The Starmer Legacy

To no one's surprise, the local election results have led to the demand, both inside and outside the Labour Party, that Keir Starmer stands down as Prime Minister. While short-lived premierships are not unknown, particularly over the last decade, Starmer's fall is spectacular. A man who arguably rose without a trace is destined for well-deserved obscurity. The first point to make is that his limited popularity started to drop immediately after Labour's general election triumph in 2024 when only 34% of the vote secured the party 63% of the seats in the House of Commons. His performance since then, from the winter fuel allowance fiasco to his support for Israeli war crimes in Gaza, has accelerated this trend, but he was never popular to begin with, even among Labour Party members and supporters who had seen him steadily renege on all the promises he made to win election as party leader. With the end of his ultimately barren political career imminent, the question we have to ask is what was the significance of Starmer? We understand the shenanigans and dumb luck that propelled him into Downing Street, but why him and why now?

Some commentators have taken to wondering if the country has become ungovernable, or if we are cursed by zombie politics, or if the problem is simply that our politics is fundamentally stupid. The common theme here is learned helplessness. The elevation of Starmer as first party leader and then Prime Minister is perhaps evidence that the country didn't think it could do any better, a feeling that persists and means Starmer will probably remain in situ for a while yet. Labour Party members may bemoan that they were deceived, but anyone remotely engaged with politics in 2019 could have told them that this was on the cards. Starmer was the clean-skin of the right, with the backing of shadowy Blairite fixers like Mandelson and McSweeney, and would purge the left as soon as he could. Likewise, the much-ridiculed claim in 2020 by the historian Glen O'Hara that what mattered was managerial competence - "Starmer can chair a meeting. He can draft a minute. He can lead a team. He can hold a press conference" - was quite simply a counsel of despair: a paean to lowered expectations, not an encomium. The irony is that subsequent events, and the anonymous briefings about his indecisiveness and lack of political nous, have shown that initial assessment to have been optimistic.

To understand the meaning of Starmer we have to put him, and this pervasive sense of learned helplessness, in its historical context. Unfortunately, this doesn't suit the fashionable concerns of our media, for whom history is just so much going over old ground and old arguments and so to be avoided. But this ahistoricism is also to be found among those who pride themselves on taking a longer view. For example, Simon Wren-Lewis thinks there was a change in the intellectual rigour of government between 2003 and 2008: "After these years when evidence-based policy making was the ideal, it was a genuine puzzle as to why the Western world had collectively decided to ignore basic macroeconomics and cut government spending in the middle of the worst recession since WWII when interest rates were stuck at their lower bound. Yet from today’s perspective, where everything from harvesting policy-based evidence to simple lying is so endemic, it all seems much less of a puzzle." But you might as well ask why the government adopted similar austerity measures in the 1930s when there was credible advice (notably from John Maynard Keynes) to do otherwise. The answer is: they did it because it was in their class interests to do so, not because of some sudden lapse in character. 

The idea that New Labour was wedded to evidence-based policy-making is obviously a myth (2003 was also the year of the instrumental lying over Iraq), but so too is Wren-Lewis's claim that "Brexit marked the first triumph of populism in the UK." Contemporary rightwing populism is marked by an anti-state fiscal obsession ("We'll make public spending savings and deliver tax cuts"), by xenophobia ("The immigrants are to blame for society's ills"), and by a belief that traitorous "elites" are undermining the nation (often in cahoots with the immigrants). If we're looking for this worldview's first triumph in British politics, surely the place to start is Margaret Thatcher's ascension to the leadership of the Conservative Party. Whatever her preferences in economic or political theory (monetarism, Hayek etc), her rise was founded on the idea that the establishment was rotten (the "wets", the traitorous BBC), had sold out to left-leaning elites (the trade union "barons", the liberal public sector that derided Victorian values), and was cultivating ethnic minorities against the interests of the nation ("people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture"). Curbing organised labour, restraining "loony left" councils, and imposing the national curriculum in education were all populist measures.

