Top Ten Dance Songs 2024

The last day of 2024 is here, and what better way to see out the year with an extravaganza of ethereal beats and monster boot stompers? For the 31st December only, the hats of "serious" political analyst and connoisseur of science fiction are set aside for digital DJ-ing. Unfortunately, because I've spent seven hours in hospital outpatients today (my mum was being discharged), you lucky people are spared the Mixmag-style repartee for another year. I'll make sure to write it up in plenty of time 12 months hence.

10. Anyma feat. Delilah Montagu, After Love (Yhork Remix)




9. Kryder, Fade Till Sunrise (Club mix)




8. Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike & Tiësto & Dido & W&W, Thank You (Not So Bad)




7. Ferry Corsten feat. Meryll, Chain Reaction




6. Sonny Fodera, Jazzy, D.O.D, Somedays




5. S0nin and Blr feat. Brieanna Grace, Rush




4. Ferry Corsten and Marsh, Fulfillment




3. Diplo and Riva Starr, Heaven or Not




2. Tim Besamusca, Final Dimension




1. Hel:sløwed and Amber Revival, Wildfire

The Most Read 20 of 2024

We've handled the skiffy, so as the year draws to a close there are a couple of wrap ups to be wrapped up. There is this blogs traditional dance-music riposte to Jools Holland's annual Hootenanny due on New Year's Eve. But before we go there, it's time to cast our eyes back at the posts that came out top according to this here blog's audience. The most read posts of 2024 more or less reflect the political ups and downs of the year. What came out on top by quite some distance was, weirdly, my resignation from Labour. The rest of the 20 shows this place's readers overdosing on the comings and goings of Keir Starmer and friends. But there were deviations from the Labourist mean, such as a couple of pieces on the "outside left" and the far left's general election interventions. Enough people were interested in what had happened to the Tories to ensure my (incomplete, partial) analysis of why they failed featured, as did some election campaign lowlights and equally abysmal moments from the new government. There will be plenty more of those before the next year runs out, but that's for 2025. Shall we get into what we have now?

1. Leaving Labour
2. Confessions of the Gravediggers
3. The Far Right's Racist Rampage
4. Left of Labour General Election Results
5. The Labour Right's Political Strategy
6. The Far Left and the 2024 General Election
7. Why does Labour Hate Universities?
8. After the Child Benefit Rebellion
9. A Note on Authoritarian Modernisation
10. The Many Problems with The Three-Body Problem
11. The Class Politics of the Tory Collapse
12. Keir Starmer's Reluctant Anti-Fascism
13. Louise Haigh's Resignation
14. The Defence of Douglas Murray
15. Politics after George Galloway's Victory
16. Bottling Clacton
17. Routing the Tories is Good, Actually
18. Dismantling Labour's Base
19. The Sun's Attack on Starmer
20. What is the Point of Morgan McSweeney?

A mega round-up of the most popular posts means an extra helping of bar props from the second hand saloon. Here are a dozen pieces taken from each month that didn't set the world alight, but are still worth your time. Read, share, read them some more, and share them all over again.

January: The Tory Politics of Immigration
February: Why the Tories Won't Confront Islamophobia
March: The Political Uses of Racism
April: Wes Streeting and Ideology
May: Pornography and Partial Subjectivity in Crash
June: The Green Party's Leftism
July: An Ambiguous Triumph
August: Securing the Oligarchy
September: Right Wing Bogeys in Lucifer's Hammer
October: How the Tories Might Win Again
November: Why the Migration to Bluesky Matters
December: The Class Politics of Rising Water Bills

Late last year, I posted about slowing down around these parts and, as promised, the schedule duly slowed. It hasn't harmed audience numbers mind. Perhaps old Lenin was right about that better fewer but better gubbins. Heading into the new year I don't plan on bumping up the posts, unless inspiration strikes, energy fills my creaking body, and the stuff at work isn't clouding the brain as much (little chance of that, alas). But unless my head falls off, this blog isn't disappearing. If you do enjoy what appears here and you are fortunate to have quids to spare there are worse ways of disposing disposal cash than supporting this corner of the internet. If you can't or won't, that's fine. Cop us a follow and a like on Bluesky or Facebook instead!

