher taxes on wealth.

Bush's attempt at pop-sociology involves the invention of a "type" that could only exist in the mind of an FT reader: "Starmerite centrism is about making the party the natural home for working age voters who feel economically insecure themselves but are uneasy about what they believe to be overly generous spending on support for the poorest, at home or abroad. They care most about Labour’s election promises to fix the NHS and not to raise income taxes, value added tax and national insurance." This is a chimera. There are obviously some voters who are economically insecure and blame the poor and foreigners as a result, but they mostly vote Reform or Tory anyway. That bloc can only be a tiny fraction of the Labour vote, even under the depressed circumstances of 2024's 34%, so it hardly makes sense as a strategy to be appealing to it. In reality, the electoral pressure for parsimony at home and obliviousness abroad comes from the comfortably well-off and is articulated via their preferred media, i.e. the rightwing press such as the Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail.

The confusion over what kind of beast the current government is (I'm assuming that neither Beckett nor Bush is being disingenuous) highlights the difficulty in discerning any clear difference between the governments endured by the UK since 1997. There are of course contingent differences: their reaction to events, such as the great financial crash and the pandemic. But a closer examination shows little evidence of choices made outside the neoliberal consensus. Thus austerity didn't start with George Osborne but with Alistair Darling, while the unpreparedness of the state in the face of Covid-19 was the result of many governments habitual unconcern, the steady erosion of public health capabilities through local government cuts, and the belief that the NHS's capacity constraints should be addressed by marketisation and recourse to the private sector. All governments since 1997 have accepted the frame of the Thatcher dispensation, hence the hostility to public ownership, the prioritisation of private property over social housing, and the belief that business knows best.

One result of this homogeneity has been that major political divisions in society, such as Brexit, have had to find a non-parliamentary route for their initial expression, often only entering the formal political domain at the latest possible moment, with predictably disruptive results. Even when one party adopts a social movement or interest in an attempt to differentiate itself, as the Conservatives finally did over "leave" and are currently attempting to do over "net zero" and "wokeness", the other parties have quickly shifted their own position to adopt much the same stance. In the case of Labour, ruling out any compromise on Brexit and turning against trans rights have both been rationalised as an attempt to woo small-town conservatives, but this is pretty obviously a top-down manoeuvre driven by the press, not an organic development feeding up through constituency parties. The latter have been ringing the alarm bell about the alienation of Labour supporters since the earliest days of this government, over such issues as the two-child benefit cap and the winter fuel allowance, all to no avail.

The popular contempt for politicians of all stripes is not simply due to their failure to do what they promised once in office but springs from a sense that they don't really have any fixed beliefs and are mere opportunists, whether in respect of the management of the economy or the receipt of free concert tickets. Starmer's claim that he isn't ideological - that "There’s no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be" - isn't greeted warmly as evidence of his grown-up pragmatism, as many dim centrists imagine. Instead it prompts the suspicion that he is a slippery chancer. In reality, Starmer has a very particular ideology, as has been made clear this week by the decision to cut public spending rather than raise taxes, it's just that it is the ideology shared by almost the entire political class. Fish don't recognise water. Both Beckett and Bush have a professional interest in claiming that politics is more varied, even that governments may be inscrutable, but all the evidence suggests that we are living through an era of little ideological differentiation and almost no variety in governmental practice.

This is What a Labour Government Does

Ahead of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Spring Statement there has been much gloomy reporting of dismay and disappointment among Labour MPs. The prospect of further austerity, on top of the deeply-unpopular cuts to disabled benefits that were recently announced, adding to the lingering angst occasioned by the earlier cut to the Winter Fuel Allowance and the decision not to lift the two-child cap on benefits, have resulted in many nameless backbenchers claiming, in time-honoured fashion, that this wasn't what they came into politics to do. You could cynically dismiss this as bleating by people who have no intention of staging an effective Commons rebellion, but the reluctance to put their name to these quotes rather blunts the purpose. As a result, you find yourself concluding that they are probably sincere and really never imagined this outcome. Given the long history of Labour governments enforcing Treasury orthodoxy from 1929 onwards, and the tendency to cheesepare benefits, from the prescription charges introduced in 1949 to the public expenditure cuts of 1975, this attitude is historically illiterate but it is psychologically plausible.

Diane Abbott, who is happy to be named, has insisted that cutting the benefits and services of the most vulnerable is "not a Labour thing to do", but that is clearly a critique of the right - i.e. a belief that they have overstepped the traditional bounds of what the party is all about - rather than a considered assessment of the history of Labour governments. Again, it makes psychological sense to assume that the party has been hijacked by neoliberal entryists, much as it was in the 1990s, but this presumes some social democratic golden age when Labour governments didn't cut benefits or kowtowed to the Treasury. The reality is that Labour has been schizophrenic in office, giving with one hand and taking away with the other (the increase to Universal Credit at the same time that PIP eligibility is cut is typical behaviour). And what determines the relative degrees of generosity and parsimony is invariably the Treasury View, aka the "fiscal rules". Indeed, as the Truss/Kwarteng interlude showed, it is Labour that has always been most rigidly observant of those economic pieties. 

A Conservative government can always get away with bending, or ignoring, the rules more than a Labour government ever could. This is because the financial markets and the media know that the party serves the interests of capital and accumulated wealth: the risks of a Tory administration are wholly to do with competence. While Labour in practice serves the same interests, it retains a reputation for profligacy that is at odds with its history. Not only was Labour the original party of austerity after World War Two, but it has frequently found itself clearing up after Tory indulgence (e.g. the Barber Boom of the early-1970s) and has had the bad luck of being in office when global crises have hit (the ongoing effects of the Oil Shock of 1973, the banking crash of 2008). The lingering suspicion that Labour is overly-sympathetic to the poor (and thus naive to boot) is not justified by the record, but it remains a central trope of British politics because its purpose is to discipline government and ensure that MPs understand whose interests they must serve.

