Pleading with the Core Vote

Perhaps it's the pedant in me, but I'm a firm believer in accurately portraying what people say and do. That includes those who never extend the same courtesy to others. Like leading Tories, for example. When reports circulated suggesting that Jeremy Hunt, he who apparently saved Britain from Liz Truss's foolishness, had gone on the record to say a £100,000/year salary was "not much", the antennae perked up. Surely Hunt, number two in the government and a deft ducker-and-diver as evidenced from his time as health minister wouldn't say what most Tory politicians talk about when no one's eavesdropping?

Writing on Twitter, he said "I spoke to a lady from Godalming about eligibility for the government's childcare offer which is not available if one parent is earning over £100k. That is an issue I would really like to sort out after the next election as I am aware that it is not [a] huge salary in our area if you have a mortgage to pay." On Laura Kuenssberg this Sunday morning, it was pointed out the average salary in his Surrey constituency wasn't even half of that. And all he could say was mortgage payments and the cost of living means that even those pulling down six figures "feel under pressure".

In an age where feelings normally don't care about your facts, he's right. Surrey average house prices sit at just over £630k. Servicing a mortgage on that typically costs over £3,000/month. Which is a fair whack when the take home pay for a £100,000 salary is around £5460/month. Out of the remainder our family has to pay car running costs, perhaps childcare, and all the other expenses that come with being affluent in an affluent county. The context of his comments, of considering raising the threshold for help with childcare costs, does speak to a concern that exists among the best paid. Or, to put it another way, a layer of people who would normally support the Conservatives are feeling the pinch.

Hunt has got to know that his "won't anyone think of the six figure earners?" rhetoric is going to make the Tories look even more out of touch. Despite the "good news" of faster-than-forecast inflation falls, rising real wages have got a way to go before they make up for the price hikes of the last couple of years. And so any affecting of concern for the well heeled implies an uncomfortable question: how does Hunt expect those on a lot less manage? And his answer, apart from talking up tax cuts, is ... nothing.

As has been apparent for some time, the Tories have given up. The question isn't whether they're going to lose the next election, it's about the margin of Labour's victory. And now poll after poll is flattering the so-called Reform party, despite its quite modest performance, the spectre of the sort of disintegration that raised its head during the Tories worst ever performance in a national election - the EU elections five years ago - is back. Party strategy has to be committed to securing the core vote. Hence over the last six months the obsessions with immigration and tax. It's why Rishi Sunak is prepared to routinely humiliate himself by pretending Palestinian solidarity protests are the extremist threat to the British state, and pledging to all and sundry that the planes to Rwanda will take off no matter the cost. He's doing what he thinks it will take to save his party, traditionally the most trusted repository of bourgeois political interests, from cataclysm.

And this explains why Hunt is doing what he's doing. Talking about extending the helping hand of the welfare state to top earners isn't going to win over new voters, because it's not supposed to. He's hoping a few more crumbs on top of the National Insurance cuts, which disproportionately favoured those on large incomes, will be enough to arrest the movement of a few hundreds of thousands of votes in what should be safe seats. All so that there might be a viable parliamentary party left after the election.

This is the horizon of Tory ambition now. It says everything about the depth of their crisis that they must bribe those parts of the electorate they should have in the bag.

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Midlands Conference in Critical Thought, 5th-6th April 2024

Remember this abstract on Keir Starmer and the resistance his government is likely to face? The lovely people organising the Midlands Conference in Critical Thought have accepted my paper, and that will be taking place on Saturday between 4pm and 5.30pm as part of the Cultural Resistance in a Time of Economic Stagnation panel.

Rather than getting a fix up of blog posts from this place, I will be using the Hardt and Negri stuff on immaterial labour that's all over these parts, and something new by applying Maurizio Lazzarato and his contributions around machinic enslavement to make sense of Starmerist modernisation, its gaps, and where it can come undone. And all in 20 minutes. I might not even get time to plug the book!

The conference, hosted by the Centre for Policy, Citizenship, and Society and the Department of Social and Political Sciences at Nottingham Trent University is free to attend. But the organisers ask interested people to register here. It is a multi-panelled event with a very large programme, so I recommend signing up so you can see what else is on offer. I also hope to blog about some of the papers in due course.

Hope to see some of you early next month!

