Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

Good piece on Starmer's position. Both the reason which is that he thinks he's going to win so is starting to act as he would as PM and the domestic angle:

Unblinking Starmer has eyes on the bigger prize
The Labour leader's refusal to budge over Gaza despite a significant party revolt enhances his standing as a PM-in-waiting
Patrick Maguire
Thursday November 16 2023, 9.00pm, The Times

The old ones are the best. "It's like that line from Jaws," said the senior Labour MP an hour or so after a third of their Commons colleagues flouted a three-line whip to vote for a ceasefire in Gaza: the biggest rebellion of Sir Keir Starmer's leadership; almost as many as defied Tony Blair's call to arms in Iraq. "They needed a bigger boat. We're going to need a bigger majority."

And notwithstanding the poisonous atmosphere in the parliamentary Labour Party, eight departed frontbenchers and well-founded fears of a crisis of confidence among Muslim voters, here's the bottom line: Starmer remains on course to deliver one.

It has been six weeks since Hamas launched its bloody incursion into Israel, five weeks since the interview in which Starmer appeared to give carte blanche to as brutal a response as pleased Binyamin Netanyahu. And what an unhappy place the opposition has been in the interim. So overpowering is the sound and fury that it has been easy to overlook (who wouldn't, when confronted with human misery on such a scale?) the emotionless stability of their lead in the polls.

This week's YouGov survey of voting intention for The Times records Labour on 44 per cent, 23 points ahead of the Conservatives, whose score of 21 per cent is their lowest since the fag-end of Liz Truss's six weeks in Downing Street. To attribute conclusive significance to any one poll is a fool's errand but together they tell the same unchanging story.

That is not to say he will be invulnerable to backbench or grassroots dissent, nor that some of his MPs will endure harder election nights than they might have expected before the war began. Far from it: both the Liberal Democrats and Greens have endorsed a ceasefire. On the Labour left, there is excited chatter of a challenge to Shabana Mahmood, MP for Birmingham Ladywood and the only Muslim in the shadow cabinet, by Salma Yaqoob, the former leader of George Galloway's Respect Party.

These, however, are questions for campaign managers or a future government chief whip to deal with on another day. In the here and now of Westminster, the Labour leadership does not think the fundamentals of the next general election have changed to the party's disadvantage.

Obvious points these may be, but they bear repetition because they explain why Starmer has behaved as he has in recent weeks. One of his intimates describes it thus: "He did not blink at all. For whatever reason, this has been the making of him." And that reason is rudimentary too. Starmer thinks — knows — he is Britain's next prime minister. He is determined to behave as if he already is. That, in his view, amounts to an obligation to establish the UK as a reliable partner to Washington on the international stage and not an outrider liable to be bounced by domestic unrest.

This will make for uncomfortable, infuriating reading for some in the Labour Party. And only the most zealous of Blairite cultists would pretend there were no legitimate criticisms to be made of this line of thinking: recall Iraq. Yet it is nonetheless what the Labour leadership thinks. "You wouldn't expect me to stand here today and say my concern is the Labour Party management," Starmer said yesterday, "rather than the hostages and the innocent civilians dying in Gaza." In other words: I will not blink.

Call his resolve what you like — statesmanlike, callous, a tacit admission of Britain's irrelevance on the international stage — but I hear it has been utterly confounding for Tory strategists. It is not reducing the conflict to SW1 gamesmanship to point out that Starmer is not a Labour leader beholden to the sectional interests Rishi Sunak would like voters to think he is beholden to. Downing Street does not disagree with the position that has divided Starmer's MPs. Whatever price Starmer eventually pays for his decision to stand firm — and it will, in time, be paid — will surely not be high enough to deny him office.

Next week will come another salutary reminder of Starmer's way of thinking. It is next Wednesday's autumn statement and not this Wednesday's vote on Gaza that weighs heaviest on their minds. Look at those unmoving polls again: it's still the economy, stupid. As Rachel Reeves constantly reminds us, consciously evoking Ronald Reagan, Tory England is poorer than it was 13 years ago. Indeed, mortgaged England is much poorer than it was 13 months ago. Usually sentences like this would collapse under the weight of historical precedent, but economics and the public finances have become this Labour Party's safe space.

