That Case Is Worth Restating

In stark contrast to Ed West’s latest, though far from first, outpouring of Bregret, Larry Elliott writes:

On the morning after the vote for Brexit, The Guardian’s newsroom was deathly quiet. There was disbelief that the public had voted the way it had, and the place was in mourning. With one exception the paper’s columnists had backed remain, and the shock of defeat was all the harder to bear because they had expected their side to triumph.

The exception to the house view was me – and I certainly received some old-fashioned looks from my colleagues that day. Judging by my inbox, both then and thereafter, my colleagues were more in tune with the readers than I was, but the editor thought it important that my leftwing case for Brexit should be given a hearing. Ten years on, that case is worth restating.

The first strand in the argument is that Europe isn’t working, and hasn’t been working for a long time. There has always been an economic case for EU membership but it has become harder to make down the years. When Britain was first applying to join what was then the European Economic Community, the major European economies were growing a lot faster than Britain, and were also closing the gap with the US. That is no longer the case. In the more than 17 years since the financial crisis, the US has grown by 87%, compared with the EU’s 13.5% – more than six times as fast.

True, the Office for Budget Responsibility has estimated that the economy will be 4% smaller in the 15 years after the referendum than it would have been had the UK remained in the single market – but this finding should be treated with some scepticism. As Jeremy Hunt, who campaigned for remain, told the BBC last week, for the economy to be 4% bigger today it would have had to have grown as fast as the US – something the former chancellor finds implausible.

The second is that Brexit highlighted the weaknesses of Britain’s financial services-dominated economic model, and provided the opportunity to try something different. While it would be wrong to blame Brussels for all Britain’s economic woes, any serious repair job requires a freedom of manoeuvre that EU membership made more difficult.

The government’s decision to impose tariffs to protect Britain’s steel industry and to cut duties on 100 imported food products to ease the cost of living crisis are examples of that freedom being used. If Andy Burnham is serious about reversing “40 years of neoliberalism”, that will require curbs on the free movement of capital, goods and people – all expressly forbidden by single-market rules.

And third, Brexit was a howl of anger from those parts of Britain that felt marginalised and forgotten. It was a vote for a different economic settlement to put right the damage caused by deindustrialisation and globalisation.

This was a problem for both the traditional big two parties but particularly for Labour, because since the late 1980s, it had tacitly accepted that the right had won the big economic arguments. The left subsequently concentrated on cultural battles that it thought it could win. A warmer approach to Europe was part of Labour’s new message.

That shift began in the late 1980s, when the TUC, having suffered three defeats at the hands of Margaret Thatcher, was seduced by Jacques Delors’ vision of a social Europe. The things the unions loathed about Thatcher – in particular the legal curbs on their activities – could be circumvented by solidarity at a European level. As it happened, these social gains proved to be illusory, not least because the EU was just as wedded to austerity and neoliberal economics as Thatcher had been.

But that’s wasn’t the point. Being pro-EU was not about how fast living standards were rising, or whether membership of the single market would boost productivity. Rather it was about a sense of self, something that marked you out as progressive and tolerant and not bigoted or nasty. It became the ultimate expression of identity politics.

In Britain, Tony Blair’s governments embraced the zeitgeist. Globalisation was like the weather, Blair insisted, something that could not be opposed. His third way involved tinkering with the Thatcherite settlement he inherited but no more than that.

That was all very well while living standards were still rising, but it left a vacuum when the financial crisis erupted in 2008. At that moment, when neoliberalism was on its knees, Labour had no convincing analysis of what had gone wrong. The system was patched up, but not fundamentally changed. Austerity filled the vacuum, causing still more hardship to working-class communities that suffered a double hollowing out – first of well-paid manufacturing jobs then of public services.

As Frank Furedi puts it in his new book, In Defence of Populism, “Brexit represented an astonishingly powerful response to the double betrayal of the people. It rejected the hitherto hegemonic outlook of the technocratic-managerial elites and effectively challenged the globalist ideology that dominated the institutions of western Europe.” 

Brexit showed that class still matters in politics, and Burnham seems to get that. In his speech after his win in the Makerfield byelection, the man soon to be prime minister talked of how his constituents had “voted for change, they have voted for more power for the north and everywhere forgotten by Westminster”.

We shall see. In itself, Brexit alters nothing. It creates an opportunity for change but by no means guarantees the changes that are needed will happen. But it has unleashed demands for action that will not be stilled. For me, that’s a good thing.

