In the summer of 2019, the former head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, said that the UK was “going through a political nervous breakdown”. He was speaking shortly before Boris Johnson became prime minister, so he did not know that the breakdown was about to get a lot worse and would last for five years.
It may well be that this all-embracing nervous breakdown is now coming to an end, after voters decisively rejected the post-Brexit version of the Conservative Party. The scale of its defeat is unprecedented in UK history and gives Sir Keir Starmer a mandate for change as large as the Liberal landslide in 1906 and Labour’s one in 1945.
Political convulsions not just on the right
Much pundit commentary on the election results has focused obsessively on the successes of Reform UK, which certainly split the right-wing vote and turned a disastrous defeat for the Conservatives into a calamitous rout. Reform may have won an impressive 14.3 per cent of the popular vote, yet this is only a little up on the 12.6 per cent that Ukip got in 2015.
Nigel Farage has leverage because he can split the right-wing vote, but this is not a card that he can play again for another five years, during which time he will be the leader of a tiny party in the House of Commons, while fewer and fewer will care what happens in a Conservative Party far from power.
More important than political convulsions on the right is the fact that the centre and centre-left group in parliament from Labour, Liberal Democrats, Greens and Plaid Cymru total no less than 491 out of 650 seats. Opposing them will be just 121 Conservatives and five Reform MPs, who will not even be well-represented on select committees whose make-up depends on overall numbers of MPs.
The six years since Brexit
It will take time to sink in just what an extraordinary and unprecedented period in British history we have been living through over the past eight years. It began in 2016 with Brexit and may have ended on 4 July this year. Sawers is correct to describe it as “a political nervous breakdown”, with emphasis on the word “political” because Brexit is often misleadingly regarded largely as an economic issue. Yet the most important and damaging feature of Brexit was that it provided a political vehicle for a populist-nationalist faction within the Conservative Party and enabled it to become dominant.
The result was the takeover of the British government by a weird menagerie of careerists, opportunists and crackpots. One day somebody may write a comic opera about them, but the script writer will have to invent very little when it comes to the characters and their antics – though he may have to tone down both to persuade audiences of the future that people like Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg and a score of others once ruled the country. Their like can only be found in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas or Edward Lear’s comic verse. The Jumblies, for instance, made a perilous voyage after preparations reminiscent of Brexit: “Our sieve ain’t big / But we don’t care a button, we don’t care a fig! / In a sieve we’ll go to sea!”
In one respect the UK may have got off lightly over the last eight years. In other countries, the populist nationalist surge has provoked divisive hatreds, as does Donald Trump in the US, or authoritarian rulers like Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and Narendra Modi in India.
But in the UK, there was always something amateur, ineffective and silly about Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. Farce invariably accompanied their plans right up to the end as Sunak brought joy to the nation with his rain-soaked calling of the general election, followed up by his D-Day dodging pratfall. Even his most serious policies, like the law declaring an unsafe police state like Rwanda to be safe, were absurd as well as toxic. “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” says the White Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.
Everything will feel serious from now on
From now on everything is going to be a lot more serious. Sir Keir Starmer exudes serious purpose as does Rachel Reeves, with her background in the Bank of England, and Sue Gray, the former senior civil servant who is his chief of staff.
It will be interesting to see how Starmer will go about translating an electoral triumph into real power and control. Public expectations are not high, but a decayed infrastructure, failing local government, an overburdened NHS and a deskilled administrative machine cannot be transformed for the better overnight – and possibly not at all. Yet all the demoralised talk about “broken Britain” is exaggerated, even if the repairs may be complicated and take a long time.
I suggest that change should start at the very top and very bottom of government. One of the most corrosive consequences of the past eight years is a high-level corruption involving billions of pounds. Crises always provide a field day for the crooked dealing because normal regulations can be ignored on the grounds that there is a pressing national emergency. The Covid-19 pandemic provided just such an excuse in the UK.
To give but one instance of this, an examination by the New York Times found that about half of the PPE supply contracts studied, worth £8bn, “went to companies either run by friends and associates of politicians in the Conservative Party, or with no prior experience or a history of controversy. Meanwhile, smaller firms without political clout got nowhere.”
Enormous sums were wasted by government without those responsible ever being brought to account. During the pandemic, the test-and-trace programme failed to make “a measurable difference” to the spread of the illness despite spending £23bn, according to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee.
High-level lobbying has become the norm for the well-connected politician as witnessed by the business career of David Cameron in the period between being prime minister and foreign minister. At one moment, he was being paid $40,000 a day by Greensill Capital which later collapsed.
