Starmer's Thermidor
Revolutionary change in America and Europe threatens to sweep Labour away. But what will replace them?
Towering columns
At UnHerd, Aris Roussinos considers how the British regime remains ideologically trapped and left behind in a world transformed by the Trump revolution.
The riots that marked Labour’s entry into power have set the tone for its time in office: the Government is constantly firefighting, unable to fund the grand infrastructural projects it promised in opposition and is forced into increasingly absurd and authoritarian postures — like considering blunting kitchen knives — to suppress a smouldering popular anger. An emergency state, Streek suggests, has developed in the post-Covid West; one reliant on fiscal giveaways drawn from burgeoning public debt to fend off collapse, while casting around desperately for new sources of prosperity to balance the books and prolong its popular legitimacy. Yet this can only be a transitional state, Streeck notes, “not a social order, like neoliberalism aspired to be, but a condition of disorder”. America may have moved on, but we in Britain are still trapped in this long and disorderly interregnum.
If the order now being born in Washington is the successor state to America’s era of unipolar empire, whatever follows here will be the successor state to the new Britain established by Blair in 1997, as our provincial franchise of the now-vanished globalised imperium. The Britain of the Nineties, the terminal form of the social-democratic state established in 1945, is as alien and unpalatable to our rulers as the replacement order now dawning across the West. So earnestly did our rulers plunge Britain into the borderless world of globalisation that Blair’s Britain — a more or less homogeneous Northwest European nation state notable to academic specialists as the West’s foremost “Zero Immigration Country” — is not only unrecognisable, but even to say it was preferable to its replacement is deemed extremist.
Just as the new Trump regime repudiates its predecessor, our current Westminster has repudiated the values of its Nineties predecessor, the Britain of Britpop and Euro 96, as something entirely beyond the pale — even as much of the country remembers it simply as home. The “British Values” conjured by Labour from thin air to manage its new experiment are simply the rulebook for a globalised, multicultural polity that no longer exists. The top-down, state-enforced cosmopolitanism that has since become Westminster’s ideology has had its lodestar extinguished at source in Washington. And yet our rulers still cling to a dead project, with Starmer and the Attorney General, Lord Hermer, making extravagant offerings of Britain’s remaining overseas territory to placate a demanding god, international law, which simply doesn’t exist, and with the parallel unilateral commitment to Net Zero. Isolated by history, we are now trapped trying to implement globalisation in one country, the backwater Transnistria to America’s vanished imperial regime.
On his Substack, James Breckwoldt takes a four-dimensional approach to examine the different segments of the British electorate and its unpredictable future.
Reform is currently polling at around 25%, but there is a strong reason to believe its potential support is far higher if they play their cards right. They could crush the Conservative Party and take a decent chuck of voters from the other parties too. The only cluster that is completely out of reach for them are Social Democrats. This group (liberal, progressive, pro-establishment and strongly opposed to populism) is never going to be drawn to the party. However, for all other groups, you can make the case that Reform has the potential (even if an outside chance) to expand its appeal…
…For the Old Left, the Conservatives always reached a ceiling due to residual partisan anti-Conservative sentiment. Reform does not carry the same historical baggage, so should be able to keep making progress with this group by focusing on social conservatism and a populist anti-system appeal. While this group is economically left-wing, my own academic research suggests voters like this prioritise social conservatism (especially on immigration and asylum) over economic policy. Even then, Farage has been speaking more in support of certain left-wing economic policies like nationalisation and domestic manufacturing.
A huge prize but significant challenge for Reform lies with the Alienated and Disengaged. Both are defined by their distrust of the political establishment, making them natural targets. For those who voted in 2024, Reform made major inroads. However, although they are both big segments of the population as a whole, these groups had by far the lowest turnout rate in 2024. The big task for Reform is whether they can mobilise voters who feel disconnected from the political process. The success of Donald Trump’s campaign in 2024 shows that right-wing populism can effectively energise low-propensity voters, but it takes unique political skills to do so.
In The Times, David Goodhart outlines why Britain needs a ten-year plan with cross-party support to get immigration under control.