If backbench MPs come across as ingenuous fools, the liberal press are even worse. The hints that a Starmer-led government would reveal itself to be more generous once in office were always incredible, ignoring not only Labour's history but flatly refusing to acknowledge that the makeup of the parliamentary party had changed after 2019, with fewer battlers for society's underdogs and many more representatives of the managerial class that prospered under neoliberalism and that spent decades overseeing cuts in local government. The hopes invested in the new intake of MPs, notably the former think-tankers like Torsten Bell who built a reputation criticising the false economies of austerity, have been dashed. The PLP is now dominated by the same unimaginative technocracy that dominated under Blair and Brown and, like the Bourbons, appears to have learnt nothing during its exile from power while nursing grudges against the left. 

The solution to the government's poor poll ratings, we are told, is "re-education", first of MPs and then more widely of the electorate. But this is doomed to fail. Not only is the language patronising and tone-deaf (imagine the uproar if someone on the left had used that term), it is based on an attempt to big-up what are actually modest achievements. Thus we are told that "nationalising the railways, imposing a windfall tax on oil and gas, and VAT on private schools" chime with Labour values, ignoring that the railway rolling stock will remain in private hands, that the windfall tax was contingent and will eventually be reversed, and that VAT on private schools is a poor substitute for a wealth tax. Insofar as these reflect Labour values, those values appear to be exaggeration, opportunism and distraction. The tone of querulous stupidity was perfectly captured in this comment: "While officials do not deny deep cuts are ahead – with some departments facing reductions of as much as 7% over the next four years – they say it is happening at half the pace as under George Osborne."

Perhaps the most gob-smacking comment in the article by Pippa Crerar, Downing Street's preferred stenographer, was this: "Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, is said to believe that when push comes to shove, Labour’s core vote will come back to the party to keep the Tories, or even Nigel Farage, out. While some may simply choose not to vote, the polling indicates a majority would return to the fold." This is little more than whistling to keep your spirits up. The key point that the media routinely ignores about the 2024 general election is that Labour won a large majority on only 34% of the vote because the right was split. It's actual vote count was half a million fewer than in 2019. Voters have been deserting the party for years now and they don't appear to be jumping ship. Turnout was dramatically down, highlighting the growing sense of public disillusion with all parties. As Frances Ryan put it elsewhere in the Guardian: "There is a feeling that, if this is life under the “good guys”, there really is no hope that anything will get better. Politicians, it turns out, really are all the same."

It's hard to imagine that by 2029 backbench MPs and the press won't have come to the reluctant conclusion that cutting benefits is actually what Labour governments do. And as there really isn't much difference between Labour and the Tories on fiscal policy, surely a coalition to thwart Reform is the progressive option if the electorate is split three ways (the Observer leader practically writes itself). As the end of this parliament approaches, there will no doubt be many backbenchers suggesting that now is time for the government to splash the cash, and just as many insisting that Labour cannot risk its new-found reputation for fiscal rectitude. Both views presume an understanding of the "political business cycle" as the alternation of parsimony and generosity around elections, ignoring the actual history of the term as the strategic deployment of anxiety over deficits to restrain stimulus. That historic meaning has disappeared from view not because it is out-of-date but because it has become hegemonic: the common sense of our politico-media caste and the final triumph of Treasury Brain.

The Human Condition

The UK's welfare system is not "broken", as some Labour MPs have claimed. If it were, then you would expect it to be failing across the board in its core purpose, which is to stop people dying from hunger and neglect. At the margin there is certainly unneccesary suffering, often the result of prior attempts at the "reform" of conditionality and procedure, but that is a different matter, specifically a matter of efficiency. In terms of effectiveness, the system is robust and does what it is meant to do. The pragmatic discussion on welfare centres on the level of benefits, and sure enough the government's mooted plans for welfare reform have, beyond the rhetoric about "moral duty", boiled down to the question of real-term cuts. But the wider framing is of existential crisis, and that cannot be explained away as either the result of systemic failure or the product of waste, which is both a chronic issue (there will always be some fraud and error at the margin) and relatively small. There is plenty to criticise in the design and operation of the welfare system, but nobody can seriously claim that it fails to do the job given it by Parliament. So why do politicians, and Labour's backbench Get Britain Working Group in particular, think that the system is broken? The argument, outlined in a letter to Liz Kendall, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, stands on three claims. 

The first is the idea that "Britain faces a crisis of economic inactivity". Despite the passing reference to NEETs, the letter focuses on the fact that employment levels among disabled people are 30% lower than among the non-disabled. You might pause at this point and wonder if that is actually a problem. Surely levels are always going to be lower: many disabled people simply cannot work. Even if you accept that the gap might be reduced by 10%, you will then wonder just how many extra workers this would produce. A little under a quarter of the working-age population have a disability of some sort, and most of them already work. A 10% change in employment levels would thus equate to roughly a 2.5% increase in the working population. That's not to be sniffed at, though as we're talking about marginal labour it is likely that the consequent output gain would not be proportionate. In other words, a 10% improvement in employment levels among the disabled might increase GDP by only 1% or less. But given that growth is the chief goal of this government, that would still be a welcome contribution.

The second claim of the GBWG is that "The economic cost of this is staggering". Leaving aside the hyperbole, this is also questionable. Not only would any increase in GDP be marginal, but there are good reasons to suspect that the types of jobs that would be created will be at the bottom end of the pay-scale and that a rapid increase in available labour would, as a simple matter of supply and demand, have a dampening effect on pay growth. In other words, getting more disabled people into work is not, whatever its other benefits, going to raise aggregate skill levels or productivity and thus long-term pay rates. The final claim is that "the current system often acts as a barrier against finding work." Expanding on this, the GBWG insist that "Rather than empowering individuals, it traps them in precarity". This is an odd claim because insofar as the welfare system makes claimants lives precarious it is through conditionality and sanctions, including the threat of benefits clawback should they secure temporary work. In other words, the system is not preventing them finding casual employment, but it can penalise them when they do. The broader problem that paid work may lead to a negligible increase in income is an issue of low pay, not high benefits.

