Five more days that made Corbynism inevitable

Despite all the alarms and excursions of recent months, if most of the recent opinion polls are right, Britain’s Labour Party are still heading for government. Yes, maybe they’ll be in a minority. Yes, maybe they’ll be reliant on the Scottish National Party and the Liberal Democrats if they want to actually pass any legislation. Yes, Britain might be back at the polls (yet) again pretty quickly. But as Theresa May’s remarkable stickability shows, and James Callaghan showed before her as Prime Minister between 1976 and 1979, there’s a huge amount that even a minority government can do to cling on for much longer than you’d think.

That’s why we took a look, last month, at eight of the key dates that gave us ‘Corbynism’ – that strange amalgam of radical rhetoric, conservative ideas and new-old economic thinking that has captured the Left, if not yet convinced the country. Those ranged from the big things – the privatisation and financialisation of the economy – to the little things, including Labour MP Eric Joyce’s famous punch that led to Labour’s One Member One Vote revolution and ultimately Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour's leader. This month, we thought it would be interesting to go further, perhaps deeper, and look at some more of those structural or big picture reasons why Corbynism has been able to take off. Here are five more dates that have made Britain’s Left turn all but inevitable in some form.

The destruction of Allende’s Chile, 11 September 1973. The single most important thing about the Corbynite movement is its anti-imperialism and anti-Americanism. That’s why the disastrous Second Gulf War gave it such succour, and why the election of Donald Trump helps it too. For the Labour Left, most things that pass in the world must be America’s fault, or the fault of ‘the West’ in general. Sometimes that’s true, of course. There’s certainly a lot of truth to that in the case of the military junta that overthrow Left-wing Salvador Allende’s Chilean government in 1973, toppled by a full-on military coup that led directly to the torture and murder of many thousands of Chileans. It's one huge driving force behind the Left's suspicion of America, and its admiration for South America's anti-capitalist Left.

Richard Nixon’s government in Washington was deeply implicated in the whole thing, fearing Soviet penetration of the Western Hemisphere, and to this day the coup is a standing warning and inspiration to the Left’s struggle everywhere. Mr Corbyn himself, who is now married to the Mexican Laura Alvarez, was married to a Chilean woman – Claudia Bracchitta – who was a refugee from the putsch, and with whom he campaigned for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s extradition to Spain for trial. You cannot understand Corbynism – its prior enthusiasm for the socialist experiment in Venezuela, its current alliance with South American populists such as Bolivia’s Evo Morales – without grasping the fundamental link between such world-historical events and the course of the domestic Left.

The invention of the World Wide Web, March 1989. There could be no Corbynism without the Web. It is there that his most fervent adherents gather, pushing video after video and meme after meme, organising campaigns, sharing Left and alt-Left stories, supporting each other on Facebook pages, and on the nastier fringes of the movement dishing out abuse to the insufficiently loyal. It was the Web that first allowed them to see how powerful the Left could become in 2015. It was the Web that helped them turn the tide during the 2016 leadership election and the 2017 General Election. It’s the Web that allows previously unheard-of activists to become media stars. The Canary, Skwawkbox, Novara Media – they are all creations of the online world that could not possibly have broken through without the aid of post-modern connectivity.

It’s here that you can read all about Newsnight putting that 'Russian' hat on Mr Corbyn. Or where you can see his mouth and words slowed down so that… well. Or that you can link Porton Down to the Salisbury chemical attack. Whatever takes your (flight of) fancy, really. When Tim Berners-Lee got frustrated at computers’ lack of a shared syntax from his CERN vantage-point in 1989, he saw the potential of the burgeoning Internet if only it could only allow all this IT to speak the same language. And lo, HyperText Markup Language was born. Little could he know that HTML would change the political world, as well as the scientific arena, absolutely and forever – for good or ill.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, 9 November 1989. There’s no way Corbynism would have got anywhere under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. Ex-spooks have come out to condemn the Jezziah. Faintly ludicrous accusations of Cold War complicity have been levelled at him. Post-War Britain was always on the lookout for infiltrators – often unsuccessfully, but at least with energy. That created an ‘us and them’ atmosphere that permeated everything. The idea that a movement so sympathetic to (say) the ex-Communist Die Linke in Germany could emerge within the Labour Party would have been anathema to its titanic Cold Warriors – men such as Ernie Bevin, Denis Healey and Jim Callaghan.

The end of that Cold War heralded by the opening of the Berlin Wall (above) initially seemed as if it would mean liberal democracy and free-market capitalism would rule the roost. It hasn’t worked out like that, of course, and the rebirth of history in its all nationalist, populist, racist, statist forms has surprised no-one with a History degree. What the removal of the Red Threat has actually done over the medium term is allow those who always saw themselves as equidistant between two Evil Empires to reposition themselves as social justice warriors primarily interested in domestic policy. Mr Corbyn’s entourage contains people happy to ‘contextualise’Stalin’s crimes and play down the deeds of those who oppose the hated American giant – whoever they are. You know what? Now that’s not a matter of pressing diplomatic concern, no-one really cares.

The election of Donald Trump, 8 November 2016. Now Donald Trump is not the Corbynites’ favourite politician, and that’s putting it mildly. But as it’s now a commonplace to note, both men share much, much more than they’d like to admit. Wildly unlikely candidate? Check. Chequered past? Check. Displacing a complacent party elite? Check. Social media rage? Check. Fervid advocates who will defend their man, whatever he’s done? Check. Black is white, and white is black? Check. But the link is actually more specific than a mere list of similarities from the same era. Since politics is about image, personality and mood as well as policy, it’s no surprise that you can draw plenty of unlikely dot-to-dots between apparent enemies. The interesting thing here is that Labour is actually basing its insurgency on Trump’s success. Cobrynite supremo Seumas Milne made that explicit when he started to beef up Labour’s media operation over the winter of 2016/17, and he got it bang on.

The techniques involved on both sides of the Atlantic are very similar. Attack, attack and attack again. Blame ‘the establishment’. Blame 'the media'. Say that everything is the fault of ‘the elites’. Offer simple solutions. Raise the stakes. Be certain. If you’re in trouble, throw off chaff and distractions – and deny the evidence of everyone’s eyes. Yes, maybe if you’re a policy purist, you’ll put your hand up at the back and say ‘erm, aren’t these employee share options just a tax the workers will never actually see?’ But by then, the kaleidoscopic news agenda of our current politics-on-acid will be haring off again, amidst a loud of shouting and screaming. Here’s what Trump knows: no-one has ever listened to people who know things. Now Labour know that too.

Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech, 17 January 2017. There’s a good case to be made here for singling out the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in February 1992 – for it was then that the European Union, as it became, surged off down the supranational route that the British disliked so much, threatening to split the Conservatives and ultimately helping to cause Brexit. But Mrs May’s speech outlining her ill-fated ‘red lines’ demonstrates, most of all, just how hard it is to keep the Conservative show on the road. The Conservatives are now really two parties: English Nationalist Eurosceptics who hark back to a closed world of cultural certainties, and British Liberals who stress openness, social change and free markets. Never the twain shall meet, and Mrs May attempted to stress the former while keeping the latter on board. That balancing act now looks very, very uncertain indeed.

What were the red lines that have now turned slightly pink? Well, Mrs May aimed to take Britain completely and forever out of European Court of Justice jurisdiction, and that’s potentially been blurred a bit. The entirety of the UK was also supposed to leave the Single Market, which if nothing happens on the Irish border question by 2021 (or 2023) won’t be achieved either – since Northern Ireland will retain those elements of the Single Market regulatory regime that are required to prevent any border with the Republic. In truth, the Prime Minister's not got a bad deal given that her overriding intention was to leave the European Economic Area and take back control of immigration policy. She’s probably got the only deal she was ever going to get, given the trade-offs involved. But even those compromises threaten to rip the Conservative Party apart, just as it was blown to bits over tariffs and trade policy in 1846 and 1903. Mrs May overbid and overclaimed, until what she did get looked mouselike: in return, her government might collapse, allowing Labour just to walk into Downing Street. Such are the wages of choice.

