Dear Subscribers,
As painful as it may be, to watch the Prime Minister’s performances at PMQs is to get a rough sense of how he is ruling the country. Irascible, evasive and righteous, mixed with a mindless cliché here and there, are about the measure of it. Thus, while Starmer’s agnosticism towards Iran war has public support, his approach has been marred by inaction.
Indeed, the UK’s military capabilities have been whittled down over the years to the point at which Healey doesn’t know how many of the Navy’s frigates and destroyers are fit to fight, and Starmer refuses to say how much defence spending will need to be raised. Adding insult to injury, Britain has been forced to borrow a German frigate in place of HMS Dragon which was going to be sent to Cyprus.
On top of this, the Iran war is set to harm UK economy, deepening the cost-of-living crisis. Growth forecasts have been revised down to 0.7pc and inflation up to 4pc by the OECD for the year. Moreover, the FT reports that manufacturers are facing the steepest rise in input costs since 2022.
Meanwhile, the government continues to be dogged by the Mandelson crisis. This week it has come to light that Morgan McSweeney had his work phone stolen in London last October and was never retrieved. It was supposed to have contained McSweeney’s correspondence with Mandelson. Suspicion of all this has been dismissed by Starmer as ‘far-fetched’.
Following Reeves’s Mais lecture a couple of weeks ago, the prospect of an EU reset has become an ever more tantalising prospect for Remainers. In The Times, Josh Glancy expresses this view optimistically: ‘For the pro-EU folk among us – which is, in fact, most of the country at this point – this is welcome mood music.’ Glancy believes the government should ‘act now and lock in some realignment before the grubby populists get their hands on the tiller.’ ‘Realignment’ is, of course, a rhetorical trick. Even if we are not formally part of the EU, Brexit is nonetheless being reversed with intent.
Blog
Let’s turn a disaster into an opportunity by Adrian Hill
The drone attack on Cyprus exposed the parlous state of the Royal Navy and its sister services. We’re long past time for Action this Day. Not all the news is bad. Global warming’s impact on the Arctic brings huge opportunities for our sea trade and defence. But we need to act, not freeze.
Media
Robert Tombs for the Telegraph: Free trade did not make Britain great: Tories must their unsuitable entanglement with it
Wolfgang Munchau for UnHerd: Trump’s war is Europe’s problem
Thomas Munson for The Spectator: Thucydides has a troubling lesson about why countries go to war
Key Points
Starmer and Europe: any port in a storm
There have been so many instances of this government flailing and u-turning that it is needless to illustrate what is already understood. But of the few things which were thought to have been going well (or less dreadfully) were foreign affairs. Then Iran happened, and Starmer stumbled.
Starmer’s foreign policy had mostly continued along the tracks of previous Tory administrations, especially on Ukraine. There have been, nonetheless, deviations. One would be Jonathan Powell’s cooling of relations with China. But another – the focus here – is concerned with Europe.
To understand the government’s attitude towards Europe is to recognise that it is has become tied to the government’s formulation of policymaking more broadly. It is in the interest of both Reeves and Miliband to promote ‘growth’ and Net Zero through collaboration with Europe. And the awkwardness and discomfort Starmer feels towards Trump has seen him lean on the shoulders of Macron in foreign affairs – to say nothing of the humiliating military bailouts to aid Britain’s response to the Iran war.
Indeed, alignment to Europe has become a central organising principle for policymaking, domestic and foreign. For a government without any clear direction, European alignment has emerged as one of the last positive courses of action available. And like any government struggling for survival, it will take any port in a storm.
Should we take Ed Miliband seriously?
The New Statesman published an idealising profile of the Minister for Energy, Security and Net Zero. It presents him as the only Cabinet minister that acts with a sense of mission (Net Zero). It is at pains to distance Miliband from the centrism of Starmer. It does so by placing him as an intellectual successor to his father, Ralph Miliband, a sociologist from the post-war era. It paints a portrait of Ed Miliband as a thinking socialist with a serious understanding of the world’s woes and with ideas to solve them – thus, ‘A Certain Idea of Ed Miliband’ runs the title. The New Statesman certainly approves.
A week earlier Michael Gove penned a piece in his Spectator that claims Miliband is running the government: Starmer ‘is Prime Minister in name only. His foreign policy, at this time of war, is Ed Miliband’s. His economic policy, Ed Miliband’s. His Chancellor, his political positioning, his very quest for meaning. All. Ed. Miliband.’
Gove’s argument is that those who directed Starmer’s 2024 victory ‘knew that, for Labour to win, it had to be serious about national security and economic growth’, e.g. McSweeney. But they have since walked the plank, and Miliband now trims the sails.
While intellectually Miliband is an implausibly absurd figure, electorally there is more to be said. Gove assumes that a Miliband supremacy will kill the Labour party as it will lose ‘moderate voters’. But he takes for granted a notion Starmer won because moderates positively supported Starmer for reasons, such as ‘national security and economic growth’ – as opposed to sheer exasperation for the old order (hence the measly 59pc turnout in 2024).
What’s more, Miliband is greener than the Greens, who have all but abandoned the green hues of environmentalism for the mixture of Corbynist red and Islamic green. A Miliband-led Labour party would be in a much better position to compete with the Greens in its urban seats, rather than a moderate Starmer-led entity, as the Gorton and Denton by-election suggested.
But of course this assumes, as the New Statesman and The Spectator assume, that voters would countenance such an absurd figure as Miliband in the first place.
