The Crown at the End of the Pier
A new by-election looms over Westminster
Towering Columns
As a former Member of Parliament for Clacton, Douglas Carswell writes in The Telegraph about the potential risks of the Clacton by-election for Farage.
When I ran in Clacton, I sent a personal letter to every household in the constituency, in my own words, explaining why, having switched parties, I wanted to give local people the final say. Farage should do the same – and do it with humility, as a man placing his fate entirely in his constituents’ hands.
Do you remember William Joynson-Hicks? Me neither. But he was the chap who defeated Winston Churchill at the Manchester North West by-election in 1908.
Nigel should avoid going Churchillian in Clacton. Rather than make this about the big things – immigration, the state of the nation – he should go local. During my by-election I baffled Farage’s own team by running leaflets that were all about GP appointments. But as I learned off Lynton Crosby, the great election strategist, it is only by talking about those bread-and-butter matters that you earn the right to be heard on the macro stuff at all.
Reform – like its precursor party Ukip – has a notoriously poor record at actually winning by-elections. I suspect that is because so many have failed to learn the first lesson in politics: learn how to count. I won Clacton on the back of a first-class analysis, division by division, of exactly where our supporters were, and then spent most of the campaign mobilising them. The mantra I drilled into my team was simple: whoever wins in Holland-on-Sea, the Clacton suburb, wins the seat. If Nigel’s team lacks the data to do what I did, that is where he should throw every effort.
In The Times, Munira Mirza argues that engendering patriotism among Britain’s youth will require putting them first alongside restoring prosperity.
Another problem is the sense of unfairness, made worse by scarcity and lack of growth. Andy Burnham has learnt to speak the language of fairness fluently by focusing on the north-south divide.
He articulates the resentment of much of the country, which often feels left behind by London’s success. He also deserves credit for helping to revive Manchester by rebuilding transport and housing and tying it to civic pride.
But to restore solidarity the new government will need to tackle other unfairnesses that impose costs and burdens on British citizens. For example, making cheap, abundant energy the goal rather than asking households and businesses to altruistically pay the costs of tackling global climate change.
Prioritising the welfare of those who live and contribute in the UK over those who have recently arrived or want to come here. Helping young British entrepreneurs grow their businesses rather than be forced to leave because they face costs that multinationals can absorb. Making sure we capture some of the value of AI rather than become entirely dependent on the US. Giving parliament the power to decide who gives away our territory, not international courts.
Writing for The Critic, Matthew Bowles outlines just how little headroom Andy Burnham will have to pursue a soft-left economic agenda.
Economic growth has been stagnant for more than a decade, and productivity has remained stubbornly weak, especially in the public sector. The tax burden is on course to reach levels never previously sustained in peacetime. The Labour Party, in its 2024 election manifesto, pledged not to increase the three main revenue-generating taxes for “working people”: Income Tax (basic, higher, and additional rates), National Insurance and VAT. Despite Reeves fiddling this pledge via threshold freezes, if Burnham stands by his party’s manifesto, the room for manoeuvre is remarkably tight.
The consequence is that many of the policies instinctively associated with the Labour left have become extraordinarily difficult to deliver. Speedy nationalisation would require compensation running into the tens of billions, and even if the plan was to pursue nationalisation by the expiration of contracts, as with the railways, then costs quickly mount in the long-term. Large increases in day-to-day spending will sit uneasily alongside Labour’s own fiscal rules and attempting to borrow on a significant scale would likely invite the sort of market reaction that brought Liz Truss’s premiership to a predictably abrupt conclusion.
That fiscal reality does not eliminate Labour’s instinct to meddle in the economy. It merely changes the form that intervention could take. If the state is too cash-strapped to own industries outright, a Burnham government could seek to influence where private capital is invested instead.
In The Telegraph, David Frost argues that in calling for a by-election in Clacton, Farage has given himself an opportunity to retake the national spotlight.
It must, in effect, be another national by-election like Makerfield, with voters asked to remember that they are giving a signal about the future of the country.
I know the professional political class in Westminster will find this hard to understand. They just do not get how a good part of the country – and let us not forget, a majority of voters on the Right – sees Reform. Westminster can’t really compute a party that is playing by different rules and appealing to voters in novel ways. They think in the end that seemingly serious people following their tried and tested rules will win through. I’m not convinced any more. More and more Britons don’t care about process. They just want results.
