I spent a chunk of my summer sitting in my London flat. This is a building designed to trap heat in a city never designed to have any. At some point, I caught myself actively fantasising about a cold summer. Think grey Bergen drizzle, a lake in southern Sweden, somewhere with a temperate climate that would require a jumper.

Seemingly, I’m not the only one. The word ‘coolcation’ has been gaining traction lately. What, exactly, does this portmanteau mean? According to many, the implication is that while Southern Europe bakes (with Spain and France pushing past 45°C this summer), northern Europeans looked at the forecast and turned the car around – trading beaches for fjords and Benidorm for Bergen. This seems like a plausible story to me: does the data agree?

What do the numbers say?

People are, without question, searching for holidays differently. On the French version of Hotels.com, searches for Copenhagen jumped 246% after the first May heatwave and Dublin rose 151%, while cooler holiday searches were up 74% year-on-year. The trouble is what this search data can and cannot do. A growing literature, from Choi and Varian to Havranek and Zeynalov, has shown that search interest is a good nowcast: it estimates what is happening right now, before the official statistics land, which in our case means the next few booking weeks. What it does not do is forecast the season.

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I built a comparison, using multiple indicators, myself. For each set of destinations, I put the demand signal (search interest, forward bookings, stated intent) next to the realised outcome (actual overnight stays and arrivals, from national statistics offices and Eurostat). The result? What I like to call: ‘the coolcation gap’.

Across these destinations the demand signal averages nearly 200% growth year-on-year while the realised outcome averages about 6% growth, a divergence of roughly thirty to one. If the coolcation were a real migration, the northern ‘cool’ destinations should be climbing while the southern ones fall. Instead, every destination that was supposed to be losing tourists is still growing: Norway’s foreign guest nights are up 14%, but so is Malta at 10%, Greece at 4%, Spain at 3.5%, Croatia at 1%. So, the north did go up somewhat but the south did not go down.

Greece shows why. At first glance it had a record 2025, but when I looked closer, it turned out to be a pricing story. In July, revenue per available room rose 15.4%, but almost all of that came from a 20.7% jump in the average daily rate, while occupancy actually softened.

A genuine coolcation shows up as empty rooms and falling rates. Instead, the rooms are nearly as full and the prices are higher, which is a sign demand is holding.

So if tourists are still, hesitantly, arriving and spending in the Mediterranean, what’s changed? To identify a change we have to look at when people are travelling. Southern Mediterranean tourism is still 59% concentrated in the prime summer months, but most of the growth is ‘in the shoulders’, with May and June bookings up 13% and September and October up 20%, and airlines scheduling 4.6% more seats into the region this coming winter.

Why is this a problem?

To identify the problem, we have to look further into the future. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) 2023 modelled 269 regions against a Tourism Climate Index, finding that a 1% rise in climatic comfort buys about a 0.57% rise in bed-nights. Meanwhile, when the same model is projected forward to a world 3 to 4°C warmer, it gives a headline number of roughly 10% of summer demand lost in the south.

I assumed a 10% demand reduction would not be problematic per se – until I placed the projected summer warming next to how much each economy leans on tourism.

The coasts that are projected to warm the most, the Iberian, Italian, Adriatic and Aegean rim, almost entirely overlap with the coasts that lean hardest on tourism as a share of the economy. In contrast, the Atlantic northwest – Ireland, the UK, western France – barely shows up on the tourism dependence map.

Looking at the data systematically, we can see which countries are most exposed – the ones where the heat and the economic dependence coincide, hot and reliant on the summer season.

So I turned that overlap into an exposure map. The horizontal axis is how dependent each economy is on tourism, measured as travel receipts as a share of GDP (Eurostat, 2024) – that is, the actual money foreign visitors spend, rather than the flatteringly large ‘total contribution’ figures the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) publishes, which fold in supply-chain, investment and knock-on spending and so inflate the headline two- or threefold. The vertical axis is my own costing of what a JRC-style 10% summer drop would take off the table, in euros. The arithmetic is deliberately back-of-napkin: inbound revenue × summer share × 10%.

Share Arguably

The map splits two dynamics apart. We can see absolute exposure in the top half and structural exposure in the bottom and top right corners. Structural exposure is defined by how much the whole economy depends on tourism. Croatia sits at 17.5% of GDP, three-quarters of it earned in summer, in a country of under four million, with Cyprus and Malta beside it, small and hot and almost entirely a summer proposition, with no autumn demand to fall back on.

This is where political economy becomes a useful lens. There is a critical tradition in tourism studies that refuses to treat tourism as mere leisure and reads it instead as a relationship of power, asking who owns and profits from it. Growing out of dependency theory in the late 1970s, it defined itself against the sunny modernisation view that tourism was a straightforward development ladder for poorer countries, arguing the reverse: that heavy specialisation results in dependency rather than an opportunity.

Turner and Ash had already named the ‘pleasure periphery’ in 1975, the poorer sunlit regions reorganised to serve the leisure of wealthy northern populations; Raoul Bianchi’s more recent political economy of tourism has carried it forward. The thesis is consistent across all of them: the core exports comfort; the periphery imports price-taking seasonal demand and rebuilds itself around serving it.

Climate adds a physical squeeze on top of the structural one, turning the periphery’s one asset, pleasant rather than dangerous summer sun, into a liability in its peak weeks. While a diversified economy loses a product line, a dependency loses its reason for being. That is why the same 10% is a rounding error for Germany and an existential question for Malta. This is why ‘just pivot to the shoulder season’ costs a city that is still charming when it rains very little, and a sun-and-sand monoculture almost everything.

Somebody must be gaining from climate change. The JRC pencils in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands for demand gains above 5%. Notably, West Wales, of all places, is the single biggest projected winner. But the gains are diffuse, spread thin across temperate places and hard to pin specifically on climate rather than price or fashion. The losses, meanwhile, when they concentrate, land hard and narrowly on a few summer-only economies. Diffuse gains and concentrated losses: that asymmetry is the real policy problem.

The implications

If the threat is timing rather than migration, the policy response is not to chase the ‘coolcation’ crowd north but to make the months around the current peak work. It’s encouraging that the levers are known and some are already being pulled.

The most concrete are the dull, structural levers. Staggering school holidays across the continent is the single high-leverage move available, and the one policy governments are slowest to coordinate. Yet, flight capacity is following market demand: seat numbers into Italy, Spain, Greece, Croatia and Portugal for the final quarter of 2026 are up 4.6% year-on-year, with Greece adding 10.7%. This is precisely the off-peak connectivity a longer season needs. And winter hotel rates across those five markets are now markedly below summer, which is the price signal doing its job, pulling cost-sensitive travellers into April and October.

But connectivity and price discounting only smooth the curve; they do not cure the dependency – the harder and more important half of the equation. The exposed economies in the top-right of my map cannot price their way out of being a single-season monoculture, and the good news is that the most serious of them have stopped pretending otherwise.

Greece, which is overheating both literally and figuratively, is now building the machinery to break that single-season dependence. It includes a Special Spatial Framework that grades each region by carrying capacity – how many visitors a place can take before its infrastructure and environment start to buckle – rather than letting the islands absorb unlimited numbers. National and regional tourism observatories now track visitor pressure across regions and seasons, while the state actively pushes tourism inland and into the mountains, through the Peloponnese and Epirus, places that work in November.

The OECD’s 2026 tourism review mirrors current Greek dynamics, albeit in convoluted policy language, arguing that dependent nations need to reduce seasonality and diversify their tourism products, or watch competitiveness erode. Around Greece, the rest of the Mediterranean is diversifying into gastronomy, wellness, rural stays and archaeology, and the European Commission is nudging the whole bloc toward ‘climate-resilient tourism strategies’.

Happily, for once, the climate-conscious choice and the pleasant option point the same way. A Mediterranean holiday in May or late September is cooler, quieter, cheaper, and kinder to the place, since your money arrives in the months it is needed most – rather than in the months when the town is already drowning in demand.