The letter talks of the security and dignity of employment but ignores that these ideals have been steadily eroded under neoliberalism to the point where they have been replaced by their opposites, rebadged as the ideal of "flexibility" and the "hack" of eating a cheese sandwich at your desk as you work through your lunch-hour. Precarity has become pervasive among lower income workers because of zero-hour contracts and the need to take multiple jobs to make ends meet, not because more disabled people are on benefits. It also ignores that chivvying the disabled into low-paid work is unlikely to increase their sense of security and doesn't look very dignified from any angle. If the letter was a transparent attempt to encourage backbench support for the government's plans to tighten the rules on eligibility for disabled benefits, in particular for the young with mental health issues (the solipsistic "snowflake" has leapfrogged the shameless skiver on the media's list of public enemies), the rumoured real terms cut in PIP looks like a dead cat that will now be consigned to the bin as a quid pro quo for allowing that tightening to proceed. 

Starmer's "private address" to MPs, which has been helpfully released to the press, echoed the letter in imagining a frustrated population of disabled people held back from fulfilling employment by a perverse welfare system: "Addressing a meeting of the parliamentary Labour party in Westminster, Starmer said the current system was “discouraging people from working ... And if you want to work, the government should support you, not stop you”." Continuing in this vein, "Starmer said the government would promise to “make work pay” for those who could work", which studiously ignores that we have had working tax credits for a quarter of a century because for too many people work simply does not pay. If his address had included a commitment to significantly raise the national minimum wage (arguably a smarter "tax" on employers than increasing NICs) then it would have been more coherent.

The idea that the state somehow discourages work is obviously absurd, but it's of a part with Starmer's more general claim that government is the problem. This doesn't mean he has taken a libertarian turn (the chat about "Project Chainsaw" is little more than a cruel joke by Morgan McSweeney), rather he is insisting that government must be more determined and effective at driving neoliberal restructuring, hence the related decision to further centralise power by abolishing NHS England. Undoing the Lansley reforms makes sense, but we shouldn't imagine that this dirigiste turn heralds the dismantling of the internal market, less reliance on outsourcing to the private healthcare sector, or a major programme of investment to address the physical decay of the last 15 years. Starmer's attempt to present himself as the Great Emancipator of the Civil Service, unshackling the talent, is simultaneously undermined by his naive belief that AI can do much of the work. What this confusion highlights is that he remains a process guy, not a people guy, something that should give the swooning fans of his shuttle diplomacy pause for thought.

There is a general confusion in the Labour Party these days over its purpose and this is reflected in the understanding of work. Some see Labour as the party of work, in the sense of a managerial class seeking to optimise labour as a factor of production (the Fabian legacy congruent with neoliberalism). Others see Labour (still) as the party of workers (or at least "working people") and thus a class formation. This isn't a simple right-versus-left dichotomy as many on the party right, particularly those formed in the trade union movement, still see Labour as the workers' party. Likewise, some on the left, influenced by the tradition of social liberalism, have seen work in terms of self-actualisation rather than collective progress. It's perhaps worth pausing at this point and considering a distinction made by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition between "animal laborans" (engaged in the brute struggle to secure shelter and food) and "homo faber" (making the world in the form of useful goods). She also included a third category, political activity or "action". In its classical origins, this was limited to the elite, but by 1958, when the book was published in an era of material plenty and high employment, there was a recognition that civic society was expanding through greater democratisation to include groups hitherto marginalised, such as the working class, women and ethnic minorities.

Arendt's progressive hierarchy was typical of postwar thinking, though it should be noted she was warning of its problems: the trivialisation of life as necessity recedes and the subsititution of action by consumption. In the optimistic telling, technology and superior management would gradually do away with the necessity of animal laborans (like AI will do away with civil servants) but it would also allow homo faber to progress to a more active civic life. What has happened since is a collapse of the boundaries between the three conditions. The hard division between venal business and the elite practice of politics, first established in the Greek city states of the Classical era, has evaporated as politics has adopted the theory and manner of business. But just as significantly the neoliberal era has seen the boundary between necessity and productivity erode. In the early industrial era, as analysed by Marx and others, necessity was reduced to the mimimum needed to keep workers alive while maximising production. The reaction to that inhumanity (the Polanyian counter-movement) led to the creation of a clear boundary between necessity and productivity: the Factory Acts, the 8-hour day, public services beyond the mere reproduction of labour. Necessity became a social concern.

What we have seen since the 1970s is an attempt to make necessity once more the responsibility of the individual, most obviously (in the UK at least) in the context of shelter. The rhetorical division of society into strivers and shirkers is not about the creation of a new class consciousness among the former but instead the atomisation of society into individuals whose own efforts constantly determine their categorisation. Labour's plans for the disabled are consistent with this, an initiative that will ignore individual circumstance (critics loudly citing specific cases of potential injustice are wasting their breath) while simultaneously denying the individual identification with anything other than the nebulous "working people" beloved of Starmer's speechwriters. Though the positive language of "security, dignity and agency" remains, it is clear that work is seen less as a route to self-actualisation than as an obligatory contribution to the economy. We have a moral duty not to treat people instrumentally, but that clearly isn't a guiding principle at the DWP, while the very name of the Get Britain Working Group of MPs subsumes the interests of both the individual and the working class in the greater glory of national GDP.

