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Tony Blair during a visit to Ukraine (Shutterstock)

Famously, Tony Blair knows how to win elections, so we should always listen to what he has to say. He also knows how to write. In over 5,000 words, he has put that on full display in his new essay on the future of Labour. He has done so in a way that reminds us all of what is in many ways his greatest gift: to lay out a political argument grounded in his own view of the global trends shaping the future (that was globalisation in the 2000s, but in the 2020s technology – and AI in particular – is centre stage).

The key argument of the essay – that getting the policy right, not the politics, must come first – is spot on. But, awkwardly, the truth is that this essay fails to live up to its own advice. Blair paints in broad brushstrokes but pays far too little attention to the canvas for those brushstrokes: modern Britain. He rightly highlights the technological and geopolitical changes shaping our world, but not their gritty interaction with Britain in the 2020s.

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George Eaton: We’re meeting on the day that the UK has just recorded its highest-ever May temperature. How should Britain adapt to becoming a hot country?

James Meadway: The initial steps were laid out by the last Climate Change Committee report. The ones that stick out are changes to working time – that we work different hours, enforce limitations on work when it becomes too hot and, I would add, start working fewer hours overall. Beyond that, there’s a great deal of planning and spatial policy we could use: more trees everywhere, more public spaces without traffic, the provision of cool spaces for public use. Infrastructure will need additional investment – more transmission wires buried underground, the return of water to public ownership and a plan for future growth taking place outside of congested and stressed regions in the south-east

George: There’s still much debate about precisely what has caused the UK’s economic stagnation since the 2008 crisis. What’s your assessment?

James: The short version is not very much investment – both government and business investment fell off a cliff after 2008. And Britain was never a particularly high-investment economy. IPPR had a good paper on this: over the last 30 years we’ve been consistently at the bottom or second-bottom of the G7 for investment. If you’re not building anything, you’re not going to grow very much.

The other question is why that’s happening. Brexit was a clear shock from which recovery has been difficult, that’s one part of it. The other is the willingness of government to act rather than just seeing itself as a risk-manager or risk-remover for the private sector, never actually really taking the initiative. Plus, a ridiculous focus on the south-east, very consistent across governments, driven by the Treasury in particular. Diane Coyle’s paper on this, The Imperial Treasury, is worth a read. And then the one that’s become increasingly apparent is big international exposure, significant supply chain risk, which adds up to ‘we don’t want to invest here’.

George: At the launch of Verdant earlier this year you spoke of the need for a think tank that is able to speak “hard truths”. What are those?

James: Britain is a rich country and wealth is unevenly distributed but there’s a fantasy that this wealth is endless and our place in the world is at the top somewhere and we can more or less do whatever we want. There’s this slightly magical thinking. ‘If we just change the fiscal rules, everything will look better’ – it would make a marginal difference. ‘We can wish away the bond markets’, well you can’t if a third of your government debt is owed to the rest of the world and you have to import nearly half of the food you eat. You’ve got to be quite hard-nosed about this. There isn’t some version of the world in which getting the Bank of England to print all the money you want is going to resolve this.

The other hard truth is how to think correctly about climate change. We have to stop thinking about it as ‘one day the world is fine, the next day it’s all gone’. Instead, everything is just getting hotter and more difficult, or more flooded and more difficult. You’re more likely to catch a disease than before. You go to the shops and it costs more. Getting people to think about the consequences of living in a world like this is a hard truth for the environmental movement, and most people in the Green Party recognise that. Caroline Lucas, who’s on our board, and Rupert Read are two people who stick out there.

George: Verdant’s first report took perhaps unlikely inspiration from Donald Trump and Elon Musk and called for a ‘Doge of the left’. What does a progressive version of state reform look like?

James: The real inspiration there was Zohran Mamdani talking about how we’re not just here to do big government but good government. He set up an office for savings, quite deliberately saying that we’ll cut back on spending that is not delivering for people in New York.