You do not have to discover Bergen to escape the crush. Instead, simply keep your original plans and move your trip five weeks back. That is the whole coolcation, really: it was never about going somewhere colder, only about going at a colder time.

I started this summer sweating in a London flat and fantasising about a lake in Sweden. It turns out the lake could also just be in a more affordable country but at another time of the year.

A postage stamp shows Eleanor Roosevelt, the longest-serving first lady, reading to children (AS photo family/Shutterstock)

Earlier this year, Reform UK announced that it would introduce a “Women and Motherhood Protection Act” if elected. The proposed law would offer various forms of protection around pregnancy, breastfeeding and fertility treatment. Suella Braverman, the party’s education spokesperson, declared that “a Reform UK government would be the most pro-woman, pro-mother, and pro-family government in British history”.

Yet the contradictions are obvious. The protections promised by Reform already exist in law and, by repealing the 2010 Equality Act, it would actually remove the right to equal pay for equal work, reverting to the narrower standard of equal pay for identical work. And let us not forget that Reform was happy to have James McMurdock – convicted aged 19 for assaulting his girlfriend – as an MP from 2024-25. A “pro-woman” party this is not.

On the left, meanwhile, there is increasingly a similar, but distinct, biological fatalism, which is also inadequate. Put simply, bio-essentialism is the notion that sex differences are rooted, immutably, in bodies. It is less interested in how culture and social life produce divergences in the experiences of men and women; when discussed at all, they are reduced to expressions of deep-seated hormonal and genetic coding – witness recent calls for paid menstrual leave.

Instead of lapsing into either pseudo-scientific ‘just-so’ stories about men and women, or flat-out denial of biological reality, social democrats need to devise stronger answers than the right.

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(Joshua Sukoff/Shutterstock)

Future historians will ask why the world spent so much time worrying about the profound impacts of AI yet did so little to govern or guide it. Part of the answer lies in deliberate strategies of distraction that have worked well, at least until now, in manipulating politics and the media.

These strategies – visible again this summer in new initiatives from Mark Zuckerberg, Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk – were answers to a contradiction that every leading figure in AI knows well.

To raise capital, figures such as Zuckerberg, Hassabis and Musk, if not the whole of Silicon Valley, have to emphasise the transformative power of AI. But if the technology is even a fraction as transformative as they claim, then it’s hardly plausible that private companies or tech oligarchs will be best-placed to guide it. So what to do?

Their answers to this obvious contradiction have come in a playbook with seven main moves.

1. Distract: The first move dominant tech players make is to pursue low-impact, but interesting initiatives. For instance, setting up ethics centres in universities (but never centres on governance) or focusing on the safety of foundational models, nearly always as an alternative to government legislation rather than as a complement to it. Creating distracting ethics bodies has the effect of pulling in many of the brightest minds, which might otherwise be working on more serious, enforceable rules.

Rishi Sunak’s AI summit at Bletchley in 2023 was a prime example, launching an AI Safety (later Security) Institute which tests foundational models. This is important work, but addresses only a tiny fraction of the risks associated with AI. Several years later the initiatives have had little real-world impact (the first warnings about Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models, for example, came from Amazon, not from one of these institutes).

2. Amplify: Next, Big Tech players talk a lot about existential risk, issuing vague statements every few years. These statements fill the media with content about the possible end of humanity, while diverting journalists and politicians from thinking about present-day governance, including facial recognition, targeted advertising and copyright abuses.

A gathering of AI pioneers in Puerto Rico in 2015 set the tone. Figures including Hassabis, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, Jaan Tallinn and Musk came together to discuss what rules might constrain AI. Their open letter committed to preparing for the risks that it could bring: “because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls … [through] expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial: our AI systems must do what we want them to do.” But nothing was done to act on these sentiments. A succession of equally empty statements has followed every few years, with equally little real-world impact.

3. Mystify: Third, those with power have emphasised the magical aspects of AI. Sam Altman of OpenAI describes artificial general intelligence as a “magic intelligence in the sky,” while Hassabis describes it as a tool to “solve everything.” Musk promises that it will deliver super-abundance (so that it won’t matter that there aren’t any jobs left). Karl Popper, the Austrian philosopher, argued that we should “work for the elimination of concrete evils rather than for the realization of abstract goods”. The AI distraction playbook does the opposite.

4. Feint: Many tech leaders talk publicly about the need for regulation, while lobbying in private against it. They give every appearance of being open to dialogue and debate, floating interesting and radical new policies on AI. For example, many tech figures suggest providing a universal basic income or allocating AI shares to the wider population, confident that there is little prospect of these things happening, while never conceding an inch in relation to real regulation.

5. Co-opt: Many tech companies try to get their people in key places serving as lobbyists in Washington, Brussels and London. Powerful players ensure they work hard to keep out challenging voices or experts. The capture of the now-closed Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) in the UK is a fascinating case study.

6. Threaten: Many companies use subtle, or not-so-subtle, threats. Warn any country that stands up to you that investment will be removed and it will be left behind in a vital technology for future growth (a threat which is not implausible).

7. Block: Finally, and perhaps most importantly, many tech players are doing all they can to block the creation of any institutions that could potentially challenge them or offset their power. Silicon Valley now favours committees, conferences, summits, and high-level expert panels – but at all costs maintains the asymmetry between strong, wealthy, highly organised corporate power and weak and poorly organised public power.

The technique is now to present anyone arguing differently as a lover of bureaucracy, as anachronistic and ignorant about technology. They argue for self-regulation, as Hassabis recently did, though there are no examples where self-regulation has proven adequate for powerful technologies (there is a good case for mobilising the big companies to check and test each other’s models for flaws – but no case for doing so without any kind of public backstop).

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(TechCrunch/Wikimedia Commons)

These strategies – to distract, amplify, mystify, feint, co-opt, threaten and block – succeeded in much of the world, but not everywhere. China introduced ever more elaborate laws throughout this decade (undercutting the argument that you can either have frontier technologies or regulation, but not both). For instance, it has some of the toughest laws on algorithmic and software vulnerability disclosure while also pioneering the ultra-cost-efficient LLM DeepSeek. In the EU, the regulatory juggernaut eventually produced the AI Act, which started being implemented in 2024, though there is still only one institution to regulate AI (the Spanish Agency for the Supervision of Artificial Intelligence).

But overall, the strategies remain in place, eagerly pursued by large teams of lobbyists. Around 3,500 lobbyists work on AI in Washington alone. Alphabet and Meta each employ nearly 90 federal lobbyists on the Hill and the industry’s federal lobbying budget is estimated at over $40m in the first half of 2026 alone. Huge sums are now going into Super PACs to influence elections. Hundreds of commentators have effectively been bought off while philanthropy has been largely silent or complicit in the distraction strategies.

There are many well-intentioned initiatives around AI governance underway. What’s striking is how few seriously challenge the above playbook. Some new bodies are heavily influenced by liberal and libertarian thinking, arguing that any role for government would contravene individual freedom. As with the Internet, in the 2000s and 2010s, this logic clears the way for massive autocratic corporations to accumulate power.

Regardless of how AI impacts the world, both for good and bad, the success of these strategies will go down in history, alongside those of the tobacco industry and Big Oil, which also needed to confuse and distract (the cases are very different but the echoes are striking).

However, the success of the playbook may at last be fading, mainly because the politics of AI is now changing. This is evident, particularly in the US, where AI is rapidly becoming far more contested (50% of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI, compared to 10% who say the opposite). Sovereignty – and the need for sovereign AI – is gaining far more attention, especially after the temporary withdrawal of Anthropic’s frontier models back in June. Additionally, many of the everyday risks – from misinformation to cognitive decay – that the distraction playbook tried to ignore, are gaining attention from the general public.

