Politics UK – thinking liberal

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 The first is that Labour is stuck in an outdated policy agenda that does not embrace the true challenges of the modern world.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.

What is the significance of “Tory sleaze”?

A series of incidents have made the news where Conservative party officials, and especially their leader, Boris Johnson, have had a questionable regard for compliance with rules. Labour think they are on to something by raising the spectre of “Tory sleaze”. Are they?

Well yes if the audience is liberal professional types. They equate cronyism and nepotism with corruption and inefficiency, and understand that their own careers can be badly damaged by a disregard for compliance, and assume that politicians should play to the same rules. But do things look quite the same way to everybody else? Are the rules just there as a means to an end, and shouldn’t we look to the results first and foremost?

This was brought home to me when I read a history of the Royal Navy. Back in the 18th Century and into the Napoleonic Wars and the era of Horatio Nelson, it was one of the most effective large organisations on the planet – a considerable feat since command and control was often very dispersed. This was founded on a system of rewarding effective performance. The key to this was the prize system, whereby the money made from captured ships (“prizes”) was divided between the ship’s captain, officers and crew. (As an aside this was not dissimilar to the other highly effective institution of the era: Napoleon’s French army). The captain had control over the recruitment of his ship’s complement. And nepotism and cronyism was rife. How to reconcile this? Captains still recruited highly effective crew – but nepotism and cronyism was the simplest way of hiring people they knew and could trust. But if your cousin or other contact wasn’t up to the job, they would be moved on at the first opportunity. For many that is still true. The key is whether the organisation’s leaders are truly and directly accountable for the success of their organisation. The reason why cronyism is lethal in public service is because there is no equivalent system of direct, financial accountability, such as with the old Navy’s prize system, or with profits in a small or medium-sized business – where nepotism and cronyism is also widely practised.

So what to make of the current Conservative government’s difficulties over cronyism, especially amongst the urgencies of dealing with covid-19? They claim that in the crisis government ministers were making shortcuts to get things done. And if some of the the bureaucrats were uncomfortable, that just shows how ill-equipped thy are for emergencies. The Conservatives under Boris Johnson are not starting with a great of credibility on this however. Before the pandemic, the actions of minister Robert Jenrick on a property development after lobbying from a party donor shocked many, including me, but were simply shrugged off by the Prime Minister. Still, we should try to focus on the facts, not simply what we expect.

In fact enough the most recent row, over WhatsApp exchanges between Mr Johnson and entrepreneur James Dyson, is capable of being interpreted as “getting thing done”. Mr Dyson has a formidable reputation as a practical engineer; there was a genuine panic at the time (actually misplaced in hindsight) about the lack of ventilators, so there would have been nothing wrong if the government had called Mr Dyson for help, or if they had responded positively to an offer for help from him. The situation of Mr Dyson’s enterprise being based overseas is relatively unusual for a British company, so helping out with tax paperwork could be fine. The prior relationship between the two men doubtless helped, but I find it hard to see this as the government doing a favour for a friend. Labour has to do what it does, by trying to make the most of it, as that is how politics is done. The Tories would hardly be different if the roles were reversed. But this is either faux outrage or a failure to understand what was actually going on.

But what about the “VIP list” of businesses bidding for urgent contracts for personal protective equipment (PPE) early in the emergency? The urgency was real, and the need to simplify procurement procedures was doubtless justified. But did the VIP list help? This time the circumstantial evidence looks negative. The VIP list seems to be based purely on businesses being well-connected; there is no sense that they were being selected on the basis of any relevant competence. I had my reservations at the time about government procurement, and I still do. The process looks to have been too centralised and too detached from the people who actually needed the PPE. But this really needs to be picked apart by the sort of enquiry the government keeps putting off until the day after tomorrow. The point here is that is not that delegated procurement and streamlined procedures would have reduced cronyism. Indeed cronyism is the dark side of localism, and one that its advocates often neglect, myself included. But local cronyism in the circumstances of crisis, when results are short-term and obvious, is not necessarily all that harmful, as in the Royal Navy in the 18th Century. In some circumstances, if driven by the right sort of leadership, it can even be the best thing to do. The problem with the government’s procurement was that those taking the decisions, and pushing forward their proteges, were too distant from the outcomes to have an incentive to do the job well. Anyway, the VIP list was apparently far too long; it isn’t hard to imagine the feeding frenzy of businesses who could claim even a vague connection, and the lack of an incentive, or criteria, for the gatekeepers to say “not you”. The result is certainly that some inappropriate suppliers were picked; it is also probable that some people who could have helped out more effectively never got the call.