If you do this seriously, you ask ‘what is the good that the public sector can do and is it doing well?’ Not the Treasury view, which is 5 per cent off everything, sort it out yourselves. Defence procurement and IT procurement are other classic examples. There’s a whole load of areas where there’s an interaction between central government, which wants to do something, and the private sector, which wants to make money, and there’s a breakdown in how that’s supposed to work, so you end up spending more and more on management consultants with really slender evidence that this is actually helping.

We’d set up a separate function in the Cabinet Office, so you’ll have somebody who is a champion for public services, an adjudicator, rather than this totally confrontational approach between departments and the Treasury.

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George: You were an adviser to John McDonnell during his time as shadow chancellor. What lessons did you draw from the failures of the Corbyn project?

James: A whole stack of things, one of them is that we cannot, like Jurassic Park, preserve these fossilised creatures in amber and resurrect them millions of years later, or in the Labour left’s case 30 years later. There’s a degree of small-c conservatism on the left, your thinking about the world is backwards-looking. For example, why do we want to nationalise water? The real answer is that we’re approaching a series of crises in which questions over water use are going to become pressing in an unpleasant way – it’s not ‘it shouldn’t have been privatised in the first place’. You need to be alert to the actual conditions we live in and respond to them, not focused on re-running arguments from the 1980s.

George: There’s been much talk of the bond markets and the UK’s fragile position in recent times. How would you have managed that challenge had you entered the Treasury?

James: It wasn’t really a challenge in 2017, we had the lowest interest rates in human history. Even a significant move upwards in borrowing costs would not have spelt disaster at that point. Today, we are no longer in that world, and that’s true for all developed countries – the cost of government borrowing has quintipled in the last five years or so.

We exploited the fact that inflation was low and interest rates were low, which is one reason why Corbynism can’t work now. Jeremy Corbyn didn’t talk about wealth taxes, he had no need to, you could just borrow money and build things.

George: Where do those material constraints leave you on questions such as taking utilities back into public ownership?

James: First of all, everything looks like a question of redistribution, we’re in a low-growth, high-inflation, high-interest rate world. One version of that is around wealth taxes, another is more subtle and around the financial system. The latest figures suggest that we [the taxpayer] will hand over £125bn to the Bank of England to cover the cost of ending quantitative easing. That money is making its way into the coffers of private banks, it’s a subsidy to the private banking system. So another redistribution question is ‘why are we doing this?’ Why are we not introducing tiered reserves, as everybody from Zack Polanski to Richard Tice to Gordon Brown has proposed?

George: Do you feel a tension inside the Greens between former Corbynites such as yourself and more traditional centrist members?

James: I haven’t noticed it myself but my route into this is a belief that the more ecologically-minded people got it right, not those who believe there’s a technical fix to climate change. Take a fairly crude version of the Green New Deal, ‘if we just invest loads in renewable energy, we’ll solve this’, no you won’t. What I detect in the Green Party is something else; without being naive about it, there’s not that ingrained, existential approach to faction fighting that you get in Labour in which every row is death or glory.

George: The Greens have often been ambivalent or even hostile towards the concept of economic growth – the last manifesto barely mentions it. Isn’t that a problem for a progressive party?

James: I don’t think so, I don’t take the view that growth is bad and we should actively avoid it. I more take the view, and this is probably the default in the Greens, that growth is just a thing that happens. If you went out and actually invested a great deal of money in decarbonisation you would get economic growth.

But the harder bit is that I just don’t think we’re going to get very much growth in the future. There is potential for catch-up growth because we’ve done things so badly for such a long time. Investing more money in the north of England, for instance, is a good opportunity for that. But once you’ve caught up, once you’re somewhere near the frontier of what is possible, that frontier is not going to move as rapidly as it used to in the past.

George: On a wealth tax, what’s your response to critics such as Dan Neidle who argue this has never been successful anywhere it’s been tried? And that we should therefore focus on levies on property and capital gains.

