There is a light that never goes out

It's been a week of chaos, but there is now a pathway to change. And with change, there's hope.

Photo by Eduard Pretsi on Unsplash

This week was an abattoir for dreams. Every day, the same breathless churn of opinion. Every day, more rumours and innuendo, more gossip, more unconfirmed reports and best guesses. Ceaseless baseless noise and gibberish. And then behind it all, past the cameras and the news reports and the resignation letters, just this one screaming thought in your head: You’re fucking it up. You’re fucking it up. You’re fucking it up.

This is our one chance and you’re fucking it up.

Keir Starmer’s victory was never going to be like Tony Blair’s in 1997. He was not going to inherit a country on the road to recovery, put there by decent, responsible men like John Major and Ken Clarke. He inherited a smashed and mangled machine, an engine room that had been set on fire by a gaggle of hysterical dimwitted drunks. But it was also distinct for another reason, which was the price of failure. Blair’s failure would have turned the country over to a conservative opposition, with both a small and a large C. Starmer’s failure would hand it to the most egregious figures in British political history.

We know the price of failure. We know what a Reform government would look like. We know because they told us. Internment camps for immigrants, placed in areas which vote against the party as a kind of community punishment. The introduction of ICE thugs on the streets of Britain. A mass deportation programme. A purging of the top levels of the civil service to make it pliable to power. The dismantling of Britain’s climate change programme. The use of conspiracy theory as a core tool of communication. The creation of a British vassal state, obsequious in the face of Trump’s America, cowardly in the face of Putin’s Russia.

We are not fighting over politics. We are fighting for the soul of a country. This was our last chance to show that our way works - that liberal democracy can provide what populism never can, by being rational and evidence-based and binding voters together rather than pitching them against one another. But they’re fucking it up.

The local election results showed a party which was about to become extinct. To continue was to accept death, to go meekly without complaint.

To their credit, Labour MPs refused to do that. For all the talk of chaos and uncertainty, we should be clear about that. Something had to be done. He can’t do the job. The only options are to change or to face annihilation.

It’s easy to sit there and say Starmer is bringing the Labour party to ruin. It’s also easy to complain when weeks like this look so chaotic. But it is harder to accept that the latter problem will necessarily follow when you address the former one. Politics is not conducted in a board room. It is composed of countless individuals and networks, semi-overlapping power centres, with their own views and their own preferred outcomes operating in conditions of information asymmetry. Things often become extremely disordered before they are resolved.

This is why the situation span out of control. Various senior figures with disparate incentives were operating with incomplete information in a fast-moving series of events. It is not because they are especially inept. I’m sure you have lots of strong views about these figures. Don’t write in and tell me, I don’t care. But whatever you think of their politics, these people are not idiots. Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband are all highly accomplished and highly intelligent political operators.

At certain points, it simply became impossible to keep up. Yesterday in particular, political fortunes achieved flight velocity, where no position held for any meaningful period of time. I had concluded that Andy Burnham had basically no chance of getting into parliament. Then Streeting failed to find support from MPs, Starmer suddenly looked briefly unassailable, soft-left support consolidated around Miliband, Rayner announced the conclusion of the HMRC investigation, Streeting’s letter blew the issue wide open again, and then Burnham found a seat he could fight in a by-election. From minute to minute, what was unthinkable became inevitable and then back again.

It was a completely insane state of affairs. I sat waiting to go live on a news channel at one point. With three minutes to go before the hour, the newsreader realised the headlines were already out of date, dismissed them, and improvised an entirely new set straight to camera. In Westminster, politicians and journalists whispered and gossiped to each other, eventually spreading so many narratives that some of them picked up momentum, grew into consensus and then subsided again, only to be replaced by something new. It was a constant churn of salty water, a storm of nothingness.

They drank and they laughed and they sneered at each other, and in the pubs in Westminster, crowds of political people congregated, slipping outside for a cigarette when the sun shone and bolting back in when it rained. Most of the journalists were in their happy place. Most of them are not really interested in political ideas. They like the sport of it, so they were emotionally unaffected. Weeks like this are really Westminster as they prefer it, the ideal form of coverage. No need to discuss policy now. Just the endless soap opera and empty tactics, Eastenders in the bookies.

Other people, the best people, looked crestfallen. Stood by a crowded bar one night, a friend lent in close, and said: “I feel like I’ve wasted my life.” He was joking, but he wasn’t. Not really. He had that terrible fear that sometimes overcomes political people. Perhaps it’s all for nothing. Perhaps we never achieve anything. Perhaps we’re powerless to stop people making the same mistakes over and over again. Perhaps we’re trapped in some terrible wheel and we would all be better off bird-watching.

