Scene and Herd

I am not a member, but after the Workers Party denied the Green Party victory in the Burnage by-election to Manchester City Council, We Are All The Workers Party Now over at Postliberal Central, where Yuan Yi Zhu writes:

By a vote of 286 to 270, MPs have voted to reject an attempt to revive the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which was first introduced in 2024 by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater and passed by the House of Commons last year, only to fail in the House of Lords.

Had the bill passed through all its stages in the House of Commons, it would have been guaranteed to become law, thanks to the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949 which allow legislation to be enacted without the assent of the upper house under certain criteria. But the bill’s promoters could not get enough of their supporters to show up this time, while opponents’ resolve, if anything, stiffened in the intervening period.

What changed? First of all, the departure of Keir Starmer from the scene certainly made a difference: it is no small thing for the prime minister to be personally in favour of such a measure, or indeed to be opposed to it, as Andy Burnham indicated a few weeks ago. While today’s was a free vote, many MPs will have seen the change at the top of the Labour Party as a sign that they could afford to skip this particular early Friday sitting.

Whether Burnham quietly put his finger on the scale is unclear, but a week before the vote the Government quietly released a new impact assessment which raised the initial estimate of the number of people dying through assisted deaths in its first decade from 13,500 to more than 25,000. It also admitted that vulnerable populations may be more likely to be coerced into suicide. That, and a stream of horrific news stories from jurisdictions where assisted dying is legal, must have had an impact too.

Meanwhile, the attempt at using the Parliament Acts clearly backfired. For the procedure to be invoked, the bill had to be reintroduced in almost exactly the same form as it stood when it passed the House of Commons last time. This meant that a bill which even its supporters acknowledged was flawed — witness promoter Lord Falconer’s 76 amendments — was put in front of the House of Commons, with no guarantee that its manifold problems could be fixed in the short time available.

The bill’s promoters attempted to cynically weaponise the upper house’s scrutiny in their favour, by casting the issue as a People vs Lords debate. But today’s life peers are not the hereditary backwoodsmen whom David Lloyd George stared down. Instead, they include disability activists, palliative care specialists, and social care experts: it was hard for many progressive MPs, even those committed to the abolition of the appointed upper house, to disregard entirely the opinion of such people.

Today’s debate could not be called Parliament as its best, the common refrain heard on the green benches when it voted for the bill at second reading. There were indeed many low points, such as Liberal Democrat MP Andrew George urging the Commons to vote for the bill so that “we don’t allow the Lords to have the victory they want,” as though the bill concerned a trifling issue instead of state-provided suicide. Lauren Edwards of Labour, to use the most charitable interpretation of her comments, demonstrated an embarrassing lack of understanding about the Parliament Acts. But there were moments of greatness as well. No one who watched it will be ever able to forget the sight of Labour MP Ashley Dalton, suffering from Stage 4 cancer, urging her colleagues against succumbing to the emotional blackmail of stories of horrific deaths to enact the legislation in the name of people like her.

Assisted dying once seemed an invincible progressive juggernaut. Its promoters like to think of themselves as the contemporary suffragettes, gay rights activists, and anti-racism campaigners. But the cautionary tales from places such as Canada and the Netherlands, as well as grassroots opposition, have stopped its progress in the British Isles. Westminster has joined the Senedd and the Scottish Parliament in rejecting assisted dying, and only tiny Jersey has legalised it. Today’s vote is a victory for human dignity and a reaffirmation of the duties we have for each other, in life as well as near death.

Liam Stokes writes:

At a time when the global systems on which we all rely appear increasingly fragile, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has sounded the alarm over yet another cause for concern. In a new report entitled “Ready to Grow”, the NFU showed how British domestic food production has faced a steep decline in recent decades. Over the past 30 years, self-sufficiency has fallen across 10 out of 11 key commodities such as wheat, vegetables and meat, while agri-food imports are up 70%.

This is cause for serious concern. Just a few weeks ago, my house became engulfed in the fine smoke billowing from a wildfire near the Westbury White Horse, some 14 miles away, while my neighbour began prudently installing air conditioning. Britons have lived through the hottest summer since records began, following closely on the record-breaking heat of last year. Persistent days of more than 30-degree weather brought drought, wildfire and discomfort across the country.