In Arendt's day it was still possible to imagine the civic sphere in the idealistic terms that would have been familiar to Pericles, despite the jarring reality (McCarthyism, venality, jobbery). No longer. Politics today is performed by managerialist drones like Wes Streeting and Liz Kendall, who celebrate their lack of idealism as maturity, while the real power in the land, the nexus of private wealth and corporate influence, avoids the public square. The postwar dream of welfare as the auxiliary support for homo faber, banishing necessity and encouraging civic participation, has given way to a revival of the Victorian principle of "less eligibility", but this time without the commitment to at least provide animal laborans with the shelter of the poor house.

War Actually

To mistake Keir Starmer for Hugh Grant in Love Actually once may be regarded as a failure of imagination; to do so a second time looks like a pathological delusion. The determination by the Guardian to cast Starmer's supplication before Donald Trump in Washington this week in the most positive terms was shared across the media spectrum. Ahead of the meeting there was much talk of the need for Starmer to "seize the opportunity"; afterwards, loud praise for his success in "walking the tightrope" and coming away with as much as could be expected. In fact, Starmer got nothing of substance. Neither, for that matter, did Emmanuel Macron, indicating that the once more popular entente cordiale, mooted as the foundation of the new European security order, is not something that even registers in American calculations. Both meetings were reported almost exlusively in terms of Trump's casual asides, his words parsed for significance like the utterances of an oracle. Maybe Putin will accept European peacekeepers in Ukraine; maybe the UK will not be hit by the same tariffs as the EU. In reality, Trump was merely toying with his interlocuters, a point made clear when he defied them to call him a liar by claiming that he'd never described Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a dictator.

Civility in politics is not just an instrument for circumscribing the legitimate. It also functions as a polite fiction that obscures the reality of naked power. Trump isn't a mad emperor who has been conned into walking around with no clothes on. Rather he is the naked depiction of American imperial might: demanding obeisance from allies and treasure from the weak. He is a performer who loves giving a performance and demands to be the centre of attention. In contrast, Starmer is lauded by his biographer for not being a performer, but Tom Baldwin fails to understand that the PM is highly performative, in the proper sense of that word, it's just that his promises are rarely kept. The British political establishment understands Trump to this extent, which is why the invitation for a state visit made in the name of King Charles was an important trinket, even though it highlights the limited options available in any future trade negotiations. Maybe we can avoid all that chlorinated chicken by offering to make Trump the Earl of Troon. Today will presumably see the President of Ukraine sign the terms of surrender. The question now appears to be whether the presence of American corporate staff in and around the countries mines will be sufficient to constitute a de facto US security guarantee. We are firmly into clutching at straws territory.

There was never any real doubt that the endgame for Ukraine would be dismemberment. Russia lacks the materiel sufficient to defeat and conquer the entire country, and had little interest in absorbing a hostile population beyond the Russian-speaking eastern oblasts. Ukraine in contrast lacks the manpower sufficient to push the Russians out of the occupied territories and has quietly accepted for some time that Crimea is never going to return to the fold. The only question was how much of the country could it hang on to and that in turn meant how much could it securitise through Western finance. The US hasn't fundamentally changed its policy under Trump, he has merely made the reality explicit. The military support was always a financial loan, not a donation, which meant that the US had an interest in the preservation of most of Ukraine as a debtor. Likewise, the salience now of those mineral deposits is less in their market value than the fact that a lot of them lie in the east, which means that the US has a vested interest in Ukraine recovering as much territory as possible from Russia. Of course, the other possibility is that Russia will keep the territories but allow American corporations access to them, which would incidentally mean an end to sanctions. It's just business.

From Washington's perspective, the angst of European countries over the end of the fiction of NATO is no more than a sideshow to its geopolitical pivot to Asia and its determination to quieten down both Ukraine and the Middle East. The desperation of British politicians and journalists to conjure up an Anglo-French nuclear foundation for a new European security alliance is a sideshow to that sideshow. With Trump's economic focus on tariffs against the EU and China, not to mention Canada and Mexico, the UK is merely an afterhought in terms of trade. In short, the UK simply doesn't matter on the world stage at the moment, despite the attempts by the political parties to talk up the significance of Diego Garcia. This was captured inadvertantly by the Newsnight journalist Nicholas Watt who claimed, ahead of this week's meeting, that "Labour figures" were hailing it as Starmer's "Falklands moment", which is obviously absurd as a parallel but does highlight the desperation to define this aimless administration. The consensus seems to be that "wartime leader", or perhaps this generation's Ernest Bevin, is as good as it's going to get, which shows how divorced from reality our politico-media caste is. Predictably, Watt reported the aftermath of the meeting in terms of an "ecstatic" Downing Street despite admitting that it had won precisely nothing in return for its "unprecedented" offer of a state visit.

Inasmuch as the Falklands War has a lesson for us today, it is in the manner that America's partisan support for the UK over Argentina during that conflict led to disillusion among Latin American countries where many, even in government, still clung to the myth of the US as an anti-colonialist power. The parallel today is with the growing disillusion of European nations about America's geopolitical interests. Again, the reality has always been privately acknowledged: America first in trade isn't a novelty, it will never impose a two-state solution on Israel (which is why that fiction can be supported in Europe) and its priorities now lie around the Pacific. The problem is accommodating this publicly in a political culture still wedded to Atlanticism and comfortable in its return to Russophobia. The reconfiguration of trade has been underway for over a decade now following the end of high globalisation and it's clear that of the major trading blocs it is the EU that will benefit least from the new order. Attempts to position the EU (or more bathetically the UK) between the US and China have come to naught, essentially because the US refuses to see Europe as a peer rather than as a collection of client states.