The next thing to consider is the lobbying by former Prime Minister David Cameron on behalf of Greensill Capital. On the face of it there is not much to be excited about: the lobbying failed to get extra financial support for Greensill. It is hardly surprising that Mr Cameron had privileged access. The more important question is how far Greensill had got into government procurement before the pandemic. It’s hard to understand what need the government had for a finance provider. More needs to be dug up about the relationship – but the issue isn’t just cronyism, it’s the degree of grasp of government ministers and civil servants of administrative processes. The former tend to have little commercial or organisation experience; the latter draw a false distinction between high status “policy” and lowly “implementation”. Greensill seems to have been inserting itself into the “implementation” side of things, which senior civil servants don’t feel they need to dirty their hands with.

The other issue doing the rounds on the general subject of “sleaze” is how the Prime Minister financed improvements to the Downing Street apartment, which wasn’t posh enough for his tastes. The careful wording of his spokespeople suggests that there is something to hide. But it does not appear as if public money, or much of it, was wasted here, though. The main issue is whether the Prime Minister broke rules on disclosure. I find it hard to get excited about it.

So far it doesn’t seem to be cutting through to the public. The attitude seems to be that, “They are all at it, so it doesn’t influence my vote.” They aren’t all at it in fact – but it doesn’t cut cleanly across party lines. You couldn’t get more prim and proper than Mr Johnson’s Tory predecessor, Theresa May. And Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair was quite comfortable with cosy relationships with business leaders, and the Labour Mayor of Liverpool is in deep do-do. Then again, the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer looks very straight, but that doesn’t seem to be doing him much good. I suspect that most people bend the rules a bit themselves, and don’t mind so much if others do too. Liberal professionals are in a small minority.

What could cause the public to get more angry? Personal enrichment, as happened with the MPs expenses saga in 2009, is more likely to inflame. Alas poor judgement and incompetence seem to get people less excited, as expectations appear to be low. The last time “Tory sleaze” got traction was in the mid-1990s, when the Conservative administration under John Major appeared tired and out of ideas. The expenses scandal, which engulfed all parties, was also at a time of perceived government failure, after the financial crash. The current government has some disasters to its name, but the news for it isn’t all bad. Success on vaccinations, and better judgement in 2021 on lockdown management, may erase memories of the Christmas, and earlier, disasters. Brexit is “done”, as promised, with teething problems not so far in excess of expectations – if you brush over Northern Ireland and the food export industry, which most people can.

What will be toxic for Mr Johnson is if his government starts to take on a general air of incompetence and failure. It clearly has that potential, as we saw in 2020, but it is not a foregone conclusion.

There is something hopeful about the ESL debacle

I don’t write about sport, because I don’t engage in it much. So why am I to writing two posts in a row about football? Well I think the rise and fall of the European Super League (ESL) is very revealing. And I don’t think I can leave things with my last post. Since then the whole thing has collapsed amid unanimous disapproval amongst football fans, institutions and politicians. Only overseas fans could be found to like the idea.

First I need to shine the spotlight on myself. I descried myself as being in a minority because I have a taste for iconoclasm. My attitudes turn out to be much closer to those reviled foreign football bosses than the general public. I couldn’t see that the US way of running sport was fundamentally any worse than the European one. And isn’t the “greed” that these owners are accused of just another way of saying “a desire for success”. They wanted their clubs to bring in more money by persuading the public to part with more of their cash, which they can only do by producing more of what the public wants. And that, of course, is why the whole thing collapsed so quickly. If the ESL wasn’t gaining traction in its core market, it was pointless.

