UK Labour: can it think its way out of trouble?

Note: this piece first appeared in Disclaimer online, as 'Labour's Best Move Now? Stop Shouting, and Start Thinking' (8 April 2016).

The UK Labour Party does a lot of shouting these days. Its leadership does a lot of bellowing about cuts and austerity. About the undoubted cruelty and unfairness of many welfare state ‘reforms’ that appear designed only to humiliate and distress millions of people in real need. About Welsh steel and the decline of British manufacturing. About those ‘evil Tories’, always and forever fixated on privatising the National Health Service, slashing local services and cutting taxes for the wealthy while they salt away their own millions in offshore tax havens.

Meanwhile, those Labour people who are out of temper with the new-old age of Jeremy Corbyn spend their time shouting back, detailing with precision all the presentational and conceptual blunders of their leader’s darkly semi-comic turns in the spotlight, pointing out just how perilous their party’s position in local by-elections and opinion polls now is, how intellectually irrelevant Labour has become, how incoherent their spending plans can look, and overall what an unimpressive shower they resemble.

If the UK is to have the competent Opposition that it deserves, and Labour is to hang on as a competitive electoral force outside inner urban areas in England and Wales, all this will have to change. There’s no point shouting about those hated Tories if you don’t have a coherent plan about what you would do in their place; there is, on the other hand, equally little mileage in just laying into Mr Corbyn every time he puts a foot wrong. He’s never done anything like this in his life. He’s not very good at it. But in a few years, he’ll be gone. Even if he’s soon swapped for a like-for-like replacement in the shape of Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, this moment will pass quickly. The few years of this Parliament are a blink of an eye in the history of Britain’s competitive two-party electoral system, which took on its final shape as long ago the beginning of the nineteenth century. He is a poor receptacle for Labour centrists’ frustration.

If they are to retain their shape into the 2020s, and say anything useful in the interim, Labour must look to nurture and renew its ideas – and build up some concrete policy proposals that stand four-square on deeper morals, feelings and emotions. The party’s refuseniks and dissidents, in particular, will have to do a lot more hard work. If you’re critical of Mr Corbyn, what would you do instead? If you don’t like John McDonnell, what would you say in his stead?

The different non-Corbynite factions in the Party can in shorthand best be understood as Milibandite, Brownite and Blairite fragments along the lines represented so unimpressively in the 2015 leadership election by Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall – with perhaps a few already-unimpressed Left and Soft Left members already defecting from Mr Corbyn thrown in for good measure. What they all have in common is an iron-hard (and in all probability entirely correct) certainty that the party will be routed in a General Election if it continues along its present trajectory. But that won’t be enough to convince members to give one of ‘their’ candidates another shot at the leadership. It won’t rejuvenate the actual politics of choice and commitment on the Left, create a sense of excitement or commitment, or summon up a programme that will bring Labour people on board with a nuanced programme in keeping with the Party’s past history. Only new ideas from the mainstream of post-Second World War Labour’s social democratic past will do that.

So here’s a few suggestions for where they might go with this. Just for fun, as it were – a bit like watching Peter Snow push his by-election swingometer around all those years ago. Just to show what the Labour Centre and Right should be trying to articulate: a first stab at a new agenda for the future, rather than a New Labour past that most are genuinely (and rightly) proud of, but that ran out of steam at some point between the Second Iraq War and Brown’s tortuous time as Prime Minister.

Two areas for advance concern the worsening position of young people in this society. If you’re British and under 35, things look verygrim for you indeed. The high marginal rates that follow the taking on of student loans, very high house prices and extremely unfair intergenerational tax and benefit policies are combining to threaten the very viability of making a good and fulfilling life in the UK – especially in the South-East of England.

The last six years of Coalition and Conservative government have enormously privileged older Britons, to an extent that is now long past justified. Richer, older British citizens should now be asked to bear their part of a future Labour government’s deficit-reducing efforts. The Party should look urgently at abolishing the higher rates of pension tax relief, ameasure that would raise £6-7bn annually. The Chancellor, George Osborne, just backed away from just such a reform, a major strategic error in his and Prime Minister David Cameron’s efforts to build a so-called compassionate Conservatism. Such a move on Labour’s part would allow university students’ grant and bursaries to be brought back, and interest rates on loans to be reduced – a far more redistributive and progressive move than abolishing tuition fees. Much-missed Educational Maintenance Allowances could be restored; Further Education spending on post-16 training cease its ruinous retreat. This would at least constitute a start to redressing our ridiculous policy emphasis on older people, cynically built into our present political dispensation just because those people vote much more than young people do.

Any such concerted move against young people’s increasing economic and social isolation can, however, only work in conjunction with a truly vast shock-and-awe housing programme that would aim to double housebuilding output over two Parliaments and to redress the country’s now-historic imbalance of supply and demand. This will need a jump-start far beyond this government’s risible attempts at building up new ‘communities’, so obviously inadequate at growth points such as Ebbesfleet. An incoming Labour government should take a leaf out of their post-war colleagues’ book and build a new generation of high-density, high-quality New Towns (above), most of which would – this time – be returned to the private sector at maturity and help pay for the whole endeavour. The relative success of East London’s Olympic regeneration could be a model here.

Next should come an absolutely fundamental, cascading and massive transfer of power out of Whitehall and Westminster to Britain’s city-regions – again, a programme that in its range and ambition should dwarf the Northern Powerhouse that Mr Osborne has got away with claiming as his own for far too long. There should be hard and scarcely-reachable target for a fixed share of all government spending to be determined outside central government. Entirely new functions (small scale local energy production and grids; the development of public and private co-operatives; the further encouragement of grassroots participatory democracy; the localisation of skills training) should be encouraged among the new city-regional governments that are emerging. The best example of what this might mean would be to set Britain’s cities free on the US model, allowing cities to raise much more capital themselves via bonds, standing for instance behind the construction of a proper East-West link from Liverpool to Hull (especially between Manchester and Leeds) that would allow growth there truly to counterbalance London. Bristol needs a tram system and a proper rapid light rail network, and Southampton and Portsmouth need their own metro system – all along the lines that now seem to be taking shape in Cardiff and South Wales. A really massive housing drive is going to need a much denser public transport grid: localisation and regionalisation, far from fragmenting efforts, would be one way to provide it.