As in Ukraine, there is a recognition that Europe must provide greater security in the Middle East as the US disengages, but there is no willingness to countenance a fundamental change in policy that might destabilise the current balance of regional powers (Iran is to be contained, and Saudi Arabia and Israel indulged). With Washington openly subscribing to the idea of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, Europe must construct some other moral basis for its public stance of unstinting Zionism, hence Germany's adoption of Israel's security as a staatsraison has become generalised in a European intolerance of all things Palestinian. It would be easy to dismiss the common political drift to the right in the EU as the result of the failures of the traditional cartel parties to "get a grip" on immigration, but this would be to miss the undercurrent of resentment towards the US for having created the "immigration crisis" through its actions in the Middle East and North Africa. There is a sense among the European political establishment of having to clean up America's mess, and that dates from long before Donald Trump's first term in office. This is why being lectured by J D Vance, the US Vice-President, over free speech and the failure of governments to respond to popular concerns about immigration, is particularly galling. 

In the UK, where Atlanticism remains strong and cleaning up after America has long been instinctive, the chief irritation this week is that the cost of rearmament will be paid for by cutting foreign aid. Former Head of the Army Richard Dannatt outlines the conventional view: "diplomacy, development and defence are not competing priorities – they are complementary". But this is a framing that quietly excludes the role of trade, not least in weaponry. Aid money has a tendency to partially return as arms deals, so this may just be a case of cutting out the middle man. Now ensconced in the House of Lords, Dannatt can be blunt: the government "may well have to break its own fiscal rules and either raise taxes or increase borrowing. We may all have to share in the cost of doing the right thing." Obviously the Chancellor has no intention of raising borrowing, so you might wonder who that "all" is and how exactly the cost will be shared. Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times helpfully notes that foreign aid must be cut to justify tax rises on working people, and that funds should also be freed-up through a "culling" of NHS officials and tougher welfare rules. In other words, higher taxes on incomes, not wealth, and no let up in austerity camouflaged as reform. Starmer's "triumph" is likely to prove as evanescent as all the previous attempts to gve this government a sense of purpose once those realities hit home.

NATO and After

Patrick Wintour in the Guardian thinks that NATO was founded on the defence of shared values and that a parting of the ways with the US may now be inevitable because of the American turn towards a populism that shows more sympathy for Russia than Europe. But NATO was never about the defence of democracy or nebulous freedom, as should be clear from the authoritarian dictatorships than it happily accommodated at various times (Portugal, Greece and Turkey). It was about the restraint of the USSR and (covertly) a mutual defence pact against communist success in domestic Western European politics. The Ukraine War has shown Russia to be a paper tiger that offers a negligible military threat to Europe and none whatsoever to the US. Everybody knows this and security arrangements will adjust accordingly. For all the urgent talk about increasing defence spending, the secular trend of a decline will continue once the war has ended. Wintour's emphasis on a "firewall" against populism indicates that the political dimension will remain uppermost in the minds of the European political establishment, but you can be sure that this won't be limited to excluding the far-right. If anything, absorption of the far-right is on the cards.

Trump's intervention has called into question the rules-based order, but this ignores that the USA has always refused to accept that the rules applied to it as the hegemon, and has done so regardless of who was in the White House. The ultimate rule has always been that might makes right. As Wintour continued later: "Sir Alex Younger, a former head of M16, argued Trump had ushered in a rules-free amoral world order in which the only commodity that mattered was raw power. “We have moved from a world of rules and multilateral institutions to strongmen making deals over the heads of weaker, and smaller countries,” he said. “This is our new world. This is Donald Trump’s world. The key psychological pivot we have to make is to that world. We are not operating in a systems world any longer, but an incentives world.”" While liberal commentators fulminate about appeasement and the 1930s, the more useful historical analogy for the slow erosion of NATO is the gradual dismantling of the Concert of Europe across the nineteenth century. We are moving from the age of Metternich to that of Bismarck, as realists have been insisting since the fall of the Berlin Wall, contradicting the many liberals proclaiming a perpetual peace.

But the value of the parallel is less to do with the notion of great power rivalries or "carve-ups" after 1848 than in the idea of a looming "policeman" guarding against disruptive tendencies which persisted beyond the end of the Concert. Then the threats were republicanism, national self-determination and socialism; now they are mass immigration, DEI and socialism (the one consistent spectre). Vladimir Putin's foreign policy has always aimed to revive the idea of Russia as a civilisational bulwark against the decadent West, an idea that owed as much to Tsar Nicholas I as Comrade Stalin, and he has found common cause now not just with J D Vance and other authoritarian conservatives but with native movements against le wokisme and immigration. If nothing else, it is amusing to see the confusion of groups such as Blue Labour as they simultaneously advocate the staunch defence of Ukraine and hob-nob with American reactionaries. This highlights the extent to which European politics over the last 30 years has been a "vacation from history", complacent in the face of geostrategic shifts - the decline of Russia and the rise of China - and obsessed with the parochial reconciliation of liberal economics and social conservatism. The early signs are not promising that the Trumpian disjuncture will lead to much more than regular meetings and portentous communiques.

If the United States believes that the greatest threat to its global hegemony is China, and if it also believes that its interests in the Middle East are best served by the regional defeat of Iran, then Russia would be a far more useful geostrategic ally than Europe, despite its relative decline. There is an obvious congruence of interests. Putin's is to weaken US support for Europe and to fragment the interests of the European states in order to give Russia more latitude in its "near abroad". But that is a strategy born of weakness, a weakness made all too apparent in Ukraine. The expansion of NATO and the EU to include Eastern Europe and the Baltics means that Russia has already lost the geostrategic battle over spheres of influence. It also means that while the US will ignore Russia intimidating Ukraine, it holds the monopoly on intimidating NATO members, as Romania is finding out. The likely failure of Europe to offer Ukraine any meaningful "security guarantees" simply reinforces the fact that the country was never seriously considered for membership of the EU and its dismemberment is not seen as an existential threat to the European order. The withdrawal of the US is a threat to Europe, but this should be seen more in terms of the reconfiguration of capital relations than in the disappearance of a security guarantee. 