During a brief lull one evening, I walked up Whitehall to Pall Mall, where UCL Constitution unit director Meg Russell was giving a valedictory speech on her last day in the job. For decades, she’s been the UK’s chief authority on parliamentary matters. She has forgotten more about British constitutional life than most people will ever learn.

We were just a few hundred metres from parliament, but the conversation was completely different. The noise was gone. The chatter. Instead, her speech was about ideas. It was about the architecture of British politics. Sitting in that room, with the storm of gibberish going on down the road, I felt like I was watching one of the last political giants.

Russell was a full time adviser to Robin Cook when he was leader of the Commons. She served as a specialist adviser to three parliamentary committees, including the crucial Wright Committee, which suggested that select committee chairs should be elected by MPs. She has been in charge of the Constitution Unit for just over a decade. During that time, she has proposed a series of modest, rational improvements: The prime minister should be stripped of their power of appointment for the Lords. The Commons should be given back control over its timetable from the government. The kinds of things which are perfectly normal elsewhere but we consider dangerously liberal, even anarchic.

She spoke calmly, but I could feel my heart ache. During her predecessor’s time running the unit, she said, constitutional reformers thought in terms of progress. But during her tenure, since Brexit in 2016, they have thought almost entirely in terms of defence. The question is not how to make liberal democracy more effective. It is how to protect it from those who would destroy it.

Russell didn’t mention Reform by name. She is studiously non-party political. But its presence hung over that room. The people in that audience knew what ministers seemingly refuse to contemplate. If a Farage government gets into power, they will use the untrammelled executive powers of the British system to redraw this country. If they get into power, we don’t know how much of our democracy will remain.

I suspected everyone had the same thought, the same scream inside their head. They’re fucking it up. They’re fucking it up. They’re fucking it up.

She looked like she had been fighting a rearguard defence for a decade, which is precisely what she has been doing. She looked like she was fed-up with demonstrating how things should change only to have a lazy and self-interested and anaemic and complacent political system throw it back in her face.

But for all her obvious frustration, she was still practical and pragmatic and fundamentally driven by optimism about what can be achieved. She proposed convincing parties of the need for reform by exploiting their current uncertainty around the election results - a kind of Rawlesian veil-of-ignorance strategy. It's a very good idea, but I was more affected by the attitude than the proposal itself.

She is of the John Maynard Keynes tradition, in disposition if not subject matter. She is of the people who are only temporarily disheartened by opposition and then come up with practical alternatives to overcome it.

On Thursday, things fundamentally changed. At first, it seemed like a mere continuation of the storm, but in fact it was the moment it broke. Two events cleared the rain and shone a light on the landscape. Finally, a pathway was visible, stretching into the middle distance.

First, Streeting published his resignation letter. Probably as a mark of weakness, possibly as a sign of enlightened self-interest, he tacitly acknowledged that either Burnham or another soft-left candidate had to be part of a leadership contest. “It needs to be broad,” he said, “and it needs the best possible field of candidates.” Suddenly, the Streeting and Burnham camps were aligned on their preferred process.

Second, Makerfield MP Josh Simons gave way to allow Burnham a run at his seat in a by-election. It was an extraordinary moment of near-Shakesperian narrative symmetry. Simons was a director at Labour Together, the Morgan McSweeney think tank that had laid the ground for Starmer. Now, he moved decisively to help Burnham bury him. Starmerism had produced its own gravedigger.

With these two events, there was now a clear road from the status quo to Burnham in No.10. The previous absence of this road had hindered events, keeping them stuck in place with nowhere to go. The presence of it allowed everything to move forward.

The road is long and hard. Burnham must secure the support of the National Executive Committee, Labour’s rule-making body, which until now has been under Starmer control. Then he must win the by-election, which is extremely challenging. In the 2024 general election, Labour won 45.2% of the vote compared to Reform’s 31.8%. By the time of the local elections, Reform was 50% to Labour’s 27%.

Somehow, while fighting a Reform-Labour marginal, Burnham must also orchestrate a simultaneous bid for the position of Labour leader, which involves a left-wing socially-liberal party constituency. How do you handle that? What do you say about Europe, for instance? What do you say about immigration?

It will be very difficult indeed, but people’s reactions yesterday told us more about their personality and their current emotional state than they did about his chances.

There are many reasons to think he will fail. The path is long, the seat is tough and the odds seem stacked against him. Then there is the uniquely weird situation of the by-election itself. Will voters think they were being told what to do? That he is taking their vote for granted? They’d elected one man to represent them, only to see him chuck it all in and suggest they pick another one. Perhaps they will see Burnham as desperate and cynical and entitled.