But the extraordinary asymmetry between corporate power and public and civil society is not about to disappear. I hope we will see more politicians achieve a better balance of AI enthusiasm and scepticism, focused on how to use the many powers they do have – over law, regulation, procurement and public education. Just this week, William Hague commented that “how we use and control AI is now becoming the single most important issue in the world”. He’s right, but far too many politicians have made similar comments in the past and not pursued the serious work needed to shape AI. In effect, they have defaulted to being followers, not leaders, creating a vacuum that the tech companies are only too willing to fill.

(Spatuletail/Shutterstock)

Big majorities should liberate governments to do difficult things. The nationalisations of the Attlee era and the privatisations of the Thatcher years were aided by parliamentary supremacy. A prime minister whose party dominates has less to fear from recalcitrant MPs, voters and interest groups.

The Starmer government didn’t entirely disappoint on this front – allowing housebuilding on the green belt, for instance – but all too often it endured political pain for little policy gain. The government could have led a new debate on intergenerational justice; instead politically toxic winter fuel payment cuts made it impossible to do so.

Andy Burnham has an opportunity to do far better. He has already signalled that “difficult decisions” will be required on social care funding, foreshadowing Louise Casey’s accelerated review next summer. His early cost-of-living interventions, such as removing VAT from electricity bills and capping bus fares at £2, have earned him goodwill – now’s the time to use it.

In policy terms, as a more popular and trusted figure than Starmer, he has the chance to be Nixon in China. In other words, to embrace the kind of counter-intuitive decision that leaders pursue at their bravest: think Ted Heath taking the UK into the European Economy Community, Margaret Thatcher signing the Single European Act, Tony Blair introducing university tuition fees and David Cameron delivering equal marriage. Below I explore four areas where Burnham could abandon the fatal progressive fixation with means in favour of an approach focused on ends.

1. Approve new North Sea licences to ease the energy transition

The UK is enduring what is likely its hottest summer on record, a trend that no one serious now denies is driven by climate change. At this juncture, approving new North Sea oil and gas licences risks appearing eccentric at best and reckless at worst (it doesn’t help that Donald Trump is one of the biggest advocates).

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Author Jonathan Haidt speaks in São Paulo (Fronteiras do Pensamento/Wikimedia Commons)

In the last three years there has been a transformation in how we describe and then legislate on digital harm to children. Rather than viewing platforms as the hosts of sometimes harmful content, politicians and parents alike now treat them as inherently exploitative. A global movement, given intellectual ballast by social psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt, has gained momentum, winning social media bans for children in Australia, Spain, France and the UK. But what is curious is that there is now no obvious stopping point for regulation.

Consider the pre-2023 digital settlement. Concern centred around online versions of offline crimes – stalking, harassment, sexual threats, blackmail, the sale of goods and services on the dark web. This culminated in the introduction of the Online Safety Act, which, while introducing landmark age restrictions on porn and other material, had clear limits. But the conversation has since accelerated faster than anyone could have anticipated.

This reflects the reality that, in the aftermath of Covid, the internet feels different. Multiple lockdowns spent with little else to do but stare at phones led to a whole new era of content consumption, and spurred on a far more powerful set of features – critically, short-form video running on personalised algorithms. The feed, particularly capturing the attention of children for hours on end, was the principal problem. As a result, the focus has shifted from content to the fundamental architecture and design of the platforms themselves. Harm is now defined by the length of time spent online, with loneliness, isolation and days not spent with friends the abiding concerns.

This has led to a new frontier in the digital legislative landscape. The UK plans to block infinite scroll and autoplay and impose a social media curfew for 16-to-17-year-olds. Gaming and AI chatbots are emerging as the next targets, with concern over how the latter mimic human relationships with children, both in friendly or more sinister ways.

This shift is far from merely a British phenomenon. Emmanuel Macron stated earlier this year that “the emotions of our children and teenagers are not for sale or to be manipulated, neither by American platforms nor by Chinese algorithms”. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has proposed a ban on “social media plus” for children under 13, a deliberately vague description which aims to capture video games, app stores and AI companions.

Britain is set to become the first country in the world to ban sexualised AI chatbots for under-18s, but beyond this there is likely to be a drive to limit how children can access chatbots at all, to curb the “emotional dependency” they may develop, alongside caps on how long they can use them for. What is being regulated now is not the output, but the duration and rhythm of digital interaction. The back-and-forth itself is the harm, but there is no version of a chatbot that does not do this. The harm and the technology have become the same object, which is why the regulatory net will only widen.

Legislating around AI chatbots is complex. Children should obviously be barred from having sexualised conversations but they should not be blocked from chatting to a chatbot for hours about history or using them to develop their own creative projects. Trying to legislate around this nuance will not be easy.

And most of the low-hanging fruit has been taken. We have entered a far more challenging phase in which interventions will reshape digital products themselves rather than simply police them. Platforms do not have “adult” and “child” versions built into their code for policy to switch between. As a consequence, the load-bearing wall of this entire legislative approach is age assurance. Every measure described above will only be as good as the ability to know who is on the other side of the screen, which means infrastructure and friction that adults will have to navigate too. Politicians must lead a far more honest conversation on where parental responsibility lies in controlling their children’s access to technologies and social media.

The complexities of implementation are catching up with countries such as Australia. Three months after the social media ban was imposed, the regulator eSafety found that usage among under-16s had only fallen from 86% to 81%, prompting the government to double the maximum penalty for firms to $99m. More contentious is the prospect, still under debate in several countries, of banning VPNs – a threat to the civil liberties of law-abiding adults – to close the workarounds used by digitally savvy children.

A social media ban for under-16s is a defensible, even welcome, piece of policy; we should aspire to shield children from this all-consuming world. But this is not where most campaigners want to stop. The current theory of harm is one without barriers or boundaries; it is aimed at design choices that are inseparable from the products themselves. The likely result is badly-designed legislation, in which intention outruns outcome and being seen to act matters more than what is achieved.

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(John Gomez/Shutterstock)

“I am committed to proportional representation,” Andy Burnham told the Observer while campaigning in the Makerfield by-election. “I think it would change the political culture.” With Burnham, a longstanding campaigner for electoral reform, now ensconced in No 10, is this the death knell for first-past-the-post?

Campaigns for electoral reform have been running for over 150 years (John Stuart Mill was an early supporter), and reformers have suffered many disappointments. Achieving reform requires a rare combination of circumstances, with popular pressure, political principle and electoral self-interest all pointing in the same direction.

Earlier efforts fell at one more or of these hurdles. The first New Labour government favoured reform in principle, but grew indifferent after concluding that a system which delivered landslides for Tony Blair wasn’t all bad. In 2011, the Lib Dems secured a referendum on introducing the Alternative Vote as part of the coalition agreement only to discover their reforming zeal wasn’t shared by the public. Will this time be different? And if reform were to happen, what would it mean for Westminster politics?

For perhaps the first time in postwar history, all the conditions for reform are now in place. The 2024 general election delivered the most disproportionate result in history, with Labour winning 63% of seats on just 34% of the vote, while Reform and the Greens won just a handful of seats despite winning a fifth of all ballots cast. This yawning gap between the will of voters and the composition of the Commons has helped shift public attitudes, with record shares backing electoral reform in the wake of the 2024 result.

(Make Votes Matter)

The principled arguments for reform have also gained ground. As chaotic and unrepresentative results have become more commonplace, the case for a more inclusive and consistently representative electoral system has grown. Smaller parties, for whom principle generally coincides with electoral self-interest, have long made such arguments. But they are now also making headway too in the largest parties, particularly Labour, where a broad coalition of support for a more proportional system has emerged in recent years, including a majority of members, many of the largest affiliated trade unions, and many backbench MPs.

Electoral self-interest, the last piece of the puzzle, has now also fallen into place. New Labour’s enthusiasm for Westminster reform waned as the party’s supremacy in the Commons waxed. But now, uniquely, we have a party which dominates the current Commons yet fears a future under first-past-the-post. Labour won a 2024 landslide by exploiting the electoral system to build a Commons ‘jenga tower’ – formidable yet unstable. Its post-election polling slump laid bare the shaky foundations of the Starmer landslide, and crushing defeats in local elections and by-elections have underlined how unpopularity in the current fragmented context could pose an existential threat. The same survival instincts that drove Labour to change leaders have encouraged the party towards electoral reform.