There is a risk of over-determination here. If you list too many causes, you end up suggesting that nothing else could ever have happened – that everything in the whole world led up to the triumph of the British Left. There were clearly lots of other moments when this could have gone completely differently. What if Mr Corbyn’s backbench opponents had really gone for broke and resigned the Whip en masse in the summer of 2016? What if Labour had never sharpened up their media operation between Christmas 2016 and Easter 2017? What if Theresa May had not decided to burn down her own election campaign? Well, then things would be different.

But they’re not different, and analysing why will occupy many historians for a long time to come. Britain is potentially about to be wrenched out of the course it’s been on since the mid-1970s. Most of the utilities are going to be nationalised. Large-scale private industry is going to be partially socialised via all sorts of binding agreements with workers, customers and partners. The Thatcherite strike laws are going to be torn up. A reborn Ministry of Labour is going to administer national pay bargaining. Tuition fees are going to be abolished, with unpredictable consequences for England’s already-struggling universities. Taxes are going to go up (though actually that just continues current trends). Capital and exchange controls might be needed. In terms of foreign policy, Britain is going to shift away from the Transatlantic alliance, and pivot Eastwards – towards Iran and Russia.

Some people will like those changes. Many people won’t. More likely, voters will like some of them but reject others. But whatever happens, and whichever side of each of those arguments you take, unpicking what has brought us to this point is a necessary and pressing task. That’s what the disciplines of History and Political Science exist to do, and the sort of task that blogs like this exist to make a start on. Britain’s national life is in a fix. Its politics sometimes look like more a tragic-comic joke than a serious attempt to unpick the problems before us. But that’s no reason, and this is no time, to stop hoping that we can understand what’s happening.

The eight days that gave us Corbynism

Regular readers of this blog will know that we now regard Labour’s victory at the next election as very likely – not overwhelmingly likely, and certainly not a done deal, but far north of fifty per cent if we’re talking probabilities. There are lots of reasons for this. For one thing, they’re so, so close to power that they can almost touch it. They need just a tiny swing of 0.5% to take the seven or so Conservative seats that would lock the Tories out of power and allow Labour to govern (albeit uncertainly) with the Scottish National Party and the Liberal Democrats.

Labour are also riding a wave of deep concern about disorganised capitalism and its unequal results. Nationalisation is popular, and profit not so much – a phenomenon we see again and again in the British Election Study data. When the Right have been in for a long time, the public swing Left, and vice versa. All of this has happened before, and all of this has happened again. And lastly, of course, the Government is preoccupied with, and increasingly exhausted by, Brexit – that great Schleswig-Holstein of a question that no-one can even understand any more, and which Labour has tricksily and artfully navigated better than anyone else.

For all these reasons, Labour is pretty likely to win the next election. They are not in themselves particularly popular, and Jeremy Corbyn as their leader certainly is not. But none of that really matters. If the Conservatives tear themselves apart, at a time when the public are tired of austerity, then Mr Corbyn will walk into No. 10 unopposed. That outcome looks more likely by the day. But these are proximate causes, located in the present or the very recent past. The extraordinary ascension of Corbynism, to the point where it looks likely to capture the commanding heights of the state, surely needs deeper and more profound explanations than these.

So for this month’s blog, we’re going to look at eight days that made Corbyn’s move into Downing Street so likely. We’ve done this before, when we looked at why Leave could win the Brexit referendum – two months before that happened. It’s hopefully a good way to lay bare the real forces – deep and shallow, long- and short-term, policy-wise and political – that have brought Britain to the verge of its first real Leftist government in the mould of Die Linke, Podemos or Syriza. Without further ado, here are the eight days that have put Jeremy Corbyn within a hair’s breadth of the Cabinet room.

4 February 1996. This was the day that the first privatised trains since the 1940s ran on Britain’s railways. Actually, the first 'train' was a bus, pootling along between Fishguard and Cardiff, but the first real train was the suburban South Western Trains service between Twickenham and Waterloo at just after five in the morning. But there was a problem with the whole design of British Rail’s privatisation: the divide between track and train, between Railtrack (as it was then) and the Train Operating Companies, fragmented the railway and lost it some of that coherence, engineering know-how and in-house organisation that had helped keep Britain’s railways going. Now in some ways the railways are a victim of their own (privatised) success: crowded, expensive and groaning under the weight of demand, they are pushing lots of regular commuters towards Corbynism. But that doesn't matter politically. When they fail and struggle and flounder, as they often do, passengers blame privatisation - forgetting, for a moment, that all the infrastructure is owned by the state. Rail nationalisation is one of Mr Corbyn's signature ideas, and it’s popular. This is the moment when Britain's political economy gradually, gradually began to go his way.

15 February 2003. The Iraq War was a defining moment in British politics. It provides meaning for so many people, across the spectrum of British politics: a coherent part of the narrative about how ‘little people’, outsiders, the principled, the unheard mainstream are never listened to. It is one key reason why New Labour in power was not able to cement its legacy, and why Tony Blair is still so unpopular. In February 2003, probably about one million people marched against that war: many also opposed the wider strategy of military intervention that had taken hold after the 9/11 attacks in the United States. The Stop the War Coalition was the directing mind behind this demonstration, and it hated (and hates still) ‘centrists’ with a passion. They are one of the most important parts of the Corbyn coalition, and stood with him in the crucial first days of his leadership. Without the Second Iraq War, the infrastructure behind Mr Corbyn simply would not have existed.

5 May 2005. This was the moment at which Labour won its historic third term under Blair: but little noticed amidst all the toing-and-froing was that an obscure backbencher named Jeremy Corbyn had just been re-elected in Islington North. At this stage, of course, Mr Corbyn was little more than an irritant or a figure of fun at Westminster, having never been involved in a single mainstream cause in his life (beyond stirring up trouble for the Anti-Apartheid Movement and others). But Mr Corbyn had an unseen friend: no lesser figure than Prime Minister Blair, who at some point in the previous Parliament had rejected some local activists’ calls for Mr Corbyn to be de-selected. Until and even after the Iraq War, the Blair government attempted to build at least something of a broad church within Labour: Robin Cook, Clare Short and Michael Meacher were all relatively successful Ministers. The Corbynites will not make the same mistake Blair did, misled as he was by the mistaken assumption that his side of the party had won and could relax.

14 September 2007. As queues began to form outside high street branches of the bank Northern Rock, it became clear that something was very wrong with the financial system. Thousands of ordinary people were in a panic, racing to pull their savings out before Northern Rock collapsed altogether. Its tellers were overwhelmed, its phone lines jammed. The lender had ridden the wave of pumping more and more cash into an overheated property market, whoever you were and whatever you could afford: now that ponzi scheme of a model came crashing down. It was the first sign of the financial crash to come. Now the epicentre of that disaster was in New York, not London, and in the American, not the British, housing market: but the British had left themselves too exposed to the US markets, and the world economy threatened to go into a tailspin. Years of economic attrition lay ahead – and the Great Moderation, so beloved of the ‘centrists’ who stood in the Left’s way, was over. Corbynites always blame capitalism for most of the world’s ills: after this, they had a point.

12 May 2010. By this point, Britain’s Liberal Democrats had been on the rise for years. They had opposed the Iraq War. They had advanced a kind of more radical, and more Left-wing, Blairism. They had got increasingly popular, and increasingly vocal, able via targeting particular swing seats to grow and grow in the House of Commons. Now the quirks of Britain’s First Past the Post voting system put them in a kingmaker position. They chose to put the Conservatives, under David Cameron, into office. This turned out to be a huge mistake, and the lovely mood music they emitted in the Downing Street garden press conference held on this day in 2010 (above) was an even worse blunder. Most of those radical voters who’d put their cross next to the Liberal Democrat choice thought they were voting for a radical party that could make Britain fairer, better, perhaps in some undefinable way newer: now they got the Tories back. The Liberal Democrats have never recovered, and there is now no rival to Labour on the Left, and no rival for pro-European Remain voters. That absence has helped Corbynism to first survive, and then thrive. 

