The Zone of Uninterest

Corey Robin recently published a post about how opinions on Israel are rapidly changing among Jews. It is heavily ironised, and stands at the intersection of the literary traditions of awakening conscience and the Jewish-American experience (his own style owes not a little to Philip Roth), but the essential point I'd like to focus on is his recognition of that rapidity: the sense that there has been a sea-change in opinion and understanding. He quotes a number of statements by prominent Jews, introducing them as follows: "I’m posting these statements here just to give you a sense of how quickly opinion is changing. And it’s not Israel-haters and antisemites or self-hating Jews who are voicing the alarm. Most of these individuals below continue to identify as Zionists, as liberal Zionists, and of those who no longer identify as Zionist, they come by their positions honestly, as I hope you will see."

What changed in recent weeks was the incontrovertible evidence that the Israeli government is engaged in a deliberate policy of starvation, with some members of the cabinet openly advocating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, an intent reinforced by Benjamin Netanyahu's current proposal for the IDF to occupy the entire territory for an indeterminate period of time. What changed was the IDF murdering Palestinians queuing for food in what can only be described as a killing field. The decision of a number of Western countries to signal their intent to recognise a Palestinian state next month, along with the long-overdue and still tentative steps towards an arms embargo by the likes of Germany, have been symptomatic of this wider sea-change, rather than contributory factors. They are evidence of the realisation of governments that have willingly supported Israel that they are way out of line with their own electorates, and are increasingly out of line with liberal Jewish opinion globally.

Many of the people cited by Robin discuss the issue in terms of crossing a line: that Israel has gone too far, and risks losing its soul in the process. Perhaps the most interesting citation is of Avrum Burg, a former interim President of Israel and Leader of the Knesset who is prepared, at least rhetorically, to address the more existential issue - essentially the entire history of the state since 1948 - but who frames this in terms of Israeli/Jewish loss: "Could it be that the current State of Israel, that its body stronger than ever and its spirit deader than ever, no longer deserves to exist? Not because of what happened on October 7, but because of everything that came before, and everything that has erupted since….The destruction of Gaza is a damning indictment of Israel’s moral bankruptcy. And we must face the truth: Israel without an ethical foundation has no justification to exist."

There is a well-worn trope in the literary treatment of Nazism and the Holocaust of the cultured German officer listening to Schubert after a hard day's work overseeing the gas ovens. Beyond the inherent class bias in this image, which assumes the ordinary German soldier was an unthinking brute in comparison, there is this idea of loss: how could a culture that produced Schubert lead to the Final Solution? Where did Germany's soul go? The problem with the "crossing a line" framing is that it suggests a step back could be taken across that same line, like the German officer coming to his senses as he listens to Erlkönig, feeling pity for his victims and understanding that he is the evil-doer. But that is obviously absurd. While some Germans bravely resisted the Nazis, most did not, and those officers in the camps were selected precisely because they were true-believers who would feel neither shame nor guilt. 

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt (another writer Robin has long engaged with) famously wrote of "the banality of evil". The book caused a furore (and continues to divide historians) both because it described Eichman primarily as a careerist rather than a fervid antisemite, and because it highlighted the complicity of some Jews in the facilitation of the Holocaust. The first charge is problematic because it suggests Eichmann's behaviour was the result of incentives, rather than any commitment on his part over-and-above career advancement. At the close of Jonathan Glazer's 2023 film The Zone of Interest we see the Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss retching as he descends the stairs of a deserted palace into the darkness. Is this his conscience rebelling? In reality Höss claimed to have realised the enormity of his crimes only days before his execution. Prior to that, his attitude when challenged was described as "apathetic" and having "a lack of empathy". I can't be the only one who saw a parallel between the film's scenes of mundane looting and videos of IDF soldiers cavorting with children's toys and women's underwear in the ruins of Gaza.

Western governments have gone out of their way not merely to support Israel's military actions but to provide it with every possible excuse to step back over the line: to be applauded for restoring a status quo ante bellum in which Gaza was already a concentration camp, blockaded and rationed to punish the Palestinians as a people. Keir Starmer's pompous conditionality is simply a route that Netanyahu can take, with minimal inconvenience, to ensure that the recognition of Palestinian statehood is once more deferred and Israel reaffirmed in the community of the Western powers. In reality, the momentum of events and the wider anger in Europe may see the UK isolated in September, perhaps only lining up alongside Germany, a country whose Staatsräson requires that it expiate its guilt over the Holocaust by giving Israel carte blanche (the embargo on arms that "could be used in Gaza" is obviously little more than a gesture).

But is it possible to step back over that line? It clearly wasn't in the case of Eichmann and Höss. You can't simply say "Sorry, we went too far" after committing a deliberate genocide. Robin quotes the academic Lihi Ben Shitrit: "As psychologists note, shame and guilt are similar and often appear together, but there are crucial differences. Feeling shame is associated with embarrassment over the actions of members of our group that we think negatively reflect on our group’s identity. Guilt occurs when we feel collective responsibility for the negative actions of our group members. Shame leads to avoidance — hiding, denying or looking away from such actions. Guilt, on the other hand, motivates reparative or restorative responses. Liberal Jews like myself need to overcome our shame, which pushes some of us to avoid or even deny the reality of Gaza. Instead, we must grapple with guilt; guilt not in the sense of personal culpability, but rather in our collective responsibility."

Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian provides an object example of that liberal avoidance, even going so far as to claim a "moral case for escapism", and thus superior virtue: "For it’s when we feel ourselves plunged into the abyss, when our despair at our fellow human beings pulls strongest, that we most need to look upward – and glimpse the stars." What Freedland is implicitly saying is that his shame will never become guilt, in Ben Shitrit's terms. In other words he will neither question the existence of the State of Israel, like Avrum Burg, nor concede that collective responsibility means that Western governments, complacement liberal media and Israeli society generally must be deemed as guilty as Netanyahu, Smotrich and Gvir. As with the reaction to Eichmann in Jerusalem, it is that second charge, of collective responsibility, that sticks in his craw.

Conditionality

The two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict remains a polite fiction, urged mostly by European governments that have no intention of taking active steps to implement it. The US long ago gave up on even the fiction, preferring to make clear its support for a maximalist policy by Israel. The decision to bomb Iran in June was an endorsement of its client state's insistence that its area of authority is all of the Middle East, with only Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states (currently) off-limits. So long as Israel remains America's regional proxy, which it will do regardless of who is in the White House, there is no possibility of its territorial integrity being called into question by a land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians. That the fiction of the two-state solution is once more in the news does not indicate some tectonic shift in the geopolitical plates, despite the breathless coverage in the media. The proposed recognition of a Palestinian state in September by France, the UK and others is merely the latest attempt to preserve the fiction with the minimum of effort and consequence.

The conditions outlined by Keir Starmer are obviously intended to give himself sufficient room for manoeuvre to once more renege on a promise, even if Isarel truculently refuses to oblige by agreeing to even a temporary ceasefire. But they are also intended to revive the value of the "card" of formal recognition, and thus of the two-state solution itself, after years in which it has dwindled to almost nothing. To switch metaphors, by solemnly reviving the carrot as the centrepiece of his strategy he hopes to avoid questions over why the UK government has not thought fit to deploy the sticks of sanctions and arms embargoes in the face of what even centrist commentators are now admitting amounts to genocide. I have no idea whether Starmer will find himself obliged to recognise a Palestinian state in September, or whether he will find a way of wriggling out of it (the absurd conditions laid on Hamas - disband, have no future role etc - might well do the trick), but I do know that his decision will amount to little either way so long as the material and political support that the UK offers to Israel continues.

Patrick Wintour in the Guardian referred to the emerging division "between the moderate and extremist visions for the future of Gaza and the West Bank once the war finally ends." But he immediately emphasised that the former is premised on the Palestinians submitting to foreign interference - "a radically reformed Palestinian Authority governing without Hamas" - which makes clear that what will be recognised is closer to the pre-1948 British mandate than an independent people. Critics who insisted that the right of statehood cannot be qualified were forgetting that such qualifications were central to the operation of British imperialism during the twentieth century and it appears that muscle memory has kicked in, even though the UK simply doesn't have the power to impose its will in the way it did 100 years ago. This is why Starmer's conditions have a slightly ridiculous air of pomposity about them: I found myself hearing the voice of Neville Chamberlain talking about having sent the German Chancellor a "final note" as the current Prime Minister stood at the lectern. 

