Dear Subscribers,
The week commenced with the spectacle of Your Party’s inaugural conference. In its wisdom neither Zarah Sultana nor Jeremy Corbyn were elected official leaders; it opted instead for ‘collective leadership’. Sultana was interviewed by Owen Jones outside the conference where she declared that ‘entire economy [ought] to be under the control of workers’. Ultimately, whatever Your/Sultana’s/Corbyn’s Party is for is less important than what it is against – the liberalism of the Starmer government.
Following her Autumn Budget, it has become clear that Rachel Reeves misrepresented the state of the public finances. One of the main concepts Reeves is leaning on for credibility is headroom than her last budget. Adam Smith in The Telegraph writes that the Chancellor’s rhetoric (‘more headroom’) and the reality that departmental spending will need to be reduced by £4bn in 2029-30, does not add up. Moreover, spending on Special Educational Needs and Disabilities spending is projected to rise to £7.5bn in 2029-30 and is unlikely to be cut. All in all, the real headroom, Smith argues, is more like £8.5bn, not the £22bn Reeves claims. This suggests that not only did Reeves mislead the public before to the budget, but after, too.
The government is delaying four mayoral local elections set to take place in May by two years. The government justifies the delay on the grounds of the need for local authorities to adapt to the devolutionary reforms of Angela Rayner. Left unsaid is the recognition that the Labour party is faced with the prospect of electoral decimation. As such, the move has been sharply criticised by the Conservatives and by Reform as an affront to democracy.
Reform UK’s rise continues apace: on Thursday it received a donation of £9 million ahead of the May elections from crypto investor Christopher Harborne. Harborne is the latest former Conservative party donor to give to Reform, following Nick Candy, who is the party’s treasurer. Reform has received a total of £10.3 million in Q3 of 2025, compared to the Conservative’s £4.5 million and Labour’s £1.9 million.
Blog
The Remain Zombies’ Pantomime by Catherine McBride
Trade economist, Catherine McBride OBE, dissects and corrects last week’s Remainer claims about: the supposed cost of Brexit; why the improbable Liberal Democrat bespoke EU UK Customs Union won’t reverse the UK’s high energy costs, high taxes, high wages and high employment costs that are destroying UK manufacturing and trade in fuel and manufactured goods; and whether Brexit really caused the UK to trade more with China.
Does This Disastrous Budget Make a UK Economic Crisis Unavoidable? by Robert Lee
A truly shambolic Budget makes it even more likely that the Labour government will confront a major financial reckoning well before 2029. The article examines counter arguments – higher UK public sector capital spending, public finances that are “relatively” sound, and a possible AI productivity miracle – and finds them wanting.
Media
Matt Ridley in The Spectator: The great climate climbdown is finally here
Allister Heath in The Telegraph: Starmer and Reeves are now a threat to British democracy
Key Points
The post-post-war order
British politics since 1945 can be understood in terms of a political settlement. Historians have called this the ‘post-war consensus’ and have adopted the term coined by The Economist in the 1950s, ‘Butskellism’, a combination of two prime-ministers-that-never-were Rab Butler (Education Secretary, Tory grandee) and Hugh Gaitskell (Labour party leader, anti-EEC). Butskellism denotes a common Keynesian understanding of fiscal policy, where the government manages the economy by either raising or lowering spending.
Tied to the Keynesianism of Butskellism was a set of assumptions about British political life: that trade unions ought to work with government, that the NHS’s supremacy was unarguable, that party politics was bipartisan, and that morals were progressing (either incrementally or radically).
Some have pinpointed Denis Healey’s adoption of monetarism or Thatcher’s election in 1979 as indicating the end of this settlement. However, this was not so.
Healey and Thatcher were significant for reversing the economic orthodoxy back to a liberal economics of the Victorian era. But, apart from this, much of the old order persisted. That is to say: the welfare state persisted.
Indeed, the Coronavirus pandemic has done more than anything to simultaneously entrench the importance of the NHS into British political discourse, and to make its persistence financially untenable. Moreover, the political arguments to justify mass migration have hinged upon the NHS’s continued existence and its ability to function.
Is the welfare state financially sustainable? Probably not in its current form. It has in many ways forced Reeves’s hand, as a reduction in welfare spending is politically untenable but financially necessary: so the can is kicked down the road to 2029-30. But the Labour party’s creed, since it became liberal, is NHS absolutism. Thus anything like cutting welfare spending is anathema, as seen in Starmer’s attempt to pass welfare spending reductions, the fumbling of his Commons majority, and retreat backwards.
The future of British politics and society is more open-ended than it has been in decades. There is something to be had for viewing the tide of politics since 1945 as being swept along by the transition from warfare to welfare; and tomorrow’s political settlement will be the result of how the decay of the welfare state is managed.
Yours/His/Hers/Its Party
It would be glib to say that pantomime season has arrived early, and that Sultana and Corbyn are playing lead roles. It is satire written without a satirist. But is there not something deeper to consider?
I would suggest that Your Party ought to be taken seriously, in the same way in which the Green’s ought to be taken seriously: not for cogency of doctrine or high-mindedness (said no one), but for their negative existence. An electoral map was (probably dubiously) deduced from a recent poll asking if there was an election tomorrow who would get your vote? and Labour would get 4 seats.
The electoral dissolution of the Labour party, rather than that of the Tory party, will be a major feature of the next election. Many forces will conspire to dilute the Labour vote, and Your Party will be one, however minor and comical. As will the Greens. Within this, it is an irony that Corbynism has been stolen and reanimated by the Jewish leader of the Greens, erstwhile hypnotist, Zack Polanski. Support for these parties will be strengthened by a hatred of Keir Starmer’s Labour party.
