Andy Beckett's Blog

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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Those who insist on spending cuts are those who are never hurt by them. Time to be brave – and take a new tack

Britain is in danger of going bankrupt. It may happen slowly or quickly, but since Labour took office this possibility has increasingly been promoted and discussed in the press, by opposition parties and in the City of London.

What exact form will this bankruptcy take? The prophets of doom tend to be vague about the timescale, but more certain about the cause of the coming meltdown: the state spending too much, generally on people who have little.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

Scathing rightwing coverage contains a revealing note of alarm: this is more than just a rebellion, and it’s gaining supporters fast

Less than a month into its existence, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s new leftwing party is already widely seen as a mess. Its leadership, its launch schedule and even its name: all have caused inconclusive, semi-public rows. The opportunity provided by political novelty appears to be being wasted.

For the many journalists and politicians who always see the left as incompetent and naive, the stop-start, seemingly uncoordinated first weeks of Your Party, as it may or may not eventually be named, have felt like a gift – a summer silly season story after months of grim political acrimony. “Thank Christ Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana are here to give us a laugh,” wrote Sebastian Murphy in the Daily Express. “Labour’s loopy Left have bravely broken free of Starmer’s stultification to bring us a political party that is easily the funniest thing since the anti-Brexit centrists Change UK.” Now largely forgotten, Change UK lasted 10 months after splitting from Labour in 2019.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

In its new guise as a luxury hotel, the building – like so many others in London – will become a monument to the 1%, and their reluctance to pay taxes

Until seven years ago, one of the key centres of American power in Europe was a few minutes’ walk from the consumer frenzy of Oxford Street in London. Reassuring or enraging, depending on your view of American hegemony, for more than half a century the enormous US embassy, by far the largest in the capital, provided diplomatic, immigration and intelligence services – and an irresistible target for protesters. Its strikingly skeletal grey building on Grosvenor Square, which opened in 1960, became steadily more surrounded by fences, concrete blocks, bollards and other defences: signs of the increasing effort required to maintain the US’s worldwide ascendancy.

So it’s strange to visit the square and find that all the defences have gone. You can walk right up to the building, as protesters never managed to in large numbers, on to pavements once menacingly guarded by the embassy’s detachment of US marines, and peer through the rows of windows at an interior eerily transformed.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist