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Andy Burnham will enter No 10 as Britain’s least unpopular politician: the high-profile figure whose net approval is closest to neutral. But can that status survive the need to make decisions and confront harsh trade-offs? Immigration – the most polarising issue in British politics – may be the toughest test.

Burnham is already in receipt of contradictory advice: there is pressure to keep Labour’s toughest voice, Shabana Mahmood, in post as Home Secretary, to combine his ‘change’ message with reassurance of little or no change on immigration. Others are urging him to liberalise Labour’s approach so the party can rebuild an electoral coalition under pressure from left as well as right.

This debate is bound to split MPs when it descends into a zero-sum argument about which defecting voters Labour should care most about. But Burnham should reject this false choice – the party’s electoral prospects depend on an agenda that can engage people in both cities and towns, with classic swing voters and young progressives considering other options too.

The government has reduced immigration dramatically. Net migration this year is projected to be the lowest this century, at less than 100,000, with net emigration possible in 2027. Having brought numbers down, ministers must now answer a central question that Keir Starmer avoided: what do they think is a sustainable level of immigration – and why?

They can acknowledge that the pace of change matters by setting a ceiling target, pledging no return to the unsustainable migration of the last parliament (when net migration peaked at 944,000 in 2023). Inflows above 0.5% of the population are too fast for housing supply to keep pace with. The government should also set a floor target, explaining why sustained net emigration and a shrinking population would damage the government finances, public services and higher education. NIESR has calculated that the economy would be 3.6% smaller by 2040 with zero net migration. A declining population would face sharper pressures and trade-offs on defence spending and financing government debt.

Labour could aim for net migration in this parliament to settle within a range of 100,000 to 250,000. But what successive UK governments have lacked is a proper plan for how to control immigration fairly. A three-year immigration plan – with an annual ‘Immigration Day’, similar to Budget Day in parliament – would set out a framework to guide decisions about handling the pressures, gains and impacts of change.

When politicians make tax and spending pledges, they are expected to show how the numbers add up, but that accountability has been absent in the last decade on immigration. Similar approaches to planning immigration policy in Australia and Canada have resulted in greater political and media pressure to acknowledge trade-offs and demonstrate what pledges mean in practice. It is primarily the visible lack of control over small boats crossing the Channel and asylum hotels that fuels public concerns about immigration – which may explain why plummeting net migration, mostly for work and study, has gone unnoticed. Further reductions in who can get a visa to study or work in Britain may simply be displacement activity.

The government has committed to emptying asylum hotels by the end of this parliament. Meeting this pledge within six months, not three years, would be noticed by voters. The Future Governance Forum has set out a three-step plan to achieve this through accelerated processing, a ‘Homes for Ukraine’-style scheme for vetted asylum seekers and a £3-5bn investment in community improvements and new homes (funded by measures one and two). This offers an alternative to the government’s plan to repurpose RAF bases, which are likely to cost more than asylum hotels even if local political controversy and lengthy planning disputes can be overcome..

A controlled refugee route to Britain, with community sponsorship and contact at its heart, has the potential to get right what dispersal policies have got wrong, by giving people the voice, power and control to welcome refugees to their local communities.

Real-world plans to link controlled, safe routes to the UK for asylum seekers with returns deals to Europe can address the asylum challenge with control and compassion. Labour needs to prove the merits of cooperation – opposing those who claim that simply quitting every convention and treaty offers any workable plan.

The party did not mention citizenship or settlement in its 2024 manifesto but has embarked on an enormously complex and controversial overhaul of indefinite leave to remain. Ethics aside, the government has underestimated the electoral risks of these proposals. While settlement is a complex, technical issue for most people, it is massively salient to the one million directly affected – mostly Commonwealth nationals with voting rights. That is why the reforms prompted the second largest consultation response ever, surpassed only by equal marriage.

New leadership will need to rebalance both rhetoric and policy to ensure clear rules without sacrificing fairness for care workers and others who have come to Britain. Most Labour supporters want to see a ten-year ceiling on settlement routes at most, not a 15 or 20-year wait. The unintended consequences of these rushed and flawed reforms will be a large spike in the undocumented population, something that risks a new Windrush scandal ahead of the next election.

Falling immigration means that Labour’s right-wing challengers are increasingly focused on who needs to leave – and on ethno-nationalist narratives about diversity. Burnham needs to recognise legitimate concerns shared across ethnic groups about fair controls on immigration, but he must also vocalise legitimate concerns about how the cruelty and chaos of mass deportation, remigration and racism risk tearing Britain apart. Most white British and ethnic minority voters considering Labour certainly hold both sets of concerns at once.