The Ten Best SF Books Read in 2024

We've seen the run down of the worst, but how about spreading a bit of positivity by affirming the best science fiction I've read this year? There were some worthies that didn't quite make the cut, which includes the late Christopher Priest's Fugue for a Darkening Island, Herve Le Tellier's The Anomaly, Jack Vance's Dying Earth sequence and, perhaps most controversially where SF opinion is concerned, Dan Simmons's Hyperion. Who has managed the feat of keeping that off a ten of the best list? Here's what did, more or less in reading order.

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. World ending plagues have been done to death, so there's nothing new here that's going to knock your socks off. What will is the exceptional writing. The novel follows a group of actors as they shunt around the Great Lakes 20 years after Georgia Flu has ripped through the world and laid waste to civilisation. The flitting between the bleak future, the weeks of the outbreak, and the time well before is expertly done. Dealing with the menacse and dangers of the post-apocalypse are covered, but we're nowhere near The Road's brutalism. There are concerns about preserving collective memory when everything has gone, which complements the switching back and forth of narrative focus. This is not a pacey piece, but it's a relaxing read without lapsing into the pitfalls of cosy catastrophe. Easily one of the best SF novels of the 21st century and one deserving of the praise.

Planetfall by Emma Newman. An example of a hidden gem, Newman's tale of a colonist on another world undergoing a mental health crisis is an exceptional achievement. Having already waxed lyrical about it, I'm not sure what more can be said. Newman is able to perfectly balance believable character, a credible SF setting, building tension, and the looming mystery of the alien structure overhanging the colony. And as it comes to a head Newman provides a satisfying ending that does not cheapen everything that comes before, which is a real test of an SF writer's ability and imagination. Ambitious but understated in its pretensions, it's a crime that this book isn't everywhere. Another contender for best SF novel this century.

Submission by Michel Houellebecq. What if France was taken over by an Islamist government? It sounds like a bad fantasy Marine Le Pen might peddle to her acolytes, but if one can lay aside the dubious premise Houellebecq has crafted a real work of art here. This is a nihilistic novel full of self-pitying entitlement, misogyny, jaded pessimism, and wry humour. It repeats the extreme right's favourite trope of well-meaning liberalism paving the way to those who would cut our throats, but the style, the perfect pacing, the deft touch Houellebecq brings to his dystopic meanderings elevates this well above the trashy diatribes typical of the far right. This doesn't beat you over the head or sets about demonising Muslims, it's much more subtle than that.

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. A bit of good old-fashioned space opera why not? This is how thrills 'n' spills should be done. This our universe where there is no faster than light travel and so it takes a long time to get from A to B. Following the fortunes of the Gentian shatterlings - a house of multiple clones of a single source as they travel around the galaxy - they have to come to terms with trauma, crisis, and that someone powerful is out to kill them. There are conspiracies within conspiracies, exceptional far future world building, weird posthumans, emergent machine intelligences, dark secrets, and an action-packed chase across the galaxy and beyond. A real page turner and, perhaps, Reynolds's best novel so far.

Malevil by Robert Merle. And we're back in the post-apocalypse. While pottering about in the cellar of a tourist trap castle, fiery catastrophe rains down on rural France and the land is burned to a cinder. With just the proprietor and a few of his employees left, they have to go about rebuilding civilisation. Not a terribly original departure point, but like Station Eleven it's the literary quality that makes Malevil stand out. Because it was the early 1970s, the gender politics are a bit, well, early 1970s and it suffers from the familar SF curse of badly drawn (young) female characters. But if you can put up with that, the challenge of living in a blasted landscape, the brutality and moral dilemmas, and the attempts at getting by without bringing back the old crap is beautifully rendered. Another seldom polished gem.

Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon. The rawest and most political of the novels on this list, this is the tale of a queer African-American woman on the run from a religious cult that is simultaneously a covert US government medical experiment. While living in the woods, she gives birth to twins but slowly begins metamorphosing into a mutant of incredible speed and strength. This is a thinly veiled meditation on racial politics, exploitation, and coloniality, the affinities that exist between all oppressed peoples, and the irredeemable nature of white America. But like some of the others on this list, Solomon strikes the balance, in this case between the politics, the narrative pace of the hunt/being hunted, fully realised, traumatised human beings. A masterclass on using SF tropes to forcefully confront the reader with injustice without appearing preachy or earnest.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. More hard SF and another one from the review backlist, this is very popular for good reason. Tchaikovsky marries together the hard and the soft sciences in his projection of a fast-evolving sentient spider civilisation. But this isn't just an exercise in world building, he's able to weave a compelling story into arachnid sociology and sum up the desperate straits of the last human colony ship from Earth. All power toward a climactic and, it seems, a cataclysmic ending. Forget the nonsense of The Three-Body Problem it's Children that is emblematic of contemporary hard SF. Tchaikovsky's work is stylistically, imaginatively, and dramatically its superior in every way.