James: Well the fact something hasn’t been done anywhere is not in itself an argument against it, you could have said the same before the National Health Service was created. And there are countries with wealth taxes: Switzerland has had one for about 200 years now, Norway has a wealth tax and has recently increased it, Spain has one. The specifics and the design is where the discussion gets more interesting: how would you make this work? What are you really going to tax and who is it going to hit? If you take Norway’s wealth tax, it’s actually quite broad, it captures a lot of people who are reasonably well-off [a 1 per cent tax on those with assets above £125,000) whereas the Green version is targeted right at the top end [1 per cent on assets above £10m].

The challenge, politically, is that this does not solve all your problems, you are looking at perhaps £10bn at the upper end, maybe more. The amount you want to spend on improving public services is going to be an order of magnitude greater than that.

George: Are the Greens right to stand a candidate in Makerfield against Andy Burnham?

James: In the end it’s up to the local party to decide, the Greens are decentralised to a fault. There’s a good case to be made either way. My own personal view, and this is really just a personal view, is that Andy Burnham is genuinely popular in a way that pretty much no other politician in Britain actually is. And there are good reasons for that, everyone saw what he was doing during Covid in particular, that gave him a national presence.

And he’s got a kind of secret weapon, which is the exact argument that Reform used to great effect during the local elections which was ‘vote Reform to get Starmer out’. He [Burnham] can now say, somewhat ironically, ‘vote Labour to get Starmer out’.

So what’s Reform’s argument going to be? They’re quite confused and spending a lot of time whinging about Restore – you don’t do that if you’re in a confident place. Whereas Labour, correctly, is not spending its time whinging about the Greens.

George: What do you think a Burnham premiership would mean for the Greens?

James: On an entirely personal basis, people who’ve worked with him say that he’s personally very likeable. I think there has been a genuine shift in how he thinks about the world, which has been quite a long time coming. You can see that in his campaign which has landed squarely in a lot of Corbyn-land themes.

He has two problems: first, this is backwards-looking, if you look at his campaign video, it’s all ‘we used to build stuff, wouldn’t it be good to have this again?’ And it would be, but that’s not dealing with the immediate cost-of-living crisis people face. Unless there’s some shift, it looks as if Andy Burnham is not going to live up to his rhetoric.

What would ‘Manchesterism’ as it has actually been delivered mean for the rest of the country? Well, a harsh version of this is, you build a lot of stuff that looks shiny and nice but places further out in Greater Manchester – like Oldham or Wigan, where I’m from – don’t see too much of it, which is why everyone’s voting Reform. You’ve got a problem if you’re just doing that nationally, so what’s his redistribution plan? Wes Streeting, at the moment, has a more obviously redistributive plan for the country because he’s going to equalise capital gains and income tax, what’s Andy Burnham’s equivalent?

Second, having a prime minister who is potentially the most left-wing prime minister since Harold Wilson is not a bad thing for the left. What are the plausible outcomes of the general election? Probably a Reform-Conservative coalition or a coalition of the left of some sort. If our version of the world is ‘death to Andy Burnham and all he stands for’ that won’t set us up very well to have the maximum political space by the time we get to 2029. Whether you go into coalition or not is a separate discussion, but you want to have the option and you want everyone who votes for you to know it’s an option.

The other bit that sometimes gets forgotten on the left is that people vote for parties they think are going to win and do something. If you look like you’re going to be in government, they’ll vote for you more often than if you look like a random protest.

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The Brexit omertà has ended. With leading Labour politicians now talking about rejoining the EU, and polls showing a majority of voters in favour, the Overton Window has dramatically shifted in British politics. However, poorly-informed commentary has promoted the idea that the UK would be forced to join the passport-free Schengen zone and the Euro – which would make a new referendum much harder to win. According to YouGov, when those conditions are presented, support for Rejoin declines from 54 per cent to 36 per cent. The matter is decisive. So progressives need to know the facts: would the UK be obliged to join the Euro and Schengen?

The answer is, in theory, yes; in practice, absolutely not. First, Britain and Ireland, which is not in Schengen, would have a veto over any implementation of the Schengen Agreement. The Good Friday Agreement, of course, requires an open border on the island of Ireland. Second, when it comes to the Euro, any new member state automatically joins with a derogation – an exemption – until it has fulfilled the Maastricht criteria, parts of which are at its own discretion. All this could easily be clarified by an EU that wants Britain back. How exactly?