These are just three examples of how Labour might start manoeuvring around its present impasse, and start once more on the deployment of radical but practical ideas. Many more come to mind immediately: a properly integrated youth and youth justice service; a really decent elderly care service paid for via collective insurance, with payments from estates capped at far lower levels than they are now; a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the City, to help rebuild public trust in the banking system. Only with such new tools can Labour rebuild the sense of hope that Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair were able to embody in 1945, 1964 and 1997. Mr Corbyn seems to have very little sense of where he is going in this arena – he spends his time, instead, emitting a long wail of despair about capitalism. Mr McDonnell is trying much harder, surrounding himself with progressive economic advisers that are indeed thinking about how to foster productivity and growth in hard times. But that project, too, seems somehow too cramped and inadequate for the socialist task ahead. The two men’s opponents, both inside the party’s administrative machinery and the Parliamentary Labour Party, also seem bereft of novel plans and programmes, despite early signs of policy renaissance among Labour’s many ginger groups: while that remains the case, their internal opposition will continue to fall on deaf ears.

Basically, it is long past the time to stop shouting: to start summoning up a little bit of hope and a lot more thought. Will it happen? It seems unlikely for now. But until it does, only a long period of Conservative hegemony stretches ahead. 

Ten days that put Britain near the Brexit

Whatever your view of Britain's relationship with the European Union, there now seems no doubt that Britons might vote to leave in June. It's a possibility. Last year, when 'Remain' was racking up massive double-digit leads in telephone polls, and while Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne rode high in confidence and political capital, that looked a remote prospect. But now? Now they might, just might, decide to tear up half a century of economic rewiring and geopolitical strategy - walking out of the door and into a very, very uncertain future. How can this be, when what we know about their underlying attitudes to the EU tells us that they quite like the whole idea, in the abstract? How did we come to stand near the Brexit?

We've been reflecting a lot on the role of structure and agency in history recently, and this most convulsive change will need structural explanations in time (these will probably focus in part, on a generalised revolt against political and expert 'elites', and the poisonous misinformation pumped out by the British press). But chance has played a role too, and the most important choice and change in the past two British generations - one of the most important days in the country's whole history - is down to a conglomeration of accidents and emergencies as well. Here are ten days that we think brought us to the point where UK citizens may decide on an act of self-harm on the grand scale.

The election that never was, 6 October 2007. For a while, Labour ex-Chancellor Gordon Brown could do no wrong as Prime Minister. He seemed gruff, grave, serious and competent - a contrast many voters found refreshing after the actorly Tony Blair had left the scene. But he blew that all away when he let his lieutenants speculate about an early election that he then ran away from when his private polling told him he'd only be able to gain a smaller majority than Mr Blair had enjoyed. From that moment on, his authority shot, Mr Brown could only ward off the inevitable Conservative (or Conservative-led) government, rather than fight for a majority in his own right. Under New Labour, the only question was how European the UK would be. Would it join the free movement Schengen Area? Might it, one day, even join the Euro? The possibilities were there. Instead, Labour would give way to a party, and a Prime Minister, who were much more sceptical about the whole project.

Nick Clegg decides to go into coalition with the Conservatives, 12 May 2010. Mr Cameron didn't win in May 2010. He captured only a rather unimpressive 36% of the vote, and 306 seats. He needed a partner if he was to get back into power. He found one in Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, figurehead of the most pro-European party in British politics, and was able to form a remarkably stable and orderly two-party government that lasted for the full five years of a Parliament. The Liberal Democrats were able to block any talk of a Euro-referendum in that term, though not to hold back the populist surge that brought the United Kingdom Independence Party to such prominence. But they did allow Mr Cameron to form a 'proper' government, from which position of power he later announced that he would allow an in/ out European referendum.

UKIP's record local election results, 3 May 2012. Labour did well in the 2012 local elections, held in the wake of George Osborne's first (and notorious) 'Omnishambles' Budget, a financial package as chaotic as it was misguided - cutting the highest rate of income tax and racking up charges on pasties and caravans. But arguably even more ominous for the Conservatives was the rise of its apparent rival on the Right: UKIP gained 13% of the vote and, although its diffuse support was not very well targeted, went on to do even better and gain a quarter of the votes in the county council elections held a year later. Conservative MPs took fright; the right-wing coalition of wealthy free marketeers and patriotic blue collar workers that Mrs Thatcher had assembled in the 1980s (and Mr Cameron was attempting to tack back together) appeared to be at risk. They upped their anti-European rhetoric, and their pressure on the Prime Minister to 'do something' on Europe.

Boris Johnson re-elected as Mayor of London, 3 May 2012. That same day, Conservative maverick, eccentric and egotist Boris Johnson got back into City Hall by the Thames - just (above). He only won by three per cent, having led most of the polls by a much larger margin, on a night when Labour advanced rapidly across the country and did pretty well in the London Assembly elections. He should have been beaten. He could have been beaten - shattering for ever the myth of invincibility that has helped to cover up his many blunders and evasions. Instead, Labour ran ex-Mayor Ken Livingstone against him, 'Mr London' in his heyday, but surely not the best of candidates when he had already served two terms as Mayor himself and actually been beaten in 2008 by Mr Johnson. Boris was left to prosper - and to seem influential when he really, really should not be. So when he came out for Brexit in February, it seemed like an important moment. Had he lost in 2012, it would just have amounted to the musings of a long-beaten backbencher.

David Cameron's Bloomberg speech, 23 January 2013. All of this piled pressure onto David Cameroon - from his restive backbenchers, looking over their shoulders at the threat from UKIP, from dissatisfied small-c 'conservative' voters in the party's blue heartlands, and from his unprincipled rival and frenemy at City Hall. So he buckled and announced an 'in or out' referendum in January 2013. It was entirely and only designed to hold his party together, and to get through a General Election that he had only a very, very small chance of winning outright. Then he could just junk the whole idea as part of a renewed coalition deal with the Liberal Democrats, and blame Nick Clegg when his subalterns took to the airwaves to attack him for his lack of scruple. Who needs scruples anyway, when you have power? Unfortunately for Mr Cameron, he was being too clever by half: he had comprehensively outsmarted himself.