The Last Starship from Earth

The skiffy turn means encountering the strange, the weird, and the completely bonkers. There's also a chance of turning up something good that time has buried under layers of obscurity. John Boyd's The Last Starship from Earth is not one of those books. Quite the opposite; it is truly terrible. According to everyone's go-to reference site for snippets of trivia, The Last Starship from Earth was praised by Robert A Heinlein as belonging on "the same shelf with Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. A thumb's up that says more about Heinlein than anything I could write.

Owing something to the hierarchy worked out by Auguste Comte, as Sociology was the last and the greatest of the sciences Boyd imagines a totalitarian society divided up into a series of departments, at the top of which sits the sociologists. Psychology and mathematics are used to determine marriage and parenthood, and order is enforced by the deterrent of sending ne'er-do-wells to the planet Hell - a frozen and desolate wasteland. The main character, Haldane IV of a line of mathematicians, falls for Helix of the creative, artistic class. Their courtship in one of tedious disquisitions about the separation of the sciences and the humanities, tempered by uncovering forbidden information that one of society's patron saints was as much a poet as he was a maths head. They begin an affair and are shopped by a classmate. There commences a lengthy sequence where Haldane has to convince a jury of a mathematician, a psychologist, a priest, and a sociologist that he's ripe for rehabilitation as a starship engine man. They see through him and off to Hell he's packed. Except, jeepers, the world is as lush and verdant as Earth and the convicts there are thriving. To maintain the illusion it's nothing but icy wastes, they've convinced the prison transports to only show up when it's winter.

Last Starship gives up about 30 pages from the end. Having banged on about Haldane's mathematical genius, a plot is hatched where he can use his facility for algebra and mental arithmetic to construct a time machine, travel back to Earth, convince Jesus not to spearhead an assault on Rome and change history so the tyranny of sociology never comes to pass. Of the characters left on Hell, which includes his beloved Helix, they seem to think dabbling with the timeline won't affect them because they're on another planet. Okay. The book closes with Haldane, now immortal and having lived for 2,000 years, hanging around a southern Californian university ogling young women. It worked. The new history, wait for it, is ours.

I don't mind absurd plotting as long as it's done well and allows for the suspension of disbelief. Here, the story is just stupid. Not only is it stupid, but it's written in a smug, self-satisfied way. Boyd tries an at-a-remove critique of mainstream American social science of the 1960s. Or, reflected through an SF lens, Isaac Asimov's psychohistory and its certitude in the omnipotence of statistics. But the info dumps are badly done, the dialogue is stilted, and I've seen more character on the shadow front bench. If that wasn't awful enough, its attempted dabbles in racial politics have severely aged. The sexual politics are likewise abysmal. For two thirds of the book, Haldane cannot decide if Helix is unabashedly in love with him or is tugging on his heart strings to entrap and ruin him. On the very first page we see him gawping at how she swings her hips from side to side, and Boyd tries to be ha ha funny by suggesting Haldane is as interested in the mathematics of a derrière in motion as having a straight up perv. This undercurrent of furtive sexual interest runs all the way through, and adds to Last Starship's unreadability. But what has ensured I'll never touch anything by Boyd again is the awful gee whizz shucks wiseacring afflicting the characters. And to think, according to the august SF Encyclopedia, that Boyd was considered an important new wave SF precursor by some. On the contrary, this is both prurient and pretentious. The only good thing going for it is that Boyd could only keep up the torture for 180 pages, but there are supposed to be two sequels.

Coming away from this book, I can only pity those new to SF who got it on publication and were forever put off. If this is anything to go by, Boyd and his works deserve their obscurity.

The Pitiful Penny-for-Leader Plot

If you've been following The Times reporting on the crisis in the Conservative Party, it has decided that this week was the week when everything changed. Despite the Tories being convinced tax cutting can only win votes, Jeremy Hunt's budget has done nothing to reverse their abysmal polling figures. Lee Anderson's abandonment of the party that afforded him a pseudo-celebrity status has convinced the paper that Rishi Sunak can no longer hold this most motley of crews together. And the delay followed by the special pleading excuses over Tory donor Frank Hester racist attack on Diane Abbott was pathetically half-hearted as they were seen to be desperate for more of his money. Evidently, it won't be long before the Murdoch stable declare for Keir Starmer.