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Principle, pragmatism and public support have got reformers to the starting line. But the hardest steps are still to come. Reformers often back ‘proportional representation’ without realising that it is an end, not a means. Proportional representation – seats awarded in rough proportion to votes – is the outcome reformers want a system to deliver, but many different systems can deliver this, and electoral reform activists who unite in opposition to first-past-the-post often divide over which is the best alternative. The most popular options include Single Transferable Vote (STV), used already in Scottish local elections and all elections in Northern Ireland; regional list proportional representation (list PR), used in the 2026 Welsh Senedd elections; and Additional Member Systems (AMS) which combine constituency contests with top-up lists to make the overall result more proportional – the system used in all Scottish Parliament elections, all London Assembly elections and pre-2026 Senedd elections.

Public support for electoral reform is at a record high

(British Social Attitudes)

All of these options produce more consistent and proportional outcomes than the current system, but each has drawbacks. List PR severs the ‘constituency link’ binding together single MPs and single locations – something both voters and legislators value highly. STV requires much larger multi-member constituencies, and the complex ranking, elimination and vote transfer process can be hard for voters and parties alike to understand. AMS aims to get the best of both worlds – retaining a constituency link while making results more proportional – but it can end up delivering dysfunctional and disproportional results, as happened in Scotland this May, when the SNP swept the board in constituency contests and there were not enough regional list seats to balance things out.

While each alternative system has flaws, all address the most glaring current problems with first-past the post. An incoming Labour leadership committed to reform could help break the impasse by pushing a specific plan and encouraging others to fall in behind it. Burnham’s commitment to reform without a referendum – “When I came into politics, my dad said, ‘Never commit to a referendum on anything.’ I look back and think how wise he was” – means the most likely path to reform is now clear. Labour sets out a reform proposal in its next manifesto, then enacts that reform in the next parliament, either on its own or with support from other parties. The next first-past-the-post election may end up being the last.

If electoral reform does happen, it will have a major political impact, regardless of which system is introduced. A more proportional system will deliver a more politically diverse Commons – that, after all, is the main point. Parliament will be less dominated by the two largest parties, and managing relations between potential coalition partners will become far more important.

(Electoral Reform Society)

A new electoral system will also change how voters and parties approach elections. Smaller parties previously dismissed as a ‘wasted vote’ will get a fresh look, while the pressure to vote tactically will be greatly reduced. As every vote contributes to the outcome, the distinction between ‘safe’ and ‘marginal’ seats will fade away – voters in formerly safe seats will get a meaningful choice, and parties will need to court them.

A new electoral system will also change the Commons as a representational institution. Reform would entail the most dramatic reorganisation of constituencies in living memory, a complex process with unpredictable effects. A change of system will change the places represented as well as the people elected to represent them.

Would all this add up to a “changed political culture”, as Burnham hopes? Perhaps. Parties would have to listen to a wider range of voters at election time and will hear a wider range of voices in the Commons chamber. The need to build coalitions will encourage broader engagement but could also complicate and slow down policymaking. Coalition bargaining may make legislating more inclusive yet also makes it harder for voters to know who to blame when things go wrong. With more parties able to win representation, legislators themselves will have more choice – which could make for more rebellions, splits and defections.

But the experience of the one developed democracy to make the switch away from first-past-the-post, New Zealand, suggests political cultures are resilient in the face of reform. The ‘big two’ parties who dominated kiwi politics before the change – Labour and the National Party – have continued to do so in the three decades since, but now usually govern at the head of multi-party coalitions rather than single–party majorities. Smaller, newer parties with distinct perspectives – liberal, nationalist, green – have played a larger role in politics yet the old dividing lines remain intact, and the traditional governing parties have weathered the transition. The New Zealand experience suggests electoral reform can be effective in delivering renewal without revolution.

There is no guarantee such experiences will travel – Britain is a bigger and more divided nation – but they will raise hopes that reform can improve the health of British democracy. Westminster has stuck with one electoral system for centuries. The time to roll the dice may have arrived at last.

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(James Jiao/Shutterstock)

Political opinion changes gradually and then suddenly. Back in the early 2020s, I would routinely point out how England’s student loan system had become a form of stealth taxation – with graduates on modest salaries paying marginal rates above 50% – but the issue went almost unnoticed at Westminster. That finally changed this year. Labour’s decision to freeze the Plan 2 repayment threshold at £29,385 for three years, rather than increasing it in line with inflation, saw the government rightly accused of behaving like a loan shark.

Influenced by a cohort of MPs young enough to still be repaying student debt (which currently averages £53,000), almost everyone now agrees the system is broken. Lucy Powell, the new Education Secretary, has said reform is “very much top of my in-tray”. Nick Clegg, who oversaw the introduction of £9,000 tuition fees as deputy prime minister, now believes that “graduates quite rightly feel very sore, because they’re sort of running to stand still”. And more than 120 MPs and peers have written to Chancellor John Healey demanding an “urgent review” of a model that places an “unsustainable burden on the next generation of workers”.

They’re right to be exasperated. Under the current system, owing to high interest rates, a graduate needs to be earning at least £66,000 before they even begin to reduce their debt. At the same time, our university sector is in crisis, with department closures at major institutions and 9,606 jobs cut in 2024/25 alone (public funding has collapsed while fee levels have stagnated). But though long on critique, most have been short on solutions. In this post I’ll outline the best way to reform the funding system and explain what both the left and the right get wrong about universities.

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In 1972, one of Michael Heseltine’s first tasks at the Department of the Environment was to help create England’s new metropolitan counties. Six were created in 1974, including Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Tyne and Wear. How did Heseltine decide where to draw the boundaries of these new local authorities? By his own account, he hired a plane, took a map with him and sketched the lines from the air. Heseltine concedes that his approach would today have been “judicially reviewed to oblivion” and a decade after the new counties were established, Margaret Thatcher would abolish them in an attempt to strip left-wing Labour council leaders of power, including her bête noire Ken Livingstone in London.

Andy Burnham, like Heseltine, has a longstanding belief in devolution, and is now following in his footsteps by embarking on an ambitious reorganisation of public services and their boundaries. Last week, he pledged to create new local policing units aligned with local authority boundaries and wider regional forces aligned with strategic authorities, such as the one he ran in Greater Manchester. Fire and rescue services and integrated care boards will also align with strategic authorities’ boundaries.

This is no small undertaking, but Burnham has set a deadline of the end of this parliament. It will be politically contentious, operationally complex and painstaking to deliver. Successive governments have grappled with the boundaries of local institutions, and the Starmer administration was no exception.

For two years, it was immersed in negotiations – often with Labour councillors – about local government reorganisation. On the final day that parliament sat under Starmer’s leadership, his government announced the new boundaries for councils across England: 134 authorities will be replaced with 38 and the number of councillors will be reduced by 51%. These reforms have proved contentious, with a growing number of Conservative and Reform-led councils mounting legal challenges against the government to stop their fiefdoms being scrapped, something consuming valuable ministerial time, attention and political capital. Like vultures circling a carcass, councils saw their role as simply waiting for the Starmer administration to fail. Now that it has, they are betting that their strategy of brinkmanship will encourage the Burnham administration to give up the fight and change course.

The benefits of institution-breaking and reconfiguring are not always obvious, and successive governments have a long history of redrawing boundaries with little discernible return. There are a dizzying array of public services, each with their own different geographies, that prevent them from working together. I call this the Incoherent State.

Yet fixing our messy boundaries could produce real benefits for the Burnham administration if it can get it right – though there is further still to go. Let’s start with Greater Manchester. It benefits from a partnership with the Ministry of Justice’s Prison and Probation Service. Together, the MoJ and Greater Manchester commission services jointly to reduce female reoffending, providing women with accommodation, education, training, and employment. This partnership is performing well and Greater Manchester has the highest Probation Scorecard in England.