Douglas Carwell defects to UKIP, 28 August 2014. Mr Cameron's concessions didn't soothe the Eurosceptic beast that stalks the heart of his party. Nothing ever does: and until Britain looks like a great big Singapore, shorn of its troublesome welfare state, shot of Scotland, and without any borders at all as a freetrading exemplar of a laissez-faire sharpshooter, nothing - absolutely nothing - ever will. So the Prime Minister's MPs even began to defect to UKIP, calling by-elections and winning them (another MP, Mark Reckless, soon followed Mr Carswell, though he lost his seat in the 2015 General Election). Up went UKIP's authority; down went the Prime Minister's stock. And all the time the idea of a Brexit - hitherto a background drumbeat of an isolated cause - began to look more and more credible and popular.

The Conservative Party wins a majority, 6 May 2015. Most of us in the know always knew that the Conservatives were going to be the biggest party back in May. We always suspected that Mr Cameron would be able to go on - somehow winning the confidence of enough MPs to continue as Prime Minister. You read it here first, right? What was genuinely surprising, and what shocked even No. 10 itself, was the workable overall majority that the Conservatives were able to gain. Capitalising on Labour's lack of leadership and economic credibility and the Liberal Democrats' perceived untrustworthiness, and tapping into a deeply-felt and passionately-expressed anti-Scottish Nationalist feeling in England, Mr Cameron could now govern alone. Now he probably wishes that he hadn't won that overall majority, because its very existence might cause his premiership to end in ignominy.

Jeremy Corbyn is elected Labour leader, 12 September 2015. The Labour Party's reaction to its electoral mauling was to turn to an obscure backbencher who had never held any kind of front-bench position at all, and indeed who came bottom of the ballot of MPs when he last ran for the Shadow Cabinet. One problem with this for the EU 'inners' is that Mr Corbyn has a long, long history of Euro-scepticism, opposing for instance  the Maastricht Treaty that brought the modern EU into being in the early 1990s, and voting himself to leave the EU in the UK's previous referendum in 1975. He has had to campaign for a 'Remain' vote this time, or risk all hell breaking lose in his Parliamentary party - as well as an enormous row with the members who back him with such fervour, but also think that Britain should stay in the EU. But he seems to have decided to say almost nothing about it, beyond grumbling about the lack of a 'social Europe' and releasing a couple of videos. Plenty of commentators think that he is the 'Out' campaign's secret weapon. There can be no route to a 'Remain' victory that does not go through Labour voters, and a huge slice of the electorate appear to have no idea at all where the party stands on Europe. That's a massive problem for the pro-EU campaign, and perhaps a decisive one.

Michael Gove backs Brexit, 20 February 2016. Michael Gove's opposition to the EU is a long-standing matter of publicly-stated principle. It is in a different order to Mr Johnson's absurd opportunism. The Justice Secretary is merely stating what he has always thought. But what his essay in favour of Brexit did was open the floodgates to Conservative opposition to the Prime Minister's stance on renegotiation. He made opposition credible and intellectually at least respectable, expanding its base from the far right of his party and outwards from relatively unknown or unpopular figures such as the (now ex-) Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith and Priti Patel, a Minister from the same Department. He gave Boris cover to lope along behind him. He allowed an alternative government, headed by Mr Johnson and with Mr Gove as Chancellor, to spring rather blearily into being. But most of all, he shattered the illusion that the Conservative Party and the Government were mostly united, with perhaps a few exceptions around the edges - thus giving Conservative voters every justification for defecting from their normal loyalty to the Prime Minister. Of all the moments listed here, this was one of the most decisive.

George Osborne's Budget from Hell, 16 March 2016. What was he thinking? How could he have got it all so wrong? When he could and should have announced the most boring Budget in history, tinkering a bit here and there to clear the decks for the referendum campaign, Mr Osborne chose to reduce Personal Independence Payments for disabled welfare recipients while cutting Capital Gains Tax and raising personal income tax thresholds for better-off Britons. It was a bone-headed decision, entirely at odds with the Prime Minister's rhetoric about helping poorer citizens that he had unveiled at the 2015 Conservative Party Conference. Voters' confidence in the Government, already falling as the shine came off their re-election and economic growth seemed to slow, went into free fall. Labour are in such a state that they won't benefit much: but Brexiteers will. The Prime Minister's own credibility is now in deep danger, as the Government loses momentum and struggles over the possible closure of the Tata steel plant in South Wales and the release of a massive batch of offshore tax-avoidance details from Panama: he runs the risk of retreating in public esteem in the same manner as Mr Brown in 2007, just at the moment when he needs to convince the public of his case for staying in the EU. The whole picture allows opportunistic Brexiteers to lay into the government overall, over anything and everything - saying, for instance, that they'll 'stand up' to China, or bring in steel tariffs and subsidies (even though they won't).

There they are: the ten days that have put Britain near the European exit door. Each one avoidable, each one fightable: if the friends of the European ideal, and of Britain's better interests and angels, had been on their guard and mettle. They weren't. They rarely are. So Britain is now spinning dangerously into the unknown, flirting with a strategic transformation that will end up who knows where, and who knows why.

Editorial note: this blogpost was originally published under the title 'Eight days that put Britain near the Brexit'. It has since been edited to include two more that spring to mind - the election of Jeremy Corbyn and the announcement that Michael Gove would back leaving the EU.

Reasons to stay in the European Union, #1: you can't have your cake and eat it

So it's time, now, to turn to the question that will dominate British public life for the next twelve weeks or so: should this country leave the European Union?

The answer is simple: no. And for the next three months we're going to be looking, semi-regularly, at the reasons why that is such a bad idea. A catastrophic idea, in fact - a concept so harmful and so fallacious that it amounts to voting to chop off your own arm. With a spoon.

The first, and perhaps most important, reason is this: you can't have your cake and eat it. Now, we know that the utter fraud and mendacious self-publicist that is 'Boris Johnson' has said that you can even while remaining in the EU, and he was certainly in favour of just that having and eating until a few weeks ago. But you can't if you leave. You can't. What do mean by this? Again, simple: you can't have all the advantages of being in the EU without being a member. You can't be in the Single Market without paying for it, voting for it, fighting for it, agreeing to its rules, accepting its disciplines. You might just as well pitch up at a party empty-handed, drink all the booze, refuse to make a contribution, and then cut up rough about being asked to leave. Never. Going. To. Happen.