But also according to a variety of outlets, moves for ditching Sunak ahead of the general election are multiplying. The easily dismissed nonsense about a Boris Johnson return has done the rounds again, but so has the outline of another plot that was mooted a few months ago: get rid of the Prime Minister, and coronate Penny Mordaunt in his place. Might this be a go-er? It goes like this. "Allies" of Suella Braverman have talked to "friends" of Mordaunt about getting her to stand as a stalking horse. Sunak would be deposed, and she would lead the party into the next election. But isn't she the wokest of the woke as far as they're concerned? Their reasoning is she polls much better than any other Tory and would ensure the result at the ballot box would be a rout, not a massacre. Then after she has discharged her responsibility, a right winger would swoop in, turn the party's fortunes around because what the public are gagging for is more racism and more culture war, and the Tories will win again in five years after Starmer disappoints.

It says everything about our low effort press that this bollocks is given credence. There is no way Sunak will lose a no confidence vote, for starters. Tory backbench criticisms, even when they're hyped fall flat more often than not. Rebellions barely make double figures. And every time the anti-woke racist right have a public outing, they show themselves completely estranged from what's happening in the country. If every vote against their own government is an occasion for their humiliation their chances of toppling Sunak are nil. But what of their putative alliance with Mordaunt and her supporters? She might be many things, but a fool she is not. How credible is a secret scheme where the plotters boast from sundry front pages that they want to support Mordaunt so she can take the fall, leaving their faction unblemished and Persil-white for the assumed Tory revival? The sheer absurdity of screaming aloud their Machiavellian subterfuge appears not to have warned our credulous hacks that the story hasn't got any legs.

Here's what has happened. Some on the right of the party have been chuntering about what a hash Sunak is making to briefcase Tories who think likewise. Someone texted the contents of this tearoom bellyaching to a journalist and here we are. More headlines than one knows what to do with.

Yet the story speaks to essential truths. The Tories are doomed and Sunak is digging the grave deeper, and everyone in the party knows this. Likewise, Mordaunt would make for a harder opponent for Labour, especially as she has occasional flashes of charisma compared to the colourless mediocrity on the opposition benches. And she could stymie the collapse and the party not be reduced to an impotent, right wing rump. Except she has no wish to captain a sinking ship, nor be remembered as the first Prime Minister to lose their seat at a general election. And so they're stuck with Sunak, and with October now supposedly the date for the general election there's going to be many more stories like this before the Tories are put out of their misery.

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The Political Uses of Racism

Another day, another awful day in the Commons. Having disgraced himself and his office during the SNP's opposition day to spare Keir Starmer's blushes, as those reading this know cringingly loyal Hoyle has done it again. Following the widely publicised remarks of Frank Hester, the moneybags filler of Tory coffers (and who, completely by coincidence, profited nicely from Covid procurement and other government contracts), Rishi Sunak tied himself in knots during Prime Minister's Questions. Hester's comments, in which he said Diane Abbott makes him want to hate all black women and that she should "be shot", was "wrong and racist" according to Sunak. But that the Tories wouldn't be returning the money because he has made a proper apology and that's that. Starmer rightly attacked the Tories, as did the SNP's Stephen Flynn and several other MPs for giving Hester a free pass. However, the one voice we didn't hear from was Diane Abbott herself. Despite indicating her desire to speak on at least 46 occasions during questions.

Having lately broken procedure to "defend MPs", during this tumultuous PMQs Hoyle was the very picture of propriety. At least according to the feeble defence proffered by his office. Abbott was neither on the order paper, which has to be prioritised, and the session only has so many minutes on the clock, and so couldn't be called. The Speaker was chapter and verse by the book, and he's bound by convention to discharge proceedings by those rules. Except this doesn't wash for two reasons. When a member is the subject of a controversy, it is customary to call them. For example, if a white woman MP was the object of similar comments would Hoyle have denied her the right to speak or let sundry men speak on her behalf instead? I very much doubt it. And second, if the order paper is so precious why was Ed Davey called to ask a question when he wasn't on it?

