Reasons to be cheerful

The sun is out and who knows? We might survive.

Yes this is my garden, isn’t it nice.

This week, for the first time in months, a ray of light reached my back garden. During the winter, the sun disappears from the space behind the house. In its absence, it seems to shudder and sink into a barren comatose state. But now, the sun has returned. There is hope again.

London was looking terribly fit yesterday. People had that look on their face, like an animal that has just come out of hibernation. They were sitting on walls, closing their eyes and facing up - that very specific Spring awareness of warmth, before you've started to take it for granted. Everyone looked beautiful: radiant, happy, alive. We'd survived another winter. We made it through.

So in the name of Spring, this is going to be a positive newsletter. I am going to try and construct the most optimistic assessment of where we are at and what will happen next.

Is it definitely true? No. But it is just as likely as the more negative assessments we see all around us, if not more so. It is a no less believable outcome than the one of total doom which we mistake for realism.

Here are some reasons to be cheerful.

The economy can recover

On the face of it, we are obviously completely fucked. The government announced £5 billion in benefit cuts this week, including personal independence payments - a system which provides freedom and dignity to those who need it most. Worst of all, this was done in order to satisfy a fiscal rule on current spending based on projections about what is going to happen in five years time - a simply insane way to make decisions about departmental budgets, public services or welfare.

Next week Rachel Reeves will unveil her spring statement, in which the walls will continue to close in on her. There are reports that the Office for Budget Responsibility will halve its economic growth forecast. Each cog in the policy machine seems designed to torture us. The bond markets are jittery, which forces the chancellor to strengthen her commitment to the fiscal rules. But the rules demand cuts, which harm growth and hurt consumer confidence, making it harder to abide by them. On and on we go, glumly accepting our Hayekian fate.

It looks bad. It is bad. But things are not going to continue this way forever.

We are, in a sense, in a holding pattern. The Bank of England anxiously held interest rates yesterday, but they are ultimately going to cut them again this year - probably twice. At some point those rates are going to reach a level which encourages people to spend. And the money is there for them to do so. Pay growth has been above four per cent for three years. There is really quite a bit of money sitting around not doing anything useful. Businesses have also held back as they prepare for the national insurance and minimum wage changes that come in next month, but soon that too will pass.

Labour's position is the same as it was at the start. Demonstrate conviction to keep the bond markets from getting panicky. This really is not unreasonable, by the way, even if I despise the way they've done it. The bond markets flipped out over Truss and they've shown plenty of anxiety in recent months too. Reeves isn't doing this shit for fun. In the meantime, you initiate reforms that stimulate growth, like reform of the planning laws. You invest. And you hold tight as the inflationary shocks of covid and Ukraine leave the system, interest rates come down, demand rises and cyclical economic growth starts again.

Once that takes place, it becomes possible to spend on the things progressives care about. As Polly Toynbee wrote this week, the 1997 intake of Labour MPs were rightly traumatised over the party's cut to single-parent benefits, but it was replaced countless times over by later improvements to working family tax credits, child tax credits, childcare and child benefit.

It feels very dark at the moment, but there are four and a half years until the next election. At some point, this series of events is highly likely to take place. Once it does, the political decisions will become less painful.

The right is really quite unutterably buggered

It can be hard to properly appreciate this because of Reform's poll ratings, but the British right is in an existential crisis. It is fucked in ways that take a decade to put right - in really deep structural ways that cannot be easily mended.

Sure, it doesn't look that way. Most opinion polls put Labour, Tories and Reform on level pegging around the 24% mark. That seems to indicate a massive 50% block of support for the hard-right. But under a first-past-the-post system, these indications of popular support simply do not matter.

In the 1983 election, the Labour party won 27.6% and the moderates at Alliance won 25.4%. Progressives had over 50% of the vote. But this was not a progressive era. It was the era in which Margarat Thatcher reigned triumphant. The system punishes division. Historically this has always damaged the left. Now it is damaging the right. This is a very basic political point but it is apparently beyond the wit of most political commentators at the moment.

The right is also divided within themselves. Nigel Farage can't even maintain a parliamentary party with five people in it. Kemi Badenoch is already going through the initial stages of a leadership challenge, as the whispers around her grow in magnitude and intensity. At some point she'll be replaced with someone who possesses the kind of minimal competence which so evidently eludes her - probably James Cleverly. He will do better. But he will face the same basic problem she faces on his right and left flank - if you appeal to Reform voters you lose Lib Dem voters and if you appeal to Lib Dem voters you lose Reform voters. You can’t triangulate toward the centre when your voters have somewhere else to go.

It is not an insurmountable problem but it is a very serious one and the kind of thing that would typically take two terms to fix.

Britain is moving towards Europe

I've written about this before so I won't dwell on it here, but the speed with which Britain is returning to Europe is striking. After years of vandalism from the Conservatives and months of equivocation from Labour, events have conspired to partially undo the damage.

