Liberal democracy, in Britain and elsewhere, is in a parlous state.  2024 has seen authoritarian populism make major advances – the election of Donald Trump as US president above all, but in Europe too, as parties of the Right continue to make inroads.  

Here in the UK, we have a government, nominally of the centre-left, recently elected with a huge Parliamentary majority.  But that landside conceals an essential democratic fragility; it was achieved with barely a third of the vote and thanks to a divided Right, whose combined vote share was higher than Labour’s. For all Labour’s language of change, and growth, it was essentially a victory resulting from rejection of a catastrophic Conservative government rather than for a clear programme that generated any great enthusiasm.

Moreover, Labour’s performance in office has been dismal.  It has made a series of errors – in terms of both policy and competence – and inexplicable decisions that have simply played into the hands of the populist Right.

In particular the revelation that Keir Starmer and members of his Shadow Cabinet has been gifted expensive suits and spectacles played right into the populists’ narrative that “they’re all the same”. And, as with the row over former Welsh Labour leader Vaughan Gething’s leadership election donations from a convicted environmental criminal, the Party’s official defence – that no rules had been broken – showed a tin-eared lack of awareness of the cynicism many people feel towards a political system that many people – especially those who have experienced collapsing living standards under a decade-and-a-half of austerity – is irretrievably rigged against them. 

But even had Labour been more competent in office, and had received a more convincing electoral mandate, it would have faced serious problems from the populists. It was always obvious to me, well before the election, that even had it been better at Government, a Starmer government would mean that liberal progressives would be facing the fight of our lives.

I start with Brexit  – the most important political event of the past decade, possibly since 1945. Yet mainstream politicians appear incapable of understanding its essentially political nature, and its real meaning, preferring instead to concentrate on its transactional effects.  As I argue elsewhere, Brexit may be the transactional disaster its opponents predicted it would be – damaging the Britain’s economy and its international reputation – but that’s not really the point; it gives every indication of having produced the political disruption its proponents wanted, and therefore it’s just wrong to say it isn’t working.  Moreover, its real political appeal simply isn’t transactional – it’s less a set of policies than a state of mind, one that gives its supporters the illusion of agency and power; therein lies both its strengths and weaknesses. But that Tao of Brexit – something I’ve written about elsewhere – was never understood by its opponents, and that failure haunts progressive politics still. 

Labour’s declared policy of “making Brexit work” makes precisely the same errors.  If it means anything at all, it means lumping it – transactionally at least, we just need to live with the damage, and the hit in living standards it implies. But I’d argue that’s missing the point – Brexit is about the undermining of Britain’s democratic and constitutional norms, and advocate making it “work” is to be complicit in that programme of the authoritarian Right.

But the nature of political discourse is itself a concern.  The growth of social media platforms like Twitter was originally seen as a welcome and liberating counterblast to an official media that too often reflected establishment views; it has become the plaything of hard-right billionaires and the oligarchs’ weapon of choice, and encourages a political discourse that is angry, unreflective, abusive in every sense of the word.  It is a discourse that favours shouting over thinking, the emotional over the reflective, the knee-jerk over the considered, the simplistic over the nuanced.  It has become the (well-manured) soil in which authoritarianism flourishes. And too often it has led to an authoritarian and intolerant activism on behalf of ostensibly progressive causes – including on University campuses where free and open discourse has often struggled to flourish in what ought to be its natural home – that has too often allowed the authoritarian right to manufacture a backlash that allows it to pose as the defender of liberal causes.

The Trump election in the United States offers an economic warning – that it is not good enough to offer abstractions about growth and economic progress to people who have experienced years of declining living standards. For all the talk of growth, the OBR forecasts that living standards in the UK will continue to fall throughout the Parliament. The explicit strategy is that the funding to repair Britain’s collapsing public services will come from growth, but there is no strategy to ensure that the proceeds of growth – even if it is delivered – will be distributed in a way that will improve the living standards of the many, rather than provide dividends and profits for the few. We are still in the discredited world of trickle-down economics. 

Labour is also an explicitly Unionist party and remains implacably hostile to the ambitions of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for greater self-government.  I am writing this blog in Cymru, as a confirmed supporter of Welsh (and Scottish) independence (Northern Ireland, because of the international guarantees that form the basis of its current political status, is a special case).  As a former Whitehall Civil Servant who moved from England to Wales a decade ago, I have become increasingly convinced of the intellectual case for independence, grounded in democratic and economic necessity, and the fact that the Westminster constitution – gravely wounded by Brexit – was no longer fit for purpose.  

For all these reasons we are living in a time of the perfect populist storm. The frustration and failure of decades of austerity – which found expression in the Brexit referendum result – and the absence of any credible or politically-serious strategy in mainstream Westminster politics to deal with them, along with the rise of an organised, well-funded political right waiting to exploit the weaknesses of an inept government without any real political mandate, mean an unprecedented level of democratic threat.

Westminster is aware of the threat but seems incapable of understanding it. The response to this threat needs to be rooted in uncompromising honest analysis – which means confronting decades of political and economic failure. It means being honest about Brexit and the disintegration of the Westminster settlement. And it means challenging aspects of the way politics is conducted, of political discourse, including those on what is normally considered to be the progressive side of politics.

The purpose of this blog is to explore and promote discussion of those issues. It is to try and fill in the gaps and evasions, the things that mainstream Westminster politicians don’t want to discuss.