And ranged against the greedy bosses were the lumbering and complacent football hierarchy, who seem incapable of showing real leadership. Racism remains rife in the sport in Europe (which includes Britain in football terms); the authorities couldn’t even protect vulnerable young people from abuse.

The point I was trying to make in my last post was than football fans themselves had contributed to the problem. They flocked to the wealthy clubs by and large after they were taken over by the wealthy owners happy to splash the cash, after the more traditional sort of owner had run the cubs into the ground. How else can you explain the rise of Manchester City, for example? The fans weren’t actually supporting their local clubs through thick and thin, but they were flocking to big international brands.

But I clearly hadn’t got that quite right. If most fans were in fact just after the glitz and branding, their attitudes would have been much more similar to those the BBC interviewed in Kenya and Thailand, who like the idea of more “better quality” games that the ESL would bring. In fact they were horrified. There is actually something rather heart-warming about this. The first point is that the football clubs provide a sense of belonging to people in a way the their US equivalents do not. When you buy into a club you buy into its history and traditions; the ESL looked as if it would be pulling up some of those roots. It was an idea that came from outside, from owners who had not themselves bought in to that rootedness.

But there is something deeper. It is a recognition that you can’t buy into all that belonging without paying a price. That means giving unfashionable clubs a chance. It means putting up with insecurity – about promotion, relegation and qualifying for Europe-wide tournaments. And in Europe it means giving teams from smaller countries, like Slovakia or Scotland, a chance. You can’t enjoy the prestige of being in a popular, successful club without recognising that all the others have the same rights and chances, in theory, that yours does. “We want our cold nights in Stoke,” read one banner carried by a Chelsea supporter. In an age of atomisation, winner-takes-all and hedonism, that is a hopeful sign of human maturity.

But, of course, that still leaves the game with its huge money headache. The fashionable sides grab all the TV audiences and are the only ones able to pack stadiums. But their income is still subject to cliff-edges. While the big teams are mainly secure in their country’s top domestic leagues, that is not the case with participation in the European Champions League, which is a huge draw. The fans may not mind the uncertainty, but it comes with a price.

Something has to give. Replacing the wealthy owners with something broader-based and more democratic is likely to drive away the deep capital that big businesses need in such a risky arena. And it still leaves clubs vulnerable to populism and mismanagement, as elected leaders make unrealistic promises of success (I heard one person suggesting that has been a problem in one or more Spanish clubs that signed up to the ESL).

And that is enough from me on the subject of football for a long time to come.

Football sold its soul to the devil long ago

The legend of Faust and Mephistopheles is one of the most enduring. Faust makes a pact with the Devil (through his agent Mephistopheles) to secure earthly pleasures. But in the end the Devil returns to secure Faust’s soul – a short interval of pleasure at the cost of eternal damnation. I feel something of this in the spectacular row over the attempt by twelve rich European football clubs to form a European Super League (ESL).

There is little doubt that the ESL is the work of the devil. JP Morgan Chase are behind it for God’s sake. It has no grounding in the web of passion and community that is club football, and is designed to maximise the sport’s financial return for a number of wealthy investors first and foremost. There has been an explosion of anger from right across society. I am not football fan, and I support no club. That gives me a bit of an outsider’s perspective.

The first thing that strikes me about the flood of arguments made against the ESL is that they are pretty weak, in the cold light of day. The ESL is based on an American model, where leagues operate as closed clubs, with no relegation and hence greater financial security. Sport in the US has its problems, but American football, basketball and baseball all have big followings delivering lots of thrills to fans. Does our system really work better? Do those desperate and depressing relegation struggles really form an integral part of the enjoyment of the game? The main complaint about European football from those outside Europe (actually a big and important market) is the number of “low quality” games. I suspect what people mean by this is games with clubs that many people haven’t heard of or which don’t have star quality. I’m not sure if the quality of the games is any more dire than that between well-branded clubs, but I’m open to correction on that.