Just as Starmer seeks to restore Washington's trust in Labour Britain, Reeves is seeking to restore the public's trust in a Labour Treasury. Trust, in fact, was the very word she alighted on when she gathered her aides on an away day early this summer to plot strategy for the year ahead. Again, there are countless criticisms to be made of exactly how she sought to build this trust. But it is working. After her much-applauded conference speech, in which one voter in a Labour focus group compared her to Margaret Thatcher, the party's internal polling showed her ratings soaring. Her approval rating for competence among the opposition's red wall target voters ticked up from 17 to 31 per cent; those who thought she knew the value of money from 12 to 30 per cent; those who knew she had worked at the Bank of England from 8 to 30 per cent. Over these difficult weeks, it is these numbers that have helped calm nerves at the top of the Labour Party.

Will they hold? Inflation is falling, and the chancellor's fiscal headroom is rising with it. Jeremy Hunt may yet announce the tax cuts Tory MPs so desperately crave next week. This week's hints of a reduction to inheritance tax might be expected to worry his Labour opposite number, who, like her leader, has done all she can to defy stereotype.

But any such tweak at the margins of fiscal policy or any individual tax cut is unlikely to panic Reeves, from whom we can instead expect to hear trenchant reminders that Britain's overall tax burden is the highest on record. Like Starmer, she will not blink.

So let's not pretend no trouble lies ahead for a Labour government. They really will need a bigger majority. But a Labour government is still exactly what Britain is likely to get.

Reading it though, it struck me that if you want to understand what the Starmer team are thinking then I think the best writer is Patrick Maguire at the Times, I think for wider analysis probably Stephen Bush at the FT. And on policy direction I'm not so sure (I feel Centre for Cities and the young centre-right have actually been pretty influential here) - but obviously the presiding spirit of the age is Jonn Elledge who has been writing "build more bloody houses" articles for about a decade.

Which is striking because all of them are formerly of New Statesman over the last ten years which has just announced its second round of redundancies this year. Labour have a 20 point lead and are very likely to form the next government. The New Statesman is the traditional magazine of the left and should be doing incredibly well. It should be a paper people buy to understand the thinking of the next leaders of the country and where left-wing wonks try to convince those leaders on policy issues (and there are plenty: AI, climate, war in Europe).

Instead they've made a lot of really weird editorial decisions to have the odd piece on how "woke Ukraine provoked Russia" with some sub-Baudrillard hyper-realism theory, or lots of articles that just feel very old and tired and 2016 about "centrist dads" and the online left. It's very odd - still some very good writers but it doesn't feel particularly necessary or even relevant to where the country is now, far less where it'll be in a year or two (I mean big pieces in the latest edition by David Gauke and Andrew Marr...). I think the editor recently did a "state of the nation" book framed around Orwell (which I imagine will become fiercely out of date if Labour win) so maybe they're just a little entrenched but I don't get it. I think the editor has also said that he wants it to be a broad magazine of right, left and centre - which I think is a mistake.

But I think it means Starmer, especially at the start, will have pretty limited support in the press - possibly as limited as the Times and the FT. The Guardian and NS will probably slowly pivot and try to find some sympathetic commentators. May be challenging, it'll be interesting to see if it has an impact.

[Sheilbh]

Unreasonably obsessed with this - from the British Election Study survey (so massive numbers) from May. The guy who did the chart hadn't updated his Excel so Brexit Party should be Reform Party:


Mainly wondering about the M&S-Waitrose gap

[Josquius]

Product of where they are?
M&S is in pretty much every town whilst Waitrose is sparse up north.

[Jacob]

Product of where they are?
M&S is in pretty much every town whilst Waitrose is sparse up north.

How would the lack of Northern stores explain a higher proportion of Tory supporters?

[Tonitrus]

Morrisons was my favorite, and I miss it. 

[Richard Hakluyt]

Product of where they are?
M&S is in pretty much every town whilst Waitrose is sparse up north.

How would the lack of Northern stores explain a higher proportion of Tory supporters?

The North is far less tory than the rest of England. Even in the recent election, a near landslide for the tories, Labour still held a majority in the North (ie NE and NW England and Yorkshire and the Humber). All this talk about the Red Wall going tory has confused the issue. I have read social media comments that the current government is the fault of the North, that raised my blood pressure    Tory governments are always the fault of the south of England where, outside London, it is a sea of sickly blue .