The conference in New York this week, hosted jointly by France and Saudi Arabia, employed similar language, insisting that "a transitional administrative committee must be immediately established to operate in Gaza under the umbrella of the Palestinian Authority". Given the corruption of the PA, this simply looks like a change of jailers for the people of Gaza and the West Bank. What is singularly lacking is any reference to the 1967 borders, which can be the only viable basis for a territorial settlement. According to Wintour, "The reality is that Israel in the wake of 7 October has moved further and further away from notions of a two-state solution." In fact, Israel had been steadily moving away from the idea since before the collapse of the Oslo Accords and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Illegal settlements have been created with state support since 1967. Indeed, you could argue that the Accords lasting influence was to confirm that Israel had no interest in an equitable peace, seeing Palestine as "less than a state", in Rabin's words, and the Palestinian Authority as mere collaborators.

For Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian's chief apologist for Israel, the problem remains Netanyahu ("Steadily, the Israeli public is coming to see the price of the pariah status that Netanyahu has all but cultivated.") If world opinion has (reluctantly) concluded that Israel has crossed a line, there is no recognition by Freedland that the actions of the government are a faithful reflection of the society that elected it. But while he ignores the reality of Israel he is happy to recyle Number 10's crude interpretation of Hamas: "That group is not interested, they say, in a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, living alongside Israel. Hamas is not in the two-state business, but rather seeks to rule over a single, jihadist state across the entire land, from the river to the sea." Freedland's understanding of the region, which accurately reflects British centrist opinion, is premised on the myth that most Israelis are liberal and secular, and that most Palestinians are religious fundamentalists who wish to wipe Israel off the map. It is this idea that informs the "moderate vision" that Wintour speaks of. 

Implicit in this vision are a number of assumptions: that the Palestinians must be actively policed to guarantee Israel's security (and not vice versa); that the Palestinian Authority must be answerable to Israel and the international community, rather than just the Palestinian people; and that Palestine must be "less than a state", lacking such accoutrements as an army or an independent foreign policy. It is a mindset that reflects the persistence of colonial thinking among Western governments in which certain peoples are deemed unfit for self-rule. Genocide never occurs out of the blue. It arises against a background narrative in which an entire "other" people is seen as a threat that must be expunged to guarantee the security of the nation. And in the context of Israel-Palestine, it is the "moderate" vision as much as the extremist that is responsible for that narrative. This was a genocide long-foretold because it is a narrative we have long been conditioned to.

The Rage of the Centrist

The evidence that Israel is deliberately starving the Gazan population if not to death then to a state of extreme malnutrition that will scar it for generations is now irrefutable. This has led to some predictable hand-wringing by centrist commentators, such as Gaby Hinsliff demanding a more virtuous response from a UK government that has not only been complicit in Israel's genocidal war but has actively criminalised principled opposition to it. We are told that pressure is mounting on Starmer to recognise a Palestinian state, even though this would do nothing to alleviate the suffering. If Emmanuel Macron thinks it's a good idea, you can be confident it's an empty gesture. In reality, the UK government is never going to recognise a free Palestine, something that the cabinet ministers briefing the press about their support for it know perfectly well. They are trying to protect their career prospects, or at least avoid being sacked by the electors, by crying crocodile tears for starving children.

What is notable is not just the abject cowardice of the response by centrists like Hinsliff but their refusal to accept that the time has come for the UK government to take meaningful steps, such as an arms embargo or sanctions against Israel. This is not just a transparent attempt to obscure their failure to advocate a stronger line months ago, when the direction of travel was obvious. It also highlights their own commitment to what we really should start calling the final solution of the Palestinian problem. Just as the government will never recognise an independent Palestine, so the commentariat will never admit that the goal all along has been the erasure of the Palestinians as a people with a land. You might as well ask them to admit that the Labour Party wasn't riddled with antisemitism between 2016 and 2019, and wholly free of that bacillus before and after.

This refusal to face the reality of their choices creates a psychic burden that needs some form of release. To no one's great surprise, as the evidence of genocide and the strategic use of starvation has mounted, so the centrist hatred of the left has reached an even more hysterical pitch. While Paul Mason insists that the new party mooted by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana would be the re-embodiment of the German Communist Party, paving the way for Hitler/Farage, Nick Tyrone, a self-styled centrist dad and think-tank wallah, opined that "literally anyone" would be better in government than the two former Labour MPs. You might think this was mere hyperbole, rather than literally meant, but the point is that he really would prefer Nigel Farage, or (for that matter) Boris Johnson or Liz Truss. These people have never been shy about admitting their hierarchy of acceptable politics.

Mason at least professes to abhor Farage, but that's really just to maintain his anti-Fascist credentials among credulous liberals and his self-deluding image as a latterday SPD street-fighter that the Labour Party would be foolish not to select as a prospective parliamentary candidate for a seat in the North. Tyrone is honest enough to admit that the political centre in this country is occupied by people who would much rather see Farage in Number 10 than anyone happy to self-describe as a socialist, which funnily enough is a more accurate historical echo of Germany in 1933, when the centre-right paved the way for Hitler, than Mason's crass analogy. Another example of centrist fantasy, built to obscure the reality of right-leaning preferences, comes from the journalist Ian Dunt. 

The "soft left" in Labour barely exists outside of the media's imagination and is certainly not organisationally robust enough to fight anyone. The mystery of the missing "soft-right" is easily explained: they're all in the Labour Party furiously fighting the left. In simple terms, the political establishment, which is coterminus with the widest definition of "the centre", has decided that it will not fight the far-right because the electorate is made up of incorrigible racists. The protestors outside asylum hostels must be placated with guff about "legitimate concerns", until they overstep the mark at which point they become suitable fodder for a crackdown. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage must be indulged not only by the rightwing press and a complacent BBC but by the political establishment as a whole. Instead, attention must be focused on the threat from the left, who must be stamped on hard along with anyone deemed a proxy, such as trans men and women or protestors against genocide.

Centrist commentators who loudly gave Israel the benefit of the doubt for years, and who now regretfully inform us that they may have been wrong to do so, are demanding that they be applauded for changing their minds. There is no humility or contrition, merely a testy anger that they have been bested in analysis by ageing hippies and pink-haired kids. Some have even taken to aggressively denouncing the left, who have been proved right, for not welcoming them into the big tent of bien pensant opinion, insisting that in the face of starving children what matters is civility and tone. What these sociopaths are ultimately defending is their authority within the politico-media complex. To that end, it is necessary that they continue to construct a leftwing bogey that can act as the scapegoat for the projected charges of naivety and delusion. For many of them, the launch of a new party by Corbyn and Sultana is a blessing.

What Determines Rent?

The popular discussion of economics divides into macro and micro, with those familiar with the former tending to adopt a slightly patronising attitude towards the latter (the legacy of Keynes' de haut en bas style), which in turn sees them map onto a left-right spectrum. This is misleading, not only because macroeconomics has historically been an attempt to reconcile classical liberalism with the reality of the state as an economic actor, thereby excluding the need for a socialist or Marxist analysis, but because it tends to omit large swathes of the real economy. A famous example was the lack of attention paid to finance and banking as a systemic vulnerability prior to 2008. But an even more prevalent omission in the popular macroeconomic discourse, which was once central to economics in the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, is the role of rent.

Smith laid out the basic proposition: "The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give." Ricardo formulated this as a general law, to wit that the rent of a piece of land will equal the additional monetary gain of its productive use relative to the production of a rent-free piece of land. In other words, tenant farmers will desert high-rent land if the rent exceeds the marginal loss they would incur by farming a rent-free piece of land. 