Pavane by Keith Roberts. Not just one of the best SF novels ever, but one of the greatest works of 20th century English letters. Yet one that is often overlooked in SF and literary circles alike. The writing is beautiful, with words chosen with such care that they're the nearest to brush strokes that prose can get. A fix up of interlinked shorts set in an alternate England centuries after the Spanish Armada reimposed Catholicism, it is a true pleasure, a book that brings the West Country landscape and the harsh everyday life of this underdeveloped society to life. Another one that got the review treatment, this is the sort of literary SF most mainstream authors wish they could write. One that should be on everyone's TBR.

Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken MacLeod. Finally got round to his latest trilogy and what can you say? It's classic Ken. The familiar themes from his other works are there. Dockside action, mysterious alien environments, non-sentient characters, Scotland!, elaborate conspiracies, a dose of realistic but flawed socialist societies, and the characteristic good humour without ever risking cringing moments. If you ever wondered how submarines might fare in space, the answers lie herein. Again, what marks out Ken's work is the complete package. Good writing, an absorbing plot, a believable future, and the sorts of action that would keep the thrills 'n' spills crowd satisfied. Some say space opera is a regressive form in SF, but Beyond demonstrates this is not necessarily the case.

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes. It made the Booker long list, don't you know? Mysterious life forms dredged up from a seemingly impossible trench on the ocean floor, this has something to do with a mysterious message from the stars. This not entirely original backdrop is the canvas for an exploration of love and loss toward an abusive parent, the conflict of vitally important work and attenuating family obligations, and how absence and distance can bring estranged siblings together. The prose of In Ascension just flows before the eyes. Never overwrought, the family drama is always in the foreground, whether the action is under the waves or tens of billions of miles from Earth. Another landmark of 21st century Sf.

What have been your best reads of the year, SF or otherwise?

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The Five Worst SF Books Read in 2024

It's been over a year since embarking on a quest to read more science fiction, and that's exactly what I've done. That has meant taking in a few that are sub-par was an inevitability, so to avoid wasting your time the five (six) below come affixed with a warning.

The Last Starship from Earth by John Boyd. Something of an obscure novel by an equally forgotten writer, my memory of this book hasn't grown fonder in the recall. This was the subject of a post for all the wrong reasons. Seemingly well-regarded by those who've heard of it (why?), the book comes with patronising 60s sexism and lechery, a heavy-handed critique of state managerialism, and the abrupt bolting on of a silly time travel story where the main character prevents Jesus from marching on Rome and helps founds the Christianity that inaugurates our timeline. Everything is made all the more insufferable by the narrative's belief in its own cleverness. A complete mess of a book.

Destiny's Road by Larry Niven. This is one I remember looking at in Waterstones when it came out in the late 1990s and thinking it sounded alright. Spiral Town is built around a road of molten rock laid down by the planet's early colonists, but it stretches off into the distance and no one knows where it goes. Until our lead character flees his home following a fatal fight with a merchant, and heading down the road is his only option. And what do we find there? 450 pages of tedium. I've read Niven before, but here he forgot how to write an interesting story. There are marriages, an exploration of merchant culture, a temporary spell in slavery, and we find out where the road ends up. But the revelation that the societies of Destiny are rigidly designed to ensure nutrient sufficiency is just about the lowest impact conceptual breakthrough I've encountered in SF. This is a minor Niven for good reason.

The Gap into Conflict/The Gap into Vision by Stephen R Donaldson. I've had occasion to to rant about these already. A space opera setting with rogues and pirates that flout the law, and corrupt space cops interested only in sustaining the corporate dictatorship that runs the joint. The plot centres on the misadventures of Morn Hyland and her relationship with two captors. But in both books, she is subject to frequent physical and sexual violence, much of which is unsparing in its description. If this wasn't enough, the so-called hero of the setting subjects her to gaslighting in-between the beatings and the rapes. Gruesome and entirely unnecessary, almost as if Donaldson added the violence to differentiate the sequence from the hum drum of ray guns and spaceship chases. Instead, all that he's accomplished is a repugnant reputation for himself.

