Politics UK – thinking liberal

The British government attempts a covid endgame

In England 19 July is “Freedom Day” when most covid-related legal restrictions will be lifted in England. This was first trailed a couple of weeks ago, when the government billed it as a major step forward in the battle against he virus, and delighted lockdown sceptics, which include a substantial number of Conservative MPs. Alas it looks like heavy going for the government.

Freedom Day was originally billed for 21 June, but the government lost its nerve. At the time I defended this postponement, based on the government’s narrative that we were experiencing a race between the virus and the vaccine, and that the extra four weeks will allow the ever increasing number of vaccinations to slow the progress of the virus. Alas for my understanding of epidemiology. There is no sign that the level of vaccinations is having much impact on the spread of the new Delta variant, which is following a similar exponential path to the Alpha variant in the Spring. There is no sign of the vaunted herd immunity, so beloved of lockdown sceptics. Delta may be just too contagious.

Instead the government’s strategy, as originally explained by the new Health Secretary Sajid Javed, is to let the disease rip, and rely on the vaccine to keep people out of hospital, and so limit the stress on the health system. Mr Javid made no attempt to deny that infections would continue their exponential path, up to 100,000 a day and beyond. Reckless as this sounds, this is perfectly logical, and even shows a degree of leadership in the face legions of people urging caution of some sort or another. There has to be an endgame, and ours is based on a high level of vaccination, using the more effective vaccines, such as Pfizer, Astra Zeneca and Moderna. We only have to look at Australian, where Delta is breaking out into a population with a low vaccination rate. Australia had managed the disease by keeping people out, but failed to focus on the endgame, and messed up its acquisition and roll out of vaccines as a result.

But the government’s strategy had clearly not been thought through. This was evident from one of the goverment’s core arguments: “If not now, when?”, whose logic I find unfathomable. They seem to be hoping that the disease will burn itself out before the busy winter season, but it looks just as likely to make things worse. Two big problems have emerged. The first is the use of face masks. Some people can’t be vaccinated; others will derive less protection than the norm; many more (I have to include myself) are far from sanguine about catching the virus, even though double vaccinated. Even most vaccine sceptics have understood that some efforts need to made to protect the vulnerable – they just don’t want the tail to wag the dog, as they see it. Where this has come to a head is on mask-wearing. As we have better understood the virus, our appreciation of the effectiveness of masks in stopping the spread has grown. It seems sensible to most people to continue to require people to wear them in those public spaces which vulnerable people will find it hard to avoid. This does not include pubs and night clubs – but surely does include public transport and most shops. And the government yet wants to drop all legal requirement to wear a mask, and at first suggested that such matters could be left entirely to personal discretion. One Tory MP (admittedly not a minister) suggested that freedom from mask wearing was essential to getting people using public transport again – his argument seemly was that if we ignored the disease our worries would cease. Slowly but surely the government is being forced into retreat on this; by this morning they were suggesting that operators should use their powers to enforce mask -wearing on public transport. But the messaging has been fatally mixed.

And them came a problem with the NHS covid app, which pings people who have come into near contact (within 2 metres for 15 minutes) with somebody who has tested positive and tells them to self-isolate for 10 days. The government said that it was going to leave this in place until mid-August, when double-vaccinated people would asked to do a test instead. They weren’t very clear on why this delay was being instituted – I suspect it simply takes that long to change the app and test it. But the consequences look worrying if infections are likely to reach 50,000 a day next week, and 100,000 a day not so long after that. The opening up was supposed to help the economy to get moving again, but the projected volume of people being told to self-isolate will hit it right back down again, remembering that these self-isolation requests will tend to cluster in particular workplaces, the disease being what it is. The government’s response has been to suggest that it would de-sensitise the app, so that fewer people would be pinged – within one metre for 30 minutes, say. As a response to the virus becoming more contagious this is nonsense – it leads to the question of what they are hoping to achieve by keeping the app in being. And it points to an easy answer to the government’s “If not now?” question. Then again, if the government wants to let the disease rip and peak before the winter comes, won’t the app just slow things down? Unlike mask-wearing it looks an inefficient way of trying to protect the vulnerable.

The government have clearly thought a bit harder about ta third issue – the effect increased infections will have on the NHS. The link between infections and hospitalisations – and that to ICU usage and deaths – has been weakened but not broken. Hospitalisations for covid now seem to be doubling every month, and we can expect that to increase after the loosening up. The levels are nothing like those experienced in previous peaks, but the NHS is fragile. Backlogs are massive; there are press reports of staff leaving, exhausted after the pressure placed on them over the last 18 months. Given the quality of the government’s ability to think things through elsewhere, there must be a degree of scepticism that they have got their calculations right.

I am more sympathetic with the government on another widespread criticism: that loosening up increases the chances of a new and deadlier variant turning up. With the virus rampant in the rest of the world, where vaccination is woefully slow in many places, what happens in Britain will make little difference. Besides, scientists are reporting that new variations are repeating. The possibilities of new variants for a simple thing like a virus must be limited, so maybe the chances of a significantly more dangerous new variant are not as high as some people are making out. That’s a bit speculative, of course.

So the government is facing a sticky few months, when it will continue to be on the defensive. Other issues loom. The government plans to withdraw the fiscal support it is giving to the covid-stricken economy. This is bound to lead to hardship and criticism; it is also likely that the economy will start to slow as well.

A government that was well-led and with a core of first-rate ministers would command a lot more confidence. But this government cannot seem to think anything through properly and lurches from one crisis to the next. It will be determined not to reimpose lockdown. Twice before it has thought it could wether the storm without reversing course, only to U-turn in the end. What odds would anyone offer that this does not happen again?

Should we be worrying about inflation?

Now is a very interesting time to be a macro-economist. The shock arising from the covid-19 pandemic is unprecedented in its extent (barring world wars, maybe) and its economic effects. Government responses, with very loose monetary policy combined with generous fiscal measures, is similarly unprecedented. The latter is remarkable in that its generosity is far greater than that shown by governments following the Great Financial Crisis that started in 2007. Economic conservatives have been routed and are grasping for evidence that their once confident assertions about the public debt and deficits have a basis in fact. These generally turn on the question of inflation.

Inflation plays a critical role in macro-economics. In theory it is what happens when supply fails to meet demand across an economy. There a number of reasons that this can happen but the most important, to macroeconomic commentators, is when a when aggregate demand is boosted by a government spending too much or taxing too little. Or, putting the same idea in a slightly different way, when too much money is being put into circulation by government policy. It is one of the points of agreement between orthodox conservatives, whose narrative is that bad things happen when governments intervene, and advocates on the left for Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), whose narrative is that governments can and should spend freely so long as inflation is kept at bay. Things get more complicated when you try to apply the theory to an open economy – one that trades substantially with others – that issues its own currency, but this is usually glossed over.

