Sub-headline: Donald Trump’s re-election to a second term on Wednesday, November 6, and the success of the Republican Party, of which he has taken total control, represent a major turning point for the United States.
Published yesterday at 11:15 am (Paris), updated yesterday at 2:50 pm
This time, they made an informed decision. In 2016, when they first entrusted him with the White House, American voters didn’t know what a Donald Trump presidency would be like and were taking a leap into the unknown. In 2024, the situation is different: Not only do Republican voters know their candidate inside out, right down to his least glorious behavior, he’s even more radical than he was eight years ago. Trump’s electorate knows where this president is going to take them, and wants more.
It’s a reality that needs to be examined with eyes wide open. The path on which Trump, strengthened for his second term by his party’s success in the Senate, will take his country diverges fundamentally from the one charted by the United States since the end of the Second World War. It marks the end of an American era, that of an open superpower committed to the world, eager to set itself up as a democratic model. It’s the famous “shining city on a hill,” extolled by President Ronald Reagan. The model had been challenged over the past two decades. Now, Trump’s return is putting a nail in its coffin.
Editor: To call this hyperbolic, and even tinctured in political hysteria, is the describe it with a telling accuracy! American History puts it in perspective : given the fact that in 1968 Richard Nixon was elected to office, the victory of 1972, followed by Watergate, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bush The Elder, Bill Clinton, Bush The Younger , Barack Obama , Donald Trump, Joe Biden: These candidates, and then Presidents, represent the very mundane politics, and politicians who have held the American Presidency! Yet Le Monde wants to sound the alarm on Trump, who defeated New Democratic simpleton Kamala Harris, it defies the historical facts aided by that hyperbole and political hysteria.
Editor: I will offer a selection of Le Monde’s ‘arguments’:
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Trump views the world solely through the prism of American national interests. It’s a world of power struggles and trade wars, which scorns multilateralism. A world where transactional diplomacy replaces value-based alliances. A world, ultimately, where the US president reserves his harshest words for his allies but spares the autocrats, who are seen as partners rather than adversaries.
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If, as he threatened during the campaign, Trump ceases military aid to Ukraine and negotiates peace with Vladimir Putin in favor of the invader, the consequences of such an outcome will go far beyond the fate of Ukraine alone. They will affect the continent’s security as a whole.
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This threat is existential for the European Union, and its leaders need to be aware of it and prepared to confront it, without waiting for Trump to take office – they are long overdue.
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Editor: Le Monde ends it’s *Bill of Attainder’:
Trump’s victory at the end of a campaign of unprecedented populist, misogynist and racist virulence also bodes ill for women, immigrants and democracy in general. The 47th American president inherits a system he began to put in place when he was the 45th, one in which the sacrosanct checks and balances, those safeguards supposed to preserve American democratic institutions, are already weakened, and in which the Supreme Court has gone over to his side. He succeeded in downplaying the assault on the Capitol by rioters he encouraged on January 6, 2021. The image of a head of the world’s leading power who calls his opponents “enemies from within,” deems some of them worthy of the firing squad, vilifies dissident media and threatens to send the army to hunt down illegal immigrants in Democratic cities can only encourage illiberal leaders the world over, including in Europe.
Trump’s voters chose him in full consciousness, as did the business and tech leaders who rallied behind him, following in the footsteps of Elon Musk, the iconoclastic CEO turned eminence grise. The rest of the world will suffer.
Newspaper Reader.
*
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Acts of attainder or of pains and penalties were passed by some of the American colonial legislatures until the Constitution forbade them. In applying these prohibitions, the Supreme Court of the United States has expanded the historical conception of attainder. It invoked these clauses in 1867 in Cummings v. Missouri and Ex parte Garland to strike down loyalty oaths passed after the American Civil War to disqualify Confederate sympathizers from practicing certain professions. Similarly, in United States v. Lovett (1946), the court invalidated as a bill of attainder a section of an appropriation bill forbidding the payment of salaries to named government officials who had been accused of being subversive. Later decisions, however, have declined to treat requirements of loyalty oaths as bills of attainder, though they have invalidated such requirements on other grounds.
Nixon v. Administrator of General Services (1977) held that the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act was not a bill of attainder even though the law referred to President Richard Nixon by name. This law directed the administrator of the General Services Administration to seize tape recordings, papers, and other materials then in Nixon’s possession. The law did not impose a punishment and did not evidence a congressional intent to punish. In light of the fact that Nixon was the only president to resign under threat of impeachment by the House of Representatives, the court held that the “appellant constituted a legitimate class of one.”
