Lost Futures

The suggestion that the "rules-based international order" is over, as a result of Donald Trump threatening to annex Greenland, is not the harbinger of a new international settlement, let alone a replacement for NATO, but a plea for a new narrative to explain US hegemony and excuse its attendant hypocrisy. 

It was notable that in his speech at Davos Mark Carney argued that we must move on from the "pleasant fiction" of the old order by quoting Václav Havel's fictional tale of an honest greengrocer "living in truth". The liberal commentariat predictably swooned at this display of muscular liberalism and the invocation of a humanist saint, but what they failed to acknowledge was that the Canadian Prime Minister wasn't arguing for the creation of a counterbalancing pole to American power but simply a more palatable story that could be sold to the electorates of the "middle powers". Inevitably, many spun the speech to suit their priors, notably those arguing for closer cooperation between the UK and the EU, but Canada is never going to seek accession (hilarious as that scenario might be) because its own interests necessitate a bilateral approach to its neighbour across a 5,000 mile indefensible border. Likewise, Keir Starmer knows that the UK is too entangled with the US security state and financial markets to be anything other than a rule-taker.

The idealised "rules-based international order", which obviously never lived up to the dreams of a Kantian perpetual peace, was a busted flush long before Israel invaded Gaza and proceeded to liquidate part of the civilian population, let alone before the US kidnapped Nicolas Maduro. As Larry Elliott notes, the economic and trade base of that order has been problematic for decades and the political superstructure increasingly dysfunctional. If you wanted to isolate a geopolitical moment when the veil was lifted, you could go back to the Iraq War or the wider War on Terror, but 9/11 was simply the moment when the narrower illusion of security that the long-90s depended on was revealed as a pause between the existential fear of the Cold War and our contemporary "polycrisis" anxiety over climate breakdown, novel pandemics, demographic decline, infrastructural decay and the deleterious effects of social media on fragile young minds. Fear has been the norm and it has been exercised systematically by politicians to discipline populations, particularly in the "sophisticated" democracies of those middle powers (that Carney's speech largely ignored the rest of the world, beyond listing Canadian trade deals, wasn't an oversight).

In this historical context, Trump's turn as a mobster who whacks opponents and demands both protection money (tariffs) and the signing over of property titles (Greenland, maybe Iceland) is frankly comical, or would be if it didn't translate to the murder and incarceration of civilians from Minneapolis to East Jerusalem. These deaths and imprisonments are the normal currency of hegemonic power. Long before Trump appeared on the scene, the US was jailing hundreds of thousands of its own citizens on racially-biased charges, and aiding and abetting murders by its proxy agents abroad, from South America to East Asia. ICE is a texbook example of how the methods of empire are inevitably imported to the metropole, but it is also an example of continuing imperial privilege: this abuse of process is not meant to happen to "us", even though it has happened to plenty of US citizens over the years. The problem now, for both the middle powers and liberal opinion in America, is the lack of a plausible narrative to whitewash the grim reality. 

After 1989, anti-communism was no longer effective at a geopolitical level, albeit it continues in weak form as a habitual recourse in domestic politics, now often combined with the charge of antisemitism. Russia may no longer be communist, or even remotely socialist, but it will forever be burdened with the psychic legacy of anticommunism simply because the charge that the Western left is "soft on Putin" remains too useful to dispense with. The 1990s narrative of liberal interventionism that succeeded anticommunism was never stable enough to survive either the raised expectations of those seeking genuine democracy, or the realities of its application on the ground by cynical realists, resulting in the anodyne compromise of the rules-based order. This was simply a rhetorical placeholder for want of anything better, and one that looked increasingly threadbare after the Balkan Wars.

The current attempts to construct a new narrative are struggling because they are being driven by the supporting cast rather than the lead character, and are consequently tentative and circumspect. Carney's frank truths aren't going to stop Trump dismissing him as a lightweight. Commentators who talk about the US President's unusual approach or unconventional style are really highlighting a void: Washington isn't providing hegemonic leadership to its empire, obliging the satrapies (those middle powers) to step forward and attempt to fill the gap. This raises two questions. First, can the "rest of the West" really constitute an independent power, whether as a collective posture in response to American unreliability or as a genuine competitor on the economic, military and geopolitical planes? Second, would their political establishments, so imbricated with American empire, even want to if they could? A third, more parochial, question is how the UK would fit into any new structure or narrative. 

The middle powers aren't going to gang up on the USA, or cut substantive deals with China and Russia. All they really want is a more palatable narrative in which their political classes aren't humiliated in public by the buffoonish head of a New York crime family. There will be much talk of realism and pragmatism, plenty of acceding to American demands dressed as compromise, and permanently clenched teeth behind fixed smiles until the Trump regime is deposed. Though the preferences of the middle powers mean nothing to the average American voter, the Democrats will, like latterday Bourbons, take heart from this international disdain and imagine that the liberal order can be restored. But the truth is that those middle powers are passing judgment on the inadequacy of that order, or at least the narratives that supported it. What the likes of Carney seek is not a Washington Consensus 2.0 but a return to the consoling fictions of the Cold War, hence the emblematic role of the Russian basket-case in current European thinking.