The theory of inflation had to be redeveloped after the 1970s, when inflation (excess demand) and high unemployment (inadequate demand) co-existed in so-called stagflation. The new theory, working its way through such ideas as monetarism, a craze of the 1980s, to the Neo-Keynesian consensus of the 1990s, built on the idea of inflation expectations. This suggested that inflation could happen simply as a function of the zeitgeist. The standard theory was that therefore it was essential that inflation expectations were “anchored”, and that it was the central bank’s job to do this. This theory has become so embedded that organs such as The Economist, who should know better, report it as fact.

In the first two decades of the 21st Century inflation in the developed world has been stable and quite low (around 2% per annum and often less). This has been hailed as a great success for central banks, who have firmly anchored those expectations. It has also been taken up by MMT enthusiasts as evidence that reticence over government spending and national debt, and especially the demon “austerity”, is vastly overdone.

And so here we are now. Many developed world governments, led by the United States, have thrown caution to the wind in response to the pandemic. This appears to have been remarkably successful in in that the economic impact of the calamity has been relatively limited. But now inflation seems to be breaking out everywhere. Optimists say that this is just the result of temporary supply bottlenecks, pessimists say that over generous economic policies are coming home to roost. Commentators pore over the available data and argue like mad.

If you find all this rather perplexing, you should. Macro-economists inevitably deal in simplified models that represent the actual world but imperfectly. The statistics they deal with, such as income and, indeed, inflation, are similarly imperfect representations of a complex reality. They all know this, but instead of taking on an air of humility, they find it easier to gloss over the difficulties and wallow in the vicarious power of dealing in the fate of millions. In the process most of them have become completely detached from reality.

Inflation is a case in point. What most economists seem to mean by the term is a devaluation of money: the price of everything going up without anything deeper going on. One of the 1980s economists suggested that “Inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon,” because it couldn’t happen in that favourite fiction of conservative economists, a barter economy. But a general rise in consumer prices may simply be part of a widespread balancing out of things across different markets. In the 19th Century, according to statisticians who estimate these things, there were many surges in prices, but compensated by falls at other times, so that there was no overall rise over the long term. Not coincidentally, money was closely linked to gold at the time, though that is incomplete as an explanation. A more recent example is the inflation that accompanied the economic boom in Ireland after it joined the Euro. This rise in prices was the only way an open economy could respond to a surge in productivity without a now-impossible currency revaluation. That didn’t stop the European Central Bank ticking the Irish government off. Another example came during the austerity years of the British Coalition government after 2010. There was persistent (though not especially high) consumer price inflation. But this wasn’t matched by wages, and it was simply the economy reflecting the reality of lower living standards. I remember one commentator suggesting that the inflation would make debt easier to pay off; nonsense because you pay debts out of income. Inflation then was not reflecting a devaluation of currency.

So what is happening now? Prices rises genuinely seem to reflect shortages in supply relative to demand, both in goods markets and labour markets. These may well reflect temporary bottlenecks. We can expect this to go on for some time as the pandemic has had far-reaching impacts on many supply chains and labour markets. Yesterday our local picture framer was complaining on behalf of his glass supplier that the cost of hiring a container from China had risen from £500 to £8,000 (or something like that), because all the containers are in the wrong places, not to mention the disruption to the Suez Canal. In Britain we have the added complication of Brexit disrupting both goods and labour markets; in that case when the dust settles most people are bound to end up a bit poorer. But the pessimists have a point too. The entrenched inflation of the 1970s started with similar temporary shocks, to the oil market in particular. If it really is all about expectations, this is how it starts. But there is so much noise in the statistics that it is really very hard to see what is going on.

Personally I am less concerned about inflation that many. I think the 1970s-style inflation was mainly a product of unionised labour markets and less flexible supply chains, which gave labour much more power. This certainly had a good side in ensuring a fairer distribution of wealth, but it prevented adjustment to economic realities. In today’s much more open world economy there are other ways than inflation for unsustainable excess demand to play out, in the most developed economies anyway. In the 1990s it may have been right to talk about inflation expectations being anchored by the central bank, but the world has moved a long way since then. Inflation is held in check by the forces of global trade. The stress is taken in the financial system through higher levels of debt and international capital flows. This is likely to end in financial busts rather than 1970s stagflation.

So if there’s trouble ahead we are looking in the wrong place. Is there trouble? Financial asset markets certainly look as if they are in a bubble, but the banking system looks a lot healthier than it was in 2007, when the last great financial crisis started to gather momentum. In Britain I think things are going to get much bumpier as the government tries to bring its budget deficit (currently an eye-watering 11.5% of GDP, though less than America’s 13.9%) back to a new normal. But there are so many uncertainties as to what a sustainable new normal will look like, that this very hard to predict. This is going to dominate politics from 2022 on as there is no coherence to the government’s message on this.

Interesting times indeed.

The Lib Dems after Chesham & Amersham: time to move to the centre

The Times operates a pay wall for its online content. I have been paying £10 a month to access it. So it was a bit upsetting when my email provider decided their newsletters were junk (while being happy with The Guardian and Financial Times). It was rather more upsetting that it took me over a month to notice. Still, I missed regular articles from some of my favourite columnists, especially Matthew Parris. I also regularly read Danny Finkelstein and David Aaronovitch. I sometimes read Melanie Phillips, who, rather alarmingly, I seem to be agreeing with more and more. You may note a distinctly conservative taste for somebody who tends to the left – but I have always believed that you should expose yourself to challenging views. In any case all three of these are liberals in the traditional sense, although that is a bit of a stretch for Ms Phillips.

I have been catching up, with especial interest on the response to the Lib Dems’ astonishing victory in the Chesham & Amersham by-election. Those from Mr Parris and Lord Finkelstein were especially striking. Both acknowledge that the result must give the Conservative leadership pause for thought, but suggest that the deeper questions posed by the result are for the Lib Dems. Lord Finkelstein’s view is made clear in the article’s title: There is no Point to the Liberal Democrats. Some context is helpful here. Like me, Lord Finkelstein’s first political commitment was to join the Social Democratic Party (SDP) when it was formed in 1981. Doubtless also like me he had been inclined to be Conservative beforehand, but he was a bit younger (born in 1962 to my 1958). Unlike me, he opposed the SDP’s merger with the Liberal Party in 1987 to form what eventually would be known as the Liberal Democrats. He limped on with the “continuing SDP” with former SDP leader David Owen until he joined the Conservatives in 1990, who made him a peer in 2013. This suggests that like Lord Owen, he has always had a loathing for the Liberals and its successor party, as the little people in British politics, though he hides it a bit better. (Lord Owen always finds some clever reason to oppose anything the Lib Dems support, most notably in the 2011 referendum on electoral reform). Still Lord Finkelstein’s arguments bear hearing out, however painful they are to read for somebody that has given so many years of their life to the party.