And Brendan Chilton writes:

The victory of Andy Burnham in Makerfield and the resignation of Keir Starmer have undoubtedly transformed the political landscape. Labour now faces a leadership election that will determine who leads both the party and the Government into the second half of this Parliament and onto the next general election expected as late as 2029. Yet amidst the speculation about personalities, factions and future direction, there is one important point that Labour members, ministers and MPs should remember: a change of leader does not change the mandate on which Labour was elected in 2024.

The Labour Party won the 2024 General Election on a clear manifesto, and every Labour MP must deliver on that manifesto. That document committed Labour to making Brexit work, not reversing it, or altering it, or watering it down. That manifesto clearly ruled out rejoining the European Union, ruled out returning to the Single Market, ruled out re-entering the Customs Union and ruled out the return of freedom of movement. Those commitments were not hidden in the small print. They formed a central and exclusive part of Labour's offer to the British people and successive Labour figures have repeated those commitments, including both Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham.

The reason was simple. Labour understood that the country wanted to move on from the Brexit divisions. After years of fighting and arguing, voters were exhausted by the Brexit debate. Whether they voted Leave or Remain, most people wanted politicians to focus on economic growth, public services, living standards and national renewal. Labour's success came not from promising to revisit the arguments of the past but from promising to address the challenges of the future. That reality has not changed because Keir Starmer has resigned. Nor has it changed because Andy Burnham has returned to Westminster.

Indeed, if there is one lesson from Burnham's success, it is that Labour remains strongest when it speaks to a broad coalition of voters that includes many former Leave supporters. The coalition that delivered Labour's majority stretches across metropolitan cities, market towns, former industrial communities and suburban England. It includes millions of voters who backed Brexit and who subsequently supported Labour because they believed the party had accepted the democratic settlement established by the 2016 referendum. As well as remain voters who, democratically and honourably accepted the outcome of the referendum. To abandon that position now would be politically reckless.

There are some within Labour and outside who will inevitably argue that a leadership contest presents an opportunity to revisit Britain's relationship with the European Union. They will point to some opinion polls showing increased support for closer ties with Europe. Although polls have also shown that the British people do not wish to return powers to Brussels. Others will argue that a new leader should pursue deeper integration as part of a broader economic strategy. Such arguments fundamentally misunderstand both the electoral and political realities facing the Labour Party.

The principal threat to Labour's future does not come from voters demanding a return to the European Union. It comes from the growing strength of Reform UK in many of the very constituencies Labour needs to retain if it is to secure a second term in office.

Reform's appeal is rooted in a belief among many voters that political elites have failed to respect democratic decisions and have become disconnected from public concerns. Whatever one's views of Reform, it would be a profound mistake to hand that party an argument that Labour intends to dilute or reverse Brexit by stealth further strengthening their argument that the elites ignore the electorate. The consequences could be severe and fatal to Labour.

Labour's parliamentary majority was built in part upon winning back voters who had abandoned the party in 2019. Many of those voters remain sceptical of Westminster and deeply attached to the principle that the referendum result should be respected. If Labour were seen to be retreating from its manifesto commitments on Europe, Reform would have a powerful narrative around which to organise opposition. The danger is not merely electoral. It is also about trust.

One of the reasons Labour succeeded in rebuilding its reputation before the 2024 election was because it demonstrated a willingness to listen to voters. It accepted that Brexit had happened and committed itself to making the new settlement work. That helped restore credibility among people who had previously concluded that Labour was unwilling to respect decisions with which it disagreed.

None of this means Labour should adopt a hostile attitude towards Europe. Britain and the European Union remain important partners. Cooperation on security, defence, scientific research, energy policy and trade is entirely sensible and in the national interest. Constructive engagement with our European neighbours is not only desirable but necessary. However, cooperation is not the same thing as reintegration. The next Labour leader should be free to improve practical cooperation where it benefits Britain. They should be free to reduce unnecessary barriers and strengthen relationships with European partners. They should remain free to strike trade deals, such as those already achieved by the government with the Gulf States, India, the United States. What they should not do is reopen questions that the party explicitly settled before the election. That distinction matters because Labour's credibility depends upon keeping its promises.

A leadership election should be a debate about how best to deliver economic growth, improve public services, tackle housing shortages and raise living standards. It should not become a vehicle for reopening old arguments about Brexit that the country has already decided. Anyone seeking to resurrect those old Brexit arguments is damaging the Labour Party. Ultimately, the lesson of both Labour's election victory and Burnham's success is that broad coalitions are built through trust, competence and respect for voters. The party won because it promised stability and change within clear boundaries. Those boundaries included a commitment to respect Brexit while making it work in Britain's interests. That commitment remains just as important today as it was on polling day.