One explanation that Wren-Lewis offers is the role of the press in advocating austerity after the great financial crash: "The media made it hard for opposition Labour voices to argue that the government was going too fast, too hard on cuts, so Labour eventually gave up." But this is inaccurate. Alistair Darling was already promising deep, real-terms spending cuts in 2009. He may not have made a virtue of it, as George Osborne did, but there was unquestionably a political consensus on austerity even before the 2010 general election. Thereafter, Labour's opposition to the cuts was little more than quibbling, which directly led to the election of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 on a platform of actually opposing the cuts (a point Wren-Lewis is willing to concede in a footnote). The question that should be asked is why there was a cross-party consensus on austerity in 2009. Can it be solely attributed to this country's horrendous media? Again, a comparison with the 1930s suggest that the economic orthodoxy - that budgets must be balanced through spending cuts and/or tax rises during a recession - was hegemonic across the major parties, hence the split in Labour in 1931.

Wren-Lewis continues: "The right wing media is hardly a source of informed and balanced commentary. To some extent that has always been true, but it does seem to have got worse over the last few decades: just look at the Daily Telegraph, or GB news. The transformation of social media, to the extent that it influences political debate and discourse, has been more dramatic, and is now clearly a source of simplistic views that tend to match those of its owners." Again, the British press is no more reprehensible than it has ever been. It hasn't got worse, it simply started out bad amidst the imperialist jingo of the late nineteenth century (when expanded literacy and growing affordability led to a boom in newsprint) and has never got any better. Simon's suggestion that social media reflects only the views of its rightwing owners is bizarre, particularly coming from someone who is quite active online and regularly gets into spats with people whose views are a million miles away from Elon Musk or Rupert Murdoch.

My point in all this is that British politics has been on a populist trajectory since at least the 1970s but one that obscures a much more persistent conservatism. You could see the Major years and New Labour as a countermovement to Thatcherite populism, but in fact continuity was more obvious than change, hence the persistence of the fundamental economic dispensation (shrinking the state's role, protecting investors, restraining organised labour), the running sore of xenophobia (recast in terms of "bogus asylum-seekers"), the general tendency towards authoritarianism (ASBOs), and the  systematic marketisation of the welfare state. That said, there was a discernible shift in the political landscape around the millennium, arising from fundamental changes in political economy and the material base. Keir Starmer's ascension can be seen as emblematic of the way that three specific developments associated with this shift worked themselves out. They are: the intellectual bankruptcy of the political centre; the assisted death of the Labour Party by its own right wing; and the terminal delinquency of the press.

The political centre as a distinctive body of thought (the Third Way) came to prominence in the 1990s first under Bill Clinton in the US and then under Tony Blair in the UK. But it was already crumbling, essentially because the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marginalised the idea of socialism for a generation. This meant that the premise of a middle way, a grand bargain between social democracy and free markets, was no longer required, which led to the era of liberal triumphalism and ultimately the folly of both Iraq and the dominance of financialisation. With the return of socialism as a viable alternative after 2008, if only rhetorically, centrist politics found itself without any space for manoeuvre - there was no meaningful middle way to plot any longer with social democracy all but gutted - obliging it to make common cause with conservatives in defence of the market. This was a key contributor to the emergence of cartel politics, with its emphases on fiscal orthodoxy, technocracy and the exclusion of the illegitimate fringe. It also compromised the media (the influence is bidirectional) by encouraging the idea that political journalism was about policing the boundaries of the cartel. The result of this in the UK has been the conscious strategy of Labour to replace the Conservatives as the dominant party on the centre-right, pursuing largely the same policies but with an appeal to managerial competence and recourse to the mawkish class sentimentality embodied by Starmer ("My dad was a toolmaker").

This shift explains the purging of the Labour left, a move that Starmer has taken to a level that would have been unthinkable to the likes of Hugh Gaitskell or Neil Kinnock. It's easy to dismiss the Labour right as slaves to factionalism and spite, but while this is a fair assessment of the pyschology of many individuals, the underlying dynamic is a pragmatic realisation that you cannot be a centre-right party and have a socialist leftwing. Fluffy liberals (aka the soft left), yes; Marxists, no. The problem that Labour faces is that while it has defined the left and right "extremes", in the form of the Greens and Reform, it hasn't managed to squeeze the fillings in the political club sandwich: the Liberal Democrats between it and the Greens, and the Conservatives between it and Reform. The reason for this is Starmer's lack of credibility, which is a consequence of his route to power. Many people have longstanding political loyalties (and antipathies), and Labour has been unable to provide a charismatic leader in the mould of Blair capable of reconstructing the party's electoral base. The problem for the Labour right today is that they don't have anyone of that calibre in waiting.