Orbital Resonance by John Barnes. Another one that got the full review treatment, this is a poor attempt at literary SF. The action takes place on an interplanetary flight between Earth and Mars, and the tropes are there: future history infodumps, experimental psychology, space sports, and an always-irritating effort at future slang. None of them are interesting, but downplaying the futuristic setting can work if the character studies are any good, but they're not. This commits the cardinal sin of being boring. The protagonist Melpomene is the least convincing teenage girl I've come across in any novel, and to crank up the ick factor Barnes inserts inappropriate asides about adolescent masturbation. One the discerning SF reader would do well to leave on the shelf.

Artifact Space by Miles Cameron. I almost feel guilty including this on the list, because it's not a bad book. It's competently written and, like its contemporaries is down with diversity. There are the popular themes of found family and group solidarity, and the suspense - such as it exists - is provided by a conspiracy to destroy the Greatships, human space's long-haul lifeline. Our heroine, Marca Nbaro, has managed to trick her way into a commission on the Athens but through a combination of luck and talent is able to work her way into the hierarchy's good graces. If it's alright, why is Artifact Space here? Put it down to taste, but it's pure space opera and nothing else. This is Flash Gordon for the 21st century, but without as much action, style, or imagination as your typical Peter F Hamilton. Perhaps it's the case that Cameron felt accomplished enough in his historical and fantasy fiction and thought it was time to have a stab at SF. And so came up with a product that doesn't say much about anything in particular. The best SF says something about the present, and it's that complete absence that places Artifact Space on this list.

What have been the worst things you've read this year?

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Elon Musk's Attack on Philanthropy

It is reported that Elon Musk has taken umbrage at MacKenzie Scott's philanthropy. In case readers are unsure about the who's who of the American oligarchy, Scott is Jeff Bezos's former wife who received billions in Amazon stock after the pair divorced in 2019. She has since been a paragon of the philanthropic turn among some US billionaires, gifting away $19bn to various charitable causes and non-profits. If Ms Scott is reading this and wants to handsomely support a blogger writing angrily about the world's ills with no strings attached, get in touch.

What has upset the world's richest man? He finds "concerning" the fact that among the many causes Scott supports are anti-racist organisations, LGBTQ+ advocacy and support, and a range of charities and social enterprises that try and patch up the gaping rents in the USA's social fabric. This you could put down to his adoption of anti-woke motifs following his rebrand as a Donald Trump supporter and chief bank roller of his successful re-election, but his animus pre-dates his coming out for the tangerine anti-Christ. In March he suggested "super rich ex-wives who hate their former spouse" are threatening the breakdown of Western civilisation with their charitable deeds. Blimey. Just another case of Musk shooting stupid from his pig ignorant hip?

No. In the last six or so years, Musk has moved from a fairly non-committal centrist figure (politically speaking) to fascist-adjacent. Some have sought this explanation in his personal history, particularly the fact one of his estranged children is trans, but since purchasing Twitter - which has become a far right propaganda machine with a sideline in news aggregation - Musk has grown increasingly enthusiastic for ideas that justify the obscenity of his wealth. For example, his support for the so-called philosophy of "long-termism". This Silicon Valley fad justifies actions taken today, such as private space programmes and the billions being thrown at AI plagiarism machines because, down the line, they will drive human evolution, spread life throughout the cosmos, and secure the future of our species for millions of years. From this standpoint, anything that arrests the glorious effort to such a gilded outcome is tantamount to denying trillions of people the chance of life. As such contemporary crises, such as climate change, joblessness, health inequalities, and so on pale against what might be. It's okay for AI and crypto mining to add to emissions because the dire consequences of global heating for billions of people in the global south is a price worth paying for Moon bases, Mars cities, and generation ships to the nearest stars - and those not yet born who are going to live there. This also means any tax on wealth, particularly tech bro wealth like Musk's, is a crime against the future.

Where his day-to-say opinions and politics are concerned, his taking up of openly racist culture war politics, the kinship he has with extreme right wing parties, and support for Trump's MAGA movement maps easily onto the long-termist garbage. They are the politics most appropriate to the unfettered pursuit of his class interests. They resonate with his being the embodiment of the greatest private accumulation of capital in history and, like many of his fellow billionaires, resent the claims others have on his fortune. This is where Musk's Department of Governmental Efficiency slots in, which in all essentials is a souped up version of the Tory approach to statecraft. I.e. Defund the state and allow it to decay so few (if any) make political demands of it. Though for Musk this is also about attacking the people he hates, such as public sector employees and the social security dependent, its consequences could force millions into the labour pool and tilt the balance of power even further in capital's favour. And there is the happy by-product of a defunded state not requiring as many taxes, which means more money for Musk's mooning.

