Quiet Radicals or Fiscal Fools? The Dilemma of Starmer’s Labour

‘Consistency is all we ask… give us this day our daily mask’ - Tom Stoppard

Splits by Blower. Source: X

By Honest John

IT HAS become a political truism to describe Keir Starmer’s Labour as opaque, vision-free, untrustworthy and craven. It is not particularly hard to see why. Ever since standing on a Corbyn-lite platform in order to win the Labour Party leadership in 2020, Starmer’s tenure has been characterised by “ditching”, “diluting”, “rowing back” and “moving beyond” pledge after pledge, commitment after commitment. Cleaving to Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rule, committing Labour to have brought down public debt relative to income by the end of its first term in office, Labour appears to have made fiscal rectitude a financial fetish - a “reassurance” to presumed Tory voters tempted to switch to Labour at the general election, that the party won’t trash the economy by embarking on an unfunded spending spree when in office. In the minds of many of the leadership’s critics however, this iron discipline has so constrained the party’s room for manoeuvre that it will, on paper at least, be instituting £20bn of public spending cuts in its first year in office, given its commitment to maintain Conservative spending plans. Ignoring opinion polls which indicate Labour is on track for a majority of 1997 proportions, the leadership seem determined to promise nothing whatsoever, while also claiming to be a transformational government when in office. For many on the left, this is simply not good enough: after 14 years of Tory social vandalism, with the very infrastructure of the country apparently on the point of collapse, implied promises to maintain Jeremy Hunt’s Austerity 2.0 is a betrayal of voters who look set to give Labour its first majority in nearly 20 years and are hoping for meaningful change from the dead end into which Toryism has driven the country. Many leftists now openly espouse the view that Labour and the Conservatives are essentially the same: both are neo-liberal entities committed to a deregulated, low-wage and low-tax economy, whose political platforms consist of tinkering at best with the marketised state established by Margaret Thatcher and her successors.

To test the veracity of this despairing conclusion, most eye-catchingly articulated by journalist Owen Jones who, having very publicly left the Labour Party, is now intending to campaign actively against Labour MPs and candidates at the general election, we need to focus not on Labour’s dropped commitments, but on what remains of its policy offer and set that against the requirements of the fiscal rule. Will Labour, like New Labour, who became rather more left wing in office, surprise its critics and reveal itself to be a government of quiet radicals, or will it indeed apply its self-imposed fiscal strait jacket literally, and so box itself in, that transformational change will be impossible? Will Starmer’s Labour ultimately be viewed by history as a fiscally foolish government, that maintained the miserablist legacy of Sunak and Hunt and achieved nothing of worth in a brief and embarrassingly short period in power?

If Labour do win the next general election, it will be in no small part to the sudden and visible collapse in public services: the chickens of 14 years of austerity coming home to roost, and bringing the whole hen house of the Thatcherite model tumbling down with them. For clear, existential, reasons, it is the state of the NHS that most concerns the public. The failure of the Boris Johnson government to deliver the funding dividend to the health service supposedly made possible by Brexit, is viewed as a grievous betrayal by many who voted Tory in 2019. The frustration of an exponential increase in mean waiting time for elective procedures combined with a horror at ambulances not turning up in time to save lives, has destroyed the public’s faith, carefully curated by David Cameron in his austerity messaging to “protect” the NHS, that the Tories can be trusted to do anything other than preside over serial neglect when it comes to health services. The King’s Fund estimates the NHS needs an annual increase in funding of 3.3% (approximately £5bn per annum) just to stay still. Labour’s fiscal rule would appear to rule out any such increase, and yet the party is committed to funding two million additional elective and diagnostic procedures in its first year in government; 700,000 additional dental appointments, 8,500 additional mental practitioners, to be recruited in the course of its first term and a doubling of CT and MR imaging capacity as well as, more controversially, expanding elective surgical capacity by utilising private hospitals. If enacted, this would represent the biggest expansion in healthcare provision since 2000, and given its targeting and lack of obsession with structures and internal markets that wasted so much of the additional funding associated with Blair’s NHS Plan, it could make a material difference to elective waiting lists in relative short order. There is dispiritingly little being said by Labour about the need to rectify the catastrophic defunding of social and community care in the austerity years, which is the root cause of crowded A&E Departments, blocked beds and delayed ambulances, but despite this glaring omission, the Labour health offer is not insubstantial.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment to Labour supporters hoping for radical change after the election was Labour’s dropping of its commitment to fund fully its Green Prosperity Plan. The Plan was the pivot on which so much transformational change hung and, dropped because the right wing press had turned the £29bn per annum required to fund it into an attack line, the heart seemed to have been ripped out of the Starmer project for little discernible political gain. Nonetheles, Labour remain committed to £24bn spend on green energy in the course of the Parliament, in stark contrast to Sunak’s witless defunding of Tory net zero commitments in his frantic search for a culture war he might actually win, and to the establishment of Great British Energy, a publicly owned research and provision company which would represent the UK’s first venture into public ownership since the 1970s. What has also survived is the Corbynite policy of establishing a National Wealth Fund, something that looks suspiciously like a Keynesian vehicle to attract and direct inward investment, and quite possibly the engine for genuine attempts to “level up” the deindustrialised towns and communities of England and Wales. Hardly the stuff of neoliberal orthodoxy.

Then there is Labour’s New Deal For Working People - a commitment to increase the Living Wage, legislate for fair pay, ban zero hour contracts and the oppressive tactic of “hire and rehire” utilised by unscrupulous employers, and even a hint that the most restrictive trade union laws in Europe might be revisited. This would represent the biggest rebalancing of the economy in favour of workers since New Labour’s introduction of the Minimum Wage. Taken with Labour’s plans to introduce an Industrial Strategy Council, and its stated intention to devolve decision making powers for the English regions to the Mayoralties, we may see the beginning of post-Brexit active management of the economy by the state. The commitment to a Wilsonian programme of affordable house building is at piece with this, an ambitious attempt to rebalance the housing market whose artificial pumping up of asset prices has been a boon to the better off. If we throw in some class war tit bits like ending charitable status for public schools, getting rid of the hereditary peers and clamping down on tax evasion, we have the contours of a very recognisably Labour administration, to the left of New Labour and streets away from the libertarian chaos of Tory Britain. An emerging government perhaps of quiet radicals.

And yet - there remains that wretched fiscal rule, which Reeves and Labour spokespeople mention every other sentence. Taken at face value, if maintained and implemented, little of Labour’s health or remaining green energy proposals would survive; furthermore the chances of the “iron chancellor” allowing the sort of regional fiscal independence that would make devolved powers worth having to the Mayors and local government, look remote at best while the rule remains in place. Whenever faced with the illogicality of this position, Reeves and her acolytes parrot the mantra that public services will be funded by “growth” while being unable to point to a single Labour policy that will stimulate that growth. The fact of the matter is that Labour’s current offer is dishonest. Labour in power, on the basis of its current policies, can indeed be a genuinely innovative government of renewed social democracy. On the other hand, it can equally be a faithful curator of a busted economic system whose “rules” remain defined by the money markets, neo-liberal economists and the right wing press, but it cannot be both. As Tom Stoppard memorably had his characters complain in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, sooner or later, the opportunistic masks have to stop being replaced and consistency of offer will have to be achieved.

Quiet radicals or fiscal fools? As scrutiny of Labour as a government-in-waiting in the last seven months before a General Ellection increases and these questions become more and more focused, the ever-opaque Keir Starmer may find himself forced to make up his mind.

14th April 2024

The Enemy Within

How Desperate “Othering” by the Right is Creating Britain’s Own Fascist Moment

Source: GettyImages/BBC

By Honest John

WE LIVE in dark political times. It appears that as with so much else associated with modern Toryism, another historic role of the British Conservative Party has collapsed: that of absorbing the bile and hatred of the far right and neutralising it, pushing it into a semi lit corner of its broad church where it could chunter and rail, but never pose any direct threat to to the U.K.’s democratic system. But in recent weeks, emboldened by protests against the Israeli assault on Gaza, and wearing a supposed opposition to anti-semitism as a fig leaf to protect it from charges of racism, the right are on the rise, turning its fire on Islam in general but British Muslims in particular. This is not new: the far right periodically garner attention and votes in this country. In the 1960s it was Powellism; in the 1970s political racism was spearheaded by the National Front; in the 1990s and early 2000s, it was Nick Griffin’s British National Party that pushed a fascist discourse. However, in the mid-2020s, the siren voices of bigotry and authoritarianism are being raised by influential voices from within one of the two great parties of the British electoral system itself: the Conservatives.

Typically this charge was started by Suella Braverman, the former Home Secretary who, in the context of demonstrations she once termed “hate marches”, declared that ‘the truth is the Islamists, the extremists and the anti-Semites are in charge now’ in an article in the Daily Telegraph. This was followed by former Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party, Lee Anderson positing that ‘Islamists’ had ‘got control’ of London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had handed over control of the capital ‘to his mates’ in an interview on GB News. Then Tory MP for Sutton and Cheam, Paul Scully opined that parts of Tower Hamlets and Sparkhill had become “no go areas” for non-Muslims, and finally there was Rishi Sunak himself, delivering an emergency broadcast to the nation to claim shadowy “extremist” forces are threatening British democracy itself. Sunak did not actually use the phrase “the enemy within”, but he may as well have.