Why is it so hard to get immigration numbers down? A recent Policy Exchange report which asks that question, by former senior Home Office official Stephen Webb, elegantly explains that it is a classic example of pressure group theory: the preferences of a large majority of the public (those who think immigration is too high is now over 70 per cent, according to YouGov) are no match for well-organised vested interests. The benefits of immigration tend to be privatised, enjoyed by businesses, universities and the NHS/social care employers, while the costs are socialised, borne by the public and the taxpayer, especially those of working age. And with the post-Brexit shift towards less productive, lower skilled migration, those costs are rising…
…This is a symptom of a Treasury short-termism that cuts the cost of higher education and health/social care now but adds to the welfare bill needed to support low-productivity newcomers in the longer run. The Office for Budget Responsibility calculates that a low-skilled migrant by the age of 80 will, on average, have cost the taxpayer £582,000 and low-wage migration in general will end up producing a net fiscal cost running into the tens of billions.
Relentlessly high immigration also has the effect, in both private and public sectors, of postponing not only investment but necessary reform. The decades-long dependence by the NHS on foreign doctors and nurses,mainly from much poorer countries — about 40 per cent of UK doctors are trained abroad compared with 12 per cent in France and just 1 per cent in Italy — means we have failed to properly reform our over-elaborate system of medical training. The more recent dependence of social care on migration, which was meant to be a temporary response to the pandemic, has postponed the fundamental reform that sector requires.
In The Telegraph, Robert Jenrick reflects on the ramifications of the Munich Attack for Europe and its lessons for Britain.
Within just a few hours of the attack the Bavarian state leader made public the nationality and police history of the suspect. The German press were briefed that his application for asylum has been rejected and that he had posted Islamist content on a social media site before carrying out the crime. An hour later the German Chancellor told the public the attacker must be punished and deported. If you commit crimes, you should be sent home, even if that is a place which is “very difficult to live in”, as Olaf Scholz put it. Nobody should be made to live next to these dangerous people. For some reason, Germany remains the only country in Europe deporting migrants back to Afghanistan. For reasons I cannot understand, our courts continue to prevent removals.
The leadership on display in Munich is as night and day to the scenes in the aftermath of Southport, where a news blackout from the British Government – caught in an excess of legalistic caution – allowed a void for conspiracy theory and fuelled deep suspicion. German political leaders appear to have learnt their lessons and taken a different approach to past attacks, bringing basic facts into the public domain quickly, no matter how uncomfortable they were. In contrast our Prime Minister went to great lengths to deny a terror-related motive, and then refused to correct the public record even after being informed privately…
…If the Government is to be given the benefit of the doubt by a deeply sceptical public it needs to take a far more open approach to the facts on Islamist extremism, migration and crime by nationality. Some data they could publish instantly if they ended the obstructionism, other statistics they need to begin to collect. Until then deep discontent will continue to bubble below the surface – above it on occasion – and more importantly, our immigration system will continue to fail the public.
In the Financial Times, Andy Haldane argues that tinkering with regulatory sprawl will repeat the failures of the past fifty years.
A regulatory action plan is scheduled by the UK government for March. Like its growth plan, this has all the makings of a Shakespearean tragedy: sound and fury signifying nothing — or nothing systemic to answer the case. Certainly, a strategy of selective pruning would quickly be overwhelmed by regulatory regrowth. By taking a leaf out of the American playbook, however, perhaps a systemic shift in regulatory cultures and practices is possible.
The UK does not need more than 90 distinct regulators, some overlapping, employing many thousands of people with rule books running to millions of pages. The government should commit to at least halving this number, with an equivalent budget cut. As the Treasury well knows, there is nothing like a cost constraint to change business models and cultures. If growth is to receive equal billing in regulatory priorities, then a dual statutory mandate will be necessary. Because higher growth necessitates greater risk-taking, the new statute should also specify clearly the government’s tolerance for consumer loss. This is a societal choice that only politicians can make — and then take responsibility when losses and public clamour rise. This leaves regulators unfettered to act in line with this mandate.
And the best way of limiting consumer losses is by hardwiring strong incentives into the very top of regulated organisations. A regulatory regime centred on, and backstopped by, sanctions for chief executives (rather than for the regulator), including sacking them in the event of failure, would do so. These incentives then cascade down organisations, reducing the need for costly compliance at every level of the pyramid.
In The Telegraph, Miriam Cates considers the role of family breakdown and declining fertility in holding back economic growth.