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One reason why Britain’s growth has been so anaemic over the last decade is that our tax system rewards those who earn money by doing nothing, and punishes those who work. This is unfair and inefficient. You can earn millions in property wealth and pay no tax. Meanwhile, workers can face marginal rates of over 60 per cent, or even over 70 per cent for younger people with student loans. For those with young children, it can be cheaper to turn down promotions, or not work at all.

These reasons, combined with Britain’s constrained public finances and struggling public services, are why so many people are looking to wealth taxes as a policy solution. Groups as diverse as the IMF, Labour’s Tribune, the Green Party, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and now Wes Streeting, have (in different ways) called for earnings from wealth to be taxed more like income.

But do wealth taxes work? The answer depends entirely on the precise mechanism. Some wealth taxes are positive for growth and increase productive investment. Others do the precise opposite.

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Labour’s battle of ideas has begun and adult social care reform is back at the top of the political agenda. Reports suggest that the issue could feature in the first 100 days of an Andy Burnham government.

Social care has long been hazardous territory for politicians of all parties. The last Labour government’s attempt to establish a National Care Service in 2010 was thwarted after the Conservatives denounced the plan as a “death tax”. Then in 2017, Theresa’s May proposal unravelled after the absence of a cap on costs saw it branded the “dementia tax”.

Ever since, our social care system has groaned under the weight of a rapidly ageing population. A report from the Kings Fund in 2025 detailed a litany of problems:

• Those receiving care find it hard to access, of variable quality, and face a one-in-seven chance of catastrophic costs greater than £100,000.

• Those providing care through the formal system are overworked and underpaid, and many relatives provide vast amounts of unpaid care to fill holes in the system.

• And this has wider impacts on society: under-provision of care and poor integration with the NHS means hospitals fill up as they are unable to discharge patients to the appropriate place for their needs.

The current Labour government’s approach has been to put social care in the too-difficult box, with an independent commission chaired by Louise Casey not due to conclude until 2028.

Yet this is an area where, to borrow a line from Keir Starmer, “incremental change won’t cut it”. To make the politics of social care reform work, transformation is the only way forward.

Where Margaret Thatcher’s government had a “big bang” for the City of London, Labour needs a “big bang” for the state. Counterintuitively, only by combining social care and another political taboo – local government reform – can Labour win the politics.

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The Makerfield by-election is a dramatic piece of political theatre – and that is a good thing. Andy Burnham’s cabinet critics have branded it a distraction, intoning that Labour must focus on “delivery”. But it is partly Keir Starmer’s disdain for politics – and his reverence for managerialism – that explains why this government is failing.

Central to any moment of political theatre is an element of risk that makes it compelling. Burnham has been Labour’s shadow leader since the start of this decade. He could have continued in that role – with a fourth mayoral victory all but guaranteed – or waited until a safe north-west seat fell vacant. But by choosing to stand in Makerfield, where Reform triumphed with 50.4 per cent of the vote in the local elections (to Labour’s 22.7 per cent), Burnham has heightened the stakes. If he wins, his status as the country’s most popular politician will be confirmed; if he loses, critics will cry that his appeal was always overstated.

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“I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter,” James Carville, Bill Clinton’s former chief strategist, observed back in 1993. “But now I would want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”

At present, there is no major western economy in which this is more true than the UK. Britain’s 10-year bond yields – or the interest that investors charge in return for lending – are the highest of any G7 country at over 5 per cent.

That reflects an array of economic woes: stubborn inflation of 3.3 per cent, which has slowed the pace of interest rate cuts, and an overreliance on energy imports (43.8 per cent of total use), which leaves Britain unusually exposed to the fallout from the Iran War. One No 10 aide puts a provocative question to me: why would any of Keir Starmer’s challengers want to inherit this situation?