The essence of Lord Finkelstein’s argument is as follows:

Here are the problems of the Liberal Democrats. They don’t stand for anything, they don’t stand for anybody, they can’t win and even if they could it would be utterly pointless.
Danny Finkelstein, The Times 22 June 2021

He goes on to say that they are worse than pointless, as they are getting in the way of establishing a coherent opposition to the Conservative Party. Lib Dems like me may protest the party does stand for a clear set of liberal, internationalist and environmentalist values, and that this has become more coherent since the loose coalition assembled by former leaders Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy has fallen apart. He would counter that those same views are also held by many members of the Labour Party, and even the Conservatives, and are not distinctive. More seriously it is clear that local government does not exist in Lord Finkelstein’s world – which is revealing. But the Lib Dems aspire to being more than being a party of local councillors. He is onto something when he points out that the party collapsed when it went into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010, its only exercise of real power. This makes it understandable that the party rules out coalition with the Conservatives. But that kills the party’s leverage, and poses the question of why members shouldn’t just join the Labour Party.

Ouch! There are many moments when I have wondered whether my support for the Lib Dems has been futile. I have made a lot of friends (and the party is how I met my wife) – and it has been one of the best ways to meet like-minded people. But I don’t join it as a social club. Sometimes I am simply left with the impact the party has had on other parties by competing with them. It is true that the spectacular by-election victories the party has scored from Orpington in the year of Lord Finkelstein’s birth to this one have led nowhere in the following general elections. But they have often had a big political impact, usually on the Conservatives. Other parties were simply in no position to deliver these shocks. The complacency of Conservatives prior to the latest Chesham & Amersham was quite astonishing, to read some of the things that their supporters had been writing beforehand.

And are we really in the way of forming a coherent opposition to the Tories? And should we really join Labour? I might ask why, if Lord Finkelstein thinks that the Conservatives so badly need such an opposition, and that if joining Labour is the only way to achieve it, why hasn’t he? I joined the SDP as soon as I realised that I wanted it to succeed. My reasons for not wanting to join Labour are probably pretty similar to his; my blood runs cold at the thought of it. I do not want to be a foot soldier in something distinctly ugly (and I would say the same for joining the Conservatives). The alternative for me to being part of the Lib Dems is leaving politics altogether. The reason that Labour can’t form an electorally convincing alternative to the Conservatives (coherence is easier…) lies mainly within that party, and not because it is missing a few more liberal members and activists. Sometimes competition works better than collaboration, even in politics. Would Tony Blair’s New Labour have happened without the SDP split?

Mr Parris’s article Tories need to start caring about the blue wall is ultimately more compelling, though almost as searing in its opinion of the Lib Dems. The article’s main focus is on the Conservatives, and how the current leadership is taking for granted a whole stratum of liberal conservative voters, of which he is one, and which is prominent in Chesham & Amersham. These are repelled by Boris Johnson’s party, and are ripe for the taking. Can the Lib Dems do this outside a fevered by election? Mr Parris is sceptical:

Liberal Democracy has a wonky wheel that, time and again when hard choices loom, wobbles them off the highway and into the ditch of localism, neighbourhood grumbles, government intervention and “whatever’s your gripe is ours too”
Beyond its orange bird, Lib-Demmery has a big yellow streak. Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander and David Laws took the leap into real politics in coalition. But their party seems to have disowned that brave compromise. Are they ready for adult politics again? If they can learn to show steel, to say no to someone, something, anything, then Sarah Green, the new MP for Chesham & Amersham, may approach the next election with a fighting chance. If not, this will be one more by-election we shout about, then forget.
Matthew Parris, The Times 19 June 2021

I often disagree with Matthew Parris, but I think he has it this time. The party has changed since the days of anything-goes in the 2000s. But has it changed enough? How should the party present itself to the electorate, and how can it show that it is interested in adult politics again?

In my previous article I suggested that the by-election showed what the point of the Liberal Democrats was. It was to appeal to Conservative voters whom Labour and the Greens cannot reach, while holding to its liberal values. That means it must champion the centre ground of politics. Lib Dem activists bristle when it is suggested that theirs is a party of the centre, as it implies the party is rootless and defined by the ground that parties of left and right happen to inhabit. But while the core values of the party are not defined by the political centre, core values do not win elections – you have to broaden your appeal. Taking the centre is how the party must do this, and that is how they pulled off this coup. If they are to turn this one-off event into something more substantial, then the party has to stick to this line.

What does that mean, in practice? It means going back to the traditional values of public service that Mr Johnson’s followers (and many in the Labour Party) dismiss as elitist: fair play and tolerance; truth rather than grandstanding; saying sorry every so often. It also means being clear that international cooperation has a big role to play in solving many of the country’s problems – from trade to taxing companies to global security – in contrast to the Tory preference for tub-thumping and “buccaneering”. That’s the easy bit. The party needs to stand up for effective public service, without getting hung up on public ownership, but combining this with a degree of fiscal prudence. This means two things which will be hard. First is not to suggest that spending more public money is the solution to every problem: which means challenging Labour every so often when they do just that. And it means admitting that an ageing population and stronger public services mean higher taxes on everybody, and not just some soft underbelly of rich people and taxes. All these positions may be open to respectable challenge, but this is the approach that will earn credibility amongst centre-ground voters. Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party may adopt similar positions in the end, but the Lib Dems can do so with more credibility amongst Conservative voters.

And the party needs to be honest about where they want all this to go. That is taking part in a coalition government, if the coalition as a whole follows largely centrist principles. The party can rule out a coalition with the Conservatives under Boris Johnson, but not necessarily under another leader. But the most likely option is government with a Labour Party that has taken some steps towards a centrist programme itself.

Will the Lib Dems be able to pull this off, and win 30 to 40 seats at the next election? I understand the scepticism of people like Matthew Parris. But I am hoping he is wrong.

What is the meaning of the Chesham and Amersham by election?