The narrative is drearily familiar, with echoes stretching back to the 1930s. At a time of economic and political crisis, locate an easily identifiable cultural or racial group, depict it as somehow alien or dangerous and then claim that not only are current social and economic problems something to do with that cultural group, but also suggest the group is somehow out of control; that it is “taking over” and that the spread of its latitude and influence needs to be controlled, preferably by authoritarian means. This is the classic fascist playbook of how to undermine democracy. A sense of crisis is created to try to encourage voters to lose their faith in civil rights and tolerance and to buy into the “othering” of a minority community and so, ultimately, to support restrictions on their rights and liberties in order to solve the fabricated “crisis”. In Europe we have seen these far right tactics score success after success in Hungary, Poland, Germany, Sweden, Italy and The Netherlands. It seems the U.K. is not immune from the contagion but alarmingly whereas the European fascists remain corralled in their own parties, in Britain it is the current governing party itself in which the racist and anti democratic narrative is being pedalled, even by the Prime Minister.

For the Conservative Party is not what is was. If the gentle mixed economy-supporting Tory Party of Harold Macmillan is ancient history, the far more recent Europhile neo liberal Conservatism of David Cameron is also a thing of the past (despite his recent reincarnation in the Foreign Office). Perhaps one of the most pernicious deeds, from a hefty list, of Boris Johnson, was his destruction of what might be termed Tory centrism in his self-serving determination to win the Brexit election of 2019, and the opening of his party to the entryists of Ukip and other assorted members of the right wing fringe. In short order, Johnson, probably unwittingly, transformed the Conservatives from being an economically right wing but still recognisably christian democrat party into a nationalist one, increasingly obsessed with Britain’s faded glories and the deadly threat to the British way of life found in immigration and the growth of assertive Islam. As Johnson’s unlikely coalition within the party collapsed with his own disastrously compromised rule, a weak and friendless Rishi Sunak has spent most of his ill-starred premiership having to placate the nationalist right of his party, who now appear to be completely off the leash.

It may provide liberal leftists and Labour supporters some cold comfort that the serial nasty Lee Anderson has defected from the Tories to his bedfellows in Reform UK; it may perhaps provide a satisfying sense of schadenfreude that the more unhinged the Conservatives become, the more likely is their electoral defeat this year and therefore the probability that they will spend at least five years in opposition fighting the culture wars of their own imaginations, but this would be naive. The current potential fascist moment is not simply a result of a desperate ruling party frustrated at its inability to turn around the polls, lowering the bar of acceptability for racism and scapegoating to a new and dispiriting level; it is also the logical conclusion of at least twenty years of identity politics finally becoming toxic, and that toxicity will remain embedded in our body politic long after Rishi Sunak has retired hurt to California. Whether it is the anti immigrant English nationalism that supercharged the Brexit vote; the continuing tendency of British South Asian-descended communities to prioritise their religious identity over their ethnic, national or cultural ones, or the absolute tangle centrist opinion has found itself in over the definition of anti semitism, lines have been drawn, and very many complex issues are becoming frighteningly binary.

This is perhaps best summed up by the extraordinary contortions that British politics has found itself in over the conflict in Gaza. In any normal political times, a war waged against civilians by a regional military superpower would attract condemnation across the political spectrum, with Parliament and public opinion as united in its wish to see an end to the slaughter of non-combatants as it was when Russia launched its unprovoked assault on Ukraine. Instead we now appear to be in a situation in which any criticism of a far right Israeli government’s unprecedented violence is held to be somehow anti semitic; that the demands of protesters - Muslim and non-Muslim - are held to be hate-filled and anti-Jewish, and the demonstrators viewed as terrorist-supporting Islamists who have taken over London. Opposing genocide in Gaza is now characterised as a “Muslim” issue - a false perception encouraged by the opportunist grifter George Galloway’s openly sectarian, but successful, by election campaign in Rochdale - and therefore suspect and alien.

The far right, despite their “voice of the common man” cant concerning woke identity politics actually love it: a minority population that openly and visibly declares itself as “Muslim”, regardless of its internal origins and differences, simply confirms the otherness of Islam that modern fascism seeks to promote, artlessly conflating Islam with Islamism in its divisive rhetoric. The country has arguably reached the end of the road in its long journey of segmenting its population into competing groups of victimhood, squabbling over the dwindling economic pie a system rigged in favour of the hyper-rich, leaves for its increasingly impoverished citizens. The social authoritarianism that Reform and the Tory right will demand as a “solution” to the alleged Muslim extremist threat in the U.K. could grow in confidence during a Labour government and who is to say Keir Starmer, with his own attested authoritarian streak, will prove immune?

There is only one answer to the growing fascist moment in the U.K. and that is for liberal and social democratic opinion to challenge and oppose the easy verities of nationalism and segmented identity, wherever it is found, and to promote instead the principles of social solidarity, progressive patriotism and the values of social democracy at its best. An incoming Labour government provides an opportunity to turn the tide on bigotry, self-defeating identity politics and pernicious nationalism. This requires political courage and a consistency in values, that has so far eluded the Labour leadership, that is wedded to a policy programme of national renewal to benefit all British citizens. The alternative is a further descent into tribalism, conflict and social authoritarianism. The fascist moment is not inevitable but its defeat requires courage, vision and solidarity. If Starmer’s Labour’s historic political purpose will be to repair and reform public services, its philosophical mission will be to restore a recognition among the British people that there is far more to unite us than divide us.

13th March 2024

Running Scared

By Honest John

Now we know the dreary truth, what to make of this, the apogee of all Labour U-turns? How to assess this dropping of the policy centrepiece that had allowed Labour to claim, that despite all other policy retreats, the Green Prosperity Plan remained in place to give lie to those that claimed Labour had no genuine transformative vision? How to respond to Labour junking its assertion that, in office, it could pursue a radical vision: to repair the ruin of the Tory years by a green re-industrialisationof post-Brexit Britain? The Green Prosperity Plan has gone - “ditched” as so many programmes, proposals and strategies before it - its ambitious intent of £29bn of annual investment to kick start a green transformation of the British economy shrivelled to less than £5bn per year in the course of a Parliament. Labour’s governing offer, purpose and mission sacrificed on the altar of fiscal conservatism; its commitment to the British people discarded in order to to blunt Tory attack; its growth engine, from which the repair work to public services devastated by Tory neglect and ideological hostility, was to come, dismantled.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of one of the most extraordinary displays of lack of self-confidence in recent political history, is not Labour’s self-defeating adherence to a “fiscal rule” as complicit as it is mendacious; not the ineptitude of the policy reversal’s messaging; not the absence now of any distinctive Labour offer at the next General Election, and not even the pernicious power grab by the Blairite faction which surrounds Keir Starmer that this repositioning assuredly indicates. No, for me, the most dispiriting aspect of this whole long drawn out saga is the utter political cowardice demonstrably at the heart of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party that this act symbolises.

That Reeves’ fiscal rule was always going to kill the Green Plan if Labour seriously intended to adhere to it, is hardly news (although the Shadow Chancellor is currently making out that this was a key reason for having to destroy the Green policy now), but the apparent intent of the Labour leadership to adhere to all Tory spending plans, no matter what stunts Jeremy Hunt may pull in the spring with regard to unfunded tax cuts, is an extraordinary strait jacket for any incoming government to impose on itself, let alone one that is telling the electorate it will be a reforming administration. In fact, as matters stands, Reeves is committed to enact at least £22bn of revenue public spending cuts and £14bn of capital budget reductions from April 2025: such is the reductive logic of Labour’s inane fiscal rule. Labour’s fear of Tory attack and its lack of faith in the British electorate, and itself, despite a 20 point opinion poll lead, is apparently so overwhelming, it is capable of neutralising its entire political project.

The real worry at the heart of the Green Plan decision is that if Starmer’s Labour is running scared of Rishi Sunak, one of the weakest Prime Ministers this country has seen, and a Conservative government that is barely functioning as such, how will it perform in government itself - when it is buffetted by a right wing media stoking scare stories and populist nonsense; by the continuing underperformance of a systemically weak economy Labour appears to be intent on doing nothing to envigorate, or by unpredictable international events that could upend current political assumptions? If the excruciating absence of political courage and principle embodied in the decision to drop its one big radical set of ideas, is carried through into power, Labour may find itself being one of the shortest-lived, and embarrassingly inconsequential, governments in postwar history.

