A few weeks ago I attended an open factory event at the premises of Isembard, a company building ‘a new industrial base for the west’ by automating the manufacturing of key components for sectors pivotal to the country’s defence, security and resilience.
Over beers and pizza on a trading estate in north-west London, the company’s highly-skilled machinists and visionary leadership rubbed shoulders with an unlikely array of admirers, from venture capitalists to journalists and academics.
The conceptual currency of conversation was the narrative of decline and national renewal sometimes associated with ‘Anglofuturism’, an increasingly popular account of Britain’s industrial past, present and future. With geopolitical fractures reframing advantage around physical resources and strategic positioning, this presents Britain’s island geography as a source of power and productive potential.
Inspired by this analysis, Isembard’s story is underpinned by a sense of purpose very different from the global notions of corporate social responsibility that have comforted British capitalism in previous decades. It suggests a future where business must align itself with a new national interest, just as some quarters of Silicon Valley have adjusted themselves to the new state capitalism through concepts of katechon and the ‘technological republic’.
The challenge for the left is that the intellectual energy powering this new political economy predominantly emits from the right, who via an effective network of outlets are developing the most seductive representations of our decline and renewal.
The Future of the Left is a vector for channelling some of this energy into a reckoning for the Labour tradition, but also part of an emerging cross-party political consensus articulated around a common diagnosis and new direction epitomised by Isembard’s example.
Last week’s debates on defence investment have demonstrated the failure of the status quo to realise the pressing, high-stakes need for a more national economy, with reindustrialisation and a stronger commitment to the country’s security at its heart. This paralysis deprives companies like Isembard of the demand signals they need to plan and prosper.
Labour should not squander the small window of opportunity it has to reset Britain’s political economy. As an increasingly fragmented electorate meets intensifying geopolitical peril, the project of a more national economy organised around defence, security and resilience could be the basis for a historic compromise. The question for the future of Labour and the left is how to lead this new consensus, rather than trail in its wake.
Frederick Harry Pitts, Associate Professor in Political Economy and the Future of Work at the University of Exeter
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For the Substack, Jonathan Rutherford reflects on what it means to live in the aftermath of a dysfunctional political settlement, and why we need new explanatory frameworks for understanding what comes next.
“The idea of aftermath is to exit the intellectual stagnation and political inertia left in the wake of the liberal market order and work on the threshold of what is passing into history, what it has left behind, and what this might portend. And to undertake this work while newly emerging social relations, institutional forms and political realities have yet to acquire commonly accepted, intelligible meanings.
The pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty (1931-2007) would argue that such an undertaking is a contest between an entrenched vocabulary, which has lost its usefulness, and a half formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things. In other words, cultural change precedes political change.
Rorty is something of a liberal individualist whereas Raymond Williams (1921-1988) is a socialist and materialist and argues that this meaning coming into existence is collective and social. Williams explores what he calls our ‘living presence’ or ‘present being’. He tries to put himself inside social and cultural formations as they are unfolding. He is undertaking a kind of hermeneutics of culture which he describes as ‘a whole way of life’. There is no privileged vantage point from which to view the world with objectivity. We as individuals are subjects of our own histories which cannot be escaped. We are always already within and inside, struggling to make sense of an opaque world.”
For the New Statesman, Emily Lawford goes in search of the decidedly progressive, but also pessimistic, young women reshaping British society.
“O’Brien grew up in Leicester, in what she calls a working-class family. (She defined this in the Marxist sense, meaning anybody who works for a wage, unlike the “asset class” and what she calls the billionaire “Epstein
class”.) She had always been progressive. But while studying for her master’s degree at Bristol University, she started going to Black Lives Matter protests on College Green and felt inspired by the collective energy she saw there. She already had a TikTok following from sharing “random content”, but her audience rapidly grew as her posts got more political. Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, and Israel’s response in Gaza, was a “catalytic moment” for her. “I had been talking about immigration issues before, like Marxism, like philosophy,” she said. “Then it all just became the war.”
O’Brien’s content, and that of a growing number of left-wing female influencers like her, is in some ways a mirror image of the content made by male influencers. While the toxic, often hard-right politics of the manosphere has been exhaustively documented, the new generation of female influencers are similarly radical – they are just on the other side of the political spectrum. On the internet, women and men have never been more alienated from each other.”
In ‘The End of the American Empire’, John Gray argues that Trump’s war in Iran signals the breakdown of US hegemony.
“In the Middle East, the war has undercut the financial foundations of US hegemony. An assurance of protection was the basis of the petrodollar system set up in the early 1970s, when the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement establishing the dollar as the global reserve currency collapsed under the weight of heavy American spending on the Vietnam war. Needing a prop for the sinking dollar, the Nixon administration tasked Henry Kissinger with negotiating a quid pro quo with Saudi Arabia. The upshot was the petrodollar system, in which the Kingdom agreed to price its oil exports exclusively in dollars that could then be recycled in purchases of federal debt. Without the petrodollar, the spiralling American deficit becomes ever more unsustainable.
Some suggest Trump’s war follows a hidden road map: the goal is to stem the rise of China. Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela disrupted Chinese imports of oil from the South American country, and the US is redirecting flows to American Gulf Coast refiners. When, as seems likely, Cuba falls into the American sphere of influence in the coming months, it will be a further setback for Chinese influence. Beijing has invested heavily in Cuban infrastructure, including cybersecurity and surveillance facilities.