What is the point of the Liberal Democrats? This question has been asked often since the party bet big on reversing the Brexit referendum result and lost. Languishing in single digit poll ratings, with only a handful of MPs, a weak brand and a leader who looks like just another white male middle-aged politician, the question was asked rhetorically. It was obvious that the answer was that there wasn’t any. The party would be replaced by some combination of a newly-moderate Labour Party and the Greens. On the eve of the by-election in the safe Conservative seat of Chesham and Amersham bookmakers were still offering odds of only 13-1 that the Lib Dems would win.

But the result showed a different answer to that question. It wasn’t even close. The Conservative vote crashed by 20%; Labour’s by 10% (they only had 11%); the Lib Dems ended up with a big majority. This shows that only the Lib Dems amongst “progressive” parties have a chance of challenging the Tories in their heartlands. Labour is still paying the price for its flirtation with radicalism under Jeremy Corbyn; the Greens do not have the strength and depth of ground organisation, and many Conservative voters find their brand offputting. It is now clear that if the Conservatives’ grip on the Westminster parliament is to be broken, the Lib Dems will have to play their part.

Why did the Conservatives do so badly, when nationally their stock is still riding high? The obvious answer is that the party is focusing on consolidating its hold on its newly won voters in northern England, the Midlands and Wales – the old “red wall”; this leaves the party’s traditional heartlands feeling neglected. By itslef this explanation doesn’t work. Under Boris Johnson’s leadership the party has a sunny “Have your cake and eat it” stance: doing well by the new voters is not meant to be at the expense of the old. After all that is what “levelling up”, the stated aim of their policy, is meant to mean. Something else is annoying the heartlands.

The first, I think, is resentment about Brexit. To old Remain supporters, many of whom were in this consituency, this is not going well, and the arguments made about the damage it would do, dismissed by Brexit supporters like Mr Johnson as “Project Fear”, are turning into facts. Combine this with the many missteps of the government’s response to covid, and there is little love and trust in the government.

There were to more specific issues that the Lib Dems hammered on, once they found they were resonnating. The first was the government’s new planning law proposals, designed to make it easier to build on greenbelt land. Suburban voters such as those in this constituency have a fear of development spoiling their green and pleasant environment. The Lib Dems also want more houses to be built, but suggest that the government’s plans will be a developers’ charter to build poor quality housing (in terms of environmental standards at least) where it is not needed, instead of “community-led” initiatives to build more good-quality affordable and social housing. The second issue was the new HS2 railway from London to Birmingham, which is being built through the area. The Lib Dems support HS2, so once again some political finesse was required. The candidate promised to uphold constituents’ interests in opposing what is seen as a brutal juggernaut not listening to local concerns.

Doubtless Tories will feel that this is more chicanery from the Lib Dems – but it is not as if their party does not delight in chicanery itself. If the roles were reversed they would have had no hesitation in doing the same. That is politics; there are no prizes for holding the high ground. For the Lib Dems a weak brand has its disadvantages: it doesn’t rile floating voters so much and gives more room for manoeuvre. Still the party is only a threat to the Conservatives if it has a local foothold, and that is only patchy. Besides its appeal is now largely restricted to better-educated voters, and the result does not provide evidence of a broadening of their appeal. But where the party already has a foothold, it will be re-energised. The party should also get more attention in the media for a while – after the embarassment of most outlets failing to spot what was happening here, in spite of ample evidence, while giving extensive coverage to the Batley and Spen by election, due on 1 July. The party now needs to make good use of this brief window of opportunity.

For the Conservatives it is a clear sign of danger, though their politcal position remains formidable. Success in British politcs depends to some extent on taking core support for granted while reaching out to more marginal voters. But this is a dangerous exercise, as Mr Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, found in the 2017 election, when she tried to do just that far too blatently. The main point of worry for the government must be those planning reforms. They are going to need far more political skill on housing than they have shown hithertoo if they are to avoid further damage.

Labour’s predicament deserves a post of its own, but for them there is good and bad news. The collapse of their vote shows that their brand is now very weak – after a period when they had often done relatively well in Lib Dem strongholds. The Greens got more than twice as many votes. But there is no evidence that resurgent Lib Dems will undermine them in critical battleground seats, and it also shows that the Conservatives can be put on the defensive. An optimist might suggest that a weakening of the brand is a necessary precursor to de-toxification. The party still needs to be able to fire up its supporters, of course. Talk of a “progressive alliance” of non-Tory parties is premature, however. But Labour strategists will need to let the Lib Dems undermine the Conservative vote somehow.

For now though the Lib Dems can bask in the glory a bit. Their new MP, Sarah Green, is a strong addition to their parliamentary ranks. Remarkably, 8 of the party’s 12 MPs are now female. Quite a reversal from a party that used to be much derided for its failure to get female MPs elected.

It is time for Sadiq Khan to stand up for London

What is the point of Sadiq Khan, London’s Labour Mayor, recently reelected for a second term? He is a powerful symbol of inclusion – a Muslim bus-driver’s son making it to the city’s highest office. After that I struggle. He has acheived little in five years. But now he has an opportunity to make his mark.

Mr Khan’s problems aren’t entirely of his own making. Since his predecessor as mayor, Boris Johnson, took over as Prime Minister in 2019 the national government has been actively hostile. We then discover how little actual power London’s mayoralty has. The situation worsened when the pandemic came along, and Transport for London’s finances collapsed. This one of the few things the mayor is responsible for, but he had to go cap in hand to the government for a bailout. In doing so the government has gone out of its way to humiliate him. Mr Khan has looked like a powerless bleater from the sidelines. But this also reflects Mr Khan’s lack of political skill. He has shown little aptitude in mobilising broad political coalitions to get things done.

But now he has an opportunity: the Daniel Morgan report. This report into the Metropolitan Police was commissioned by Theresa May as Home Secretary in 2013. It looks at the Met’s repeated failings in the case of the murder of Daniel Morgan, a private investigator, in 1987. It was suspected that corrupt policemen were involved. The report is summarised here by the FT’s David Allen Green. It is shocking. It shows the Met as being keener to protect its reputation than to be held accountable. This culture is described as “institutional corruption”. And the report makes it plain that it stretches to the present day, with the inquiry being obstructed by senior police officers, who were as slow as they could be in producing evidence. What is even more significant is that the current Commissioner, Cressida Dick, is deeply implicated in this criticism. Ms Dick is every inch a Met insider, with her fingerprints on numerous police foulups. It is time for her to go and for an outsider to be brought in to replace her. The Met needs a change in management culture and she is n ot the person to do it.