We know this, because what the British have always wanted is a free trade area without a Common External Tariff (we'll get to the technicalities in a minute) - a 'hard core' of the EU's full members, surrounded by a 'soft' outer core of associates who are perhaps not so keen on the Ever Closer Union so memorably evoked by the EU's founding treaties. That's why we've been down all these byways so many times before. That's why UK Ministers tried to build a wide free trade area around the emergent EEC in 1956-59, in the UK's so-called 'Plan G' that eventually turned into the European Free Trade Area (EFTA). The reaction? France and West Germany blocked the idea, for the exact reason that Britain will never get Single Market access from the outside: that it would punch a massive hole in the Single Market's protective tax-and-duty rules on behalf of a outward-looking and open trading nation, thus negating the whole point of building a Single Market in the first place. If everything that Britain bought and sold in the world could then just pour in and out of the EU itself, the very idea of a Single Market operating under one set of rules would turn to dust.

Let's turn to theory. A Single Market is not just a free trade area. It is a market of rules - rules on (say) product safety and testing, labeling, the language of commercial guidance and rules, on hiring and firing, outsourcing and contracting, financial transfers and the treatment of agricultural livestock, vehicle emissions and energy use... One could go on forever, which is why many EU rules do seem to. The UK has until now accepted these, especially in the Single European Act that Mrs Thatcher accepted in 1986, because it is by far and away the power that gets the most out of all this. Because it exports a great deal of services, and partly people (including expert people), the large corpus of already-existing European rules vastly reduce the non-tariff barriers to trade that could be raised to UK goods if we were not in the EU.

And don't give us all that stuff about World Trade Organisation rules forbidding new tariffs. They don't apply to services, for a start - a relatively small (but still very important) part of our export sector. Don't raise with us all that nonsense about how the EU relies on the UK as its biggest market and will have to do a really good deal with us if we do leave. Yes, the UK is its biggest single market, but in an entirely asymmetric manner: put simply, the share of UK trade with the remaining EU countries taken individually is far, far higher than theirs with the UK. Any trade deal with the EU if we left, and did not then just apply to semi-remain on an EFTA-style basis, would be a tough, tough old slog for just this reason. It's clear: we need them much more than they need us. French farmers and Frankfurt bankers would have absolutely no incentive to help us: indeed, as their lowest-cost and most skilful competitors, Britain's employers would risk being shut out of the markets that matter the most. All that guff that Boris began his Brexit 'campaign' with, about how we could emulate Canada and do our own deal with Europe? He's just dropped it all, having a little bit of a giggle about it on the way, because it would take many years (like Canada's deal) and - again - wouldn't cover services. Our experience in the late 1950s, which prompted the UK after all to try to enter the then-EEC, shows us that a total go-it-alone is exactly where this would land us: on the outside looking in. What a truly distasteful fake he really is.

By far the most likely outcome of a Brexit would be Britain continuing as a member of the European Economic Area - EFTA's successor organisation. If we left entirely and tried to negotiate a free trade deal, after the two years it would take to expel the UK under Article 50 of the Nice Treaty we'd face many years trying to bargain down the four per cent or so tariffs we might expect on our physical manufactured goods, let alone all those non-tariff barriers to trade that could go up: all a very difficult ask given that defence of the Common External Tariff and the Single Market is the sine qua non of 'Europe' existing at all. Nor should anyone be confident that, given the complexities, Whitehall and Westminster would even be capable of coming out - especially as they struggled with the Prime Minister's likely resignation, a new-old government, a likely sharp recession, a possible snap General Election and the build-up to a second Scottish independence referendum.

So we'd almost certainly be left going for the deal Norway has, in which they have to accept the majority of EU rules and have to pay over 80% of the requisite budget contributions, but have absolutely no say whatsoever over those rules. Or the Swiss deal, which sees them paying about 40% per person of what the UK pays in, but doesn't give them any services access to the Single Market at all. Oh, and it would still very likely involve the free movement of EU citizens to work and live in the UK: Norway, for instance, is even an 'associated' member of the Schengen free movement area (as the UK is not, and will never have to be - unless we open up everything to yet another 'renegotiation'). Anyone here want to pay billions to have no seat at the table, and have a load of rules that are against the UK's interests imposed on us? No? Thought not. Even on this least disruptive and best-case scenario, the London School of Economics' Centre for Economic Performance reckons that the effects of trade diversion would be such that every single household in the land would be £850 a year worse off in the early years of a Brexit.

So: vote for Brexit, if you wish. But you will be choosing to make everyone in the UK significantly poorer, with less say over our economic future than we have now. You will be voting for not having your cake, and not being able to eat it. That's not a prospectus we can back. Neither should you.

What on earth is happening to John McDonnell?

Politics is dizzying sometimes. Let's leave aside for a moment the Great Implosion of Chancellor George Osborne's latest Budget, which would be darkly funny if it were not so serious. We'll get to that. Let's look across the aisle to those who are opposing him. No sooner have you got used to the fact that a man who cites Lenin and Trotsky as his greatest inspirations is actually the Shadow Chancellor - is actually the Shadow Chancellor! - than he surprises you with a load of counter-intuitive statements. John McDonnell's speech on Labour's 'new' fiscal rules (above) looks, on the surface, like just such a moment: the exact second when the penny dropped, with Labour MPs no less than everyone else, that their new masters were rather like the old ones. Only with berets and megaphones.

This because Mr McDonnell's speech, on the surface, appeared to say that Labour was moving back to Gordon Brown's policies, of only borrowing to spend on capital infrastructure projects, and even to the Coalition's budget target of achieving the current spending balance involved in such a pledge over the Parliament. One was tempted to ask: what on earth was all the fuss about? All that stuff about 'austerity lite', 'Red Tories', 'taking the party back to its roots', even 'principle before power'? All just junked - for what? To convince swing voters and the City? We genuinely and deeply doubt that they will be impressed by Mr McDonnell, whatever he says, but it's incumbent on us to take a proper look at all this. Because, beneath the surface, there may well be interesting things going on here.

Start with this: some of the other parts of Labour's rules announced by Mr McDonnell are far superior to the 'fiscal mandate' that the present Chancellor, George Osborne, has set himself. Mr Osborne has boxed himself into reducing the deficit's share of GDP every single year, as well as running an absolute surplus (including capital) by 2019/20. Sorry, but these are utterly inflexible and unrealistic rules that don't bear any relation to the facts as they are. The United Kingdom is an open, liberal, service-orientated economy that is highly susceptible to changes in the world economy. Lay down rules as rigid as this, and eventually you're going to get a shock when things change very quickly. Then you'll have to break all your rules, gradually degrading the good name of HM Treasury and Her Majesty's Government as you do so. 