22 February 2012. When the Labour MP Eric Joyce got drunk and got into a fight in the House of Commons, no-one really thought much of it. It’s not as if there’s never been a drunken disagreement in our politics before. This particular bust-up turned out to be one of the most important moments in modern British political history. Mr Joyce eventually had to give up his seat in Falkirk, but the jiggery-pokery being pulled there by the huge Unite union led to the then-Labour leader, Ed Miliband, suspending the process by which the local party picked its Parliamentary candidate. In future, trade unions were not to be allowed to pay the dues of people that it was signing up to play a role in Labour Party selections. The whole debacle put huge pressure on the link between the unions and the formal Party itself. Mr Miliband soon announced a clean break with the unions, so that Labour’s three-part electoral college was to be replaced by a One Member One Vote structure for all elections – including that of leader. That new system was to allow Mr Corbyn to be elected, as he never would have been had MPs had one-third of the say (and unions another third) over the choice.

23 June 2016. When Britain voted for Brexit, it looked as if that decision might sweep away Mr Corbyn just as it did Prime Minister David Cameron. Labour MPs and officials were furious that Mr Corbyn had basically done less than nothing to make the case for Remain – unless you count turning up at a handful of pretty pitiful photo opportunities as doing something. A political riot ensued, in which almost the whole of Labour’s top team resigned to try to force out their leader. That putsch failed, because the members continued to support him – in part of course because they had only just chosen him. But the Brexit vote secured for Labour that sense of chaos, thrill and opportunity that any new movement needs to gain a hearing: it played, and is playing, the role that the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent played for Mrs Thatcher when she said that Britain was broken. It is tearing apart the alliance of big business, liberal-minded small-‘c’ conservatives and self-consciously English patriots that allows the Conservatives to govern: justifying, all the while, New New Labour’s case that something is deeply wrong with British state and society.

22 May 2017. Theresa May’s social care u-turn was the defining moment of the 2017 General Election campaign. Her Conservatives trounced Labour in the local elections, held in early May. She enjoyed a 20-point lead in the opinion polls. Labour was a chaotic laughing stock that made a bin fire look organised. But then the Conservatives published their manifesto, and machine-gunned their own campaign. Its centrepiece was an entirely reasonable and justifiable policy – that you (or your estate) would keep more of your own money if you needed residential care in your old age. But there was a catch: the value of your house would be included in the assessment, and charged, if you needed care at home. Hitherto it had been left out of that account. Reminding people that they might need care, and still more that they are pretty soon going to get old and die, oh and by the way you’ll steal their house on the way, is pretty much up there with the most moronic decisions in all of political history. If we look at the best polling of that election, it was at about this time that the Tories’ hopes of a majority tanked, never to recover. Their majority – indeed, their landslide – was gone. Mr Corbyn looked like a winner, though actually Labour didn't even do all that well. He was well set on his march to power.

So there we have it. Labour is now likely to govern. You could always pick out other reasons for that, of course, but when a historian looks at this, they see a series of very deep-seated causes and some butterflies flapping their wings. In the ‘deep’ end: what if privatisation had never cut so deep into the British economy? What if the US banking system hadn’t got out of control? In the ‘medium’ category: what if the Iraq War had never happened? What if the Liberal Democrats had tried to keep Labour in power? What if voters had not chosen Brexit? What if the Conservatives had not launched and then unlaunched a manifesto that basically amounted to ‘we’ll take your mum’s house away’? And then the little things. What if Mr Blair had left Mr Corbyn to his fate in 2001-2005? What if Mr Joyce had not thrown his fists about? Well, just take away one or two of these, and Britain would not be on the brink of the most fundamental changes to her economic and social life since the early 1980s. But they did happen, and here we are. Whatever else it is, it’s quite a story.

Is the Labour Party institutionally racist?

Is the UK Labour party institutionally anti-Semitic? Almost unbelievably, that has become a real live matter of public debate over the last few months – a development that previous generations of Labour activists and members could scarcely have imagined. Once upon a time, Labour seemed like the natural choice for Britain’s Jewish community. Labour was of course a rallying-point for all Britain’s non-Anglicans, as the Conservatives represented Deep England’s Established Church; it was an anti-racist Party that welcomed all-comers; it was friendly towards Israel, or at least sympathetic to that country’s situation. Most (though by no means all) Jews thought of Labour as their home.

Not so today, after more than three years of mounting tension between Labour and the Jewish community. This year’s local elections showed that Jewish communities in (for instance) Barnet have had enough of Labour – and will boot out their councillors where they live in enough numbers to make that choice. What we know from opinion polling is that Labour’s vote has crashed to almost nothing among Jews – and that for instance 85% of them regard the Party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, as quite simply an anti-Semite. There are some dissenting voices, to be sure: but that’s the picture taken as a whole.  

Why has this happened? Well, let’s just take a look at the whole sorry farrago. To be honest, it’s exhausting just trying to give you a list, but here's an initial reckoning with these frankly astonishing events. Over the past few years, it’s become clear that a minority of Labour members and office-holders – a group of very hard-to-determine size, though perhaps it amounts to some thousands or tens of thousands – hold very worrying views about Jews. We’ve had councillor after councillor, officer after officer, member after member, repeating the same awful hate speech as if they think it's okay. Apparently ‘Zionists’ run the world’s press. Or the banks. Or the ‘deep state’. Or the whole international economy. Apparently they’ve organised themselves into a sinister cabal biased against the Left, determined to prevent real people taking a real leading role in public life. Apparently they’ve got money and they’re influencing our politics behind the scenes. Apparently some Jews have divided loyalties as between the UK and Israel. And so on. And on. This sort of thing has become such a constant drumbeat of low-level fear and loathing that it’s often forgotten amidst the shrapnel storm of Labour’s unending civil war – though it shouldn’t be.

Instead of listening and learning, the core group at the heard of Corbynite New Model Labour doubled down on their denials. They basically decided to go to ground with their hands over their ears, shouting ‘lah lah lah, can’t hear you’. Their allies on Labour’s National Executive Committee let plenty of people off. Members got slapped on the wrist. Deadlines slipped. People were recommended for ‘training’. A long-standing friend and ally of the leadership team was appointed to oversee this type of complaint. Labour’s new masters also encouraged the creation of a ‘Jewish’ group called Jewish Voice for Labour, which was a Jewish Voice only in the very dark sense that it showed just how little Labour thought of most of them. JVL then set about muddying the waters about who was who and what was what, which was always the whole point of them. Having watched Trump take advantage of the media’s liberal naivete and its false cult of ‘balance’, they made sure they got themselves on broadcast after broadcast – often facing off against Labour’s far, far more representative Jewish members, organised as they always have been in the Jewish Labour Movement. Pretty soon they were all over the airwaves – and busy talking nonsense at Labour Party Conference as well. A tiny groupsicle of activists had got themselves legitimised as one strand of Jewish Labour thought. That was lovely.

Things ramped up a great deal the moment ex-Labour Mayor of London Ken Livingstone took it upon himself to repeat a load of old far-Right nostrums about Hitler’s supposed support for a Jewish homeland. All a load of unpleasant nonsense of course – Ken has form in this respect – as any actual historian will tell you. But it was enough to light the touchpaper on the real crisis to come, as scandal followed blunder followed nightmare for what seemed like years. As soon as the whole thing blew up, some thousands of Labour members got onto Twitter and Facebook and started either agreeing with Ken (though about what, it was never one hundred per cent clear), or saying ‘it’s all a smear’, got up by… well, again, they never quite said.

Len McCluskey, head of the Unite union and in many ways Labour’s paymaster, said that all those Jews and academics getting worried about Labour’s behaviour were just playing some tired old ‘mood music’ to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn. The chair of the Disputes Committee, the Party’s disciplinary clearing-house – herself installed after a rather nasty old battle inside Labour’s National Policy Forum - had to resign when she was found to have defended a Holocaust-denying councillor.  Labour carried on pretending that there were just a few cases of Jew-hating being reported, even while it was being reported that the Party’s compliance unit itself was (and is) close to collapse.

Then, things got even worse. Labour’s leader was caught shooting the breeze in a number of Facebook groups where anti-Semitic tropes were freely thrown around like confetti. Not a single word did he say about it all – before that membership was published. Then he was shown to have defended a clearly anti-Semitic mural. He dissembled about that for a few days, then issued a half-apology, then went silent, obviously hoping that the whole thing would go away. He was dragged out a few times to make some general and meaningless ‘anti-racist’ statements before being sent off once more on some speaking tours to make the same anti-austerity stump speech he always makes. It didn’t look good.