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William Beveridge in his study at University College, Oxford (Wikimedia Commons)

What is the welfare state for? Why do we tax ourselves at ever greater levels to sustain this fiscal Leviathan? It’s a question that – despite the hours devoted to welfare across the media – we often forget to think about deeply.

But it demands an answer now. Welfare reform was perhaps the most notable absence from this week’s King’s Speech, a silence shaped by the trauma of last summer’s Labour revolt. Yet there is no case for inaction – if the government fails to reform the welfare state, this work risks being left to those who care little for its survival (Nigel Farage has pledged to impose “the biggest benefit cuts you’ve probably ever heard any government do”).

The enduring argument for the welfare state is clear: it is a form of collective insurance against life’s hazards: ill-health, unemployment and disability. It supports individuals in their hour of need and gives them agency to rebuild themselves. But to do this, it must sustain consent.

Today, this compact is under threat from two directions. First, inflated by the anachronistic “triple lock”, spending on pensioners is projected to reach £196.2bn by 2030-31 (accounting for almost half of all welfare spending). Second, spending on health and disability benefits, now claimed by one in 10 working-age people, or more than four million, is forecast to reach £109.8bn, up more than £30bn since 2020.

There are legitimate reasons for this, such as an increase in mental health conditions, driven by economic insecurity, the after-effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and greater social isolation. But there are also perverse incentives at play. Unemployment benefits in Britain are so low – just 12 per cent of previous earnings – that the rational response for too many is to seek to claim sickness and disability benefits, which are paid at a far more generous rate. The Universal Credit health element comes without the punitive work search requirements and the constant threat of sanctions.

While young people have become sicker, many other European countries do not allow such large numbers to receive support unconditionally and without time limits. The application process, often conducted over the phone and through forms, can be gamed by using new technologies, reducing the frictions that previously controlled demand. Large Language Models, for instance, can explain to a person how to fill out forms for Personal Independence Payments (PIP), ensuring they have the correct language to access support. Search TikTok for #ADHDhacks, and you will be stunned by the cultural shift among many young Britons toward claiming as much as they can. This isn’t Beveridge’s dream – it’s his nightmare.

All this contributes to a dangerous divergence. Some workers are now taxed at Nordic-style levels – a 51 per cent marginal rate for graduates earning £50,270 – to fund one of western Europe’s most dysfunctional states. Too many see their taxes slide away into a system from which they receive little in return: no affordable housing, barely functioning public services and, critically, no sense of shared institutions or ownership.

Karl Polanyi called it the double movement: when the market disembeds social life to a sufficient degree, society pushes back. Indeed, the welfare state itself was the product of such a movement. But if the contributory principle is further hollowed out, a pushback from the opposite direction will follow (49 per cent of Labour supporters now believe the system is “too open to abuse and fraud”).

The 1942 Beveridge Report offered a clue as to how we can escape our current plight. The welfare state was never supposed to be the whole answer; it was one part of a universal model of social policy. If the modern system is to regain consent, it must recover that breadth of ambition.

This will mean rebuilding the institutional fabric that once gave the social contract substance: public, affordable housing that young people can actually access, a health service that functions as a shared experience rather than a rationed emergency response, and employment support that treats people as citizens with agency rather than infantilising them.

The government’s attempt at welfare reform in 2025 failed to articulate a wider moral ambition for a new social contract; instead it became a counting exercise for the Treasury (which planned cuts of £5bn to meet its fiscal rules). There was no explanation of what the system was for or how it would benefit society, only an argument about its cost.

Since then there has not been a serious attempt by critics to propose ways to rebuild the trust which underpins the welfare state. Too often, these voices adopt a purely defensive posture based on existing claimants rather than the system as a whole.

Take PIP as a welfare instrument that ought to be reformed. It compensates people for what disability prevents them from doing – a benevolent intention with a perverse logic. The benefit pays out for the continued performance of incapacity rather than for the development of capability. It monetises exclusion instead of investing in inclusion. Indeed, by tying support to demonstrated inability, it creates a powerful incentive to inhabit, rather than escape, a medicalised identity. The system is, in this sense, unprogressive: it asks disabled people to perform their disadvantage in order to be supported, and then withdraws support at the first sign that the disadvantage might be overcome.