This is the context for Musk's attack on billionaire philanthropy. If he represents capital that figuratively and actually wants to escape earthly entanglements, the likes of Scott, the Gates, and Warren Buffet are a reminder that capital can never cut itself loose. That it is embedded in a world on which it preys, and ultimately the only one that can sustain continued accumulation. Their philanthropy is relatively generous and ambitious because previous iterations of oligarchical politics has already gutted the capacity of the US state to support its people and regulate capital effectively. If Musk wants to depress the public power further, that members of his class are shelling out cash and salving their consciences is at cross purposes to the overt and absolute dominance of labour by capital that his project (and that of Trump's) is trying to accomplish. It's not about their largesse to the worthy poor making him look bad, it's more fundamental than that.

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Merry Christmas!

Repurposing the Soviet new year cards from yesteryear for tools in the class struggle today, I'd like to wish all comrades, regular readers, occasional flybys, and randoms who frequent this blog a very merry Christmas!

British Collectivism in A Fall of Moondust

While respected for his contribution to science fiction, Arthur C Clarke doesn't have the greatest contemporary critical reputation. His prose is often considered technical and dry, his character work limited, and his claims to hard SF long superseded by the likes of Stephen Baxter (who he collaborated with over the excellent The Light of Other Days, and a couple of others) and Greg Egan. Even his best known works, that includes 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rendezvous with Rama, and Childhood's End are often criticised for being boring and dull. If you want high adventure and drama, best go elsewhere.

My expectations weren't very high for A Fall of Moondust, a Poseidon Adventure-style rescue caper set on the lunar surface. The plot is not the world's most riveting either. With space travel between the Earth and the permanent Moon colony a fixture of the 21st century, space tourism is a thing and punters happily shell out the cash for cruises across the lunar surface. For Captain Pat Harris and hostess Sue Wilkins, the latest foray across the sea of dust in the skimmer, Selene, is another routine sightseeing trip. Unfortunately, as they're speeding across the sea an underground expulsion of gas creates a sinkhole analogue just as they're passing over. The ship is immediately buried without nary a trace of it left on the surface. Facing problems with heat, air, and supplies, can the crew and passengers hold out until they are rescued? On the Moon, is rescue even possible?

Fall is not the most sophisticated novel, but it is a very good one. Shock horror a break with the consensus! The usual criticisms about character apply, and because it's 1961, the gender norms and a quick racial aside dates it. But as a straightforward SF thriller, it works. Taken on his own terms, for Clarke science fiction was the literature of exploration - a thought experiment of fantastic but just-about-plausible scenarios and conceivable future tech within the limits of the science of his day. Fall works as the mapping out of how a disaster might unfold on the Moon, and what engineering challenges would have to be overcome to pull off a successful rescue in hard vacuum. A lot of Clarke's description of the environment and geology was well realised, and perhaps his speculation did have an affect on NASA planners who were worried the Apollo landers might sink into the dust.

But what I took from Fall was a distillation of the postwar zeitgeist. The economic boom, the rapidly rising living standards across the West, the celebration of expertise in popular culture and the can-do resolution of problems through the application of science and technology suffuses the book. It also works as a paean to the lost world of collectivism in the British mode. The Selene's crew are unflappable, not given to panic, and see the safety of the passengers as their first duty. The engineering team that rush to the crash site are protected from the glare of global media interest by the distance between themselves and the TV cameras on a nearby mountain, and the anonymising sun shades of their space suits. There is no hyping up of the individual, despite one of the passengers being a famous astronaut travelling incognito, and life after Selene is not one of celebrity and media deals. This was simply a group of people pulling together and doing what was expected of them with a minimum of fuss, and then getting on with their lives. A reminder that an unshowy, cooperative individualism is a submerged - as if buried under tonnes of Moon dust - part of our cultural present, but still one that comes to the fore at moments of acute crisis.

Is A Fall of Moondust hauntological? Yes, it is. But its modernist impulse, the conception that a better future is possible, is certainly one our time of socio-political and environmental disasters could do with gripping hold of again.