Then Labour published its new 'anti-Semitism code'. In a distasteful little move almost beyond parody, this downgraded four of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance examples of anti-Semitism from being actually racist to merely being bad. So you could now compare (say) Israelis to Nazis if you wanted to, or question British Jews’ loyalty to Britain, if you saw fit: just so long as you didn’t show ‘anti-Semitic intent’. Whatever that means. No consultation appeared to have taken place with Labour’s mainstream Jewish groups (nor did it when, faced with a storm of protest, the Party promised to consult yet one more time). Lots of Corbynites – including Jon Lansman, one of the leader’s more thoughtful backers – supported the new code for a little while, before it became clear that it was utterly indefensible. A huge hoo-ha followed, during which Labour promised to consult again (after which, unsurprisingly, it didn’t), and then basically gave in – though not without Mr Corbyn attempting, one last time, to append a deeply offensive new text to the IHRA’s examples.

Mr McCluskey, for his part, said that ‘Jewish groups’ wouldn’t 'take yes for an answer': that they were basically a load of difficult refuseniks who should get with the programme. Lately, he's been saying that Labour's only agreed to make changes to take the issue off the agenda. That was helpful. One of Labour’s NEC members, Peter Willsman, got taped ranting about all those Jews who apparently admire President Trump, declaring as part of his masterly oratory that he’d never seen anti-Semitism in the Party – despite sitting on a disciplinary committee that oversees oodles of it. He got voted back in by members just a few weeks later, by the way. Oh, and other NEC members – including the Party’s General Secretary, Jennie Formby – sat and listened to that without much demur. She just rebuked Mr Willsman after the meeting. A fine state of affairs.

In the interim, Labour’s leader-slash-campaigner had been caught on video snidely remarking to some particular Jews as lacking a ‘British sense of irony’, despite having ‘lived here all their lives’ – a nasty little bit of upper-class presumption revealed for all to see. That was bad enough, but what followed was much worse: official Labour spokespeople actually tried to defend what everyone in the whole world could see was an impossible-to-excuse bit of racism. Yeah, it was ‘Zionists’ all right he was having a go at: though, of course, that reference to how long they’d been here gave the game away, despite his attempts to make amends on a Friday evening just before the start of Shabbat, or by cutting and pasting stuff he’d said before. The mask was torn away: yet Labour members went on fixing Twitter hashtags and Facebook likes to their defence of the indefensible.

That was in many ways the most worrying development of all – because the poison has entered the Left bloodstream more widely, via partisanship, a usually-healthy scepticism, and sheer failure to grasp the hard-to-believe scale of what’s really going on. Because all this will have long-term consequences. Mr Corbyn and his immediate coterie will be gone soon. Maybe they’ll be in Downing Street for a while on the way. Maybe not. But the Far Left lived through such a political ice age in the 1990s and early 2000s that there’s not that many of them, and they’re rather old: one day fairly soon, a Soft Left Labour leader, such as Emily Thornberry or Angela Rayner, will sit where Mr Corbyn sits, and will gradually move the party away from its more egregious and eccentric fears and hatreds. But the anchor that Labour’s leadership team is moving is shifting the Party further and further away from Britain’s Jewish community, just as it’s remaking Labour more generally as a closed, autarkic, resentful community of the conspiratorial and the suspicious-minded. 

You can see it in those local Constituency Labour Parties in which some activists are moving against Labour MPs who took a stand alongside Jewish community groups back in the spring – including motions that basically say ‘one can understand anti-semitism after the banking crisis’. You can see it on all those forums and Twitter feeds where people say ‘there is no anti-Semitism’ or ‘the Tories are worse’ or ‘what about Israel?’ In all those people who say ‘I’ll turn a blind eye to a bit of racism so long as we abolish tuition fees and nationalise the railways’. The hate has gone deep. It’s hard to see now how the breach can be mended. The gulf is just too wide.

So, to try to answer the question – is Labour institutionally anti-Semitic? Let’s be clear here. Even if it were, that would certainly not mean that most Labour members or elected representatives were closet racists. Most of them are lovely people – retired public sector workers, students, teachers, lecturers, trade unionists, radicals of all stripes originally attracted to a Party just trying to make the world a better place. It’s not as if there isn’t plenty of work to do in that respect. And many of these same members know that their party has a problem. A majority of them agree that it has – to a greater or lesser extent – and that number has been growing. It’s not a nest of vipers.

Still. Consider what the following chain of disaster and excuse sounds like. A group of people who have always experienced prejudice come forward with a long list of complaints against an old and established British institution. At first, that institution rejects their complaints. Then, it starts to take them on board, but does it badly, while denying they have a real problem. It’s all a few bad apples. You’ve got to understand the unique problems. You’ve got to realise that there’s a context here. Oh, and others are just as bad. Those in authority try to set up their own rules, in defiance of the community complaining about them. Then, the institution in question adopts a new code of practice that has been designed by others, but don’t quite take it to heart. Its leaders close their ears to the pain and hurt they and their followers are causing. It takes a policy disaster of unprecedented scale to force them onto the right path. Sound familiar? Yes, it’s the Metropolitan Police and its antediluvian attitude towards young black Londoners between the 1950s and the early 1990s - before the Stephen Lawrence case and the Macpherson Inquiry forced them to at least start mending their ways. And just by the by, it’s exactly the path Labour has been treading recently, albeit in accelerated fashion.

Institutional racism is a very grave judgement. It’s one we’re reluctant to make. No-one thinks that Mr Corbyn or Mr Cluskey, whatever their other faults (and they are legion), go home at night and think ‘I hate those Jews’. That’s absurd. Be that as it may, they have given every indication that they are full of fear and loathing for one of Britain’s minority communities. They are full of innate preconceptions, as we all are in a way, but in a more exaggerated form. When they hear the word ‘Jew’, they also hear the word ‘Israel’, and engage all their hatred of that state’s oppression of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories – a state of affairs that British Jews certainly shouldn’t bear any responsibility for, in Labour or elsewhere. There's a word for that immediate association: that word is prejudice.

Somewhere in their consciousness, since they are economic determinists, they furthermore think that apparently wealthy and successful communities can’t be discriminated against, and that if all economic inequality were abolished, racism would disappear with it. They’re wrong about that, of course, as they are incorrect about so, so much else: but the idea exerts a powerful hold over them. And if you start saying that ‘the banks’ are an international problem, that the world economy is ‘rigged’ for ‘the elites’, rather than the many? Well, you’re not much more than a Trumpian hop, skip and a jump from the British Left’s traditional anti-Semitism, as obvious in the DNA of Edwardian New Liberalism as it is in the warp and weave of what has become of the 1960s New Left. They don’t suffer from the traditional race hatred of the boot-boy and the skinhead. They have a far more refined set of prejudices. If they truly examined them, talked about them, admitted they’d got it wrong, spoke to everyone, they could have avoided all this. But they won’t, and now they probably can’t.

Even so, ‘institutional racism’ would be a heavy conviction when Labour’s members are showing signs of waking up, when its governing body has just adopted a new code that might finally purge anti-Semitism from its ranks, when there are still plenty of activists, councillors and MPs fighting for a truly cathartic change such as that which the Macpherson Report wrought on the Met. It’s all very suggestive of a Party that is sick, but not quite yet succumbing to the fever. The case is not dismissed – not by a long way. But it is still a deeply problematical one.

Make no mistake, though: if Labour continues to turn a blind eye to the stream of hatred flowing through social media, goes on ignoring the need for a mea culpa right from the top (Mr Corbyn refused to say sorry in a recent BBC interview), keeps pushing back its self-imposed deadline for getting on top of even just the high-profile cases, revisits the IHRA definition with some weasel form of words once the new NEC takes office after Conference: then a verdict of guilty will be unavoidable. 

Labour has walked right out to the edge. Just a few more steps, and it will sink irrevocably into that rancid sewer so obvious to those of us who've been watching properly. It has stopped, rightly hesitant – for now. Whether it now turns around and begins to recover remains to be seen. The signs are not very hopeful. We shall see.