11th February 2024

Party Without A Cause

Without the Green Prosperity Plan, a Labour Government has Nothing

Source: The Telegraph

By Honest John

LABOUR'S GREEN Prosperity Plan, first announced with much aplomb and admirable ambition at its Party Conference in September 2021, effectively comprises the governing purpose for what is likely to be the first Labour government for 14 years. The Plan is comprehensive: it seeks to re-order the post-Brexit British economy towards a sustainable future; it comprises the first national economic strategy since the 1970s, and it would revolutionise employment, industry, housing and technology. It is nothing less than Starmer's version of Attlee's Beveridge, Wilson's "White Heat" and Blair's "education, education, education": an emblematic set of policies into which everything else fits and which differentiates Labour utterly from the stale and busted Thatcherism of Rishi Sunak and the broken promises of the wasted years of Tory failure.

Perhaps this was why the Plan is so loathed by not just the Conservatives and their client press, but by the Blairite right of the party too. For the latter in particular, the Green Plan is too statist, too socialist and above all, too expensive. For Morgan McSweeney, Labour's Campaign Manager, and his ilk, the £28bn three year annual price tag is too inviting a target for Tory attack which was why Rachel Reeves' "fiscal rule" effectively neutered the commitment. But clearly this was not enough. The floundering Tories, with nothing to offer the British people but the absurdity of the Rwanda policy and the inane slogan "Back to Square One under Labour", latched onto Labour's centrepiece claiming it was unaffordable and would lead inevitably to tax increases. The Labour leadership team, instead of rebutting the attacks by pointing out the Plan would not be funded from general taxation, but from borrowing (from year three of a Labour government), or - heaven bid -actually defending the policy on economic, social and climate emergency grounds, according to The Guardian on 1st February, have let it be known that the £28bn investment plan is to be "ditched" with commitments reduced by as much as two thirds.

Putting aside the abject political cravenness of this decision - if it proves to be true, and all the indications are that will be - and the fact it is yet another example of the Conservatives saying "boo" and Labour collectively running for cover, it actually leaves Labour with practically nothing of interest to say to the British people at all.

The dropping of political pledges and policies have become epidemic within Labour over the last twelve months. Much of this is to be expected. As the prospects of Labour turfing the Conservatives out at the next General Election became more and more realistic, then hostages to fortune had to be dispensed with; any Manifesto collation is also an exercise in culling, and Labour's impressive political operation will rightly not allow the Tories to develop the sort of attack lines that did for Neil Kinnock, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn. Therefore, for example, commitments for comprehensive nationalisation, the ending of university tuition fees and increased taxes for higher earners, were necessarily dropped in acts of clear-eyed political calculus. Whereas the relinquishing of each one of those more left wing and progressive policies was regrettable in the view of many Labour supporters, the ultimate goal of winning power was recognised by most as the main priority and nothing should distract from that imperative: after all, it was the sheer incontinence of the 2019 Labour Manifesto that made it incredible to voters, and this time no such indulgences would be allowed.

But the Green Prosperity Plan is different: it is the pivot around which every other aspect of what Labour is still seeking to claim will be a reforming government, revolves. Without the Green Prosperity Plan, how can Labour's Missions of achieving economic security, turning the country into a green energy superpower and getting "the NHS back on its feet" be achieved? Without the stimulus economics, the borrowing and the inward investment implied to deliver the Plan, what will be the economic motors to secure the economic growth that Labour claims is its top priority? Without the Green Prosperity Plan, there is a yawning gap where political purpose and governing philosophy needs to be - especially for a party assuming power after one of the most devastating periods of failed governance the country has seen. Without the Green Prosperity Plan, Labour has nothing - it will be a government without meaning; a political party without a cause.

There is a more depressing interpretation of recent events, even than that of Labour's political cowardice. It is that the Blairite right are no longer simply influencing electoral tactics, but are now in effect running political strategy. I have long been of the belief that Starmer is not a political Blairite: the Labour traditions he draws on have more to do with Harold Wilson, or even Ramsay McDonald, than they do with those of Tony Blair. The remaining Labour policies - on housing, Lords reform, extended workers' rights, and of course the Green Plan itself - are far to the left of anything Blair or Brown ever put in their manifestos. I have never been of the view that Starmer's ultimate aim is to turn Labour into a right of centre party, squeeze the Tories to the far right and make them unelectable forever, which was Blair's intention from 2005. However some of those surrounding Starmer - Wes Streeting, Reeves, McSweeney, Pat McFadden and the baleful Peter Mandelsson - hold onto the true faith: that Labour need to return to being a pro-market, pro-business, deregulating, fiscally conservative, pro-EU party with an emphasis on equality of opportunity as opposed to equality of outcome, in order to secure sustained electoral success. This faction failed to learn the lessons of the 2015 and 2019 General Elections which demonstrated that parties infuriate their base and natural supporters at their peril. Labour supporters are notoriously fickle and will vote Liberal Democrat, Reform UK, SNP and Conservative rather than Labour if the party no longer seems to represent their interests. This however does not shake the belief of the Blairites. How else to explain Reeves' gratuitous and gleeful statement to the BBC that restoring the cap on bankers' bonuses would not take place under a Labour government (despite its widespread popularity) and her extraordinary statement on Sky News that "fiscal rules are the most important thing for me".

in electoral terms, I doubt that any of this matters for the next election. A majority of voters made up their minds a long time ago that the Conservatives have to go. I suspect they will vote for anyone other than the Tories which, under First Past The Post, will guarantee a Labour victory - quite possibly a sizeable one. But the question that is now impossible to answer, without the Green Prosperity Plan to guide it, is what will Labour do with power? As matters stand, no one can be sure, and a real worry is that the man with least idea is the future Prime Minister himself.

3rd February 2024

The Tory Migration Catastrophe

How Conservative Immigration Policy Will Destroy Its Thatcherite Model

Source: The Financial Times

By Honest John

LIKE A desperate gambler deciding to bet his shirt on one last turn of the roulette wheel, Rishi Sunak has staked his entire political reputation on the latest iteration of the Tories’ Rwanda bill. This is a piece of legislation which has been declared illegal by the British Supreme Court; which has so far cost the British taxpayer £240m with a further £50m due to be paid to Rwanda next year; which is considered as impractical as it is morally questionable and which has seen precisely zero asylum seekers so far sent to Rwanda to have their claims processed. This sad wheeze is going to be dragged before the House of Commons once more, while Sunak desperately claims black is white and that Rwanda can miraculously become a safe country for asylum seekers by the passing of a law in Westminster. The Prime Minister’s determination to turn Tuesday’s vote on the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill into effectively a vote of confidence in his leadership is simultaneously reckless and absurd. Sunak’s desperation to quieten the increasing insurrectionary noises from his party’s right wing in the wake of the dismissal of Suella Braverman, has led him to to invest all his hopes in a piece of legislation for which there is no evidence will succeed in deterring the “small boats” (its stated claim), which will place the U.K. once again in breach of international law and will succeed only in enriching the government of Rwanda, incredulously receiving millions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money for its civic infrastructure, gifted by a country whose own infrastructure is falling apart. It is actually hard to find anyone outside the fevered confines of Sunak’s inner circle who supports the plan or thinks it will work. Apart perhaps from the government of Rwanda itself that is.

It is easy to laugh at the infantile antics of a government that, in any real sense, has ceased to function and to treat this latest act in the Tory psychodrama as the piece of absurdist political theatre it undoubtedly is, but the Rwanda bill is simply the congealing icing on the top of a poisonous cake that the Conservatives have been serving up for years, masquerading as migration “policy”. This is legislation that is as contradictory as it is cruel; as performative as it is populist. For the Conservatives, migration is their key emergency break glass area of public policy. When everything else that they and the succession of hopeless lightweights they have foisted on the country as Prime Ministers, has turned to dung at their touch, they still believe that the prejudice and hatred of “the British People” toward foreigners and immigrants has no bottom level: for Tories you simply cannot go too low on immigration. The Rwanda scheme - when it was first cooked up in the days of Boris Johnson and Priti Patel - had nothing in reality to do with deterring asylum seekers from trying to cross the Channel to Britain; it was all about trying to appeal to a mythical “Red Wall” voter for whom no amount of cruelty, illegality and contempt was too much when it came to migrants. As their polling figures slumped and by election and council election results confirmed their worst electoral fears, the Conservatives still believed that victimising the victims could yet turn it around for them - no matter the dark forces their racist and bile-filled rhetoric might unleash: if they could just once again gaslight the electorate into believing that all the catastrophes of the last fourteen years of Tory rule are, in fact, the fault of incoming foreigners, all may yet be well.

This dismal flirting with the fascist playbook may have resulted in the headline-catching idiocy of Sunak’s latest Rwanda wheeze, but beneath that blather James Cleverley has announced planned measures that are far more significant, far more damaging, and far more frightening than any amount of ludicrous assertions about the Rwanda scheme. Tired of being taunted by Labour and others about the huge rise in legal migration (its net increase topped 600,000 in 2022) despite all the Tory promises to bring the numbers down over the last fourteen years, the Conservatives’ response is to quite literally attack, and potentially destroy, its own Thatcherite economic model.