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Local Council By-Elections: 2024 in Aggregate

848,165 votes were cast over 384 local authority contests. 104 council seats changed hands, and all percentages are rounded to the nearest decimal place. For comparison you can view last year's results here.

* Reform's comparison results are based on recomputing their tallies in Others over the last quarter/year
** There were 40 by-elections in Scotland
*** There were 23 by-elections in Wales
**** There were 37 contests with Independent clashes
***** See the quarterly round ups for the results from smaller parties

Truly a year of two halves for Labour. It was making slow inroads into the demographics that normally turn out for council by-elections and were able to pile up a decent popular vote lead up until and immediately after the general election. But that counts for nothing when the electorate sharply turns on you. Which is exactly what happened after August. The Tory gains come entirely from the latter half of the year. Labour might consider a further erosion of its roots in local government a price worth paying for chucking millions of pensioners off winter fuel allowance, but the public appear to think differently.

Good news for Kemi Badenoch then. But likewise, Reform surged in the second half of the year. The year-end modest vote total underplays their momentum. I expect that this time next year Reform will have outpaced the Liberal Democrats and Greens to claim the third party status it currently enjoys in polling. Provided they're able to find enough candidates to stand in enough seats. Overall, the Lib Dems will be happy with their by-election performances. They're doing better than what the polls are suggesting and stand to do well out of Labour's woes and those Tory leaners who don't like the direction Badenoch is leading her party in. The same goes for the Greens, though the rise of Reform has depressed their vote share. But actual votes are more or less matching the polls and the upward slope in support and councillors continues. It would be nice if they were the repository of electoral discontent rather than Reform, but these are the politics we've got.

Just a couple of other notes. It seems by-election turnout is trending downwards. This is an impression rather than something backed by data, but it's worth keeping an eye on. And there's the performance of the Independents and Others too. The rise of Reform gives legends in their own council wards opportunities to become electorally successful, so I imagine their share will decline as more would-be Indies and small party people clamber aboard the bandwagon. And with more choice available through the main parties and the major minor parties, the appeals of Indies and Others could well decline. We'll see this time next year.

Labour's Defence of Billionaire Influence

What to do with a party that won't help itself? This is a question that will variously crop up in political comment over the next four-and-a-half years about Labour. The scenario unfolds thus. A problem presents itself to Keir Starmer. An obvious course of action could be taken that would mitigate problems for the party, might in some instances be popular, and could help increase the chances of re-election in 2028/29. And the leadership resolutely refuses to do anything about it.

Take the Elon Musk/Reform love-in for example. News, or to be more accurate, rumours started by senior Tories that Donald Trump's money man wanted to donate $100m to Nigel Farage's private company has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Farage met Musk at Mar-a-Lago last week, and what began as gossip is now being taken seriously as a real possibility. With a hefty wodge deposited in the Reform leader's bank account, minus whatever "top up fee" he'd cream off, it would give Reform the sorts of resources that, realistically, only the Labour Party has got: a decent-sized full-time staff that can be bussed around the country, a Contact-Creator-style platform for voter ID, the budget for targeted social media advertising and literature, and the expensive "campaign specialists" capable of creating and running such an infrastructure. Reform does have a ceiling, but a professionalised operation could cause the two main parties a headache. Particularly the floundering Tories.

This has provoked calls for an overhaul of campaign financing laws. Quite sensible to stymie the influence of overseas billionaires trying to buy the future direction of British politics, you might think. 10 Downing Street, however, disagrees. An unnamed source (Morgan McSweeney) ruled out new rules governing foreign donations. "We’ll beat Reform by defeating their arguments rather than changing the rules to stop them getting money from Elon Musk ... You don’t successfully take on populists by changing the rules in bid to thwart them." Beating the extreme right by chasing them on immigration, you mean? Or conceding popular issues ripe for exploitation by a party from whom principle is merely a word in the dictionary? But taken on its own terms, the argument makes no sense. Farage's "populism" is quite conventional. It's "us", the pure, hard-done-to, innocent (white) Britons versus the corrupt establishment. As Musk and Trump are, for the moment, closely intertwined and that the president elect is largely reviled by public opinion here, the possibility of Farage pulling off a little man act with the richest man on the planet in his corner is fanciful to say the least.