It is also the only place outside of London where the operational boundaries of the Prison and Probation Service are the same as the boundaries of Greater Manchester. In other words, West Yorkshire or Cornwall cannot benefit from a similar collaboration, because the boundaries are different.

The NHS English Regions, the Probation Service Divisions, the Environment Agency areas, the Water Supply Areas and the Integrated Care Boards, similarly, do not match the geographies of strategic authorities. This is understandable given that this phase of devolution is only a decade-old, but the government is failing to grasp the scale of change required. If the Burnham administration envisages a role for mayors in holding water and energy providers to account as part of a move towards public ownership, then reform is imperative.

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So, what should the government do? It will need to add coherence to this disorganised devolution. It must first establish mayors across all of England. No longer can England tolerate spatial inequalities of its own creation, with a small number of strategic authorities benefiting from devolution and swathes of areas, including much of the South, without it. Burnham has been clear that he wants to see change in “every postcode”. A necessary precondition is allowing public services to coalesce around one institution. The Starmer administration failed to establish more mayors owing to a combination of departmental budget constraints and a fear of creating powerful political opponents who would end the near-hegemony of Labour mayors. The Burnham administration will need to demonstrate that it is committed to devolution as a principle rather than merely when it is politically convenient.

With mayors across England, the government can begin to reconfigure institutional boundaries around them, starting with those Burnham has already outlined. The police forces undergoing change are low-hanging fruit, but so too are School Commissioners based in the Department for Education. Ofsted monitors school performance and local authorities work with council-owned schools, but there is no whole-system democratic oversight. To address that deficit, Burnham is reportedly considering ‘Health and Education Commissioners’ to oversee GPs, schools and childcare providers.

Given the prospect of public control over water and energy, the Water Supply Areas, controlled by regional water companies, are another candidate for alignment. With oversight over water, mayors could return to an approach practised in Victorian England, with ‘Water Commissioners’ or ‘Commissioners of Sewers’ responsible for managing water shortages and poor sanitary conditions. Align the geographies of utilities with strategic authorities and, much like the Victorians, mayors could have real oversight over their performance.

This is no big bang. In fact, restructuring these institutions is likely to take time – and while the ambition is welcome, the timeframe the Burnham administration has set is, at best, demanding and, at worst, undeliverable. The Starmer administration was afflicted by state reform fatigue as it sought to reorganise local authorities at the same time as pursuing devolution. Burnham will need to avoid making the same mistake.

The ability of mayors to act as convenors and market-shapers, to hold the police and water industry to account, and to work with prisons to give people a better chance at life, as Burnham did in Greater Manchester, requires a sensible administrative geography. Fixing the Incoherent State is critical to making the most of devolution and public service reform. The Burnham administration must grasp the nettle with both hands; now is not the time for half-measures.

Vantage data centre complex in Ludwigsfelde, Germany (Magicmaik123/Shutterstock)

They don’t create many jobs. They guzzle electricity and use water. They are ugly, noisy and take up space. So why would anyone, least of all progressives, care about building data centres?

I am going to try to make a progressive case for them, while also acknowledging their limitations and arguing against some of the policies that AI companies are pushing for.

In common with wealth taxes and North Sea oil, data centres have become a site of ideological division that will only intensify. Opposition to them unites a broad range of groups, including environmentalists, NIMBYs, workers worried about jobs and millions of people who (not unreasonably) worry about the power of Big Tech over our economic future. Anti-AI anger is real. As my Centre for British Progress colleague Julia Willemyns has written:

Sam Altman’s home was recently attacked. A city-county council member woke up one day to find bullet holes in his home and a note that read ‘No Data Centers.’ In LA, Waymos are being vandalised. Cults are back. Political assassinations are in.

Closer to home, residents are protesting a new data centre in Brick Lane, London, and the Green Party has made it a defining campaign issue.

Meanwhile, AI companies are spending billions – trillions, even – on building data centres. New data centres are under construction in Northumberland (the former Blyth Power Station site), Essex (where the UK’s largest AI supercomputer is being built by Microsoft and Nscale), Bridgend (a former Ford engine plant), Stockport and London. Many more have been approved but not built yet.

Globally, AI data centres have become one of history’s largest and most rapid megaprojects, on a similar scale to the US Marshall Plan or the railway mania of the 1840s. Recent wobbles aside, investors generally seem to believe these bets will pay off. Even though stocks have recently fallen, bonds for data centres have held up well. Our future will be determined by whether these investors are right.

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FIFA president, Gianni Infantino (Wikimedia Commons)

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“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” – Charlie Munger

Donald Trump had barely been ushered away from the middle of Spain’s World Cup celebrations before reports emerged that FIFA president Gianni Infantino wanted to sell a stake in the future of the tournament. This plan has thankfully now been abandoned after a response that was about as positive as Barcelona fans were when Luis Figo signed for Real Madrid. UEFA’s members threw the metaphorical pig’s head by unanimously threatening to boycott FIFA competitions, while the Asian and North American confederations also signalled their strong disapproval.

The proposal is now dead, but it was only the latest symptom of a deeper problem. Schemes such as this will keep returning in different forms as long as FIFA is structured to profit from the decisions it makes as football’s governing body. Only institutional reform can break that cycle.

What has gone wrong

This is hardly the first time FIFA has been accused of putting money ahead of the good of the game. In 2015, US prosecutors charged senior officials over a 24-year scheme involving more than $150m in alleged bribes and kickbacks. Sepp Blatter resigned days after being re-elected, while much of FIFA’s leadership was arrested or removed.

Infantino was elected in 2016 promising to “implement good governance and transparency” which he said would “help to restore trust in our organisation and deter future wrongdoing.” Two years later, he was promoting a secretive $25bn deal with outside investors to create new and expanded competitions.

The proposal that has just been scrapped, FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), would have been a new subsidiary valued at around $20bn. It would have placed the commercial operations of future World Cups and other FIFA competitions into a separate company, then sold investors a minority stake in the revenues generated by those tournaments, with FIFA retaining overall control.

The temptation is to denounce FIFA greed and demand that it govern purely in the interests of football. It is a noble sentiment, but if proper governance of the game requires every FIFA bigwig to acquire the moral fibre of a Boy Scout, we will probably be waiting a very long time.

Human beings are good at rationalising whatever decision materially benefits them into the morally virtuous choice. What psychologists call “moral wiggle room” means that people interpret the facts and consequences in ways that serve their own interests while preserving their belief that they are decent people. This means that good intentions can resist a badly designed system for a while, but the quality of an institution cannot depend on the virtue of whoever happens to run it forever.

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Former FIFA president Sepp Blatter, who was suspended following the 2015 investigation. (Marcello Casal Jr./ABr Wikimedia Commons)

FIFA’s recurring problems stem from its structural setup. It governs world football while also staging the competitions that generate most of its income. One responsibility is to protect and develop the game, but the other is to maximise FIFA’s bottom line.

Those interests can sometimes overlap, especially when a successful World Cup generates funding for countries with fewer resources. If that investment ever finally reaches the right people, standards rise and international football becomes more competitive. This can create a virtuous cycle where more money produces stronger tournaments, and those stronger tournaments generate more money to reinvest in the game. The problems come when FIFA’s commercial interests conflict with the interests of the game.

Every additional match produces more broadcast money, ticket sales and sponsorships, so FIFA has a powerful financial incentive to make its competitions as large and as frequent as possible. Recently, it’s been doing this very successfully, and the Club World Cup and men’s World Cup expansion coincided with spectacular financial results. Just before the final, Infantino said FIFA expected revenue to exceed $15bn across the 2023-2026 cycle and promised to “unleash” its remaining commercial potential.

This has not had a positive effect on the players’ bodies. FIFPRO’s workload study tracked 1,500 male players and compared their schedules with recommendations from medical experts. Those experts called for 28 days of off-season rest followed by another 28 days of pre-season preparation. However, Chelsea received only 13 days of pre-season after winning the 2025 Club World Cup, while Paris Saint-Germain had seven.