Attainder | Definition, History & Effects | Britannica
Of the post-mortem commentaries on the Trump Election, nothing quite compares to Bret Stephens ‘pre-mortem’ on the election, before the results were known:
Dear President-elect, __________,
This column must publish before Tuesday’s results are known, so I’ll have to fill in your name later. Sorry — but no worries. Because, whether it’s Harris or Trump, some pieces of advice will serve either of you equally well.
First point: You owe your victory as much, if not more, to your opponent than you do to yourself. If it’s President-elect Harris, be grateful you didn’t have to face Nikki Haley or some other Republican who was not quite so verbally flatulent and politically toxic as Donald Trump. If it’s President-elect Trump, thank your lucky stars that Kamala Harris was, after Joe Biden, probably the least electable potential Democratic contender. You’d have been toast if your opponent had been Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania or Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
Put bluntly, outside of your hard-core supporters, many if not most Americans dislike or distrust you and will not easily give you the benefit of the doubt. Which raises the second point: Unlike Barack Obama in 2008, Ronald Reagan in 1980 or Lyndon Johnson in 1964, you do not have a mandate for sweeping change. Even if your victory is larger than the pre-election polls anticipated. Even if you win majorities in Congress. Even if friendly pundits hail you as the Savior of Democracy or the Vanquisher of the Woke or some other quasi-messianic moniker.
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Opinion | To Whom It May Concern – The New York Times Nov. 5, 2024
Editor: Mr. Stephens is a Strussian and like his master, has a penchant for re-writing to political ends, if not as grandiose as the Masters re-write of The History of Philosophy, yet it follows the mendacious Straussian Model. The Reader might wonder that Francis Fukuyama, once Straussian now identifies as a ‘Liberal’.
Stephens even celebrate the 1994 Crime Bill!
But people can get their heads around legislative achievements like the bipartisan 1994 Crime Bill that put 100,000 police officers on the beat — and contributed to long-lasting improvements in public safety.
And who can forget Senator Joe Biden’s racism?
Video: Trump says ‘sources’ tell him Joe Biden repeatedly uses the term ‘Super Predator’ when referring to young black men – despite any evidence Democrat has said it
Joe Biden speaks of potential for ‘predators’ during 1994 Crime Bill speech in the Senate.
November 18, 1993 | Clip Of Senate SessionThis clip, title, and description were not created by C-SPAN.
User Clip: Biden 1993 speech
During a 1993 speech pushing the crime bill, Biden warned of ‘predators on our streets.’
A Party of Prigs and Pontificators Suffers a Humiliating Defeat
The final paragraphs of the Stephens diatribe:
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Today, the Democrats have become the party of priggishness, pontification and pomposity. It may make them feel righteous, but how’s that ever going to be a winning electoral look?
I voted reluctantly for Harris because of my fears for what a second Trump term might bring — in Ukraine, our trade policy, civic life, the moral health of the conservative movement writ large. Right now, my larger fear is that liberals lack the introspection to see where they went wrong, the discipline to do better next time and the humility to change.
Editor: Mr. Stephens last two paragraphs of his diatribe, are an unwitting self-description!
Mr. Finkelstein fails to report that Thedore H. White re-rote his 1972 book, The Making of the President, because of the Watergate Scandal. Though The Reader might find it hard to find the evidence of it, I was aware of the re-write, because it was a bit of a scandal of the time! I voted in my first American Election 1968 and recall it quite vividly! And White’s offered an object lesson to all political commentators?
Title this: Kamala Harris striding toward The Future? Even Alex Shepard can’t quite buy his own political chatter!
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Harris is not a generational politician. As I have written, she is not even a particularly different candidate from the one who crashed and burned in the 2020 primary. She is overcautious and too fond of bromides; her political instincts can be wobbly; it’s still not entirely clear what principles guide her foreign or domestic policy. But she has run about as impressive a campaign as you could expect any Democrat to run given the extraordinary situation that she found herself in—or that, more accurately, Biden put her, his party, and the country in by refusing to drop out of the race earlier.
If Harris loses, pundits will focus on a number of decisions: her choice of running mate, her reluctance to break with Biden, her muddled message to young and Arab American voters disgusted by her administration’s support for Israel’s destructive war in the Middle East, her overcautious approach to both messaging and policy. But the fact remains that Harris gave Democrats a chance they did not have before. That is an accomplishment in and of itself, no matter the outcome of the election.
