UK Politics

The democratic recession does not begin when a far-right party takes office. It begins when a centrist party crushes hope in democracy. When Keir Starmer’s government takes a chainsaw to people’s aspirations for a fairer, greener, kinder country, he cuts off not just faith in the Labour party but faith in politics itself. The almost inevitable result, as countries from the US to the Netherlands, Argentina to Austria, Italy to Sweden show, is to let the far right in.

So what’s the game? Why adopt policies that could scarcely be better calculated to prevent your re-election? Why stick to outdated fiscal rules when projections suggest they’ll make almost everyone worse off, especially those in poverty? Why impose devastating attacks on wellbeing, such as sustaining the two-child benefit cap, freezing local housing allowance and cutting disability benefits?

Why pursue austerity when the country voted so decisively to end it? Why cut and cut when years of experience show this will undermine the government’s primary (and ill-advised) goal, economic growth?

Why taunt, insult and abuse a crucial part of your political base: people who care about life on Earth? Why trash environmental commitments, abandon protections, expand airports and tie down green watchdogs? Why sustain and defend the most extreme anti-protest measures in any nominally democratic country?

Why seek to nix the financial regulations inspired by the 2008 crash, when the likely result is a repeat performance? Why reject a wealth tax, when a 2% levy on assets of over £10m could raise £24bn a year? Why not adopt the measures proposed by Patriotic Millionaires, generating £60bn a year? Or those suggested by political economist Richard Murphy, worth £90bn in tax revenue? Why abandon plans to tax non-doms properly? Why not demand an end to the Bank of England’s destructive quantitative tightening?

Why bury policies that might help restore democracy, such as proportional representation? Why introduce new political funding rules without actually addressing the capture of politics by the rich?

Why adopt Reform’s messages, Reform’s branding and Reform’s cruelty, to compete over who can most brutally beat up asylum seekers? An abundance of evidence shows that when centre-left parties take radical-right positions, they lose more voters on the left than they gain on the right. Adopting far-right messaging helps far-right parties win.

These policies might seem incomprehensible. But there’s a thread running through them. They all arise from the same doctrine: neoliberalism. This ideology, which has dominated the UK since 1979, demands austerity, the privatisation and shrinkage of public services, curtailment of protest and trade unions, deregulation and tax reductions for the rich. Justified as a means of creating an enterprise society, it has instead delivered a new age of rent, as powerful people monopolise crucial assets, from water to housing to social media. It leaves a government with few options but to scapegoat asylum seekers and other vulnerable groups for the problems it fails to address.