One of the more useful comments on the last few days came from Yanis Varoufakis in his "leftist jester at the court of liberalism" role. Amid the tearful hyperbole and wild prescriptions in the Guardian, he focused on Trump's economic-cum-geostrategic plan: "His tariffs are a negotiating tool to get foreigners to revalue their currencies, to swap their holdings of short-term for long-term US debt, and to magnetise European chemical and mechanical engineering conglomerates (eg BASF and Volkswagen) from a stagnating Europe to a boisterous United States." This is a view implicitly shared in the more considered capitalist press, which has been concerned by European industrial and technological stagnation for over a decade. As Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times put it: "Europeans need to start preparing fast for the day when the US security guarantee to Europe is definitively removed. That must involve building up autonomous defence industries. It should also mean a European mutual defence pact, outside Nato, that extends beyond the EU — to include Britain, Norway and others" (but not Ukraine, you'll notice).

The US demand for European states to increase defence spending is self-interested, but not in the simplistic sense of "burden-sharing": there is no appetite in Washington to reduce American defence spending, as the priorities of Elon Musk (a major recipient of Pentagon money) make clear. Rather Washington expects much of that increased European spending to be directed to American arms manufacturers. Trump's executive order to suspend enforcement of the Foreign and Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which was passed in 1977 in the wake of the Lockheed arms scandal, is a signal that every means will be used to boost the interests of American capital. Europe is not so much a geostrategic theatre as a developing market in this perspective. The approach that the US will take will be informed by the standard operating practices of its multinationals, particularly those in the energy and mining sectors: coercive extraction of natural assets (already the price being asked of Ukraine), the demand for impunity from local laws and regulations (Vance's attack on Europe's legal integrity was pretty transparent), and the completely unfettered mobility of capital. No wonder Amazon, Meta and the like are on board with the administration.

The strategic issue for the UK is not the percentage of GDP that is devoted to defence - the mooted rise to 2.5% - but the use it is put to. An aircraft carrier in the South China Sea isn't much use for the defence of Europe, let alone Ukraine, and it wouldn't make that much difference to the US strategy in East Asia and the Pacific either. What does matter in Washington is Airstrip One and its forward operating bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia. If the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan achieved anything, it was to convince the Pentagon that the British military is at best of marginal use and at worst a positive burden, but it has some nice real estate. Integrating them more closely operationally would best be achieved by buying American arms, rather than trying to maintain an independent arms sector that is obliged to sell to American clients like Saudi Arabia to keep afloat. The challenge then is not simply to the Treasury to find more money, but to the coherence of British Atlanticism, hence the attempt by Paul Mason to reimagine NATO as a British-led coalition that can reassure the US that the European flank is well-guarded, and incidentally to recast Keir Starmer as a modern Ernest Bevin (the parallels made with Harold Wilson as recently as 6 months ago now appear laughable, but drawing a line to Bevin seems much more risky given Ernie's well-known anti-Zionism).

Everyone agrees that Europe needs a major economic stimulus, and many have noted how the Russian economy has adapted to sanctions (an extreme form of tariff) and being put on a "war footing". Some thought that the green transition would provide this stimulus, but the decision of the centre-right to opportunistically oppose much of it (largely at the prompting of the reactionary press) has made that politically problematic. Likewise, there is no consensus on large-scale investment in public infrastructure, particularly public housing, even if specific business-friendly projects, like a third runway at Heathrow, will get state backing. In this climate, "building up autonomous defence industries", as Rachman suggests, makes sense. This doesn't necessarily herald a return to what David Edgerton, in the British context, referred to as the Warfare State, let alone to Paul Mason's daydreams, but it does provide a programme, likely to be acceptable across most of the political spectrum (e.g. including the German Greens), for a major domestic industrial stimulus whose costs can be funded by a combination of collective EU bonds (the same mechanism that many on the left proposed for the green transition), public spending cuts and higher taxes, but without jeopardising the dominance of capital markets or property prices. That Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves immediately spotted the political opportunity this presents explains the alacrity with which the PM announced "our" readiness to once more put boots on the ground.

What's Up?

Katy Balls, the Spectator's resident Tory-whisperer, might seem an odd choice to present the Guardian's commentary on the latest Labour WhatsApp scandal, but the paper has long outsourced topics that might compromise its own political desk (there are plenty of Labour right factional chat groups that include both politicans and journalists). An added advantage is that it allows for an ecumenical approach, hence Balls can set the brouhaha in the context of a Westmister-wide addiction to chatting shit. What was notable by its absence in Balls' brief survey of the history was the infamous leak of the WhatsApp messages of the Labour Party HQ group that plotted against Jeremy Corbyn when he was leader. Balls does mention Corbyn, but only in the context of a separate group that provided an early outing for the clown troupe that would become known as Change UK. Given that the HQ group leak prompted an independent inquiry by Martin Forde, you might have thought it worth highlighting, not least because the personal attacks on the likes of Diane Abbott in the "Trigger Me Timbers" group clearly continued a theme. 

One explanation for the omission is that this latest example had no strategic or policy substance to it, allowing Balls to characterise such communications as an example of poor impulse control and the sort of backbiting that constitutes the chaff of daily political journalism. What the Forde Report revealed was, among other things, evidence of a conspiracy to pervert the conduct of the 2017 general election campaign for factional ends. If there is one thing that has characterised the Starmer regime it is the absolute determination to avoid having the party's factional disputes aired so publicly again, hence the alacrity with which the whip is withdrawn the moment an MP steps out of line. Andrew Gwynne will no doubt look suitably contrite while he sits in the sin bin but he can expect to be welcomed back into the fold once he has served his time and displayed good behaviour. After all, Starmer has made it clear that even lefties can be rehabilitated if they keep their noses clean, though some of them can also expect to be squeezed out before the next general election through deselection, something Gwynne will probably be spared.