New leaders may emerge. New priorities may develop. New challenges will certainly arise. We don’t know how many people will stand for the position of Leader. But the democratic mandate on which Labour was elected remains unchanged, unless a new general election is sought with a new mandate. If Labour wishes to go on to secure a second term in government, it should focus relentlessly on delivering growth, opportunity and renewal. The path to victory lies in fulfilling the promises it has already made, not revisiting the arguments it has already settled.

He Merits None

The Morning Star editorialises:

Keir Starmer’s resignation as Prime Minister attracts all the usual plaudits to his decency, integrity and commitment to serve. He merits none of them.

Establishment pundits will echo too his mythologising claim to have made Labour electable again — a misrepresentation of Britain’s recent history by a discredited elite still trying to shore up a Westminster consensus the whole country can see is broken.

The most sycophantic lobby journalists might hesitate to repeat his other boasts. Britain’s “reputation in the world restored… standing up for decency, respect and the rule of law” when police now routinely make mass arrests of peaceful protesters against genocide, and ministers claim unconvincingly to be friends with a US administration that openly backs the far-right mobilisations on our streets?

Was it his commitment to “wealth and opportunity for all, not just the privileged few” that inspired his unseemly grab for freebies from a wealthy aristocrat as soon as he entered Downing Street?

Is a party floundering because of its support for the plutocrat-worshipping Peter Mandelson, despite knowing of his long and close association with paedophile tycoon Jeffrey Epstein, entitled to accuse its last leadership of “political, financial and moral bankruptcy?”

It is no surprise that Starmer said that, though — the service he rendered the ruling class is and was the defeat of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, and dashing the hope of real change Labour inspired a decade ago.

This mission was his whole purpose in politics. It dovetailed well with his work, as Brexit lead in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, to commit Labour to reversing the Brexit vote of exactly 10 years ago — both because this guaranteed the electoral disaster that ended Corbyn’s leadership and because Brexit, like Corbynism, was a revolt against the politics-as-usual he was determined to restore.

Starmer succeeded on one level.

He successfully used Brexit as a wedge issue to wreck the electoral coalition that won Labour its largest vote this century under Corbyn in 2017.

He drove hundreds of thousands of socialists, including Corbyn, out of the Labour Party with bogus charges and stitched-up disciplinaries, or simply by making continued membership politically and morally intolerable. He changed the rules, making the future election of a socialist leader all but impossible.

He imposed the most repressive internal regime the party had ever seen, withdrawing the whip from MPs at any hint of rebellion, forcing out mayors or councillors showing any hint of independence, making opposition to Nato or Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine dangerous heresies.

These were the actions of a liar — there is no reconciling the policies Starmer advocated when running for the leadership with his conduct since — and a bully who, despite his career in law, has shown consistent contempt for due process, natural justice and human rights.

And on another level it was all for nothing. Because politics-as-usual could not be put back together again.

The Westminster consensus on privatising and outsourcing every public service, allowing unlimited freedom to big banks and foreign “investors” to shape our economy in their interests, and on total subordination to Washington in foreign policy is universally resented.

It is blamed — rightly — for NHS waiting lists and crumbling schools, poisoned rivers and unaffordable housing, for British complicity in genocide in Gaza and unprovoked war on Iran.

All Starmer achieved with his Remain manoeuvres was the sleaze-ridden Boris Johnson premiership. The cost of what he has done to Labour since may be still higher, if Reform UK sweep the far right to power.

Can a post-Starmer Labour be part of the effort to stop that? In the end that will not be down to a new Labour leader. It is a question for the whole trade union movement and the wider left.

Budget Responsibility?

Cabinet Ministers are clearly underemployed if they had nothing better to do today than to attend a meeting chaired by Keir Starmer. And as Rachel Reeves announces Professor Jonathan Haskel as her nominated candidate for Chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility, what does the Chancellor of the Exchequer do at all, never mind for £72,454 over and above a parliamentary salary of £91,346?

Without a manifesto commitment, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown immediately surrendered democratic political control of monetary policy. The Liberal Democrats forced the creation of the OBR. The Conservatives created the short-lived Economic Advisory Council out of thin air, and Reeves reconstituted a Council of Economic Advisers with at least one of the same people on it.

Yet on none of those occasions have the salaries of the First Lord of the Treasury, of all other Treasury Ministers, and of all senior Treasury civil servants been halved, as they should have been.