Mr Johnson is not going to support this, and has expressed his confidence in Ms Dick. He is not in favour of public accountability, and likes senior public officials to be beholden to him. He is not directly responsible for appointing or dismissing the Commissioner, though. That is a matter of joint responsibility between the Home Secretary, currently Priti Patel, and the Mayor. Will Ms Patel stand up to her boss? She probably could if she wanted too, as she is one the politically stronger members of the government (whatever one thinks of her record). It is unlikely though. Which leaves Sadiq Khan as mayor.

I doubt that the Mayor has the legal power to sack the Commissioner by himself – but a public statement of loss of confidence would make her position untenable. That would allow him to show that he is standing up to the bullying from government and asserting his new mandate from London voters. There is a risk that Ms Dick could try toughing it out based on Ms Patel’s backing alone – that would be sadly characteristic of the current times. In which case the mayor would need to up the ante and start making the government, and the Force, pay a price. This is what politicians can do. Authority depends on much more than just legal powers.

So it is clear what Sadiq Khan should do. But I expect him to bottle it and serve out the rest of his term as another act of futlity and pointlessness.

How do we live with Covid-19?

As predicted “Freedon Day”, when covid restrictions were due to be lifted, has been postponed from 21 June. And as usual most of the sceptical comment seems to have missed the point. They are suggesting that the government will keep on postponing through dither and indecision. But in fact I thought the government was being quite clear, and there is good reason to think that they will stick with the new proposed date of 19 July, though doubtless some restrictions will be long-term. Meanwhile there is not nearly enough debate on what is an acceptable balance between risk and danger in future while the virus remains prevalent in the world at large – which may well be forever.

The government’s narrative is that the we are in a race between vaccination and the virus. This suggests that there is some kind of equilibrium to be found between the proportion of the population that is vaccinated and the infectivity of the virus, which might bring the reproduction rate to below one, depending on the level of restrictions in place. There is good reason to think that if 75% of the population is vaccinated, then the R rate will stay below one even with most restrictions lifted. The government’s calculation seems to have been that, with the previously dominant Alpha variant, R would be close enough to one on June 23, when 80% vaccination has been reached for one dose. But with infection rates increasing at an alarming rate, this is clearly not true. The now-dominant Delta variant seems to be to blame. They have now calcualted that 75% or more people need both vaccine doses for this equilibrium to be reached.

It isn’t as simple as that of course. There is plenty of evidence that vaccinated people who do become infected do not suffer severe disease, while the mainly younger people who are not vaccinated are less likely to suffer severely too. So we might be able to weather higher infection rates just like we already do for flu. Against this I think two arguments have been accepted. First is that there are still a lot of unknowns about the Delta variant, including whether the earlier assumptions about the vulnerability of younger age groups still hold. India seemed to be less vulnerable than us to covid, mainly it was thought because its population is younger: until it was hit by Delta. Second the NHS is distinctly fragile at the moment. Waiting lists are massive in many places; the Financial Times has reported that many staff are leaving, exhausted by the stress of the last 18 months, and without substantial improvements to pay and conditions on offer. While it is true that the NHS can cope with high levels of flu, that is because it is seasonal – and even then it can be touch and go. So it seems more sensible to wait. Most people agree.

But the most significant thing I picked up from the announcements was that ministers were saying that we must learn to live with the virus, rather than expect that it will be beaten. What does this mean? Hospitalisation rates need to be stable and reasonably low, and likewise deaths. Current levels are surely close enough to this – but the exponental growth of infections is a clear threat. But that comes with significant restrictions on public events, hospitality, social distancing and so on. The big question is whether we can relax all of these. What measures can be kept in place that would reduce risk of infection (and not just from covid), without annoying too many people? Better ventilation standards for public places is an obvious one. I suspect we need to adopt more Asian approaches to mask-wearing (though this is more a metter of social mores than regulation). Certain settings, hospitals and care homes perhaps, will doubtless need higher levels of infection control.

These are the questions we should be asking ourselves. We need to watch and learn from what is happening in the rest of the world. Alas instead we get the usual nonsense about whether lockdowns are evil in principle, or whether the government lost two weeks by not restricting travel from India earlier.

The information gap – the big issue of our age

I felt a brief pang of sympathy for former Prime Minister David Cameron last week, as he endured grandstanding “questions” from MPs over his lobbying on behalf of Greensill Capital. He probably really did think that what he was suggesting on that company’s behalf would be helpful to the government. But nobody cares about that; they just wanted the masochistic pleasure of giving him a beating. Such is politics. There is a deeper issue, though.

That issue is what I call the “information gap”. Governments do not have the information they need to use their resources efficiently on our behalf. We don’t get the right sort of help when we need it; lots of people get help they do not need. The government’s aid to businesses to help survive the covid lockdown was a case in point. Many needy businesses were unable to comply with the conditions and received no help. But many fraudulent companies were also set up to make claims, costing the state many millions, so it is thought. Greensill’s business was to lend money to businesses against outstanding invoices. Could this have helped close this information gap? Probably not, but it surely merited a closer look. It is not clear that the Treasury ever gave it that look. Mr Cameron does not seem to have been given any clear reason why they considered his suggestion unsuitable. There turned out to be good reasons to turn Greensill down, but Mr Cameron wasn’t wrong to put the question.

The information gap is nothing new. It arises whenever a large, centrally-managed organisation has to interact with the world beyond the direct experience of the core group of 100 or so people that run it. We might call it “Empire Syndrome”. The classic way to deal with it is for the elite to create an arbitrary set of rules for outlying officials to follow, and simply to shrug when this leads to bad outcomes – call this the “Imperial Method”. Conscientious officials try to optimise these rules to minimise bad outcomes and get some sort of positive return. Other officials don’t care – they just derive pleasure from the exercise of arbitrary authority and the status that this confers. The alternative solution is to allow local officials broad discretion to exercise their judgement based on the achievement of broad objectives. This brings problems of its own. Discretion is a opportunity for corruption; also it allows power centres to build up and undermine the authority of the central elite.

The imperial method is deeply ingrained into our psyche. Most people assume this is the way things should be done. You can see this from how annoyed people are getting with the government’s regulations on foreign travel. Nobody is asking whether it is wrong to expect anybody to offer advice that is going to be applicable in all circumstances. As a school governor there was an expectation that you would create files of detailed policies approve them, even to run a primary school of 200 pupils. When Chair of Governors I learned not to spend too much time on these, although developing a policy can be a good way of thinking through problems in advance. As an operations manager for a department of over 100 people I remember being advised by a lawyer that management-by-policy was what you had to do: you create rules and people follow them, and that way you could manage risks of legal liability. I tried to do this but soon gave up. The rules never could keep up with the world as you encountered it, and they soon became so complicated that nobody could master them, especially if you kept updating them. In the face of the real world you had to be more flexible – discretion and honest two-way communication between the levels of management were the key.