A genuinely pro-disability reform of PIP would invert this logic. It would seek to enable participation by redirecting spending towards workplace adaptation, assistive technology, and the preventative mental healthcare whose absence is now driving so many young people towards benefits.

This is not a cut; rather, it is a refusal to accept that compensating people for non-participation is the highest aspiration the welfare state can offer them. This case is one that neither Labour, nor its critics – focused on defending the current settlement – have made. But until someone does, the political ground will be ceded to those for whom “reform” is simply a byword for punitive cuts.

Critically, to rebuild the social contract, we must also scrap the triple lock, acknowledging that untargeted generosity to all pensioners, including the asset-rich, funded by higher taxes on the young, is an act of generational warfare that will reap a politics of grievance best harnessed by populist forces.

And we must design a benefits system that does not financially penalise people for being honest about their capacity to work. We should not accept thousands of young people signing on to health benefits or PIP for years on end without question: this is an unprogressive settlement.

The postwar welfare state was built on a bargain: contribute, and you will be protected. That bargain has been allowed to decay until what remains is a hollowed-out transfer system that commands diminishing loyalty from the people it was built to serve. Renewing it is not merely a fiscal challenge; it is one of moral ambition.

If Labour does not reform welfare in this parliament – and reform it in a recognisably Labour way, anchored in dignity, participation and the contributory principle – the alternative is not the current settlement. It is a Reform government inheriting a system that has already lost the consent of those who fund it, with a free hand to dismantle what remains.

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Until yesterday the only place the Labour Party appeared to be going was round in circles. Keir Starmer was at once too weak to command authority and too strong to be dislodged. But the impasse has finally been broken. Andy Burnham, by far the most popular leadership contender among both party members and voters, now has what he previously lacked: Starmer’s consent to return to parliament. Victory in Makerfield is far from guaranteed: based on current polling, Nigel Farage’s Reform would comfortably take the seat. But Burnham’s personal appeal – he has a +20 approval rating in the north-west compared to Starmer’s -40 – may be enough to carry him through and provide proof that he could win a general election (Ben Judah and David Lawrence wrote on the lessons of “Manchesterism” earlier this week).

Meanwhile, having resigned as health secretary, Wes Streeting will now be free to give full voice to his distinctive brand of Labour revisionism, representing a tradition that stretches back to Tony Crosland, the author of The Future of Socialism (1956), who Streeting has long identified as his political hero. In the most ideologically notable section of his resignation letter, he spoke of Labour’s “historic responsibility of defeating racism” and of the need to prove that “Britain’s best days lie ahead through social democracy”.

Here at Arguably, we’ve focused from the start on the “what” rather than the “who”. The charge that Labour has long faced is that while it has no shortage of clashing personalities, it has a dearth of ideas. Yet this week has also seen the liveliest policy debate since the general election – and the beginnings of a new progressive consensus.

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In the coming weeks you will read a lot about what “Manchesterism” is or isn’t. The term is as attractive as it is protean. In a Labour Party desperate for a rallying philosophy, Manchesterism evokes solidity, grounded in the concreteness of a city, while remaining open to interpretation. But what is truly behind it?

Everyone agrees that Manchester is a rare modern British success story. Since 2015, the city’s GDP growth has averaged 3.1 per cent each year, double the UK average, and outpacing the US over the same period. Between 2011-2023, real incomes in Manchester increased by over 50 per cent – higher than any other major British city. Life expectancy, falling elsewhere, rose in Manchester, a city with control of its own health budget.

But people disagree about the causes of Manchester’s success. For some, Manchester’s story has long been inextricable from capitalism: Manchester Liberalism, an eponymous philosophical movement, opposed the Corn Laws and advocated free trade. More recently, Manchester has actively courted Gulf investors and leased public land to private developers. For others, Manchester’s secret lies in the municipalisation of core services. Yimbys claim Manchester’s success lies in its willingness to build. Most analyses link Manchester’s recent success, at least in part, to devolution.