The UK will remain relatively isolated, still supposedly navigating between the imagined Scylla and Charybdis of America and Europe, despite the fact that we went all-in with the former 80 years ago. As Keir Starmer has made clear, the establishment is unwilling to adopt as provocative a rhetorical stance towards the US as the other middle powers and will insist that the special relationship remains sound and will show its value any day now. We will continue to make TV programmes like Downton Abbey and The Crown, for domestic consumption and American export, that highlight our uncertain self-image, somewhere between a thoughtless aristocrat and a pompous butler. We will painfully inch towards the EU to redress the impact of Brexit, while the City of London will become ever more a satellite of New York, and UK public services and government itself will be ever more penetrated by American businesses as we "embrace AI". We will continue to be haunted by the lost futures signed away at Bretton Woods and Nassau, and in June 2016.

What Is the Labour Government For?

Though noticeably obtuse when it comes to actual history, the Guardian's political coverage has a marked tendency to recycle the past, seeking parallels and portents to explain contemporary developments. The shadows of Thatcher and Blair loom large. This can give the impression that British politics is stuck in an endless holding pattern, which isn't entirely wrong. The latest example sees the political editor Pippa Crerar mining a more recent seam, the 2015 general election: "Before the 2015 UK election, the Australian political expert Lynton Crosby devised a strategy for the Tories that became known as “scraping the barnacles off the boat” – shedding unpopular policies that hindered the party’s electoral appeal. Instead, the party focused on core issues it believed would help win over floating voters: the economy, welfare, the strength of David Cameron (and weakness of Ed Miliband) and immigration. Everything else was deprioritised and the Conservatives stuck to their messages rigidly. It worked."

The Tory focus on essentials in 2015 had the advantage that most voters considered it plausible. The Tories can usually be relied on to promote the interests of business, and enough people are convinced by the media that this is the same as promoting a healthy economy. Likewise, there were solid grounds in 2015 for believing that the Tories would be hard on welfare (excepting pensions), not least their track record as part of the outgoing coalition government that had embedded austerity. And it wasn't implausible that they would lower immigration relative to the "influx" of Eastern Europeans seen under New Labour. Of course, the last of these is now a busted flush, following the "Boriswave" that was the predictable consequence of getting Brexit done, which goes some way to explain why the party is down in the polls and Reform is up. Indeed, you could argue that it largely explains why Reform exists and now has 6 MPs (Robert Jenrick having defected from the Conservatives this week).

In contrast, the problem for Labour is that a dwindling number of voters are convinced of the party's core values, or even believe that they have any. As a result, a strategy of "scraping the barnacles off the boat" in order to focus on core issues like the cost of living doesn't convince, both because the commitment seems insincere and because the government seems incapable of dragging its attention away from the barnacles. The recent partial U-turns on ID cards, inheritance tax and business rates all suggest a government that doesn't really know what it is doing, or why it is doing it, given that all were battles it chose to fight and could easily have avoided. The emblematic ID card scheme, like the watering down of the Hillsborough bill and the proposed abolition of jury trials, suggests a government incapable of passing up an opportunity to indulge it authoritarian instincts, while its attempt to exempt the security state from the duty of candour is an example of its unerring ability to misunderstand public opinion. None of this is ever going to be popular with voters.

The bulk of the PLP also seems unwilling to let go of the issues that it believes helped it into power, hence antisemitism is once more in the news, with MPs apparently terrorised by teachers and the West Midlands Police accused of a secret agenda in banning the notorious ultras of Tel Aviv Maccabi. This is because the essential issue for many on the party right is the defeat of the left, the one issue that reliably unites the Old Right, the Blairites and Blue Labour. This has mechanically led to the promotion and protection of Israeli interests, which has in turn gradually morphed into a soft Islamophobia. This has presented the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, with a dilemma. She can't dismiss the WMP's poor handling of the affair as a trivial operational matter without being accused of pandering to the Muslim vote, and she can't dismiss the force's critics as hyperventilating opportunists without calling into question the seriousness of the charge of antisemitism. The result is that she has felt obliged to demand the Chief Constable's resignation. 