As prime minister, Burnham will have to grip these challenges rather than merely trying to change the subject. The new context of falling numbers requires a new strategy and voice. Labour cannot compete to eliminate immigration from Britain or engage in a deportation auction with Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe. It must instead set out how it will manage reduced immigration fairly – while contesting the rising tide of racism that seeks to undermine the foundational values of the society we have become.

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No British prime minister has presided over sustained economic growth since Tony Blair. Andy Burnham’s challenge will be to buck the trend. If he fails, he won’t be able to deliver on his agenda, and voters will punish Labour, as they have punished successive political leaders since 2007. If he succeeds, he will have the fiscal headroom to transform the country and reap electoral dividends.

Keir Starmer said that growth was his “number one mission”, and his government made real progress on planning and infrastructure, nuclear regulation reform and securing AI investment. But growth has disappointed. Starmer and Reeves failed to back up a pro-growth narrative with meaningful policy reforms, and somehow still managed to get into unnecessary and damaging fights with MPs and other groups. Burnham will need to be smarter: say less, but do more.

Burnham is right that the fundamental problem in Britain’s economy is a lack of regional dynamism. Wealth is hoarded in the South East of England, which has failed to build enough housing, while workers face painfully high living costs. Outside London, our cities and towns are poorly connected, and suffer from ailing infrastructure. Our energy is too expensive, and our markets are dominated by rent-seeking incumbents, who use regulation to shield themselves from technological disruption and competition. Meanwhile, our tax system penalises work, encourages passive wealth accumulation, and is excessively centralised in Whitehall.

The good news is that it is within the government’s power to fix many of these problems, and Burnham has shown that he is up to the task of reforming Whitehall and devolving more powers to regions. Unlike Starmer, he enjoys the luxury of Parliamentary Labour Party support and maybe even a 6-12 month grace period from voters and the media. He should use this while he has it.

Here’s what Burnham should do:

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It is a real privilege to be with you tonight. It is especially meaningful to be at the LSE, and not just because my parents met and fell in love here.

In 1933, LSE’s director, the great liberal reformer William Beveridge, saw what was happening in Germany and created the Academic Assistance Council, which helped hundreds of German scholars flee fascism and find “individual and intellectual freedom” in the labs and lecture halls of the UK.

Later that year, the organisation helped to bring Albert Einstein – who as it happens was the founder of the International Rescue Committee – to the Royal Albert Hall, where he argued that both science and civilisation depend entirely on those freedoms. Our duty, he argued, was to resist the powers that threaten to suppress them.

In 1930s Europe, that effort was unsuccessful. My parents were refugees to the UK, as was Jonathan Sacks’ father. They shared with Jonathan, and with Einstein, a learned passion to fight the abuse of power. My topic tonight honours that shared history.

Jonathan was a leader, a teacher, and a friend. I first got to know him and Elaine in the mid-1990s. At the time, I was Head of Policy for Tony Blair. Tony couldn’t get enough of Jonathan’s insights, and certainly not enough from their occasional meetings, so I was deputed to visit the Chief Rabbi on a monthly basis to get further food for thought.

Our meetings would take place at 9am at Hamilton Terrace. Elaine and I would chat for a few minutes, then suddenly we would hear remarkably loud and unusually fast banging on the stairs. Jonathan would speed round the corner and greet me with a booming: “David! … How are you?”

Over the next hour, we would talk about education policy, community, family… contracts and covenants, hopes and realities. I remember vividly Jonathan’s curiosity, patience and kindness. He was a patriot and an internationalist. He was rooted and cosmopolitan. He had an unwavering belief that communities could be, should be, pluralist in perspective yet united in commitment. To him, this was not a contradiction, but instead the foundation of a healthy society.

I also recall something else: Jonathan’s insistence that it is not hope that leads to action, as was often said, but instead action that leads to hope. I will come back to this.

Today, in times marked by political rupture, economic danger, societal doubt, international flux, we miss Jonathan and his voice sorely. But he still offers us wisdom and guidance, because he left so much inspiration and instruction in his books, speeches and sermons.

Perhaps this is the reason I was struck by Gila Sacks’ commitment, at the launch of the Rabbi Sacks Legacy, that its animating ideal should be to continue Jonathan’s work rather than hallow his memory. In saying this, Gila carried a torch for Jonathan’s commitment to debate, to humanity, to actions that learned the lessons of history and shaped the future for the better.

That is the commitment I want to summon tonight, by focusing on a subject Jonathan returned to again and again: the question of power and its guardrails, its necessity and its dangers, its use and its abuse.

I have given many speeches about the international dimension of this challenge. Tonight I will focus on the home front. At home and abroad we have, in my view, a dual task in the face of new and powerful forces of impunity: to defend and to create.

We must defend our inheritance of democratic institutions and the rule of law. But defence on its own is not enough. It is too passive, too satisfied… too defensive. We need to renew our inheritance for an age when improvisation, agility, innovation are the coin of the realm, and a necessity. These qualities cannot be the province only of those who would destroy the liberal democratic experiment; they need to be reclaimed by those of us who believe in it.