The end... again

So it's been a very long year. To be honest, as politics speeds up (and weirds up), it's often seemed that it will go on forever. But it couldn't, and it hasn't. It's time to wind up 'Public Policy and the Past' for the academic year 2017/18.

We hope you've enjoyed it. To be honest, 'enjoyed' is probably over-egging the pudding. As British politics has degenerated into something crossed between a shaky 1980s sitcom and a black-and-white Scandinavian horror movie, 'endured' has probably been something more like it. Let's face it: both of the UK's main parties are a bad joke, as we've chronicled. The Conservatives have absolutely no guiding philosophy worthy of the name, and what detailed proposals they do have are just plain wrong. Labour's little better, with a mix of policies that will massively redistribute wealth and power towards wealthier citizens, and which are based on a load of prejudices unworthy of the word 'analysis' in the first place.

That's why both parties have struggled to break away from one another: not because they are strong, but because they are weak, and because their supporters are motivated not by enthusiasm for their choice, but fear of the forces on the other side. The UK is now covered by an unstable rash of micro-marginals that will probably head in lots of different directions at the next election, though Labour must be favourites to win it given the Conservatives' divisions over Brexit and their total lack of any new ideas at all. Then, as that government struggles in its turn, the Conservatives may well come roaring back at a government whose reading of the world is misleading at best, and downright mendacious at worst. Can't wait? Well, you've got stronger stomachs than us.

So this is the end... for now. We'll be back in the week commencing Monday 17 September to look at the ongoing Brexit drama, the United States' midterm elections, European 'populism' and much, much more. We expect to see you right here. Don't let us down now, will you?

Labour's basic presumptions are false

So as you will know by now, 'Public Policy and the Past' is no fan of the UK's ruling Conservative Party - at least in its present guise. Almost everything it tells you is just flat wrong. Philosophically, it is barren. Its policies are threadbare. The remedies it espouses - from the mythical Brexit dividend, via help for homebuyers, through expanding grammar schools and on to their vaguer and even less convincing appeal to 'equality of opportunity' - are at best wrongheaded, and at worst cruel fictions designed to fool the many at the cost of the few. They are overdue, and more than overdue, for an electoral drubbing.

So this month, we thought we'd look at the other side of the fence. What, if anything, can Labour's policy offer achieve (above)? If the Conservatives are in such trouble - and the signs of incipient civil war are there for all to see - are the official Opposition's ideas any better? We are less than convinced. The public aren't all that keen: opinion polls right now are pretty much deadlocked, with a historically unusual (albeit small) lead for the governing party as they toil unconvincingly into their ninth year of government. And, to be frank, you shouldn't be impressed either. For Labour's ideas, such as they are, are based on folk knowledge and prejudices that just don't really pass muster in detail. That being the case, British politics will have to struggle on with two sets of preconceptions that are simply not fit to bear the burden placed on them. Don't believe us? Here are four examples.

Most new jobs are on zero-hours contracts. Well, no, not really. It's a standard Left critique of Britain's puzzlingly-strong jobs market that employment growth is all in bad jobs. It's been repeated by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at Prime Minister's Questions. It's very misleading. For one thing, we're talking about quite a small number of jobs here - less than a million, and less than three per cent of all employment. And most job creation recently has been in full-time, permanent roles: in the last year, for instance, full-time roles have increased much faster than part-time ones. Now they haven't yet replaced the great big hole in that part of the labour market that the crisis of 2007-2008 ripped out of that part of the job market, but they're not now far away.

Labour has pledged to ban zero hours contracts. But what statistics we have show that both their absolute number, and the number of businesses using them, are now in decline after a very rapid rise in their number between 2012 and 2015. In fact, Labour is tilting at a windmill here. For one thing, lots of people - young workers or students, for instance - might quite like zero hours contracts. Her Majesty's Opposition would be much better off focusing on the world of work more widely: on the very rapid growth of self employment in particular, but also on on the whole question of supposedly full-time posts and apparently permanent contracts that seem much more likely to add up to a string of jobs rather than one simple-to-understand career. The much-heralded but very undersketched idea of a 'National Education Service' might do some of that work. But unless and until they accept that they're fixing on the wrong problem here - and one very small part of the overall jigsaw - Labour will have to go some to stand up their plans in any credible manner.

Britain has the most expensive railways in the world. Sort of, but sort of not. If you rock up at a UK mainline rail station and try to buy a peak-time ticket, you'll get fleeced compared to the prices you would pay in comparable European nations. So far, so familiar. But book ahead a bit, even a day in advance, and you're likely to do okay - especially if you want a return ticket. Don't believe us? Here's a not-so-random selection of comparisons from people who do know. Once you understand that, two key insights follow. The first? This is a highly redistributive and progressive system aimed at charging business travellers - and especially business travellers who want or need high levels of flexibility - in order to subsidise everyone else. And it's exactly the system you would expect if you were looking at an old railway, squeezed at vital bottlenecks into very tight urban areas, which is suffering from capacity constraints during a period of enormous success and passenger growth. That is, Britain's rail fares price congestion at peak times, so as to spread the load. Whoever owns them will have to do the same.

Don't expect new state-owned Train Operating Companies to start slashing fees where they are relatively high, because if they do, they'll be letting high-end businesses off the hook and choking our railways to death. Now we could go on and on about this, but the mental picture so common among Left-wing Britons - of profiteers gouging passengers - just isn't true. They are highly regulated. They make very low profits, as these things are measured (which is one reason why they struggle to make the whole thing work). Other problems are more complex than they appear. Old-fashioned ticketing systems? Mandated by the very Department for Transport that would be in control of nationalisation. Inadequate capital spending, broken points and out-of-the-ark signalling? Already nationalised. Now you could nationalise the Train Operating Companies. There would probably be some gains to integration. Would it change all that much? Probably not.

Inequality is getting worse, and has been getting worse for years. Now this one is pretty contentious, and the big-ticket answer is 'it depends what you mean by inequality, and it definitely depends on how you're measuring it'. Overall, the headline Gini Coefficient measure of inequality, which looks at the income of top earners against those of the less well-off, shot up in the early- to mid-1980s, before reaching a plateau in the early 1990s and then gently drifting slightly downwards during the years of John Major, New Labour and the Coalition. So far, so not-particularly-controversial. Slightly more controversially, and little noted among the 2010-15 government's many failings, it did actually continue to fall under Chancellor Osborne too - partly due to strong real income growth towards the end of his tenure, and partly because behind his cut to the highest rate of Income Tax he stealthily made things rather less comfortable for higher-middle earners (via income tax thresholds), as well as asset-rich landlords, investors and the like.

To some extent this highly counterintuitive picture might be a little bit of a statistical artefact, because it's quite hard to capture the earnings of the really wealthy (especially when they move around), and if we delve into thismore closely, it might be that inequality has been at best stable, and at worst rising slightly. There's no sign of that in terms of wealth inequality, which we'd have expected to rise if that was the case - this has been held down by pension auto-enrollment, accruing capital for ordinary people - but it might be that inequality has been bumping along at about the same level it's been at for years. Even so: here again, Labour is really not homing in on the real problem. Inequality isn't surging. Anger and confusion over the boundaries and function of the job market are. If you're in work, low inflation, tax credits and lower income tax (via rising thresholds) have at least helped you regain your ground by now. Where the pain is really acute is at the margins of the working world, for instance for those people who the Department for Work and Pensions imagine will be 'encouraged' (read: pushed) into working under 16 hours a week by the inception of Universal Credit (opens as PDF: see page eight). Or for those people with lots of problems who are nevertheless being moved into jobs and are going to find it very, very challenging to manage the constant to-and-fro of employment and benefit changes. That's where the real attention needs to head - as soon as possible.

University fees are deterring working-class kids from getting on. Again, this is at least arguable, and it's certainly not an open-and-shut case given that the number of undergraduates from poorer backgrounds have definitely been rising in recent years. Labour's Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner (usually a rather impressive politician in many ways) has gone out of her way to single out fees as the reason universities' social profile is still so narrow - and been forced into at least a partial retreat. It's hard to be sure, because there is no one accepted yardstick for who is from a 'disadvantaged background' and who isn't, but it does seem as if lower-income youngsters have closed the gap just a little bit on better-off students in recent years. Certainly that gulf hasn't widened. The percentage of students who used to claim free school meals has gone up a bit. Those coming into English universities from poorer postcodes has also increased a little bit more quickly than those entering HE from other districts (though if we look at a wider basket of indicators, the picture is quite static).

