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In ‘Mahmoodism will save the Labour Party’, Jonathan Rutherford argues that Shabana Mahmood has opened up a space for a conservative-left politics capable of defeating the populist Right.
“For 25 years a bi-partisan consensus led by the “Blairites” and “Cameroons” ruled the country, valorising globalisation and frictionless borders. Its mix of social and economic liberalism extended market forces into society, enabled large scale immigration as a social good, ceded sovereignty to the EU, and handed economic power to global corporations. In the name of progress, successive governments oversaw the unravelling of social norms, traditions and ways of life that had bound society together and defined national life and identity.
This consensus was an alliance of a dominant economic elite and what Barbara and John Ehrenreich called the Professional and Managerial Class (PMC). Subordinate to the economic elite it reproduces capitalist culture and class relations through its control over large swathes of the media, the quangocracy, the NGO sector, civil service, judiciary, and cultural and educational institutions. The Ehrenreich argue that relationships between “teacher and student (or parents), manager and worker, social worker and client” are a mix of hostility and deference on the part of working-class people, contempt and paternalism on the part of the PMC…
The liberal individualism of a typical white PMC that dominates the left, its refusal to recognise the problem of an immigration and asylum system that is broken, widely abused, hugely expensive and a cause of increasingly deep and bitter social division, has actively undermined the left and ceded influence and authority to the radical right.”
For The Guardian, Julian Coman argues that Labour must fuse the values of social justice and rights with a grounded, community-based politics rooted in civic virtue and solidarity.
“For many on the left, this showdown between two ideological blocs, on everything from immigration to net zero, is likely to be lived as a moral crusade. Liberal tolerance v reactionary authoritarianism. Diversity v racism. Hope v hate. Universalism v a narrow and defensive Little Englandism. Such binaries will be accompanied by warnings that it is both futile and immoral to try to “out-Reform” Reform in the public square.
The attraction of a strategy of No pasarán is understandable, given that a virulent and repellent strain of ethno-nationalism has entered the national bloodstream. But resistance politics is not enough, and it oversimplifies the complexities of the moment. To truly see off Faragism, progressives will ultimately need to understand and outthink Reform’s broad appeal, as well as denounce its malign consequences. That will involve dialling down the moral self-certainty, analysing rather than anathematising, and confronting some inconvenient truths.”
For the New Statesman, Jason Cowley interviews a reflective Anthony Barnett on nationalism as an inescapable necessity, the failure of the Sixties left and what he admires about Farage.
“When I contacted Barnett for this interview, his reply intrigued me. “A new epoch is on the way, marking the end of the Sixties one, which I participated in the birth of,” he wrote in an email. “A catastrophic failure, apart from feminism. Ironically, while the key figure of the new order is surely Xi Jinping, Trump himself is a personification of the Sixties – its dark side, but then Nixon won the election.”
I was born in the Sixties but came to political awareness in the early Thatcher years of the Eighties. Even then, I had a sense that the legacy of the revolutionary excesses of the Sixties generation – the student rebellions, the radical individualism, the licentiousness, the revolt against family and tradition – was greater atomisation and the fragmentation of society. In many ways, the triumphalism of the left in the Sixties created the conditions for the new right’s counter-revolution. It was, therefore, fascinating and surprising to hear Barnett describe the Sixties as a catastrophic failure. What exactly contributed to the failure?
Before answering, Barnett wanted to qualify what he’d written in the earlier email by saying that, as well as feminism, the Sixties left had “won the argument” on racial justice and ecological sustainability. But, as he put it in a later email, “while many, including me, talked about the need for a ‘hegemonic project’ etc we utterly failed to develop one that had any tangible grasp on society. At the beginning of the Eighties Raymond Williams wrote about how, in contrast to the postwar era, the left was suffering from ‘an absolute loss of the future’ in the sense of believing it was taking society somewhere different and better. Whereas the right, which had been conservative and backward looking – a lost cause if you will – now expressed a self-confident, forward-looking project of marketisation and high-tech global future.””
Harry Lambert interviews Maurice Glasman on Shabana Mahmood’s sweeping asylum reforms, deindustrialisation, and the rise of progressive legal culture.
“I mean look… [in] 1500 we were nowhere. What could we export? Basically wool and some mud. We had a really huge surplus of mud. And then someone called Wolsey and another person called Thomas Cromwell along the way created these institutions. First of all, there was the real transformation of Cambridge in terms of the endowment of the chair in maths and then Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and the King James Bible which did codify our language; [there was] the Royal Exchange where London became the center of the Atlantic trade; the Greenwich Naval Academy where we went from basically wandering around in corals to really state-of-the-art ship building. Within 100 years we really controlled the Atlantic in a very serious way.
This was all institutional building but it wasn’t done by the state directly. It was done through the granting of licenses to corporations with a particular mission. So there was an institutional framework that could then lead to the extraordinary growth in knowledge, science, prosperity. So it really disputes the free market view of the world that the industrial revolution was to do with free markets. And then the transformation of vocational education, grammar schools was all Wolsey and Cromwell, with 10 to 15 per cent of working-class people actually going to school and then the access to the universities that followed from that.
What I’m saying is that the state has to make judgments about the direction of travel. And I’m saying that from Thatcher right up to now, the state has not acted in order to shape the direction of travel.”
For UnHerd, Katja Hoyer asks whether the resignation of Sahra Wagenknecht as leader of the BSW signals the end of the left conservative experiment in Germany.
