Having gained power by not being the Conservatives, Labour is becoming an iteration of the Conservatives at their chaotic worst. The donations scandal, infighting at the heart of power and the resignations of Rosie Duffield and Sue Gray are signs of a systemic fragility. History is repeating itself at a vertiginous pace. For all Labour’s mountainous majority, the Starmer regime is beginning to look like an interregnum in British politics.
Defined in the public mind by high-minded moralising, the government is acutely vulnerable to further scandals. Duffield’s departure will be followed by splits from the left. Any misstep in the Budget and there could be a Truss-like financial storm. Replacing Gray by the superior strategic intelligence of Morgan McSweeney will not stop the rot while a politically vacuous mix of liberal legalism and Treasury economics remains Labour’s project. No one in government knows what Starmer wants it to do, because the Prime Minister seems not to know himself.
If they are to exploit the government’s weakness, the Tories must confront its root cause. The British state has defaulted on its core functions while attempting to remake society. Unless they elect a leader willing to challenge the progressive ideology that has produced this perverse combination, the Conservative Party will slip into irrelevance and oblivion. The task of opposition will fall to Reform, which from being the personal vehicle of a mercurial, charismatic leader, is turning itself into an organised and rapidly expanding party.
It is hard to exaggerate the depth of state failure in this country. When some of the criminals released early due to prison overcrowding are returned to custody because they pose a risk to public safety, then released again by mistake, a functioning justice system has ceased to exist. Britain’s inability to make a significant military response to war in the Middle East, noted by the former Tory defence minister Ben Wallace, confirms that national defence has been gravely compromised. Building the big society, in practice, meant gutting the state. Much of the responsibility for this situation must be assigned to David Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity programme, which Labour is continuing. But the problem, in the end, is not underfunding.
In crucial areas, the decisions of government cannot be implemented. Authority has been transferred to the courts, and policies are made by judges. Almost anything government does can be litigated and undone. Declaring energy policies unlawful because they will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently, as the Supreme Court did in May this year, gives a spurious legitimacy to a particular – and politically driven – environmentalist agenda. Even when collective choices are made in parliament, Starmer’s legalism blinds him to their larger context. At a time when pensioners are at risk of freezing to death and the NHS is stretched to breaking point, prioritising a Commons vote on assisted dying – a cause this columnist supports – betrays a lack of judgement that is almost beyond comprehension.
It is not that the state has simply become too large, as neo-Thatcherites like to say. Government has surrendered much of its authority to institutions it cannot control while losing a sense of the common good. This is the fundamental source of Britain’s malaise, which is obscured by stale debates about free markets and state intervention.
Old dichotomies are poor guides to present realities. Doctrinal market liberalism is a nonsense in any world that contains Xi Jinping’s China. In the Seventies, industrial strategy meant propping up declining industries. Today, because of inadequate support from government, Britain is losing capacity in new technologies such as small nuclear reactors. As innovative companies and abandoned communities both know well, leaving the future to market forces alone can also be a recipe for decline.
The state cannot withdraw from the economy, but nor can it remodel society. Labour’s insistence that the era of culture war is over must be seen for what it is: a move to entrench values that much of the population rejects. What hyper-liberals describe as “stoking culture wars” means refusing to submit to an ideology that aims to transform how people speak, interact and think. Conservatives who belittle these concerns are aligning their party with Labour and the Liberal Democrats while further alienating Red Wall voters.
In the age of the progressive uniparty, conservatism only survives by disrupting the ruling consensus. Can the NHS be saved in anything like its present form? Does the UK need a university sector anywhere near its current size? Can mass migration ever work without cultural integration? Questioning bankrupt orthodoxies is the first step towards devising workable solutions.
Only one Conservative leadership candidate grasps that the core of Britain’s paralysis is an incompetent state and can firmly seize the opportunity presented by a floundering government. Whether she is chosen may decide more than the fate of the Tory party. The issue is whether British politics can renew itself, or if it drifts on into a crisis that none of the established parties can resolve.
[See also: The menopause industry is a murky area of women’s healthcare]
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This article appears in the 09 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, 100 days that shook Labour