But if I find the argument a bit muddled, the shock and emotion is easy to understand. People tend to be iconoclasts or conservatives. Mostly I’m an iconoclast; I like it when long-established things change; I tend to think that there is always a better way. But I have long learnt that I’m in a minority. Most people love the familiar patterns of life, and get upset and disorientated when they change. And football is a big part of many people’s lives. The ESL would upend it to be replaced by something very unfamiliar. Most people cannot see how it can possibly work.

But somehow the whole plan holds up a mirror to sport-watching public. What seems to upset people most about the ESL is an abandonment of the community game – the lives of the middle-ranking clubs and smaller. But that leads to the question of how people let these six English clubs develop into the massive global brands that they have become. A long time ago, when satellite TV was taking off, one satellite provider thought it had delivered a coup by securing the television rights to second division games (known as The Championship). It was a complete flop. Few wanted to watch lower league games, preferring to affix themselves to the heavily-marketed big brands. This mirrors British attitudes to local communities more generally. They think that local communities are a good idea, but not many people put themselves out; it’s somebody else’s problem. The idea that money trickles down from the big games to the lesser folk is a sort of salve to the conscience to make up for the lack genuine community support.

But life in the big clubs isn’t so easy. They are locked in an arms race for more expensive players, facilities and marketing, and the insecurity of European level competition is placing them under a major strain. They used to rely on people with more money than sense to fund this but this was a pact with the devil. Now the finances are moving out of range of such people. Private equity is moving in, and most billionaires have a strong instinct for financial sense anyway. The owners of the big clubs are in strong bargaining position and it may take more than bluster to stop them. The hostages are trying to negotiate their release by threatening to kill themselves. The clubs’ supporters are angry because they have no say in their clubs’ future – but most of them were drawn to those clubs in the first place by the lavish spending of the club owners. What do you expect?

Of course the ESL still raises many profound questions about the sustainability of the sport, and the scheme is more likely to collapse than not. But something else has to give if that happens.

One of the more interesting aspects of the whole episode is that the ESL only covers three countries: England (Scotland is out in the cold), Italy and Spain. Football in France looks too weak at major club level for that country to take part. But Germany is a football powerhouse, and its top clubs don’t seem to be tempted. But these clubs are much more genuinely grounded in their communities. There is a lesson there surely. Alas strapping German-style rules on local ownership onto the British system is unlikely to go well unless public attitudes change, and more people start supporting less fashionable teams.

The Royal Family is a factory of human misery

How I hate the British fascination with royalty. I will not watch That Interview. But the Royal family is a critical link in my country’s constitution and we can’t ignore it entirely, much as we might want to. Both sides in this spat are making the case for the family’s release from its constitutional role; the grubby business of elections and politics can’t be worse than this.

For somebody that affects uninterest in the royals, I have a guilty secret. I immensely enjoyed the Netflix series The Crown. I only started to watch last autumn, but I have now seen all four series. Before the last series I was interested to read the criticism of it in the press, from royal experts. This is a class of people who make my flesh creep, as they try to exploit the social cachet of knowing the royals. Mostly this criticism was pretty weak – a lot of trivial things (but none that made as annoyed as the use of a Crusader III tank in Suez in 1956; this vehicle was obsolete in 1943). More serious were the conflations and exaggerations in the drama, and events that never happened. These often annoy me too (machine-guns at the Curragh, etc) , and I’m very wary of the defence that the dramas are following a higher historical truth. But to my surprise, I found that I felt that the makers of the series had a point in this case. There was another category of criticism, the knowing “they wouldn’t do that” about some or other misbehaviour, such as the mistreatment of the Thatchers when they visited Balmoral. And yet the drama made it clear that this arose from a gulf of misunderstanding, not intention, and it is all too credible.