Prohibited Relationships?

Dr Luke Evans has presented the First Cousins (Prohibited Relationships) Bill, which would ban not only marriage and civil partnerships between first cousins, but also sexual relations between them. At last, someone in this debate has got to the point.

Cousin marriage is unconditionally legal in 18 of the United States plus the District of Columbia, and conditionally legal in a further six. Proponents of a ban here should ask themselves why there was not one already. There did used to be. Until the Reformation, the Late Roman ban on marriage to the fourth degree of consanguinity had obtained, extended to affinity because in marriage, “the two shall become one flesh”. Catholic Canon Law has therefore always banned cousin marriage, at one time to the seventh degree, although with possibilities of dispensation since the ban was not in the Bible.

Such dispensations did the Hapsburgs no good, but our own Royal Family would agree with NHS England that cousin marriage, not least where one party was an immigrant, had “benefits” that included “stronger extended family support systems and economic advantages”. Queen Victoria and the immigrant Prince Albert were first cousins. By descent from that marriage, the King’s parents were third cousins, while they were also second cousins once removed through a different line. Prince Philip was not only an immigrant, but an asylum-seeker who took refuge in Britain because he had relatives here, one of whom he married. Britain intervened militarily in his native land to restore his family to the Throne. Talk about bringing their troubles to our door.

It was not a happy marriage between Victoria and Albert’s granddaughter, Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and their grandson, Grand Duke Ernest Louis of Hesse and by Rhine, although rather more successful was the union between Ernest Louis’s sister, Princess Irene of Hesse and by Rhine, and another of Victoria and Albert’s grandsons, Prince Henry of Prussia, even if two of their three sons were haemophiliacs. The other one did not die until 1978. Did Queen Elizabeth II never meet him? At any rate, cousin marriage was the most uncompromisingly Protestant thing about her public life. Ernest Louis and Victoria Melita were known in the Royal Family as Ernie and Ducky, but she was not the only ducky in the marriage, which was dissolved after only six years in 1901.

That brings us to the fact that the legality of marriages between first cousins was a product of the Reformation. Its prevalence until the First World War, and as recently as that, was a badge of Protestant honour, since Henry VIII had legalised it when he had wanted to marry Catherine Howard, who was Anne Boleyn’s first cousin, and since although William and Mary never had children (there’s that Ducky thing again), the intention had been that they would, and they were first cousins whose marriage would not ordinarily have been possible in the Catholic Church. Does the Orange Order, named after a fruit, now wish to ban a marriage such as William of Orange’s? Would the four stripes of Northern Irish Unionist in the House of Commons vote for that ban? We may be about to find out.

This seems to be about the Two Cultures. Although Charles and Emma Darwin were first cousins who had 10 children, and although Albert and Elsa Einstein were both maternal first cousins, and paternal second cousins such that her maiden name was Einstein, the mere thought of this practice is profoundly shocking to scientists. But to people formed by the study of literature and history, then, while that is where it belongs, that is where you will find it routinely. Mainstream British society was educated out of it, and not very long ago, so that can obviously be done. South Asians are hardly unreceptive to education.

Anglo-Saxons and Scotch-Irish still regularly marry their first cousins in several of the parts of the United States that voted for Donald Trump, and they did so as a matter of course into the very recent past. But if the argument is that this was something that certain other ethnic groups did, then , much as I would still vote for this Bill since it was available, it may be better to treat the matter as one of health education rather than of criminal law. After all, that was what worked with everyone else. Nineteenth-century novels are full of marriages between first cousins as the most normal thing in the world. In HMS Pinafore, Sir Joseph Porter marries his adoring Cousin Hebe. Between 1979 and 1981, the makers and viewers of To the Manor Born took it as read that Audrey fforbes-Hamilton’s late husband had been her cousin. Although Coronation Street does not, both Emmerdale and EastEnders still feature such arrangements between white characters whose families were supposed to have lived in Emmerdale or Walford since time out of mind, and that seems to raise no eyebrows. Still, the King is a last great hurrah of that sort of thing. His mother was one of the least inbred monarchs ever, and his son and grandson are not at all inbred. Educate people, and it will mostly or entirely die out. That worked with everyone else. Even the Royal Family.

