Andy Beckett's Blog

In the face of multiple crises, disruptive technology and populism, making Britain orderly again is an impossible goal

This Labour government loves rules. Fiscal rules, stability rules, investment rules, immigration rules and rules restricting protests: this government’s first impulse, when faced with the fluidity and chaos of the modern world, is to put in boundaries and try to police them. Keir Starmer, a methodical person as well as a former director of public prosecutions, is so keen on orderliness that in 2022 his close colleague Lisa Nandy called him “Mr Rules”.

There are things to be said for this approach. Many voters have been saying for at least a decade that they want politicians to exert more control over Britain’s erratic trajectory. Meanwhile the recent catastrophic administration of Boris Johnson, with its vast carelessness about Covid deaths, Brexit and immigration, still looms over our politics as a demonstration of what happens when governments have little interest in rules. As tech oligarchs, bond traders, international criminals, and digital and physical viruses increasingly prey on vulnerable people, it can be argued that a libertarian or fiscally loose government is a luxury most Britons can’t afford.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

On one hand, no more safe seats or long careers could mean less complacency. On the other, no big parties could mean greater corporate influence

Politics as we have known it in Britain for more than a century seems to be falling apart. Only six years ago, at the 2019 election, the Conservatives and Labour got 76% of the vote between them, coming first and second in both votes and seats, as they have at every general election since 1922. Yet in most opinion polls now, the two parties around which politics is usually arranged at Westminster, in the media, and in the minds of millions of voters, activists and party donors have a combined support of less than 40%.

Not only has Reform UK surged well past them, Labour and the Tories are no longer consistently ahead of the Greens and Liberal Democrats – and sometimes level with them, or even narrowly behind. With an inexperienced, hard-right populist party dominating, and an equally unprecedented four-way battle to be Reform’s main challenger, British politics appears to be assuming a strange and volatile new shape.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

In California, daily life under Trump is marked by sporadic resistance and avoidance. Neither will defeat the autocrats

How would you behave if your democracy was being dismantled? In most western countries, that used to be an academic question. Societies where this process had happened, such as Germany in the 1930s, seemed increasingly distant. The contrasting ways that people reacted to authoritarianism and autocracy, both politically and in their everyday lives, while darkly fascinating and important to study and remember, seemed of diminishing relevance to now.

Not any more. Illiberal populism has spread across the world, either challenging for power or entrenching itself in office, from Argentina to Italy, France to Indonesia, Hungary to Britain. But probably the most significant example of a relatively free, pluralist society and political system turning into something very different remains the US, now nine months into Donald Trump’s second term.

The feeling of crisis in Manchester also afflicts Labour and the Lib Dems. It leaves voters facing a dangerously unstable political order

Much of democratic politics is about getting people’s attention. That’s a particular problem for struggling, less-than-compelling leaders. The further your party falls in the polls, the larger the temptation to launch dramatic, supposedly transformational policies. It’s like speaking more and more loudly to someone who has stopped listening.

Thus this week’s Conservative conference in Manchester, with the party at historic lows in the polls, featured a frenzy of policy announcements, on once-successful Tory themes such as tax cuts, law and order, welfare and immigration, that were often made to half-empty rooms. Expanses of blue carpet had been installed in the huge, barn-like convention centre – as if to reassure delegates that the party still had an identity – yet much of the time they were eerily deserted. The Conservatives, famed and feared for their durability, seem to be disappearing before our eyes.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

For once, Starmer’s premiership seems energised – the task will be building this into a campaign for next year’s crucial local elections

Crises can liberate governments. Collapses in popularity, huge dilemmas about public spending, foreign policy emergencies, poll surges by opponents and the prospect of losing office: all can persuade even previously cautious administrations to change their direction and rhetoric – or simply say more clearly why they are in power.