Against most of our instincts, and probably yours too, the tripling of fees in 2010 hasn't actually made things worse. Now you could build a counterfactual in which numbers from non-traditional backgrounds went up even faster if tuition was free, but it's hard to be sure - and there are some good reasons to believe that they wouldn't. In fact, countervailing the undoubtedly daunting debt numbers has been the fact that fees have allowed the cap to come off student rolls, facilitating an expansion that is letting more students in than ever before. Given that Labour will want 'value for money' if and when it's paying for everything in Higher Education again, we wouldn't give you much chance that the cap won't come back when they're in charge - something that will throttle working-class life chances more than anything, as we've already seen in Scotland.

Now we know that there's a risk of setting up a series of straw men here. Not everything that left-wing Labour types hold close to their hearts is wrong. Britain's public sphere is - literally - crumbling, with local government services in particular having been made to take the strain of nearly a decade of cuts that's leaving the cupboard bare for any more. Simply put, there's not much else to cut before you lop off a limb: one of the reasons for the support Labour is marshalling among middle-income and middle-aged Britons worried about their local roads, libraries, parks, high streets... and, most of all, what on earth they are going to do if their elderly parents need looking after. The privatisation of core non-commercial functions of the British state (such as the prison service) has been a disastrous failure. And even if inequality as a whole has not been rising, the level of egregious cruelty meted out by the Conservatives' welfare 'reforms' is at such a pitch that most people can tell you a bleak and tragic story of an uncaring or unwilling state that simply isn't there for anyone any more.

But putting those very real problems into the mix with a more general (and mythic) critique blurs the focus. Everywhere you look, it's just misrepresentation after illusion after distortion. You know that 'youthquake' that was supposed to be a key part of Labour's surge upwards at the 2017 election? It didn't happen. Remember all those empty homes in London, bought up by rich foreign investors and left empty, to the detriment of everyone else looking for a home? Outside of some upscale hotspots, we're talking pretty small numbers here, and very few even of those are actually empty. Heard of that Private Finance Initiative that's bankrupting public services? It peaked twelve years ago, and it never constituted more than fifteen per cent of capital formation in the public sector.

This kind of dross actually lets the Government off the hook, and diverts us from thinking about real world structures and solutions. Labour's surge was actually powered by the middle aged and the middle class. Young people's housing woes are caused by an ageing society and a ridiculously tight planning system. The NHS has been tanked by tiny real real terms funding increases, not really by its building costs. And so on. Take those four examples we've highlighted here. What would constitute actually-relevant answers to our true problems?

You can probably guess the thrust from the discussion above, but here's some thoughts. Banning short-term contracts is probably going to cause more problems than it solves (as many tasks are driven underground): more sophisticated labour market regulation is usually better than binary yeses and noes to anything. Nationalisation is unlikely to be more than a palliative or a short-term boost for Britain's railways, while medium-sized wodges of government cash could lift capacity constraints and ease bottlenecks better than rebadging things ever could. Big increases in public service spending and tax changes should be focused on areas and groups where most can be done, rather than sprayed around indiscriminately; while bringing back grants and reforming fees for students from low income backgrounds, and above all focusing on part-time education, would be much more likely to change the mix in English HE than simply abolishing fees altogether.

At the moment, British voters are faced with an unpalatable menu that amounts to what we've elsewhere called 'Brexit versus nationalisation'. The Right is busy kidding itself that it can reinvent the 1950s. The Left seems to be bodging up a faux 1970s. Labour's members, and to a lesser extent the new white-collar electoral alliance they reflect, understand the world through a particular prism: one in which Britain is failing because it is not settled enough, not organised enough, not equal enough, and not educated enough. While there's some truth to that - and has long been truth to that -  there's little evidence that the remarkable break-point in the UK's productivity record experienced at the time of the Great Recession (and at the heart of so many of our problems) has its roots in any of those long-term structural failings. Otherwise, the country's productivity would have stagnated in the 2000s just as much as it has in the 2010s. Reader, it didn't.

There are some good ideas on the Left. The new Centre for Towns has some. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell's nascent co-operative agenda - far, far more likely to do good and stick than some of his bizarre Ministry of Works-style organigrams - is another good place to start. But overall Left Britain is living in a bit of a narrow comfort zone. More and more, its ideas look like a cluttered mantelpiece of tat, with a Post-It here, a battered Wally Dog there, and a load of pens in coffee-stained mugs everywhere else. A trail that tells a story: but not a coherent one, and not really an appealing one either.

How can experts help governments think?

Note: this is the written text forming the conclusion of the author's Inaugural Lecture, held at Oxford Brookes University on Wednesday 9 May. It does not match the lecture as delivered, the whole of which is available here. 

At least experts aren’t charlatans

To sum up: there are six ways of both thinking and acting that might help us make public policy. Puzzle, rather than power. Delete your old drafts. Take the long view. Test, measure and test again. Accept uncertainty. Enable others. Such approaches are much more persuasive, I think, than that of our present political leaders. I’ve singled out just a few for special treatment here, which is probably not very fair, but I couldn’t help myself… Just a few egregious recent examples might include: the Shadow Secretary of State for Justice (Richard Burgon), one of the most Eurosceptical Conservative Members of the European Parliament (Dan Hannan), the Foreign Secretary (Boris Johnson), and the Shadow Secretary of State for International Trade (Barry Gardiner).

Now I am just putting up these particular faces as examples of two party leaderships that are currently trying to sell you two very unconvincing stories, which I might sum up as ‘train nationalisation versus Brexit’. But their views on all sorts of things might help me make a wider point. I am genuinely sorry to say this, but I cannot stress it enough: these people are charlatans. And none of them is worse than the charlatan-in-chief, the darkly comic character often known only as ‘Boris’ – a man so bent out of shape by political ambition that he makes a plumb-line look like a pretzel. They are willing to say blue is red, and red is blue. That up is down, and down is up. On public spending, on trade, on Brexit, on their own parties’ blind spots and prejudices, they seem to have no sense of shame itself. Whatever else experts are – academics, planners, educators, scientists, economists – they are not outright charlatans. That is a low bar, admittedly, but for the most part they handily clear it. Many of our political leaders do not. And though hard to quantify, it is unfortunately difficult to avoid the conclusion that this situation has got worse, not better, over the last three or four years.

One reason for this is our increasingly bitter partisanship. If you take a look at social media maps of present party political competition, for instance those assembled by the think tank Demos over the course of the 2017 General Election campaign, they show a very clear clustering by party. There is in this world very little engagement between each group, but also – just as worrying – less engagement the further away each cluster is from another on the ideological plane. So there is a little engagement between social media accounts run by self-declared Conservative and Labour supporters, but almost none between (for instance) UKIP and Labour, and especially UKIP and the SNP. Now, UKIP were much less of an electoral presence in Scotland than elsewhere, so that will explain some of the differential there, but the consequences for a Parliament that could well have contained a few UKIP MPs – and did contain 56 SNP MPs – could have been very rancorous indeed.

Recent days have injected into our politics a poisonous tone of hatred that was not quite there before – or, at least, did not contain the air of threat, the tightened atmosphere, that has pertained since the tragic murder of the Batley and Spen MP, Jo Cox. Her motto, ‘more in common’, is today observed more as pious incantation than real insight. Instead, rival tribes of Left and Right roam the political landscape, meting out justice to those they deem insufficiently committed to their questionable cause. Their very similar techniques reveal them to in fact share much more than they would like to admit. Delegitimisation of their opponents – especially their internal opponents. The fanning of social media fury. The deployment of anonymous swarms of trolls and bots. Loyalty tests. A semi-sponsored (but deniable) ‘new media’ of alt-Right and alt-Left. A dark humour that dares others to draw the boundary between real statements and a self-knowing mocking set of poses. The employment of intellectual outriders who say what the leaders cannot say. And lastly: outright untruth.