The strength of The Crown is that it has a clear and consistent theme, and that theme is clearly true. The institution of the monarchy overpowers the individuals in the Royal Family, and crushes all those who attempt to assert their individuality. Although the drama starts with the last days of George VI, its real beginning is the Abdication Crisis of 1936, when Edward VIII had tried to rebel against the system. This casts a heavy shadow over the first two of the series. The drama shows how the Queen herself came to terms with not being in control, and how pretty much everybody else in the family was crushed and became very unhappy. It focuses on Prince Philip, Princess Margaret, Prince Charles and Princess Diana. But we know that the unhappiness doesn’t end there. Funnily enough the series doesn’t make a big deal out of the tabloid press, the big focus of Prince Harry’s anger – but they point to the contradictions of the institution itself.

The fourth series of the Crown ends in the early 1990s. But we all know that the same drama has been continuing at the same pace in the quarter-century since. And That Interview is only the latest twist. What to make of it? The most explosive claim, about remarks over the colour of Harry and Meghan’s baby is quite hard to take seriously without more context. Was is overt racism, or was somebody being a twit? We may never know – but sensitivities differ across the Atlantic. The broader claim is more serious though: that much of the British public struggled to accept an interracial marriage, which was stoked by the British press. This was part of the toxic atmosphere that the couple felt they had to escape; Prince Harry feels that the Royal Family machine ran for cover rather than fight their corner. The Crown suggests that this was always so, but that this is out of necessity. Another serious charge was that Meghan was not offered help, or help that she felt she could use, when she complained of suicidal thoughts. This echoes, consciously perhaps, of the Palace’s neglect of Princess Diana. In that case the usual secret sources suggested that The Crown was being unfair and one-sided, and that Diana was pretty difficult to deal with. That defence reveals an incomprehension of the problem; the television portrayal was all too convincing. In Meghan’s case the story is likely to be more complicated – but establishing the truth feels like an intrusion.

But the big picture is clear; it is another variation on a theme that has been played out many times. A younger member of the Royal Family feels they can freshen things up. The ‘Firm” feels that this is intolerable and will undermine the monarchy, and crushes the troublemaker. The interesting thing is that The Firm could well be right: the moderniser may do much more harm than good, given the ambiguous nature of the institution, being an upholder of democratic values while being deeply undemocratic itself.

Is it worth it? The British Monarchy does a reasonable job of being the ceremonial head of state. It has its weaknesses. In 2019 the Queen could do nothing to stop several months of Boris Johnson controlling the considerable executive powers of the state with no parliamentary or democratic mandate – a constitutional and democratic outrage. It was the Supreme Court, not the Monarch, that stopped the most outrageous element of this: the attempt to prorogue parliament.

But this constitutional arrangement comes at a huge human cost to the family at the centre of it. By and large they don’t choose to be members. If we had an elected head of state, they at least would have chosen it as a career. The Monarchy has turned the Royal Family into a factory of human misery. There are better ways. Alas reform is unlikely to be a political priority. The misery of one family is not worth the time and trouble.

Rishi Sunak shows a sure touch with 2021 Budget

Yesterday Rishi Sunak, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer (though that job title belongs to no other country so far as I know), showed why is considered to be the country’s top performing minister after Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister. It was Budget Day; he got most things right, while putting off a lot of decisions for another day.

The central issue for the government is, of course, dealing with the pandemic. His decision was to continue with a whole raft of fiscal support measures, such as the furlough scheme, until the end of September. This is well after the vaccine programme is supposed to have brought society back to normal, sort of. This shows that Mr Sunak has learned from his mistakes. Last year he was too eager to hurry things back to normal and withdraw fiscal support. Like his boss, he seems to have effortlessly risen above the mistakes of 2020.

But how is this to be paid for? Government finance does not work like household finance, and especially not for a medium-sized developed country with its own currency, like the UK. Mr Sunak has simply added the costs to the national debt without any serious plans to repay it. After dealing with short-term support for the stricken economy, Mr Sunak’s next priority is to show how he will stabilise government finances in the new, shrunken, normal by reducing the budget deficit. He did this by freezing tax allowances and raising the rate of corporation tax (from 2023). The former will allow the government to benefit disproportionately from incomes increasing through inflation. This allows the Conservatives to stick to their pledge not to raise personal tax rates, nowithstanding the hurricane that has hit the economy.