Running through my remarks is the pithy but vital insight by the author and journalist Fareed Zakaria. He wrote earlier this year: “The West is not a bloodline. It is a bargain. Power constrained, rights protected, coercion accountable.”

Jonathan’s story, my story, the LSE’s mission, Britain’s situation, all demand that we renew and re-invigorate this bargain that has defined the idea of the political ‘West’. I think this is today’s generational challenge. Those of us who have lived with the benefits of the bargain in the post-Second World War period, so much so that it is often taken for granted, need to defend it and advance it.

Kings, Priests and Prophets

Jonathan Sacks (Wikimedia Commons)

This is the Sacks Lecture so it is right to start with Jonathan Sacks. He was fascinated by politics. But there was a catch. Jonathan wrote the following: “…politics is about power, and at the heart of the Abrahamic vision is a critique of power”.

Jonathan repeatedly invoked Lord Acton’s warning that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. His concern was rooted in scripture, not political science.

In The Great Partnership, Jonathan wrote: “Nothing amuses and angers God more in the Bible than people setting themselves up as demigods, as many ancient rulers did and as tyrants have continued to do ever since”.

Jonathan explored what the Hebrew Bible says about the balance of power between the leaders of Judaism, what the Sages would call the “three crowns”: Kingship, priesthood and prophecy. Hence the title of this lecture.

As many of you will know, Kings had formal power. Priests had institutional authority. And prophets had moral authority. For Jonathan it was no accident that there were three voices of leadership in Judaism. They served different functions in relation to God: Creation, Revelation and Redemption. Each group had their own ways of thinking and speaking.

Kings held secular, coercive, executive power. They spoke the language of wisdom. They were necessary to get anything done. But according to Jonathan, the Bible is clear that while this form of power was necessary, it was a necessary evil, because the temptations of power made Kingship dangerous. After all, even King Solomon succumbed to temptation, acquiring great numbers of horses, taking many wives and hoarding gold.

Jonathan wrote: “Wisdom without Torah is not enough to save a leader from the corruptions of power”. He explains that it was the job of priests to teach Torah, the word of God for all time. Priests therefore held power in the religious domain, with formal “systemic” power as custodians of sacred order. Their role was to discriminate, distinguish, divide. They were teachers and judges who upheld rules and norms.

Prophets, by contrast, had informal power, mandated by God to be critical of corruptions of power and to speak truth to power. They spoke on behalf of the people, the poor, the downtrodden. Their prophecy responded to contemporary issues, and illuminated the here and now. Prophets had visions for their time, not all time.

What Jonathan saw was that these three forms of leadership were needed to balance each other. The tendency to impunity was thereby held in check.

Without pressure from priest and prophet, the King had too much power, and was likely to abuse power. Equally, a priest without a prophet becomes a technocrat, lacking moral urgency. And prophecy without priesthood becomes performative: words not deeds, or in modern incarnation, tweets as a substitute for action.

For Jonathan, the injunction was clear. Beware the siren call of rule of one. And build the institutions of collective agency.

The Great Reversal

The questions this raises are not far below the surface in the UK. But they are well above it where I live, in the US. The 250-year-old battle cry “No Kings” has taken on contemporary relevance.

It is an irony that in his formidable speech to the US Congress earlier this year, King Charles, the hereditary Monarch of the former colonial power, the descendant of George III against whom the colonists had 27 grievances, reminded elected representatives of the most powerful Republic the world has known not just about shared history but also about the need for checks and balances on the use of executive power.

You might call that chutzpah. But in fact it was insight. And he was cheered for it.

The King’s address was timely and edgy because democracy and constitutional rule of law, the most advanced and elaborate checks on the abuse of power, are now contested terrain.

The Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg is the world’s largest and most detailed data set on democracy. Its 2026 Report states baldly: “For the average global citizen, democracy is now back to 1978 levels. In effect, almost all democratic gains of the ‘third wave of democratisation,’ starting with Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of 1974, have been erased.”

A mural commemorating Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution (Jeanne Menjoulet/Wikimedia Commons)

Incredibly, less than 40 years after the collapse of communism, there are now more autocracies than democracies in the world. A record 41 per cent of the global population now live in autocratic countries; only 7 per cent in “liberal democracies”. Those living in the 44 countries heading towards autocracy suffered a serious decline in freedom of expression last year. In over half of those nations, people were punished for or restricted from engaging in political, religious or activist groups. Their election processes became less transparent, and less fair. In two thirds, torture rose.

These are dramatic figures by any standards. After a wave of democratic advances since the 1990s, we are now experiencing a “great reversal” on a global scale. What Professor Larry Diamond diagnosed ten years ago as “democratic recession” is now a full-blown democratic depression.