Headline: Our £1.5 trillion state will mean nothing without innovation
Sub-headline: Kemi Badenoch beware, there is no guarantee that voters will return to the blue team after being brutalised by Labour
Sunday November 03 2024, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
What might The Reader make of this report from The Times of November 3, 2024
Headline: Rachel Reeves: It was wrong to promise I wouldn’t raise taxes
Sub-headline: The chancellor defends her budget and denies it was motivated by class or ideology
Sunday November 03 2024, 12.25pm GMT, The Times
Reeves was asked whether her decision to raise taxes on private schools, users of private jets and multi-million pound farming estates was motivated by class.
“It wasn’t an ideological budget,” she told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg. “It was a budget where we had to raise £40 billion to put our public finances on a firm footing and also to ensure our state schools, our NHS are properly funded and that we can build the homes and indeed invest in those long-term investment opportunities … to grow our economy and bring good jobs paying decent wages.”
Following a backlash from farmers, Reeves defended her changes to inheritance tax on agricultural estates and said they would only affect the wealthiest landowners.
Notwithstanding Mr. Colvile’s lack of knowledge of Rachiel Reeves statement:
Labour thinks budget is a success — yet concerns mount over what’s next
The chancellor told an admiring Labour Party that they had ‘made our choices’, but the public reception to her far-reaching reforms remains highly uncertain
Friday November 01 2024, 10.10pm GMT, The Times
November 03, 2024, 12.25pm GMT, The Times
A few years ago my colleagues at the Centre for Policy Studies think tank noticed something extraordinary. Boris Johnson’s government was poised to become the first in British history to spend a trillion pounds — not just on Covid firefighting, but every single year.
Last week they noticed something else. Thanks to Rachel Reeves’s budget, that figure has risen. Substantially. In fact, by the end of this decade “total managed expenditure” will top £1.5 trillion.
It is hard to get a handle on how large this number is. By my estimate, if you gave away a £10 note every second, spending £1.5 trillion would take you more than 4,750 years. Lay those tenners end to end and you’d get to the moon and back, 25 times over.
Now, I may have got those calculations slightly wrong. There were a lot of zeroes. But by any metric, this is an absolutely staggering amount of spending — whose growth rate is completely unsupported by the economy that is paying for it.
And this is the underlying truth of the budget — what is behind the record-breaking tax rises, and the extra borrowing too. We are entering the age not so much of the big state but the super-state, the mega-state. As a result of Labour’s decisions, both taxes and spending will hit levels — as a percentage of our GDP — that have never been reached in peacetime, or, in the case of the tax take, in wartime either.
Editor: Mr. Colevile’s above paragraphs, uses the vehicle of Boris Johnson, to act as a rhetorical bridge to a critique of Rachel Reeves’ budget. And the appearance of the rhetorical phantoms of the not just the big state but the super-state, the mega-state. The Regular reader of Mr. Colvile confronts his panic about The State as anathema to the Thatcherite Hayekian civic/political romance!
Reader there are 887 words left of Colevle’s essay yet nowhere to be found is the actual fact, evidence of Tory financial profligacy, incompetence:
Headline: The lost decade: The Tories spent all the money
Sub-headline: The party’s programm of austerity has choked the economy, harmed public services and doubled the national debt.
Since the Tories came into power in 2010, the national debt has more than doubled. It now stands at more than £2 trillion. They have increased the national debt more than every Labour Government combined.
At the last Conservative Party Conference, Boris Johnson applauded the Tories for having “tackled the debt and the deficit” left by the last Labour Government. But, the truth is that the Conservatives have created a huge national debt. The Tories are the real culprits of ‘spending all the money’ rather than the disingenuous phrase of “Labour spent all the money” – which is one of the biggest myths in UK politics. What is also conveniently forgotten is that the Labour Government ran a surplus between 1998-2002 – an achievement almost unparalleled in modern history in the UK.
In 1997-1998, public sector debt as a percentage of GDP was 40.4 per cent; in 2007-2008 it was 36.4 per cent; in 2010-2011 it was 60.0 per cent; and in December 2019 it was 82.9 per cent.
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Colvile ends his essay here, yet The Reader finds these paragraphs maladroitly comic, tinged with mendacity!
Politically, the great challenge for the government is to show that all this spending actually works — that this great swollen state can actually deliver. For its opponents, the scenario is manna from heaven. If you were trying to come up with the perfect recipe to reconcile the Tories with their electoral base, it would involve stripping benefits from the elderly, a massive tax raid on business, rising gilt yields, hikes in inheritance tax, furious farmers and a general sense that Labour promised the earth to get elected and then instantly reverted to type.
Yet the Tories’ new leader should not be complacent. There is no guarantee that voters brutalised by Labour will return to the blue team, especially given its record in office.
