Category: government

A cheer or two for democracy

‘The tyranny of the discontinuous mind.’ That’s Richard Dawkins, quoted by Adam Rutherford in a discussion with David Runciman about taxonomy, our human instinct to classify when in reality everything is in a state of flux. The context was the Linnaean system. It applies to plants, of course, and the way we classify racial types (with historically pernicious consequences) and also, in our own homes, the way we classify books as fiction and non-fiction and more, when there is in reality massive overlap.  

I could also apply this to our democracy, to politics, to our party system. As parties try and shoehorn policies into manifestos we can see how imagination and big ideas are constrained. We get frustrated, and yet, is there any other way to manage a democracy?

We do need to clear about what we stand for. The old divides, Tory/Whig, Tory/Liberal and Tory/Labour, had a rhythm and a recognition that power alternated as an expanding electorate dictated, however great our misgivings might be. ‘Tory’ and ‘Labour’ now don’t mean quite what they did. That of course is part of our current problem.

Politics depends on classification. We need to know where we stand, and where others likewise. But, taking the broader picture, behind the apparent certainties lay a rhythm and underlying that rhythm was a sense of progress. In our own time progress has hit the trip wire of populism.

I’m well aware of the very alternative and wonderfully cynical view of a certain Groucho Marx: ‘Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.’ But while it might have a ring of truth it really isn’t helpful.

It’s getting too close to a populist’s playbook. Budding autocrats would concur. You remould the institutions and take over the media and the courts. You suppress dissent. The Orban playbook. I’m reminded of Alastair Campbell’s three Ps, populism, polarisation and post-truth, which in his view, form the foundations of autocracy.

‘Democracy’ as a classification is ancient. Aristotle and Plato differed in detail but autocracy and oligarchy glorified as monarchy and aristocracy were their preference. History shows us where they lead. Aristotle and Plato saw democracy as mob rule, which in ancient Athens was limited by strict property and men-only qualification.

We have by happy accident and occasional design and a huge amount of good fortune fashioned a working democracy which is based around a free press and honest reporting and high levels of education and awareness. It also requires high levels of integrity among our politicians. And from our popular press.

To have the kind of democracy we have – we don’t know, we don’t appreciate, how lucky we are.

Beware the extremes

As the Tories lurch ever further right we have reason in the UK to worry. But they are as weak, absurdly so, as they have ever been. But if, after the forthcoming election, they absorb the far-right Reform Party and travel further to the extremes themselves, and the right-wing media head off further in the direction of conspiracy and talk of a deep state, then we may need to pay closer attention to what is happen in other countries.

In Hungary under Orban, and until recently Poland under the Law and Justice party (PiS), the takeover of the media has been blatant. The aim has been to take over all the key institutions of state, usually in the interests of a socially-conservative and nationalist agenda. The government takes over the media, the judiciary, the universities, and as Donald Tusk is finding in Poland it’s hard to claw back the power of the state once it’s entrenched, especially when you have to use that same power of the state – to return authority to independent institutions – to do so.

Over in the USA the Republicans have effectively captured the Supreme Court. Conspiracy theories are rife. Taylor Swift is part of a Democrat conspiracy. That’s tame compared to QAnon. Conspiracy theory has a long history in the USA, going back to Nativist parties with anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic agendas in the 1830 and 40s. Trump is in there, playing an age-old game.

The Deep State, a nefarious coalition of the various forces running the liberal (socially and economically) state, is a Trump obsession. Conspiracists gravitate to such notions. Liz Truss on a US tour talked about a British ‘Deep State’. In a recent podcast Ed Balls and George Osborne wondered where that Deep State might lie. What or who did Truss mean? The Civil Service? The Financial Times? They landed, for want of better, on The Economist. I will be searching there for signs when I next read it, wary of how I might be influenced in covert ways…

Just a few days ago I was listening on a car journey to a podcast where the subject was the possible takeover of the Daily Telegraph by Paul Marshall, a vastly wealthy hedge fund owner and co-owner GB News. (Al Jazeera is far more informative.) I was high in the Pennines, the M62 snaking beneath me, and that sense of a vast empty space stays in my mind.

Marshall (as reported by the charity ‘Hope Not Hate’) has liked on his X/Twitter account posts (all now deleted) that refer not just to ‘losing patience with fake refugee invaders’ but also to the survival of European civilisation requiring mass expulsions. (The ‘Great Replacement Theory’ assumes a vast plot to replace our existing Christian with an Islamic population and culture.) Let’s assume they aren’t his real opinions. But if so, why the ‘likes’? Marshall is a practising Christian of a very born-again and conservative (and, arguably, very un-Christian) persuasion.

The Telegraph may or may not be safe from Marshall. For now it looks as if we will safe from the Telegraph, assuming Labour gets elected. But longer term – the old sane Toryism of the Telegraph under its long-time editor Bill Deedes (‘Dear Bill’) may be lost forever.

The old post-war centre of gravity is shifting right. Obama and an enlightened middle ground seems light years away. But it was only 2009…

Empire in the North Country

The legacy of the British Empire is everywhere. Some empires collapse in dramatic fashion, others fade away. At home, we came to terms with its demise. Or did we? Still we argue. And the legacy beyond our shores is vast. China doesn’t remember kindly the Opium Wars, and Narendra Modi has a very different concept of India, as a ‘Hindutva’ nation, to the liberal democracy we attempted via Nehru to bequeath.

My history of Hebden Bridge in the late nineteenth century (see my previous post) describes a village which cotton manufacture turned into a town. It looked over the border to Lancashire for supply and routes to market. Supply came from slave plantations before and after the American Civil War, and as the century progressed more and more from India. Raw cotton in India was shipped to England and it left the vast Indian market open to imports from England, from Lancashire mills, via Manchester. It was in the UK’s interests to keep India impoverished, the better to govern it, as Orwell characterised British policy.

We sing ‘Rule Britannia’ at the Proms. That kind of pride in Empire is a false emotion. But it was very real in late Victorian England. Trade was its lifeblood and Empire was the (initially) accidental legacy of trade. In India and the Caribbean, and later in China, trade was a single-minded and ruthless activity. But as Empire put down roots it took on a moral, and a spiritual, aspect. With that went a sense of superiority, and arrogance. And pride. We did rule the waves.

Army and government, and the Church of England, were the backbone of Empire. But while Empire was physically distant from the non-conformist populations of upper Calderdale they too made their contribution, not just through the output of their mills but also in the money, and compassion, they vested in missions to the big cities – and overseas.

Take missionaries as an example. They were hero figures right through to the 1950s. They were part of the imperial as well as Christian ‘mission’. Eric Liddell, hero of the 1924 Olympics, died as missionary in China in the 1940s. Old timers might remember the movie the ‘Inn of the Sixth Happiness’, a story of missionaries in China: it seems quaint today. But this was the old Britain, patronising without realising it, exercising an imagined and inbuilt superiority.

I’m resisting the temptation to engage in the current debate about Empire and its legacy. Save to say that I understand the anger. Also the benefits (and disbenefits) of industry and communications that came with Empire. I’ve little time for apologetics. The one lesson we must learn is that we have to look forward.

Implicit in the apparently unstoppable advances of industry and Empire were a confidence and self-belief which don’t come so easily these days. They didn’t look back. That’s the sense I’ve had researching and writing about Hebden Bridge, a small corner of the Empire in which its mighty neighbour Manchester was such an extraordinary player.

It’s time to say goodbye (revisited)

That means my blog, Zenpolitics. It is time to say goodbye.

That’s what I wrote three months ago. I have decided to continue, but to give the blog a different slant, with more of a focus on history, and the historical context too often missing from politics. How successful I am, time will tell.

And why? (I wrote back in October.)

The crises keep on coming, and my original conception for Zenpolitics (see below) now seems, in one word, unrealistic. I wish it were otherwise.