The third development is the economic decline of the press. This has been offset not by recourse to social media, as Simon Wren-Lewis imagines, but by the colonisation of TV. GB News is simply a visual tabloid - somewhere between the Sun and the Daily Mail - while political coverage on the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 has descended to little more than apeing the comment pages of the Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian. With newspapers increasingly consumed online with multimedia content, and with the decline of linear broadcasting leading to TV journalism being chopped up into short videos, and increasingly dominated by longer-form creator content, a merger of the two forms seems inevitable. This gradual process has led the press to become ever more directive about how TV should conduct itself. Whereas once Rupert Murdoch's interests were in breaking up broadcasting monopolies and undermining the state broadcaster, his successors will be far more interested in securing control of those broadcasters' political coverage. Were we to revive the Leveson 2 Inquiry, its scope would have to be considerably widened.

The significance of Starmer is to be found in the Labour Party's demographic challenges. Its skilled working class electoral core had shrunk through the twin pressures of deindustrialisation and embourgeoisement in the 1980s and 90s, leading to the New Labour reconfiguration around totems like "Worcester woman". But this obscured that its actual core vote was increasingly minorities and the educated but economically precarious young clustered in cities. The decision to colonise the centre-right, thereby marginalising both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, required it to adopt an electoral strategy focused on post-industrial small towns and white-coded social conservatives ("Workington man"), along with the comfortable (and multi-ethnic) professional middle class from which its own candidates now largely hail. Purging the left was seen as attractive to both groups. The result of this, as seen in the local elections, has been the erosion of its urban core but no compensation in small towns. The latter is less to do with the success of Reform than the fact that small towns also have young and ethnic minority voters, not to mention more mature "lefties", many of whom are now shifting to the Greens in England and Plaid Cymru and the SNP in Wales and Scotland, allowing Reform to win on low vote shares much as Labour did in the 2024 general election.

The learned helplessness of the current political conjuction arises partly from this conscious attempt to reconfigure the party landscape. The centrist media's obsession with "populism" - i.e. the disparaging frame for emergent demands from outside the cartel for a "new politics" - together with its unwillingness to properly investigate the Labour Party's purging of the left as a political endeavour, rather than the "crisis of antisemitism", means that this strategy of reconfiguration has little salience in political analysis. At best, the attempt to win over social conservatives is described as the recapture of the party's historic core of non-graduate, manual labour (the "white working class"). Likewise, the decline of the Conservative Party is seen chiefly through the prism of the "revolt on the right" and the legacy of Brexit: a failure to resist the seductive powers of Nigel Farage rather than a failure to resist Labour's march onto its traditional territory. Prior to 1995 (i.e. the start of New Labour), no Conservative MP had defected directly to the Labour Party in its history. Since then, seven have, with an acceleration in recent years.

In addition to this increasingly volatile party landscape, the other factor encouraging the learned helplessness of the politico-media caste is the steady decline of state capability following the UK's extensive application of privatisation and outsourcing since the 1980s. This has seen government increasingly adopt the role of a regulator, setting targets and parameters, rather than an author of action. The recent Whitehall farce of the inquiry into Peter Mandelson's appointment as ambassador to the US was an object lesson not only in obfuscation and avoidance but a clear sign that there remains a gulf of understanding between government and the Civil Service. The former is driven by announcements and "resets" - performative actions that achieve little - and remains baffled that there are no levers of power that it can simply pull to get the desired outcome. The latter suffers the delusion that it has control over fragmented processes that long ago breached the boundaries of the state, ironically returning us to the culture of corruption and the promotion of "interests" that marked the era before the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms.

Keir Starmer will likely cling onto office for a while yet, not simply because there are no compelling alternatives among the PLP ranks (Streeting is obviously Marmite, even among that narrow constituency) but because the wider Labour movement is enervated (trade union general secretaries may publish their demands in the Guardian or Daily Mirror but they won't actually do anything) and the soft left remains a disorganised wannabe faction that lacks a coherent ideology ("Manchesterism" is little more than municipal buses - i.e. mitigating market failures). But perhaps I too am indulging in learned helplessness. Perhaps if Andy Burnham returns to Parliament he might recommit Labour to a robust social democracy that defies the financial markets and unwinds the damage done by both New Labour (of which he was a minister) and the Tory misrule of the last decade and a half. Perhaps. Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will, and all that. But I can't help feeling that the legacy of Keir Starmer, at the controls of a driverless train whose route was set by others, will be a diminished Labour Party that eventually convinces itself the best course of action in a fragmented political landscape will be a coalition with the parties to its right, rather than its left.