Interestingly, one part of our state services complex has actually thought about this problem and developed a solution: the military. The Prussian army and then Germans were the pioneers in the 19th Century. They developed a system of discretion and honest communication to govern their operations. In many ways this operated against their authoritarian culture, but the system improved over time. By the time of the Second World War it had developed into a highly effective system which meant that man for man the German Army was most effective in the world, alas for humanity, until Hitler undermined it toward the end. It has been widely copied since, notably by the British and US armed forces. Which is one of the reasons why these institutions are now held in such high regard by the public. But the system requires immense discipline and a very strong culture of working towards common objectives.

Back in the 1990s it became fashionable for large businesses to develop analogous systems to run their businesses. This included reducing the number of layers of management and empowering junior and middle managers. It never caught on in the public sector, and by the 2000s central authority and management pyramids became the norm again everywhere. I’m not quite sure why this was, but I suspect that senior officials feared that they would be blamed for bad decisions made in junior ranks, as the public and politicians are only too happy to do.

New technology may also have played a role. Developers of information systems offered their own automated way of closing the information gap, by baking the rules into control systems. This started with workflow technology, which can be used to empower workers by making more information available to them, but instead became used for tying them down, including the measurement of toilet breaks. The process of “de-skilling” began. This had a dire effect on the public sector, as de-skilling became the basis of many an outsourcing contract, causing catastrophic loss of effectiveness. But this was but the start of a journey; the technologists started to talk about the Holy Grail – the use of Artificial Intelligence to intermediate between organisations and the public, so that you wouldn’t need people at all. AI is powerful technology, with many important uses, but it cannot possibly as effective as a skilled professional in helping people solve complex personal problems. Many, if not most, AI applications are pre-destined to fail.

Unfortunately too many people believe that technology can solve the information gap by itself. The Chinese Communist Party seems to have embarked on this road. Providing the data that the state needs to make its systems work means a steady erosion of privacy; ensuring its consistency means standardisation; maintaining confidence in the system means the suppression of honest communications. And so on. Ultimately the Imperial Method means that people have to conform to the needs of the state, rather than the other way around. This is truly the road to serfdom.

But the answers are not too difficult to find. Free markets will find appropriate solutions for most of our needs if we are alert to excessive market power by large businesses. State services need to be mediated by empowered professionals held accountable by people who understand the challenges they face. Countries like Britain, with a strong public service culture, can do this. There are examples of excellent public service – the two primary schools where I had the privilege to be governor are undoubtedly among them. Technology can empower other than enslave.

Too few people appreciate this in government, or amongst those holding them to account. But as public service systems fail, perhaps understanding will grow. There is now a growing consensus that the Test and Trace system for coronavirus was approached in completely the wrong way, and should have been localised from the start. If more aid to businesses had been intermediated at local level then perhaps more businesses could have survived and more frauds stopped.

Organisations like Greensill were never going to be the answer. But the more important question is whether the Treasury ever really cared about the problem.

Labour: Tony Blair is on the wrong track

I really wanted to leave Britain’s Labour Party alone for a few weeks. It gets too much media attention as it is. Part of me just wants to party to go away and die quietly. Another part thinks that most of the comment is just ritualistic diatribe from enemies and internal factions, saying the same old things regardless of reality. Then along came Tony Blair. My concern is not so much about the effect of his intervention has on Labour, but that too many people outside the party cheer him on and congratulate him on his insight. Especially ageing liberal professional-types like me.

Mr Blair’s intervention was a long article in the New Statesman. It is clever and well-written, and worth a read if you are interested in British politics. It has drawn widespread praise, for example this from Trevor Phillips in The Times. He suggests that parties of the centre-left (a dying breed, as he points out) must be both radical and sensible. Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership Labour was radical but not sensible, but under Sir Keir Starmer’s… well you can fill in the blanks. He makes two main points. The first is that Labour is stuck in an outdated policy agenda that does not embrace the true challenges of the modern world. It supports on nationalisation and “free” university tuition, and it is without a reform agenda for public services. But the world is being rapidly changed by new technology, and many of the world’s biggest challenges, such as climate change, can only be embraced using that technology. Meanwhile the party’s central theme – a rejection of austerity, has been trumped by the current government’s “what it takes” approach to the covid crisis. Mr Blair’s second point is that Labour has surrendered the debate on social and cultural issues to the extreme left – shouting down people who question it from the likes of J K Rowling on transgender politics, and Mr Phillips on racism.

Mr Blair doesn’t really spell out what he means by the embrace of new technology, beyond more online learning and a few other examples at the fringes. On cultural issues he wants to move to a middle ground that tolerates a wider diversity of views. He seeks a remaking of Labour, and joint efforts by Labour and Lib Dem figures, alongside apolitical ones, to define the new agenda.

There is much here that I can agree with. Much of the old policy agenda promoted by Mr Corbyn’s party was nonsense, especially those favoured by big trade union bosses. The shouty and intolerant way that the left take on cultural issues alarms me too, even though I agree with much of what they say. The problem is that, for all his talk of embracing the way the world has changed, I’m not sure Mr Blair has noticed how much it really has. And in some ways the post-Blair Labour Party has adapted well to these changes, saving it from the disaster it was heading for under his leadership.

The rise of two groups in particular encapsulate this change. One is younger public service professionals. The Labour government of 1997 to 2010 greatly expanded public services, and extended university education. This has expanded a new class of people directly or indirectly employed by the public sector. But their path to middle class security is barred by high property prices. They have a stake in the public sector, hence a vitriolic reaction to austerity, have cultivated modern social attitudes at university, and are angered at the way Conservatives prioritise protecting and enhancing the property and entitlements of older people. The current Labour movement is largely made up of these people. The second group is the new working class: those with precarious jobs and drawn from a diverse range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. This group felt badly let down by cuts to benefits and public services, are victims of routine discrimination, and feel that the government is not doing enough to enhance its physical and economic security. In 2010 the new working classes’ support for Labour was soft; Labour has turned that around.

Labour’s predicament is that while it has consolidated its hold on these two groups, it is letting go of many others, and in particular traditional white working class voters with relatively stable jobs or pensions, and ethnic minority middle classes (of which many are now holding jobs in the Conservative cabinet). It is not at all clear that there is a magic “sensible but radical” policy agenda out there which allows Labour to hold not its current core vote, while winning over many of the people who currently support the Conservatives.