This theory was useful in an era when many people were tenant farmers and when colonialism was bringing marginal (i.e. rent-free) land into production, so the idea of farmers upping sticks to find a more economically advantageous plot wasn't as unrealistic as it seems to us today. Obviously the externalities of colonialism were ignored while rent was seen as a product of natural endowment - the gift of heaven -  and the industry of white colonisers (cf Locke). Subsequent attempts, e.g. by Marx, were made to focus on the capital investment of land, its improvement in Smith's terms, and how natural endowment in reality gives rise to rentierism, i.e. monopoly exploitation, notably in the area of patents and technical innovation (as theorised by Joseph Schumpeter).

The one area of rent that has tended to receive far less attention from economists, in terms of explaining what determines its price, is the rent of property, and specifically houses and flats. This might seem odd given how large rent looms in our lives. Even if you have bought a property or are currently paying a mortgage to do so, you are subject to rent insofar as house prices will always reflect the equivalent contract rent - i.e. what you could get if you let it over the same period as a typical mortgage (hence buy-to-let). Many people assume that the dynamic of this relationship works in the opposite direction: high house prices lead to high rents, and that rising house prices are simply the consequence of demand outstripping supply, hence the arguments that we should ease planning restrictions or curtail immigration, but this ignores that there is no shortage of empty or under-occupied houses and flats across the country. So what determines rent?

The law of supply says that more goods will be produced at higher prices. In other words, if demand for a commodity grows, thereby pushing up the price, producers will increase output to take advantage of the larger demand and thus fatter profit margins. The law of demand says that at higher prices demand falls. So once supply of that commodity exceeds demand, following that increase in output, prices will fall back to their notional equilibrium level. This simplistic model obviously ignores a lot of real world frictions and contraints. For example, not all commodities can be rapidly produced at a higher rate, e.g. by adding shifts or converting existing production lines. Likewise, if the market is cartelised there may be a reluctance among producers to increase output excessively. OPEC is the obvious example here.

In the case of housing, there are real constraints such as restrictive planning regulations and limited real resources (builders and building materials), but the biggest determinant is the reluctance of volume builders to over-supply the market and so depress prices. In this context, the state is a volume builder that has taken a self-denying ordinance to maintain house prices, both for owner-occupiers and landlords, which is why the UK government is so reluctant to build council houses despite the pressing need, and why US liberals like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that "abundance" can be achieved by simply rolling back regulations and striking out building codes, which provides an easy excuse to ignore capitalist realities in favour of a technocratic can-doism.

The "law" of demand is also undermined by necessity. In other words, there are certain things we have to buy, at least at a minimal level, such as shelter, food and clothing, lest we risk injury or death (self-sufficiency is not a practical strategy for most people and a return to a subsistence economy would result in mass starvation). We cannot realistically choose not to buy shelter, preferring to spend our money on first editions or champagne, so demand cannot fall to such low levels that prices must drop. Equally, we cannot easily cut back on the amount we spend on shelter, unlike certain other necessities such as food or clothes. We can skip meals or wear socks with holes in them, but we can't decide to move to a cheaper flat for a month and then back again to ease our cashflow.

When we talk of "the housing market" (singular) we are dealing in a fantasy. In reality, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of geographically limited housing markets, which estate and letting agents understand only too well. Goods (i.e. houses and flats) cannot be moved from one market to another, so prices must always reflect local circumstances. We also cannot easily choose to buy from alternative suppliers in cheaper markets. If I work in London but can't afford the rent, there's no point renting a flat in Sunderland. And if I got an equivalent job in Sunderland, it might not pay well enough to allow me to rent there either.

When house prices or rents do fall, that is typically because of a relative over-supply in a limited geographical market. But when this happens it is rarely because the quantum of supply rapidly increases. Instead it is because the quantum of demand rapidly falls. The obvious examples are all around us: areas that saw deindustrialisation in the 1980s with the result that the population shrank. But the fall in house prices and rents in those areas also reflects the lower average income of the remaining population: deindustrialisation typically took away above-average wage jobs, and they were above-average in most cases due to the strength of trade unions in heavy industries like coal, steel and shipbuilding. Outside these geographic exceptions, house prices and rents rarely if ever fall, something that cannot be explained away as price "stickiness" or the lower bound of a zero return on capital.

Rents then will always reflect "what the market can bear", which is a polite way of saying that landlords will push prices up to their maximum: the point where tenants can just about afford them, assuming they're willing to limit expenditure on other goods, which may be discretionary, such as entertainment, but may also be necessities, such as food and clothing. The "cost of living crisis" due to the recent spike in food and energy costs shouldn't distract from the fact that the prices of these other necessities are, in real terms, a fraction of what they were 50 years ago. That rents have grown over this period is not because people have felt that housing was a better choice for their discretionary expenditure, despite the relentless media propaganda, but because landlords have, in Smith's words, constantly recalibrated what the tenant can afford to give.

Everything Must Change For Everything to Remain the Same

We've reached that stage in the political cycle where commentators are beginning to wonder why the government keeps screwing up. The immediate prompt for this was the passing of the latest welfare bill, which generated a minor backbench revolt and a "dilution" that means it isn't as stunningly mean-spirited as originally intended. Beyond the theatrics of Westminster, the government continues to pursue its programme. Not the one it was elected on, but the one it intended to enact all along, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the received wisdom of twenty years ago, hence ideas such as a national ID card have resurfaced while a rebranded Sure Start has got Polly Toynbee trilling with delight. 

There are obviously tonal differences between Blair and Starmer, and these have even been offered as an explanation for the current government's struggles. For example, Stephen Bush has decided that the Prime Minister has no real interest in policy beyond justice and security, which was a useful insight when made by Oliver Eagleton in The Starmer Project in 2022 but seems otiose now. Starmer's brief was to recover the Labour Party from the left. That he then won the general election was a bonus, but it's churlish to condemn him for being narrow-minded and dull when those were the qualities necessary to fulfill the original brief. There is a hint in Bush's reading of Starmer that the chief cock-ups, notably the Winter Fuel Allowance imbroglio, can be laid at the door of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Simon Wren-Lewis is baffled that the government didn't recognise that tax rises were inevitable immediately on taking office. He doesn't mention Rachel Reeve's crap impression of Captain Renaud, shocked to discover what a mess the Tories had left, which would have reinforced the point, perhaps because he wishes to find an explanation for the Chancellor's behaviour that doesn't highlight her cynicism (if nothing else, those tears mean everyone will try not to be mean to her for a week or two). The best he can come up with is: "that they accepted that George Osborne was correct: the size of the state under New Labour was too large, and he was essentially right to shrink it. This meant Labour in government would be a more competent version of a post-Osborne Conservative government." 

But rather than accept the charge of the left that there is an ideological congruence between this government and that of the 2010-16 period, Wren-Lewis insists that this was simply a political misjudgement. Likewise he attributes the government's attempts to outbid Reform on immigration to error: giving undue salience to the issue and echoing Nigel Farage's lies about the impact on public services. At this point you might wonder if telling "lies" is evidence of misjudgment or maybe something else. Starmer's track record of deceit and dissimulation in his ascent to the party leadership can lead one to assume that he has no fixed beliefs, but you don't accidentally employ the language of Enoch Powell unless there is some base sympathy.

Simon's prescription for the government to turn round its unpopularity is to be more honest about the need for tax rises, to "plausibly argue that while everyone is promising lower immigration, only they are doing so in a way that doesn’t damage the economy", and finally to start admitting that Brexit has been a mistake. The latter should be emphasised not only because it is true, and will become more evident to voters over time, but in order to remind voters that Farage was one of the chief authors of that calamity. For good measure, he also suggests pointing out that the chaos of the Trump administration is a harbinger of what we could expect from a Farage premiership. 

In his final analysis, Wren-Lewis is pessimistic, anticipating that the government will not raise taxes sufficiently, that they will continue to ape Reform on immigration and that they will fail to be open and honest about the costs of Brexit. Given that he set out to explain why Labour have made these mistakes in office, you might feel a little short-changed. Insofar as he points the finger, it is to suggest that Morgan McSweeney may be less clever than his mates in the media suggest and that Starmer hasn't understood "the difference between being in opposition and government". But naivety on the part of Starmer is no more explanatory than the trope of the king's evil advisor.