There's no need to don a tin foil hat to explain his decision-making. Because past behaviour is the best guide to present and future behaviour, Hoyle again abused his position to defend Starmer's leadership. This is not because of straightforward partisanship. Hoyle would never allow such crudities to intrude on the "neutrality" of his judgement. He committed a procedural violation in the service of his unstated constitutional role: upholding the authority of the state. As per the SNP's motion, Hoyle did not call Abbott to speak because she wouldn't just attack the Tories over their appalling and unjustifiable defence of their position, but raise the racist attacks she has sustained from her own side. Above all, what was said in in the Forde report about anti-black racism in generally and what was directed at her personally by employees of the Labour Party. A point she reiterates in her post-PMQs Independent piece. Hoyle wants to oversee a smooth transition from the chaos of the Tories to Starmer's briefcase government, and if he can help this by seeing off divisions or preventing racist blemishes from adhering to the incoming administration, he will.

But this episode on Starmer's side reminds us of what racism is in bourgeois politics. For the labour movement, racism is an evil. Among other things it justifies exploitation and is employed by bosses and right wingers to divide and rule. It is immediately, viscerally a class issue. But in the rarefied halls of Westminster, racism is a weapon to be wielded for one's own ends. And that was typified in Starmer's attacks on Sunak. In four years he and his allies have gone from using accusing their opponents on the left of racism for factional ends, to ignoring it when their own side was on the hook, to gleefully exploiting it when sundry Tories openly tout their racist wares. Starmer and friends might occasionally find the expression of racism distasteful and bad manners, but they're not interested in addressing it let alone getting to grips with its roots. Because it is and will always be a handy stick for bashing political opponents with, whether on the Conservative benches - as per Wednesday's PMQs - or (ostensibly) on their side. Labour has to hold the space open for scapegoats of its own too, just in case.

Which brings us back again to the old-fashioned but no less true insight that politics is not about ideas, but interests. And in mainstream politics that applies to the fielding of or batting away accusations of racism, as it does to everything else.

The Demise of Lee Anderson

You can't say Lee Anderson looked terribly thrilled as he announced his defection to Reform at a press conference on Monday morning. "All I want is my country back", he whinnied like a broken legged horse. But instead of taking a shot gun to him, his new backers are hoping another foray into grievance politics will boost the "party" into the big time. After all there are rumours that nine other Tory MPs are in defection talks. Of course there are.

Of Anderson, we can confidently say we're on the final page of the chapbook of his career. His performance at the press conference was begrudging and uncomfortable. There was zero enthusiasm, no personality, nor a frisson of charisma. The surliness in friendly interviews that have won him a handful of fans among the far right looked like barely syllabic chuntering in front of the TV cameras. Richard Tice gave every impression he was out taking his pet prole for walkies. The one thing that did provoke actual words was the question asking him whether he would call a by-election. After all, previous floor crossers to Nigel Farage's vehicle - namely Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless - had the decency and the political courage to call one each when they took up UKIP membership. And Anderson himself has signed an unsuccessful EDM making by-elections compulsory in the event of defections. This time however, he wanted to save time and expense because there's "going to be an election in May." True, soaraway tax give aways in the budget were made to butter up the electorate for a contest soon, but Rishi Sunak would have to call it this Friday if he wants the traditional second-week-in-May slot. Alas, there is a more prosaic explanation for our hero's reticence: Anderson is scared of losing his seat.

In the event of a by-election, Reform would do well to look to Rochdale. They might hope for a Galloway-style result, but in all likelihood Anderson's would share the fate of Simon Danczuk's. For one, the political dynamic is heading away from the radical right. It is a tide that is ebbing, not rolling in. Then there is no Anderson groundswell in Ashfield. He got in because he was the Conservative Party candidate on the back of the 2019 election's Brexit referendum rerun. He might severely erode the Tory vote, but like in so many other Tory seats, a win for Labour is the likeliest outcome, with a strong challenge from the local independents. Anderson knows this as well, and no amount of pretending that red wall seats voted Tory in 2019 because they're bigots will alter this arithmetic. Likewise come the general election, the seat will be between Labour and the independents. Anderson might save his deposit, but he'll have to get used to subsisting on his GB News presenter's salary. Until they have no use for him any more and he spends the next few years earning peanuts from the pantomime circuit of Britain First rallies.