I think there is a deeper problem with Mr Blair’s approach as well. It is very top-down. His “radical” ideas about embracing technological change sound a lot like he has fallen for a lot of the hype around new technology prompted by large, progressive companies (as well as the Chinese Communist Party, but I digress). He has form on this: while in government Mr Blair fell for a lot of the radical business transformation talk put about by management consultants and big business executives, and badly misjudged their applicability to the public sector. My worry is that this approach to technology transformation, and especially its enthusiasm for Artificial Intelligence, is dehumanising and creates dependencies that are vulnerable to disruption by criminals and others, which in turn leads to increasingly intrusive security.

What I believe the left has to do is to engage with the public at the local level, and develop new civic institutions to create a human interface between the public and public services and the social safety net. This means working with a diversity of people, many of whom you will have political disagreements with. It also means using new technology in a distributed and empowering fashion, rather yet more “computer says no”. Some Labour people, including people in the far-left Momentum movement, understand this. There are local bright spots (Preston is often quoted), but by and large Labour as an institution, and Mr Blair is a prime exemplar, favours the seizure of power at the most senior level it can, and implementing change from there, and crushing local dissent.

So yes, Labour must be remade if it is to play a useful part in the progress of this country. But not in a way that Tony Blair has any clear conception of.

All the main parties have opportunities and challenges

We now have nearly a complete body, so the post-mortem is more convincing. What the elections show is that politics has been changed decisively by Brexit and the takeover of the Conservatives by Boris Johnson and his supporters. This new world offers challenges and opportunities for each of the five main political parties – the Conservatives, Labour, the SNP, the Lib Dems and the Greens.

One comment I am reading a lot of is how much these elections have been favourable to those in power, at least down to regional level. The Conservatives have done well in England, and in the Teesside and West Midlands mayoralties. Labour did well in Wales, Manchester and other big city mayoralties. The SNP did well in Scotland. Perhaps that is the influence of the covid-19 crisis. Perhaps that means that the winners are not as secure as some suggest. One aspect of this incumbency bonus is the naked way the Conservatives are using power in recently won seats in England to bring in local government spending. The voters have got the message, it appears, and don’t object; Labour complaints only draw attention to it.

The biggest winners are the Conservatives, who have consolidated their hold on formerly Labour areas in northern England and the Midlands, but not Wales. I have already written about this. It places the party in a formidable electoral position. The challenge has been well put by Matthew Parris in The Times. The party has been garnering support among people who see themselves as the rejected, society’s losers. Important though these people are, the policies they favour are not those that will be good for the country’s prosperity and wellbeing. They favour continuity and stability, if not pushing the clock back. Sooner or later this is going to create unbearable pressure at government level. They will either be unable to deliver on their promises to improve local conditions, in which case their voters will move on, or they succeed, in which case the politics of victimhood will play less well, and other parties will find the going easier. The two pronged attack that did for the Conservatives at the Euro elections in 2019 can do for them again – as both professionals and populists close in on either flank. For now the Prime Minister looks likely to bluff his way through this challenge, delivering cheery words but little in the way of substantive results. But the vulnerability remains. Meanwhile Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens were all able to chip away at the Tory hold in their southern heartlands where well-led locally.

One of the rituals of election post-mortems is commentators to have a go at the Labour Party, criticising it for not listening to its core supporters. Take this piece from Janice Turner in The Times again. And yes, I often join this chorus myself. But when most of these people accuse Labour of looking down on traditional supporters, they themselves look down on Labour’s core support, especially amongst “woke” public service professionals. It needs to be taken with salt. More interesting is the variation on the theme by John Harris in the Guardian, who accuses Labour of too often ignoring local community groups, to rebuild the civic infrastructure it lost when old industries went into decline. This is something that the party seemed to understand under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, and certainly was important to his effective deputy, John McDonnell, but it is being abandoned by the current leadership.

Labour finds itself in a tricky position. It must extend its base beyond those public-sector professionals and the “new” urban working classes, without abandoning core ideas, like multiculturalism, that are central to its hold on that existing base. I’m sure that Mr Harris is right and that local community politics is part of the answer. But it isn’t easy, and in places they will find that the Lib Dems or Greens will have got there first. Tricky strategic decisions lie ahead, but their position is far from hopeless. The results are not as bad as many are making but, but they do show that the Tory hold on the old “Red Wall” remains tight, in England at least.

The SNP are the other big winners. The challenge for them is clear: navigating the drive towards independence for Scotland. The idea of independence is popular in Scotland, but the hard reality is likely to be less so. Perhaps the UK government’s best strategy is to move the debate onto the nitty gritty and let the SNP get bogged down; but to do that it has to concede a referendum, though not perhaps the referendum that the SNP want. See this interesting article by David Herdson on political betting.com. Losing the last referendum was the best thing to happen to the SNP; that will not be the case for another one. But if the government refuses to concede a referendum, then the SNP will continue to control the agenda.

For the Lib Dems the elections produced mixed results, but hopeful signs outweighed the discouraging ones. The party is making headway against the Conservatives where it has local strength. The Tory drive for the old Labour heartlands increases its vulnerability in its own backyard. But no earthquakes. It is not yet clear how the party breaks through into national scene. The party does not have a sharp brand; this can help in Britain’s electoral system, as a sharp brand deters as well as attracts voters. In Scotland the party held onto all its first-past-the-post seats, and challenged hard for a further one. But it won no seats on the proportional list system. This is ironic for a party that is so keen on proportional representation.

The advantages of a clear brand are shown by the Greens, who generally did well. If Labour starts to dilute its appeal to younger and environmentally conscious voters, the Greens are more likely to benefit now than the Lib Dems. The Greens easily beat the Lib Dems in London, as well as Scotland (where they contested no first-past-the post seats). Still, their claim to be the third party of national politics is overdone. Their predicament is the opposite to that of the Lib Dems – trying to turn a strong national brand into something that wins them councils and parliamentary seats.

Should the non-Tory parties work together to challenge the Conservatives, outside Scotland at least? This can only be on the basis of changes to the electoral system and perhaps other constitutional changes. This has been done in New Zealand. But for that to be viable there needs to be a broad understanding in the public that the system is broken and needs to be changed. For all the whinging I see little evidence of this. Beyond a little sotto voce staying out of each others’ way at the next general election I don’t think this idea will get anywhere.

So the landscaper has changed, but we are only beginning to see where this is leading.