For over forty years, Tory politicians have extolled Britain’s “flexible” workforce; its deregulated system; its low wage/low unemployment economy and its marketised society. Indeed, for years we were told by politicians on the right and the left that in a globalised world, mobile and non-unionised workforces, cheap production costs, outsourced supply lines and minimal regulation was essential to the easy access, low price, and plentiful supply digital capitalism that has taken hold in Britain. Key to the success of this model has been migrant labour, first from the EU and now from a swathe of sub-Saharan African, Middle Eastern and South Asian countries whose residents have been offered visas to replace the low wage flexible European workers that post-Brexit Britain apparently no longer wants. The legal migrants that the Conservatives are now in such a lather about are an essential component of the Thatcherite economic model they have all been promoting to us for decades. If, as Cleverley maintains, the government wishes to reduce net migration figures by 300,000 in 2024, then that is 300,000 workers not available to drive lorries, deliver Amazon parcels, pick our crops, clean our offices, valet our cars, serve in our restaurants and, crucially staff our hospitals and care homes. By creating a shortage of deregulated low wage labour, the Tories will simultaneously damage large parts of the service economy and drive up wages, and with it inflation. In their desperate belief that hatred of foreigners will somehow save them from oblivion at the next General Election, the Conservatives are prepared to throw overboard an approach to employment and wages that has sustained them for nearly two generations and was one of the driving ideological impulses on the right that drove Brexit. The revolution has truly begun to eat itself.

Apart from the casual abandonment of what has been the essence of right-wing Toryism for years, Cleverley has also managed to introduce the class-based nastiness of the Sklled Worker minimum salary threshold of £38,700 pa that legal migrants and their dependents must meet. This is a measure that will drive families apart, possibly force British citizens, married to foreigners but earning below the threshold, to emigrate to be with their loved ones and cause untold damage to the university sector (one of the few growth areas of the British economy) and the NHS and care sector, already on its knees after years of austerity and disproportionately reliant on migrant labour. It is as if the Tories are not content with the calamities that austerity, Brexit and Trussonomics have already wrought on British society: with this latest episode of ill-thought through prejudicial nonsense, they seem to want to finish it off altogether. I have predicted for some time the implosion of modern Toryism - its Thatcherite ideology a busted flush and its Brexit nationalist makeover lacking in depth or practical solutions; but what I hadn’t bargained for was that the Tories would try to take the whole country down with them.

Never has a government looked more threadbare, pointless, desperate and unlovable. All they have left to offer is hatred, racism and self-defeating vindictiveness. If Sunak’s absurd posturing over his doomed Rwanda bill results in his resignation before Christmas and a January General Election, the “British People” that this band of charlatans and incompetents keep claiming to speak for, but who in reality they do not understand, will breathe a sigh of relief, because we the people will at last be given the opportunity to cast this catastrophic version of Toryism into an electoral oblivion it so richly deserves and from which it will, hopefully, never emerge.

Migration may yet be modern Conservatism’s epitaph.

10th December 2023

Simply the best New Statesman “special” cover in years.

Happy Christmas.

The New Minister for Common Sense

This is the moment that Rishi Sunak’s government moved from being simply pointless, hopeless and absurd, to literally taking the piss.

Suella the Provocateur

An Unprecedented Home Secretary

By Honest John

LET’S NOT worry at this point about Suella Braverman’s Tory Party positioning; her blatant leadership ambitions; her probable desire to shift the Conservative Party into a far right position post-General Election that is fundamentally removed from traditional Tory values, let’s instead just focus on what Braverman, the current British Home Secretary, appears to be trying to do.

Perhaps the most fundamental role of the third highest governmental office in the land is to ensure the security of the citizens of the United Kingdom: to maintain law and order and keep our streets safe. Braverman has apparently decided that her role is no such thing. Rather it is that of a right-wing agent provocateur, a culture warrior pitching incontinently into street protests, geopolitics, and Tory internal battles, to conflate them all into some extreme right wing worldview that seeks to pitch citizen against citizen, colleague against colleague, friend against neighbour.

Braverman’s stigmatising of those British people publicly expressing a pro-Palestinian view against unrestrained Israeli military violence against the civilian population of Gaza as “hate marchers”; the enabling dog whistle to the fascist right by asserting the police are harder on them than muslim demonstrators and that they are somehow hard done to, and the pretence that a pro-Palestinian march is intrinsically inimical to the values of the Armistice Day commemorations, must be the first time in living memory that a British Home Secretary has actually incited street level criminal violence, rather than attempted to prevent it. And this, on a day that commemorates the end of conflict.

Under any normal Conservative government, Braverman, with her unilateral outriding, serial disloyalty and deeply undemocratic instincts, would be out on her ear. The enfeebled Rishi Sunak is either unwilling or unable to rid his front bench of Braverman’s wholly toxic presence. Whatever one’s views on the current Middle Eastern conflict, we should all be agreed that on a weekend of reflection, respect and national solidarity, this vituperative, rabble-rousing, undermining and unprecedented politician should be cast from the very office of state allegedly designed to keep us safe. Today of all days, the memory of our fallen deserves better - and so do we.

Sack her, Prime Minister.

Armistice Day, 2023

The Forever War

How Binary Positioning on the Israel/Palestine Conflict Ignores Its History

Source: BBC News

By Honest John

POLITICS LOVES binaries. There is nothing that pundits, journalists, activists and the committed like more than a straight good guy/bad guy narrative in which complex issues can be reduced, ultimately, to that of a wholly malign force oppressing a virtuous victim bravely standing up for freedom, democracy, common sense or equality - particularly on the left. And no issue dispenses with subtlety and context more readily and thoughtlessly than the tragic forever war of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Since the Hamas attack on the border settlements of southern Israel on 7th October, the partisans have been out in force. Whether it is the pro-Israel “shoulder to shoulder” rhetoric of the US, EU and U.K. governments, Keir Starmer and most of the conservative media offering almost unconditional support to the Israeli regime in the face of those attacks , or the pro-Palestinian sectarian left, street protestors, Muslim communities worldwide and much of the liberal left press appalled at the extent and depth of the Israeli assault on Gaza in response, the space for nuance seems vanishingly small. Lines are drawn: you are either with Israel and its right to defend itself, or you are a hate-filled terrorist apologist and borderline antisemite; or you are either with the Palestinian population being bulldozed in Gaza or you are supporter of neo-colonialism, racism and violent attacks on a defenceless civilian population. It has always struck me as curious that one of the least straightforward geopolitical issues in the world can be reduced to emotional adherence to one cause or the other, each filled with an enraged righteousness that is unwilling to give any room to the narrative or case of their opponents. No wonder this conflict appears intractable. But this habitual positioning is simply not good enough. If the partisans in a conflict now nearly a century old cannot even begin to discover empathy for the other side then the war, violence and misery that infects this narrow eastern Mediterranean coastline will truly never end.

On the left, nothing triggers moral outrage more than the plight of the Palestinians at the hands of the state of Israel. Since the end of South African apartheid, no other issue of social or political justice arouses such passion, denunciation and disproportionate attention than the spectacle of the Israeli military pulverising Gaza or protecting the settler extremists in their efforts to seize more and more of the West Bank from the enfeebled grasp of the Palestinian Authority. Much of the left’s position on Israel is indeed a moral standpoint that supports an asymmetrical struggle of street resistance against overwhelming military force, particularly since the PLO ceased to be a credible military presence in the 1980s. But the left’s position is not motivated purely by liberal handwringing. Its roots lie in the ahistorical ideology of anti imperialism, a transfer of the moral turpitude of apartheid South Africa seamlessly to the state of Israel, and a far darker antipathy to a Jewish ethnic state that leans into the long and ignoble history of left wing antisemitism.

Where the left analysis, such as it is, is so inadequate is in its bending of inconvenient truths about the foundation and development of Israel into a sub-Trotskyist narrative of neo colonialism versus internationalism. It is simply untrue to characterise Israel as a neo-colonial tool of the US, which is the standard narrative of far left parties and the Stop The War Coalition: in fact American military support for Israel did not become significant until after the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel was attacked by six Arab nations committed to destroying it. Before then Israel had looked to France and Britain for support, with the USA wary of Israel as a disruptive force in the region. It is equally incorrect to describe Israel as a “European settler state”, characterising it as a projection of European land grabbing power into the Muslim world. This account demonstrates a failure to understand what European settler colonialism actually was and ignores the status of Israel as a Jewish homeland, which is its fundamental purpose. Indeed, it is impossible to understand why Israel behaves as it does without also understanding the Jewish historical experience of lethal antisemitism.

The Jewish contact with European Christian civilisation was characterised by, at best, a grudging tolerance, punctuated by occasional bursts of terrifying violence. Whether this was the burning alive of Jews in York in the twelfth century; the expulsion of Spain’s Jewish population in 1492; the vicious antisemitism of the early Reformation; the regular lethal pogroms in Eastern Europe or the culmination of anti-Jewish genocide in the Holocaust which, in a sick irony, took place in Germany, a country viewed by many Jews as an accepting refuge, the message appeared to be the same: European Christians hated Jews and frequently wanted them dead. The Holocaust, with its industrialised slaughter, removed all meaningful opposition to the establishment of a Jewish homeland: the German National Socialists had proved the Zionist case for them in the most graphic and horrendous manner. Getting away from Europe for many Jews in the late 1940s was not a matter of land grabbing or colonialism, it was a matter of survival. When the leadership of the new state of Israel said “never again”, it absolutely meant it.