The opportunity for Farage now, even if the by-election is effectively sabotaged by the other parties, is to position himself clearly as the leader of the change vote, and make it unambiguously clear that the other parties are simply frightened to have an argument about policy and only want to play political games.
Get this right and it could give Reform a top-up of the political rocket fuel that has been visibly lacking in recent months. Of course, get it wrong and they are back at square one. So they have to make the arguments national, and make this a Midlothian campaign for the 21st century. If anyone can do it, Nigel Farage can.
In Conservative Home, Max Thompson highlights Labour’s growing tendency towards authoritarianism when it comes to online activities.
It is also curious that Nandy was free to leave the platform at all, given that her Cabinet colleague Liz Kendall, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, indicated earlier this year that she would consider banning British citizens from accessing X altogether — a platform that has drawn both applause and criticism for its championing of free speech under Elon Musk’s ownership.
If Nandy was genuinely concerned about the spread of misinformation and disinformation on X, her departure looks less like principled protest than an abdication of duty. She should have stayed and engaged in the debate. More conversation, not less, is the antidote to disinformation online. Instead, she has vacated the stage.
What should concern us all is Nandy’s proximity to her constituency neighbour, the self-styled “King of the North” and our next Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. Should Nandy remain in Cabinet, she will be the minister tasked with carrying out the wishes of Andy Burnham — and Love Actually‘s Hugh Grant — which is, of course, bringing the free British press under increased state regulation.
Writing for The Critic, Mike Jones argues that New Labour may have breathed its last breath with the end of Keir Starmer’s premiership.
The New Labour era did not end when Gordon Brown lost to David Cameron in 2010. Cameron proved remarkably effective at keeping much of the settlement alive. Nor did it end during the long years of Tory rule that followed. It ended with Keir Starmer.
After fourteen years of Conservative failure, voters were desperate for something different. Instead, they got the last exhausted incarnation of a political project that had already run out of steam.
That is why Starmer matters. His premiership was not merely another government that failed. It was the government that finally broke the spell of Messrs. Blair and Brown. What comes next, however, may be even more unsettling. Keir Starmer may have buried New Labour. But Andy Burnham could yet bury what remains of the country.
Wonky Thinking
Prosperity has published new research arguing that Britain is experiencing a free speech recession, driven by the expansion of criminal and civil restrictions on lawful expression. The report proposes a new Free Speech Act that would repeal a range of existing speech offences, replace overlapping communications laws with a narrower offence targeting intentionally menacing and targeted communications, strengthen legal protections for free speech in the workplace, and introduce cost protections to make it easier for individuals to challenge infringements of their free speech rights.
By the twenty-first century social media had given everyone a voice that could be heard beyond the citizen’s family and friends. This should have been viewed as an opportunity to engage the public in a free and wide debate on anything political. Instead, the state, drawing on ground prepared in 1965 and 1986, sought to restrict public debate with criminal laws that inappropriately targeted three types of speech:
General speech: defined as speech that is not sent via a medium (electronic or traditional) is speech that a potential listener can usually avoid. Its curtailment should be limited to that which is either intended to, or might reasonably be expected to, provoke violence. Yet, since the passage of the Public Order Act 1986 the threshold for curtailing general speech has been too low, as section 5 criminalises speech that may cause harassment, alarm, or distress. It needs to be repealed.
Communications speech: defined as speech sent via a medium (electronic or traditional) is speech that a potential listener cannot usually avoid. It should only be outlawed if it is either intended to be, or might reasonably be expected to be, menacing and targeted. This principle requires three existing offences to be repealed (under the Malicious Communications Act 1988, the Communications Act 2003, and the Online Safety Act 2023) and replaced with one offence of communication that is intentionally menacing and targeted.
Hate speech: defined as political speech that the state has decided to criminalise. Hate speech laws have no place in a democracy, where undesirable political views should be defeated with better ones. Accordingly, all hate speech laws need to be repealed.
With laws that inappropriately criminalise speech, Parliament has engendered a cultural norm that those who express the “wrong” views may be imprisoned or visited with punishments in the workplace and beyond. Underpinned by bad criminal laws, the nation’s civil laws have proven inadequate to protect citizens from what has become known as “cancel culture”.
On The Spectator podcast, Michael Simmons and Joanna Marchong discuss a report which states that White working-class students are being failed by Britain’s education system. They also discuss the private school VAT charge brought on by this Labour government.
Quick Links
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