Over the last couple of years, we've had occasion to discuss the rise of Anderson. His move from the right wing of Ashfield Labour Party to the right wing of the Tories was one of the smoothest defections in politics. And that's because the unsubtle racism of Anderson's person is an unwelcome reminder that Labourism's broad church has room for the small-minded and the backward in its congregation, the inescapable complement to an awful history it's rather proud of.

By ditching the Tories for Reform, Anderson has sealed his own demise and it won't be long before he becomes nothing more than an unpleasant memory. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for those who would come after him. They are there, encouraged and promoted within the bowels of the Labour Party, and when well remunerated if episodic opportunities arise in time, there will be one, two, many Lee Andersons more than happy to walk a mile in his scabby shoes.

Rumours of Another Johnson Comeback

With the Tories staring down the barrel of certain doom, everything they do has an air of unreality about it. Rishi Sunak taking to the steps of Downing Street to denounce George Galloway's election. Jeremy Hunt dishing out tax cuts for the better off as the state continues to crumble. And now the latest Tory story: hopes of a Boris Johnson comeback.

According to the Mail on Sunday, senior Tories alarmed by catastrophic polling are "plotting to replace" Sunak with the former Prime Minister. This is based on private surveys commissioned by Judith McAlpine, which suggests only Johnson can save the Tories from total devastation. She was able to get 50 MPs at a private meeting where the results were unveiled. It's worth noting that nowhere does the article suggest the Tories are in with a chance of winning: they are faced with a choice of bumping around with 200 or so MPs with Johnson and far fewer with Sunak.

How likely is a comeback? Even more meagre than the last one. The piece excitedly talks of getting Johnson back into the Commons as if it's a minor trifle. McAlpine is influential in Henley, which would be the favoured seat, and the current party candidate is an ally. But assuming she was to stand aside to let the boorish bombshell have another crack that won't get him into the Commons before the election. So a bit of a flaw in the plan. And there are more. As Sunder rightly notes, where are the Tories in a position to win a by-election? It's not as if safe seats are safe any more. And a Tory candidate needs the leader's writ to run, which Sunak is not about to extend to a Johnson candidature determined to depose him. And there's a third consideration. For the first time in his life, Johnson is making money faster than he can spend it. Why would he give that up to lead his former party to certain defeat and then five years in boring opposition? It's not going to happen.

But when things are desperate and providence is mocking the party to its face, anything and everything that might promise salvation will be grasped at. Yet there is a glimmer of rationality beneath the cope. The Tories, or rather the Tories pining for Johnson's return haven't completely lost it. Getting him back would almost certainly see the threat of Reform off. By-elections are a better gauge of support than the polls that continually flatter them, but the right flank would be shored up and the damage of split voting negated. And those Tory supporters electing to stay at home when the election drops would come out for the man who, a short time ago, was happy to see their bodies pile high.

It's just unfortunate for the Tories that their would-be saviour has better things to do than save the party that has provided him with a very fine living and a place in the history books as one of the worst Prime Ministers this country has ever seen.

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Jeremy Hunt's Last Budget

The curtain falls on Jeremy Hunt's final budget, and as such this was the most explicitly political of statements. And looking tonight at the BBC's website, it has dished up the message the Tories are hoping to fill the front pages on Thursday: Jeremy Hunt cuts National Insurance and extends child benefit. A headline speaking of munificence and "getting it", designed for the low information punter who catches it in the side eye. As with all things Tory, they're hoping most won't bother with the detail.

And they're right, most won't. Stealing Labour's feeble flagship policy of abolishing nondom status, but then giving moneybags new arrivals four years of tax-free life won't get a negative write up in The Sun. The flat rate cut to National Insurance will see low paid workers save barely £150/year while those who are better off can look forward to pocketing thousands. The extension of child benefit by raising the income threshold might be welcome to some enjoying a higher household income, but it does not match the rise in the cost of living - leaving most parents with zero extra help. Public services will continue to rot as pleas for more resources fell on deaf ears. Apart from the Graun and Mirror and sundry internet-based outlets, none of this shall get coverage. And because they're shielded from critical coverage, the Tories will think they've pulled a blinder.