Will AI Revive the Centre?

In parallel with the media fears that AI will bring about the collapse of Western civilisation, or at least the loss of jobs among journalists and commentators, there has been a countervailing, more hopeful narrative that AI may in fact save us from the horrors of social media, or at least its negative impact on journalists and commentators. The latest to make the link is John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times. The headline and lede provides a summary of his argument: "Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite. Large language models elevate expert consensus and moderate views, in sharp contrast to social platforms". He doesn't offer any evidence for the claim that social media is populist, or even explain what that means in this context. The subject of political polarisation plays an important ideological role in the US, as the corollary of "bipartisanship", hence it is there we find the best evidence for historic trends. And what these show is that polarisation between Democrats and Republicans started to increase in the 1970s for well-known political reasons: the decline of the postwar social and economic consensus and the deliberate embrace of divisive anti-state rhetoric by the Republican Party. 

Social media may have helped amplify that polarisation over the last twenty years but it didn't cause it, so the idea that the technology is inherently polarising is unproven, while the claim that it is populist is simply a category error. In fact, there is evidence that social media increases exposure to different viewpoints: that structurally it tends towards diversity rather than the uniformity of the filter bubble, and that it is traditional media that has more consistently amplified political polarisation (i.e. the New York Times or Fox News). This makes sense when you consider that the consumer of social media has far more (potential) control over what they see and read, despite all the tales of malign algorithms, than the consumer of a tightly-edited newspaper or TV programme. Burn-Murdoch's second claim, that LLMs favour expert consensus and moderate views, assumes that these are related: that the one gives rise to the other. The infamous case of climate change, where the expert consensus has been undermined by traditional media airing the views of lobbyists and motivated sceptics in the service of "balance", suggests otherwise. 

The underlying belief of the hopeful narrative is that LLMs avoid the structural bias and partisan editorialising of traditional media because of their omnivorous nature and because they lack the status consciousness and condescension of human experts. In contrast, social media is problematic because it airs the uncurated opinions of millions, many of whom are idiots. In this worldview, LLMs embody the wisdom of crowds while social media embody the madness of crowds. The idea that media have these inherent epistemological qualities is evident in Burn-Murdoch's potted history, which is worth quoting at length: "Every media revolution has transformed who distributes information, what messages are distributed and what form they take. As such, some media are fundamentally democratising and polarising, widening the pool of publishers and views beyond a narrow elite and amplifying radical and anti-establishment voices. TikTok and the printing press arrived almost 600 years apart but share these characteristics. Others push the opposite way: radio and television had high barriers to entry, creating a monopoly for the voices and views of elites and experts."

The idea that the media changes whose voices are heard is crude technological determinism. The reality is that new technology is absorbed into existing power frameworks. There is feedback from the one to the other and thus change - newspapers gave rise to press barons, for example - but the power framework is dominant and adapts. This is evident in the fact that capitalists control most social media platforms and AI chatbots, an outcome that surprises no one. Equally, few people question whether AI must necessarily follow a capital-intensive development path. We worry about covering the Earth in data centres, but alternative paths are unthinkable, particularly those that would democratise decision-making (that would be populist). Burn-Murdoch's yoking of "democratising and polarising" should raise eyebrows, but we should also remember that "moderate" does not simply mean average. The word comes from the Latin for controlled. And it is control which commends AI to centrists rather than its tendency to "elevate expert consensus", just as the valorisation of such concepts as consensus, bipartisanship, civility and the like is ultimately about ensuring that political discourse is kept within strict bounds.

To return to Burn-Murdoch's history lesson, the moveable type printing press, when introduced in the mid-15th century, was a very expensive and initially rare piece of technology that required a team of craftsmen and labourers to operate. It was the IBM mainframe of its day. It was also quickly put under state control - e.g. the Stationers Company monopoly in England. The idea that ordinary people could access and make use of the press, in the way that they can with a social media platform like TikTok today, is absurd. Cheap prints (chapbooks) did not arrive in any great numbers till a century later and were still subject to censorship up until the Statute of Anne in 1710. And while there was a radical fringe, particularly in respect of religious nonconformism and political dissent during the 17th century, most chapbooks were little different to the popular press of later eras, their content dominated by tall tales, true crime and bawdiness.