Labour pays the price for internal party democracy

We don’t have a complete body yet, but the post-mortem has started. (Credit to The New Statesman’s Stephen Bush for the post-mortem without a body metaphor, which I find very appealing). The Conservative victory in the traditionally Labour seat of Hartlepool is not especially surprising, but the scale of that victory is greater than expected. Looked at in a broader, longer term perspective, though, and it is quite startling.

The scale of the result was not because the Tories did unexpectedly well (most people thought they would hoover up the Brexit Party’s substantial vote), but because Labour’s vote share sank from 38% to 29%. An independent candidate picked up nearly 10%, and that seems to be were most of the Labour loss went – though a string of other candidates picked up about 1% each. That included the Lib Dems who sank back from 4%; they had been in second place no so very long ago.

The first thing to say about this is that the Brexit referendum of 2016 has proved an astonishing political success for the Conservatives, if an unintended one. It has fractured the Labour Party. At first many of their voters went to Ukip and then the Brexit Party. The Tories then undermined and demolished these insurgent parties and scooped up the bulk of their votes. The party has been brutal to its own Remainer supporters, but has managed to keep many of these in tow – though as Hartlepool as on one of the most Leave-supporting areas of the country, the by-election itself does not provide much evidence of Remain-supporting Tories staying with the party. Now that the country has left the EU, the politics of Brexit are much easier for the Tories to navigate. Remainers can still be painted as bad losers, unpatriotic and metropolitans sneering at the working classes, while Remain supporting politicians have no convincing policies to rally around.

But Labour’s failure has deeper roots than Brexit. It is often attributed to the party’s estrangement from its working class base. It certainly seems to be true that what might be called “traditional” working class voters have been deserting the party for some time. These may be characterised as white, less educated and less physically or socially mobile people, often living in towns rather than big cities. And yet this is a shrinking demographic, and Labour’s hold on the more modern version of the working class voter (living in big cities, insecure job, rented accommodation, often with an ethnic minority background) looks as strong as ever. Labour is also missing out on a substantial non-metropolitan middle class vote, which is well represented in places like Hartlepool. Back in the 1990s these voters used to be called “Middle England”, and were the particular focus of Labour leader Tony Blair. Mr Blair proved very successful at this, but his success was denounced as treachery by many Labour activists. In the end Mr Blair, a consummate Metropolitan if ever there was one, was losing this demographic, especially because of his liberal approach to immigration.

But Labour’s rot turned toxic after 2010, after they lost power, and with the selection of Ed Miliband as its leader. This was about the time that I started this blog, and there was still some engagement on social media between Labour and Lib Dem supporters, before we fractured and disappeared into our separate bubbles. Those Labour supporters proved right about the Lib Dems, and how long-term the damage the Coalition would be to the party. But we proved right about them, when we suggested that Labour neglected Middle England at its peril. This was denied furiously. Labour supporters were convinced that their route to victory would come by consolidating their support amongst “progressives’, including people who had been too disillusioned to vote previously. They did not need to convince people who had voted Tory to change their minds; the collapse in the Lib Dem vote would be to their benefit. Tory and Lib Dem hating became a signature theme, along with increasingly shrill condemnations of “austerity”.

In fact at the next election in 2015 Labour succeeded in winning the Conservatives a majority in their own right, by scaring many Lib Dem voters into their arms, and by undermining the Lib Dems in Tory facing seats. That, of course, is not how Labour activists saw it, and they doubled down by selecting Jeremy Corbyn as their new leader. The relatively strong Labour performance in 2017 seemed to vindicate this. But Labour success was as much due to mistakes made by Tory leader Theresa May as the ability of Mr Corbyn to mobilise new voters. Mrs May still made headway with her strategy of pressuring Labour in their heartlands. There followed a further two years when the party hollowed itself out, ending in the disaster of the 2019 election. Hartlepool has shown that the Tory victory then was no flash in the pan.

A lot of the responsibility for this disaster rests with the two leaders, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn. But both were elected by the party membership and the membership placed them under particular pressure, though party processes on policy. These processes are usually referred to as “democracy”, which the party prides itself on. The Lib Dems, and I assume the Greens, are just the same, and indeed often criticise Labour for not being “democratic” enough. As you will notice, I am extremely reluctant to use the word “democracy” in connection with the processes by which members of a political party exercise their rights. Political parties are self-selecting groups of people, who can leave at any point, and who may be expelled if they annoy other members too much. Democracy is about broader society and the inclusion of people who don’t have a choice about whether they belong. This is one of the paradoxes of our political system: political parties are an important and necessary part of the democratic system, but they themselves are fundamentally not democratic. The Conservatives are so successful because their members have the least influence over leadership and policy out of all the main parties.

The Lib Dems and Greens have little choice but to give their members a strong say over what their party does and who leads it. They are insurgent parties that need to offer reasons for members of the public to join and stay with the party. For Labour it is different. They aspire to be a national political institution: part of a two-party system which shares nearly all the important political power. The party has an institutional assumption that political parties other than themselves or the Conservatives are a damaging distraction that no politically responsible person should support. But a successful institution of that nature can’t be over-fussy about about political values – it constantly needs to be thinking about recruiting support from any group of voters it can. That’s an exaggeration; the two big parties do have core values running through them. But whereas the Tory Party can dump a large part of its core support (in the case of the Remain supporting political elite) in a drive to recruit Middle England voters, Labour has been unable to pull off a similar feat since the days of Mr Blair. The membership naturally wants the party to focus on people like them; they cannot be counted on to take a cold hard look at the facts. It was the Labour membership, not the leadership, that fought tooth and nail against Brexit. That was seen as betrayal in Brexit-supporting parts of the country, though it did help Labour drive back a real Lib Dem threat in places like London. Mr Corbyn then compounded the trouble by appearing incompetent and unpatriotic – and yet the membership enthusiastically backed him as their mascot, preventing MPs from removing him when they could see all too clearly the damage he was doing.

That membership may now be chastened, and more accepting of compromise. Labour’s position is far from hopeless. They can still win the next election. They have a secure base among the metropolitan middle class and the “new” working class. They have strong support among younger voters, and escalating property values are creating a growing class of people excluded from the Tory dream. The Conservatives are not widely trusted. But in order to win Labour must go after groups of people who normally vote Conservative, and pressure Tories in areas where they had previously felt secure. That will mean taking Labour into places that it is not comfortable about. To date I have not seen any sign that anybody in in Labour’s higher echelons understands that. Perhaps the shock of these elections will jolt them into decisive action.