What these two cases highlight is that the right of the party are having to cast their net ever wider to find opponents now that the left has been expelled from Labour. In Bristol, it isn't the pro-Palestine protestors who face sanction but the school that sought to avoid conflict outside its gates, while in Birmingham Labour find themselves attacking the police because they too sought to avoid conflict on the streets around Villa Park. The Labour right - many of whom had little interest in antisemitism before 2015 - now find that they can no longer control the monster they created over the last decade, but also find that they cannot kick the drug, if I can mix my metaphors. They are now at the mercy of small, unrepresentative activist groups, like Labour Against Antisemitism, but they have also internalised the cause so completely that they are willing to credulously espy antisemitism almost anywhere within the institutions of the British state and the wider establishment, from the BBC to school governors and the police.This has the febrile atmosphere of a "terror", even if people aren't being routinely shot on the flimsiest of pretexts.

You can understand why the likes of John Mann wish to keep antisemitism prominent, over and above a defensive posture in the face of protests over Gaza. Without it, he has no political utility for the British media and thus no public profile. But you would imagine that there are plenty of MPs outside Labour Friends of Israel who can see how self-defeating this has become for the party and how irrelevant it is for most voters. The demand that the government do more about the cost of living crisis is thus a veiled criticism not only of its lack of focus but of its chronic tendency to be distracted by the "barnacles". You could (generously) interpret the recent chunterings by Paul Ovenden about the "stakeholder state" as having a similar rationale. But what all the mutterings about a lack of focus and the ineffective "levers of power" avoid is the admission that the reason this government is failing is because it is run by people whose ambition (and whose expectation until quite late in the day) was limited to recapturing the Labour Party from the hated left.

Now in office, purely as a result of the Tory collapse, and augmented in the Commons by a generation of rightwing novice MPs who have only ever known factional struggle in draughty church halls and social club committee rooms, the Labour Party cannot shake its belief that the UK faces a greater threat from a fragmented and disorganised left than it does from a nativist right led by a genuine antisemite. The revelations about Nigel Farage's schooldays can be read as an attempt by liberals to shift the government's focus from the left to the right, and will succeed up to a point - Starmer will happily decry antisemitism on both flanks - but the effort will ultimately fail so long as the likes of John Mann and Steve Reed have a platform. They will always prefer to attack the left. This is reinforced by their not-so-secret belief that the political right will remain divided as the bitter and acrimonious defection of Tories to Reform continues. The focus of the Labour right's ire will increasingly shift to the Greens, particularly if Your Party continues to spiral towards irrelevance.

The problem is that this still doesn't answer the question: what is this Labour government for? All it does is recapitulate the same arguments made by its media outriders in 2024: that here is a group of sober professionals who can be trusted to manage the country after Tory chaos, and who have proved their ethical credentials by their robust expulsion of the left. It fails to recognise that they won the last general election by default, that their authoritarian managerialism was never popular, and that their track record in office has underwhelmed even the pessimists. A change of leader later this year is unlikely to alter the trajectory, but that in turn will only cause the party to redouble its efforts to remind the electorate that the real threat is the left and only this iteration of Labour can counter it. More enemies will have to be found who can be tarred with the brush of objective antisemitism. The herbivorous teachers and nonplussed police officers are only the start.

Leverage

In the latest issue of The Economist, Matt Holehouse has an article that purports to reflect the consensus of the political class: essentially, that the levers of government are ineffective. He opens with an anecdote about the denizens of Number 10 Downing Street fiddling with redundant thermostats that fail to alter the temperature. This is, pretty obviously, an invention, though it does serve more purposes as a metaphor than the author perhaps intends. Rather than focusing on the systemic disconnect between dial and boiler, perhaps we should note the British state's unwillingness to rip out old fixtures and fittings (the House of Lords inevitably springs to mind), or even to wonder whether people who persist with a futile action (the very definition of madness) should really be in a position of power. Holehouse then quotes Keir Starmer: "Every time I go to pull a lever, there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations and arm’s-length bodies that mean the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be". Is this credible coming from a former DPP, who was supposedly so well-versed in the machinery of the state that he was seen as a natural for Prime Minister?

This bathetic introduction provides an opportunity for Holehouse to cite the recent complaints by Paul Ovenden, Starmer's former director of strategy, who quit the chilly building when vicious messages denigrating Diane Abbott came to light, about the supposed "stakeholder state: a sticky nexus of campaigners, regulators and lawyers who gum up government business with fringe causes." Ovenden's diatribe barely qualifies as analysis, but the language employed by Holehouse to summarise him is revealing, both the emphasis on a "nexus", which implies a common interest, and on the "fringe causes", which is a condescending way of describing attempts to hold the government to account. Whenever a politician talks about the ineffectivess of the levers of power, they are simply demanding fewer constraints on their ability to exercise that power. Holehouse makes this clear when he claims that "Focus groups increasingly see Reform UK’s leader, Nigel Farage, as a “just do it” politician." That bowdlerised phrase originates in the world of business - The Economist 's natural audience - and is usually abbreviated to JFDI: just fucking do it. In other words, execute my will without demur. If you want an example of what that means in practice, consider an unarmed civilian shot in the head by a masked agent of the state on a street in Minneapolis.