Yet since the intention would apparently be to prevent genetic defects, which is not the only reason to oppose cousin marriage, then it would be pointless without the criminalisation of sex between first cousins. So be it, but we have already raised the age of marriage to two years above the age of consent, a literally preposterous arrangement. It is now legally impossible to do the decent thing, but not to do the indecent thing. Pity poor Imam Ashraf Osmani of Northampton, who in January was handed a suspended sentence of 15 weeks’ imprisonment for having performed a nikah, which has no legal status whatever, so that two 16-year-olds could have a perfectly lawful sexual relationship without sinning. The second time as farce.

Something similar applies to polygamy. As you could marry your cousin my nikah, with no legal standing, and the two of you could then have children perfectly legally as you could have done anyway, so you can take three more wives alongside your legal one by nikah, with no legal standing, and have children with all of them. Or you could take all four wives by nikah alone. In fact, any man can have children with four different women simultaneously if they will let him. Doing so with two, often in arrangements that lasted decades, has never been especially uncommon, and nor has sending the bill to the DWP or its predecessors. Whatever else that may be, it is certainly not un-British.

Good Riddance, Keir Starmer

Owen Jones writes:

Good riddance, Keir Starmer. No sooner had the toppled prime minister wiped away his tears than the solemn guff began. The Labour leader is “principled” and “driven by a deep sense of public service and duty to this country”, said deputy prime minister David Lammy. He showed “the great dignity and integrity that is the mark of the man”, said energy secretary Ed Miliband. “A devoted and dedicated public servant” said home secretary Shabana Mahmood.

No. This was not a decent man defeated by circumstance, a man of duty and integrity who was simply in the wrong job, a principled leader undone by events. This was an unprincipled politician who abandoned promises with as much enthusiasm as he trousered freebies from rich donors.

Labour was “politically and morally bankrupt” when he took over, Starmer declared in his resignation speech. Yet here was a man who not only served in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, but declared himself “100% behind” him. When Starmer stood for leader, he praised his predecessor for bringing “radicalism” to Labour, declared we are not “going to trash the last four years”, repeatedly called Corbyn a “friend”, and denounced the “terrible” media attacks on him.

But Starmer was a frontman for a Labour-right operation whose purpose was clear: persuade a leftwing membership to hand the party back to those who despised everything it had just stood for. At the centre of that plot was Morgan McSweeney, career fixer for the Labour right, and his Labour Together thinktank. It was generously funded by the undeclared donations of wealthy donors, leading to an eventual fine from the Electoral Commission. When journalists investigated those donations, McSweeney’s successor, Josh Simons, commissioned a PR firm to smear them. Simons, of course, later became an MP, before surrendering his seat to make way for Andy Burnham.

To win over the membership, Starmer’s campaign promised tax hikes for the top 5%, public ownership of utilities, abolition of tuition fees, “an immigration system based on compassion and dignity”, human rights “at the heart of foreign policy”, and the abolition of the House of Lords. In power, Starmer has either failed to deliver on these promises or done the opposite.

Soon after being elected leader, Starmer suspended his predecessor from the party before finally expelling him in 2023, claiming that he and Corbyn had never been friends and distancing himself from his previous leadership pledges. This was deceit, not pragmatism. When he stood for leader, Starmer told the BBC that nationalisation of utilities was a pledge that would be in the next Labour manifesto. The following year, he denied ever saying this, and told the BBC: “I never made a commitment to nationalisation, I made a commitment to common ownership.”

The party would be a “broad church”, Starmer had promised. Instead, he suspended Labour MPs or prevented candidates from running for making comments critical of the state of Israel, and opposing the two-child benefit cap. His machine blocked leftwingers from standing, such as Faiza Shaheen and Lauren Townsend.

As for his claim that he took over a Labour party that was “morally bankrupt”, he was the human rights lawyer who said that Israel had a right to cut off power and water to Gaza. For nearly 20 weeks, as Israel reduced Gaza to rubble and killed tens of thousands of people while its leaders issued genocidal statements, Labour refused to back a ceasefire. Israel’s “right to self-defence” filled the void where Palestinians’ right to live should have been. As predominantly Muslim councillors resigned in disgust, one Labour official bragged that the party was “shaking off the fleas”. It took Labour six months to officially back a ceasefire.

Starmer was handed an election victory thanks to the total self-immolation of the Tories, yet triumphed on just a third of the vote, securing a landslide only because of Britain’s absurd electoral system. He soon proved that junking a political vision is easier than offering an alternative. Last year,when his government scrapped the universal winter fuel payment, Starmer calculated that the electorate would respect his willingness to make “tough choices”. Instead, voters were repulsed by an attack on pensioners, eventually forcing a partial U-turn. A Labour government then placed disability benefits in its sights, before mass opposition forced another partial retreat.