There is truth in all of these stories. Manchester’s economic and political history embodies contradictions that do not lend themselves to a single overarching political philosophy. If there is one unifying theme, it is dynamism: Manchester has repeatedly adjusted and reinvented itself and made the most of its autonomy.

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A decade ago this month – in the distant era when David Cameron was still prime minister and Barack Obama was still president – Sadiq Khan became mayor of London. I remember the day well: mayors were traditionally inaugurated in the basement of City Hall, but Khan’s team chose the more resonant venue of Southwark Cathedral, where he was welcomed by guests including his seven siblings, his close ally Ed Miliband and Ian McKellen.

It’s now easy to forget how much of a political underdog Khan was back in 2016: the late Tessa Jowell had been the favourite to win the Labour nomination and plenty questioned whether London was ready to elect a Muslim mayor (the capital, with typical nonchalance, thought little of it). The Tooting boy defeated his Conservative opponent Zac Goldsmith by a landslide and was comfortably re-elected in 2021 and 2024, securing the third term that eluded his Labour predecessor Ken Livingstone.

This electoral success, critics contend, has been unmatched by policy delivery, but Khan argues he has benefited from what Keir Starmer has so lacked: a sense of direction.

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Banish all talk of “midterm blues”. That was the comforti…

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A standard diagnosis of Britain’s political ills has settled into something close to consensus. We have, it is said, a generally poor cohort of MPs and if we got better ones, our politics would improve. There is some truth to this, and it generates a familiar set of proposals: more open selection procedures, restrictions on phones in the chamber, tighter rules on outside interests and, most recently, an alcohol ban. But what this analysis misses is the question of why our politics requires and produces the MPs it does. The reason too few talented people enter parliament is not that they are excluded by the selection process (though some are). It is that the current incarnation of the British state does not need them.

In other words, the change in the MPs being supplied is downstream of the change in demand. The more MPs have legislated their authority out of existence, the more that, consciously or not, politics rewards a different kind of talent than in previous decades. The Britain we live in now was shaped by Blairism and Thatcherism, which both diluted parliamentary sovereignty through privatisation, the establishment of quangos and the introduction of independent commissioners or “tsars”. Too often, MPs become mere narrators of state failure against groups of victims rather than active legislators. To understand why the system isn’t working, this is the place to start.

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Liberalism, the ideology whose global victory once appeared assured, finds itself under siege. Democracy has been in retreat for most of the last decade. Culture wars convulse western politics, threatening established norms. And populist right parties, some with fascist origins, lead polls in Germany, France, Italy and, of course, the UK. How should liberals fight back?

Adrian Wooldridge’s Centrists Of The World Unite! is one recent attempt to answer this question. Far from being a cri de coeur in defence of a fading regime, the book is relentlessly critical of much of what has occurred in the name of liberalism: the excesses of free-market globalisation, uncontrolled immigration, identity politics on left and right and the prevalence of multiculturalism over integration. All of this, Wooldridge argues persuasively, undermines liberalism. His alternative – harnessing liberalism’s capaciousness – is a project which moves to the right culturally and to the left economically (mirroring Blue Labour and Red Toryism).

Patriotism, tighter controls on immigration, a greater insistence on cultural integration, a more combative approach to Islamism and even conservative Islam (while supporting liberal reformers), a more knowledge-rich education system and a greater emphasis on civic virtue are among the prescriptions that follow. At the same time, drawing inspiration from Theodore Roosevelt’s trust-busting, Wooldridge wants to tackle Big Tech, plutocracy and harmful concentrations of wealth and power. It’s an agenda that the US Democrats would certainly benefit from. Their embrace of identitarian liberalism and failures on immigration – as Bernie Sanders has recognised – unquestionably helped pave Donald Trump’s road to victory.

Wooldridge ultimately advances a pragmatic case for liberalism in our fractured era. But is that enough when this tradition is threatened to its very core? What are the moral and ethical arguments that underline it and why are they right? Why are objectors wrong? On what basis do we defend, from first principles, the dignity of the individual?