Assuming there is any such strategy, the results are mixed. As a major oil importer, China is under some pressure. Unlike Russia, which is benefiting from higher prices, Beijing needs oil to keep flowing to maintain its export-oriented economy. But as Iran’s largest oil buyer, China is one of the countries allowed through the strait and paying the toll in yuan – a direct challenge to the petrodollar.”
For the New York Times, Ross Douthat argues that Viktor Orbán’s defeat offers a set of practical lessons, rather than sweeping conclusions about the end of populism.
“This leads to the second lesson of Hungary for liberals, which is that the best political response to populism is usually to deal with its concrete policy demands, rather than insisting that a democratic emergency requires people to back the establishment no matter what.
Peter Magyar, the incoming Hungarian prime minister, ran against Orbanist corruption, but otherwise he promised his own form of nationalism and even tacked to Orban’s right on immigration. In the process he vindicated the most basic theory of how to respond to a populist era: Move to the cultural right, especially on immigration.
It’s a simple admonition but one that establishment leaders in both Europe and America have found nearly impossible to follow, preferring to treat their periodic electoral victories as opportunities to return — as the Biden administration did, to its own destruction — to the very policies that prompted populist rebellion in the first place.”
For the Telegraph, Scarlett Maguire explains why politicians misunderstand where the centre-ground is.
“In the hope of a return to simpler times, many politicians and commentators are calling for a movement to take back the centre ground. The idea is to appeal to the reasonable voters in the centre abandoned by our new, more volatile politics, to reassert something that is more stable and reasonable…
…The uncomfortable truth for those seeking to re-capture the centre-ground of British politics is that to do so at the moment might mean adopting much of the Green party’s economic platform while also borrowing heavily from Reform’s playbook on immigration.”
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In Don De Lillo’s White Noise (1984), Jack Gladney is the head of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the Hill. He is preoccupied with the fate of his wife and himself – which of them will die first? And yet his anxiety is constantly distracted by the mundanity and ephemera of consumer culture. He skims across the surface of life fearful of the unknown depths below. In contrast his teenage son Heinrich relishes the prospect of disaster, and one day it is visited upon them when a cloud of poisonous toxins, released after a train crash, drifts toward their town.
Gladney’s reaction is incomprehension. ‘I’m just a college professor. I’m the head of a department. I don’t see myself fleeing a toxic airborne event’. But abandon home and normality he must. They drive past a group of shoppers who watch them from inside a home furnishing store. Gladney suddenly feels self-conscious and foolish. And then at the sight of hundreds of people trudging through the flurries of snow he senses something ancient, doomed and ruined, a whole history of people trekking across wasted landscapes.
By the end of the book order has been restored. A post-traumatic introspection settles on the town. And then, without warning, the shelves of the local supermarket are rearranged. ‘There is agitation and panic in the aisles’. Shoppers stop and cluster in confusion trying to work out the underlying logic of the changes. But none of it matters because all is part of a great machine digitally organising their lives in the language of waves and radiation. It is ‘how the dead speak to the living’. And, as DeLillo writes, ‘it is where we all wait, a slowly moving line toward the till, passing the tabloid racks and their cults of the famous and the dead’.
In 2003, in a rare interview, he told Entertainment Weekly, ‘I don’t think anyone is prescient. What artists sometimes do is see things a little sooner than other people see them’. But in writing about Jack Gladney’s thwarted attempts to live a meaningful life, De Lillo understands the tragic quality of America. In this he was prescient of the future.
Jonathan Rutherford, Future of the Left
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In ‘How Australia really stopped the boats’, Amelia Wood argues that turnbacks are the best way to deter illegal migration.
“In September 2013, [Kevin] Rudd was voted out in favor of an opposition coalition that promised a still tougher approach. Within days of election victory, the new government, led by Liberal politician Tony Abbott, introduced a policy it called Operation Sovereign Borders.
Under this approach, offshore processing was kept, but the emphasis shifted to boat turnbacks. Australia resumed navy-led policing of its borders. As during Operation Relex, the navy was charged with intercepting and turning back any boat that tried to reach the mainland’s shores. In the early stages, from September to December, intercepted boats were escorted to offshore processing facilities. After that, the policy changed to turning boats back directly to Indonesian waters…
The evidence was enough to satisfy politicians. Though the Labor party had initially resisted and eventually undid the Pacific Solution, by 2016 all major parties supported offshore processing and boat turnbacks. Even Operation Sovereign Borders’ strongest opponents eventually changed their minds. Anthony Albanese was deputy prime minister in Rudd’s government and argued against the policy in opposition for several years. In 2018, he conceded that it had stopped the boats. Now he is prime minister, his government regularly turns back boats which attempt to reach Australia.”
Labour Together argue that Britain needs a politically workable way to build more homes in existing high-demand places, and that ‘street votes’ are the best lever for doing that.
“In expensive cities around the world, resident-led schemes like street votes have successfully boosted housebuilding. Where residents are able to drive change, the tangible benefits go to those communities that welcome new homes and create positive plans. Street votes offer aspiration that is rooted in community, not individualism. In Britain, this could be Labour’s next big home building policy.
In a street vote, residents get together with an architect to collectively design and then agree on new rules which allow more housing on their street. Those rules could be a design code for home extensions or for new, extra homes on the street. In a similar system in Seoul, this often meant two new flats for owners in the new apartment buildings built on their land – one for the existing resident, and one for their adult children. A strong motivation for NIMBYs to become YIMBYs.”
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The Spectator talks to campaigner Harry Scoffin about England’s broken leasehold system and why it needs to be abolished.