“German Left-winger Sahra Wagenknecht is stepping down as chair of the BSW, a party named after her and founded only last year. It may well be the end of her political experiment of “Left-wing conservatism”, in which she combined Left-wing economic policies, such as on labour rights, and Right-wing policies on social issues such as immigration. Her decision leaves Germany to fall in line with a broader trend: a surge of the Right, opposed by a smaller but growing current of “pure” Left-wing identity politics.
Wagenknecht’s offering was unique, and had the potential to disrupt German politics. Together with a small band of fellow travellers, she left her old party, Die Linke (“The Left”), and in January 2024 founded the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, a movement so centred on her that it bore her name. The brand-new party made astonishing gains last year, winning over 6% of votes nationally in the European Parliament elections and between 11% and 16% in three state elections in the former East Germany.
Crucially, however, it fell at the ultimate hurdle: getting into the German parliament in the election of February this year. All parties must pass a 5% threshold and the BSW narrowly missed this, receiving 4.972%: around 13,500 votes short of the target. For the first time since 2009, Wagenknecht found herself without a seat in the Bundestag.”
For Compact, David Goodhart argues that while the asylum reforms signal a dramatic break with Labour’s progressive instincts, they may struggle to deliver the rapid changes demanded by an impatient electorate.
“To adapt a David Frum quote, “If white liberals won’t enforce borders, their ethnic minority colleagues will have to.” As the country’s center of gravity has shifted from metropolitan openness in the heyday of New Labour to provincial insecurity in more recent years, Labour leaders have struggled to authentically embody the new mood, despite wrapping themselves in rhetorical union flags. The public can sense it.
By contrast, Mahmood feels no white liberal squeamishness about attempting to stop the boats. Her inner Birmingham constituency of Ladywood is more than three-quarters ethnic minority and around half South Asian, mainly Pakistani. Many are children and grandchildren of legal migrants, like her, who resent the queue jumping of the illegals.”
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With councils spending most of their budgets on care services, a report by the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) finds how private-equity backed providers are profiteering at the expense of care workers and the people they care for.
“The drive for profit among the largest for-profit care providers shapes not only how they extract money through debt, rent, and dividends but also how they cut costs in daily operations. One key area is staffing, where the largest for-profit providers spend 25% less of their revenues on staff costs than the largest non-profits. Cost-cutting like this leaves care workers facing low pay and impacts the quality of care people receive, with many care services now failing to meet the needs of our communities, with reports of substandard and frequently unsafe provision.
These outcomes flow from the logic of profit-maximisation that is built into financialised ownership structures and shareholder-driven business models. In this system, staff pay, working conditions and even improvements to care quality can be treated as potential costs to be minimised, while financial returns to investors are prioritised. As a result, both workers and those in need of care are left worse off, while the public continues to fund a system designed to extract value rather than provide it.”
A statement by the Home Office outlines its plan to restore order and control to the UK’s asylum system by reducing arrivals and expediting removals.
“In an increasingly volatile and more mobile world, huge numbers of people are on the move. While some are genuine refugees, others are economic migrants, seeking to take advantage of the asylum system. Even amongst those who are genuine refugees, economic incentives are at play. Instead of stopping at the first safe country even genuine refugees are searching for the most attractive place to seek refuge, many now ‘asylum shop’ their way across the continent, in search of the most attractive place to seek refuge.
As a result, in recent years, hundreds of thousands have come to this country seeking asylum. Some have come by illegal routes, most notably small boat channel crossings. But similar numbers have overstayed legal routes into this country, such as visitor, work or study visas.
The impact on this country has been profound. Over 100,000 people now live in asylum accommodation, funded by the taxpayer. Many refugees remain unemployed several years after being granted protection, depending on taxpayer funded benefits to live in the UK. This must change. To the public, who foot the bill, the system feels out of control and unfair. We as a government must be honest. It feels that way because it is. The pace and scale of change has destabilised communities. Illegal migration is making this country a more divided place. It is the job of a government to unite the country. To do so, we must understand why this crisis has happened, and what we can do to address it.”
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Stephanie Mudge’s Leftism Reinvented traces how centre-left parties evolved from socialist mass movements to Keynesian managers and, ultimately, to today’s market-friendly technocrats. Her key insight is that these shifts reflect changes not just in voters or economic conditions but in who speaks for the party. Mudge shows how internal experts translate the wider economic world into policies and ideas. As these experts changed, so did the parties, helping explain the left’s drift from its working-class base to its current crisis of political identity.
In Radical Hope, Jonathan Lear - who recently passed away - asks what happens when a culture dies. This was the fate of the Crow people in the late nineteenth century, when they were pushed from a world in which their virtues and practices made sense into a reservation life that rendered those concepts unintelligible. Lear’s point is not that the Crow were destroyed, but that the framework through which they understood a life well lived had vanished. The book speaks to our own unsettled moment of cultural exhaustion, in which inherited political, economic and social frameworks no longer seem to make sense, yet new ones have not appeared to replace them. Lear argues that facing such uncertainty requires a form of radical hope: holding on to ethical aspiration even when familiar concepts fail, refusing both nostalgia and despair, and remaining open to new forms of meaning, solidarity and political purpose that have not yet come into view.
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In conversation with Jonathan Rutherford, John Gray speaks on the failures of progressivism, why it appears incapable of confronting reality, and what will come next.
Aaron Bastani interviews Branko Milanović on the changing global economic order, how high concentrations of wealth can cause economic crashes, and the potential for a new conflict between the West and China.