At the other end of the scale in de-industrialised Britain, quite small investments would enable people to get to work or otherwise improve their lives. In much of rural Britain, there is no longer a local bus service to connect people up with the nearest town.
Last week I was in a beautiful but remote part of Herefordshire close to the border with Wales. A farmer told me that had recently encountered a couple of American tourists waiting hopefully at a bus stop who asked him when they might expect the next bus: “1.30pm on a Wednesday,” he told them.
Further thoughts
The US and UK media have wall-to-wall coverage on President Joe Biden’s reported mental decline, but this is almost exclusively focused on its impact on the race for the White House. Does his floundering performance in the TV debate mean that he must step down if the Democrats are to avoid defeat in November?
Emphasis is on the impact of Biden’s apparent mental decline on US voters in five months’ time. Little attention is given to strong evidence that this same decline may have been going on since he entered the White House three-and-a-half years ago, and would explain his consistently poor judgement on matters of war and peace. Currently, he presides over wars in Ukraine and Gaza with no feasible idea of how to bring them to end through military victory or diplomatic compromise.
In past wars between Israel and its neighbours, the US has restrained Israel after a few weeks and negotiated a ceasefire, using its leverage as Israel’s main weapons supplier. A long succession of Democratic and Republican presidents have done this, but not yet Biden, though some 38,011 Palestinians have been killed and 87,445 injured in Gaza since the Hamas attack on 7 October last year. But in his debate with Trump, Biden boasted in one of his few coherent sentences that he had only banned US-made 2,000-pound bombs being sent to Israel and otherwise the weapons’ supply was flowing freely.
Frequent claims by the President that he is close to organising a ceasefire have invariably turned out to fantasy or PR stunts.
The daily massacre of Palestinians is a war crime in which Biden is complicit. But what is most extraordinary about the slaughter is that it is not the result of some piece of immoral realpolitik, but is against both the national interests of the US and the political interests of Biden himself. The only rational explanation for US policy on Gaza is Biden’s decline harnessed to an old man’s stubbornness.
Much the same is true of the Ukraine war. It is extremely unlikely that either side can defeat the other. Ukraine will not get back Crimea and the Donbas, but neither will Russia capture Kyiv and Odessa. Russia is getting stronger rather than weaker, but not enough to win a decisive victory. With no winner likely this might be a good moment for compromise to bring the killing to an end, but Biden does not appear to do diplomacy.
Weird and ineffectual US policies in Gaza and Ukraine can only be explained by an assumption that Biden’s brain no longer functions as it ought. They are also evidence that his senior officials like Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan are either unwilling or unable to steer Biden away from disaster. Three years ago, the catastrophic US retreat from Kabul in August 2021 seemed a legacy of the Trump era, but it may rather have been an early sign Biden’s detachment from reality.
Why wasn’t this recognised earlier? I suspect that one reason is that such is the loathing for Donald Trump by Democrats led them to discount as Republican smears any allegation about Biden’s senility.
Beneath the radar
What will be the long-term impact of the Julian Assange case? For long it was undeservedly below the radar because Assange was demonised by governments and given pariah status by the media. He is now free in Australia, but the US and Western security services can congratulate themselves on having inflicted enough punishment on him to deter many Western journalists from emulating his great scoop of 2010.
I have always argued that what Assange did was no different, aside from the scale of his disclosures, from what any serious investigative journalist ought to do. Assange significantly altered the balance of power between governments and the media in favour of the latter. Unsurprisingly, governments pushed back with unrelenting persistence. The news outlets that published the WikiLeaks files ran for cover. Pundits and commentators, with a few notable exceptions, did the same thing. Assange was isolated and an example made of a man who had gone “a scoop too far”. Now, the balance of power has swung back towards those in authority. They have won this round, but there will be others.
Cockburn’s picks
The movie Civil War is much better than its reviews. It is really about war reporting, though it is set in the United States in the midst of a civil conflict, leading people to think that it is about some dystopian future when Trump and anti-Trump forces start shooting at each other.
I found the movie was authentic in conveying the never-ending edginess and uncertainties of war reporting, when you never know what will happen at the next checkpoint and there is a heavy price to be paid for the smallest mistake. The only point at which the movie is unrealistic – though this is true of all war movies – is that the battle scenes show close quarters combat. But this has practically never happened since about the time of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, after which fighting was at a distance with smokeless powder and quick firing weapons. In the middle of a modern battle there is little to see aside from the explosions, since everybody is very wisely keeping their heads down.