Here is the reality. Extremists of both Right and Left are trying to pull this country apart. Right now, they are succeeding: so much so that British politics looks like Humpty Dumpty, broken to bits at the bottom of his wall. In part this is because the joint approach of the cadres now in charge of the two main parties can only smash. It cannot build. It is superficially attractive, but actually on closer inspection sunk deep in philosophical error.

Intellectually, their fundamental misconception of our collective life exists at two levels. The first is that they claim to have not just an answer, but the answer. On the Right, Brexit will solve your problems. Unemployment? Low wages? Record levels of immigration? Over-subscribed schools? Over-fishing? Let Brexit fix it for you. On the Left, the state will intervene. Your train is late? Your university is expensive? Social care is broken? Let the taxpayer fix it for you. I need hardly add that these approaches are likely to prove misleading.

It’s not that they are necessarily incorrect as far as detail goes. For instance: rail nationalisation probably would lead to some benefits emanating from the integration of services with track infrastructure. It’s that the Ministers and Shadow Ministers talking in this way seem unaware of the way policy is actually made, subject to all the constraints of time and thought and energy I hope I have followed in this lecture. To perhaps unfairly pick on Labour’s plans: is the state really going to be able to manage the backwash from Brexit, and nationalise much of the utilities sector, and completely reform England’s Higher Education system, and launch a new state-led infrastructure programme, and reach much more ambitious housing targets, and fund the National Health Service so that it meets all our needs, and save social care? The answer is no. Of course not. No single Labour government could possibly hope to do those things – a prelude to another round of our current political malaise.

I think that the most profound objection is not that these pronouncements are disingenuous, or likely to be inefficacious – though they are – but that they are morally wrong. Because it is wrong to offer people not only that which you know will never be, but that which you know in private simply cannot be.

Because such leaders aim, secondly, at certainty, at control – at timeless end-points that are desirable in and of themselves and that live in a kind of eschatological forever-present, both millennial and millinnerial, final states privileged and rarefied as if they are principles to be exalted rather than tools to help people progress. Unfortunately, no such public policy end-point exists.

Given these two very worrying trends in what might be termed the deep presumptions, the trigger motions and prejudices of those who seek to lead us – a fixation on certainty, and a focus on theoretical aims rather than paths towards actually better lives – it is hard to be optimistic about the recommendations in any lecture. Unless and until you yourselves, as voters and citizens, say ‘stop’, politicians will continue to act like this. Experts can warn all they want. Only politics – new demands on politicians to put their foot on the brake – can effect actual change. It’s not about what I know. It’s about what you know.

If only there were people who could help

Experts can’t tell you exactly what to do. But they can draw you a map, an aim that perhaps does not sound very ambitious, but may contain rather more hope than at first appears. To speak like a historian, for instance: we live at a very gritty time in our public life. But the long view tells us that things have been much worse, and also that they will get better. It is not 1931. Our entire economic system is not teetering on the brink of dissolution. It is not 1940. Britain’s armed forces are not clinging to North-West Europe, betrayed by a near decade-long retreat in the face of the dictators. It is not 1976, with inflation surging and Britain forced to surrender its budgetary autonomy to the International Monetary Fund. It is not 1981, when a sado-monetarist drive towards inefficient so-called ‘efficiency’ wiped out a tranche of the UK’s manufacturing sector. Our situation was far more serious then, and we recovered. All this can be done in a better way. We can put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Tonight I have suggested a handful of ways in which we can negotiate our way out of some of those systemic malfunctions. Legislate at caution, and slowly. Rip up what’s not working, rather than double down on your mistakes. Look ahead. Check your workings. Accept help, even from unlikely places. Embrace mess. Think. Analyse. Devolve. Because experts can at least sketch the alternative marching routes for both governments and voters. Tomorrow, like every other day, all sorts of people will get up and do just that. In universities, for instance, we will research, and write, and teach, and speak, and engage, and consult, as per usual. Maybe people should start listening a bit more to the recommendations that are both implicit and explicit in universities’ work. It can’t hurt.

Perhaps all that’s just process. Just administration. But I would bet quite a lot on the following: it doesn’t seem like process if you’ve lived in the UK for half a century and you can’t get cancer treatment on the NHS. It doesn’t look like administration if the house your single mum rents is going to be taken away from you because your tax credits have been messed up, or if you’re that single mum and your kids are crying and you don’t know what to do. It’s not a matter of mere detail if your Personal Independence Payment assessors say you can work when you can’t walk out of your front door. It’s not a little thing if you’re eighty years old, and you need a hip replacement, and you need to take four buses to get to see your General Practitioner. It probably seems quite important.

Those recommendations might seem small. They aren’t. It is not ‘technocratic’ to insist that real people’s services and lives get better. It is not bloodless to focus on delivery. It is not any sort of ideals-light ‘centrism’ to believe that what you say you will do will actually get done. It does not speak to a lack of commitment, or care, or passion, if you reject the divisive politics of social media bellowing. On the contrary: all of that might be found at least near the heart of a better politics that people actually feel they recognise, they own and they like.

Expertise can all us to build both signposts and waymarkers. It can tell us all where we’ve been, and where we might be going. It can provide a link between the islands of what we know, and allow us to circumvent the ersatz or even false knowledge of what passes for our political leadership. Experts do not know much. But they can walk with you as guides, and travel with you along these much-neglected, forgotten, overgrown – but far from hollow – ways.

Thank you very much for listening, and good evening.

What will the local elections tell us?

This Thursday, Britain's political parties face their first major electoral challenge since last June, when Labour's unexpectedly strong showing raised spirits across the Left. It's going to be a big night, at least in England (Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh voters might be tempted to skip the rest of the post, though Thursday night's results might give us quite a lot of clues about the future government of the UK as a whole). All of the councillors for London’s boroughs are up for election, along with one third of councillors in Metropolitan Boroughs – and all of the seats in the following big cities: Birmingham (above), Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle. The same one-third count in 17 unitary authorities are also up for grabs on councils such as Portsmouth, Reading and Slough, as well as 68 second-tier districts such as Ipswich and Lincoln.

The opinion polls right now seem stuck, and as such might not be much of a guide to detailed local and regional performance. Both Labour and the Conservatives seem to be hovering a little above the 40 per cent mark that they both cleared back at the June 2017 General Election. The Conservatives, probably and slightly, have their noses just in front: but really, given the only middling record of British opinion polls, it is hard to be sure. Taken as a whole, the polls at the moment just about point to a continuing Conservative minority government, able to govern (as now) only with the help of Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party. But the polls are so close, and so many seats out there to be won are on such a knife-edge, that your guess is as good as ours, really. It's just as likely that Labour would be able to seize power, albeit very tenuously, and only in their turn with the assistance of the Scottish National Party, the Welsh Nationalists Plaid Cymru and the single Green MP, Caroline Lucas. And the acquiescence of the Liberal Democrats, which may or may not be forthcoming.

This is, however, where we can start to draw out the significance of what we do and don't see when checking the results on Friday morning. On the surface, this might be a bit of a standstill contest. The Conservatives have painfully built up a one or two per cent lead on average in the polls, varying between a lead of five per cent (with Matt Singh's Number Cruncher Politics) and an exact draw (recorded by ComRes): but the last time most of these wards were fought, in May 2014, it was Labour that had the edge. Labour’s lead was just under three per cent that month, with a rather bigger range between a lead of seven per cent and a deficit of one per cent.

On a uniform swing, given that Labour is not performing quite as well as against the Conservatives as it was early in 2014, we might expect Labour to gain no more than a few scores of new councillors. That swing between the relevant, equivalent contests is in truth quite small (of just under three per cent): but it is there. So although Labour should be looking forward to quite a good night at this stage in a Parliament, overall it might be quite disappointed if the polls are any guide. Except they might not be, partly because the relationship between Westminster polling on alternative governments and local election scores isn't particularly good. Remember the 2016 locals, held at a time when the Tories had their noses in front a bit in the polls? Labour came out on top when the National Equivalent Share of the vote was calculated. But instead of just putting up a big shrug emoji, let's take a look at the known unknowns involved.