Andy Beckett, whose modus operandi is to ask innocent questions, focuses not on the economic logic for tax rises but on the moral case for redistribution. He often overdoes the disingenousness. Thus he is correct to point out that "Creating a more egalitarian society and politics – which by definition means redistribution from the powerful – was Labour’s original purpose", but there are surely few people, even in the party itself, who imagine that egalitarianism continues to be a motivating force rather than a mere shibboleth. The mantra of New Labour, and centrist political parties in most other developed countries from the 1980s onwards, was that growth would deliver improved public goods, and thus ameliorate inquality, but that we must therefore prioritise wealth creation and so coddle the wealth creators. 

It was, in effect, the centre-left version of trickle-down economics, with the state providing a more concrete presence than the invisible hand of the market. The problem, evident to all since 2008, is that underlying growth was anemic, artifically amplified by financial speculation in the preceding decades. The steadily-encroaching climate crisis has called into question whether growth is even viable, and we may find ourselves struggling to stand still as decades of under-investment cause the fabric of public life to start falling apart. If the cake can't be rapidly enlarged, then inevitably politics will turn to the question of how big our relative slices should be. 

The answer to the question "Why is Labour so afraid to admit that we must tax the rich?" is therefore quite simple. It remains committed to the idea that wealth must be coddled. To that end, public goods must be rationed so that the state's share of GDP doesn't rise and ideally falls. What Beckett describes as New Labour's strategy of redistribution by stealth (the minimum wage, family tax credits etc), but which would be better called "trickle down", is no longer viable because economic growth will not produce tax revenues sufficient to address the growing demand for public goods. The reforms suggested to boost productivity, such as deregulating planning, are hopelessly inadequate, while the one available change that would boost the economy quickly - completely reversing Brexit - is politically unpalatable.

The Blairite Philip Collins thinks that we are facing an era of small party politics and thus of coalition government. The fragmentation of support in the opinion polls is real enough, but we shouldn't imagine that this reflects a greater volatility among voters. The British system was built on two mass parties that acted as informal coalitions: the "broad church" in Labour's case. Together with the trope of the swing voter, this gave the impression of structural stability and marginal shifts. Underneath was a wide variety of views across the electorate and often vicious contests within the parties themselves. What has happened since then is that both main parties have become narrower and more intolerant of dissent, largely due to Brexit (the Conservatives) and the war on the left (Labour). The inevitable consequence is that voters look elsewhere.

Collins's future preference is for a grand coalition of Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, though with the implicit rider that the Tories return to the sensible centre, leaving the crazies to Reform and the lefties fragmented and ineffective across the Greens, various independents and whatever vehicle Corbyn and Sultana manage to launch. What this daydream ignores is that so long as MPs are elected on a first-past-the-post basis, Nigel Farage is more likely to be a king-maker than Ed Davey. Indeed, a Labour-Reform coalition is far from being improbable. Collins may be right that Labour supporters are "inveterately hostile to a deal with Reform", but that doesn't apply to the PLP. 

As this point it is worth recalling that Simon Wren-Lewis saw the government echoing George Osborne and apeing Nigel Farage as misjudgements, as evidence of Starmer's political naivety. The troubling reality may be that just as there has been an ideological congruence between Labour and the Tories on the need to privilege wealth since the 90s, so there is now a meeting of minds between both parties and Reform on the need to lower immigration and welfare rolls. And don't expect the Lib Dems or Greens to mount an effective opposition to that emerging consensus.

We're facing a future in which no one party can command anywhere near a majority of the electorate, not because there aren't policies that command public support but because the cartel isn't prepared to put them to the vote - most obviously a meaningful wealth tax, but also nationalisation of utilities - and will happily fragment the party system if it means the same people can stay in power through increasingly squalid coalition deals. In Lampedusa's The Leopard the famous maxim is that everything must change for everything to remain the same. In reality, it was a change in outward forms, the compromise of the fading aristocracy and the emerging bourgeoisie, not a change in the fundamental class relations of capital and labour. To maintain the privileges of wealth, the British party system will be broken apart.

Uncomfortable Truths

The British state is no stranger to formally recording ethnicity, from census-taking to the analysis of healthcare outcomes, but the purpose has typically been to make minorities legible in the context of trying to avoid negative discrimination, or at least trying to satisfy the critics of institutional racism. Parallel to this has been the tacit prejudice of officials: the police's discriminatory use of stop-and-search against Black youth, the DWP's disproportionate sanctioning of ethnic minority claimants. What we have not seen for many years is government policy directed towards formal monitoring on the basis that ethnicity and religion are causal factors in the formation of criminals rather than the characteristics of victims of crime or discrimination, though you could argue that the Prevent programme went there in all but name in using "Islamic radicalisation" as a proxy for the institutional suspicion of Asians, Arabs and Muslim converts. 

The "audit" of child sexual exploitation (CSE) cases undertaken by Louise Casey at the government's behest has "criticised a continued failure to gather robust data at a national level" on ethnicity, but also tells us that offenders in three police areas were "disproportionately likely to be Asian men", while further suggesting that "Ignoring the issues, not examining and exposing them to the light, allows the criminality and depravity of a minority of men to be used to marginalise whole communities." That last point is a case of using the traditional justification for monitoring, the need to prevent harm being done to a whole community, to justify a prejudice about that same community.

Casey's claim that it is "not racist to examine the ethnicity of the offenders" is a distraction. The charge isn't that it is racist but that it is irrelevant. After all, what would the outcome be if we discovered a national correlation? Would we conclude that it was the product of "cultural or social" factors, as Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, all but suggested in her brief to Casey, or might we ask whether the correlation was spurious but indicative of something more relevant. For example, the higher rate of drug-deaths in Scotland, compared to England and Wales, certainly correlates with cultural and social factors, but this has not led to the demonisation of Scottish society or suggestions there is something awry in its culture. That's because the significant correlation is with deindustrialisation and deprivation, not sectarian football rivalry or a fondness for shortbread. 

If a correlation with culture and social factors is established in respect of grooming gangs - and let's not be under any illusions that this is the only acceptable outcome for many, not only on the far right but in the respectable centre of politics too - what consequential actions might the government take? Will all men of Pakistani heritage be expected to get DBS certificates? And perhaps wear them pinned prominently to their jackets.

We know that crime correlates with opportunity. This is why police officers are disproportionately more likely to be convicted of corruption in a public office, or small business people of VAT fraud. If an ethnic minority is disproportionately represented in the night-time economy of fast food outlets and taxis, then the attraction that these hold for vulnerable youngsters will inevitably create opportunities for abuse. But nobody is suggesting that those parts of the economy need to be more closely regulated or policed. This stands in contrast with the response to institutionalised child sexual exploitation in children's homes and borstals. As the facts steadily came to light over the decades, there was a concerted effort to enact controls and safeguards. The ripples of this interventionist approach continue down to today, with scandals and chastening reform affecting such august bodies as the BBC and the Church of England: the very heart of the British establishment. That this initiative has slowly shifted focus shift away from the disciplinary state of the 1970s to the contemporary agencies of social authority is no accident. 

The political opportunity afforded by CSE is in the realm of hegemony, the chance to define the sacred and the profane and thus define new boundaries between the good people and the bad, hence the Conservative and Reform parties have sought both to advance a racist narrative - the threat to "white British women" - and to pin the blame on the failures of a liberal elite. There are obvious overlaps with the "I don't recognise this country anymore" crowd of proud bigots, but also with those Labour politicians, such as Cooper and Starmer, who appear to imagine that ceding the essence of the racist argument - that these "strangers" are a threat to national identity and cohesion - and pandering to "legitimate concerns" will allow them to channel public opinion towards their own brand of authoritarian mangerialism. 

The term "uncomfortable truths" is a rhetorical advance on "legitimate concerns" in that it suggests ichoate fears have been replaced by incontrovertible facts, but there's really no practical difference in use. Whereas the older term sought justification the more en vogue one appeals to subjectivity. The result is an ironic detournement of the language attributed to "snowflakes" - "I'm not comfortable with that" - in the cause of confrontation. It isn't the people who use the term who are expected to be uncomfortable, after all.