Politicians sometimes enjoy being bolder. Commonly seen as always calculating and never spontaneous, some are in fact relieved to stop filtering their public words and finally speak their minds. At the Labour conference this week, fringe meetings were refreshingly, sometimes startlingly, full of ministers, MPs and recent government advisers talking frankly about the government’s problems and the toxicity of modern politics.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

Vast numbers want a party that counters the country’s rightward lurch. Despite the chaos, they are willing Your Party to get off the ground

Does Britain need another leftwing party? If you’re not on the left – or if you are, but consider yourself a realist – then the answer may seem obvious. This is a conservative country, you probably believe, in its underlying political assumptions, electoral system and media biases. Any party that doesn’t fit these is put under intolerable pressure. It always splinters, shrinks and collapses, sooner or later.

If even the Labour party, in which radical leftwingers are only ever a minority, is still fundamentally unacceptable to many voters and powerful interests – as the right’s constant outrage at Keir Starmer’s occasionally egalitarian government demonstrates – then what chance does a less established, more disruptive party than Labour have? Over the past half century in particular, ever since Margaret Thatcher successfully undermined socialism’s legitimacy as a mainstream belief system, the space for leftwing politics has sharply contracted in this country. Britain has become one of the world’s least left-tolerant democracies.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

Vast numbers want a party that counters the country’s rightward lurch. Despite the chaos, they are willing Your Party to get off the ground

Does Britain need another leftwing party? If you’re not on the left – or if you are, but consider yourself a realist – then the answer may seem obvious. This is a conservative country, you probably believe, in its underlying political assumptions, electoral system and media biases. Any party that doesn’t fit these is put under intolerable pressure. It always splinters, shrinks and collapses, sooner or later.

If even the Labour party, in which radical leftwingers are only ever a minority, is still fundamentally unacceptable to many voters and powerful interests – as the right’s constant outrage at Keir Starmer’s occasionally egalitarian government demonstrates – then what chance does a less established, more disruptive party than Labour have? Over the past half century in particular, ever since Margaret Thatcher successfully undermined socialism’s legitimacy as a mainstream belief system, the space for leftwing politics has sharply contracted in this country. Britain has become one of the world’s least left-tolerant democracies.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

At this year’s TUC conference, I found cautious optimism about the employment rights bill – and a resurgent left looking to capture hearts and minds

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‘Unions winning” declared a giant, cheerily multicoloured sign along the windy seafront side of the Brighton Centre this week. Built in the unions’ distant 1970s heyday, the hulking traditional venue for their annual TUC conference is sometimes a melancholy place, windowless meeting rooms half-full of delegates and union leaders trying to raise their spirits while talking about setbacks, betrayals and rare victories.

Yet for much of this conference the sun was out, the wind was light by Brighton standards and, inside the centre, the exhibition stand for Labour Unions, the collective body for those affiliated to the party, was plastered with uplifting posters promoting “Labour’s new deal for working people”. The employment rights bill, less comprehensive than some trade unionists would like but full of improvements never offered by New Labour, is expected to easily clear one of its final parliamentary hurdles next week.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

Listen to the inflammatory language around immigration, multiculturalism, press freedom – that old notion of British ‘moderation’ has gone for ever

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While British rightwing politics has never been exactly a gentle pursuit, there is a longstanding assumption that its tone and content have limits. Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech, Oswald Mosley’s embrace of fascism, Keith Joseph’s 1974 speech apparently in favour of eugenics: each of these transgressions was punished and became infamous.

According to believers in this country’s political moderation, the mainstream British right does not make overt appeals to prejudice, encourage political violence, form alliances with the far right, or advocate authoritarianism here or abroad. Unlike in other democracies, such as interwar Germany, our conservatism has always had red lines.

Keir Starmer’s government is treating voters with contempt. With the arrest of hundreds of protesters in London, for many, the feeling is mutual

In the third month of this tense, parched summer, the British state is under severe strain. Stripped of resources by 14 years of reckless rightwing government, contorting itself to maintain relations with ever more extreme regimes abroad, expanding its security powers at home through ever more tortured logic, regarded by ever more voters with contempt, a once broadly respected institution is increasingly struggling to maintain its authority.

You could see the strain on the faces of some of the police officers, reddening with exertion in the sun, as they arrested 521 people in Parliament Square on Saturday for displaying pieces of paper or cardboard with a seven-word message supporting the proscribed group Palestine Action. It was one of the biggest mass arrests in London’s history.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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