Austerity after the financial crash had a serious impact at several levels. We engineered our own special crisis with Brexit. Trump didn’t help. We came through Covid, we learnt as we went along. The world economy it seemed was re-balancing.

Then came the invasion of Ukraine, energy and grain prices sky-rocketed, and the divide between more autocratic regimes who could turn to China for investment and support, and democratic societies, which could be tainted by their history as colonisers, was exacerbated. And now we have Hamas and Gaza and a crisis which may yet draw in the wider region. Countries take sides, worse, super-powers take sides. We have scant idea where it will lead.  

Our one-time conviction that the world was ready to fall into step with our open, liberal, freethinking and free-market view of the world has proved sadly mistaken.

Back in 2009, when I started this blog, the world was indeed a different place. My focus I wrote then would be on ‘taking the trash and the hyperbole out of politics and trying to look at people and issues in a way that’s detached from emotion and as they really are’. That is language of its time, immediately after Obama’s election.

It needs a different approach now. Emotions run high, and the stakes are higher. I can’t easily convert this blog into something it was never meant to be. I may start another blog, with a different theme, or find another way. My passion for politics, mulling over, talking, writing, about how we might yet achieve a better and more inclusive world will continue.

To anyone who has read this blog at any time in the past, and just happens to be reading now – it’s goodbye, and thank you for reading.

Taking sides

I quoted from a song called The Partisan is my last post. It has a history as I’ve discovered that long precedes Leonard Cohen. It was written, as ‘La Complainte du partisan’, by two members of the French Resistance, in 1943. It was widely popular. It expressed for me the emotion of the moment, as of a week ago, but it is a song about resistance to an occupier, and freedom from that occupier is clear-cut. And the current conflict around Gaza is anything but.

Far too little is written in the English and American media about the dispossession of the inhabitants of Palestine, of many many centuries standing, by the Jewish immigrants who created the state of modern Israel. (The plan of course had been that Jew and Palestinian should live together in harmony, communities side by side.)

But that wrong cannot be put right by the destruction of a country, modern Israel, which has been heroic in many ways, and which I’ve long supported.

I, like so many others, am conflicted.

While l support Israel in its determination to remove Hamas forever from Gaza, I also support Palestinians seeking to create a country of their own, with boundaries which allow the old areas of settlement, in and around Gaza, and Nablus and Ramallah and Bethlehem, and beyond, to flourish.

The Partisan is a song Palestinians might take up. For Israel, it would be a different song, though ‘song’ for Israelis facing what seems like an existential challenge is totally inappropriate.

Whatever our politicians say, the only answer has to lie in the UK, US and Europe identifying as much with the Palestinian cause as they do with the Israeli. And that means all of us, people and governments. Only if we do so will we ever find a solution.  A solution which both sides, those of Christian heritage, and those of Muslim heritage, can readily accept.

Amid all the terrible carnage, and the apparent intractability of the conflict, and the way in which all the world takes sides, and we polarise all the more, we have to keep that in in view.

An act of theft

Edmund Burke, whose heyday as a politician, and as a writer on politics, was the late eighteenth century, remains today the respectable face of the political right-wing. Often quoted, and much revered.

At least he was the ‘respectable face’ until the US-based Edmund Burke Foundation came along and adopted his name for their version of far-right conspiratorial conservatism. In its own words, ‘the Edmund Burke Foundation is a public affairs institute founded in January 2019 with the aim of strengthening the principles of national conservatism in Western and other democratic countries.’

Simply, to my mind, an act of theft. Taking a good man down, albeit some 225 years after his death.

It is a foolish liberal who trespasses on to territory which conservatives in our time are fighting over, but Burke more than merits attention. He believed in tradition, but it was an evolving tradition, based on where we are now, and not a throwback, an attempt to return to a lost age that never was. (For background on Burke, see Jesse Norman’s excellent biography, published in 2013.)