I know that in the UK, we have so far been protected from the worst of these trends, but we should not kid ourselves that we are immune. In the last decade, independent judges have been denounced as enemies of the people. Parliament was illegally prorogued until the Supreme Court stepped in.

Also, the UK is among the democracies with very high levels of democratic dissatisfaction. Ipsos reports that only 26 per cent of the public are satisfied with how democracy is working. Three in four are worried about the state of democracy, and only one in five say that the national government is doing a good job of protecting it.

My focus tonight is why this is happening, and what can be done about it.

But I want to insert a coda here, about the international dimension. I do not have time to dwell on it, but it is relevant. As I see in my day job every day, the worst kind of international records are being broken. Sixty wars underway, 120 million refugees and displaced people, 300 million people hungry, 100,000 civilians killed in conflict last year, health facilities attacked over 10 times a day in conflict zones around the world.

The very rules of war, designed to constrain the abuse of power, are increasingly viewed as optional, not just by non-state actors who never signed up to the Geneva Conventions, but by states who did.

The issue is not whether this is happening, but whether it is a good thing. I think it is not.

The post-Second World War efforts to establish rules for international order were based on the fact that the rule of “might is right” had led to global disaster twice in half a century. The new rules intended that the sovereignty and integrity of states were foundational. Also that the most basic rights of civilians caught up in conflict to life and aid were absolute. This had never been set out in such a way before. As President Truman said at the founding conference of the UN in San Francisco in 1945, the historic function of the conference was to show that “right makes might”.

Now things are heading in the opposite direction. And the relevance to my topic tonight is that retreat from the rule of law abroad reinforces democratic recession at home, and is accelerated by it. Look at the scholarship of the period and you will see this is precisely what the pioneers of the post-Second World War order feared.

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Why, and What Now?

Two questions arise from this analysis.

The first is how have we gone from a situation where liberal democracy was, in the words of the brilliant political scientist Ivan Krastev, “presumptively canonical” at the end of the Cold War, to one today where there is more autocracy than democracy in the world?

One answer is that the rules and norms of liberal democracy have failed. That they have at best become ossified, inefficient, inimical to the speed necessary to get anything done, and at worst they are agencies of deviant, minority power.

This is the argument of President Putin, who called liberalism “obsolete” in an infamous Financial Times interview in 2018, and is echoed by so-called populists in democratic countries today.

It is true that the modern state is often bureaucratic and behind the times. The modern state can get in the way of itself. It can over-regulate. This argument defined the 1980s, after President Reagan said that the eight most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the government and here to help”. There are legitimate arguments about government process and judicial review.

But these points cannot, in my view, explain the reversal of the democratic order in the 2010s and 2020s.

Instead, I believe we need to look to four major factors that have combined together to widen the gap between people’s rights and their power, the gap that political philosopher Judith Shklar identified as the source of powerlessness for the many, and impunity for the few.

The first is the rise of global inter-connectedness and therefore global risk. Many problems today cannot be solved on a national level because they are of international scale. Migration, which has roiled so many countries, fits into this category. So does climate; pandemics; nuclear proliferation.

Yet far from being too strong and over-bearing, international institutions – including the UN – are too weak to address them. This failure creates anger in countries like our own. Equally, the pre-eminence of western democratic nations in international institutions, and their failure to reform them, has alienated rising countries of the so-called Global South. So there is frustration all round.

Second, the relative economic decline of the West and the rise of the rest. The share of global income of the G7 group of leading democracies has dropped from nearly 60 per cent in the early 1990s to just over a quarter today. China has produced and negotiated its way to being the leading trade partner to 120 countries in the world. The success of an economically dynamic model of autocracy threatens to reverse the lesson of the Cold War, that democracy is a better system not just on moral grounds but also for reasons of efficiency.

Third, and related, is the rise of new and massive inequalities of income and especially wealth. These have corroded confidence in the democratic model. And these inequalities have corrupted political systems around the world. A third of American wealth is now in the hands of the top 1 per cent, and 55-60 per cent in the hands of the top 5 per cent. Democracy seems rigged and ineffective to its own citizens.

Finally, the technological revolution has accelerated all these trends, and all the indications are that the rise of AI is going to drive them further, not least by creating a 21st-century information ecosystem out of sync with 19th-century democratic institutions. Technology now moves faster than regulation, and the gap is only widening. And impunity is not only practised by governments; it is also a feature of powerful private interests.

Each of these waves of change would on their own be challenging. Together they reinforce each other and create a massive delivery deficit. Political fragmentation makes it harder to tackle global risks, and global risks make it harder for nations to collaborate. Money, including foreign money, escapes regulation and infects politics. Rogue states, and rogue actors, hold asymmetric sway.