Kevin De Bruyne summed up the problem in 2024: “It seems that money speaks louder than the players’ voices.” Multimillionaire footballers may not be the most instinctively sympathetic group of workers, but a sport in which its biggest attractions are all lying on a surgeon’s slab is worse for everyone watching it.

Supporters’ bank accounts have been on the receiving end of FIFA’s incentives too. Before the 2026 tournament, the cheapest final ticket offered through national association allocations cost £3,129. Following a team from its first match to the final through those allocations would cost around five times the equivalent price in Qatar.

Selling a stake in FFE would have made FIFA’s decision-making even more lopsided in favour of money-making. The investors were not willingly handing over billions of dollars because they felt strongly about improving grassroots coaching in Suriname. At the same time, the proposal would have protected FIFA’s leadership from opposition, given it would double the amount of money each association would receive – sums which are literally game-changing for smaller nations.

Spain celebrating winning the 2026 World Cup alongside Donald Trump and Gianni Infantini (Wikimedia Commons)

What is to be done

To fix this, we need to separate FIFA’s commercial and governance functions. This would mean creating a new commercial company that would sell media rights, sell sponsorships and generally seek outside investment. At the same time, though, a separate governing body would be established to control the international calendar, competition formats, player workloads, issues around supporter access, and, God knows, maybe even minimum human rights violation standards for proposed World Cup host countries.

For that separation to work in practice, nobody would be able to hold a position in both organisations. Most importantly, pay and bonuses in the governing body would have to be unrelated to commercial income, rather than increasing each time it approved another tournament or added more matches.

Imagine that the commercial arm proposes another expansion of the World Cup to 64 teams. That would be well within its transparent remit of maximising revenue. The key, though, would be that the governing body would have no financial incentive to agree. Because of this, it would be able to judge the proposal against metrics it thought good for the game’s long-term viability. The final decision taken would come from a, hopefully creative, tension between commercial ambition and football’s wider interests.

Under FFE, there still wouldn’t have been that separation between functions. FIFA would own the company, control its board, and decide the calendar and tournament formats. The commercial arm may technically have sat in a different legal entity, but the same people would still make the rules and benefit from the money those rules generate.

Even if that plan is not to be, how likely is FIFA to impose restraints on itself going forward? Today, I feel sceptical. Today, I feel cynical. Today, I feel unconvinced.

Any serious separation would threaten the financial interests of FIFA’s leadership. The people required to approve reform are the same people who benefit from the present system.

Meaningful change would require governments to challenge FIFA’s position. The US is powerful enough to do this, but the Trump-Infantino bromance, coupled with the fact that one of FFE’s proposed lead investors was Trump’s son-in-law’s brother, Joshua Kushner, means it won’t happen anytime soon. The EU might be able to have some influence, but they move slower than Teddy Sheringham at the best of times (although, maybe the first yard is in Ursula von der Leyen’s head too).

UEFA’s threat may have worked to defeat this particular proposal, and they may even get Infantino to resign. But stopping one ill-judged scheme would not correct the structure that produced it. Until that structure changes, FIFA’s behaviour will stay the same.

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(Sven Hansche/Shutterstock)

If London were a country its GDP would be larger than Sweden’s. Its mayor has the largest personal mandate of any politician in the UK and the third-largest in Europe. The city is, as the Conservative MP Neil O’Brien once observed, “New York, LA and Washington all rolled into one”– the capital of finance, culture and politics. But this powerhouse is also a strangely puny one, a Leviathan in chains.

No other leading G7 city has such minimal fiscal powers. The Greater London Authority (GLA) retains just $955 in tax revenue per resident, compared with $9,473 in New York, $5,478 in Tokyo, $4,632 in Munich, $4,600 in Paris, $1,554 in Milan and $1,061 in Toronto. London may have been showered with infrastructure spending over the last decade – an IPPR study found a £140bn disparity between it and the North – but it has never been the master of its own fate.

That much was made clear in the summer of 2025 when Rachel Reeves’ Spending Review unashamedly marginalised the capital. Infrastructure proposals such as the Bakerloo line extension to Lewisham and the West London Orbital between Hendon and Hounslow went unfunded with no alternative solutions offered. When an indignant Khan protested, he was simply ordered by Reeves to leave her office.

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(Carol Tyers/Shutterstock)

No one should underestimate how politically difficult prisons and sentencing policy can be. Any politician who is perceived as being soft on the punishment of serious offenders is in deep trouble.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Andy Burnham has paused the early release scheme due to commence in September. This was an issue with which he was not previously involved, and it is understandable that he does not want to expend political capital on a policy unless it is essential. It will not have escaped his notice that the early releases were due to commence on 2 September, the date of his first appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions.

The reality, however, is that there are no easy options on this matter and he has set expectations at a level that he will struggle to meet. Burnham may come to regret announcing the pause before reaching any conclusions.

The simple fact is that when it comes to sentencing policy and prison places, we have long been living beyond our means, and the provisions of the Sentencing Act – including those that are causing controversy – are necessary to correct the situation.

A political bidding war

It is worth setting out the historical context. Since 1993, sentencing policy has been characterised by a bidding war as both Labour and the Conservatives have sought to compete to imprison more people for longer. Maximum sentences have been lengthened, minimum sentences introduced, and new offences created. As a consequence – in a period of falling crime – the prison population of England and Wales doubled over a period of 15 years and we were left with the highest incarceration rate in Western Europe. Plenty of new prison places were created, but the system barely coped and an emergency release scheme was in operation from 2007 to 2010.

Rather to everyone’s surprise, the prison population stabilised in the 2010s, and at least some of us who held the post of Justice Secretary resisted the temptation to add to the prison numbers. But this was not to last. In 2020, Boris Johnson’s government extended the release date for some serious offenders from the halfway point of the overall sentence to two-thirds. Johnson returned to the issue in 2022, and he had great fun accusing Labour of not supporting measures that kept serious offenders behind bars for longer (Labour voted against the relevant Act, but not specifically on extending the point of automatic release). Naturally, this expanded the prison population, but without a commensurate increase in capacity.

For the last year or two of the Tory government, ministers lived in fear that prison capacity was about to be reached. Expensive, short-term capacity was found; dilapidated wings were kept in operation rather than repaired; the entire system was run dangerously hot (with capacity at over 99% from 2023 onwards).

Source: MoJ, Offender Management Statistics Quarterly

The Ministry of Justice warned No 10 that the situation was unsustainable and that prisoners approaching the end of their sentences were going to need to be released, but, with an election imminent, the warnings were dismissed. Such was the scale of the crisis, it may have been decisive in Rishi Sunak’s decision to go to the polls earlier than he might have done in 2024.

This left a horrendous inheritance for Keir Starmer’s incoming government. Even with new prisons planned, there was still a projected shortfall of 9,800 places by early 2028. Labour had no choice but to implement the emergency release scheme that had been devised by its predecessors. Not that this spared the new government from criticism at the sight of released offenders toasting themselves with champagne as they left the prison gates.

Emergency release schemes are far from ideal, for offenders or their victims. Providing support for those leaving prison in terms of housing, employment and medical care – which we do not necessarily do well at the best of times – becomes much harder with only a few weeks’ notice. It also makes it harder to notify victims of what is happening.

This was the context in which the Independent Sentencing Review – which I chaired – was established by Shabana Mahmood. Our task was to ensure that we had a sustainable approach in the longer term, but also that the numbers added up in the medium term while new prison capacity was created. These recommendations formed the basis of the Sentencing Act.

There are aspects of the Act that have, so far, proven to be less controversial. There is a move away from short sentences, an expansion of the use of suspended sentences, and changes in the ways in which released offenders are recalled to prison. But by far the most important measure in ensuring that the numbers add up is the move to an “earned progression model”. This gets a little complicated, but in essence we recommended that offenders serving a standard determinate sentence are released a third of the way through their sentence or, if their release point was previously two-thirds, at the halfway point. The latter category covers more serious offenders, although not those serving a life sentence or those identified by the courts as being dangerous, who receive an extended determinate sentence.