Last week's Budget saw Chancellor Osborne many billions of pounds down even on where he was last November, having to make this up with some more tax rises and spending cuts. Many of the tax rises' yields looked optimistic indeed; the budgetary path went back to looking like a completely unrealistic hockey stick, akin to the rhetorical ingenuity the Treasury demonstrated before Autumn Statement windfalls seemed to solve a lot of their problems at the back end of 2015: the overall budget goes zooming on up into surplus at the end of the Parliament. It's not going to happen. It won't happen. He'll just defer the whole thing. Again. It's an example of where you get to if you write a load of rules that are just far, far too tight for reality. 

And that's where Labour come in, saying that the deficit doesn't have to fall every year, only by the end of the Parliament, and that the zero point isn't all spending, but day-to-day outlays. It's a sensible, pragmatic, workaday solution to many of our problems, and it's got a longstanding and impeccable Keynesian rationale behind it. As the world economy turns down, Mr Osborne is taking more demand out of the system. That never ends well. It unites Leader of the Opposition and Shadow Chancellor in a way that Ed Miliband and Ed Balls were never at one during the last Parliament. It will allow Labour in power (stop sniggering at the back there) to spend many billions more on investment, at a time of historically low interest rates, in a country that is crying out for better transport, more homes and new energy sources. It's a winner.

There is, alas, a flaw. And it's this: no-one will ever believe a single word Mr McDonnell ever says about policy. Not just because he is extremely selective in what he chooses to remember from history (a theme we will return to in subsequent blogs), though that's an important point. Nor is the main problem his absurd and bathetic wielding of the Little Red Book in the Chamber of the House of Commons, damaging as that was. That was just a symbol of his wider problem. But because it is now an ingrained and unimpeachable truth in the public imagination that Labour in power spent too much, borrowed too much and wasted too much. All quite untrue, of course: but any efforts to convince electors to the contrary were lost long ago, in the summer of 2010. There's no point raking back over the coals. 

Voters think, instinctively, that positives must beget positives: in this instance, that 'paying back the debt' must lead to growth. Not necessarily true when you're leaning into a macroeconomic headwind, but there you are. If they're to do anything about this, Labour probably has to wait until the Conservatives' own reputation for economic competence is shredded, as during the 1992 European Exchange Rate Mechanism debacle; just telling voters that they will spend and borrow more, however correct, is unlikely to get them very far. 

The interesting-but-academic underpinning of some of Mr McDonnell's more speculative punts makes this problem worse. The actual text of his speech is slightly opaque on many of the more interesting theoretical and administrative elements involved, but we've been briefed that he will declare himself free of these rules if the Bank of England declares that it would cut interest rates to deal with weak growth, but cannot go further given how low they are already. This instead of waiting for growth to fall below one per cent, as in Mr Osborne's plans. At the moment, Mr McDonnell's trigger for his rules' suspension would indeed likely come before Mr Osborne's, given how low rates are: but if rates do rise at some point in this Parliament and the next (some way away yet), he may find that his rule is much more 'iron' and restrictive than those adopted by the Conservatives. Not only that, but Labour's 2015 Manifesto, so derided by Mr McDonnell's Twitter army of clicktivists for its 'Tory' leanings, was much less disciplined about public spending, only announcing there would get to a surplus on the current budget 'as soon as possible'.

The doorstep-unfriendly ideas in the background are another drawback. One of Mr McDonnell's representatives on earth, the economics journalist Paul Mason, has long been a great defender of Labour's new radical leaders. In recent times some of his writings seem to have become fantastically detached from reality altogether. But in defence of this particular speech, and on a subject where he does wield some expertise, he has summoned up some frankly hard-to-credit (or understand) rhetoric about times when 'fiscal and monetary policy become fused'. Sorry, but I thought that the Treasury had always understood that the two bleed into one another, and there are piles of files in the National Archives going back to the first creation of national accounts in the 1940s, through the Radcliffe Commission on the Working of the Monetary System and then on to the secondary banking crisis of the 1970s that prove just that. Mason also argues that, if Labour's extra investment raises the country's measured growth rate via tweaks to our methodology, apparently through the Keynesian multiplier effect rather than just increased efficiency, that will give the Chancellor more to spend on the current side. True: but given the rather small amount of government infrastructure spending when measured against the whole economy, not to say its complex and slow-to-mobilise nature, we doubt that'll make much difference in the near term and before the end of a future 2020-25 Parliament.

Dear Corbynites: it seems that you've been had, and for little productive reason. Because Mr McDonnell has spent a lifetime saying one thing, and now he says quite another (with some fiddly economics ornaments attached). The government and the Chancellor are very unpopular: only 21% of voters think that Mr Osborne would make 'the best Chancellor'. The Budget numbers look even worse than that. But the number for Mr McDonnell? A pitiful 11%. Eleven. Per. Cent.

The reason that politicians now pre-announce rules and regulations is that not many people trust them. 'Fiscal locks', along with all the other tiresome language of precommitment, are designed to stop politicians reneging on their promises. The obfuscatory nature of the theories that Mr McDonnell evokes but does not name, the press conference questions that he invites but will not take, and the sheer fact that he is after all John McDonnell makes these new rules an exercise in futility. That's a pity, because there's something that's at one and the same time sensible and intriguing trying to get out here. It's failing.

A hundred years of Harold Wilson

Last Friday was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Harold Wilson (above), Britain's Labour Prime Minister between 1964 and 1970, and then again between 1974 and 1976. Such a date provides us with an opportunity to take stock, to look back and to ask: what did Wilson's Labour achieve, how did it do it, and what might we learn from Mr Wilson today?

The first thing to say is that his stock has been rising for two decades, ever since the 1992 publication of Ben Pimlott's magisterial and empathetic biography of the four-times Labour election winner. By taking a much more detailed look at his life and premierships, Pimlott was able to show that there was a consistent thread running through his life: holding the Labour Party together, and trying to hold the country together, often in tough times. Those are not low, indecent or pragmatic aims: they are at the heart of what it means to be a party leader in an adversarial system, and to try to get things done in a country that is often extremely conservative (with a small 'c'). If you have no tactical nous, no strategy to rout the other side, no commitment to the organisation and structures of your political tribe, what are you doing in politics in the first place?