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Millennials are not a generation that dreams of labour. Nor, really, do they dream of big houses, fast cars or designer handbags. It’s not that these things have lost their appeal; it’s that, for many, they have drifted entirely out of reach.

In the postwar Keynesian era, capitalism rested on a simple bargain: work hard, earn more, build a better life. But in Britain today, that contract has been eroded. Real wages have risen by just 2 per cent since 2008 while the cost of housing and other assets has surged. For many, that means working full-time without getting any closer to owning a home, building savings, or achieving the kind of stability previous generations became accustomed to. The promise is broken, and with it, the incentive to devote yourself to work weakens. Who can blame those millennials who pull back rather than lean in?

For a generation raised on the promise that effort would be rewarded, the breakdown of this bargain is not just economic, but psychological. That promise was internalised early, so when success does not follow, the failure feels personal, a phenomenon identified by Michael Sandel as the “tyranny of merit”. Success breeds hubris among the winners and humiliation among those left behind – both are taught to believe they deserve their fate.

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Back in September 2025, Keir Starmer insisted his cabinet reshuffle was about “delivery”. He used the word repeatedly. He moved half his cabinet, scattered ministerial teams and disrupted departments mid-programme, all in the name of a “phase two” focused on getting things done. Eight months on, as briefing wars over a potential…

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In Stockholm, when you turn 18, your parents honour the occasion by putting your name on the waiting list for a flat. The Bostadsförmedlingen, Stockholm’s housing agency, acts as the central gatekeeper for the city’s rent-controlled apartments. If your parents are quick, you might enjoy the privilege of picking up the keys to your new flat on your 30th birthday – twelve years later. If they are slow, you could still be waiting in your 40s.

The waiting lists are so long that some housing cooperatives allow parents to pay to register children from birth. Indeed, there are 15,000 children between the ages of 0-10 on the waiting list for a single housing cooperative in Stockholm. If you’re a migrant who’s just arrived in Sweden, good luck – you’re at the back of a long queue, competing with native Swedes who have waited from birth. Things are so bad that even the mild-mannered BBC has described the policy as a failure.

Stockholm’s extraordinary housing queues are the complex product of a simple policy – a policy that fixes rents at a set value, rather than allowing them to adjust to reflect demand for housing.

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Back in 2009, as the shockwaves from the financial crisis reverberated, Britain created a notably more progressive tax system. Much of the political and media attention focused on the new 50p tax rate on earnings over £150,000 but it was accompanied by a less-noticed act of redistribution. In one of the stealth taxes for which New Labour had become famed, the personal allowance was reduced by £1 for every £2 earned between £100,000 and £112,950 (now £125,140), creating an effective marginal rate of 60p, or 62p once you include National Insurance.

Ever since, even as earnings have risen – nearly two million workers, or 6 per cent, now earn over £100,000 – this policy has endured. George Osborne, a man who once flirted with eastern European-style flat taxes, maintained a tax rate that would make Nordic finance ministers blush.

Why, you might ask, should progressives worry about that? Real wages have risen by just 2 per cent since 2008 – the median full-time salary is currently £39,039 – and high earners risk appearing an eccentric political priority. But the policy problems with the 62p rate – or 71p for those with a student loan and 77p for postgraduates – have now become unignorable.

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On the streets of London, you might see a new sight this month: Waymos or autonomous vehicles, mapping every road and junction through roof-mounted sensors ahead of their planned commercial launch by Alphabet in September. Automated ride-hailing services, including those from the rival Wayve-Uber partnership, are due to follow. The vehicles are learning the city so that, before long, no human assistance will be required. What has not yet been answered, or even seriously asked, is what will happen to the people they could replace.

This is a moment of change. Britons are beginning to experience the first green shoots of the AI revolution, not only on their screens but in the physical world around them. Driverless cars will be followed by delivery robots for hot meals and groceries as companies such as Starship scale up. Progressives should not seek to halt these technologies. But the state is unprepared for the prospect that thousands of gig economy workers – already living precarious, insecure existences – could find themselves displaced and homeless.

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