The hall is shrouded in blackness, the audience ensconced in plush red seats. All heads are turned to the bright lights on stage for that annual ritual, the panto.
In front of us stands Cinderella or Aladdin or Peter Pan, lost in their usual patter, and blind to the baddie looming up …
He’s behind you!
The cry is heard across the country every winter. Even in the nosebleed seats, we can see the jeopardy, but the stars are so oblivious as to be in danger.
Westminster’s panto season falls a little earlier than your local theatre’s. The first half of the bill was this week, with the king’s speech. The actors may change, but it’s always the same props: Black Rod follows the Lord Chamberlain’s wand, and all ends in a squat gold carriage. We get the second half in the autumn statement, in a fortnight’s time: red briefcase, numbers delivered with spurious precision and a sprinkle of jokes (this season’s likely fave: Rachel Reeves’ handiness with cut and paste).
Everything in its right place, all the better to reassure you with. But this winter the public can spot huge threats skulking just behind the politicians, even as they blithely carry on with their workaday routines. There’s Suella Braverman, dabbling in cartoon cruelty by vowing to rip the tents off rough sleepers. Just along is Rishi Sunak, trying to force the police to ban a demonstration, and failing – showing with exquisite comedy that Britain’s Little Authoritarians hold little authority. Over here are the politico-media classes. Even as 4,000 children in Gaza are bombed to shards of bone, they remain happily absorbed in their trivial pursuits: debates about whether the BBC should label Hamas “terrorists” or abide by their own editorial code, or whether a march for an armistice should proceed on Armistice Day.
Meanwhile, stalking out from stage right comes a monster with three heads, one for each of the real dangers about to shatter Westminster’s cosy torpor.
He’s behind you!
The first menace can be spied just beyond the headlines: the breakdown of a 30-year geopolitical order. Since the end of the cold war, America has been the sole superpower and wars have been short and sharp (whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, it’s their aftermaths that have been long and bloody). In Ukraine and Gaza, that is now falling apart.
The post-cold war era is “definitively over”, declared the White House’s national security strategy, and with it goes Washington’s supremacy. Earlier this year, the former White House Russia expert Fiona Hill declared that the Ukraine war was “the event that makes the passing of pax Americana apparent to everyone”. It had become “a proxy for a rebellion by Russia and the ‘Rest’ against the United States.” The war in Gaza is clearly another proxy: at the UN two weeks ago, 120 countries voted for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce”. Only 14 countries opposed the resolution, chief among them the US and Israel.
Westminster has long outsourced its biggest foreign policy decisions to Washington. If Joe Biden demands a “humanitarian pause”, then so too do Sunak and Keir Starmer, however ineffectual everyone knows it will prove. George Bush wanted a “coalition of the willing”, so Tony Blair signed us up. Perhaps that was what those American analysts really meant when they talked of “the end of history”.
But we’re now in a new era, what we might call “the end of the end of history”. Marching in lockstep with the US will prove trickier if it antagonises the very countries Brexit Britain needs to sign its trade deals, and buy its football clubs and central London real estate. Either the UK’s foreign policy gives way – or its economic model does. Which brings us to the second great threat.
He’s behind you!
Throughout most of the “end of history”, financiers thought they had an understanding with central banks: when times got rough, interest rates got slashed. It happened after the emerging markets crisis in the late 1990s, after 9/11 and again in the great banking crash of 2008. Each time a massive economic problem came along, central bankers threw money at it. For much of the past 15 years, the cost of borrowing in the UK, Europe and US has been at record lows. In “the end of the end of history” rates have shot up and will almost certainly stay high for years to come. This means huge pain for those Britons loaded up with big mortgages. But it spells disaster for others: the US office firm WeWork filed for bankruptcy this week with nearly $3bn (£2.4bn) of debt, while from Woking to Birmingham, councils in England are declaring they’ve run out of cash.
Much more pain will come. Each month sees the expiry of fixed-rate mortgages for around 133,000 households, who then go on to higher interest rates – and far costlier monthly bills. Last month, Bank of England rate-setter Swati Dhingra said, “The economy’s already flatlined. And we think only about 20% or 25% of the impact of the interest rate hikes have been fed through to the economy.”
The free-money era was particularly dangerous for the UK, because so much of the economy depends on consumption and debt. It was also dangerously seductive for our politicians. George Osborne relied on free money from the banks to take the edge off his austerity, while the left argued, rightly, that the UK ought to be deploying that cash to productive, progressive ends. Both sides now need a fundamental reassessment of their arguments.
He’s behind you!
Scientists declared this week that 2023 will be the hottest year on record. For so long, British politicians have nodded solemnly at the threat of the climate crisis while tacitly assuming the worst of it would hit brown people in poor countries. It was a foreign story, not a domestic one. But food shortages, elderly people dying of heatstroke and floods – all are already here on our shores.
Let’s take one example. This week, Panama – one of the wettest places on Earth – revealed that water levels had plunged so low that it had to restrict how many ships passed through its famous canal. From as many as 38 ships a day, there will be less than 30, also carrying less cargo. About 5% of all world trade passes through the Panama Canal. This huge disruption will mean fewer goods and higher prices.
“The end of history” bred in British politics a lazy assumption that tomorrow would always be just like yesterday: there would be no fights in the backyard, the money men would keep coining it in, and prices were for ever heading south. This rainy archipelago in the North Sea was safe, inviolable and unchanging. The end of the end of history blows away all those premises. Yet our politicians have not changed. They were reared to revere 1990s politicians and to treat Westminster as a gap year before the inevitable podcast-and-boardroom portfolio career. But if they look, the threats to their intellectual models and their careers are lurking right behind them. The show’s over.
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