A lot is missing from this plan. Public spending plans have not been changed once the emergency subsides, though it isn’t hard to see many ways in which the stress on public services will rise; some are painting this as strategic choice for a return to austerity, but surely it is too early to say for sure. The long-promised solution to social care funding did not materialise. The temporary increase in Universal Credit, which many want to make permanent, has been prolonged only until 30 September. There were various gimmicks under the heading of “growth strategy”, i.e. measures to encourage business investment, but nothing major. Tax advisers will indeed get an economic boost, especially from his 130% capital allowance scheme for “productive” investment. So the Budget was not the long-term strategic rethink many had been hoping for. The big question is whether the government has such a rethink in mind at all, or whether it is saving it for later. Saving it for later would be perfectly sensible in the current fast-changing environment. A lot of criticism is focused on these missing items, however. Another line of attack, notably from the Liberal Democrats, points to gaps in the emergency support, especially for smaller businesses. This is valid, but it is a bit late for a government rethink.

The leaves two bigger questions: is it sensible to put off dealing with the expanded national debt? And is it sensible to raise the rate of Corporation Tax? My answer to both is “yes”. The limits to government finance are very tricky to assess. On the one extreme we have countries like Argentina, constantly overdoing it and stuck in a world of inflation and debt crisis; on the other we have Japan, whose mountainous public debt and frlarge budget deficits are simply shrugged off. A large national debt needs to be refinanced over time, as the bonds that finance it mature. For now this is cheap and there are plenty of buyers. But that can change; interest rates can rise; investors can be scared off. There’s no sign of this at the moment, but this debt will be with us for a long time. Can’t the Bank of England take on the debt that the markets can’t digest anyway? Yes, but this is a bad idea if inflation is in the system, especially wage inflation. But some wage inflation is good – it is the process by which living standards increase, especially in poorer households. Another problem is if the country requires a lot of foreign currency (the position Argentina got itself into); this is a risk if the country has a large current account deficit. But there are no warning lights flashing on either inflation or currency needs. If that changes the government might need to raise taxes further – but not yet.

And as for Corporation Tax, the government’s reversal of strategy is spectacular. Starting with the Coalition with the Lib Dems in 2010, the rate has been steadily reduced to 19%; the plan now is to bring it up to 25%. This rise is widely portrayed as an attack on business. But that isn’t the right way to look at it. As a tax on profits, rather than on sales, employment or property occupation, it is a very efficient tax. The incentives to run a business efficiently remain unchanged by the rate. It is better regarded as a tax on capital. It is certainly one of the things that companies look at when deciding where to locate a business internationally – but it is still quite competitive at 25%, and basing attractiveness to business investment on tax rates is an invitation to footloose capital, not secure growth. Capital is already cheap, and the story of this century has been the rise of rewards on capital compared to labour. This looks like a good place a tax hike. There are problems with the tax, especially in its treatment of foreign trade and borrowing, but the rate is surely not too high.

Politically, though, this Budget is part of a general revival of the Conservatives’ fortunes. Mr Johnson and Mr Sunak are often painted as rivals, and doubtless they are, but so far this year they are working well together, promoting a narrative of a sure-footed, cautious but fiscally generous recovery from the pandemic. Labour, who had opposed the rise in Corporation Tax, are floundering.

The pendulum swings rapidly in politics, but Rishi Sunak is showing a sure touch. Later this year, as his bluff is called on public spending, it will be interesting to see what he and the rest of the government do.