Casey's claim that the ethnicity of perpetrators is "shied away from" doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The simplest explanation for why ethnicity was not systematically recorded in respect of child sexual exploitation cases is that it wasn't deemed relevant, not because police officers were scared of upsetting local communities that they otherwise barely tolerated, or because grizzled council officials were excessively "woke". This doesn't mean they were oblivious, but that they treated ethnicity informally as an explanatory factor: "What do you expect from these people?", much as they assumed the (usually) working-class girls entrapped by these gangs were "slappers" or "teenage prostitutes". They now have a green light to formalise their prejudices. Having turned that light on, it is both disingenuous and hypocritical of Casey to subsequently claim that we shouldn't over-interpret the "data", and for Labour politicians to claim that the Tories are trying to "politicise the scandal". 

One thing that the government appears to have given little thought to is how far the monitoring of ethnicity is likely to spread in the criminal justice system, which could indicate naivety but is perhaps more likely to indicate comfort with its maximum employment. For example, I suspect we're going to see pushback against the long campaign to restrain stop-and-search in London. If the data on ethnicity shows that men of Jamaican heritage are disproportionately involved in drug-peddling then the Metropolitan Police will argue they have reason to target Black kids in South London for frisking. Just don't expect a report any time soon confronting the uncomfortable truth that white ex-public schoolboys are disproportionately involved in City fraud and suggesting that Eton and Harrow have questions to answer. But just as ethnic and religious monitoring was originally about making under-served and peripheral communities legible to the state, in the ostensible service of integration and equity, so this latest turn will also keep a narrow focus on those groups deemed to be outside of the nation, or at least semi-detached and potentially disloyal. To be monitored has never been a privilege.

Woke

The first thing to note about Gaby Hinsliff's extended essay in the Guardian is the title: How does woke start winning again?, which suggests that woke had a successful period of dominance in the recent past. The standfirst also employs the idea of progress halted, but with the implication that this was inevitable due to the misjudged approach of campaigners: "British progressives have suffered major setbacks in recent years, in both public opinion and court rulings. Was a backlash inevitable, and are new tactics needed?" Hinsliff would no doubt point out that journalists don't write their own headlines or standfirsts, but neither is unrepresentative of the essay in suggesting that woke is simultaneously hegemonic and embattled. This confusion arises because of her use of "woke" and "progressive" as interchangeable whern they are actually quite different and often in conflict. Wokeness is a critique of actually existing conditions, specifically a recognition of systemic injustice. Progressivism, as conservatives often point out, is a secular teleology based on the religious idea of the perfectibility of humanity, but one whose lofty aims are in practice subservient to quietism and the defence of the status quo, not because the ultimate triumph is not in doubt, but because of its imbrication with liberalism.

Hinsliff starts by recalling the Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol in 2020 that led to the statue of Edward Colston being toppled and dumped in the harbour. She notes of the recovered statue and contemporary protest placards that they "evoke the radicalism of a summer that already feels oddly consigned to history, when frustration erupted on to the streets but never quite seemed to be channelled into lasting change." What's missing here is the way that the protests were channelled by the media into a debate about statues, and then into a fruitless standoff against the far right who answered the implicit call to defend our stone heritage against the leftist wreckers, resulting in Tommy Robinson fans careering drunkenly down Whitehall with one them unironically pissing on the memorial to a murdered policeman in Parliament Square. Though that incontinent "defender" was jailed for 14 days, there was quiet satisfaction among the establishment that the BLM protests had been derailed. If Hinsliff is looking for the legacy of that summer, she might consider last year's attacks on asylum seekers and the language of beleaguerment employed by the press and politicians (an "island of strangers" etc.)

Both liberal and conservative commentaries on "wokeness" play fast and loose with history. Conservatives tend to accuse critics of presentism, of applying today's values to actions that in their historical context were neither remarkable nor seen as objectionable. This invariably ignores that in many cases those actions were condemned at the time, slavery being an obvious example and colonialism another. Liberal commentaries take a different approach because of the belief in progress: the aim is to detach today's protest from history, as if the protestors weren't keeping to the progressive script. This is done by recasting the history as meek and mild, the protestors as unobjectionable and even heroes by today's standards. Hinsliff cites Bristolian antecedents "once considered shockingly radical but now celebrated without question: Theresa Garnett, the suffragette who brandished a horsewhip at Winston Churchill at Bristol Temple Meads station, or the heroes of the 1963 Bristol bus boycott, who walked to work in protest against the bus company’s refusal to hire black drivers (and helped pave the way for the 1965 Race Relations Act)". The bus boycott was not considered "shockingly radical" at the time. Indeed more people were probably shocked at the collusion of the TGWU in enforcing a colour bar, while simultaneously opposing Apartheid in South Africa, than in black (and white) Bristolians refusing to use the buses.

Liberal commentators often appropriate radical history to suggest that progressive change would have happened anyway (Martin Luther King's "arc of history" line predictably makes an appearance, his critique of capitalism does not) and to highlight the unhelpfulness of "activists" in advancing that cause. It is a constant exercise to remove the taint of radicalism from any successful development and reserve the term for those considered wrong turns or dead ends, the orginal case study being the French Revolution. This leads not only to misrepresentation but to a simplification of once-challenging concepts. Thus Hinsliff claims the term was "borrowed from a phrase used as far back as the 1930s by black Americans, urging each other to “stay woke’” to the threat of racial violence". In fact, the phrase originally meant staying alert to the reality of systemic racism, in other words the polite refusals and condescensions rather than the lynchings. As such, the word has expanded to cover an appreciation of other forms of systemic repression and abuse, but it hasn't really changed its meaning, let alone been "borrowed". It is a critique of the liberal worldview in which progress is inevitable, incremental and defined by those already in positions of authority. 

Hinsliff does correctly note that the "war on woke" has been turbo-boosted in the UK by the recent Supreme Court judgement on the interpretation of sex in the 2010 Equalities Act, but she counterpoints this with other examples of an anti-woke turn across the political spectrum: Reform's anti-woke platform (which is mostly hot air), Starmer's turn to reactionary rhetoric (which heralds nasty policy), and Ash Sarkar's media-friendly book in which an irritation with identity politics and decolonisation is given a leftwing patina by the appeal to class. This allows Hinsliff to claim a consensus: "On all sides, woke has become shorthand less for a set of widely accepted liberal beliefs – few people today would put a slaver on a pedestal – than an associated style of highly online activism, seen as prone to denouncing opponents as morally evil, engaging in competitive victimhood and favouring performative protest over practical change." This is a conservative characterisation in its emphasis on perversity and futility, but also a liberal characterisation in its obsession with civility and decorum.

Trying to find a way forward (remember, the standfirst suggests that progressives need "new tactics"), Hinsliff turns to Luke Tryl of the cross-party More in Common think-tank. Ignoring the cringe-worthy marketing methodology of "political tribes", we find the claim that "Progressive Activists [are] further from mainstream public opinion on cultural issues than they realise. They’re the only group where a majority thinks that immigration should be as high or higher than it is now, and that protecting people from hate speech matters more than defending free speech (a key rationale behind “no debate” – the idea that trans identities aren’t up for discussion – and “no platforming”)." This ignores that progressives, defined by More in Common as "well-educated, highly engaged", are more likely to have an accurate understanding of levels of immigration, i.e. that they are much lower than the impression given by the media and consequently the common perception, hence "further from mainstream public opinion" isn't quite the gotcha Tryl imagines. It also ignores that we have laws against hate speech but no formal rights to free speech. Insofar as free speech needs defending, it is from restrictions on the right to protest, not from protestors.

Tryl's key conclusion, presumably shared by Hinsliff, is that "Progressive Activists overestimate by a factor of two to three how much others agree with their core beliefs, from abolishing the monarchy to letting children change gender. Consequently they tend to invest too little time on persuasion, focusing instead on mobilising the masses they wrongly imagine are on board." This is interpreted as arrogance and self-absorption by "purists", rather than a tendency to think well of other people or even the naivety of the unworldly, echoing the traditional conservative critique of reform. Again, notice the conservative emphasis on futility: don't protest, kids; you'll only alienate the silent majority. Hinsliff picks up the theme: "Core to woke philosophy is what is sometimes called “systemic thinking”, or the idea that society consists of overlapping systems of oppression, from capitalism to patriarchy, which we are socialised not to notice and to which we must be awoken by unpacking the power dynamics hidden in everyday interactions". This neatly undermines her own stunted history of the term, but it also undermines the claim that the woke don't care about explanation or persuasion: a systemic critique is literally a case of "Have you thought about it this way?" rather than "I have the key to all the mysteries" (or "rejecting supporters who don’t endorse a complete worldview", as she puts it).