Taken in an historical context, therefore, the Hamas attacks were simply a continuance of the centuries-old murderous assaults experienced by Jews in Europe. Israeli fear of physical extermination is hardly pacified by the fact that Hamas is probably the most antisemitic organisation the world has seen. Its founding charter calls not only for the eradication of the state of Israel, but seeks the physical liquidation of all Jews in Palestine and the wider Middle East. Netanyahu and his gang of nationalists and racists may have viewed Hamas as useful idiots to keep the West Bank PLO survival, Fatah, weak, but its radical Islamist ideology was always there in plain sight. The 7th October atrocities were simply the gruesome enactment of that nihilistic world view. From the Israeli perspective therefore calls for restraint when faced with an enemy as ideologically committed to the killing of Jews as the Nazis ever were, is a luxury. Does Israel care if its air and ground assault to dismantle Hamas kills thousands of civilians in the process? Not at all: from the Israeli perspective it’s them or us, the same reductive mindset as their enemies.

There is therefore an historical context to the systematic brutality of Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians, especially in Gaza. But just as its critics show little interest in the history of antisemitic persecution and death that directly led to the foundation of the Jewish homeland, so Israeli public discourse allows little or no concern for the Palestinians, a dispossessed people oppressed and murdered in their own land without even the restraint of common humanity when it comes to the inflicting of mass civilian casualties, including those of children. Whatever moral high ground Israel may have been able to claim after the psychotic Hamas attacks last month, this has been utterly undermined by its policy of collective punishment and war on non combatants. The war crimes inflicted by Israel on the people of Gaza in acts of rage and revenge have effectively put the country beyond the pale of moral acceptability. These actions infuriate international public opinion, radicalise another generation of Gazans and give succour to those who would see Israel wiped from the face of Palestine “from the river to the sea”. In this inferno of never ending grievance and hate, it is hard to find any hope. However, there is a fundamental truth that may yet, one day, see an end to this forever war. Both Palestinians and Israelis have one overwhelming urge in common: both wish to live in peace, dignity and security. If one day the two communities can rid themselves of their current calamitous leaderships, understand each other’s history and thereby glimpse the humanity of their enemies, the realisation may dawn that continued attempted mutual destruction provides no security at all.

6th November 2023

With thanks to Chris Alcock, conversations with whom have helped inform this blog

It’s The End of the Tories and They Know It

Mick tells it like it is. A piece of agitprop genius by PoliticsJoe

Tory Blues

Any government which loses two safe seats after its Prime Minister has just “relaunched” himself with less than 12 months to go before a General Election simply cannot retain power. The swing from Conservative to Labour in Tamworth, at just shy of 24%, in line with the previous record-beater at Selby and Ainsty, is phenomenal and doubles the swing implied by Labour’s allegedly “fragile” opinion poll lead (perhaps commentators will stop describing it like that now). The loss of Mid Bedfordshire is even more depressing for Tory electoral strategists - Conservative since 1931, the seat epitomises the Tory-voting shires and unlike Tamworth, which returned a Labour MP between 1997 and 2010, it has no history of representation by any other party. There will be furious argument about whether the strong Liberal Democrat campaign in Mid Beds helped or hindered the Labour challenge, and the significance of “stay at home” Tory abstentions to the result, but the very fact a seat like Nadine Dorries’ old stomping ground now has a “red” MP tells you all you need to know about Tory prospects at the next General Election.

These two extraordinary by election results at this stage in the electoral cycle means there is barely a Conservative seat anywhere in the country that can now be considered truly safe, that Labour’s onward march to power must now be considered unstoppable and that a landslide at the General Election is looking increasingly likely.

20th October 2019

1992 And All That

Labour’s Thirty Year Old Trauma Still Haunts the Party: Could It Happen Again?

Sources: The Sun/ GettyImages

By Honest John

LIKE A psephological Banquo’s Ghost, the 1992 General Election haunts the Labour Party like no other. The contest - thirty one years ago now - is continually held up as a warning against complacency and proof positive of the baleful influence of the right wing media in the U.K. and the almost mystical ability of the Conservative Party to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by relentless attacks on Labour’s economic competence, its patriotism, and even its right to exist as the main party of opposition at all. After twelve electoral defeats out of twenty since the Second World War (and just two victories before that), Labour is perhaps justified in its belief that the British electorate fundamentally do not trust the Labour Party, viewing it alternately as spendthrift, economically reckless and threatening to a British way of life based on capitalist aspiration and social advancement. It suits the Tory Party and the right wing commentariat to present Labour as somehow alien to the value system of good British (or perhaps English) folk, and their rare election victories to be seen as at best aberrations and worse, dangerous. It may also suit certain factions within Labour itself to restrain radicalism and utopianism and to keep the party focused on a centrist agenda that does not really threaten the basis on which the capitalist economy is run.

That sense of excessive caution, even fear, has been at the heart of Labour’s political positioning almost from the moment Keir Starmer became leader. The promises on which he ran for the party leadership have been dropped one by one; commitments on nationalisation, tuition fees, and even the Green Prosperity Plan have been ditched, diluted or postponed. In an attempt to neutralise any hint of the fiscal incontinence on display in Corbyn Labour’s 2019 manifesto, Labour has adopted the “iron discipline” of Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rule and a policy-light offer designed to “bomb proof” Labour’s positioning from any conceivable Tory attack line. With its smooth competence, heavy hitters from the New Labour past and a relentless focus on reassuring the electorate that Labour is “safe” to vote for, the Party has seemed at times in danger of being unable to articulate any vision for the country at all. However, this caution and apparent lack of ambition has been rewarded by a 20 point opinion poll lead for over twelve months, serial council and by-election victories and the drift, turning to a scramble, of business interests and lobbyists, either cynically or hopefully, towards the opposition. Change appears to be in the air. At the Labour Party Conference, quiet confidence was the order of the day and if hope that Labour will at last form a government some time in 2024 was present, this was accompanied by palpable nervousness that the Tories might yet find a way to turn things around, and behind this doubting, is always the shadow of 1992.

It of course benefits the Tories to maintain the fallacy that they are hardwired into the brain of Middle England and can anticipate and stoke almost atavistic fears of a Labour government on the part of voters. It’s nonsense of course, but the Conservative ability to pose as something new after a long period in office does have a track record and John Major’s ability to secure a 21 seat Tory majority and an extraordinary 42% of the vote after the Conservatives had been in office 13 years holds an almost supernatural hold on the Labour imagination, in a way the similar Tory reinvention acts of Macmillan and Johnson do not. It is true that the Conservatives, who rid themselves of Margaret Thatcher due to her electoral toxicity in 1990 (a fact often forgotten by Tory mythologisers who have raised the Iron Lady to secular sainthood) , were able to rally behind John Major, a personally liberal and politically emollient character, and to present him as a new type of Tory leader, less divisive, hectoring and uncompromising than his predecessor. It was also true the Conservative attack machine lethally picked apart Labour’s policy frailties and ambiguities in 1992. This had its greatest impact in the Conservative claims, masterminded by then Party Chairman Chris Patten, that Labour had a “tax bombshell” they would drop on middle income families to fund social programmes and that a “Double Whammy” of tax increases and inflation (complete with posters of a boxer wearing outsize gloves with each “whammy” -more taxes and higher prices - painted on them) would be a result of Labour’s spending plans. Thirteen years of transformative government under Thatcher had completely changed public attitudes on the necessity of increased taxation to fund public services and the appeal of aspiration to the lower middle and upper working classes was key to Major’s self-effacing style.

Superficially, there are similarities today to the political situation in 1990/91. A flamboyant and divisive Prime Minister has been replaced by a modest and technocratic successor; Keir Starmer, like Neil Kinnock, struggles to connect with swathes of the electorate; Rishi Sunak presents himself as the “change” candidate, contrasting himself both to unpopular Tory predecessors and the time-served leader of the opposition, and he and Jeremy Hunt present themselves as fiscally responsible conservatives, in contrast to Labour’s reckless borrowing plans, particularly to fund the Green Prosperity Plan. But there the similarities with 1992 end.

The Thatcher governments in the 1980s had presided over a period of growth in the British economy bolstered by North Sea oil revenues and investment in the new technology industries, following the rapid withdrawal of the U.K. from its previous industrial dependence on coal, iron and steel. With the privatisation of state assets and the “Right to Buy” council houses the proceeds of that growth had been targeted at an aspirant demographic, sufficient to win General Elections under First Past The Post, even as social inequality grew and communities that had hosted Britain’s former heavy industries collapsed into economic wastelands. John Major inherited this voting coalition and retained its support in 1992. Sunak has no such legacy to boast of. Austerity, Brexit and Trussonomics are words that dare not be spoken: inflation, low growth and crumbling public services are the lived experience of families who researchers tell us have lost an average of £10,000 thanks to stagnating living standards, since 2010. There is no prosperous demographic outside the hyper rich of which Sunak himself is a self conscious member, that are seeing their incomes or lifestyles improve. With mortgages barely affordable, the housing ladder long since removed and well paid jobs and pensions increasingly out of reach, aspiration is simply not an option for most ordinary people.