But Harold's rising reputation owes more to just different ways of seeing the man. An important 1991 essay in the London Review of Books, by Oxford historian Ross McKibbin, gives us rather more perspective on the question. McKibbin here put forward two intertwined arguments that are often lost amidst the largely inaccurate folk memory of 'industrial chaos' and 'Winter of Discontent' with which even we professional historians cannot help conceptualising the end of the 1970s. The first point is that subsequent governments have helped to trash Britain's industrial base, balanced growth among her regions and nations, investment, training, overall social harmony and indeed the UK's good name in the world, But the more significant fact presented by McKibbin is that Britain's economy did pretty well in this period. Her productivity gains and her overall economic growth rate reached peaks in the 1960s that they were never to touch again; indeed, that last indicator in particular has looked pretty weak from almost exactly the day on which Harold left office.

So the last few years have burnished Harold's reputation. There were a number of reasons why his name fell so far into disrepute, so quickly, but most of them have inevitably faded with time, leaving a more substantial legislative and intellectual record than was clear during the 1960s and 1970s. By nature he sought a middle way, and he was as boxed in as any other leader. He refused to help the Americans in their ruinous war in Vietnam, despite a great deal of pressure being put on him to do so late in 1964; but he needed American financial support to support a very vulnerable pound. So he refrained from criticising US policy until 1966. But in the end his government was forced off the fixed dollar parity of sterling it had sworn to defend anyway, and had to renounce the effective end of Britain's worldwide defence and security policy anyway. So radical policies that would have been seen as enormously dangerous and Left-wing in 1964, and would have seen Harold lionised among the intelligentsia and on campuses across the land, were brought in through necessity anyway. It Harold Wilson's bad luck that he tried to compromise between traditional policies and more radical departures, and often ended up garnering popularity from supporters of neither.

All of it took a big toll on a man who thought it his duty to see much of the key paperwork himself. He ended up looking exhausted, quitting long before he had to and basically just saying 'I've had enough'. He used more diplomatic words, to the effect that he didn't want to rule out solutions he may have rejected in previous situations, when things may have been different. But that's what he meant.

Mr Wilson was often portrayed as a bit of a trickster, a twister, a tactician to whom the game was everything, and the principles of socialism perhaps much less. Of course, in these present days when everyone to the Right of Trotsky is apparently a 'Red Tory', he looks to many on the Left as if he was just another managerialist technocrat, bent on preserving capitalism by throwing a few bones to Britain's reformist but ultimately timid liberals. This is certainly the line that many took at the time, including that great campaigning Left-wing journalist Paul Foot. And then there were the endless compromises, inevitable in any long career of course, but apparently particularly so in Harold's. He was the Left-winger who resigned with Aneurin Bevan over National Health Service prescription charges, who then drifted to the Right when it seemed to suit him in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Here was the man who originally ran on a platform that was very sceptical about Britain's nuclear weapons, who then made sure that she kept them; here was the politician who challenged his own leader (Hugh Gaitskell) in 1960, ostensibly to defend the rights of Labour's Conference, but in the minds of many of his colleagues to put his own name up in lights. One could go on.

We're tempted to say: so what? Not only is it necessary and proper to change, tack, zig-zag and obfuscate in the face of change, but it may in fact be a moral endeavour to take those choices on one's self as the leader, rather than engaging in the eternal (but barren) purity of Opposition. Deciding is better than posing: governing more a matter of conscience than refusing to get one's own hands dirty on behalf of other people. Who would it serve to plough on regardless, unchanging, uncomprehending, unyielding? Certainly not Labour voters, who need a Labour government most of all - and who always preserved rather more affection for the man from Huddersfield than many of his more immediate colleagues.

Whose principles do not change over nearly four decades in public life, in any case? The challenges facing the Attlee administration, in which Mr Wilson served as President of the Board of Trade, were nothing like those at the end of his long time in Whitehall and Westminster: the decontrols he brought forward in the late 1940s, as the economy shifted from wartime rationing towards production for peace, might be just as justified as those building and land controls he brought in during the late 1960s, a time of incipient inflation and speculation. Harold was prepared to get up every day, roll up his sleeves and wrestle in the mud to push back evil by degrees - week after week, month after month, year after year winning political and ideological ground from which he could make the world a little bit more fair, more just and more equal. Few could have battled harder towards those ends.

What was in fact most remarkable about Harold Wilson was his sheer political virtuosity, the skill of a man who could be a Harold for any hour, a Mr Wilson for any occasion. There was Doctor Wilson, the family's trusted general practitioner; Uncle Harold, the friendly confidante; Inspiring Harold, calling us to embrace the 'white heat of the technological revolution'; Negotiator Harold, who thought that he could talk anyone round to anything (which, alas, in Northern Ireland he could not); Party Rulebook Harold, who thought and fought his way through Labour Conference time after time to keep the party headed towards power; and finally Gannex mac-and-pipe Harold, a man so thoroughly normal, so workaday, so through-and-through, well, British, that you identified with him, you liked him, you admired him and you would vote for him. Labour was lucky to have him. So was Britain - a land amassed with political unreason, now, but then led by an ex-academic who believed in reasoning, cajoling, thinking, speaking, convincing, befriending, and who was without the messianic fervour that we are now supposed to want from our aspiring Prime Ministers. Well, the Wilson version was better.

In the end, Harold knew which way the wind was blowing. He was ahead of his time. He knew that telecommunications and computerisation were about to reforge the world of work. He understood that the trade unions would have to brought within the frame of the law, even if his In Place of Strife proposals hit the buffers of trade union conservatism in the late 1960s. He saw the danger of social disintegration and inequality in an age of inflation. He moved to recognise, seize on and reshape all those trends, through a new Ministry of Technology, via new arbitration arrangements and productivity agreements, by increasing pensions and boosting low wages in his social contract with the unions. Many of these initiatives were in the end found wanting. But the alternative? Just giving up on comprehensive solutions, abandoning any attempt to square the circles of globalisation, price rises, labour discontent and efficiency? Just sweeping away many of the industries Mr Wilson was labouring to save as a 'solution' that basically any old Chancellor could have settled for? That didn't always work out very well in the 1980s, either.