There are two big unknowns on Thursday night, and they make the result in terms of both vote share and council seats very uncertain indeed. First, and most importantly: where will the United Kingdom Independence Party's voters go? They won seventeen per cent of the vote, and 166 councillors, the last time these wards were up. But UKIP right now seems to be in advanced state of decomposition, with national leadership woes, defecting councillors and huge falls in its vote at council by-elections all contributing to the suspicion that they will lose almost all, and perhaps every single one, of the council seats they contest this year. In last year's General Election, most of these voters went to the Conservatives. If that's true again this week, then lots of seats will fall into the Conservatives' hands. Not just UKIP ones: potentially Labour ones, too, often in quite working-class bastions of previous Labour strength. But if Labour can detach more of these voters than they have hitherto managed, they will hold off any potential Conservative surge in (say) Walsall, Basildon, Peterborough or Rugby.

But some of those voters will simply not now turn up at the polls, and some smaller but significant chunks of ex-UKIP support – for instance in smaller English cities or struggling coastal communities – might heed Labour's renewed populist appeal to discontented 'left behind' voters. This might just make up for any anti-European (and anti-immigration) sentiment that continues to thrive in ex-UKIP heartlands, helping Labour overcome the barriers between them and these potential sources of support. Councils such as Hartlepool, North-East Lincolnshire and Great Yarmouth are worth watching in this respect. What will be the mix of Brexity Ukippers moving over to the Tories, those going back to Labour if that's where they came from in the first place, and those abstaining - especially in these traditionally quite low turnout contests? We simply don't know. The Conservatives will probably lose seats this year, but the exact scale of their retreat will outside London depend on this mix of choices, not by straight switching between the main red and blue teams.

The second element complicating the picture is the performance of the Liberal Democrats. They normally do quite well in local elections, even at time when they are struggling on the national stage. They managed to gain 18 per cent of the vote in the 2017 local elections, just a month or so before they went on to gain under half that total at the General Election only a month later. They managed to score 13 per cent in 2014, when they were recording between five and ten per cent in the Westminster polling. Can they attract pro-Remain voters in urban areas, perhaps detaching them from Labour? If they can, they will blunt the Labour attack just as surely as UKIP defectors to the Tories and ex-Labour Ukippers staying at home will. The Liberal Democrats themselves will probably have to comfort themselves with some progress in, and perhaps capture of, Kingston and Richmond councils in South-West London, their leader Vince Cable's own heartland... and, not very coincidentally, the sites of some of the heaviest Remain votes in the whole country. But their effect elsewhere could be to slow Labour's moves forwards. 

We suspect that these local elections will in fact show that a great, quiet sorting among the British electorate is still underway. Put very crudely, blue collar Britons outside cities are gradually trending towards the Conservatives, while higher-income and more liberal areas are gradually being shaded in pink and red. It is hard to avoid the impression that Brexit – and, more importantly, the cleavages of age, geography, social status and cultural outlook that it highlighted and revealed – has gathered voters in England and Wales into two tribes. The first, very crudely made up of relatively socially conservative over-50s who live in medium-sized towns and across a relatively settled Deep England of suburbs and villages, has seen at least the single largest group among 2015 UKIP supporters move over to the Conservatives. But there is a second Britain, mainly living in cities and radical university towns, and full of the under-50s trying to raise families or make their way in a punishing job and housing market – and in which Labour has hoovered up most left-leaning Liberal Democrats, ex-Greens and voters who previously backed smaller Left parties.

So look for grounds of relatively high-income public sector workers, professionals, liberals, well-travelled Remainers, black and minority ethnic Britons, as well as relatively well-educated young people. Wherever you find them, Labour will do well, and the Conservatives will be giving up territory that, however well-established, is increasingly hostile to their Hard Brexit fervour for a Britain that never really has been, and certainly doesn't exist now. This situation seems unlikely to change until the reality of Brexit dawns, and a new Prime Minister takes over from Theresa May. Only then will some of the likely lines of the next election become clearer. But these local elections – taking place this time only in England – will give us some precious pointers as to whether the country really is resolving into two hostile camps, eyeing each other warily in a kind of cultural Cold War. If the Labour challenge is deflected just where Leave did really well in 2016 (so for instance in Amber Valley, or Thurrock), while they triumph in more Remain-friendly areas such as Trafford, then the long-term trends we sense are there get another tick in the box marked 'actual evidence'.

A number of interesting contests should be to the fore here. This complex balance of Leave versus Remain, the extent of UKIP decline or collapse, Liberal Democrat success or failure, and most profoundly (albeit slowly) of urban liberalism versus ex-urban cultural conservatism, should sharpen up our questions. Will Labour continue to make progress in towns that look more and more like distant London suburbs – in Reading, for example? Will they continue to attract ex-UKIP voters in poorer southern towns and cities, such as Plymouth? In the same vein, will they push their vote even higher in Hastings, where they did quite well in 2014 and which is part of now-ex Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s very vulnerable Westminster seat of Hastings and Rye? Can Labour up their appeal in relatively blue-collar Harlow – a seat they held until 2010, but in which the Conservative Robert Halfon presently enjoys a 7,000-plus majority? What about Dudley, where the Conservatives did very well – in both Labour Dudley North, and Tory Dudley South – in 2017, and which witnessed yet another great big victory for Leave in 2016? There will be myriad clues in the details.

London, of course, now looks like a completely discrete political city-state: it behaves in quite different ways to the rest of the country. But it is still set to be the most important battleground this year, and all indications are that Labour will do extremely well here. It's increasingly a red city. Its entire cultural outlook - the whole feel of the place - sometimes gives you the sense that city is Labour, rather than simply voting Labour. Labour did very well in the capital at the 2017 General Election, achieving a swing of over six per cent and taking three Conservative seats. London is in general full of those Remain voters, social liberals and renters who are increasingly slipping out of the Conservatives’ orbit: European Union citizens are also eligible to vote in these elections, they are disproportionately concentrated in London, and they are unlikely to look kindly on Mrs May’s party. In addition, Labour's membership boom is concentrated in London and the Home Counties, and the street-level campaigning that allows the party to mobilise seems particularly appropriate in densely-populated city streets.

Such is the increasing grip of the metropolitan media, that it is probably in London that the headlines will be made. Although the latest YouGov London polling in late April showed very little change in voting intention since the general election, there seems to have been a huge seven per cent swing from the Conservatives to Labour since the last time these boroughs were contested in 2014. Labour can certainly hope to take control of Barnet, and may even find themselves running Wandsworth: they might just be able to manage to seize control of the Conservatives’ symbolic borough of Westminster too. If they do manage all that – and the last result would be a huge stretch – then Mrs May’s leadership of her party could immediately come under even greater scrutiny. Be warned, though: Labour is already so dominant in the capital that it's hard for them to move forward very much in terms of councillors, and the Conservatives are so entrenched in Wandsworth and Westminster that it requires a big swing (7.5 and 8.8 per cent, respectively) to get them out. In Barnet, once thought a certain Labour gain, the party might well suffer among Jewish voters for its anti-semitism scandal. We suspect that Labour is going to come very close or actually win in Wandsworth, but it's hard to tell. 

Altogether, Labour is likely to come away with a medium-sized haul of new councillors. The Conservatives are likely to get a real hammering in London, while holding the majority of their ground across most of the rest of the country. But that London result should not breed the type of complacency on the Left that the 2017 General Election – Labour’s third defeat in a row – inexplicably seems to have evoked in many progressive partisans. Oppositions are supposed to gain councillors. Labour added 88 councillors in 1984, and 76 in 1988 – the first contests after their disastrous election losses in 1983 and 1987. After those admittedly very small gains when expressed as a proportion of council seats up for election, they still went on to lose the next election.

The real test is to be had at a more granular, and perhaps more challenging, level. Labour must break out of London, do well across areas where UKIP has previously succeeded, and show that they can move forward in seats that are marginal at Westminster while fighting back in Brexit Britain. If they can do all that, then they might be heading for government after all.

This is an updated and expanded version of the author's article on the same subject in the spring issue of The Fabian Review, entitled 'Poll Position', which is available here. 

Next time: the text of my inaugural lecture, followed in June by a review of Labour's policy prospectus as it stands now. There's always more where this has all come from...