The same, only different – from Tony Blair to Keir Starmer

“The same, only different.” This is the advertising slogans I remember most clearly from the later 20th century (the 1970s most likely). I can’t remember what it was for, and a Google search doesn’t help. It was not one of the era’s more successful slogans, evidently. The advertiser was trying to say that its product had been improved, but without saying that it had been rubbish beforehand, or to put off loyal customers. I have often used it in connection with the Labour Party led by Tony Blair in the mid 1990s. As Sir Keir Starmer attempts a relaunch with a big speech today, it seems appropriate again, as indeed I was saying last week.

The same as what? In my original analysis of Mr Blair, I meant that the Conservatives. The party was making a pitch to “Middle England” voters who had been voting Conservative, and needed to reassure them that his party stood for a was a triumph of style over substance. Labour’s policies, notably on taxation and spending, were almost the same as the Tories. The key differences could be confined to four points that could be put on a small pledge card, alongside a fifth that said there would be no increase to income tax. Tories worried about putting “clear blue water” between them and Labour, but when they tried, Labour either immediately adopted the policy themselves, or let the Conservatives dig deeper into a hole with an unpopular policy. It was an extraordinarily disciplined effort, resulting in the most spectacular election victory of modern times, but which left the party with a weak mandate to actually do anything radical.

On reflection the slogan also applies to Mr Blair’s message to party activists. His policy stance displayed a marked turn to the right, in favour of the neoliberal orthodoxy. But Mr Blair maintained that the party retained its ultimate objective of getting a better deal for the working classes; it was just the tactics that were changing. He wrote the slogan “For the many, not the few” into the party constitution.

Mr Blair’s highly managed approach to politics invited distrust, but in both these messages he was as good as his word. In his first term he implemented austerity policies just as severe as the Conservatives were proposing, and was careful about raising taxes. In 2001, when the public had got used to Labour being in charge, he won another big election victory, but took a distinctly more socialist approach. Over the next two terms, Labour ramped up public spending and invested in public services. Anybody who did not think this approach was of the left only has to compare it with what followed. The problem was that he, and Gordon Brown his Chancellor and successor, and just as much an architect of this strategy, chose to avoid raising taxes on income and spending, and instead focused on the bubbly capital markets. When the crash came a massive hole was left in public finances. Mr Brown’s progressive cuts of the basic rate of income tax to 20% were a massive misjudgement.

What of Sir Keir? It seems to that he is trying a similar trick. His speech today was long on vague talk of transformation and a “fork in the road”, but his policies sound distinctly close Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, which are a distinct turn to the left for that party. He made working with business a central theme, and stressed sensible management of the nation’s finances. But the comparison with Messrs Blair and Brown does him no favours. These two offered the public clear messages of what they were about, especially Mr Blair. Even before he was leader, he offered us “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. As the election approached it was “Education, education, education”. On the radio this morning the Shadow Chancellor Annaliese Dodds was offered the chance sum sum up what Labour now stood for in a sentence. She waffled; I really can’t remember what she said.

But it is early days and this is not the mid 1990s. The Tories then were led by the uncharismatic John Major. Often the public go for opposites – so the best way to oppose the charismatic Mr Johnson might be something much more competent and mundane. It worked for John Major in 1992 after all, contrasting with his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, as well as the Labour leader Neil Kinnock.

Still, clarity of message can’t hurt. The real test of that is that it must upset people, especially on the left. Only then will the public understand that Labour has moved on from the crazy years of Jeremy Corbyn, and that the party will deliver what Mr Johnson say he wants to do, but is too chaotic to succeed. The same, only different.

In defence of vaccine nationalism

Not all are equal when it comes to vaccination against Covid-19. Israel speeds ahead, followed by Britain and the USA, with other European countries bumbling along in their wake. Developing countries, or most of them, are a long way behind. This has provoked some harrumphing. “None of us are safe until we are all safe”, it is said. According to this idea the vaccine should be distributed in a world programme based on individual vulnerabilities. This gets general murmurs of approval from liberal types, or at any rate those are not in government. No wonder conservatives think liberals are soft in the head.