After 50 years of below-replacement birth rates, Britain has very little left in the tank. In the 1970s, there were four people of working age to every pensioner; yet by 2050 the ratio will be just two to one. If you think taxes, inflation and waiting lists are too high in 2025, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Mass immigration has given the illusion of economic growth (though not on a per capita basis), but each new wave brings only a short-term superficial boost to HM Treasury bean counters. Unless birth rates increase, the OBR estimates that 350,000 new immigrants will be needed each year just to stave off stagnation…
…Putting all our efforts into driving up productivity is a shot in the dark. But we know exactly how to increase labour force growth and participation – we must restore the family. At present, the British tax and welfare system are stacked against couples who want to have children, and there is next to no fiscal recognition of marriage even though this is demonstrably the most beneficial structure for raising children. We have socialised the cost of old age – everyone is entitled to pensions and healthcare, regardless of whether they have “replenished” the economy by having children of their own – but privatised the cost of parenthood, removing entirely the link between bearing children and future economic security.
Today’s young adults are now heavily indebted, face eye-watering housing costs and have been raised in a culture that attributes more status to owning a dog than to marriage and parenthood. Better family policy may be expensive and will take time to achieve results, but it’s a much more certain bet than chasing “productivity”, the economic equivalent of searching for a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Strong families are the foundation of economic growth, but the family is not merely a vehicle to deliver productive units to the labour force. The purpose of family is as a place of belonging, nurture, safety and meaning for all of us.
Wonky thinking
The Centre for Policy Studies published Here To Stay? Estimating the Scale and Cost of Long-Term Migration by Karl Williams. The paper dives into the numbers behind the ‘Boriswave’ of over 2 million visas issued between 2021 and 2024 that pave the way for Indefinite Leave to Remain eligibility. The lifetime net fiscal cost to the state of leaving ILR conditionality unchanged would be £234 billion – equivalent to a bill of £8,200 for every UK household across several decades. To mitigate the impact, Williams supports publishing more data on the fiscal cost of mass migration and a pause in granting ILR.
Many of the visa routes created under the new system do not provide a direct route to applying for ILR. These include sponsored study visas (1.74 million) and visas for Ukrainian refugees (260,000). (This may seem cruel, but the Ukrainian government itself argues that it will need its citizens to return to rebuild.) However, other major routes such as the skilled worker and health and care visa routes can lead to ILR, both for actual workers and their dependants (1.01 million visas), as can other niche work routes (many of the 250,000), the Hong Kong (BNO) route (170,000) and a wide range of family (220,000), humanitarian and other visas (150,000).
In other words, between January 2021 and June 2024, more than 1.7 million visas were issued that could enable their holders to apply for and gain ILR, the vast majority after five years. That equates to 46% of all long-term visas issued to migrants outside of the UK’s borders. We also need to think about those switching from non-ILR-eligible visas to ILR-eligible visas after arriving in the UK. In particular, from study to either work, family or humanitarian visas. The Home Office publishes fairly good data on visa extensions, which also covers immigrants moving between types of visa. From this data we can see that in the years 2021-2023, just under 23,000 people switched from study to family or ‘other visas’ – which will include, for example, the 5,000 international students who claimed asylum in the year to March 2023 within 12 months of having arrived in Britain.
We can also see that a much larger number switched to work visas. But included in this category is the two-year Graduate visa, which is not itself a direct route to ILR on the five-year route (although it can be counted towards a separate 10-year route). Fortunately, the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford has obtained data on the breakdown of international students moving into the skilled worker route versus the Graduate visa route for 2021-2023. In 2022, 53.3% switched onto the skilled route and 46.7% on to the Graduate route; in 2023, it was 57.9% and 42.1% respectively. We therefore know that around 200,000 students had switched into the skilled worker visa route by the end of 2023.
This fits with the argument made by Neil O’Brien MP, co-author of the CPS paper ‘Taking Back Control’, that many of the new one-year taught masters courses offered by universities are designed to accommodate those on ‘Deliveroo visas’, whose priority is access to the UK labour market rather than higher education. Fully 88% of the increase in international student numbers between 2018/19 and 2022/23 was driven by taught postgraduate courses. And sure enough, as Migration Observatory analysis has found, only around a quarter of those switching to from study into skilled worker visas were actually doing graduate level jobs – in fact, the majority were going into the lowpaid social care sector.
As a result, the contrast with the pre-2021 trend is stark. Between 2015 and 2019, the number of international students switching to new visa routes averaged 9,900 per annum – roughly 2%. In 2022 and 2023, it averaged 145,000 – 20% the total. The Home Office has not yet published visa extension data covering the first half of 2024. However, if we use the 2023 figures and ratios, we can reasonably assume about 50,000 switchers to ILR-eligible work and non-work routes in the first half of 2024. So overall, we can say that around 250,000 immigrants who arrived on student visas have since switched to other visa routes and will be eligible for ILR by mid-2029 at the latest.