More to the point, even if Kemi Badenoch can pull the Conservatives back into contention, any future Tory prime minister will face the same awful situation. A state for which that £1.5 trillion figure is just a starting point; which despite those huge inputs is still failing to deliver the services its citizens expect, or the growth; which is taxing and spending at rates never before seen.
In short, the challenge for the Tories over the coming decades will be the same as for all Britain’s politicians: wrestling with Leviathan.
Can Joanna Coles and Ben Sherwood revive the once-buzzy news site and reclaim their perches atop the New York media world? Their own staff isn’t sure.
Ben Sherwood and Joanna Coles took over leadership of The Daily Beast in April with the task of turning the money-losing site around. Credit…Gili Benita for The New York Times
On a sunny morning in early October, Joanna Coles, clad in a stylish tomato-red coat, and Ben Sherwood, dressed more demurely in a corduroy jacket, convened at their regular breakfast spot, the no-frills Star on 18 diner on Manhattan’s Far West Side.
The two veteran media executives were talking about their ambitious plans for The Daily Beast, the 16-year-old money-losing news website, in which they jointly acquired a minority stake in April.
But along with the predictable optimism about the mission they are taking on and enthusiasm about early signs of audience uptick and subscriber growth, Ms. Coles, a former chief content officer of Hearst Magazines, and Mr. Sherwood, a onetime president of ABC News and Disney TV chief, also conveyed a sense of frustration.
Frustration that they weren’t greeted by the staff they inherited as warmly as they expected. Frustration that the site’s tech problems meant they’ve had to buy multiple subscriptions just to log in. Frustration that convincing the newsroom of their editorial vision has been an uphill climb.
Less than three weeks after the pair’s takeover, New York magazine published a detailed report on the friction between reporters and Ms. Coles over story suggestions that they deemed ridiculous, including an investigation into whether former President Donald J. Trump was having stress-induced flatulence during his criminal trial and a list of the most obese members of Congress. (Neither article ran.)
It was clear that many of the sources for the report were inside the organization, with one unnamed staff member bluntly criticizing the new owners’ “warped vision” of the news site.
“This thing came within a day of being sold to the private equity knacker’s yard, where it would have been stripped,” Ms. Coles said later in an interview at The Beast’s offices in Chelsea, using a British term for a slaughterhouse. “In what way is it helpful to tape our conversations and to proudly boast that you are not going to even attempt to look at the stories that your new bosses are asking you to look at?”
“To me, that’s just, like, ‘No wonder the place is going out of business,’” she added.
For his part, Mr. Sherwood was aghast that Beast journalists had anonymously complained about a Daily Beast article on plans by Barron Trump, Mr. Trump’s youngest son, to attend New York University. The article relied on a source of Ms. Coles and was published without a byline.
“That happens to be something that she knew stone cold — her source was solid,” Mr. Sherwood said. “The organization went into a convulsion over this because Joanna did not reveal her source and no one could stand this up with any of their sources.”
Myra: while WWIII simmers, under the hand of The Netanyahu, backed by senile Old Joe, a bought and paid for House and Senate, and a complicit Corporate Media, Katie Robertson provides an amuse-bouche, for those Sunday morning readers of The Paper of Record!
Editor: Mr. Ganesh begins his essay with this ‘The paragraph that follows is the most reluctantly written of my career.’: what might The Reader make of this ‘confession’ of a sort? Could it be hyperbolic? Or just a feint?
Donald Trump qualifies as a titanic success in politics. And not because he got himself elected to the world’s highest office. Someone does that every leap year. It is because he achieved the hardest thing in government, which is to bind one’s successors. He moved the consensus on a big issue — trade — until the next president couldn’t go back, or didn’t want to. Hence the tariffs and subsidies of Bidenomics. Hence the spread of protectionism elsewhere in the world. Most leaders who change the “common sense of the age” need consecutive terms (Reagan) or a crisis (Thatcher) or both (FDR). Trump needed neither to turn an apostasy into an orthodoxy.
Whatever happens next week, we will be living in Trumpland for decades. Yes, I’ll manage, thanks. Besides some marginal trimming of restaurant wine lists, it is odd how little an era of global economic fragmentation incommodes a man. But “we” also encompasses the unknown millions who won’t now be elevated out of low income through trade, as so many Chinese were in the decades either side of the millennium. It includes the political class of Europe, too, which must decide whether to match the American fence. Trump could lose on Tuesday and still untie the west over time via his protectionist successors.
Editor: The Reader might wonder at focus on trade? Is its very remoteness from the usual Anti-Trump propaganda, that makes Ganesh’s essay so appealing? Ganesh just doesn’t shift his argument but expands it both exponentially, and prescriptively in the following.