Burke’s most quoted words are ‘the little platoons’. We should ‘love the little platoon in society to which we belong’. We are part of an organic whole, and there is a natural hierarchy. Jesse Norman expands on this to focus on the supposed faults of the Enlightenment and liberal individualism, from which he argues many of the problems of modern society emanate. It’s interesting to read back ten years and see how David Cameron and Jesse Norman were promoting the idea of the ‘big society’.

Attacks on liberal individualism can take us to some unfortunate places.

Tim Montgomerie, founder of the Conservative Home website, in December 2019 praised Hungary’s ‘interesting early thinking’ on ‘the limits of liberalism’. (‘Short Cuts’, in the London Review of Books, 1st June 2023.) For an idea of what those limits might be, see below. Hungary is about the imposition of change, the imposition of values, Burke is about evolution.

Unlike those who claim to be his modern descendants Burke was also an astute judge of the realities of his time: arguing for financial reform, for greater freedoms and representation of Catholics in Ireland, and against the abuses perpetrated by the East India Company. If governments had listened to his wiser counsels the American War of Independence might have been avoided. And his reading of France after 1789, and how the revolution might and did play out, proved quite remarkably accurate.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 had established the king-in-parliament as a successful modus operandi, and while the king alone might appoint his prime minister and cabinet, only with the approval of parliament could they operate with any degree of success. Political parties, in nascent form in Burke’s time, have provided the underpinning to parliamentary democracy as it has advanced over the last almost 350 years. And yet …

One feature of the new Tory Right has been an attempt to discredit parliament, witness the Daily Telegraph’s milking of the expenses scandal in 2008, and the attempt to elevate executive, or more specifically prime ministerial (Johnsonian) control.

Back to the Edmund Burke Foundation.

The recent National Conservatism Conference (NatCon, the eighth of its kind, the first in London), is a brainchild of the Edmund Burke Foundation, and attracted a lot of publicity. MPs Braverman and Rees-Mogg attended. So too, Michael Gove.

In June 2022 a group of National Conservatives put together a manifesto. Among the ten core principles: ‘the free market cannot be absolute’, the paramountcy of the Christian Bible, and severe restrictions on migration. A NatCon supporter and British MP Danny Kruger railed against faceless ‘powers that be … who are not on the side of the British people, but serve the abstractions of human rights, international law, or other signals of middle-class virtue’.

We are, with all this, living in the past – and with the danger that the future might lie with the likes of Orban and Erdogan, where parliament, media and judiciary are suborned, and where the religion of another age is called on to provide underpinning. Netanyahu it seems has similar ideas for Israel. Putin and Russian Orthodoxy is a story in itself.

For Burke ‘all the major religions were the products of custom, tradition and “long and prescriptive usage”’. (Norman, p91) He would have profoundly regretted our drift from religion but any notion of its reintroduction by diktat would have been, literally, inconceivable.  

How the NatCon Tories and how I read Edmund Burke are radically different. Let’s leave it at that.

Metropolitan – and other – elites

We’ve heard a lot of talk about elites. Am I part of one? With a university education. Middle class. Manchester-born and raised, I’ve lived in London for forty years. That may make me one of the one of the ‘metropolitan elite’.

Maybe I’m also an ‘anywhere’, someone’s who’s happy anywhere in the country, in the world, rather than a ‘somewhere’, someone whose happiest close to home. (We ‘anywheres’ are a species of public enemy.) Though, in truth, I’m both.

Then there’s Matthew Goodwin who imagines he understands the ‘ordinary working-man’, left behind in a hyper-globalised world by an elite who wilfully don’t care for his welfare. And yet – he fell in behind the free-traders, the globalisers, the Brexiteers who espoused a fanciful ‘global Britain’. Only, it seems the free traders aren’t responsible: it’s we university-educated types, who only care for themselves, according to Goodwin. Forgive our confusion.

Peter Turchin*, who I referred to in my last blog, defines four early warning signals for societies entering a disintegrative phase of a natural cycle to which all societies are prone. ‘Popular immiseration’ is the first phase, and the decline in real wages over the last fifty years can be seen as a cause of that. The fourth signal is competition and conflict between elites.

