Dear Subscribers,
This week has been characterised by the media’s incessant exposure of Reform UK’s candidate in the Makerfield by-election. In particular, the BBC has been keen to launch assaults at Robert Kenyon’s pre-political social media posting – see for instance Emma Barnett’s vexation when interviewing Danny Kruger on Tuesday. Kenyon apologised for nothing (‘if you go into any building site, I think you’d hear a hundred times worse said’: Ms Barnett can’t have frequented many building sites). Meanwhile, Andy Burnham has announced another reversal: he will end the private contracting of asylum hotels – instead, local authorities will ‘disperse’ asylum seekers into HMOs etc.
Elsewhere, Tony Blair has published a 5,000-word essay that presents his vision of ‘the Radical Centre’. The essay is a coruscating assault on the post-Blair Labour party: ‘the absurdity of the Corbyn leadership’, Streeting and Burnham contesting the leadership ‘has an extraordinarily retro 20th-century feel to it’ and Starmer – whose ‘personality’ isn’t, Blair assures us, the ‘government’s principal problem’ – for not having ‘a worked-out, coherent plan for the country’. About Brexit, Blair is deceptively accepting, criticising those in Labour who want to reverse it; but in the end he wants ‘a structured, formal relationship with Europe’, ‘a robust dialogue’ and ‘cohabitation’ – which sounds an awful lot like Starmer’s ‘dynamic realignment’.
It is not obvious what Blair is up to. Perhaps he wants to influence policy; perhaps he wants to help Burnham in Makerfield by giving him a bone to chew on, supposing that it is a place that is anti-Blair; perhaps it is a manifesto for posterity. Starmer (/one of his aides) wrote a boring response, defending his government’s record; Burnham also felt compelled to write his own boring response, saying predictably unthinking things about ‘40 years of neoliberalism’ and ‘Thatcher legacies’, which no doubt the electors of Makerfield are up in arms about. Burnham starts his response by claiming he read Blair’s essay ‘three times, to be precise!’: but his arguments are exactly what Blair attacks as a ‘retro’, mindless leftism. Does Burnham read wearing a blindfold?
Burnham’s gripes with Thatcher and ‘neoliberalism’ don’t illuminate the more pressing problem of mass youth unemployment in Britain. The former Blairite cabinet minister Alan Milburn has produced a report for the government that has looked into NEETS aged 16 to 24, for whom weekend employment is unavailable and apprenticeships are hard to come by. There are now more than one million NEETS, which is estimated to cost the taxpayer £125bn per year if nothing is done. The report is cautious about the impact of immigration on the availability of part-time jobs (see ch 3, paras 276-83), hinting at the obvious but not committing to it. Yet research by the Centre for Social Justice has shown that the 4.2 million Boriswave immigrants has meant 27 non-EU under 25s have been hired for every young Briton since 2020.
Blog
The Doomwatchers are back – ignore them by Adrian Hill
The UK is doing well in high-tech start-ups. Much of this is due to our ability to ignore EU regulations which constrain the growth of high-tech companies.
Media
Reform’s strange balancing act by Tim Shipman in the Spectator
Tony Blair cannot escape politics by Henry Hill in The Critic
Key Points
On Blair’s essay
Reading Blair’s essay is striking – for its conviction about the future, its intensity of mission and its urgency; it betrays all the qualities of a radical political manifesto, with banal one-liners to boot (‘Governments – any government – must find their place in this new world’ etc etc). It is striking also because many of these qualities have been lacking from mainstream political discourse in Britain: perhaps its only equivalent may be found in occasional interviews of Dominic Cummings. Like Cummings, Blair’s critiques about politics and its practitioners are saying something true about British political life.
Both Starmer’s and Burnham’s responses are testimony to the infantility of liberal thinking, if it can be called that. For both could have been written by AI and show a grasp of things as they were a decade ago. Moreover, Blair is right to say that Streeting’s and Burnham’s platforms for Labour party leadership are retrograde; they have no sense of the fragility of global affairs and the destructive potential of technology – both of which a Prime Minister should be sensible. Blair’s contempt for Corbynistic stupidity over ‘neoliberalism’ and wanting to rejoin Europe is connected to the essential unseriousness with which he sees the left-wing of the Labour party. Such ideological experiments are not befitting of a natural party of government – which is what Blair had always intended for Labour.
And yet, as enjoyable and accurate as Blair’s negativity is, his positive recommendations are misconceived. His ‘Radical Centrism’ is apparently ‘where you put policy first and politics last. So, you begin with the question: what is the right answer? And only once you have that do you engage in the political task of persuading people of it.’ This is not, pace Burnham, ‘neoliberal’; it is neo-Machiavellian.
Alas, what is possible in policy is ultimately conditioned by ‘politics’. (By ‘politics’ Blair presumably means party politics and public image.) Moreover, the ‘question’ and ‘answer’ that constitute ‘policy’ are not so straightforwardly immune from the personalities, systems and forecasts, which have and will always bear upon ‘policy’, however hard one tries to abstract it. Cummings tried his best in Boris Johnson’s government to do this, but his sense of mission – as strong as Blair’s – was gradually deflated by the machinations of Carrie Symonds (now Johnson) who saw Cummings and his ‘misfits and weirdos’ as dispensable after the 2019 election victory.
Not unlike Cummings, Blair is at bottom a technocrat. It is for this reason that the ‘history’ he invokes is not a historical past as it was, but rather a past that ratifies his prejudices about technological change in the present: ‘Think of how Britain was in 1826 and how different it was in 1926. And then in 2026. This is the scale of change but in dramatically faster time.’ ‘We’re living through the 21st-century equivalent of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution’. This is what is known as ‘whig’ history.
Thus Blair’s sympathies towards Europe are unsurprising; his kind of home is a parliament that is unelected and can implement policy onto the masses with a masque of accountability. The power of Blair’s essay does not lie in a radical openness to technology or a non-ideological politics, as he might seem to be conveying. Rather, it lies in his oligarchic cynicism which will stop at nothing to implement his vision of how society ought to be ruled.