Competence was supposed to be Starmer’s one defining trait, but he always found scapegoats for his shambolic administration. Like Sue Gray, the former senior civil servant tasked with preparing for government, who suffered a barrage of negative briefings before being thrown under the bus, like so many others.

This “principled” leader once campaigned for free movement and reprimanded Labour for being “a bit scared of making the positive case for immigration”. As prime minister, he sounded like Enoch Powell, declaring immigration had done “incalculable damage” and risked turning Britain into an “island of strangers”, while building one of the harshest asylum systems in Europe. And that was not the only hostile environment built for a marginalised minority: ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Index now rates Britain as having one of the worst records on trans rights in Europe, only narrowly above Russia.

His government broke promise after promise. Its housebuilding revolution failed to materialise. “No return to austerity” gave way to departmental squeezes. International aid was gutted. Meanwhile, Labour’s internal authoritarianism was exported to the country. Thousands were arrested for holding placards after anti-genocide direct action group Palestine Action were proscribed as terrorists on the same legal footing as Islamic State.

Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US because he was a hero of the Labour right, despite his publicly recorded links to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. This was faction before country. This time, McSweeney was forced to carry the can, and there was no one left to throw under a bus.

The only defence is that Starmer’s failure does not belong to him alone. His faction and its cheerleaders in the media believed this brand of politics was an electoral elixir that would thrive in government. The truth is that they have no answers for the crisis-stricken Britain of the 2020s and its failed economic model.

Starmer believed in little other than his own advancement, a trait hardly uncommon among Labour MPs. The danger is that his dismal, disreputable premiership laid the foundations for the hard-right agenda of Nigel Farage. We will soon discover whether the next occupant of No 10, Andy Burnham, believes the answer is simply to paint a northern, charismatic gloss over a failed agenda. If he fails to offer a decisive break from this useless travesty of a government then he, too, will sink.

10 Years On: Colonialism In One Country

Alwyn Turner writes:

A decade is a long time in politics. It’s been ten years since the Brexit referendum, and we’re on our sixth prime minister, our seventh defence secretary, our eighth chancellor of the exchequer, and our ninth foreign secretary. Sir Keir Starmer having decided to mark the anniversary by resigning, those numbers are just about to increase further. ‘Strong and stable,’ promised David Cameron in the 2015 general election, which isn’t quite how it has always appeared. Nor has it often felt that we ‘got our country back’, as Nigel Farage offered.

It’s all been a bit of a mess, a confusion that has not yet worked its way through the political system, and that has disrupted the existing parties, creating new camps of Leaver and Remainer.

In fact, that dividing line has long been part of British politics, going back to the days of the imperialist and the Little Englander in the nineteenth century, the clash between those who sought power and glory through the Empire, and those who argued for free trade and a withdrawal from the colonies. The result of that dispute was a kind of compromise: a free-trade Empire. And it worked. The British presence in the world grew wider still and wider, reaching a peak at the start of the 1920s, when some of the old German colonies were added, via the Treaty of Versailles. It was the biggest empire in human history, on which the sun famously never set.

But the centre couldn’t hold and, starting with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, the Empire fell apart with unexpected speed. By 1970, the land-area of the colonies that remained was smaller than England itself, with a population less than that of London. There remained a memory of what had been, in the form of the Commonwealth, but that was – at the highest valuation – a far-flung family, rather than any kind of serious power-bloc in the world. So where should Britain go now?

The radical answer was to reassert the ethical imperialism of the nineteenth century, most notably with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. ‘We have lost the world’s leadership – for what it was worth – in power politics,’ says a teacher in Jack Trevor Story’s 1963 novel Something for Nothing, ‘but by being the first country to abandon nuclear weapons we would be leading the world again on the only path left.’ This tendency survives; you can see it in the pursuit of Net Zero, and Ed Miliband’s declaration that ‘the UK has a particular responsibility to lead the world and show the way forward for a greener future’.

Meanwhile, the establishment solution to the problem of Britain’s post-imperial role was to look to the Continent, where six countries had signed the 1951 Treaty of Paris, bringing into being the European Coal and Steel Community, and then the Treaty of Rome in 1957, setting up the European Economic Community. Britain had not been involved in those initiatives, but when the Suez crisis revealed the country’s declining authority – and with the winds of change blowing through Africa – a change was clearly needed. Britain could only retain its status in the world by subsuming itself into the supranational European project of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman.

