Labour, beware hubris
Talk of completely destroying the opposition is dangerous
This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.
Service has been slower than usual on this newsletter in the last few weeks, for which apologies. Getting whacked by the latest edition of Covid induced brain fog and slowed me down for longer than expected. And then ten days ago I was in for an eye operation (removing a cataract, with the next to be done in a few months time).
On the upside, it really is true what they say about the wonders of contemporary eye surgery. I can see again.
A week ago today I wrote the paragraphs below in an attempt to get a new edition of this newsletter out, but my eyes so soon post-operation couldn’t adjust and I had to abandon it.
Here are the opening paragraphs. How out of date the stuff on Labour appears seven days later, given the events of the last week in Britain.
Almost a month in and it is clear there is goodwill out there towards Sir Keir Starmer and the new administration. And no wonder.
By polling day on 4 July pretty much everyone had had enough of what went before. Even if you approved of some of what the last government was trying to do – defeating the referendum rerun and getting Britain out of the EU under Boris Johnson from 2019, or improving standards in England’s schools since 2010 – it is undeniably the case that the years since the referendum in 2016 were exhausting. Boris Johnson blew an 80 seat majority by being a shambles. Liz Truss governed abominably and has behaved disgracefully since. And throughout the party’s tenure a large part of the Tory cohort in parliament behaved like an utter shower.
After all that, what is not to like about a new government appearing to be pretty disciplined and for the most part reasonable in tone? The refrain one hears most often in conversation is that it is simply a relief. While the country is not wildly enthusiastic, anecdotal evidence suggests people like that the temperature has gone down and the Westminster hysteria has subsided. Not having to think much if at all about the Conservative psychodrama, of the ERG and the 1922 and endless squabbling factions, and never seeing it on the evening news, is liberating and refreshing.
On that basis, Labour can get on with governing and Starmer will likely have a sustained honeymoon.
Since then? Well you know what happened last week. After Monday’s catastrophe in Southport, where three girls were killed and more injured, a far-right mob assembled via social media looking to exploit the tragedy by organising demonstrations in some of England’s towns and cities. Counter-protestors turned up. This weekend the internet is awash with footage of rioting, looting and attacks on the police. Further violence is feared.
This is a leadership test for Starmer, of course, although he has direct experience that will help. During his time running the Crown Prosecution Service he dealt with the aftermath of the riots that spread in August 2011. The response from Starmer and his team was robust and rapid, as they moved quickly to process the cases and send a signal. More than 3,000 arrests were made and more than 2,000 individuals were convicted of riot-related offences. Sentences were tough.
Even though these latest riots are likely to end in a similar fashion in a few days time, with hundreds of arrests, they have already brought about an end to the government’s honeymoon.
In such a dark, fast-moving and troubling context, it is perhaps unwise of Labour’s campaign chiefs to talk so confidently of how “the sky is the limit” for Labour if it delivers.
In accounts of last Monday’s political cabinet, held before the riots, we learned that the party’s electoral Svengali Morgan McSweeney briefed ministers on the opportunity to completely destroy the Conservative party. Yes, completely destroy. The landslide with a 174 seat majority is just the start, apparently.
Opposition is vital for a healthy democracy. Otherwise, elections are not a meaningful choice and those in power become arrogant and careless because they need not worry about losing power.
Reading the accounts of that meeting of the political cabinet last week, the word hubris came to mind. And a story from less than three years ago. “Boris Johnson eyes another decade in power,” ran the headline on page one of The Times on 11 September 2021.
“Boris will want to go on an on,” a cabinet minister told The Times. “The stuff Dom (Cummings) was saying about him going off into the sunset (to make money) was nonsense. He’s very competitive. He wants to go on for longer than Thatcher.”
The country was emerging from Covid. Fans of Boris hailed his plan to “level up” Britain and Sir Keir Starmer was cast by Borisites as a hopeless washout who had no chance of reaching Number 10.
And look what happened.
As one of my newsroom mentors used to shout at us the last time Labour was in power and falling a little too much in love with itself: politicians are like buses and there will be another one along in a minute. A Labour high command giddy with electoral success forgets this at its peril.
How the US election could be good for Ukraine
Only a few weeks since Joe Biden stepped out, and Kamala Harris stepped in, and already the US presidential race is unrecognisable.
Until Biden gave up his selfish, reckless bid to fight another election in defiance of reality, when it had been obvious for two years he was a one term president not fit to serve another four year term, it had felt as though the Democrats were on a death march towards inevitable defeat. The outgoing President was behind Donald Trump in opinion polls in the key swing states that will decide the result of November’s contest.
Now, the fight is joined, the race is on. Harris has erased Trump’s swing state lead and the election is a proper contest again, reports Bloomberg.
According to Newsweek’s coverage of the latest polling: “Looking at certain swing states, which typically decide the election, Harris is up in Pennsylvania; although only by less than a point (45.3 to 44.8 percent); Wisconsin by 1.2 points (46 to 44.8 percent) and Michigan by 2.4 points (45.2 to 42.8 percent). Meanwhile, Trump leads the vice president in the battleground states of Georgia (46.3 to 44.8 percent), North Carolina (46.7 to 44.7 percent), Arizona (46.3 to 43.8 percent) and Nevada (43.9 to 42.6 percent).”