Then there are the opinion polls. In 1991, Labour’s poll lead, when it had one at all, averaged at best 5%; in 1992 it had dropped to 3%. Apparent false memory frequently relates that Labour were “expected” to win in 1992. They were not. The two parties entered the election campaign more or less neck and neck and the most frequently predicted result was that of a hung Parliament. The emphatic Tory win, at least in percentage vote terms, was a surprise but not because most commentators expected a Labour majority government. Contrast this to the fact Labour have enjoyed a lead of between 15 and 20 points for over twelve months, a lead consistent with actual by election and council election results over the same period. An opinion poll lead of this size and duration has never been overhauled by an incumbent government who went on to win a general election, in British political history. Also in 1992 the media was unremittingly hostile to Labour’s mild social democratic offer. Famously The Sun ran a front page that, if Labour won the general election, asked the last person leaving Britain to “please turn out the lights” with Kinnock’s head framed in a light bulb. After the result the same paper boasted that it was “The Sun Wot Won It”. Today, formerly reliably Tory newspapers and journals like The Times, the Financial Times, The Spectator and occasionally even the Daily Telegraph will run Labour-friendly articles, and seem unworried at the prospect of Keir Starmer being PM. Only the Daily Mail and Daily Express can be relied upon to churn out anti-Labour scare stories on a consistent basis.

The left would claim that this is because, compared to Kinnock, Starmer is in the pocket of vested interests and represents no threat to the rich and powerful. But the Labour programme confirmed at its conference is Wilsonian indeed, including tax reforms targeted at the rich, reform of the House of Lords, the biggest proposed improvement to workers’ rights since the 1970s, renationalisation of rail and a post Brexit commitment to an industrial strategy to propel a rebalancing of the economy towards green energy. To top it all, there is a promise to build 1.5 million affordable homes in New Towns - an unapologetic commitment to Keynesian economics. The Starmer programme is therefore far to the left of anything ever proposed by Blair, who prided himself on adherence to free market solutions to Britain’s problems. However, much of the right wing media this time seem relatively sanguine about this Labour programme of social and economic reform, Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rule notwithstanding.

Neil Kinnock’s Labour in 1992 did offer a programme of renewal and a reprioritisation of social values, but insufficient numbers of voters were prepared to give it a hearing. The difference in 2024 is that the majority of the electorate want change after 13 years of serial failure, social vandalism, open corruption, ideological folly and broken promises delivered by a series of chaotic and unserious Conservative governments. Keir Starmer will succeed where Neil Kinnock failed not just because the Tories have been rumbled, but because Labour possess a credibility it did not have 31 years ago and above all, because it offers a weary electorate that precious electoral commodity: it offers voters hope.

17th October

Sh*t Show at the F**k Factory*

Sunak Loses his Party and the Plot

Source: conservatives.com

By Honest John

WHEREAS NO Conservative Party Conference in recent years can be described as entirely sane, the gathering in Manchester this month, if it is actually remembered at all, will surely go down as one of the most weird. On display we had open leadership bids by swivel eyed partisans of various right wing persuasions; performative politics by Ministers taking place in a world that seems to exist entirely in the fevered imagination of the Tory faithful and GB News, and probably one of the most bizarre conference speeches ever heard (and by one of the alleged Conservative “grown ups” to boot). And, oh yes, we had Rishi Sunak gamely, if wanly, smiling throughout a barely concealed car-crash of a conference, attempting to wield authority no one believes he actually possesses and presiding over one of the biggest political unforced errors in recent years (and that’s saying something). Welcome to the F**k Factory.

Perhaps there was a clue that all might not be going according to plan when one of the most feted politicians at Conference turned out not to be a member of the Conservative Party at all. Like a reanimated Ghost of Brexits Past, Nigel Farage hove into view, allegedly as a GB News anchor. In typical Farage style, the newsman swiftly became the story, with Tory delegates queuing up for selfies and journos interviewing the architect of Britain’s singular act of self harm, seemingly for the job of Conservative Party leader. Just about disguising the twinkle in his eye, the predatory populist opined he would be very happy to lead the Tories if only they could become a little bit more right wing, thereby putting forward his candidature for a vacancy that doesn’t exist. The excruciatingly embarrassing video footage of Farage later bopping with a breathless Priti Patel to Robbie Williams’ Angels will have been small comfort to Sunak, seemingly upstaged on day one.

Altogether more serious were the ideological challenges thrown down at Conference by a curiously unrepentant Liz Truss and an entirely repellent Suella Braverman. Truss, seemingly unaware that she and Kwasi Kwarteng permanently crashed the British economy as well as the Conservative brand during their disastrous tenure as Prime Minister and Chancellor this time last year, swaggered into Manchester Central to address a packed fringe meeting of the “Great British Growth Rally”, which sounded like a cross like Brands Hatch and Nuremberg. Her speech was peppered with the same hubristic nonsense that brought the bond markets crashing down around her ears last autumn and which saw her ludicrous premiership end after just 49 days. Without insight, contrition or political intelligence, Truss nonetheless signalled that the Chicago Economics wing of free market Leninism remains in contention for the post election battle for the soul of the Conservative Party and Truss herself clearly believes her tax-cutting zealotry will find an audience in a party that has almost entirely lost its way. Truss 2.0 cannot be ruled out - at least in opposition.

If Truss’ ego trip had an element of the comic about it, the Home Secretary’s speech entered altogether more sinister territory. One of the many catastrophes of Brexit was the infiltration of the Conservative Party, once the political expression of bourgeois civic values and British business, by rank English nationalism as Boris Johnson purged the party of its Macmillanite liberal wing in order to force through the hardest Brexit deal he could. What Braverman’s speech revealed was that tendency on full display - paranoid, dishonest, divisive, racist and filled with fear and hatred, made all the more ironic by the fact its standard bearer is a woman of colour and the daughter of immigrants. It would take a panel of psychiatrists to truly get inside Suella Braverman’s head, but what her speech articulated, with its talk of a ‘hurricane’ of immigrants heading to the U.K., was the essence of English fascism, now safely ensconced in the formerly respectable colours of Tory blue, but as intolerant, nativist, authoritarian and hate-filled as it has ever been. This, I fear, is the rising tide within Toryism, and Braverman, with her nasty following congregating within the National Conservatives, is likely to be the coming woman.

Braverman’s speech perhaps indicates a dark future for British Conservatism, but there were other Ministers to remind us what a literal joke the Tories have become under Rishi Sunak. In his desperate attempt to win a General Election on culture wars issues alone, his cabinet were encouraged to excoriate “policies” (implemented by whom was not always clear, seeing as the Tories are allegedly the government) that don’t exist or “crack down” on situations that, equally, don’t exist, turning the conference into even more of a theatre of the absurd than it was already. We had Steve Barclay bizarrely assuring a British public, infuriated by lengthening elective waiting lists, despairing of ever getting to see a GP and terrified at the non-arrival of ambulances, that there would be no admission of trans women to female wards. We watched bemused as Jeremy Hunt promised that benefits claimants who turned down a job offer would have their benefits reduced (they already do, Chancellor), and Transport Secretary Mark Harper promise to save us from the controlling malevolence of “fifteen minute cities” (an urban planning idea to place city centre facilities within in walking distance of each other) despite the fact that, as yet, they don’t exist anywhere in the world. Perhaps the most idiotic contribution was by the unfailingly unimpressive Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary, Claire Coutinho, who told us to much hearty Tory laughter, that Labour was keen to introduce taxes on meat. Coutinho was later ridiculed into silence by the conference press pack who repeatedly and gleefully demonstrated to her that she had made her meat story up. Finally, the most unintentionally hilarious contribution to this sh*t show of ridiculous posturing, was the toe-curling speech of Penny Mordaunt who stood on the stage, waving her fist heroically and urged the assembled Tories to “stand up and fight” - continually. Quite who the Blue Army was intended to come to blows with, Penny didn’t make particularly clear apart from some vague exhortation to “freedom”. It is hard to believe Mordaunt is considered the great centrist hope of Toryism and the potential future leader Labour allegedly fear. On the evidence of that speech, Mordaunt seemed not only to lose Conference, but most of her marbles too.

