With eyes on politics internationally, it’s hard not to feel hope-pilled this week after Donald Trump and the Republican party received a historic battering in the US midterms.
The president told voters to pretend he was on the ballot. They used the opportunity to raise a middle finger to him, Elon Musk – who set fire to a cool $446m backing Senate candidates that lost – and AI data centres.
The midterms’ “bluenami”, along with Lula’s stunning win in Brazil and the student-led movement that defeated Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, represent a wave of progressive victories globally. So why does the landscape at home feel so… grey?
The Cortado
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With Andy Burnham now beyond his first 100 days in power, the view from his premiership is looking rather overcast. On Thursday, Burnham told the Economist that his long-awaited ten-year plan – remember, the one he touted outside Downing Street in his first speech as PM back in July? – may be delayed into 2027.
Sure, maybe Old Eyelashes is taking his time dotting all the ‘i’s and crossing every ‘t’, but sources were briefing that last week’s milquetoast budget was low-key precisely because big things were being held back for the ten-year plan.
And frankly, the budget hasn’t had nearly enough hate for being embarrassingly unambitious at a time when people who actually want to live here (not the high-net-worth individuals who are always just about to flee over the mere hint of wealth taxes) are crying out for actual change.
The budget’s £100 sticking-plaster energy bung for households in four council tax bands does nothing to solve the long-term cost-of-living crisis or improve British energy security. And this seems to be something of a pattern – big talk and puny delivery. Take the failed monopoly on water: the eight new regional water councils announced yesterday will allow local leaders to “set priorities” and “shape billions of pounds of investment” but, crucially, they do not put water back into public ownership.
This is to say nothing of the climate-illiterate decision to green-light new gas drilling in the North Sea, and murmurs that approval of the much more damaging new Rosebank oil field was baked into the budget.
Alongside the can-kicking and edge-tinkering, there’s also Burnham’s admission in the summer that his government “got it wrong” on Gaza and foreign secretary Ed Miliband’s appeal at Labour conference to everyone horrified by the slaughter of Palestinians: “You were right.” Both statements are ageing like a tuna sandwich stuffed behind a radiator (if you can afford to turn yours on, of course).
Burnham has rejected Jeremy Corbyn’s call for a Chilcot-style public inquiry into Britain’s role in Israel’s genocide, which means the UK public continues to be kept in the dark about the military, economic and diplomatic assistance rendered to a rogue state, in our names and with our tax money, over the past three years.
What’s more, the government has been defending its Starmer-era proscription of direct action group Palestine Action in the supreme court this week, while grannies, the children of Holocaust survivors and a CBE were arrested outside under the Terrorism Act. Why? Because they held paper signs quoting the wife of the PM’s national security adviser.
And peaceful protesters opposing the ban on Palestine Action have reportedly been handed bail conditions barring them from any protest in support of… Palestine. Not Palestine Action – Palestine in general. Burnham’s willingness to keep this authoritarian and antidemocratic farce going is damning, and the footage of retirees being carried away by cops makes Britain a laughing stock on the global stage.
When we can see so much hope elsewhere – from communities united across party lines against sprawling, energy-hungry data centres and the anti-human technology they serve, to Brazil’s digital mass mobilisation strategy becoming a beacon of global leftist inspiration – the landscape at home can feel frustratingly dreary.
Blame my chronic low dopamine or the leaden November sky for this doomerism, but without strong opposition from Labour’s left, this government will be content to sink back into the centrist torpor of the Starmer years. And we all know how that story plays out – with an emboldened far right and a country run in service of corporate elites, at the expense of everyone else.
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