The US media – or most of it – is enraptured and Harris is getting a phenomenally easy time of it in terms of scrutiny. In part that is down to liberal bias in the media. In part it is just that the turnaround, the return of competition, is a fabulously exciting story. As Peggy Noonan, no Democrat and former speechwriter to Ronald Reagan, observed in her latest column for the WSJ, it is quite entrancing watching the Trump campaign struggle to regain its footing.
Harris has a freshness and a wave of pent up support behind her, from those who are sick of being, in effect, bullied by Trump banging on and on.
The risk for Trump is that he looks increasingly dated, still doing that wisecracking schtick that, as Noonan says, he learned from watching TV comics in the era of the Ed Sullivan Show (1950-1970).
There is no guarantee Harris will do it in November. She stumbles in interviews, badly. Is she credible? Harris is ditching her far-left policy positions even faster than Sir Keir Starmer did after he won the Labour leadership. One wonders what she really believes in, apart from winning.
For Ukraine, and those worried about European security, a Harris victory does open a tantalising possibility, namely that a new president chooses to go all in on defending freedom, projecting American power and beating back the Russians by allowing the Ukrainians to do more.
One of the most interesting, and encouraging, aspects of the Harris campaign so far is that she has made the word “freedom” the centrepiece. If this sounds like a small thing, a mere rhetorical device, it is not. The signal she is sending to voters – particularly women – is that constitutional rights and freedom are at stake.
Extended to the international sphere, the use of the word “freedom” creates all sorts of Reaganite possibilities for going all in on forcing Russia back, defending Ukraine’s right to exist in freedom, and telling the autocrats that the US will defend its friends.
Think about it from the perspective of a newly elected Harris next January, if she wins. It is not in her interests to abandon Ukraine, to look weak internationally by repeating Biden’s catastrophic mistake in Afghanistan. That withdrawal by Biden let Russia and China know that this was an America in retreat. The invasion of Ukraine followed six months later.
Harris would also be looking for re-election in 2028 and projecting strength helps.
It is also worth acknowledging another potential scenario I have heard mentioned in Whitehall, in which a Trump victory works out well for Ukraine. On day one of his presidency he is pledged to “solve” the Ukraine war. That means proposing a peace deal – surrender deal, more like – to Kyiv and Moscow. Putin wants more territory than he already has and demands impossible guarantees. So, the peace deal offered by Trump is rejected by Putin early next year, at which point Trump says “okay, I offered you peace, you choose war, so now you lose.” Off come the shackles on Ukraine. And in doing so he also sends a signal to China, Iran and North Korea.
We’ll see soon enough. Or not that soon. There are still 92 days left until polling day.
A government by international human rights lawyers for international human rights lawyers
A defining piece about the new government, and where it is trying to take us, appeared in the Financial Times late last month. The leading human rights lawyer Philippe Sands KC mapped out “how Britain can restore its global reputation” by reengaging with the world and putting international law at the heart of this effort.
The claim by Sands that Britain has not been engaging with the world, until Labour won power, will be a surprise to the government in Kyiv; or to the UK’s partners in AUKUS in Australia; or to the member states of NATO or the Joint Expeditionary Force (the JEF); or to the US military and intelligence agencies given US and UK close cooperation on helping Ukraine; or to the countries in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. The members of the CPTPP are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. And soon Britain is joining, because Kemi Badenoch as Tory Business Secretary oversaw the application process for membership of this new trade bloc.
What Sands really means by reputation and British reengagement is, of course, that more power needs to flow to the international human rights lawyers, of which he is one and Sir Keir Starmer is another.
The Sands essay in the FT is an extraordinarily arrogant piece. There is no recognition that the field of international law is politically contentious, or that it can be controversial in the way it cuts across national sovereignty and potentially even democratic decision-making.
The International Court of Justice was established in 1945 and settles disputes, but the International Criminal Court (ICC) was only established in 2002. It began with the creditable aim of prosecuting genocide cases, but it aspires to prosecute environmental crimes and who knows what else next. Today, it is pursuing the Israeli government. There are legitimate democratic doubts about the expansion of the court’s remit and authority.
On the FT letters page, a reader responded to Sands and demolished his programme for international government by international lawyers.
Andrew Anderson, writing from Edinburgh, put it well:
“Philippe Sands (The Weekend Essay, Life & Arts, July 27) argues that the UK should make a trade agreement with the EU a “priority”, apparently unaware that it already exists. His other priorities, many shared by us bien pensants, essentially amount to the view that unelected lawyers should run the world. That’s bad enough, but worse is his failure to understand how the international institutions he reveres actually work. For example, he believes that, apart from self-defence, “military force” should be illegal unless “genuinely authorised by the UN Security Council”. How naive. Does he not understand that Russia and/or China will always use their veto to stop any such authorisation that it doesn’t like? The Sands doctrine would have prevented any intervention to get rid of the Khmer Rouge. He calls for “realism”, but he shows little understanding of realpolitik.”
Indeed.
What I’m reading
The Atomic Human: Understanding Ourselves in the Age of AI, by Neil D Lawrence, the Professor of Machine Learning at Cambridge. This examination of the risks and opportunities was recommended by Bryan Appleyard, who reviewed it for Engelsberg Ideas. As Bryan says, it jumps about a lot, from philosophy, to D-Day, to Alan Turing, to the Amazon supply chain, and much more, and can be confusing initially. Still, it is packed with insights and those in our office who have read it tell me it is worth persisting. Onwards.
Have a good week.
Iain Martin
Editor, Reaction