Hidden in the manifesto: Labour's war against populism
Farage cannot be defeated by rhetoric, he can only be defeated by competence.
Yesterday's YouGov poll put Reform one point above the Conservatives. It is the transition moment. The pain point.
Ultimately that poll is just a peg for a conversation rather than an event in itself. It's within the margin of error. Other polls haven't replicated it. And anyway, you never pay attention to one poll. You wait for a pattern to emerge.
But the basic reality of what is happening is now well documented. Reform is ascendant. The Tories are collapsing. Nigel Farage might well win his seat and become an MP. It's possible that a few other Reform candidates will too. They will then become the nucleus of a populist parliamentary insurgency against the new Labour government.
Our era is defined by the war against populism. That's the story of our lifetime. Travel down one path and liberal democracy survives. Travel down another and we mutate into something murky and terrible, an experiment in authoritarianism. We’re now starting to see the outline of how that war might play out over the next few years.
The global rise of populism has taken place in two separate ways. In countries with proportional representation systems, the populist party typically secures representation in parliament. In countries with first-past-the-post, populism tends to be absorbed into the centre-right party. This has happened to both the US and the UK.
Having Farage and his idiot henchmen in parliament suggests we might be about to end up with the worst of both worlds, some morbid symbiote where the Tories and Reform combine or become morally synergistic. It's not clear how that would work. But the underlying trends are fairly clear: We have an extremely volatile electorate. We have deep-set national problems, including economic stagnation. And we have cratering levels of public trust in the political system. In short, we have the ideal environment for populism to thrive. We have all the necessary conditions.
This election is the most important for a generation. And that's not because Labour is about to get back into power. It's because this is where the battle against populism takes place. Keir Starmer's role is historic. The burden on him is immense. It is to neutralise the populist threat. Because if he fails, very terrible things indeed wait for us on the horizon.
The Labour battle against populism will not be rhetorical. It is ultimately about a great battle of ideas, but it will not be expressed in soaring speeches and dramatic clashes of personality. It will be expressed through the details. It is, at its heart, about organisational competence: Can you make things work? Can you make a promise and stick to it? Can you improve the quality of people's lives? If you can show that, you can reduce populism’s attraction.
Starmer is well placed for this. Unlike other party leaders, indeed unlike politicians in general, he has run a large organisation. As director of public prosecutions, he was responsible for managing a department with 8,000 officials, organising hundreds of thousands of criminal cases every year. He personally visited all 42 regional divisions and met around a third of all staff. Tellingly, he asked senior management to leave the room when he did so, to make sure junior staff had the freedom to speak openly. That's key. It's how good management works: making sure the people who understand the real day-to-day work have lines of communication with senior levels.
This is all basically unheard of. Most people who are asked to become a secretary of state have never even run a small business, let alone a massive organisation. The same applies to prime ministers. There's almost no precedent in the British system for someone who knows what the fuck they’re doing.
Yesterday's manifesto gave indications of how things may proceed. Only indications - nothing more. Do not expect firm answers from Labour at the moment. They are not engaged in technical line drawing. They're doing watercolour painting. Everything is hazy and vague, aspirational and inoffensive. But the indications are pretty clear.
Labour plans to return to one major fiscal event a year. That's important. The temptation of owning the media's attention for a full week has led governments to maintain a bi-annual Budget and autumn statement approach, combined with various mini-Budgets and god-knows-what else. This has resulted in a tidal wave of politically-motivated short-termist changes to the tax system which have reduced it to the point of unintelligibility.
There were other sections which promise potentially useful action on Commons and Lords reform. But the most important part rests with Downing Street.
Journalists have mostly skipped over this section as a piece of vacuous political fluff, but it is crucial to what takes place over the next five years. It is expressed in the very first few pages of the Labour manifesto, before any of the policies. It's given pride of place.
"To rebuild Britain, we need to change how Britain is governed. For too long, Britain has been held back by governments that, because they lack a relentless focus on long-term ends, are buffeted about by events. Politics has enormous potential to change lives for the better, but too often different parts of the government have pursued their own narrow goals rather than working together."