Hinsliff resolves this by a retreat to the liberal concerns with civility and decorum. The woke are simply rude and offensive: "dismissive of other people’s small but well-meaning efforts ... correcting other people’s “mistakes” ... pile-ons and point-scoring ... shouting". This results in a line that wouldn't have been out of place in the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph when she raises the topic of class: "Were activists who scolded critics to “educate yourself” or “do the reading”, while speaking the language of undergraduate sociology essays, always likely to grate on the two-thirds of British adults who don’t have degrees?" Not only has she shrunk the Progressive Activists that More in Common estimate constitute 10% of the population down to a bunch of mouthy students, but they all appear to have studied sociology, a subject that has been in dramatic decline for 40 years now. This is like a cartoon in Private Eye, circa 1981, printed on the opposite page to the latest Dave Spart column. At this point Hinsliff rather loses her way, with discursions into whether woke language has hamstrung the Labour Party (a reminder that "the many, not the few" was first employed by Labour under Blair in the revamped Clause IV) and the tale of an academic who steadily moved to the right because he was challenged by students (a tale as old as academia). 

The essay finishes with some anecdotes from climate protestors whose purpose is to convince us that dramatic protests have had their day and we must work more cautiously in "an era of populist politics, tight budgets and renewed emphasis on energy security". While we are meant to submit to these artificial constraints (who sets the budget, Gaby?), the planet fries. Perhaps the most depressing part of this is Hinsliff's conclusion that this new sobriety and maturity (she doesn't use those words, but they hover over the entire essay) "reflects growing interest within the climate movement in focusing on what Roger Harding, co-director of the small eco-charity Round Our Way, calls “working-class, red wall voters who are not about to become vegan anytime soon” but still worry about the planet." After the caricature of domineering, middle class, twenty-something activists patronising the proles with their fancy jargon, we get the caricature of a reactionary working class that must be indulged in its prejudices in order to bring it onside for incremental change. For all that it reads like a cross between a Times editorial and an undergraduate essay on Animal Farm (see, anyone can do this), Hinsliff's magnum opus never loses sight of its main contention: that we can only have nice things if we behave ourselves and don't badger the authorities.

Nearly Men

Around this time last year I noted that Spurs fans had happily willed their team to sacrifice a Champions League place in order to ensure that defeat against Manchester City would prevent Arsenal winning the domestic title. Their reward was participation in the Europa League instead, which in the event led them to win their first trophy in 17 years, while finishing immediately above the relegation places in the Premier League, thereby qualifying for next season's Champions League. It's a funny old game and no mistake, mate. Daniel Levy's decision (for it will have been his alone) that Ange Postecoglu should be sacked as Tottenham manager ironically reflects the coping machanism of many Arsenal fans: the odd bit of silverware doesn't really matter (the 2020 FA Cup coming in Mikel Arteta's first season was only ever considered an appetiser). What does matter is being able to compete for, and hopefully win, either of the big two: the Premier League or the Champions League. Coming second in the former and exiting to the eventual winners of the latter in the semi-finals is objectively a good season, even if pot-less, but it also raises a number of what-ifs, not least what if Merino's goal in the PSG first leg wasn't offside and what if Saka had scored a second in the return leg.

Nobody would deny that Arsenal needed to buy a top-end striker last summer, but equally few would claim that their failure was down to a perverse belief that they didn't need one. It was purely about who was available. If Arsenal can be criticised, it is that they missed the opportunity to sign the promising Alexander Isak in 2022, preferring to opt for the more seasoned Gabriel Jesus. This wasn't down to price, despite the impact of Saudi money at Newcastle, as the difference in headline cost was reportedly only £10 million. The more likely explanation is a combination of the Swede's relative inexperience and Arteta's familiarity with the Brazilian. That conservative decision hasn't worked out, largely due to Jesus's long spells of injury, and you have to suspect that he won't be more than a backup centre forward in future, if only because his career strike-rate (roughly 1 goal in 3 games) is simply not at the truly elite level (better than 1 in 2). Eddie Nketiah's sale last summer was a risk, with no replacement coming in, requiring first Kai Havertz and then Mikel Merino to take over striker duties once Jesus's season was ended by an ACL injury.

Arteta has done a good job building the squad over the last 5 seasons but he has been unlucky in terms of transfer timing - who is available when - and injury to key players. If nothing else, he has proven his ability as a manager in having to adapt the team to the available resources. But there is a sense that he really has to get it right this summer up-front. To compound matters, he has to do so with a new Sporting Director, Andrea Berta, and at a time when a lot of other elite clubs are looking for reliable goal-scorers. Despite winning the Premier League, and Mohamed Salah picking up the Gold Boot, Liverpool aren't going to rely on Darwin Nunez. Manchester United clearly need at least two new attackers, and possibly three, while Newcastle United, Tottenham Hotspur and Aston Villa could all do with more firepower. Probably only Isak and Erling Haaland at Manchester City can be sure of their positions as first-choice stikers. While there are other parts of the Arsenal squad that will need replenishment or expansion, a top-class striker will be the sine qua non of this transfer window.

Arsenal have been derided as nearly men, but it's worth taking that criticism on the chin and asking just how near they are to finishing top in the Premier League. In the 2023-24 season they finished second on 89 points, with a goal tally of 91 scored and 29 conceded. Those are unquestionably title-winning numbers: Liverpool's for 2024-25 were 84, 86 and 41 respectively. Arsenal's problem was that in 2023-24 Manchester City finished 2 points ahead on the same goal difference (so yes, Spurs' capitulation did make a difference). This past season has seen a decline in the numbers: 74 points, 69 scored and 30 conceded. Points per game dropped from 2.34 to 1.95, due to the number of draws increasing from 5 to 14. Defeats actually fell from 5 to 4. Broken down into thirds, Arsenal struggled in the first period (22, 21, 12), hit their stride in the second (31, 30, 10) and then struggled again in the final stretch (21, 18, 12). The last of these was clearly the result of injuries to key players, while the first saw the PGMOL test their new guidelines on delaying a restart exclusively on Arsenal players, which cost the team 4 points (Brighton at home and Manchester City away), and which they then seemed to forget about for the rest of the season. The overall impression is one of bad luck. 

How much is luck a factor? The two previous seasons saw Arsenal also finish second, but at a higher rate of points accumulation (2.21 and 2.34 per game) and consistency between the thirds. The problem was that Manchester City managed to finish a few points ahead on both occasions. In 2022-23 this was largely down to the head-to-heads, when City won both, while in 2023-24 it was down to Arsenal losing at home to Aston Villa having taken a net 3 points from the head-to-heads. Arsenal were clearly improving and many expected them to take the final step this season, not least when City went into free-fall before last Christmas. That they didn't is down to a lack of goals scored. The defence is the best in the country and the midfield one of the best. There have been concerns over a lack of creativity against low blocks, but in reality this reflects the issue at centre forward rather than Martin Ødegaard's poor form or the lack of a top-quality backup to Bukayo Saka. Despite not always being clinical, Jesus's movement helped open up attacking channels for the midfield, whereas Havertz, and latterly Merino, offer a more predictable target man. Arsenal need a striker who can dominate one-on-one but also a player who is mobile enough to unsettle the opposing back line.

In contrast, Liverpool were fortunate this season is not being so badly disrupted by injuries, having a largely settled squad, and in having Mohamed Salah in the form of his life. Their goals have mostly come from wide attackers and midfield while their defence, though second best to Arsenal, conceded only 2 fewer than Chelsea who finished fourth. You need a bit of luck to win a cup competition (Spurs managed 1 shot on target in the Europa League final), but what you need to win a league is an absence of bad luck. Arsenal's wide attackers have been hampered by injury, while the central midfield has yielded few goals largely because the players earmarked to provide bursts into the box, Havertz and Merino, have had to deputise at centre forward. Declan Rice has proved himself the English game's leading all-rounder, but it's a bit much to expect him to score a hatful of goals as well as covering every blade of grass between the penalty areas. We all know what the missing piece of the jigsaw is; we now just need to go out and buy it.