It takes a complex web of delicate natural and human systems to bring food to Britain’s tables — a web that grows more complicated the further it is stretched around the globe by a network of logistics, working non-stop to keep shelves stocked. Yet as those systems begin to face severe strain, it is alarming to consider how much food is produced beyond the country’s shores.

Britain has always imported food as a trading, seafaring nation. No one sensible is talking about food autarky, not least because total self-reliance would leave the country vulnerable to localised disasters. The question is whether the growing reliance on global food networks is sustainable in a world of climate shocks, rising international belligerence and unpredictable artificial intelligence.

Food is designated as Critical National Infrastructure — a series of essential assets which keep the country running — but just last week the National Audit Office produced a report stating that Defra has not done enough to strengthen resilience, and the country’s ability to absorb catastrophic events remains untested despite rising risks.

The solution may not be as simple as building a patriotic wall of cattle sheds and wheat silos, however. Domestic production is dependent on an industrial base of fertilisers, animal feed, food-grade chemicals and gases that have been significantly outsourced overseas. The worst self-sufficiency figures don’t relate to good old British beef and bread, but to fruit and vegetables, for which Britain is only 17% and 55% self-reliant respectively. In 1995, the country was producing 74% vegetables domestically.

A strategic response would be to boost not only British farming, but the whole agri-industrial base and certainly horticulture too. Perhaps less intuitively, British ecology needs to be boosted. It’s too easy to assume that a food-first paradigm pits farming against nature, but to do so would be to misunderstand the lessons that summer wildfires provided. Britain needs functioning ecosystems more than ever, not only to provide the soil, water and pollinators that agriculture has always demanded, but to mitigate the shocks of flood, drought and fire that are becoming the new reality. Tree cover and floodplains are essential food infrastructure.

The looming threats of AI and climate change might provoke anxiety, but perhaps a more useful response would be humility. Relying on food produced thousands of miles away is pure hubris in an uncertain world. Let’s bring at least some of that infrastructure home.

Ralph Leonard writes:

In the wake of the Labour government imposing sanctions on settlements in the West Bank, Israel retaliated by closing the British consulate in Jerusalem. Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have at least one ally remaining in Britain, however, as Nigel Farage hyped up his relationship with the Israeli government on Wednesday. While the Reform UK leader claimed to have “emphasised the Falklands issue […] and its importance to the British people” following a diplomatic spat over the islands, he also proclaimed that, if elected, his party would reverse the West Bank sanctions and “undo the damage” caused by the Labour government.

However, this raises the question of whether a Reform government will adequately advance Britain’s national interest, rather than just kowtow to foreign states, particularly Israel. Former Reform parliamentary candidate Matt Goodwin said last year on GB News that the party will put “Britain first…not Pakistan, not Gaza, not any other foreign policy”, but when fellow panellist Aaron Bastani asked whether this rhetoric applied to Israel, Goodwin started stumbling over his words. It was a sign of just how much of an Achilles’ heel the issue is for Reform.

The British Right tends to be pro-Israel, largely out of a notion of “Western” solidarity against the threat of Islamism. Another reason is that Israel resembles the model of a strong, sovereign nation-state with military and economic power, capable of unapologetically defending its borders and dismissive of outsiders which try to dictate its policies. It’s therefore natural that British conservatives might view the national interests of Israel as complimentary with those of the UK.

Yet it’s now increasingly apparent that these national interests are not interchangeable at all, and that in some cases they even come into conflict with one another. Explicit support from Israeli government ministers for Argentinian irredentism over the Falklands is a clear example of this.

It’s not like this hasn’t happened before, either. During the Falklands War, Menachem Begin’s Israel supported the Argentine junta (which persecuted Jews), partly out of a lasting Anglophobic sentiment held by the Israeli Right since the days of the British Mandate. If it wasn’t evident then that British conservatives’ affection for Israel frequently wasn’t reciprocated, then it should be now.