It’s wrong, evidentially not just morally, to say that in these circumstances only a dictator can get things done. But the lure of strongman solutions arises from frustration and grievance. And that is what we are seeing, such that the period we have lived through in the West since the Second World War now looks like a historical outlier. If there is a natural tendency, it is seemingly towards impunity not towards accountability. And it is reasserting itself.

Countervailing Power

So this leaves a second question. What can we do about these trends? How can we reverse this great reversal?

I want to turn to a man who looked at an enormous imbalance of power, and developed a theory of how to address it.

In 1953, JK Galbraith – the Canadian-born American academic, diplomat, sage – saw the American economy falling victim to exploitative large corporations, with ever-growing power. He argued that this power, if it was allowed to increase unchecked, would be a threat to consumers and workers. And he offered a solution: “the best and established answer to economic power’, Galbraith argued, “is the building of countervailing power”.

Countervailing power meant creating and developing institutions that would hold monopolies and oligopolies to account, that would build new public capabilities, and offer new forms of participation, in their place. This would help to create new public responsibilities and agency, emboldening and enabling individuals with a shared power that was previously unfelt.

Countervailing power worked on two levels. It meant imposing guardrails to limit the abuse of power. But it also meant generating new forms of power. So, while trade unions needed to be boosted to check employer abuse, they could also act as schools of citizenship, builders of solidarity, providers of welfare, political educators.

Countervailing power was a “self-generating force”. According to Galbraith, it was a feature not a bug of any effective system of administration.

Today, I think we should take inspiration from Galbraith, and build countervailing power to renew our democracy. It should be generative of new sources of power not just defensive of old ones; it should be informal as well as formal; mass as well as elite.

I will discuss countervailing power in five areas.

The first has been thrust onto the front pages in this country in the last couple of weeks. It concerns the need to take on the concentration of the UK’s economic and political power in Westminster. The constraints on local government make the UK an outlier. I believe it is one of the major reasons we are also an outlier in levels of democratic discontent.

Since the 1990s I have seen this over-concentration as a weakness of the British model. As Local Government Minister I championed “double devolution” and “city regions” to tackle the problem. Yes, we have the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, and the English mayoralties, but devolution is, to paraphrase Andy Haldane, former chief economist at the Bank of England, “half a loaf, half baked”.

Power over spending, taxation and financing is still so centralised in this country. As Haldane has pointed out, this is ironic, because the UK’s infrastructure in the 19th century was originally financed at city level using long term municipal bonds.

The commitment last week by Andy Burnham that he intends to give meaningful power to those who know and serve their communities, to invest in those communities, suggests we are on the verge of big change, and it is long overdue. Devolving down to encourage levelling up will create countervailing power in Britain in a healthy way.

The second area concerns the independent institutions that prop up our democracy. Living in America, it becomes especially clear why we must defend an independent judiciary, fight for a non-political civil service, bolt down the independence of the Boundary Commission and the Electoral Commission, and preserve our democracy from foreign influence.

Not because these institutions always get it right, but because they are sworn to defend the public interest. These impartial institutions are needed to keep elections and civil processes fair by keeping money and inappropriate influence out of politics.

The same goes for universities, non-governmental institutions, law firms: in the march of impunity all find themselves under attack. Yet as Einstein’s speech suggested 90 years ago, these are pillars of all our liberties. They are countervailing power in action.

The same argument applies to the need to defend independent public media like the BBC. I promise you that living in the US is the best antidote to BBC-bashing. Public service broadcasting makes mistakes, but the benchmark it sets for scrutiny and accountability is second to none.

BBC Broadcasting House (Amy Karle/Wikimedia Commons)

This leads to the third area. We must address the concentration of power that is growing in our new information eco-system. We must do so by upholding the foundation of debate and deliberation: shared facts around which people can hold different opinions. This, I believe, is the number one democratic issue of the next decade.

Historically, democracies depended on local newspapers, investigative journalism, professional editorial standards, for these shared facts. But the economic model for that work has collapsed. In its place, engagement-maximising commercial digital platforms subvert deliberative democratic practice. What counts is what sells, and what sells has been well-documented, including recently by Yuval Noah Harari. As he puts it, “…the easiest way to make people engaged is to press the hate button or the greed button or the fear button”. As he says, we are being “hacked”.

The recent riots in Southampton and Belfast show what happens when there are no safeguards on the spread of opinion masquerading as fact, and when the algorithm rewards and accelerates the spread of hate.

There are many insidious and dangerous aspects to this. One that stands out has been highlighted by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, which studied extensive foreign manipulation and interference campaigns – run via social media – designed to undermine our democracy. They highlight the role of Russia, China and Iran.

The Committee proposes a suite of counter-measures:

• Greater transparency about the function of social media algorithms.

• Better education for everyone, from children to adults, to help us understand how the media we consume everyday actually works.