To be a bit contrarian, they have and they haven't. By re-emphasising their politics of doing bugger all, Labour's tepid response - Keir Starmer took Hunt to task for not cutting income tax - only serves to reconfirm that the Tories' political project since Covid, of downplaying the state's capacity to do anything, has become a consensus the shadow front bench has embraced. As reiterated by Rachel Reeves on Sunday. It also means that Labour's capitulation to their agenda means the measures announced today are so many potential rakes for a new government. When Labour comes to reverse National Insurance cuts, claw back child benefit from better off families, increase fuel duties again, unfreeze booze taxes, spend more on public services, and start taking the green transition seriously, the surviving MPs of the coming wipe out will sit there on the opposition benches reeling off gotcha after gotcha. As if anyone will care for what they say.

The Tories have remade the political terrain in their image, but they're not in a position to profit from it. The triumphalism of John McTernan, writing in the Telegraph, underlines this basic truism. Among the professional middle class, the opinion formers, and the personnel of the state, the recklessness of the Tories have destroyed their reputation as a serious party of government. And among the wider layers, those who have traditionally formed the backbone of mass conservatism, no amount of anti-immigration posturing or pledges to bear down on tax are going to win them back. And the reason why is simple. Despite her pathetic efforts at rehabilitation, Liz Truss gets the blame for hiking up interest rates and crashing the economy. And Sunak cops the flak for doing absolutely nothing to shield the core Tory support from the effects of their folly. Both have used their leadership to slam their feet on the accelerator and driven their party hell for leather down the highway to oblivion.

What will seemingly be the last Tory budget for a very long time doesn't change a thing. By-election disasters for both parties have only reaffirmed rather than challenged their strategies, and the budget's political reception won't change that either. The Tories are doomed and Labour will win. And the rest of us? If we want anything out of the next government we're going to have to fight for it, as has always been the case.

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A Cynical Case of Fiscal Dishonesty

In an incredibly soft ball feature for The Telegraph, Rachel Reeves told the paper she learned all about balancing the books at her mum's kitchen table. I wonder if mum taught her that copying other's people's work was wrong, because the evidence suggests not. Not that the Telegraph were rude enough to mention it, and so Team Reeves will be happy with the results of their handing the Tory house journal "unprecedented access". They wanted to show the human side of our tinny voiced shadow chancellor, and something that would endear her enough to the readers that they might give Labour a punt - and once again assure the interests that circulate in the paper's political orbit that contrary to some of its more excitable articles, there is absolutely nothing to fear. Keir Starmer is as committed to Britain's sacrosanct class relations as Rishi Sunak is.

But because this is the Telegraph, the heavy Thatcher allusions were there. Reeves said she wanted to be known as the "iron chancellor", simultaneously invoking the blessed Margaret and, for those readers who prefer to life in the 19th century, the wily but tough Otto Von Bismarck. And the kitchen table anecdote with mum, her calculator, and the notepad famously recalls Thatcher's brilliant but wholly misleading reduction of government spending to household budgeting. This builds further on the consistent messaging coming from Labour: don't promise, don't ask. Unfortunately, if social media and earnest think pieces are anything to go by too many people think Reeves is genuinely mistaken about how state finances operate. When she attacks the Tories for maxing out the credit card, and Labour now has to be "disciplined" with its spending you can see why anyone with half an understanding about how the state makes money and the way economics works feel like they're banging their heads against a wall. My advice? Relax. It's not you, it's Reeves.

The shadow chancellor is not a stupid woman. She knows the British government can't bankrupt itself. Rather, her fondness for the household metaphor is driven entirely by politics. Cynical politics. It helps Labour bat away the tax and spend attack lines customarily deployed by the Tories and their favoured journals. By caving without a fight to right wing framing, the editorial offices might be flattered into thinking that it is they who will get to set the agenda for the incoming government. Not the members, and not the unions. Which helps explain why we've yet to see much bellyaching about extending workers' rights that, theoretically, Reeves and Starmer remain committed to.

The second reason is central to their political strategy. With Reeves affecting the countenance of a robotic disciplinarian whose commandments are programmed by "the economy", this is a concerted effort to depoliticise economic questions and spending decisions. Hospitals in crisis? Sorry, growth is sluggish - let's get business to help. Below inflation public sector pay rises? There is no money because the Tories sunk the economy. Kids getting taught in crumbling RAC classrooms? Can't replace them any faster because of the fiscal rules. Cut social security? Not my fault guv'nor, not enough tax receipts. It suits Reeves to misrepresent the budgetary position and how state cash really works, so Labour is off the hook when things don't change as fast as they should or don't change at all. And when they condescend to do something, they can toot the over-delivery tune when a public service is patched up. They want to control the agenda and the pace of authoritarian modernisation, so is there any better way of setting up some spurious objective rules that they say they are powerless to change, and must obey come hell or high water? It's a deliberate effort to obfuscate, distort, and make snoring boring the most fundamental political challenges of the day.