This was not the same agenda as that pursued by the original members, whose overriding motivation was to bring to an end two centuries of German-French rivalry that had repeatedly spilled over into devastating war. Nor was it the same as the post-Cold War joiners, seeking to embed their independence from Russia. Britain’s approach, said Labour’s Denis Healey, was ‘imperialism with an inferiority complex’.

Healey was not alone in this judgement. In 1971, Conservative MP Enoch Powell told American talk-show host Dick Cavett that in the drive to join the EEC, ‘there’s a great deal of this instinctive post-imperial wish to be big’. The following year, Tory prime minister Edward Heath signed the Treaty of Accession and spelt it out: this was ‘the end of a glorious era, that of the British Empire, and the beginning of a whole new chapter of British history.’

And for four decades, this was the settled view. Membership of the EEC (and then the European Union) wasn’t glorious by any measure, but it was at least something. Combined with Britain’s permanent seat of the Security Council of the Union Nations and with the possession of nuclear weapons, it meant the country could still hold a place on the world stage. We could ‘punch above our weight,’ as politicians liked to say in the 1990s. This, according to the governing elite, was what not only they but the people wanted. ‘The British,’ wrote former Labour prime minister Tony Blair in 2010, ‘prefer their prime ministers to stand tall internationally.’

It was a perfectly respectable position to take. The wish to help shape humanity’s future – even at a diminished level – is an honourable aspiration. The problem was that Blair was wrong: he didn’t have the public behind him. They had largely moved on, and he and his kind had been left behind. The vote to leave the EU demonstrated that. By a narrow margin, the British people rejected the imperialist dream. Which sent the governing classes into a state of panic. In their grief, they’ve tried denial, bargaining and anger, and are currently depressed. Acceptance seems some way off yet.

The old instincts are still there, though. The psychology of imperialism was generations in the making, and has proved hard to shift. With no one else to govern, that instinct has been turned inwards, directed at those who were foolish enough to vote Leave. The passive-aggressive paternalism of the Blair years, chiding us for smoking tobacco and eating junk food, has got more and more tetchy in recent years. The natives have been getting restless, they’ve been listening to troublemakers and rabblerousers, and they need to be reminded who actually runs the place. Enough of your social-media complaints about multiculturalism and immigration, of your far-right Raise the Colours. We all believe in free speech, but there are limits.

Stalin’s great contribution to political thought was to popularise the theory of socialism in one country. Since the referendum, there’s been a strong sense of colonialism in one country.

Little of this is about Europe, of course. It never really was, and no one serious is now proposing that Britain should rejoin the EU. Powell’s prediction of membership proved to be entirely accurate: ‘We should simply be merged into something very different. Or, at any rate, be refusing all the time to be merged in it – and there’s not much future in that.’

The political divide over the EU is not about trade arrangements and customs unions, nor even about immigration, massive though that issue is. At heart, the central question remains that one of post-imperial identity. Is Britain to be a major player in world politics, or is the priority to get its own house in order?

The two great blocks of British opinion survive: the conservative and the radical. What has happened in the last couple of decades has been a splintering within those blocks, so that the Tories have faced competition from Nigel Farage’s various outfits, and the old Labour/Liberal co-existence has been disrupted by the rise of Celtic nationalism and the Greens.

This is not entirely unprecedented. Historically, the radical block has been particularly susceptible to splits (Liberal Unionists, Labour Party, SDP). The difference this time, as the referendum made clear, is that dissatisfaction is found in both blocks, and is therefore taking longer to resolve.

Nonetheless, the logic of first-past-the-post suggests that the internal divisions will be resolved, as they have been before, and the most plausible outcome is a return to the old, established parties. That assumes that both Labour and Conservative reinvent themselves (again), to absorb their next-door rivals.

And in that endeavour, it feels to me that Labour are lagging, the party of the public sector still hung up on being colonial administrators. The Tories have the edge, claiming for themselves the tradition of the Little Englander that used to belong to the radicals – from Richard Cobden through Lloyd George to Tony Benn. And that is where most British people now are.

As with so much of the Right’s history over the last half-century, Enoch Powell’s arguments are going to prove pivotal: ‘I’m trying to tell the people of Britain that they don’t have to be big to be great.’

The Last Fiction of Keir Starmer

Paul Knaggs writes:

There is a particular kind of lie that does not trouble itself to argue with the truth. It simply replaces it.

On Monday morning, Sir Keir Starmer stood outside Downing Street and performed that replacement in full public view. In six minutes during his resignation speech, he rewrote the history of the Labour Party, casting himself as the surgeon who saved a dying patient and his predecessor as the disease. It was a fluent performance. It was also, in its founding claims, untrue.