While television transmission had high barriers to entry, radio did not. Amateur broadcasters ("radio hams") were a feature from the 1920s onwards, which was hard on the heels of broadcast radio's expansion following the introduction of vacuum tube receivers. It's certainly true that the bulk of broadcast spectrum, and the listening audience, was quickly taken over by large commercial firms and state corporations, like the BBC, but radio was always a more democratic medium than both television and print (for most of its history). Even today, despite the impact of the Internet and the decline of radio as a hobby, there are over 100,000 amateur broadcasting licences held in the UK. Understanding the history is important because it highlights how the existing power framework (the role of the state, the dominance of capital) absorbs the new media. But it also highlights how that media can be adopted and potentially repurposed by the people (democracy).

Burn-Murdoch's central claim is "that where social media’s inherent mechanisms push towards personalisation and fragmentation, LLMs are innately “converging” — their underlying dynamics push them towards objective reality". He sets out to prove this by comparing the responses of AI chatbots on political topics to the general population: "I found that while different AI platforms behave in subtly different ways, all of them nudge people away from the most extreme positions and towards more moderate and expert-aligned stances. On average, Grok guides conversations about policy and society towards the centre-right — a rightward push for most people but a moderating nudge towards the centre for those who start out as conservative hardliners. OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini and the Chinese model DeepSeek all exert similarly sized nudges towards a centre-left worldview — a slight leftward nudge for most people but a moderating push away from fringe leftwing positions."

The data he provides to justify this is questionable. The profile of the general (US) population employed in his charts above suggests that Americans are mostly to be found left of the political centre and predominantly at the left extreme (the Y-axis is responses). After some toing-and-froing with him on Blue Sky, it became evident that the source data he was using was designed to accentuate differences between Democrat and Republican voters and that the far left position was essentially that of Barack Obama. It's hard to avoid the suspicion that this converging is simply the product of an LLM-based AI chatbot lacking intentionality and simply tending slightly towards a median position, which he describes as "objective reality", despite an LLM being at one remove from reality. More interesting is to wonder why the chatbot doesn't converge to a greater degree. In other words, why don't we see a normal distribution (a bell-curve) in which the moderate position is predominant? That would be the actual "opposite" of the supposed polarising effect of social media. 

One explanation is that AI's ability to counter the anchoring and confirmation bias that users bring to it is undermined by its desire to be agreeable. There is a commercial rationale to this. People won't use a tool that is confrontational and repeatedly tells them that they're wrong, a problem well-known in areas such as public health policy where expertise is often viewed with suspicion (think vaccines or diet). As Dan Williams puts it, "Being human, experts are often biased, partisan, and simply annoying, and when they seek to “educate” the public, it can be perceived—and is sometimes intended—as condescending and rude. In contrast, LLMs deliver expert opinion without such status threats." This tendency towards sycophancy is well-known. Williams recognises the risks it entails, and the related risk that personalisation may simply reflect the idosyncracies of users, but ultimately he thinks "LLMs will produce much more reliable, expert-aligned information than most of these real-world alternatives [i.e. traditional media and information sources], even if sycophancy and personalisation introduce genuine biases."

I suspect the key for Burn-Murdoch and other political centrists is not that AI "elevates expert consensus and moderate views" but that it marginalises what he describes as extreme or fringe positions: "In addition, I found that while conspiratorial beliefs about topics including rigged elections and a link between vaccines and autism are over-represented among people who post to social media relative to the overall population, the opposite is true of AI chatbots, which almost never express agreement with these claims." But some of today's fringe opinions may turn out to be right. LLMs are expressions of conventional wisdom, but that means they will certainly be wrong about many things because expert opinion is currently wrong or incomplete. That he cites rightwing opinions on election rigging and vaccines is interesting, as not a few leftwing "conspiracy theories" have been proved right of late. In fact, many critiques from the political left have been categorised by centrists as conspiracy theories solely in order that they can be dismissed. Ironically, this has led to many centrist conspiracy theories, such as the prevalence of antisemitism on the left.