Harold Wilson passed the first legislation to outlaw racial discrimination. He passed equal pay for women. He vastly increased the education budget, so that for the first time it overtook defence spending. There were massive pushes on council housing, road building, new universities. There was the Open University, Harold's own pet project and a life-changing higher education revolution for those who wanted to better themselves. The iniquitous 11+ exam that condemned so many to the inferior education of the Secondary Modern schools was abolished. The Wilson years saw the shadow of the death penalty lifted, and abortion law reformed. He set up the Department of the Environment and the standing Royal Commission on the Environment, recognising public concern and pressing need on that front. He kept the UK out of the war in Vietnam. He made the second and near-decisive push towards Europe, a bid never taken off the table, and then his negotiating skills and cunning kept us in when the Labour Left might have dragged us out. Pensions rose. Wages rose. Productivity rose; unemployment remained fairly low, by subsequent standards; growth stayed strong.

All of which means one thing: we owe Mr Wilson. We owe him a lot. Happy birthday, Harold.

So just how left wing are Labour's members?

All the recent stories about Labour's new and expanded membership would have you believe that many Labourites are a load of far left entryists bent, at all costs, on shoving their party decisively away from the centre ground of politics - and towards widespread renationalisation, pacifism, neutralism and high taxes. If you listened to some people, the party is at risk of being taken over by highly organised extremists from the grassroots movement Momentum.

Well, allow us to be a bit sceptical for a moment, but that's completely unproven. Sure, many of them have voted for a very left-wing leader in the shape of Jeremy Corbyn (whose real views on a lots of issues would appall many of those who back him, were his straightforward and uncluttered opposition to the present government's policies of austerity not seen to trump any other considerations at the moment). And no doubt they are a special breed overall - for who really joins political parties in the first place? The recent flowering of passionate activism around Mr Corbyn is undeniable, if apparently limited to people who leant towards a socialistic outlook in the first place. He can bring out huge crowds on dark March evenings. He can make people break down in tears as they describe how he's their only hope to remake society on truly fair and equitable grounds. All the while sinking further and further in every opinion poll, to levels of favourability (or, let's face it, unfavourability) among the general public last seen when Michael Foot led the Labour Party. It's not an unusual dichotomy, though it is more than usually well developed in this case: citizens likely to join political parties - and still more those likely to organise and campaign on behalf of their favoured political grouping - are by definition very different from the background population.

But what we need here are comparators - ways of seeing Labour members' views in context and as against other views. Luckily, we have a lot of data on this - in part because we have a recent in-depth poll of Labour members and supporters commissioned by Ian Warren, recently one of Labour's data gurus but now busy acting as a sort of independent source of polling wisdom, helping all of us other researchers out with very kind data dumps covering British politics. And we also have previous academic studies of what Labour members used to think in the early 1990s and 2000s, in the shape of two excellent academic tomes on just this subject: Patrick Seyd and Paul Whiteley's Labour's Grass Roots: The Politics of Party Membership (1992), which surveyed members in 1989-90, and the same authors' New Labour's Grassroots: The Transformation of the Labour Party Membership (2002), which looked again at Labour supporters in 1997 and 1999. We can use the evidence there as a cross-check against what we see now - and compare Labour people's views then and now.

Let's have a look at some of that evidence from the Corbyn party. 68% don't agree with renewing the Trident nuclear weapons system (opens as PDF), while in the late 1990s that figure was 'only' 44% (at that point 45% of Labour's members agreed with keeping Trident, so the party was pretty evenly split). But in the 1990 data we can see that 72% of Labour people thought that 'Britain should have nothing to do with nuclear weapons' - a very, very similar number to that we see now, and in fact as you can see even a little bit lower. So on this measure, Labour have really just gone back to the relatively unilateralist views of the last days of Neil Kinnock as leader (above), at a point when he had only recently abandoned his own commitment to scrapping Britain's nuclear forces.

Take another example - the restrictive trade union laws that the Conservatives introduced while in office during the 1980s, and which New Labour in power only in part repealed. Labour members are way out of line with public opinion on this one, as you can see from that link above: 64% of them think that the trade unions should have more influence on British national life than they do today, as against 'only' 41% of Labour voters, and a much smaller 23% of all British voters. But when we look back at the situation in 1997, at the height of New Labour's electoral success, and on a rather different question, 74% of Labour members thought that there should be no more anti-trade union laws: a much lower 49% of voters thought the same. That's a narrower gap between the people and Labour supporters, but the gulf was already there. 74% of Labour's 1990 members disagreed with the proposition that 'it is better for Britain when trade unions have little power'. In 1999 that number was exactly the same - confirmation, albeit on a different question, that Labour people were always (as one would expect) much more sympathetic to the trade unions than most other people in the country.

Or how about this one? Only 23% of Labour's 2016 members and supporters agree with the statement that 'it is possible to achieve better public services such as health, education and the police by running them more efficiently, without spending more on them'. Again, they're way of out line with the voters - 57% of whom are happy to concur with this proposition. But if we scroll back to 1990, though again utilising a different question, 73% of that sample disagreed with cutting public spending, a figure that had admittedly dropped to 65% by 1997. We're not convinced that the more recent numbers represent a convulsion. The general public may have shifted rightwards a tiny bit on some issues, and Labour has certainly moved left since most of its members voted for David Miliband as leader in 2010. However, some more details found in Mr Warren's polling (opens as PDF) - that Mr Corbyn would be much less popular if he started to lose elections, and that his left-wing ally John McDonnell does not enjoy the same level of support - should give us pause before we conceptualise Labour as already that new ally of Syriza, Podemos and Die Linke that some around the leader want to build. 

This stuff matters. Labour members are very left-wing compared with the general public, on a whole host of issues. These numbers from YouGov and Ian Warren display that more than clearly. But actually, in some ways they're not as far away from the general public as many Conservative members - given their level of concern for the standard maintained by what's left of the welfare state, for instance, or their lack of obsession over the minutiae of the powers and competencies enjoyed by the European Union. 70 per cent of the Conservative Party's members have a positive view of Michael Gove - a figure way, way above that of the general public, as even Mr Gove himself would be the first to admit. They're not like your typical Briton. We knew that. What matters is the extent of their change, and the scale of their differences with the average voter.

Labour members are quite a lot more left-wing than they were in the 1990s. That should come as little surprise, actually, because there's little controversy over the fact that many of the incomers are actually older returning members - 'retreads', in Peter Mandelson's rather sniffy and unwise description of them - who are now coming back after a decade or two of sitting on their hands, furious over Labour's lack of socialist commitment, its multilateralism, its turn away from a planned economy, or perhaps the second Iraq War. But when we quantify that, using our history? They're perhaps not a million miles away from where they started on this great circular march, all those years ago in the late 1980s. Which tells us one more thing: they can walk themselves back towards the centre ground. And one day, they will.