Rather than mope, wonder how he did it. How does profound and lasting change happen? How does one leave a mark?
On YouTube, videos abound of Trump from the 1980s. He is measured, even soft-spoken, until the subject of trade comes up On YouTube, videos abound of Trump from the 1980s. He is measured, even soft-spoken, until the subject of trade comes up. At that point, a new edge enters the voice and a hint of a snarl contorts the face. Japan is the main target (“They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs”) but Kuwait gets some too. And this is on things like Oprah. In temporal terms, we are almost as far from this footage as it was from D-Day. But he still says the same things now about the same subject with the same vehemence.
Editor: Ganesh fails to see that Trump by nature, by design is rabble-rouser: he baits his audience with reports of bad actors.
Editor: Some Ganesh Snapshots:
This is almost all he cares about. (Immigration is a distant second.)
We can mock the primitivity of the economics.
The secret to leaving a legacy is monomania.
Editor: Bill Clinton, a sublime generalist: ornate Oxbridger dreck.
If there is a counter-Trump, it is Bill Clinton, a sublime generalist, his own wonk on most issues, an intelligent tinkerer of tax credits here and diplomatic relations there, but also one of the more forgettable two-term presidents.
Editor: Ganesh ignores the Clintons political romance with The Neo-Liberal Swindle that collapsed in 2007-2008!
In the end, Clinton just didn’t have a paramount obsession.
Editor: Ganesh uses Isaiah Berlin for almost a full paragraph. Although not mentioning the very elastic standards demonstrated by Berlin’s academic politicking!
‘Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic
by David Caute
Two high-voltage scholars engage in a bitter conflict in this irresistible tale of principle and politics in the Cold War years
Rancorous and highly public disagreements between Isaiah Berlin and Isaac Deutscher escalated to the point of cruel betrayal in the mid-1960s, yet surprisingly the details of the episode have escaped historians’ scrutiny. In this gripping account of the ideological clash between two of the most influential scholars of Cold War politics, David Caute uncovers a hidden story of passionate beliefs, unresolved antagonism, and the high cost of reprisal to both victim and perpetrator.
Though Deutscher (1907–1967) and Berlin (1909–1997) had much in common—each arrived in England in flight from totalitarian violence, quickly mastered English, and found entry into the Anglo-American intellectual world of the 1950s—Berlin became one of the presiding voices of Anglo-American liberalism, while Deutscher remained faithful to his Leninist heritage, resolutely defending Soviet conduct despite his rejection of Stalin’s tyranny. Caute combines vivid biographical detail with an acute analysis of the issues that divided these two icons of Cold War politics, and brings to light for the first time the full severity of Berlin’s action against Deutscher.
Editor: The final Ganesh paragraph is unsurprising, yet the very nature of Trump, since his Apprentice Circus, is his wayward attention span and volatility. Mr. Ganesh fails to even consider what role Elon Musk might play in the next Trump Administration!
Well, for a reason. It clarifies a lot. *Leaders glamorized as “change-makers” are often bores who grind away at one groove: rolling back the state, or joining the European project (Ted Heath was an immense hedgehog) or leaving it. Watch Trump fulminate about trade in the 1980s, and again 40 years later. The narrowness of his concerns would invite a chuckle, if they hadn’t prevailed.
Rachel Reeves will today deliver the first Labour Budget for 14 years and the first-ever by a female chancellor. It’s a major moment in the UK’s history – even before Reeves has uttered a word. Below I explore what will define her statement.
During the general election campaign, Rachel Reeves appeared trapped in a straitjacket of her own making. By pledging not to raise income tax, National Insurance, VAT and corporation tax, she had ruled out deploying the taxes that account for more than two-thirds of government revenue.
Reeves had also bound herself to fiscal rules that radically limited the scope for investment. In order to meet her promise to reduce government debt as a share of GDP, Labour’s manifesto offered just £4.7bn of extra capital spending. Economists scoffed at its fiscal modesty: call this a growth plan?
But today, in an act of political escapology, Reeves will break free of these constraints. First, she will increase employers’ National Insurance as part of what some predict will be the biggest tax-raising Budget in history (the current record was set by Norman Lamont in 1993). Mindful that this may be her moment of maximum political leverage, Reeves has moved swiftly. Call it the Macbeth Budget: “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly” (as is said of the murder of King Duncan).