If the substantive arguments that characterised previous Labour governments - from incomes policy to membership of the euro - are notable by their absence today, this doesn't mean that factional spite and jockeying for position have taken a back seat. This week's revelations about Rachel Reeves's questionable expenses when working for HBOS and her sexed-up CV are actually old news but they've been revived both because Starmer looks increasingly like a one-term Prime Minister and because others in the cabinet don't fancy Reeves taking over from him either before or after the next election. The implicit charge against her is that she isn't as competent a manager as she claims, rather than that she is drifting towards the left or has questionable judgement on how how high to jump when Washington barks. It's politics reduced to office politics, which is arguably a summation of this government with its vapid mantra of "Growth" and its insistence that greater process efficiency, from the Competition and Markets Authority to local planning decisions, can deliver it.

The dynamic behind all of this is the publication of Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund's Get In, a follow-up to their Left Out.  While the earlier book portrayed the 2019 general election defeat as a "betrayal" of Labour's constituency by the naive left, their latest gossipy offering revels in the skill by which the party right, and in particular Morgan McSweeney, won power first in the party and then at the 2024 general election. This obviously elides the contingent luck of facing a shattered Tory administration and a split on the right occasioned by the rise of Reform, but it also ignores the extent to which that same Labour constituency was cynically betrayed through a series of pledges made by Starmer to win the party leadership that were then steadily binned, resulting in fewer votes at the 2024 general election and a share of only 34%. That opinion polls now have Labour on around 25% simply emphasises the point that while journalists may be in awe of McSweeney the public have steadily turned against Labour and are perhaps disillusioned with representative politics more generally (turnout has fallen from 69% in 2017 to only 60% last year.)

What Maguire and Pogrund's book makes clear is that Starmer is despised by many in the PLP and in particular by the Blairites who think that he has served his purpose: the clean-skin with few moral scruples who was needed to finally seal the left's tomb. With the old right, represented by Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper, deemed too stupid to govern and the soft left little more than a punchline, the Blairites feel that their time has come again. The memory of Liz Kendall's dire performance as their flagbearer in 2015, garnering only 5% of the membership vote in the leadership election, has been washed away, and the woman herself given free rein as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to tell us that too many people on benefits are "taking the mickey". This is ironic not only in the sense that forcing the disabled to take crap jobs does not constitute a credible strategy for growth but also in the sense that, as Maguire and Pogrund make clear, the Labour Party has been taking the piss since 2019, something the electorate appears to have clocked long before the media.

The name in the frame as Starmer's most likely successor is the Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who is in many ways similar to the Prime Minister, particularly in his opportunism and eagerness to please business interests, but who at least doesn't need the help of a voice coach to humanise him. But while the lad with the colourful East End family background may seduce the media with what passes for emotional intelligence in their circles, he does not offer a departure in terms of his politics from either New Labour (directing NHS funds towards the private health sector) or the current shift towards a Reform-adjacent Blue Labour (criticising the NHS for pulling the "immigration lever" to recruit foreign doctors). If the latest WhatsApp nonsense tells us anything, it isn't that the Labour right is made up of horrible people - we already knew that - but that their factionalism was always a substitute for a meaningful politics. Being an arsehole is an end in itself, hence Trigger Me Timbers' performative arseholery.

Just as getting Brexit "done" served to obscure the lack of a meaningful Conservative Party programme after a decade of self-defeating austerity, but quickly evaporated as the reality of a pointless government became all too plain after the Covid pandemic, so the insider revelations of Labour Party politics since 2015 are now being promoted way beyond their intrinsic value as a distraction from the lack of a meaningful programme of government. But arseholes being arseholes can only take up so much newsprint and airtime, hence the Guardian finds itself once more legitimising the far-right by its obsessive focus on populist incivility and poring over the receipts for donations to Reform, as if rich men funding reactionary politics was newsworthy. We are cursed in the UK with a dumb government and an anti-intellectual and bitchy political class, and the chief reason for that is our awful media, most of which is owned by other rich men keen to advance reactionary politics. As the nominally liberal opposition to this, the Guardian has played its part by offering an insipid centrism that celebrates the political void and now presents the political class as addled teenagers, glued to their phones: victims of social media who deserve our pity.

Waiting for the Barbarians

According to Jon Henley, the Guardian's Europe Correspondent, centre-right parties across the continent are being cannibalised by the far-right, in particular over the issue of immigration: "For decades, mainstream European parties on the right and left united behind a barrier – the Brandmauer (firewall) in Germany, the cordon sanitaire in France – against accommodating far-right ideas or cooperating with far-right parties. More recently, however, centre-right parties in particular have increasingly adopted far-right policies and, in several countries, formed coalitions with far-right parties. Despite evidence showing this only boosts the radical right, the process is accelerating." This makes it sound like centre-right parties are simply stupid: repeatedly pursuing an electoral strategy that demonstrably does not work. But they are clearly doing this with their eyes wide open. In fact, the normalisation of rightwing policies is less a push from the fringe and more of a pull from the centre, reflecting that it is the nominal middle that is choosing to shift rightwards. It isn't being dragged there against its will. 

Henley's suggestion that the centre-right are making a tactical error by trying to accommodate the far-right's policies on immigration ignores that the policies in question have long been promoted by the centre-right. In the UK, the Tories have been openly hostile to immigration since Margaret Thatcher's "swamped" remarks and regularly accused Labour of overseeing an intolerable rise in both net migration and asylum-seeking during the Blair and Brown years. That they subsequently proved incapable of delivering the promised reductions in net flows reflects the contradictions of their politics: support for capital's appetite for cheap labour and the tacit indulgence of the bigotry and xenophobia of their electoral base. In reporting the prediction that "Europe’s centre-right parties could be subsumed by the far right within 10 to 15 years", Henley misidentifies the dynamic: it is absorption, not subsumption. We've already seen this in the UK with the inroads that first UKIP and then the Brexit Party made into Tory support, its evaporation in 2019 as these voters "returned home", and now its re-emergence as Reform. This electoral promiscuity obscures the steady march to the right by the parties of the centre.

The European and American far-right remain ideologically chaotic and organisationally incompetent. The parallels with the 1930s are misleading because these groups do not in the main aspire to reorder society. As we are witnessing in real-time in the US, in power these people are focused on vandalising the state, not reinforcing it as a tool of totalitarian repression. Some voices on the far-right are programmatic reactionaries, or even sincere Fascists, but most are just pro-capital conservatives who want to deregulate markets and lower taxes on the rich. It's worth emphasising that the party leaders who have come to prominence on the far-right in Europe - Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Georgia Meloni, Alice Weidel - are electoral pragmatists, concerned with relative positioning and alliance-building, rather than visionaries set on revolution. They face towards the centre and are unsurprisingly cut from the same bourgeois cloth as the cartel party leaders. That latter group includes the nominal centre-left as much as the centre-right. For example, the UK Labour government has shown its centre-right nature in office by consciously pursuing policies that it thinks will find favour with Reform voters as much as with Conservative ones, and you can't simply blame this on panicked MPs in marginal seats.

The far-right's strength is down to its promotion by the media. Long before Steve Bannon talked of "flooding the zone with shit" (ironically his claimed tactic for subverting mainstream media), rightwing newspapers were churning out propaganda that placed the locus of politics significantly to the right of centre. The rightwing policy entrpreneur Joseph Lehman claimed that "The most common misconception is that lawmakers themselves are in the business of shifting the Overton window. That is absolutely false. Lawmakers are actually in the business of detecting where the window is, and then moving to be in accordance with it." That claim itself was false, not only in its supposition that changes in policy preferences were purely organic but in its implication that political parties ("lawmakers") simply responded to public opinion rather than seeking to craft it. The relationship between press barons and politicians is often presented as asymmetric, the latter obliged to pay homage to the former (think of Tony Blair's relations with Rupert Murdoch), but they are actually symbiotic. Just as the EU was regularly blamed for policies that originated in Whitehall, so the press (presented as a reflection of popular opinion) can be blamed for a party shifting its policy rightwards.

This shift is often justified by reference to a minority of voters whose concerns and interests are given outsized importance on the grounds that they have hitherto been ignored by the political establishment. This is usually little more than puppetry. The political cartel has been convinced since the 1970s of the rightness (sic) of the neoliberal analysis: the primacy of private property, the need to marketise public services and the priority of tax cuts. To this end, the parties have worked with pollsters and the media to construct a number of character types seen to embody the same preferences and associated virtues (independence, hard-work etc), from Basildon Man through Worcester Woman. Initially these were presented as new formations in society, representing the zeitgeist, and were characterised by a transactional attitude towards both the state and each other. As neoliberalism has curdled, a new character group has come to the fore: the left behind. In contrast to the progressive and pragmatic types of the 1980s and 90s, these voters are conservative and nostalgic, motivated by "values" that have been supposedly undermined by globalisation and "identity politics" .

The psephology of the second half of the twentieth century centred on the construct of the median voter who was not only to be found in the middle of the political spectrum but also at the midpoint of other demographic dimensions such as age, education and income. In contrast, the politics of the era that commenced with the bankruptcy of neoliberalism in 2008 - what liberal commentators have taken to referring to as "populism" - have been characterised by the idea of the neglected conservative: older, less educated and poorer. In reality, far-right voters tend to be richer than the median and predominantly middle-aged. If far-right parties are gaining greater support, that will be down to what were once described as median voters. In other words, the median voter has been recast as more conservative than the demographic reality, and thus they have acquired the traditional characteristics associated with conservatism. The one dimension of the populist cliché that does appear to be true is educational attainment: voters for far-right parties tend to be less educated than the median, however that appears to be largely a product of the relatively recent expansion of higher education, i.e. it correlates with age, and is therefore likely to dissipate over time.

This "left behind" character is deemed by political scientists to combine a more leftwing view of economics (e.g. pro-nationalisation) with a social conservatism, and thus to be potentially attracted to the policies of the far-right, or at least to the faux nostalgia of a mythical hybrid such as Blue Labour. This ignores that actual far-right parties are typically economically liberal: in favour of rolling back the state and cutting taxes. It also ignores that in the character's political articulation in the media the leftwing economics are barely mentioned, just as they are equally marginal among MPs trying to revive Blue Labourism. And that's the clue that this is a character constructed in the interests of the cartel to justify a rightwards shift in social policy without jeopardising neoliberal hegemony. This is why "anti-green" and "anti-woke" impulses features so prominently. Genuine Fascists tend to be pro-environmental, to the point of blood-and-soil mysticism, and obsessive about identity and group rights. The push against net-zero and DEI in the US clearly serves the interests of particular fractions of capital, not neo-Nazis. 

The biggest shifts in policy on the right in recent years across Europe have been on the far-right and have invariably seen a move towards the centre. This has coincided with the nominal centre-left moving to the right, so squeezing the traditional parties of the centre-right. Thus the Rassemblement National in France has dropped its plan to quit the EU while Marine Le Pen continues her strategy of de-demonisation and seeks de facto alliances with the centre-right now represented by Emmanuel Macron. The Brothers of Italy have toned down their support for protectionism and shifted towards Atlanticism as they have joined the centre-right in a government coalition. The AfD in Germany is split between a centripetal Alternative Mitte and a more radical-right Der Flügel, with the former clearly in the ascendancy and keen to ally with the CDU/CSU. Across Europe, the far-right is being house-trained by the cartel as part of a process that seeks to embed neoliberal economics and governance within a "populist" framework of social reaction. All that has changed since 2008 is the abandoment of the progressive narrative of the centre-left.