This week the EU unveiled an €150 billion defence investment lending scheme. Troublingly, it excluded Britain, but this is a short-term issue. British access to the scheme will rest on ongoing talks concerning a defence and security pact. Ideally, they will be completed in time for an EU-UK summit in May. The initial offer is for British manufacturers to access 35% of the money available. Successful negotiation should result in a higher level.

Europe is now the leader of the West, whether it wants to be or not. It represents the last stand for liberty. That stand can only be maintained with Britain's help. Europe needs us and we need them.

The events of the last two months have provided a much-needed reminder of that fact. Within weeks, Britain’s return to Europe has gone from a dreamy aspiration to something so obvious it is approaching cliche. The direction of travel is now clear.

Trump is the ideal enemy

We’ve spent a long time pondering this thing across the ocean. From the very beginning, he has been an almost incomprehensible presence. If you are not prone to like him, he is repellent. But over the last decade, we've been forced to accept that he has a degree of control over the thoughts and feelings of his followers that is without precedent anywhere else in the world, in either democracies or dictatorships. It doesn't matter what he does - they'll forgive him. It doesn't matter what he thinks - they'll adopt it. They have outsourced their independence of mind to him. Whatever the dark blood magic is that links leader and supporter, he has it.

In the beginning, we used to fixate on this. During his first term, we'd try to figure it out. Why would no scandal stick to him? Why were they so loyal? Nowadays - a sign of our defeat - we no longer talk about it at all. We simply assume it to be the case. Win or lose, Trump will maintain his base.

Here's the thing we talk about less. Those who despise Trump have also remained firm. If anything, we have found him even more hideous as time goes on. It is predominantly the policies, of course. But it is also the basic emotional and social temperament - the cruelty, the viciousness, the preening paper-thin ego, the uniquely repugnant combination of privilege and self-pity. He even looks like a villain in some low-budget daytime US legal drama.

Now a new thought it starting to tentatively emerge. Perhaps Trump is actually the ideal villain. He is so self-evidently grotesque that his personality corrodes the popularity of the ideology he is promoting. He is becoming the single best argument against the political propositions he puts forward.

This might not help us solve the problem of Trump's loyal base. But what about the rest of the world? There, it does seem to be solving problems. When Trump won, I worried that he would corrode the values we hold in society - kindness, gentleness, civility, compassion, empathy. Now I wonder whether his obvious comic book monstrousness might actually strengthen them in opposition to him.

Look at the evidence. Look at the speed and scale of the anti-Trump wave around the world. We see country after country reporting huge drops in support for the United States.

In the UK, the country is unified in its rejection of Trump and Musk, in every demographic, across support for all parties - with even Reform voters starting to turn.

In Canada we're starting to see the concrete electoral effect of this. Trump's return and his childlike imperialist threats have eradicated a seemingly unconquerable Conservative lead.

New Liberal party leader Mark Carney is set to call a snap election. Who knows? Perhaps it'll all go wrong and we'll look foolish for ever thinking that good things can happen. But it is clear that Trump has provided the single most powerful argument for continued Liberal governance in Canada.

His behaviour has triggered a sense of global revulsion. It has improved the prospects of those who stand for reason and freedom.

He is laying out, in stark terms, what far-right populism entails: the amassing of executive might, the abolition of free speech protections, the end of the rule of law, the abuse of the weak, the hatred of difference, the humiliation of small countries, the law of the jungle, the breakdown of society. The tyranny of state power.

For a large minority of US voters, that's evidently a desirable thing. Good luck to them. But for everyone else, Trump has combined a monstrous personal image with a powerful intellectual demonstration of why his brand of politics should be destroyed.

We didn't want this situation. But now that we have it, we can exploit it.

The sun is shining in my back garden. The good people of London are full of confidence and grace. But these things that I have written here might still be true even when the summer is over and the sun has retreated once again.

They are no less likely than more pessimistic outcomes. And they are no less compelling on the basis of the evidence before us.

Odds and sods

My column for the i newspaper this week was a breakdown of the read-outs from the Trump-Putin call. As must be obvious to anyone with a mind to see it, he is always going to support Russia over Ukraine and nothing which took place recently should disabuse us of that fact. I chatted to David Marr at ABC Late Night Live about Europe's new dawn, Farage's old small-party bullshit and the trouble with Labour. And I was on Jeremy Vine's Radio 2 programme (01:40:00) talking about why your partner will never be attracted to you again after seeing you play VR.

This week I've mostly been listening to the Mafia soundtrack. I spoke about this game a while back and pointed out that it has a far better score than anyone could sensibly expect of it. Well now I am apparently unable to stop listening to it. I wander around feeling like whatever I'm doing is terribly important if this is the sound of my life. It is a pastiche, of course, but then so many of the best things are.

See you next week.