Noah Smith offers a typically more trenchant view when he claims that "the people who create LLMs have difficulty imparting their political bias to their creations", but also thinks that "Because of the way they’re trained, LLMs will be a force for homogenization and moderation of opinion", which is just another way of saying that they will promote an orthodoxy. As ever, centrism is deemed to be beyond ideology and therefore bias. It's just common sense, or Burn-Murdoch's "objective reality". Smith's claims are contradicted by Burn-Murdoch's data which show that the chatbots in his study do exhibit a bias consistent with the preferences of their owners (thus Grok is clearly more conservative while the others are more liberal) and that they maintain the (apparently) polarised distribution of the general population, despite "nudging" to the centre. In other words, the evidence actually points to the marginalisation of heterodox opinions more than it does to homogenisation.

The confidence displayed by these supporters of the hopeful narrative has to be read in the context of the last 18 years, since the financial crash of 2008. What that event, and the subsequent failure of austerity, showed was that the political centre was bereft of ideas. It was unable to satisfactorily explain why financialisation was always doomed or why neoliberalism would always tend towards greater inequality without conceding ground to the left, and it had no coherent response to the rise of rightwing anger and bigotry, falling between the stools of pandering ("legitimate concerns") and contempt ("deplorables"). The traditional arguments of centrism - of moderation, technocratic pragmatism and the "third way" - no longer work. The problem that centrist politicians face is not that they are poor communicators, a la Starmer, but that that they have no convincing story to tell, a la Macron or Harris. 

The belief that AI may help nudge the population towards more moderate views is a counsel of despair. The democratic ideal of a Habermasian discourse has given way to the subconscious sculpting of opinion through a technology dominated by the rich. This is little different to the ideological role played by earlier media, such as newspapers and TV, even if it takes a more subtle form. For all the talk of "expert consensus" and "moderate views", what matters is simply the marginalisation of views beyond the narrow bounds of centrism. The role of social media in this, or more accurately the caricature of social media as a cesspit of malign propaganda and wilful ignorance, is simply to provide a "worse" alternative that flatters AI by comparison. To that end, the myth of the filter bubble is joined by the myth that social media is inherently polarising and even "populist". AI won't revive the centre by stealth, and it won't marginalise the "extreme" left any more than traditional media have done, but it may well put a few journalists and commentators out of work.

National Insecurity

The US National Security Strategy (hereafter the NSS) is perhaps oddly named in that it pays scant attention to the security of the country itself, whether from foreign attack, natural disasters or the growing impact of climate change. The comments about defence against potential aggressor states are cursory when not fantastical ("a Golden Dome for the American homeland"). This blitheness is a persistent feature of American political culture, rooted in the assumption that two oceans protect it from sudden attack (a point the NSS makes explicit) and that the threats from the North and South are non-existent, at least since the annexation of Texas in 1845. The "infamy" of Pearl Harbour obscured that this was an assault on an imperial outpost that would not become a US state until 1959. In threatening Canada and Mexico over tariffs, and in suggesting that Denmark should do the decent thing and sell Greenland to the US, Donald Trump isn't stepping beyond this base assumption. He is merely articulating, loudly and at length, a stance that all parties have felt it prudent hitherto to keep sotto voce.

These assumptions have long been shared across the political spectrum in the US. In his Lyceum Address of 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln famously emphasised not only this sense of external security but also the fear that what threatened the union was internal: "Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

The NSS takes a similar approach: an obligatory nod to the idea of an external threat that immediately gives way to a focus on internal disarray and then homes in on migration as not only a threat to the US but to the world order: "We want to protect this country, its people, its territory, its economy, and its way of life from military attack and hostile foreign influence, whether espionage, predatory trade practices, drug and human trafficking, destructive propaganda and influence operations, cultural subversion, or any other threat to our nation. We want full control over our borders, over our immigration system, and over transportation networks through which people come into our country—legally and illegally. We want a world in which migration is not merely “orderly” but one in which sovereign countries work together to stop rather than facilitate destabilizing population flows, and have full control over whom they do and do not admit."

In his preface to the NSS, Trump (or at least his ghostwriter) claims that "Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest ... They placed hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called “free trade” ... And they lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty." The dichotomy of internationalism and isolationism is important, but it can lead us to fail to see the common elements in the thinking of American elites (which includes Trump). First and foremost is the fear that the country could be undermined by unconstrained immigration. Today the focus is on Central America and "shithole" countries in Africa. But as the familiar rhetoric of vicious drug-pushers and greedy moochers makes clear, this is a continuation of older fears of Jewish communists, Italian gangsters and Irish hoodlums, not to mention uppity blacks. 