But there is one further factor to consider. Analysis published by the Home Office indicates that a substantial proportion of students who switch to the Graduate visa go on to switch again from that route, to other visas that are ILR-eligible. In 2023, a very considerable 46% of Graduate visa holders switched to work routes, 6% to family routes and 5% to other routes (such as asylum). That’s another 14,500 visas to add to the ILR pile. Applying the same rates to Graduate visas that were set to expire in the first half of 2024 adds another 24,800. In total, therefore, the theoretical pool of recent immigrants who could get ILR is over 2 million: more than 1.7 million via the visa route they entered the UK on and a further 289,000 students who have acquired a different type of visa post-arrival. These visa holders will start to become eligible for ILR from January 2026 (five years on from January 2021), and eligibility reaches the theoretical maximum at the end of June 2029 (five years on from June 2024).
The Institute of Economic Affairs has published Liberalising Discrimination Law by Daniel Freeman and Alex Morton. The authors make the case for returning the Equality Act to genuinely liberal principles, outlawing direct discrimination rather than using the law to reduce gaps between different groups.
This essay discusses the major shifts in the way the United Kingdom has approached the issues of discrimination and individual freedom. It focuses on how some laws have reflected these changes and the consequences that these changes have had. It sets out a template which shows how the UK appears to have moved through four distinct stages in its cultural and legislative approach towards discrimination in the past seven decades.
The four broad approaches and associated legal frameworks are set out below:
1. Laissez-faire. The belief that there is no role for legislation to stop discrimination.
2. Stopping direct discrimination. Banning direct discrimination towards individuals.
3. A structural approach to racism. A belief that systemic or institutional, or indirect discrimination had to be combatted at a system-wide level.
4. Anti-racism activism. The belief that all gaps between different groups are the result of present and historic systemic prejudice, to be eradicated by active discrimination.
While these four stages are necessarily fuzzy and imprecise, there is sufficient intellectual and legal coherence in this framework for it to be useful in understanding how the UK’s approach has changed over time. In addition, the intellectual framework of these four stages can largely apply to other Western countries, particularly the USA.
While this paper largely uses the issue of racial discrimination as the prism to examine how legal and wider approaches to discrimination have changed, the concepts presented can be extended to other groups as well. Similar changes have also applied to issues around biological sex and, to a lesser extent, areas such as homophobia and other forms of prejudice. The shift from laissez-faire attitudes to banning direct discrimination, to defining and opposing systemic or institutional (and so indirect) discrimination, and finally the call for constant activism and the elimination of all gaps between di fferent groups (interestingly, often excluding socioeconomic class), can be traced across various areas of public policy.
This essay argues that a liberal approach to tackling prejudice and discrimination is confined to the first two approaches, while the second two approaches necessarily involve overturning liberal values around individual freedoms and market mechanisms. In addition, it discusses how the first two approaches are aligned with the views of those who argue for a strong but small and focused state, whereas the second two approaches call for an increasingly interventionist approach, which culminates in disregarding all other principles (e.g. freedom, privacy) and simply focusing on removing all gaps between di fferent identity groups.
Book of the week
We recommend Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? : Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century by Eric Kaufmann. The author examines how mass migration into the West from more religious countries could reverse the liberal process of secularisation. Particularly extreme varieties of religion, such as Islamism, have flourished and could see their cultural influence amplified by demography.
