There is plenty of action in British politics but not a lot of movement. The government’s unsteady start in office and a Tory leadership contest have kept the Westminster news machine spinning on the only setting it has: frantic lather. Labour’s poll ratings have tanked but that reflects bleak continuity more than change. Voters who were unhappy before the election are no happier. Old blame is unfairly carried over to the new regime.
The story of whether the government can lift that mood only really begins with the budget on 30 October. In the absence of a settled tax and spending programme, Keir Starmer’s talk of missions and tough choices is all preamble. But that isn’t the only reason politics is in a state of suspended animation. A week after the budget comes the US presidential election. If Donald Trump wins, no one will still be talking about Rachel Reeves tweaking her borrowing rules.
Although I can envisage such an outcome, I doubt I am alone in finding it hard to keep the image in mind without recoiling. The implications are too appalling. Trump despises the principles on which the American republic was founded. His candidacy is an explicit promise to make vindictive, militant and racist ultranationalism the operating doctrine of the world’s most powerful country.
He is a much better friend to Vladimir Putin than to any fairly elected leader of any free country. The character of the threat is documented by Trump’s wild caprices in his first term, then proved beyond doubt by his refusal to accept the legitimacy of his defeat. Still about half of US voters disbelieve that evidence or are prepared to disregard it. The insurrection of 6 January 2021 was a near-death experience for US democracy. This time it could die by suicide.
Even if Kamala Harris wins, there will be no settling back down to an old equilibrium. The sigh of relief will be short. There will still be a schism running through what used to be definable as a singular “west” and is now contested between two irreconcilable tribes: liberal constitutionalists and nationalist crusaders. The former defend a 20th-century legacy of multilateral treaties, respect for democratic protocol and the rule of law. The latter style themselves as warriors in an existential, civilisational struggle against moral decay through “wokeism” and cultural dissolution in an immigrant horde.
With a ballot offering a choice between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, the Tories have already elected to oppose Starmer from the nationalist crusader camp. But does the prime minister understand that this is the fight he faces, that he is defending a front that stretches across the Channel and the Atlantic?
Up to a point. The promised “reset” of relations with the EU is off to a cagey start. Britain’s offer of a new security treaty has been accepted in principle but the substance is a long way off. While the vandalistic Brexit mode of diplomacy is long gone, red lines prohibiting a return to the single market limit talk of economic cooperation to the shallow end of the negotiating pool.
Starmer’s reluctance to make any political splash around Europe is understandable, but his continental partners find the inscrutability frustratingly familiar from previous regimes.
When there are so many competing pressures on a government, a preference not to debate hard subjects in public easily becomes a decision not to think about them in private either. Labour looks stuck at the vague, aspirational stage of European policy.
That is consistent with a certain insularity in Starmer’s vision of Britain’s future. He doesn’t ignore global turbulence, wars on Europe’s periphery or the threat from authoritarian regimes and surging populism. He weaves them into his analysis, while keeping them somehow remote, as devices to illuminate the UK as a lone beacon of political stability.
By accepting so many premises of Boris Johnson’s Brexit settlement, Labour has ended up saddled with a weird hybrid, left-leaning, statist version of the Eurosceptic Singapore-on-Thames model. Britain will be a dynamic, free-trading, red-tape-slashing sovereign hub that is also big on social protections and aligned with European rules for some industries.
Earlier this week, at an investment “summit” in London, the prime minister elaborated his economic argument in a speech that was subtly revealing without making headlines. He promised a Labour government of predictable sobriety, in contrast to the vandalistic, spasmodic rule of the Tories. Britain, he said, will go back to being the “stable, trusted, rule-abiding partner” it was once reputed to be, and so a worthy location for investment.
That makes sense as a pitch to a roomful of corporate executives. It also aligns with everything Reeves says about the essential pursuit of economic growth as a precondition for repairing the public realm, and the need for private sector capital to deliver it.
In Starmer’s telling there is then a political dividend. Growth satisfies an appetite for rising living standards and decent services. It proves that moderate, democratic politics works, thereby healing social division and neutralising populism. “Growth leads to a country that is better equipped to come together,” the prime minister said on Monday. “[Growth is] the key ingredient of that ‘great moderation’ we became accustomed to before the financial crash but which together, in partnership, we now have to earn again.”
In summoning the spirit of the long boom before the epic bust of 2007-8, Starmer flashed the nostalgic streak common to many members of his liberal constitutionalist tribe. Trauma at the seismic disturbances of Brexit and Trump inevitably contains longing for political certainties that fell into the hole when the old centre ground collapsed. But it is rare for a political leader to pine for the bygone consensus so explicitly.
The prime minister does know that times have changed. He makes a case for intervention in markets, industrial strategy and enhanced workers’ rights that was highly unfashionable at the turn of the millennium. But there is still something drily economistic about it all. By providing the foundations for long-term investment, a more secure workforce with higher wages and lower NHS waiting lists will be less angry, and less amenable to recruitment by extremists.
It isn’t a bad theory. As a fellow liberal constitutionalist, I want it to be true. But I worry it isn’t enough.
The US experience contains a salutary lesson in the limits of economic growth, which has been robust throughout the Biden years without inoculating the population against fascistic politics. Partly that is a problem of distribution and inflation. Plenty of Trump voters don’t feel higher GDP in their pocketbooks. But many are so captured by paranoia and hyper-partisanship that they refuse to believe in a healthy economy as long as there is a Democrat in the White House.
Britain is not so polarised. Yet. But looking ahead, there is a potential propaganda chorus of Tories, Reform UK and the anti-Labour press denouncing any incremental improvements delivered by Starmer as inadequate or nonexistent. There will be a symmetrical critique from the radical left. And that is if the growth comes. Reeves’s diligent cultivation of Britain as fertile terrain for investment cannot insulate the country from harvest-wrecking storms that blow in from overseas.
This doesn’t have to be a counsel of despair. Starmer has a theory for how Britain might buck sinister anti-democratic trends. He is on the right side of the most important argument of our era. He also has a plan. But it is incomplete and he is intoning it in conference halls to receptive audiences. What he lacks, and badly needs, is an emotional connection with the much tougher crowd that doesn’t believe his kind of politics can ever work.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