• Beefed-up national efforts to counter foreign misinformation campaigns.

• Greater European coordination on all of these efforts, in line with the European Democracy Shield initiative of the EU.

• And requirements on social media campaigns to disclose user locations.

These are all good examples of countervailing power – and we need to put them into action if we are to understand and improve our current information ecosystem.

We need to “stop the bots” not just “stop the boats”.

My friend and former colleague Geoff Mulgan has also made a case for a “right to truth” as an antidote to the pernicious phenomenon of “truth decay”. Mulgan’s solutions, like independent Electoral Integrity Commissions, to assess claims and counter claims, offer another potential route to protecting our right to shared facts.

In the spirit of Galbraith, we must also enable new actors rather than simply keeping those we have in place. This means actively encouraging co-operative or community platforms that work with anti-algorithm media, which give people more choice about the way they consume media.

The fourth area concerns democratic deliberation. I chair the Advisory Board of the Atlas of Impunity, which tracks impunity and accountability in 170 countries across the world. The report we have just published describes the need for norms and rules, information and consequences to keep power in check. But it also highlights the importance of deliberation in the fight for accountability.

As with new forms of media, new forms of deliberation and decision making are now proliferating. They use new technological tools for positive effect, and we should learn from them. They include:

- Citizens’ assemblies in Ireland and France that have brought people from all walks of life together to discuss major policy issues. These conversations have led to real legislative change - from abortion to climate policy.

- Deliberative polling in America shows that when people of vastly different political tribes are given shared information - shared facts - they can often find shared ground.

- Participatory budgeting now spreading to Paris from Sao Paolo means residents of a neighbourhood can decide – with the click of a button – whether funding goes to a road repair or a community garden.

In the UK, the newly-launched National Strategy Project is promising to use these techniques to forge consensus on big choices. These systems promise to put people back at the heart of policymaking. And they can counter that sense of individual powerlessness and structural ineffectuality that has led to democratic malaise. The lesson from abroad is that government needs to commit to action following deliberation to make it real.

The final area concerns our electoral system. At the 2024 election, only 15 per cent of MPs won 50 per cent of the vote. Meanwhile, the top seven countries in Cambridge University’s Satisfaction with Democracy Index all have some form of proportional representation. There is an issue here.

I supported the Alternative Vote system when it was debated in parliament in 2011 because it offers a way to better engage the public in politics without fueling the fragmentation of society. The AV system ensures every one of the elected 650 MPs wins at least 50 per cent of the vote in their constituency.

AV allows voters a first vote with the heart, and then second and third votes with the head. And it means that when people vote, they feel their individual and intellectual choices count. That remains why I support electoral reform today.

Conclusion

Of course, none of these points are a silver bullet. But they speak to the need to make our democracy one where power is spread, and the abuse of power countered.

The kind of democratic backsliding I have described today, and which I see as a threat, has been described by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as “grievance-fuelled illiberalism”. Around the world it is slowly but surely eating away at the governmental and non-governmental institutions designed to keep the powerful in check.

To fight back, we need to go back to where we began: to Jonathan Sacks.

Where JK Galbraith explained how societies can and do generate alternative centres of organised power, Jonathan Sacks explains the moral and civic foundations on which countervailing power is built: trust, covenant and shared responsibility.

In The Politics of Hope, Jonathan wrote that “civil society is where we learn the habits of cooperation”. This is what countervailing power can offer, and it is a spirit as well as a system that is needed more than ever.

You can see it at work around the world if you look. In Bangladesh and South Korea, contrary to global trends, people saved their democracy last year. At all levels of society countervailing power fought back. And Prime Minister Orbán of Hungary, who led the drive to pioneer “illiberal democracy” in Europe, was comprehensively defeated in the recent election, despite a massively unbalanced playing field, by a united civil society coalition.

It was Jonathan who famously wrote in his book The Home We Build Together that society is a home where we contribute, not just a hotel where we consume, and that homes require more than laws and rules to keep them standing. A home needs maintenance, participation, contribution and shared responsibility.

The home of British liberal democracy has taken centuries to build. My argument tonight is that we cannot cease to maintain and develop it, because if we do, then its foundations will crumble; and that would be a disaster.

In the spirit of Jonathan, this is a project that will demand from all of us that “each be leaders”.

By holding power to account. By building systems that enable collaboration. By fighting for representation that channels the best of us, rather than perpetuating the worst of itself. By encouraging leadership to innovate as well as to defend. By taking action, which is the renewable energy of hope.

Of course, Jonathan would have made this case much better than I. He was both priest and prophet, with formal and informal power. I believe that today, in this age of Kings, he would be urging us to use both.

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(Lev Radin/Shutterstock)

Progressives haven’t run out of voters. They’ve run out of nerve.