Labour's cowardice speaks of an abject failure of political nerve. Except it doesn't. There are very simple reasons why Labour doesn't want changes to campaign financing, and that's because they benefit from it. We're not talking about the clean and extensively scrutinised donations from trade unions, but the bungs party coffers enjoy from the millionaire and billionaire donors Labour has courted under Starmer's leadership. They want this to continue with a minimum of public oversight because it raises awkward questions. The relationship between private health's donations to Labour and Starmer's enthusiasm to create more profitable opportunities for them in the NHS is a case in point, but there are others. More widely, if we're going to be talking negatively about foreign billionaires and British politics, that flags up the decades of vetoes one Australian billionaire has had on this country's enfeebled democracy, and the kowtowing and complicity generations of Labour politicians have had in maintaining this affair.

Billionaire money is simply a facet of how things work. Labour have made it quite clear that their project is not to change things for the better, but perfect the way of the state as is. That means no action, and another step toward embedding the extreme right as an every day feature of how we do our politics.

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Quarter Four By-Election Results 2024

This quarter 231,558 votes were cast in 124 local authority contests. All percentages are rounded to the nearest single decimal place. 51 council seats changed hands. For comparison you can view Quarter Three's results here. And yes, the table is rather ugly.

 

Party	Number of Candidates	Total Vote	%	+/- Q3	+/- Q4 23	Avge/ Contest	Seats
Con	118	57,449	24.8%	+4.6	+0.6	487	+20
Lab	111	54,567	23.6%	-14.5	-1.3	492	-21
Lib Dem	110	45,254	19.5%	+4.7	-4.9	411	+2
Ref*	63	19,686	8.5%	+6.0	+7.9	312	+7
Grn	95	20,133	8.7%	-4.4	-2.8	212	+2
SNP**	22	18,020	7.8%	+6.3	+6.4	819	-3
PC***	6	1,706	0.7%	+0.5	+0.5	284	0
Ind****	60	10,161	4.4%	-4.1	-3.6	169	-5
Oth*****	45	4,582	2.0%	+0.7	-2.7	102	-2

* Reform's comparison results are based on recomputing their tallies in Others over the last quarter/year
** There were 22 by-elections in Scotland
*** There were eight by-elections in Wales
**** There were nine Independent clashes
***** Others this quarter were Alba (239, 178, 118), British Unionist (241), Communist Party of Britain (23), Coventry Citizens Party (94), Heritage Party (61, 20, 11), Progressive Change (529), Propel (305), Scottish Family Party (83, 71, 53, 51, 25), Scottish Libertarian (15, 9), SDP (116, 33, 26, 12), Skegness Urba District Society (79), Socialist Party of Great Britain (22), Swanscombe & Greenhithe Residents' Association (395, 252), TUSC (327, 116, 76, 68, 56, 44, 35, 25, 18), UKIP (23, 11), Workers' Party (212, 143, 133, 80, 47, 40, 35, 32). The comparison figures from last year have been recomputed minus Reform's contribution.

The unprecedented becomes the precedented. No party has won such a huge parliamentary victory and seen their fortunes reverse as quickly. No party that has suffered an historic defeat has rebounded as rapidly. But these are what the numbers say. Political fortunes were going to turn against Labour at some point, and when they did the impact was always going to be disproprortionately felt at the level of council by-elections. Why? Because the age/turnout effect, i.e. the greater propensity to vote as one goes up the age range, is even more exacerbated for second order elections. And this is aggravated further by what looks like an across-the-board reduction in turnout since the general election. This matters because for the last 15 years the right have consolidated their support among older people, and when you consider how Labour expended its meagre political capital on a pointless attack on the elderly, you can see where their problems began. Caveats aside, it used to be the case that popular vote share tallies were simply effects of what was happening locally with some national overdetermination. Now, at least where the two main parties are concerned, the polls are resembling the by-elections.

Leaving aside the large SNP vote as an artefact of a greater number of Scottish by-elections than normal, the story of the quarter is the continued rise of Reform. The period underplays their potential strength because they have not stood in anywhere near as many seats as the other parties, and it's this spread of candidates that, at least for the Greens, in making them look better right now. Here the vote average is a good indicator of strength and this quarter we see that Reform is now fourth place in England and Wales, but did out-perform the Liberal Democrats in December. Unfortunately, thanks to the favourable media environment and Reform's slight age/turnout advantage over the other parties bar the Tories, if Nigel Farage can find enough candidates this rise is going to continue.

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