Turchin’s conclusions are based in some extraordinary statistical research but extrapolating to a natural cycle is a big leap. That said, is that what we have? A university-educated relatively liberal elite on one side and on the other a globalising free trade elite?

The curiosity has been the attempt of the free traders to get the ‘discontented masses’ on side, by adopting an anti-woke and socially conservative agenda, leading to the kind of populist rhetoric we’ve seen on both sides of the Atlantic, though far worse on the other side of the pond.

All this talk of elites has seriously, and dangerously, muddied the waters. Societies have always had and will always have elites of one kind or another, not least a financial and business elite, which has through history garnered wealth and privilege to itself, and an educated elite which seeks to pull up the drawbridge behind it.

There’s no better way of constraining that apparently built-in drift to elitism than a functioning liberal democracy which limits their influence on our politics and cuts the biggest egos who try to weaponise opinion down to size.

A nice, neat letter to Prospect magazine suggests that the ‘white working-class’ might actually want the same things as many other people, a decent job, a nice house, good schools – and, maybe, even, a university education of their children.

Make that our focus – and apply to everyone, all classes, colours and creeds. Not just white working-class males….

*Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, published by Allen Lane

Wiping the slate clean

Finding answers was always hard but it’s now in a different league of difficulty.

I began this blog a few years back wanting to write about how we could make liberal democracy function better. Now the issue is how liberal democracy can survive in the face of China, illiberal democracies in Hungary and Turkey, the Republican right in the USA, and, just recently, the ideas promoted by the recent National Conservatism Conference here in the UK.

The issue for many is a sense of lost power. Ideas of ‘nation’ muddled with social conservatism, as if this could be the way we Brits might claw back lost influence. Language and the Premier League mislead us.

Many on the other side of the spectrum would like to renounce power altogether, renounce capitalism, renounce politics, head for utopia.

What if we could go back in time. Start again. Wipe the slate clean.

Gillian Tett, writing in the Financial Times, refers to what she describes as ‘the ancient Mesopotamian idea of a wiping the slate clean’ – a wiping out of debts to allow a society to reboot. McKinsey estimates it would ‘wipe out $48trn of household wealth in the coming years’. That I assume is just the USA.

That takes me to another theme, growth, or the absence of it, the post-growth advocates and as the Economist describes them, ‘the actual de-growers’. We stop caring about growth targets and GDP. Or we go further and actively ‘shrink the pie’.

Only, it won’t happen, can’t happen. For one we’d have to rein in population growth. And if we take that too far we’ll have a massively reduced younger generation to fund the lifestyles of a vastly increasing older generation. The answer – we voluntarily cut back on our lifestyles. Which isn’t going to happen. More likely, the world economy would implode.

Tett quotes a biologist Peter Turchin, ‘a biologist and complexity scientist who employs Big Data to study ecosystems’. Studying reams of data over thousands of years he identifies a fundamental pattern whereby an elite grabs power and ‘tries to protect itself by grabbing more and more resources’. This leaves poor people even poorer and an ’over-production of the elite’. It’s a recipe for a social explosion. Is this what we’re currently seeing in the USA?

Tett suggests the only way ‘to shift this trajectory is to re-play the New Deal policies of the 1930s and the immediate post-war years in the USA, using redistribution to reduce inequality’. She’s not saying that Turchin is right, but that the symptoms he describes are indeed deep-rooted in modern American society.

There are many other parts to this jigsaw. Climate change, generative AI, China, Ukraine. Regarding China it’s been interesting to listen to what Henry Kissinger, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, has to say. Lowering the temperature is key, contrary to what the new breed of American hawks, and a good few British, are arguing. That requires building confidence step by step. Establishing and maintaining a conversation, however deep the divide.

There is in all this one constant – our liberal democracy. Hold to that and we can still find answers.

Travelling in India …

I began my last blog with a few words which may give a misleading impression.

‘All, on the surface, appears to be going well in India. The economy under Narendra Modi has momentum, a contrast to our own. Modi has a 77% approval rating. There was a sense of optimism among the people I spoke to.’