Orwell saw this coming, as he usually did. “Who controls the past controls the future,” he wrote in 1984; “who controls the present controls the past.” Starmer, in his last act of control, reached back for the past and tried to bend it. The difficulty is that some of the past is written down, audited, and filed with the Electoral Commission, where it cannot be talked over.

SIX MINUTES OF FICTION 

The Bankruptcy That Wasn’t: Labour Was Debt-Free

He told the nation he had inherited a party that was “financially bankrupt.” The accounts say the opposite. Labour was debt-free. The debts of the Blair years had been cleared; the books balanced; membership fees were arriving at the rate of £19.3 million a year.

The red ink came later, on his own watch: a deficit of £5.2 million by 2021, with Momentum pointing not at Corbyn but at Starmer’s leadership and the exodus it caused. Membership income fell to £16.2 million as the members walked. He did not inherit the deficit. He spilled it.

He Inherited a Movement – He Presided Over an Exodus

He implied a party in terminal decline. He had in fact taken charge of the largest political membership in Western Europe, close to 600,000 people. Within a year of his leadership it shed around 91,000 of them, falling to 432,213, leaking members at a rate that would empty a marginal constituency inside a month.

He inherited a movement. He presided over its hollowing. Then he stood in Downing Street and described the hollowing as a rescue.

He did not inherit a ruin. He built one, and called it a rescue.

The tragedy is this. Starmer could have built on Corbyn’s achievements. He could have taken the party’s colossal membership, its debt-free finances, its popular policies, and turned them into a government that genuinely transformed Britain. Instead, he spent five years dismantling everything he inherited, alienating the membership, abandoning the policies, and governing as a pale imitation of the Tories.

“Morally Bankrupt”? The Forde Report Contradicts Starmer

The cruellest claim was the most personal. The party, he said, had been “morally bankrupt,” and he had “ripped out the poison of anti-Semitism.” Here the ground is more serious, and honesty requires precision. The Equality and Human Rights Commission did find, in October 2020, that Labour had broken equality law in its handling of complaints. That finding was real, and it mattered.

But the Commission did not find that the party was morally bankrupt. It did not find that Jeremy Corbyn was personally anti-Semitic. Corbyn accepted its conclusions and commissioned the Forde Report, which found the scale of the problem had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons,” and that hostility towards the leader from inside his own party had crippled the response.

There is one fact Starmer left out. Within weeks of becoming leader in 2020, his party chose to settle the Panorama libel claim rather than fight it, a settlement Corbyn called “a political decision, not a legal one.” The man who boasted of cleansing the party had paid, early and quietly, to close down the argument about it.

What Corbyn actually said 

Corbyn did not stay silent this time. He said he was “extremely angry.” He reminded the country that he had been “elected twice” to lead, that the policies were “all of which were endorsed by Keir Starmer,” that the party he handed on “had funds,” “had 600,000 members,” and stood on a programme of “social redistribution” that stayed popular long after its author was expelled for believing in it. 

Then the line that will outlast the speech: “The idea is morally bankrupt is a really disgraceful comment to make.”

Corbyn Won More Votes in Defeat Than Starmer in Victory

Let the other case be put, because his defenders will put it. Starmer won a landslide; Corbyn lost twice; a man who reaches Downing Street is entitled to write his own record. But let the record be true.

It was not a landslide in any honest sense of the word. It was a supermajority of seats conjured out of barely a third of the vote, the lowest winning share ever recorded, on the lowest turnout since 2001. Labour did not win that election so much as the Conservatives lost it, having made themselves so toxic that no one, not even a lifelong Tory, could bring himself to mark the ballot.

Here is the figure that should settle the matter. Starmer’s triumph rested on around nine and a half million votes: roughly half a million fewer than the party polled under Corbyn in the defeat of 2019. The man he calls a loser brought more people to the polls in defeat than Starmer managed in victory. The majority was a quirk of the counting, not a verdict of the country.

His list of achievements is arguable, line by line. The inheritance he described is not arguable. It is checkable. And it fails the check.

The tragedy is the size of what he was handed. The largest party in Europe; debt-free books; a manifesto the public actually wanted. He could have governed as though all of it were true. Instead he spent his years dismantling it, alienating the members, discarding the policies, and ruling as a cautious imitation of the people Labour exists to replace. When his own MPs finally moved against him, he stood on the steps of Downing Street and blamed the man he had betrayed to get there.

That is not leadership. That is cowardice dressed as valedictory.