Dropping the Pilot

Keir Starmer's intention for Labour to supplant the Tories and hegemonise the centre-right of politics is now undeniable. Whether this was the goal all along, or whether it simply reflects the opportunism of electoral success, needn't detain us. What matters is whether it is sustainable. The party's success in the 2024 general election, planned or not, depended on splitting the vote on the right and leveraging an "efficient" distribution of its historically poor 34% share into an overwhelming majority of seats. Given the current unpopularity of the government, it is hard to see the party commanding a higher percentage of the vote at the next general election, and it's quite possible it will fall below 30%. As a result, you would expect Starmer to cling to the split on the right as a drowning man would to a raft, but his words suggest that he is actively hoping for a Conservative implosion and preparing the ground for a straight fight with Reform in which the nominal party of the workers becomes the establishment's bulwark against reckless populism, hence his emphasis on fiscal responsibility and the characterisation of Nigel Farage as Liz Truss 2.0.

You could argue that defining the next election as a run-off between Labour and Reform makes sense as a way of maintaining the split on the right, because the Tories are unlikely to fall below 20% in a general election, no matter how far they plummet in the current opinion polls or in local council contests. Indeed, a smart bet would be that Labour, the Conservatives and Reform all end up with a share in the 20s, with the main net movement relative to 2024 being from the first to the last of these, but with Labour still the largest party by votes and seats and quite possibly with a reduced but still viable majority. While first-past-the-post hasn't always been kind to Labour, it definitely aids it when the vote is fragmented (i.e. 80% spread across four parties with the Liberal Democrats in the teens), and that is largely because Labour has a core of urban seats that it is unlikely to lose even on a major swing, while it can pick up seats in a four-way contest simply by getting over 25%.

It might seem odd that so much attention is being paid to the polls at this time, and that so much of what the government says seems to be geared to positioning the party relative to a contest that is unlikely to happen before 2029, but that is to ignore both the nature of the Starmer administration and the dynamics of this parliament. Right from the off, the Starmer project has been about winning power: first in the Labour Party and then, almost as a continuation of that primary battle, at Westminster. As has become clear, this is power for its own sake, not power for a purpose, as Gordon Brown used to put it, hence the thrashing about in search of some philosophical underpinning that even sympathetic commentators like Stephen Bush are beginning to find embarrassing. This is not to say that Starmer doesn't have political goals, but they are not ones that he can be open about: securing the state against democratic accountability, cementing the UK's role as the US's wingman and making London safe for international capital. In key respects, you could say: job done. But Starmer clearly isn't going to retire at this stage, both because he feels there is more to do to copper-bottom the ship of state from popular challenge and because he does appear to be acutely sensitive to, and not a little baffled by, his unpopularity..

A consequence of the government's intellectual void is the need to create plausible enemies that it can define itself against. Just as the myth of antisemitism in the Labour Party under Corbyn provided a vector for an attack on socialism and even liberalism, so the spectre of Nigel Farage haunting Westminster provides a plausible target by which Labour's conservative policies can be dignified in comparison, even when Farage seeks to outflank Labour on the left over the two-child benefits cap and the winter fuel allowance (WFA). Indeed, this manouevre is helpful to Starmer because it additonally allows him to dismiss internal dissent by bracketing it with Reform. The result is Labour's steady march rightwards and the media's willing shift of the locus of political debate to the right of public opinion as a consequence. Evidence of this shift can be seen in the ratchet effect of the government's approach. Thus unpopular policies, such as the two-child cap and the WFA, are followed by hints that the government might relent, softening the rules but not fully reversing and certainly not conceding on the principle that benefits should be conditional and means-tested. 

There are two notable dynamics in play in a House of Commons in which Labour has 403 seats and the official opposition, the Conservatives, have only 120. The first is the inevitable temptation for MPs of the ruling party to rebel, whether out of principle, boredom or the desire to make a name for themselves. Where the government has a wafer-thing majority, this can lead to individual MPs enjoying a lot of leverage. Where it has a large majority, rebellions take a lot of organising if they are not to be futile. With the Socialist Campaign Group marginalised within the PLP, this has led to the liberal media attempting to disinter the mouldering corpse of the "soft left". That the media are leading this effort tells you that the soft left does not meaningfully exist, but also that there is no organic development of an internal opposition. As nature abhors a vacuum the result has been a proliferation of "caucuses" (the West Wing framing of the media is tiresomely predictable), often with no more members than you can count on one hand, e.g. Blue Labour, while some of the larger groups, e.g the Labour Growth Group, turn out to be nothing more than distribution lists for statements by Number 10.

Insofar as there is a discernible group within the PLP that has the insitutional heft and organisational experience to form a coherent opposition, it is those MPs that have come up through trade union ranks. The assumption that Angela Rayner is the most likely challenger to Keir Starmer as party leader is based on her own union background as much as her nominal appeal as the soft left standard bearer. She is, in fact, a bread-and-butter Labourist, so actually located on the centre-right of the party in historical terms, which her leaked suggestions made clear: "There is no doubt this memo setting out new ways of raising taxes on wealthy people as well as a proposal to clamp down on benefits for migrants is a way of trying to show her broader appeal. “She’s trying to put clear water between her and Keir,” one senior source said." It is simply the shift of politics rightwards that leaves her traditional and unimaginative views looking radical and allows the Guardian to call her "the most leftwing member of Starmer’s cabinet" and the Independent to fantasise about dropping the pilot: "a large number of MPs from the so-called “soft left” of the party are organising to try to force a change of direction, with allies of deputy prime minister Anglea Rayner urging her to organise a leadership contest."

Among the Labour-supporting commentariat, Stephen Bush at the Financial Times has been the most vocal is his belief that the election victory last year is in danger of being wasted. As he sees it, Starmer remains too preoccupied with legitimising himself relative to the party's history and culture: "People at the heart of the Labour government seem to be more preoccupied about whether or not it is governing within the Labour tradition than whether it is governing well. Because frankly, the only time that Labour has been able to secure two consecutive full terms in power is when, under Tony Blair, it had a clear theory of economic growth: that of economic liberalism, openness to the world and to the EU in particular. ... If Labour ministers stagger on as they are, with no economic project, no overarching plan for the public services, twisting and turning in the direction of public opinion, they will, like the Wilson government did, spend all their time losing and drifting before they lose the next election." That Blair's "theory" led to the global financial crisis of 2008 and the UK's exit from the EU does not give Stephen pause for thought.

Bush's depression doesn't stem solely from Starmer's inadequacies: his anti-intellectualism, his preference to cleave to the familiar territories of criminal justice and national security, his lack of charisma. It also arises from the belief that the window of opportunity presented by the fortuitous split on the right cannot last: that either the Tories recover their balance and Farage is once more relegated to the fringe, or the Conservative membership decamps en masse to Reform and regenerates it as a radical Thatcherite party, dropping the social liberalism but also re-establishing its role as the political wing of UK corporate interests and presenting itself as a competent national conservative party rather than a populist ginger group. It is likely that Kemi Badenoch is going to be walking the gangplank once her first 12 months are up in November. As Phil Burton-Cartledge notes, "a more moderate conservatism that actually conserves instead of destroys is ... the prospectus offered by no would-be successor to Badenoch". But that's because moderate conservatism is now the Labour brand. The push rightwards means that the space further right becomes congested, but that simply encourages merger. Labour's strategy remains the hope that such a reconfiguration can be avoided or, if it happens, that the Reformed Tories remain a Quixotic rabble. 