All three Abrahamic faiths encourage people to ‘go forth and multiply’ and extol the virtues of motherhood, marriage and family. This was largely redundant when material necessity compelled everyone to have large families. First, most children died before they reached the age of ten. Second, young hands were needed to work the land and serve as one’s old-age pension. Today, by contrast, modern medicine and sanitation have conquered infant mortality. In the city, children are more a burden than a boon. Contraception is readily available to limit fertility. Birth rates are consequently much lower. Under these circumstances, value choices have a bigger impact on fertility, and, by extension, the composition of the population. In other words, those biblical injunctions to reproduce now matter. Across the world, surveys find that the religious –especially fundamentalists –marry earlier and have children sooner and more often than their secular counterparts. This holds even when we narrow our focus to women at identical income and education levels. The difference is most dramatic in modern pluralistic societies, where value choices matter most for family formation…
…The stakes are high. Fundamentalist revolution, as in Iran, Sudan or Taliban Afghanistan, is not the primary threat. The authoritarian states of the Muslim world have crushed their Islamist challengers who in turn have lost popularity. Rather, the greatest danger comes from the gradual seepage of puritanical mores into society: restrictions on freedom of expression, science, recreation, the rights of women, minorities, heretics, gays and converts –even a return to barbaric punishments. Muslim governments have swiftly implemented sharia to defang their jihadi adversaries. In the United States, the religious have a monopoly on the highest public offices and the rising waters of fundamentalism lap against foreign policy, foreign aid, abortion and the curriculum. In Israel, the government yields on yeshiva subsidies and civil marriage, while corporations bend to Haredi boycotts and moral censorship. At least the Zionists have a powerful secular nationalism to deploy against their fundamentalists. Though it has lost some of its shine in recent decades, the Zionist dream becomes relevant with every Palestinian rocket or Iranian nuclear advance. If, or rather when, Europe and North America face similar challenges, seculars will not have the ammunition to respond so robustly. I cannot see a way out.
Evolutionary psychologists marvel at the resources that primitive societies expended on religion. Surely these were extraneous to the process of survival. Some, including Richard Dawkins, maintain that religion served a series of important functions in prehistory. It ensured a high degree of group cooperation for collective goals. Those who were part of hunting and gathering bands that possessed religions had superior survival rates to those who were governed purely by their passions and self-interest. Religious groups passed their genes on more effectively. In the process of natural selection, our ancestors developed a religious sensibility, even a need for it.
The mechanism of natural selection is demography. Demographers Ron Lesthaeghe and Dirk van de Kaa have developed the theory of the second demographic transition (SDT), where values rather than material constraints come to shape fertility and much of society fails to replace itself. Might it be the case that the second demographic transition is a population bottleneck through which only the devout can pass? One would not have to resort to a genetic argument, though twin studies show a significant inherited component to religion. Instead, it may just be that religious ideas, so-called ‘memes’, are destined to be selected. In Michael Blume’s words, when it comes to Creationism vs. Intelligent Design, ‘evolutionary theorists brought up far more scientific arguments –but committed believers in supernatural agents brought up far more children’. Scott Atran reminds us that no human culture has survived without some form of religion for more than two generations.
Those who claim that religion is destined to vanquish secularism forever are no more accurate than those who predict that secular reason will eventually smoke out religious ‘superstition’. Sixty years ago, when Orthodox Jews were slaughtered like sheep while their more worldly coethnics sometimes survived, one would have returned a different verdict. As the social environment –what Dawkins calls a ‘memeplex’ –changes, so do the criteria of natural selection and therefore the fittest creed. What is today’s environment like? We see the collapse of the great secular religions of the twentieth century; the growing importance of values in determining fertility; an uneven demographic transition which is reshaping Western populations; the rise of global identity politics: all this in an atmosphere of multicultural toleration. The confluence of these currents creates a nutrient-rich breeding ground for religious fundamentalism.
Quick links
OBR has downgraded the growth forecast and removed the Chancellor’s fiscal headroom.
Courts ruled that a Pakistani paedophile cannot be deported because it would ‘harm his children’…
…allowed an Albanian criminal to stay because his son cannot eat foreign chicken nuggets…
…delayed a Grendanian national’s deportation due to concern for her Latvian husband being unable to cope with the tropical weather and cuisine…
…and gave Gazans the right to settle in the UK.
If the growth rate stayed at pre-2008 levels, the UK economy would be 23% bigger.
The UK’s combined liabilities are 161% of GDP, totalling £4,389 billion.
A judicial review reinstated police officers arrested for grooming and rape charges.
The percentage of people receiving more in benefits than they pay in tax has hit 53%.
Cost of nuclear construction is considerably higher in the US, UK, and France than in Japan, China, and South Korea.
Chris Whitty admits he got the evidence wrong in Assisted Dying Bill hearing.
Extremist preacher Mohamed Hoblos, who has been banned from Germany and the Netherlands, is coming to the UK.
Scepticism towards transgender rights has increased over the past two years.
The taxonomy of industrial policy, according to a Cambridge University professor.
Mental health schemes have prompted ‘emotional difficulties’ in English schools.
DOGE launched a website detailing the size and scope of the US regulatory state.