We returned from a two-week holiday in north-western India six weeks ago.

‘On the surface.’ I left open what might lie below the surface. India as envisaged by Nehru and the Congress Party in 1947 was to be a secular, non-aligned state. Nehru looked to the West, but also to communist Russia. India was partitioned, with terrible consequences, and the tension between India and its neighbour Pakistan is palpable, seventy-five years on, even to short-stay visitors. The army’s presence, in the areas where we travelled, is everywhere.

Over the last seventy years the Congress Party has gone into sharp decline and the fundamentalist Hindu party, the BJP, has taken hold of the levers of power, at a national and increasingly local level. The BJP under Narendra Modi has been in power since 2014.

In 1992 Hindu activists destroyed a mosque, at Ayodhya, on a site widely believed to have been the birthplace of the god Rama. If this act was symbolic of an India reconstituting as a Hindu state, the 2019 decision of the Modi government to revoke the status of Jammu and Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim territory, as a self-governing entity, and the transfer of power to the central government, was, and is, widely seen (outside India) as brutal act of suppression of Kashmiri, and Muslim, aspirations. Also pertinent is the 2019 legislation extending the National Register of Citizens to the whole country which would have the effect of leaving several million Muslims stateless.

Our own sampling of Hindu opinion during our stay in November suggested a disdain toward a Muslim population which is more and more ghettoised as threats and sometimes specific acts of violence increase. The irony of Delhi’s and Agra’s great tourist locations being Mughal and therefore Muslim forts and mausoleums, not least the Taj Mahal, seemed lost on our (otherwise splendid) Hindu guides.

All that said, India remains a functioning democracy of not far short of 1.4 billion people. We were in Shimla on election day for the state of Himachal Pradesh’s legislative assembly. We chatted to a friendly BJP teller outside a polling booth. (The BJP were noisily confident, but in this particular election they lost – and Congress won.)

The mood among the Hindu population was positive, almost aggressively optimistic. The economy is growing fast, and Modi, like him or not, is an influential figure on the world stage. The contrast I made in my last blog between the UK and India is for real.

And yet … quotes from my travel journal are apposite here:

‘Am I soft-pedalling on Modi too much? What of the Hindutva nationalist philosophy of the BJP? The Booker Prize winning novelist Arundhati Roy is no friend of the BJP. She writes in a recent book of essays of how “the holy cow and the holy script became of the chosen vehicles of (Hindu) mobilisation”. The “holy script” is Hindi…

… In The Times of India I read about a move to convert Christians among the Adivasi, India’s indigenous tribes, to Hinduism. Shivaji, the 17th century Marathi leader, is celebrated not least in movies as a Hindu proto-nationalist. The Shiv Sena movement, the leader of the local branch of which was shot the day before our arrival in Amritsar, is radical in its advocacy of a pure and dominant form of Hinduism. Muslim culture, and the Muslim population, which existed side by side with Hindu culture for many centuries, is under unrelenting pressure. And yet Bollywood still has many Muslim stars.’

Arundhati Roy, as an outspoken opponent of a regime increasingly hostile to dissent, lives dangerously. She sums up the situation, as she sees it, succinctly as follows. (The RSS is the ideological arm of the BJP.)

‘The abrogation of Kashmir’s special status, the promise of a National Register of Citizens, the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya are all on the front burners of the RSS and BJP kitchen. To reignite flagging passions all they need to do is pick a villain from their gallery and unleash the dogs of war. There are several categories of villain, Pakistani jihadis, Kashmiri terrorists, Bangladeshi infiltrators or anyone of a population of nearly 200 million Indian Muslims who can always be accused of being Pakistan-lovers or anti-national traitors.’

India has a militant China on its Himalayan border. It needs a strong army and a strong leader. You could argue it now has both. And a growing economy. But the cost in terms of its move away from the secular and open society that Nehru aspired to has been a high one.