US elites don't fear invasion, but they do fear the dissolution of the racial and religious hierarchies that underpin their political and economic power, which makes the strategy paper's focus on European "civilizational erasure" all the more obviously a case of projection. The writers of the NSS do not understand Europe either politically or culturally, but then they don't feel that they need to. European civilisation is for them simply a proxy for a white, Christian, conservative ideal of homogenous "nations" that has no historical basis. Western European populations were already being dramatically remade through migration two centuries ago. That, after all, was one of the drivers in the emergence of the "imagined communities" of nationalism. In advocating for conservative nationalism today, the US is not promoting national sovereignty, let alone more racism, as some liberal commentators lazily assume, so much as arguing for the continued fragmentation of possible economic competitors. What it dislikes about the EU is the regulatory impediments to US businesses exploiting European markets. It's fear is not that the typical European will be a brown-skinned Muslim in 50 years but that she will be buying European goods in preference to American ones.

The global reaction to the NSS has largely reflected parochial concerns. South of the Rio Grande, it has focused on the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which can be read as a clear warning that regime change is coming to Venezuela, a point that Maria Corina Machado has been happy to amplify. In the Middle East, there has been a largely positive response to the shift in emphasis from "nation building" (always an implicit threat to the Gulf monarchies) to pacification, investment and trade. The claim that the region "is no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was" will ring hollow in Gaza, the West Bank and Southern Lebanon where Israel will remain unrestrained. In Europe there has been much pearl-clutching by liberals appalled at the antipathy towards the European Union and the stated intent for the US to act as a referee between Europe and Russia rather than a staunch ally of the former. According to Simon Schama, "Historian in me knows the Trump national security strategy document will go down as one of the great betrayals of the free world and all those responsible for it remembered in shameful ignominy."

It is ironic that a British historian noted for his comfort with the broad sweep and his emphasis on the importance of rhetoric (cf his Citizens) should fail to see that the NSS doesn't break any new ground other than in its choice of language. Other historians would point out that it simply makes clear what has always been understood to be the US's real interests and incidentally its abiding contempt for European politicians. The words may be salty but Trump has not diverged in any meaningful sense from either standard US theory or practice. As Tom Stevenson noted, "In its open aggression and territoriality, Trump’s second National Security Strategy is less duplicitous about US actions around the world than past official documents." If anything, Trump has been relatively restrained, reflecting his political base's tendency towards isolationism and his own laziness. Insofar as you can bandy around words like "betrayal", this would better fit the generation of European politicians who refused to address the new world of the 1990s and instead promoted NATO, and thus dependence on the US, as the sine qua non of collective security.

The question now is whether they have the nerve to move towards a genuine European security alliance, backed by French nuclear weapons, in which NATO would simply be an outer envelope incorporating the US and UK (London will never reject Atlanticism and its nukes are controlled by Washington). The truth is that this will not happen, partly because of political cowardice but mainly because Washington has no intention of allowing it. For all the demands that Europe step up to the plate, the strategy remains the same: to keep Europe under America's thumb. The increased spending on defence will go towards US-manufactured weapons and clear constraints will be placed on their use. Ukraine will be chopped up but Russia will not go to war with the EU. If the conflict has shown anything, it is that Russia is militarily weak and has no more popular enthusiasm for conflict than Western Europe does. The usual suspects among the UK political class will chunter about national security and the independent nuclear deterrent, but none will go so far as to identify the US as a threat. The global order will remain intact and at the very heart of it will remain a paranoid society of gun-owners who fear being murdered in their beds.

A Touch on the Tiller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Save the Tories

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conservative Pessimism

In last Monday's Guardian you could read both John Harris describing his dismay at the right's "ballooning narrative about complete social breakdown" and Nesrine Malik noting that the call for the deportation of immigrants has become mainstream. Harris inevitably felt the need to drag in the left as a pointless comparison: "Just as people on the left have been predicting for at least 150 years that capitalism is about to chaotically implode under the weight of its own contradictions, so some of the loudest voices on the post-Brexit right have come up with their own version of a similarly historic meltdown: a vision of the immediate future in which rampant wokery, crime, failed immigration policy, weak policing and general establishment decay and corruption will lead inexorably to what Nigel Farage calls 'societal collapse'." Leaving aside the crude strawman, not to mention the plentiful evidence that capitalism is trashing the planet, the point to note here is Harris's belief that this is a new development on the right, with the none-too subtle hint that the left remains trapped in the past so we shouldn't look for any answers there.

Similarly, the normally acute Malik falls into the trap of assuming that the calls for mass deportation are novel. She is correct that this language has been amplified by politicians in recent years, notably by Keir Starmer, but she is mistaken in claiming that "the last time a member of a political party even hinted at any sort of deportation policy was in the late 00s, when British National party leader Nick Griffin ... stated that he would 'encourage' voluntary repatriation of legal migrants and 'those of foreign descent to return to their lands of ethnic origin'." There been plenty of hints in the interevening period. After all, what do you imagine most people think when they hear the phrase "one in, one out"? And repatriation was never limited to the neo-Nazis, as Enoch Powell's many supporters proved. In fact, both ideas - that society is coming apart at the seams and that immigrants should be "sent back" - have been common among Tories since the 1960s when the Monday Club was founded. The views may not have been considered respectable by many Conservative grandees, but they were common among the rank and file. Margaret Thatcher's victory in 1979 owed much to both: the belief that the country was falling apart during the "Winter of Discontent" and the perception that immigration left many people feeling, as she put it, "swamped".

Going further back, in 1945 Winston Churchill infamously predicted that a Labour victory under Clement Attlee would lead to the creation of a British Gestapo. This wasn't a lunatic exaggeration fuelled by too much champagne but simply the continuation of pre-war practice. Between 1919 and 1924 the Conservative Party defined itself primarily around the anti-Bolshevik "Red Scare", culminating in the notorious Zinoviev letter, a forgery published by the Daily Mail to (successfully) damage Labour's chances in the general election. The mainstream right have always been hysterical when out of power, or facing that prospect, and the form this takes is invariably hyperbolic warnings about threats to our way of life emanating from a coalition of foreigners, traitors and idiot do-gooders. In its contemporary guise, Bolsheviks and sandal-wearing vegetarians have been replaced by rapacious asylum-seekers and trans rights activists. There's nothing novel in anything that either Nigel Farage or Robert Jenrick has said lately, though there is an important difference in their manner of delivery.

Pessimism is the natural tenor of conservative thought. The roots of the right's philosophy lie in the Hobbesian vision of a war of all against all, not in Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshott's eulogisation of the small platoons and the familiar. Burke was actually a stinging critic of the Ancien Regime, along with Joseph de Maistre, precisely because he feared it lacked the rectitude and courage to defeat revolution from below. It is fear that is central to conservatism, and that fear routinely manifests as a belief that the country is going to the dogs and that we are being invaded by grasping foreigners. In this context it's worth noting that revolution from above, in the sense of the elite restoration of tradition in the face of such threats, is not only countenanced but seen as exemplary: hence the eulogisation of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which apparently saved the country from absolute monarchy, Catholicism and foreign fashions. 

In contrast, the common thread that runs through the political philosophy of the broad left, from incremental liberals to ecstatic insurrectionaries, is optimism: the belief that things can get better and that politics can effect change. Even John Harris's crude caricature of the Marxist left gets this right: the certainty that there will be another crisis and thus another chance for progress. One way of thinking about Labour's current troubles is that despite expelling most of the left, the PLP remains divided between the optimists - e.g. Blairites insisting that AI will solve all our problems - and the pessimists - the authoritarians insisting that if we don't stamp down hard on little old ladies with cardboard signs Vladimir Putin will be strolling up the Mall tomorrow. Starmer is clearly in the latter camp. His fundamental mistake is the failure to understand that the "conservative" voters he is trying to attract are motivated by optimism as much as pessimism, hence the talk of hard choices and the need for crackdowns has failed to win them over.

Michael Oakeshott's famous quote reflects the instinctive pessimism of the Tory elite: "To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss." But success in democratic politics requires a mix of optimism and pessimism. Since 2016, voters in Britain have, perhaps paradoxically, tended towards optimism: displaying an appetite for the unknown and untried that led first to Jeremy Corbyn's ascent and then to Boris Johnson's victory in 2019. While Nigel Farage may currently lay on the horror stories of national decline with a trowel, it is his cheerful optimism that garners support for the mystery that is Reform, and it is Starmer's ingrained pessimism that means Labour's hopes of attracting conservative voters, or even retaining left-leaning ones, will likely continue to be frustrated.

NATO and After

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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