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How capacity could be breached

There is a principled case to be made that the new regime should be prospective and only apply to new convictions so that victims and their families did not see offenders being released earlier than expected at the time of sentencing. This was not, however, the approach taken in 2020 and 2022 when release dates were extended and, more importantly, would have failed to address the short-term prison capacity crisis.

This is a problem that cannot be dismissed. There is currently some spare capacity in prisons, but without the earned progression model, all of this will be lost by November – creating a new crisis. And, by the way, we should not want to run our system so that we are at capacity, given that some of the spare places will be the wrong type (in open prisons, for example) or in the wrong places. It also means that we lack resilience if there is a spike in criminality (as happened with the riots in the summer of 2024) or if there is a need to close a wing because of disorder.

On that subject, many prisoners will have already been told of their release date only to now be informed that this may be postponed. I understand that the prison authorities are very nervous about what this might mean for maintaining order in prisons over the next few weeks, especially with the hot weather forecast to continue – always a dangerous combination.

Presumably, Burnham’s review will come up with a means to ensure that some high-profile offenders stay behind bars, but he should not kid himself into believing that this will satisfy every victim or much of the media. For all the calls to exclude every violent or sexual offender from earlier release, the nature of our prison population is such that we cannot achieve this without a capacity crisis.

If Burnham prioritises trying to avoid difficult headlines by partially backing away from the earned progression model, he will either precipitate a crisis within months, or leave much of the public disappointed as high-profile releases continue. The responsible course of action would be to face up to the realities and persuade the country that it has to do so as well.

There is a broader point to be made about criminal justice. The temptation to focus on short-term politics over good policy is immense. This results in our prison population continuing to grow rapidly, becoming increasingly out of line with comparable countries, and our prisons struggling to cope. Scarce resources are diverted to building prison places, usually at the expense of other parts of the system – like probation – that can do more to reduce re-offending. The opportunities provided by greater use of technology – such as electronic tagging – are ignored because the only response to criminality that counts is imprisonment. The system lurches from crisis to crisis.

This is what we have done for decades. When Andy Burnham says we must change the way we do things, this is one area where it would be entirely justified. A more strategic, evidence-based and long-term approach is badly needed.

(Mykhalio Pavlenko/Shutterstock)

I’m not alone in having served in Keir Starmer’s government and regretted watching our progressive agenda disappear. Working for Labour in opposition, I helped prepare an ambitious anti-corruption agenda for the then shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, to take into office. The idea was simple. For a Labour government to succeed, every department had to show people at home how it was fighting for them. And the Italianate grandeur of the Foreign Office on King Charles Street was no exception.

We promised to hold a major anti-corruption summit in London and to use the Foreign Office to campaign against kleptocrats. This mission got off the ground, with sanctions hitting major money launderers around the world such as Aivars Lembergs, one of Latvia’s richest people, Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s former president who systematically abused her positions at state-run companies to embezzle at least £350m and Dmitry Firtash, an infamous oligarch who has extracted hundreds of millions of pounds from Ukraine. Much advance policy work and diplomacy was done, but the summit never took place. Despite constant pushing from us, No 10 would never sign off on a date. I was never offered an explanation as to why. After Lammy moved on to Justice, Yvette Cooper fortunately kept our commitment to a summit, even announcing at the end of 2025 that it would take place in June this year, only for it be postponed until December, as the government’s attention shifted elsewhere. This was such a missed opportunity.

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Andy Burnham has opened his premiership with a flurry of politically astute cost-of-living measures: the removal of VAT from electricity bills, a £2 cap on bus fares and a 20% cut in business rates for English pubs, clubs and music venues. Yet nestled within many of Burnham’s speeches is a wider ambition for reindustrialisation as a key driver of growth. And while John Healey’s appointment as Chancellor may suggest a focus on defence, this will not be enough, nor provide the best return on public investment. Instead, embracing the opportunities that AI and frontier technologies such as quantum computing and engineering biology offer, ought to define this government’s industrial strategy.

Britain’s starting position is genuinely strong. It is the incumbent AI hub in Europe, home to world-class universities and to large outposts of many frontier labs. Capturing the value that this industry creates – and the jobs that will result – is critical for Britain to remain competitive and, fundamentally, secure.

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Rough sleepers in the City of London (Acabashi/Wikimedia Commons)

To be a successful Prime Minister, Andy Burnham needs to improve upon his predecessor in numerous ways, but two of the most pressing are delivering quick, tangible results and proving that he has authentic principles and values. That’s why making his first instruction an order to end rough sleeping is so powerful. It meets both of those objectives while tackling a moral outrage that scars our society.

Keir Starmer was hardly wrong when he said that the country needs a “decade of national renewal”. Investment and reform will take time to pay off and the economy, energy system and housing market cannot be turned around overnight. Burnham’s intention to develop a “10-year plan for Britain” recognises this reality. Yet voters are fast losing patience: 51% expect to see “real improvements in our country” within the next year compared to 62% who were willing to give Starmer more time than that when he entered office.

Street homelessness is one of the most visible indicators of societal failure but unlike other long-term challenges, it is possible to make rapid and evident progress. The last Labour government prioritised this issue, meeting its target of reducing rough sleeping by two-thirds between 1999 and 2001. It achieved this through assertive outreach, investment in prevention and funding for shelters, and built on these successes to reduce other forms of homelessness. Yet the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition halted this progress in 2010, cancelling national homelessness programmes and devolving all responsibility to local government. Rough sleeping duly surged again. A 43% fall during the Covid-19 pandemic, building on Theresa May’s nascent efforts to end rough sleeping by 2027, provided further evidence of what can be achieved. But these gains were again squandered and rough sleeping reached a record high in 2025, up 171% since 2010.

We await the detail of Burnham’s target, but it would make sense for him to try and match the scale of improvement achieved under New Labour, reducing rough sleeping by at least two-thirds by the end of the parliament. It won’t be easy, but it’s a promise history shows he can keep. And it is one that voters can hold him accountable for with the evidence of their own eyes.

This said, a signature promise on homelessness might prompt an unpleasant sense of déjà vu in Burnham. When he took office as mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017, he set himself the goal of ending rough sleeping across the city region by 2020 (donating 15% of his mayoral salary to the cause). Though he made impressive initial progress, reducing the number by two-thirds by 2021, the problem has returned. Reducing rough sleeping by a quarter, as Burnham did in Manchester, is not to be dismissed, but for the last four years the figures have gone in the wrong direction and the city region no longer outperforms the rest of the country.

From No 10, Burnham has the opportunity not just to make good on his original promise, but to turn this apparent failure to his advantage. He can, with some justification, claim that decisions taken in Westminster undermined his homelessness initiatives in Manchester. Budget constraints, a lack of available beds, failures in the welfare system and evictions of asylum seekers have all been blamed for the resurgence of rough sleeping in the city. Now, with his hands on all those policy levers, Burnham has the chance to wade upstream and stem the flow of new cases he dealt with as mayor.

In particular, from the centre of power, Burnham can scale up the ‘Housing First’ approach he has long championed, which prioritises securing access to shelter for those with addiction, mental health or employment challenges, rather than putting conditions on public accommodation places. The scheme has seen dramatic success, reducing rough sleeping in Finland by half, and eliminating rough sleeping among pilot participants in English cities after a year.

The three-year, £340m investment announced by Burnham this week, to acquire 1,2000 homes and provide “intensive support” to 3,000 long-term rough sleepers, should be sufficient to expand Housing First nationally. The Social Market Foundation (SMF) think thank, where I used to work, estimates it will cost around £75m a year to provide accommodation to everyone currently sleeping rough in England, a total offset by savings to public services within five years. This funding should be used to secure accommodation agreements and partnerships and hire support workers able to offer individualised help, linked up with health and addiction services as well as the wider voluntary sector. The programme should be led at local authority level, but with oversight and lesson sharing from a director overseeing the process within the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

That should address the stock of high-need rough sleepers and get a grip on the acute problem. Staunching the flow of people being thrown out on the streets will also require some upstream prevention to help people at risk of rough sleeping. This might involve temporary supported accommodation, funding domestic violence refuges, and extra support around discharge from prison, hospital or the asylum system. The costs here could plausibly run into the low billions and might be funded by housing ‘sin taxes’: levies on empty properties, purchases by foreign residents and house flipping, which other countries make greater use of. The SMF has estimated these could raise as much as £4bn a year.