But Holehouse is not interested in impunity so much as unanimity: "This appetite for a stronger, faster, politically charged centre of government amounts to a curious consensus between Sir Keir, the Tories and Mr Farage. ... Like Mr Johnson during covid-19, Sir Keir has talked of “mission control” nerve centres in Whitehall, with large screens displaying data feeds. Reform UK shares the same vision. The party promises a cull of civil servants and quangos, and a shock-and-awe legislative campaign, to “ensure that the state apparatus obeys the will of the people”." The current experience of Reform in running local authorities - i.e. their realisation that far from cutting council tax they must increase it simply to keep the lights on - should have prompted some scepticism on Holehouse's part. And the ridiculous image of large screens, like something out of a James Bond film, should have stirred the memory of New Labour's obsession with fatuous and misleading metrics. But these are ultimately distractions. What matters is the claim of consensus, which might seem paradoxical if you were expecting the next general election to provide a clear choice between Labour and Reform.

Holehouse then pivots to present a more subtle argument. As he correctly notes "For governments that know what they want, arm’s-lengths bodies are not obstacles to their agenda, but instruments for executing it. Margaret Thatcher created “executive agencies” to run services like passports and patents, reckoning that a new cadre of business-minded managers would be more efficient than the Whitehall old guard." What he doesn't explore is the patchy record of the agency approach. He also accepts at face value the claims of decentralisation: "Such centralisation is a big intellectual break from the past 40 years. New Labour saw decentralisation as synonymous with modernisation. David Cameron came to power in 2010 with ideas of localism, volunteerism and personalised choice in public services." As any fule kno', the UK state has undergone massive centralisation since Thatcher opened her multiple fronts against local government, industrial coordination and the welfare state, and that direction of travel has continued up to today. The problem is that the antipathy towards the men from the ministry - the Civil Service - has seen that centralisation made deeper but narrower through the agency state: the parcellisation of power across "independent" regulators and commercial outsourcers.

As befits The Economist's ideological position, what Holehouse is really arguing for here is a continuation of the neoliberal state. The whining about ineffective levers is seen as an unflattering reflection on the political inadequacies of the government: "Sir Keir promises a “fundamental reform of the British state”, but his remarks reflect frustration with government more than a plan to remake it ... Sir Keir has, his colleagues say, no real theory of the state ... by lamenting that Labour feels powerless, Sir Keir only makes the case for his populist rivals." The worry then is that if capitalism's B team is admitting its inability to govern, at the same time as the A team have spiralled off into irrelevance and culture war posturing, then the way may be opened to a party of rightwing chancers whose approach to the neoliberal state will be a mixture of vandalism, cupidity and gross incompetence, in the manner of the latest Trump administration in the US. The Economist was against Brexit and remains in favour of closer economic ties with the European Union. It is disappointed in the timidity of the current government in achieving that. This is a vote of no confidence in Keir Starmer.

Coincidentally, Larry Elliott published a more centre-left variant of this critique in The Guardian on the same day. This was again heavy on the ineffective levers trope but did at least acknowledge the role played by "obeisance to market forces", the "dominance of the Treasury" and the "British cult of the amateur". Where Holehouse is happy with the neoliberal state but dismissive of the quality of the politicians tasked with presenting it to the public, Elliott wishes for a return to the indicative planning of the 1960s and the marginalistion of the Treasury, which (briefly) empowered politicians. This is hardly likely, not least because the political courage and imagination required to make it happen is lacking in a Labour Party now deeply imbricated in the agency state (Ovenden's bitter screed noticeably ignores the revolving door). As a high-profile Lexiteer, Elliott ignores rapprochement with the EU, but it should be clear that his desire for a more dirigiste economic policy would be in tension with any move towards greater integration, not least in attempting to "pick winners" in a single market hostile to preferential state subsidies.

The flurry of press articles about the ineffective levers of power is best read as a withering judgement on the calibre of the cabinet in general and the Prime Minister in particular, rather than a systemic critique. Indeed, the very emphasis on levers, buttons and dials tells you that these are not synecdoches of the machinery of government but metonyms of the politicians - the hands - meant to operate it. Significantly, these articles don't propose substantive policies ("picking winners" is an aspiration) or forward-looking structural reforms (recreating the NEDC is just nostalgia). This is because the authors have no confidence that Starmer, or anyone else among the senior ranks of the Labour Party, is capable of putting the machinery of government to radical use. As Elliott notes, "Only rarely, and then usually as a result of extreme circumstances, has the British state been geared up for transformative change." The chance was missed with the 2008 financial crisis and again with the Covid pandemic. Should another opportunity, offering similar leverage, arise over the next four years, it will be studiously ignored.