Beyond the Red Wall

Travelling in India last month I was struck by the continuing interest in the UK. All, on the surface, appears to be going well in India. The economy under Narendra Modi has momentum, a contrast to our own. Modi has a 77% approval rating. There was a sense of optimism among the people I spoke to. And a concern for us, as for an old friend who’s not in the best of health. (Unless it’s cricket, where they acknowledge we lead the world at the moment.)

An Indian commentator (Swapan Dasgupta, writing in The Times of India) refers to a distinction made by Tony Blair between party activists and ordinary voters. With the UK and USA in mind Dasgupta continues: ‘It is largely the angry and dogmatic Right and Left who have the time and inclination for political activism. …. They can inspire the faithful but ordinary voters aren’t driven by doctrinaire concerns. The problem is that no-one can define what they want. Hence the appeal of identity politics as a fallback. Caught in the pincer movement of woke and the menacing xenophobic, liberal democracy should be worried about its own future.’

Applied to the UK, how did this work out?

The economic crisis and the years of austerity which followed brought to the fore deep divides in the UK. They were defined in various ways: north/south, city/country, as levels of education, ‘somewheres’ vs ‘anywheres’ in David Goodhart’s contentious formulation. The European Reform Group and Farage and sections of the media weaponised this divide. Notions of ‘Global Britain’ held back by the EU’s restraining hand gave a false economic credibility to the argument.

Janan Ganesh writing in the Financial Times has a useful take on the same subject. ‘People do not work out their beliefs and then join the corresponding tribe, they join a tribe and infer their beliefs from it. The sense of belonging, of group membership, is what hooks people…’

Come the 2019 election the group identities born of the Brexit ‘debate’ and the Brexit vote were firmly established.

Sebastian Payne’s Broken Heartlands (published 2020, revised 2021) focuses on the 2019 election. Interviews across the Red Wall (northern seats which switched to the Tories in 2019) with MPs, activists, business figures and a few old political warhorses attempt to explain why people voted as they did.

The explanation doesn’t lie in hyped-up fears over immigration – that was Brexit. It is, Payne concludes, twofold. Two personalities in fact. Johnson’s can-do enthusiasm, focused on get-Brexit-done and levelling up. And Jeremy Corbyn. That takes us back to 2010, when Ed Miliband diverted Labour’s focus away from the New Labour path and opened up the way for Corbyn’s disastrous election.

Payne’s new-Tory-MP interviewees, with their big plans for their constituencies, have reason to feel embarrassed. They’ve been relying on the magic money tree, which the last sane chancellor, Philip Hammond, had kept well-locked away in a cupboard. They’ve also been mesmerised by Johnson.

Where do we go from here? All sides of the argument are focusing on the regions. Andy Burnham, Andy Street and Ben Houchen, mayors of Manchester, Birmingham and Tees Valley, are cited as examples of what can be achieved at a regional level. We’ve also had Gordon Brown’s recent report on the regions for Labour, with its big ideas, not least an assembly of the regions replacing the House of Lords.

The polls suggest people are looking to Labour for answers – but primarily for want of alternatives. They are not convinced. Sebastian Payne approves a simple formulation, arising out of a conversation with Neil Kinnock. If Labour could ‘manifest itself as the “security” party, in terms of personal security, employment, education, enterprise, national security… it would be capable of getting over the identity demarcations that produced the referendum result’.

High-flying sentiments but the emphasis is wrong. Enterprise would be a better starting-point than security – enterprise supported by education, and enterprise put in the service of transforming social care and health care more widely. Business entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs, and government agencies, working side by side.

Payne quotes a striking statistic: ‘just 17 per cent of over sixty-fives voted Labour in 2019…’ Security might be a watchword for the over 65s but it is surely more important to get young people engaged, and young people voting.

Politics needs to be about challenge, even exciting. (A big ask, given where we are at the moment.) It is extraordinary how the younger generations have been left out of current arguments and deliberations. If we’re to break out of our small ‘c’ conservative mindset and take on the future they have to be put centre stage. They deserve their own ‘triple lock’.