Yes, Britain is at a crossroads, but all directions currently lead to disaster
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You can tell that we have tipped into a new epoch by the shift in elite language about epic political journeys. Margaret Thatcher warned Britain that there was no alternative to free markets lest it sleepwalk down the road to serfdom. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton argued that it was the destiny of social democrats to forge a glorious new “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism. The first-wave populists empowered us to “take back control”.
Now, with populism down but not quite out, the recovering political class has started to concede that we at least find ourselves at a “crossroads”. Politics cannot merely be about who will be most competent at administering a failing technocratic state, some of them are grasping towards saying. Instead, when experts seem to lack the answers, we need democracy to come into its own, with Left and Right competing to offer us choice and radical solutions. This is an era of tough calls.
In what was undoubtedly the strongest speech of his career, Rishi Sunak on Monday came closer than any mainstream politician in Britain to making this conceptual breakthrough. The delivery was oddly powerful. With his hopes of winning the general election next to zero, he exuded an eerie, yogic calm.
His warning that we face the “most dangerous yet most transformational” period in history hit the bullseye. His caution that we could well experience more change in the next five years than in the past 30, amid the emergence of a new “axis of authoritarian states”, AI disruption and unprecedented migration, triggered by destabilising violence in the global South, may turn out to be prophetic.
More importantly, he outlined a vision for a new kind of mainstream Right-wing politics in dramatic contrast with that of the liberal-Left. Unlike his previous speeches, which have been a dry shopping list of pledges, Sunak positively exuded “lucid” conservatism. He called for aggressive optimism to cut through the apocalypticism of our age.
Perhaps the most brilliant part was when he said that it has been the most perilous periods that have tended to yield the most transformational breakthroughs, citing the codebreakers of the Second World War.
The PM compared a Right-wing politics of security – tightly focused on border control and defence – with the more amorphous paternalism and conformism of the centre-Left. He was refreshingly clear on the need to temper our yearning for security with our reverence for freedom, even groping towards a new centre-Right vision of liberty anchored not only in market capitalism but also sovereign integrity, freedom of speech, and self-realisation (achieved in part through world-class education).
It was impressive, making one feel almost tempted to forget all the Tories’ abysmal failures over the last 14 years and swing behind Sunak to keep Keir Starmer and his comrades out of No 10. That is of course until one remembers that there is a difference between rhetoric and reality. And the reality is that the two roads before us both lead to the same place. That is straight to hell.
Because, despite the best efforts of the PM to persuade us otherwise, his practical actions have failed to rise to the momentous challenges of the pivotal era in which we find ourselves. Instead, in political terms, we seem to have entered a dismal time of “new centrism”. One in which, the major parties converge towards a mush of post-growth economics, border control fudge, and mock welfare reforms.
In his speech, Sunak depicted the Tories as the party of dynamism, but both major parties have embraced the post-growth age. On the one hand, Labour is likely to edge towards growth-sapping wealth taxes, given that it is committed to strict fiscal rules and is ultimately unwilling to radically scale back the welfare state. But the Tories are little better. They have raised taxes to a peacetime high and refused to make growth-boosting investments in infrastructure for fear of upsetting their Nimby grassroots.
Sunak’s bid to contrast Labour and the Tories on illegal immigration stretches credulity. While both parties have abandoned the unequivocal open border liberalism of an earlier age, they are also both drifting towards a fudge. Even the PM’s “hardline” Rwanda policy is intended not so much as a long-term deterrent as an act of theatre to distract from the boats that will continue to arrive on our shores.
Starmer’s own smoke and mirrors plan is even more brazen. It seems he actually intends to increase the number of asylum seekers through a returns deal with the EU, hoping that as long as they arrive in an orderly fashion on ferries rather than in rubber dinghies, the public will barely notice.
And although both parties are keen to reassure voters that they are finally serious about reducing legal migration, they both favour tinkering over bold reform.
Neither has demonstrated a willingness to broach the tough calls that will need to be made if Britain is to wean itself off cheap labour. There is a deathly silence, for example, when it comes to the question of how we are supposed to bankroll investment in upskilling our homegrown workforce, in an era of stagnation and high interest rates.
Sunak is eager to establish that the Tories are the only ones who will tell benefits “scroungers” to get back to work. But even the PM is not willing to level with the public that, in an era when one in four Britons are believed to be suffering from a diagnosable mental illness, it will take a cruel kind of determination and defiance of modern clinical science to coax millions of people whom the system deems to be disabled back into the workforce.
Labour and Tories alike have baulked at what it will really take to slash welfare spending: investing more in preventative anti-obesity and mental health programmes.
Sunak is correct that Britain, and the wider West, is at a crossroads. The tragedy is that, if there are stark and difficult choices before us – between centrism and radicalism, growth and post-growth, spending on defence and spending on the NHS, cutting immigration and protecting the welfare state – the mainstream parties have only just begun to talk about them, let alone do anything practical about them.
It is a breakthrough of sorts that the political elite is finally under pressure to admit that there may be an alternative to our current, disastrous course of action. But unless the Prime Minister is about to surprise everyone with a truly revolutionary set of policies to match his rhetoric, there is no end in sight to the tyranny of centrism.