But perhaps the best was saved for last. With probably little more than twelve months to go before a General Election, this conference speech, his first as Tory leader, was Rishi Sunak’s opportunity to provide some direction, principle and purpose to what has seemed like an exhausted and rudderless government, out of ideas. Instead what we got was a bizarre concoction of unrelated intentions that seemed to owe more to Sunak’s own personal wish list than any re-launch of Conservative philosophy. There was a promise to scrap A-Levels and replace them with a Baccalaureate, for what reason, Rishi never got round to telling us; he wants to ban children from smoking; he loves his family and the last 30 years (eighteen of them under the Conservatives) have been a political failure. He sounded much of the time like a really cross parish councillor. But the denouement of this plotless speech was Sunak finally confirming the scrapping of the northern branch of HS2. This was announced in the city it was designed to benefit most, a short sighted decision of monumental proportions that neutralises any further network expansion in the north and turns high speed to low speed once the trains get north of Birmingham. If Labour needed any further proof of the systematic Tory failure to deliver “levelling up” to the Red Wall, Sunak provided it to them in Technicolor. The whole sorry saga is political naivety and weakness at its most miserable - an announcement that was meant to show the public the Prime Minister can make “tough” financial decisions in the national interest has pleased virtually nobody. Sunak’s keynote moment was to tell the country what he was not going to do. Nothing sums up Sunak’s failed premiership better than the dog’s dinner of the cancellation HS2 for the north.

Sunak’s speech was weak and vision-free, but to be fair, what else could it be? There is a reason why Rishi’s showpiece was an embarrassing combination of personal dislikes, tired populism and broken promises. The British people are paying the highest personal taxes for seventy years because Hunt’s budget is trying to fill a £40bn hole in the public finances recklessly inflicted by Liz Truss, the context also to the HS2 decision; Britain’s public services are now collapsing as the consequences of a decade of needless and destructive austerity under David Cameron are finally felt, and the inflation-wracked British economy barely grows, fatally and permanently held back thanks to folly of Boris Johnson’s Brexit. That is the real story of over 13 years of Tory rule, but Sunak’s problem in Manchester was that he couldn’t possibly tell it.

*With acknowledgements to Series 1 of the HBO TV drama Succession

7th October 2023

The People Who Lie to Themselves

The Dishonesty at the Heart of Keir Starmer’s Labour

Source: iStock Photos

By Honest John

THAT THE Conservatives are political toast is now a truism of British politics. It seems everything Rushi Sunak touches turns to blight. With his increasingly wan smile, the Prime Minister frequently gives the impression of simply going through the motions, as though he himself no longer believes in the bizarre concoction of austerity economics and crude populism that has characterised his rudderless premiership. The latest scandal of aerated concrete threatening the physical collapse of schools and hospitals symbolises Tory Britain: after well over 13 years of ruinous Conservative rule, the country feels like it is literally falling to bits. With electoral projections predicting a Labour majority of anything between 40 and 140 seats at the next General Election, if the government ever did have a “narrow path to victory” as Isaac Levido claimed eight months ago, it now seems overgrown, mountainous and littered with fallen concrete.

With an average opinion poll lead of 18 points, historically unassailable at this stage In the electoral cycle, Keir Starmer’s Labour seem destined for power, possibly as soon as May next year. The party, pursuing an almost carbon copy of the tactics employed by New Labour in 1996/97 have been careful to shut down any conceivable Tory attack line by diluting, postponing and removing most of the headline policies that had made the Labour offer truly distinctive as recently as last year’s Party Conference. There has been much disappointment and complaining on the left at Starmer’s and Reeves’ caution, lack of ambition and even political cowardice at what appears to be a surrendering of any recognisable progressive agenda to the Tory settlement even as that very settlement appears to be in its death throes. The question of what Starmer’s Labour stands for as it gets ever closer to becoming the next government of the U.K. is constantly raised. Whereas I share those concerns, there seems to me to be something far darker at the heart of the Labour project that goes beyond normal electoral calculus: Labour is actually being wilfully or naively dishonest with the British people.

That dishonesty is fiscal, but also political.

Labour’s current fiscal policies are rightly criticised by disappointed supporters as symbolising the government-in-waiting’s lack of political courage, but are rarely taken to task for their lack of economic coherence. In short order, Rachel Reeves has “ruled out” increasing the top rate of income tax; increasing corporation tax above 25%; any increased borrowing for the first two years in government, and any form of wealth tax. Keir Starmer has recently joined the closing down of fiscal options by promising no increase in income tax at all. The Right have traditionally challenged past Labour Party spending plans with the knowing sneer “where’s the money coming from?”. Now that question is one of genuine objective political curiosity: how on earth is Labour going to govern after it has voluntarily committed to raise no new money whatsoever?

It actually gets worse. It seems to have been forgotten (and I sometimes think by Rachel Reeves too) that Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement last year, designed to stabilise the money markets after Liz Truss’ crazed tax cutting experiment, not only launched Tory Austerity 2.0 by keeping public spending below headline inflation, but also committed to reduce current spending by £22bn and capital spending by £14bn in 2025/26. Labour has signed up to the government’s spending plans and therefore has effectively committed itself to public spending cuts in its second year in office. Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rule (public debt to be less than public income by 2029) is of a piece with this.

The Labour response to criticism of its lack of spending plans, in a reprise of Truss’ mantras, is that Labour wishes to grow the economy and that this cannot be achieved by increased taxation. This of course takes as read the tired Tory assertion that all taxation is derived from income and that increased taxation therefore suppresses consumer demand. This sophistry ignores what governments can do to stimulate the economy with increased revenues, from whatever source, and refuses to countenance the reform of taxation of wealth and property. Even if one puts unexplored policy options to one side (including the rebasing of Council Tax) Labour seems to believe that the economy will grow as if by magic; that the very appearance of a Labour government will automatically attract inward investment, stimulate new businesses, fund capital infrastructure projects and increase wages. To the question “How?” the Labour front bench has no answer.

The fact is that Reeves at least, as a former economist at the Bank of England, knows full well that growth does not occur spontaneously. Investment-led growth requires deployment of fiscal actions by the government, whether that is through the tax breaks, quantitative easing, low corporation tax, low interest rates or the selling off of state assets favoured by the Right, or through the stimulus economics, capital infrastructure spend, government-backed lending and job creation initiatives favoured by the Left. Growth always requires decisive action by the Treasury. To pretend otherwise is either delusional, economically illiterate or, that word again, dishonest.

Starmer and his front bench, given their relentless and highly effective, critique of modern Toryism, also understand that the series of policy disasters inflicted by successive Conservative regimes - the social vandalism of austerity; the self harm of Brexit; the magical thinking of Trussonomics and the inadequate neo-Thatcherism of the hapless Sunak - has resulted in untold damage to the fabric of the British economy, to the resilience and adequacy of public services and to people’s standards of living. Labour know that the unprecedented ruin wrought by the various Tory iterations can’t be “fixed” by a little policy tinkering, some structural reform and fiscal conservatism. To imply otherwise is beyond dishonesty; it is a lie.

Politically, the public’s disgust with the Tories is real. The inchoate anti-austerity that could be detected in the Brexit vote, and even in the vote for Boris Johnson’s offer in 2019, is real. However, unlike its response to those choices, this time the public refuses to be gaslighted by the right wing media. Voters have accurately joined up the dots between Cameron’s “debt reduction” falsehoods of 2010 and the lived reality today of a collapsing NHS and crumbling classrooms. The public not unreasonably want ambulances to turn up, police to manage low level crime, their councils to have enough money to regenerate their town centres, for the unaccountable water companies to stop spewing sewage into the nation’s waterways, for trains to run on time, waiting lists to come down, courts to function and public buildings not to collapse. The Labour critique has done its job, but the opposition’s implication that these public expectations can be met solely by growth and “reform” and no restitution of the public spending cuts implemented by the Tories, is fundamentally and politically dishonest.

In truth, Labour once in office, will live its dishonesty. Perhaps, like Starmer’s cheerleaders earnestly hope, the new government will reverse all its commitments not to increase existing or introduce new taxes, drop Reeves’ fiscal rule and its proclaimed adherence to the 2022 Tory financial settlement, and set about raising revenue in order to stimulate the growth it claims it wants. Or perhaps it will militantly keep its financial word but achieve no meaningful change and let down the millions of voters Labour had encouraged to turn to it to reverse the destruction of the Tory years. There is no way out of this bind - Labour will be unable to avoid the charge of dishonesty whatever it does, or chooses not to do. Starmer and his team may be able lie to themselves in opposition, but as the Tories have discovered to their cost, you can’t lie to the electorate when in government and hope, for any length of time, to get away with it.

7th September 2023

Mugshot

Dear God, what a jerk. He really does think he is some sort of mobster. The charge of racketeering could not be more apt. Actually, I think the Georgia indictment is the one that will do for Trump. Not just because of the widely heard evidence of him personally trying to corrupt an electoral process, but because it is Georgia, normally a Republican state, with a recently re-elected Republican Governor and whose Republican state officials were leaned on by the former President. It is therefore very difficult to portray this indictment as politically partisan. It also carries by far the the greatest jail time for the former President if convicted.

I suspect this one really is the beginning of the end for Donald J Trump.

Thin Blue Road

Could Rishi Sunak Yet Turn It Around?

By Honest John

BACK IN January, Isaac Levido, Rishi Sunak’s chief electoral strategist, told an Awayday of Conservative MPs that despite the opinion polls, the Tories still had a “narrow path to victory” at the next General Election (probably to be held in just over twelve months time), but that depended on clear messaging and Conservative MPs maintaining the messaging line. However, since Levido’s pep talk, we have seen the Conservatives decimated at the 2023 Local Elections and both Labour and the Liberal Democrats winning safe Tory seats at by-elections never held by them before. In the meantime, Labour’s average opinion poll lead over the Conservatives of 20 points appears impervious to Tory attacks, right wing media scare stories or Sunak’s insistence he is well on the way to meeting his five pledges to the British people.