The charge that Reeves faces is that she has killed one of Labour’s manifesto pledges. Party aides reject this claim, recalling that the Tories challenged them during the election to rule out an increase in employers’ NI (they didn’t). But what Reeves can’t deny is that this is a tax on business and, indirectly, “working people” – the criticism that she made of Rishi Sunak’s NI increase back in 2022. Expect the Chancellor to argue that the Conservatives’ profligacy left her with no choice. The facts have changed, so she has changed her mind.
Reeves’s second escape act is over borrowing. As first trailed a month ago in her Labour conference speech, the Chancellor will revise her debt rule to create more room for investment. Reeves is set to adopt a measure known as public sector net financial liabilities (PSNFL), which takes into account government assets – such as the student loan book and company shares. This would free up £50bn for investment, but Reeves is expected to settle for around £20bn to reassure the markets. She will also vow not to borrow for day-to-day spending (something that could necessitate future tax rises).
The Chancellor hopes that her extensive pitch-rolling will prevent anything resembling a Truss-style backlash. But more than Sunak’s Budget response – his last major act as leader of the opposition – eyes will be fixed on UK gilt yields (already at a post-election high).
Reeves’s wager is that the short-term pain of tax rises will be offset by the long-term gain of improved public services. This, polls suggest, is what voters expect from a Labour government. The nightmare for Reeves will come if the Conservatives can credibly argue that voters are “paying more for less”. That’s one reason the debate over public sector spending – and reform – is only just beginning.
Good morning, George here. Rachel Reeves’ tax-and-spend Budget represents an unambiguous break with the Conservative years. But while there are a lot of big numbers in the Red Book, they don’t appear in the growth column. That’s the problem I explore below.
This Budget was the one that Labour always promised to deliver – if you listened closely enough. As I wrote before the election, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves’ pledge to “prevent austerity” was only achievable through larger tax rises. These, I suggested, would be imposed after Reeves discovered “the books are worse than thought”. That’s exactly what has happened.
The £41.5bn of tax rises announced by Reeves put the UK within touching distance of the western European norm (a tax take of 38.2 per cent of GDP will leave us level with the Netherlands and not far off Germany). Combine this with a new industrial strategy, stronger workers’ rights and the highest public investment since Harold Wilson and a distinctively social-democratic model emerges.
Economic growth is critical to this approach – improved public services and higher living standards for workers depend on it. The problem for Labour is how little of it is predicted. GDP growth is forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility to average just 1.66 per cent across the five-year period (after a temporary rise to 2 per cent next year). And remember, despite its gloomy reputation, the OBR has generally been overly optimistic in the past.
The outlook for living standards is even grimmer: they are projected to rise by just 0.5 per cent a year on average across the parliament, only slightly higher than growth during the previous Conservative term (0.3 per cent). This, the Resolution Foundation notes, would be the worst performance under a Labour government, lower than the 0.8 per cent growth recorded in the 2005-10 parliament.
Are there any glimmers of hope for Reeves? Labour aides point out that the OBR hasn’t accounted for the potential boost to growth from the government’s planning reforms (as they have yet to be finalised). But these alone won’t have the transformative effect that the Chancellor seeks.
Reeves insists that she doesn’t want a return to either austerity or ever-higher taxes – yet that is the unpalatable choice she faces. Spending on unprotected government departments is currently due to fall by 1.1 per cent a year in real terms after 2025-26. In common with her Conservative predecessors, Reeves has deferred rather than cancelled cuts.
Higher economic growth would help ease her dilemma. That’s one reason we can expect an increasingly animated debate about how to achieve it. Looming over the Budget was Brexit – a word mentioned just once by Reeves (“their Brexit deal harmed British businesses”, she noted of the Conservatives). The OBR’s judgement is as unambiguous as ever: it expects Brexit to “reduce the overall trade intensity of the UK economy by 15 per cent in the long term”.
I’ve long noted the irony that, far from becoming “Singapore-on-Thames”, Britain has embraced a more European model since Brexit: higher taxes, higher spending, more regulation. That is more the case than ever under Labour.
But what still separates the UK from its European peers? It isn’t a member of the single market. As the debate over Labour’s next manifesto begins, this inconsistency will become increasingly apparent.
The New Statesman proclaimes itself to represent:
New Times, New Thinking.
The once Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes magazine is no more. Jonathan Rutherford represents that ‘New Times, New Thinking’?
Headline : How the Corbynite left hit self-destruct
Sub-headline: Andy Beckett’s The Searchers charts the rise and fall of Tony Benn’s heirs, but fails to confront the obstinacy and intolerance that undid them.