Reform voters are therefore justified to be aggrieved with Farage for not forcefully asserting Britain’s national interest in the face of foreign aggression. His comments give ammunition to the accusation that he is “Israel first” and out of touch with what domestic voters want. British opinion on Israel has become increasingly negative in the last couple of years, while a majority of Britons support the sanctions against the West Bank settlements. Reform is operating in a political environment where unconditional enthusiasm for Israel is thin on the ground.

This isn’t the first time that Farage has shown his enthusiasm for the Jewish state. When the Americans and Israelis began their war against Iran earlier this year, the Reform leader criticised then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer for not permitting the use of British military bases. He then rolled back his position to one of “staying out” after the consequences of the war and its unpopularity became unavoidable.

Farage could perhaps take inspiration here from Mark Carney and Claudia Sheinbaum, the Prime Minister of Canada and President of Mexico respectively. Carney is a liberal and Sheinbaum is a Left-populist, yet they both govern as patriots — not just in terms of pursuing the national interest but in standing up for their country’s honour when it has been infringed, as with their responses to Donald Trump’s annexationist fantasies. It should be no surprise that they are popular with their publics as a result.

Though Farage is not in power, this does raise questions. If he were prime minister, would he really govern like a patriot? Would he defend Britain’s national honour, even against ostensible allies? One does not need to become pathologically hostile to Israel, let alone Jews, to understand that what’s good for Britain and what’s good for Israel are two distinct things. This week has revealed that defending what’s good for Britain might mean facing off against the Israeli government, and it’s a reality that Farage needs to recognise.

And David Littlefair writes:

In January 1924, a breathless editorial in the Manchester Guardian marvelled at the prospect of the first ever government run by the Labour Party. A minor miracle had transpired: Ramsay MacDonald, the bastard son of a farmhand, had been elected to lead a government “whose most prominent men are drawn from the humblest rank of society”. Even the Daily Express wrote admiringly of the collection of former foundrymen, miners and seamstresses sitting on the government benches around MacDonald. Here was “unquestionable ability, as well as new blood”.

Just over a century later, Labour — as it is still quaintly known — has begun to rediscover the concept of social class that was once the foremost reason for its existence. Earlier this week, Bridget Phillipson, Minister for Women and Equalities, announced the creation of a new “class unit” within the Office for Equality and Opportunity. “We have been squeamish about class for too long,” said Phillipson. Reporters were quick to identify the unit’s purpose as “improving outcomes for white working-class people”. The government clarified, bashfully, that the class unit would examine disparities across all ethnic groups.

Things do seem to be changing from the era when identity, rather than class, seemed to rule the Left’s moral calculus. In August, the American Democratic politician Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez admitted on ABC’s This Week that perhaps some of the new socially radical politicking that had overtaken the institutions of the Left for a generation hadn’t landed quite as intended. “Woke One was crazy!”, she said.

In truth, it was never really clear what so-called wokeness had to offer a majority of working-class people in Britain. As Woke 1.0 spread from the USA to our shores, it brought with it a moral diagnosis that resonated in America, where some states had struggled to move on from the Reconstruction era, but bore a smaller relevance to the malaise in much of the post-industrial Britain of the modern era. Prosperity and opportunity had begun to centralise in cities and vanish from Britain’s much less diverse towns and coastal regions. Social attitudes had seen huge progress. Race wasn’t the immovable roadblock in life that it once was.

My generation came to political maturity riding a wave that crested alongside Woke 1.0. We began walking into institutions equipped with a politics shaped by the 2008 banking crisis, the expansion of the EU’s migration covenant and the introduction of the Equality Act in 2010. It was an era where the moral leadership of the Left, once the de facto voice of working-class people, became dominated by people for whom “the white working class” were a distant species.

The former industrial communities of Britain’s regions were something modern politicians left behind en-route to a career in London after Oxbridge — and why wouldn’t the aspirational leave? Margaret Thatcher’s decade long war on local council democracy had left millions with little power at the ballot box. Everything meaningful was now decided in the capital.