The PM is doubtless aware that rough sleeping is just one part of the homelessness crisis, let alone the wider economy, and increasing housebuilding and supporting growth should certainly be his medium-term objectives. Yet faced with a sceptical public fast losing faith in the state’s capacity for delivery, he needs to get some quick wins on the board. Making a big prominent vow to functionally eliminate rough sleeping – again – risks creating a hostage to fortune. But it’s a risk worth taking. If we’ve learned anything in recent weeks, it’s that Burnham isn’t afraid to gamble with his reputation – and win.

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Hope and joy do not come easily to progressives. Maybe it’s the disposition. Maybe it’s the timeline. Maybe it’s our long history of emotional and intellectual disappointment. Whatever it is, we seem to live in a state of permanent discontent. We’re an England football song in political form.

This instinct has now gone too far. A new prime minister will take office today. He is charismatic, telegenic, unashamedly progressive and has a thought-through programme for structural reform. Yet much of the reaction has been one of cynicism and despondency.

Many insist Andy Burnham will be continuity Starmer or that he will dissolve under the glare of the media spotlight. And it’s true that his challenges are legion. The economy is stagnant, the bond markets are vigilant, the far right is resurgent, the media is hostile, geopolitics is in turmoil. But Burnham recognises the possibility of change.

“Growth in every postcode and hope in every heart” is what he has promised – simple, meaningful, uplifting. Expect to hear it many more times before the next general election. Burnham refuses to let the conversation get dragged into decline and inertia.

In most elections, the candidate who promises you a good time wins. Think of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” victory in 1984 or Boris Johnson’s triumph over Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. The left too rarely grasps this tonal principle, though there are signs this is changing.

New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, who like Burnham has built his political career through a local support base, shares many of the same principles as Corbyn, but never comes across as a scold or a killjoy. He seems to be in a state of permanent delight; it’s almost impossible to find a photo of him not smiling. He projects joy, not self-denial. Burnham gets this too: he smiles, he cracks jokes, he pledges short-term relief and long-term improvement.

And yet much of the progressive response has been funereal. Something unhealthy has happened to the emotional mood of the left in recent years. It’s the result of an unbroken string of defeats. During austerity, we were forced to watch an act of economic vandalism. During Brexit, we were forced to witness the rupture of the European dream and the triumph of right-wing culture war techniques.

We lost over and over again. Even when we won, it turned out that we had simply lost in a new way. Progressive voters combined to throw the Tories out, only for Labour to alienate its own supporters in a doomed attempt to win the backing of people who would never vote for it.

Something broke at that point, in the emotional mindset of British progressives. After the long wilderness years of Conservative rule, it was acutely painful to finally get a Labour government and then see it stumble in ways that mirrored what came before. This created an unspoken worldview – rarely stated outright, but deeply internalised – that optimism is somehow naive. That all events point inevitably towards doom, that decline is embedded as a physical rule of the British political universe.

This is misplaced. It is wrong both as a strategic instinct and as a statement of fact. Burnham has weaknesses, of course – he is less ambitious than he should be on immigration and Europe. He is unproven on making painful decisions. But any objective assessment must make these concessions: he has been unusually clear about what he wants. He is more radical than any prime minister for decades on devolution, public ownership, social care and electoral reform. He has appointed serious people with proven track records and complementary skills – such as James Purnell and Greater Manchester CEO Caroline Simpson – to senior positions in the new No 10 hierarchy. He is charismatic, has real emotional presence, and a proven appeal to voters. Why wouldn’t a progressive be excited?

Pessimism, cynicism and despair are not just emotional states. They can become political weapons. Since 2016, right-wing populists have presented their movement as unstoppable. Many political reporters have accepted this narrative in its entirety.

Whenever populists win, it is treated as a confirmation of destiny. Whenever they are defeated – as they have been in Canada, Australia and Norway since 2025 – it is soon forgotten. How often were we told that victory for Reform, now falling in the polls and wilting under media scrutiny, was inevitable? After a while you realise: there’s nothing inevitable about it. This is simply the message put out to try and extinguish the promise of an alternative.

One of the core aims of this populist narrative is the demoralisation of progressives. It is to get them to give up the fight. And that ultimately is what the current mood of ennui provides, a generalised political malaise which undermines determined action.

But it’s OK to feel hope again, even if it is underpinned by caution. It’s OK to embrace optimism rather than hide it under a pretence of mock-realism. In fact it is more than that. It is necessary to do so. Because hope is the precondition of political change.

We discuss subjects including different models of public ownership, wealth taxes, fiscal rules and Burnham’s choice of chancellor. Become a paid subscriber or sign up for a seven-day free trial to read it.

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George Eaton: You founded Common Wealth back in 2019 to champion public ownership of the essentials: energy, housing, transport, water. That’s obviously an agenda that’s been embraced by Andy Burnham. What were your inspirations back then and why do you think these ideas have become politically salient?

Mathew Lawrence: The core arguments for public ownership and public provision, not as nostalgia or totems, but as tools for the delivery of productive investment and for reclaiming economic sovereignty, have multiple tributaries across the progressive left. This is a rich tradition from Keynes to Marx to Mazzucato.

Partly it reflects a recognition that we’re still living with a crisis of British capitalism and the state, a sense that the economy is not working and that too many people are locked out of prosperity, but also that the state is this strange yet explicable combination of overburdensome and weak.

The same crises that inspired the creation of Common Wealth exist now as deeply as they ever did: the relentless squeeze on living standards and an economic model which has seen some important reforms under Labour but remains weaker, poorer and less equal than comparable countries. And if you zoom out further, we face the structural challenges of the climate-nature emergency, the energy transition, deep geopolitical conflict and enormous trade pressures with the emergence of China.

But in a fundamental sense, people feel like those essential services simply aren’t working. They are paying too much for too little and the productive potential of the economy is constrained by an architecture of ownership that is not working in the interests of ordinary communities, ordinary people, or the British economy as a whole.

George: And what were the origins of your engagement with Burnham and the Manchester project?

Mathew: So Burnham, during his mayoralty, articulated some of these arguments. If you look at the integration of NHS and social care and the Bee Network, which replaced a fragmented, outsourced, costly and inefficient private [transport] system with a publicly-controlled system in which fares have fallen, ridership has increased and access has grown, you can see in miniature some of the examples.

Burnham has recognised the fact we’ve lost control of the fundamentals and that this has not only led to higher costs and worse services in many instances, but also upwards pressure on public spending as the state has been forced to intervene through higher levels of redistribution. There’s a growing recognition across the political spectrum that we need a supply-side agenda that tackles market dysfunction, but that also brings the state to bear in coordinating and scaling investment and in the provision of essential services.

George: Do you see Burnham’s project as essentially a decade-long mission to reverse Thatcherism?

Mathew: To answer that you need to have a sense of the two legacies of Thatcherism. The first is the privatisation of economic power and the second, and this is less noticed but of growing importance, is the centralisation of political power. In other words, the extent to which the fiscal independence and economic power of local government was stripped away by Whitehall. That is a key reason why Lyon is doing better than Leeds, why Munich is richer than Manchester and so on. Whether it’s North America, Europe or East Asia, our cities and towns have less ability to determine their own economic development than elsewhere and that is a direct consequence of Thatcherism.

And so, if you map that onto the Burnham project, there are three core planks.

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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.

(Ultraskrip/Shutterstock)

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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(US Institute of Peace/Wikimedia Commons)

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.