Something telling happened at the Global Progressive Mobilisation in Madrid this April. In attendance were Brazil’s Lula and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa and Spain’s Pedro Sánchez – a gathering of leaders who collectively represent hundreds of millions of people. They used the word “progressive” freely and confidently. But ask any of them or their advisers what that word actually means in 2026 – what specific transformation it promises, what story it tells about the future – and the answer tends to dissolve into warm generality.

That is the progressive puzzle. Not a lack of votes, not even a lack of values, but a collapse of forward vision so profound that a movement defined by belief in human improvement has quietly stopped believing in it.

The problem is clear: in recent years, progressives became small-c conservatives, opting for centrism and caution, aspiring to be competent managers rather than makers of change. In doing so they created a politics that’s technocratic and uninspiring – lacking both a compelling explanation of the present and any plausible roadmap for the future.

The result has been a double failure. Moderate progressive parties have defaulted to short-termism and incumbency bias, captured by business interests and drained of emotional energy. Meanwhile, the occasional victories of more radical left parties – from Syriza in Greece to the Historic Pact in Colombia – unravelled quickly on contact with the difficulties of power. The centre offered little inspiring; the radical left offered inspiration without delivery. Neither had solved the puzzle.

Three fears lie at the root of this paralysis, each rational in moderation, each disabling when taken too far.

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When the Prime Minister (Keir Starmer, that is) stood up and declared he was a Yimby, it felt as if the guy who sings at your local pub’s open-mic night had suddenly topped the charts. For those of us who have spent years in niche pro-housing circles on Twitter, or facing down anti-development committees in local councils, Labour’s embrace of Yimbyism felt like a vindication and a victory.

Starmer vowed to “back the builders, not the blockers”, and put building at the heart of Labour’s policy agenda: namely, 1.5 million new homes in England before the next election.

Nearly two years later, however, England has built fewer than 300,000. At this rate, we are set to miss the target by about 30%. The government’s flagship Planning & Infrastructure Act was watered down by amendments from its own backbenches. Rather than being a unifying political agenda for Labour, Yimbyism became another dividing line.

What went wrong?

While some blame undoubtedly lies with politicians, and the many vested interests which seek to prevent planning reform, the unfortunate truth is that Yimbys have often been their own worst enemy. As a self-described Yimby who is convinced that building more homes is just about the best thing we can do for Britain, this is deeply frustrating.

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Across the West, a quiet medical revolution is unfolding. Weight-loss drugs such as Mounjaro and Wegovy produce results previously achievable only through bariatric surgery. In the US, obesity rates have fallen for the first time in a decade. After years of endless diets, unused gym memberships and social embarrassment, millions…

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Milton Friedman liked to observe that “nothing is so permanent as a temporary government programme”. Income tax, you might recall, originated in 1799 as a short-term measure by William Pitt the Younger to fund the British military campaign against Napoleon. In 2011, fearful of anger over high petrol pieces, George Osborne cut fuel duty by 1p and delayed a planned rise – no government has had the courage to increase it since (the Treasury is £133bn poorer).

Then there is the case of the “triple lock”. This generous mechanism, which guarantees that the UK state pension rises by the highest of average earnings, inflation or 2.5%, was introduced by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition back in 2011/12. Like a fiscal Larry the Cat, it has since outlasted six prime ministers, acquiring quasi-constitutional status. How many other policies can you name that are backed by Labour, Reform, the Conservatives, the Lib Dems, the SNP and Plaid Cymru? The triple lock has become the third rail of British politics – no one dares touch it for fear of political death (all the more so after the winter fuel debacle).

But outside of Westminster, no measure attracts more reliable ire from policy wonks, including those advising Andy Burnham. Jim O’Neill, or “Mr Brics”, has labelled the triple lock “bonkers”; former RSA head Andy Haldane has proposed its abolition to help fund defence spending. They join a coalition that also includes Tony Blair, Jeremy Hunt and Matthew Yglesias who, from an American vantage point, has called it a “truly demonic piece of public policy”.

So how do we escape this inferno? This story, like so much in British politics, begins with Margaret Thatcher.

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A week might be a long time in politics, but a decade is nothing for Britain’s infrastructure. Decision…

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There’s a popular story about Brexit that runs like this: it may have ushered in a decade of political chaos, but in economic terms it has proved a non-event. After all, GDP and real wages underperformed before 2016 and this pattern has merely continued since. Brexit has only made a difference at the margins, in fact it’s a distraction from our real economic woes.

It’s a seductive narrative, heard on both left and right, because treating Brexit as a neutral event is far more reassuring than confronting its real cost. Has all that effort just left us worse off? The answer, unfortunately, is yes.