Otherwise, the white working class were a group many of the Left had never actually met. They were to be spoken on behalf of in student meetings — the way a primatologist might talk about what was best for the gorillas in their charge at a zoo. Rather than considering the diminishing life chances and outcomes of millions of people on lower incomes as a central part of their politics, my generation were encouraged to adopt a series of niche causes under the doctrine of “intersectionality”. It was as though working-class life was a solved problem and not something collapsing around us.

For this more bourgeois iteration of the Left, the emotional pull of Woke 1.0, and maybe, dare I say it, a bit of traditional liberal guilt atonement, held an appeal that was easy to ratify just by looking out of the front door. We lived in big cities and in Britain’s most metropolitan boroughs, there really are still notable gaps between people’s prosperity that can be predicted based on their skin colour. Those who might object to making these concerns the most prominent pillar of our politics could easily be presumed to only do so because of prejudice. In reality, the gaps on the doorstep weren’t nearly as wide as those between metropolitan Britain and everywhere else.

The country we maligned for its supposed backward social attitudes was quietly becoming the most regionally unequal major economy in the developed world. Large swathes of Britain had been torn to shreds by austerity not with a bang but a whimper. Traditional Labour politicians like Ellen Wilkinson or even Ramsay MacDonald would have marched the breadth of the country to do battle on issues like unemployment and closing factories. By the mid-2010s, this was an unsexy, even faintly embarrassing cause — largely forgotten, maybe a bit nostalgic. The odd episode of Benefits Street would present the collapse of working-class communities as something with a cosmic justice to it: they were always lazy, weren’t they? John Harris would conduct a Guardian-sponsored safari around the shuttered high streets of provincial England, furrowing his brow in befuddlement as people told him they were planning to vote to leave the EU, but couldn’t say exactly why.

Working-class institutions, like trade unions, had been collapsing for years. Deindustrialisation, something the Left had largely given up trying to stop, had robbed unions of anyone to represent and deprived millions of working-class people of a decent job to go to after school. Culturally, the white working class were becoming unmentionable. They had been absorbed into the wider and varied “white” group by the Equality Act, their life outcomes masked by this sleight of hand.

“As education secretary Angela Rayner spoke about the needs of white working-class boys — and was pilloried for her trespass” Those who did mention the white working class — the last few political figures that had lived similar lives, like Angela Rayner, who left school, pregnant, aged 16 to become a care worker — were shushed. As education secretary Rayner spoke about the needs of white working-class boys being “pushed down the food chain” due to the focus on ethnic minorities and women, but was pilloried for her trespass. Even to mention the group seemed to risk resurrecting the ghost of Enoch Powell, like a monster from an Eighties horror movie coming back to life. It was a faux pas to mention the white working class. It could only be assumed that the speaker didn’t realise that working-class people now came in all colours.

None of this handwringing stopped the least well off white working class kids’ educational attainment utterly collapsing. White British kids on free school meals have the lowest higher education participation rate in Britain. They are less likely to spend age 19 in further education than Roma Gypsies.

As rolling the dice on higher education has become the only accepted way of creating social mobility in Britain, it isn’t hard to understand why people in these communities feel a profound loss of hope. The Social Mobility Commission — which will apparently become surplus to requirements following the creation of the Class Unit — places the least diverse former industrial and mining areas, such as the North East of England, Yorkshire and the Humber, and the West Midlands as the places least likely to allow someone to make generational progress. The Sutton Trust’s Opportunity Index shows a yawning gap in educational attainment between London and places like the North East and Cornwall.

Swathes of Britain being completely left behind has been a quietly accepted part of our national story for more than a decade. The story briefly came to a head during Brexit, only to be quickly dismissed by the political Left. The fact that the old Labour heartlands voted for Brexit in spite of what sensible people in London were telling them to do was seen simply as an inconvenience that their betters would need to muddle through. It was the spasm of a palliative patient whose bedside vigil often gave them cause to yawn and glance at their watch — a victory for the far-Right that any right-thinking person would reject.