What will ultimately determine Labour's fate is whether the bitterness that it is currently cultivating persists. A government can be unpopular and still win if it is considered the lesser of two (or three) evils, but it can't win if it is hated, as Rishi Sunak discovered, and there is no question that a lot of people, including many who voted Labour last July, hate Starmer and his cabinet, and they have hated them right from the off. As Morgan McSweeney's amanuensis Jessica Elgot plaintively noted, "There is a barely concealed frustration among some Labour staffers about the intensity of the rejection. This is a government overseeing a huge boost to the minimum wage, protecting employees from tax rises, nationalising the railways and investing billions in the NHS." Leaving aside the sense of entitlement and the dubious claims, the point is that only one in three voters plumped for the party in 2024. It wasn't popular then and it isn't going to get any more popular with Starmer in charge. The last election was a fluke, but if you spent the previous 8 years insisting that only centrist managerialism and Starmer's "adultness" could propel Labour into office, you aren't going to admit that now. 

Starmer will continue as leader to the bitter end because the lurch to the right means there is no coherent opposition to him within the party, just a lot of unfocused personal ambition among the cabinet, few of whom appear to have any original ideas of their own, hence the excessive emphasis on their "life stories" as much as their appetite for the tired prescriptions of liberal think tanks and the Tony Blair Institute. A paradox is that while many Labour MPs, novices to the fore, know that they'll be looking for new jobs in four years, few fancy the gamble of a leadership challenge to try and change that doom-laden narrative now. As "Freebiegate" (which we should note occured within months of Labour taking office) showed, there is an air of fill-yer-boots about the current PLP, something that the public beyond Westminster appeared to pick up on well before the media did. If I can make one prediction with confidence, it is that this parliament will go down as one of the least talented and most underwhelming since full adult suffrage. When the most notable backbench initiative is a law to allow you to kill yourself, perhaps that isn't so surprising.

It's the Only Language They Understand.

If you want to shrink the prison population, reducing the tariff for murderers in exchange for the modern equivalent of the leg-iron (a "tag"), or chemically castrating a small number of sex offenders, will make little difference. Yet this recourse to the almost Medieval is the predictable focus of the media, and thus politicians, when the obvious short-term solution to over-crowding is a general amnesty for non-serious crimes. Outside of newspaper columns, there is no dispute that the reason British gaols are full is that we send too many people to them for often trivial reasons, not because we haven't built enough of them. It is standard to bemoan the failure of the prison system to rehabilitate, but while this can be fairly attributed to overcrowding and insuffcient resources, it is also the case that many people reading reports that prisoners spend 23 hours a day locked up will respond with "good". In other words, even if resources were infinite, it's unlikely we would prioritise rehabilitation over punishment. 

The government's current sentencing review, which was headed by David Gauke, the former Conservative Justice Secretary, is typical in reiterating this priority even as it admits the spiteful dynamic: "The purposes of sentencing, as set out in legislation, are punishment, reduction of crime, reparation, rehabilitation and public protection. The Review’s Part 1 report History and Trends in Sentencing found that over the last two decades, sentencing has focused disproportionately on punishment with a view from politicians and the media that 'the only form of punishment that counts is imprisonment.'" The response of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners was similar in its view: "The deprivation of liberty by imprisonment is a powerful tool, and Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) are clear it must be used to punish, and keep the public safe from, the most serious offenders. However, we support greater use of community supervision for those convicted of lower level crimes because the evidence shows short custodial sentences do little to rehabilitate repeat offenders". 

What we're witnessing in the latest floating of alternatives to prison is neither pragmatism nor idealism but a determination to maintain punishment at the apex of the hierarchy of purpose for the justice system. Convicts must suffer, hence even the mild inconveniences of tagging and curfews are preferred to the socially useful contributions and reparations of community orders that the press routinely deride as "soft". But the instinctive liberal response - that we should issue fewer custodial sentences, that prison conditions should be more humane and that we should properly support rehabilitation - has its own flaws, not least that it obscures the nature of the prison and the role it plays in society. For this reason, a decision to avoid the use of prison can potentially lead to worse outcomes. A famous example of chemical castration as an alternative to porridge was Alan Turing whose subsequent suicide eventually led to an apology by the last Labour government. No doubt Shabana Mahmood, the current Justice Secretary, is aware of the history, but she has a feral press to placate so it's (chemically, and with consent) "cut their goolies off". It's the only language they understand.

Prisons are the product of another age, specifically the Victorian era of high industrialism and the consequent reduction of labour to standardised units, as explored by social historians such as Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Their mix of the modern (surveillance and regimentation) and the anti-modern (a regime predating all that nonsense about human rights) remains a virtue for many. The reason prisons are antiquated in their operation as much as their fabric is because as a society we don't want to let go of that Victorian regime. We find modern prisons, with their functioning toilets and air-conditioning, irritating because there isn't visible suffering beyond the boredom of incarceration. Insofar as there has historically been an aversion to the use of prison it has been wholly on the basis of class (nicely satirised in Kind Hearts and Coronets), hence the reluctance to jail whitecollar criminals or the preference to send them to "open prisons" if a custodial sentence was unavoidable. 

As some point, there will be a dissolution of the prisons as dramatic as the dissolution of the monateries. Prisons are costly and ineffective, in terms of punishment as much as rehabilitation, as indicated by the high levels of recidivism. There will still be a need for the incarceration of "dangerous criminals" for public safety, but that definition will inevitably elide with that of the "criminally insane" or the "terrorist", whom society is happy to consider as categorically different, not least in their obscurity (the old idea of the oubliette). For the vast majority of crimes we will inevitably drop custodial sentences. The problem is that we will do that by normalising the idea of punishment within society rather than apart from it. Like the leper colonies and madhouses of the late Medieval period, the first purpose of the recognisably modern prisons that emerged in the Age of Enlightenment was quarantine, a principle taken to the extreme of preventing any intercourse between prisoners themselves, or even allowing the prisoner to see his gaolers, as in Jeremy Bentham's famous Panopticon.

We have already shifted the idea of reparation out of the prison system into society with community orders and ritual apologies to victims. The next step will be to shift punishment out as well. It isn't a coincidence that there have been a number of high profile cases of prison staff being prosecuted for having sexual relationships with prisoners in recent years. The subtext is the evaporation of boundaries: the very antithesis of Bentham's regime. That these incidents are often explained as the result of a crisis within the prison service (low morale, poor vetting, inadequate training) is illustrative of the belief that prisons are no longer fit for purpose: that the system is breaking down. But the more telling feature of this trend (the prominence of reporting rather than incidence) is the sense of the outside world breaching the prison wall, whether in the form of drugs and mobile phones smuggled in by drones or the sexual opportunism of warders. It is in this context that we should see the government's plans. Chemical castration is a punishment enacted within society. Tagging and curfews likewise. Punishment is moving out of the quarantine of prison and into society at large, and once that happens the need for forbidding walls diminishes.

The reason the prison population has grown is because the high threshold for custodial sentences has fallen over time. The threshold was obviously very low in the 18th and 19th centuries, as prison became an industry in itself and a key component of industrial society, but it rose over the course of the 20th century, due to "reform", reaching a peak in the 1970s as part of the sociological turn in which institutionalisation was seen as failure. It then fell once more, as politicians under pressure from the reactionary press decided that sending more people to gaol was a reasonable compensation for not reintroducing the death penalty. Tony Blair's mantra "Tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime" was an early sally into social punishment, blurring the boundaries between society and its criminal element, the most famous example of this being ASBOs: a device that recognised a social ill but simultaneously insisted that redress should be social as well, so placing both crime and punishment beyond the penal system.

The danger is that the threshold will remain low but be transferred across to punishment in society. In other words, you could easily find yourself serving a non-custodial sentence for an offence that 50 years ago wouldn't have resulted in more than a caution. We could see a lot more people tagged and curfewed. Not just a handful of murderers who have served half their sentence but youth done for smoking weed or the poor for shoplifting (whitecollar criminals will once more tend to be spared the worst). The choice that faces us as a society is whether the priority of the justice system is punishment or restitution (i.e. the rehabilitation of offenders and the reparation, where possible, of victims). The discussion of alternatives to prison is being carefully curated to emphasise that punishment remains the priority. The full development of a prison industrial complex run by private companies like Sodexo has been ruled out on the grounds of cost and incompetence, but the privatisation of punishment in society, managed by the likes of Serco, continues apace, and despite the same failings.