Perhaps this should not be such a surprise. In truth, Sunak’s messaging has been awful and all over the place. When it is not dumbing down into nasty populist rhetoric about asylum seekers and migrants, it is lurching towards anti-green and pro-carbon fuel postures, proclaiming the Prime Minister “the motorist’s friend”. The reluctance to focus on the issues that the public say they care most about: inflation, the economy, the NHS and polluted water is both marked and counter-productive. The desperate Tory attempts to find “wedge” issues with Labour run the risk of putting off more voters than they attract. There is every chance that the Tories are playing to a gallery that is already converted to its intolerant and regressive message and that doubling down on the “anti woke” rhetoric is actually helping make the non-Tory “wedge” even bigger as a result. It is hard to interpret the opinion poll findings and election results any other way.

This incontinent plumbing the depths of GB News-inspired Trumpism cannot be what Levido meant when he urged message discipline and a will to win on the part of Tory MPs. Far from staking out a narrow path to victory, under Sunak, the Tories give the impression of talking entirely to themselves and heading off in a far right direction that can only be resolved after an inevitable defeat at the next election. However, if Sunak was willing to junk the racism, drop the anti-green posturing and free himself from the strait jacket he allowed Jeremy Hunt to place him in in last autumn’s financial statement, there may yet be, as Levido hoped, a thin blue road to at least the avoidance of electoral catastrophe next year.

In truth, recent headline economic figures are good: inflation dropped by over a percentage point last month: the economy grew by 0.2% in the second quarter, and average wages rose in June by a staggering 7.8%. With forecasts that energy prices will also begin to tumble, Sunak may be able to claim credibly that he is meeting his pledges and good times are in sight. The message that Sunak should be putting out there is that the party of economic competence is being vindicated and voters should, as so often before, trust it to put things right.

The Tories are arguably helped in this by Labour’s excessive caution, characterised by an almost neurotic dropping of any policy commitment which could invite, possibly, a successful Tory attack line, and its mumbling incoherence from Keir Starmer down, as to what a Labour government would actually do in office and what the Labour Party now believes it stands for. When the opposition is basically promising to do nothing of significance whatsoever when in government, it vacates the field for the Tories to colour in a narrative beyond simple headlines of economic performance. If Sunak was bold, he would ditch the Austerity 2.0 that comprised Hunt’s financial statement, borrow heavily and look to make good on the “levelling up” agenda so signally not delivered by Boris Johnson, while also addressing the most egregious financial shortfalls in health and criminal justice and intervening decisively in the polluting disgrace that is the privatisated water industry. After all, it is only what the Tory Party promised the British people in its 2019 manifesto.

If Sunak possessed the verve and imagination to relaunch the Tory brand in this way, not only might he pull the rug from under Labour’s bloodless non-offering, but he might actually deliver on the real “people’s priorities” in a way that could impact on their lived experience over the next 12 months. Whether after 13 years such a further re-invention would work, is hard to say, but it is equally difficult to see how Tory political fortunes could be any worse. Such a shift could mean that Sunak might deny Starmer a majority, perhaps even saving a sufficient number of seemingly doomed Conservative seats to enable him to hang on as Prime Minister.

Is this scenario likely? Not really - internal Tory political dynamics probably could not enable it; it maybe too late to turn around the Tories’ financial plan without a severe reaction from the bond markets, and Sunak’s own innate Thatcherism also probably prevents it. However, something for Sunak and Starmer to contemplate as Parliament prepares to return from its summer recess is this. Possibly on the back of the improved economic news, according to the New Statesman’s poll of polls, in August, Labour’s lead over the Tories fell by a full five points and the Conservatives are now in touching distance of 30% once more, a rating they have not secured for over 12 months.

The thin blue road may well be open if Sunak has the courage to take it and if Starmer remains too craven to prevent him.

19th August 2023

The Leader of the Opposition

Rishi Sunak’s Bizarre Political Strategy

Source: Open Democracy

By Honest John

IT’S HARD to believe that it was just nine months ago that Rishi Sunak became leader of the Conservative Party and therefore, absurdly, the fifth Tory Prime Minister in thirteen years, and stood in front of Downing Street to promise the British public “professionalism, accountability and integrity” after three years of debauched corruption under Boris Johnson and gimlet-eyed ideological lunacy under Liz Truss. In those heady autumn days there was real worry on the Labour front bench and hope on the part of right wing political opinion not infected by the corroding virus of the Johnsonian cult, that “Rish!” (as he hilariously termed himself in last summer’s leadership contest), might give the Tories once again the opportunity to re-invent themselves - to sweep away the putrid remnants of Johnson’s legacy and to despatch Truss’ “ideas” back to the Tufton Street parallel universe from whence they had escaped. Sunak could basically tell the electorate despite nearly thirteen years of Tory rule that there was actually nothing to see here and could we all just start again, please? Indeed, in late 2022 and early 2023, pollsters detected a “Rishi bounce”, as Labour’s opinion poll lead narrowed to a ‘mere’ fourteen points. Could Sunak be the man to do it again? Could the billionaire tech bro from Silicon Valley cut through to the public, reassure the Blue Wall that “normal” Toryism was back and shore up the sliding Red Wall by, improbably, reassuring its voters he understood their pain and that levelling up would at last be delivered?

Alas, no. After that initial bout of optimistic public curiosity about the relatively politically opaque Sunak, he has revealed himself to be as bereft of ideas as his party: his low bar “pledges” in danger of 100% non-achievement; his Austerity 2.0 budget restricting any serious management of, or investment in, the post-Brexit economy; and he appears paralysed in the face of an inflation that refuses in any meaningful way to subside, and public services finally buckling under the damage of Cameron-era austerity and the final collapse of the Thatcherite economic model. As a result Labour have re-established a 20 point opinion poll lead, safe Conservative council and Parliamentary seats fall to whichever party can defeat the Tories and Keir Starmer is forecast to achieve a General Election victory on an epic scale, one that could reduce Tory representation in the Commons to less than 200 seats. Is Rishi downhearted by this collapse of personal and political support, in which his leadership and his party’s approval ratings are now lower than those of Boris Johnson when he was forced out by the Tory parliamentary party on the grounds that that he was, well, unelectable? Not at all. Rishi has a plan. His new political strategy is to pretend he is the Leader of the Opposition.

Not fazed by the fact that banging on about Britain’s “broken immigration system” - run by the Tories for thirteen years - for the last twelve months has not shifted the dial on the government’s dire poll ratings one iota, Sunak has seen hope in the unexpected Conservative win in the Uxbridge by election and decided that running against government policy (like ULEZ) could yet save his political bacon. Even Rishi can appreciate that the government blaming the Tories for the country’s ills might be a slightly weird look, so he has hit on the wizard wheeze of blaming the hell hole that is modern Britain on the Labour Party.

Sunak’s entire political strategy is now to campaign against the green policies his own government introduced, commitment to net zero by 2030 now replaced by Rishi as “friend of the motorist”, unlike Just Stop Oil-supporting Labour and its preposterous Green Prosperity Plan; to brief against the Bank of England’s interest rate rises despite only weeks ago Sunak praising the Bank’s determination to bring down inflation by, yes, interest rate rises; to claim Labour are thwarting the ability of a government with an 80 seat majority to enact its anti migration legislation, that has already been passed into law, due to Labour’s disgraceful collusion with “lefty lawyers”, and to blame record NHS waiting lists on Labour’s trade union paymasters bringing services grinding to a halt and holding patients to ransom. Poor Rishi, he could do such good if it wasn’t for that darned Labour Party thwarting his every move.

This whole approach is simultaneously hilarious and profoundly depressing. Government tactics have become a reactive game of sub-fascist rhetoric, blame and mendacity to try, somehow, to persuade the public that voting Labour at the next election will ruin all the good things the Tories have visited on the country over 13 years in office and prevent them from getting on and “finishing the job”. The whole campaign is as bizarre as it is funny and will as ineffective as it is nasty and childish. There are indeed limits to voter prejudice and credulity: their lived experience of shopping in a supermarket, of trying to get a GP appointment or an NHS dentist, of going on holiday in a burning Europe and the sheer horror of seeing effluent being poured into Britain’s waterways and shorelines by under-regulated water companies has told them all they need to know about the truth of Tory Britain. No amount of migrant-baiting and new oil drilling licenses can alter the fact day to day life for tens of thousands of people is basically rubbish. The Conservatives and their execrable right wing media mouthpieces can continue to broadcast their bile out of Radio Nowhere, but no one is listening to the cant and broken promises any longer. Hapless Rishi may yet achieve a status not reached by any of his predecessors, despite stiff competition. Sunak may be looked back on by political historians as the most ridiculous Prime Minister in recent times.

9th August 2023