Reeves is playing a deeply cynical game as all the Labour right have done. And they can get away with it for now because the election is in the bag. But as we saw on Thursday, when there are controversial issues Starmer et al have no answer for, they will be punished for it. And as these are going to multiply once they're in government, it won't be long before the rust clings to Reeves's steely projection and chews great gaping holes in what the Labour leadership believes is a clever-clever strategy.

Why Reform Failed in Rochdale

Another reason why mainstream politics is tearing its hair out over the Rochdale result was its refusal to follow the by-election script the media had written for it. It goes something like this: Labour wins, the Tories get a pummelling, and Reform does well enough to get touted as a challenger both parties would do well to take seriously. This gives the Mail, Telegraph, etc. license to offer this private company (remember, the "party" is constituted as a business in which Nigel Farage is the majority shareholder) free advertising and to carry on pushing politics further to the right. At the outset, none of the official scribblers or high foreheads at campaign HQs believed Galloway was going to win, or that the independent candidature of David Tully would blow the main parties out of the water. For its part, Reform thought they were in with a shout of scooping up the votes of the disaffected. They were just as much part of Westminster's groupthink.

By selecting Simon Danczuk, the former UKIP-while-Labour, Sun-loving noted sext pesterer MP, the "party" was hoping to capitalise on his name recognition. Buoyed by the decent results in the previous week's by-elections, they had in fact taken the campaign seriously. Activists were bussed in, a professional campaigning operation was set up, Richard Tice was frequently present. And you could be forgiven for thinking the background ratcheting up of Islamophobic rhetoric and more immigration scaremongering would have played to their advantage. But they got considerably less bang for their buck. I suppose Danczuk might be happy that Reform found 1,100 more people to vote for him this time than at his feeble independent challenge in 2017, but overall Reform fell for their own hype.

Having confused being backward and reactionary with "working class" - a category error common among Westminster elites - to find their usual anti-immigration/stopping the boats/abolish tax rubbish falling on deaf ears must have come as a shock. In the end Reform saved its deposit, but came in at 6.3%. This was behind the Liberal Democrats whose campaign didn't extend beyond their candidate and a few local members. The fancy battle bus and glossy leaflets amounted to a heap of crushed expectations. It's little wonder then, failing to find the electoral Red Seas parting for his party, that Tice has been moaning to any media outlet who'll listen that there was "intimidation" and "death threats" on the campaign trail. And, that old canard, there being something iffy about the postal votes.

While Galloway's campaign was a disgrace for pushing cheap anti-trans arguments, it is doubtful if anyone came in behind his campaign because they found his brand of scabbing on this more convincing than the bilge issuing from the Tories or Reform. Rather, "social conservatism" played little to no role in Galloway's win. His victory capitalised on local disaffection about being a forgotten town - hence it was wise for him to reach out to Tully in his victory speech. And because of Gaza. This wasn't just a first order issue for local Muslims. Polling suggests over 70% of people in this country want to see a ceasefire. Even if you're a non-political person, scenes from the atrocities Israel are committing against civilians are making it onto social media feeds across multiple platforms. The latest outrage often makes in onto the news and, yes, the unwillingness of the Tories and Labour to do anything about Israel's behaviour drives their reputations lower, and lower, and lower. To the point where, what a shocker, is affects voting patterns. Who could've thunk it?

If Reform has a purpose, apart from securing seats at the trough for Farage, Tice, and other select hangers-ons, it is to channel anti-political establishment disaffection into the safety of right wing populism. Which happens to present the interests that structure politics in this country zero threat. The same cannot be said of Galloway with his trenchant critique of the international power politics all sections of the establishment are wedded to. That's why they hate him. And having been the first to be elected against the background of an active, mass Palestinian solidarity movement, that's why they fear him too. Reform? They weren't even on the pitch in Rochdale.