This is a story about four left-wing Labour politicians – John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone and Diane Abbott – and how they carried forward the cultural revolution of 1968. Inspired and guided by the older Tony Benn, the fifth “searcher” of the title, they single-mindedly enlivened a moribund London Labour politics and transformed the political culture of the capital as it emerged from its postwar decline. In their comradely, disputatious and occasionally angry relationships with one another they shared a political heritage in Benn’s democratic socialism.
In 1981 his bid for the deputy leadership had bitterly divided the Labour Party. He narrowly lost and, unforgiven, suffered the political death of internal exile. A similar fate of banishment awaited three of those he inspired. In 2015, when Corbyn won the leadership of the Labour Party, they took their London politics of economic radicalism and social liberalism on to the national stage. Like all stories of hope and human desire, it ended in tragedy.
Andy Beckett has written a sympathetic and absorbing political history of the main actors of the hard-left Socialist Campaign Group. McDonnell is the intense and thoughtful one, the strategist whom Beckett describes as influenced by the Italian communist theorist Antonio Gramsci. McDonnell will prove to be the most adept in the tactical pursuit of power. Corbyn is the believer who likes people. He wants them to like him, and generally when they meet him they do. Some will come to revere him. Livingstone is the great political talent, and like Corbyn a political obsessive. His cheeky-chappy patter disguises his dark political arts. Abbott stands a little apart and slightly aloof, more guarded in public. She has had to force a trail through racism, insults and ignorance to become the first black female Labour MP. They have all had a tough fight to make their way in Labour politics, but Abbott has had the hardest. It never got easier.
The 1960s was a brief period of social change and upward social mobility. These four individuals – the working-class Abbott, McDonnell and Livingstone, and the middle-class Corbyn – were able to establish themselves as activist leaders of a new metropolitan middle class that eventually came to dominate Labour politics. They pursued their ideal of socialism with tenacity and no little courage, earning themselves both love and hate – the latter at sometimes shocking intensity. And as Beckett makes plain in his title they won “many enemies”.
Of whom I was probably one. There is a brief mention of my role in Labour Together, the organisation that set itself the task of “winning the philosophical, intellectual and policy arguments within Labour”. The purpose was to “build the organisational capacity and political leadership to carry out this project”. That was the idea. Not unlike the project of these four politicians, then. Like them, the 1968 cultural revolution inspired my teenage years. Like them, although I was younger, my politics was formed in the late 1970s and 1980s with the rise of a humanist brand of Marxism and identity politics. But in the end I opposed their political ascendancy in the party.
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By 2015 Tony Benn had died – the year before, aged 88 – and Livingstone was no longer mayor. McDonnell, Corbyn and Abbott, all now in their sixties, were marginal if troublesome figures in the Labour Party. As Beckett writes, it felt like the Labour left “was passing into history”. But the cooling embers were about to burst into flame. Labour lost the May general election, Ed Miliband resigned, and there was a contest for a new leader.
Should Corbyn carry the torch of the left into the leadership contest? As the deadline for nominations approached he ummed and ahhed. Finally, he agreed. Abbott immediately tweeted out the news before he could change his mind. A short while later McDonnell and his wife were at the Globe Theatre on the South Bank. McDonnell got a call from Seb Corbyn, Corbyn’s middle son, who was working on his father’s campaign. He said: “Dad’s worried about running. He’s worried that he might win”.
He did. In an astonishing populist revivalism, Corbyn united a coalition of the “defeated idealists of the 1970s and 1980s” and the “discontented of the early 21st century”. His election in September 2015 stupefied the political class. And then, a year later, it was knocked sideways by Brexit. The old rules of the game had been torn up. The polarising politics of friends and enemies was back in force.
The centrists and moderates who dominated the Parliamentary Labour Party had no conception of how to respond to the Corbyn leadership. He had attracted a huge influx of new members and created a plebiscite that underwrote his leadership. MPs opposed to Corbyn found themselves under increasing pressure in their constituency Labour parties. In an attempt to unseat him, 20 shadow ministers resigned. They tried a second time to remove him in a leadership contest in 2016. The problem was they had no political alternative to offer. Corbyn increased his vote. They bided their time until the next general election. With Corbyn as leader Labour would suffer a catastrophic defeat.
The 2017 election confounded them again. Labour, after an energetic campaign that was picking up support, lost but increased its vote. A few more weeks of campaigning would have seen it victorious. This was the high point for the four remaining searchers, a “victory” that was actually a defeat. And then the past and their allegiances began to catch up with them. Corbyn’s dramatic elevation into national politics brutally exposed his shortcomings. His naivety in dealing with foreign relations culminated in his questioning Moscow’s involvement in the Novichok poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in March 2018. His support, along with Livingstone and McDonnell, for Irish republicanism and anti-Zionism provided the right-wing press with a rich supply of stories about his meetings with extremists, conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites. Did Corbyn like the country he wanted to lead? His sympathies lay with the historical victims of British imperialism. Its enemies were his friends.