One reason Brexit gets downplayed is that it didn’t trigger the immediate recession that the Remain campaign had warned of (though real wages, which were increasing, fell once more as inflation rose). Next to the later shocks of Covid and Ukraine, Brexit looks like a blip – and that’s precisely the problem. In reality, it’s more like a permanent tax that we’ve imposed on ourselves, but one that has brought far more costs than benefits.

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Gordon Brown, who declined to call an election after becoming prime minister in 2007 (Wikimedia Commons)

On 17 July, through a coronation rather than a contest, Andy Burnham will become prime minister. Attention has already turned to a different question: should he call an early election?

Reform and the Conservatives, despite their humblings in Makerfield…

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We’ve heard a lot about what Keir Starmer got wrong. What we’ve heard less often is that he simply got unlucky. I am firmly of the belief that Donald Trump’s election as US president 19 months ago played a major role in derailing his premiership.

Trump’s return clearly helped fuel support for right-wing populism in the UK. Reform was polling around 19 per cent at the time of the US election in November 2024. By the time of Trump’s inauguration the following January, Farage’s party was at 25 per cent and neck-and-neck with Labour. The interval had been filled with incessant media coverage of Trump and his talking points, creating an aura of invincibility around him as he was embraced by Big Tech.

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It’s hot, inescapably so. You’ve closed the blinds, you’ve got a tower fan running – only opening the windows once the sun has set – and it’s still 26 degrees inside. Do yo…

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Last weekend, following intense discussion and negotiation, the US government forced Anthropic, the world’s most valuable AI firm, to close down two of its most capable models for foreign nationals. Fable 5 and Mythos 5 operate at the frontier of machine cyber-capability and were switched off because Washington decided that …

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Andy Burnham is going to be prime minister; the only political question left is when. But policy-wise there are still question marks over everything. Nowhere more so than on foreign policy, which has hardly featured in media interviews, even as “one last question, Mr Mayor!” Bizarrely, after two years in which Labour has been overwhelmed by geopolitics, the SW1 ecosystem has turned peculiarly insular, as if the burning issues of the winter will be devolution and the triple lock rather than Trump, Ukraine and chaos in the Middle East. This is what Burnham should be thinking about as he prepares for No 10.

The politics of foreign policy

It’s actually quite simple why Burnham is about to be prime minister and Keir Starmer is not. He’s got more of a feel for the politics of the Labour Party – how to speak to it and how to tell a story about his insurgency to the media. But the politics of foreign affairs is an art in itself. There is little time and there are two looming bear traps that could derail matters.

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Britain will soon have its seventh prime minister in 10 years. As rapid as this turnover is, we shouldn’t become dismissive of the office. Few democracies place more power in the hands of one individual, especially those with a commanding parliamentary majority. Leaders who can bend the state to their will, as Attlee, Thatcher and Blair did, can deliver transformative change. And, far from being “ungovernable”, Britain is desperate for direction.

Andy Burnham took a genuine risk by standing in Makerfield. A fashionable view after the local elections was that there was no winnable seat available (and Reform had just won all eight wards in that constituency). But predictions of disaster always ignored Burnham’s status as Britain’s most popular politician. By running as a quasi-independent – complete with Northern Soul branding – he has detached himself from a loathed government. After 25 years in elected politics, that is no small achievement.

Should Burnham halt Reform’s forward march, the cries will go up for a coronation. A Labour leadership contest, it will be said, is too divisive and a waste of precious time. But these protests should be ignored. Burnham deserves more scrutiny as a putative prime minister, rather than merely a by-election candidate, and Labour needs to decide what it is truly for.

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Britain has spent the past year arguing about defence spending: 2.5 per cent of GDP, then 3 per cent in the next parliament, then 3.5 per cent by 2035. Almost every fight has been about the price. Almo…

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After Labour’s catastrophic local election results in May, pundits and citizens alike wondered what Keir Starmer would say to try and revive his dying premiership. One pledge was to put the UK at the “heart of Europe” – but without altering the Brexit red lines that make that an impossibility. Another was to renationalise British Steel “subject to a public interest test”. That last phrase could be Starmer’s political epitaph.

Reliance on consultation, or some barometer of the national interest beyond his own judgement, is how Starmer governs. Time and again, he has outsourced essentially political decisions to others. Louise Casey was appointed to lead a commission into social care that will conclude in 2028 – deferring a solution to a decades-long crisis. It was Casey, too, who was chosen to rule on whether a national inquiry into grooming gangs should be held, giving us the uniquely Starmerite construct of an inquiry into an inquiry.

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Britain’s long-gestating university crisis is now beginning its acute phase. Ten…

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Earlier this year, 30-year-old Labour MP Luke Charters stood up in the House of Commons and described Britain’s student loan system as “Frankenstein’s monster”. He told parliament that communication around Plan 2 loans felt like a “misselling scandal waiting to unfold”. Borrowers were, he noted, “never clearly told that the hig…

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