If ever there was a journalist whom we have learned to take seriously, it is John Harris of the Guardian. He it was, along with film-maker John Domokos , who first went round the people in the heartlands of Britain in the 2010s. And thereby revealed the depths of bewilderment, rage and despair that now lurk ubiquitously just below the surface of our national life. “Anywhere but Westminster” they called their work, revealing the deep cleavage between the formal politics of governance and the real feelings of most voters. His article which we riff on for you today, gentle readers is a neuralgically painful contrast between the increasingly empty rituals of the nation’s leaders and an ever more bloody-minded and fractious populace. [1]
Being a thoughtful sort of chap, Harris goes deeper. suggesting that this explains the sudden rise in the fortunes of formerly small parties such as the Greens, Reform, Plaid Cymru and the others. And the agonising decline in the fortunes of those two stalwarts of 20th Century British politics, the Conservative and Labour Parties. He cites the obvious causes- a stagnated economy, changing identities and “the failures of the various administrations that have run the UK since 2008” And this:
The essential point was made a few days before Reeves’s speech by Luke Tryl, the UK director of the thinktank and research organisation More In Common, and someone with an incisive understanding of where we have arrived. “I still don’t think enough people realise how much traditional mainstream politics is in the last chance saloon, in no small part because it can’t be trusted to deliver what it promises,” he said on X.
Why has every single administration failed to deliver the things people want? Governments in the last century used to deliver quite acceptable levels of health, defence, housing and so on.. Here we move beyond Harris (we never put words in others’ mouths) to our own speculations, touched on in our blog Pity poor Rachel Reeves, LSS 23 10 25, and earlier ones in this vein. Remember how we said every nation state, even the richest, are plagued with such debts and poor economies that they no longer have any room to seriously mitigate the lives of their citizens? That the combined weight of investment capital, expressing its power in things like bond and currency markets, could stymie the efforts of any finance minister? Could it therefore be that the Nation State, which has hitherto served us so successfully, is no longer an effective vehicle to manage the the lives of its citizens? It is a terrifying conjecture: for we have no idea of what may replace it. But one thing we do remember: read everything you can lay your hands on about the collapse of Yugoslavia, and what followed.
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