To understand why this is so important, we have to understand what’s gone wrong.
Early last year, Rishi Sunak announced his five pledges, one of which was to get NHS waiting lists down. But here's the thing: improving performance in the NHS is very hard to do. The failure of one bit of the system affects other bits. If social care is poor, you can't get people off the wards. And if you can't get them off the wards, you don't have space for people coming in from A&E. And if you don't have space for that, the ambulances can't discharge the person they collected, which means they're not available for the person who just collapsed in their bedroom. Fixing this requires joined-up thinking, clear lines of communication and remorseless attention.
Sunak didn't bother to organise how he would fulfil his promise, just like Liz Truss before him, or Boris Johnson before her. It was therefore broken. This is the cycle that feeds populism: Promise, followed by failure, followed by disillusionment, until eventually people lose faith in liberal democracy.
What does Labour's missions commitment mean?
Today's FT offers a pretty good indication. Five mission-specific boards covering the main commitments on growth, the NHS, clean energy, crime and skills. They're aimed at stopping the 'siloing' of departments, where they become hermetically sealed cultures unable to cooperate with one another even though their policy areas overlap. They're also aimed at ensuring there is permanent communication between the centre in Downing Street and the departments, presumably through personal secretaries, permanent secretaries, special advisors and ministers. Most importantly, if done right, they will prevent the government from becoming distracted.
Distraction is one of the key under-analysed forces in British politics. It doesn't matter what Starmer is talking about now. Once he gets into Downing Street, events will take over. Trump might become president and stop supporting Ukraine. We might have another war, or virus, or financial crash. Or a minister will leave top-secret documents on a train, or someone will have an affair. He'll be subject to the great endless cycle of global and domestic scandal and disaster. It'll consume his time.
The solution is to get structures up and running so that the promises are fulfilled regardless of whether the prime minister is paying attention to them at that precise moment. As Michael Barber, who ran the delivery unit under Tony Blair, said after September 11th: "Whatever you have to go and do in the world, I will never be distracted from this. We are going to get these targets met. We are undistractable."
This proposed system, clearly the brain child of Starmer and his chief of staff Sue Gray, provides a compelling vehicle to achieve that. It suggests they have committed serious thought to how to deliver their promises. It's the product of two civil servants with experience of the system and a clear plan of action for how to improve it.
While they do so, we'll have the usual public debate: personalities and rows and polls and Farage said this and Jeremy Corbyn said that and God help us all, our brains are leaking out our ears. On Twitter, the usual battles will play out about the race of someone playing a Star Wars character, or a National trust report, or immigration policy - all the big and small cultural issues which feed the populism machine.
But the basic weaponry in the war against populism does not lie with high rhetoric and low abuse. It lies in whether the engine room of government can function. Whether it can deliver. Whether people feel the system improves their lives.
On that basis, there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic about what comes next. It'll be conducted in technical terms that bore the hell out of most of the people watching. But it will be the decisive factor in whether populism can be defeated and then buried in the ground. This is the barricade against Farage and his poison. It’s a barricade that can hold.
Odds and sods
I'm actually way for most of the rest of the campaign - I had a holiday booked in Greece which Sunak seems to have not paid the slightest attention to when he settled on the election dates. It's going to be blissful - good friends on an island somewhere, followed by some time alone with the missus. I am now obviously going to have work throughout the bloody thing, but I'm still going. Sunak's fucked the country. He can't fuck my holiday too. he can only partially derail it.
There'll certainly still be a newsletter on Fridays and probably a few others over the next two weeks. But they might be a bit later than usual, or at weird times. I dunno. I'll figure it out as I go. I might also have to write a few of them drunk. It won't be the first time, to be fair.
See you then.
My favourite line: ‘There's almost no precedent in the British system for someone who knows what the fuck they’re doing.’
This is the first thing I’ve read that has actually made me feel hopeful for the future of the U.K. Thank you. Now if the rest of the world, especially the US, would also get its shit together, I’d feel even better!