Are the big parties coming to pieces?

Tories at war. Labour at war. Whichever way you look, our traditional parties are in trouble. The Conservatives are caught up in their own internecine struggle over Europe, something they seem to have been firing at each other about for about the past thousand years. No doubt they'll be warring over subsidiarity and sovereignty as the sun boils and burns up the solar system. Labour? Well, the People's Party are caught up in what looks to be a long-running war between the party's left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, the increasingly left-wing leadership, and party activists, staffers and MPs (most of whom frankly regard their titular leader as something between a bad joke and a terrible nightmare).

All of which means that people are asking whether our old parties are no longer fit for purpose. Whether they are going to break up, in the end, splintering into many, many pieces under the stress of social and ideological change. And you can see why. There's lots of evidence for it. Lots of Conservative MPs have been going around this weekend apparently threatening their leader, David Cameron (above), with a coup whatever the result of our forthcoming referendum on membership of the European Union. One of his best friends in politics, Justice Secretary Michael Gove, has apparently knifed him in the back - and by so doing, encouraged others to do so. The Prime Minister has responded in kind, lashing out with barbed words and scarcely-veiled taunts at London Mayor Boris Johnson in the Commons. Rather effectively, it has to be said, reducing that shadow of a fake of a fraud of a ghost of a politician to just folding his arms and looking crestfallen. But it's not a good look for any party, really, and it shows just how much binary constitutional issues - rather than social and economic questions that can be compromised on, elided and parsed all you want - really split parties.

Labour's ongoing crisis is probably more deep-seated. While we've been declining to chronicle the party's decline into irrelevance, it has been subject to a whole load of allegations about far left anti-seminitism in (for instance) the Oxford University Labour Club, had a Young Labour Conference descend into red-on-red bitterness and farce (followed by demands for a recount and yet another rash of bullying allegations), seen the Shadow Chancellor muse about abolishing the unit that weeds out entryism and extremism, and watched Mr Corbyn march against his own party's policy on nuclear weapons - on the same day that Labour was trying to mount a big campaigning push to argue that we should stay in the European Union. The party is entirely dysfunctional. It is more of a soap opera than a functioning political movement that seeks to govern. It is so far behind in the polls that it would need the Hubble Space Telescope to see any actual power.

Let's face it: neither party is in great shape. So you're inevitably seeing commentators muse about the deeper sociological roots of their travails. The gradual tides of social change are probably making the fixed markers of class ever less relevant in Britain today, undermining Labour's sense of identity where challenged for instance by the United Kingdom Independence Party, but also breaking up the broadly 'respectable' and bourgeois sense of togetherness that held the Conservatives together (within and around the Church of England, for instance) for so long. The progress of what social scientists term 'glocalization' is also helping to undermine state narratives at the level of the United Kingdom taken as a whole. Each nation and region that makes up the UK seems to be doing its own thing, disintegrating the idea of a 'national' debate and swingometer. The Scottish National Party, in particular, does seem to have dealt a death-blow to Labour's dominance of the Scottish political landscape (which, given how long they took that country for granted, may be no bad thing in and of itself), while Labour actually seems to be doing pretty well in London - and, to be honest, London alone. National newspapers' dominance of the intellectual scene seems to have been on the wane for a long, long time, breaking up every General Election into six hundred skirmishes on social media rather than a single daily press conference pitted one against the other.

But will the Conservatives and Labour really struggle, buckle and break up? It seems unlikely, for three or four reasons. But the biggest one is that we've been here before, in both cases. The Conservatives defenestrated a powerful sitting Prime Minister over Europe in 1990, pushing Mrs Thatcher out in a nasty and contested coup that has resonated down the political ages - and done them immense damage, all the while. Labour spent most of the early 1980s fighting itself in a battle that (so far) makes today's hand-to-hand combat look like a bit of an echo rather than a shout. Momentum and other Corbynite movements are many things, including nastily and messily divided among themselves, but they do not at the moment particularly resemble the 1980s Militant Tendency: a single, organised, hidden party of sworn adherents trying to blow up the Labour Party and replace it with a Trotskyite sect with more voters than the comrades would then have known what to do with. Some of the rhetoric is the same, sure, but most Labour members who voted for Mr Corbyn are not entryists or hard left activists: they just wanted a clearer and more consistent opposition to economic austerity. These are the soft left - the persuadables - and eventually they will coalesce around a more presentable standard-bearer: a Neil Kinnock for our times, you might say. Labour might in the end have to conduct a proper, in-your-face, let's-be-having-you civil war. But things are still relatively genteel. So far.

Most of this has all happened before. And, on both occasions when it did, the two dominant players picked themselves up and then just got on with existing, with being - the great standing facts on the political battlefield. Inertia is usually more powerful than change. That looks the most likely outcome this time, too.

Where would all the dissident Conservatives and Labour people have to go, in any case? UKIP would be the natural home for furious Conservative refuseniks if Mr Cameron does secure a 'Remain' vote in June, but the purple 'people's army' are giving off the unmistakable smell of crankdom and decline as their party, too, wars with itself at the top. And will Labour centrists really break off and try to do a deal with the Liberal Democrats? No, probably not. Our first past the post electoral system should stop anyone in their tracks before they thinking about setting up a new political party - a Social Democratic Party Mark II - and it seems increasingly clear that the Liberal Democrats' parliamentary representation may be cut to as low as just two or three MPs after 2020 (we should note in this respect that they are currently struggling to hold on to any representation at all in the Welsh Assembly). Boundary reforms, less publicity, a sheer paucity of representative critical mass and the eminently targetable nature of most of their parliamentary majorities says one thing: there's no point Labour's self-styled 'moderates' breaking off to join up with them.

We've been musing a lot really about the role of structure and agency in political history. Here, again, there's likely to be more agency - more deciding consciously to stick together and try to defy some of these so-called big battalions of social change - then there is going to be the structural transformation of our politics (and the inevitable decline of the 'big two') at the hands of economic post-modernism and the rise of nationalist, regionalist and localist politics. Those forces are definitely in play, but will they really blow up the Conservatives and Labour? Reader, we doubt it.

So the answer to the question in our header is probably this: no, the big parties are not about to come apart. They are under immense pressure, from inside as well as outside, but they are almost certainly going to hold together. That conclusion might not last forever, but it will probably last us for this Parliament. Accept no big old talk to the contrary.