Nevertheless, the broader political realignment that Brexit represented refuses to go away. In the recent Saxony-Anhalt election in Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland [AfD] party dominated the votes of a community that looks like a facsimile of left-behind Britain: shuttered industries, a low rate of higher education, too disillusioned to bother much with politics. The AfD’s platform hoovered up and sent to the polls exactly the kind of working-class voters that have fallen off Britain’s electoral rolls over a generation of hopeless disengagement. Saxony-Anhalt was an election infused with a sense of the injustice of regional inequality too: 73% of voters there believed that East Germans are second-class citizens. The result is that Neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, ex-Stasi officers and Putin apologists are now more trusted to run a swathe of Germany than the old parties of the working class.

Labour’s answer to the British version of this disengagement suggests that some within the party are at last waking up to the anger present in swathes of working-class Britain. However, the tools it has unveiled look much like those that have already produced unremarkable results.

For many years the moral component of modern social justice has amounted to a kind of human flower arranging. How many protected characteristics can you gather and display in your vase to prove that Britain is a caring society?

The creed of modern social justice was that Britain’s growing prosperity would be accompanied by the assurance that more of the beneficiaries would have a certain colour skin, or a certain preference for other’s genitalia, or a certain bodily or mental difficulty. Now the working class will be included in this bouquet of virtue.

It isn’t yet clear exactly how big a change this could be. Perhaps new positive discrimination access schemes of the kind that have become common (and commonly gamed by middle-class climbers) will be developed. Now Britain’s social justice engineers will be encouraged to say: “Look, we have a black person, a disabled person, a gay person AND a poor person.” Where previously an applicant being white and poor only gained one virtue point, now perhaps it could gain two.

The expanding prosperity that undergirded the politics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is evaporating. It hasn’t existed in parts of Britain for a long, long time. DEI politics has shown that it can take the ever-more centralised wealth of Britain and divvy it up among a more diverse fortunate few. It hasn’t shown any ability to provide for the parts of Britain clinging on by their fingertips.

In 2024, the Institute for Public Policy Research published its report, “State of the North”, detailing for the umpteenth time how the Britain that was remade by industry closure during the neoliberal turn was full of sicker people with shorter lives. It showed that wealth inequality was set to grow in spite of a Labour government: there will be an average gap of £228,800 per head between the wealth of those in the South-East and the North by 2030. The authors proposed “Germany-style levels” of investment — nearly £8 billion a year for 15 years — to start closing the gap, referencing Germany’s history of “solidarity taxes” between West and East since reunification. IPPR proposed that this would be achieved by wealth taxes that mostly land on the South. But then, even that level of investment hasn’t worked to keep faith in the political system of Germany, as downward mobility leaves people hyper-vigilant, hoarding, worried about losing or being forced to share what little is theirs.

Andy Burnham came into No. 10 promising to be a prime minister for “The North”. But his previous economic advisor and Goldman Sachs chief economist Lord Jim O’Neill has already come out strongly against taxing the wealthy regions. His argument: London will need even more investment if any growth is to reach the rest of Britain. The money markets seem to agree that borrowing to restore prosperity to the once proud working-class areas of Britain should come at a punishing cost. A cost it isn’t clear anyone is willing to pay.

Will working-class voters buy into the idea that “social class” can be solved by being granted a protected diversity status? It’s not hard to wonder what someone like Ramsay MacDonald might think of such a measure; “class” was once the entire reason a Labour politician got out of bed in the morning. 

But it speaks also to the mindset of the modern political class: that more unity can be created if more people can be given permission to be recognised as “in need” by their betters. The Labour of old knew that working-class people didn’t want this politics of pity: they wanted a politics of dignity. They built institutions, friendly societies, social insurance schemes, working men’s clubs and trade unions as a living demonstration of their ability to stand on their own feet, not reliant on other people to decide whether they can be given a leg up for the sake of meeting a quota.

Clearly, the working class of deindustrialised Britain will need to wait for anything that would mimic the gigantic leaps of change that Labour once provided: homes where there were once slums, work where there was once unemployment, an NHS where there was once sickness, a welfare state where there was once desperation. A New Jerusalem. In the meantime, the white working class can celebrate their induction into the world of DEI. One more flower in the bouquet.