There are deeper philosophical and ethical questions behind this, but it would be useful to start with two facts which don’t seem to get mentioned in this context. The first is that vaccine manufacture is well behind the ambitious targets set earlier in the year. The headlines may be dominated by the massive scale of orders placed by the British government and others, but delivery is another matter. According to Tim Harford in the Financial Times some 800 million doses were promised in 2020. but only 20-30 million were actually delivered. There are no surplus stocks sitting around in national inventories while the needy are unvaccinated. The second fact is that death rates in the developed world, and Britain and the USA in particular, are very high. Britain’s is the highest in the world, we are told. In the developing world death rates are much lower. Some of this may be down to weaknesses in data gathering and government denial, of course. But mostly it is because their populations are much younger, on average, and so less vulnerable. And Britain and the USA both have an obesity problem. So if you are going to start with a worldwide vaccination programme, why wouldn’t you begin with the USA and Britain anyway? Is there really a worldwide injustice here?

Looking a bit deeper there is then the question of practicality. Collective efforts are often inefficient. In Europe the EU’s joint procurement is well behind that of newly separate Britain’s. A centrally organised world programme doesn’t bear thinking about. It’s bit like the lockdown sceptics’ idea that we should protect the vulnerable and let everybody else live their lives unrestricted (or restricted only by their own fear). At fist sight you might think it looks a good idea, but it doesn’t survive any closer inspection at all.

It’s worth a thought as to why this might be. One problem is accountability. The more complicated a project, and the more people involved, the more the need for accountability slows things down. And at the world level accountability has always been a problem. There is also the question of information. The further away you are from the sharp end, the poorer the quality and the less effective decisions tend to be. Committees and collaboration have their place; they even have heir place in worldwide vaccination programmes. But not in leading the emergency effort to get as many people vaccinated as fast as possible. here allowing national governments to act independently is going to get more shots into arms more quickly.

This leads to an important philosophical and ethical issue that liberals would do well to think about more deeply. How often do we hear pleas that needs of African peasants (we often focus on the rural poor and overlook ballooning urban poverty for some reason) should be just as much concern to us as the problems of our immediate neighbours? The fact that we neglect poor people in faraway places is regarded as a moral failure. And yet when rich people, or people in rich countries, try to help poor people far away, it so often ends badly. Aid ends up helping the wrong people, or distorting market and governance structures to their detriment, or simply comes over an example of patronising post-colonialism, reinforcing ethnic stereotypes. The exercise often seems to be guilt-tripping with little wider practical utility, beyond raising the status of certain NGO types. Of course the first premise of the liberal argument is sound enough: that all people on earth are morally equal. This is not a given, but there are all manner of reasons, moral, spiritual and pragmatic, why we should believe this. But this needs to be complemented by some form of proximity principle. It is quite right to be more concerned about those closer to us than those further away. It isn’t a moral failure. We can imagine a sort of hierarchy of family and close friends, neighbours, fellow countryman and so on. Such a hierarchy invites a whole series of problems, though. Western liberals, me included, agree that race or ethnic identity should play no part in it, of course, but this isn’t universally accepted (look at what is happening in China or India). Should Britons be more concerned about Latvians than Moroccans because of some form of European or Christian identity? And a lot of aid made by rich countries to faraway places is beneficial to humankind; I give to several charities and support the UK’s generous aid budget. It’s a bit of a nightmare, which is doubtless why many liberals try to short-circuit the discussion by denying any kind of proximity principle. But that doesn’t work either.

I am no moral philosopher,so I am not going to attempt an answer to these tricky questions. I rely on intuition. To me there is nothing wrong with countries focusing on vaccinating their own citizens as a top priority, even if richer countries end up getting ahead of the queue (which won’t be entirely the case anyway; India, for example, is the world’s leader in the manufacture of vaccines and is as nationalist in its priorities as anybody). That does not mean it is right to sabotage other countries’ efforts, or to hoard unused vaccine stocks. And once the urgencies of your own country have been dealt with, it is right to devote national resources to aiding other countries where the need is greater. I often disagree with the current British government’s moral priorities, but I think they have this one roughly right.