If only we had figures for Booths, a posh northern chain equivalent to Waitrose, we could then test Jos' hypothesis. I do see a lot of oldies buying the Daily Mail and even the Express when I shop there, so he may be right.

[Sheilbh]

Although - wouldn't the lack of Northern Waitroses (because why would you need one when you have Booths - also very pleased at them scrapping self-serve tills) make Waitrose more Tory and the gap with M&S smaller?

[Josquius]

The North is on the whole less Tory than the south (maps are confusing as we have huge sparsely inhabited rural seats which do tend to be tory) however even the most working class of towns will have a solid 20-30% of tories.
This is how the "red wall" thing happened in so many places. It wasn't socialist areas suddenly becoming tory in huge numbers.
The bulk of the tory vote was the tories who are already there +the solid 10% or so you of fascists find everywhere with their party standing aside switching  to support them. It doesn't actually take that many labour supporters putting a drill up their nose to flip a seat. Especially considering the numbers who due to brexit upset and other Corbyn issues went green or lib dem.

My hypothesis, purely based on my anecdotal feels and half remembered fact, is M&S is the go to for this heavily elderly  tory in enemy territory crowd.

Waitrose meanwhile is located in wealthy southern areas which are generally tory held. Here the wealthy are less of a hidden minority and a lot of them are far more liberal than proper conservative.
They see the culture war shit and brexit and all that and declare it'll take a mighty tax break on high earners to get them to stay tory.
Not to mention that many of them will be those from humble backgrounds who got an education who escaped the north. Prime tory voter this group is not.

Had wanted to write more but rushed...it's kind of a minority vs majority, stodgy old tory vs wealthy professional thing.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Well the tories are still on 20%+ despite the utter incompetence of this government, an amazing figure imo.

M&S are very strong on producing items in smaller quantities and individual portions. This is appealing to old people, who often live alone and have reduced appetites. My mother-in-law, for example, would claim to save money by shopping at M&S despite the high prices due to the reduction in waste. Increasingly old=tory so this is another potential reason for the gap (though MIL is resolutely socialist of course).

[Tamas]

also very pleased at them scrapping self-serve tills)

 

[HVC]

also very pleased at them scrapping self-serve tills)

 

Not because people are mad, but because they steal too much

[Gups]

Product of where they are?
M&S is in pretty much every town whilst Waitrose is sparse up north.

How would the lack of Northern stores explain a higher proportion of Tory supporters?

The North is far less tory than the rest of England. Even in the recent election, a near landslide for the tories, Labour still held a majority in the North (ie NE and NW England and Yorkshire and the Humber). All this talk about the Red Wall going tory has confused the issue. I have read social media comments that the current government is the fault of the North, that raised my blood pressure    Tory governments are always the fault of the south of England where, outside London, it is a sea of sickly blue .

If only we had figures for Booths, a posh northern chain equivalent to Waitrose, we could then test Jos' hypothesis. I do see a lot of oldies buying the Daily Mail and even the Express when I shop there, so he may be right.

London is far less Tory than any of the northern regions. It's true that overall Labour had a small lead in the north but it was more or less even in the NE and the Tories had a small lead in Yorks and Humber

[Richard Hakluyt]

2019 was a disastrous election for Labour, but even then Labour won a majority of the seats in the North. 89 to 68 I make it. It will get a lot redder next time round 

Corbyn was a huge turnoff. But I also think that Labour has a problem up here as the memories of the heavily-unionised industries that people used to work in fade away. It is becoming just a poorer version of the South these days, so the vote is more up for sale. Though being taken in by Johnson, so sad 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_United_Kingdom_general_election_in_England

[Gups]

Unreasonably obsessed with this - from the British Election Study survey (so massive numbers) from May. The guy who did the chart hadn't updated his Excel so Brexit Party should be Reform Party:


Mainly wondering about the M&S-Waitrose gap

Reform changed their name back to Brexit  recently, apparently

[Josquius]

Although - wouldn't the lack of Northern Waitroses (because why would you need one when you have Booths - also very pleased at them scrapping self-serve tills) make Waitrose more Tory and the gap with M&S smaller?

I know objectively self service is bad. The data does suggest it's played havoc on jobs, especially for women with low education....

But dammit I love getting out of the shop quicker and not having any obligation to chat. At fast food places it's particularly wonderful.

And no Booths up here. Posh southern stuff that :whippet: