If the recent eruption of rigmarole forces out either Starmer or Morgan McSweeney (which will lead to the former’s collapse within a year) it must be emphasised that the Starmer project did *not* collapse because of ‘unforced errors’ such as the appointment of Peter Mandelson. In a normal political cycle, with living standards either stagnant or improving, the defenestration of a senior political figure caused by a scandal is a routine procedure which has little impact on the Prime Minister. Mandelson himself was sacked twice by Tony Blair in the space of New Labour’s first Parliamentary Term before the party went on to maintain a 400+ seat majority in the 2001 General Election. The reason that Mandelson matters politically is because literally everything else is already going wrong.
The Mandelson incident will be weaponised by the now resurgent ‘soft left’, headed by Andy Burnham, to either excise McSweeney or to severely reduce his authority. Him and his ‘cabal’ will be blamed for Labour’s atrocious polling figures. Starmer’s problems will be blamed on his top-down management style.
This is, in reality, the inverse of the truth. The problem the Government has is that McSweeney’s faction does not have a strong enough grip on the Parliamentary Party to actually deliver a pivot to the right. McSweeney was unable to get rid of Ed Miliband, he is also unable to force through a withdrawal from the ECHR or to implement meaningful spending cuts which have become a necessity due to lockdowns. The end result is this confused mess where Starmer festoons themselves with Union Jacks and makes vaguely Powellite statements while failing to deport foreign rapists because of ‘international law’.
The conclusion of this all will be that Labour has to return to its core values and base. There is some short term electoral logic to this. Simply ‘being woke’, flinging open the borders to be kind and refusing to accept the fiscal situation is what most of Labour’s core support - workers in the public sector - wants. This reversion is what Burnham and his mates will be able to force onto the executive now that the Mandelson incident has weakened McSweeney’s authority. Labour MPs are already openly briefing against him and this will continue over the coming weeks. Briefings that Starmer never liked Mandelson and that he only became a candidate after Sue Gray was removed by McSweeney suggest that the Prime Minister may be about to sack him to save his own skin. My best guess is that neither Starmer or McSweeney will resign but that there will be a ‘reset’ after conference and the government will be taken into a soft-left direction, with policies like wealth taxes introduced.
The problem with this all is that McSweeney’s diagnosis is, in the long run, the correct one. A ‘soft-left’ Labour party, led by Starmer or Burnham or whoever, will fight the 2029 election with millions of illegal immigrants being housed in hotels, military bases, and even student accommodation - with all of the concomitant violent and sexual crime this engenders. Extreme energy costs will have closed down tens of thousands of small businesses and will be destroying voter’s disposable income. There will be some kind of financial crisis when the wealth taxes inevitably fail to work and no spending commitments are pared down. Even mild policy successes that Labour could have pointed to, such as Wes Streeting’s progress on the NHS, will be jeopardised by an ideological revulsion towards performance management and the empowerment of the Trade Unions. Pat McFadden will be prevented from forcing the idle youth into the workforce which will be expensive and create demand for even more legal immigration.
I do not like Morgan McSweeney because of his role in the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, but I recognise that he is, like Cummings was, vastly more intelligent than the people around him. His extremely aggressive ‘top-down’ approach has been necessary because a ‘bottom-up’ approach which allowed the Parliamentary Labour Party to run the country would run it into the ground. He has been dealt an impossible hand by Starmer’s inability to reckon with ‘international law’ and by the fact that the media/political class has decided to collectively forget that we shut down the economy for two years to prevent 50,000 people in their 80s dying, and that Rishi Sunak delivered one of the most expensive lockdowns in the world because of the dreadful furlough scheme.
The truth about lockdown is that it was never a credible course of action because the country did not have the money to pay for it. The sums did not add up. The only hope was to put the cost burden directly on the shoulders of pensioners who benefited from it, either through the abolition of the triple lock, a series of windfall taxes on pension funds or making pensioners pay NI. McSweeney attempted a version of this at the start of Starmer’s term through removing the winter fuel allowance, this eminently moral course of action was torn to piece by both the Parliamentary Labour Party and the official opposition. That McSweeney, an energetic and resourceful individual, has failed is a symptom of a completely broken political system. Removing him will not save Labour MPs from what is coming over the horizon.
With the political scene set, let us move on to discussing the political beneficiary of this mess, Nigel Farage’s Reform party. There are three fundamental policy issues where Reform are strongest, and on all three of these policy issues Labour is dead in the water. These are immigration, crime and the standard of living. On these three issues their messaging is detailed and precise; we must tear up all human rights legislation which prevents deportations and set a migration cap, we’ve got to the lock up criminals or send them home, and it’s time to put a stop to Net Zero madness. Farage is now holding a ming vase in his hand. As long as he does not make any significant errors he will enter Downing Street before the decade is over one way or another. So a high degree of caution is clearly warranted.
Commentators and opposition politicians will attempt to pressure Reform into taking detailed positions on a wide range of other issues, saying that they are not credible unless they have a Fully Costed life sciences strategy. This would be a major strategic error at this juncture. The policy vulnerability Labour have attempted to exploit for Reform is the NHS, this is a genuine wedge issue for Reform. Many Reform voters would like to see a social insurance model introduced however ‘privatise the NHS’ still provokes a bovine reaction from the sort of Goggle-Box Brits that want to give Farage a chance. There are a whole host of other smaller policy issues that could be drawn out in this fashion to derail Farage, including, as an example, abortion, which splits opinion.
The strategy that Reform should take is to present themselves as continuity on most policy areas whilst offering radical departure on the core problems of immigration, crime and Net Zero. There is a public consensus on deporting paedophiles, there is not a public consensus on privatising the NHS or restricting abortion, whatever your views on either topic. Farage should restrain himself from making interventions on these more contentious topics. He should also put forward an economic policy which resembles a standard Conservative Party election manifesto which avoids the more outré suggestions on tax (e.g raising the personal tax threshold to infinity) that many individuals in his circles want him to implement which will open him up to Project Fear on tax and spend, ‘remember Liz Truss’ etc.
Again, this is not because cutting tax is bad, but because it’s important to avoid spooking voters into voting for the establishment. This is basically the strategy that Donald Trump adopted before the 2024 election. The greatest political manoeuvre I have witnessed in my lifetime was how Donald Trump handled the ‘Project 2025’ scandal when the Democrats correctly adduced that the Heritage foundation had extreme plans for the second Trump presidency, including legislation and staff. Outright, brazen denialism. This, in my mind, is what separates Trump from other politicians. I am fond of JD Vance for his Lobean characteristics but I do not think he has the animal instinct to aggressively lie about his intentions once they are exposed, he does not have that same ability to create the truth.
Once Reform are in government, they must learn a lesson from Trump’s second Presidency, and that is to not get distracted from your mandate by esoteric policy commitments. The two errors of Trump II have been DOGE and tariffs. Farage is going to be under intense pressure to immediately cut taxes, which would be similar to the tariff issue in that it precipitates an economic crisis, but he will not have the insurance of the American economy. This would risk derailing the entire Reform project before it has really begun. He should avoid it for that reason, and instead focus all of his efforts on the core three issues; immigration, crime and energy.
The first five years should be considered a test that he has to pass in order to implement more radical changes in his second term, in the same way that it was for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in 1997-2001. He should unironically have his own ‘Iron Chancellor’, a Lords appointment of a very senior banker, who reassures the Markets whilst Farage gets on with the important work of mass deportations and tearing up bogus Blairite constitutional changes, and finally starting fracking.
It does not please me to write this, but it is a reality that the Markets and press can conspire together to bring down a government if they are unhappy with fiscal policy. Britain’s bruised and battered economy is not in the condition for immediate shock therapy, and many of the changes that would have to be implemented like taxing charities would offend his Gogglebox base.
Farage will be a three term Prime Minister (lifespan allowing) if he spends his first term carrying out mass deportations of illegal immigrants and implements Net Zero immigration. If people wake up to find that the scary men who follow their daughters home from school have suddenly disappeared, they will vote Reform for the rest of their lives. If Farage immediately cuts taxes without cutting spending he will have the same trajectory as Liz Truss. Making sure the populist mandate is implemented effectively in 2029 is the only way to ensure that some form of legitimate democratic government continues and we do not experience significant political violence. For the sake of my own neck, I hope Farage can deliver it.
This was excellent. Sharply delivered and succinct analysis regarding both the state of Labour internally and Reform.