We don’t know. We don’t know because no-one has ever really tried anything like this before. It is equally possible that Burnham’s unique image in the north could turn him into a viable change candidate, a vehicle for fed-up voters to alter the status quo. Perhaps they won’t feel they’re being taken advantage of but will instead realise that they are now, at this moment, the most powerful voters in Britain. They wield a level of democratic influence that is almost unheard of, defining the future of the country.

Burnham has flaws. He has changed his image so often it’s hard to be certain which version of him you’ll get. There’s evidence that he avoids painful unpopular decisions, which threatens to trap us in the same tax straitjacket as Starmer. He has been incautious when talking about the bond markets in a way that is now costing us, literally, as they assess the perceived risk of his premiership.

But when that seat became free, I was instantly transported back to that Russell speech. Not the doom, not even in her specific arguments about constitutional reform, but in her general sense of realistic practical ambition.

One thing is true and remains true no matter how depressed everyone seems to be. Change is hope. Under the status quo, we had nothing. Starmer had implemented no plan, so there was no point waiting for voters to feel the effect of it. He had no new ideas so there was no point hoping for them to suddenly emerge. There was only the long, slow march to electoral oblivion.

The most impressive political people ask themselves, at each stage: What is possible? What can be achieved? What are the viable proposals which reflect our ideals?

Now, today, there are more of them than there were before. Burnham is a supporter of electoral reform. Read that again, you cunt - it’s important. This is a thing that is really happening. An out-and-proud supporter of electoral reform is currently fighting to get into No.10 with a viable chance of succeeding.

Burnham is a believer in devolution. Read that again too. It matters. One of the reasons Britain stagnates is because its centralised system stifles creativity. Local power drives decision-making down to where people understand what’s needed, whether that is a tram network or a tax system.

He is politically astute and emotionally present. He is a far better communicator. He is empathetic, and he retains the political acumen that comes from being empathetic and thereby anticipating people’s reactions to events. Most of all, he is prepared to take big swings. Standing for a by-election in a Reform-Labour marginal at the height of government unpopularity in order to challenge a prime minister is a big swing. It is unprecedented. It is the kind of thing someone does when they are driven by self-confidence rather than the hesitancy and inertia which has typified the last two years.

Is it going to work out? God knows. It’s possible - likely even - that he will lose that by-election. It’s possible that in power he will be more like Burnham the health secretary of 2009 than Burnham the Manchester mayor of 2021. It’s easy to default to cynicism and despair.

I don’t say that in an accusatory way. I say it as a description of my own internal mental state, of the emotional experience of being so badly let down by a government we desperately needed to succeed, of the exhaustion of hearing that voice in your head all day, every day: You’re fucking it up. You’re fucking it up. You’re fucking it up.

But then I think back to that Russell speech. And I remember: Despair accomplishes nothing. Cynicism is the death of radicalism. Optimism is a political act.

It has been a week of horrors, no two ways about it. But we end it with a bit of light peeking out from behind the clouds. If you tilt your head, and cover your eyes, and gaze out to the middle distance, you can just about make out a trace of hope. Might not be much, but it’s more than we’ve had for a long time.

Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

Two pieces for the i paper this week - both on the leadership election. The first is here and the second is here. I wrote a piece for Spain’s El Pais newspaper explaining the failure of the Starmer project. The English translation is here. I bashed that one out in between tasks but it’s actually a pretty good summary of its failure. I doubt I can improve on it.

The third part of our epic Origin Story on a United Europe came out this week, starting with the development of the single market, running into the eurozone crisis and then culminating in the battle against populism. I’m very proud of it.

Europe is in trouble like never before. But it is also rediscovering something. It is the dream nurtured in the mud and barbed wire of Ukraine. It is the placard used to defend against water cannons in Georgia. Wherever Europeans fight against Putinism, this is what they aspire to. It is a reminder of what it is for and why it exists, just as one was most needed. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch it below.

Also I apologise for the outfit. I was going to the gym afterwards. I refuse to dress for the video on these things.

I mostly made myself feel better this week watching Gogglebox. It’s been years since I saw this programme but coming back to it is deeply reassuring. It is a vision of Britain as benign, witty, unfathomably stupid, loving, warm and fundamentally gentle. How true is it? Well, it is at least as true as the vision of it as a snarling aggro beer-swilling thug but it is a vision we do not see so often. I am basically in love with every family you see on there and I sit there, smiling giddily, as they get on with their lives watching the telly. On the one hand, it is frothy nonsense about nothing. On the other, it is this strange little bit of patriotic medicine, which reminds me, when it is sometimes hard to remember, about the better side of this country.

Right. I am going to sleep for the entire weekend. Fuck off.