His desire to please everyone and to avoid difficult decisions created a leaderless party. Without political authority, intolerance, intimidation, mob persecutions on Twitter and the booing of journalists became regular features of Labour’s politics. A sanctimonious, cult-like politics grew up around him that identified his enemies and mobilised against them. Beckett makes elaborate efforts to distance Corbyn from the anti-Semitism that took hold and grew in this environment. In doing so, he more or less denies its existence, and cannot admit the paradox that the left too can be a source of evil as well as good.
Livingstone was the first to fall. In 2016 he was suspended for suggesting Hitler supported Zionism. He formally resigned in 2018. The following year Labour suffered a fourth, crushing election defeat. In 2020, under the new leader, Keir Starmer, Corbyn was suspended for stubbornly refusing to accept the scale of anti-Semitism in the party following the investigation by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. The banishment was completed in March 2023 when the National Executive Committee (NEC), Labour’s ruling body, vetoed Corbyn standing as a Labour MP. The final act came a month later in April 2023 when the Observer published a letter from Abbott in which she argued that Jews, Irish people and traveller communities experience prejudice but not racism. It was sufficient excuse to suspend her from the party. Only McDonnell remained, leading a diminishing and marginalised hard-left faction. The influx of new members under Corbyn went into reverse. By summer 2023, the NEC reported a fall of nearly 170,000 from the peak of 564,000.
Each of Beckett’s five politicians confirmed Enoch Powell’s observation that all political lives end in failure because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs. What were they searching for? They came to represent a politics in search of redemption. The dogmatism and attacks on those perceived to be its enemies did not come from a searching, so much as the belief in a true path from which there can be no deviation. Politics came to stand for a religious quest for the puritan ideal of the city on the hill. That way lies the road to hell, paved with good intentions.
Beckett ends his book in 2023 with a visit to a talk by Bernie Sanders at the Royal Festival Hall. Looking around at the packed audience, Beckett recognises its similarity to Corbyn’s mass meetings. He reflects that it does not look like a Britain whose political time had gone for good. This may be true, but for the searchers of this book and their particular brand of London socialist politics, it has.
The Searchers: ‘, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies Andy Beckett Allen Lane, 560pp, £30
Editor: Should The Reader give any creedence to a publication that trades in Anti-Left propaganda, that could have been published in The Telegraph? There can be no doubt that the ghosts of the ‘Fives Rebels’ still haunt the Blairite New Labour, a pastisch, if that’s the right descriptor, of Mrs. Thatcher, but none the less toxic!
Editor: A portion of The Spetator’s Kate Andrews offers what George Eaton cannot!
Part of the problem will be the massive increase in spending on services like the NHS. With more than £22 billion worth of additional day-to-day spending going to the health service (without any reform attached), already public policy circles are doubting that tax and borrowing will stick at the levels announced in yesterday’s Budget. Paul Johnson at the Institute for Fiscal Studies notes how ‘incredibly front loaded’ the borrowing and spending is; ‘day-to-day public service spending, after inflation and the additional cost to public sector employers of rising NI, is set to rise by 4.3 per cent this year and 2.6 per cent next year, but then by just 1.3 per cent each year thereafter.’ Similar to the Tories’ pledge to cut spending dramatically in the years to come, it’s hard to believe Labour really intends to reduce its spending plans so substantially, especially in the run-up to an election. This suggests yesterday’s announcements are the start of what’s to come. Far from giving markets confidence, it’s uncertainty that has come to characterise the government’s borrowing strategy.
It should be said that Reeves is still far off breaking her own borrowing rules. And unlike the aftermath of the mini-Budget, the story of borrowing costs is being told over days, not hours. But costs are still moving in a more expensive direction, which will cause the Treasury plenty of problems, even if no policy undergoes a U-turn. The OBR forecasts that both interest rates and government borrowing costs will be roughly a quarter of a percentage point higher due to Reeves’s plans – but if headline figures settle higher than expected, that will add billions of pounds on to the government’s bills.
Winning over the markets was one of the biggest challenges in Reeves’s first Budget – and borrowing more was always going to be tricky, with the era of low interest rates long gone. So far they don’t seem convinced that this is an agenda for growth, which is why investors want a bigger pay-off for the risk they’re taking. Don’t be surprised if the goalposts shift: the hope for the government now is not that markets celebrate this Budget, but that they come to tolerate it.
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